Anna Wintour

Dame Anna Wintour (/ˈwɪntər/; born 3 November 1949) is a British and American media executive who served as editor-in-chief of Vogue from 1988 to 2025. Currently, Wintour serves as global chief content officer and artist director at Condé Nast. Known for her trademark pageboy bob haircut and dark sunglasses, Wintour is regarded as the most powerful woman in publishing, and has become an important figure in the fashion world, serving as the lead chairperson of the annual haute couture Met Gala global fashion spectacle in Manhattan since the 1990s. Wintour is praised for her skill in identifying emerging fashion trends, but has been criticised for her reportedly aloof and demanding personality.

Her father, Charles Wintour, who was editor of the London-based Evening Standard from 1959 to 1976, consulted with her on how to make the newspaper relevant to the youth of the era. She became interested in fashion as a teenager and her career in fashion journalism began at two British magazines. Later, she moved to the United States, with stints at New York and House & Garden. She returned to London and was the editor of British Vogue between 1985 and 1987. A year later, she assumed control of the franchise's magazine in New York, reviving what many saw as a stagnating publication. Her use of the magazine to shape the fashion industry has been the subject of debate within it. Animal rights activists have attacked her for promoting fur, while other critics have charged her with using the magazine to promote elitist and unattainable views of femininity and beauty.

A former personal assistant of Wintour, Lauren Weisberger, wrote the bestselling 2003 roman à clef The Devil Wears Prada, which was adapted into a 2006 film starring Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, a fashion editor, believed to be based on Wintour. In 2009, Wintour's editorship of Vogue was the original focus of a documentary film, R. J. Cutler's The September Issue. The film's focus switched to the creative teams and more senior fashion editors as filming progressed.

Anna Wintour was born in Hampstead, London, to Charles Wintour (1917–1999), editor of the Evening Standard, and Eleanor "Nonie" Trego Baker (1917–1995). Her parents were married in 1940 and divorced in 1979. Wintour was named after her maternal grandmother, Anna Baker (née Gilkyson), a merchant's daughter from Pennsylvania. Audrey Slaughter, a magazine editor who founded publications including Honey and Petticoat, was her stepmother.

Wintour's paternal grandfather was Major-General Fitzgerald Wintour, a British military officer and descendant of George Grenville, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Through her paternal grandmother, Alice Jane Blanche Foster, Wintour is a great-great-great-granddaughter of the late-18th-century novelist Lady Elizabeth Foster, who was later the Duchess of Devonshire, and her first husband, the Irish politician John Thomas Foster. Her great-great-great-great-grandfather was Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, who served as the Anglican Bishop of Derry. Sir Augustus Vere Foster, 4th Baronet, the last Baronet of that name, was a granduncle of Wintour's. She is a niece of Cordelia James, Baroness James of Rusholme, the daughter of Fitzgerald Wintour.

Wintour had four siblings. Her older brother, Gerald, died in a traffic accident as a child. One of her younger brothers, Patrick, is also a journalist, currently diplomatic editor of The Guardian.

Wintour attended North London Collegiate School, where she rebelled against the dress code by taking up the hemlines of her skirts. At the age of 14, she began wearing her hair in a bob. She developed an interest in fashion as a regular viewer of Cathy McGowan on Ready Steady Go!, and from reading Seventeen, which her grandmother sent from the United States. "Growing up in London in the '60s, you'd have to have had Irving Penn's sack over your head not to know something extraordinary was happening in fashion", she recalled. Her father regularly consulted her when he was considering ideas for increasing readership in the youth market.

"I think my father really decided for me that I should work in fashion", she recalled in The September Issue. He arranged for his daughter's first job, at the influential Biba boutique, when she was 15. The next year, she left North London Collegiate and began a training program at Harrods. At her parents' behest, she took fashion classes at a nearby school, but soon gave them up, saying, "You either know fashion or you don't." An older boyfriend, Richard Neville, gave her her first experience of magazine production at Oz.