The New Yorker:

The longtime editor and executive talks about appointing her successor, the arc of her career, and what she thought of “The Devil Wears Prada.”

By David Remnick

On the morning after Labor Day, Anna Wintour, who has been the editor-in-chief of American Vogue for the past thirty-seven years, gathered her staff and, with a sense of occasion and pride, handed over the job to a sharp, funny, and independent-minded protégé named Chloe Malle. Not that Wintour was retiring: she remains the editorial director of all the Vogue editions throughout the world—there are twenty-eight of them—and the chief content officer of Condé Nast, which owns both Vogue and The New Yorker. At a time when most people cannot name the editor of a major metropolitan newspaper any more reliably than they can name the king of Belgium, Wintour has iconic status well beyond the realms of fashion or journalism. At Wimbledon or the U.S. Open, when the camera cuts to her between points, viewers know who she is. No chyron needed.

A few hours after meeting with the Vogue staff, Anna kept an appointment to be interviewed for The New Yorker Radio Hour at our common workplace: One World Trade Center. As she entered the studio, she said dryly, “Here I am, a lamb to the slaughter.” Yeah, right.

Years ago, I asked one of Anna’s deputies why Anna commanded such respect, why she was such a good editor. “It’s because she knows what she wants,” the deputy said. As I came to know Anna better—the real person, not the celluloid caricature—I learned that this meant not that she thought she knew everything but that she had a clear sense of what her publication should be. And while she relied daily on her colleagues for advice and argument, and cultivated an array of creative photographers, writers, and stylists, she led with clarity and imagination. If one decision or another went sidewise, she took stock and recalibrated. There was always tomorrow.

Go to link