Anna Wintour's first Vogue cover predicted her pathbreaking editorship: Where it all began

Hindustan Times

2 days ago

Denim? For a Vogue cover? Groundbreaking. Anna Wintour's first Vogue cover predicted her pathbreaking editorship(Photos: Instagram, X)
And that's how Anna Wintour commenced her nearly four-decades long reign over the institutional fashion vanguard that is, American Vogue. The year, was 1988 and the November edition in the magazine's 96th year, was perfectly placed to predict the mammoth shift in sands when it came to defining fashion, both high and street, for the oncoming last decade of the century.
"Has there been a mistake?" was the first query from the magazine printers at the time because the finalised shot sent, was so unlike what Vogue had stood for, decades in the making, shared Anna, in a 2012 personal recounting of her first Vogue cover. Israeli model Michaela Bercu, all of 19 at the time, graced the cover, photographed by Peter Lindbergh and styled by Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele. But Michaela wasn't giving the high-art smize, nor was she painted in contour and decked out in jewellery. Stonewashed Guess jeans priced at $50 and a bejeweled Lacroix top with a $10,000 price tag is all she wore. Her hair was untamed, her smile was bright and the frame just looked like a gorgeous, happy candid with the crusted Cross on the Lacroix piece being the only defining factor. "Afterwards, in the way that these things can happen, people applied all sorts of interpretations: It was about mixing high and low, Michaela was pregnant, it was a religious statement", Anna recalled, who was all of 39-years-old at the time her editorship commenced; "But none of these things was true. I had just looked at that picture and sensed the winds of change. And you can't ask for more from a cover image than that", she concluded.
And that's the Midas touch the world of fashion has been witnessing for the past 37 years — the renaissance of Met Gala, from a high-brow exclusive dinner to quite literally, 'fashion's biggest night', being just the tip of the iceberg.
The fashion community held their breath collectively last evening as news broke of Anna stepping down as editor-in-chief of US Vogue. Now while this was immediately considered quite akin to the fall of an institution, the 75-year-old isn't really giving up her curated empire. Anna will stay on in Vogue as the Global Editorial Director and will also continue to serve as the Chief Content Officer at Condé Nast. This puts Anna in-charge of not just Vogue, but also Vanity Fair, GQ, Glamour and more — a gig that honestly sounds befitting of her personal stature and legacy.
After Edna Woolman Chase, who served as American Vogue's editor-in-chief for 38 years between 1914 and 1952, Anna happens to have to her credit, the second-longest reign in the history of the magazine, ending at just a year short of Edna's, though this is of course not the end.
The end of an era for sure — but from the looks of it, the beginning of an even grander one.