Anna Wintour is stepping down from Vogue but she isn't going out of style

The departure of the doyenne of doyennes had leaked out to the fashion news site Women’s Wear Daily while staff in Vogue’s Manhattan offices were still being told, hitting social media before a planned press release. Word rippled through designers’ show venues, dotted between Le Marais and Place des Vosges, as commentators on insider websites such as Outlander began to respond with shock. “This is bigger than Warren Buffett stepping down,” said one. “That was a long cold Wintour,” quipped another.

Many heard as they were entering the Palais Galliera after Rick Owens’ show. The music playing inside, it was drily noted, was Klaus Nomi’s version of Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead from The Wizard of Oz.

Speculation quickly centred on whether Wintour, 75, was being managed out by publishers Condé Nast, or whether she will now, in effect, wield even more power over the international fashion business, released from her editing duties to oversee the global range of titles and branded events. She remains chief content officer, controlling titles including GQ, Wired and Tatler. “If she’s really leaving, she should go completely,” commented one fashion aficionado attending menswear week.

But Hetty Mahlich, the editor of the fashion website SHOWstudio, argues that it is welcome news in an industry which often resists change. “American Vogue will benefit from a new creative eye, without losing Anna’s expert overarching direction,” she told The Observer. “She has a track record for putting the right people together in the right places, but it’s being intentionally done so that there won’t be another Anna Wintour figure, as we know it.

“If the new head of editorial content is given enough creative control, they could bring a very necessary new perspective to American Vogue. It’s the original Vogue title and has shaped the industry, but has perhaps lost a clear point of view in a crowded media landscape.”

“It is a clever move,” said one ­leading industry writer. “Wintour has become the international emblem of the Vogue brand and now she can look down on all the edition editors from above.”

Wintour’s biographer Amy Odell agrees, telling People: “She’s still going to be at Condé Nast, overseeing what they’re doing and influencing the magazine. So it seems like a controlled way to leave her editor-in-chief job.”

Names of possible successors in a new role of head of editorial content at US Vogue are emerging. Chloe Malle, the editor of vogue.com and daughter of film star Candice Bergen and film director Louis Malle, and Eva Chen, the magazine’s head of fashion partnerships for Instagram, are frontrunners, while British Vogue’s Chioma Nnadi is also believed to be in with a chance. Wintour is thought likely to steer the choice, as she did with the appointment to French Vogue of Scottish fashion journalist Claire Thomson-Jonville.

Whoever gets the job, Wintour’s exit is a jolt to the luxury market and to New York’s high-end social set, over which she presides, though she plans to continue chairing the annual Met Gala, as she has done since 1995. Rumours that Wintour may leave have circulated before. They grew in volume when Edward Enninful, much vaunted as the first black editor of British Vogue, stepped away from the post two years ago. There had also been talk in 2018 when Wintour was criticised for Vogue’s links with star photographers Mario Testino and Bruce Weber, who had both been ­subject to misconduct allegations. And four years ago, when the editor-in-chief apologised for not “finding ways to elevate” black contributors after criticism of Teen Vogue and the apparent lightening of Kamala Harris’s skin in a cover shot.

This time, though, Wintour is really going. Or is she? Just as Rupert Murdoch, 94, keeps kicking himself further upstairs inside News Corp, so Wintour is now to perch where she can watch, and decree, at will.

It may appear to onlookers as if this is double-fake news. On the one hand, not much has changed, since Wintour will still be in charge, but on the other hand, not much has changed because Wintour had already retreated from the daily editing of Vogue. “When I heard about this, I thought: ‘Oh, surely that has already happened?’,” said one writer who has worked for the title for more than 20 years.

Others see this as the moment when the old guard has finally retreated, despite the fact that Wintour will still control publications consumed by more than a billion people in 32 ­countries, maintaining her great sway in the $1.85tn fashion industry. And succession is not easy. For royalty such as Wintour, the arrival of a new editor will be a major adjustment.

After all, back in November 1988, she herself was the breath of fresh air. When the printers received her first cover, a Peter Lindbergh shot of a carefree Michaela Bercu on the sidewalk in a Christian Lacroix top and Guess jeans, they called in to check it was the right image. Until then covers were all studio set pieces, fore­grounding fairytale couture and big gems. “When I became the editor of Vogue,” Wintour told staff on Thursday, “I was eager to prove to all who might listen that there was a new, exciting way to imagine an American fashion magazine.”

Already famous in the media, Wintour became a pop culture figure when Meryl Streep played a fictionalised version of her in The Devil Wears Prada the film of Lauren Weisberger’s bestseller.

“Wintour is one of those editors interested in power, so she has always looked to that world. And she has moved into the stratosphere now,” said Henry Porter, a former editor at Vanity Fair. “She is also quite loyal, I believe. She stuck with John Galliano after he got into bad trouble. She clearly sees redemption as possible.”

Her father, Charles, was the editor of the Evening Standard and founder of its theatre awards, perhaps inspiring Wintour, who said this weekend that she still hopes to run Vogue’s ­coverage of her twin obsessions, theatre and tennis, “in perpetuity”.

Wintour said she will be paying “close attention to the fashion industry and to the creative cultural force that is our extraordinary Met Ball”. Her role at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art extends well beyond this high-profile event – its costume institute, where she works with curator and fellow Brit Andrew Bolton, was renamed in her honour in 2014.

In February, when she was made companion of honour at Buckingham Palace, she told King Charles she had no plans to stop working. It looks highly probable she will be as good as her word.

Above: Anna Wintour in Paris in March 2025. Photograph by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images