June 29 2025 - 5:00pm
It seems like everywhere one looks, regime change is in the air. This even applies at Vogue where, after 37 years, Anna Wintour is stepping back from her role as editor-in-chief of the American edition.
Condé Nast, the parent company which owns Vogue as well as a stable of other formerly influential titles such as Vanity Fair and GQ, has been Wintour’s employer even longer. She first joined the New York office at the beginning of the Eighties, where she was reportedly removed for undermining then editor-in-chief Grace Mirabella. She was able to fail upwards into the editorship of British Vogue, which tanked under her rule, as did House & Garden, which she is credited with bankrupting. It was her close friendship with Si Newhouse, owner of Condé Nast, which saw her installed as editor-in-chief of American Vogue in 1988.
This chequered past is usually overlooked in favor of hagiographies reporting history of a different kind: Wintour’s groundbreaking first cover, which mixed high and low fashion; how she ushered in the supermodel era of the Nineties featuring the likes of Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Cindy Crawford; her hard pivot in the 2010s towards pop culture, with cover stars such as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. This last choice was particularly controversial: some saw it as savvy prophesying of how celebrity culture would engulf us, while others viewed it as a degradation of Vogue’s previous excellence.
It is unlikely that Wintour knew what these moves, which made Vogue increasingly mainstream, would mean in the long-term. Yet the current Condé Nast CEO, Roger Lynch, has a clear plan. There has been an intense restructuring taking place at the company for years now; once-powerful local editions, which celebrated regional style and textile trades, have been erased. Vogue Paris was known for being a little sexier and naughtier, German Vogue had a groomed high-glamour vibe, and Vogue Italia was a colorful fantasia which celebrated international creativity through a distinctly Italian lens. No more.
Various editors-in-chief have been moved on, most of them replaced by little-known staffers with far less star power and the rather less distinguished title “head of editorial content”. (It’s a nice cost-cutting exercise too: their salaries receive a considerable squeeze from the fat paychecks once guaranteed for an EiC.) This “content” is now shared between all the Vogues, piped out in a flattened, homogenous form that can be repackaged cheaply and reused globally.
While some outlets have kept up the half-hearted coverage of a succession plan, ranking possible heirs to Wintour’s role, others are more willing to read the writing on the wall. The truth is that, with Wintour’s departure, the title of “editor-in-chief” is likely to expire too. It was once a highly respected post, requiring uniquely talented personalities able to balance creativity and commercial nous, but modern-day publishers have fallen under the dubious spell of AI efficiency and chosen it over human skill.
In 2023, Wintour gave a keynote speech for the British Society of Magazine Editors. She spoke in expansive, vague terms about the rise of AI and how we must all learn to live with it. Had I looked closer, would I have been able to detect an ironic smile as she told the editors of today that the world they’d worked so hard for was slipping away, and she was escaping the consequences, given her age? At 75, nobody could expect her to continue the daily grind this job once required — though she will retain a string of ceremonial titles.
Still, the “restructuring” seems to have caught up with her. Even Wintour, whose bob-and-sunglasses combo became the de facto symbol for the fashion industry itself, has clearly had her time. And it doesn’t seem that Vogue itself has long left either, the once-trendsetting magazine fast slipping into irrelevance. Instead of its traditional place as a bold tastemaker, it has become a forgettable online brand which chases styles set by others.
This doesn’t mean that media is dying, as a slew of profitable independent new platforms have shown. Rather, this is what happens when you over-rely on tech and get rid of all the talent. Wintour is probably the last person at Vogue who anybody recognizes or cares about. Once she’s gone, what’s left?
