Farewell, Anna Wintour: sphinx-faced, super-enduring doyenne of global fashion. The news that the editor-in-chief of American Vogue has stepped down after 37 years marks the end of an era, but I don’t mean her reign over couture and catwalk.
What her bow marks is the golden age of magazines, when editors were celebrated as celebs in their own right and whose names were synonymous with their product. Mark Boxer at Tatler, Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair, Nick Logan at The Face, Bill Buford heading Granta, Alan Coren at Punch and Tina Brown presiding over Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and the Daily Beast. But “Nuclear Wintour” outsaw all of them, while the only famed editor still at his desk and outdoing Wintour by two years and still counting is my first boss, Ian Hislop, Private Eye’s Lord Gnome.
