Given she’s the global editorial director at Vogue, you might be forgiven for thinking Anna Wintour’s path to becoming the queen of fashion has been smooth sailing.
In fact, Wintour put such ideas to rest this week when she appeared on Cush Jumbo’s Origins podcast and revealed she was fired from one of her first jobs in fashion for not being able to “pin a dress.”
“I really didn’t have much talent when I was young. I was not good at anything,” admitted Anna, adding that she faked it until she made it.
After leaving school at 18, Anna had few qualifications, but through connections – her father, Charles Wintour, was the editor of London newspaper The Evening Standard – managed to get a job as an editorial assistant at Harpers & Queen in London.
Anna Wintour speaks on September 3, 2024, in New York City. She has revealed that after a series of poor career starts, she faked it until she made it.
Theo Wargo/Getty Images
This was, she says, despite the fact she couldn’t do any of the things an assistant needed to do.
“I was a terrible assistant. I couldn’t do any of the things that assistants are meant to do, like type or sew on a button, I was awful. I still can’t type very well,” she told Jumbo.
“But it was a very different time. Where people got jobs with no discernible skills, but maybe somebody knew someone. So that’s sort of how you ended up in that position. And it was really wrong and I was very bad. I just was lucky. I was just very, very lucky.”
Wintour then says she made the move from London to America to escape being defined by her origins.
“In England, you were defined by where you went to school or what your accent was or what your dad did. And that wasn’t interesting to me. And you came to New York and everyone is from somewhere else and they didn’t care. You became much more anonymous and you succeeded on your own terms, although I wasn’t very good working here at the beginning either,” she told Jumbo.
Following that first job, Anna moved to New York and began working as junior fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar. However, things were not to be and after just nine months Anna was handed a pink slip.
“I got fired from Harper’s Bazaar because I couldn’t pin the dress. I remember people were so shocked.”
Newsweek has emailed Wintour’s representatives at Conde Nast for further comment.
In the past, Anna has also claimed that she was fired from Harper’s Bazaar by then editor-in-chief Tony Mazzola for being “too European.”
“At the time I didn’t know what he meant, but in retrospect I think it meant that I was obstinate, that I wouldn’t take direction and that I totally ignored my editor’s need for credits. In his eyes I was neither commercial, nor professional,” Wintour said during a Women in Journalism speech in London in 2017.
“The shoot that finally drove him over the edge was when I photographed the Paris collections on girls with Rastafarian dreadlocks – a concept that must have been ahead of its time.”
In her podcast interview with Jumbo, Wintour said she spent no time mourning over the loss of her job at Harper’s Bazaar, adding that Ed Kosner, the then-editor of New York Magazine, recognized her talent for fashion journalism and snapped her up.
“Somehow he saw something in me. He saw that I had a sense of journalism and that I saw the story.”
There Wintour embarked on a career of “faking it until you make it,” aided by the fast pace of the weekly magazine.
“Working on a weekly felt so fast at that time, having worked on monthlies up until that point and closer to what my dad had done and what I had learned. So it was a really good fit. And because I was a one man show, I did have to do a lot of things that I was bad at, but I found a way. I did them decisively and fast and with confidence, completely faking it.”
“Ed was so kind and so generous,” says Wintour. She added her thanks to others who mentored her, saying she has always taken time to give this back to others.
“When you’ve been helped a lot in your career, I think, I hope it teaches you to help others.”
In 1985, Wintour became the editor of British Vogue before returning to New York in 1987 to take over the editorship of House & Garden. Ten months later, she was named as editor-in-chief of American Vogue.
