Anna Wintour

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Anna Wintour : biography

3 November 1949 –

On one occasion she has had to pay for her treatment of employees. In 2004, a court ruled that she and Shaffer were to pay $104,403, and Wintour herself an additional $32,639, to settle a lawsuit brought against them by the New York State Workers’ Compensation Board. They had failed to pay the $140,000 it incurred on behalf of a former employee injured on the job who did not have the necessary insurance coverage.Bastone, William; 18 May 2004; ; The Smoking Gun. Retrieved 10 December 2006.

In the 2000s, her relationship with Bryan was credited with softening her personality at work. "Even when she’s in a bad mood, she has a different posture", someone described as a "Wintour watcher" told the New York Observer. "The consensus is that she’s so much more mellow and easier to work for because she’s probably getting laid."

Pro-fur stance

She has often been the target of animal rights organisations like PETA, who are angered by her use of fur in Vogue, her pro-fur editorials and her refusal to run paid advertisements from animal rights organisations. Undeterred, she continues to use fur in photo spreads, saying there’s always a way to wear it.The September Issue, 0:05. "Nobody was wearing fur until she put it on the cover in the early 1990s", says Vogue co-worker Tom Florio. "She ignited the entire industry."The September Issue, 0:09

She has "lost count" of the times she has been physically attacked by activists. In Paris in October 2005, she was hit with a tofu pie while waiting to get into the Chloé show. On another occasion an activist dumped a dead raccoon on her plate at a restaurant; she told the waiter to remove it. She and Vogue publisher Ron Galotti once retaliated for a protest outside the Condé Nast offices during the company’s annual Christmas party by sending down a plate of roast beef.

Others outside of the animal-rights community have raised the fur issue. Braunstein wrote in his manifesto that she would go to a hell guarded by large rats, where it would be so warm she wouldn’t need to wear fur. Pamela Anderson, in an early 2008 interview, said Wintour was the living person she most despised "because she bullies young designers and models to use and wear fur."

Elitism

Another common criticism of Wintour’s editorship focuses on Vogue‘s increasing use of celebrities on the cover, and her insistence on making them meet her standards.Derrick, Robin; 6 November 2006; ; The Independent. Retrieved 12 August 2009.Landman, Beth, and Mitchell, Deborah; 28 September 1998; ; New York. Retrieved 2 March 2007. She reportedly told Oprah Winfrey to lose weight before her cover photograph. Likewise, Hillary Clinton was told not to wear a blue suit. At the 2005 Anglomania celebration, a Vogue-sponsored salute to British fashion at the Met, Wintour is said to have personally chosen the clothes for prominent attendees such as Jennifer Lopez, Kate Moss, Donald Trump and Diane von Fürstenberg. "I don’t think Vreeland had that kind of concentration", says WWD publisher Patrick McCarthy. "She wouldn’t have dressed Babe Paley. Nor would Babe Paley have let her." By persuading designers to loan clothes to prominent socialites and celebrities, who are then photographed wearing the clothes not only in Vogue but more general-interest magazines like People and Us, which in turn influence what buyers want, some in the industry believe Wintour is exerting too much control over it, especially since she is not involved in making or producing clothes herself. "The end result is that Anna can control it all the way to the selling floor", says Candy Pratts Price, executive fashion director at style.com. She has been credited with killing grunge fashion in the early 1990s, when it wasn’t selling well, by telling designers if they continued to avoid glamour their looks would not be photographed for Vogue. All complied. Another Vogue writer has complained Wintour excluded ordinary working women, many of whom are regular subscribers, from the pages. "She’s obsessed only about reflecting the aspirations of a certain class of reader", she says. "We once had a piece about breast cancer which started with an airline stewardess, but she wouldn’t have a stewardess in the magazine so we had to go and look for a high-flying businesswoman who’d had cancer."