Condé Nast has claimed Anna Wintour isn’t going anywhere after speculation surrounding the longtime Vogue editor’s future at the company began to mount this week as the white women at the head of other leading fashion media brands like Refinery29 and Man Repeller stepped down amid accusations of racial discrimination or insensitivity.
“There is no truth to that,” Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said of the rumors suggesting Wintour may be stepping down during an all-staff call on Friday, the Daily Beast reported.
Like many other notable media figures, Wintour came under increased scrutiny this week amid the industry’s ongoing racial reckoning. Earlier this week, after acknowledging in a note to staff that “it can’t be easy to be a Black employee at Vogue,” and saying that the elite magazine had not “found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators,” Wintour faced backlash from critics who said the longtime Vogue editor had intentionally fostered a community that did not value diversity for decades.
Writing for The New York Times on Thursday, Ginia Bellafante questioned whether Wintour “can survive the social justice movement,” noting that while the iconic editor has recently presided over a somewhat more progressive Vogue that has begun taking steps toward fostering a more inclusive environment (including a recent Wintour-penned op-ed encouraging Biden to select a woman of color as his running mate), those attempts can’t help but ring a little hollow coming from the woman who “has done more to enshrine the values of bloodline, pedigree and privilege than anyone in American media.”
After all, if millennial “girl boss” types once supposed to be leading a new, more progressive generation of fashion media are taken to task for being “tone-deaf” wealthy white women who create content exclusively for other wealthy white women, what hope is there for the original wealthy white woman in media whose brand never even pretended to be anything else?
Not much, according to André Leon Talley, longtime Vogue editor who recently wrote a memoir exploring his complicated relationship with Wintour.
“Dame Anna Wintour is a colonial broad; she’s a colonial dame,” Talley told Sandra Bernhard in a recent radio interview. “She’s part of an environment of colonialism. She is entitled and I do not think she will ever let anything get in the way of her white privilege.”
Lynch, however, remains more optimistic. “I think she can be an incredibly positive force for change,” he said. “Many of us can look back at our history and think of things we should’ve done differently. The real question is: Are you in a position to contribute and make change now? I think there are very few people in the world who can have the influence to change the culture…than Anna.”
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