Born: 3 November 1949, United Kingdom
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Having worked at Vogue for 17 years, Wang had risen to the role of senior fashion editor and reportedly left the magazine after losing the top job to Wintour. The first issue of the magazine under Wintour came out in November 1988, the same month she turned 39. In the decades that followed, Wintour became one of the most powerful and influential people in the fashion industry, if not the most. She started putting prominent women on the covers instead of only models, launched successful spin-offs, and organized high-profile philanthropy. She’s credited, at least in part, with the rise and success of well-known designers. Starting in 1995, Wintour has also chaired the internationally renowned Met Gala, growing the legacy of her Vogue predecessor Diana Vreeland to turn the event into one of the most talked about, exclusive, expensive, and celebrity-filled parties in the world. As The Guardian observed in 2018,
Wintour has changed how the world gets dressed, in a way that has nothing to do with following trends. (“Trends,” she once said, “is a dirty word.”) She is the key architect of one of the prime aesthetics of our era, which is that of soft power. She has always been as much about power as she is about fashion, and her biggest impact has been on the clothes we see on television screens and newspaper front pages, not on catwalks.