Anna Wintour

The Fashion World

The editor-in-chief of American Vogue and the artistic director of Conde nast, Anna Wintour is looked at as one of the most influential figures on fashion.

Her father, Charles Wintour, was the editor of the London Evening Standard from 1959 to 1976. Her mother was Eleanor “Nome” Trego Baker, an American daughter of a Harvard Law School professor. Anna was named after her grandmother, Anna Baker, who was a merchant’s daughter from Pennsylvania.

Anna is a member of a ‘landed gentry family’ and, through her paternal grandmother, she is a distant relative of the late Duchess of Devonshire. Anna had four siblings. Gerald, her older brother / Patrick, a younger brother and journalist / and James and Nora, who have worked in local government.

Anna was educated at the North London Collegiate School, where she ‘rebelled’ against the dress code by taking up the hemlines of her skirts. At 14 years of age, Anna started to wear a ‘bob’. Her interest in fashion was developed when she started to read the magazine “Seventeen”, which her grandmother sent over from the United States. Anna recalled: “Growing up in London in the ’60s, you’d have to have had Irving Penn’s sack over your head not to know something extraordinary was happening in fashion”. At this time, her father regularly consulted with her when he was considering ideas for increasing readership in the youth market.

“I think my father really decided for me that I should work in fashion”, Anna is quoted as saying. He…