Anna Wintour is stepping back. Who would want to take over Vogue?

Wintour is giving up the reins at American Vogue. But fashion’s dream job - the Vogue editor-in-chief - has deflated.

Anna Wintour made an announcement that shocked the worlds of fashion and media last week: She will look for a new editorial lead to oversee the day-to-day operations of American Vogue, the magazine she has edited for the past 37 years.

This shift will likely change little for Wintour, with her laconic style and pristine bob that have made her synonymous with what it means to be in and out of fashion.

Wintour will retain her two other titles, as Vogue’s global editorial director, overseeing international editions of Vogue, including the American imprint, and as Condé Nast’s chief content officer, which gives her dominion over all other magazines in the company’s stable, including GQ, Wired and Glamour (the only Conde title she does not oversee is the New Yorker). Wintour will still supervise the celebrated Met Gala and the travelling Coachella-meets-fashion-show event Vogue World.

Her sunglass-masked face will still appear front row at nearly every runway in Europe and New York, and she will attend the upcoming couture shows in Paris in July. She will stay in her office at 1 World Trade Center and joked in her remarks Thursday that “I plan to remain Vogue’s tennis and theatre editor in perpetuity”.

Indeed, the change may increase her influence, as she’ll now have more time to dedicate to Wintourising the company’s other magazine brands. (This type of role is not unprecedented at Condé Nast: Alexander Liberman served for decades as the company’s editorial director, overseeing Wintour as well as her predecessors and other bold-faced editors of the luxury magazine peak.

Instead, it marks an opportunity for a new generation to vie for a job that, while diminished of much of Wintour’s power, will serve as an emblematic face of the new state of fashion media. “Now, I find that my greatest pleasure is helping the next generation of impassioned editors storm the field with their own ideas, supported by a new, exciting view of what a major media company can be,” Wintour told her staff Thursday.

Rather than the title “editor in chief,” this person will be Vogue’s “head of editorial content,” in line with a change that Wintour and CEO Roger Lynch have put into place over the past five years, replacing traditionally siloed editors around the world with a new crop of talents, who are asked to tell bigger stories with smaller budgets in an outrageously competitive media landscape, and who share content with their international counterparts and report to a global lead. (Vanity Fair’s recent hire, Wintourian protégée Mark Guiducci, also has a newfangled title of “global editorial director.”)

The question is: is this the job a million girls would kill for, as The Devil Wears Prada promised?

The fashion magazine editor has long been the industry’s most coveted, mythologised role. The Devil Wears Prada, the 2006 film adaptation of the best-selling book based on author Lauren Weisberger’s time working as Wintour’s assistant, cemented the fashion editor as a hegemonic tastemaker and power broker, who puppeteers designers and celebrities into a machine of trend-making and unquestioned authority.

But even before that, the fashion editor was the dream job: a role that combined celebrity, a fabulous lifestyle of free designer handbags and exotic travel, and an authority over what people wear, buy and think about that few positions in the world allow. Vogue’s Diana Vreeland, Harper’s Bazaar’s Liz Tilberis and Kate Betts, and Paris Vogue’s Carine Roitfeld may not be household names, but they were and are more recognisable than most designers, photographers or stylists. In a business as sprawling as fashion, the editor was the vessel for normal people to make sense of the chaos and frivolity.

“You would be the complete boss. Si Newhouse used to say, it’s your magazine, do what you want to do with it,” said Alexandra Penney, the former editor of Self during Condé’s golden age, referring to the company’s late kingmaker. “You had so much power to do what you wanted.” It was stressful, she said, but “it was a sense of, as long as I’m here, I am going to give this magazine my own imprimatur”.

Now, the path to that position of impact rarely includes magazines. Many of the most promising millennial editors, such as stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, a longtime Vogue fashion editor and the first Black woman to style a cover of Vogue, and Emilia Petrarca, who held jobs at W Magazine and the Cut, departed their more traditional posts to write independently, collaborate with brands and pen newsletters with paid subscribers.

“I really wanted to work my way up in media and specifically fashion magazines and one day become an editor in chief,” said Petrarca, who had fulltime magazine jobs for seven years before going freelance and launching a much-followed Substack. “That was very much the path I saw for myself when I got through college.” While Petrarca said she has witnessed the unravelling of media since she entered the industry in 2014, she thinks the pandemic changed the status quo of success. “I just don’t have one dream job anymore. That singular path of, I do this, I do that, and then I get the prize at the end – it is gone.”

Now, someone breaking into fashion can start their own Substack, offer commentary on TikTok or intern with a celebrity stylist – all of which feel like more direct routes to success and stability. Would-be editors have found ways to combine the authority of old-school magazine editing with the perks of influencing.

Laurel Pantin worked at magazines such as Teen Vogue, Lucky and InStyle before moving into the retail world and launching a newsletter. In the fall, she’ll open a small boutique in Beverly Hills, California.

Many women say the circumstances of an editor in chief – long hours, kowtowing to advertisers and continual cost-cutting – are simply not appealing. “Once you have a taste of the freedom of making your own decisions and following the things that genuinely interest you rather than an editorial calendar that’s like, ‘April is our denim issue’ – it’s hard to imagine going back to thinking about things in that way,” Pantin said.

Even the editors who were touted as Wintour replacements have taken on juicy roles outside editing. Eva Chen leads fashion initiatives at Instagram – which arguably has more sway over the popular understanding of style than any magazine. Rickie De Sole is the fashion director at Nordstrom. Sara Moonves, of W Magazine, is still an editor in chief but appears to be building her own publishing empire, as she co-purchased the brand with BDG and a group of investors in 2020. Betts, who worked at Vogue throughout the 1990s before taking the helm at Harper’s Bazaar and was long considered Wintour’s heir apparent during the ’90s magazine heyday, wrote a memoir and now consults for brands.

In some ways, the glamour of editor life has not disappeared – it has simply relocated. The style of writing and level of taste (and expense) in many of these newsletters, including former Vogue writer Liana Satenstein’s Neverworns and Petrarca’s Shop Rat, resembles what might have appeared in the pages of Vogue 20 or 30 years ago. And while Petrarca emphasises that her freelance career is complex to manage and feels precarious, it also allows her to travel freely, and her newsletters often offer recommendations from recent trips to Greece and Rome. Ross Anton has shared stories on redecorating her apartment – the sort of feature that would be at home in a Condé title in the 1990s – and says that her training at Man Repeller was essential to her career today: “I worked under and learned from editors who were very much shaped by the magazine heyday. That still informs the way that I work.”

You may be more likely to discover the influential styles of the moment, from the Row to guidance on trends and personal style, through newsletter writers like Jalil Johnson, Laura Reilly and Pantin than through Vogue editors.

Pantin doesn’t feel that’s necessarily a positive change: fashion has become more about pragmatism, and looking presentable, than about fantasy and play. “When I think of how I came up through the industry – I died for those big editorial spreads and high-budget advertisements,” she said. “They really informed a sense of fantasy and ability to see the clothes as something other than something you could buy.” Fashion media is much more about consuming. “It’s so service oriented and sales oriented, and people are dreaming in other ways.”

In some way, it mirrors the change of a dozen or so years ago, when fashion bloggers began joining and in some cases supplanting editors in the front row. Back then, those bloggers wanted the access and prestige of their more traditional colleagues, and magazines eventually adapted some of the practices of the digital arrivistes – live-streaming and posting from the front row, for example – and the blogosphere eventually all but disappeared.

Now, the editor life does not seem so high-flying. Earlier this year, Vogue reduced the work days of three of its most prominent editors, fashion news director Mark Holgate, global head of fashion Virginia Smith and global creative director Raul Martinez, all by their own request, a Vogue spokesperson clarified. Many fashion observers have viewed the global reorganisation of the magazines as a cost-cutting (and influence-shrinking) measure.

“It’s been depressing interviewing for full-time magazine jobs,” Petrarca said. “The people presenting the jobs know that there’s not a lot of draw, necessarily, to the position.” You could potentially make more money with your own Substack, especially if you use affiliate links that give you a portion of sales of products you recommend.

But it isn’t just monetary, Petrarca said: “If we live in a magical world where money is not an issue, I would be looking at a job in terms of: What is the mission here? And is that exciting?” She sees that at smaller magazines like i-D and Interview, but “when I look at these bigger magazines, I’m really struggling to find the mission there”.

Penney said that regardless of the platform, readers still have a hankering to know what is the best of the best. “What still left in the world is taste,” she said. “Taste is never going to go away.”

Observers are watching the changes at Vogue more out of removed fascination than invested interest. “It would be very hard for the [new editor] to shape the magazine or culture in the same way that someone like Anna did in our current media environment,” said Ross Anton. “I still want my perspective to matter. I just no longer feel like I need my name at the top of a masthead for that to be the case.”

“I am super excited to see what happens at Vogue,” said Pantin. “It just feels like a very different thing than 10 years ago, or five years ago, even.”

Now, the appeal of old-school media may not be the lifestyle but proximity to Wintour. “The draw of the job is working with her,” said Petrarca. “It would be silly to pass that opportunity up.”