Anna Wintour

Alexander Lieberman, who ran Condé Nast and controlled Vogue, mentioned to Viva's editor, I love Viva.

I noticed you have an English woman on the masthead.

For three years, Anna transformed Viva's fashion pages into the required reading at Vogue and Harper's.

The porn magazine nobody respected was teaching the fashion establishment how to shoot.

Excellence is excellence.

The platform is just context.

November 17th, 1978, Viva announces it's closing tomorrow.

Anna starts sobbing, shocking colleagues who thought she didn't care.

She wasn't crying for the magazine, she was mourning the loss of her laboratory, the first place she had had total control.

For 18 months, Anna disappeared into what fashion people call the wilderness, jet-setting with her boyfriend from Paris to Jamaica to the south of France, her only real break from work since age 16.

But Ambition doesn't like vacations.

When she returned to New York in 1980, Savvy magazine called, the magazine for executive women.

Anna needed work.

She took it.

The problem was immediate.

Savvy appealed to women who'd fought through the 70s to make partner at law firms, women who hid their femininity like a liability.

But Anna had built her entire career making femininity a superpower.

Editor Judith Daniels wanted real people instead of models, practical office clothes, reasonable prices.

Anna nodded in meetings and then shot exactly what she wanted.

Anna was very strong-minded, and she just did whatever she wanted, the executive editor recalled.