Anna Wintour
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
The first rule of transformation, you can't renovate a house with people still living in it.
Two years later, she's proven her point.
When House and Gardens editorship opens in New York, Anna takes it.
Not because she wants to edit home decor, because it's her ticket back to America and closer to Vogue.
At House and Garden, she renames it HG.
Anna adds fashion shoots to a decorating magazine, replaces anonymous rich people's homes with celebrity features.
Subscription cancellations require a dedicated phone line.
She would do things that people have never done before and that alienated some people, a features editor observed.
But Anna wasn't trying to save House and Garden.
She was auditioning for Cy Newhouse and Alexander Lieberman.
The magazine was her performance space.
Years later, every decor magazine would copy what Anna tried at HG, voyeuristic glimpses into celebrity homes instead of furniture catalogs.
She was right, just a little bit early.
But by then, she'd have bigger things to transform.
Just as the criticism at HG was starting to die down, Grace Mirabella's 37 years at Vogue were ending.
She just didn't know it.
Newhouse and Lieberman had decided by summer of 1988.
They kept Anna in endless planning meetings while she pretended everything was normal at HG.