Anna Wintour

Pattern recognition can't be taught.

It can only be earned through obsessive accumulation of high-quality inputs.

Most people want to trust their gut without feeding it the right things first.

Then came the moment that defined her aesthetic forever.

Christmas, 1971.

Anna styled a shot mixing a $2,000 white fox coat with a $29 wicker chair.

Diamonds with democracy.

Luxury with accessibility.

Everyone else segregated high and low.

Anna smashed them together.

The insight she had was that aspiration without accessibility is just snobbery.

Accessibility without aspiration is just a commodity.

The magic lives in the tension between the two.

That high-low mix would become her signature and eventually fashion's default language.

But first she had to survive long enough to impose it on the world.

Anna's assistant, Claire Hastings, got a front row seat to what extreme standards actually look like in practice.

Anna wasn't warm.

She didn't explain much, but Hastings noticed something.

Anna was obsessively invested in her success, not through pep talks, but through the intolerance for mediocrity.

Every borrowed item needed to be returned perfect, down to the original tissue paper.