She Took Anna Wintour’s MasterClass So You Don’t Have To
The legendary Vogue editor expands her brand. By Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz/New York Magazine
Editor’s note: This article was first published on TheCut.com
Escaping the onslaught of ads for Anna Wintour’s “MasterClass” on Instagram should be a master class of its own. And while I had my reservations, I just couldn’t resist the value prop of learning from someone who has led Vogue for 31 years; has hired and fired hundreds of people; and who is indubitably the most influential and powerful person in fashion, an industry she has spent her entire career upholding and enabling (for better or for worse). Plus, the only new and surprising thing we’ve learned about her in the past several years is that she loves a flip-flop. Maybe, I thought, she was finally going to open up a bit.
The online course, which promises lessons in “how to be a boss,” begins with that same footage you’ve probably seen in the ad: Wintour, moving coolly through a crowd of rabid paparazzi (Anna, love the hair! Anna, Anna! Stop!), followed by a slideshow of her magazine covers. “Anna Wintour, you are a power,” Christine Amanpour intones solemnly. Cue inspirational music.
“I was sold on the proposition that if she was really engaging in lessons on leadership, she might cop to some of her mistakes.”
In theory, for $90, the course gives you a dozen classes in “leadership and creativity” and “unprecedented access” into Wintour’s world. It’s produced by MasterClass, a polished online learning platform whose slogan is “online classes from the world’s greatest minds” and which features lessons from the likes of Martin Scorsese and Serena Williams. (MasterClass did not respond to inquiries about whether it recruited Wintour for the course and what its fee structure with instructors is.)
I hadn’t heard of the platform before now, but it looked promising: Anna Wintour is notoriously private, a woman who rarely reveals herself—here she was offering a chance to get inside her head. Again, I had strong reservations: Part of Wintour’s extreme privacy is her tendency to stay mum on the controversies and criticism she’s received while head of Vogue over the years. That said, I was sold on the proposition that if she was really engaging in lessons on leadership, she might cop to some of her mistakes.
So I joined the ranks of some 100 other students. A quick scan of the community forum revealed that many of them were, like myself, women working in fashion or media, eager to know if Anna would actually respond to anything in the community forum’s “Dear Anna” advice column. She hasn’t yet.
It’s no secret that Condé Nast has struggled in recent years, including a $120 million hemorrhage in 2017 that forced it to sell three of its magazines and consolidate departments across titles. And Vogue, once the arbiter of fashion, taste, and culture, has struggled to fend off the forces of indifference from younger readers. Celebrities no longer need it in quite the same way now that they have their own social platforms, and when the news of Condé’s shake-up broke in 2017, a few writers addressed the elephant in the room: With the democratization of high fashion via social media and blogging, does the fashion industry even need a magazine like Vogue? The answer, mostly, was no.
—
Continue reading at The Cut.
ORIGINALLY POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 23, 2019 ©VOX MEDIA NETWORK