Nuclear Wintour

The Wall Street Journal runs an interview with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, "Pulling Fashion's Strings." I think Wintour is fascinating -- she's a lot like Martha Stewart in that she's sustained a household-name franchise in a typically "female" market and become the target of a lot of bilious commentary as she goes -- and I also think she'll be remembered in the same breath as Diana Vreeland as someone who had an innate understanding of her field and no hesitation at all for using her influence to shape it. Witness her takes on fur:

I think Vogue's support of fur absolutely helped the fur industry. And at the time when fur sales were really suffering, we put [supermodel] Linda Evangelista on the cover in a blue fur. I think fur is an important part of our business. I love fur. I love the fancy of it. I love what designers are doing with it in terms of accessories and colors. We totally supported it and will continue to support it.

and grunge:

We certainly showed grunge. I don't want to pretend it didn't happen. We did a big Steven Meisel portfolio that showed the look, and the feedback from all the stores and the consumers is that they hated this look, and it wasn't working. We sat down and we talked about it. I said, 'OK, we are going to do an issue about the return to chic.' (May, 1994) We did a whole Helmut Newton-esque spread of women in fabulous suits and high heels. It kind of rallied the whole industry behind us because grunge just wasn't working. It was a battle cry, 'let's move on.' And readers loved it. Stores loved it. Then things turned around.

It's worth remembering that grunge was never really fashion so much as it was a protest against fashion, and that its flop in the stores is less reflective of its success as a trend than it is of its failure to be commodified. Which, come to think of it, means that grunge succeeded on some level anyway.

As for the fur ... while I'll be the first to agree that some furriers are getting their pelts in shockingly cruel and awful ways, I'd rather see fur than fake fur; after all, the former is organic and will therefore return to the Earth in the fullness of time, while the latter could clog landfills forever. This is no way an endorsement for fur, just a way of determining the least odious alternatives.