ANNA

How the legendary editor of Vogue assembled her extraordinary corporate and personal power.

Though Wintour declined to be interviewed for this book, Odell, a fashion journalist and author of Tales From the Back Row: An Outsider's View From Inside the Fashion Industry, explains that she "blessed the project" so that her friends and colleagues would feel comfortable speaking about her. More than 250 sources did so—Tina Brown even shared her diary—and the author also mined earlier interviews, memoirs by friends and associates, a 2006 biography by Jerry Oppenheimer, and even Wintour's lectures for MasterClass.com. Yet as Odell acknowledges in her introduction, the frustrating fact is that "the many people interviewed for this book had a hard time explaining why she is so powerful and what her power amounts to." This biography could not be any more thorough on the who, what, when, where, and how of Wintour, but without the why, the enigma remains. One notable example is Wintour's long, intense friendship with the recently deceased designer and editor André Leon Talley. Wintour, "as cold and removed as she is said to be," had a connection to Talley unlike any other. Often deferring to him on matters of taste, Wintour gave him a huge salary and nearly unlimited expense account and paid for him to attend a three-month weight-loss program at the Duke Lifestyle and Weight Management Center. Even when Talley was sometimes rude to her—and even when he told an interviewer, "I do not think she will ever let anything get in the way of her white privilege”—she never flinched. Concerning almost everyone else in her life, she "just moved on." Why were these relationships so different? In this recollection, we never learn. More satisfying is the section dealing with the book and movie The Devil Wears Prada.

The book may satisfy fashion industry devotees, but Anna’s iconic sunglasses still don't come off.