The Anna Wintour Effect The Most Infulenfual Woman In Fashion History 2

Some women changed history, and the world wrote their story wrong. Some women broke every rule they were given, and the world called them dangerous. Some women built empires with nothing, and the world forgot their names. This channel exists to find those women, tell their real story, and give you the psychology behind what made them impossible to ignore. This is Iconic Her, and class is in session. Welcome back to Iconic Her, where every week we study one woman, real or fictional, ancient or modern, famous or forgotten, and break down the psychology behind what made her so magnetic, because these women did not just live interesting lives, they understood something about power, presence, and influence that most people never figure out, and our job is to find exactly what that was, and bring those lessons into your life. So let's get into today's woman, and see what she has to teach us. Today's lady is none other than the most influential woman in fashion industry, Anna Wintour. She got fired twice before she ever set foot inside Vogue. She had no formal qualifications. She dropped out of school at 15, and the editor who fired her from Harper's Bazaar told her she was too obstinate, too European, and too unwilling to take direction, and yet by the time she was done, she had run the most powerful fashion magazine in the world for 37 years, raised over $230 million for the Met, had Bradley Cooper sending her film scripts before casting his movies, and became so influential that designers at Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton would ask themselves during production whether Anna would like it, not their customers, not their investors, Anna, and the question that her entire life answers is not how she became that powerful. The question is what she understood about authority, and respect that most people spend their entire lives completely getting wrong. Her father Charles Wintour was the editor of the London Evening Standard, and he consulted her on how to make the newspaper relevant to young people, meaning Anna Wintour was being treated as an editorial authority before she was even old enough to have a career, and that early experience of being taken seriously, of having her taste and instincts consulted by someone powerful, planted something in her that never left, which was an absolute certainty about the validity of her own vision, and at 15 years old, she had already settled on the bob haircut she would wear for the rest of her life, not as a fashion choice, but as a statement of identity, a declaration that she had already decided who she was, and had no interest in changing to suit anyone else's preferences. And this is the first psychological lesson she offers us, because the people who command the most genuine authority in any room are almost never the ones still figuring out who they are, they're the ones who settled. That question's so long ago that it no longer even occurs to them to wonder what other people think about the answer. She was fired from Harper's Bazaar, and her editor told her she was obstinate, that she would not take direction, and that she totally ignored her editor's need for credits, saying in his eyes she was neither commercial nor professional, and most people in that situation would have either collapsed with self-doubt or spent years trying to prove the person wrong by becoming exactly what they were told to be. But Anna Wintour did neither of those things, because she spent no time mourning the loss of her job, and instead found an editor at New York Magazine who saw something in her, and she embarked on what she herself described as a career of faking it until you make it, doing things she was bad at decisively, and fast, and with confidence, and the psychological principle operating here is one of the most important and least understood ones in the study of high-performing women, which is that failure only defines you if you allow it to become part of your identity, and Anna Wintour's response to being fired was not to question her vision, but to find a better environment for it, and that distinction between questioning yourself and questioning your environment is the difference between the women who eventually win and the ones who never figure out why they kept losing. Behind the scenes, people were asking her advice on all kinds of things, and the reason she remained powerful and influential was that she never talked about what she was doing, and this is where her psychology becomes genuinely fascinating, because Anna Wintour built her authority not through loudness or visibility, but through the exact opposite, through a precision and a restraint so complete that people began to organize themselves around her silence, rather than her words, and the sunglasses, that everyone associates with her as a symbol of coldness were actually just prescription glasses she wore because she needed them, but she understood that the mystery they created was useful, that when people cannot read your face, they project power onto you, and she never corrected that projection. She simply let it work for her, and then there is the question of her standards, which everyone who ever worked for her described as impossible, and which she herself described as non-negotiable, and the psychological truth about high standards is not that they make people afraid of you, it is that they make people respect you in a way that being like never can, because when you consistently refuse to accept less than what you believe is possible, you communicate something about your own value that no amount of charm or warmth or social effort ever could, which is that you know exactly what you are worth, and you are completely unbothered by the discomfort of anyone who disagrees. There are three things Anna Wintour understood about authority that are worth naming directly, because they work in every industry and every room you will ever walk into, and the first is what psychologists call identity foreclosure, which simply means she decided who she was so early and so completely that she had no psychological space left for other people's opinions to occupy. The bob, the sunglasses, the standards, the silence. None of it was performance, it was just a person who had finished the work of becoming herself, and had moved on, and the second principle is strategic silence, because Anna does not talk about what she is doing, and that is probably the biggest reason she remains powerful and influential, because in a world where everyone over shares and over explains and constantly seeks validation through visibility, the person who says nothing forces everyone else to pay attention, and the third principle is vision over consensus, because Anna herself said when I, here a company is being run by a team my heart sinks, you need to have that leader with a vision and heart that can move things forward, and what she understood is that the most powerful thing you can offer any room is not agreement, it is clarity, a point of view so specific and so unwavering that it gives everyone around you something to orient themselves against. Anna Wintour was called nuclear winter, she was called the devil, she was called cold and impossible and too much by people who mistook her certainty for cruelty, and she wore Prada to the premiere of The Devil Wears Prada and said nothing, because she had already understood something that took everyone else years to figure out, which is that the most powerful response to being misunderstood is not explanation, it is results, and the question her life leaves you with is this, how much of your energy right now is going toward managing what other people think of you, and how much of it is going toward becoming so completely and specifically yourself that their opinion simply stops having anywhere to land, because Anna Wintour stopped asking that question at 15 years old and never picked it up again, and that is not coldness, that is the most radical act of self-respect that a woman in a world full of opinions about her can ever perform, stay iconic.