The End of the World Belongs to Radiation, Cockroaches & Anna Wintour

On September 5th, David Remnick interviewed Anna Wintour. The New Yorker’s editor in chief sat across from Condé Nast’s chief content officer and Vogue’s global editorial director - the ex–editor in chief of Vogue America, though that job is fused to her image in a way no corporate title ever will be. The timing was conspicuous. Wintour had just handed her blonde baton to Chloe Malle, the long-standing co-host of The Run-Through with Vogue. Malle is not blonde. She is, however, Wintour’s chosen one.Remnick asked the obvious questions. Wintour confirmed she’ll keep her office. Malle’s will be next door. She rejected the idea of whispering in her heir’s ear. “She’s very much her own person. She has her own point of view,” Wintour said. “I think she looks at things with a more - what’s the right word? Not eccentric . . . a quirky, unusual point of view. She comes at things from different angles. She’s interested in fashion but not obsessed with it, so there are many levels that will weigh into her decisions. I think that she will not be drawn into - I don’t like this word, but - a ‘fashionista’ conversation.” Translation: Malle will edit, Wintour will hover, everyone will pretend otherwise.

When I was eleven, Vogue was contraband. It lived at airports and corner kiosks, glossy and extortionate. My parents financed Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Jacqueline Wilson; Adele’s March 2012 cover was dismissed as frivolous. They hoped I’d graduate to literary fiction - capital L, capital F. As a compromise, I was permitted the back pages — the Youm7 events coverage, wedged between obituaries and classifieds, where Amr Adib made his ritual weekly cameo. I always noticed the switch. Eventually, their strategy worked: I leaned into lit-fic and stopped hoarding perfume samples.But Wintour, unlike Malle, haunted me. In 2018, Vogue launched an Instagram account. The same year Meghan Markle married Prince Harry, and meme pages rewrote the news cycle: the largest pizza ever consumed, a dog without paws, Ben Affleck’s revolving mistress, the obligatory UFO sighting, and Melania Trump in a Zara coat that announced, “I really don’t care, do you?” Vogue’s grid arrived late, peddling gloss in a medium built for trash.

It was belated, but inevitable. If anything rivals Vogue’s canon, it’s Wintour herself - frequently a bigger headline than the magazine she edits. The Met Gala jury: hers. The season’s designer shortlist: hers. The daily order (whole-milk latte, grande, extra shot, egg on a roll): also hers, duly reported. Every few months, someone resurrects The Devil Wears Prada just to speculate about her feelings on it, and when that grows stale, there’s the sequel to pick at. Even her haircut is a beat. Which leaves the most recent plot twist - Chloe Malle - as less a passing of the torch than a cliffhanger in the Wintour Cinematic Universe, where the protagonist never dies, she simply multiplies.The announcement arrived with its own PR playbook: a set of glossy portraits of Malle, dispatched to outlets overnight. In the pictures, she is framed as already in possession of power - transferred after thirty-seven years, though the source remains seated a few feet away. For anyone who’s indulged in the fantasy of Vogue succession, it’s a familiar exercise in suspension of disbelief. The Logan Roy analogy gets overused, but only because it fits.

What, exactly, would Vogue be without Anna Wintour? Wintour isn’t just the steward of Vogue; she’s the wiring, the scaffolding, the brand’s entire operating system. The magazine doesn’t exist alongside her so much as revolve around her, every headline - Met Gala juries, bob maintenance, latte orders - folding back into the cult of Wintour. Malle’s promotion, then, doesn’t read as succession so much as a wedding announcement in the Wintour dynasty: the eldest has finally been paired off, the empire remains intact. She can edit, direct, pivot to a ‘social-driven’ strategy and even rebrand but the engine is still Wintour. Vogue, in its current form, is little more than the wheels she keeps turning.In the weeks leading up to Malle’s coronation — or, to be precise, her editorial civil wedding — speculation over who Wintour might anoint was relentless, impossible to scroll past. The Mirror — objectively among the UK’s gossipier tabloids, second only to the Daily Mail — published a piece headlined, “Anna Wintour’s Vogue replacement: All the rumoured names in line to become editor.” It floated four contenders: Eva Chen, Pharrell Williams, Chioma Nnadi, and Amy Astley.

A parlour game, essentially. Yet it was enough to ignite that familiar whisper lodged at the back of so many POC minds: but what if? Perhaps it was naïve, or merely aspirational, to imagine a person of colour at the helm of fashion’s most canonical legacy title. Then again, the possibility was hardly outlandish — Edward Enninful, long-time editor of British Vogue, had already shattered those gates and reimagined what leadership could look like.What I really wanted to know — and yes, I’ll admit it’s a subjective itch, but one that matters — was whether Wintour’s successor would carry the same shade of beige. Would fashion’s most fashionable-on-paper remain a carbon copy of fashionable as we’ve always known it? Or could this new decision-maker, this industry shaker, bring with them a sense of style so disruptive it might actually shift the way we dress?Because in Vogue’s quest for “timelessness,” the cookies have been cut just a little too close to the bland side of the spectrum. Not that there isn’t an audience for that — there always will be. But what I longed to hear was that Vogue was finally recalibrating its lens. That it was willing to prioritise the less established, the diasporic, the ‘ungendered,’ the frayed. The artists without pedigree or portfolio. The ones who resist being neatly packaged into business plans or bottom lines. A room doesn’t feel so claustrophobic if — heaven forbid — the nepotistic designer conveyor belt paused long enough to let in someone other than the usual suspects. If it wasn’t forever Jonathan Anderson or Glenn Martens on repeat, briefly interrupted only by Sarah Burton or Miuccia Prada.

Which is all to say: Malle’s appointment came as absolutely no surprise. And that when the world ends, all that will remain are radiation, cockroaches, Amr Adib, and Anna Wintour.