Raw Power: Anna Wintour’s Top Editor Ranking and Her White House Pals
The NY Post’s Page Six asked today: “Has Anna Wintour gone power crazy?” The Vogue Editor appears to have ruffled the feathers of fashion retailers by suggesting that the industry seek to change price-fixing laws because the Council of Fashion Designers “now has friends in the White House,” according to unnamed “fashion insiders” sourced by Page Six.
The likely reason for Wintour’s renewed mojo? Her very recent debut as the #1 most powerful Magazine Editor. Take that, McKinsey!
No one individual may be a bigger brand in either fashion or magazine publishing than Anna Wintour. So when she speaks up, it makes the papers. Page Six reports:
At a Tuesday “town hall” meeting hosted by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, designers like Donna Karan and Elie Tahari lamented steep markdowns that have plagued profits since last fall, The Post’s James Covert reports.
“Could someone lead a committee that would make ground rules for retailers when the discounting starts, and then all the retailers can agree to it?” Wintour asked.
When CFDA President Diane von Furstenberg pointed out, “That’s illegal,” Wintour said: “Is that something we can change? We have friends in the White House now.”
According to a Vogue spokesman, Wintour was merely alluding to designated days for retail discounts that are already in place in certain countries including France and the United Kingdom.
“That may be OK over there,” says Vano Haroutunian, a New York lawyer focused on the apparel industry. “But here, it sounds like collusion.”
It may, but if that is indeed what Wintour said it should be noted that she didn’t suggest doing something illegal, but “changing” the offending law to make legal, by the good grace of her new White House friends. (This can be construed as either nefarious or charmingly naive, but either way, it’s just one reason why Condé Nast has a legal department.) Don’t blame Wintour entirely though — she was only following the lead of newspaper honchos, which had their own super-secret meeting in may to talk about “Models to Monetize Content” (not to be confused with that other super-secret meeting of newpaper honchos in April). Slate neatly draws the lines:
Antitrust law is complicated, but one principle is very simple: Competitors cannot get together and agree on price or the terms on which they will offer their services to their customers. It doesn’t matter if the industry is ailing or if collusion would be “good” for society or necessary to preserve democracy. An agreement regarding pricing is “per se”—automatically—illegal under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, the main federal antitrust law.
Unless Wintour’s friends in the White House want to change that, designer discounting seems alive and well.
Any negative attention brought by Wintour’s misunderstanding of antitrust law, however, is likely to be overshadowed by her very recent domination of the the Magazine Editor category of the Power Grid. Previously at #4, Wintour rocketed to the top spot today thanks to a new metric just added to the Power Grid that to make the rankings more accurate. News Buzz, which tracks the number of mentions from major news outlets over the past month, tracked via Google News. This is what’s been shaking up the Power Grid – including Wintour’s rise to the #1 spot.
With so much Condé Nast news in the press of late, the recent trailer release of the Wintour-focused documentary The September Issue, plus her recent flirtation with antitrust law, it’s no wonder that Wintour finds herself at the top of the heap. But for how long?
