This may shock those three people who haven’t read or watched The Devil Wears Prada, but it turns out that Anna “Nuclear” Wintour, Editor in Chief of Vogue magazine, treats her underlings like shit. An informant recently told Gawker that Wintour ordered a makeover for a new assistant:
We hear from a salon gossip that the razorlike Wintour recently made a new 22-year-old assistant cut her Rapunzel-like long hair.
It flowed all the way down her back, and Wintour requested directly that the girl chop it to below her shoulders. The assistant, who is probably making her age in yearly salary, ran immediatey to Bumble & Bumble. Despite the bitchiness of the request, the word is that Anna was right—the assistant looks much better this way.
Before I could even weigh on the layers of fucked up in this story, a commenter calling himself TheHonJudgeSmails did it for me: “The story isn’t Anna Wintour or her behavior; it’s the fact that some people are willing to let her get away with it.”
The real question we assistants should be asking isn’t “why won’t someone fire/discipline my evil boss?” so much as “who lets evil bosses get that way, and what can we do about it?” In Anna Wintour’s case, people so desperately want to work in the fashion industry that they’re willing to put up with a couple years of being treated like garbage. And thus, she’s allowed to get away with what she does, even though a movie let the entire world know what a terrible boss she was. As long as there are new willing applicants lining up around her door, there’s no motivation for Anna Wintour to be nicer to her employees.
Besides, who wants to be a Vogue assistant when they can be a Vogue intern?