Odell

Time took on an elastic and sinuous quality during the Covid-19 lockdowns, if it retained any coherence at all. Days bled into each other, as did walks and Zoom catchups and Sopranos episodes. Feeling a sense of “temporal weirdness”, California artist and writer Jenny Odell set up a camera on a tripod facing her window. “Time felt the same in my room, but in the photos, it rained, it stormed, and the fog rolled in from San Francisco,” she recalls. Flicking through the photos, Odell encountered a mysterious emotion that…

Any book that claims to offer an insight into Anna Wintour, the longterm editor-in-chief of US Vogue, is a guaranteed bestseller. This is as true of fiction (The Devil Wears Prada, by Wintour’s former assistant, Lauren Weisberger) as it is of schlocky biographies (Front Row: the Cool Life and Hot Times of Anna Wintour by Jerry Oppenheimer) and hatchet jobs by those who know her (2020’s The Chiffon Trenches, in which her former close friend and colleague, the late André Leon Talley, claimed she is not “capable of simple…

For all those who have occasionally wondered just what might lie behind the eternal sunglasses of the famously scary Anna Wintour, the author of a new biography of the longstanding editor-in-chief of American Vogue has momentous news: it seems that there is, after all, “a person there” (as opposed, you understand, to a robot programmed by the ghost of Oscar de la Renta). But while journalist Amy Odell has indeed found several witnesses willing to testify on the record to the existence of this corporeal being, she is,…