Brand Anna by Joshua Levine | Mario Testino | WSJ Magazine

DolceTracker|WSJ’s Brand Anna by Joshua Levine is a powerful, detailed tribute to the international powerhouse who is the editor of American Vogue.

Editor of American Vogue since 1988, Wintour is humanized by Levine. Grace Mirabella, then American Vogue’s editor, asked Anna Wintour what job she wanted at the magazine when Wintour first interviewed with Mirabella in 1982. Without flinching, Wintour replied, ‘Your job.’

If there is consistency in quotes about Anna Wintour from her powerful friends and allies, it’s that you don’t say ‘no’ to her. To be clear, everyone says that’s Wintour invests in relationships and often doesn’t call an IOU for years.

Australian director Baz Luhrmann story tells a personalized Anna Wintour experience, one of several examples that show — not Anna Wintour as a softie, because she isn’t — but Anna Wintour as a woman who embraces an issue and makes things happen:

Australian director Baz Luhrmann met Wintour when he sent her a half-finished reel of his movie “Moulin Rouge!” after it was beset by toxic prerelease buzz. Wintour threw her support behind it, putting Nicole Kidman on the cover in a gown from the film and organizing a celebrity auction around it with allies like Weinstein and Donald Trump. “Those people helped me see ‘Moulin Rouge!’ through its birth pangs,” Luhrmann says. The two have been close friends since. “I always talk to Anna about what I’m up to,” he says, referring to plans for his next film, an adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” “and I always listen to what she has to say.” Read on at WSJ

Anna Wintour is all business at American Vogue. There is considerable conversation about Anna Wintour vs Carine Roitfeld in the piece. The question isn’t about talent or taste but about American vs Europe and particularly France.  Business rules in America and every photographer will tell you so. Cost is the number one question; creativity and artistry far down the checklist.

Much is made of Anna Wintour placing John Galliano at Christian Dior in 1993, but the article doesn’t mention that Dior has failed to make any significant money for LVMH. Wintour’s recommendation of Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton has paid off handsomely for LVMH.

Even if Syria wasn’t killing protesters in the streets as we speak, we question the ‘soft-focus’ look at Syria’s ruling al-Assad family that landed in the March 2011 issue of Vogue.

Yes, conceded writer Joan Juliet Buck, “In Syria, power is hereditary,” and there are those “souvenir Hezbollah ashtrays” scattered around. But president Bashar al-Assad’s wife, Asma, is nonetheless “glamorous, young and very chic.”

In honoring and glamourizing Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert, Vogue does turn away from the facts of Syria’s repressive regime, citing instead the reforms that Syria’s First Lady advances for the people of her country.

This is the pragmatic side of Anna Wintour at work, advancing the business of fashion worldwide.