Coddington talks Anna Wintour!

 

Grace Coddington And Anna Wintour’s Work Rivalry Makes Them Better At Their Jobs

 Grace Coddington, the Creative Director of Vogue, has been opening up about her relationship with her boss, Anna Wintour, as she promotes her new memoir Grace (Random House). Though they are considered to be somewhat rivals, their healthy competitive relationship makes them both better at their jobs.

 

R. J. Cutler, the director of The September Issue, which gave the world an inside glimpse of working dynamics of their interesting relationship (watch the clip below from the documentary to get an idea) told The New York Times.

“Though I don’t think of them at all as rivals, in thinking of Anna and Grace’s relationship, I was reminded of what McEnroe said about Borg, which is that if Borg hadn’t retired early, he would’ve been a much better tennis player and a better human being. I do think these women bring each other to new heights.”

 

The two women are extremely different and as we saw in the documentary, they often butt heads. Anna embraces the fact that celebrities dominate fashion and constantly features them in her magazine while Grace tends to hate the Hollywood scene. “… Because my feeling has always been that people should concentrate on their jobs and not all this fashionable ‘I want to be a celebrity’ s–t,” she wrote in Grace. They also clearly make different impressions on their assistants. Anna’s former assistant wrote The Devil Wears Prada while Grace’s wrote a 70th-birthday tribute that appeared in More Intelligent Life. 

 

In sillier things, Grace also mostly wears black with her bright red hair flying while Anna has declared her hatred for the color so much so that guests know not to wear it to Vogue functions.
Grace also, clearly, cares more about what people think about her but I think that makes them a better team.

 

 “I care whether anyone – from the mailman to the dry cleaner – likes me. Maybe that is my weakness,” she explains in an exclusive extract for British newspaper The Telegraph. “But not Anna’s. She does, however, care very, very much about her children. If one of them comes on the phone, I’ve watched her melt, which is not something you very often see with Anna.”

 

And though in the film it looked like Anna dominated Grace in terms of decisions, Grace has quite a but of fight in her. In the book she wrote:
“I am often heard grumbling about Anna Wintour. For instance, at the end of a fashion meeting at American Vogue in which one of my cherished ideas is arbitrarily dropped. Funnily enough, I had no idea how cantankerous and argumentative I can seem until I saw myself in the film The September Issue. Small surprise that, in the past, Anna has said I am the only person in fashion who can actually grind her down. As the nuns who wrote my school report when I was 14 put it, ‘Grace has a very nice way of getting her own will.’”