Dame Anna Wintour had just sent off her first edition of US Vogue in October 1988 when the magazine received a phone call from the printers. They had seen the issue's front cover, and had one question: "Has there been a mistake?", News.az reports citing BBC.
The cover, Dame Anna's first as editor-in-chief, featured a lesser-known model, Michaela Bercu, smiling at the camera in a stylish Christian Lacroix couture jacket.
But two things were notably different from usual: the model was standing outside, in the street, and wearing a pair of jeans. The printers half-assumed there had been some kind of error.
"I couldn't blame them," Dame Anna later recalled. "It was so unlike the studied and elegant close-ups that were typical of Vogue's covers back then, with tons of makeup and major jewellery. This one broke all the rules."
The jeans had, in fact, been a last-minute addition, after the skirt which Bercu was supposed to wear didn't fit properly. But the intended message was clear: the cover star was a regular, everyday girl - and this was a new era for Vogue.
Dame Anna's arrival, and desire to defy convention, "signalled a revolution" at the magazine, according to CNN Style's Oscar Holland, who praised her debut issue as "warm and easygoing".
After two years in charge of British Vogue, Dame Anna had been hired for the US edition precisely to shake things up. She was tasked with making sure the magazine didn't lose its edge as it headed towards the 1990s.
In the decades since, Dame Anna has "steered the title from glossy print editions featuring first supermodels then grunge, via Noughties celebrity culture and reality TV stars, into an online era of social media and digital publishing," noted the Times' fashion editor Harriet Walker.
But this week, Dame Anna announced she would be stepping back as Vogue's editor-in-chief after 37 years.
She will remain publisher Condé Nast's chief content officer, a role she was appointed to in 2020, which means she will still oversee Vogue's content, along with the company's other titles such as GQ, Wired and Tatler.
But while she may be staying with the company, her departure as editor-in-chief marks the end of an extraordinary era for the magazine, which helped to define pop culture.
