MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It's official. Chloe Malle will be Vogue's next top editor, taking over from longtime editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. So what does that mean for the publication? To help answer that question, we've called Amy Odell. She is a fashion and culture journalist who wrote "Anna: The Biography," which is about Anna Wintour. And she's with us now. Amy Odell, welcome back. Thanks for joining us.
AMY ODELL: Thank you for having me.
MARTIN: So tell us about Chloe Malle, and why do you think Wintour picked her for the job?
ODELL: Yeah. So if you look at the history of Vogue successions, they tend to pick someone who has had experience working at Vogue, and Chloe Malle is no different. She has a long career in journalism. She's contributed to many publications. She went to Brown. She studied comparative literature. And she started working at Vogue as the social editor in 2011. That was coverage that Anna has always been keenly interested in. So think weddings. Think fashionable party coverage. She also wrote the recent cover story about Lauren Sanchez's wedding to Jeff Bezos. And she worked her way up to being the editor of Vogue's website.
I would say she's Vogue's first real digital native editor, which is momentous and historic, and it's sort of amazing. It's only just now coming, but she really has a lot of experience that qualifies her for the job, and she's a known entity to Anna and within Conde Nast.
MARTIN: You know, I think people have focused on her celebrity sort of origins. Her father is the director Louis Malle - the director. Her mom is Candice Bergen, who, coincidentally, played Vogue's editor-in-chief on "Sex And The City." But so the celebrity universe is nothing new to her, but what I think I hear you saying is that sort of that internal work-your-way-up connection is - was really what was dispositive here?
ODELL: Yeah. I mean, connections certainly help you at Vogue. That is absolutely true, and Chloe Malle definitely knows her way around a red carpet. But Conde Nast tends to put people in this job who have had experience. Anna herself, she worked at Vogue as creative director beginning in 1983. She then became the editor-in-chief of British Vogue. Then she became the editor-in-chief of House Garden, which she renamed HG before she became editor in chief of American Vogue in 1988. And if you go back in history, there haven't been that many Vogue successions, amazingly. But if you go back in history, you see that all the editors-in-chief really had a lot of experience before they got that job.
MARTIN: So what's your sense of what's next for Vogue under her direction?
ODELL: Well, she has talked about actually cutting back - cutting back on the number of print issues that Vogue did and doing those issues more around themes instead of months, which seems like a way, perhaps, to appeal to advertisers. It could perhaps make those issues stand out more online. I think it will be fascinating to see how she distinguishes her Vogue from Anna's Vogue because Anna is staying on. So how much is she really going to be able to break from Anna's very, very strong aesthetic?
The other thing that distinguishes Chloe Malle is that her background is in journalism, whereas Vogue's previous editors have pretty much all had backgrounds in styling, and that's Anna's background as well. She's really more of an image-maker. She's not a writer or a journalist.
MARTIN: Well, how do you think the dynamic between them is going to play out?
ODELL: Yeah. All I know is that they have a really great working relationship, and they have both said that Chloe is going to have the opportunity to distinguish her magazine from Anna's. Her first print issue is supposed to come out next year, so I think at that point, we'll be able to see what the aesthetic difference is.
MARTIN: That is Amy Odell. She's a fashion and culture journalist. Her latest book is "Gwyneth," a biography of Gwyneth Paltrow. Amy, thanks so much.
ODELL: Thank you for having me.
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