by Maria Bustillos, Vintage

There is reason enough to suspect that US Vogue editor Anna Wintour is in fact the cloven-footed demon known as Satan. For one thing, those sunglasses are very likely hiding glowing red eyeballs. For another, Wintour's destructive powers are so immense as to raise a strong suspicion of supernatural origins.

After a long spell of editorial mayhem and bloodletting in the United Kingdom (where she was dubbed "Nuclear Wintour" by a perceptive press), our subject descended on the States in 1987, and proceeded to lay waste to House & Garden. Where once this venerable magazine published breathtaking pictorials of the Villa Medici as restored by Balthus, Wintour installed a small, second-rate celebrity merchandising hell; an adjunct, apparently, to her larger property below ground. In a devastating maneuver, Wintour even trashed House & Garden's dignified black-and-white cover logo, replacing it with the inane initials, "HG", widely supposed to stand for "How Gauche." Despite a return to its original name, House & Garden has never recovered.

But that was just an appetizer, compared to the putative archfiend's next move. Landing somehow (cf. Rosemary's Baby??) in the driver's seat of America's leading women's magazine, Wintour has proceeded to demolish not only Vogue but with it the whole American fashion world, with colossal force, and for over a decade. Women who were permitted, during the heady days of Carmel Snow and of Mrs. Vreeland, to live in a wonderful fantasy world of beauty and delight every month, have been exiled to a wasteland populated by drab, desiccated, amenorrheic teenagers, wearing rags that would look unnaturally bleak on the set of Blade Runner. Gaiety is gone; humor is gone; warmth is gone; pleasure is gone; style is gone. In their place are greed, insolence, starvation, envy and malice; in short, Satanic stuff Read on