It was late spring, and Anna Wintour, the notoriously decisive editor of Vogue, was stymied. That is not a common state for her. But the presidential election had her in a bind, at least when it came to her December issue. She had to make a magazine in one reality and publish it in another. What to do?
“I thought, It’s going to be a very emotional time,” she said. “I think we should all take a step back.”
Other Vogues, including French Vogue and British Vogue, had been “guest-edited” in the past. Ms. Wintour had always, she said, been awed by the French Vogue created by David Hockney in 1985. (It included a portrait he did of the British designer Celia Birtwell for the cover.) So she decided to do something she had never done before: She handed her Vogue over to someone else. The designer Marc Jacobs would step into her metaphoric Manolos for one issue.
The result is online this week and will be on newsstands Nov. 26. Spikier than the usual Vogue, it includes contributions from names that have never before worked for the magazine (the playwright Jeremy O. Harris, who wrote about the pain of wearing a corset) or, in the case of the artist Gregory Crewdson, who photographed Mr. Jacobs in his Frank Lloyd Wright house in Hitchockian gloom, for any magazine.
Here’s how it happened — arguments, lessons and laughs included. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
ANNA WINTOUR I asked Marc to do it over lunch. We always have lunch at Balthazar, and our lunches are very speedy.
