When Anna Wintour started as editor-in-chief of US Vogue on August 1, 1988, the gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote that a “Wintour chill pervaded the Condé Nast offices”.

Wintour, 39 at the time, had been editor-in-chief at House & Garden, a magazine she had transformed so rapidly and radically that, by the end of her 10-month tenure, it was named HG and confused subscribers thought they had received the wrong publication.