Did Anna Wintour and Bob Marley have an affair?

SHE was new to the fashion world and he was an already-famous reggae singer. So did Anna Wintour and Bob Marley really disappear together for a week-long affair in 1975?

The Australian 50th - 1981

IN 1975 while working as a junior fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar, Anna Wintour met Bob Marley and they had a week-long love affair.

At least, that’s the rumour.

According to Jerry Oppenheimer, who wrote Front Row: Anna Wintour: What Lies Beneath the Chic Exterior of Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief, Wintour was obsessed with Marley throughout the 1970s. She saw him perform with The Wailers and managed to score a backstage pass when they were playing in Manhattan. Then, they disappeared together for a week. Or did they?

It’s been the subject of much debate and frankly, we’re not sure if it’s true or not. Wintour herself denies it, but someone who really, really wants it to be true is Mallory Ortberg.

Reggae singer Bob Marley (1954-1981) in an undated photo.

Ortberg reignited the flame in a tongue-in-cheek blog post on The Toast this week, listing eleven things she ‘believes’ about the affair.

Among those is the idea that Wintour called Marley ‘Robert’. Ortberg also holds onto the hope that a photograph of the two does exist, and that he was in fact the love of her life.

Was his disinterest in the fashion world their undoing? “Bob Marley steadfastly refused to play tennis or come to a fashion show with Anna. He was perfectly calm but perfectly firm about it, and he was the first and last man to stand up to her without an ounce of malice or resentment in his heart,” she imagines.

“Once a year Anna sends everyone in the Vogue offices home early, pulls down her blinds, and plays one of his albums while slowly eating a piece of carrot cake. I believe that she prefers Exodus to Uprising.”

Fashion editor Anna Wintour attends Chanel 2015-2016 fall/winter ready-to-wear collection fashion show on March 9, 2015 at the Grand Palais in Paris. AFP PHOTO / PATRICK KOVARIK

Was she wearing her trademark sunnies at the time? Did he serenade her? Is it truth? Fiction? Fantasy? We will never know.

Read more at The Toast

Originally published as Did Anna Wintour and Bob Marley have an affair?