Riding in elevators with Miss Wintour
(design by Chris Sauve)

On Sunday night, in millions of rooms across America, Morley Safer turned to fashion's most powerful woman and asked about an elevator.

There is a rumour, it seems. No one is to speak to Anna in the elevator. Is it true? She says no.

Do we trust the ice queen? Can she not fill a room with silence with the slightest lowering of those fabled sunglasses? I had to find out.

I turned to the only living person I know to have shared an elevator's dead air with one Anna Wintour. A few hours later I had 350 crisp words, describing the fear driven into the heart of an intern by an implausibly perfect editor-in-chief.

Thanks to the often eloquent and always entertaining Miss Taylor Mckinnon for this exclusive account. Beers on me, Tay (we'll pick a bar without elevators, I promise).

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Exactly three floors separate the Conde Naste building's cafeteria and lobby.

It was the summer of last, my New York summer, and I was an intern at a magazine in the building. I was wide-eyed, tongue-tied, and ten pounds heavier than I had planned on being when I walked through those tall glass doors for the first time. I had a new wardrobe that felt too small, too itchy in the sidewalk-scorching heat; and open sores on my feet from the heels I had finally had an excuse to wear every single day. It was just after 5. I was going home.

When the doors slid open, I recognized her instantly. Dark sunglasses, hollow cheeks, and that iconic honey-blonde bob. Fuck. Anna Wintour. For a moment after the doors closed, I felt nothing. Then the thoughts came; spastic, one on top of the other. Did I get out of the elevator? Did I flatten myself against the back wall to give her more space? Did I avert my eyes? Was I allowed to take in her watch, her necklace, her shoes?

If I were a different girl, I might have said something; might have found those perfect words to strike up a conversation in which she would respond, maybe even turn up the corners of her stoic lips in a smile. But my clothes were all wrong and my shorts were riding up and I was ten pounds heavier and ten times less interesting than I wanted to be, without an opener in the world that would be good enough.

Three floors. The doors slid open to the lobby.

Anna walked ahead through to the tall glass doors leading out to the street, where a town car, and a driver to open another door, were waiting. She slipped in and disappeared behind the blackened windows. In four seconds, the car pulled away. I exhaled. I leaned up against the building, lit a Marlboro menthol.

I walked twenty blocks in my heels towards home before I hailed a cab.