It was 20 December when I received an invitation out of the blue.
Would I like to attend lunch with Anna Wintour? If so please save the date and a formal invitation will follow.
After the bewilderment (why me?) came joy (lunch! With Anna Wintour! At the tennis!). Then came the anxiety.
What would I wear? I had nothing to wear! What the fuck would I wear?
Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, has passed into legend. She has been mythologised in books and movies, had an award-winning documentary made about her (The September Issue), and has more influence on what we wear on a daily basis than anyone else.
As the lunch drew nearer, questions about what to wear overcame any thoughts of the event itself. Or even the woman herself. I didn’t know if there would be a small selection of guests or large. I didn’t know if I’d be actually talking to Wintour or was expected to interview her. I didn’t know how I was going to get there (the lunch was in Melbourne, I was in Sydney) or even why I was invited.
She doesn’t like all black, counselled one friend. She hates clothes to be wrinkled, so you have to wear something freshly ironed, said another. At the hairdresser, the woman at the next basin, who had once been in the same room as Wintour (an experience she described as “terrifying”) advised sotto voce to “Wear sunglasses. Everyone around her wears sunglasses.”
Others suggested I just wear the most fashionable thing I own.
Fair enough, but the most on-trend piece in my wardrobe is the Big Puffer and it was going to be 41C in heatwave-afflicted Melbourne.
Apart from an upcoming court appearance (another wardrobe dilemma!), what I would wear was the thing I thought about most frequently, and also caused me the most stress in the weeks between 20 December and 24 January.
When it comes to Anna Wintour, there exists a warped relationship between her and the public. It is not about what she is wearing (as it would be with normal celebrities), but what am I wearing when I am seeing her (her, the ultimate global arbiter of what we all wear).
An invitation to lunch with her then becomes mostly an experience to be disseminated through the following lens: what did you wear when you went to lunch with Anna Wintour?
The experience with Wintour has already been related to your friends perhaps weeks before the event itself. You might have Instagrammed a selfie wearing the chosen outfit before you have even gone to the lunch. It is over before it has even begun. The encounter is complete without in the conventional sense, ever having occurred.
Wintour has gone beyond the usual questions you get when you meet a celebrity of “what is she like?” to the more meta “what are you like (or ‘how do you present’) when you are in a room with her”.
She (the abstract she, because she is not real or human in this exchange) becomes a story that you tell others about yourself. The story is what you wore the day you had lunch with Anna Wintour.
The mirror that she provides helps create and possibly endorse your identity (an identity that speaks through clothes).
Zadie Smith did a very good essay on Justin Bieber about how he is denied personhood because he is the object of such intense projection among fans.
“Not only is this meeting always already a story, it only really exists as narrative … it’s obvious that a [fan’s] only relation with the globally famous Bieber is as a piece of narrative to be told and retold to herself and other people and that Bieber himself, in his human reality, is barely involved, almost unnecessary,” writes Smith in Feeling Free.
This is the problem not just with meeting famous people, but people who exist in our imagination in a state of perfection.
Wintour’s state of perfection is in the area of clothes. For decades she has edited the most influential fashion magazine in the world. She exists then at the top of a hierarchy. It is a very human instinct to want to establish a hierarchy and create order. If you want to find out how good you are, you need to find a representation of perfection upon which to measure yourself. Wintour through the pop culture myth that surrounds her, and the fact that she edits Vogue, is the collective symbol of sartorial perfection.
So the lunch came around and I walked in, still not sure what to expect.
There was a giant screen with Wintour’s face on it and at least 400 people in the function room, drinking green juice or champagne or ordering flat whites from the coffee station or talking selfies on a small piece of red carpet in front of an Australian Open trademarked backdrop.
We were all having lunch with Anna Wintour. Yet none of us were.
My relief at the lack of intimacy was immense. You see, I was unhappy with my outfit and I did not want to be seen.
The day was filthy hot and most people there were dressed neatly, the men in nondescript light suits, the women in cotton or linen sundresses.
No one – literally no one – not Baz Luhrmann, not Julie Bishop, looked as if they’d stepped off the catwalk. People looked off-the-rack normal, unmemorable, fine.
But yet, somewhere, even in this clothes-limiting heat, Wintour does actually serve her totemic purpose.
She showed me who I am through the clothes that I ended up wearing.
I did not have access to 90% of my clothes (I was on the road) and I didn’t have a lot of time or money, so I bought something tasteful but boring at the airport as I flew into Melbourne.
We find out who we are under moments of stress and panic. We find out who we are when we dress for lunch with Anna Wintour.
I found out this week I am a generic, mid-priced brand in an airport, that markets office clothes for women aged age 20 to 55.
Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist.
