The Oldie magazine — of which, until otherwise advised, I appear to be the editor — runs an occasional article about someone’s experience of being sacked. When I was young, this used to carry something of a stigma: other people found it hard to believe that you could be sacked without having somehow deserved it. But since then so many admirable people have lost their jobs for no good reason that nobody thinks any the worse of them for it. And now we are told by Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue and queen of the fashion world for 27 years, that to be sacked is actually a good thing. ‘I think everyone should be sacked at least once,’ she told Alastair Campbell in an interview for his new book Winners: And How They Succeed. ‘It forces you to look at yourself.’
It was in 1976, when she was still in her twenties, that Wintour underwent her one and only sacking. This was from the magazine Harper’s Bazaar, at which she had been a junior fashion editor. How or why it happened remains rather unclear — Wintour has said it was because she had made models wear dreadlocks at a Paris photo shoot, for which she was told that she ‘would never understand the American market’ — but whatever the reason, she is very pleased it happened. ‘It didn’t feel it at the time, but it was definitely a good thing for what it taught me. It is important to have setbacks, because that is the reality of life. Perfection doesn’t exist.’
Wintour, the ultimate perfectionist, may have needed to learn that perfection doesn’t exist, but most people know that already. And while her dismissal from Harper’s Bazaar may have somehow set her on the path towards a job that she finds almost perfect (‘I always look forward to coming into the office,’ she says), not everybody who gets sacked is so lucky.
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