Will Vogue apologise for calling Asma al-Assad ‘A Rose in the Desert’?

Back in 2020, Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour issued a rare public mea culpa in which she apologised for the magazine not finding ‘enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators’. The magazine, Wintour added, had ‘made mistakes…publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant. I take full responsibility for those mistakes’.

More than four years on, the question must now be asked – will Wintour expressly apologise for the mistakes she made against the people of Syria, as well? In 2011, Vogue breathlessly celebrated the country’s former First Lady Asma al-Assad in a glossy profile. After all, while Black staffers were distinctly disadvantaged at the magazine under Wintour’s editorship, the suffering endured by the people of Syria has been on a scale of several magnitudes larger.

‘A Rose in the Desert’ was how Vogue described Assad, a former investment banker who now appears to have played an equal – if not more craven – role than her husband in quashing dissent during Syria’s brutal 13-year-long civil war, which claimed more than an estimated 500,000 lives. ‘The