Dame Anna Wintour has always been “relentless” in her approach to parenting.
Dame Anna Wintour has two children with her ex-husband
The 76-year-old media executive has daughter, Bee, 38, and son, Charlie, 40, with ex-husband David Shaffer, and Anna has opened up about her commitment to her family life.
She told Vogue magazine: “I was relentless about going to the games and turning up at the parent-teacher meetings, being there when it was important. I felt like Vogue could always wait and that it’s okay to be a busy mother. You make it work.”
Anna, who has four grandchildren, said family is the cornerstone of her life outside work.
She said: “I try to instill in my children and my grandchildren that it’s family that counts and family who will give you love and support. If you have that, everything else will be fine.”
The Vogue editor-in-chief has a family compound on Long Island, which she sees as a gathering place for her loved ones.
The London-born star – who has lived in the US for decades – said: “We have a family compound on Long Island, and I try to make it a centre for all of us, who are spread all over the world. We love to celebrate birthdays and weddings; traditions are important—we’re English, so we constantly play games and stage countless tennis tournaments—and we try to take care of each other through thick and thin.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, watching her son Charlie work on the frontline put everything into perspective.
Anna said: “I thought all the time of my son, Charlie, who was a resident at Cornell. He was working in the COVID wards and because his field is mental health, a part of what he had to do was to break tragic news to families when they had lost someone.
“He would come home every weekend and had to descrub and then he would reach for his children and just hold onto them. That for me was context—an important reminder of what was happening in the world even as I was trying to lead these global teams through uncharted waters.”
