Free Front Row by Jerry Oppenheimer

British
Vogue
, said, “Charles, I’d be delighted. What can I do?”
    Sounding a bit uneasy, he said, “Well, my daughter Anna
thinks
she wants something to do in the fashion world. I wonder if you could take her out to lunch and give her some advice. I’ll pay for the lunch, of course.”
    Looking back on that moment years later, Griggs remarks, “I don’t think that Charles was big on fashion, and I don’t think he wanted that for his favorite daughter. He hoped for more for Anna at that point.”
    Griggs invited Anna to lunch and found herself sitting opposite “this incredibly self-possessed child—
extreme
self-possession, which is unusual in someone of her age.” She found Anna
very
focused and came away from their meeting thinking that this girl would go far. “It appeared to me that she needed absolutely
no
advice from
anyone
, and she’d carve her own path fairly smoothly.”
    The next day, still following through on her editor’s request, Griggs telephoned Barbara Hulanicki, the owner of Biba, one of the hottest boutiquesin London, and asked her whether she had any part-time openings for a very savvy and confident schoolgirl whose father happened to be the powerful editor of the
Evening Standard
. Anna was a regular customer and wore the styles Hulanicki promoted—knee-high boots, tight tops, and miniskirts—and Vivienne Lasky firmly believes that Anna’s obsession with clothing was strongly influenced by Biba and its fashions.
    The boutique became a glittering star in London’s sixties fashion firmament, influencing the way girls in the street dressed. Hulanicki paid particular attention to the cut of her clothes, giving them a couture look, so every girl who wore her designs was made to look thin. Overnight, Biba’s customer base cut through the class system and changed from strictly working-class girls to include pop stars, actresses, aristocrats, and all the young fashionistas like Anna who wanted the “look.” An expert at promotion, Hulanicki shrewdly designed outfits specifically for influential trendsetters like Cathy McGowan and for the very visible pop singer Cilla Black. Julie Christie wore Biba for her role in
Darling
. And iconic model Twiggy’s reed-thin frame was always draped in Biba designs.
    Biba’s hot mail-order catalog used photographers like Helmut Newton—a favorite of Anna’s when she became a fashion editor—to produce shots that juxtaposed innocence and knowingness, which, in fact, was the image Anna possessed in the eyes of men during the sixties and seventies.
    As Hulanicki remembers the call from her fashion editor friend at the
Evening Standard
, Barbara Griggs asked, “Oh, could the daughter of Charles Wintour come and have a holiday job? You know, just to learn about working in a boutique.” Hulanicki said yes immediately—a prominent editor’s daughter as a shopgirl couldn’t hurt business—and hired her to help out on Saturdays and holidays in her Kensington Church Street shop and also at a Biba branch in touristy Brighton on the English Channel. Hulanicki often escorted Anna and few other girls on the one-hour train ride. They spent the day working in the shop, returning that night.
    “Anna would have been about fifteen, sixteen,” Hulanicki recalls, “and was
very
young,
very
sweet,
very
pretty, and
very, very
quiet, but I had a feeling her intellect was definitely a little bit higher than fashion. Anna came from an educated family and most of the Biba girls didn’t. She wasnot typical. But she became one of the girls who were learning the boutique business.”
    Hulanicki was intrigued with Anna and kept a close watch on her. While Anna appeared shy and timid, “I could see she was taking
everything
in,” Hulanicki says. “Anna was interested in fashion, but also Biba was
the
place to be. Boutiques were the most important places in those days . . . all the girls wanted to work in them.”
    Hulanicki remembers Anna, who was paid about fifteen