Streep, incidentally, was on the December 2010 cover of Vogue, so whatever feelings her performance engendered were not hard.

"It was entertainment," Wintour said of the film, telling 60 Minutes in 2009, "It was not a true rendition of what happens within this magazine."

But considering how much Streep put into conjuring this larger-than-life character, you can imagine how hard the Anna Wintour had to work to ascend to her real-life role running the 131-year-old institution that is Vogue (duties she's juggled since 2020 with being Global Chief Content Officer of publisher Condé Nast, as well as artistic director since 2013).

"I grew up at a time when women still left the dinner table so men could smoke their cigars and talk about the real issues of the day," she told the Financial Times in an interview published Sept. 22.

No one has ever suggested that Wintour isn't a tough boss, but people continue to want to be part of the still vibrant and glamorous (if not as much taste-dictating) world that "Nuclear Wintour"—a holdover nickname from her days in charge of British Vogue—has cultivated in her 35 years atop Vogue's masthead.