After nearly four decades as editor-in-chief of American Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour is stepping down and looking for her replacement, CNN reported.

Wintour announced the news to her employees. Although she is leaving the top position at Vogue, she is not leaving Condé Nast entirely, but only reducing her responsibilities. She will remain global chief content officer of the publisher, as well as global editorial director of Vogue.

The new position she will replace at the renowned American fashion magazine will be called chief content editor.

As editor-in-chief of Vogue, she transformed the publication, turning an increasingly conservative magazine into a powerful media outlet capable of creating and destroying both trends and designers.

Although magazines should not be judged solely by their covers, Wintour's covers showed that she was not afraid to put lesser-known personalities in the spotlight and deviate from the norms of high fashion magazines. Her first issue, published in November 1988, featured Israeli model Michaela Bercu on the cover wearing stone-washed jeans—the first time jeans appeared on the cover of Vogue.

This set the tone for the hundreds of issues that followed, and Wintour continued to make countless editorial decisions that her predecessors would have considered unimaginable. The days of controlled studio portraits were over, replaced by casual outdoor shots showing the upper body. In 1992, she broke Vogue's century-old tradition by putting a man on the cover (Richard Gere, who appeared alongside his then-wife Cindy Crawford).

Although Wintour is most closely associated with Vogue, in 2020 she became chief content officer of Condé Nast, responsible for all of the company's publications worldwide, including Vanity Fair, Wired, GQ, Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, and Condé Nast Traveler.

Rather than announcing her retirement, Wintour's career change, as well as her new role at the helm of the American edition of Vogue, are part of a broader global restructuring of the company.

Still, the changing of the guard is a seismic shift for the American edition of Vogue, offering a coveted opportunity for fashion editors and a chance for the industry's most influential publication to take new directions. Two years ago, Chioma Nnade became the first black woman to head the British edition of Vogue, succeeding Edward Enninful, who made history as the magazine's first black editor-in-chief during his six-year tenure. |BGNES