Be A Butcher

“A good Prime Minister has to be a good butcher.”

– William Gladstone, 19th-century British Statesman and Prime Minister.

Sometimes the photo shoot just doesn’t go as well as planned.

Maybe the lighting wasn’t quite right. Maybe the photographer was having an off day. Maybe it rained on your outdoor set. Or maybe the idea itself could’ve used a little bit more work.

So you make the best of it. You shoot what you can, take it to the suits, give them some spiel, put your best foot forward, dust yourself off, get the photos to editorial, and hope that next time will go better.

Yeah, well, when Anna Wintour was editor of Vogue in the 1990s, she didn’t do that.

She would just kill the work. Throw it in the trash. Not good enough, sorry. Onto the next. 

People hated that. These shoots were expensive. Sometimes as much as $300,000. She had her bosses, Alex Liberman and Si Newhouse, tearing their hair out. All the shoot crew who worked their tails off would feel deflated and hurt. The editorial staff and the people dealing with advertisers and suppliers would all be put into a state of panic as they tried to clean up the ramifications on their end. Photographers, especially, would get ticked off. One famous photographer was so annoyed, he wouldn’t work with Wintour again for years. “This was my masterpiece, and Anna killed it! How dare she not recognize my genius,” etc., etc.

But Wintour didn’t care. Her attitude was: setbacks are temporary, standards are eternal. Sure, she might get some flak from shareholders, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle.

Killing these shoots costs Vogue a ton of time, money, and hassle in the short term. But those murders had immense long-term value. 

Because people knew that Winotur was willing to kill their baby if even the slightest detail wasn’t what she wanted, so they’d BETTER be on their A-Game. They knew they would not get away with anything less than truly excellent work, so there was no choice but to get it right the first time.

And so they did. 

This turned Vogue into one of the most successful fashion enterprises ever created. 

But to do that, Wintour had to be willing to be a good butcher, ruthlessly and decisively wielding that very sharp knife she carried around with her.

If you don’t stick to them, even when it’s tough, are they really standards?

You already know what Anna would say.