Anna Wintour was reportedly sporting her signature shades as she laid off nearly half of her entire staff who worked at the music magazine Pitchfork.
The 74-year-old Vogue editor-in-chief was slammed online by her now former employees, who called the move indecent and appalling.
‘One absolutely bizarro detail from this week is that Anna Wintour — seated indoors at a conference table — did not remove her sunglasses while she was telling us that we were about to get canned,’ Allison Hussey, a former Pitchfork staff writer, wrote on X.
‘The indecency we’ve seen from upper management this week is appalling.’
The tweet, posted Friday morning, has already reached nearly 300K views online and hundreds of retweets.
Conde Nast laid off upwards of half of the Pitchfork staff on Wednesday, including editor-in-chief Puja Patel and features editor Jill Mapes.
Stay inside! Anna Wintour shared a photo of herself staying inside her Long Island home and urged other not to go out
Condé Nast, who bought Pitchfork in 2015, is merging the publication into GQ.
The company announced the move in a memo to employees,
The decision ‘was made after a careful evaluation of Pitchfork’s performance and what we believe is the best path forward for the brand so that our coverage of music can continue to thrive within the company,’ Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief content officer and global editorial director of Vogue, wrote in a memo to staff.
Mapes, a feature editor who was laid off, stated on Twitter: ‘I’ve referred to my job at pitchfork as being on a ferris wheel at closing time, just waiting for them to yank me down.
‘After nearly 8 years, mass layoffs got me. glad we could spend that time trying to make it a less dude-ish place just for GQ to end up at the helm,’ Mapes added.
The ‘fashion legend’ Wintour is known for never taking off her trademark sunglasses.
Magazine publisher Condé Nast, which owns Vogue, GQ and The New Yorker, is laying off nearly 100 employees in the US due to a sharp decline in ad revenue spurred by the coronavirus pandemic
As well as wearing them in the Vogue offices, she is regularly seen sporting them on the catwalk, and even watched the entire Academy Awards in 2015 without taking them off.
She also donned her signature specs while working from home at her Hamptons house in 2020 – as she pleads with others not to go out amid COVID-19 outbreak.
One of the only times Wintour, who has worked for Vogue for 30 years, has been seen taking them off is when she was made a Dame at Buckingham Palace in 2017.
She wore her trademark sunglasses on arrival at the Palace, but removed them before entering the ballroom, where she received the award from the Queen.
During her ’60 minutes with Anna Wintour’ interview, the American editor admitted she used her sunglasses as ‘armour’, and they were a useful tool to ‘hide boredom’.
‘I can sit in a show and if I am bored out of my mind, nobody will notice… At this point, they have become, really, armour’, she said in 2012.
She said: ‘There is no more important rule for all of us to follow. We must, right this moment, pledge to stay in our homes as much as we possibly can’
Wintour has served as editor-in-chief of Vogue since 1988.
In 2020, Magazine publisher Condé Nast, which owns Vogue, GQ and The New Yorker, was under fire when it laid off nearly 100 employees in the US due to a sharp decline in ad revenue spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.
The cuts were announced in an internal memo that also said under 100 other staffers would be temporarily furloughed and ‘a handful’ of the company’s approximate 2,700 staffers would have reduced work schedules.
‘Not all teams will be impacted equally by these actions. That doesn’t mean some teams are more valuable to us than others,’ Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said at the time. ‘We tried to identify specific areas where we could bring down our costs without limiting our growth priorities.’
Also that year, Condé Nast announced in a separate memo that employees earning more than $100,000 would receive 10 to 20 percent pay cuts.
‘These decisions are never easy, and not something I ever take lightly. I want to be transparent about the principles and approach we used,’ Lynch added.
Dailymail.com has contacted Conde Nast but did not receive a response.