Front row - Jerry Oppenheimer

She's ambitious. She's a perfectionist. She's insecure and needy. But most of all she's extremely successful. She's Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, the most powerful arbiter of fashion and style in the world. This is the inside story of the public and private worlds of the enigmatic icon often hidden behind dark sunglasses and under the fringe of a Louise Brooks bob, a style she's been wearing since she was a teenager obsessed with fashion in "Swinging Sixties" London. A dropout at 16 from a tiny private school, Anna Wintour grew up in a home dominated by a powerful and icy British newspaper editor father and a cold and critical American heiress mother who had a scandalous marriage. Anna Wintour has been called many things over the years: "Nuclear Wintour" by her fearful subordinates at British Vogue, "cold, suspicious and autocratic, a vision of skinniness" by Grace Mirabella, the editor-in-chief whose job she grabbed at American Vogue, and "The Devil" in a recent bestselling roman a clef, written by Wintour's assistant.;In her mid-fifties, nearing her second remarkable decade at the helm of Vogue, her story is part Cinderella, part Horatio Alger: an ambitious fashionista arrives here - from London in the mid 70s and fights her way to the top of the bitchy and very competitive fashion magazine world, artfully rafting and reinventing herself along the way. Front Row is also the scrupulously researched story of this ingular woman's personal passions and needs, of her loves lost and won, of her battles and feuds, and of her incredible achievements.