CNN

After months of speculation, Anna Wintour names Chloe Malle to take top Vogue job

By CNN

Published September 2, 2025 7:45 am

CNN

By Leah Dolan, Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — After months of speculation on who will replace fashion’s most famous editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour has announced a new top editor at Vogue — though the role isn’t quite the same as the golden post Wintour held for almost 40 years.

Chloe Malle, who currently serves as editor of Vogue.com, will step up as the head of editorial content for Vogue US, the magazine announced on its own website on Tuesday. As well as managing the website’s editorial direction in her former role, in 2022 Malle became the voice of Vogue — co-hosting the magazine’s only current podcast, “The Run-Through with Vogue,” alongside Chioma Nnadi, head of editorial content across the pond for British Vogue.

After Wintour announced in June that she was stepping down, or rather, stepping away from one of her many duties, the highly sought-after role — which was even the subject of a viral bet on prediction market app Polymarket — was posted publicly on LinkedIn over the summer.

But the names reportedly in the running were all in Wintour’s close orbit: Eva Chen, who is Instagram’s director of fashion partnerships but worked closely with Wintour for years in top posts at Teen Vogue and Lucky; former Vogue staffer Sara Moonves, who became W’s first female editor-in-chief; and Nicole Phelps, who currently leads Vogue Runway and Vogue Business in a joint global director role.

Although Wintour has stepped down as the magazine’s editor-in-chief, she will remain on as Vogue’s global editorial director, as well as Condé Nast’s global chief content officer, overseeing titles such as GQ, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit and Teen Vogue. Malle will be taking over Vogue’s daily operations across print and digital, but will report directly to Wintour.

“Fashion and media are both evolving at breakneck speed, and I am so thrilled — and awed — to be part of that,” said Malle in Vogue’s story. “I also feel incredibly fortunate to still have Anna just down the hall as my mentor.”

“At a moment of change both within fashion and outside it, Vogue must continue to be both the standard-bearer and the boundary-pushing leader,” said Wintour in a statement on Vogue.com. “Chloe has proven often that she can find the balance between American Vogue’s long, singular history and its future on the front lines of the new. I am so excited to continue working with her, as her mentor but also as her student, while she leads us and our audiences where we’ve never been before.”

Malle, 39, first joined Vogue back in 2011 as the publication’s social editor, writing about weddings, parties and “fun, fluffy things,” she told Into The Gloss in 2013. She graduated to become a contributing editor of the magazine in 2016, and as of 2023 has been the editor of Vogue.com overseeing the publication’s digital output. She has also interviewed celebrities such as Gigi Hadid and Greta Gerwig for print cover stories. Recently, she launched the second edition of Dogue — Vogue’s digital-only issue dedicated to celebrity dogs, with Sabrina Carpenter’s two pups gracing the cover — and interviewed Lauren Sanchez for Vogue’s June cover story, which coincided with her lavish wedding to Jeff Bezos.

Malle studied comparative literature and writing at Brown University, and began her career as a real estate writer for the New York Observer before joining Condé Nast. In the run-up to the announcement, Malle’s name was rarely mentioned without the added context of her famous parents: American actor Candice Bergen (of “Murphy Brown” fame, and who ironically played Carrie Bradshaw’s Vogue editor in “Sex and the City”) and the late French film director Louis Malle.

On Monday, fashion journalist Lauren Sherman first broke the news via Puck, framing Malle’s appointment as a “practical, reasonable and rational” choice to head up the day-to-day operations of Vogue US.

“Wintour doesn’t aim to provoke. She seeks solutions, and Malle is the path of least resistance,” Sherman wrote.

According to Sherman, Wintour shared with candidates for the role that she was seeking someone “whom she could empower to transform the brand into a live-action content machine,” while Wintour mentors regional editorial leaders abroad.

Vogue isn’t the only legacy media brand undergoing large-scale change at Condé Nast. Vanity Fair hired Mark Guiducci — previously creative editorial director at Vogue — in June as its global editorial director. Guiducci has already begun to make his mark on the century-old title. In a memo distributed to staff, per Variety, he outlined decisions to streamline Vanity Fair’s offerings to celebrity and culture, entertainment and “money, politics and style,” while scaling back reviews and trade coverage and phasing out specific verticals.