FOR MOST of us working folk, job perks can be pretty sweet: quarterly bonuses, maybe some court-side tickets to a basketball game, weekly lunches where the company picks up the tab. If you’re lucky and working in certain industries, using the company card to lavish clients (and yourself, of course) with expensive meals and entertainment might be part of your job description. But if you’re Anna Wintour and working for Condé Nast, the mass media company that owns and publishes Vogue, it’s a hefty clothing allowance worth more than most people make as their yearly salary.
Vogue is a fashion magazine, and Anna Wintour is the HBIC (look that up if you don’t know what that means) when it comes to fashion editors, so it does make sense that she needs to be on or ahead of the trends at all times. Apparently, though, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to be a fashion killa, since her yearly clothing allowance clocks in at a whopping $200,000. Come on — she’s chums with every major designer in the game and has access to floor after floor of couture of all kinds. Does she even need to spend any of her own hard-earned cash on clothes?
The New York Times spilled this figure, so it’s probably safe to assume that it’s accurate. Considering that most of the high-ranking employees at Condé Nast publications pull in $175,000-$200,000 as their salaries, it’s been estimated that Wintour’s own salary is closer to half a mil or so when the clothing allowance is taken into account.
While we hear figures like that thrown around in the media all the time, the average salary in the U.S. falls somewhere in the $40K-$50K range. Most people wouldn’t even know where to start with the mission of spending $200,000 a year on clothing. Maybe that’s why Wintour is in charge, and not most people.
Hm. It could be nice, to say the least, to have that kind of paper to blow. Here are some of the many, many things you could buy with that clothing allowance: 222 pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes, 2,857 dresses from Nasty Gal, 100 bags by designer Chloé, 915 pairs of J Brand jeans, or 57,142 pairs of underwear from Forever 21. Or some mixture of those.
Obviously, Anna Wintour is not wearing underwear from Forever 21. 200 grand might still get you a decent amount of Oscar de la Renta tweed suits and signature black sunglasses, though.
Happy New York Fashion Week folks.
