Keith J. Kelly

Keith J. Kelly

Media

Anna Wintour’s Glamour makeover picks up steam

Anna Wintour’s thumbprints are all over Glamour.

In another sign of her sweeping influence within the Condé Nast empire, Anne Christensen, the fashion director of Glamour, has resigned.

Christensen didn’t return a call for comment, but sources said she’s going to return to freelancing for advertising and editorial clients and may even do some freelance work for Glamour.

No permanent replacement has been named.

Sources said it’s just the latest move orchestrated by Wintour, who became artistic director of all of Condé early this year in addition to her role as Vogue editor-in-chief.

Already she has replaced the two top editors at Lucky, bringing in her protégé Eva Chen, and at Condé Nast Traveler, where she raided Pilar Guzman from Martha Stewart Living.

Despite high-profile Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive, Glamour’s newsstand sales took a drubbing in the first half of 2013, dropping 28.8 percent to 301,014 on total circulation of 2,300,854, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.

In fairness, other titles fell in the double-digit range as well. Hearst rival Cosmopolitan was off 23 percent to 1,028,892 on total circulation of 3,017,987.

Even the Condé flagship Vogue was down 10.4 percent on newsstands in the first half to 269,740 out of a total of 1,246,765.

On the ad front, after a sluggish first half, Glamour appears to be closing stronger with 1,334 ad pages through November, up 3.6 percent.

While Leive’s job is not at stake, Wintour clearly wants to revamp the magazine and top brass is giving her free rein.

Last week, Geraldine Hessler was replaced as creative director of design by Paul Ritter, who was raided from Hearst’s Elle. Ritter starts the new gig on Monday.

Before Hessler got the ax, there were plenty of warning signs. Wintour and her art director, Raul Martinez, had been meeting with Leive for the past several months, and Hessler was pointedly being left out of the discussions, sources said.