Sadly, the plate and the cutlery had been whisked away at much the same time as Anna.That was at 2.15. No one knew where she was going but everyone was pleased she had come. Over dessert the consensus was that she was much nicer than anticipated but with a nickname like Nuclear Wintour expectations were not exactly high. Her icy reputation was born a decade ago when editing British Vogue and she clearly finds it baffling. She regrets she was not more open then and perhaps that is why she kept this transatlantic luncheon speaking date despite the fact her original main engagement had been rescheduled “I seem to have an image here that I can’t lose.

They’ve never found nicknames like that for me in the States,” she said. “But my dad, who I think is the sweetest man in the world, was always called Chilly Charlie! Maybe it is in the genes.”Her father is a former editor of the Evening Standard and the family is full of academic achievements – at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge. Anna decided to go to work instead and, at the age of 20, found herself in the fashion department of Harpers & Queen. “I can remember the editor saying to me that Anna was not a writer but that she had something else, she had the eye, and that one day she would be employing all of us,” says Vicki Woods, a writer.She still has the eye (and Woods now is working for her) and it is impossible to exaggerate how important it can be for a designer to catch it.

American Vogue is icon and industry rolled into one: some months it is as thick as a telephone directory Anna Wintour knows each page “I’m horribly hands-on, I’m afraid I like to read every caption I like to know what’s going on. I find that people work better if you are talking to them all the time. I think people thrive on attention.”Her Chanel sunglasses lie next to her on the couch. They are black and huge and she clearly wants to put them on though in the end she just clutches them. “I really started wearing them at the shows because I simply could not see well enough with the lights in my face. So it just became a habit which probably means something very dramatic, like that I’m hiding from the world behind them or something.

But I’m just used to it.”They are as much a part of her as her Chanel suits, her short skirts, her spikey shoes, her elegant thinness. She is 47 and has had the same perfect bob haircut since her 20s. She says she loves fashion because it is ever-changing but she herself seems to have stayed more or less the same Her looks, her habits, her time-keeping are absolute “She always left parties early. I’ve seen her leave her own party at 11pm,” says a friend.Despite all evidence to the contrary Anna Wintour obviously believes that she is a fairly normal person. She is married to the chief of child psychiatry at Columbia Presbyterian and takes her two children Charlie, 11, and Bee, nine, to school every day – “it’s great because they have to talk to me, they are trapped in the car” She tries to be home to have supper with them at 6pm. She fusses that young girls these days wear their skirts too short “My God when I see the girls in my daughter’s school I want to tell them to lengthen their skirts They are up to here,” she says, gesturing at a tiny hipbone “I’m sure mine was never that short And the shoes!” I glance at her Manolo Blahnik slingbacks.