Madonna is regarded as a gay icon and her song Vogue and the official music video for it are based on a dance style called voguing that was popular in gay clubs.
In Madonna: No Bull Making of Take a Bow at about the 11 1/2 minute mark, the interviewer uses the phrase "Madonna bitch on wheels" and part of what she says in reply to his query is that If you care about something, so often you're perceived as being a bitch. But in the end it's your ass on the line.
In other words, she demanded that people meet a certain level of quality and people complained about that. Her standards were too high for most people to readily fulfill.
This was not her being a bitch. The live performance of Vogue for the MTV Music Awards is said to have raised the bar permanently for what they expected on that show.
If you're a woman with any talent, accomplishments or standards, no matter how polite you are, someone will call you a bitch. I suggest you make your peace with being called a bitch if you don't want to be someone's bitch.
Madonna's song Vogue was used in the movie The Devil Wears Prada. Presumably this is because the movie is based on a book which is a roman a clef -- a fictional world based on real events -- and the titular character ("the Devil") is supposedly based on Anna Wintour, longtime editor of Vogue magazine.
There is a scene in The Devil Wears Prada where someone says something like "They are changing their entire line because she pursed her lips?" I also once saw a clip of the real Anna Wintour, probably from The September Issue, where she asked someone a question and was perfectly polite about it.
Yes, people freaked out, but she struck me as nothing like the demeanor of Miranda Priestly who is intentionally bitchy. She just is intimidatingly knowledgeable and powerful and she can't ask an innocent question "what about x?" without people feeling raked over the coals about stuff they didn't think about.
The Wikipedia article appears to have been edited since I started my draft of this post some weeks back. It used to say that The September Issue starts out focused on Anna Wintour but moved on to other things as filming progressed.
My inference is that they likely wanted to do "The Devil Wears Prada: The Documentary" or Reality TV version and drag Wintour. They were looking for gossip and for drama. They expected her to actually be like Miranda Priestly and she wasn't.
Rather than apologize to her or admit they were wrong and scrap the project, they decided to make the film actually about The September Issue per the title, which was likely initially a polite cover story to get her to agree to be filmed doing her job where they intended to do a "gotcha" in editing and she failed to supply the dirt they expected.
Historically, screw up males were sometimes given a job by dad because they couldn't get another. Screw up girls were married off.
Women with similar interests to their father and TALENT for it sometimes take over the family business or go into a similar job. Women who are close to their father are more likely to have a serious career.
Anna Wintour's father was an editor and I have read he told her she would be the editor of Vogue and that's what she did. She probably knew more about editing by age fifteen than a lot of seasoned editors.
She is credited with reviving a "stagnating" publication and I imagine that's part of why her father picked Vogue in specific. He saw an opening for a young relative unknown to make her mark, which you don't do by taking over something flourishing and changing it.
If things are going great already, people freak out and resist change and are also unlikely to hire a relative unknown. They are more likely to welcome change if it's basically dying and they hope to save the publication rather than end up unemployed.
Wikipedia says Anna Wintour gets criticized for her "aloof and demanding personality and for using Vogue to set an unattainable standard of beauty and femininity.
Re "aloof": She's British. Get the fuck over it.
Demanding? She sets a high standard. That's WHY she's the boss. Get the fuck over it.
Unattainable standard of beauty and femininity?
Rest assured my mother set a standard for how I should dress that is unattainable when shopping in American stores for clothes, most of which could be rebranded Sluts R Us.
I worked an office job in corporate America for five years and had trouble meeting the business casual dress code because good luck finding women's clothes that doesn't display your cleavage anywhere in America.
And with budgetary constraints and health issues impacting my clothing choices, it was a nightmare. On top of that, I HAD to actually meet dress code because the highest ranked woman in the department has her eye on me, so if I fucked up, my immediate boss was all over me even though other women could wear the same hookerific outfit repeatedly and apparently no one said nothing.
One of the reasons I have fantasized for years about starting a clothing line was because of that corporate experience and finding it hard to meet dress code. My fantasy of starting a clothing line BEGAN with "Man, I fucked up with never learning to see, knit or crochet because I hate so much of the clothes in stores!"
But my corporate experience convinced me that if I can figure out how to make clothes I want to wear, there will be other women who want to know where they can get clothes like that and like when I lived in Kansas they will be crestfallen if I tell them essentially "You can't."