Quote of the Day: Anna Wintour

“I had just been on a trip to Minnesota where I can only kindly describe most of the people that I saw as little houses, and I just felt like there’s such an epidemic of obesity in the United States. And for some reason everyone focuses on anorexia ... We need to spend money, time, and education on teaching people to eat, exercise, and take care of themselves in a healthier way.”

Anna Wintour is the editor of Vogue and perhaps the most powerful person in fashion. She bad-mouthed my home state on yesterday's episode of 60 Minutes.

Yes, she's a hostile stick figure with hair like a starched curtain framing alien eyes above a skeletal nose, and yes I resent the likes of her singling out the 30th fattest state in the nation as an example. (Mississippi ranked worst, West Virginia second and Alabama third.)

But if she's saying that Americans are overweight and do not care much about the way they dress, she's right. We in America dress more for comfort and, paradoxically, prefer clothes that are made for action even while we languish indoors. We like track suits and running shoes for things like riding on planes and shuffling through malls.

Then again, have you seen models these days? Even in menswear runway shows, they're long and skinny with big heads like Tim Burton characters. We don't talk about anorexia and bulimia nearly as much as we talk about obesity, and maybe we should change that. In fact, Anna Wintour could change that herself.

The video here (which I haven't embedded because it starts automatically -- very irritating) doesn't show the anti-Minnesota bit -- that was in another clip that CBS has removed from the Internet.