No Visions of Loveliness
A conversation with Linda Wells (Editor: Allure, Air Mail Look, more)
A conversation with Linda Wells (Editor: Allure, Air Mail Look, more).
—
THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT MOUNTAIN GAZETTE, COMMERCIAL TYPE, AND LANE PRESS
Ed: You’ve loved our collaborations with The Spread—their Ep21 interview with former Cosmo editor-in-chief Joanna Coles remains one of our most-downloaded shows. Now, Rachel Baker and Maggie Bullock are back again, this time with the queen of the beauty magazines—Allure founding editor Linda Wells.
You can find The Spread every week on Substack, where Rachel and Maggie round up juicy gossip—from The New York Times to The Drift, and everywhere in between—big ideas, and deeply personal examinations of women’s lives to create their idea of the perfect “women’s magazine.”
Picture it: It’s 1991. You’re sitting at your desk at The New York Times, when you get a call from the office of Condé Nast’s Alexander Liberman. Alex wants to meet you for lunch at La Grenouille to discuss an opportunity: Si Newhouse has decided to launch the first-ever beauty magazine, and he thinks you’re just the woman to make it happen. You’re 31 years old. The canvas is blank. The budget is endless.
What’s your move, Linda Wells?
For the women’s magazine editors of today, struggling to keep the lights on by juggling Instagram, TikTok, marketing events, digital content, and whatever remains of their print product, this is a tale so far-fetched it feels like the stuff of an early aughts rom-com. But millennial editors’ wildest ideas about the “Town Car Era” of magazine-making were just another day at the office for Linda Wells.
Linda led Allure for 25 years, becoming a front-row fixture at Fashion Week—while also pioneering the cottage industry of backstage beauty coverage—and enlisting writers like Arthur Miller, Isabel Allende, Betty Friedan, and John Updike to write about … beauty.
In 2018, she pivoted, restyling herself as a beauty entrepreneur, launching with Revlon a makeup range she called Flesh. Now she’s back in the land of editorial, having a bunch of fun at the helm of the beauty vertical of Graydon Carter’s Air Mail, commissioning articles on everything from psychedelics to orgasm coaches.
We knew Linda Wells would be delightful, and yet she exceeded our expectations. We know you’ll love her too.
Allure’s premiere issue, March 1991
“I don’t like to change clothes. If I put on something in the morning, that’s what I’m wearing to dinner.”
Maggie Bullock: You wanna do this? Should we do this? We’re doing it.
Linda Wells: I’m ready.
Maggie Bullock: Great! So Linda as we record this, people are flying home from Europe for Fashion Week and they’re all seeing their children for the first time in weeks and unpacking. And I wonder—where are you with that? Do you still do any of the circuit? Is it a relief not to do the circuit? Tell us where you sit.
Linda Wells: I don’t do the circuit anymore. Every once in a while we’ll get an invitation and it’s ha, you don’t have to have me there. I loved it when I did it, but it was really exhausting and I know, “Boo-hoo, you’re going to all the fashion shows. What a terrible hardship that is.”
But it’s a lot. I always think about it. If you really love ice cream and then someone says you have to have it every single meal and you can’t stop having it until midnight, but then you’ve got to wake up at five the next morning and have more. It’s a lot of sweet goodness stuffed into a very short period of time—with high heels on.
And I think that was the other piece of it that was a killer was you had to get dressed every day. And that really intimidated me. I hated packing for it. It would just send me into such a tailspin. And then just the whole pressure of looking good and being photographed. It’s not who I am.
I like being behind the scenes. And so it just felt like a lot of public activity and not a lot of time to think. I always brought a book. And then of course, when books became obsolete, I brought a Kindle or an iPad or whatever. And I would read while everybody else was chit-chatting. Chit-chat before the show is exhausting because it was 45 minutes of chit-chatting.
Maggie Bullock: With the same people that you just saw the last one.
Linda Wells: I was like the rude person reading a book, but it just was a way for me to escape.
Maggie Bullock: Yeah. That is so interesting to me because I definitely perceived you as someone of like unshakable confidence who could sit in front of all those cameras and dress for all that. Honestly, the idea that caused you any kind of agita is like a genuine surprise to me.
Linda Wells: Yeah. Oh no, absolutely. And it was always like, you’re not thin enough. You’re not young enough. Even when you are young enough, you’re not young enough. You’re not thin enough. And I never personalized like the models.
The models part of it to me was like, they were a different species up there. People would always say isn’t it depressing to look at models all day? And I’m like, “No. I don’t think I’m like them. They’re just—there’s no relationship.” But it was just that expectation, I think, and the expectation of all these fashion editors.
And they really do dress the part and they think they come to the job at the very beginning as people who really like to wear clothes, and try on clothes, and change their clothes. I don’t like to change clothes. If I put on something in the morning, that’s what I’m wearing to dinner.
Maggie Bullock: I don’t want to take us too far off track, but my personal theory has always been that people who grew up to be fashion editors are often people who had a really easy relationship with clothes. Like they didn’t feel conflicted and terrible about themselves when they tried on new clothes. Because they’re thin, and beautiful, mostly, and whatever. They fit that ideal. I know I’m really vastly oversimplifying and many uncountable hours have probably been spent in the therapy chairs of fashion editors. But I did always think, Yeah, it’s a little bit easier for you to love clothes in an uncomplicated way. That’s the way that it seemed to me.
Rachel Baker: What’s the beauty equivalent? What’s in people’s heads who become beauty editors?
Linda Wells: I think that’s become a prerequisite in a way of being a beauty editor. It didn’t used to be because beauty editors were really much more behind the scenes. You’d go to events, but the events weren’t public events. They were meeting with a brand or learning about a new product or going to a launch, but it wasn’t really that outward facing. And so now, if you’re a beauty editor with any value at all, you’ve got a great big Instagram account, and you post, get-ready-with-me and you put on your technique and you show everything and it’s like I’m not that person either.
You can do a winged eye in the back of an Uber, and that’s not me. So I think that there’s that kind of expectation of a certain amount of personal skill that’s not about being the editor, or being a writer, or being any of those things. It’s about makeup skills and hair skills.
Rachel Baker: Performance.
Linda Wells: Yeah. And that was not what the job used to be. So it’s a lot harder, I think, for beauty editors today.
Maggie Bullock: Or it’s just a totally different skill set, right?
Linda Wells: That’s true.
Allure launched at the height of the “Supermodel Era.” Among its early cover models: Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Bridget Hall, and Kate Moss.
“Allure was deliberately aggressive and deliberately not pretty. I was going to say ‘ugly.’ It wasn’t ugly, but it wasn’t trying to be pretty. We didn’t want to be pretty.”
Maggie Bullock: So, actually, going in the way back machine how did little Linda Wells, at Trinity college. Do I have that right?
Linda Wells: You do.
Maggie Bullock: Would she have ever envisioned this kind of future, this kind of career um, you know? Reading up on her books and writing her papers.
Linda Wells: Right, that's all I cared about. No, really, when I graduated, I didn’t have a career plan. I didn’t have a job, which is unthinkable for people who are graduating from college now. They’ve got their whole strategy. They’ve had all their internships. I wasn’t that person. I didn’t really even know, or think about, life that way. And no one in my family was from this world. They were all finance people.
So I graduated and I was really at a loss of what I was going to do. Because what I wanted to do was go to graduate school. My father was like, “Sorry, no.” And I went to New York and interviewed with everybody: graphic design firms, ad agencies, book publishing, and then magazine.
I interviewed at Hearst and I interviewed at Condé Nast. And got the job at Condé Nast as a—they had this program called Rover—the Rover program—and it was for the most green beginners ever who knew nothing and they would put you in different jobs where there was an opening.
So let’s say, the assistant to the assistant to the shoe editor was sick. Then they’d stick you there for a couple of days until the assistant to the assistant got better. And what you would do is take shoes down to the messenger room, or you’d Xerox shoes, or you’d mark up shoes and put them away. It was like being at an Amazon warehouse—but a really nice one.
Maggie Bullock: But you did eventually land more full time in the beauty department at Vogue. Is that right?
Linda Wells: I did. Yeah. I got a full time job in the beauty department as an assistant there. So that was my step up.
Maggie Bullock: That was actually my first real job too, in the beauty department of Vogue under Sarah Brown, actually.
Linda Wells: Oh, wow! It was a very different place when I was there. It was a Grace Mirabella world and Anna Wintour was there as the creative director, about a year into when I was there.
Maggie Bullock: So tell us about Grace Mirabella. Were you so low on the totem pole that you didn’t really interact?
Linda Wells: I didn’t really interact with her much. When I decided to leave and got this job at The New York Times I was packing up my boxes and she came in and said, “Kiddo, don’t leave!” And I thought, You don’t know my name, do you?
“There was the assumption that you had to live, and breathe, and act as if you were the Vogue reader and the Vogue editor all rolled into one.”
Maggie Bullock: Were you a natural fit as a Vogue girl? Did that shape you in some way, that experience? Obviously it’s a larger than life, like cultural idea now to be a Vogue person, but what was your experience like?
Linda Wells: I did feel a little bit like I fell off the turnip truck because I was born in New York, but I spent four years of high school in St. Louis. And so I felt like I had a bit of a midwestern in me. And so I think that was at odds a bit with what the atmosphere was. And then, everyone was really well dressed and they wanted to look like they belonged there.
So there was that part of it that felt at odds. And then the funny thing about this, and I don’t know whether you experienced this Maggie, but being an editor at Vogue—and even just at the lowest level, an assistant at Vogue—there was the assumption that you had to live, and breathe, and act as if you were the Vogue reader and the Vogue editor all rolled into one. So you became, or I became, the biggest snob ever about little tiny things. I’m making no money, I can’t afford a taxi. I have an attitude about where the best vacation is—Is Capri better than the Amalfi Coast? Who am I?
Maggie Bullock: It is a really weird psychology. Also, you’re living in a shoebox, you’re eating ramen.
Linda Wells: I ate ramen. If I wasn’t living on hors d’oeuvres. I’d go to events and have lots of hors d’oeuvres. And then you would be a snob about, I don’t know, where you got a facial or what cream you would use. And you weren’t going to go to the drugstore to buy something. It would be so de classé.
Maggie Bullock: Yes. I’m still completely broken by this. Rachel can confirm—I’m still broken in that way. So then afterwards, as you just mentioned, you left Vogue and went to The New York Times. That was a really cool job, because you were at the Times magazine, correct?
Linda Wells: I started at the paper and I was a bit of a fish out of water, to put it very mildly. And it was tough because I was brought in, I thought, to bring beauty to the pages of the, not, make them beautiful but cover the beauty industry. Not so much as a business, but as trends and things like that.
I was on what was loosely called the Living Style desk. It wasn’t the style that we know today. And so I kept pitching story ideas and they were just like, “These are not what we do at The New York Times.” And so I got panicky because I was on trial. They put you on trial for three months before they hired me. So I had to get a whole lot of bylines pulled together before I was going to be hired.
Wells’ on her boss, mentor, and friend Carrie Donovan: “She introduced me to the world of fashion.”
I agreed to do whatever they would throw at me. So I ended up covering a lot of the evening parties and getting all dressed up and taking my reporter’s notebook and an evening bag and going out to The Pierre and to ballrooms around New York and covering events. And it was hilarious, I have to say. If you want to be really popular at a party, pull out a reporter’s notebook. And it will be like—people would flock to me and tell me things they want so badly to be in the paper.
And sometimes I went around with Bill Cunningham and that was a great introduction to that world. So I was doing that and Carrie Donovan was the editor of The New York Times Magazine, the Style part of it. And she saw that I probably saw that I was floundering. And so she rescued me and brought me to the magazine and that was much more a natural fit.
And then I wrote every other week about beauty in the magazine. And then about a year in, I became the food editor, too. The food editor quit, so I got that job too. And it was really two jobs. And so I did both of those things.
Maggie Bullock: How did you know about food?
Linda Wells: I know it was random, but I’ve always been really obsessed with food and I’ve always cooked and took cooking classes. It was just a personal interest. And I think, again, I was on trial for three months. I did a proposal. I did the work for three months and they said, “Yes, you can stay.”
So it was an odd mix, but it was something that was incredibly fun. And it was a very fertile time for food because it was a time when Daniel Boulud broke out on his own and Jean-Georges Vongerichten came to the US. And there were just these superstars that we all know now, but at the time they were just breaking out on their own. So it was fun.
Rachel Baker: That is cool.
Maggie Bullock: But I’m noticing too, that you had Grace Mirabella and then Carrie Donovan. So what did you learn from Carrie Donovan?
Linda Wells: Oh my God, I learned everything from Carrie. She just was the most fantastic boss. I loved her so much. I learned that your boss could be more than just a boss. They could be an example of how to live. They could be a friend. I ended up scattering her ashes with another person who worked for her from the Pont Neuf in Paris.
We were really close. And she really rooted for me, so I felt great about that. And she took me everywhere. She introduced me to Ralph Lauren, and to Karl Lagerfeld, and to all the world of fashion, and took me to the shows, and introduced me to Calvin Klein, and all the biggies. And that was great, because there was no better introduction.
She also taught me about how to work with people and how to spare their egos. And I hope I learned that from her. To take good care of people who are creative, because it’s not easy to put yourself out there like that. And she had this way of, even if she was killing a story or killing a photo shoot, she’d bring the photographer in, have a conversation and they leave looking like they were walking on air and smiling. And she just had a way of magically seducing people.
She was really exceptional. She taught me a lot. And she was brutally honest too. So when I started Allure, she looked at that first issue and I took her out for lunch and she was just like, “Oh, this is not good.” She went through it and told me all about why.
Maggie Bullock: Did you agree with her? Was she right?
Linda Wells: She had points. The thing is, I also think, when someone gives you criticism, it’s a gift. So I wanted to pay attention to it and take it in and not become defensive. We were doing something. I don’t want to get ahead of myself about Allure, but it was deliberately aggressive and deliberately not pretty. I was going to say ugly. It wasn’t ugly, but it wasn’t trying to be pretty. We didn’t want to be pretty. So I think that was a little jarring to people who had a different expectation of what this was going to be. It took a little while.
Rachel Baker: Yeah. Just to rewind it back just a minute. You were, I don’t know, 30 when Si Newhouse called you and asked you to create a beauty magazine. From scratch. Can you tell us what that call was like?
Linda Wells: It was, first it was Alex Liberman, who was the editorial director of Condé Nast and the creative side. Si was the business side and Alex was the creative side. And Alex wanted to have lunch at Le Grenouille, and I thought, That’s a little public. I don’t know.
Because it was a place that a lot of these people went for lunch all the time and I thought, Condé has been trying to hire me back. And Anna Wintour tried to hire me back to Vogue to be a beauty editor, a beauty director. And I really loved being at the Times, so I didn’t really want to go back and do something at a place I’d already been.
So when Alex called me to have lunch, I just thought that’s what he was doing. And I just thought that would be not very thoughtful to Carrie Donovan whose relationship was really important to me. So I said, “Could we have lunch in your office or a meeting in your office as opposed to at a very public place?”
And so I went to meet with Alex and we went to Si’s office and I was like, “Oh, maybe this is about something else.” And it was a very simple conversation. And if you had ever met Si or heard about Si he was a man of very few words and very long pauses. Very long pauses. You had to try your very hardest not to fill in that pause.
Rachel Baker: Yikes.
Linda Wells: So, I went to his office, and Si said, basically, “I want to start a beauty magazine and I want you to be the editor.” And that was it. I mean, he said, “Also, I want it to be journalistic.”
And then I got on my high horse and said, “If it’s going to be journalistic, then we can’t be beholden to the advertisers.” Because Condé Nast was very advertising-friendly. And there was the fantastic example of Condé Nast Traveler, which had started a few years before us. And “Truth in Travel” was their subhead and they were going to be critical of the travel industry.
But it was different in the beauty world because beauty had never had anybody criticize anything that they did. And it was a very close relationship between advertising and editorial. And I learned at The New York Times where I was really encouraged to be tough and encouraged to be critical.
And when, when the big companies, all the big beauty companies would complain about something that I did or wrote, usually, the top editors would come and congratulate me. My bosses and Abe Rosenthal were thrilled: “Good. Go for it.” They wanted it to be tough. It was a different scenario at Condé Nast that didn’t really have that approach to these subjects and also our advertising was going to be beauty.
So unlike the travel magazine, not all of its advertising was travel advertising. A lot of it was, but not all of it. But for us, we were going to be critical of the very people who were supporting us. So that was a bit of a process to figure out how we were going to do that.
“I like being behind the scenes. I always brought a book. And I would read while everybody else was chit-chatting. Chit-chat before the shows is exhausting.”
Rachel Baker: Wow. My next question was going to be what kind of hoops did you have to jump through to ultimately get the job—but it sounds like they knew they wanted you and you pushed back on them, which is incredible. How old were you then?
Linda Wells: I think I was 31 when it started. I think I was hired in April of 1990. So yeah, I wasn’t really pushing back. Of course, I was going to take the job. I’m not crazy. It was the chance to start your own magazine with the support of Condé Nast, which is, there’s nothing in the world like that kind of financial support and also support for you as an editor. They just really stood behind their editors.
It wasn’t so much that it was just let’s be sure that we agree what this is and what this means. So I didn’t say yes to the offer in that room that day, but I did later that very day. So I was thrilled to be there.
Rachel Baker: What was happening in the beauty world at that time that made Si and Alex be like, “We’ve got to do a beauty magazine and we need Linda to do it.”
Linda Wells: It was still a kind of quiet time in the beauty world. It was before Retin-A was approved by the FDA, and I always think of that as a watershed moment because it was the first time that a prescription medication to make you look better was approved, but with the marriage of science and beauty in a really legitimate way.
It was still really early days, but what they knew was that those beauty pages in the Condé Nast magazines, particularly Vogue, Glamour, were really successful. They had very high readership and they had built-in advertising. So I think that they saw that and saw the way that The New York Times was covering it and thought that could be good territory for Condé Nast.
Maggie Bullock: So what was your vision? Like, invent the form of a beauty magazine.
Linda Wells: At the time it was really taking my only two experiences, which is Vogue and The New York Times, and mashing them up together. So it was like the visual excellence of Vogue and journalistic excellence of the Times, and trying to see if those two things could be pushed together.
And in the end, we didn’t go with quite the visual excellence of Vogue for a number of different reasons, but the short version is that I was a little afraid of it being too pretty, and too predictable, and a little obvious. And Alex Liberman kept saying, “We don’t want any visions of loveliness.” And he kept repeating that, “No visions of loveliness.”
He wanted it not to look like one of those magazines that you found in a beauty salon. This was such a long time ago that it’s hard to remember. Beauty was a very reverential pristine, retouched, perfect concept of a very narrow definition in every way.
And beauty photographs were really quite limited, too. Most photographers shot fashion. So we’d be like, crop in. They’d crop in on the picture to make a beauty picture. But it was really the advertising world that had all the creativity and beauty and it didn’t exist in a very big way in magazines.
So it was trying to figure out how we were going to interpret beauty, and talk about it, and make it exciting. And it was a time of MTV and it was tabloids and it was a rougher time. And I think that we wanted to pick up on that kind of energy. So the layouts and the design ended up looking very much like that world.
Maggie Bullock: And then you also put a lot of energy into making it quite literary, right?
Linda Wells: I think that the assumption is that beauty is superficial and vain and hence not smart and not provocative or complicated. And to me, the reason that I found the subject interesting was because people have really conflicted opinions about the way they look, the way they present themselves to the world, the beauty standards. All these things are really fraught and it became a subject of feminism. And it became a subject of politics.
There are a lot of issues in there that I think magazines weren’t really parsing very much and dissecting. And so I wanted to be able to do that. Not just in reporting, but also to have real writers, literary writers, explore the subject. So it was fulfilling a fantasy because I love to read and I love great writers.
So I read The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien and got her to write for the first issue and put her on contract. And we had those great Condé Nast budgets. And so people would write for us. And I’d say, “Write for us!” And sometimes people would say, “I need a new couch.” So sure. Okay. If that’s what it takes, I don’t care what you’re using the money for, just write for us.
So we had Arthur Miller, we had Edwige Danticat, we had Isabel Allende, Geraldine Brooks, Betty Friedan, Diane Ackerman. I mean, it was an exceptional group of writers. David Sedaris in the really early days. Fay Weldon. And they would immediately think that we wanted them to write about something like makeup, or they didn’t feel like they belonged in the magazine, or they wanted to approach it in an obvious way.
And we would talk to them about, What does it mean to you? And what was your vision of beauty? And what was your interaction? And how did you feel about this? And they just really would dive in. And it was always the most fantastic surprise what we would get from these writers.
The new millennium brought a new approach to Allure’s covers: celebrities
Maggie Bullock: And tell us, how did you get Updike to write about psoriasis?
Linda Wells: I know. John Updike. We really wanted John Updike to write for us. And I loved what he was writing for The New Yorker. And we had several editors over the years who interacted with these writers and had relationships with them. And generally, I would hire them from The New Yorker and they were assistant-level people and they would have this senior job and they would have a great Rolodex.
So we went through Mary Turner and she would write these letters. And it was letters. It was in the mail because John Updike wasn’t on email. And so we’d send him letters about story ideas that we’d have. And he would send us back postcards that you buy at the post office. And he would type on the little postcard. It was pre-stamped and it was almost like an index card. And he would very politely reject our ideas, but in a way that made us feel humiliated.
And we’d be like, “Oh, this is so embarrassing.” We go back and try again. And he wrote something for The New Yorker about spending the summers with all the women whose husbands went to the city to work. And while they were with their kids on the beach, because he had psoriasis and he would hang out and sunbathe while they were playing with the kids. And this became his group of friends and how he would spend his days.
And so I thought that’s a beauty story. He wrote a story about that. We just sent him that idea, and suddenly we got this envelope, and in it was the manuscript. And there was no contract and no agreement, and there it was, and of course it was perfect. And we called it “The Prodigal Sun”—S-U-N. And it was such an excitement. We were so thrilled.
Maggie Bullock: Do any of these stories live in an archive? Can you find them?
Linda Wells: I can’t find them. I don’t know why, but Allure doesn’t have an archive like that. You can search for Kim Kardashian’s hair color, but you can’t search for John Updike’s psoriasis. And I don’t know why.
Maggie Bullock: That is sad. That is really sad. A personal question—because I did start out in beauty—I just wondered how you talked about these stereotypes of beauty being a less-serious subject. I just wondered how you, on a personal level, have dealt with or played with that stereotype about what it means to be a beauty person.
Linda Wells: I guess in a way I don’t really think of myself as that. I’m not someone who gets a lot of facials or wears a lot of makeup. I don’t personalize it. And I think that’s really true of almost everything that I’ve done. It’s not personalized. And so I look at it as a fascinating subject to pull apart and explore and see what it means about us as a culture. But I don’t look at it as How can I look better? or How do I look?
I care about the way I look, but I don’t care that much about the way I look. I’m one of those people who looks in the mirror and then goes about my day. And I feel sorry for people today because everyone’s on zoom and they’re photographing themselves. And I think there’s a requirement now in the beauty world to be a beautiful person in a literal way. And that’s not fun, you know. And I’m not young and none of that bothers me in the sense of me doing my job.
Rachel Baker: So these last couple months, there’s been some chatter about the “Town Car Era” of magazines. And you landed at Condé Nast as an editor-in-chief right in the middle of that. What do you make of that image that everybody’s talking about once again?
Linda Wells: The hilarious thing is everybody was talking about it all the time. I would laugh and I’d like every profile of every editor would start and she steps out of her town car and her high heels go clickety-click across the sidewalk and I’m like, “Here we go again.” And it was a great time. It was a really fun time to be an editor, because Condé Nast took care of us. Si Newhouse believed that we should be living like our subjects. And out in the world. And so the indulgences were many.
And it was almost as if you were looked down upon if you didn’t take advantage of them, if you didn’t spend enough money. And it was like, you were not rewarded for having a tight budget. Eventually, yes, that was important. But in the first 10 or 15 years I was there, that was not the attitude at all. It was excessive.
Rachel Baker: And what were the perks—will you tell us? Did you get an interest-free mortgage?
Linda Wells: I had an interest-free mortgage. That was really great. And then eventually, you know, I had to pay it back. That was shocking—Everything isn’t free? And so yes, I had an interest free mortgage. And it was funny because when I got there, I didn’t know any of these things and I was coming from the times where you didn’t get anything. You didn’t, for the most part, you didn’t take a pen home at night.
I got there and I didn't know this until well in. I got a call from human resources and they said, “Oh, we have a car for you.” Meaning a car for me to have to drive, not a town car, which yes, I had that town car thing. So I was like, “Oh, that’s fantastic.” It was a former ad director’s car and she left. And so I got her old car and I thought, This is the greatest thing going. And then people were like, “You’re crazy. That’s someone’s old car. You should be getting a new car and you should be getting a better car because you’re an editor in chief. You don’t stick around for this Hyundai thing or whatever it was.”
I thought I’d died and gone to it. I was so happy to have a car. And I didn’t really know what was available to me, but once it was available to me, believe me, I went for it. It was trips on the Concorde, and Michael Jackson was on my flight one time, and it was rooms, plural, at The Ritz. When I had kids, I brought my kids to the fashion shows and the nanny and we all hold up at The Ritz and I had a bassinet that used to be someone else’s bassinet and then I’d keep it in storage at The Ritz and then I passed it along to another editor at another magazine. And it was just, it was extreme.
I remember one time the CEO, Steve Florio, was supposed to moderate a panel discussion in Detroit at Chrysler. And at the last minute he decided he couldn’t do it or he didn’t want to do it. And he called me begging for me to do it. And I was like, “Okay, sure, I’ll go.”
And he said, “I’ll fly you there on a private plane and I’ll get you anything you want at Prada.”
And I said, “Fine.”
And then I ended up, I was on Northwest Airlines. I’m like, Who are all these people? This is not a private plane. And then he was like not available to go with me to Prada for shopping. Now, can you imagine going with the CEO shopping at Prada? But I ended up saying, “Why don’t I do this? I’ll just go to Prada. I’ll get something and I’ll send you the receipts.”
Wells talks homemade beauty fixes with Katie Couric, c. 2014
But that was like—kind of the grandiosity of it. And I remember one time there was an advertiser who was very unhappy about what we had done published in Allure. And this happened all the time, by the way, unhappy advertisers all the time. And that’s the consequences of being a journalist in this field. So this advertiser was a part of a huge organization. A very big beauty company, one of the largest. And he decided he was angry.
We wrote a story: Does hair dye cause cancer? And we did all this research and the research said that it did not, that it was clear. And so it was a lot of just apocryphal rumors and things like that. He was so angry that we even asked the question. He said to me, “I’m going to destroy you and your magazine.” He called me to tell me that.
So he tried to get all of the beauty companies in the US to band together and to boycott Allure. No advertising. No editorial coverage. He was gonna put a stop to us. And this culminated in a meeting that he decided to have like December 23rd—maybe it was the 24th. And my whole family went down to the Caribbean on vacation with my little kids, and my husband, and the nanny. And I was in New York meeting with angry advertisers.
The CEO, Steve, felt so terrible about it that he sent me down to Antigua on a private plane. I had a much better experience. I was like, I did my work and I got to Antigua without any problems. It was fantastic. And they didn’t pull the advertising. And it turned out that the advertiser was retiring on January 1st. And so this was going to be his last act. But as I walked him to the elevator after we had this meeting, he gave me a kiss on two cheeks and, “Happy holidays!” And I was like, “What are you talking about? You went after me!”
Maggie Bullock: And tried to get the whole industry to go after you, too.
Linda Wells: Yeah, that was cute.
Rachel Baker: Kiss, kiss.
Maggie Bullock: So cute. You launched in 1990, right?
Linda Wells: 1991 was the first one. And I started working there in 1990, yeah.
Maggie Bullock: So you were right where you needed to be when this whole era of the celebrity really took off. The idea of celebrities on the cover of the magazine instead of the models. What was the turning point or the point at which you were like, “Whoa, we’ve entered a new phase.” Does that stand out in your mind?
Linda Wells: Yeah, yeah. It was because we were very much wedded to the model and I came around when the supermodel was hitting its peak. And so that was really exciting. It was like that moment where Gianni Versace was alive and had all the girls on the runway at one time. And the power of that whole group.
And there was nothing better than if you get Linda [Evangelista] on a cover and Cindy [Crawford] and Christy [Turlington] and Naomi [Campbell]. It was that really great moment of beauty and models and larger than life characters. And while that was happening, the actors were really downplaying beauty and wearing converse high tops, big dresses, and no hair and makeup.
It wasn’t a time of really glam squads and things that happen now. So then InStyle came along and really made celebrity their identity. And they were having huge success in it. And you just felt the balance shift. And I think it was partly that the designers became uninterested in the supermodels in the same way because they felt the supermodels were getting too much attention.
And they ended up getting all those Eastern European models, who were very anonymous and looked all alike. And so the personalities disappeared from the runways and from fashion and celebrities became the big personalities.
And they started claiming fashion and beauty as something they wanted to participate in. And that meant they would get contracts with fashion brands. And so it shifted in a big way. The whole business shifted to a more celebrity driven business.
And I remember, I think our first celebrity cover was Sharon Stone. And that was funny because we were shooting her—I think the first cover was shot by Herb Ritts, so that was a different shoot. But we shot her previously and we had borrowed, for the shoot, a gown from John Galliano. And it was like one-of-a-kind, embroidered silk. It was an incredible dress. And she was about to get in the dress—she was in a hotel room and we were shooting her—and she said, “You know my rule, don’t you? I wear it. I keep it.”
And the stylist on the shoot called me up in a panic. “Sharon Stone says that if she wears the dress, she’s going to keep the dress.”
And I’m like, “That’s not our dress to give her.”
So I think she’s going to be shot in the hotel robe. And that’s what we did. We shot her in the hotel robe. And she looked great. But that was the assumption on the part of the celebrity that, “I will get all the jewels and I will get all the things.”
“I got on my high horse and said, ‘If it’s going to be journalistic, then we can’t be beholden to the advertisers.’”
Maggie Bullock: Sharon Stone loves a declaration. She’s like, “It will be such. You will now give this to me.” But also on the other hand, nobody wears a robe better. Your backup plan was good.
Linda Wells: The downside of the celebrity was the celebrity profile. There’s only so much you can say after a while when everyone’s covering the same people. There’s just not that much more to bring to it. And one of the things that we started doing, and it started out as an accident, but we found all these pictures, I think first with Helen Hunt. We found all these pictures of her as a child actor and all through her days, we brought them to the interview and she looked at them and she commented on them.
And that became our point of difference. And it was a moment of unrehearsed reaction. And it was a reaction to the way they looked, which is what we cared about at Allure. What they were wearing, and what their hair was, and their eyebrows. And there was always a comment. And the comments were funny. And so that was just an element of humanity that didn’t exist in a lot of the profiles. I think that GQ would get a great profile, but for the most part it was very much standard phoned-in, kind of predictable.
Maggie Bullock: I loved those things. I still love that technique. It’s such a smart way to crack them open.
Linda Wells: Yes. And it was always surprising to me when they wouldn’t expect it and a few would get angry when we’d bring the pictures out and, “I’m not doing this.”
And I’m like, “We do this in every issue. Who’s not telling you? Someone’s got to prep you.”
But it was really fun. And one of our best profiles was when Judith Newman went out to interview Britney Spears. And we’d photographed her first, which usually didn’t happen. We usually got the story first and then the photograph.
So we’d photographed her first, and so we were stuck. We had to run this thing. And every time they were supposed to meet, Brittany would cancel. And Brittany would cancel. And Brittany would cancel. And Judith was there. And then she spent another day. And she spent another day. And she lives in New York.
She called me and I was like, “Can you stay a couple more days?”
And she said, “Can you pay for my divorce?”
So I said to her, “Write the story, ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.’” It’s the story about celebrity for the celebrity who doesn’t show up. The sort of empty-vessel that celebrity actually is. And she wrote such a good piece.
Maggie Bullock: This feels like a bumpy pivot because we’re talking about the highs, but can you tell us about the day when you got fired from Allure after so many years there? What was that like?
Linda Wells: Actually, the funny thing was, it was surprising. Working for Condé Nast, what should never surprise you is that you will someday be fired. People were fired all the time. Magazines closed. I remember people saying, “I was abruptly fired.” And I thought, What other way do they do it?
And I know how the famous Grace Mirabella was fired—she found out when she was watching Liz Smith on TV. Some gossip report on local TV. It’s never pretty and it’s never easy, but I didn’t expect it. And then again, of course it seemed like it was time. I probably should have left before, but I didn’t want to. I really liked it.
And so I remember going back to my office. And It was handled very strangely because they said they were going to announce the new editor at a certain time. And it was like, I would say, it was in a half an hour. I was like, “Oh. Not very much time.”
And you know, “Yes, you can stay and you can move up to the floor with all the executives. And you can be on that floor and you can do whatever.”
And I thought, Oh God, I don’t want to do that.
Wells talks beauty trends at New York Fashion Week, c. 2011
But I wasn’t really thinking because it was such an out of body experience. So I went back to my office, I saw Paul Cavaco, who is the creative director, and my work husband, and who I adored so much. And I was like, “I was just fired.”
He’s like, “What?”
So I said, “We have to get everybody in the conference room immediately.” And I went and told them. But I had no time to think about what I was going to say and how to prepare. And I was still in shock. And people were crying and it was terrible. I felt like I was abandoning them. And I’m sure that they knew that this meant that it wasn’t going to be so great for them either.
And this had followed a lot of budget cuts, and before I was fired, I was asked to fire certain people who were paid a lot. And I thought, They’re doing a good job. I don’t really feel like I want to fire them. And I’m sure they thought She’s not going to be the right person to do these cuts. But I’m glad I didn’t fire them.
Can you imagine if I fired them and then I was fired? And then it was like, “Why don’t I ruin people’s lives who I felt were really great people.” So I was spared that. And then I went back to my office and I thought, Oh, I’ve got this full inbox. And then I was like, Wait a second, that’s not my problem anymore. And so I just walked out of the office and I never went back.
And I didn’t go to the 78th floor. Or whatever floor it was. I just thought it was strange. If I’m going to go, I’m not going to hang around and pretend I have a job or act as if I’m a puppet up here. I don’t want to do that. So I just left. And that was that.
Maggie Bullock: I heard you talk about this once and you said that everybody else is crying, but you did not cry. Is that true?
Linda Wells: Yeah.
Maggie Bullock: Are you just not a crier?
Linda Wells: I’m not much of a crier. Although, if you get me on a TV show with a good song I could fall apart really easily. No, I am a bit of a stoic and I think that it seems as if I have no emotions maybe, but I’m very placid on the outside and then inside I’m thinking about things, but no I didn’t cry.
There was a moment where I just felt terrible for everybody. But I didn’t cry for myself. And I don’t think I really ever cried for myself about that. It was bad, but I did really feel as if that chapter was over. And it was time for me to move on. And it was time for me not to feel bitter about it.
There were a lot of people who were fired and were really angry about it for a long time. And I just didn’t want it to ruin the previous 25 years, which were great. And I was really proud of what we accomplished. And so I just thought, I’m not going to let that one day color my attitude about the previous 25 years. It was the end.
Maggie Bullock: I’m just curious where you were in the arc of your generation of editors being fired or replaced had that turnover really started to happen already? And also, Rachel and I wondered if you are on a text chain with a bunch of them. Like, you know, did you console each other? You all went through this very unique experience, but you all went through it.
Linda Wells: I feel like I was probably the first of the editors to go. And I remember Graydon Carter was really fantastic and took me out and we had lunch and he’s just, “If you’re going, it’s just a matter of time before everybody goes.” And he was very brilliant in the way that he executed his own departure and it was so well done.
And I think that people who saw the writing on the wall left before they were pushed out. But I think for Allure it was tough because I felt that they just took a line in the salary and they just fired everybody over that line. I remember being on a text And seeing one person was gone and then, I was getting texts like, “Oh, they just fired X and they just fired this.”
“I learned that I’m not meant for the corporate world whatsoever. And even though people are like, ‘Condé Nast is so corporate.’ Oh no. No, it’s not corporate. That’s corporate.”
Rachel Baker: This is a little bit of a gear shift, but there’s been such a revolution over the past decade in terms of inclusivity, vis-a-vis beauty types, skin color, and body ideals. Thinking back to Allure’s heyday, how much of that was part of the conversation in making your magazine?
Linda Wells: It wasn’t a huge part of making the magazine. We included a variety of people, but it wasn’t a conversation, a daily conversation. And it’s regrettable. I look back on it and I think, That wasn’t good. And I think that we fell into the same concept of what beauty was. And it was a narrow definition of what beauty was.
And, there were incidents like, we did a shoot once where we had all these models lined up at a sink and they were wearing, like, what’s now thought of as skims, but they were not skims at the time. But it looked like that kind of beige underwear, all lined up at a sink and there was a dermatologist there and it was some kind of concept.
And one of the models was significantly heavier than the others. And I got it back from the retoucher and her body was made to look like all the others. And the head of production came in to me and she said, “I’m really upset about this.”
I’m like, “What was it?”
And she showed her to me. I’m like, “What happened to this model?”
And the photographer had gone and done it on his own and directed this. And I was like, “Oh my God.” But that sort of showed me how it was just rote. And how at every level, this is what was just commonly done. And it could be done because of the ease of retouching. There were just incidents like that, that were visible issues.
But it was a different time. And I don’t even think it’s fair to even defend it. It was just then. And if you look back, I think about the number of cover lines I had of “Lose 10 Pounds.” It was like I was fully delivering diet culture, beauty culture once a month, like clockwork. And that’s not good.
Maggie Bullock: We’re also guilty. The number of cover lines I’ve written trying to rephrase weight loss stories. They’re countless. And the number of weight loss personal test drives I have done and written.
Linda Wells: I have a human guinea pig for all of them. And I have a tough time forgetting that because it’s so part of my life from when I was a teenager. And I’m always thinking, I’ve got to lose weight. Or, I wish if I could just be a little bit thinner, my life would be perfect. But it’s just like you get on the scale and they can make or break your day. And I know better. But it’s just in your blood cells. I don’t know what it is.
Maggie Bullock: Yeah. It’s really hard to shake. So one thing that kind of bowls Rachel and I over, amongst many, in your story is that it felt like pretty quickly after you left Allure, you were reinventing yourself. You became Revlon’s chief creative officer. And then a couple of years later, you launched your own beauty brand, Flesh Beauty. This is a podcast called Print Is Dead and we’re very much focused on that side of things. Obviously, now you’re back on the editorial side. What’s your, kind of, post-mortem on switching to the other team for a while? And did you like being over there? Or did you long to be back in editorial land?
Linda Wells: It was such a great experience in terms of just learning something completely different. Something I thought I knew but knew from the outside and didn’t know anything about from the inside. And in some ways I wish I’d done it 20 years earlier so that I had that perspective because it was fascinating. It’s just, it’s a different orientation, a different world.
I learned that I’m not meant for the corporate world whatsoever. And even though people are like, “Condé Nast is so corporate.” Oh no. No, it’s not corporate. That’s corporate. There’s factories and there’s supply chain—and the number of hours I spent in meetings about supply chain.
And I don’t know why I was there, but there I was, sitting there trying to stay awake, and also Googling acronyms under the table because I didn’t know what I was talking about. But it was really interesting. And I was working for a CEO who came from Colgate and he went to Unilever, Fabian Garcia. He was fantastic.
He wanted to have a better relationship with Ulta and he saw what was happening with all the indie brands in beauty and thought, Is there a way for us to create a brand internally that mimics the Indie brand format, which is quick-to-market, no red tape, no deliberating, get it out fast, and really trust your gut.
“Condé Nast took care of us. Si Newhouse believed that we should be living like our subjects. And out in the world. And so the indulgences were many.”
So I raised my hand to do that. So it wasn’t really my line. But I hired a makeup artist, I hired a designer and I went with the makeup artist to Italy, and we created the formulas, and I created the concept, and we created the names, and named all the products, and made the identity, and worked with our social media person to create an identity on Instagram.
And it was so insanely fun. And that was a success in terms of what was asked of me. The challenge was that at Revlon, they didn’t work this way. They weren’t in the prestige business. And it’s a different business that requires a different kind of service in the store that you have to pay for.
It requires marketing, merchandising—all these things that it just isn’t You set it up and then the people come. It isn’t—it’s a new brand. So It was really doomed from the beginning, honestly. We had too many products. We didn’t have a DTC presence. Everything that indie brands are doing, Glossier, or you name it, was not the way we were doing it.
We came out with something like 160 SKUs right off the bat, which is an insane amount of stuff. But what I cared about was the quality of the products, and the way they looked, and the way they sounded, and their personality. And I love them, and I still have them, and I still use them. I love those products. And they were great.
Rachel Baker: And I love the name too. We love Flesh.
Linda Wells: So outrageous. And we named one lip gloss Moist and people were just losing their minds about it. And we just had so much fun. It was so much fun.
Rachel Baker: So tell us about Air Mail. You launched the beauty vertical Air Mail Look last year. What was the mandate from Graydon there?
Linda Wells: He brought me in to write about beauty and wellness for Air Mail, and he is the greatest boss. He and Alessandra Stanley are the greatest bosses because they just let you do what you do. And sometimes I feel like my mission was, can I scandalize Graydon with this, but he’s pretty un-scandalizable, if that’s a word. That was going along well. And I think the stories are really well-received. And I think that was a big thing. And again, there’s a built-in advertising interest in the subject. And he saw that this subject is just exploding.
And so we started having conversations about what that would look like and how it would be. And he came up with the name, Air Mail Look. And then he, very generously, had me work with a deputy editor from Air Mail, Ashley Baker, who is my partner in crime and so much fun. And we talked every day and we just came up with a lineup and off we went.
And I have the art director and the creative director from “Big” Air Mail. We call it Big Air Mail because we’re little. And then we have a photo editor who I knew from the Vanity Fair days, Susan White. So we have this incredible talent and no one’s full time on Air Mail Look, but we put our heart into it. It’s enormously fun. We just laugh about, Should we do this story? And we’ve got these outrageous stories.
Rachel Baker: You can really feel that as a reader. Even skimming the headlines this morning just to refresh my memory, I was like, “Oh, that’s hilarious.” What’s your favorite story you’ve worked on recently?
Linda Wells: The story about the orgasm coach. There was nothing better. I don’t know if you saw that one, but it was so hilarious. So a friend of mine, Lisa Eisner, was telling me, “There’s this guy in LA and he teaches women how to have orgasms.”
I’m like, “Say no more.”
We have this fantastic editor who’s working with us, Lauren Bans, who was at GQ, and she’s a TV writer. And so...
Rachel Baker: The Spread loves Lauren.
Linda Wells: Oh God, she’s so good. I love her so much. So she was available to us because of the writer’s strike. So we brought her in to be an editor and she knew a writer in LA who was willing to do it, another TV writer. And so this woman went off and had a session with a man called “The O Man.”
He was a physical trainer. He became an orgasm coach. And she paid $800. It was a low price because it was like a holiday discount. And she had two hours of orgasms. I don’t know how many there were, but I would say probably safely 40. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it was certainly over 20. She was exhausted.
But it was hilarious. My phone went crazy the morning it happened and I was getting texts from men who lead entertainment divisions of giant companies, and they’re like, “Whoa! This should be a TV series.”
Rachel Baker: Yeah, it should.
Linda Wells: I talked to one person in that world about it, so I’m hoping so. Yeah.
“Designers lost interest in supermodels because they were getting too much attention. So celebrities started claiming fashion and beauty as something they wanted to participate in. The whole business shifted. ”
Rachel Baker: Fingers crossed. So you invented Allure in your early thirties. You created beauty publishing. And then you worked on the corporate side. If you had all the funding in the world, what would you create?
Linda Wells: I do feel like I should create a skincare line. I even have a name. I have a concept. I know. But the market is so oversaturated. I feel like what needs to happen in skin care is something that just doesn’t happen often enough, and that is the marriage of science with sexiness. There is no sexy science. And there should be.
We should have products that perform really well and in a legitimate way and that are fun and well packaged, and fun to name and look at and put on your counter and that you look forward to using. But they should also deliver on the performance.
And it’s very separate in the beauty world. It’s either it’s clinical, and it looks clinical, and it sounds clinical or else it’s frivolous, and indulgent, and luxurious, but it really doesn’t do anything. And so I would love to do a mashup of those things. But I don’t know. I think that to do it, I just think there’s so much in the industry right now.
And then we had this influx of celebrity lines. And I get it. I know that in order to get attention, you need a celebrity behind your brand. And in order to get attention, you need an influencer behind your brand. And that was one of the negatives about Flesh was we didn’t have that. It wasn’t an influencer brand, and it wasn’t a celebrity brand.
And so it’s hard to get brand recognition and awareness without that. But right now, a lot of these celebrity brands are dying and a lot of the influencer brands are dying. So I think that there needs to be a bit of a shakeout and then maybe I’ll do it. Who knows?
Rachel Baker: So you just solved skincare. Can you solve magazines? If you were in charge of Condé Nast now what would you do? Or can magazines be saved?
Linda Wells: I think that they can be. But I think that they can’t be in the model that—I’m not saying anything that’s so ingenious—the business model is beyond broken. And there’s no point in trying to force magazines into the current business model, which I think the surviving magazines are still trying to do and they’re trying to be all things to all people. Or a lot of things to all people.
And I think when you look at some of the really exciting creative magazines, like The Gentlewoman, or Homme Girls, or Beauty Papers, or Self Service. They’re really specific. They drill right into their subject. They’re not all disparate, they’re very focused, and they feel precious. They’re expensive, and they’re on really good paper, and they don’t come out every month.
So I feel like in a dream, it would be having a lot of little magazines that speak to a smaller consumer. And then maybe have more to it than just the magazine. You look at Homme Girls and they have clothes. Or you look at Self Service and they have exhibitions. Is there another something they could do?
Air Mail has these newsstands, and they’re opening another newsstand in March, and what does a journalism brand selling products look like? And can that be done? And it’s breaking the old habits of selling a lot and having a lot of advertisers. Get one advertiser. The Air Mail model of having a single advertiser per issue is really attractive.
It’s a very luxurious experience. The advertisers are the absolute highest luxury. And it looks good for Air Mail and it looks good for the advertiser. It’s a really happy marriage. And so that to me is like a really good solution. And doing fast on digital, but keeping—it’s like slow food—making the slow part of it be the magazine, and the contemplative part of it, and the more artistic part of it, or creative. There’s probably no money to be made there, though.
Wells interviewing hairstylist Orlando Pita backstage at a 2002 Celine runway show in Paris. Photo by Franz Walderdorff
Rachel Baker: I think you just articulated the future of Spread Media. Are you ready, Maggie?
Maggie Bullock: Let’s sidebar about this later. In the meantime, I have a very important question. So actually, our final question for you is I bet or we bet that people ask you beauty questions all the time. So what is the one that you get the most?
Linda Wells: The one about the neck. Everybody asked me, and that’s probably my age too, but really the question I get more than anything else is: I want to get my eyes done. What should I do about my neck? Nora Ephron hit it when she said, “I feel bad about my neck.” That’s every woman who’s ever been on a Zoom call. Unless you’re under 35.
So I think that’s the thing I get. And I have one friend who is in the film industry who texts me once a year and says, “Who should I get to do my eyes?” And I have to go back to my file and look at who I sent her last time. “You should go to this guy.” And we just repeat it. It’s like Groundhog Day every year.
So it’s all about plastic surgery. It’s about injections. It’s about lasers. I went to a dinner party on Friday night of extraordinarily accomplished women. And that’s what they want to talk about. And I was talking to Anna Deavere Smith at this party, to drop a name, but she was like, “Why isn’t there a Kennedy Honors for beauty?
I’m like, “Yeah. Pitch me that.”
Wells’ current project: Air Mail Look, a collaboration with Air Mail founder and former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief, Graydon Carter
You can find Linda Wells at AirMail Look and on Instagram @lindawellsny. And don’t miss out on the best reads of the week every week at The Spread on Substack.
More episodes from The Spread
Back to the Interviews
A Style All Her Own
A conversation with editor and designer Stella Bugbee (The New York Times Style Section, The Cut, Domino, more).
A conversation with editor and designer Stella Bugbee (New York Times Style Section, The Cut, Domino, more).
—
THIS EPISODE IS A SPECIAL COLLABORATION WITH OUR FRIENDS AT THE SPREAD
EDITOR’S NOTE:
This summer, our first collaboration with The Spread—the Episode 21 interview with former Cosmopolitan Editor-in-Chief Joanna Coles—became our most-listened-to episode ever. Now Rachel Baker and Maggie Bullock are back, and this time they’re speaking with another game-changing woman in media: Stella Bugbee, the editor of The New York Times Style section.
For our new listeners, Rachel and Maggie are a pair of former Elle magazine editors and “work wives.” In 2021, like many of you, they found themselves wishing for a great women’s magazine—and watching the old-school women’s mags drop like icebergs from a glacier. They decided to be the change they wanted to see—and The Spread was born.
Now, more than two years into publishing their dream weekly on Substack, rounding up juicy gossip, big ideas, and deeply personal examinations of women’s lives—from The New York Times and The Atlantic to Vogue and Elle to NplusOne and The Drift—The Spread is a cult favorite of media mavens and the media-curious.
Rachel & Maggie call Bugbee “a magazine-making unicorn”—we’re excited to be able to share their conversation with you.
—
Maggie Bullock: Last month, the big, bad headline in the world of women’s media was the shuttering of the groundbreaking feminist website Jezebel. We’ve since learned that Jezebel could be revived, but who even knows what that means? Regardless, the “closure” unleashed a wave of mourning, even among magazine fanatics like us who’ve become a little bit inured to the decimation of the legacy magazines that Jezebel was invented to skewer. Rachel, Jezebel was supposed to be the radical “antidote to the establishment”—and it didn’t have to contend with the print and circulation costs that sink bigger ships. When that topples, you have to ask yourself: What era of women’s media are we in now?
Rachel Baker: That’s what makes it such an interesting time to talk to Stella Bugbee. Ask any 30- or 40-something today about the one women’s media brand that is absolutely a daily must-read, and she will say New York magazine’s The Cut—the site that, starting in 2012, Stella built. The Cut was not just a women’s magazine re-sized for the internet, but a whole-cloth reinvention of the form. Jezebel (which was founded in 2007) was as much its forebear as the Elles and Vogues of the world: The Cut had the irreverence and voice-yness and political savvy of new media and the high-caliber production value of old media. And it was built to last: While we may have lost Jezebel, The Cut is still operating, more or less, on the blueprint that Stella created—and going strong.
Maggie Bullock: What we’ve always found fascinating about Bugbee is that she started out as a designer—she worked at a creative agency and on the visual side of a ton of cool indie magazines (like Interview and Topic) and had a stint at The New York Times before becoming the design director of the original Domino. But then when that magazine folded, she somehow totally switched teams, becoming an editor and a really great writer. I can’t think of anybody else who did that, can you? It's no surprise that The New York Times tried for years to get Stella to come to run the Styles desk. Somehow, the middle of the pandemic—when most of the Times was still working remotely, when she was unable to meet her team in person—felt like the right time for her?
Rachel Baker: Now I think you can really see the Stella touch in the way they package their stories. Like, a couple weeks ago, when the section ran a cover story titled, “Ozempic vs. Thanksgiving.” The idea sounds almost obvious, but I’d argue that it’s a masterclass in headline writing—it demonstrates a specific Bugbee-an ability to survey the culture and zero in on the thing everyone is thinking about—like when Styles spotlighted the “girl dinner” over the summer. My group texts are still full of photos of “cheese plates for one,” how about yours?
Maggie Bullock: Totally. So should we stop yammering so folks can listen to what Stella has to say?
Rachel Baker: Let’s do it.
Maggie Bullock: Okay, so now we shall ask some questions. So Stella, thank you for joining us here. We’re super excited to have you and we are taping this on a Monday afternoon, it is 1:02 p.m., and we were wondering what’s going on at the Times at 1:02 p.m. on a Monday. What are you guys doing right now?
Stella Bugbee: Should I tell you the truth?
Maggie Bullock: Preferably.
Stella Bugbee: Normally at 1:02 on a Monday I’m catching up. Usually I’m probably eating lunch at 1:02, actually, because at noon there is this meeting called the enterprise meeting where a lot of desk heads come together with the masthead and we talk about the developing big story of the day or of the week.
And people kind of think about how their section might get in on telling that story or what they could contribute. Mostly, I listen in those meetings. But every once in a while, there’s a way that Styles could get into the story, and it’s really helpful to be at those. And then after those end, I usually go upstairs and eat a salad.
Maggie Bullock: Perfect. So you’re fueled. That’s important. And like, what’s the stressful part of the week in terms of your deadlines and Styles?
Stella Bugbee: Styles closes two issues a week. We have a Thursday edition and a Sunday edition. So we are closing Thursday on Wednesday afternoon, and we were closing Sunday on Friday morning.
But, we’re really digital-first as they love to say, but it’s true. So we’re really meeting every, we meet a couple times a week. One of those moments is Monday mornings and we look at the whole week and we sort of publish divorced from the print product. And then we look at what’s going to fill Thursday and what’s going to fill Sunday, but we publish way in advance, often, online.
So we’re looking at this big Airtable—I don’t know if anybody uses Airtable, but that has our whole calendar. And I try to have at least three or four things publishing every day, regardless of the print product. But we’re sort of in a real rhythm with publishing Thursdays and Sundays.
And mostly what we’re thinking about is like, what’s the cover of Thursday and what’s the cover of Sunday. And how are we going to spread out the stories that we’ve published all week into either one of those places.
Maggie Bullock: So we’re going to get more into the nitty gritty of that, but for now we’re going to back up a little bit. So you grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, correct?
Stella Bugbee: Where I still live.
Maggie Bullock: Where you still live. You went to the smarty-pants high school, Stuyvesant.
Stella Bugbee: Wow. You did your research. Yes, I did.
Maggie Bullock: And then you went to Parsons, right? And you majored there in communication design.
Stella Bugbee: Yes. Magazines, basically.
Maggie Bullock: In magazines? So it seems safe to say you’re a total dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker. Is that safe to say?
Stella Bugbee: I like to think so, yes.
Maggie Bullock: And how do you think that informs your editorial point of view—certainly your job now? Like, how key to your makeup is the fact that you grew up the way that you did?
Stella Bugbee: I sometimes think about, going back to Stuyvesant, like If you had said to people who knew me back then, “Someday she’s going to be editing the Style section of The New York Times,” I think people would have said like, “Oh yeah, that makes sense.” Because it was a huge interest of mine. Fashion was like a huge part of how I identified within my friend group and I was always super-interested in it, always had subscriptions to Vogue and Interview and a lot of interest in that stuff. And also in writing.
I think I took a lot of detours. I didn’t necessarily think I would end up here. But then I think if I told my high school self, “Oh that’s what you’ll be doing in 30 years,” I think I’d be like, “Oh yeah, I guess so.” It makes sense in retrospect. So I think growing up in New York, you’re just exposed to fashion all the time by just leaving the house.
You can’t help but see all the stuff around you. And I just naturally found it so interesting. I just loved the way people looked and I couldn’t stop watching them. And I think being on the subway every day, walking through Manhattan, it’s unavoidable.
“I don’t think a career in fashion was necessarily something that I thought was a valid career. Which is a shame because it truly is.”
Maggie Bullock: And did you grow up—I mean, every New Yorker really grows up reading the Style section.
Stella Bugbee: Yeah, I guess so. We had a subscription to the Times. I feel like I read the Book Review a lot. (I was a little pretentious). And I apologize to the people who knew me then. Yeah, I mean, it was around. It was, like, in the world. I don’t think a career in fashion was necessarily something that I thought was a valid career then. Which is a shame because it truly is. There’s so much you can do in fashion. I just didn’t have that awareness. My family didn’t work in fashion. I didn’t really have any examples of people who had careers in fashion. My parents were teachers.
Like it just didn’t seem like a valid direction. And then at Parsons, it’s obviously a huge part of the school, although I wasn’t in that program. So again, I saw magazines as this bridge between what I enjoyed about fashion, which is image making and culture creation and analysis, and writing. Like a magazine back then—this is, whatever, mid- to late-nineties—was this place where you could catalog culture in this way that was really permanent and relevant.
And I was looking to the magazines to give me the information about these communities that I really wanted to be part of or that I really admired. And so it just sort of felt like, well, that’s where I want to be working. I want to be doing that. And the communication design program was really about—you could pick a lot of different things within that. But for me, magazines were the natural crossover of my many interests: writing, and visuals, and culture. It wasn’t just fashion.
Maggie Bullock: But that said, when you got out of Parsons, you didn’t follow what we think of as the traditional path to magazine success, exactly. You went into advertising, right? Was that the first leap?
Stella Bugbee: Yeah. There were a couple of people that I really admired in the late ’90s. Some of them were my teachers and some of them were just people in the design community that were bridging this gap between designer and editor. Like, Tibor Kalman was a person that had been incredibly influential in New York City and he had employed most of my teachers.
So I’m, let’s just say, like, third-generation—maybe I’m second-generation? So all of my teachers at Parsons were working designers, that’s the way it worked. And they had all worked for Tibor. So he was, kind of, this grandfather figure in the city. And he had done Colors magazine. It was this very groundbreaking project where a designer could tell stories as an art director and it was super powerful and this huge commentary, but it kind of crossed this line between advertising/advertorial/content. But it really was independent of, I guess it was Benetton who was the company that put out Colors.
And so Tibor was this figure for me that I kind of wanted to emulate. And then in college, I worked for Roger Black, who is this seminal magazine designer. And at that point he had a firm where he redesigned magazines. And I loved it. I worked on Reader’s Digest, I worked on Men’s Health, I worked on all these magazines.
But what didn’t appeal to me about that was the sort of rigorous work your way up as an art director and have like no say in the content part of it. And there was just a little bit of fluidity between advertising and design in the people that I most admired, like [Stefan] Sagmeister or Tibor Kalman. And I ended up just taking a job that I got, which happened to be in advertising at the end.
And it was advertising for theater, so it felt kind of editorial in a weird way. Like I had to come up with art direction in the same way you might for a story. Because you’re reading a play, and you’re trying to come up with how to advertise that play. The other day I was in my basement and I found the Playbill for one of the plays that I designed right out of college, which was this play called W;t.
Maggie Bullock: Oh wow, I remember that.
Rachel Baker: Yeah.
Stella Bugbee: Yeah. And it had a semicolon instead of the “i.” It was advertising, but it was extremely creative, that part of it.
Rachel Baker: But you’re responsible for the semicolon?
Stella Bugbee: I’m responsible for that logo, yeah. It’s in the play. Like, I read the play and I was like, “Let’s make the “i” a semicolon.”
Rachel Baker: Right.
Stella Bugbee: The semicolon is like a character in this play. Anyway, it was a way not to have to commit to a linear work-my-way-up-to-being-a-creative-director type of move out of college. And when you’re out of college, if somebody offers you a job, you’re just like, “Yeah, I’ll take it.” And I loved that job. I loved my boss and it was a fantastic job. But I only did that for about a year.
Maggie Bullock: So, I want to talk about all of these things, but we also want to cover a lot of ground. So I’m going to leap forward to 2006. Is that the year that you got hired at Domino?
Stella Bugbee: Yeah. I had a brief detour working here at The New York Times for the summer. I was obsessed with Adam Moss and The New York Times Magazine. And there was an opening—somebody went on maternity leave in the art department. So I was like, “I’ve just got to go and try it out and see what it’s like.”
So I got to do that. I got to cover her mat leave. So I was here for like this minor tiny moment and I got to see just like, “Oh, that’s what it’s like to work at a magazine.” And then I took a couple more detours before going back to magazines. But it was cool.
“All of us were obsessed with Adam [Moss], and just dying to get to Adam.”
Maggie Bullock: So that’s where you met Adam then, and where that started?
Stella Bugbee: No, that’s where I met Rob Giampietro, who is another graphic designer who knew David Haskell. And he said, “This guy I know from college is starting a magazine and I think he could use some help on it.”
And so I was like, “Oh, I’ll do that. That sounds fun.” And we just kind of took it over from, not from David, but for David, like in terms of just trying to reimagine what it could look like.
And at that point, working on that, I was like, “I want to be the editor.” That was where I got this, like, “Well, I have more ideas for the stories than I actually have for the art and design of this.” And I got this bug.
Maggie Bullock: Is that Topic?
Stella Bugbee: That was Topic magazine.
Maggie Bullock: Can we just tell our listeners, briefly, what was Topic?
Stella Bugbee: So Topic was David Haskell’s literary magazine that he started when he was, I think, I should fact check this, but I think he was at Cambridge when he started it. And when he moved back to America, he talked to Rob. And Rob talked to me.
And then I brought on a photo editor that was a friend of mine. And it was just this small, quarterly, sometimes only twice-a-year, self-funded literary magazine. And it covered a different topic each time. So we did games, we did prison, we did money—kind of like a little prototype of what a special issue of New York magazine might look like.
And all of us were obsessed with Adam, and just dying to get to Adam. And then David actually did get to Adam first. And David started working at New York magazine. That must’ve been, maybe 2007, 2006, something like that. And at that point I had gone to Domino.
Maggie Bullock: So somewhere along the line, you also had a few babies in there.
Stella Bugbee: Yes, right around Topic. I bounced around between advertising, just working and learning how to be an art director and stuff. I got pregnant and was sort of like kicking around, not sure what to do.
I also did this project with Joanna Goddard. She did this magazine that was all about Italy. It’s called Bene. I took the same photo editor from Topic and we went over to help her do this. It was really kind of a fun dream project all about Italy, but for Americans. They don’t do projects like this anymore. It’s like one of those things that you hear about, you’re like, “People don’t do that!”
Rachel Baker: Yeah. Who was funding that? Where is it? Can we get a copy?
Stella Bugbee: I might still have some copies like in my basement. I think we only did four or three, I can only remember the three covers. But I did that for a little while. And I was out of work, technically. I was at home with my babies. And I remember saying like, “I got to get to Condé. I got to get, I just got to get—I just need to be, like, a design director somewhere.”
Maggie Bullock: Because you needed, like, stability, insurance? Or you had bigger ambitions? What was, "I gotta get to Condé?"
Stella Bugbee: Well, I was like, “Okay, it’s time. It’s time to go do that thing I’ve been avoiding doing and just actually do it. If I’m going to do it.” And a guy that I had gone to college with had designed the original prototype for Domino. And he just put my name up for the job and I went and got the job.
Rachel Baker: And you were 30.
Stella Bugbee: I was 30. Yeah. It’s crazy to think about, yes.
Maggie Bullock: So we love Domino. Rachel and I both loved Domino. And to me it really made interiors, which had been this, sort of, off limits, rich person’s hobby into, like, a shoppable, fun, younger—I thought it was really innovative. It was so fun to consume. But looking back on Domino what do you think was the brilliance of that publication?
Stella Bugbee: Well, I think Deborah [Needleman] was brilliant. I think Deborah, who also comes kind of from a visual background—she was a photo editor before she became an editor— understood how to tell the story about how a regular person could decorate their house.
And the genius of it is that I didn’t realize just quite how expensive everything was until I actually went to work there and got a deep education in interior design from all these brilliant, amazing women that I worked with. And you never felt that as a reader, which, I thought, was a really nice sleight-of-hand that she was able to pull off. Because actually designing a house is so expensive.
And somehow, as a reader, you’re like, “I could do this.” And I think that feeling of being invited in to participate was super-key to the success of that magazine. And it’s something that I feel is very important, especially for fashion, right? So it’s an ethos that I, like, took a big note from with Deborah.
And Deborah was obsessive about captions, which I think was also a great lesson for me. Like, she cared more about the captions than she cared about the actual long copy, because she understood that readers have all these different entry points into a story. And as a designer, like, who really was a reader first I think the way that I thought about design, and still think about editing, is like as a reader first.
So you’re sort of saying like, “I know that as a reader first, I’m going to go to the caption. I’m going to go to the headline, caption, and then I’m going to read the story.” Because it’s all these different entry points. And she really taught me the value of being obsessive about that small copy And that kind of what it contributes to the overall experience of a magazine.
Maggie Bullock: That is a hundred percent. Two, two hundred percent! Okay, but so this is a podcast called Print is Dead. So people are going to want to hear—tell the people about your experience just a few years later of watching that OG Domino be shuttered. What was that like from your vantage point and what did you learn from that?
Stella Bugbee: It was devastating, frankly, to have this project that everybody worked so hard on—I mean we were just finishing the book, The Domino Book of Decorating, which we had killed ourselves on. And we were doing that on top of the magazine, and I had this incredible design team of seven people, and they were just the loveliest, best people. And there was no warning. And they fired us all—like a hundred and some people—within 10 minutes.
I was out that day. I was sick at home. And I just got a whole bunch of phone calls. And they called everybody into a conference room, and when they got back to their desks, there were, like, “you’re fired” notices on their chairs. Then I pulled myself out of bed, andI went to work. And everybody was inconsolable.
It was really quite upsetting and disorienting for everyone because everywhere you went, people said like, “I love Domino. I love that magazine. It’s so great.” And you felt like you were working on something that people really were relating to. And then you get shut down in a mass firing.
So I was pretty discouraged. I’d finally committed to being in magazines, and I gave up on them almost immediately—well, that’s not true. I had a brief stint at Interview while Glenn [O’Brien] was there. And then he got fired. And I quit and went back to advertising. But this time in fashion, which was again, like kind of an incredible education. So every job that I had, I tried to use it as a way to just get a deeper understanding of how to do a skill.
And so when I went to work in fashion, it was really this, sort of, deep plunge into visual storytelling and brand building. And it happened to be working for Raul Martinez, who was a legendary Vogue art director forever with Anna [Wintour], and his husband Alex Gonzalez, who was also an art director at many Hearst publications.
And they had, in the Tibor model, also made their own magazines. One was called Influence. This was like long before the term “influencers” was broadly used. And II just kind of put myself at their feet and just learned everything there was to learn from them about how to tell a story.
And one of the most amazing things about working there is they had every issue of Vogue ever made. I mean, they had every issue of every fashion magazine. And there’s huge stacks of library magazine racks. And you basically spent all day looking through old Vogues. So, it was not only an incredible experience to work for these two great men who I loved, it was this immersion in the history of fashion photography.
So I really learned a lot of the cliches, a lot of the popular tropes, a lot of who the models were. It was kind of like a graduate thesis program, but instead I was also working. But it was great. And I’m so, so grateful for that time of just being able to like, literally spend hours looking through every Vogue ever made from the beginning to now.
“I saw magazines as this bridge between what I enjoyed about fashion, which is image making and culture creation and analysis, and writing.”
Rachel Baker: Wow. I mean, I’ve been sitting here this whole time being like, “I’ve got to get into Stella’s basement. I bet there are Dominos and Topics in there too.” And now I’m like, “Oh, I’ve got to call Alex and Raul and see their collection.”
Stella Bugbee: Yeah. Well, there used to be this place, I don’t know if you guys ever went there, called Gallagher’s. And they dealt in vintage magazine collections. And so when somebody would die—or I don’t even know actually how they came about these massive collections—you could get every magazine. Of any kind. And I discovered it in college.
And you would just go down there—and you have to imagine this is before Google image search, so you were kind of hoarding imagery, if this was your trade, because having access to historical imagery meant that you had references that nobody could find. So you were always building on this history of photography, and always building on this history of fashion and references, because no one else could find those things. It was cool.
Rachel Baker: In 2011, you came to New York magazine to work on relaunching The Cut. I was working at New York at the time, and I was so intrigued when you walked in the door—I’m still intrigued—but I just remember being like, “Who is this woman?” Because you were a designer, but you were also an editor, with all these amazing ideas. And I think your title was creative director. And then, Boom!—you were the editor of The Cut. How did all that happen?
Stella Bugbee: Well, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Adam Moss, who was the editor of New York magazine, who I think did one of these podcasts, right? I love him. I don’t know that many people might’ve said, “Oh, you can do this.” It’s hard, in our industry, to break out of whatever role you’ve been assigned early on. Which is maybe one of the reasons I didn’t want to take an early path that just “put me on a path” because I didn’t really want to be pigeonholed in that way.
But it was actually David Haskell who suggested that I come and talk to them about The Cut. I’d had another baby, and I was out of work. And he said, “We can’t quite find anybody that Adam feels really excited about to help with this project.” And I was really unsure about it.
But I thought the internet seemed really interesting, given what had happened at Domino. And I decided to come on as a consultant. I wasn’t sure and I didn’t have enough confidence frankly to just say, “I can do this.” And then I just loved it so much. And I got along with Adam. And, you know, I just like I just started to have so many ideas. And then I started to have a real vision for what it could be. And it was slow. It didn’t happen right away.
And even when I came on to be the editor in 2012, I would say for the first two years we were just trying a ton of stuff. I feel like we found our rhythm in 2014. And then from 2014 on, it built in ambition and in relevance. It was a very slow process. Seems like it wasn’t, but it really actually took a long time from when I came to when I felt like we were starting to really get going.
An anonymous note delivered with a box of donuts during the height of the #MeToo movement.
Rachel Baker: But when you showed up at The Cut, the ambition was so grand. The ambition was to reinvent the women’s magazine. How did you set out to do that? And what was the mandate from Adam? You mentioned your relationship with fashion magazines. What about traditional women’s magazine content? Did you read and like that stuff?
Stella Bugbee: I definitely read all that stuff. My whole life. So it was steeped in that. The internet allowed us to be voicey-er, and to be more immediate, and to reflect what the writers wanted to say, and how they wanted to speak in a different way than a magazine may have constrained the voices of some of the people working on it.
And there was just a feeling of like, “Well, you just put it up.” And you see, and then you react. It didn’t feel precious. I will say that. And we didn’t have any budget. It wasn’t like we had a huge media budget and we had all this stuff that a Condé Nast magazine had.
So with that came a lot of freedom. And I think right away I thought, there’s a way to talk about fashion that I’ve never encountered before, which is sort of “it’s a big party and you’re invited, if you want to come in.” It’s here for you. Anybody can participate. Anyone can, in theory, be stylish. But I think that the top-down message from a lot of fashion magazines, a lot of women’s magazines was, like, “Nope, you’re on the outside.”
And you didn’t really know what you had to do to get past that barrier. What, as a woman, did you have to do to be able to wear the clothes or be invited to wear the clothes? And I just thought that was all garbage. So right away, we just had a different way of talking about fashion, and about beauty, and about what was happening on the internet.
So It wasn’t that hard to “remake a women’s magazine” because women’s magazines had gotten a little bit stale. At the same time as we were doing that, there were other publications popping up that I think were addressing this, as well. Like The Gentlewoman, for example, which, right out of the gate, Penny Martin had this very crystal clear idea about how she wanted to talk about fashion and women.
And it was kind of simpatico to what we were doing, but in a very different tone. But it had a similar kind of motivation behind it, which is like, “I don’t really like what I’ve been seeing. I don’t really relate to that. But I still love this subject matter. And I think there’s probably a lot of other women who feel that way.”
One of the beautiful things about the internet is that you get feedback right away. So, if you feel like you’re on to something, you can hear right away whether people are also on board with it.
Rachel Baker: Yeah, one of the things about The Cut that felt so singular was that not only did you comment on the culture, you were really creating the culture, like normcore, millennial pink, BDE (“Big Dick Energy” for our listeners who don’t know what BDE is), Dad Bod. These were coinages and cultural touchstones made by The Cut. What was the secret sauce there and how were you able to establish such authority just to be, like, “We’re creating the culture”?
Stella Bugbee: I think New York magazine has a certain place in the culture where that’s their role. And we benefited from being part of the history of that place. It’s a provocative place. Its whole identity is to be on the cutting edge of culture and be lobbing provocations out into the world.
And we were, I think actually, just operating in that tradition. It’s a bold, scrappy place. All of it. Every single person who works there had that same—I mean, you worked there, so you know—you would take these big swings quite confidently. But those story ideas, and all of the things that we did, came out of conversations that were happening on the staff.
And it was very important to me to create a place where what we wanted to say was okay to say. And sometimes that was at odds with what was happening outside of our little pod. But I stuck very strongly to that feeling. I would say that the continuity between what I was doing at The Cut and now is [exactly] that. They get to say what they want to say in the way that they want to say it.
I think that’s the most important thing about that part of New York magazine. We just got to do it the way we wanted to do it. And I hope that continues. And I see Lindsay [Peoples] doing that beautifully. But I also felt like no one’s ever going to give me this chance again—or what if no one ever gives me this chance again? So you saying, like, right away “there was this ambition”—it was more that I felt insecure.
After going through Domino, I was like, “Well, you could have a really limited time to get to do everything you feel like doing. You’ve got to just, you’ve gotta do it. Because nothing in life is guaranteed.” And I just saw this bright, shiny thing and I was like, “I’ve got to just throw every single thing at this because you never know. You just never know what could happen.”
And I really didn’t want to miss a single second of it. And I hoped to communicate that to the whole team. It’s just like, “We’ve got this opportunity. We have to just go for it.” So that’s why I probably felt that way, too, coming in.
New York magazine’s bi-annual fashion issue featured Bugbee’s cover story about regional pride as a fashion statement.
Rachel Baker: Meanwhile, you guys were really finding your wings amid the wider cultural reckoning with gender, and race, and class, and #metoo, and Trump. And you wrote these brilliant and blazingly confident editor’s letters every step of the way. Maggie and I are still obsessed with the one about “skinny privilege”—by the way, we like, quote it. So what’s the best and the worst thing about helming a magazine that had become the voice of the generation during that upheaval—what was that like?
Stella Bugbee: So many of the things that you’re mentioning were just circumstantial things that were happening. I feel lucky to have been at a place like that, at a moment where those issues were what people wanted to talk about. Women’s issues were suddenly what everybody wanted to talk about. I don’t think that is the case anymore.
It’s like we’re in this total #metoo backlash moment. That wouldn’t be the place for—that would be harder for me, I think, as an editor. But the fact that everything that I wanted to do coincided with this cultural moment was just luck, honestly. And it was a lot of pressure to get it right.
And when we didn’t get it right, which happens, there’s a great amount of disappointment in our audience. And again, they let you know right away. And it felt like every mess up was so colossal for me. I felt personally on the line for every mistake, every wrong idea. And it didn’t just coincide with all these political moments. It coincided with this incredible social media moment where mistakes felt very permanent. They felt very colossal.
So if you did a story that people hated—I know this is still the case—you just felt like, “Oh my God, I can’t get up. I can’t keep going.” And it was a lot of pressure. It was very dramatic. Very dramatic. There were a lot of things that happened, like the [Shitty] Media Men List and publishing E. Jean Carroll’s accusation.
We really benefited from the broader New York magazine brain. I don’t think I could have done it without all those incredible editors that were also working on the magazine, in the room talking these things through. I could never have done it without a big group of people. It was a very big group effort.
Rachel Baker: So then in 2017, there were rumblings that The New York Times had offered you the Style section job, but you stayed at The Cut where you were promoted from editorial director to editor in chief and president and the to SVP. You must be a master negotiator, Stella! I need you to teach me how to negotiate. I’m curious about where you learned to negotiate like that, and also to what degree money has driven your decision making throughout your career?
Stella Bugbee: Well, If money had driven my decision making throughout my career, I probably wouldn’t be in this career, to be honest. And I have always chosen the opportunities that I think are going to get the best work and be around the people that will enable that. And the relationship I had with Adam at New York magazine really pushed me in a way that I never had been pushed before.
And it was whatever I needed at that time. And I just needed it and it unlocked some kind of feeling of possibility. So I would say I was much more motivated by opportunity than salary. And as far as staying at New York magazine. Again, I just saw the opportunity and it was, we were going to relaunch again.
And that relaunch was really exciting to me. I’d already put a ton of work into that relaunch. Strategic thinking, not just editorial thinking, but business thinking and strategy. And it was an acknowledgement that the job that I had been doing had grown into something that was more than just an editor, because I was really involved in a lot of the business decisions. I don’t know if I “negotiated” it that much. It was an acknowledgement, I think, more than a negotiation.
“I remember saying, ‘I gotta get to Condé. I just need to be, like, a design director somewhere.’”
Maggie Bullock: But in 2021, you did make the leap to Style. And you’re a person who’s on the record saying “print is dead.”
Stella Bugbee: Did I say that? I probably did.
Maggie Bullock: You have said it, yeah. Which works very well for this podcast.
Rachel Baker: We listen to every podcast.
Stella Bugbee: I disavow everything I’ve ever said. What did I say? Where did I say it?
Rachel Baker: Refinery29. But times change.
Maggie Bullock: You are a person who, perhaps at one time, thought that print was dead, and now you are a person sitting at the Grey Lady as we speak. So what made you decide to make the change when you did, and what was the opportunity in your mind that you couldn’t turn down at that time?
Stella Bugbee: Well, at that time I had already stepped down from The Cut, so I was at New York magazine as, I think, the title was Editor at Large. And I was debating, “Should I be more of a writer?” I think editor-at-large is kind of a funny title, and you’re like, “What am I doing?” And then the Styles job opened up and it was like, “Oh. I had missed that opportunity back when and maybe I should try it.”
And it’s so funny because I don’t think of this as a “print job” primarily at all. I love the print product and it’s very fun to think about how these things translate, but I don’t think about this as a print job. This is a journalism job. It’s like journalism happens online. It happens like what you guys are doing here. It happens on Tik Tok. It happens in print.
And Styles just seem like a natural place to get to do some of the things that I was still really interested in doing. And one of the things that’s super appealing about it is that it’s not just print and it’s not just women.
And that felt like this opportunity to do a lot of stories that I hadn’t gotten to do before. I don’t know. I mean, it’s kind of cool to work at The New York Times. It just feels really interesting to take this leap, journalistically. To be at a news organization primarily, as opposed to a magazine, feels really interesting and kind of suits my pace, that I actually prefer.
And it’s just something that I’ve realized over time is I really love that online cadence. I know that it burns a lot of people out, but I love being able to do things quickly. This is somewhere in between—you can do things really quickly, you can take a lot of time. We’re not a magazine, so we don’t have to come out in this sort of weekly cadence quite the same way. Like we do have these print products, but it has a very different energy than a magazine.
Maggie Bullock: So when you started there, I think, are we right that things were still pretty pandemic-y? Like, were people even coming to the office? What was that like for you to start that kind of job under those circumstances?
Stella Bugbee: That was very challenging. That was one of the most challenging experiences I’ve ever had at a job, where I didn’t even meet some of these people that I worked with for seven or eight months. Some of them I never even saw their faces, they didn’t turn their cameras on.
I think every one of us had been going through a lot for like over a year by the time I joined. Emotions were high, people were stressed out, people were burned out. Just everybody, the whole world, was feeling that way.
So it’s hard to have a sense of how to direct anything from afar. And at that point, not even as a team, you couldn’t meet your team. It was challenging. It was really challenging. And I think all of us were also highly emotional to begin with. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.
Maggie Bullock: How long did you actually have to run it before people started coming back into the office again?
Stella Bugbee: We’re really just starting to come back. I mean, by this point obviously, I’ve met my whole team. It’s been over two years since I started. And I made a lot of hires and you know, there was one person I didn’t meet for like seven or eight months.
Maggie Bullock: That’s so crazy.
Stella Bugbee: Yeah. And she’s like one of the most important editors on my team. We just communicated remotely. I do think that it was helpful that we’d all been doing this for over a year by the time I joined. Some people were in the habit. We all knew how to do it. It just wasn’t that much fun to do that with a new team. It was very hard to build consensus, to just get people excited. It was really hard.
How The Cut gets it done
Maggie Bullock: So in addition to that, you were also in a very different environment. And a wildly different type of publication. At The Cut, as I understand it, it was really very much a blank slate to reinvent the women’s magazine, as we’ve said, for a new era. But the Times is so different from that. How is running a section there different from pretty much anything you’ve done before?
Stella Bugbee: It can’t be overstated how totally different it is. It’s like night and day. New York magazine, The Cut, were these fairly new, very open, undefined—well, New York magazine has more of a legacy. But The Cut really didn’t. So it’s building something versus fitting yourself into a legacy publication with a lot of expectations around it internally and externally.
I met with somebody when I first came here, and she runs another desk and she’s been here for a while and she said, “Well, I’m new.”
And I said, “Really? How long have you been here?”
And she was like, “About six years.”
And I was just like, “Oh my goodness.” And it started to dawn on me that a big part of the job is learning about this institution and learning how to make work inside of it so that you are getting to the reader again. I always think about the reader.
But the reader of The New York Times is very hard to figure out. And the reader of the Style section is many, many people—different kinds and for different reasons. And so, whereas I had this really hardcore understanding of the reader at The Cut, I had to relearn what that was here at the Times. And I had to try to understand how to work with the newsroom a lot more.
That’s been the fun challenge. That’s why I go to that enterprise meeting—to listen and to hear what their priorities are every day. And like, “Well, I’m here. I run this desk. What do I contribute to that larger story of the day, if possible?” Or just like, “How does what we’re doing on the Style desk fit into the larger mission of The New York Times? And that, again, can’t be overstated how totally different that project feels than The Cut.
Maggie Bullock: So when we were talking about doing this episode, Rachel and I both agreed that 2023 for us feels like a very stressful time to edit a legacy section, a legacy desk like Styles which still has the last vestiges of being like society pages—somewhere back in its DNA it’s still that—and where people are still coming to you for, like Vows. Plus it’s always been sport for people to go bonkers on any Style story for being out of touch in one way or the other. That’s a New York tradition. It just feels like the stakes are incredibly high. I guess the first question there is did Style need reinventing when you came in?
Stella Bugbee: Well, I think Styles always needs reinventing, right? That’s the nature of Styles. And I think I’m reinventing it week to week, which is good. That’s sort of the point. But no, total reinventing? No.
I think Choire Sicha, who had the job before me, did a lot of reinventing and loosened up a lot of the expectations. And there was this big project underway, that started before I came, to reinvent Vows. And there’s a new editor on Vows, Charanna Alexander. And, if you pay close attention, you’ll see that the type of people that are featured are totally different. They started Mini Vows. It's a very different energy than it had maybe 10 or 15 years ago. That predated me.
And in terms of parties, it’s probably not totally evident unless you’re a super close reader of these things, but we really have talked a lot about what kind of parties we cover, what we’re trying to get out of party coverage—there’s this crazy, amazing legacy with Bill Cunningham and what he was doing and why he was doing it. How do we build on that? What do we preserve from what he wanted to be doing?
I don’t think it’s like a crazy, terrible time to be doing any of this stuff. I think it’s really a fun section where we get to play with what’s happening in the culture. And, of course, some people are going to hate it.
I think you have to have a rock solid sense of just, “It’s okay if people hate things.” And maybe, to go back to your earlier question about The Cut, people hated what we did at The Cut too. I got a lot of criticism all the time. I mean, people loved it, but people hated it. And when you work on the internet, you become a little bit numb to the ebb and flow of people hating things.
So that’s a good place to be when you get to a place like Styles where people love to hate on the Style section. And that’s part of it, I guess.
Maggie Bullock: Do you have what you consider to be like a formula, a mix—like we’re x percentage of this and y percentage of that? Or if you were bringing in a new editor, how would you describe to them the way that you want the section to feel and what you want it to embody?
Stella Bugbee: That’s a great question. So Styles is funny because it’s like, don’t quote me on this exact ratio, but it’s like 30 percent fashion beat reporting, maybe 30 percent love, marriage, relationships, advice, and, like, 40 percent this other stuff that’s totally up to whomever is editing it—the group of us—to fill. Like, “Well, what words are people using? Are people smoking cigarettes? How are people treating their children? Who’s interesting? What did Shannon Abloh have to say once she became independent? Who’s the hot designer? Which book is everybody sharing around town?”
It’s much more about the way we live and what’s fun to talk about. That is a kind of amorphous sensibility thing. And the challenge I’ve found is like when to time those things. Because for a Times reader, they may not have heard of something that maybe The Cut reader had definitely heard about three years ago. So you’re always kind of trying to say like, “Well, for the broader Times reader, this will be new.”
And that’s when you get into maybe being annoying to some of the people who are a little bit more ahead of the curve because they’re like, “Oh, how come the Times is just getting to this thing?” At the same time when you’re covering online culture, we will be early to things all the time.
‘Girl Dinner’ for example, was a recent thing that was happening on TikTok that we wrote about. When the Times turns its lens on a thing, it has a bigger reach. Like, broader than TikTok, in some ways. Obviously, I don’t mean like it’s going to get as many views as TikTok, but it’s going to get people who aren’t on TikTok to talk about Girl Dinner.
“It was upsetting and disorienting because everywhere you went, people said like, ‘I love Domino. It’s so great.’ You felt like you were working on something that people really were relating to. And then you get shut down in a mass firing.”
Maggie Bullock: But also broader than The Cut. I mean, I don’t know what the eyeball comparison is, but it’s a much wider swath of the population. And also, Boom! None of us can eat crackers and cheese anymore without thinking it’s a political act.
Stella Bugbee: Exactly.
Maggie Bullock: It’s very complicated now.
Stella Bugbee: I’ve hired a bunch of people that I’ve worked with from the New York mag era, and they bring a certain amount of that hunger for that cultural moment stuff. We just did, “What are men thinking about? The Roman Empire.”
But what’s fun is we can also do an investigation into CoolSculpting and expose the fact that they knew that they were harming people—long before they admitted that they were harming people—in partnership with the actual Investigations desk. And we can do a deep profile of Cheryl Hines, and she doesn’t know she’s about to get this treatment because she thinks she’s in the Style section.
So there’s a real kind of eclecticism. And how I think about Sunday covers is like each week should be really different. Each week should be like, “What is all this? What are they doing?” And if I’m creating that feeling in a reader, either when they open the app or when they look at the paper, then I feel like I’m doing my job.
Maggie Bullock: So, what should Thursday be then?
Stella Bugbee: Traditionally, Thursday has been more fashion news focused. It’s the more hardcore fashion audience. That’s the way we had been doing it for years. I’m actually trying to sort of break that up a little bit, and just say we should just do more of a mix in both. For me it’s all about the mix. You want every day, and every print product, to be a really weird mix of stuff. So you’re getting some advice, you’re getting maybe a little bit of celebrity stuff, you’re getting a little bit of something serious. It should feel like a Girl Dinner of editorial [laughs].
Maggie Bullock: Nicely done. Well played. So, we want to know how many nights a week you have to go out in order to have this job. Like, in order to be the person in charge of Styles. How visible does that make you? How—I don’t know. Rachel and I never leave the house, so this sounds very taxing to us.
Rachel Baker: Because you have this busy life, you have three kids and a long-running marriage, and—I don’t think we said earlier—you live in the same Brownstone in Park Slope that you grew up in.
Stella Bugbee: I do.
Rachel Baker: So, so amazing. It’s the best detail. But you’ve got this rich and complicated life. What is required of you socially and how do you get it done?
Stella Bugbee: I go out less for this job than I did before because we have incredible reporters and they go out. And I have an incredible party editor—that’s Katie Van Syckle, who actually was a New York magazine party reporter herself. She came to the Times before I did. And when I came, I really wanted to reinvent how we cover parties. And we’ve been working on that for like a year.
So, no, we have reporters. That’s the superpower of The New York Times, right? It’s not the editors, it’s the reporters. And the editors are amazing, and they’re super fun, and they all have ideas. But the reporters come back with the information. And they tell you what’s relevant, and they tell you what’s good.
So I go out, but I actually had to go out more, I think, at The Cut, to be honest. It’s a manageable life. It’s good. It’s a good job. It’s a good life. I’m not complaining.
Rachel Baker: Sounds great. So 11 years ago, you were charged with reinventing the women’s magazine, as we’ve said several times throughout this conversation. You did it! You reinvented it. Check! But here we are in 2023, and it’s a totally different media landscape. What do you think is ripe for reinvention now?
Stella Bugbee: I would just love to see somebody reimagine a celebrity profile because I cannot read another one. They’re just deadly. And I think we should just stop doing them. I would like to never read one ever again.
I think, with the invention of social media, they are the most passé form. Because the minute that the celebrity could control their own narrative, and create their own content, and have their own direct relationship with an audience, the form of a celebrity profile, just feels mannerist. And so boring to me. So I’d love it to be reinvented, or maybe to go away, or just to—I don’t know.
I mean, even with all the fantastic celebrity podcasts that there are out there, I just don’t think we need them anymore. One publication that I think is still able to do that really well is The New Yorker because for some reason, people still let The New Yorker follow them for a year and a half, or whatever it is. They still have that.
But other than that, most of us should just stop. I say that and I’m sure we’re going to do like 20 more this year. So take what I said with a grain of salt. But what, yeah, what else? I mean, what needs to be re imagined? Probably social media.
Rachel Baker: Yeah, reinvent that, Stella! Speaking of, we know from Instagram that you love to cook, and that you do so beautifully. So, for The Spread Lightning Round, if you could make dinner for three magazine greats, dead or alive, who would they be?
Stella Bugbee: Are they all together at the same dinner, or is it like one-on-one?
The Cut staff, circa 2014
“If money had driven my decision making throughout my career I probably wouldn’t be in this career, to be honest.”
Rachel Baker: Yeah, they’re together at the same dinner.
Stella Bugbee: I think Diana Vreeland would be really fun as a guest. I would love to just see her up close. Legend. I’m a big Martha Stewart fan. I wouldn’t mind having her over. We could have some potatoes or whatever. One of my favorite magazines of all time was Nest magazine. A brief magazine from the ’90s. And so maybe Joseph Holtzman, who was the editor and founder of Nest. That might be a weird group.
Maggie Bullock: What would you serve?
Stella Bugbee: Oh, Jesus. Actually, maybe serving food to Martha would be pretty—I don’t know. I’ve been really into making pasta, like hand-making pasta lately. So maybe that.
Maggie Bullock: That would find favor even with Martha.
Stella Bugbee: I don’t know. I’m sure she’d be critical. I feel like no matter what I served Martha, I would want, like, the honest—oh, you know, who would be really fun, speaking of food, is Ruth Reichl. I love her.
Rachel Baker: Stella, thank you so much. We really appreciate it.
Stella Bugbee: Oh, it was so fun. Thanks for making me think about magazines again.
Maggie Bullock: It is really hard doing this because all I want to do is interrupt—the amount of energy I’ve spent muzzling myself! You were talking about being at The Cut and how much freedom there was to say what you thought. And I am somebody who started just, like, one generation earlier than that at Vogue, and I had my voice really hammered into that Vogue voice.
And it was such a shock to my system. And I was threatened and confused by all these people—at The Cut specifically—writing so beautifully in their voice, with their point of view. And I can kind of do that now. But I just remember that being in my brain, like, “Why are you allowed to do that now?” And I was told—literally told—that I had to learn the Vogue voice.
Stella Bugbee: But yeah, New York magazine, that’s what they prize. Voice, right? That’s the tradition of that place. And every vertical had that. Vulture had it. And Grub Street had it. That was the name of the game: develop your voice. Spend some time doing that, and then go out into the world.
The Times’ Style section covers a little bit of everything.
See Stella Bugbee's work every Thursday and Sunday in the print edition of The New York Times or online every day at nytimes.com.
More Like This…
Back to the Interviews
The Last Celebrity Magazine Editor
It’s Joanna, b*tches.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Welcome to a very special episode of Print Is Dead. (Long Live Print!).
For our first pod-nership we’ve teamed up with The Spread, the brainchild of two former Elle magazine editors and “work wives,” Rachel Baker and Maggie Bullock, who, in 2021 found themselves wishing for the perfect women’s magazine—at the exact moment when women’s magazines were irrevocably going down the tubes.
Each week, The Spread rounds up juicy stories, big ideas, and deeply personal examinations of women’s lives—from The New York Times and the Atlantic, to Vogue and Elle, to N+1 and The Drift. It’s no surprise that The Spread is now a cult favorite of media insiders—as well as the media-curious.
We’re excited to follow The Spread into the world of women’s magazines, starting with today’s interview with the ever-quotable former Cosmo editor, Joanna Coles, who Rachel and Maggie call “the last celebrity magazine editor.”
Maggie Bullock: It’s 2016. Rachel and I are sitting at our desks on the 24th floor of the Hearst Tower working at Elle magazine when the glass double doors blow open—or at least that’s how I remember it—and a vision of white-blonde hair, metallic pants, and checkerboard platforms, breezes into the office speaking in a commanding British accent to two or three minions in her wake.
There are no cameras in sight, but it’s as if we’re watching a grand entrance and a reality TV show. You can almost feel the wind machines in the air, which is what it’s like pretty much any time you witness a Joanna Coles appearance in the corridors of Hearst. There’s just something cinematic about her.
Rachel Baker: Joanna started her career as a reporter in London, moving to New York in the late 1990s to be The Guardian’s New York bureau chief. Next, she shifted into editing. First, as an articles editor at New York magazine, then over to More magazine.
By 2006, she grabbed hold of the editor-in-chiefship at Marie Claire, part of Hearst, and in 2012 became the editor-in-chief of the company’s largest title, Cosmopolitan.
Maggie Bullock: By the time she strode into the Elle offices in 2016, she was much more than an editor. She was also a reality TV star, a television producer, an author, a public speaker, a driving force of the “girl boss” movement, besties with Sheryl Sandberg, and a celebrity in her own right, who famously ran meetings from the helm of a treadmill walking desk.
Rachel Baker: The Jo-Co who walked into our office in 2016 had been newly-crowned as Chief Content Officer of Hearst Magazines—the first to hold the title—and tasked with consolidating the creative side of the 100-year-old publishing giant in the new digital-first era.
Maggie and I are a longtime print editors, so you can imagine how that sounded to us. But even through our fear goggles, we could also see that Joanna was ready to do the necessary surgery that other print editors didn’t have the stomach for, so that legacy magazines might live to see another day.
Maggie Bullock: Joanna was certainly the most famous women’s magazine editor at Hearst at that time. But what wasn’t clear back then, and is undeniable now, is that she was the last of her breed. There was a rich history of iconic women’s magazine editors that came before Joanna, but can you think of an iconic, larger-than-life one that came after her?
Rachel Baker: Joanna left Hearst in 2018, roughly around the same time that both Maggie and I did, and today she’s a board member for major tech companies like Sonos and Snapchat and an executive producer for major Hollywood projects, including an upcoming Amazon series starring Priyanka Chopra.
And she is, as ever, a baller.
Setting up our interview, with what lesser individuals might call a “personal assistant,” but Joanna has anointed Chief Get-It-Done Officer, when we met JC via Zoom, she was without pretense or treadmill desk. She was disarmingly down to earth.
Maggie Bullock: And yet somehow she still emanated that chutzpah or moxie—or maybe we should bring back the word “pizazz” to describe it. The X-factor that, in a 44-floor media empire brimming with big egos and considerable talent, made her one of media’s biggest stars.
Miley Cyrus on the cover of Coles’ first issue of Cosmo.
Maggie Bullock: Joanna, we’re going to go full Spread on this podcast, so we thought we would start off with a question about you and the world of men.
So, from where we sit, you seem to be preternaturally comfortable in male dominated—traditionally male dominated—spheres. You came from the world of British newspaper reporting. You’ve conquered Silicon Valley, you rose to the height of the Hearst Tower, which was traditionally run by men.
Do we have this right? Do you think that’s true of you? That you’re somebody who has, I don’t know, a special chutzpah in that realm?
Joanna Coles: I’m trying to think of an industry that isn’t dominated by men. I mean, I love the work and you go where the work is and you want to work with the best possible people you can find. That’s always been my mantra. And honestly, most of the time, when you’re working with really good colleagues, you don’t notice if they’re male or female unless they do something egregious and then their gender might become relevant.
But for the most part, I don’t think of it like that at all. I just think all industries are dominated by men. And so you have to get on with it, don’t you?
Rachel Baker: Still, it’s like you have this reverse imposter syndrome. (We mean that as a compliment). You have the ability to walk into any room and kind of claim a seat at the table. Where did that come from?
Joanna Coles: First of all, I love this version of me that you’ve created. It doesn’t feel like that. But look, the ability to ask questions, the ability to be interested. And, God knows, at this stage in my life, I’ve been in a lot of rooms. So you get pattern recognition about how people behave, who wants to be pandered to, who wants to be asked questions. And then you take it from there.
Rachel Baker: Let’s wind it back a little. You grew up in Yorkshire—home of the pudding and the Brontë—which is pretty different from Manhattan.
Joanna Coles: I’m so good at making Yorkshire puddings, by the way. My Yorkshire puddings are excellent. I use the Gordon Ramsey recipe and they’re very good.
Maggie Bullock: So glad we worked in the pudding. Right now I’m feeling very happy about the pudding.
Joanna Coles: The secret, should anybody be listening and care about this …
Rachel Baker: Yes, please!
Joanna Coles: … Is animal fat in the pan, which you heat until it’s absolutely smoking. And then you pour in the batter as fast as you can, slam the door and then just watch them. And actually, I don’t like the American version, which is a popover, which they sort of fetishized somewhat at Hearst actually, because they make them very crisp.
A real Yorkshire pudding should be soft at the bottom because it’s just so much more delicious and it should never be cold. You should eat them warm and you can eat them with gravy or my favorite: You can eat them with golden syrup.
Rachel Baker: Maggie, I know what we’re going to do at our next spread retreat.
Maggie Bullock: I feel like I should explain to the listeners that in the fancy, fancy Hearst 44th floor luncheons, you always had the Good Housekeeping popover. That was like the signature—maybe it still is—the signature accoutrement to your meal.
Joanna Coles: That’s right. You always got one on your plate instead of a bread roll. And everybody would be fascinated by them because they were huge. They were the size of a baby’s head. They may have reduced them now with inflation, but they were the most enormous things. And they were almost impossible not to eat, and not to eat the whole thing.
But actually, it always felt to me very much like a popover and not a Yorkshire pudding. Because the Yorkshire pudding would be warm. It would be soft at the bottom, not crisp. And it would be a third the size of a baby’s head. Not the whole head.
Maggie Bullock: Okay. We won’t spend the whole hour talking about popovers, but I always thought it was an interesting litmus test, which of the female editors were actually eating the popover in the Hearst 45 …
Joanna Coles: I would often not eat it only because it would make me homesick for a proper Yorkshire pudding.
Rachel Baker: What kinda childhood did you have and how did it lead you to decide to leave, to get out of there?
Joanna Coles: Well, if you grew up in Yorkshire in the 1970s, believe you me, you wanted to leave. I mean, partly there were constant brownouts at one point and blackouts with minor strikes. But the north of England at that time, and I’ve spoken to lots of people who left Yorkshire at that time, it really wasn’t what it is now, you know?
And at the time, it really felt like the UK was very much a city-state, and that city was London. And all the sort of centers of the industries that I was interested in, which was media, and politics, and the arts, were all really focused in London. There’s been a huge effort to disperse those industries now.
And you’ve got, you know, Channel 4 has now got a big—I think it’s even headquartered in Leeds, which is enormous. And the BBC has enormous facilities now in Salford and Manchester. But at the time that wasn’t the case. And you had to get to London if you wanted to do something in the industries that I did.
And I’ve got mixed feelings about it. I’m always fascinated when I hear Kevin Plank, the founder of Under Armor, talking about Baltimore and how he went back to Baltimore and really rejuvenated and worked on it. And I sometimes think, “Gosh, perhaps I should have done that.” But it’s been fun to move to America and I’m an American now. My kids are American. So there you go.
“Most of the time, when you’re working with really good colleagues, you don’t notice if they’re male or female unless they do something egregious and then their gender might become relevant.”
Maggie Bullock: You wanted to be in the newspaper business really early on. Is that true? You started writing as a child, right?
Joanna Coles: I started writing for the orchestra post when I was 10. They had a brilliant section that I used to read doggedly every Saturday and their evening Saturday Yorkshire Post, called Junior Post, which was about kids, and what other kids were doing, and things for kids. And I just thought, “Well, I could write for this.”
And so I used to send in unsolicited things, which, amazingly, they would pay me two pounds for! And I got very excited about that and thought, “This is fantastic! I can earn a living doing what I love.”
And my hobby at the time was making dolls, clothes. And I had a series of dolls and a series of trolls, and I made all sorts of clothes for them. I loved doing it. So, actually, when I ended up editing a fashion magazine, it was a weird combination of things I really had always enjoyed as a child.
And I think sometimes, and I know I felt like this, if you are looking for clues as to what you should be doing in your life, going back to your early childhood years is very helpful to find the things that you were just naturally gravitating towards before having to think about how to make a mortgage payment or whether or not you could get into the right college to get the right training.
You know what actually ‘blew your skirt up’ as they say.
Rachel Baker: Who was supporting you? Who was your champion, and helping you mail out your writing to the, you know, the section?
Joanna Coles: My parents, like most English parents, just really believed in, sort of, benign neglect. So I just had a lot of time on my own. So what do you do? You fill it. You fill it with the things you enjoy doing that bring you satisfaction.
And I had a neighbor who was my age. We were born within 21 days of each other, and she helped me. We would work on things together, which was really fun. She was called Anna and her mom was a professor at the local polytechnic.
And she would get involved or my parents would read things. But essentially, kids were left to their own devices in those days. And you got on with it. I remember Anna’s father helping us make photocopies of our first magazine and we just posted it to our neighbors. You just sort of got on with it then.
Rachel Baker: So in 1997, after being a reporter at The Telegraph and The Guardian in London, you made the leap to the US to be The Guardian’s bureau chief. What was your beat? And what did you love about being a reporter?
Joanna Coles: Well, often my beat was British people in America who were doing bad things. My beat was really anything in America that I thought British people would be interested in.
And British people, for the most part, are pretty interested in almost anything in America. So we had two big stories while I was at The Guardian. The first was Louise Woodward, the British nanny, who was an au pair, unfortunately under whose care baby Matthew Eappen died. And it was a terrible story to cover because there were absolutely no redeeming features of anything to do with the story.
The parents got hammered for both working. They were a mixed race couple, so they came in for a lot of racism. Louise Woodward herself was a relatively unsophisticated girl who’d got absorbed by this American family, but clearly wasn’t enjoying looking after two children because it’s really hard looking after two children, especially if they’re not your own.
So it was a very complicated story with a brilliant Barry Scheck from the Innocence Project who was running the defense team. And it was a very long and dramatic court case. And there are a couple of elements I’ll never forget. One, when they came in with the guilty verdict and you had 12 security guards standing between the public gallery and Louise and the lawyers, because I think they were terrified something was going to happen.
And you had Louise breaking down in court and hyperventilating and weeping and saying, “Why are they doing this to me?” And it was the most extraordinary human drama. Still one of the most amazing things I’ve actually covered.
And then you had, amazingly, about six weeks later, the judge coming back and giving her a sentence of time served, which I had never seen before. And it was very provocative and, I think, really humane sentencing. And she left and then went back to the UK.
So I covered that story. And then, of course, there was the Monica Lewinsky story that broke—to another young woman. Not much older. And so I spent a lot of time covering both those stories and thinking how vulnerable young women can be.
Coles served as the mentor for Project Runway All Stars for two seasons while running Marie Claire, a longtime partner of the fashion design competition series (the winner receives a fashion spread in the magazine and a yearlong position as contributing editor).
Maggie Bullock: In America or in general? Did you find anything about that to be specific to this country?
Joanna Coles: I think the enormity of the press coverage—this was all pre-social media, so this was ’97, ’98, the Lewinsky story. It was just the extraordinary coverage and fascination that people had in those stories. And when they happen to you in America, they’re just bigger than when they happen elsewhere because the audience is bigger. And then the international audience is bigger.
I mean, if those stories had happened in Lyon, in France, really no one would’ve been interested. Certainly no one would be interested in a French premiere having an affair with a young woman, because they all seem to do that. Although Macron might be the exception because his wife is, fascinatingly, 25 years older.
But it wouldn't have been a story in France. And an au pair in that situation in France, similarly, wouldn’t have had the media attention that the Louise Woodward story had.
Maggie Bullock: Right. So, I went to grad school in London and I interned at The Times of London and it’s such a particular culture, London newspaper culture. British newspaper culture, I should say. So can you put that into your own words? Like, what is so particular about that energy? Because I’m wondering if you brought some of that with you here when you landed stateside.
Joanna Coles: Well, there are two very distinct kinds of energy. There’s the British tabloid energy, which is really a monster if you like. And people say, you know, “they’re going to ‘monster’ him” or “we’re going to ‘monster’ them,” which means that you just throw every single resource you have at a particular story and just squeeze every last drop out of it.
And then you have the broadsheets who pretend that they are superior to the tabloids, but really suck a lot of the tabloid energy and just cover things with longer words. And I loved working for—I worked for The Guardian. I worked for The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, then I worked for The Times.
I loved all of them. You had really smart, interesting people. And what was fun about the job was that you had this permission to challenge—to challenge the powers that be regardless of whatever they were doing. So it could be the police, it could be politicians, it could be writers, it could be people in television, it could be actors, it could be celebrities.
But the British culture is less respectful than the American culture, in many ways, to authority. And, obviously, one of the biggest differences is that when the American president walks into the media room, the media stand up. When the British Prime Minister walks into a room with the British media, the British media basically recline as if to say, “Okay, you know, what do you got for us? Because we know it’s bullshit.”
So, it’s an enormously fun environment to work in. You’re obviously under enormous pressure, deadline wise. It’s incredibly competitive because every morning, if you are a reporter in Britain, or certainly when I was working, you knew that there would be nine other versions of your story that would be out there in the world. So yours had better be the best.
So, whatever you were covering, you knew there would be nine other newspapers that would’ve covered it. And it’s not often that you get that in a job. And I often used to think, if a doctor carries out an operation and it goes wrong, the team around him might know it goes wrong. The family of the victim will know it’s gone wrong. Or the victim, the survivor, if they survive.
But if you get something wrong as a reporter or as a columnist in a newspaper, everybody knows because everybody complains. And so you have to be accurate. And it was always astonishing to me when I moved to America that writers would hand in features with “TKTK,” which means ‘to come.’ Which meant the fact checker was going to fill in the facts.
And I was always fascinated that writers wouldn’t want to take responsibility for their own facts, because that way at least you know your source and you know, you were trying to get it right. Even if it turns out to be wrong. And of course, it’s wonderful to have a fact checker run underneath you catching anything you get wrong. But the idea of letting someone else put a fact in your story always worried me.
“If you are looking for clues as to what you should be doing in your life, going back to your early childhood years is very helpful to find the things that you were just naturally gravitating towards—you know, what actually ‘blew your skirt up’ as they say.”
Rachel Baker: Thinking about swashbuckling British journalists and editors, you know, Tina Brown comes to mind. And you’ve often been compared to her. Who are your media heroes and influences? Is Tina Brown one of them?
Joanna Coles: Yeah, of course. Tina Brown would be one of them, and she’s a fantastic editor. Her versions of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair were terrific. Helen Gurley Brown—the ‘other’ Brown that doesn’t get mentioned as much as Tina—was also an extraordinary editor who really picked up Cosmo in 1963, dusted it down from this little old literary magazine that it was, and understood what was coming down the pike with the evolution of the pill, and created this extraordinary blockbuster of a magazine that really created the modern template for all magazines.
Vanity Fair couldn't have happened without what Helen did to Cosmo. And her ability to understand that the tides were shifting for women was, I think, absolutely extraordinary.
But you know, I’m thrilled to be thrown into any sentence with either of them because they’re extraordinarily powerful, successful editors who had a very strong vision and created a product that was just delicious. I mean, the fun of magazines at their height was they were just this combustible mix of ingredients that was almost as good as the Yorkshire pudding.
Maggie Bullock: Nice. Nice circle back there.
Rachel Baker: Okay, so after The Guardian, you spent a couple years as articles editor at New York magazine. We read an anecdote about how you took that job—despite it being significantly more junior, and it being a huge pay cut—in exchange for sponsorship. Can you tell us that story?
Joanna Coles: Well, I had been here for The Times of London for nearly four years, and the editor called me up and said, “Hey, we want you to come back. We have a job for you,”—what was known as ‘parliamentary speech writer,’ which meant that I would be following Tony Blair and writing every day a sort of funny sketch.
And that’s a, sort of, a specific column in every British newspaper. And it’s a prestigious thing to do, actually. And on the one hand I was excited, but on the other, I didn’t want to go back to Britain. I didn’t feel my tour of duty in New York was yet done. And I knew there was more for me to do.
And I was also pregnant with my second son, and I had an absolute premonition that he would not sleep and I would be exhausted. And I was really anxious about taking a job where I would have to write amusingly every single day. And there would be quite a lot of travel involved if you were following the Prime Minister around.
And so, I decided not to go back. We decided as a family not to go back to London and to look for a job in New York. And Michael Wolff, actually, who, at the time, had a media column in New York magazine said, “Why don’t you come and join New York magazine? You’ll really enjoy it, it will be really fun.”
And I was looking for a job. I needed sponsorship because I didn’t have a visa and I didn’t have a passport. And Caroline Miller, who was then the editor of New York magazine, thrillingly offered me a job. And I was on, at the time, a fantastic foreign correspondent package, which was reduced in half actually, to take that job.
But I did it for three years. I had my second son. I had the pleasure of working for Adam Moss when Caroline left, and so it was actually a very good investment in my American career. I mean, ideally I would’ve done what Tina Brown did, which was come and go straight into editing something. But actually I didn’t have the experience and it was fun. New York magazine was a really fun place to be at the time.
Maggie Bullock: I mean the willingness to take that big of a pay cut—obviously you had all these other factors going on that made it make sense for you at the time—but is there some bigger picture point about being willing to take a pay cut? I guess what we’re curious about when we read that story and talked about it with each other is, ‘How much is Joanna driven by money? By achievement? By getting a bigger platform?” What do you think has motivated you through the many moves of your career? How do these things fit together in your mind?
Joanna Coles: Well, I don’t spend very much time thinking about it, honestly. So they don’t necessarily fit together. But at the time, New York could offer me what I needed most, which was an entry into the American market.
I had spent three and a half, four years here traveling around America, covering American stories, realizing the American marketplace was much bigger than the British marketplace. And thinking, when I looked out at the spread of magazines on the new stand at that time, “Oh, I could do that and it would be fun and I would enjoy it. And I would like to have a go.”
And so that’s why I took the cut and I started a New York magazine on $150,000 and I had been earning just over $300,000 as the bureau chief for The Times. So it was a significant drop in income. But I started writing a freelance column in London to make up for some of the difference. And I just knew it would be a good investment. I knew that it would be a different network of people and that it would pay off.
Rachel Baker: Right. Okay. In 2004, you left New York to become executive editor of More magazine, which, for our younger listeners, is a dearly-departed magazine for women, 40 and up—which Maggie and I loved even though we were not then 40 and up. Leaving New York magazine to dive into women’s media for the first time is a pretty major pivot. (I did the same thing but not at your scale). What was your thinking behind that?
Joanna Coles: My thinking, when I went for the interview, was, “This’ll be good practice. I haven’t had a job interview for a bit.” And one of the problems, when you move from one country to another—and especially when I’ve been here as a foreign correspondent—was nobody in the American media knew I was here. And nobody had seen any of my work because it had all appeared in the UK.
And now that would feel different because of social media, and you could post it and people would see it here. But that was yet to be invented, incredibly. It makes me sound very old and I’m not that old. But this was, sort of, pre the ability to post your work and get an audience.
So I went. And then what happened was I had a fantastically interesting conversation with Peggy Northrop, who was the editor of More, and I said to her, “What I think I might do…” because I was running out of patience at New York magazine slightly and I was also finding it exhausting. It was one of those places where I felt there was an extra layer of work that I didn’t always feel was necessary.
And I was often staying at the office until 10 or 11 at night, probably three nights a week. Which, with two young children, really wasn’t much fun. So I was tired, I looked terrible. When I go back and look at my photos of myself at that stage, I look absolutely wiped out. And I was.
And so I said to Peggy in the interview, “What I really want to do is probably work full-time as an editor and do some writing on the side and spend more time with my kids.” And she fixed me with a look.
And she said, “You are never going to do that.” She said, “Look at you—so driven. That’s never going to happen.”
And then she said to me, “I want you to come and be my executive editor. The problem is I’ve just offered the job to someone else.”
So then I thought, “Well…”
And then, weirdly—and this is going to sound very strange—she pushed a bowl of fruit across the table at me, and there were all these sticks of fruit and there was a stick of jicama in it, which I had never had before, and I bit down on it. And it was this extraordinary sort of texture and flavor. And it was completely new to me.
And I had this thunderbolt of, “You need something new in your life. This will be new for you.” And so I said, “All right. Well, look, I’d love to come and figure this out. Let’s see what happens.” I think the other person didn’t accept the job or whatever.
And so I moved in as her executive editor and learned a ton from her. And she said to me, “If you give me 18 months, I’ll make sure you go on and edit a magazine.”
And that’s exactly what she did. So I moved from More to Marie Claire with a really good set of skills that Peggy had shown me, and one from Adam Moss. Because when Adam Moss joined New York magazine, he literally stripped it down completely to its sort of bare bones. And we spent a lot of time talking about, “What should this magazine be?”
It was a very useful exercise, which I then did again at Marie Claire and Cosmo. So by the time I got to Marie Claire, I felt really well equipped to take on a women’s magazine and try and do something new with it.
Rachel Baker: Joanna, what is it that you really love about the magazine business? You mentioned earlier about Tina Brown and how it’s so combustible and exciting. I think about, for me, I love magazines because of the collaboration. And, like, the magazine ‘theater.’ And battling with the art department. And all—just kind of the ‘guts’ of magazines. What is it for you, then and now, like looking back?
Joanna Coles: I like the mashup of ideas—of short, fun ideas and longer, thoughtful ideas. I love the journalism in it. The long, narrative pieces you can’t find anywhere else which change someone’s life, or change an agenda, or change a political direction. I love the fact you can really change the agenda around something with a really thoughtful piece. I like the fact that you can have really thoughtful, interesting conversations with celebrities and show different sides of them.
And I like when you pick up a good magazine that you feel well equipped to face the next month. We used to spend enormous amounts of time thinking about, “What will be the subjects that people are interested in in three months? In six months? In nine months? What are the things that are going to be in the culture that we’re all going to be talking about?” You know, like The Last of Us? How would you know about that? Well, you would’ve heard about it from HBO. You would’ve watched early versions of it. Someone would’ve read a script on it, you would’ve talked to the director. So you can say, in three months’ time, “This is worth spending your time on. This isn’t.”
And I think the tragedy of what’s happened to the media now is there’s so much information out there, but so little of it is curated. It’s very hard to know what to watch, what to read. And more than ever, a magazine is needed now, but the cadence of them doesn’t make any sense for our modern life.
And you can’t really compete with the cellphone. The cellphone is so exciting. It’s one person versus half a million engineers. There’s no way you are ever going to be able to compete against that as a humble collection of paper put together. We have to think of different ways of keeping that value alive.
Maggie Bullock: Do you have the answer?
Joanna Coles: I’m definitely working on something which I’m very excited about. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. I spent a lot of time with a couple of really senior people in the news business. And we kicked the tires on a few news ideas. And the struggle there is really just revenue and not being beholden to advertisers.
And then I’ve sort of pivoted slightly and I don’t want to talk about it yet because, a) it involves other people and, b) we’re not quite ready to. At some point I will, but I’m very excited about what I think could be a solution.
Maggie Bullock: So that is … please, you have our number.
Joanna Coles: I will! I’ll definitely be calling you because it’s going to require people with that magazine skillset. And when I was growing up, I always felt like when I got my weekly magazine as a child, and then, as I got older, and I was getting monthly magazines as well as weeklies, that it felt like a finger from the future beckoning you towards it.
And that was what was exciting, that you knew there was something bigger than your own life and you could be a part of it. And this was a window into how you would be part of it. And then, I would throw whatever magazine it was across the room and be full of energy and excitement about embracing the month ahead.
And you don’t feel like that when you’ve scrolled through TikTok. You don’t feel like that when you’ve sodden yourself with Instagram Reels. You feel listless, and insecure, and bubbling over with FOMO.
Maggie Bullock: Yeah. A hundred percent. Okay, we’re going to go back because where we left you in the timeline of the story is that you had become an editor-in-chief at Marie Claire. That was your first editor-in-chief role. Then, in 2012, Cosmo came knocking. The biggest magazine in the Hearst Tower. At the time—and possibly still—the biggest women’s brand in the world. And a magazine that also, at the time, was best known for sex tips.
Well, first of all, how did that happen? Did they come to you? Did you go to them? Did you seek out Cosmo and know, because it was this big giant brand, that it was the … golden … what is the golden thing?
Joanna Coles: The brass ring.
Maggie Bullock: Did you want them or did they want you?
Joanna Coles: Well, I had lunch with David Carey, who was then the president of the magazine division, and he said, “We’d love you to take on Cosmo.”
And I immediately said, “Oh, no, no. I’m completely the wrong person for Cosmo.”
And I immediately suggested three other people that I thought would be better qualified to do it. And then I thought about it for a bit and then realized that it was, by far, the biggest magazine in the stable and that it would be mad not to try. And it stood for a lot of the things that I was excited about.
And it had a fantastic run, obviously, under Helen [Gurley Brown]. It had been crazily successful and really contributed to that glorious Hearst Tower on the corner of 57th and Eighth Avenue. And then Bonnie Fuller had had a very brief run at it. And then Kate White had given it 14 great years where it had been commercially incredibly strong.
And by the time I got to it in 2012, the world was beginning to change and the sort of second, or third, or fourth wave of feminism was clearly bubbling under. And so it felt like a new opportunity to create a different kind of empowerment with Cosmo. I mean, there was so much more sex available online, and yet women were still underpaid and they were still underconfident and they still weren’t negotiating in the ways that they should, and, I think, now feel much more confident to do so.
But that wasn’t the conversation in 2012 that was still bubbling under. So I felt we were able to ignite that conversation. And so it felt really fun to have that audience.
“The biggest life-changing perk going to Marie Claire, was getting my own full-time assistant. For a working mother, having a full-time assistant was unbelievably liberating. It really changed everything.”
Rachel Baker: Speaking of money and negotiation, you were so candid a minute ago about your money situation at New York magazine. Going from executive editor at More to editor-in-chief at Marie Claire and then Cosmo—what was that like? Like your first editor-in-chief salary? Was it life-changing? Was it double the salary? Was it crazy perks? Like, did your life totally change once and then change dramatically again?
Joanna Coles: The biggest perk going to Marie Claire, the biggest life-changing perk, probably was getting my own full-time assistant, because that just meant that you didn’t have to sweat a lot of the small stuff, which, weirdly, takes up a lot of brain power.
And also, if you’re like me—I was listening, the other day, to an interview with a comedian who said how much he enjoyed going to the post office. And he said he loves filling his days with going to the post office and small errands. Right? And I thought, “Why aren’t I the kind of person that wants to go to the post office?”
And so actually for a working mother, having a full-time assistant was unbelievably liberating. It really changed everything. Having someone give me a clothing allowance was fantastic for the first time I was able to go and really buy some nice clothes, which I was so excited about.
And also, as a journalist, I’d always dressed in essentially the same thing, which was a Navy blazer and navy pants and a white shirt because you just want to blend in. And now I had the opportunity to explore fashion and figure out, “What should I wear? What expresses me?” Which I loved.
And I’ll never forget my first trip to Paris and going into Prada on Rue Sainte-Honoré and buying a suit. That was all very exciting. But what was really exciting was just the opportunity to create something in your own image that you felt would feel relevant to readers. And it was a bit up and down my first year, but then we hit our stride.
And the increase in salary was very nice. I wouldn’t say it was entirely life-changing, but what it made me feel was secure, which was very life-changing because then you are not worried. And you’re not scrambling with a side hustle to fill in the gaps. You know? You can relax into it a bit.
Rachel Baker: I remember so vividly in 2013, Maggie and I were both at Elle, and Joanna Coles had taken over Cosmo. And then there was a 20-page excerpt in Cosmo of Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, who was not a household name at that point. It seemed like kind of an unlikely partnership. What was that like for you?
Joanna Coles: Well, I had read a very early edition of Lean In that Sheryl had given me. And I’d gone to see her at the Facebook offices because I had gotten to know her and she, slightly shyly, pushed this thing across the table and said, “Look, I’m writing this book, do you want to take a look? I’d really appreciate your comments.”
So I went off and I, my heart sank and I thought, “God, it’s going to be some tedious business book about Silicon Valley. I really don’t want to read this.” And I’d gone to the Palo Alto Mall to buy a Michael Kors ribbed sweater that I had been tracking and had found in this mall.
Anyway, I got there and tried it on, didn’t like it, went off to have a cappuccino, and started reading this book. And I couldn’t put it down. And when I looked up, the mall had closed around me, and I just thought, “This book speaks to me. It speaks to my generation.”
And what she really did—I know there’s been some ups and downs about Lean In since—but the real thing she did, which nobody, crazily, had done, was to put all the data together and show that men and women were going to college at the same time in the same numbers, and the minute they came out, there was a disparity in what they got paid when they were hired.
And the first management jobs would go to men, not to women. And women were one step behind them. Then they were three steps behind. And then they had a baby and then they were five steps behind. And they couldn’t catch up. And the research was extraordinary. I still think it’s an excellent book for young women to read.
There’s a brilliant chapter about negotiating in it and about the differences that men and women feel and are judged by when they ask for things. And the thing that it taught me, which was really depressing, but a very valuable lesson, is that actually nobody really likes women. Women don’t like women, and men don’t like women in the workplace.
And you often hear women saying the worst bosses they’ve ever had have been female bosses, which was so not my experience. But that’s part of the culture now that we sort of deride women in the workplace. And it’s something which really worries me.
And part of why we wanted to do The Bold Type, the five season show that came out of editing Cosmo, was to show women that you can like each other and still disagree in the workplace. You can have conflict in the workplace as a drama, but it doesn’t have to be between the women. It can be outside and the women support each other.
And that was based on my experience. You know, Cathie Black was running Hearst when I got there and was a fantastic supporter. She hired me and she wasn’t easy to deal with because sometimes she was right. Sometimes I fucked up and she told me in very direct terms. And that was fine. You’re much better off with someone telling you.
Ellen Levine, who died recently, but who was the editorial director at Hearst when I was there, was a fantastic mentor. Super supportive and frequently critical of what I was doing, but in the nicest possible way. And I really learned a lot from her.
My best friends have all come from work. And so I felt that Lean In pointed out that it’s much harder for women. And I just don’t think we’d ever acknowledged it until that point. We knew it, but we didn’t know the empirical evidence that pointed to it. We didn’t have a solution.
And her chapter on negotiating is excellent. Was it aimed at wealthier, educated white women? Yes, of course it was. Have there been revisions since then? Yes, there have. But it’s hard to think of a better book to give a young woman to prepare her for what it’s like in the working world.
Maggie Bullock: You really elevated Cosmo by marrying together the sex positivity of Cosmo and the Girl Boss era, right? That seemed to be the formula. Maybe I’m wrong, but that seemed to be the two major components of the Venn diagram that became your Cosmo. You had said earlier when you set out, like, ‘What should this magazine be?’ That process of ideating and putting it all on your Pinterest board or whatever. Was that your vision?
Joanna Coles: No, I think what I was doing was trying to sniff the culture and understand where it was going. And I was talking to lots and lots of young women, and I would go out to campuses, and I would talk to young women in the workplace, and I would hear they didn’t know how to ask for a raise. They didn’t know how to ask for an orgasm. They didn’t know how to ask for what they wanted.
And the explosion of internet porn had really impacted the behaviors that they were experiencing in the bedroom from violence, choking, spitting, slapping, hair pulling, anal sex when they didn’t necessarily want it, had all become conversations among young women that weren’t really being addressed. And the explosion of internet porn is still something that we haven’t really addressed in our culture.
And I think it does a lot of damage to men and to women. That’s not actually what real sex is like. And it’s not the benefit of real sex. And we don’t talk about the benefits of real sex. Why not? Because there’s no money in it. I think in American culture, you always follow the money.
And there’s no one telling you that if you, you know, make love to your partner, and you are married, three times a week, you’ll stand a better chance of surviving as a couple than if you don’t. And that the physical act of having sex is incredibly empowering in a relationship, assuming you both like each other. And you may not always feel like doing it, but you usually feel much better after you do. An orgasm for either partner is a great release emotionally and physically. And these were things that I didn’t feel were getting quite enough attention.
And in the grandiose scheme of things—when we weren’t just simply hustling whatever celebrity we could to do the cover that month because someone had just let us down or their show had gotten postponed or something—was that sense of encouraging women to ask for what they want and feel confident in that conversation.
So I wouldn’t necessarily say we elevated it. I would just say we broadened it to encompass other things.
Rachel Baker: Okay, so you reimagined Cosmo and you promoted it as a newly-feminist enterprise, and your own brand grew at the same time. It was not since Helen Garley Brown herself had an editor at Cosmo, been considered a media star, and then suddenly you’re being talked about in the same breath as a Graydon Carter, Anna Wintour. You were so famous and respected—at least within the media bubble. What was that like?
Joanna Coles: I’m hoping I’ll have another moment [laughs]! You know, you don’t really think about it in those terms. You are just like, “Who’s going to be on the cover next month? What can I do? What’s the next Lean In? Where am I going next? How is Cosmo going to show up?”
We did a TV show called So Cosmo that took a year to get off the ground. We did The Bold Type. That took three years to get off the ground. You’re always working on things. So my thinking about myself or my own relative celebrity took very little of my consciousness, really.
And the odd thing is, funnily enough, I was having lunch the other day with someone, and during the lunch, three people came up to me—they were all young women or women in their twenties—and they all came up and said how much the work I had done had impacted them. And that felt pretty good.
So when you, when it comes back at you in ways like that, or when you see people that you’ve had who’ve gone on to great careers, that’s sort of exciting. But the celebrity of it didn’t really interest me. And that’s not what energizes me.
What energizes me is doing the really, really fun work, and working with really good people, and talent spotting. And the thing that was good about magazines was they were great laboratories for imaginative people who needed some structure, perhaps. But when I think about a lot of the people I’ve had who’ve gone on to good things, that’s how you feel that you’ve had some kind of impact.
Maggie Bullock: But suddenly cameras are focused on you a lot more than they used to be in your prior life. You talked a little bit about coming to Marie Claire and having the freedom to develop a personal style, but I also think when you’re in the public eye, you need a kind of armor, right?
You need either an armor or a system for how you present yourself. Did you feel like you needed to develop that for, I don’t know, your clothes, your hair—just the ‘you’ that is taken out into the world where now there’s going to be, probably, some cameras and a lot more people looking than there were previously?
Joanna Coles: I don’t honestly. I was always, because my initial training was as a journalist, I was always interested in looking at other people. So if people were looking at me, I was trying to figure out. “Who are they? What are they thinking? Where are they from?” I wasn’t thinking about me. It’s not interesting to think about oneself. It’s much more interesting to sort of observe what’s going on in the larger space.
And also, I would go to fashion shows or I would go out to things and I would just be looking for clues for the next issue, really. There was no question that Hearst wanted me to have a bigger public profile. And they told me that. Which is partly why I was very much encouraged, with all the support system from Hearst, because they could see that it was good for the business.
And it was definitely better for advertisers and sponsors if you’ve got an editor who’s got a higher profile because they’re more interested in talking to you. And it gets you into bigger rooms. It gets you invited to better things, more interesting things. So from that point of view, it’s a very useful thing to have. But I wouldn’t say it impacted me as a person either way, because I got it fairly late in life.
You do see younger people getting a certain degree of celebrity and behaving really badly with it. And I saw a lot of editors behaving badly and stamping their foot and literally saying, “Do you know who I am?” When they didn’t get the seat at the fashion show they wanted. And I always thought, “God, I never want to be that idiot. I never want to be that person.” I would so be fine sitting on the sixth row.
And, it’s much nicer to fly business class than it is economy. But I will tell you, when I do fly economy and I do from time to time if I can’t use miles or I’m not going on someone else’s dime, you always end up talking and having a great conversation with a person next to you, which you never do in business class.
“The explosion of internet porn is still something that we haven’t really addressed in our culture. And I think it does a lot of damage to men and to women. That’s not actually what real sex is like.”
Rachel Baker: I’m just thinking about, you mentioned So Cosmo and you mentioned The Bold Type. I watched every episode of The Bold Type. I loved it. But when you were working on those shows, you also made the leap to executive producer. You were a ‘business person’ on those shows. What was your instinct on being a producer? What did that mean? And did you sense that maybe that would be your next life outside of magazines?
Joanna Coles: Yes, I think so. And if Covid hadn’t been so dramatic, I hope I would’ve had a few more shows done at this point. I’ve managed to get one on air and I’m working on another at the moment with Amazon, which I’m incredibly excited about, which is a version of Tanya Selvaratnam’s book, Assume Nothing, which I am executive producing with Priyanka Chopra, who’s going to star as Tanya.
[The Bold Type] was just an interesting new way of storytelling for me. And my role in it was to invite the writers and Dave Bernad, the executive producer, who’s since gone on to do the White Lotus series, to come into the office to spend some time with the staff, to absorb my diaries and my anecdotes, and turn it into something, which is what we ended up doing.
And it just spoke to people. It’s had a great afterlife. It’s been huge in odd places like India. In fact, oddly, someone told me all the countries with “I”—India, which has an enormous population of young business women who don’t have anything to look at, in terms of role models, Italy, and Israel—I was told it’s very popular in, as well as the UK, which has been great. And, obviously, here. And it’s on Hulu here and it’s on Netflix internationally.
But I think it hit a vein. It hit the vein that Lean In hit, which was a group of ambitious women who really weren’t addressed in popular culture, by anyone acknowledging their ambition, in a way that wasn’t just horrifying. And, oh my God, she’s the most ambitious person you’ll ever meet. And she’s the nightmare.
It was very different. That had a different feel. So it was partly the project I was excited about, and then having a slightly different creative role in it. And it definitely made me understand the power of television more, which is fairly obvious and I’d understood from having done a couple of seasons of Project Runway All Stars.
But it’s fun to create a project from scratch and put it out into the world. And television has such a big impact when you do it well.
Tilda Swinton’s character in Trainwreck was based loosely on Coles.
Maggie Bullock: You’ve created shows and you’ve produced shows, but you’ve also been portrayed in various onscreen iterations, including Tilda Swinton’s editor-in-chief in Trainwreck. So we wanted to know what you think of that character. What was that like for you?
Joanna Coles: I mean, it was pretty hilarious, actually. So Judd Apatow came into the office to talk about This Is 40. It was a fantastic role for Leslie Mann. And I loved that movie, and I feel like that movie didn’t get enough attention, actually. And I know he is working on This is 50, which I’m dying to see.
But she was so good. And the bit where she is told she’s pregnant and she’s not expecting to be told she’s pregnant is, I think, one of the great women-acting-being-pregnant scenes of all time. So I’m assuming he sort of picked it up from there.
And he was working with Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who I’d spent some time with. And Tilda Swinton and I, actually, we don’t look alike. I have a picture of the two of us standing together and we really don’t look alike. But our hair is similar. So I think people put one and one together.
And there’s the wonderful scene where she says, you know, it’s something to do with, “Can you give someone a blow job and find out if their semen tastes of garlic,” or something. Which was the sort of mad thing that we would occasionally come up with at Cosmo. I thought the movie was hilarious. Anything with Amy Schumer, bow down. And I was thrilled.
Maggie Bullock: So in 2016 you were promoted to Chief Content Officer of Hearst. I think that’s, I mean, that was not a preexisting condition…
Joanna Coles: ‘Condition’ is right! ‘Condition’ is exactly right.
Maggie Bullock: Yes. ‘Position’ I should say. And so, this being about print and whether or not it’s dead, it seems to me that at that time you were tasked with staving off that death. Can you talk about what the media landscape was at that moment and what your mandate was in that role?
Joanna Coles: Well, if you were in magazines, it felt very much like you were standing on a train track. And you could see the train. And the train was coming straight at you. And, initially, you looked at it and you thought it was a long way away. And then you suddenly realized that if you didn’t get out of the way, you were going to be splattered against the tracks.
So part of my job was to try and think of new creative projects, and we did think of some. And part of my job was to begin to consolidate departments because we couldn’t afford to carry on as we had been. And certain magazines were declining faster than others. And obviously digital was growing, but it couldn’t grow and make the same amount of money as fast as the legacy brands were declining.
So it was a very frustrating time. And Hearst is a fantastic company to work with. We had really smart, interesting people there. But, ultimately, it’s very hard to fight all the new media that’s available on your cellphone.
And I stopped reading magazines. I just didn’t find them as interesting anymore, because the phone is just like this extraordinary box of magic tricks in your hand, as is your laptop, or your iPad, or whatever device you carry around. And the magazine felt less and less relevant. Which doesn’t mean magazines don’t still have value, but the cadence and the urgency of them just isn’t the same.
Maggie Bullock: Right. So then, two years after being named Chief Content Officer of Hearst, you were up for the job of president—which actually seems like a job that not everybody would want at this point. And that would’ve been a fully executive role and taken you out of the creative magazine-making piece of it, mostly. Beyond just ascending the ladder, what about that job appealed to you?
Joanna Coles: Well, actually I wasn’t really up for it. I suppose it’s fair to say that I felt I had to kick the tires off it, because if you don’t, then it looks like you are not taking these seriously. Or you are not taking the company seriously.
But the truth is, I would’ve been terrible at it, and it wasn’t where my strengths lay. So I never seriously thought about it, and I don’t think they seriously thought of me for it because it was obvious. My real abilities lie in content and that’s not what the job is.
The job is about trying to make sense of the changing media landscape and balance budgets and figure out ways of holding onto a media business, which is being attacked from every direction.
“I had lunch with David Carey and he said, ‘We’d love you to take on Cosmo.’ And I immediately said, ‘Oh, no, no. I’m completely the wrong person for Cosmo.’”
Maggie Bullock: But I think that when you left Hearst, it was perceived that that was because that job had gone to Troy Young. You seem to be saying that’s not the reason.
Joanna Coles: No. To be fair to Troy, who, as you probably know, left a couple of years later, I had been at Hearst for 12 years at that point. I’d done two years as chief content officer. It wasn’t clear to me that I could have as much impact as I’d already had. And by this point I was on the board of Snapchat. I’d written a book, I had a TV show, and I felt like being more entrepreneurial. And my kids, actually—and this is a really important stage in any work in women’s life—my kids were basically done with school. My oldest son was at college, and my younger son was about to go to college.
So I didn’t feel I needed a stable job in quite the way that I’d had before. And so it felt like a really good time to make a move. And there was no secret that I didn’t get on with Troy and he didn’t particularly get on with me. So it wouldn’t have been a fun proposition to work with him.
And so it was a very nice mutual parting of the ways. I had a fantastic 12 years at Hearst. I really had a great time.
Rachel Baker: What was it like to be like, ‘I’ve been at this company for 12 years. Now I’m no longer with the company.’ Like, what’s next? Reevaluating. And now you do so many things. It’s suddenly like Silicon Valley! Hollywood! The world is your oyster.
Joanna Coles: It was fun actually. It’s fun not having to get up and go to the same place every day. And it’s fun having different people to talk to and time to, at that point go to the gym in the middle of the day. And it felt nice. It was the first time in my life I’d not worked, or it was the first time for 20 years when I hadn’t really worked incredibly hard all the time. I’d had a period in my early 30s where I was writing a column for The Guardian and I was doing a program for the BBC and I had a bit of time in between. And that felt like a very nice lifestyle.
So actually it felt pretty good. And I wanted to spend more time on the West Coast. I’m really interested in the West Coast. I’ve never lived there. And so I’ve certainly done that. I joined a series of boards. I joined the Sonos board, I joined a couple of private tech company boards. I joined a private equity company. So I just had more opportunities to be more entrepreneurial, and I found that really interesting.
Coles was an executive producer for The Bold Type, a scripted series airing on Freeform and starring Melora Hardin (The Office) as Jacqueline Carlyle, a strong-but-kind editor-in-chief at a high-end women's magazine, and was inspired by the life of Coles.
Rachel Baker: So when you’re a producer on all these projects, what does that mean your role is, exactly? I know producer can mean like a bunch of different things. But like in the Priyanka Chopra project for Amazon, and then you also mentioned that you are even producing a Broadway play. That’s so interesting.
Joanna Coles: What I like doing, and what I’ve been able to do, is identify projects, often early in their process. You asked about Assume Nothing, the Priyanka Chopra project. I left Hearst and did a development deal with ABC Signature, which is a terrific producer of really creative TV shows. And I ran into Tanya Selvaratnam at NeueHouse. And she said, “Oh, I’m just finishing a book. I’d love to send you a draft. So she sent me a draft that afternoon. I read it that night. I couldn’t put it down. And I thought, this is an amazing story.
And it’s her story about going out with the Attorney General of New York, Eric Schneiderman, who, at the same time as he was trying to bring charges against Harvey Weinstein for sexual assault, was actually sexually assaulting Tanya in their private relationship.
And it was such an extraordinary story. She’s a very good writer. She’s the sort of woman that in the book is very relatable, you know. She went to Harvard, she’s been very successful. And she said, “I’m the kind of woman that if someone had asked me, ‘What would you do if a man hit you?’ I would say I would leave immediately.”
Well, she didn’t leave. She stayed with him a year and she became, essentially co-opted almost, in his violence against her. And it was an extraordinary story of intimate violence, some of which we’d actually written about in Cosmo.
And actually, I remember going to talk to Valerie Jarrett at the White House about it and saying, “This is a really important subject that we need to get politicians much more focused on, because it’s much more common than we think.” And in fact, at the time, they were dealing a lot with unwanted sexual violence on college campuses and consent, which we’d also spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about at both Marie Claire and Cosmo.
So I read Tanya’s book and I just thought, “This is extraordinary. We need to option this book. I want to option this book. I want to turn it into something.” And then it became clear if we did that, we needed a really strong actor. Tanya is from Sri Lanka. We definitely needed an Indian or a Sri Lankan actress, and obviously, you know Priyanka Chopra. We had met when I was editing both Marie Claire and Cosmo and had stayed in touch, so I reached out to Priyanka.
She read it. She has a production company Purple Pebble, run by Mary Rolich, and they came on board. They were like, “This story is extraordinary.” There’s something in that story that speaks to so many women, many of whom have not gone through the extent of the horror that Tanya went through, but have certainly gone through degrees of it.
And so we then, with the support of ABC, went to Amazon. Amazon bought it and we’re now in the process of writing the script. And it’s been a long process because Covid intervened. But we kept it going and I think it’s going to be a very powerful project.
“The thing that was good about magazines was they were great laboratories for imaginative people,” says Coles, seen here in her Cosmo office in the Hearst Tower.
Maggie Bullock: So how involved are you in the script process and, like, the hands-on work of making the storyline?
Joanna Coles: Well, I found the galley. I bought the option, or ABC bought it on my behalf. I pulled in Priyanka. And then we went through a series of interviewing writers, which is an incredibly long and laborious process. We talked to probably eight to 10 really serious, successful female writers. And then we finally found the one that we all agreed on, Mimi Won [Techentin], and she is now writing on it. So I’m very involved in it.
I’ve read the initial outline. I talk to Mimi. Obviously, I talk to Priyanka. So I’m very engaged in it. And then you get great executives from both ABC and from Amazon, who have much more experience of television shows than I do. And so we’re all in the room or we’re all on Zoom screens together, talking about where we want it to go.
Maggie Bullock: And so, if you’re working on the scripts now, just give us a sense of do you expect to shoot it in 2023, and then we might see it in 2024, or is that too fast?
Joanna Coles: It may not be too fast. It will all come down to Priyanka's schedule and what she can figure out and when the scripts get delivered. But, I would hope that you would’ve watched it by the end of 2024.
These things take a long time to make well, and we also have to cast Eric. And we want the scripts before that. But I think it’s going to be a really powerful, interesting—you know, it’s a dark psychological thriller. And if you think of the Dirty John series, it has a version of that.
But it’s at a much more elevated level in that he was the most powerful law enforcement officer in New York, and he was threatening to have her followed. And they met at the DNC. And he seemed like this charming, incredibly sophisticated man. And they were hanging out in the Hamptons with the Clintons, and yet she was dealing with this secret violence and this private shame that, as an intelligent woman with her own means, she was being swallowed into his madness.
And actually what was fascinating was there were times when he was struggling with alcohol and he was struggling with Ambien, according to Tanya, in the book, at least. And there are one or two times when I remember actually seeing him at a press conference and he had a cut above his eye. And the story was he’d fallen when he’d gone jogging, but that’s not the story that’s in her book.
So it’s fascinating when you watch the juxtaposition of what he was doing going over Harvey Weinstein and then battling his own private demons.
Rachel Baker: Okay, are you ready for the Print Is Dead Billion-Dollar Question?
Joanna Coles: Let’s see what happens.
Rachel Baker: Okay, if Laurene Powell Jobs gave you a billion dollars to start a new media venture, what would you do with it?
Joanna Coles: What would I do? God, it’s a great question. I would definitely want to do something in the news arena because I think we are ill-served by our news. I think we are made anxious by it. I think it depresses people. It focuses entirely on conflict and gives us a completely different sense of the world than the world as it is. And yes, of course there’s bad things going on and conflict going on, but we shouldn’t have to feel like that every day.
And I think it’s one of the reasons people feel so anxious and so depressed and so out of control. And so we have to free it from the pressures of advertising. Otherwise otherwise we will drive ourselves crazy. We are in a spiral around news of despair and it has to end.