Smiling Through the Apocalypse
A conversation with editor Will Welch (GQ, GQ Style, The Fader, more)
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THIS EPISODE IS A SPECIAL COLLABORATION WITH OUR FRIENDS AT THE SPREAD AND IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT COMMERCIAL TYPE, MOUNTAIN GAZETTE, AND FREEPORT PRESS.
In the past few weeks, Will Welch has taken a bit of flack for letting Beyoncé promote her new whiskey label on the cover of GQ’s October issue, with an interview that one X user described as “an intimate email exchange between GQ and several layers of Beyonce’s comms team.”
Whether that kind of thing rankles you or not—and yes, we asked him about it—in the five years since Welch took over, GQ seems to be doing as well or better than everybody else in the industry. Why? Ask around. He’s got a direct line to celebrities, who consider him a personal friend. He’s got real credibility with The Fashion People. And because of both of these things, advertisers love him.
Perhaps most importantly, his boss Anna Wintour loves him.
The Atlanta-born Welch started his career at the alternative music and culture mag the Fader in the early aughts, and jumped to GQ in 2007. For a decade under EIC Jim Nelson, he operated as the magazine’s fashion-and-culture svengali, eventually becoming the creative director of the magazine and the editor of the brand’s fashion spinoff, GQ Style.
In 2019, Wintour tapped him for the big job: Editor-in-Chief of GQ—a title that in 2020 was recast in the current Condé Nast survival-mode as Global Editorial Director of GQ, overseeing 19 editions around the world.
After speaking with Welch only a few hours after the Beyonce cover dropped, we get what all the fuss is about. He is a great sport with good hair and just enough of a Southern accent who is confident-yet-never-cocky about his mission at GQ.
Let other people bemoan the “death of print.” Will Welch is having a blast at the Last Supper.
Rachel Baker: Will, we’re so happy that you’re here today because it’s Beyoncé Day.
Will Welch: Oh my gosh! Yes, it is indeed.
Rachel Baker: Yes. So we would like to thank you for putting a woman on the cover of GQ. Just in time for us. It was really thoughtful, so thank you.
Will Welch: We worked really hard to get these particular stars to align. I let Beyoncé know that we would be doing this today and she was like, “That’s absolutely when we should time the cover drop.” It’s been great.
Maggie Bullock: She’s like, “I love Rachel and Maggie, I’d do anything for them.” That’s pretty much what she said, right?
Will Welch: Yeah. Six months ago I was like, “I’m going to go on this podcast. Would you like to be on the cover? And here’s how we’re going to time it.” And she was like, “Perfect.”
Rachel Baker: Bingo. There you go. Do you have any good behind-the-scenes goss for us on how the sausage got made on that shoot? Maggie and I have worked on Beyoncé cover stories several times and we know she is a woman who knows what she wants. We were wondering if you could tell us anything from behind the scenes?
Will Welch: Rachel, I’m sorry. I’m too tempted. We’ve just got to play the Southern people game really quickly. Your accent?
Rachel Baker: Jackson, Mississippi.
Will Welch: Jackson, Mississippi. Okay.
Maggie Bullock: And you are the A-T-L?
Will Welch: I’m Atlanta, Georgia. Yeah. A-T-L. There was never a huge accent on my front, but having been in New York for, I don’t know, since 1999. Most traces are gone, but it’s a point of view and outlook on life and occasionally a little glimmer of a Southern accent.
Rachel Baker: That’s right. You’ll be surprised to hear that I have lived in the North for most of my life.
Will Welch: I’m not surprised at all. Hold on to that [accent] like gold.
Rachel Baker: I’ve really hung on, yeah. That’s right.
Maggie Bullock: Rachel, you’re not going to defend me and point out that I’m from North Carolina?
Rachel Baker: No. I’m usually the Southern one.
Will Welch: I did hear a little in the “defend me.” The “E”s become “I”s.
Maggie Bullock: Yeah, “dee-find.”
Will Welch: Yeah. I don’t have any hot BTS goss, but Rachel, to your point about Beyoncé being a woman who knows what she wants, we tried to reflect that in the concept of the cover. So the cover has two Beyoncés on it.
There’s the big billboard of B, and then there’s Little B who is actually hanging her own billboard. And the idea was about like a woman who is in control of her own image, who constructs her own public persona. And then the cover line is “The Business of Being Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.” So that concept of her being in charge of everything having to do with her life and her career is what we were trying to capture in the cover image.
Maggie Bullock: And was that your baby, Will? Did you come up with that concept? How does it happen behind the scenes?
Will Welch: Yeah. And in the case of Beyoncé it’s through a really deeply-involved collaboration with her and her creative team. All the aspects of the shoot were done through a combination of conversations, negotiations, all that kind of stuff.
But I really savor that element of the role. And I think more than ever, it has to be done in a very modern way. Beyoncé doesn’t need a GQ cover—or any other piece of press. I haven’t looked this morning at how many followers she has versus how many GQ has, but she definitely has more.
But at the same time, there is still this recognition of, the thing that I love about making magazine covers in this era is, I’m like, “I want to take Beyoncé someplace she wouldn’t go without GQ.” And I also am prepared for her to take me and GQ someplace we wouldn’t go if she weren’t the specific subject.
And I think that’s very different from an era where it was like, if you’re going to be on this magazine’s cover, the magazine had all the power and you had to submit to their makeover and all that kind of stuff. Fully submit to their creative. And maybe it was never full submission, like I’m painting it. But it was much closer to that.
And the balance of power has evolved and I just love and savor the push and pull of modern magazine making, cover making, image making, collaboration. And the other thing that’s so exciting about it is if you don’t understand the talent that you’re working with—let’s say a cover star is like “I love GQ, I’ll do whatever you want.” And we render their image in a way that is off to their fans, that cover will be a failure because their fans want to see the stars that they love and an exciting new twist on who they are, but they don’t want to see a total magazine makeover.
I was trying to think of the talk show host that did like … Maury Povich? I don’t know.
Rachel Baker: There are lots of them.
Maggie Bullock: Vinnie Jones?
Rachel Baker: Yeah. Vinnie Jones, Oprah, so many.
Maggie Bullock: Ricki Lake?
Will Welch: Ricki Lake, yes!
Rachel Baker: Can you say it’s a failure though? By what metric? So much of it is about shareability and social. Does the newsstand matter at all? How would you measure a failure even?
Will Welch: Of course I would like to say that I go by my own internal compass and gut instincts only and I don’t care about anything else. But if we were to publish a cover with somebody and everyone who cared about that talent hated it and thought it was a violation of their favorite star, that would feel like a fail for sure.
“The balance of power has evolved and I just love and savor the push and pull of modern magazine making, cover making, image making, collaboration.”
Maggie Bullock: Going back to our Beyoncé history. You have to make a lot of concessions in this day and age. For example, Beyoncé stipulated that the writer of her story was like somebody’s niece—not a writer. But we were like, “Okay, you’re Beyoncé, that will happen.” How do you feel about that? It’s not even horse trading at this point. It’s if they’re willing to do it, you take it.
Rachel Baker: Yeah, we noticed that she did the interview by email, for example.
Will Welch: Yeah, so that is an example of a concession that I was willing to make in the case of Beyoncé that I generally outright refuse to make. But I felt that we had the opportunity to get a really in-depth, back-and-forth interview with her. Given the circumstances, I felt that it was a win for the audience for us to agree to that.
You’re measuring things differently every time, and the trade offs, and artists willing to go different. But I think one of the things I’m most proud of about the current iteration of GQ is we have really held the line on access to talent.
And I feel great about the level of access that we got with Beyoncé. So I’m not going to talk myself into—and this doesn’t go for anybody else, this is for me and GQ—for me to be like, “I will never agree to an email interview.” Even though I think we were being presented with a very rare opportunity to get a very in depth email interview with talent that people really care about what they have to say, and who had a constellation of interesting things going on.
For me, that would have been like a really silly line to draw where you’re like holding a principle just to hold a principle and not being smart and dynamic about the way you’re thinking about the opportunity. And every day, you’re measuring and remeasuring that all the time.
But like I was saying, in general I think GQ gets amazing access to its interview subjects. And let’s be real—people would prefer to get the great fashion shoot and be on their merry way, but they want the cover and the whole look enough that we’re able—because we hold the line and we’re super demanding about what we require—we’re able to get it.
And then we’re just really clear about, at what point do you have to walk away? You’ve got to find the middle ground with people in these negotiations and sometimes there isn’t a middle ground. So we walk away and that happens all the time. We do that as well.
Maggie Bullock: You said something we were going to bring up—thank you very much—that it’s an era in which they don’t “need” the magazine in the way that they once did. You guys still are one of the few really who still get AAA-List celebrities. Last month it was Brad Pitt and George Clooney. We wondered, that’s—it was, we said AAA. So that’s … what would you call it? Sixtuples?
Will Welch: Six As in a pool.
Rachel Baker: Matching white suits!
Will Welch: Wet.
Rachel Baker: Wet A-Listers! You heard it here, folks. But can you talk a little bit about the decision to put Brad Pitt on the cover at this time when he’s, for the first time ever, a controversial pick in some ways?
Will Welch: Yeah, sure. There’s an ongoing conversation between GQ and Brad Pitt going back a very long time, and then for me personally as editor-in-chief, we did a cover with him when I was editor-in-chief of GQ style, where we—
Rachel Baker: Oh, we remember. We remember. It was, like, 40 pages!
Will Welch: Yes. Yeah, good. That’s always the goal. Where we went to three different national parks with him. And it was in a way I would say like a precursor to what became this thread of the new masculinity that GQ has been exploring. So this was several years before the new masculinity issue that we did in November of 2019 with Pharrell.
But it was just the beginning of this idea of making GQ a place where you invite people to open up and be vulnerable. That was a big marker for us, that cover story. And so there’s been just an ongoing relationship—editorial relationship, not anything else—with Brad from there.
And then we were also able to work with George Clooney for the first time in many years for GQ. There was a long Clooney gap. During COVID we were able to work with Clooney again and establish a rapport there.
This was the opportunity to put the two pieces together. To have a conversation about masculinity and aging. And yes, of course they have a movie together. And they had something to promote. But we were able to look at male friendship and all of these themes that have been a big part of this era of GQ.
Maggie Bullock: But that being said, did you feel like internally you had to overcome any doubts about whether or not now was the right time for Brad? Or was it like, “We have this relationship, he is who he is. Of course we’re going to do it”?
Will Welch: Everything is always a conversation and a measurement. One thing I rely on is a dynamic conversation with my staff. We all have our individual opinions and we all discuss these things. Ultimately it felt like the right September cover for us.
Rachel Baker: Let’s go back to 2019 with that Pharrell in the gown—”The New Masculinity.” We remember that very vividly. That was such a moment when you took over. That was now five years ago. So what is the “new-new-new masculinity”? We’ve been through several cycles since then. Where do you see the pendulum swinging now? What does the culture want for men now? I felt like in 2019, it was really about gender-bending and it was very hot post-MeToo. Where are we now?
Will Welch: Yeah, American culture and American opinion and all of the battlegrounds on social media and on the linear news, all the places where those things are fought, as we know, I mean we’re in the middle of an election cycle, are extremely stratified.
I think there were of course people grumbling in the heart of the MeToo movement even, which is when we published the new masculinity issue, which was basically us saying, GQ has been one of the go to voices for what’s going on with men and in men’s lives and in men’s heads.
I think we were in a moment in MeToo, where it was long overdue that men face a reckoning for so much behavior, so much cultural baggage. But I think, as these things often go, it started out with, it was just criticism and what we felt and what we heard from our audience was like a desire to change, a recognition that change was very much overdue. But, not really any constructive path forward being offered.
So the new masculinity issue was like, “Okay, this is this longstanding voice of, I don’t know, male culture to an extent? And maybe we can help chart a progressive and constructive path forward so it’s not just critique and men should feel awful.”
It’s okay, yes. Once those of us who are thoughtful and sensitive have processed some of that, what can we actually do about that? And so that’s a conversation that we’ve been seeking to continue.
Since then, so many of these conversations, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. There’s a lot of everything just gets written off as woke these days and all of that, but what we’ve been really exploring is this idea that men now it is permissible to be vulnerable and to share how you’re feeling, to have insecurities.
What has been profound to me is finding that almost anyone that we’ve interviewed over the last five years, if you open the door in the very public pages of GQ for a musician or an actor or athlete or whoever to be vulnerable, they will choose to walk through that door with you. Which I think is really remarkable, because the perception of our era is that everyone’s media trained, everything’s overly controlled, nobody is being authentic.
“I go by my own internal compass and gut instincts only and I don’t care about anything else.”
And I just think, hopefully, the stories that we’re publishing all the time are proof that’s not the case. What I think it’s become is a dynamic conversation. It’s many notes and there’s no agreement across the board, but for us, it’s this ongoing exploration.
Even on the cover of “The New Masculinity” issue, the coverline begins, “an exploration of” rather than a definitive dossier of “how to be a good man.” In 2019 it wasn’t that at all. Let’s understand what’s going on with challenges to gender norms. Let’s understand what’s going on with sexual violence. Let’s begin to unpack these things.
The place that we were trying to get editorially, and I think we have—it’s never perfect, but to a certain degree, is achieved—is you see the sort of pulp of that conversation reflected in everything from our grooming coverage, to a big cover story, to a piece of reporting that’s more on the nose about gender somehow.
We’ve reported for men’s groups and all these different places where these conversations are active. So trying to make it like direct theme, sub theme, meta theme—to play on all those layers at once. And ultimately still trying to help men see themselves in some of these stories and hopefully to find a path forward that isn’t just like, “Me and my nature are bad and violent.” But you have to recognize those elements too.
Rachel Baker: That’s just really interesting to think about—GQ as like a “permission structure.” Can you share an example of a celebrity who you feel like you gave that permission to be vulnerable and where you were surprised by the outcome?
Will Welch: Yeah, sure. Just looking around my office and I’m looking at our Kevin Costner cover from a couple of months ago. Icon of a different era of masculinity. But when you dig into Zach Baron’s piece with him, which, to your point about access, was reported over several months and many hours of both observation of him directing his film and focused journalist-to-subject interviewing. He’s talking about divorce. He’s talking about his dreams as a young actor. He’s talking about literally risking the family farm to make his magnum opus—all of these things. And I think that thread continues through it. And then to the September conversation, which is also Zach Baron with Brad Pitt and George Clooney. There’s basically like a, “You guys still evolving?” moment and getting their reflections on that.
Rachel Baker: Yeah. Zach Baron is a busy guy.
Will Welch: He’s a very busy guy. Very talented. That’s why he’s so busy.
Maggie Bullock: Props to Zach Baron. Absolutely. This may be over-extrapolating—and we don’t have to spend a lot of time on this—but I just wonder, now that we’re in this election cycle where it’s like masculinity is on the ballot, right? Hulk Hogan is speaking at the RNC and then the Democrats are all being their best husbandly selves. And I just want to hear from you on how this thinking and, like, this weird moment for masculinity, how does that filter into your thinking about how to make a men’s magazine?
Will Welch: Yeah, I guess my observation of the let’s take the, there’s stuff really active like yesterday and today around Donald Trump attempting to re adjudicate his rape accusations and like saying all kinds of really shocking, vile stuff. I guess the impression that I came away from observing the two conventions was—I think you were hinting at this Maggie—there’s a level of stagecraft going on. On both sides of course.
The convention is literally just stagecraft. But beyond the obvious and necessary elements of it that, you see the Democrats really carefully honing the message and presenting the men in different ways in relationship to the women in ways that are interesting—trying to complicate traditional power dynamics, but sometimes being a little bit like hamfisted in how carefully crafted that is. Sometimes you, like, crave some authenticity.
And then on the other side, I just find, Man, it is disappointing. Growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, I understand the “little-c” conservative point of view very well. It is shocking that the side of the debate that is ostensibly representing little-c conservatism contains so much hatefulness towards so many different people, broad swaths of people. In a way, to me, it’s disappointing that those things are just swamping what should be a really dynamic conversation about the future of our country, which is a longstanding debate between big government and small government. And it’s so gone. That’s what I was observing as I was watching masculinity be performed in the dueling conventions. It’s like a lot of hate in one and a lot of craft in the other.
Maggie Bullock: Yeah, no, I agree with you. I do think, though, that it must make some for some pretty juicy editorial meetings! The country is divided on how to be a man. It’s fodder.
Will Welch: It definitely is. I think it’s also uninteresting to be really predictable and by the book on that. To always just be trying to get it right and to send the right signal. We try to make some challenging, surprising, not easy. I don’t know, a good magazine should have a little bit of danger to it. And if all you’re doing is trying to, if all you’re doing is like the magazine version of that stagecraft, I think that can feel hollow as well.
Rachel Baker: Okay. Now I’ve got a really elegant transition for you, Will.
Maggie Bullock: She tees it up! She tees it up.
Will Welch: See, but with the Mississippi accent, everything’s elegant.
Rachel Baker: Let’s talk about fashion. When you took over GQ from Jim Nelson, you’d worked there for 12 years.
Will Welch: Something like that.
Rachel Baker: And under Jim, the famous mix was a lot of men jumping in suits. And long-form journalism, like 6,000-word swashbuckling adventures by Sean Flynn.
Will Welch: Yeah.
Rachel Baker: And now, your magazine strikes us as a lot more high-fashion, younger counterculture. Can you tell us how you recalibrated the balance, the high-level vision and the priorities? Because it definitely has changed.
Will Welch: Yeah, I grew up under Jim Nelson and the creative director who ran the fashion department, Jim Moore, and learned literally everything I know from the “dynamic duo of Jims.” I absolutely worked my tail off in those 12 years under them, and loved every minute of it, and was wholly committed to the project.
When I got the opportunity to reimagine GQ and lead it myself, I had some moves that I thought it was time to make that would reflect my personal sensibilities. Part of that from a strategic perspective was thinking about what has the internet wrought essentially? GQ is a legacy magazine, we’ve been around for many decades. I think in the nineties and the 2000s, there was an era where magazines like GQ were these general interest behemoths.
So GQ used to actually claim to speak to American men and it did along with Esquire and like certain sections of some of the national newspapers. Those were your options when it came to printed media. Through the aughts, magazines like GQ became these like very gentle, general interest publications where anything that might be interesting to a man belonged in GQ. Then with the rise of internet culture and social media, that really disrupted that. The internet and social media thrive on niche. It is very hard to be general interest in an internet culture.
And I just felt that the idea of speaking broadly to American men, doing fashion that was speaking to the kind of regular guy who’s trying to get dressed in a snazzy way for the office it just came, by the time I was editor-in-chief of GQ, “regular guys” were no longer reading fashion magazines.
And GQ has been, and always will be, a fashion magazine. In this era, you have to be super declarative about your point of view, super honed topically. You have to be really clear with people. It’s like, “We do these types of things and we don’t do any of that other stuff.” You grow by depth in your niche rather than having the wide open barn door, broad and shallow.
That was the strategy, the big picture thinking. Then we just got to work at defining all the things that we cared about.
The other thing I would say is that what I learned in my time at an independent music magazine, The Fader, where I was from 2003 to 2007, was that a magazine is just a community platform. Everybody wanted to go to the parties at The Fader. The parties more than anything else. I just realized that one of the most powerful senses of community and togetherness and bringing people together and connecting them with culture, was one of any publications’ greatest strengths. So we really leaned into that as well.
If you guys don’t mind, there’s an image that I have in my head. It’s a little corny but it works for me so we’ll see how I do. GQ is a platform, almost like a stage. Its audience has been accruing, with people coming and some people going, but over time, it’s been growing since it was founded in 1957. All we do is reach out our hand and invite interesting people up to stand on that platform and address this audience that’s been built over the years. And that can be anyone from Beyoncé to our fitness columnist, Joe Holder, to a chef, to our staff of writers, to a one-time writer, to a photographer.
It’s, “Hey, come up here with us, make something with us, and then show it to this crew.” Me and my staff can’t make a single day of gq.com, a single day of GQ on Instagram or any of the other platforms, or certainly not an issue of the magazine. We need all these other people.
So you just want it. You want people to feel like GQ is theirs. And I think we’ve been able to do that successfully. And that’s why the parties are fun. And people follow us on social media. I don’t know.
“A good magazine should have a little bit of danger to it.”
Rachel Baker: This beautiful picture that you just painted for us—this ride you took us on—was that your pitch to Anna Wintour when you were going for this job? Everybody said that it was obvious that Will was going to get the job. Tell us about it.
Will Welch: No, I never pitched Anna. I never went for the job, but I did have the opportunity in 2016 to be the founding editor-in-chief of GQ Style, which was a quarterly sort of high-fashion spinoff of GQ. It wasn’t intentional, but I guess that was my opportunity to show what I could do.
When I actually got the job, I got a call to Anna’s office. Usually she comes to see me. At the time she had a Vogue office and an executive office. It was in her executive office. We met a lot and that wasn’t normally how we met and I was really confused about what the nature of the meeting was going to be because we just had this steady cadence of the way that we met and this was different.
She just said, “Would you like to be the editor-in-chief of GQ?”
And I said, “Yes, that would be great.” And that was it.
Maggie Bullock: And how did you feel inside of your body at that moment?
Will Welch: I felt great. And then I went back to my office and I spoke to my wife and then another woman in my life who is an important mentor and she said, “Huh. You have just become the face of a men’s magazine in the middle of the MeToo movement.” She was like, “Congrats and shit, but let’s slow down for a second and think about this.” That was a really profound, I got chills just repeating it to you guys. That was a really profound moment for me and basically led directly to the new masculinity issue.
From that moment, I was like, I just understood. Forgive me. I’ve said it this way before, but she was like, “Here’s a challenge.”
And I was like, “Oh, I know what to do with the challenge. You either see it as a challenge or see it as an opportunity.” And I was like, “I’ve got to figure out how to make this an opportunity. We’ve got to do something instead of being scared to publish GQ in the middle of the MeToo movement where people did not fucking want to hear from men. Shut up. Shut up and listen.” Literally it’s the heart of shut up and listen. We have to publish every day. So I was like, “How are we going to do that?” And that was very inspiring.
Maggie Bullock: But it’s really, more than that, it’s a double-whammy because it’s MeToo plus whatever is happening to magazines right now. It’s like trying to keep a magazine afloat in the middle of the MeToo movement and redefine it at the same time. That’s a heavy load.
Will Welch: That part just didn’t intimidate me because I came from The Fader where we had five people sweating in an office together and $200 between us to make an amazing magazine. I just remember over the course of my career at GQ being like, it would be better if there were less just because, you can get in these big machines and it’s hard to be like.
Rachel Baker: And Anna heard you say that. And then she said, “How would you like to be the next editor of GQ?”
Maggie Bullock: “Get up here to my office!”
Will Welch: I’m really like—yeah, I shouldn’t be grouchy about that. But I totally set that up and then walked into it. Thank you.
Maggie Bullock: But, obviously, you’ve done it very well and now people keep saying that you’re going to be her successor. How does it feel when you hear those words?
Will Welch: I don’t hear those words.
Rachel Baker: Like the creative director. You’ve heard it.
Will Welch: No, I don't, I don't listen to any of that stuff.
Rachel Baker: What’s the title, Maggie?
Maggie Bullock: Global Artistic Director.
Will Welch: I’ve never had less to say about anything.
Rachel Baker: Have you ever thought about running for office?
Will Welch: Oh my god! On what platform?
Rachel Baker: … because you’re doing a great job at dodging these hard questions!
Will Welch: I'm running on the well tailored pants platform. We'll see how many votes I get.
Rachel Baker: So now you’re also in charge of the beloved online music magazine Pitchfork. And there was a big brouhaha when Condé Nast announced that Pitchfork was moving into the Will Welch portfolio and people on Twitter were pissed. Could you just clear this up for us? What happened to Pitchfork? How’s it different now? What’s your involvement?
Will Welch: Yeah, so the The brouhaha was just a misunderstanding because of the way the announcement was received. They didn’t say it was “moving onto the Will Welch portfolio.” It was just, it was rolling under GQ and people thought that meant that Pitchfork was going away. My perspective was like, “All of this is new, we’re figuring it out, we’re going to let everybody say what they want to say.”
And a lot of it was really, I think, valid think pieces about the change, the diminishment of music journalism and in many ways, the diminishment of criticism across genres. So a lot of the pieces that I read that I thought were quite smart, used this misunderstanding around Pitchfork as the timing to talk about something that I think is really valid. And that actually, I think the truth of what we’re doing with Pitchfork has a lot to say. So it was just, it was totally a misunderstanding.
Essentially Pitchfork is remaining Pitchfork. It is still publishing as Pitchfork. It is not like becoming, gq.com/pitchfork or anything like that. It’s all just continuing. I have, honestly, again, sorry if I sound corny, but the honor of leading it from a big picture strategy perspective. And I had the opportunity to go out and find a leader for the day to day content. I don’t have my hands in the day to day of it. I’m really thinking about the big picture direction, the overall strategy, like the big picture work I did around GQ.
But with GQ, I’m very involved in the day-to-day. I hired a young, entrepreneurial music writer named Mano Sundaresan, who had started this incredible blog called No Bells. He just built, just on his own will and with some code, a whole culture and community of new music writers who, to talk to him about it he talks about how they were frustrated because they were sick of getting their pitches rejected at places.
And so Mano started No Bells and recruited a bunch of his friends and their friends to write for this site and I was just really blown away by the work itself and also meeting him and talking to him about what his vision for Pitchfork would be.
“By the time I was editor-in-chief of GQ, ‘regular guys’ were no longer reading fashion magazines.”
Rachel Baker: God, it sounds a lot like Pitchfork.
Will Welch: It is an awful lot like Pitchfork.
Rachel Baker: It sounds a lot like the beginning of Pitchfork. I’ll just push back a little. I think also the reason people on Twitter were freaking out is because a lot of their favorite critics were losing their jobs. It sounds like you had a different plan for that, but I just don’t want to move on to the next thing without saying that’s also why people, understandably, were so upset.
Will Welch: Yeah. And all of us who work in media are exhausted from the constant wash and tumble of budget cuts and layoffs and our colleagues losing their jobs and great beloved outlets closing. The people who follow this stuff closely are understandably assuming the worst anytime an announcement is made. It was definitely a case of that, but no, you’re right. There were serious cuts.
Maggie Bullock: Well, not to pile on…
Will Welch: Oh, this is an honest conversation. It’s all good.
Maggie Bullock: … One thing that struck me—I remember several of the editorials I read about it that were intriguing to me because of what we do. And one thing that people seem to be pissed off about is that Pitchfork was being shoved under a men’s vertical, right? And the idea that the move implied that there was something “gendered” about music fandom. I just thought that was an interesting argument. What do you have to say about that one?
Will Welch: Just that it’s not actually what’s happened other than me being a man. So it is true. No, seriously, it is very relevant in that regard. But Pitchfork is not a wing of the GQ men’s media empire. Pitchfork stands alone.
But, yeah, I understood where a lot of that tension came from as well, because if you turn on Sirius XMU. It’s girl-led bands or entirely girl bands song after song. All the biggest pop stars in the world, including the one on the cover of GQ this morning, are women. And so I understand. But again, it was based on a misunderstanding.
Rachel Baker: Yeah. Well, thank you for talking about it.
Will Welch: In moments like that, I just feel like I can have a meltdown and try to tell everyone on the internet what to really think. Or you can say, “Wow, this isn’t going in a great direction. But we’re going to take it on the chin and then we’re going to earn everybody’s trust back.”
I was just beginning to take on this new aspect of my role right then and just be like, “Okay, we’re going to be patient and we’re going to win people over by getting this right,” because look how much everybody cares about Pitchfork. People really care about Pitchfork and we can earn their trust back. And sometimes when that ball starts rolling downhill, you just gotta let it be.
Rachel Baker: You’re a chill guy. You’re unbelievable. No wonder the celebrities like you so much.
Will Welch: I don’t know. I guess I probably have an interior intensity and an exterior chill or something like that. I don’t feel chill, but it always feels like a compliment when it comes my way. So thank you.
Rachel Baker: Yeah. We have no chill. So it’s a big compliment coming from us.
Maggie Bullock: Rachel, speak for yourself. I am. But anyway, we were talking about gender, I think, and—
Rachel Baker: —Gender! We love to talk about gender.
Maggie Bullock: We make this newsletter about women’s magazines. And so it’s pretty clear where we are.
Rachel Baker: It’s called The Spread. You can find us on Substack.
Will Welch: Such a good name, guys.
Rachel Baker: Thanks, Will. It means a lot coming from you.
Will Welch: No, you killed it with the name.
Maggie Bullock: It's just because we like things like peanut butter and hummus. We love women’s media and we wear it on our sleeves. But we like to ask our guests about whether women’s media is still relevant, whether it still has a future. One of those guests was your mentee, Willa Bennett. Congrats! Mazel tov, Willa!
Will Welch: Shout out to Willa. Shout out!
Maggie Bullock: The new, yes, editor-in-chief of Cosmo.
Rachel Baker: And Seventeen!
Will Welch: And Seventeen. Yeah.
Maggie Bullock: And Seventeen?
Rachel Baker: Speaking of portfolios … she’s certainly got one.
Maggie Bullock: You guys could compare portfolios. She’s very young. She told us she thinks of magazines in general as being post-gender. She’s not shopping for a men’s magazine or a women’s magazine. She’s just shopping for a good magazine. I don’t know if we personally can get there, but we never get to talk to people on the dude side of the aisle about these questions. So that’s like all a big, long wind up, but gendered media—should we be past that? Do men still need a safe place to talk about ingrown hairs? Where do you stand on this?
Will Welch: It’s a little bit convoluted to express, but it feels like it’s pretty easy to do in terms of assigning and publishing stories, which is that we don’t wake up in the morning and come to work at “the men’s magazine GQ.” We just come to work and make GQ. And as I said earlier, we’ve been carefully honing the point of view and trying to be really rigorous about this is what we’re up to. We’re going to let go of all these other things.
And to me, some of the raw material of that, like men’s clothes—do we work with women’s clothes? Yes. We dress Beyoncé in women’s clothes. We dress men in women’s clothes. Sometimes there’s a bunch of clothes that it’s easier not to gender at all. But essentially one of the raw materials of GQ is a bunch of men’s fashion and you dress somebody in it.
We dress women in men’s fashion all the time. But to me, like, where we are in terms of the relationship with the reader is not like, “Why would I look at that picture? I’m a woman and that’s a man wearing men’s clothes. How could it ever make me feel anything or be interesting to me?” That's just absurd in this day and age where even the average person on Instagram is an extremely sophisticated consumer of media and a digester of fashion images. And even if they aren’t passionate about it, you can still enjoy it. Album covers are fashion images like 80 percent of the time now.
So I think there are people that just relate to the GQ point of view and Willa did a great job at GQ of really riding hard for what young people respond to and what they want to see. And so little of the conversation was like, “Here’s how we’re going to talk to men versus here’s how we’re going to talk to women.”
It was just like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this project, or reported this feature, or worked with this talent and surprised their audience and ours by presenting them in this way? So, we’re not throwing out gender in any way. I think GQ is still a men’s magazine in some regard, but what we’re actually doing when we’re just making it all day, every day, is thinking about telling compelling stories that feel like they’re very specific to our point of view.
Another way to think about it would be, like, a GQ way of doing a story could bear more resemblance to a Vogue or a Highsnobiety way than it would an Esquire way. Even though traditionally, it’s thought of that GQ and Esquire are going to be the most similar to each other because those are the two major men’s magazines.
So in a way the gendered element is no longer the thing that is driving people to engage. It’s less a part of the conversation. I said it was convoluted. How was that? How did I do?
Maggie Bullock: Oh, I thought you did great, Will. Aces. But I had this theory, Rachel’s not quite sold on it, that when we were talking, when we were prepping for this, we were talking about the current—do you see how she’s ... ? Listener, she’s cocking her head to the side.
Rachel Baker: I think I might agree, present your theory and I’ll weigh in.
Maggie Bullock: It feels like the editorial balance of GQ and where the money goes—when you look at GQ, we’re editors, we can see where the money goes to make things, right? It feels like it’s now operating in a more traditional women’s magazines economics. Like the length of the stories, and the depth of the stories, and the focus on fashion—and that’s not a critique. It’s just that’s the world that we come from.
Will Welch: Maggie, the modern GQ reader reads like a lady. I’m serving her.
Rachel Baker: You and I both were the same age when we were coming up, and it was like GQ had the long stories that they would send people to the Arctic to write and you had to go to GQ. The women’s magazines wouldn’t give it the space or the investment because they were first-and-foremost fashion magazines. So it’s just interesting to say, the quality of the writing and reporting and celebrity coverage, everything is great. It’s just interesting to see GQ, feel like it’s a capital-F fashion magazine, like the women’s magazines have been.
Maggie Bullock: Thank you, Rachel. I think that your readers really love cats too. That’s what I’ve heard.
Rachel Baker: We have one last question. This has been a blast especially because, often on this podcast, we are hearing from people who are talking about, like, the wildest expenditures during the Town Car Era of magazines in the 1990s. And so this has been really fun because you’re … thoroughly modern Willie, if I may.
Will Welch: You may at this point.
Rachel Baker: So thinking about how your predecessor had a bathroom in his office and a driver. And according to the very nice Style section piece on you in The New York Times a couple years ago, you don’t even have a window in your office.
Maggie Bullock: No window?
Rachel Baker: Different, the times. So here you are with us as this beacon of optimism about media—present and future. What is up with that, Will? How did you become like this?
Maggie Bullock: Where do you get this optimism?
Rachel Baker: It’s a little contagious. I’m getting a little.
Will Welch: I’m glad you’re getting a little. Okay. Here’s what it comes down to for me. It comes down to creative freedom. I have total creative freedom at GQ. Myself and my team, we do whatever we want. We publish whatever we want. We do not have the budgets that I enjoyed when I was working under Jim Nelson and that the media at large once had. They’re no longer there. I don’t have a bathroom in my office. I walk around the hallway and I pee next to my colleagues. It’s, by the way, totally fine. Sometimes we get work done while we wash our hands.
But what we have is total creative freedom to do our thing, get out our ideas. And I’ve had some pretty wild ideas during my time as the editor of GQ, and I have been able to figure out—through smart accounting, thank you, director of operations, Sarah Schmidt—and other tricks of the trade, I have figured out how to do all of those things. We made it rain Pharrells over Paris. We went to the South of France and got Monsieurs Pitt and Clooney to get into the pool. I have been to Africa with my co-conspirator, Mabalaji Dawoodu, GQ style and GQ’s fashion director, many times to shoot street style images.
If we can dream it, we can go do it. I’m trying to find something about that element to be pessimistic about. We’ve already talked about, layoffs, budget cuts, beloved titles entirely closing. I have been through many rounds of all that stuff, not the titles closing part, but the budget cuts, the layoffs. It’s fucking awful and it’s hellish.
Otherwise, in terms of the editorial storytelling, the people in my role, maybe they used to have a bathroom in the office, but they didn’t get to do whatever they could think of. There used to be A/B testing on covers: “Is the audience going to this picture of the smiling white guy, or are they going to that picture of the smiling white guy?”
Maggie Bullock: So you don’t do that anymore?
Will Welch: Hell no!
Rachel Baker: We loved that.
Will Welch: No. We don’t do that anymore.
Maggie Bullock: Wait, somebody isn’t doing coverline testing right now?
Will Welch: Come on Maggie! Don’t troll me this late in the pod. Absolutely not.
Rachel Baker: Will, thank you so much for being such a great sport. This was really fun.
Maggie Bullock: This was really fun.
Will Welch: You guys are hilarious and awesome. Let’s do it again sometime.
Maggie Bullock: Yes. We’re just a bunch of Southerners with blonde highlights sitting around chatting.
Will Welch: Just us girls.
Rachel Baker: Just us girls. All right. Thanks, y’all.
Maggie Bullock: Thanks.
Will Welch: I’ve got to go get my nails done. Bye!
Welch with his wife, Heidi Smith.
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