After a speech about this person’s qualifications, he introduced his son.
It is, as I’d soon learn, very common for privately owned media companies to be family businesses. And in a way, in theory, working for a family business is a lot more secure than working for a corporation: they have a personal interest in your success. I was also deeply relieved that our CEO was leaving. Even though he and I had somewhat worked out our conflict, I knew he’d never fully take me seriously as a professional adult, and I craved a fresh start with someone who might have more respect for what I was capable of.
In my first meeting with my new boss, I asked if I could take the word “global” out of my title, and he had no idea what I was talking about. And as it turned out, “global editor in chief” had never been officially entered into any sort of HR system anyway, so the title truly was a joke—no one higher up knew about it. I became the editor in chief, period, no qualifier.
Because of the context of my promotion, though, there was no announcement to the press. There wasn’t even an internal memo; at our first company-wide meeting post-layoffs, the new organizational chart was presented, and there I was, quietly at the top. It did not feel like a victory.
Several days later, in an Uber to a fashion show, a colleague said to me, “You know, in the made-for-TV movie about Nylon, you’re not the good guy.”
She was the only print editor who hadn’t been let go, because she was part-time anyway and also had been there since basically the beginning. I was complaining to her about how stressful it had been to go through so many rounds of layoffs over the years, and she cut me off.
She continued, “You’re the young digital person who took the older print woman’s job.” She was laughing, but it wasn’t entirely a joke. And it confirmed my worst fear: that everyone hated me, that I stood for change and not in a good way, and that people would somehow blame me for a beloved magazine’s demise. I felt like a cockroach in the apocalypse, outlasting everyone, but not because of merit.
In reality, I had literally no idea it was going to happen. Our former CEO had actually made a point of fighting for print to continue, which was questionable in a time when digital was growing and print wasn’t, but either way he had given no indication to me that the magazine was selling poorly enough to warrant a closure.
As the EIC, the only EIC, the weight of my role was finally apparent from my title, and I could become the face; my values could be the company values. I needed a real raise, for my own morale, and because being the face of the brand is literally more expensive than just being an editor—in so many ways I was required to look the part, and that was eating up my paychecks faster than I could have imagined.
Our new CEO was exactly the same age as me, so I trusted that my age wouldn’t be a factor in the conversation. And honestly it wasn’t; when I told him about what had happened between his predecessor and me, he agreed to give me a 12 percent raise, which was less than I’d asked for but more than nothing. I was relieved. It was enough to make a difference in my quality of life, and ultimately it felt really good to not be treated like asking for money meant I was entitled or ungrateful.
In October, the last issue of Nylon print came out and featured musician Annie Clark, a thin white woman. As I scrambled to figure out what to keep from the magazine’s heritage and what to leave in the past, one thing was certain: there needed to be a major ideological shift in the way content was created.
Now that I was in charge, I could take a step back and look at the big picture of the brand and what it meant in the context of what was happening politically and culturally in the US. I had realized over the past few years that almost every women’s lifestyle publication was chasing some idea of coolness, but the people who I considered the coolest—the artists, the activists, the DIY musicians—weren’t reading them. Despite that, coolness had always been core to the brand’s DNA, and now it was up to me to define it for our audience. The more I thought about it, though, the more meaningless the word became. Who the fuck was I to determine coolness? And what was the relevance of the brand if it was attaching the idea of coolness to one specific body and background, and leaving everyone else out? I did not want to limit the scope to people like me; I did not think that my own identity was the pinnacle of coolness. It was something more abstract than that, and it needed to be liberated from class, race, and gender. Because in limiting taste to something that only privileged people could claim, it seemed to me that fashion media had actually made itself nearly irrelevant.
It was a major disconnect, and it wasn’t hard to figure out the source. Rather than focusing on diversifying audiences, from a marketing perspective, the brand had been attempting to define the reader as a singular “girl,” and conversations around strategy always centered on trying to describe who she was. Who is the reader? we were asked, again and again. Who should she be?
As a more junior editor, when I protested the validity of the question, I was told that it was standard marketing lingo and not to read too deep into it. But it seemed to me that when the people asking that question are relatively old-school, and they’ve been creating media for a specific kind of white/thin/straight/rich aspiration, the answer becomes a symbol of their own biases, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their reader was like them. And many of them don’t even realize it’s happening, because under patriarchy whiteness is read as a neutral identity, as is heterosexuality and skinniness, and so people were getting away with saying that their reader was this one girl, as though that opened them up to a lot of different possibilities instead of limiting them.
When you can describe your reader as one person and say exactly what she likes and where she spends her money, it’s easier to pitch advertisers. But it’s not easy to grow an audience that way—not to mention it’s literally the definition of institutionalized racism, homophobia, and fatphobia. And I heard so many stories from not that long ago about editors in chief across the industry who would frequently say that someone was not “on-brand” if they didn’t fit that mold. The language of “on-brand” or “off-brand” became an excuse to uphold oppressive values.
So when I was promoted to editor in chief and it was up to me to ask who the reader was, I decided the problem wasn’t finding an answer but the question itself.
After all, I had seen firsthand online how diverse our readership truly was, and upon my promotion and raise I was being told I had to triple traffic within the next year, and I knew limiting the audience to one kind of person would never get us there.
I also quickly realized that the covers—however problematic they had been over the years—were iconic enough that we needed to keep doing them in order to keep the readers happy and engaged. Of the other magazines that had ceased print, not many of them were doing digital covers yet, so the plan was a bit of a gamble. There was no road map. But maybe, just maybe, I didn’t want one anyway. The more I pored over previous editorial strategies, the more I realized that there was a problem so enmeshed in the brand’s DNA that fixing it would require a top-to-bottom overhaul, starting with that age-old question of who the reader was.
I changed it from “Who is she?” to “Who are they?”—a simple word switch with massive implications: it was a readership, not a reader. And that readership needed to be racially diverse AF, with the whole rainbow of sex and gender identities, with all kinds of bodies and from all types of places. What should unite them is not their demographic profile but their values, which the content could reflect back to them. As for what those values were? Well, they were mine: I wanted to create media that was actively anti-racist, progressively feminist, queer encompassing, interested in sustainability, and aesthetically oriented but only in a way that fit the previous ideas. This opened up a whole new world of emerging culture to cover, united by an underlying progressive vibe while being wildly different in scope.
“They” also represented a gender-neutral future. I killed the men’s magazine, Nylon Guys, with the goal of transcending gende
r entirely. There would be no ideal Nylon reader. Nylon would be a community, a web of communities, a lifestyle.
The topics that had performed the best online—politics, wellness, and sex—became core to the new digital strategy, with a brand-new vertical called Life to encompass the stuff our readers cared about the most.
I wanted the people creating the content to be diverse, too, from the editors and writers to the crews on set. That, I felt, was the ultimate way to revolutionize media: from the inside. All-female crews are a given, and within that, I tried to hire as many women of color as possible—especially if the person they were photographing wasn’t white. The 2019 February cover star, Aja Naomi King, looked into the camera with tears in her eyes and said that it was the first time she’d been on set where the photographer and the stylist/glam team were black women; she put her hands together and said, “Thank you, Nylon.” Similarly when the cover stars were queer, I tried to create LGBTQ crews, which fostered a sense of community like nothing else. This was the most important part of my job to me, and it’s what made the long hours and endlessly fast pace worth it.
All in all, I was able to triple my salary in five years—from when I was hired as an assistant at Refinery to when I became EIC of Nylon. Sometimes I wondered if it was worth it, if maybe I should have left Nylon before even becoming the digital director and gone to a place where I had more people to learn from, so that I could have slowly climbed a corporate ladder instead of being catapulted to the top of it simply because no one around me knew how to internet better than I did. But at the same time I felt confident in my skills as an editor in chief, and I had nothing but pride for what my team created every day. I don’t think there’s anything I could have absorbed slowly that would replace what I was able to teach myself and what I learned from hands-on experience. Because I hadn’t had formal training, I didn’t hesitate to radically change the brand from the inside out.
Something I struggled with a lot was the fact that my six-figure salary was a huge amount of money for my age, and more importantly in the context of middle-class America, but for the average salary of my title and the work I was doing, I was still being underpaid. I was plagued with guilt for wanting more and then also beating myself up for being so spoiled. Surely I should have just been grateful to get a regular paycheck at all in media. My older friends yelled at me when I’d say that out loud. I’m still not sure where the line is.
While I was EIC, an intern came to me for career advice. She was a women’s studies major and had heard that I had been, too, and she couldn’t get over the fact that I’d studied something so traditionally “useless” and managed to have a career. She also said that she had heard I was “self-made.” I honestly had no idea what she meant.
She explained, “That you got this job so young with no one helping you.”
I still didn’t get it. Who would help me?
She clarified further, “That, like, you’re not related to anyone.”
I had to hold in a laugh. The thought of a relative helping me in my career was so far-fetched that it didn’t even occur to me that people might think otherwise. I had forgotten how many media people who get ahead young are able to do so because a family member puts in a good word with someone close to them. My parents, who both work in healthcare, set me up for success in a lot of ways: they taught me the value of education, of being kind and a good person, of working hard, of taking care of the people you love. They love me a lot and are always there for me. No one in my family, though, connected me to anyone in media for jobs when I was starting out—not because they didn’t want to, but simply because we’re not a media family. I entered this industry not knowing a single person.
After that interaction, I had a new sense of pride. Sure, a lot of my promotions were purely because I was in the right place at the right time, but every win felt squarely like my own.
After I spent a year as editor in chief, I started generating press. Finally there was a story to tell, and it was a success story. I had reinvented the brand, somewhat of a risk for a fashion magazine, and as a result we were surviving in a time when our competitors were folding. My age was included in almost every headline, if not the first sentence, but it wasn’t written in a condescending way anywhere; if anything, there was a sense of admiration and respect. One journalist, for NewNowNext, wrote the following:
These days, Nylon is going a lot deeper than just young women’s fashion, beauty, and glittery pop culture. In fact, a sampling of its latest content includes stories on queer Brazilian films, an upbeat ruling for transgender students in Oregon, and Planned Parenthood’s plan to open more locations in the South.
Under the guidance of 29-year-old Gabrielle Korn, an out lesbian who lives in Brooklyn with her musician girlfriend, Nylon has become one of the most politically-aware, racially diverse, LGBTQ-inclusive, and feminist-forward digital magazines out there since Korn was appointed editor-in-chief in September 2017 (the same time the outlet’s print edition folded).
My age had become a detail that made my story more compelling, not more suspicious. I was a little young for the job but was succeeding anyway.
My absolute least favorite part of being the boss was having to say no to young women who weren’t satisfied with their salaries. It was so weird to be on the other end of a money conversation. When I hired people, I made sure to get them the best possible offer I could, but at the end of the day I didn’t really control what the budget was. Having insight into budgets and perspective about age and ability gave me a newfound empathy for the people who had to tell me I couldn’t have more money. It must have been terrible to tell twenty-four-year-old me that I could only have a thousand more dollars on top of my $40K. I made a point to never, ever bring up someone’s age in a conversation about their salary, but sometimes it was hard not to. No matter how great you are, there is no amount of talent that can be a stand-in for years of experience, and that’s something you can’t understand until you’re on the other side of it.
I’ve been told from insiders that in the not-so-distant heyday of women’s magazines, EICs were paid not just double but probably triple what I made. I can’t really imagine getting that kind of money to do a job that is ultimately so fun. I hope they knew how lucky they were.
I’ve also learned that culturally there’s no “right” way to be an ambitious woman. We don’t have a lot of models for young female leadership, and many people’s first instinct is to be suspicious of that kind of drive. I’ve never heard about any of my male coworkers being called entitled when asking for more money. I think if anything it probably gains them respect.
I eventually mastered little tricks to make myself appear older: wide-legged pants and heels, glasses, a cool-toned platinum bob, face makeup, square red nails, consciously removing “um” from my vocabulary, etc. Gradually, though, that aesthetic became less a role I was playing and more of a reflection of who I truly was. There was no longer a need to try to trick people into thinking I was qualified for my job—I knew that I was.
Once my twenties were over, I got asked, “Aren’t you a little young?” less and less. Instead, my staff, especially the ones just out of college, teased me for not knowing who certain celebrities were or for not knowing how to use the latest Instagram feature. It was interesting to have gone from “too young to be taken seriously” to “too old to be cool” so quickly. Just like there’s no right way to have ambition when you’re a woman, there’s no right age to be; you’re either too young or too old with nothing in between. And I was quietly a little bit thrilled to finally be considered too old for certain things; it was a nice excuse to go to bed early and not follow pop culture so closely. Toward the end of my time at Nylon, when I’d take the occasional phone call from a recruiter, and they’d ask me how much money I’d need to be offered to leave my job, I’d tell them the highest number I could say without laughing, and they took me seriously. And being taken seriously was priceless.
4 Low-Rise
> I started high school in 2003. George W. Bush was president, and it was the year the war in Iraq began; meanwhile, late-term abortion was banned, and gay marriage remained illegal. The government was pushing for abstinence-only education in public schools. Nylon had existed for four years, and Lil’ Kim was the only black woman with a cover. The Simple Life starring Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie premiered. White indie crossed over into the mainstream, with hits like “Such Great Heights” by the Postal Service, “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and “12:51” by The Strokes. Late-night infomercials promoted Girls Gone Wild. The earnestness and PC culture of the ’90s was replaced with hipster irony.
It was also around the time that low-rise jeans became not just trendy but ubiquitous. My favorite pair was from Delia’s: stretchy, faded blue/gray denim, with zipper pockets and slightly flared ankles that dragged on the floor so much that the hem was frayed and mud stained. They buttoned just above my pubic line and—as was the style at the time—my colorful Victoria’s Secret thong was pretty much always whale-tailing out the back.
As a Jewish teenager on Long Island in the early aughts, you had two major style camps to fall into. You could be Jappy (Jewish American Princessy) and indicate that with rolled-down yoga pants (Solo or Hard Tail) or Juicy Couture velour sets and engraved Tiffany jewelry—the precursor to a style that today would be called “basic”—or you could be emo, illustrated with a band T-shirt layered over a long-sleeve shirt, under a black hoodie, with Converse or Saucony sneakers. I was a fifty-fifty hybrid, with a black studded belt barely holding my skinny jeans above my butt crack, bat mitzvah jewelry layered over a Saves The Day shirt, or a Free People dress with combat boots. I wore Hot by Ralph Lauren, a fragrance that came in a vibrant purple bottle and smelled like vanilla and fig on a sweaty summer day. I used Benefit’s BADgal black eyeliner to fill in my lower waterline (no mascara). My hair was parted down the middle and hung to my waist; I used a CHI flat iron to kill any life it might have had. The next year I’d cut it all off into a spiky pixie and then streak it with purple.
Everybody (Else) Is Perfect Page 6
