Don’t Tell Me That Young People Can’t Fix Fashion

On Monday, the abrupt announcement of beloved editor Robbie Myers’s departure from Elle magazine shook up a New York Fashion Week season that was already on unsure footing. From the start, there was much ado about Fashion Week being “over” as we know it, as well as thick, glossy magazines being “irrelevant,” with the next generation interested only in easily digestible, digital content. So, the news of Myers’s exit compounded with Graydon Carter leaving Vanity Fair and rumors of Glenda Bailey leaving Harper’s Bazaar had many crying “End of days!” And then on Thursday morning, the day after New York Fashion Week ended, the Times broke that Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive was stepping down, too. This wasn’t the end; it was a “changing of the guard,” and the future looked bleak. As the Cut fashion critic Cathy Horyn pointed out in her decidedly optimistic essay prior to Fashion Week: “Someone in New York is always complaining about fashion.” But this season felt particularly upsetting because people weren’t just flippant; some of them were scared for their future. What was going to happen to a business that those like Myers, Carter, and Leive spent decades building? How could it possibly continue, with no one left with any “real” experience to lead it? Was the figure of the “magazine editor” dead, too? And what would it look like then if Instagram influencers ruled the world? Read more at The Cut.