Sure cultural staples have outlined girlhood for many years, and for therefore many people, Teen Vogue was considered one of them. It was the shiny information that helped younger girls navigate the messy evolution from preteen curiosity to early maturity confidence. Now, generations of readers are mourning the top of a exceptional period in media.
Yesterday, Condé Nast introduced that “Teen Vogue” will probably be merging into Vogue.com, leading to mass layoffs, sending gifted Black editors like Aiyana Ishmael, Kaitlyn McNab, and its whole political editorial group again into the greuling job market. For many who grew up clutching its print points, the information looks like a pang of nostalgia. However for readers who watched the journal’s metamorphosis beneath Elaine Welteroth’s management, this loss cuts deeper. It’s the top of a cultural touchstone that proved storytelling might be each youthful and world-shifting.
“Teen Vogue was a once-in-a-generation experiment in what occurs while you hand the mic to younger individuals from numerous backgrounds and take their voices critically,” the previous editor-in-chief wrote in a press release on Instagram. “That period set a brand new commonplace in media and confirmed the ability of trusting younger individuals with actual information and actual tales.”
Welteroth’s journey on the publication dates again to 2012, when she turned its first Black magnificence director. Then, in 2016, Anna Wintour appointed her because the editor-in-chief of “Teen Vogue.” Underneath her management, Teen Vogue developed right into a publication that mentioned not solely movie star gossip and trend developments but additionally broader social points. Threading an intentional needle between trend, tradition, and politics throughout one of the vital polarizing occasions on this nation, Welteroth carved out digital and bodily areas that amplified younger individuals’s voices throughout tradition, trend, politics, and activism.
“Teen Vogue served its viewers with such purity of mission and integrity that it tailored its tone and protection for a reader that wanted a protected enviornment for political discourse,” trend editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson commented beneath Welteroth’s publish. “That type of influence is written [in] ink… attempt as they could to erase it…”
As Welteroth wrote, “Dropping Teen Vogue’s newsroom is greater than a enterprise resolution — it’s a cultural loss at a time once we want dependable journalism greater than ever.” Her phrases hit even tougher when you think about the broader context: mass layoffs at NBC that disproportionately impacted Black journalists, the Vibe and Rolling Stone merger that gutted newsroom range, and an administration actively clawing again range, fairness, and inclusion efforts from almost each sector.
Younger individuals are feeling the burden of those shifts most. From school campuses to newsfeeds, they’re dropping areas that see them and communicate to them. The lack of Teen Vogue isn’t nearly a model disappearing; it’s about dropping an area that noticed younger individuals not as stereotypes, not as developments, however as complicated, good beings. For a lot of, it’s the lack of an important pipeline for tales informed by way of the lens of youth and identification.
“The spirit of that motion is alive in each younger journalist who got here by way of these doorways and in each reader who was impressed by their fearlessness. I’ll all the time be happy with the position Teen Vogue performed in shaping tradition and civic consciousness,” Welteroth concluded.
