RIP, Teen Vogue

 

By Stacy Lee Kong

 
 

Image: Teen Vogue

 

I don’t know exactly when I became a fan of the then-new Teen Vogue, but I’m willing to bet it was in or around July 2015, when the magazine dropped its August issue with a cover featuring three up-and-coming Black models. In a piece by then-beauty editor Elaine Welteroth, the magazine positioned Imaan Hammam, Aya Jones and Lineisy Montero as the new faces of the fashion industry. What struck me wasn’t the accolades, really—magazine editors are forever making predictions like this, and we aren’t always as prescient as we’d like to be (though in this case, all three did go on to build successful careers, Hammam especially). It was more the gutsiness. 

I know it’s basically a cliché to say at this point, but 2015 really was a different time. I was then two years into an almost three-year stint at a home décor magazine where we almost never managed to feature people of colour—unless it was the small spaces issue, the one time a year that we showed apartments, condos and anyone other than ultra-wealthy white people. And no, the young women of colour who worked there at the time didn’t think that was a coincidence, either. But it wasn’t just that publication. Only a few years before, a white magazine editor had told me, straight-faced, that Black women just don’t sell magazines, which was why the ‘right’ cover for a special project we were working on had to be the one featuring a white woman. No one else in that boardroom batted an eye, or seemed to think there was anything wrong with saying that to a young, racialized woman, though I’m clearly still angry about it more than a decade later. And those are just two of the countless microaggressions and indignities my peers and I experienced throughout our careers! So to see a magazine put three unknown Black women on the cover felt big, and important.

It turns out, that was just the first of many boundaries Teen Vogue would break. The following year, Welteroth was named editor-in-chief of the print magazine, making her the company’s second Black EIC, and the youngest person to hold that title at a Condé Nast publication up to that point. (One of her successors, Lindsay Peoples, became the youngest EIC when she was hired in 2018 at the age of 28.) Weirdly, the company didn’t actually give Welteroth EIC-level power; she was required to share leadership duties with digital director Philip Picardi and creative director Marie Suter, which… of course. Regardless, she is widely credited with developing the blueprint for Teen Vogue’s evolution, and for reimagining what journalism for young people could look like. The magazine’s breakout moment was Lauren Duca’s viral op-ed, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” which went live on December 10, 2016 and sparked many surprised tweets about a teen mag covering politics, and doing it well. But actually, Teen Vogue had been serving a growing readership of politically-minded young women for years at that point, and it only continued to double down on politics and social issues under subsequent leaders, including its most recent editor-in-chief, Versha Sharma. The magazine consistently hired diversely, invested in topics that often go overlooked, including disability rights, and earned its spot as a reliable destination for storytelling that was at once smart, entertaining, informative, political and fun. It was not only a successful editorial strategy, it was an uplifting one. When I started what was supposed to be a three-month stint at Flare magazine in 2017, Teen Vogue was the publication I looked to the most for inspiration, encouragement and validation. And when I left two years later and began conceptualizing Friday Things, that didn’t change. (I was very excited I got to tell Welteroth that when I interviewed her for The Globe and Mail just a few months before launching FT.)

So, it was a little devastating when news broke earlier this week that Condé Nast would be folding Teen Vogue into the wider umbrella of Vogue.com. According to the company, it’s “a transition that’s part of a broader push to expand the Vogue ecosystem. The title will remain a distinct editorial property, with its own identity and mission; sitting under the Vogue umbrella will provide a more unified reader experience across titles.” Which… sure. We all know what’s actually going to happen, though—after a period of time that could range from a few months to a few years, Teen Vogue will likely just fade away. And in the meantime, everything that makes the brand special will be neutered, especially since the company has already laid off many of the staffers that make the magazine what it is: features director Brittney Mcnamara, news and politics editor Lex McMenamin, culture editor Kaitlyn McNab, style editor Aiyana Ishmael, design director Emily Zirimis, associate visuals editor Bea Oyster and editorial assistant Skyli Alvarez. Sharma will also be leaving the company in a few weeks, per the statement she posted on Instagram. According to Condé United, a bargaining unit of the NewsGuild of New York, most of the laid off staffers “are BIPOC women or trans, including Teen Vogue's politics editor… Nearly all of these staffers identify as LGBTQ. As of today, only one woman of color remains on the editorial staff at Teen Vogue.” (And if that one staffer is Sharma, very soon there will be no women of colour working at the magazine.)

Teen Vogue’s demise is terrible for girls, women, journalism, the world, etc.

There have already been so many emotional tributes to Teen Vogue, especially for the work it did to inform, reflect, uplift and protect tweens and teens. As almost everyone has pointed out, the magazine has been an oasis of rigorous journalism, important analysis and critique and—just as importantly—safety for young, vulnerable readers who are navigating an increasingly scary world. Author Bolu Bablola put it pretty perfectly the day the news broke: “Teen Vogue being absorbed and losing vital journalists just as ED signifiers and dialogue enters the mainstream, regressive views on body image are insidiously becoming fashionable again, fascism being back, women's rights being rolled back, yeah this feels bleak.” 

But there’s this other angle that I want to think about, and that’s Condé Nast’s assertion that the magazine will remain a “dedicated pillar” on Vogue.com that focuses on “career development, cultural leadership and other issues that matter most to young people.” That… is a wild interpretation of what the youth are most interested in. Everyone knows they do not dream of labour. Like, literally. Young people (and young-ish people, because apparently we’re still doing economic hand-wringing over millennials, who are in their 30s and 40s) obviously have career ambitions, but that’s not the most important part of their professional lives, per a March 2025 report from Deloitte. “Gen Zs and millennials prioritize career progression, yet many are not motivated by reaching leadership positions,” the report says. “They’re focused on work/life balance and learning and development. Making money is important to them but so is finding meaningful work and well-being. They are looking for careers with the right balance of these factors, a ‘trifecta’ that can be hard to find.” 

What’s more, while the world of work is something I’m willing to bet Teen Vogue’s audience does care about, career advice is not the primary reason the mag’s current readership follows, likes or reads it. In fact, Sharma gave a keynote speech earlier this year where she pointed to “coverage of issues that affect young people, such as attacks on trans students, threats to queer youth, and campus protests, [as] one of the main reasons why Gen Z readers trust [the magazine].”

Now, why would a media company alienate a brand’s dedicated, engaged audience? I’ve been a journalist too long to buy into conspiratorial thinking, so I don’t necessarily believe that the lifestyle media overlords are plotting to trick the girlies into consuming content that’s intended to undermine their collective power. Instead—because I’ve also been a racialized woman working in media for a long time and know you don’t need to look for conspiracies when garden-variety oppression will do—I’m going to put forward another theory: Condé is trying to contort Teen Vogue’s content to fit into an older, whiter, more milquetoast take on feminism. In other words, they’re trying to bring back the #girlboss. But that’s because the company is run by a cohort of wealthy, mostly white people who are invested in upholding society’s existing power structures, and that requires younger generations to buy into a similarly individualistic, and ultimately capitalistic, worldview. I know this framing basically gets us to the same place, but I do think the distinction matters. It’s not a mysterious plot. It’s that oppressive systems are actually just people, making decisions that benefit them, to the detriment of the rest of us. (As a fellow editor reminded me this week.)

Condé Nast’s decision to fold Teen Vogue into Vogue.com is also part of a wider move away from diversity and inclusion in media  

And I think that assessment holds when you zoom out to look at the wider media landscape. This isn’t the first time the company has merged two outlets; in 2024, it announced it was folding Pitchfork into GQ, though the brands continue to operate as standalone publications. Teen Vogue isn’t even the only media outlet focused on covering racialized, queer, disabled and other marginalized people to be hit with layoffs in recent weeks. Last month, Penske Media Group announced it would be merging Rolling Stone and Vibe magazines, a move that is ostensibly about “enabl[ing] Rolling Stone to level up the publication's hip-hop and R&B coverage, allowing [it] to dive deeper into the culture,” but is actually likely to be yet another example of elite capture, per music publication Shatter the Standards.

“Several women journalists of color were laid off [due to this consolidation]. The merger narrative thus combined the language of investment and growth with actual workforce precarity,” the piece argued. “[And] because the same corporate parent, Penske Media, controls both magazines, the merger effectively concentrates control of mainstream rock and hip‑hop coverage under a single executive structure. [Olúfẹ́mi O.] Táíwò’s description of elite capture precisely illuminates this dynamic: elites ‘steer the resources and political direction of organizations or movements… toward their narrower interests and aims.’ In this case, a private media conglomerate repackages Black cultural capital within the infrastructure of a general‑interest entertainment brand. The radical potential of Vibe as a platform for Black writers and artists is constrained by the commercial imperatives of Rolling Stone and Penske Media.”

Similarly, NBC recently dismantled the teams behind NBC Asian America, NBC BLK, NBC Latino and NBC Out. As The Wrap noted at the time, “[these] layoffs also reflect the media industry’s larger retreat from efforts focused on diversity, equity and inclusion. Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, removed mentions of diversity from its website in April and said it would stop publishing demographic data on its website. Disney also rebranded its internal DEI efforts last week to ‘Opportunity & Inclusion,’ according to Puck.” 

Makes sense—the same decision-makers and power-brokers who would prefer young women focus on their own personal success over any sort of collective empowerment are also threatened by media outlets that encourage young people to think about necropolitics, Palestine, meaningful political action, immigration activism, and so on. Community, collective liberation and the desire to remake society in a model that actually uplifts everyone just isn’t very good for the corporate bottom line, you know?

Of course, just because people are making these decisions doesn’t mean there aren’t wider trends at play; rising conservatism absolutely incentivizes corporations to lean into systematic oppression. The previous decade or so was a period of rapid, widespread social change, which meant companies saw investing in minorities and positioning their brands around progressive values as valuable, both on the social capital and profitability fronts. But now, in lockstep with the rise in conservatism, they're more interested in the savings that come with institutional disenfranchisement, and are perhaps just less inclined to care about people not like themselves. This is also widespread—I’ve definitely been subject to someone else’s changing whims around values-based journalism at several points in my career. Meanwhile, over at Condé, they’re literally firing people who question them about the decision to fold Teen Vogue into Vogue.com. Like, literally: on Wednesday, more than a dozen employees confronted head of HR Stan Duncan at his office. Not only were they rebuffed, four people—Alma Avalle, writer and digital producer at Bon Appétit, as well as NewsGuild of New York VP, trans activist and union leader; Jake Lahut, Wired senior reporter covering the Trump White House; Jasper Lo, senior fact checker at the New Yorker, as well as a U.S. Army veteran and outgoing first vice chair of the New Yorker Union; and Ben Dewey, videographer at Condé Nast Entertainment and former vice chair of the CNE unit—were actually let go on the grounds of “extreme misconduct.”

Rage aside, this is all just very sad. As Khira Hickbottom pointed out in a 2022 issue of Tulane University’s Women Leading Change: Case Studies in Women, Gender, and Feminism, when Anna Wintour appointed Welteroth and her fellow leaders in 2016, it “was more than an administrative shift—it would mark whether or not Teen Vogue was moving into the progressive world of youth politics or staying grounded in their tried-and-true stereotypical white, affluent, teen girl message surrounding boys and beauty. [Welteroth, Picardi and Suter] charged forth with a modern message surrounding identity politics, sex positivity, and youth advocacy.” Not even a decade later, it’s clear that Condé, and most other large media companies, see this detour into progressive, inclusive, diverse and community-focused journalism as a failed experiment and, worse, a business liability. To them, it doesn’t matter that Teen Vogue’s run helped push other outlets to serve their readers in similar ways, or coincided with the most affirming, important era of my and many of my peers’ careers. But to me, those are the actual marks of a successful publication. So, seeing Teen Vogue get absorbed into the Vogue mothership feels like an unfair, legitimately tragic end.

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MediaStacy Lee KongTeen Vogue, Elaine Welteroth, Lindsay Peoples, Versha Sharma