Resister-in-chief
Teen Vogue editor Elaine Welteroth takes on the politics of now.
NEW YORK — On Monday evening in the middle of New York Fashion Week, the editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, Elaine Welteroth, isn’t resting between shows. Instead, she’s one of five women participating in a panel discussion about diversity and representation in fashion at the Parsons School of Design at the New School. Her words are hitting home for the students in attendance.
Welteroth, 30, is asked by moderator Kim Jenkins if there’s a moment when she first felt “other” as a biracial woman. The Bay Area native tells a story from her childhood about wanting a hardto-get doll shown on television and how, after much effort, her mother, who is African American, managed to find one. Welteroth remembers “my face just falling” when she opened the box to discover that her mother had bought the dark-skinned doll instead of the white one.
“Looking back, I realize the only reason I felt that way was because the blond, white doll was presented as superior,” Welteroth says. A murmur of empathy and agreement rippled through the crowd, much of it made up of female students of color only a few years younger than Welteroth herself.
Following the panel, Welteroth had aimed to leave quickly to attend the Helmut Lang runway show. But the audience surrounded her.
“I had to be pulled out of that pit of people,” Welteroth says a few days later in her office. “Even as the door was closing, someone shoved a writing sample through for the website.
“It’s the best part of my job when I get to see the impact our work has on the actual people who we’re making it for,” she says. “It happens a lot — girls just come up to me. It’s always an emotionally charged reaction to Teen Vogue and what we’ve become. That tells me there’s just such a thirst for authentic storytelling for this audience. There’s a hunger, there’s a craving for truth.”
In May 2016, Welteroth replaced founding editor Amy Astley at the helm of Teen Vogue. When Welteroth was officially named the magazine’s editor-in-chief in April, she became the youngest to hold the position in publisher Condé Nast’s history, and the second African American in the position at the company.
She quickly started a major transformation of the publication.
The fashion features and interviews with pop culture darlings haven’t gone anywhere, but the overall focus of Teen Vogue (and its hugely popular website under digital editorial director Phil Picardi) has become more outspokenly political, unapologetically feminist and more intellectually ambitious.
The current magazine, which now publishes quarterly, features an interview with 14-year-old “Stranger Things” actress Millie Bobby Brown by former child actress Drew Barrymore that touches on the potential pitfalls of early success; an appreciation piece about drag and vogue dance culture; and a letter from Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson to Jordan Edwards, a 15-year-old African American student fatally shot by police in Texas. Perhaps most emblematic of Teen Vogue’s new mission is Thigh High Politics columnist Lauren Duca’s piece “Fashion Is Political. Period.” It could be the mission statement for the publication under Welteroth’s leadership.
“I wanted it to be the definitive answer to anyone who continues to ask the question ‘Why does Teen Vogue talk about politics, isn’t it a fashion magazine?’ ” Welteroth says of the column back in her office and wearing a “What would Maxine Waters Do?” T-shirt, referencing the Los Angeles congresswoman. “Not only is it meant as the definitive answer on behalf of Teen Vogue, it’s meant to serve as a framework for young girls. They are faced with that question as well, as if you can’t contain multitudes, you can’t be interested in both or be respected for both. I’ve contended with that in my career as a journalist, also having this interest in style and understanding how important it is to connect conversations about identity to fashion and beauty.”
While Welteroth says that the reaction from the publication’s core young adult readership has been overwhelmingly positive, the magazine has also had negative reactions to its social and political positions. Duca’s December 2016 piece — “Donald
Trump Is Gaslighting America” — received expected conservative backlash, and a July guide (online) to safe anal sex practices also drew criticism.
But overall, the shift in voice has raised the 14-year-old publication’s profile in the world of journalism: 7.9 million U.S. visitors to the magazine’s website in January 2017, compared with 2.9 million the January before. The website’s politics section traffic now surpasses that of the entertainment section.
Elaine Welteroth grew up in Newark (Alameda County), the daughter of an African American mother, Debra Welteroth, and a Caucasian father, John. She also has a brother, Eric, and is engaged to musician Jonathan Singletary, whom she’s known since they attended the same church as children.
“My household was like a microcosm for what growing up in the Bay Area was like,” Welteroth says. “Everyone was different and everyone was given permission to be who they really were. That was a unique privilege I didn’t realize until I left.”
As a child she spent hours putting together collaged photo albums that she later realized were her first magazines. She remembers publications like YM and Seventeen during her adolescent years but was more affected by her mother’s issues of Essence Magazine — one of the few pieces of media where she saw “beautiful black women like my mother represented.” After graduating early from Sacramento State, Welteroth pursued Ebony editor-in-chief Harriette Cole (whom she still considers a friend and mentor) until it led to a job with Cole at the magazine in New York, working in the beauty section.
“Very early on I connected the idea of how beauty empowers you,” Welteroth says. “No matter what race you are, how old you are, where you come from, a ladies’ room is a meet-up for women to connect.”
But Welteroth was unsatisfied in the “echo chamber” of black publishing and wanted to make the move to what she considered “the best of the best” in media, Condé Nast, which also publishes Vogue, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. “I felt like my mission was to bring the black perspective and the ‘other’ into the mainstream.”
After a year in beauty at Glamour magazine, Welteroth replaced Eva Chen as the beauty editor at Teen Vogue in 2012, making her the first African American beauty editor in Condé Nast’s 108-year history. Upon Astley’s departure as editor-in-chief to Architectural Digest in 2016, Welteroth took leadership during one of the most contentious and gender-focused election seasons in memory.
As swiftly as Welteroth rose in publishing, it was nothing compared to the meteoric rise she’s had in pop culture since taking the helm of Teen Vogue. She’s become a coveted guest on television programs like “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” (she calls the 33-year-old a “cool teen”), and she’s guest-starred as herself on the ABC sitcom “Black-ish.” In a time where the leadership at fashion magazines is quickly changing, Condé Nast is clearly investing in Welteroth’s personal brand and announced that in December, she will host the inaugural Teen Vogue Summit in Los Angeles.
With her ever-rising profile, Welteroth wears a lot of labels: editor-in-chief, youngest, first African American, “resistance leader:” Are they ever a heavy crown?
“I don’t think about those labels very often,” Welteroth says. “I’m the same person today poring over pages, thinking about how we expand Teen Vogue’s footprint, how to reach more girls,” she says. “My purpose right now at Teen Vogue is to make sure the audience feels like constituents and not just consumers. I want them to feel like they are invested in this mission. It’s so much more about them then it is about me.”
The day after the panel at Parsons, Welteroth attended the Coach fashion show. This time she was surrounded by photographers. Her honey-highlighted, naturally curly Afro gives her a distinct silhouette that’s hard not to notice even in the Fashion Week crowds. For the young women who attended the panel discussion the night before, seeing Welteroth sitting front row at New York Fashion Week may be the most powerful statement about representation of all.