Being a teenager is terrifying. It’s a half-state between child and adult, when you’re tangled in knots over friendships, looks, and dread for the future. Teen Vogue was conceived as a guide through the more shallow horrors of being 16: fashion, makeup, crushes; expected fare from Vogue’s younger sister in the larger Condé Nast family.
But over the course of its 20 years, it evolved. Through the blending of the personal and the political and the rising prominence of younger Americans as a voting force, the magazine’s own coming of age has been forged by dizzying cultural and social change.
It’s been years since Teen Vogue’s Trump-era heel turn toward progressive politics made national news of its own — a revolution that roughly coincided with the end of its print run in 2017 and that gave the magazine a much-needed boost as it transitioned into a fully digital shop. Building on the mission in 2023 means doubling down on political content, focusing on quality representation and finding a balance between its lefty bonafides and mainstay lifestyle content.
Teen Vogue’s print run ended in 2017, but the magazine still produces digital covers for profiles on a monthly basis. From left to right, model and activist Aoki Lee Simmons, musician Ice Spice and musician Olivia Rodrigo are featured in cover photoshoots. (Courtesy: Condé Nast)
Two years into her tenure as the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Versha Sharma sees the magazine’s responsibility — taking young people seriously as they figure out how to navigate the world — as largely unchanged. She came to the magazine in 2021 from a position as managing editor at the video news publisher NowThis, having observed Teen Vogue’s Trump-era metamorphosis as a political reporter.
“Young people have always been political,” she said. “But I do think that today’s younger generations and Generation Z understand intersectionality and global community in a way that no other previous generation has. Building on that from 2016 is something we’re very proud of.”
As newsrooms try to cater to younger audiences through next generation initiatives and embracing TikTok as a news vehicle, Teen Vogue has been there all along. After two consecutive elections where youth voter turnout was far higher than normal, and as data shows that teenage Americans are consuming news at higher-than-thought levels, Teen Vogue’s focus on political reporting that treats younger generations as a legitimate news audience has been vindicated.
The Trump-era turning moment was a big inspiration to work there, current editors at Teen Vogue said. Lex McMenamin, news and politics editor, said they couldn’t see themselves working somewhere that didn’t have the strong set of values that they saw in Teen Vogue. They earned an undergraduate degree in 2017, the heyday of the magazine’s politics section’s origin.
“Those who know me know that I spent five years doggedly saying, if I could have one job, it would be the politics editor at Teen Vogue,” they said.
This week, Teen Vogue’s politics desk published Red Tide, a package months in the making that focuses on life in Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis. One central story sees McMenamin driving across the state, talking to nearly two dozen young people about how DeSantis’ policies have impacted them. McMenamin spoke with transgender people who lost access to gender-affirming care and hormones, and peaceful protesters who have jail time looming over their heads.
One of the benefits of working at Teen Vogue, McMenamin said, is the magazine’s focus on marginalized voices like transgender people when other news outlets have struggled to include them. (McMenamin wrote an op-ed for Teen Vogue about the failures of The New York Times and other mainstream outlets in coverage of transgender issues.)
“I get so exhausted by seeing coverage of this policy that is completely focused on the political theater or how it ultimately benefits or damages the campaign, as if that’s the most important thing as opposed to the people whose material realities are being shaped under them,” they said.
The representation of those and other voices is a major part of where the magazine stands today, reflective of both its growing political sense that uplifts marginalized voices and a reckoning in the fashion industry over a longtime lack of diversity.
Associate editor Aiyana Ishmael grew up obsessed with glossy magazines, including Teen Vogue, and the fashion industry in general. As a dark-skinned Black woman, she didn’t see a career for herself at a fashion magazine, where the stereotypical image is endless halls of thin blonde women in seasonally trending attire.
But that changed with Teen Vogue’s political turn and its elevation of Black women to top positions, like former editors Elaine Welteroth and Lindsay Peoples, in the late 2010s. “I think that’s when I started realizing, oh, I can actually have a career in this thing that I’ve been reading all my life,” Ishmael said.
Ishmael’s fashion coverage skates between Teen Vogue’s two worlds, from product recommendations and listicles to features on the death of tween fashion and her column CTRL+C, where she copies influencers’ fashions for a week to make a point about inaccessibility for plus-size people like herself interested in fashion.
“Our readers, they love that space where they can have it all,” Ishmael said.
A 2021 piece in the Columbia Journalism Review asked how long the magazine could maintain its political sensibility while commodifying itself for advertisers within both Condé Nast and the larger fashion and beauty industry. Editors say it’s more about giving readers everything they’re looking for.
Hunter Schafer, actress and model best known for HBO’s hit teen melodrama “Euphoria,” is featured on one of Teen Vogue’s last print covers in 2017 for her work as a teenage activist. (Courtesy: Condé Nast)
“They are interested in knowing about the latest celebrity trends, or where they can buy like a dupe on TikTok, just as much as they’re interested in what’s going on with reproductive rights in this country,” Sharma said of Teen Vogue readers. “Both things have to exist, like we have to hold space for all of these opinions and realities.”
The more commercial side of the magazine also funds the political reporting, McMenamin said. “I don’t have to beg for donations to be able to do my job,” they said. “That is a luxury that only exists because of the model that we have.”
Feminist media has struggled in recent years. G/O Media announced this week that it was suspending publication of the website Jezebel, and the magazine Bitch folded last year after a 26-year run. Though Condé Nast recently announced layoffs, those are focused largely on its social video team. Average time on the Teen Vogue website is up 55% compared to last year, a Condé Nast spokesperson said, with politics among the site’s fastest-growing sections.
In 2023, political reporting on progressive topics also comes with a hefty dose of pushback. Teen Vogue is a semi-regular topic in right-wing media and online grievance circles, with Fox News picking up “woke” enough headlines to scrutinize on occasion and frequently pointing to the magazine’s perception as a less serious publication.
That coverage follows former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s much-publicized “stick to the thigh-high boots” comment directed at Lauren Duca who, in 2016 as a contributor to Teen Vogue, wrote “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” considered by many to be an inflection point for the magazine’s political turn.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m writing about DeSantis or just the fact that I write about young people and have pronouns and my username on social media means that everything I write gets quote-tweeted with, ‘they/them,’ comma, ‘Teen Vogue,’ and quote, ‘all you need to see,’” McMenamin said. “They’re not very creative.”
“I think this louder voice that’s unapologetic is threatening to people because we’re challenging their notions of what America should be or what America is,” Sharma said. “Which, in my opinion, is what we should be doing.”
After two decades, the magazine has grown into that niche comfortably. Sharma pointed to the upcoming Teen Vogue Summit as “the magazine come to life,” a cross-section of Teen Vogue’s multi-pronged nature.
Attendees will celebrate the magazine’s 20th birthday with keynote speakers including TikToker Dylan Mulvaney, Gen Z Girl Gang founder Deja Foxx, musical performances from Renee Rapp and Coco Jones, and career guidance and networking opportunities.
Phillip Picardi, a former Teen Vogue top editor who, along with former editor-in-chief Elaine Welteroth, is frequently credited for leading the magazine’s political turn, will be interviewing Mulvaney at the summit. Even though he left the magazine in 2018, he still points to its work as a model for newsrooms to not underestimate younger readers.
“You can say all you want about the TikTok choreography that people are doing as evidence of their stupidity, but it’s like, no, you can do a TikTok dance and fully understand foreign policy,” Picardi said. “Those things are not mutually exclusive.”
In the lead-up to 2024, not understanding that is a mistake.
“I think the Teen Vogue reader is someone who’s chronically underestimated, so it often feels very appropriate that Teen Vogue as a publication is chronically underestimated,” McMenamin said. “While everyone is busy treating us as a novelty, we’re often leaving them in the dust when it comes to actually making progress.”
