Can someone please post this article.
I didn't know you can't see the article via the link? Anyway, here it is:
'If I'm Succesful I Can Open A Lot of Doors'
Harper’s Bazaar’s new editor Samira Nasr talks to Carola Long about racism, the future of magazines and getting a ‘fashion rush’
Samira Nasr’s office isn’t the classic fashion editor’s workplace. It might be on the 25th floor of Hearst Tower in New York, but from my vantage point on Zoom I can see none of the delicately scented candles or lavish bouquets of flowers synonymous with such seats of power. It’s a temporary set-up, but when I express surprise at the bare, functional shelves and lack of overt glamour, the new editor-in-chief of American Harper’s Bazaar says, “I’m not the classic kind of girl anyway. I’m not sure I’m going to have a scented candle. And I won’t be ripping out walls and bringing in rugs — it feels wasteful.”
This July, the approachable, smiley Nasr became the first woman of colour to edit the 153-year-old magazine. Exuding effortless cool in a Supreme x Mary J Blige T-shirt, Celine velvet waistcoat, jeans and Clarks Wallabee boots, she describes herself as a “worker bee”. Now in her early fifties, she has almost 25 years’ experience, with roles at Vogue, where she was assistant to creative director Grace Coddington, InStyle, Elle and Vanity Fair, as well as styling campaigns for brands such as Tiffany and Tory Burch. It’s certainly an interesting time to be an editor. Fashion is one of many industries undergoing a moral reckoning around diversity, sustainability and toxic management; the future of print media is uncertain; and then there’s the small matter of a global pandemic. The November issue is the first that Nasr will have her name on. There will be a full redesign in March, when she and her team are hoping to have a “clearer vision of what we want certain franchises to look like”, as she is also heading up the brand’s more celebrity-driven website, which has an average of 17.1m monthly unique users. When we talk, the print pages are still being created, and a week later she Zoom-walks me through the almost complete versions pinned to a board.
For almost 19 years until last January, the US edition of Harper’s Bazaar was helmed by industry grande dame Glenda Bailey. Under her editorship, the magazine was known for lavish, fantastical imagery — Demi Moore feeding giraffes, Rihanna seemingly in the jaws of a shark, Kate Winslet hanging off scaffolding in a ballgown — combined with approachable, consumer-friendly features. How will Nasr’s magazine be different? “We are living in different times,” she says, “I see things through a different lens, I think it’s a little more grounded in humanity and honesty . . . and not as retouched. I don’t mind if the sky isn’t blue, I don’t mind if the cover subject has some wrinkles.” (As it happens, November’s cover star, 42-year-old Liya Kebede, the Ethiopian-born model turned ethical fashion entrepreneur, doesn’t seem to have any wrinkles. This is still an editorialised version of real.) Nasr has also dialled up the politics and inclusivity, in line with a broader move in glossy magazines towards embracing current affairs, “real” people with regular jobs, and more serious issues than an actor’s favourite lip gloss.
The theme of her inaugural issue is “firsts” and includes a new essay section with a dialogue between Nigerian-American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola and Ghanaian-American novelist Yaa Gyasi. “Pro Shop” has a postal worker recommending the best walking shoes; the feature “First Ladies” asks female politicians about being “firsts”; and understated shoots feature wearable clothes. This is also the first issue with a musical director — this month it’s British producer and singer-songwriter Dev Hynes — who has curated a playlist to go with the magazine. The only flicker of perturbation in our interview comes when I ask how the casual reader might differentiate Harper’s Bazaar from Vogue. “I’m not Anna Wintour,” she retorts, “I’m not trying to recreate that, we have a different point of view.” And for Nasr, a strong, experienced point of view is a magazine’s USP in the age of the influencer and Instagram. “I want to get back to that authoritative ‘please trust us, this is what we think is the best,’” she says. “We have editors who have been doing this for 30 years.”
Print magazines have been suffering from the rise of digital publications and competition for falling ad revenues for years, but Covid-19 is hitting luxury brands’ marketing budgets even harder. Reader numbers at some publications have risen or experienced a temporary bounce from the pandemic (Bazaar subscriptions purchased online are up 18 per cent, and its average circulation of 767,774 print and e-reader copies in the first six months of 2020 is up from 762,088 in the previous six months) but this is set against a fall in ad revenue. Nasr has her game face on when discussing this. “We are a media company, we have other platforms and we will grow those, but I feel great about the future of print. Print is the purest expression of what we do, everything will spring from it. It’s not going away.” But surely there is heavy commercial pressure on her shoulders? “I have to be honest,” she says. “So far all the people I report to have been incredibly supportive of my vision. Certainly I want to grow the business, find new revenue streams — we have to be creative and build the brand — but there’s no ‘you have to do this, you have to do that’.” While anyone in her position would feel the weight of expectation, Nasr says that as a woman of colour (she was born in Montreal to a Lebanese father and Trinidadian mother), she feels an extra incentive to be a role model. “Most people of colour, or who have checked the box ‘other’, I think they would all say that they feel pressure to succeed,” she says. “If I’m successful it could open a lot of doors for a lot of people, right? It will be not only ‘we hired that brown girl’ but ‘we hired that brown girl and she did great.’”
Though there are high-profile black editors, notably British Vogue’s Edward Enninful and Lindsay Peoples Wagner at Teen Vogue, the fashion industry is still disproportionately white. “I never thought this position would be available to me, I certainly don’t look like any editor I know,” says Nasr. “In order to dream about a role, you need to be able to see your likeness in it. That might seem like a wild statement, but for other women who look like me, my appointment is their victory too.” Nasr has experienced racism in the industry, with one of many examples being when she went for a job as an assistant.“I was about to go in to meet the person in charge and I had a group of white editors around me,” she says. “They were looking at my appearance and one said that the person I was going to meet ‘doesn’t like messy hair, what are we going to do?’ I didn’t understand what they meant. Then I realised it was just because my hair was worn loose. It wasn’t messy, I have textured hair.” She recounts how, on other occasions, “after photographing actresses with their hair styled naturally, I have been told to ‘stop trying to put myself on the cover’. Would you ever tell a white editor if they brought back three covers of an actress with blonde hair to stop putting themselves on the cover? No. The list goes on and on.” What did she make of AnnaWintour’s mea culpa, an internal memo sent to Condé Nast staff in June, in which she said: “I want to say plainly that I know Vogue has not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators. We have made mistakes too, publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant.” Nasr’s answer is diplomatic. “I have tremendous respect for her. She was the first person to hire me [as a market assistant at Vogue] and she hired me again [as executive fashion director] at Vanity Fair. I think that she gets criticised a lot and that is probably what happens when you are in such a big role, but I have nothing bad to say about h Anna. Yes, there are not enough black people [at Vogue], but there is not enough diversity anywhere. A lot of people who run big companies could also maybe apologise.”
Whether discussing the future of New York Fashion Week (“this city is resilient!”) or if shopping and sustainability can coexist (“I really think it so”), Nasr is determinedly optimistic. She echoes the view that fashion needs a reset: she wants to say to her magazine’s readers: “Don’t throw that amazing thing you bought last season away — we’ll help you incorporate it into your wardrobe.” Nasr has an upbeat energy that contrasts with the froideur often ascribed to fashion editors. As a single parent, she may routinely get up at 5.20am to prepare her young son’s lunch, but she doesn’t seem tired. And when we take a deeper dive into clothes chat, she practically leaps out of her swivel chair, radiating real excitement. “What am I going to buy for autumn? Oh! Well this is a fun question. I have my eye on a Dior Bar jacket, the Chanel boots from the show, there’s a Celine oilcloth coat. . .” Ultimately, it’s this visceral love of clothes, with their promise of transformation and fantasy, that will charm readers. “I hope our readers get a fashion rush,” she declares, but she wants them to feel welcome too. “There is no velvet rope around this magazine.”
Financial Times
