Your previous role was as senior digital director at Harper’s BAZAAR, but your resume is long and impressive. I’ve admired your career from afar for a long time and I’m hoping you can tell me a bit about your trajectory and your aspirations. Was it the editor-in-chief position that you were always working towards?
I don’t think in my career I’ve actually ever been working towards one position.
I graduated from college in 2007 and my dream was to work in fashion. At that time, I knew I liked to write and I knew I liked fashion.
The only sort of fashion job I knew or understood after all of my internships was a market director.
A market director is the person who sort of helps logistically when it comes to getting photoshoots together and working with stylists.
That’s sort of what I imagined I was like, “I’m gonna be a market director by the time I’m 30 and then I’m gonna be there forever.”
Then, I was working at InStyle. This was sort of around the time of when the internet was just starting to get big and it was becoming a thing.
I saw all of the opportunities that my friends who were budding bloggers were getting, but I knew I didn’t want to go out on my own.
I knew I didn’t want to become a blogger myself, so I figured I would go after a digital job.
That’s how I ended up at Glamour. I was the style editor there. I wrote fashion and beauty posts.
From there, it’s just sort of grown and grown—my career has.
I took a detour back into print when I went to GQ, but I really wanted to try something new.
I’d been a little burned out at my job previously and I think every job that I’ve had I’ve always been like, “I don’t want that job.”
When I was a fashion editor, I was like, “I don’t want to be a digital director. Seems like too much work.”
Then I was like, “I don’t want to be an editor-in-chief. Seems like too much work.”
Here I am having done both.
Despite your best efforts, you just keep climbing that ladder.
I just keep climbing that ladder. I think that in my last two jobs—this job and the one before it—I was approached for the jobs.
In being approached, I’ve realized that I could do the job and I could do a good job at the job. So that’s sort of how the trajectory has occurred.
Honestly, when it came to the Marie Claire job, I really wanted to work with Hillary [Kerr]. I think that she’s so incredibly smart and prolific and has built an incredible brand in Who What Wear and the many other brands that she’s helped launch.
I really wanted to just be able to learn from her. That’s generally how many of my jobs come together.
As a digital director at Harper’s BAZAAR, I wanted to work with Leah Chernikoff and I wanted to work with Samira Nasr.
I think it’s more so for me, the team that I’m going to be around and the team that I’m going to be able to build. The exact job itself is great, but it’s more so about the team.
