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Last week, Condé Nast announced during a perfunctory conversation with staffers that they were folding Teen Vogue into Vogue proper and laying off 70 percent of the staff. Teen Vogue was a beloved magazine that for ten years had unflinchingly taken on coverage of issues at the hot center of American political controversy, among them trans healthcare, abortion bans, and student protests in support of Gaza. Meanwhile, Vogue busied itself with shoots of Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid. As a spin-off, Teen Vogue was as unlike its parent as Vivian Wilson is to Elon Musk.

To staffers, it was clear that the politically progressive editorial stance that Teen Vogue had represented was now finished, and that the people hired to lead that coverage were no longer wanted at the company. Allegra Kirkland, the magazine’s politics director from 2019 until earlier this year, wrote in Talking Points Memo that “nearly all of my former colleagues—including all but one woman of color and the only trans staffer—were let go. The identity and politics sections, which covered reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues, campus organizing, state and national politics, the labor movement, education, and more, were folded.” Vogue announced it would continue to publish content under the Teen Vogue brand about “career development” and “cultural leadership.”

A spokesperson from Condé Nast wrote in a statement to CJR: “Teen Vogue has faced ongoing challenges around scale and audience reach for some time. Rather than continuing to operate independently with limited reach, bringing Teen Vogue under the Vogue umbrella allows it to tap into a larger audience, stronger distribution, and more resources.” Those who worked there have greeted this reasoning with skepticism. The publication’s March interview with Wilson, Musk’s estranged daughter, was one of Condé Nast’s top-performing stories of the year, according to Kirkland. She confirmed to me that the story garnered nearly six hundred thousand views, over two million minutes spent, and coverage in outlets including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and New York magazine. It was the best-performing cover in Teen Vogue history, prompting Si Newhouse to congratulate Anna Wintour on the story. Far more than a typical celebrity interview, the piece situated the conversation within the context of Musk’s firings of federal employees and wove in reporting about legislative attacks on trans teenagers.

When I spoke to Lex McMenamin, the politics editor of four years who commissioned the interview with Wilson and who was laid off last week, they told me that when they were a college student and aspiring journalist, they found that the way mainstream media covered college politics was “inauthentic, misrepresentative, and frankly antagonistic.” While they were taking part in protests over sexual assault and student debt, the conversation in the media was all “pronoun wars and cancel culture. It was totally missing the material reality of what it was like to be on campus.” McMenamin started freelancing for Teen Vogue while still in school, inspired by editor in chief Elaine Welteroth’s social-justice editorial vision (she was hired in 2016), and their first piece was about Bernie Sanders and student loan forgiveness. “I needed that information,” they told me. “My friends needed that information.”

Mary Retta, a longtime Teen Vogue contributor and its education columnist from 2020 to 2023, likewise started writing for Teen Vogue while in college, getting some of her first national bylines there. It was “definitely the politics section that drew me in,” she told me, because it was “cool to see student issues covered and often written by students or young people.” For Kirkland, “what’s hitting me the hardest about this whole thing is that there are so few outlets who will take a chance on a college student or a high schooler.” It was through these young writers that Teen Vogue led national coverage of hot-button issues, like COVID regulations on campus, Black Lives Matter protests, student debt, and more.

Under the editorship of journalists like Kirkland and McMenamin, Teen Vogue seemed more attuned to the massive political shifts happening in America than other Condé glossies like Vogue (for liberal-ish grown-ups), Vanity Fair (awash in British royals), or Architectural Digest (which made headlines for filming the brownstone from Lily Allen’s breakup album). The young staffers at Teen Vogue took a magazine that had been cute and commercial before 2016, and wrestled it into the flagship publication of feminist Gen Z politics. Welteroth began the process when she became Condé Nast’s youngest-ever editor in chief, and only its second Black editor in chief, during Trump’s ascent. She left in 2018, but the staff pressed the magazine further into serious territory, and by the end of Trump’s first term, the magazine had more in common with the outspoken online outlets Jezebel, Feministing, and Bitch than its famous stablemates at One World Trade Center. “I don’t think,” McMenamin told me wryly, “we were an intentional pivot for Condé Nast.”

Condé Nast didn’t just kill its own relevance with a large swath of loyal Gen Z readers—it dealt a blow to the larger ecosystem of feminist media.

After Teen Vogue’s closure, a group of unionized Condé Nast staffers gathered outside the office of Stan Duncan, Condé’s HR chief, to question him about the layoffs. Four of those staffers were fired later that same day for what the company called “extreme misconduct.” The Wrap published a video of the supposedly “extreme” confrontation; I’ve seen more raucous newsroom fights about comma placement. Condé also filed a complaint about the union to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Following public outcry, Condé then suspended five more* *employees who had been present at the conversation with Duncan. The NewsGuild, the union that represents Condé Nast employees, denounced the company’s attempts “to intimidate and silence our members’ advocacy for the courageous cultural and political journalism of Teen Vogue” and is fighting for the staffers to be reinstated. It seems that Condé leadership, including Trump critic Wintour, has been happy to use the conservative moment to get rid of left-wing staffers, weaken the union, and clear the ground for Wintour’s quasi-successor, Chloe Malle, to run a magazine characterized by “childlike excitement.”

Apparently the plan does not include the actual excitement of actual teens. That’s a shame, because teen girls and queer kids are among the most maligned of demographics. Kirkland noted that young Teen Vogue writers were sometimes criticized for not being “old enough to have opinions.” In fact, “kids are being fatally shot in schools, our government is making teenagers give birth to kids they don’t want and aren’t prepared to have, teens write to us about being displaced because of climate disasters like the LA wildfires,” she said, “and we’re treating them like they’re not old enough to engage in politics.” She worries about the loss of a fact-checked publication addressing teens’ issues in an age of book bans, university censorship, and floods of unverified health advice on TikTok.

The success of the magazine’s pieces profiling young activists and queer celebrities suggests to the former staffers that young people are searching for content that addresses these needs and finding it at Teen Vogue. According to Kirkland, their 2024 election coverage performed third best in the building, behind The New Yorker and Vanity Fair (beating out Vogue, Glamour, and Wired, among other publications). Condé’s most prized metric was reader loyalty, or readers who return many times, and “we had that.” It was reported to Kirkland that “of all the sections, politics had the most loyal readers.” This year, the progressive Roosevelt Institute honored Teen Vogue with its Freedom of Speech medal and, in a statement mourning the publication’s collapse, wrote, “Teen Vogue connected the dots between the issues that matter to young people and the policy choices that underpin them.”

By ending Teen Vogue as we knew it, Condé Nast didn’t just kill its own relevance with a large swath of loyal Gen Z readers—it dealt a blow to the larger ecosystem of feminist media. Teen Vogue has gone the way of so many other titles that were once dedicated to the voices of young women. In many ways, it’s in the mode of controversial nineties teen glossy Sassy, which got in trouble for covering sex and teen drug use, and its spiritual successor, Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie. Bitch went out of business a couple of years ago, and Jezebel never righted itself after Peter Thiel torpedoed the Gawker Media group that housed it.

When I started Lux magazine, an independent feminist glossy, in 2021, I replicated the small trim size of the original print Teen Vogue, which I had loved as a kid. I was interested in hard politics mixed with the weirdness and charm of our daily lives, and I mimicked the splashy photography of “women’s magazines” to create an object of pleasure as well as journalism. When Lux published articles like “Help! I hate my comrade” or “It Happened to me: I Pinkwashed War Profiteers” or “8 Hot Ways to Sabotage Your Office!” we were twisting the tropes we had learned from earlier versions of Teen Vogue and its Condé Nast ilk. When we published in-depth profiles of young organizers, or interviews with politicized celebs, we followed much the same format as the new Teen Vogue, the one that had shown that this model could be successful. A couple of years later, when Lux embarked on a big reporting project about a right-wing takeover of a community college in Idaho, we copublished with Teen Vogue.

As the media landscape changes, it’s worth remembering how we all ended up with intelligent things to read in the first place. Teen Vogue’s early political pieces emerged because large social movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Bernie campaign, and the Sunrise movement politicized millennials and Gen Z. Young writers brought a sharp political orientation to their work. For a while, heads of corporations at least performed shame about the whiteness, maleness, and straightness of their hirings; for a while, they did hire more diverse staff. The writers were also protected by new unions, which forced the powerful heads of magazines like Vogue and The New Yorker to negotiate with organized workers. It was no secret that media bosses didn’t like this—and long-standing conflicts have gotten more contentious as workers demanded, over the past two years, better coverage of Gaza. Last year, Semafor reported that the talent-booking side of Condé Nast (essentially, the celebrity wranglers) were unhappy with Teen Vogue’s sympathetic coverage of the pro-Palestine movement. Now left-wing movements are reeling and Trump has hamstrung the NLRB. Young lefty writers are being swept out with the elimination of DEI programs.

Journalists for Condé Nast have always known that in the long run, the parameters of their work will be determined more by the tastes of the Hermés marketing department than by readers or editors. Perhaps the recent books about Condé’s glamour days signal the end of an era where that could at least be fun. Today, the fun continues somewhere else: in independent media. Worker-owned projects like Hell Gate (of which I’m on the board), Defector, and the The Flytrap are alternate models for journalism without bosses, and with grit valued over glamour. (If you read these publications, you know they’re having fun.) Feminist media lives on through Lux, and also Ms., The 19th, Liber, Dame, and a quasi-blogosphere of networked Substacks.

Over the past few years, I and the rest of the team at Lux have personally felt immense relief that we are able to write freely about Gaza, about abortion, about trans athletes, and to do it in a way that ranges from journalistically sober to gleeful to a little unhinged—and know that our readers trust us to grapple with these genuinely thorny topics.

Kirkland and McMenamin told me that many readers reached out with offers to support Teen Vogue directly to keep it from folding, but, said Kirkland, we had to say “you can’t subscribe, because we don’t have a print publication, and we don’t have a membership organization.” McMenamin told me that they hope these readers will support the perpetually cash-strapped but brilliant independent media that is sure to pick up the talents of these staffers. Losing Teen Vogue writers in the name of childlike excitement will only hasten the obsolescence of the once glamorous world of glossy magazines—but there’s a media universe where feminism is more than a trend.

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**Sarah Leonard is the editor in chief of Lux magazine. She is a contributing editor to Dissent and The Nation. **