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Can Anna Wintour Survive the Social Justice Movement? A reckoning has come to Bon Appétit and the other magazines of Condé Nast. Can a culture built on elitism and exclusion possibly change?On Monday, as swiftly as a 9-iron taken to a tee at Augusta, Adam Rapoport resigned as the editor in chief of Bon Appétit magazine after a damning Halloween photo circulated on social media that morning. Drawn from the vast insensitivity archives to which so many influential people have made inadvertent submissions, the picture, from 2004, shows him costumed in a tank top and thick chain necklace as his wife’s “papi,’’ the term she attached to it in an Instagram post several years later.As it happened, Mr. Rapoport had been facing mounting grievance from his staff about the magazine’s demeaning treatment of employees and freelancers of color and the dubious ways in which its popular video division presented culturally appropriated cooking. But these apparently were insufficient grounds for forcing him out.Over and over, power structures seem to require that accusations of racial bias are documented by photographic evidence — proof to override a reflexive or simply inconvenient skepticism. Police officers abused their authority for decades without consequence. It was not until a growing body of video footage revealed all the brutality, and the systemic prejudice at the heart of it, that the world began to express the outrage there to be mined all along — justice by iPhone.In that sense, Mr. Rapoport’s ouster at the hands of a camera was entirely fitting. Bon Appétit belongs to Condé Nast, a media empire perhaps unrivaled by any institution on earth in its supplication to image. For decades, both at the level of corporate culture and branded worldview, the company’s lifestyle magazines have held to the notion that there are “right’’ people and wrong people, a determination made by birthright. 

There are the rich, and there are the dismissible; the great looking, and the condemned — a paradigm that has now become dangerously untenable, and one the company has been striving to change.Within the Condé Nast framework, autocratic bosses were left to do whatever they pleased — subjugating underlings to hazing rituals with no seeming end point. So much was excusable in the name of beauty and profit. “Difficulty,” Kim France, a former editor in chief of Lucky magazine, told me, “was regarded as brilliance.

”No one at Condé Nast has had more of an outsize reputation for imperiousness wed to native talent than Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, the artistic director of the company and more recently its “global content adviser’’ as well. Mr. Rapoport, who spent 20 years at the company and turned around an ailing product in Bon Appétit, reported to her.What sort of management cues were to be taken? Famous for a self-regarding style — she might demand that subordinates arrive 30 minutes early for certain meetings she attended — Ms. Wintour was obviously not in the best position to try to convince him, for instance, that he should not ask his assistant (black and Stanford-educated) to clean his golf clubs. (That was one of the many revealing details in a Business Insider exposé of the food magazine that arrived this week.)Race is a fraught subject at Condé Nast. Several employees of color I spoke with, all of them laid off over the past few years, talked about the challenges they faced. They struggled to be heard or get the resources they needed to do their jobs at the highest levels; they faced ignorance and lazy stereotyping from white bosses when the subject of covering black culture came up; they all said they were exhausted by always having to explain it all.

Even though they were no longer at Condé Nast, not one of them felt free to speak on the record out of fear of retaliation from the company or the concern that they would be looked at as complainers, making it much harder to find work.Editors’ PicksHotels Transformed New York’s Social Life. Now What?Solving the Mystery of What Became of J.F.K.’s Other Patrol BoatOne former staff member who is black could not fail to see the irony in being made to go to unconscious bias training — which became mandatory at the company early last year — only then to lose a big chunk of his portfolio shortly thereafter. “I felt so devalued,’’ he said, “after working so hard.’’Unconscious bias training is supposed to alert you to your blind spots in your perception of people and ideas. But at the level of corporate and creative governance, the programming at Condé Nast has not been seamlessly woven into the company’s broader philosophy. Last month, during a round of layoffs, in which 100 people were let go amid the economic calamities of Covid-19, the company dismissed three Asian-American editors, all of whom covered culture at different publications.Among the top 10 editorial leaders listed on Vogue��s masthead, all are white. According to a spokesman for Condé Nast, across divisions on Vogue’s editorial side, people of color make up 14 percent of senior managers. On June 5, amid global protests spurred by the death of George Floyd, Ms. Wintour sent a note to her staff, acknowledging that “it can’t be easy to be a Black employee at Vogue,’’ and that the magazine had “not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators.”Although Vogue has made a greater effort to feature black women on its covers in recent years — Rihanna, Serena Williams, Lupita Nyong’o — the gate swings open far more easily for those who are not. And in this particular area, too, legacy weighs heavily. When LeBron James made history as the first black man to grace the cover in 2008, he shared the space with a white supermodel, Gisele Bündchen, who appeared as a damsel in his clutches, an unmistakable reference to King Kong.

A spokesman at Condé Nast admitted that much progress needs to be made in regard to diversity at the company, but he defended Ms. Wintour’s record, pointing out that she has passionately supported various designers of color throughout her career, helping to raise money for them through her work with the Council of Fashion Designers of America. She also installed two black editors to lead Teen Vogue, genuinely radical in its content, one following the other (Elaine Welteroth and then Lindsay Peoples Wagner).At the same time, Ms. Wintour has presided over Vogue for 32 years, and during that period she has done more to enshrine the values of bloodline, pedigree and privilege than anyone in American media. A brief and very inconclusive list of Ms. Wintour’s assistants in the 21st century includes the Yale-educated daughter of a prominent Miami dance director, the Dartmouth-educated descendant of a major bank president, the Princeton-educated daughter of an Oscar-winning screenwriter and so on. For so long it was central to the Condé Nast ethos that you had to be thin, gorgeous and impeccably credentialed to retrieve someone else’s espresso macchiato.

Even now, as the publishing industry continues to implode and wonderful writers who could really use the work (or at least the prestigious affiliation) abound, Vogue continues to list among its contributing editors people like the German heiress Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis and many others among the well born. Five years ago, Ms. Thurn und Taxis posted a picture on Instagram of a homeless woman reading Vogue, seated on the sidewalk, with the words, “Paris is full of surprises.” Vogue quickly issued a statement, calling the gesture distasteful, and then proceeded to run her byline on its website at least 10 more timesLast year, Grace Coddington, another contributor, who had held enormous influence over what was shot for Vogue and how, in her many years as the magazine’s creative director, was photographed with her collection of “mammy’’ jars, racist ceramics depicting African-American women as servile maids.

Ms. Wintour clearly believes that she can break from the past and kill off any vestiges of a system steeped in the benighted values for which she has become the corporate avatar. The public apology from Bon Appétit was quite startling in its admission of failure, particularly its concession that the magazine “continued to tokenize” the people of color that it did hire.As part of her contribution to this new wave of progressivism, Ms. Wintour wrote a piece for Vogue.com a week after the death of George Floyd, aligning herself with Black Lives Matter and calling on Joe Biden to select a woman of color as his running mate.For someone who had seemed so averse to activism as the world has roiled from inequality for years, it felt like a desperate grasp for relevance. A spokesman for the company bristled at the suggestion, arguing that it is Condé Nast’s job “to cover what’s going on in the culture in the moment.”As it happens, André Leon Talley, who recently wrote a memoir about his complicated relationship with Ms. Wintour, as a black man and longtime former editor at Vogue, also has a lot to say about the current moment. This week in a radio interview with Sandra Bernhard, he offered his opinion about his ex-boss’s professed transformation.“I wanna say one thing, Dame Anna Wintour is a colonial broad; she’s a colonial dame,” he told Ms. Bernhard. “I do not think she will ever let anything get in the way of her white privilege.”

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Worn a brightly colored accessory with a neutral outfit Stared out the car window while listening to sad music as if you were in a music video Danced around your room with the curtains open Driven through a neighborhood you don't live in blaring indie music from your car Cut your own bangs with kitchen scissors Tried on a bunch of wacky outfits in a thrift shop with no real intention of purchasing anything Gotten a septum piercing Transferred schools in the middle of the term Played the ukulele Thrown a themed costume party Worn Heelies unironically DIYed home decor Filmed one second of your life every day for a year Sat on a playground swing as an adult Learned to juggle Sat in the front row, whether it was class or a concert Used your Polaroid camera to chronicle a road trip Been told you're "Heather" Studied the arts or humanities Related to at least one Taylor Swift song hardcore Had the same best friend for several years Been part of a love triangle Had a niche hobby or interest not many people have heard of Watched the sunrise or sunset from an airplane window Been way too overdressed for the grocery store Dyed your hair a bright color Recorded yourself singing to see if you sounded as good as you thought you did Made a video in the rain Gone night swimming Curated a very specific playlist for a very mundane task Referred to going somewhere super normal (like the gas station) as "an adventure" Had a "life-changing experience" at summer camp Performed in a talent show Considered your pet your best friend

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Sagittarius - Fire never saving phone numbers loopholes strong unfounded opinions buying a round of shots going viral on tiktok snapchat stories calling everyone ‘bro’ lapsing into a character health fads loving tacky aesthetics self-organization will watch any show that has hot people surfing airbnb for fun mangonadas have made someone cry romance languages tone-deaf but love karaoke fun facts making a day out of one errand tattoos silver lining losing internet once someone shows interest never paying people back calling in sick 9/24

Capricorn - Earth trusting two people *cracks knuckles* self-deprecating jokes owning multiple colors of the same pants love having an excuse to say no clothing with pockets sitting together in silence sore loser needing alone time to decompress no interest in petty drama compartmentalizing emotions unsure what to do while someone cries noticing everything solution-oriented called ‘precocious’ as a child favorite sound is the crossword jingle rising to meet high expectations speaking to pet and babies in an adult voice large iced coffee, black ‘sent from my iPhone’ long-form articles no sympathy for stupidity sophisticated neutrals remember your sat score 8/24

Aquarius - Air avoiding contact during earnest conversations history of bad bleach jobs people watching from afar have considered a burner phone only listening to b-sides have gone by five different nicknames hating on astrology tirades keeping your birthday a secret reusable water bottle hating hugs using shock humor to alienate people know exactly where you’d run away to if you decided to start a new life self-described “bad influence” jstor subscription encyclopedic knowledge of niche pop culture deliberately esoteric “what’s the science?” 71 unread messages over-ear headphones a piercing you did yourself most active between 3 and 6 am favorite celeb is David Byrne or David Lynch hiding inside a hoodie 2/24

Pisces - Water chipped nail polish believing your own lies not wanting to upset someone by telling them they’ve upset you crying when someone else cries swaddling yourself in a cardigan donating to wikipedia our of guilt batting eyelashes thinking everything is a sign mystery novels have plans to ‘find yourself’ battery always under 20% working on asserting yourself “I’m fine, but how are you?” rich inner world ethical veganism house slippers sitting on the floor of the shower talented artist small handwriting picking ‘truth’ in truth or dare reacting to messages with a heart emoji starting sentences with ‘sorry’ planning birthday presents months in advance happy crying 3/24

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Leo - Fire reposting birthday wishes on Instagram stories lip gloss “I thought you’d be a bitch before I met you” crying on command showering strangers with compliments loud laugh giving up if not instantly good at something new outfit for every occasion waiting exactly as long as the other person to text back awful at apologies movies with makeover montages craving validation thinking everyone should have an ego other people’s parents love you sleeping with six pillows dumping people before they can dump you love being the therapist friend president of a club in high school the protagonist of reality planning a memoir arriving late with beverage in hand pipe dreams good at icebreaker games tipping 30% 4/24

Virgo - Earth saunas needing 2+ hours to fall asleep having the last word standards so high even you can’t reach stress-induced IBS modifying your restaurant order vices turned off by rudeness matching pajama sets knowing which fork is which self-doubt currently worried someone is mad at you observational humor complex self-soothing rituals Youtube tutorials subtly sensual creating problems to fuss over editing articles as you read them talking points checking weather before getting dressed chamomile tea making sure your friends know their worth “I’ll pencil you in” realizing your jam has been clenched 10/24

Libra - Air you’re ‘not on social media’ ...but you meticulously curate your finsta jack off all trades belonging to 15 distinct friend groups only ‘reading’ audio-books fantasy movies situationships returning favors natural deodorant cooking elaborate meals for one mediating friend drama can’t take a compliment “I could make that myself” passive aggression power couple aspirations fusion foods fear of being forgotten meet-cutes inspirational quotes watching music videos instead of just playing the songs overly familiar pet names underestimating the effects of your actions “no makeup” makeup look taking it easy 5/24

Scorpio collecting screenshots just in case hyperbolic speaker slouching alibis keeping everyone’s secret loving your hometown mirror above the bed hate when people waste your tame evasive responses to innocuous questions performative sigh human lie detector penetrating eye contact secretly wish someone would scale your emotional walls “what’s the catch?” decoding algorithms remembering every embarrassing thing you’ve ever done testing people’s allegiance a natural at networking refusing to acknowledge dropped hints falling in love quickly and intensely “fool me once” mentality weighing your options fiercely loyal friend 10/24

Can Anna Wintour Survive the Social Justice Movement?

big city A reckoning has come to Bon Appétit and the other magazines of Condé Nast. Can a culture built on elitism and exclusion possibly change?

Anna Wintour at the Coach show last spring.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

June 11, 2020 On Monday, as swiftly as a 9-iron taken to a tee at Augusta, Adam Rapoport resigned as the editor in chief of Bon Appétit magazine after a damning Halloween photo circulated on social media that morning. Drawn from the vast insensitivity archives to which so many influential people have made inadvertent submissions, the picture, from 2004, shows him costumed in a tank top and thick chain necklace as his wife’s “papi,’’ the term she attached to it in an Instagram post several years later. As it happened, Mr. Rapoport had been facing mounting grievance from his staff about the magazine’s demeaning treatment of employees and freelancers of color and the dubious ways in which its popular video division presented culturally appropriated cooking. But these apparently were insufficient grounds for forcing him out. Over and over, power structures seem to require that accusations of racial bias are documented by photographic evidence — proof to override a reflexive or simply inconvenient skepticism. Police officers abused their authority for decades without consequence. It was not until a growing body of video footage revealed all the brutality, and the systemic prejudice at the heart of it, that the world began to express the outrage there to be mined all along — justice by iPhone. In that sense, Mr. Rapoport’s ouster at the hands of a camera was entirely fitting. Bon Appétit belongs to Condé Nast, a media empire perhaps unrivaled by any institution on earth in its supplication to image. For decades, both at the level of corporate culture and branded worldview, the company’s lifestyle magazines have held to the notion that there are “right’’ people and wrong people, a determination made by birthright. There are the rich, and there are the dismissible; the great looking, and the condemned — a paradigm that has now become dangerously untenable, and one the company has been striving to change. Within the Condé Nast framework, autocratic bosses were left to do whatever they pleased — subjugating underlings to hazing rituals with no seeming end point. So much was excusable in the name of beauty and profit. “Difficulty,” Kim France, a former editor in chief of Lucky magazine, told me, “was regarded as brilliance.” No one at Condé Nast has had more of an outsize reputation for imperiousness wed to native talent than Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, the artistic director of the company and more recently its “global content adviser’’ as well. Mr. Rapoport, who spent 20 years at the company and turned around an ailing product in Bon Appétit, reported to her. What sort of management cues were to be taken? Famous for a self-regarding style — she might demand that subordinates arrive 30 minutes early for certain meetings she attended — Ms. Wintour was obviously not in the best position to try to convince him, for instance, that he should not ask his assistant (black and Stanford-educated) to clean his golf clubs. (That was one of the many revealing details in a Business Insider exposé of the food magazine that arrived this week.) Race is a fraught subject at Condé Nast. Several employees of color I spoke with, all of them laid off over the past few years, talked about the challenges they faced. They struggled to be heard or get the resources they needed to do their jobs at the highest levels; they faced ignorance and lazy stereotyping from white bosses when the subject of covering black culture came up; they all said they were exhausted by always having to explain it all. Even though they were no longer at Condé Nast, not one of them felt free to speak on the record out of fear of retaliation from the company or the concern that they would be looked at as complainers, making it much harder to find work. One former staff member who is black could not fail to see the irony in being made to go to unconscious bias training — which became mandatory at the company early last year — only then to lose a big chunk of his portfolio shortly thereafter. “I felt so devalued,’’ he said, “after working so hard.’’ Unconscious bias training is supposed to alert you to your blind spots in your perception of people and ideas. But at the level of corporate and creative governance, the programming at Condé Nast has not been seamlessly woven into the company’s broader philosophy. Last month, during a round of layoffs, in which 100 people were let go amid the economic calamities of Covid-19, the company dismissed three Asian-American editors, all of whom covered culture at different publications. Among the top 10 editorial leaders listed on Vogue’s masthead, all are white. According to a spokesman for Condé Nast, across divisions on Vogue’s editorial side, people of color make up 14 percent of senior managers. On June 5, amid global protests spurred by the death of George Floyd, Ms. Wintour sent a note to her staff, acknowledging that “it can’t be easy to be a Black employee at Vogue,’’ and that the magazine had “not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators.” Although Vogue has made a greater effort to feature black women on its covers in recent years — Rihanna, Serena Williams, Lupita Nyong’o — the gate swings open far more easily for those who are not. And in this particular area, too, legacy weighs heavily. When LeBron James made history as the first black man to grace the cover in 2008, he shared the space with a white supermodel, Gisele Bündchen, who appeared as a damsel in his clutches, an unmistakable reference to King Kong. A spokesman at Condé Nast admitted that much progress needs to be made in regard to diversity at the company, but he defended Ms. Wintour’s record, pointing out that she has passionately supported various designers of color throughout her career, helping to raise money for them through her work with the Council of Fashion Designers of America. She also installed two black editors to lead Teen Vogue, genuinely radical in its content, one following the other (Elaine Welteroth and then Lindsay Peoples Wagner). At the same time, Ms. Wintour has presided over Vogue for 32 years, and during that period she has done more to enshrine the values of bloodline, pedigree and privilege than anyone in American media. A brief and very inconclusive list of Ms. Wintour’s assistants in the 21st century includes the Yale-educated daughter of a prominent Miami dance director, the Dartmouth-educated descendant of a major bank president, the Princeton-educated daughter of an Oscar-winning screenwriter and so on. For so long it was central to the Condé Nast ethos that you had to be thin, gorgeous and impeccably credentialed to retrieve someone else’s espresso macchiato. Even now, as the publishing industry continues to implode and wonderful writers who could really use the work (or at least the prestigious affiliation) abound, Vogue continues to list among its contributing editors people like the German heiress Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis and many others among the well born. Five years ago, Ms. Thurn und Taxis posted a picture on Instagram of a homeless woman reading Vogue, seated on the sidewalk, with the words, “Paris is full of surprises.” Vogue quickly issued a statement, calling the gesture distasteful, and then proceeded to run her byline on its website at least 10 more times Last year, Grace Coddington, another contributor, who had held enormous influence over what was shot for Vogue and how, in her many years as the magazine’s creative director, was photographed with her collection of “mammy’’ jars, racist ceramics depicting African-American women as servile maids. Ms. Wintour clearly believes that she can break from the past and kill off any vestiges of a system steeped in the benighted values for which she has become the corporate avatar. The public apology from Bon Appétit was quite startling in its admission of failure, particularly its concession that the magazine “continued to tokenize” the people of color that it did hire. As part of her contribution to this new wave of progressivism, Ms. Wintour wrote a piece for Vogue.com a week after the death of George Floyd, aligning herself with Black Lives Matter and calling on Joe Biden to select an African-American woman as his running mate. For someone who had seemed so averse to activism as the world has roiled from inequality for years, it felt like a desperate grasp for relevance. A spokesman for the company bristled at the suggestion, arguing that it is Condé Nast’s job “to cover what’s going on in the culture in the moment.” As it happens, André Leon Talley, who recently wrote a memoir about his complicated relationship with Ms. Wintour, as a black man and longtime former editor at Vogue, also has a lot to say about the current moment. This week in a radio interview with Sandra Bernhard, he offered his opinion about his ex-boss’s professed transformation. “I wanna say one thing, Dame Anna Wintour is a colonial broad; she’s a colonial dame,” he told Ms. Bernhard. “I do not think she will ever let anything get in the way of her white privilege.” Read More Read the full article