Lindsay Peoples Wagner on championing inclusivity at Teen Vogue

‘I felt very strongly that the article was something I had to do. I was scared, and I’m still scared today. A lot of things are scary when you are the only black person to say things.’

In August 2018, New York Magazine’s The Cut published an article by Lindsay Peoples Wagner that ripped the lid off racism in the fashion industry. For the first time, someone had convinced 100 people of colour to speak out on the discrimination they’d faced, from being pushed out of jobs to being asked if their family had been slaves. Within hours, the piece had sparked a social-media firestorm, capturing the attention of an enormous audience, including the monarch of Condé Nast herself, Anna Wintour. The author, however, had no idea what was going on. Six months of emotional interviews – ‘I’ve never heard that many people cry’ – combined with warnings that the article would blacklist her from ever getting another job, convinced Peoples Wagner to be far away when it was finally published. ‘I didn’t know how it would be received, but I needed a moment to be somewhere calming,’ she says. So, she escaped on holiday to Mexico with her husband, her phone hidden away.

Two months (and a summons to Wintour’s office) later, Peoples Wagner moved into her new office at Teen Vogue as the youngest editor in chief of a Condé Nast magazine and the third black editor ever to run one of its American titles. Under its predecessors, Elaine Welteroth and Phillip Picardi, Teen Vogue had already gone through a massive reinvention, emerging after the 2016 presidential election as a platform for Gen Z and millennials to rebel against Trumpian politics and speak up on social issues. When Peoples Wagner landed the job, the magazine had also dropped its print issue to become the publisher’s first major title to go digital only, proving itself as forward thinking in the industry.