Samira’s New World Order

Big news from the Sally Ride and Kathryn Sullivan of newsletters: Harper’s Bazaar EIC Samira Nasr has touched down in Spreadlandia!

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Glorious Spreadangels,

For this week’s installment of the Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) podcast, your Spreaditors got to interview the luminous and brilliant Samira Nasr. Samira is our friend. Also? Editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, one of the most influential fashion magazines on planet earth. Casual.

Samira truly earned her place at the helm of that 156-year-old institution. Don’t get us wrong; she is seriously glamorous—the kind of woman that phrases like “effortless chic” were invented to describe. But she did not cruise to her current perch on connections and camera-readiness alone. Rather, she calls herself a “worker bee,” one who worked her way up—past a pretty serious case of impostor syndrome, from the sound of things—by attending J-school at NYU, then making her way through the fashion closets of Vogue, Mirabella, Vanity Fair, InStyle, and Elle. That’s where we met in the trenches, and got to see firsthand how she mixes an old-school, roll-up-your-sleeves work ethic with her own fresh vision.

When Samira got the big job at Bazaar in 2020, she became the title’s first-ever Black editor-in-chief. The Bazaar she has rebuilt is as close to a glossy art mag as mainstream fashion magazines get, but it is far from chilly. As she has long put it, “I just want to bring more people with me to the party.” Which, when you think about it, is a brilliant mantra for a rapidly shifting era in media and culture. How to keep a legacy fashion magazine going circa 2025? Drop the velvet rope.

Her timing could not have been better. After her first year in the role, Bazaar took home its first-ever National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

Samira breaks the fashion mag editor-in-chief mold in other ways, too, namely by being exceedingly kind, and anything but imperious. (We suspect it has something to do with being Canadian.) How many other editors-in-chief, in Milan for the exhausting Fashion Week crawl, are trying to cram as many colleagues as humanly possible into their cars?

In our interview—which you can listen to here, here, or wherever you like to pod, really—Samira talked about starting in an era in magazine-making when “if you could dream it, you could build it,” and remaking one of fashion’s most legendary magazines today, with joy and verve, but in a very different climate. Plus, jeans, editorial budgets, head-to-toe gold outfits (Rachel!), and even the odd parenting tip.

Party on,

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. The chef brother we mention in the pod is Riad Nasr, co-owner of NYC’s Le Veau d’Or and the James Beard Award-winning Frenchette.

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