The New-Model Editor in Chief
On the first Monday in May, Marie Claire's Nikki Ogunnaike doles out fashion advice you might actually use (starting with: Madewell's best jean and a *cool* buttondown.)
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Spreadinistas,
Welcome back to the Spread Original Interview Series™. (We’re simple people, really. It’s our extensive legal team that keeps *insisting* on these trademarks.) Why not take a break from auto-refreshing Vogue’s Met Ball coverage to chill with Nikki Ogunnaike, who’s been at the helm of Marie Claire for ten months and is fluent in the kind of clothes you don’t need three assistants and a can of spray-adhesive to apply?
In our book, Nikki is the very model of the modern major-general…hang on, let’s see if we can take the Pirates of Penzance out of that sentence…er, the very model of the circa-2024 fashion mag chief, in an era in which the magazine part is just that—a part. She’s a millennial achiever with 82.5K Instagram followers. She doesn’t look, act, or think like her predecessors, and with her cool, frequently asymmetrical hairstyle, subway commute, and sneaker collection, she takes a friendlier, less dictates-from-on-high approach to the job (put it this way: our old bosses weren’t writing their own web posts). “My generation of journalists—my class, if you will—was not afforded the opportunity to stay in a job for years and years,” she tells us with a chuckle. “I started working in 2007. We had a financial recession shortly thereafter. The internet was on the rise. I’ve sort of approached my career with the idea that if I wanted to be able to learn a new skill set, if I wanted to get promoted or move up, I should jump around.” Thus she leapt from the fashion closet of Vanity Fair, to InStyle, Glamour, Elle.com (where our paths first crossed), GQ, and Harper’s Bazaar. Today, she’s running Marie Claire out of offices in Bryant Park, far from the long shadow cast by the Hearst Tower. Owned by UK-based media company Future, which also owns Who What Wear (WWW cofounder and queen of all style media Hillary Kerr oversees Future’s fashion publications) M.C. now produces two print issues and four digital issues a year, a website, a storm of social media, and the IRL entrepreneur event series Power Trip. Here, Nikki attempts to rein in your Spreaditors’ wardrobe malfunctions (good luck with that) while pointing out the head-smackingly obvious problem with Substack fashion that is now all we can think about.
Is there a media-world insider you’d love to hear from? Maybe you have followup questions on a story you read that are keeping you up at night (code word: goldfish). Maybe there’s a behind-the-scenester you feel deserves their day in the sun? Drop your suggestions in the comments or email us at rachelandmaggie@thespread.media, and we’ll do our level best to chase ‘em down. Or, more honestly, if they’re someone we also want to hear from, we’ll try to do something about it.
Ship it!
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. This is your gentle reminder to like us, love us, heart us.
P.P.S. New drinking game: How many times can we say millennial in one interview? Come right this way to find out!
Nikki! Hello and welcome to Spreadlandia! Let’s get into it. You worked for Ariel Foxman’s InStyle, Cindi Leive’s Glamour, and our beloved Robbie Myers’s Elle—that’s a wide swath of the last generation of fashion mag editors for whom print was really the thing. All to say, you’ve seen firsthand the old way of doing it. What's the new way?
Well, we do take a lot of the old—the good old service journalism that comes from working at places like InStyle and Glamour. Now it’s reshaped to SEO, but, like, it’s still service journalism at the end of the day, right? The new-guard piece is that it's not just me, magazine editor—it's me, influencer, or whatever you want to call it, with my social platform. It’s me as the face of the brand. It’s me doing video, writing for the site, writing for print. Writing my newsletter, Self Checkout. It’s doing print issues, digital issues, meeting traffic goals on the site. The job is big. That’s what I was trying to say in that Washington Post story they did on a few of us [“Millennial Women Leading a New Era of Fashion Journalism”] recently.
You brought up that story before we had a chance to!
When I said the job was bigger than it had ever been before, it wasn't to knock what any of these people have done before. Like, Tina Brown is the GOAT, let's be very clear about that. But the job has changed, no ifs, ands or buts about it. The job is very different. The perks are very different.
We were thinking about that story when we spoke with Linda Wells recently. We wanted to know, did her “Town Car era” generation of editors have it better? It could not have been more gratifying when she was like, Yes. Yes, we absolutely did.1
Yeah, confirmed!
Do you think of Marie Claire as a magazine or a brand? For that matter, what even is a magazine anymore?
I think it’s one piece of a brand. When I introduce myself, I say I'm the editor in chief of Marie Claire magazine, because that's what most people know it as. But that's just one arm of what happens, right? There's Marie Claire, the actual print magazine, there's Marie Claire, the day to day website, there's social, there's video. There’s Power Play, more of an experiential arm.
At this point, why bother making a print issue at all? Seems expensive.
I think of a print magazine as just a part of the way a person consumes media, honestly. Part of the media diet. The people we’re covering, our subjects, still really care about print. And the people we're writing for, millennials, still care about print. But I don't think they need it 12 times a year. Somewhere between two and six feels really good though, right?
Nikki, your Spreaditors are terrifyingly out of fashion. Will you choose us three items that could bring us somewhat more up to date if we were to, you know, go somewhere that people actually noticed what we were wearing?
Interesting. What kind of jeans are you wearing right now? That’s a big tell.
Because we are the same person, we are both still in the Levi’s Wedgie.2
OK, I think we could widen the leg a little bit. We’re moving towards looser, mid-rise, and a darker wash. More of a straight leg, with a finished hem. I love a good pair of vintage men’s Levis. Front General Store in Dumbo [Brooklyn] has an incredible vintage assortment—you just have to try a bunch to see what works. Levi’s also does secondhand, but you’re taking a risk ordering online. I take vintage finds to the tailor at my local dry cleaner and we figure out the fit. But Levi’s stores do have in-house tailors you can schedule appointments with.
We love this for you, but Spreaditors are notoriously lazy people. Where can we find ready-to-roll new jeans?
I love Madewell’s Perfect Vintage jean in the wide-leg crop, the hem is the perfect length for either heels or flats and sneakers. Also Alex Mill just came out with jeans. I haven’t tried them yet, but the Bev looks great.
What about shoes?
I’ve aged out of the teetering heels of it all. For sneakers, I think the Adidas Samba is a little played out, but I still like the Gazelle, or the Nike Killshot 2. Also love the Wales Bonner Adidas collab, but you had to jump on those fast—they’re sold out. Otherwise it’s a super-flat Mary Jane. Le Monde Béryl, a brand I really like, makes a super-supple ballet Mary Jane.
Now what do we put on top?
I’m very simple—it’s always a button-down shirt with a t-shirt layered underneath to add a little interest. I’m partial to The Frankie Shop’s Liu, which is slightly oversize and comes in really nice colors. Attersee is worth checking out, too. But it’s one of those newsletter brands—pretty pricey.
Wait, “newsletter brand”? Is that a thing?
Take High Sport, for example [maker of $880 stretchy flared pants that mysteriously popped up on “everybody.”3] The company seeded those pants on the newsletter cohort early on, so they’re they ones who shaped the conversation around them. They're the ones spreading the gospel of High Sport. Now, these pants are well made, and they look good, but I've only seen them on women who are a size…four? That’s not me. I don't know what that pant looks like on me. I don't see it on e-commerce on somebody who’s bigger than a six, and I don't see it in newsletters on somebody who's bigger than a six.
You’re so right. High Sport is a headscratcher.
I think it’s a bit of an echo chamber, the Substack fashion space. The ones who got to [the fashion newsletter game] early— Becky Malinsky , Leandra Medine Cohen , Laura Reilly from Magasin, Laurel Pantin—they’re all former fashion editors. We have to be cognizant of the fact that it’s sort of replicating what traditional media looked like, which, frankly, is very thin and very white. I’m friends with these people, so it’s not a knock on them, but—who’s popular in these spaces? Whose voice do we hear the most of? It’s those women, because they have great taste, and they’re really good at their jobs, and they’re former fashion editors… and because brands like women who look like that.
We are frankly embarrassed that we haven’t thought of this before—it could be because the High Sport phenomenon clubbed us over the head and we’ve never quite recovered. Can you share some women who don’t fit that mold we should be following in the fashion newsletter space?
Sure. Hey Mrs. Solomon on Style is by Rachel Solomon, written for women 50+; she calls it people who are “arriving” instead of “aging.” Canadian fashion consultant Irene Kim writes In Moda Veritas. And there’s are you wearing that? by Subrina Heyink, who’s a former vintage dealer. I confess I’m still working on finding more size-diverse newsletter writers. [Ed note: Readers, please point us in the right direction!]
In the 2010s, M.C. was really successful at aligning itself with the young working woman—dare we say, the girlboss? Is that still your woman?
Our reader is firmly a millennial, so now that’s family, money, but yeah a lot of that is career. I think she knows she shouldn't be a quote-unquote girlboss. But she’s still got a bit of that girlboss energy to her, like, can’t really break it—myself included [laughs].
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Linda Wells on the “Town Car era” of magazine journalism: “It was a great time. It was a really fun time to be an editor, because Condé Nast took care of us. Si Newhouse believed that we should be living like our subjects. And out in their world. And so the indulgences were many.”
Update: It was later revealed that Rachel has been cheating on Maggie with the Levi’s Ribcage. Harrumph!
The Strategist’s Hilary Reid unpacks the mystery of High Sport here. Speaking of good old fashion service journalism, we also found this couldn’t-be-more-obvious obvious J.Crew dupe (untested, let us know what you think) as well as this round up of dupes on on Totally Recommend. When it comes to $880 stretch pants, yes, we are pro dupe.
Nikki!! Hail, Brilliant Woman!!!
Nikki is so cool 😎 ❤️❤️❤️❤️