If you are, like me, a person with no sense of style and a stomach paunch, you might understand why dressing for a fashion show would be a psychological challenge. The day before my first one, I begged my best-dressed co-worker to chaperone my visit to a fast-fashion outlet. I’d coveted a pleated gold-foil skirt I’d seen on the store’s website. My co-worker had approved the skirt on the model. I tried it on. She did not approve it on me. In person, the gold foil looked cheap, the waistband of the skirt unflattering. Instead, she picked out a rose-colored accordion skirt that I would never have thought to buy. I put it on the next morning. Four hours later, I spilled steak juice all down my front.

Maybe another person would have given up at that point, but I was on my way to meet Elaine Welteroth, the editor in chief of Teen Vogue. Hired at 29, she is the youngest-ever editor in chief of a Condé Nast publication, and only the second black woman to hold the title there. Since taking over the magazine last year, she has become a personality of sorts, appearing as herself on ABC’s ‘‘black-ish’’ and being photographed cuddled up to celebrities: the Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, the actors Gabrielle Union and Aja Naomi King. As I headed to the Coach fall show this February, I found myself growing increasingly nervous to meet her. It wasn’t that she was famous, really. But I spent a significant portion of my adolescence fantasizing about running my own teen magazine, and, like her, I am a young, black New York-based editor with curly hair and myopia. She was famous to me.

The current iteration of Teen Vogue is, if you listen to anyone who likes it — and you’d be surprised at the diversity of people who do — a ‘‘revolution’’ in magazines. Devoid of the prom- and weight-loss-themed articles that usually litter teen magazines, the title, read primarily by 18-to-24-year-olds, is now full of articles like an open letter by Mckesson to Jordan Edwards, a 15-year-old black boy who was fatally shot by police, or a conversation between the singer Troye Sivan and the model Hari Nef about being members of the L.G.B.T. community in the current political climate.

It certainly feels strikingly different from the Teen Vogue that began showing up at my family’s house in the early aughts. Back then, it was mostly indistinguishable from the other teen magazines I read: CosmoGirl (for sassy white girls), Seventeen (for ambitious white girls), YM (for white girls prone to toxic-shock syndrome). Teen Vogue — for rich white girls — was explicitly dedicated to fashion, less ‘‘finding a prom date’’ and more ‘‘finding a prom color palette.’’ What sticks out most in my memory is ‘‘A Room of My Own,’’ the back-page feature that almost always presented a very posh New York girl whose bed was inevitably from either Crate and Barrel or some cool, unnamed Brooklyn thrift store. Even though my life didn’t resemble the ones I saw in those pages, I read the magazines as soon as they arrived. I knew the themes were corny and hypocritical — breathless embraces of self-love despite diet tips 12 pages later — but I was convinced they would teach me how to be a person in the world.