Interview by David Palumbo-Liu

Could Condé Nast be publishing the best mainstream forum for progressive views?

Since 2016, bolstered by the contributions of radicals like Kim Kelly, Teen Vogue has made a curious transformation into a venue that mixes standard fare culture writing with political primers like “Everything You Need to Know About General Strikes” and “Who Is Karl Marx: Meet the Anti-Capitalist Scholar.”

It hasn’t gone unnoticed by the rest of the media, with Quartz going as far as to say that the publication was “terrifying men like Donald Trump.”

We’re not so certain about that. However, it’s certainly an important sign of the times and the growing influence of anticapitalism that its politics editor and author of some of the publication’s best pieces, Lucy Diavolo, spoke at this July’s Socialism Conference in Chicago. And it’s not just the left echo chamber that’s reading these articles — Teen Vogue receives around ten million monthly page views and has over twelve million social media followers, many of them young women.

Reaching a segmented market with radical views isn’t exactly revolutionary in and of itself, but at the very least the coverage is pissing off the right people. The far-right Federalist noted that a Teen Vogue tweet linked to a “poorly-written diatribe that reads like a B student’s Marxism 101 paper and gets key historical facts wrong.” The article instructed Teen Vogue to “shut up about politics” because, after all, the magazine “owes its existence to the tremendous wealth capitalism has created.”

What the Federalist is concerned about, and what socialists and others should celebrate, is that Teen Vogue recognizes the artificiality of separating the public, the private, and the political, and its political writing fuses all three. As the publication warns: “the relentless politicization of all spaces in public and private life is exhausting and dangerous.”

But how dangerous is Teen Vogue ?

The New Statesman has just declared Teen Vogue to be a “champion of democratic socialism,” and editor in chief Elaine Welteroth refers to the magazine as “a movement.” However, a realistic appraisal shows that Teen Vogue presents a range of liberal to left materials, and despite the earnest political convictions of so many of its authors, as an institution its pivot may just be a rebranding exercise.

After all, Teen Vogue is owned by Condé Nast — a 108-year-old global media company with more than one billion consumers in thirty-two markets — and the magazine must toe its corporate publisher’s line. But what it can do, and what it has been doing so successfully, is to educate its readership on issues that they might not have ever been exposed to. Think of what the average American high school, or even college, puts before the eyes of its students — it is mind-numbingly bland and hardly the material that provokes political thought.

And timing is everything — the interest in the new Teen Vogue is attributable to a sense of urgency in the air and also the growing awareness of the bankruptcy of neoliberalism. People want to know new things, and socialism is more and more one of the things people want to know more about, for it seems the only humane response to economic violence.