THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
The Zohran Mamdani effect, Anna Wintour’s “Exit,” and what the hell Lauren Sanchez has to do with any of it?
I was almost done writing Letter 013 when an anxious-avoidant, chronic procrastination-induced Instagram scroll delivered a deeply cursed image onto my feed. As I exited my body, hovering above my screen, I caught a bird’s-eye view of what this letter should actually be about, a moment of true clarity: we live in a world where Lauren Sanchez is on Vogue’s digital cover wearing a Dolce & Gabbana wedding dress.
Please allow me to repeat this for dramatic effect: we live in a world, where LAUREN SANCHEZ is on Vogue’s digital COVER, wearing DOLCE & GABBANA.
This one is tough.
Fact: Literally no one should care about the union of these two people.
Other fact: We should care even less about what they will be wearing because as is consistent with everything else they have ever worn, all data suggests that it will not be good.
So: why exactly am I seeing this cover drop on my timeline? What are the criteria for making the cover of a fashion and culture magazine if they are neither fashion, nor culture? Is it scandal (crass)? Spectacle (cheap)? Or are we just straight up livingggg for the oligarchy these days? I guess that depends on the “we” in question…
This comment took me OUT:
Is it SEO driven? How meaningfully can surge traffic to a single page convert. And at what cost? Can metrics even override taste? What does this all mean about the state of magazines in general?
Coupla notes: