Vanity Fair is dead. The new Vanity Fair has gone “Brat.”
The new Vanity Fair is something quite different than anything from Tina Brown or Graydon Carter.
The November cover subject? Pop starlet Charli XCX, 33, a minor player in the music business but big among teen girls and the early 20-ers. She doesn’t have a thought in her head, and she’s proud of it.
Vanity Fair, under new editor Mark Guiducci — who is still running Vogue World, a one day live fashion event — is now in the demo of Cosmopolitan or Cosmo from the 1990s. Like Charli, the magazine also doesn’t have a thought in its head.
This is a deliberate move. Subscribers over the age of 40 are being told by this cover choice and last month’s — Dakota and Elle Fanning — to go away. Young girls are coming to the valley.
It’s ironic timing that Diane Keaton, a woman of such accomplishment well before Charli’s age of 33, has passed this week.
Charli XCX is the downmarket Taylor Swift. She’s not even Billie Eilish, who has Oscars and Grammys and might merit such treatment some day. Charli’s “Brat” album was a pop phenom in 2024 among teens and young women. It wasn’t about the music, per se. It was the concept– an ad concept that worked well. “Brat” became a password.
Here’s a key passage from the article:
“I’m always thinking about how I look and what I would change about my face,” Charli says, citing her favorite plastic surgery website RealSelf for giving her the resources to know that she can’t achieve a permanent version of the braid eye tilt with sugar threads. At some point, she says, she “probably will get” a mid-facelift. “I’m fucking thinking about all the shit that I could do and pull and stretch and morph on my face, all the time,” Charli says. “I have to just remind myself that maybe I can’t get too sucked into that.”
Anna Wintour has gotten what she paid for. The “Young Hollywood” feature takes over. Charli XCX has almost 9 million followers on Instagram. Her “Brat” video, below, has had 35 Million views. If putting her on the cover doesn’t bring readers and sell issues, the next step may be even more jarring.
After all, last month’s issue had only 92 pages, the minimum for perfect binding. Lower than that and you get staple binding, something like an airline magazine.
One last note and maybe most important: this issue and the last are also clear signals that Vanity Fair is separated from the movie business. They’re detached now from actual stars of movies, or new releases that might some relevant. Would Timothee Chalamet’s people have him follow Charli XCX?
