Rowan Blanchard & Elaine Welteroth Discuss Identity

Sam.

Hi, Boston.

Elaine Rowan. I love you. I love you, too.

Can we just take a moment and just appreciate the fact that we are sitting on the same stage that Michelle Obama was yesterday? If we weren't already nervous. I know that's too far way up here.

Elaine. We are. I think of you as this fairy godmother in my life. I really do. I think of you as like, this, this godmother, this fairy angel that's come into my life. And I look up to you in so many ways. And I don't know, I've. I've had a subscription to Teen Vogue since I was probably 11 or 10, and I've sort of watched this magazine change. And from this thing that felt a little alienating, felt like something that wasn't accessible to me, to what it is now, which speaks directly to me. Yeah, I have this weird relationship with it because I'm friends with you. I've been on the COVID but I'm also just this really big fan.

Which makes you perfect to have this conversation.

Right.

By the way, I just want to say it's a little weird because I feel I've been. I've interviewed you so many times at this point that I'm used to being on the other end of it.

I know now I get to turn.

The table, and now you're turning the tables on me. I feel like you're, You're. You're trying to go Oprah on me right now. I hope you get some tears.

Oh, I hope I get some tears, too. That's pretty amazing. Obviously, you sort of became known because you were the first. You were the youngest editor in chief in Conde Nast history. You were also. Yeah. You were also only the second black editor in chief in Conde Nast history. You were also the first black before you were editor in chief of Teen Vogue. You were actually there as a beauty director, and you were the first black. Black beauty director in Conde Nast's 107 year history. I just want to start there. You're a woman of first. You've been the first of a lot of things. And I want to talk about how you realized that, how you sort of came into Teen Vogue, and especially what it was like to realize you were the first of all these things.

Well, it's interesting because first of all, I didn't realize I was a first when I just accepted a job. Right. My first job at Teen Vogue was beauty Director. I was 25, and I was still wrapping my head around what that meant when I learned via headlines That I was the first black beauty director in Conde Nast history. And the weight of that hit me. And I realized two things. One, it was interesting to me that race was in the headline. Like, I got a new job that I felt I had really worked hard for and was really grateful for. But I realized that I'm never just going to be Elaine. Got the job. It's going to be Elaine, the black editor. The first black editor. And so I struggled with it a little bit because I just thought, wow, in 2012, we're still having firsts of this sort. Let's just unpack that. Right? And then it became, you know what? This is a reality of our world that we live in. My race is going to enter every room before I will. Before they know who I am, before anything. They're going to see the hair. They're going to. They're gonna say, this is an interesting. I haven't seen this before in this context. And so I realized actually, the responsibility that comes with that and the opportunity that comes with that, and being the first meant that I was bringing my community with me. It means I was bringing a perspective that hadn't been represented there in that way before. And it empowered me to own that position as the first versus shying away from it and wanting to be like, let's not distract ourselves by the race card here. Let's focus on the work. And I just want. And it was that, too. I wanted to obviously be appreciated for my perspective and for my work, but I wanted to embrace my culture and my identity while doing it. And I thought, you know what? This is an opportunity to bring my full self to this opportunity. And in doing so, it's an opportunity to speak to an audience of people who haven't really been spoken directly to on this particular platform.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah. We were talking about how it can sort of feel when people address you with, like, the title instead of just realizing the amount of work that you've done to actually change Teen Vogue as just, like, the first black editor in chief or the youngest black editor in chief, how that can sometimes imply that it was just given to you rather than you worked for it. So I kind of want to rewind and I want to take us back, like, before college, before this was even an option, before you realized you wanted to be working at a magazine or whatever position that was. Take us back there. How did that all start?

Well, so I grew up in a small town, working class family, an interracial family. My dad is this, like, acoustic guitar playing Kind of hippie rock guy. My mom is a gospel singer, black woman, and my brother is this, like, biracial guy, punk rock guy, with, like. He had, like, a green mohawk the whole time. We were growing up in the Bay Area, so I grew up in this really eclectic household that really embraced creativity and quirk and, like, individuality and kind of just let. Let you be who you are. And I don't think I really appreciated how much that influenced my point of view and my confidence growing up as a young person of color in a mostly white neighborhood in the Bay Area. But it's. I realized it later, and I also realized how it impacted my perspective as a journalist. So I think being biracial allows you to be this bridge in conversations and, you know, in storytelling. And so when I eventually realized that I wanted to work in magazines, it wasn't because I was reading Seventeen or Teen Vogue necessarily. It was because I read Ebony and Essence, my mom's magazines, even as a young girl, because that's where. That's what I identified with. And so when I started my career at Ebony, I realized there was such a power in that audience. But I felt my mission was to bring that perspective to the mainstream. Like, I didn't want to be kind of stuck in this black media echo chamber, so to speak. I wanted to kind of break out of that and bring that perspective to really. To Conde Nast. As soon as I got to Ebony, I was like, now that I've gotten here, I realize that I think I'm needed there. And so I kind of set my sights out to be at Conde Nast, which, in my mind, was the best of the best. When you think of the publishing industry.

When you started working at Teen Vogue, you sort of worked your way up and also worked your way in as far as, like, infiltrating representation and diversity. As I was saying before, like, I've sort of watched this entire Teen Vogue thing just as a subscriber, and it was really interesting to me because it hit a certain point before Trump, before the election, before all these things where I realized that I could no longer read about, like, the same white girl over and over again, which I didn't even realize I was reading, because you don't. When you're always represented your entire life, you don't realize that there's people who don't get to be represented. And I think one of the biggest key points and one of the strongest things about Teen Vogue now is the amount of people it represents and its call to diversity and not Only just writing about diversity, but hiring people who represent that diversity. So when you did start working at Teen Vogue, you brought Philip Bond. So can you just tell us about bringing people in, who you chose to bring in, how you wanted those perspectives to shine from the in out?

Yeah, well, I think in order to change the storytelling, you have to change the storytellers. And you can't, you know, evolve as a brand. You can't think in new ways if the people are. If there isn't diversity of thought, of experience, of point of view. And so it's interesting because I think Teen Vogue has had this phenomenal moment where, you know, we're now recognized as being a credible political news source for this young generation at a really, really critical time in our history and. And for standing for diversity and for representation. And I think sometimes I'm asked, like, how did you do it? Like, as if it happened. Like, you guys just came out of nowhere. Like, where were you? You guys were like this fashion magazine, and all of a sudden you became this political force. What happened? And the reality is, I think people think it happened when Trump showed up. I think they think people think it happened when Lauren Duka, who's one of our freelance writers, did this phenomenal piece called Trump is Gaslighting America. And if you have not seen it, read it, you should. Definitely. You should. It's really phenomenal. And that story changed the narrative around what Teen Vogue stood for well beyond our demo. But for folks like you who've been following Teen Vogue's trajectory along the way, you know that it actually started well before that. And so I always like to. I'm like, let's not give Trump that much credit, okay, for Teen Vogue's evolution. Like, it was. We were here doing this before that. But, but. But thank you for recognizing and thank you for now being a part of the conversation. But. But to go back, I think what transformed Teen Vogue, what evolved Teen Vogue was diversifying the people sitting at the table. And starting with. And this is not. I'm not taking credit at all. I think as. As soon as you put someone different in a position of power, just simply by the law of alchemy, like, it's going to change the nature of some of the conversations. And when that person brings in someone else with this perspective that has never been represented, the conversation is going to continue to shift in a different direction. So my first hire as beauty director at Teen Vogue was someone named Philip Picardi, who was this young gay man, and I wanted him to be my beauty the associate beauty editor. He was the best guy for the job, Best person for the job. And so I remember when I went to say, like, exactly that and we should hire him. It was sort of like, interesting. A boy in beauty. Like, that's an interesting. And I was sort of like, this is the. At the time, Glee was the number one show on tv. I think they're ready for this. Like, I think they're all right to take advice from. From a guy who can beat a face better than anyone I know. You know, like, I think we're ready. So bringing him in, and I'm like, you know, you'll fall in love with him. And they did. And together, you know, Philip and I created something that hadn't existed at Teen Vogue before, which was a safe space for those who feel othered, you know, And I think we talk a lot about first and we celebrate first, but we don't talk a lot about the behind the scenes and what it takes to sustain that position, to thrive in that position and not just survive. And I think your natural inclination when you are other coming into a position of power is first and foremost to assimilate. It's like you just want to be respected and you don't want your race to become a distraction. So you just do as you fit into the box. Right. And I think I did do that for a while. I think it's a survival tactic in your professional life. I think a lot of people do that when they are different. But eventually, by hiring someone like Phil, and by Phil hiring someone who was. I think his first hire was a black gay man who was fantastic and headed up our social media, and then an Asian American woman who headed up the digital. She was his deputy on digital. And you just created this space where it was safe for us to actually show up as our full selves and bring issues to the table that maybe we didn't feel so comfortable talking about before. And so taking Teen Vogue, taking a hard look in the mirror and changing who was actually at the table is what changed the storytelling and created an authentic connection to our audience through that storytelling. So I always. I like the opportunity to be able to actually tell that story. It's not something I usually have an opportunity to do very often, but that is the magic. That's the magic. You know, Phil came in, he had never had a black friend. And for him to come into a workplace where his boss was a black woman, he was able to see for the first time how racism shows up at work in subtle ways. Microaggressions and. And through my exposure to his experience as a gay man, even in 2013 or 14 or whatever it was, he experienced discrimination in New York City and would come to the office and things happened to him where we cared for each other and we saw each other as humans, and we thought, we are creating the safe space for each other here. We have to do that with our platform for the audience, the millions of young people who feel the way we felt growing up. And we wanted to create a magazine that we wish we had, that was inclusive, that was vibrant, that celebrated representation, that showed the world as we saw it, which is beautifully diverse and colorful and filled with substance. You know, we could talk about fashion and beauty, but we could also be so much more, and we can mean so much more to our audience. But it all started with changing the face of the brand from the inside.

I want to talk about sort of the magnitude of representation and the magnitude of diversity, especially how you were saying, just as far as people you were hiring, getting a chance to have them actually put people in the magazines who looked like them, who represented them. Can you talk about, especially as a young girl, as a young biracial girl, somebody who is entering into a world of editors where the space is predominantly white. Like, how would you. How do you talk to them about the importance of diversity, about gaining trust from your audience and broadening your audience? Because I think people. It's exactly what you were saying. People sort of categorize black media into one box, and the rest is all like mainstream media. So how did you sort of, sort of infiltrate that?

Well, I think the way Teen Vogue approaches fashion and beauty even has evolved. And I think we. We've started to see that beauty, for instance, is really. It's a filter. It's a lens for how you can. How you want to be seen. And it's also. It's a platform to have a conversation about identity, about representation, about who you are, self expression. And so we dove a little deeper into the way we approached beauty. And one of our first stories that. That set us on this trajectory, I would say, in terms of our new editorial direction, was a story called Cultural Appreciation. I don't know how many of you guys might have heard about that story, but it all started from a conversation in the office where, you know, we were seeing, season after season, Runway on the runways. You know, people. Designers were committing to cultural appropriation, and it became. They got the backlash season after season on social media. And Teen Vogue also was called out for cultural appropriation. You know, in our, throughout our history. And so at some point we all came together and we had to talk about it and say, well, we also had to create a safe space for people to ask questions like, what is cultural appropriation? And like, why is it actually wrong to put cornrows on a blonde white girl? Like, why can't we do that? Why is it offensive? And we had to have hard, controversial conversations and confront each other around these issues that were already bubbling up in our audience or in our community, on social media in particular. And we were coming under fire. So it's either we ignore it, which isn't really an option today. There's a two way dialogue and the reader wants to be heard. Our reader in particular, they want their voices to be hear. So it forced this conversation inside. And we came up with this idea. We're like, you know, if we're having this conversation inside, we should be fostering this conversation with our audience. And there probably are people that read Teen Vogue who also don't know what it is and don't know why it's wrong. And then there's also a ton of people who read Teen Vogue who feel personally offended by this. So how do we bridge the gap here? How do we be a gap? How do we be sorry, a bridge in the divide in this conversation? And how do we also inject some positivity into it? You know, how do we bring it forward versus just contributing to like kind of the hate and the confusion and all of that. And so we came up with this idea to shoot real girls who come from these cultures that are routinely appropriated and have them tell their audience what it is, why it's wrong, and what the difference is between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. So we, and I remember we came up with this big idea. We're gonna, we're like, we're gonna get a Native American girl. We're gonna get, you know, an Afro Latina with baby hairs. We're gonna get a black girl with a big Afro Freedom fro. And I remember my French creative director being like, really? We're gonna just find a Native American girl just walking down the streets in New York City to be in. I'm like, we're going to find her. We are going to find her. And we did find her. We hired an amazing street caster. And this story brought our whole team together. It elevated all of our consciousness. We learned so much from these girls. And in particular, the Native American girl we found, her name was Donnette and she came with her beautiful headpiece. That she earned in her tribe and. And no one could touch it except her mother. So we had this hairstylist on set and everyone's like, we cannot touch this. It's out of respect for her culture. And he's like, how do I do her hair around it? I mean, everyone became so much more culturally sensitive. And so I think our approach was we have work to do, we need to build trust with this audience. And the way we're going to approach it is we're going to hand the mic over to the girls and use our platform to amplify their voices. Versus the old school way of approaching magazine writing as like the authority. Like, it's a one way dialogue. We are the authority on xyz, on trends, and we're telling you what you should think. This was. Tell us, Tell the world what you think. We're handing the mic to you. And it was such a beautiful experience. We did a video series. There was a beautiful shoot in book, There was a digital rollout. And when it hit, we were like, this could go wrong. This could go terribly wrong because people don't really trust Teen Vogue to take on these types of issues. But when it hit, it exploded on social media and it became a Twitter moment and everyone was talking about it. And it reinforced for us that we're on the right track, we're doing the right thing, and there's a hunger. There's a true thirst for this type of authentic storytelling that brings people together. It's not about isolating anyone. It's really about just shedding light and educating and just informing people and being the bridge in a divide. So that was an important turning point for Teen Vogue.

You were touching on gaining trust from your audience. We were talking about this last night before you ran this piece on cultural appreciation. You got this piece done that was specifically about black hair. But the way it was received was different because your audience didn't trust you first.

Can you take me back there?

We're gonna go there. I want to go there.

We're gonna go there. Okay, so listen, we had work to do. Gaining trust, we had to. And we make mistakes going along the way when we're trying to change a brand and what it means and who it's speaking to. And so I told Rohan this story last night. Basically when I started at Teen Vogue, as I said, I think there was a certain period of just gaining trust and just kind of assimilating. And I think about two and a half years into my career, I was like, I am going to do a story about? Well, it started with me going taking a trip to Africa. I went to Rwanda and Ethiopia for the first time and I got my hair braided. And as a biracial woman, it was sort of this experience of connecting with my African heritage. And I realized that there was such power in that hairstyle and especially as, you know, a corporate leader in a predominantly white industry, for me to come back with these braids that were like down here and like blonde and, you know, very bold. It was it would make a statement and I was ready for that. I felt beautiful. I felt like they were a crown. I loved them so much and I loved what they what they reflected in terms of the culture. And so I came back and I remember just experiencing interesting remarks and none were intended with there was no mal intent. But I just think there was a lack of.