...Teen Vogue has retained its passion for style, but transformed into a charmingly unholy, strangely coherent mix of explainers on Karl Marx, op-eds calling for prison abolition, and on-the-ground protest coverage from teens—all of which sit beside profiles of Jari Jones, a transgender model; a guide to oral sex; and the latest on Zayn Malik and Gigi Hadid. It’s a curious evolution for a publication within Condé Nast, a media conglomerate better known for being an institution of power than for challenging it. The contradictions are obvious: Teen Vogue maintains a socialist bent while trying to commodify its brand for advertisers primarily in the fashion and beauty industry. Yet its peculiar position in media has seemed, somehow, to work; the magazine has attracted bona fide leftists to its ranks as well as praise from unlikely admirers. In 2019, Jacobin, the socialist publication, ran a piece that declared: “Teen Vogue Is Good.”
