Willa Bennett
editor of magazines
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/style/highsnobiety-magazines.html
Highsnobiety won a National Magazine Award for general excellence — its first nomination and win at the Oscars of the magazine world.
editor in chief is Willa Bennett, who ran social media at GQ magazine until 2022.
On the April night she accepted Highsnobiety’s National Magazine Award, her former boss, the GQ editor Will Welch, was “hooting and hollering” (his words) for the 30-year-old woman. She wore a gray Thom Browne suit with a matching skirt layered over the pants, and black Tabi cleft-toe shoes. She spoke into a microphone about how magazines are important and how print media matters.
designer Virgil Abloh shared many of the same interests as Highsnobiety: adolescence, corporate collaborations, the blurring of high-end fashion and “streetwear.”
framed thank-you note from Donatella Versace and a receipt for $19,010 from the Château Marmont in Hollywood, where Highsnobiety co-hosted a dinner before the Grammys in February.
cover story on Dries Van Noten, the 65-year-old Belgian designer who recently announced his retirement.
spring issue had three cover stars: Mr. Van Noten, the musician Andre 3000 (age 48) and the model-actress Pamela Anderson (age 56), none of whom seem like intuitive choices for a magazine that typically concerns itself with young emerging talent.
Ms. Anderson was a more personal choice for Ms. Bennett, who wrote in the issue that Ms. Anderson’s 1989 Playboy cover once hung on her bedroom wall.
Ms. Anderson wore a blazer and tie and nothing else. She wore a blazer and tie on her Highsnobiety cover, too. Women are often styled in men’s wear in the magazine’s pages.
Ms. Bennett grew up in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles and attended the private school Oakwood. Her parents were divorced. She lived with her mother, a therapist who moved to Hawaii when she was in college. Her father, a prominent music manager, lived in Nashville for most of her life. She wears his birth year, 1950, on a silver ring.
Ms. Bennett attended Sarah Lawrence College on a dance scholarship. When she told her adviser she wanted to write for magazines, the adviser suggested she write her thesis about the future of the industry. Instead Ms. Bennett pitched embedding in a middle school for four weeks, writing “about what teens are reading and how they’re reading it,” she said. The project helped her land a job after graduation at Seventeen.
“She really is a voice of and a champion of what young people care about,” Mr. Welch, the GQ editor, said. “And what young people care about isn’t exclusively, necessarily, all young subjects.”
clients include Champion, best known for its sweatsuits, when it’s looking to reach cooler, younger shoppers. Voilà, suddenly Champion and Highsnobiety are hosting a rave together during London Fashion Week, partnering with an edgy local radio station. (Highsnobiety once collaborated on a T-shirt with The New York Times, one of many products created for an event series celebrating New York.)
“They can go through the sales side, and they can buy branded content,” Ms. Bennett said. “They cannot buy a magazine cover.”
In less than two years, in addition to winning the National Magazine Award, Ms. Bennett has shifted Highsnobiety’s audience from predominantly male to a 50-50 gender split.
http://linkedin.com/in/willahbennett
Willa Bennett is former editor-in-chief of Highsnobiety, whose Spring cover star Pamela Anderson is getting Oscar buzz for starring role in “The Last Showgirl”.
