Two years in the past, when Condé Nast introduced that Margaret Zhang could be the subsequent editor in chief of Vogue China, many within the trend media have been stunned.
For one factor, at simply 27, Ms. Zhang was the youngest ever editor in chief of a Vogue title. For one more, there was her unorthodox multi-hyphenate résumé as a photographer, advisor, filmmaker, mannequin and social media influencer — with virtually no journal expertise. Then there was the truth that Ms. Zhang, who was born to Chinese language immigrant dad and mom in Sydney, was an Australian who had by no means lived in mainland China.
Her appointment was a substantial gamble for Condé Nast, and particularly for its world chief content material officer, Anna Wintour. China was, and is, a cornerstone of the luxurious trend market, answerable for billions of {dollars} of gross sales. It’s an financial superpower with an advanced relationship with the West, and a spot the place censorship of the press is widespread.
It is usually one of the populous nations on the earth (about 1.4 billion individuals), whose nationalism helps reshape client tradition and the retail panorama. Some Western trend manufacturers have confronted sturdy reactions after angering the federal government over strikes involving Xinjiang cotton or Taiwan.
Angelica Cheung, the founding editor of Vogue China, held the place for 15 years. Its subsequent editor would wish to have an formidable imaginative and prescient, formidable connections and industrial and diplomatic savvy — a problem for somebody twice, and even 3 times, Ms. Zhang’s age and expertise, not to mention a foreigner.
How wouldn’t it really feel to step right into a job like that, understanding how many individuals count on you to fail?
In Soho throughout London Vogue Week final month, Ms. Zhang, now 29, paused for a second when requested that query. Petite, and at present with electrical blue hair (she defines the intervals of her life with its hues), she has been in a position to journey freely for reveals since China lifted its strict lockdown earlier this 12 months.
“I don’t thoughts individuals underestimating me,” Ms. Zhang stated. “And I really say that to individuals who look to me for steering on how they are often taken significantly.”
She added with a smile: “It’s really higher when individuals underestimate you. Then you possibly can show them flawed. It’s all of the extra satisfying.”
New Beginnings
Ms. Zhang’s first issue, in September 2021, was referred to as “New Beginnings” and was produced throughout quarantine by a bunch of girls, together with a little-known photographer, Hailun Ma. It featured a 19-year-old dance pupil from Beijing Sport College on the duvet. Since then, Ms. Zhang, who now lives in Beijing, has continued plotting her imaginative and prescient for Vogue and what it may signify in Twenty first-century China.
Her deal with on Instagram, the place she has 1.8 million followers, doesn’t say “editor in chief”; as a substitute, it says “Movie Director.” (She is engaged on a screenplay.) Little shock, then, that considered one of her most high-profile initiatives is Vogue Movie, a platform to assist Chinese language girls in movie. To this point, it has produced 11 brief movies.
Then there may be Vogue Open Casting, an annual mannequin scouting program that can go worldwide this 12 months, and the Chinese language Craftsmanship Initiative, which facilitates collaborations between worldwide designers, native design expertise and conventional Chinese language craft communities. Ms. Zhang has additionally spearheaded a mentorship program pairing rising Chinese language designers with worldwide names, like Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino.
Ms. Zhang’s journal covers and the content material inside are placing, rooted in daring saturated colour and the candid model that originally discovered her fame as an influencer. A September 2022 digital cover series explored trend’s collision with the metaverse; the splashy cowl of the December 2022 problem, photographed by Ms. Zhang, featured the supermodel Liu Wen.
In China, male film stars and influencers — identified regionally as KOLs — are sometimes extra widespread than their feminine counterparts. Final month’s cover of the movie star Jackson Yee, in a contemporary interpretation of conventional Beijing Opera character that included current-season trend, was Vogue China’s first solo male cowl star.
“When Margaret was employed, we have been all very shocked,” stated Emma Zhang (no relation to Margaret), a trend director of Gusto Collective, which helps Western luxurious manufacturers navigate expansions in Asia. “However it’s clearer now, when Era Z is such a precedence client, why they needed somebody with a youthful perspective and visible model. Her method is totally different from what got here earlier than. Many see it as a breath of contemporary air.”
It’s a digital native method that feels, to many within the trend trade and elsewhere, younger and experimental. There’s a highlight on rising expertise, whereas nonetheless revering points of Chinese language heritage at a time of rising appreciation amongst many shoppers for the nation’s cultural historical past.
For Ms. Zhang, Vogue can now not painting itself as an arbiter that dictates model and traits. That’s merely not acceptable to readers anymore, particularly in China, the place Ms. Zhang described the viewers as “15 years forward in consumption of product, content material and engagement.”
“The best way we have interaction with our Chinese language viewers, and more and more internationally, is by presenting Vogue as a means of seeing the world reasonably than simply as an output platform of content material,” she stated. “Sure, we act as a curator, however what’s the Vogue lens on life? What entry and exclusivity can Vogue give you?”
“It’s a dialogue,” she continued. “Vogue in China performs a a lot better institutional position than most different markets as a result of it’s such a younger trade and there’s a lot new expertise to embrace and encourage. On the identical time there isn’t the identical quantity of luggage or preconceived notions about what Vogue ought to and could be. That’s actually thrilling.”
A Cultural Bridge
China is so huge that Ms. Zhang, who runs a crew of fifty, stated the journal should produce considerably extra content material than Vogue editions in different nations. Each social media viewers issues — whether or not Weibo, Douyin (China’s model of TikTok) or the purchasing platform Little Pink E book — and has totally different necessities.
Print magazines, she stated, are considered extra as coffee-table collectibles than disposable month-to-month compilations of runway traits or glitzy occasions. However she additionally has worldwide markets in her sights, together with the Chinese language diaspora the world over.
Ms. Zhang, the daughter of a health care provider and a professor who emigrated from Huangyan, in Zhejiang province, was introduced up in what she referred to as a “very conventional Chinese language family” and attended Chinese language college each Saturday. She educated as a ballet dancer and live performance pianist earlier than beginning her private web site, Shine by Three, in 2009.
She then studied for a joint diploma in regulation and commerce on the College of Sydney, which she accomplished as soon as her trend profession started to flourish. She appeared on the duvet of Elle Australia — the primary Asian to take action, in response to Condé Nast — and she or he stated that when she was rising up, many Asian cultures have been not often featured in Western media, one thing that’s shifting now.
Whereas she is aware of her core viewers in China, she additionally desires to achieve Chinese language individuals dwelling outdoors the nation. She can be conscious, she stated, of the “urge for food from non-Chinese language individuals to find out about Chinese language creatives and youth tradition.”
Previously 12 months and a half, she stated, Vogue had repositioned itself as a cultural bridge — China to the world, the world to China.
Not too long ago, Condé Nast has restructured its worldwide operations, notably the way it syndicates content material. Veteran names disappeared, changed with a brand new era handpicked by Ms. Wintour, who, unsurprisingly, speaks in glowing phrases of Ms. Zhang.
“It was her digital fluency and information of the place trend is headed that made Margaret stand out — her skill to talk to audiences wherever they’re and to grasp what’s related now,” Ms. Wintour wrote in an e mail.
“She’s a world thinker who is aware of that thrilling personalities, designers and tales from China can journey throughout borders. Most of all, she is aware of tips on how to converse to younger trend obsessives wherever they’re, as a result of she is one herself.”
‘The Execution Is Not There’
Not everybody feels that means. Final January, Sophia Liao, the previous boss of Condé Nast China (who sued the corporate for unfair dismissal), printed a sequence of stinging articles on WeChat concerning the path of the journal and Ms. Zhang’s appointment, regardless of having had a hand in hiring her.
“It was actually harmful to have such an individual be the editorial director of Vogue China,” Ms. Liao wrote. “Why? As a result of she has been rising up and dwelling in Australia and abroad, her understanding of China is just too superficial and restricted.”
Leaf Greener, a former Elle China trend editor turned inventive advisor, questioned whether or not Ms. Zhang was fluent sufficient in Mandarin to edit {a magazine} and stated that many within the Chinese language trend trade remained skeptical. She requested whether or not a international perspective was what the Chinese language market wanted at the moment.
“Margaret is making an attempt to interrupt the foundations and convey contemporary content material to the desk,” Ms. Greener stated in a telephone name. “She has some good concepts and is supporting younger native designers, however generally the execution is admittedly not there. With the intention to succeed, she’s going to wish to repair what I see as a serious cowl drawback and intention for various versus chaotic styling. I don’t assume it’s the place it must be to be a world-class trend journal.”
Ms. Zhang thinks her Mandarin talent is enough. (She conceded she speaks it reasonably formally, and lacks native colloquialisms however added that it had proved very helpful for speaking with grandmothers in markets in Shanghai.) She additionally seems sanguine about naysayers, which she stated she has grappled together with her entire working life.
“I might be mendacity if I stated that this job or the duty wasn’t intimidating,” she stated. “However I’ve develop into used to being the youngest individual within the room. Typically, I’m additionally essentially the most inventive in a enterprise room, or essentially the most business-literate in a inventive room. Principally, the odd one out. However two years in, I really feel like every little thing that I’ve realized in my profession, and all of my totally different threads of expertise, unusually converge for this position.”
Ms. Zhang is extra reticent on subjects like authorities censorship or the rising challenges of getting cash or standing in China (normally core content material for protection in Vogue magazines outdoors China). The federal government can be cracking down on celeb tradition amid concern that it’s poisoning the minds of the nation’s youth — and that could be a purpose to give attention to rising expertise reasonably than the emerged.
However she additionally comes throughout as clever and curious, fizzing with opinions and satisfaction — like a stage mother, she declared — that Fan Jinghan, her inaugural problem cowl star, had walked for Burberry, and that the Chinese language designer Susan Fang confirmed on the London schedule.
The Vogue alternative, Ms. Zhang stated, “got here out of the blue and was not in my life plan, and it meant a complete recalibration of what my targets have been.”
“I might at all times have puzzled what this expertise would have been like if I hadn’t grabbed it, so I did,” she added. “Plus, as I’m positive you possibly can inform by now, I like a problem.”
Supply: NY Times
