Comrade Teen Vogue

The 2000s have resurfaced in fashion and design, alongside references to the magazines that rule nostalgia. We remember them for their vibrant colors, endless beauty tips, and celebrity news. What might not come to mind is the savvy politics of magazines like Teen Vogue—and the importance of their rollback.

If you’ve never heard of Teen Vogue, or only remember it as checkout aisle fodder, Teen Vogue was once a print magazine for a young millennial (and later Gen Z) audience. It hosted surprisingly progressive views, spurred on by fourth-wave feminism's prominence in the 2010s. Alongside celebrity gossip and skincare hacks, Teen Vogue was publishing fearless coverage of hot-button social topics. For a publication targeting teens, it certainly treated its readers like adults.

While competitors like CosmoGirl were losing popularity by the mid 2000s, Teen Vogue’s freshness kept readers hooked. By 2016 Teen Vogue's popularity was peaking, and by 2018 it was the premier publication for Gen Z left-wing politics. But today, less than a decade later, Teen Vogue is a husk of its former self, a fact only emphasized by the search-suggestions on their now digital-only platform (go look it up). 

What happened?

During the Biden administration Teen Vogue’s parent company, Condé Nast, was getting tired of Teen Vogue’s pesky politics. Allegra Kirkland, Teen Vogue’s former politics director, reported that during this time Condé Nast’s global chief content officer Anna Wintour had questioned if they needed a political section at all. Kirkland began to introduce herself as the editor handling coverage of “social issues,” following a strategic decision by Wintour to veto the word “politics” in Teen Vogue.

Anticipating conflict, Teen Vogue writers had unionized with the NewsGuild, the largest media and communications union in North America. By 2019 writers like Kim Kelly, a respected labour columnist for Teen Vogue, had been publishing digitally in an effort to maximize Gen Z viewership. Like other political writers for Teen Vogue, Kelly’s articles grew more risqué with time; the last few ranged in topics from the UAW strikes to “What to Know About Your Rights to Unionize”. 

But last year Teen Vogue’s daring politics hit a breaking point with Condé Nast. In November  of 2025, Condé Nast announced the closure of Teen Vogue as a standalone entity and fired 70 percent of the staff, allegedly to realign with the values of the "Vogue ecosystem". In other words, “It’s not you, it’s me.” When unionized staff went to question the layoffs, four of them were fired on the spot.

As of 2026, The NewsGuild of New York remains in ongoing legal action with Condé Nast.

Accessible political coverage was once nearly non-existent for young audiences, and with the loss of Teen Vogue they now face extinction. 85% of Gen Z gets its news from social media, and the misinformation war rages online. Teen Vogue’s disappearance should remind us of the bias we bring to those “girly” media outlets; not all grocery aisle magazines are what they seem. 

Sophie Dunlap 

Justin Cuvelier