How Lindsay Peoples Wagner Is Remaking The Cut

How Lindsay Peoples Wagner Is Remaking The Cut

New York Magazine’s The Cut has long occupied a unique place in the fashion media landscape. Under former editor in chief Stella Bugbee, the women’s vertical — part blog, part magazine — was one of the first publications with fashion week credentials to tackle political news, feminism and mental health in earnest. The wide-ranging mix, delivered with humour and wit, presaged a similar shift in fashion media more broadly that picked up speed during the Trump era, as publications realised they had to expand their coverage beyond the usual designer profile and shopping guide fare to stories from the #MeToo movement or the impact of immigration policy, or risk losing audience attention.

The Cut’s new editor in chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner wants to use her new platform to push difficult conversations not just about the wider world, but also about the industry’s own shortcomings around racism and elitism, topics that have been more frequently discussed in recent years but especially since last summer.

Her editor’s letter for the fall fashion issue, her first go at The Cut’s twice-annual print magazine package since taking up the editor role, is about “whether there is room for fashion criticism in a racist industry“ and describes how the industry’s surface-level efforts to make amends have created “even more of a convoluted space for people of colour like myself.”

She also wrote about the pressure she feels “to get it right at all times, at all costs, that comes from being one of the very few Black leaders of a publication,” saying that often “the high wire can feel like it’s suspended above a pool of piranhas.”

Peoples Wagner has made a name for herself by taking the industry to task. Before she was named Teen Vogue’s editor in chief in 2018, a piece she penned for The Cut on “What It’s Really Like to Be Black and Work in Fashion” raised her profile. In June 2020, she launched the Black in Fashion Council with Sandrine Charles to advance Black professionals and created a yearly report measuring what companies who have signed up to the initiative are doing to further representation. PVH, Everlane and Tiffany & Co. are among the companies taking part.

“We’re in the middle of this pandemic, we’re also in the middle of a reckoning,” Peoples Wagner said in an interview. “There’s definitely some room for us to figure out… [the] conversations that need to be had in the industry that I end up always being the person to bring about, for some reason.”

Other features in the upcoming fashion issue include a profile of Naomi Campbell by Michaela Angela Davis, an anthology of Black supermodels by Jason Campbell, an exploration of the past and future of American fashion by Cathy Horyn, as well as pieces on the “secret shame” of liking Kim Kardashian’s intimates label Skims and fall of “girl boss” founders.

“We wanted to create something that was timeless, that could last forever, that you go back to you and see this moment,” said Willis of the portfolio of Black models, for which the magazine shot Veronica Webb, Tyra Banks, Karen Alexander, Beverly Johnson and Pat Cleveland, among others.

Peoples Wagner wants The Cut to present readers with an “elevated” view of inclusivity, but in a way that is still approachable. For the cover, style director Jessica Willis dressed Campbell in couture from a range of designers including Schiaparelli and Miss Sohee. Willis, who joined The Cut this year on a contract basis and has styled for the likes of Solange Knowles and Pyer Moss, said she aimed to make the resulting images feel more grounded by setting the supermodel in nature, photographing Campbell on a European mountain range.

Peoples Wagner said fashion magazines typically think about inclusivity in terms of price points or “just surface-level race things of, okay, we need to put a Black model on the runway so people don’t say that we’re racist,” she said. “I still don’t think fashion people have an understanding of — it is not a ‘check this box, you did one thing’… It really is holistically looking at everything that we do — editorially, business-wise, all of those things — and saying, how can we be more inclusive of different perspectives in this?”

Peoples Wagner feels that The Cut has focused too exclusively on the issues facing women of a “privileged background,” she said. “I really want to make sure that we’re covering the unsung heroes, that we’re covering the issues that really matter to people and not just matter on a really large scale.”

One example of that is a series of portraits of transgender and nonbinary people by photographer Salgu Wissmath, coupled with interviews about gender dysphoria, published in March. Peoples Wagner pointed to it as an example of a way in which she wants to challenge the idea of a target audience of The Cut.

Peoples Wagner has also started assembling an editorial team “led by women of colour.” She’s spent much of her first five months at The Cut hiring. More than 15 staffers have left the vertical since the start of the pandemic including Bugbee, who stepped down from the EIC role in October and was named the editor of the Styles section at the New York Times in June. Other exits included deputy style editor Izzy Grinspan, who went to Harper’s Bazaar, and executive editor Melissa Dahl, who went to Bustle Digital Group.

Writers including Rebecca Traister and Matthew Schneier, who both also write for other parts of the magazine, remain, as does Horyn. (Peoples Wagner and Willis plan to travel for fashion month this season with Horyn, who will continue to review the shows in the usual format.)

Members of the New York Magazine union, which organised before the publication was acquired by Vox in 2019, released a pay study in August, revealing median salary disparities between men and women employees, as well as between white women and women of colour employees.

“We are confident, based on a thorough and independent pay-equity study that Vox Media commissioned last year, that there are not any systemic patterns of pay discrimination based on gender identity or ethnicity (or the intersection of the two) at the company level, at New York Magazine, or within the News Guild bargaining unit,” said a representative for New York Magazine, adding that the company is working to improve “representation and diversity at all levels.”

Peoples Wagner’s hires have included deputy style editor Joanna Nikas, joining from the New York Times; senior writer Andrea González-Ramírez, joining from Medium’s politics website GEN; and deputy editor Jen Ortiz, joining from Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire, among other appointments.

“Expanding the perspectives on The Cut has been a huge thing,” said Peoples Wagner, adding that she will be announcing additional new contributors in the coming weeks.

“I want people to feel part of this community whether they know a luxury brand or not, whether they care about skincare or not,” she said. “Who is a ‘Cut person’ has to expand.”

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Indigenous peoples are finally getting a say in global conservation policy

The General Assembly of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, will gather next week to shape a collective strategy to protect the world’s increasingly at-risk flora and fauna. Representatives from more than 217 nations and territories, 18,000 experts, and 1,400 NGOs, businesses, and scientific institutions will vote on recommendations and motions that will mobilize money and build political momentum for global conservation efforts. And now, for the first time in the IUCN’s 73-year history, Indigenous peoples will finally get a seat at the table.

Twenty-three Indigenous organizations, representing groups from every continent, will join this year’s IUCN’s General Assembly as members, meaning that they can introduce motions; vote for or against resolutions and recommendations; and participate in working groups.

“We’ve been fighting for 40 years to be included in the U.N.’s international system and other international spaces to defend the identity, culture, and lands of Indigenous peoples,” said José Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, who leads the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin, or COICA, a group that congregates the biggest national Indigenous associations from nine Amazonian countries. “[We know that] if we don’t go [to international meetings], solutions will not come to us.”

In addition to COICA, other new Indigenous members to the IUCN include the Highlanders Association from Cambodia, the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee, and the Inuit Circumpolar Council, from Canada, among others.

COICA plans to introduce a new and urgent motion — the main mechanism to influence IUCN’s policy — to the General Assembly on Friday, proposing a target of preserving 80 percent of the Amazon rainforest by 2025. The plan, which they have called “Amazonia por la Vida,” or Amazonia for life, requires that the region’s governments legally recognize as autonomous 100 percent of Indigenous lands in the Amazon, ban deforestation-linked activities, and suspend all future licenses for mining, oil extraction, and other extractive industries in the rainforest. The motion also proposes that banks and financing partners should prioritize funding for projects that include Indigenous peoples in the region, and respect their human rights.

In addition to participating in the General Assembly, Indigenous groups will lead the World Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nature on September 3, a side event to the main IUCN conference in Marseille, France that will exclusively highlight the contributions of Indigenous peoples to conservation and climate goals. They will also potentially meet with France’s President Emmanuel Macron, and with United States and European Union climate and biodiversity officials.

Getting Indigenous groups a seat at the IUCN table has been a decades-long battle, explains Kankana-ey Igorot peoples activist Victoria Tauli-Corpuz. Previous to this year’s conference, Indigenous peoples could technically join the IUCN as members under the category of NGOs. But the distinction irked many Indigenous leaders. “They are not just simply NGOs,” Tauli-Corpuz explained. “They are peoples, they are nations, and of course, they are communities.” As a consequence, they stayed out of the member’s assembly, participating only in the event’s forums and exhibitions. (COICA enrolled as an “environmental actor” in 2010, but never participated).

The turning point came in 2016, during the IUCN Assembly in Hawaii. For years, Indigenous peoples had been raising concerns about how conservation areas, often supported by the IUCN and other conservation organizations, were violating their rights. That year, Tauli-Corpuz, who was then the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, sat in front of the Assembly and presented a report detailing the ways in which many conservation areas across the world were harming Indigenous communities, from expropriating their land — forcefully displacing them — to denying them self-governance, access to livelihoods, and causing them to lose cultural and spiritual sites.

“[We wanted to tell the IUCN members] ‘We have lived in these territories, these ecosystems since time immemorial,” Tauli-Corpuz said. “And yet our knowledge is not really taken into account in a very serious manner. And our governance over our ecosystems is also not supported by state laws or by the conservation organizations.”

Despite occupying just 20 percent of land worldwide, Indigenous communities live in areas encompassing 80 percent of the earth’s biodiversity. Researchers have found that in certain regions, like the Amazon, Indigenous peoples are more effective than governments in protecting natural resources.

Yet despite this data, Indigenous groups only administer 5 percent of the world’s protected areas, and receive less than 1 percent of climate funding.

On August 9, 2016, after Tauli-Corpuz’s testimony, the IUCN Assembly approved the motion to create a membership category for Indigenous peoples. The decision was history-making: It was “the first time in IUCN’s history that a new membership category has been established,” Aroha Te Pareake Mead, chair of IUCN’s Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy, said in a statement at the time.

As soon as they heard the announcement, Indigenous communities in the Amazon started working towards becoming members, Diaz Mirabal said. Last year, they joined the Congress of Protected Areas of the Amazon Basin and drafted the plan with international environmental organizations. This is a proposal, he said, that unlike the Paris Agreement and international agreements, comes from the communities themselves, addressing the key issues that defenders need to protect biodiversity.

“We often say that governments negotiate [green funds] over Indigenous lands with banks, with other governments on the table, and we’re often under the table trying to get whatever scraps fall,” he said. “But no more. We want to be equal partners.”

Kachikwu demands N3B from Peoples Gazette over fake news

Former Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu has described as unfounded and disparaging allegations by Peoples Gazette that he tried to smuggle a stolen vehicle into the United States of America.

The media outlet also alleged that the former minister received N9.7 billion in his personal bank account, a report that has been denied by the bank.

The former minister made a demand of N3 billion compensation from the newspaper, following the false and malicious publication.

Kachikwu through the legal representative, Mike Ozekhome SAN said the allegations are baseless, provocative and malicious and a calculated attempt to rubbish his robust and enviable heritage of integrity and sterling character.

A pre-action notice to the media house clarified what transpired with the allegedly stolen/smuggled car.

“Contrary to the false and malicious narrative projected in the cyberspace by your media outfit, the true state of affairs remains that our client bought a Jaguar car in 2009 from Dazz Motors Nigeria Ltd, Victoria Island, Lagos.

“Our client paid fully for the car. After using it for some years, our client shipped the car to the United States of America, as a gift to a relation.

“However, the US Customs erroneously impounded it, mistaking it as a stolen car and for emission control infringement as cars with European and African emission control specifications cannot be used in the USA.

“Our client availed the US authorities of the details, and they reached out to the car dealer.

“The US authorities apologized for the error in seizing the car after they were unable to establish any basis or proof of the suspected stolen vehicle.

“Whereupon, the car was subsequently released to our client, who brought the same back to Nigeria and returned it to the car dealer.

“The car dealer subsequently refunded our client, the money he had paid for the Jaguar.

“It is pertinent to state that our client never stood trial in respect of the said car before any court in the US.

“Rather, it was he who as a claimant initiated administrative proceedings at the United States District Court in which the Jaguar car was a defendant.”

On the false accusation of having N9.7 billion in his personal bank account, the notice stated, “our client maintains that the purported bank statement of account, published by your platform, was a fraud as same was criminally doctored.

“While our client maintains a Domiciliary account with that bank, the true position remains that the purported statement put out a false transaction of N9.7billion Naira inside a Dollar Domiciliary account! How ridiculous?

“This factual relationship between our client and his bank, therefore, makes your spurious claim of a purported deposit of 9.7 billion naira into our client’s said bank account most preposterous, outlandish, bogus and bizarre. Be assured that the Police will unfailingly handle this criminal aspect. The machinery has been put in full gear.”

Dr. Kachikwu further demanded that the article be pulled down and a sum of three billion naira paid to him through his lawyer as compensation “for the unquantifiable and collateral damage done to him, his family, political, business, goodwill and professional endeavours.”

Failure to do this will lead to the commencement of legal proceedings against the media house, the notice disclosed.

In a letter dated August 26, 2021, and in reaction to the false account statement published by the online platform, the bank affirmed that the account statement published by the online platform is a fake statement of account as it did not emanate from the Bank nor did the account statement reflect the actual transactions as shown by the false publication.

“The statement is not in line with those issued by the Bank and did not emanate from us. They also did not reflect the true state of your accounts and are therefore false,” the bank said.