12 minutes with Eva Chen, Instagram's fashion whisperer
RIP Feministing and The Cut On Tuesdays
One of the best BEST television scenes, to grow out of a passion project, this year (via BBC/Fleabag).
Hello! I’ve missed you. December feels like a great time of year to take stock, and I am very much a person who enjoys reflection. For the last couple months, I’ve known that I’d like to make more time for passion projects unrelated to work. So consider this my way of accountability—more hobbies to come.
On Monday, I got to meet someone who I imagine excels at holding herself accountable—and who I’ve wanted to interview since launching this newsletter two years ago. Eva Chen is the Director of Fashion Partnerships at Instagram. Before that, she worked as the (youngest ever!) Editor in Chief of Lucky, columnist at the Wall Street Journal & Vogue China and Health & Beauty Director at Teen Vogue. She also recently published the children’s book Juno Valentine and the Magical Shoes. Impressive, right?
Beyond her resume, Eva is known for mentoring, and she has the warm demeanor of a confident person who makes you, reader or interviewer, also feel confident. We met at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn, where Instagram was screening a slate of video projects. Before we sat down, she eyed an impressive candy buffet and said “ooh, can I have a Milky Way?” We talked about her career and path to a job in tech, and because ‘tis the season, Central Park’s Hot Duck.
<3, Natalie
Q&A with Instagram’s Eva Chen
Eva Chen (right) with Instagram #advocates (photo courtesy of Instagram)
You were at Teen Vogue for seven years. How did that job shape your understanding of the role media can play in girl’s and women’s lives?
For me, when I was growing up—and I grew up in a time before there was Teen Vogue— my mom and dad were quite protective, and I wasn’t really allowed to read magazines. My mom and dad did allow me to read Vogue, though, and Harper’s Bazaar, because they were fashion magazines, and they really saw fashion as art. And so, working at Teen Vogue, it was always critical for me to show girls from all different backgrounds, to showcase talent or personalities who had a lot of different kinds of stories, like focusing on diversity and inclusivity, even though I guess this was like a decade ago. And so, I feel like working at Teen Vogue was an opportunity to share not just my story—not just celebrity. I also started a first-person column called “Beauty Blogger” where I talked about personal experiences. We did a lot digitally as well, and it was at Teen Vogue where social media began to ramp up, and when I joined Instagram, I think it was definitely there that my thinking shifted as well, because I saw social and Instagram as an opportunity to share more of the behind-the-scenes of my everyday life. And so yeah, the Teen Vogue years were very formative for me.
I love that, and that legacy of showcasing a wide range of girls’ stories has definitely survived. What is your impression of its current iteration?
Oh, I mean, I love it—I think [Editor-in-Chief] Lindsay Peoples Wagner is doing an amazing job. I look at the recent covers, and I literally love that I’m way way way way way past being a teen, like...
Same...ish.
… Like take 15 times three—like, I’m older than that. And I love that I can look at a cover of Teen Vogue and feel so inspired and what to learn more about the people who are not usually like— they’re pop culture icons, activists, feminists. I think her [Lindsay’s] predecessors Elaine [Welteroth] Phil [Piccardi] and Marie Suter—all of whom are scattered and doing amazing things— I really thought their visions were great as well. I think it’s great that Teen Vogue has evolved so much from the magazine that Amy Astley had. And now she’s at AD [Architectural Digest], which is wonderful as well. Their Instagram is killer—I refer to Architectural Digest’s Instagram like all the time.
She [Amy] was one of the editors who hired you [at Teen Vogue], right?
Yeah, yeah, she hired me.
Great. I love that you’re paying such close attention to all of the editors now.
Yeah, I subscribe to so many magazines now, probably nine different magazines. And I really think that the way Instagram and media work together—it’s a really nice cross-pollination and platform where they can both share different things.
When you took over at Lucky, you were viewed as sort of representative of a new generation of editors.
I think I’m going to have some popcorn now [smiles].
[Laughs]
Tell me more—was I?
I think the quote I read in the New York Times was that you were dubbed “a turning point for fashion magazines in general.”
I’m gonna use that. Put that in my bio, okay.
What was it like to take on not only the responsibility of running a magazine, but to be portrayed as this kind of “turning point”?
I don’t know that I ever saw myself as that—maybe I have a self-awareness problem—I never thought of myself as that. For me, my whole career has been guided by following my passion and doing things I enjoy or am curious about. I do informational interviews pretty much every week with people who are aspiring to break into the industry. I feel like when I took over at Lucky, it had been through a lot of different transitions. I think that especially under [former Editor-in-Chief] Kim France, when it launched, it was like nothing else out there.
If you think about that approachable friendly voice that Lucky had, a lot of that was happening on Instagram and the voices of Chiara Ferragni or Aimee Songor Margaret Zhang. I think that’s why when I worked at Lucky, I put Chiara on the cover. It just made sense to me that people were looking to people like Aimee and Chiara and Michelle Phan, who we featured on the magazine as well, for that friend voice. I guess I never thought too hard about any kind of titles because they’re just words.
That’s liberating.
Right, I don’t know, I try not to think too hard about stuff like that, because I feel like it’s daunting.
Coming back to social media and your use of Instagram, that’s something that people always refer to when speaking about your career, and how you’ve done a lot of work to demystify and go behind the scenes of what it’s like to work in industries like media and fashion and tech. Why do you find that’s a valuable approach?
For me, I’m a first generation American. My parents are Chinese. I moved here without a lot of contacts on many different careers. My parents worked really, really hard to provide their family with opportunities, but at the same time it’s not like my mom could call and say, “Oh, you should talk to this designer. You should talk to this person who works in magazines or this person who works in technology.” And so I think that’s why I’ve always made an effort to bring people into the fold because I didn’t necessarily have that access. I feel like knowledge is power—and the more you can share with people, you can help them make informed decisions and figure out what they might want to do with their lives.
Sometimes people ask me, “what’s the process of writing a children’s book?” It’s just like writing a book is kind of mystifying. People don’t know what the process is. Whether it’s something like that or what it’s like to work at a magazine or be a mom, I’ve always kind of been a sharer. I think maybe because I found it hard to get information sometimes. But all of that has changed, of course, with digital and Instagram. If you’re interested in being a vet, you could follow a vet on Instagram and learn what it’s like to be a vet. My friend Shiona Turini is a costume designer, and she did the movie “Queen & Slim” and Issa Rae’s show “Insecure.” If you follow her, she posts pictures of the script readings and the table reads. She did a tour of the costume trailer that she had for the movie she just did with Lena Waithe. You really can get a lot of this step-by-step… and that’s so cool.
Absolutely. I enjoy learning who my friends who aren’t working in tech or fashion or media are following, because there are so many people with different jobs across the board.
One of my best friends is an emergency room doctor, and she posts information about cardiac arrest. She posts information on holidays about what to watch out for. She posts random stuff on her stories— she doesn’t have a ton of followers. But I find it so interesting. I get a sense of what it’s like; I was supposed to be a doctor, if my parents got their way— like what could have been, I get to see it through her eyes.
Yeah. I think my parents would have been happy if I became a doctor, too, but here we are.
Here we are!
There was a recent interview with [Instagram co-founder and former CEO] Kevin Systrom in The Cut with Stella Bugbee. Stella had mentioned the Aubrey Plaza movie “Ingrid Goes West.”
I have not seen that movie.
I haven’t either, but it’s basically about the female psychology of hero worship. I thought it was interesting that Stella Bugbee—the editor of one of the most popular women’s publications now—
I love The Cut, yeah.
—compared basically the emotion and experience of flipping through a magazine, which is an experience she maybe more likely grew up with than some of the people that are reading Teen Vogue now— to using Instagram, because all of those images—
I know, but I subscribe to New York Magazine.
Me too, me too.
I follow The Cut, too, and they post their articles about The Duck in Central Park
I love The Hot Duck. [Editor’s note: Please see my interview with former The Cut writer Gabriella Paiella for more information regarding The Hot Duck].
I click through to the link in bio.
They just updated it [The Hot Duck story] this year, too.
I think it’s an example of the ecosystem you can create on Instagram. Stella can have an amazing article, maybe not about The Hot Duck, but they do such great, deep, investigative reporting at The Cut. I remember they did a piece about what it’s like to be Black and work in fashion.
Yep, that was a Lindsay Peoples Wagner piece.
I remember seeing it on Instagram, because I hadn’t gotten my print issue yet—tapping through, reading the comments, being really moved, going to their link in bio, clicking through. That’s an example of the ecosystem. I don’t know, I think there’s room at the table for everyone, you just need to know how to use the tool as well.
Right, so would you say they’re more complementary experiences than comparable?
Yeah, I don’t think Instagram replaces magazines. I think the best magazines and media platforms will use Instagram as a tool to reach more people. So Vogue U.S.— I don’t know what their circulation is, probably over a million, but not the 20 million you see following them on Instagram. Some of the things they do— they create amazing videos on the Met Gala that just could not live in the print magazine. It’s a complementary experience, and I think you see magazines now, a lot of them have Instagram editors. The Cut, I think, has one. I think it’s totally complementary.
This interview was edited for style & clarity.
in other women’s media news
A Farewell to Feministing and the Heyday of of Feminist Blogging (New York Times) — for the record, this bummed me out
There’s Absolutely No Reason For Your Woman Journalist Character to Sleep With A Source (Jezebel) — holy shit, we’ve been discussing this for years (!!)
Amy Klobuchar Doesn’t Think We’re Doing Nearly Enough to Protect Voting Rights (Cosmopolitan)
5 Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s Abuse on Trauma, Justice, and Sisterhood (Glamour)
The Cut on Tuesdays podcast is ending, and in the words of my friend Mahita, I AM BEREFT