In 2017, when there were "no other lesbians at the tippy top of major fashion mastheads," Nylon magazine switched to an all-digital format and Gabrielle Korn became editor-in-chief at age 28. The death of Nylon in print and the concurrent promotion of Korn from the company's digital director to its top dog caused some friction, moving one of Korn's colleagues to tell her, "You know, in the made-for-TV movie about Nylon, you're not the good guy." In Everybody (Else) Is Perfect: How I Survived Hypocrisy, Beauty, Clicks, and Likes, Korn comes across as more than just a good guy: she's a hero.
In Everybody (Else) Is Perfect, Korn writes about her life, both in and out of the office, in a series of smart, nervy essays. Armed with her women's studies major and her love for clothes, Korn started writing about style before "beauty as self-care" was "something you did for yourself and not for a man." By the time Korn was helming Nylon, she was wholly committed to transforming the brand through her feminism and through "an editorial strategy that prioritized racial diversity, that welcomed all bodies to the table, and that didn't limit the idea of coolness to a certain economic class." Readers showed their love with clicks.
Korn's professional success corresponded with some rocky personal trials, including navigating an eating disorder and shaking a weakness for insufficiently supportive romantic partners--the very sorts of self-defeating traps that Korn and her Nylon compatriots were hoping their readers, bolstered by stories from the magazine, would avoid. And yet Korn is well aware that there's an underlying conflict when fashion magazines employ the language of feminism--after all, they're serving an industry dependent on women's insecurity about their appearance. Korn devotes a barbed essay to the wellness industry's co-opting of feminism ("The Cult of Empowerment"), and she's equally eviscerating on subjects like healthy-food fanaticism ("Bone Broth") and--surely a bubble burster for style-maven readers--New York Fashion Week ("Fashion Weak").
When Nylon was sold in 2019, Korn decided to leave, after five years with the company, by which point she was burned out and underslept to the point of illness. Of course she was spent: it's hard to read Everybody (Else) Is Perfect without seeing Korn as a soldier fighting in the culture war on the side of women's empowerment. The nation is better off for her service. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: In a collection of essays, Nylon magazine's wise-beyond-her-years former editor-in-chief writes about her efforts to improve the brand and herself.