How not to be a character in a "bad fashion movie"

Laura Brown lost her job as a magazine editor in 2022. That's okay.

About 10 months ago, Laura Brown donned an emerald green suit and walked into an East Village art gallery, where two rows of benches lined the walls of a square room in high ceiling. She took her seat in the front row.

It could have been a scene in what Mrs. Brown calls a "B.F.M." or "bad fashion movie" - a phrase she started using years ago to describe the archetypal fashion editor: elitist, self-absorbed and downright "The devil wears Prada". A day earlier, publisher Dotdash Meredith announced that Ms. Brown's post as editor of InStyle magazine had been cut.

In her "B.F.M." , the scene would have gone like this: A fallen editor makes her first public appearance at a fashion show, walking through a den of whispers and side-eyes, as steely as ever.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Except Ms. Brown was about the furthest a mainstream fashion editor could get from Miranda Priestly's ilk. She didn't show up that day with sunglasses and a cool smirk. She wore beachy waves and a playful smile. She hugged fellow seatmates and made them laugh between looks.

When people asked about InStyle, she didn't say "I left," which fashion people often say after being fired, Ms Brown said. She had no interest in "walking away for a while to, like, collect yourself and then announce my next thing."

Furthermore, she knew that "magazine power isn't what it used to be". Many years ago, social media leveled the playing field in fashion; In today's front row, top editors are usually sandwiched between Instagram personalities and famous friends of the brand. In this case, Ms. Brown was all three at once.

"I knew what equity I had earned," said Ms. Brown, who is 48 and is deeply Australian, having lunch last month at the deeply Parisian restaurant Le Voltaire. "My value didn't depend on being the editor of InStyle."

"A nice lady who eats spaghetti"

But, oh, what power these fashion magazines once held . Raised in Sydney by a single mother, Ms Brown waited on tables as a teenager in a seafood restaurant, where she learned to joke around with adults for tips. Without the internet, reading magazines felt like a "stepping stone" into other people's worlds, she said. Working for magazines was all she wanted.

She moved to New York at age 27, a week before 9/11, 2001. It was still there. age of imperial publishers, even though budgets were already shrinking. Ms Brown had only been working at Talk magazine for a few weeks when she learned the magazine was folding, halfway through production on a young Hollywood photo shoot by Melvin Sokolsky. (The concept was oiled-up actors hatching from eggs.)

In 2005, after brief stints at W and Details, Ms. Brown began working at Harper's Bazaar. The magazine's editor at the time, Glenda Bailey, favored theatrical photography, like Rihanna basking in the mouth of a shark, which she called "shots." One of Mrs. Brown's first "hits" was sending 'The Simpsons' to Paris with Linda Evangelista (more than a decade before Balenciaga premiered its own 'The Simpsons' episode in Paris).