What will the future hold for a new era at Vogue?

This week, Vogue ushers in a new chapter with the appointment of Chloe Malle as Head of Editorial Content for American Vogue, an editorial insider tapped to succeed the iconic Anna Wintour, who ends a 37-year reign in name but remains firmly in command as Condé Nast’s global Chief Content Officer.

This transition is textbook Vogue: seamless, insider-driven, and politically safe. Malle’s credentials may not be audaciously creative, but they are solid: tenured since 2011, propelled like clockwork through digital channels, podcasts, newsletters, event collabs, and branded content expansions. Under her stewardship, Vogue.com’s direct traffic doubled, with engagement metrics across unique views, time spent, and content output booming, now averaging 14.5 million unique monthly visitors. For a legacy media brand, this kind of digital-driven growth is no small feat.

Yet in today’s media landscape, the role of Vogue’s head of content resembles more operational generalship than a vanguard of creativity. Malle must balance the weight of glossy heritage with the grind of audience analytics, engagement quotas, newsletters, short-form vignettes, events, collaborations and trend-driven video. This is the reality of legacy media in the AI age.

Condé Nast in transition

Condé Nast, the publishing house behind Vogue, has cut large portions of its workforce, primarily in its digital video and entertainment divisions, citing the rupturing of digital ad revenues and shifting audience preference towards short-form video formats. The company is pivoting instead toward subscriptions and e-commerce, subscription revenues are growing and e-commerce is expanding by 44 percent via affiliate models, it plans to double consumer revenue over five years, according to Subscription Insider.

Against this backdrop, Malle’s remit is clear: monetising content, pursue audience-driven innovation, and sustain Vogue's cachet even as budgets shrink. She stands between two critical poles, the creative flame of fashion’s heritage and the cold reality of media economics.

It’s also a generational shift worthy of note. Many of Vogue’s earlier aspirational recruits, children of fashion elites, eschew such roles today. The burden of legacy brands, falling ad rates, platform volatility, AI threats, and relentless metrics have made the job less appetising. Malle, who like Anna Wintour is a “nepo baby,” is pragmatically ambitious. Her mother, the award-winning actress Candice Bergen, played a Vogue editor in Sex and the City; and now she steps into that fiction made real.

What of the brand’s future?

Malle must be both custodian and innovator. Vogue is expected to remain a “standard-bearer and boundary-pushing leader,” as the Guardian put it of Wintour, but the context has shifted. The Met Gala, Vogue World, and the global editions still carry Wintour’s imprint, yet the core of the brand now lives in vertical scrolls, newsletters, podcasts, and shoppable content. For Malle, the challenge is making Vogue essential to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, not just a marker of prestige for fashion insiders. Print, once the magazine’s anchor, has already faded. Rumours suggest it may shrink to a handful of editions each year, printed on premium stock. Either way, the days of American Vogue as the “fashion bible” are gone, and have been for some time.