I'd Rather Be Reading Kate Betts on Being Editor-in-Chief at Harper’s Bazaar, Working for Vogue and Fairchild Publications, Her Books About Paris and First Lady Michelle Obama’s Style, and What’s Next for Her
Well, we started our Women in Power series for Women’s History Month with a legendary editor-in-chief and we’re going to end the series with one, too. Today on the show I have Kate Betts, former editor-in-chief at Harper’s Bazaar, a longtime colleague of Anna Wintour’s at Vogue, and the author of one of my all-time favorite memoirs, My Paris Dream: An Education in Style, Slang, and Seduction in the Great City on the Seine. In addition to My Paris Dream, Kate also wrote the book Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style and reveals in our chat today that she’s working on a third book, which I will devour when it comes out. I first interacted with Kate when I interviewed her for an oral history piece I did in Vanity Fair on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s wedding dress back in 2021—I love that piece, and I’ll link it below. Of course, I’d known of Kate and her work for 25 years prior to us speaking three years ago. After graduating from Princeton, one of Kate’s first big roles was at Fairchild Publications’ European office in Paris, a period of her career that she calls essential to her development as a fashion journalist. Kate was a features writer for the Paris bureau of Fairchild, overseeing fashion coverage for Women’s Wear Daily, W, and M magazines. In this role, she also helped launch W Europe. After two years, she became the bureau chief, and in 1991, she left Paris and Fairchild for New York City and Conde Nast, where she took over as fashion news director at Vogue. She created Vogue’s Index section, and in 1999 took over as editor-in-chief at Harper’s Bazaar. In a testament to Kate’s ferocity, three days after starting at Bazaar, she gave birth to her first child. Kate was a new mom, and the youngest editor ever at America’s oldest fashion magazine. She hired two writers I adore, Bret Easton Ellis and Lynn Hirschberg, and after leaving Bazaar in 2001, Kate freelanced for The New York Times, specifically its Styles section. In 2004, she became the editor of Time’s Style and Design section, and she remains a contributing editor there still today. In addition to freelancing and writing books (as if that’s not enough!), she reports on fashion for CNN, and today we talk about her formative career experiences, her books, what she’d tell her younger self, and she leaves us with incredible book recommendations to add to our “To Be Read” pile.
By Kate Betts:
My Paris Dream: An Education in Style, Slang, and Seduction in the Great City on the Seine
Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style
“25 Years Later, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s Wedding Dress Still Stuns,” written by me for Vanity Fair and featuring Kate as a source
+ Kate’s picks
Devotion by Dani Shapiro
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories by Joan Silber
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
+ more picks from me!
Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything by Geneen Roth
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain