Fashion figure Friday: Margaret Zhang
starting a new series on people in fashion that you might not have known about, but whom I find pretty cool
News broke today that Margaret Zhang is stepping down from her role as Editor-in-Chief at Vogue China. I’d planned to pen a Substack post on her simply because I had found her work at the magazine fascinating to watch (I’d even made a TikTok video mentioning the post hours before the news hit our screens). While there was general criticism that she wasn’t tapped in properly to the local interests (she’s Australian, but of Chinese heritage, the daughter of first-generation immigrants), I had the, apparently misplaced, belief that if given time, she would be able to bring in the business alongside the editorial novelty that she had already been creating.
A/N: Click the image to view the tweet.
When Margaret had been appointed as Editor-in-Chief in 2021, she was twenty-seven years old, making her the youngest ever for the position. Fashion and entertainment media in general do have a bias for the young, but ultimately they fall prey to the traditionally conservative industries that they claim to fundamentally differ from. If one’s youth and their ability to be keyed into a global, digital world are the merits on which they are found to be competent, then the inexperience of their youth cannot be simultaneously used to demean them, for no one becomes better equipped without actually going through the paces and gaining experience. Margaret had been running her blog Shine by Three for a decade and had already gained credibility and respect in fashion circles within that span of time. Anyone who has ever tried to garner an enthusiastic audience on the internet, whilst not belonging to the industry (she was a law student through a lot of her career, and her nascent interest in fashion came from her exposure to ballet and piano as a child) would acknowledge the difficulties one faces in trying to work with limited resources and an audience who begin from a position of disinterest, rather than tapping into a world of voracious enthusiasts of an already established magazine.
I read a whole host of articles and interviews on Margaret before sitting down to pen this post. There seems to have been some amount of scepticism about her appointment as the Editor-in-Chief, her Mandarin skills have been brought into question, and as is the general norm when writing about China, the question of censorship regarding celebrity culture informing her interest in emerging talent has been brought up. In the articles that follow the news of her upcoming departure, certain other gripes that people had against her seem to have returned to the spotlight, mostly about her supposed inability to truly understand her primary local market.
Margaret Zhang was not a traditional choice for the Editor-in-Chief position in any magazine of considerable repute because of how young she is and how swiftly we underestimate the youth, but perhaps more significantly because she’s Australian, with no obvious connection to mainland China other than her traditional Chinese upbringing by her immigrant parents and attending Chinese school on Saturdays. The enthusiasm with which immigrants introduce their culture to their foreign-born children manifests in creating people with unique perspectives on the world. In her position, Margaret has managed to aid Vogue in its mission of speaking to a global audience, one that is no longer limited by geography, but reports appear to indicate that she did not receive the same appreciation among her primary audience. Ultimately—and this is perhaps indicative of a larger trend across a plethora of subjects—the links between the homeland and the countries abroad are difficult to establish by the second-generation diaspora, no matter how deeply they feel themselves to be part of their parents’ culture.
I personally will miss Margaret’s editorial sensibilities at Vogue China, and I have sympathy for what must have been an extremely difficult position for her to be in. There’s a common refrain you see thrown about on social media—that the innovative, beautiful, and ultimately creative Vogue covers are not the publications out of the US or other European countries (that is, the commonly-held power centres of both Vogue magazine and fashion markets) but the covers of Vogue in Asian countries, and often more specifically, Vogue China.
The most exciting emerging luxury fashion market in the world is currently China, as anyone who’s taken so much as a cursory peek into the scene in recent years knows. The newly rising fashion scene there is not overtly informed by Western influence, but instead references its own history and looks to the rest of Asia for support and inspiration. The rest of the world is hooked on to their phones, waiting for the latest Xiaohongshu trend, checking how to get their Taobao orders correctly, and trying out Douyin makeup styles. Margaret had been enthusiastic about putting emerging talent at the forefront of her work as the editor, and perhaps being “controversial” in the manner of doing so, by reportedly having several unsponsored cover issues, as mentioned in the WWD article on her departure.
Listening to Margaret’s podcast with Yiling Pan (Vogue Business China’s Associate Editorial Director) shed further light on why she was perhaps selected for this position. It’s easy for subject matter experts—in this case, those within the fashion industry—to lose sight of the interests developing just underneath the surface, the trends not being dictated from the cutting room floors of designers or being informed by the latest trending television show (yes, this is another dig at quiet luxury). This isn’t because of their lack of knowledge of emerging ideas, on the contrary, it’s because there is more emphasis on established fashion, beauty, and luxury landscapes. If someone is part of the establishment, then they are more aware of the legitimate, the established, they are part of the in-crowd.
My TikTok for you page is informed heavily by my interest and fascination with the knowledge that Asia is perceived as cool now. It wasn’t the case until a few years ago, and it’s amazing how quickly things have changed that I see young people barely realising how different it had been for us when we were their age. As such, I had already been mildly aware of how idol airport outfits were informing Chinese street style and how Douyin makeup trends were influencing makeup artists for idol Inkigayo stages, a shared space of creative energy, happening alongside one another. However, I can see how such diffusion can be perceived by naysayers, and one must have to walk a careful, sensitive line in positions of power.
While my grumblings about this decision are entirely about how I feel regarding Margaret leaving her post so soon, there have been several senior leadership changes at Condé Nast over the past few weeks, and this too is perhaps part of the reset button that they’re hitting. Margaret is a talented, prolific digital personality, one whose departure from the top job will be felt across the fashion space.
Ultimately, the fact that Margaret Zhang was hired as Editor-in-Chief for Vogue China was perhaps indicative of something else in our current fabric of reality. The world is moving through a news cycle faster than ever before, and in that framework, time is a luxury none of us are afforded any longer, even when we’ve managed to get the job.