Editor’s Letter November 2019
, Editor in Chiefhis accompanying essay, navigating success
in new ways now that YouTube celebrity has
begun to resemble establishment celebrity—not
something we might have imagined when
the age of user-generated content began and the
platform’s stars tended to be, as Richard writes,
“earnest kids on the edge of their beds.”
And in an excerpt from his new book, Bob
Iger, the CEO of Disney, reects on his
friendship and partnership with Steve Jobs.
Jobs died eight years ago this fall, and as
I read Bob’s story, I wondered how our world
might be dierent if he were still here—if he
were bringing his exacting, perfectionist point
of view to our stormy seascape of technology,
media, and entertainment. There are people on
our New Establishment list right now whose
presence on earth holds great import; what they
do will determine whether the planet remains
livable for humans, whether our elections will be
tampered with, whether a kid aspires to start a
business or go into comedy or pick up a tennis
racket because he or she sees that it can be done.
The Establishment isn’t a collective colossus
anymore, nor does it rely on institutional power.
It is individual, unexpected, and far-reaching,
and that’s what makes it new.The Establishment can seem like a concept
out of sync with our times. Those 20th-century
titans of industry who amassed supremacy
and sway based on tangible things—iron, steel,
celluloid images; those guys whose names were
chiseled onto banks and libraries; they read
like fossils of an earlier epoch—the Stone Age
of inuence. Not that people in our century
don’t slap their family crests on buildings, but
the gesture is less everlasting—ask any board
member debating, privately or publicly, whether
the name Sackler or Epstein remains capable of
heralding artistic achievement or scientic
inquiry when they’ve become synonymous with
abuse, epidemic, and scandal.
But the idea of an establishment remains
helpful, as long as it can contour and ex with
the moment. It’s good to get a handle on
who’s calling the shots on our money, our votes,
our eyeballs. We live in their world, whether
we celebrate, fear, or loathe them. The cultural
elite is more uid these days, thankfully; the
political elite more mercurial; the nancial elite...
kinda sorta mostly the same, but let’s see how
the economy is doing 12 months from now. For
our annual New Establishment list this fall, now
in its 25th year, our team of editors, led by John
Homans, Ben Landy, and Claire Landsbaum,
made some structural changes: They broke
down our group of 100 into 10 categories, the
better to show how the establishment itself has
fractured, even as it intertwines.
Throughout this issue, power manifests in
myriad forms. Hasan Minhaj pokes at the
lions’ den from the stage of Patriot Act, his Netix
show, which is in its fourth season. Emily Weiss
invented Glossier, the beauty company valued
at $1.2 billion that doubles as a way of life.
Emma Chamberlain, the rising Gen-Z siren
of YouTube, leads our portfolio of famous
creators, who are, as Richard Lawson writes in
The Power
and the
Glory
Above: Priyanka
Chopra Jonas and
Radhika Jones at
V.F.’s Best-Dressed List
party at L’Avenue in
New York City. For
more pictures from the
party, see page 41.
Below: Vanity Fair’s
Women on Women,
a new anthology
that gathers our best
writing about women,
by women, to be
published October 29.HAPPENINGS28 VANITY FAIR NOVEMBER 2019
PHOTOGRAPHS: TOP, BY LANDON NORDEMAN; BOTTOM, BY JOSEPHINE SCHIELE