Vanity Fair UK - 11.2019

FACE

VALUE

in a tiny conference room—Weiss deemed

a larger one too cold—to review plans for

an upcoming pop-up store in Boston

(open through October 6).

“Did I show you guys the tweet?”

Weiss asks brightly, taking out her iPhone

for show-and-tell. “This is the line out-

side Glossier Seattle on the last weekend.

It’s a full city block long.”

Weiss pauses over renderings of the

section devoted to their lipstick, Gen-

eration G. It’s a sheer formula, the kind

you can swipe on in the back of a Lyft

or midway through a Hinge date. “You

could be 15 or you could be, like, 60, but if

you believe what we believe, then you’re a

part of Generation G,” she says. “We can

really own that here.”

“Maybe we can add some text,” sug-

gests Adriana Deleo, the head of design.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Weiss

agrees, tapping her ‘ngers on her mouth.

“Instead of ‘You Look Good’ ”—the tag-

line already emblazoned across the com-

pany’s mirrors—“maybe it’s...”

Founder and CEO Emily Weiss

has taken Glossier from millennial catnip

to billion-dollar juggernaut.

Five years in, MARISAMELTZER goes

deep on the beauty brand’s boom

Photographs by

MARTIN SCHOELLER

Styled by

ANATOLLI SMITH

OWNING IT

Emily Weiss, photographed at Glossier’s

flagship store in New York City.

Jacket and pants by

Bottega Veneta; T-shirt by Three Dots;

jewelry by Sophie Bille Brahe.

America met Emily Weiss

in 2007, halfway into the sec-

ond season of MTV’s The

Hills. As the camera panned

up from a pair of high heels, we saw a

college-age Weiss striding through a Los

Angeles o™ce, dressed in a short šared

skirt and a black turtleneck. “Emily: New

York Intern” šashed on the screen. With

her pin-straight brown hair and a binder

in hand, she looked like some wildly con-

‘dent apparition who had come to show

the laconic stars of the series what work-

ing at a magazine really takes. (In this

case, e™ciently MapQuesting directions

and discussing chinoiserie with noncha-

lant authority.) They called her, with

begrudging awe, the super intern.

Twelve years later, Weiss is the CEO

of Glossier, the paradigm-shifting beauty

brand she founded in 2014, and she still

has the same command, as seen on an ear-

ly summer morning in Manhattan. At the

company’s SoHo headquarters, a meeting

of the in-house brain trust has convened

136 VANITY FAIR NOVEMBER 2019