When Margot Villiers entered Cooper, the building changed, deference rippling out in military precision as she passed through the lobby. Employees lowered their heads and sucked in their stomachs. Only the interns were dumb enough to look directly at her. Even the custodians, who’d been fully immunized to celebrity by ten thousand trash cans, paused as they cleaned, feeling gravity’s tug toward the black hole of her particular type of power.
Margot was seventy-two years old and had stood at the helm of RAGE Fashion Book since its founding in 1985. A former personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman, she’d happened upon the opportunity through her first husband, a cocaine-addled Wall Streeter who was a close friend of George Cooper, onetime CEO of Cooper House.
The apocryphal story went like this: George Cooper spent so many nights on the balcony of the Villierses’ apartment in the early eighties, drinking scotch and complaining about the downward trend of his women’s titles, that Margot stole his Filofax and penciled in a meeting for herself two weeks later, which his secretary found, confirmed, and added to his calendar.
She walked into that meeting with a full written assessment of the last year’s issues for four of his titles, chronicling their faults and successes down to the final detail, along with an elaborate proposal for a magazine of her own: RAGE Fashion Book, a publication that would work with American manufacturers and retailers to reinvigorate an ailing industry in a way that the new workingwoman would recognize. RAGE would contain no recipes, table settings, or money-saving household tips; it would instead serve the women of the eighties, power-suited careerists who paid for their own thousand-dollar briefcases. Let their housekeepers read about housekeeping. Margot anticipated that the college-educated women of 1985 would want more from their magazines, and by narrowing RAGE’s demographic to educated women, breadwinners with money to burn and families to feed, their ad rates could skyrocket. She argued that guaranteeing exclusive product for the magazine from companies who, with their guidance, wouldn’t be going out of business anytime soon, would in turn guarantee a natural advertising base and that the American-only angle would anchor their editorial stance in the otherwise rocky shoals of the cold war era’s media landscape. “Women are the new men,” Margot had declared to George Cooper, “with one big difference: they fucking love to shop.”
By the end of the meeting, she’d founded her own magazine with a renewable contract for two years and a guaranteed staff draw from existing Cooper titles. She turned that two-year audition into the most successful publication the magazine industry had ever seen; betting on the better angels of the Western world’s women had paid off, and she survived the tenure of not only George Cooper, but his younger brother Matthew as well. Their older brother Pete remained a mostly silent partner, and now George Cooper Jr. ran the show.
In the nineties, as Gap and Nike suffered enormous public relations crises over their sweatshops, Margot had pivoted the magazine’s focus and moved from the patriotic to the humanitarian, banking on the living-wage appeal of luxury goods that required expensive production to ensure their value. “There are no fucking Gap jeans in RAGE” was an oft-repeated Margot quote, along with “We don’t promote clothes made by children,” a claim easy enough to commit to given the quality of the clothing they featured. Nineties-era RAGE was transformed from “American-made” to “living-wage, worldwide,” with the clothes increasing further still in price. When confronted in 1998 by the Wall Street Journal about the astronomical costs of RAGE’s fashion editorials, Margot pointed out, “It costs a lot to look like you didn’t continue a cycle of poverty for working women on the other side of the globe.” Luxury brands touted their RAGE seal of approval, and the mid-level “designer” labels and luxury diffusion lines sold in department stores had to shift their focus to hold on to their cachet, lest they be branded as fascist fashion. RAGE Fashion Book flourished, and though it spawned multiple imitators, none matched the success of Margot’s original.
But in the new millennium RAGE’s prospects had shifted, trending downward as technology made luxury accessible to people Margot had never considered in ways she’d never dreamed. Street-style stars of their own blogs, who subsisted on protein shakes while Photogramming images of cupcakes, created their own advertorials faster and cheaper than magazines and got their kickbacks direct from the manufacturers through Mania, a software application that was now RAGE’s biggest competitor. Margot’s specific ethics were taken for granted, and her empire no longer cornered the aspirational market for women’s luxury goods. The magazine’s ad rates had been forced into decline as they competed with Manhattan teenagers willing to sell their lives, without any disclosure whatsoever, to the sponsorship of brands. Why pay $150K per page for an advertisement in RAGE to reach four million American women—once, on paper, without a resale opportunity—when you could just throw some free clothes at a teenage girl who would sell them directly to her own twenty million global followers, while Mania measured their clicks, engagement, and ROI down to the second?