The founders of Mania, four siblings, all born after 9/11, were teenagers who’d started the entire company three years earlier as a middle-school science fair experiment. The Bishop children’s initial app had allowed users to snap or upload a photo of any object or article of clothing, then geolocate the nearest version or substitute on sale. The results were sorted by price and their “proprietary ethical rating,” which compiled publicly available data to determine the degree of “ethics” in the garment or object in question, a notion so vague it gave Margot hives. Mania had over a million downloads in its first week. In under a month venture capital groups from Silicon Valley were competing over their first round of seed funding. Within six months, they’d discovered a way to gather user-generated content from the street-style stars who worshipped the platform, and created an entire advertorial application from the clothing and objects they were already generating revenue from. “Local, ethical, radical” was their slogan, a stab in RAGE’s direction. The software—open source from the start—worked flawlessly, receiving constant updates and patches from the engineers all over the globe who were eager to help out a start-up, one that was made up of not only primarily female engineers but photogenic adolescent ones to boot.
It didn’t have any editorial content—only user-generated images and advertising—but nobody cared. Now, two years later, Mania’s content was created by their users and curated directly by their advertisers; they operated out of a warehouse in suburban Los Angeles, of all places; and they had a staff of just ten. They were lean, impossibly young, and successful on every available digital platform. Mania was everything that RAGE could never be—no matter how many times Margot flew around the globe to shower their advertisers with the glow of her attention.
George Cooper Jr. had made it clear he was less inclined than his predecessors to support RAGE’s insane budget, including the lobbying firms, labor attorneys, and global auditors who verified their living-wage-only editorial claims. Until twenty issues ago he’d been unable to do or say anything about how Margot ran the magazine, but now he’d made it crystal clear that if they didn’t move forty-five million global issues by the end of the year, he’d be taking control of the magazine. His staff was checking their expenses line-by-line, and she felt Cooper’s fountain pen swinging over her head, ready to drop and reduce her kingdom to nothing in a moment.
She stalked through the lobby, Paula trailing behind with her ever-present cellphone glued to her ear, before taking the escalator steps two at a time and striding confidently across the upper lobby. Paula hung back to finish her conversation. A handsome young man in a tuxedo—one of Cooper’s doormen, his uniform designed by Margot herself in the late nineties, although he probably didn’t know that—directed her to elevator B with perfect timing. As she rounded the corner into the elevator bank, the doors opened and the assembled crowd instinctively parted. She swept in and stared down at the black screen of her phone, incapable of making eye contact, until the doors parted on 46 and Margot glided seamlessly into the cavern she’d once built from nothing.
At 11:00 a.m. the editors of RAGE Fashion Book filed in and took their places around Margot’s office, each unfolding one of the custom camp stools that were stacked next to the door. There were exactly enough stools for the twelve members of the editorial team, no more, no less: Margot’s own foolproof attendance system.
The walls of the office, a twelve-hundred-square-foot glass rectangle that took up most of the building’s north side, were lined with plants—hearty succulents, lush cascading ferns, potted trees, tuberoses, and even a lilac bush. A corner of the room was arranged with silk sofas, dressmaker’s dummies, and sewing machines, but the empty space in front of Margot’s desk was where Cat and the other editors placed their stools and sat in a semicircle.
Margot remained behind the lacquered pearl-gray slab she used as a desk. A single yellow legal pad lay on her blotter. Paula sat on the left, a laptop open beneath her narrow fingertips. Constance stood to the right, commanding a large rolling corkboard used to plot stories and issues.
When the group was seated—Cat let her dress fall around the stool in a perfect bell—Margot spoke five words in the dense Scottish accent she’d never shed.
“We are losing our edge.”
No one responded, but Paula’s narrowed eyes and embittered face showed the group all the emotion that Margot’s blank visage so automatically repressed.
“Mania’s outpacing us, has cornered us on every front, every platform, every angle. I need to hear stories that are original today. Nothing that is a retread. I want new. I want the future. I want you to give me elegant full frontal: provocative, exclusive, salable. We have to go all the way. I want ideas that the little children of Mania cannot even conceive of.”
Oh shit, thought the editors collectively, each of them scrambling for a spin to place on their pitches by the time their turn came up.
Margot nodded slightly to Paula, who pointed at managing editor Constance Onderveet, a hawk-nosed, birdlike woman swaddled in Prada.
“Connie, go,” Paula ordered.
“I got an update yesterday from Maddie Plattstein,” Constance reported. “She’s nearly done with her exposé on unregulated beauty products. In terms of the fallout, she takes retailers to task but manages to place a great deal of the blame squarely on Congress and on the manufacturers, so I don’t think we’ll see too much trouble—I can give a quick heads-up to Barneys, Bergdorf’s, Net-a-Porter, and Sephora that they’ll need to check newsstands and be ready to pull product. That should be sufficient courtesy.”
“Issue and pages?” asked Paula.
“September, barring any hang-ups with research and legal. Four or five pages.”
Janet Berg, the senior features editor, nodded in agreement. “It’s solid. I don’t anticipate too much trouble, but we’ll turn it around in time no matter what.”
Constance moved two yellow index cards—I Stopped Using Soap and Heaving Bowls: Secrets of the Jockey Diet—across the corkboard from September to October, replacing them both with another that read Skin Deep in Their Pockets: The Big Business of Beauty Lobbyists, before she ran down the remainder of her list. Upcoming pieces included a set of first-person essays from transgender students at three different elite men’s colleges; a class-picture-style profile of twenty-one female Fortune 500 CEOs; a digital map of the New York and Paris Garment Districts; and an essay from a scientist who was developing the next big stain-resistant fabric.
Janet jumped back in and listed pitches she’d gotten in from freelancers. Margot voted yes or no with a simple nod or shake of her head, occasionally smearing her liver-spotted hands with hand cream as she stared out the window; everyone else remained quiet. During Cat’s early days at RAGE they’d all spoken up excitedly during meetings, throwing ideas back and forth. Now everyone was treading on eggshells. Margot’s management style—ruling with fear and absolute control, choosing the covers and coverlines mere days before each issue closed—had previously been motivational, but now…now it seemed to be paralyzing the room.
Paula pointed to her next victim, senior photo editor Rose Cashin-Trask.
Reading from a single sheet of paper, Rose robotically recited the shoot schedule and her various updates. As she spoke, Constance layered pink photo cards on top of the yellow story cards, Paula nodding in approval, while Margot’s face remained blank and unimpressed. Cat didn’t look up from the jellied Mary-Janes Rose wore, a slightly more sophisticated version of the ones Helen had on the previous night.