New ‘Glamour’ Editor-in-Chief Samantha Barry Wants to Highlight Overlooked Voices in Fashion



“I’ve spent a lot of the last couple of months thinking about taking on this legacy brand.”

It’s been only two months since new Glamour hire Samantha Barry officially stepped into her role as Editor-in-Chief after Cindi Leive’s departure, and the “first digital-native editor” from CNN is already thinking about how she’ll make her mark on the 78-year-old media brand. “Legacy is such a lofty word,” said Barry on a panel about equity and self-expression in the digital age at SXSW 2018, hosted by Mercedes-Benz’s Me Convention on Sunday. “I’m new to this role, [going] from a newsroom to a publishing company, and I’ve spent a lot of the last couple of months thinking about taking on this legacy brand.”

Her career shift has been a transition, but the goals she has set for herself and Glamour are slowly but surely coming into fruition as she pushes her team to go after content that allows them to shine. “That is often the untold stories,” said Barry, citing a story with Open Style Lab, a unique nonprofit organization focused on “adaptive wear,” from the April 2018 issue as an example.

“Some [our best stories] are the voices of people that haven’t been really listened to in fashion before,” she continues. “When you look at Glamour either on the website or in print, does it seem like diversity and equity is not just something that you do in one issue? It’s just part of [our] DNA. It feels authentically part of what [we’re] doing. So that’s some of the things I’ve been grappling with recently.”