How Highsnobiety is shaping the current media landscape

18 Apr 2024

“To be perfectly honest with you, I needed a few Americans to tell me what it means to win this award,” said David Fischer, the founder of the company Highsnobiety.

Mr. Fischer was sitting in an airport in Spain, wearing a denim jacket and a designer baseball cap. About 10 days earlier, in New York City, Highsnobiety won a National Magazine Award for general excellence — its first nomination and win at the Oscars of the magazine world.

“I’m not a journalist by background, nor would I consider myself a great writer,” Mr. Fischer, 41, who lives in Berlin, said.

He started Highsnobiety as a sneaker blog in 2005. Today it is a website that covers fashion and youth culture broadly. It is also a clothing store and clothing line and, more lucratively, a creative consultancy and production agency. In other words, Highsnobiety writes about and recommends T-shirts, but it also makes its own T-shirts, sells and advertises other labels’ T-shirts, advises brands on how to market their T-shirts and throws big parties in honor of T-shirts.

But is Highsnobiety a media company? “It’s certainly not a clear yes,” Mr. Fischer said. “I was mostly interested in finding exciting new things and putting those things in front of the audience. And I suppose I was always excited about building a brand, more than anything.”

The magazine is printed twice a year. Its stories and images are frenetic, meant to speak to readers who are either young and cool or interested in being young and cool. The editor in chief is Willa Bennett, who ran social media at GQ magazine until 2022.

On the April night she accepted Highsnobiety’s National Magazine Award, her former boss, the GQ editor Will Welch, was “hooting and hollering” (his words) for the 30-year-old woman. She wore a gray Thom Browne suit with a matching skirt layered over the pants, and black Tabi cleft-toe shoes. She spoke into a microphone about how magazines are important and how print media matters.

Neither is a given in the current media landscape. About six months ago, Condé Nast announced it would cut five percent of its work force, following some years of turmoil and nine-figure annual losses. Hearst Magazines announced layoffs in 2023. So did, for that matter, Highsnobiety.

And yet people are still making magazines. Nylon returned to print this month; last month, the new owners of Complex magazine and Life magazine announced print resuscitations. In New York, new indie titles like Family Style and Byline have emerged.

Ms. Bennett is idealistic about this future. She is generally cheerful, prone to skipping down sidewalks, even while wearing a smirk that borrows more from Daria than Mary Tyler Moore. She is also uncommonly curious about people — especially young people, whose ideas and skills she mines for the magazine.

“I believe it’s my responsibility to, like, make sure that young people still dream of being journalists,” she said. “We just need to keep iterating and continuing to stretch what it means.”