Carlos Nazario on Reinventing Wonderland Magazine, Designer Turnover, and Why Nike Needs to Fight Back

Magazine editing offers something stylists can’t get elsewhere: the chance to shape culture without compromise, which is why Carlos Nazario left his influential styling career to become editor-in-chief of Wonderland.

Summary of Carlos in Charge. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:04:34 — Alistair McKim, the chief creative officer overseeing Wonderland, brought Carlos into the role after he had built a reputation as a stylist and creative director working with major designers.
• 00:08:35 — Carlos realized early in his career through mentors like Katie Grand that magazine editing was where cultural influence happened most powerfully.
• 00:09:46 — After spending years as a stylist working under other editors’ visions, Carlos reached a stage in his career where he wanted to express his ideas without compromise.
• 00:10:58 — Silver Lining, his independent book project, was intentionally anti-commercial and designed to capture an unfiltered version of culture that traditional magazines avoid.
• 00:12:05 — Carlos believes mainstream publications have become too cautious to appeal to broad audiences, when there’s actually demand for content that feels more provocative and authentic.
• 00:30:31 — The pace of fashion industry changes has accelerated dramatically, with designers now having three seasons instead of three years to prove themselves before facing removal.
• 00:31:42 — Internet culture and social media have created an insatiable appetite for content that makes brands quick to blame stylists and change direction when results aren’t immediate.
• 00:45:15 — Photographer Sylvester Macco became overexposed through simultaneous magazine covers, but this reflects the same repetition that happens with traditional luxury campaign photographers, just made more visible by social media.
• 00:56:36 — Nike remains a cultural kingmaker despite recent market struggles, similar to brands like Louis Vuitton and Apple that maintain emotional goodwill regardless of performance, but Nike hasn’t capitalized on collaborations quickly enough to rebuild momentum.

In depth

Why trade styling freedom for an editor’s desk

Carlos Nazario’s move to Wonderland looks, on paper, like a step down in creative autonomy — he already had covers, runway clients, and a reputation as a kingmaker in his own right, so why take on the administrative and commercial weight of running a title? His answer, laid out at length, is that collaboration is the thing he values most, and no format produces denser, more varied collaboration than a magazine 00:06:00. He traces this back to his first job at seventeen, a scrappy downtown pamphlet-sized publication, and to formative stints under Camilla Nickerson and Alex White at W, where he watched editors balance editorial authority with commercial influence in real time 00:06:5800:07:02.

But the deeper argument is about authorship. Nazario is explicit that even the most generous editor still requires a stylist to compromise — your idea gets filtered through someone else’s vision no matter how much latitude you’re given 00:09:2300:09:28. After years of contributing to other people’s mastheads, he describes reaching a point where he has accumulated enough to say that he no longer wants it refracted through anyone else’s editorial lens 00:09:46. Alistair McKim’s offer to let him rebuild Wonderland from the ground up was, in his telling, not something he could turn down once that appetite had set in 00:09:5900:10:05.

He credits Katie Grand’s Love as the formative proof of concept — a magazine built almost entirely on one person’s access and point of view, where cross-pollination (styling Marc Jacobs, being friends with the designer, landing the cover) wasn’t incidental but structural 00:07:5300:08:24. That model, where personal relationships and taste directly become the content, is what he says he wants to scale at Wonderland, inflected by his own travels and the people in his orbit rather than hers 00:12:2200:12:30.

Silver Lining as a deliberate provocation, not a dry run

Nazario is careful to distinguish his self-published book Silver Lining from a preview of Wonderland, even though Lauren Sherman frames it that way. Silver Lining, he says, was built to be unsuitable for the workplace and anti-commercial by design — in its nudity, its language, its indulgent length — and the discomfort some readers reported was the intended effect, not a side effect 00:10:5800:11:1200:11:32. He’s careful to add that this isn’t an anti-commercial stance in general; he says plainly that he thrives on commercial success and isn’t ashamed of wanting people to buy his work 00:11:3800:11:44. His objection is narrower: that mainstream publishing has conflated broad appeal with blandness, treating safety as the only route to scale, a premise he rejects outright 00:11:5400:12:00.

The self-publishing decision reinforces the same logic. Nazario says he considered going through an established publishing house but concluded that any such deal would eventually force a compromise, so he built his own distribution instead, including starting an e-commerce site himself 00:18:1100:18:35. He cites Joe McKenna’s self-published Joe’s magazine as the reference point — a body of work he considers unimpeachable precisely because McKenna didn’t have to answer to advertisers while making it 00:18:4600:18:59.

What’s left unresolved is how much of that independence can survive the transition to Wonderland, which is owned by Peter Jones’s group and will need advertisers. Nazario gestures at drawing on his experience at huge-reach publications while still serving what he calls his own vortex of worldly, culturally plugged-in readers 00:12:1300:12:22, but he doesn’t fully reconcile how a commercially dependent magazine will retain the freedom that made Silver Lining what it was. He promises the result will be unexpected and global in scope rather than simply louder 00:13:3600:13:59, but the specifics — what gets cut for advertisers, what doesn’t — are left open.

From three years to three seasons: why designers get judged instantly now

A central thread of the conversation is Nazario’s claim that the runway for a new creative director to find their footing has collapsed. He uses Riccardo Tisci’s early, poorly received Givenchy collections — florals and pastel bandage dresses, nothing like what the house became — as his proof case: the press wasn’t kind, but Givenchy’s ownership backed him with time and resources, and the slow burn eventually produced one of the defining houses of the era 00:30:4300:31:1500:31:24. His explicit claim is that this patience no longer exists; where designers once had roughly three years to develop a point of view, they now effectively get three seasons before the brand starts making changes 00:34:0200:34:12.

Sherman extends this with concrete contemporary cases rather than letting it stay abstract. She argues Sabato De Sarno was judged as a poor fit for Gucci almost from his first show, and that fifteen years ago the industry might have allowed him longer to prove himself, but that didn’t happen this time 00:34:2900:34:43. She applies the same logic more sympathetically to Pierfrancesco Gori — sorry, Pier Paolo — at Balenciaga, arguing he’s a genuinely skilled designer who may simply have landed inside a company whose financial circumstances didn’t permit the slower runway his predecessors got 00:35:1400:35:20. And she flags her own discipline of withholding judgment on Dries Van Noten’s new designer, Drew Henry, specifically because she doesn’t yet know what he’s capable of, even though the first show wasn’t strong 00:35:4500:36:07.

Both speakers trace the mechanism to the same place: an internet audience that, in Nazario’s phrase, turns into a chorus of boos capable of stressing out not just the designer but everyone above them, producing exactly the kind of reactive micromanagement that makes it harder for a new hire to succeed 00:38:2200:38:5300:39:00. Sherman adds the financial dimension — Capri’s falling share price puts direct pressure on executives like Luke De Meo to act fast, and cost-cutting alone won’t fix it, so changes at the top become almost inevitable regardless of whether any individual designer deserved more time 00:36:3400:36:4900:37:06. Neither speaker resolves whether this compressed timeline is simply the price of an attention economy that can’t be undone, or a correctable overreaction — Nazario calls the current cancel-culture dynamic around designers short-sighted and says it costs the industry people who might have grown into the job, but stops short of proposing what would actually slow it down 00:39:0700:39:1300:39:42.

The Sylvester Mako pile-up and what overexposure actually reveals

The discussion of photographer Sylvester Mako is less about his talent, which both speakers concede is real and distinctive, and more about what the sudden pile-up of his covers across multiple magazines in the same window exposed about structure and representation in the industry. Nazario’s key factual point is that Mako doesn’t have an agent and represents himself, which he frames as admirable but also as the likely mechanical cause of the glut — a larger agency, he argues, would have either refused to let so many bookings land in the same territory in the same month or would have at least informed the competing magazines so editors could make an informed call 00:45:1500:45:2300:45:45. His inference is that Mako, lacking that sounding board, made a calculated individual decision to seize the moment while it was available to him, which Nazario doesn’t fault on its own terms 00:45:5500:46:00.

Where he pushes back is on the scale of the online reaction. He argues that repetition of style across campaigns is already the industry’s baseline condition — the same roughly eight photographers shoot nearly every major luxury campaign without anyone treating it as scandal — and that Mako’s case only reads as shocking because his aesthetic is unusually specific and therefore more recognizable at a glance 00:46:2300:46:32. He also predicts the controversy is likely to be self-correcting and short-lived, speculating that Mako may simply have fewer covers next month and the conversation will move on 00:46:3500:46:46.

Sherman’s read emphasizes the visual evidence more than the structural explanation: she says most of the Mako covers looked interchangeable to her, with the Mel Ottenberg-directed Sandra Bullock interview standing out as the one image that didn’t feel like the same formula repeated, which she takes as a sign that even within a singular style there’s a difference between a photographer adapting to a strong editorial vision and one being deployed the same way everywhere 00:43:4400:43:59. Nazario extends this into a forward-looking concern: he compares Mako’s position to Rafael Pavarotti’s early career, when Pavarotti’s highly specific imagery seemed hard to translate into commercial work until he learned to diversify it for different clients — the implicit question being whether Mako can develop that same range once he starts working inside bigger production teams and campaign structures, or whether his specificity becomes a ceiling 00:49:3100:49:4100:49:46.

Nike’s goodwill problem: cultural capital without commercial follow-through

The closing exchange on Nike turns on a distinction Nazario draws between emotional brand equity and market execution. He places Nike alongside Apple and Louis Vuitton as brands whose cultural authority functions almost independently of current performance — people retain what he calls goodwill toward Nike regardless of stock results, because the brand still represents, in his words, excellence and the best of the best 00:55:0501:01:5701:02:06. Sherman pushes on this by asking directly whether that status makes Nike effectively too big to fail, and neither speaker fully answers yes — both acknowledge the market has been unhappy, but they diverge slightly on why that matters: Sherman frames it as proof that even beloved legacy brands face real performance pressure now, while Nazario treats the market dip as a fairly ordinary cyclical lull for a company of Nike’s size 00:55:5700:56:10.

The more specific critique, which both speakers converge on, is about speed and follow-through rather than reputation. Sherman’s own reporting leads her to argue Nike’s core failure recently has been converting buzzy, culturally resonant collaboration pieces into mainline retail product quickly enough — she cites Bodhi reviving a vintage seventies silhouette that then took a year and a half to reach general retail, and contrasts this unfavorably with New Balance’s handling of its collaboration with Teddy, where a design was folded into the main collection rapidly 01:00:0601:00:1801:00:47. Nazario’s parallel claim is about Adidas rather than New Balance: he argues Adidas has outpaced Nike by identifying cultural figures early, building relationships before any formal deal, and then committing real marketing weight once a collaboration launches, which is why a partnership with someone like Willy Chavaria can make an unfamiliar name feel urgently desirable 01:02:4801:03:0301:03:07. His claim, stated plainly, is that Nike literally invented this playbook and has simply let competitors execute it better in recent years 01:03:2701:03:32.

What’s left unresolved is whether the Our Legacy collaboration they close on represents a genuine correction or just another isolated bright spot that fails to change the underlying pattern. Sherman is candid about her own uncertainty here — she says it feels distinctive to her but concedes she can’t rule out that she’s only noticing it because of her specific media feed, and that it could easily amount to nothing 00:59:4800:59:5901:00:06. Neither speaker treats the question as settled; the conversation ends less with a verdict than with a direct appeal for Nike to, in Nazario’s words, fight back and compete like the sportswear company it is 01:03:3701:03:43.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.