Eva Chen on Building Fashion Community at Meta and How the Industry Has Changed

The most successful brands on Instagram now prioritize genuine connection and intimacy over exclusivity, moving away from hyper-exclusive trips toward accessible experiences that feel authentic to their audience.

Summary of All About Eva. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:09:05 — Early in her career at Teen Vogue, Eva responded to cold pitches from journalists like Lauren Sherman, which was unusual at the time and helped build early relationships in the industry.
• 00:13:15 — During her internship at Harper’s Bazaar under Glenda Bailey, Eva realized that people were paid to create the magazines she’d always assumed just magically existed, leading to her epiphany about pursuing fashion media.
• 00:18:23 — At Teen Vogue, Eva worked to recruit established makeup artists and photographers like Pat McGrath and Guido to shoot for the magazine, breaking through their typical gatekeeping where they only worked for certain fashion houses.
• 00:19:05 — Eva was an early adopter on Tumblr and Twitter before Instagram launched, discovering that excess knowledge from interviews could be shared directly to audiences interested in beauty and skincare, building her own following.
• 00:24:07 — When consulting for Lucky magazine, Eva proposed incorporating social commerce and creator voices into the publication, recognizing that influencers wanted validation from traditional media but were being excluded from editorial.
• 00:48:19 — Eva left magazine work after realizing it’s extremely difficult to merge high-quality content creation with commerce at scale, as editorial and commerce teams operate from completely different business models and priorities.
• 01:03:23 — Eva advises brands and creators not by telling them what to do, but by providing the current state of the industry—what’s actually working, how young people shop and consume—and letting them make their own informed decisions.
• 01:06:11 — The shift in brand strategy is moving from exclusivity and hyper-exclusive trips toward creating intimate, accessible experiences that feel genuine; brands are losing audiences by creating Instagram content for other fashion insiders rather than actual customers.
• 01:13:13 — Bottega’s five-year social media absence and recent return demonstrates how taking a strategic break can actually strengthen a brand’s position, especially when re-entering with a clear, authentic vision aligned with current cultural values.

In depth

Why a beauty conglomerate’s investor day made the cut

Sherman opens by justifying a trip that seems out of step with a newsletter about fashion: a capital markets day for Puig, a group best known for fragrance and cosmetics. Her reasoning is that these events exist to pitch investors on a company’s long-term worth, and she went for the same reason she covers any brand-obsessed operator — Puig’s chairman framed the business around the question of why a given brand deserves to exist at all 00:02:47, which is the exact question she says she is always asking herself 00:02:53. The other draw is pure appetite for consolidation: Puig has done fifteen acquisitions in seventeen years 00:02:58, and she sees an industry where today’s corporate shapes may not survive five more years intact 00:03:07.

Structurally, she notes Puig diverges from houses like Estée Lauder, which licenses out manufacturing on brands such as Tom Ford, by actually owning the fashion labels it buys 00:03:28. Dries Van Noten is her case study: a print-heavy, garden-obsessed designer whose move into fragrance felt organic 00:03:45, yet the house remains primarily a fashion business that she expects to grow slowly as a share of Puig’s revenue precisely because the company is still family-controlled 00:04:01.

That family control is also why going public mattered to her analysis — not to relinquish authority but to install outside checks that keep the family honest without ceding the reins 00:04:10. She draws a broader comparison to Hermès and similar family-run public companies, where public markets reward aggressive growth and dividends while family owners often prefer a slower, longer-horizon approach 00:04:37. That tension, she argues, is the actual function of a capital markets day 00:04:46. The number she’s skeptical of is the target itself: growing from five billion to eight billion euros by 2032 00:05:01, which she flags as unlikely to come from organic growth alone and far more likely to be acquisition-driven 00:05:06.

The accidental path into fashion media

Eva Chen’s route into the industry was never the plan. Raised in New York by immigrant parents from China and Taiwan who prized stability above all 00:11:12, she was tracked toward pre-med at a rigorous Upper East Side school and then Johns Hopkins 00:12:04, a path she now describes as a fast route to burnout 00:12:10. The pivot came almost by accident: before taking the MCAT, she decided to spend one last carefree summer applying to roughly twenty internships, cold-mailing physical addresses in an era before digital outreach existed 00:12:27. The only one that paid was Harper’s Bazaar 00:12:53, which she notes wryly given fashion’s reputation for not paying interns at all.

That internship, under Glenda Bailey during the Cameron Diaz cover era 00:13:08, produced what she calls a genuine epiphany: she had never actually considered that people were paid to make the magazines she’d grown up reading 00:13:3100:13:36. It reframed an entire industry she’d treated as a given into an actual career possibility.

But the timing nearly sank her first attempt. She graduated straight into September 11 and the collapse of the first dot-com boom, a period that triggered a wave of magazine consolidation and closures 00:14:2200:14:37, leaving her unable to land a publishing job at all. She spent nine months at a law firm she calls the worst stretch of her life 00:14:41 before re-entering media — a detour she treats almost as a footnote, cutting herself off mid-story because, as she puts it, she could talk for forty-five minutes on this alone 00:14:10.

Breaking gatekeeping from inside Teen Vogue

At Teen Vogue under editor Amy Astley, Chen says she was given real autonomy, and she used it to pursue photographers and makeup artists who typically worked exclusively for major fashion houses — pushing to book Pat McGrath and Guido 00:18:29, names she had only interviewed from the outside as a junior editor at Elle 00:18:44. Landing that caliber of talent for a teen title, she argues, cracked open something in her own sense of what was possible 00:18:56, effectively forcing a generational gatekeeping structure in beauty media to bend.

That same period coincided with her early embrace of Twitter, before she says it turned toxic, and Tumblr, where she positions herself as an original adopter 00:19:0000:19:09. She’s pointed about the fact that when people now treat Substack as a novel format for independent voice, she sees it as something Tumblr was already doing two decades earlier 00:19:1200:19:18 — a mild corrective aimed at present-day amnesia about platform history.

The mechanism behind her following was almost incidental: reporting produced far more material than any single published piece could use — interviews with dermatologists, makeup artists, skin-cancer researchers — and that surplus knowledge found an outlet on social media 00:19:5200:20:0200:20:06. She frames Instagram’s arrival as decisive because it fused image and text in a way Twitter and Tumblr hadn’t 00:20:3300:20:38, giving people like Pat McGrath the ability to build an independent public voice and brand separate from the fashion houses that had always controlled her image 00:20:56.

Lucky magazine: the wrong decade for the right idea

Chen took the Lucky editor-in-chief job largely for the chance to work one-on-one with Anna Wintour and to experiment digitally with a format she’d long admired 00:28:1800:28:36. She and Sherman agree the original magazine had a distinct, plainspoken voice — no clichés, writing that treated readers as smart participants in shopping culture rather than passive consumers 00:29:2000:29:43 — comparable to what a title like L’Étiquette does today, except, as Sherman notes, done in a distinctly American register 00:28:5900:29:05.

Chen’s own retrospective verdict is blunt: the magazine’s digitally-savvy, culture-of-shopping concept arrived roughly twenty years too late, and would have had a much longer run had it launched in 1980 rather than 2000 00:30:03. She attributes its struggles partly to being caught in the industry’s broader digitization crisis and a broader uncertainty, shared across publishing houses, about what a magazine was even supposed to be anymore 00:30:1000:30:18.

Her concrete regrets are operational. She says she lacked any formal training for the editor-in-chief role — there was no instruction beyond Anna Wintour’s mentorship 00:30:4700:30:55 — and in hindsight wishes she’d pushed harder to understand the P&L, watched the blurring line between editorial and advertising more closely, and pivoted toward social-first commerce and reduced print frequency sooner rather than treating two street-style special issues as isolated experiments 00:31:3200:33:4100:33:54.

The deeper lesson came when Condé Nast merged Lucky with an LA e-commerce company: she concluded that merging high-quality editorial with commerce at scale is extraordinarily hard, because the two sides don’t share a cost logic — commerce teams understand customer acquisition but not what quality writing costs, and editorial teams don’t grasp commerce mechanics 00:48:1000:48:1900:48:5000:48:58. That experience was compounded by the trauma of returning from an improvised maternity leave to find people she didn’t directly manage being laid off by strangers in HR, a wound she compares to a horcrux that leaves something behind permanently 00:49:2800:49:3600:50:32.

From gate-opener to industry weathervane

Chen insists her influence was never strategic in the beginning — she calls herself “the antithesis of a gatekeeper,” a gate-opener who shared things she liked, from a vitamin to a Jil Sander shoe, simply because she wanted others to discover them, and her following built itself as an accidental byproduct of that habit rather than a deliberate brand play 00:42:2300:42:4100:42:5300:43:00.

That same instinct now shapes how she advises brands and creators at Meta: rather than telling anyone what to do, she says her value is delivering an honest state of the industry — what’s actually working, how people are shopping — and leaving the decision to them 01:03:1901:03:3101:03:37. Embedded in that neutrality is a pointed critique: she argues most brands over-engineer their Instagram presence for an audience of other marketing teams and industry insiders rather than their actual customer base, losing the people genuinely engaged with the brand in the process 01:03:5601:04:0101:04:06.

She traces a shift in what resonates: the old playbook of ultra-exclusive influencer trips to remote destinations no longer reads as luxurious because it ignores what the rest of the audience is actually experiencing 01:09:23. The newer currency, she argues, is intimacy rather than authenticity, precisely because authenticity has become easy to perform while real intimacy is much harder to fake 01:06:1101:06:30. She points to Ralph Lauren’s Polo Fest as an example of an accessible-but-specific experience that replaces old-style exclusivity without losing cachet 01:09:2701:10:05.

Bottega Veneta’s five-year withdrawal from social media, and its recent return, becomes her proof case: the gap let the brand come back with a clearer, more confident voice tied to new creative direction, while also illustrating a structural pressure every brand faces — once a competitor re-enters and starts growing, CEOs inevitably ask why a rival’s follower count is outpacing theirs, a question Chen says she’s had to explain, sometimes literally on video, is really about not being part of the cultural conversation at all 01:13:1301:15:2601:15:4701:15:51.

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