Good Night, NYLON

There’s a specific embarrassment that comes from buying a magazine clearly not targeted at you—the slight angle you hold it on the subway so the cover isn’t quite facing outward. I read NYLON for years anyway. Not every issue, but enough to know its cadence: the particular mix of downtown cool and pop shamelessness that Marvin Scott Jarrett built when he launched it in 1999. It was nominally a women’s magazine, but the cultural range was too interesting for that label to hold. Lindsay Lohan on the cover next to a piece on some obscure Tokyo street subculture. Mischa Barton next to something that actually had opinions. Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens—the parade of young women who were famous for being young and famous, shot and styled with more intelligence than the format usually demanded.

Now it’s over. NYLON is killing its print edition after October 2017 and going fully digital, folding whatever remains into a web presence and an influencer agency. Which makes complete financial sense and is nonetheless a small loss.

The easy take—and it’s not wrong—is that print is dead and everyone arguing otherwise is lying to themselves or to their advertisers. Nobody functioning at full capacity is buying magazines anymore. The ritual of it, the physical thing you can hold and smell and dog-ear, is real, but sentiment doesn’t keep publishers solvent. The business died before anyone was ready to admit it, and the long tail of denial has been genuinely painful to watch.

NYLON was one of the better ones. It had a specific sensibility, a genuine sense of where the culture was moving before the culture had fully moved there. Whatever replaces it online will probably be fine—faster, more responsive, optimized for the feed. Just not the same thing. Never quite the same thing.