They were the first major magazine to cover Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything, for instance, with a profile describing her disappointment with the limited achievements of Occupy Wall Street, and capitalism’s success in “convincing us that we’re not worth saving”. Vogue has consistently proven itself more than happy to “dirty” its hands in politics. Two decades later, this no longer seems to be the case. McRobbie argued that the result was “an inward-looking and culturally isolated group of fashion media professionals who seem to belong to a time when politics did not intrude on the world of fashion and when fashion people had no need to dirty their hands with what went on in the outside world”. Fashion-as-politics might at times appear in the magazines’ pages, but only as “a catchy idea for a ‘fashion story’.” While these magazines clearly wanted to avoid being associated with “mass culture”, and most editors were “unashamedly elitist in their desire to create a luxury magazine for well-to-do readers”, she noted that fashion simultaneously saw itself as occupying a lowly position within “high culture” (as well as within serious journalism). In her 1998 book, British Fashion Design, the cultural theorist Angela McRobbie argued that the editors of magazines like Vogue clearly believed fashion ought to avoid politics, and that fashion journalists were expected to comply.

The Economist declared, “Rulers of the world: read Karl Marx!” Another seemingly unlikely publication asked, “So how can teens learn the legacy of Marx’s ideas and how they’re relevant to the current political climate?” That publication was Teen Vogue.

The reasonably serious treatment given to many of Karl Marx’s ideas, on the 200 th anniversary of his birth last year, was surprising to some.

The Teen Vogue Handbook by Teen Vogue