By Penelope Green | New York Times News Service
NEW YORK—One windy morning in February, Amy Astley, the new editor of Architectural Digest, was showing off her magazine’s renovation: a near-gut job, as they say in the trade. Her office on the 26th floor of One World Trade Center overlooks the September 11 memorial, a harsh landscape in late winter, but there were pink roses on her white Parsons table—a Condé Nast staple (the table, not the roses)—and Astley wore a silk dress printed with butterflies.
On her window ledge, amid photographs of ballet dancers by Arthur Elgort, Henry Leutwyler and others, was a cartoon portrait of Astley with a speech bubble that read, “Kiss My Astley”.
Made by Angelica Hicks, an illustrator whose sly cartoons lampoon the fashion world, it was a sign that this editor, who has the gracious but on-message manner of a corporate executive, may have a bit of mischief in her. Certainly, her version of the almost century-old magazine, redesigned and christened AD for its April issue (any subliminal message is unintended), is livelier than it has ever been.
On the cover, you will see the delirious apartment of Ashley Hicks (father of Angelica), which once belonged to his father, designer David Hicks, and is an expression of the sort of eccentric bohemian Englishness familiar to readers of The World of Interiors. In the apartment, Ashley Hicks, whose loopy and appealing photo vignettes have made him an Instagram star, has glued pheasant feathers to a lampshade, made voluptuous resin furniture and painted his burlap walls with scenes of 19th-century Constantinople and portraits of his chickens, Instagram stars in their own right.
The new AD owes some of its DNA to the 10-month period in 1987 when a 38-year-old British fashion editor named Anna Wintour took over House & Garden, shortened its title to HG and upended its arm’s length coverage of stately interiors by showing models romping in chintz, children—children!—skateboarding, unmade beds and other revolutions. The similarities are not surprising, given Astley’s reputation as Wintour’s protégée and proxy.
Astley is a company woman, through and through. She likes to say that she was trained by Diana Vreeland’s assistant. It was 1989, and Astley, now 49, was the second assistant to Nancy Novogrod, then the editor in chief of HG. (The first assistant had worked for Vreeland, the legendary Vogue editor, at the Costume Institute.) Astley is proud of these shelter magazine bona fides, which even magaholics may have forgotten after her nine years as the beauty editor and then beauty director of Vogue, and another 13 as editor in chief of Teen Vogue, which she founded.
In 1993, when S.I. Newhouse, now the chairman emeritus of Condé Nast Publications, bought Architectural Digest, the stiff-looking but enormously successful catalogue of the good life, he closed the underperforming HG and Astley lost her job.
“I learned early on the vagaries of the business,” she said. Hers is the second makeover of Architectural Digest since its longtime editor, Paige Rense, retired in 2010. Then, the job went to Margaret Russell, who had spent 21 years at Elle Décor, 10 of those as editor in chief. Known for her own steely work ethic, Russell, a design industry veteran who counted Michael Smith, former President Barack Obama’s decorator, among her inner circle, lightened up the joint without throwing out too much of the furniture.
For decades, the magazine had presented the work of designers and architects who were gussying up the nests of the powerful, attracting an affluent audience that was almost 50-percent male, which delighted advertisers. Russell’s version was lighter, cleaner and just a bit younger, but it hewed to the formula. Astley’s stirs in the intimacy of social media.
Astley grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, where her father, Irving Taran, was a chairman of the art department at Michigan State University and her mother, Judith Taran, was an arts educator. Astley trained to be a ballet dancer but jettisoned that career at 18 when it was clear, she said, “that I wasn’t going to make it.”
“Ballet is harsh; there’s no wiggle room,” she continued. “I was devastated.”
When she was a teenager, her father took a sabbatical year to paint, and the family moved to a raw commercial loft on Greenwich Street in Manhattan, on the same block where Astley lives with her husband, Christopher Astley, an artist, and their teenage daughters. The couple met during college; Amy Astley majored in English at Michigan State. You can glimpse their loft on her Instagram account: their daughters’ Porthault sheets; a pink velvet banquette-sofa; lots of trippy Josef Frank fabric; and a miniature dachshund named Bear.
Novogrod said that Astley “has a kind of authenticity”. “Despite everything, her head hasn’t been turned around,” she continued. “I think coming from the Midwest and knowing there’s a world beyond New York is a good thing.”
What’s curious is that Architectural Digest, a relic of an era when decorators were stars and we gawked at the excesses of corporate raiders and other machers, is the title that has hung on, rather than elegant HG or the original Domino. It is a brand “that seems to be able to survive any regime change,” said Lee Mindel, an architect who has been featured in the magazine since the 1980s.
In fact, for the past two years, AD’s circulation has been fairly steady, hovering around 818,000, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. But in the past year, its audience across all platforms rose 47 percent, a number found in the Brand Audience Report for the upscale shelter category prepared by MPA (the Association of Magazine Media). The research noted a 131-percent rise in its mobile audience.
Despite these numbers, Russell was abruptly let go last May. It’s not just AD that has been catnip to readers. The entire shelter category grew 28.3 percent, in contrast to all measured magazine media, which saw its audiences grow just over 5 percent. “The upscale shelter category far exceeds the average growth and vitality of the magazine industry in total,” said Susan Fraysse Russ, the senior vice president for communication at MPA. “It’s thriving on all platforms.” It may be that the current sociopolitical climate has so rattled people that they are reaching for the escapism found in the colorful fantasy worlds that Astley’s AD provides. Or they have gone to ground and are trying to feather their own nests as a prophylactic against the chaos.
“People want to be cozy,” Astley said. “They want to spend money on their homes, perhaps now more than ever.”
Image credits: The New York Times