When Liz Tilberis Transformed BAZAAR

Here’s the story.

In 1992, Vogue was, as now, the global fashion authority, and Anna Wintour was its already-famous editor-in-chief. But an upset—to this day, the only one of Wintour’s reign—was in the offing. The long-comatose Harper’s Bazaar, once Vogue’s greatest rival, was about to berevived, and its publisher, Hearst, had just hired Anna’s former fashiondirector (and polar opposite), Liz Tilberis, to lead the charge.

Within weeks of defecting to Hearst, Tilberis had cleared Bazaar of deadwood, hired the team behind Madonna’s Sex book, lured away two of Vogue’s biggest photographers, and persuaded Linda Evangelista—who had also built her career at Vogue—to appear on the cover of her first issue. “We won’t share,” sniffed Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse.This battle was the fashion equivalent of King Kong vs Godzilla, and thepress couldn’t get enough. Before Liz even set foot in her new corner office, New York magazine ran a cover story with Liz and Anna smiling together under the headline War of the Poses.

When the new Bazaar hit the stands for the first =me—its crisp white cover graced by a gamine Evangelista playing with the Bazaar logo and a single line of black text Enter the Era of Elegance—it instantly became the hottest magazine of the decade.

This Bazaar wasn’t just pretty. It poked fun at convention, balanced punk and posh, and smudged the boundaries between typography, graphic design, and photography. But mainly, it embodied a new minimalism that drew a line under Eighties excess. Vogue still had the largest circulation, but Bazaar’s latest issue was all anyone talked about: Versace-clad plastic mannequins posed on a gritty street in Bensonhurst; an entire page devoted to one gorgeous letter T; the shoot introducing teenage “ati-model” Kate Moss.

Soon, Bazaar was mopping up the awards, and Liz became the chair of the Costume Institute’s nascent 1996 Met Gala. Her guest of honor, Princess Diana, flew in to introduce her dear friend onstage and forever put the event on the map.

But Bazaar’s Big Return was operaing on borrowed time. For all of Liz’s fizz, she had been fighting ovarian cancer since her second year atBazaar, and in 1999, she died at just 51. None of her devoted staff,including the hosts of this podcast, could believe such an effervescentperson could evaporate, nor appreciate that gone with her was not just a brilliant vision for Harper’s Bazaar but a fast-fading world in which magazines defined the culture.

Blow•Up is produced by long time friends Dennis Golonka and CynthiaTrue, who landed at Harper’s Bazaar as assistants a few months after Liz arrived in 1992. Although more Urban Outfitters than Armani, we knew we’d fallen into a moment. We reported to the most glamorous office in the world, where you might run into Kate Moss wandering the halls or see David Sims shooting darts, and were lucky enough to witness a game-changing moment in fashion.

Constructed with our recollections and interviews with the major players—legendary creative director Fabien Baron, Linda Evangelista, Paul Cavaco, Tonne Goodman, Christy Turlington, Grace Coddington, David Sims, Elissa Santisi, Amber Valletta, Mario Sorrenti, Patrick Jephson, Susan Magrino, Donna Karan, and Isaac Mizrahi—our six-part podcast tells the story of one of fashion’s greatest characters, an oft-forgotten woman’s woman who did things her way and, for a brief time, not only gave Vogue a run for its money but evolved some of fashion’s most limiting ideas about itself.