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 be revived, and its publisher, Hearst, had just hired Anna’s former fashion director, the warm, white-haired, size-twelve editor of British Vogue, Liz Tilberis, to lead the charge. Tilberis was known for her fantastical approach to fashion photography, having models over for Sunday roast, and starting staff meetings with a round of champagne.

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

When the new Bazaar hit the stands for the first time—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, overnight, it became the hottest magazine of the Nineties. “I was so excited that there was another magazine option to work for,” Christy Turlington says. “One that had the sort of integrity, and the style, and the modern sensibility that Liz brought.”

This Bazaar wasn’t just pretty—it poked fun at convention, balanced between 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 biggest 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 large letter T; the shoot introducing teenage “anti-model” Kate Moss.

Liz put theatricality into American fashion (and refused to run plastic surgery stories), and soon Bazaar was mopping up the awards. Liz even hosted host the Costume Institute’s Met Gala. For her first time as co-chair, Princess Diana introduced her dear friend and forever put the event on the map.

“It was like the gods were finally doing something right,” Isaac Mizrahi says.

Or as Fabien Baron puts it, “We did give such a good run to Vogue.”

But Bazaar’s Big Return was operating on borrowed time. For all of Liz’s fizz, she had been fighting ovarian cancer since her second year at Bazaar. That’s why, despite an open eight-year struggle, it was a shock when she died in 1999.

None of her devoted staff, including the hosts of this podcast, could believe such an effervescent person 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 culture and editors dressed rock stars, dined with royalty, and thought nothing of sending an assistant to Milan to pick up a wayward gown. Liz, everyone realized, had effectively given glossy publishing a decade-long farewell party and been one of its last great stars.

Blow-Up is produced and hosted by Dennis Golonka and Cynthia True, 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 had not only front-row seats to the most glamorous office in the world, where you might run into Kate Moss wandering the halls or see David Sims shooting darts, but a game-changing moment in fashion. Constructed with our recollections and interviews with all the core players, including Fabien Baron, Linda Evangelista, Paul Cavaco, Tonne Goodman, Isaac Mizrahi, David Sims, Donna Karan, Mario Sorrenti, Grace Coddington, Christy Turlington, Patrick Jephson, Susan Magrino, Elissa Santisi, and Amber Valletta, we’re making a six-episode doc-style podcast that tells the story of one of fashion’s greatest characters, an often forgotten “woman’s woman” (in the words of Linda Evangelista) who, for a brief time, not only gave Vogue a run for its money but evolved some of fashion’s most limiting ideas about itself.