Deez Interview: Stella Bugbee on stepping down from the Cut!!!
Today we’ve got a lil flash q&a with Stella Bugbee in light of the news yesterday about her stepping down from her EIC and SVP roles at the Cut!! The good news is that she’s not LEAVING leaving; Bugbee will become an editor-at-large at New York Magazine and remain a senior member of the editorial team for print and digital projects, plus she’ll continue as executive producer of the Cut podcast, which launched earlier this summer.
Still! For the generation of Very Online Women who’ve seen the Cut grow under Bugbee’s leadership into the place to get everything from your Traister takes and hard-hitting essays to contextual explainers of modern phenomena such as millennial pink and BDE, it’s the end of an era.
So I* got the chance to ask Bugbee a lil bit about her tenure — what she’s proudest of, what she wished she could have made happen (ctrl + f “parrot to attend fashion week”), and advice for her successor. (And if you think that successor could be you, the job listing is here!)
[Disclaimer: I have written for the Cut once!!]
In eight years, you took a vertical that was originally meant to replace a fashion week blog and blew it out into a full-fledged magazine brand in its own right. What was the hardest part of executing that ambition?
Oh my god, what a question! The Cut grew slowly, over time, and carefully, with the input of a lot of excellent people. One of the things I love about New York Magazine is the relative lack of "internal politics” compared to other places I had worked, and the sense that always existed here that anything is possible. I didn’t create that! It was a part of why I wanted to come work here in the first place!
What’s always impressed me about the Cut is the way its pieces so memorably interrogate traditional narratives around women and our place in the world, whether it's via popularizing terms like Millennial Pink indulging everyone's obsession with lady scammers like Anna Delvey, or publishing definitive #MeToo perspectives from people like Moira Donegan and Ellen Pao.
All that is to say….is there one single story that you're most proud of publishing during your tenure?
The true sensibility of the Cut can only be appreciated in total. It’s all about the mix of serious and silly, horny and angry and chic. So, no. No favorite story, but there were many favorite weeks where we published a wide range of articles.
I loved the 2017 relaunch phase, working on the organization of the whole site, the new look. I loved preparing for that launch. It was an incredibly invigorating and exhausting time, but we did some of our best work then.
When you started at the Cut in 2011, it was still the “heyday of feminist internet,” when blogs like Jezebel and the Hairpin kind of ran the place while legacy women’s media brands, like Vogue or Seventeen, were still catching up. How do you feel about the state of the feminist internet today?
The great thing about feminism, is how it keeps being interpreted and evolving. I have no doubt that there is a lot of interesting stuff coming up in that space and I look forward to seeing how each new generation translates the ideas of equality and justice. Everything is on a continuum.
Is there anything you wish you’d been able to do during your tenure at the Cut that you didn’t have the political capital/time/resources to do?
I had many many outrageous proposals over the years, from a Cut Beach House to a Cut Yacht for the staff to work on during the summer. Sadly, I was not able to make those things come to fruition.
One time I tried to get a parrot to attend fashion week. A woman can dream.
Finally, what are your hopes for whoever is chosen as your successor, and do you have any words of advice you'd want them to know right now?
For us, the challenge was how to have fun, while also covering very serious topics. I hope that whoever takes over the Cut has a strong and exciting vision for style, and how women can exist in the world.