These Magazines Ran on Nepo Babies

Photo-Illustration: New York Magazine;

Not so long ago, the media world contained an entire nepo-baby microclimate. At a time when magazines were still seen as glamorous and culture defining, New York editors and publishers could do a solid for a powerful friend by giving their offspring an internship or assistant job. It’s hard to imagine actual celebrities or socialites wanting to work for a magazine now — but in the ’90s and aughts, three outlets were more notorious than others for hiring their kids. (And make no mistake: Media is still full of nepo babies. Their parents just tend to be journalists too.)

On the cover

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Photo-Illustration: Joe Darrow for New York Magazine

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Rolling Stone

The magazine where Mark Ronson “interned� at age 12 was like a summer camp for the children of co-founder Jann Wenner’s rock-star and celebrity friends. Bob Dylan’s granddaughter passed through. So did Chevy Chase’s kid. Boz Scaggs’s son Austin stuck around, becoming a music critic and overseeing the online “Smoking Section� column. As late as the 2010s, if you happened to serve out an internship there, you could have found yourself fetching coffee and transcribing alongside Jessica Springsteen or Frances Bean Cobain. Now the whole place is run by a nepo baby: Wenner’s son Gus.

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Vanity Fair

What Rolling Stone was to rock royalty, Vanity Fair was to Hollywood spawn — including the daughters of Bette Midler, Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, and Larry David. A nepo-baby assistant or intern could be an asset in the access game. At an editorial meeting, one might pipe up with something useful: “Daddy knows about that from his work with David Lean in the ’60s�; “I’ll call so-and-so and see if we can shoot the house in Morocco.� Former editors insist the nepo babies were mostly helpful, except for one who, in the early aughts, left a lit cigarette smoldering in the VF fashion closet and set it ablaze.

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Vogue

For decades, Vogue’s raison d’être was teaching Upper East Side girls how to dress, and much of its staff were the lily-white daughters of Park and Madison Avenues and the European aristocracy. The Voguette nepo babies were stylish, sun-tanned girls with bodies that fit sample sizes. They traveled in packs, populating Anna Wintour’s dinner parties and filling seats at runway shows, but, according to one former longtime Vogue editor, “they never came to fashion meetings. There was no editorial contribution needed.� Still, they worked hard: “If you didn’t, you were out. Anna wasn’t tolerating it.� The ultimate might have been Elizabeth Saltzman, who went on to have a long career as a respected stylist; her mother was Ellin Saltzman, fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue.