How Teen Vogue’s Elaine Welteroth is shaking up expectations for a new generation of young women

Elaine Welteroth was bored. For months, Teen Vogue — the magazine where she served as beauty director — had been featuring the same young women on its cover: “Rich, pretty, white bloggers in fashion.”

So she called a meeting. “Who else is bored?” she asked her fellow editors.

She urged her colleagues to consider featuring a different type of star on the cover of the glossy — or to at least ask models and actors more than just the rote promotional questions.

“Listen, everyone’s covering the same people,” Welteroth told her co-workers. “Let’s let them do that, and let’s decide to put people on our cover who are role models for this generation.”

Her plea worked. In February 2016, Teen Vogue put Amandla Stenberg on its cover — a 17-year-old almost as famous for a Tumblr video she’d posted about cultural appropriation as for the touchstone role she played as Rue in 2012’s “The Hunger Games.”

Just three months later, Welteroth was named editor of the magazine, part of a leadership team that included digital editorial director Phillip Picardi and creative director Marie Suter. In April, she was named editor-in-chief outright. She was 29.

Since her rise, Welteroth has become a media darling — the chic yet socially conscious wunderkind! — and self-described “cool auntie” to Gen Z. Even though Conde Nast last month announced it was discontinuing the print edition of the magazine, the editor has forged ahead with the brand’s reinvention last weekend arriving in Los Angeles to oversee the first Teen Vogue Summit.

Attendees paid between $299 and $549 to take part in the two-day event held in “Silicon Valley South” on the Playa Vista campus of an advertising firm. Not surprisingly, the crowd of roughly 500 guests was young: 52% under the age of 24 and just 16% over age 35. But while some Hollywood types were on the schedule — director Ava DuVernay and Stenberg — the major…

Please read original article-  How Teen Vogue’s Elaine Welteroth is shaking up expectations for a new generation of young women