Teen Vogue gained further momentum when Dan Rather wrote about it on his Facebook page and Tucker Carlson sparred with Ms. Duca on Fox News. After that, Trevor Noah welcomed Mr. Picardi and the Teen Vogue editor, Elaine Welteroth, to “The Daily Show,” and the publication they oversaw was no longer just another magazine for adolescent girls.
Since then, Teen Vogue has shut down its print edition, but Mr. Picardi has collected new responsibilities. After Ms. Welteroth left Condé Nast in January, Condé Nast named him the chief content officer of Teen Vogue. He has also started a new digital project at the company, an L.G.B.T. community platform called Them, which has drawn support from advertisers including Burberry, Google, Lyft and Glaad.
To Ms. Wintour, Mr. Picardi is someone who fits the cultural moment — he’s the ideal promoter of a millennial-flavored brand of anti-Trump activism and identity politics that is gaining strength in a stormy political atmosphere.
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“He understands how young people are thinking today,” Ms. Wintour said. “He’s very activist, he’s very engaged. He wants to make waves, which I think is important. He wants to cause a conversation, not in an angry way but in a helpful way.”
At the Odeon, Mr. Picardi wore an outfit he referred to as his “pajamas” — midnight blue velvet pants and a matching shirt from the Sies Marjan label. Despite his swift rise at a company known for its Versailles-style office politics, Mr. Picardi said he was not the calculating sort. “I’m never making an effort to behave any differently or modify my behavior,” he said over poached eggs and avocado.
It is not difficult to see why Mr. Picardi — who goes by Phill, with two L’s, thank you very much — has impressed his boss, particularly at a time when Condé Nast is looking for its next generation of (younger, cheaper) leaders. Even at his age, he is polished, with a repertoire of life-affirming stories. One of his go-tos: “I got in trouble for bringing Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera CDs to second-grade class because I was in Catholic school and they freaked out and said it was too sexual and I was like, ‘That’s the point.’”
During our interview, Mr. Picardi noted that Teen Vogue’s monthly traffic under his team had gone from two million unique visitors to 12 million. “Not to toot my own horn, that is very hard,” he said. Traffic has since fallen, but his success has resonated inside One World Trade.
“People in the building are always referring to things that were instituted at Teen Vogue and now at ‘them,’” said Amy Astley, the editor of Architectural Digest and a former editor of Teen Vogue, who hired Mr. Picardi as an intern. “I honestly think that people in the company wish him well and are not jealous of him and are learning from him.”
Mr. Picardi grew up in North Andover, Mass. His father, a devout Catholic, owned a technology company. His mother was a homemaker and an executive assistant. He had four siblings, including a sister who used to paint his nails pink and a brother named John Paul, after the pope. Family dinners sometimes included Mr. Picardi’s grandmother, who moved to America from a mountain village in Italy.
“My dad used to pick the sausages out of the sauce and eat them with his fingers, and my mom would cry,” Mr. Picardi said.
It made for a sometimes challenging environment for the young Mr. Picardi. “I was gay,” he said. “G.A.Y., with an exclamation mark and a little asterisk.”
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He came out to his parents in the summer before ninth grade. It was 2 in the morning, and Mr. Picardi, who had just finished watching “Queer as Folk,” burst into their bedroom and said: “Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you.” His mother sobbed as he said everything he had to say. Ten minutes later, his father rolled over and asked what was going on. He had slept through it.
His parents sent him to a Catholic therapist and instructed him not to tell his neighbors, his friends or his younger brother. But with his identity solidified, he began shaping his future. Before coming out, he had wanted to be a lawyer. Now, he decided, he should work in fashion.
“I watched ‘Will Grace,’ and that’s what it felt like they were doing, more or less,” he said.
At a bookstore, he picked up copies of Out and Details. Then he saw it: Vogue.
“I picked up a copy of Vogue just because I was, like, I need to know about women’s fashion now, because I’m gay,” he said. “Jack and Will make fun of everything Grace wears on ‘Will Grace,’ so I need to be like that.”
He helped start a charity fashion show at his high school, Central Catholic High School, called Catwalk4Cancer, which has since raised more than $250,000.
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“He had the ability to make people do what he wanted them to do,” said Carmen Lonero, a teacher who served as his adviser on the project. “I always knew he was going to do something that was special.”
What set Mr. Picardi on a path toward working in magazines was a Vanity Fair cover story he read on Jennifer Aniston and the celebrity love triangle that involved Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
During his first week at N.Y.U., Mr. Picardi attended New York Fashion Week, covering an Alexandre Herchcovitch show for the shopping and style website Racked. Some months later, he had the internship at teenvogue.com. He became a beauty intern after writing a blog post, “BrowBeat: Confessions of an Over-Tweezed Teen,” about his eyebrows, following a painful experience with online bullying. He graduated a year early and became the head of Teen Vogue’s website at 23.
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/business/media/conde-nast-phillip-picardi.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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