NEW YORK — On a Tuesday morning in early October, Stellene Volandes, the editor-in-chief of Town &Country, sat around a conference table on the 19th floor in the Hearst Tower with three senior editors. They were intensely debating cover lines for the print magazine’s philanthropy issue, coming out in November with multiple cover subjects, including actress Mariska Hargitay and former football player Michael Strahan.
With coffees, laptops and notepads and pens on hand, they debated which words would strike a balanced tone (“It’s November, so it’s going to be somber, but we need a little candy in there also”); which would be appropriate (“Can we use the word ‘hissy fit’? ‘Beef”? ‘Cat fight’?”); and which would translate well online (“What is going to make someone click?”)
Haggling over cover lines is a time-honored tradition at Town &Country and a reminder that, in this digital age, the power of print still matters to Volandes, 53. “We had this story once with the headline, ‘Ham I am,’ and I remember walking around the office being like, ‘Should it be ham, comma, I am?’ or ‘Ham, period, I am?’ or wait, ‘Should there be an exclamation point?’” she said, laughing.
Some brainstorming sessions have led to cover lines that summed up the times. The April 2021 magazine issue, for example, had “Remember Fun?” bannered on the cover, a signal that the country was finally emerging from the somber cocoon of the pandemic. More recently, the September 2024 issue looked back on the history of social climbing in New York City and featured a “dinner party,” where uptown debutantes mingled with downtown hipsters (think Oscar Nñ with Nicky Hilton, Adam Rhodes with Susan Gutfreund, Jenny Dembrow with Mohammed Fayaz). “What’s more T&C than a dinner party?” Volandes said. “You expect us to know how to throw a really good one. But the guest list in that shoot? That might surprise you. And good. We want it to. But we also want you to really hope you get invited the next time we throw one.”
Erik Maza, the magazine’s executive style director, who joined Town &Country in 2018, said that coming up with those kinds of surprises is one of Volandes’ main skills. “For an editor to subtly transform people’s idea of what a magazine might mean takes a lot of guts, but it also takes a canny understanding of who our readers are and how they are willing to evolve and learn,” he said. “I think she has calibrated the magazine’s evolution successfully.”
Fern Mallis, the creator of New York Fashion Week and a longtime observer of the New York media scene, said the strategy is working. “I think Stellene has taken a traditional Town &Country attitude and made it young and contemporary but hasn’t abandoned the blue bloods and royals,” she said. “I have to say it’s probably the one magazine I read.”
A steady climb at Hearst
From the beginning of her time at Town &Country, Volandes said it was her mission to make the magazine a luxury print product that is as relevant as ever in the digital age.
“The brand was founded in 1846 by these two guys who saw suddenly that there was this rising class of people who have money, who want to know how to spend it, who want to know how to look like they spend it,” Volandes said during an interview in her Manhattan office, a cozy space nearly overflowing with books on art, design and jewelry. “They set out in their first editor’s letter that they were creating a magazine to instruct, refine and amuse. Those things continue to guide us in every single thing we do,” she said, adding “creating conversations when you are 178 years old is a fantastic thing.”
Volandes’ ascent at Hearst has been a steady one: In 2011, she joined Town &Country as jewelry and accessories director, and less than a year later was promoted to style director. In 2016, she was named editor-in-chief, replacing the ousted Jay Fielden; in 2020, she acquired the added title of editorial director of Elle Decor, another Hearst publication.
Volandes said the key to getting people to buy a print publication was to have it offer something that online can’t do. “It creates an experience for whoever is sitting down with it,” she said. According to Hearst, Town &Country has a print circulation of 440,000 (the magazine is issued nine times a year), 5.8 million monthly visitors to its website, and 2.9 million followers on social media. Digital direct advertising is up 16% year over year. A dual print and digital subscription costs $35 annually.
‘She lives the brand’
If Town &Country is a club that both subscribers and advertisers want to join, its embodiment is Volandes. “Stellene is out there; she lives the brand,” said Steven R. Swartz, president and CEO of Hearst. “She is out supporting the cultural institutions, she is in the restaurants, she is traveling the types of places that Town &Country readers want to go or want to learn more about.”
Indeed, Volandes recently posted photos from the opening night of “The Roommate,” starring Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow (“Legends only”), and the closing night of Le Grenouille, that classic East Side hangout for the ladies who lunch (“It’s the end of an era”).
”As an editor I need to be out there and have this curiosity and this voracious appetite for information and news and stories,” Volandes said.
On Sept. 9, the fourth day of New York Fashion Week, she was sitting in the front row of the Carolina Herrera fashion show, dressed in a navy Dior blazer, a LALAoUNIS necklace, and a bag that is a collaboration between Christian Louboutin and Konstantin Kakanias. She was seated next to her Hearst colleagues Samira Nasr, the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, and Nina Garcia, the editor-in-chief of Elle.
After greeting the other editors with hugs and cheek kisses, Volandes admired the space that the fashion house had rented out for its presentation: the plaza of 28 Liberty St., a downtown skyscraper with a Japanese rock garden designed by artist Isamu Noguchi. “Isn’t it wonderful that we get to see this?” Volandes said. Afterward, she went backstage to congratulate her close friend Wes Gordon, Carolina Herrera’s creative director, and then posed for a photo with him that she would soon post, explaining, “I am taking over Town &Country’s Instagram today.”
Volandes is part of an increasingly small group of New York editors who still oversee print lifestyle magazines, including Nasr; Garcia; Radhika Jones, editor-in-chief at Vanity Fair; Sarah Ball, at the WSJ Magazine; and Lindsay Peoples, at The Cut (which recently published its own stand-alone print magazine).
Mallis categorized this group of editors as the generation in waiting to be the next Anna Wintour when the Vogue editor finally steps down. Until then, she argued, it’s hard to get that much attention: “Anna so dominates the media landscape. She created an image and a role for that position that is unrivaled.”
Volandes deftly deflects the suggestion that her prominent presence at theater openings and even tennis tournaments sounds as if she is taking a page out of the Wintour playbook. “Anna is a cultural figure, and I think that is great for our industry,” she said. But she said she believes an active social media presence is a crucial part of her job.
So does Hearst management. “I think the challenge for all magazine brands today is to establish a particular voice and curate a particular type of lifestyle that can attract an audience and help differentiate ourselves from the information one can get through search or generative AI,” Swartz said. “Stellene has truly crafted a unique voice.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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