A onetime ballerina, Ms. Bennett attended Sarah Lawrence College on a dance scholarship. When she told her adviser she wanted to write for magazines, the adviser suggested she write her thesis about the future of the industry. Instead Ms. Bennett pitched embedding in a middle school for four weeks, writing “about what teens are reading and how they’re reading it,” she said. The project helped her land a job after graduation at Seventeen.
“She really is a voice of and a champion of what young people care about,” Mr. Welch, the GQ editor, said. “And what young people care about isn’t exclusively, necessarily, all young subjects.”
Ms. Bennett, for example, doesn’t seem to hang out at bars or restaurants catering to the city’s cool 20-somethings. She spends her time at established fashion and media haunts, like Via Carota or Minetta Tavern or the Odeon. One recent Thursday night, walking into the Odeon in TriBeCa, she immediately recognized a few young editors sitting at a table outside the restaurant.
She used to work with them at GQ, she explained, bouncing over to the table to say hello. “They said they all work at Vogue now,” Ms. Bennett reported when she returned.
‘Larger Than Life’
By the end of 2005, Mr. Fischer was fielding brand requests to advertise on his sneaker blog. By 2010, those advertisements had shifted to sponsored content — or brands paying Highsnobiety to write positive pieces.
Over time, Mr. Fischer said, he realized branded stories “performed best if we shot our own imagery, too,” rather than republishing photos from the companies. This is how Highsnobiety gradually became “more like a full service creative agency, rather than just being a publisher.” Brands began asking Highsnobiety to host events, like pop-ups or parties related to the content Mr. Fischer’s team was producing.
