Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill could have never predicted what would happen the day after they met as 20-something fashion editors at a Marc Jacobs runway show in New York City on Sept. 10, 2001.
Back then, they also might have found it difficult to predict that they would later work together for nearly a decade at Harper’s Bazaar, go on to become editors in chief — Ms. O’Neill of WSJ Magazine and Ms. Brown of InStyle — or lose those plum jobs abruptly within a year of each another.
Ms. Brown’s role at InStyle was eliminated in early 2022, about six years after she joined the publication, when its parent company retired its print magazines. WSJ severed ties with Ms. O’Neill in the spring of 2023, about 10 years after she took over the magazine, as part of a broader restructuring at The Wall Street Journal.
After becoming unemployed, Ms. O’Neill and Ms. Brown, as editors are known to do, came up with a clever way to frame their situation. In an Instagram post, Ms. Brown captioned a photo of herself and Ms. O’Neill with the line: “All the coolest girls get fired.” (She has since deleted the post.)
“There’s that trope about all the cool girls,” Ms. Brown said in a joint interview with Ms. O’Neill, referring to the thinking behind the caption. “All the cool girls are wearing this jacket, all the cool girls are hanging out, all the cool girls get fired — wait, what?” She and Ms. O’Neill said the post struck a nerve, especially with women, many of whom responded in solidarity or with their own stories of losing jobs.
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