“The most important editorial principle that I’ve been pushing is authenticity, as trite as that sounds,” said Noah Johnson, sitting at a small round table in a corner office partially lined with lawyerly dark wood paneling.
It was a September afternoon at the Manhattan headquarters of Highsnobiety, the style publication where Mr. Johnson is the editor in chief. He was dressed in a white T-shirt, denim zip-up jacket and Hobbit-like leather shoes. Two neon tennis rackets poked out of a L.L. Bean tote at his feet.
He hadn’t added many personal touches to his space since taking over the magazine from Willa Bennett in January, when she left to be the editor in chief of two Hearst publications, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen. David Fischer, the Highsnobiety founder, said in an email that Mr. Johnson was “the first person that I called when the role became available.”
Mr. Johnson, 42, got his start in lifestyle media at Complex and went on to editorial positions at Style.com and Details, with stints as a freelance writer in between. He landed at GQ in 2017, where he worked with Ms. Bennett, and eventually became its global style editor.
Even as he cringes at himself slightly when he says his focus is “authenticity” — he knows it’s a buzzword — he also sees it as a viable editorial strategy. Highsnobiety’s latest white paper survey, a recurring collaboration with Boston Consulting Group, found that younger customers of luxury goods are looking for “stability and authenticity.”
Mr. Johnson gestured toward copies of Highsnobiety’s fall 2025 issue, his first as editor. Its three different covers featured: Turnstile, a punk band bringing a hardcore spirit to the mainstream; Odessa A’zion, an actress poised for a breakthrough in the upcoming Josh Safdie film “Marty Supreme”; and Kader, a professional skater and fashion plate.
“They’re all very famous in their own worlds, but not in the way that maybe a typical past Highsnobiety cover would be,” Mr. Johnson said. Cover stars during Ms. Bennett’s tenure had included Billie Eilish, Marc Jacobs and Pamela Anderson. He added that he had an “allergy” to remarks like: “This is how we normally do it.”
The new issue has articles on craft and design, including features on the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the British designer Margaret Howell. Mr. Johnson said he hoped to avoid the “generalist pop culture swirl” of other publications. On his watch, Highsnobiety should be for “enthusiasts,” he said.
The magazine, which won a National Magazine Award for general excellence last year, is just one part of a larger brand that started out as a sneaker blog in 2005. Over the years, Mr. Fisher has transformed it into a hyper-modern media company with a clothing line, an e-commerce business and a brands consultancy. Highsnobiety also hosts events, like a dinner party before the Grammy Awards last year at the Château Marmont in West Hollywood.
At the end of the workday, Mr. Johnson changed into a fresh cobalt-blue button-up and headed to Sake Bar Asoko on East Broadway to greet guests for a party celebrating his inaugural issue.
Guests pressed into the shoebox-size space as a D.J. spun unassumingly groovy vinyl. A pair of Vibram FiveFingers shoes wandered by. When asked about a pair of nubby socks stuffed into loafers, one guest declined to share their providence on the record.
Veronika Slowikowska, a recent addition to the “Saturday Night Live” cast, and the comedian Kyle Chase pored over a spread in which they modeled fall plaids as the designer Emily Dawn Long toured the crowded room armed with a silver point-and-shoot camera.
Ms. Long snapped a photo of Jian DeLeon, the men’s fashion director at Nordstrom. A previous editorial director at Highsnobiety, Mr. DeLeon once worked at Complex, where Mr. Johnson hired him to be a staff writer in 2011. Mr. Johnson’s editorial style returns Highsnobiety to its roots, Mr. DeLeon said, capturing “that sort of underground youthful spirit of rebellion.”
Another guest, Tremaine Emory, the Denim Tears designer and a former creative director of Supreme, reflected on how print media could still serve as a portal of discovery: “A magazine cover should be a road sign.”
From the overflow crowd on the sidewalk outside, the plates of udon noodles at the back of the bar felt impossibly faraway. The designers Emily Adams Bode Aujla and Aurora James communed with Mr. Emory’s enormous shaggy dog, who lounged in a car’s open trunk.
The bar’s co-owner, Arianna Cho, squeezed by in a Sacai dress to refill the glass of Highsnobiety’s deputy editor, Claire Landsbaum, who was chatting on the sidewalk with the writer Delia Cai, who worked on the new issue.
“Noah is fabulously blunt,” Ms. Cai said. “It’s very fun to bring him options for something and watch him make a dozen decisions in short order: Yes, yes, no, yes, definitely yes.”
“The vision is not a negotiation,” she added. “I like that.”
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