The Anonymous Fashion Substacker and Her Audacity to Succeed

Women making money isn't a scandal, but our reaction to it might be.

Wow, y’all really got worked up about the anonymous “Fashion Substacker” making 275k in New York Magazine. First of all, no, it isn’t me. The magazine did reach out and ask me to participate, but I was hyper focused on editing one of the essays in my book and never got back to them. When the number was published, it went bonkers across this platform. Substack even internally reached out to me trying to sniff out the person, presumably to celebrate her, but I think it’s telling what a stir this has made.

It’s my birthday this week, and I wasn’t going to publish a letter. A little break! But no, the internalized misogyny of the internet never rests.

Nobody gasps when a male finance bro announces his bonus. Nobody clutches their pearls when a male podcaster reveals his ad revenue.

A major publication offered to profile my business: to tell the story of The Love List properly, with real numbers, context, the actual arc of what it takes to build something like this. And everyone I trust (people who know this industry, who love me) told me not to do it. Every single one of them said the same thing: it will put a target on your back.

And they’re right. I know they’re right! Because I make significantly more than 275k doing this, and the reaction to that anonymous woman’s number was already uncomfortable enough.

I have been building The Love List for almost twenty years. Through every format shift and platform change and industry implosion, through the death of print and the rise of social and the pivot to newsletters. I have been doing this work, consistently, longer than some of my readers have been adults. And I cannot publicly say what that work is worth without bracing for the kind of scrutiny that no male founder of a twenty-year media brand would ever face. That is the part that makes me tired. Not the work, but the freakin’ calculus I have to do around simply telling the truth about it.

The assumption — baked in, often unconscious — is that a woman writing about beauty and fashion for other women is a hobby dressed up as a job. That the work is soft, so the money should be too. That taste and curation and the labor of genuine expertise don’t count as “real work”. They do!

I got declined for an apartment I wanted once because the guy simply did not believe my income. He could not fathom that a girl writing to girls about girl stuff could make a girl rich. He then asked me to submit financials for my Tax Attorney husband-to-be.

The disdain is even worse, because it isn’t just surprise, it’s resentment. The sense that she “got away” with something. That money attached to a women, attached to a “frivolous” subject, is somehow obscene! It isn’t. What’s obscene is the reflex!!

And can we please retire the idea that this business model is some kind of scam waiting to be exposed? Subscriptions and advertising are how every magazine, newspaper, and media company has made money since the printing press.

This is not a trick. There is no trapdoor. Women building audiences, cultivating trust, and monetizing that relationship through brand partnerships and reader subscriptions is not a hustle that deserves an investigative piece — it’s just media, functioning exactly as it always has. The only thing new is who’s holding the revenue. Newsletters like this one operate on the same fundamental logic as Condé Nast, just without the corporate infrastructure and the thirty-person masthead.

The framing that there's something to expose here, that newsletters like this one owe the internet a confession, is condescending. I make recommendations. My readers trust me because I've earned it, and some of those recommendations come with affiliate revenue or paid partnerships, all of which I disclose. And if the model bothers you, you have options: You can unsubscribe. You can opt out. You can go read something written by someone who makes less money and see if that improves your experience. The free will is right there. Use it.

I am telling you this: the discomfort or disbelief you feel when a woman is compensated well for work you’ve decided isn’t serious is yours to deal with. I’ve got a newsletter to write.