The Cut

About The Cut

The Cut is an online publication based in New York City and part of New York magazine, covering fashion, work, money, sex and relationships, mental health, pop culture, politics, and parenting through a lens centered on women. Launched in 2008 as a fashion blog on the New York website, it became a standalone site in 2012 and broadened its focus from fashion to women's lives and interests more generally. Since September 2019, when Vox Media acquired New York Media, The Cut has been a Vox Media property. Lindsay Peoples has served as editor-in-chief since 2021.

Origins as a fashion blog

The Cut launched on the New York magazine website in 2008, edited by Amy Odell, replacing an earlier fashion-week blog called Show & Talk. Where its predecessor had documented the runways twice a year and gone quiet the rest of the time, The Cut was conceived as a daily destination: a humorous, informed site for fashion news and gossip that readers would bookmark and visit constantly. The relaunch arrived at a moment when fashion blogging was still treated with suspicion by parts of the industry, and The Cut helped legitimize the form by pairing insider knowledge with an accessible, conversational voice. It quickly built a devoted readership among fashion-conscious readers.

Becoming a standalone site

In 2012, The Cut became a standalone website and began shifting its focus from fashion alone to a broader range of topics centered on women's lives. Stella Bugbee launched the standalone site as editorial director in August 2012, overseeing a pivot that brought coverage of work, relationships, health, and politics under the same roof as style. The move reflected a bet that the site's voice — smart, funny, attuned to how women actually live — could carry well beyond the runway. The fashion obsession remained, but it was joined by the full texture of women's interests, and the audience grew accordingly.

The 2017 relaunch

Bugbee became editor-in-chief in 2017 and presided over a relaunch unveiled on August 21 of that year. The redesigned site was built mobile-first and organized around four sections — Style, Self, Culture, and Power — that better reflected the breadth of the site's coverage. The relaunch formalized The Cut's identity as a digital lifestyle publication rather than a fashion blog, with sections designed to house everything from service journalism to reported features to personal essays. The redesign cemented the site's place as a leading digital publication for women.

The Vox Media acquisition

In 2019, The Cut's parent company, New York Media, merged with Vox Media, bringing The Cut into the Vox Media portfolio alongside Vulture, Grub Street, Intelligencer, The Strategist, and Vox's own brands. The deal gave the site the backing of one of the largest digital media companies in the United States while keeping its editorial identity within the New York magazine family. The acquisition came during a wave of digital media consolidation, and for The Cut it provided stability and resources at a time when many independent women's publications were struggling.

The Lindsay Peoples era

In 2021, Lindsay Peoples became the publication's second editor-in-chief, succeeding Bugbee. Peoples, who had previously written the widely discussed 2018 essay "Everywhere and Nowhere" about the fashion industry's inhospitality to Black voices, brought a focus on community and conversation to the role. Under her leadership, the site's stated mission is to be the thing readers share in their group chats — not preachy or judgmental, but conversational. Cover stars under Peoples have included Naomi Campbell, Simone Biles, and the women of Euphoria. To meet advertising and subscriber demand, The Cut expanded its editorial team in 2024 to grow its coverage and readership.

Peoples has described the site's ambition as cultivating inclusive, forward-thinking conversations about the issues that matter most to readers — politics, feminism, work, money, relationships, mental health, style, pop culture, and parenting. The emphasis on community reflects how the site's audience actually uses it: as a source of pieces to send to friends, debate in group chats, and return to for advice. That social dynamic, built on trust in the site's voice, has become one of The Cut's most valuable assets in an era when publishers compete for attention across fragmented platforms.

Coverage verticals

The Cut organizes its journalism across four verticals: Style, Self, Culture, and Power. Style covers fashion and beauty with the authority of the site's origins; Self addresses health, wellness, and personal life; Culture takes on entertainment, books, and the broader conversation; and Power covers work, money, and politics. The site also incorporates Science of Us, the pop-science rubric that previously existed as a standalone site. The mix of service journalism — practical, expert-backed advice — with reported features and intimate personal essays is the site's signature, designed to meet readers where they are in their careers, relationships, and routines.

Notable journalism

The Cut has published several pieces that broke into the national conversation. In January 2018, it published Moira Donegan's essay revealing her as the creator of the "Shitty Media Men" list, the viral anonymous spreadsheet crowdsourcing unconfirmed reports of sexual misconduct by men in the media industry — a landmark document of the #MeToo era. In 2019, the site published an excerpt from E. Jean Carroll's book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, centered on her account of sexual assault by Donald Trump. And Peoples's own 2018 essay on race in fashion helped set the terms for an industry-wide reckoning. The site's willingness to publish difficult, first-person work has been central to its influence.

Commerce and the Cut Shop

The Cut has moved into e-commerce alongside its journalism. In 2018 it launched a T-shirt shop on Amazon, and it later expanded into the Cut Shop, a digital boutique offering shopping recommendations across fashion, beauty, wellness, and home products. Since 2018, The Cut has also published Spring Fashion and Fall Fashion print issues that run on the flip side of New York magazine's own biweekly edition, maintaining a print presence tied to the fashion calendar. The commerce and print extensions reflect the site's origins in shopping-adjacent content and its audience's appetite for recommendations.

Place in women's media

The Cut sits at the center of digital women's media, competing for attention with legacy women's magazines, independent newsletters, and social platforms. Its differentiator is the combination of New York magazine's editorial standards with a distinctly digital voice — intimate, funny, and unafraid of difficult subjects. Where traditional women's magazines historically mixed service content with aspirational fantasy, The Cut aims for something more conversational: journalism that feels like it comes from a smart friend rather than an institution. That posture, refined over more than a decade and a half, has made it one of the most influential women's publications online.

The site's evolution from fashion blog to full-spectrum women's publication mirrors the trajectory of digital media itself. It began as a niche vertical serving a specific enthusiast audience, then broadened as its voice proved portable — the same sensibility that made its fashion coverage distinctive turned out to work for essays on work, money, and power. The 2017 relaunch and the 2021 leadership change each deepened that broadening without abandoning the style roots. Few publications have managed that kind of expansion while keeping their core readers; The Cut's continued growth suggests the formula — authority plus intimacy — travels well.

Official website

The Cut publishes at thecut.com, where readers can browse coverage across the Style, Self, Culture, and Power verticals and shop the Cut Shop.