Daily Front Row

2010 June 8

Sally Singer Named EIC of T

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Sally Singer nibbles at Nobu in Milan
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(NEW YORK) Should we be shocked? T's Horacio Silva has just announced—via Twitter—that Sally Singer has been named new EIC of T, effective July 5. The longtime fashion news and features director at Vogue has long been rumored to be competing with T's current fashion director Anne Christensen for the gig. Why would Singer jump ship from (relatively) flush Condé Nast to the (relatively) stingy Times? A few factors could be responsible. Perhaps she got the money she wanted. Perhaps she was angling to be a #1. Perhaps she wanted to expand her professional focus beyond Vogue's usual subject matter and into the worlds of design and travel, which T covers regularly in the 15 issues it publishes each year. (Along with men's and women's fashion, of course.)

Singer, 45, joined Vogue in 1999, after serving as fashion director at New York and editing for the ELLE, British Vogue, and the London Review of Books. She's also written for magazines such as The Economist and the Atlantic Monthly. A native of Oakland, CA, she attended the University of California at Berkeley and earned her master's degree in American Studies at Yale. Along with her husband, the writer Joseph O'Neill, whose excellent third novel Netherland was awarded the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Singer has three sons. The family lives in the Chelsea Hotel.

"I have no idea. It makes no sense," Singer told MediaBistro in 2009 when asked how she got where she was. "There's nothing in my biography that led to this. I really should have been a civil rights activist or I should be working for Amnesty International. It probably reflects the deeply shallow nature of my inner life. I still pinch myself. I don't know how I got to American Vogue. I couldn't even begin to trace the steps that landed me here, but I did."
ASHLEY BAKER

UPDATE: Anna Wintour announced relevant promotions hours within Singer’s departure announcement. Eve MacSweeney will become the new features director, and senior fashion writer Mark Holgate was named fashion news director at Vogue.