The Devil Wears Allbirds

Silicon Valley companies are sucking up all the fashion editors.

-  Emilia Petrarca

TAPED TO THE SIDE OF Aya Kanai’s standing desk in her Brooklyn apartment is a list of acronyms. She received it last September after she had left her role as the editor-in-chief of Marie Claire to become the head of content and creator partnerships at Pinterest. The list, which came inside her onboarding packet, would help Kanai decipher the shorthand that comes up in meetings—abbreviations like care, which represents the categories of CPG (consumer packaged goods), auto, restaurants, and entertainment, and raft, which stands for retail, fintech, and telco (and further translates to retail, financial technology, and telecommunications).

Kanai, who had worked in fashion for over two decades, was fluent in a different insider language. She could probably tell you all about GOTs (going-out tops, not Game of Thrones) or why you should buy a PF21 MNZ LBD on TRR (a pre-fall 2021 Maryam Nassir Zadeh little black dress on the RealReal). This, in part, is why Pinterest poached her. The platform, at first popular among sorority girls and brides-to-be, was copying YouTube and Instagram and trying to strengthen its relationships with creators and influencers from the worlds of fashion and design. Kanai’s job was to translate between the two species: She would help the fashion people and other content creators understand how to use the platform, and she would help the designers and engineers better understand the desires of the influencers.

Kanai was, in some ways, following the latest trend among fashion editors. In January 2020, her predecessor at Marie Claire, Anne Fulenwider, took on an executive role at a health-tech start-up called Kairos. In February, Carolyn Kylstra, the editor-in-chief of Self, left for Google, and in April,