How Sara Moonves Rescued W Magazine

Sara Moonves loves to tell the story of how Brad Pitt split open the back of a pair of too-tight Celine pants and then did the rest of his W Magazine photo shoot with his butt out.

Pitt had been determined to squeeze into a sample-size pair of ultra-slim houndstooth trousers while posing as one of the nine cover stars for the venerated fashion magazine’s January 2020 Best Performances Issue. And Moonves, then 34 and newly appointed as the first woman editor-in-chief in the brand’s history, as well as the youngest person in that role — and, at the time, the youngest EIC of any fashion magazine by about a decade — had been afraid of insulting Pitt by suggesting that he might not fit in them.

But when the pants inevitably cracked down the seam and, well, nearly exposed his crack, she says, laughing, “It was, like, the best day of everyone’s life.”

She enthusiastically reenacts the scene for me, in her office that is all floor-to-ceiling windows and spectacular views of the Hudson River and beyond, from the 37th floor of One World Trade.

“We were all jaws down,” she says. “It was his actual ass! I mean, there was some form of boxer, but there was enough ass there.” Pitt, who was being honored for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Ad Astra, eschewed a robe, threw on a tight white tank top and leaned against a black SUV, as the tight pants created a bulge in a certain area that would later send the internet flying onto their metaphorical fainting couches. You’d never know from Juergen Teller’s front-facing photos that anything was amiss. For Moonves’ part, she knew how excited her staff was about the day and kept rotating assistants on and off set so that everyone could get “a different Brad moment.”

It was a rare instance of fangirling for Moonves, who insists the only time she’s accosted anyone for a selfie was when she ran into two castmembers from her favorite reality show, Below Deck. She grew up in a showbiz family, as the daughter of Les Moonves, who in 2018 stepped down as chairman and CEO of CBS corporation after The New Yorker published accusations of sexual harassment, assault and misconduct from over a dozen women. At 40, though, she’s more than earned the right not to be defined by her family. She also seems to recognize that her very insider upbringing is why she’s so effective at a job that requires an ease in being around celebrities and convincing people like Emma Stone that it would be fun to drag a blood-soaked actor playing a dead body around for a 2025 cover shoot. (Which, to be honest, was a pretty easy yes.)

Moonves, who counts childhood friends Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, middle school buddy Jonah Hill and fellow mom Jennifer Lawrence as her “best-best friends,” has a way of making every encounter feel casual and friendly. Within minutes of sitting down together, she wants to gossip about the media implosion and commiserate about my recent move from D.C. back to New York.

But beyond that girls’ girl exterior lies a shrewd business mind that’s turned a niche, large-format magazine that only publishes seven times a year into one of the most relevant and objectively cool titles around, routinely punching above its weight in its ability to garner attention at the same, and sometimes greater, scale as heavyweights like Vogue and Vanity Fair.

The secret sauce may reside in Moonves’ deft handling of high-profile relationships. She, for instance, got Nicole Kidman to fill up an entire issue, dressed in a skinny tuxedo and posing like she was dodging bullets in The Matrix, in a re-creation of artist Robert Longo’s early 1980s “Men in the Cities” series. “But what has meant even more is the way she’s embraced my daughter,” Kidman tells me over email. “Sara was the first call we received as soon as Sunday walked her first runway, offering her an editorial opportunity with Grace Coddington for the magazine. The way she recognizes and highlights talent across the board speaks to Sara’s belief in nurturing the next generation as much as celebrating the present.”

That W not only survived but is thriving under her tenure is, to put it mildly, a surprise, particularly in this media landscape dotted with layoffs. She’s turned the artsiest of fashion magazines — one whose print issues are so big, they’re constantly getting mangled in New York entry mailboxes, and a subscriber base of 450,000 in households that make, on average, $550,000 a year — into a window to a party everyone wants to be at. And as legacy media battles against AI, she’s actually going more analog, by gathering the biggest stars and best photographers in the world in person, whether it’s at shoots or fabulous parties sponsored by fashion houses, seeing what happens, and then disseminating it through all the digital tools now at our disposal. Moonves proudly tells me that W isn’t just breaking even; they finally hit profitability this December.

She seems to get that the magazine’s DNA has always been in letting creatives be creative, and that famous artists will rearrange their notoriously Jenga-like schedules to cook in that kitchen.

“Sean Penn showed up for his W cover shoot, but he didn’t show up to win his Oscar. That is a big bragging right,” Moonves says. The whole staff apparently watched the tracking on the car they sent for him and cheered at the confirmation that he’d gotten in it like it was the finale of the World Cup.

***

On the early April Monday we meet, Moonves picks me up from the elevator bank looking incredibly chic in a vintage black maxi dress with an upside-down “V” in bright yellow leather, by designer Phoebe Philo, “from a gazillion years ago when she was still at Celine.” Her chunky necklace that looks like a bell is also Philo’s. Her combat boots are, of course, The Row, which comprises most of her wardrobe thanks to the Olsens. A fun fact Moonves likes to share is that she was on Full House four times, usually playing a friend of Michelle’s, though she’s known Mary-Kate and Ashley “since we were, like, zero.”

Her curly hair looks neat and air dried, her face nearly bare. She has two small children, Georgia, 4, and Jack, 2, with her husband, photographer Jeff Henrikson, whom she met 20 years ago when she was a styling assistant and he was a photo assistant, and just does her makeup in the car between dropping her daughter off to school on the Upper East Side and getting to the office downtown.

Presenting Moonves with the Media Award at the 2025 CFDA Awards in November, Jennifer Lawrence described her as someone “who dresses like Coco Chanel but has the work ethic of Genghis Khan,” which doesn’t seem far off.

Two walls of her office are all glass, lending an illusion that she works in a curated ode to fashion magazines floating in the sky. And lining the floor are stacks and stacks of iconic W magazines. “I want to be surrounded by print!” says Moonves, a self-described “Energizer bunny” who thinks every issue is iconic.

Her favorite covers from her own run are also framed and everywhere, from Chappell Roan in bridal Chanel with insane red hair and rainbow face paint to Timothée Chalamet multitasking while clutching a bunny rabbit.

The term “nepo baby” didn’t exist when Moonves was coming up, but “I totally relate to it,” she says. Her father became the head of Warner Bros. Television soon after Sara was born, greenlighting shows like E.R. and Friends. Some of her earliest memories are of racing around the WB lot in golf carts with her brothers to those sets or bopping over to Family Matters and Step by Step.

It’s precisely because TV was such a big part of her childhood that she thinks she became so obsessed with fashion. She plastered her bedroom wall with images from Vogue and read every issue cover to cover, including the credits, memorizing the names of photographers and stylists. Her mother Nancy’s closet was another training ground; she remembers her showing up to her bat mitzvah in purple Versace.

It’s fair to say most kids don’t get the chance to intern at Vogue‘s L.A. offices starting at 14, which she got because she met Graydon Carter and then spent weeks writing a letter making the case for why she’d be the best intern ever. She happily fetched coffee and dry cleaning for Vogue‘s West Coast director Lisa Love every summer till she graduated. “What I love about Anna [Wintour] is she’s so decisive. She’s so honest and you can really talk to her about anything. I’m sure most people don’t say that, but there’s never been a moment from the time I started working at Vogue until now that I couldn’t call her and ask her advice or her opinion, and she’ll give you her honest feedback.”

Though Moonves says she’ll always be “a California girl,” New York’s brand of power suits her more. It’s a power, she says, rooted not in being on the cover of a magazine, but choosing who gets to be on the cover, more in backroom deals than being seen at The Ivy.

“I’ve known her since she was 11 years old and she’s remarkably the same,” says Lynn Hirschberg, W‘s editor-at-large for the past 12 years and resident celebrity whisperer largely responsible for curating who appears in its pages. Hirschberg was writing a New York magazine cover story on Les and recalls watching a young Sara run around Tavern on the Green in her patent leather Mary Janes, intent on getting every celebrity at the CBS upfronts party to sign her autograph book.

“She was a person who you felt like had a mission,” says Hirschberg. “She was going to get those autographs. She wasn’t going to let the opportunity go by. And that’s what she’s like. She’s very aware of the opportunity.”

***

In a place of pride behind Moonves’ desk is Frank Ocean, gap-toothed and clad in a color-blocked Prada hoodie, staring down visitors from his 2019 Pop Issue cover. It was Moonves’ first cover as editor-in-chief, and a reminder of the whirlwind of controversy that came with the announcement of her appointment in July 2019, just a year after her father’s ouster.

She’d joined W in 2017 as style director, only to watch Condé Nast put it up for what felt like a fire sale. The new owners, Future Media Group, the publishers of Surface magazine, had asked everyone on staff to name their dream job. “I said, ‘To be the editor-in-chief of W Magazine,’ ” says Moonves. “I didn’t think that would lead to it actually happening.”

But then in June 2019, suddenly it was happening. She’d flown out to London to style the Ocean shoot, only to find out that the announcement was being pushed up. She got back on a flight to New York before Ocean even got to set, in part to stave off a potential exodus from a staff who were about to find out that her rise was coinciding with the immediate firing of longtime editor Stefano Tonchi, who’d clashed with the new owner. (That was then followed by a three-year legal battle in which Tonchi sued Condé Nast for $1 million for wrongful termination, and was countersued. They finally settled in 2022 for an undisclosed amount.)

“That plane ride from London back to New York was maybe, like, the most anxious I’ve ever been in my entire life,” says Moonves. “I had a fear the night before it was happening that everyone would quit and I would just be sitting trying to run the website. I was literally, like, thinking of tech friends I could call to make sure the website was still running and that we wouldn’t lose all our advertising overnight.” (Spoiler alert: The entire staff of 40 stayed.)

And then — and then! — a year later, two weeks into the COVID shutdown, the new owners furloughed the entire staff, revealing a financial precarity that Moonves says made clear she had to find new buyers or watch the magazine fold.

Ultimately, Moonves teamed up with Bryan Goldberg, the head of Bumble Digital Group, to form W Media, pulling together a group of magazine-loving investors with model-mogul Karlie Kloss taking the lead, alongside the likes of race car driver Lewis Hamilton, model-actress Kaia Gerber and Blumhouse Productions founder Jason Blum.

“You know, she really wanted the magazine not to die, and it was a very messy situation,” says Hirschberg.

And she did all this in the wake of a scandal that will forever be part of her life’s story. When I ask how her father’s ouster affected her during this transition, she nods and smiles like a media-trained pro who knew the question was coming.

“I love my dad, and my dad is the best person to ask advice from and to forge my own path,” she says. “He was great at letting me shine and do my thing. And made me more resilient for sure.”

How so?

“I think it was just, you know, conversations and life lessons and growing,” she says, before politely switching to a tone that signals this is as far as she wants to go. “And I think that you just move forward.”

***

Since rescuing the magazine, Moonves has demonstrated a kind of boundless determination to turn the 54-year-old publication into “a world,” as she puts it, that everyone wants in on. She’s done so by pairing A-listers with world-class photographers and letting them get their creative freak on — a potent cocktail for our social media age. Hirschberg’s long-running “Screen Tests” video series has found new audiences on TikTok, where a 2025 compilation of celebs like Ariana Grande, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Colman Domingo poetry-slamming Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” has gotten 50 million views. Moonves and her team also had the bright idea to ask Rihanna to pose for their recent Pop Issue cover with her 7-month-old daughter Rocki in a custom Dior diaper and headpiece, marking the baby’s first public appearance, which the singer then shared with her 148 million Instagram followers. (“cover girrrrrlz!!! baby Rocki served sumn serious on her first cover! came on set and shut her mama dowwwnn!!!” she wrote.)

Much of the buzz around W is due to a ramping up of a “really lucrative” event business, in which they team up with fashion brands and even Substack to host intimate dinner parties with enviably relevant guest lists. It certainly helped when her good friend Jonathan Anderson became head of Dior and wanted to host his first party with W for the Academy Awards. They threw it at Mr Chow and invited the cast of Love Story, their TV obsession of the moment. Charlize Theron and Josh Safdie sang karaoke all night. And Charli XCX approached them about DJing a Grammys afterparty at Bar Marmont that had Martha Stewart dancing with Katseye and the KPop Demon Hunters ladies.

Moonves is also on a mission to prove that print isn’t dead. In 2024, W actually increased its annual print run from six to seven by adding a summer issue that’s allowed them to tap into advertising for travel brands and resort collections — a move brought about when a pregnant Hailey Bieber said she wanted to be photographed for their cover, but all the fall issues would’ve been too late.

Half of W‘s revenue, Moonves explains, still comes from print advertising. Brands still care about having their expensive photo shoots displayed on huge pages of high quality paper. Readers seem to want that, too, particularly members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who have already been ditching smartphone cameras for grainy digital point-and-shoots, or developing nostalgia for the long-ago 1990s.

That’s why, just last month, Moonves announced the launch of WYouth (pronounced “double youth”), a new biannual teen print magazine that Moonves will edit alongside Ava Nirui, the former creative director of Marc Jacobs’ youth-focused line, Heaven.

A brand new magazine! In this day and age!

The idea came about through a conversation with Sofia Coppola and her daughter, Cosima Croquet, both of whom will be contributing writers. Moonves wants WYouth to be in the tradition of the magazines whose pages she used to plaster on the walls of her teenage bedroom, like Sassy, Tiger Beat and YM.

“It feels like there’s this desire from young people to hold something,” says Moonves. “Yes, we’re all on our phones and on TikTok, but we did a lot of research before we launched this thing and there’s a desire to hold it and save it and to not have everything just be on your phone. So, I don’t know if that feeling will last forever, but right now it’s there. So let’s capitalize on it.”

Soon, she’ll be leaving the office and changing into The Row for the premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2. It’s a full-circle moment for her; she saw the first movie with her mom the summer before starting her first paid job, as an assistant to Vogue‘s fashion editor, Phyllis Posnick. “My mom’s line to me [afterward] was, ‘Are you sure you want to work at Vogue?’ ” says Moonves, laughing. “She was scared for me, but obviously I made the right decision.”

And, like a shark in couture, she never stops moving. This January, for the first time, W released a movie trailer and casting videos featuring the hottest movie stars on the planet to accompany their Best Performances Issue.

“It was so much fun; I was so sad when it was over. When we had our wrap dinner, we were all like, ‘I could have done it for weeks longer!’ ” says Moonves, who still styles that issue herself, dressing 10 movie stars a day for three or four days in a row.

Hirschberg corrects the record a little: “We all got sick afterwards, just pure exhaustion. I think she threw up on the plane going home.”

This story appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.