Daily Front Row

2008 April 11

Nina Garcia Out at Elle

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(NEW YORK) It appears that Nina Garcia has parted ways with Elle.

According to company-wide speculation at Hachette Filipacchi Media, buzz built late Friday that the talented fashion director had resigned. Garcia's contract was up for renewal this month.

Neither Elle editor in chief Robbie Myers nor a spokeswoman for Elle could be immediately reached for comment. Garcia, reached for comment, neither confirmed nor denied the rumor. “I have not heard anything,” she said.

According to a colleague who spoke with Garcia on Thursday, there was no indication that she was leaving. “Everything seemed fine,” said the editor. Garcia was reportedly in the office on Friday.

If Garcia’s exit is indeed true, there were no clear indications of her leaving this week. In the midst of several days of nighttime activities, Garcia attended a dinner in honor of Christian Lacroix at the Gramercy Park Hotel rooftop deck Thursday night. On Wednesday night she turned up at the Jeffrey Fashion Cares benefit. However, she was a no-show Tuesday night at a dinner her magazine hosted with Moschino to celebrate Simon Doonan’s new book, Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insane More Fashionable You. Noticeably absent--despite the presence of fellow colleagues Myers, Joe Zee, Paul Ritter, Kate Lanphear, Keith Pollock, Anne Slowey, and Joann Pailey--Garcia at the time shrugged it off to being in Los Angeles, where on Monday she taped a cameo on "Ugly Betty."

Last March, Garcia went on maternity leave, giving birth to her first son named Lucas Alexander Conrod. Talk that she would not return to the magazine were proven untrue when she came back and was given a monthly fashion column while her visibility and level of authority remained unchanged. Garcia’s celebrity spotlight has grown exponentially, however, since she joined the cast of the Bravo reality show “Project Runway” as a judge and penned a book, The Little Black Book of Style, having recently returned from Hong Kong for a promotion at Lane Crawford. Earlier this week, The Weinstein Co., producer of “Project Runway,” announced the decision to move the show from Bravo to Lifetime Television, resulting in a lawsuit filed by the former.

Should Elle confirm that Garcia has exited the magazine, it would put to rest months of rumors and gossip over unrest at the fashion title that began when Zee arrived at the beginning of 2007 as creative director. It’s no secret that there were ever-increasing tensions between Garcia and Zee--largely reflective of the old guard versus the new guard--where the former saw several colleagues from her heyday leave the company, including art Guillaume Bruneau and style director Isabel Dupré. Since then, Myers has also taken on a more active role on the fashion side and has made several significant changes to the structure of the magazine, including taking international creative director Gilles Bensimon’s office and authorizing Carter Smith to replace Bensimon in shooting this and next month’s covers.

Garcia, a graduate of Boston University, is a highly-respected fashion industry veteran. An instrumental member of the fashion team that made Elle a legitimate competitor to the likes of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and W, she got her start working in the public relations department for Perry Ellis and its then-designer, Marc Jacobs. From there, she moved to Mirabella magazine as an assistant stylist and market editor, until taking a position at Elle. Garcia worked her way up the ranks at Elle until she was named fashion director in 2000, replacing Marin Hopper.
JIM SHI