Kate Betts

I was a reporter. I was reporting on the lingerie business and perfume launches — what everybody at Women's Wear Daily has to start off with. That's where you learn about the industry; that's the baptism by fire. You learn about fabrics, you have to cover Premiere Vision, which is the big fabric fair in Paris, and you have to figure out who the perfume nose is at Christian Dior and the difference between the fragrances. You have to learn a lot about the people and processes of each industry within the fashion industry. And that's the best way to learn about fashion.

Her review, it was noted, "alternates between sniping at the author and sucking up to former Vogue cronies." "As far as book reviews go, Betts' review isn't an actual review", said Gawker.com. "It's really just an ethical analysis of Weisberger's decision to trash her ex-boss in print". "What more can I say? I can't speak to anyone's agenda", Weisberger, who admitted she was curious as to why Betts had been assigned the first of two harsh reviews that ran in the Times' pages, responded in a Salon.com interview. "I don't know her. I can't presume to know." In her second novel, Everyone Worth Knowing, Weisberger had a character suggest that a pseudonymous online gossip columnist was "that ex-fashion editor—oh, what is her name? The one who keeps busy penning nasty book reviews". It was read as a reference to Betts.

In 2004, she returned to the editorial ranks when Time hired her as the editor of its Style & Design section. It was a special supplement focusing on fashion and related stories published six times a year with the U.S., Europe, and Asian editions of the magazine. "She brings the savviest sense in terms of the role that fashion plays in our lives -- and the business of fashion", said editor Jim Kelly. Betts again said she planned for the supplement to cover fashion within a broader social context as she had tried to do at Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. The supplement was discontinued in late 2009 when the luxury goods market declined in the worsening economy. Time has retained Betts as a contributing editor, and hopes it could bring the supplement back when the economy recovers.

After Bazaar, Betts began doing freelance work for The New York Times Style section, and elsewhere in the paper. One piece in the latter category, a highly negative 2003 review in the Book Review of Lauren Weisberger's debut novel The Devil Wears Prada, the basis for the film of that name, attracted some criticism of its own. Weisberger had worked as one of Wintour's personal assistants a few years earlier, and reportedly based her main character, Miranda Priestly, a tyrannical fashion magazine editor, on Wintour. At the end, Betts belittled Weisberger for "seem[ing] to have understood almost nothing about the isolation and pressure of the job her boss was doing, or what it might cost a person like Miranda Priestly to become a character like Miranda Priestly" despite her time at Wintour's side.

It soon became apparent that it wasn't working out. Not quite two years later, in May 2001, she was replaced by Glenda Bailey of Marie Claire. Looking back on her tenure, one of her former deputies said "She was a control freak, and she wasn't good with people. It makes me think that there was truth to [the notion] that she was too young".

Eventually, her discontent with the magazine's direction became known outside it, and Condé Nast offered her the editorship of Details. She turned it down and quietly began to look outside the company. In 1999, Hearst offered her the chance to take over Harper's Bazaar, filling the vacancy left by Liz Tilberis, another former likely successor to Wintour, who had died earlier that year of ovarian cancer. Company president Cathie Black was impressed with her demo issue.

After two years, she became the bureau chief. The following year, 1991, she left Fairchild and Paris for New York and Condé Nast, where she took over as fashion news director at Vogue. After a difficult initial adjustment, she beefed up the magazine's news coverage. In 1995, she created its Index section, an aggregate of beauty, health and style briefs that soon became one of the magazine's most popular sections. "Kate felt you should be able to tear out pages and have information you really need," said Vogue's arts editor Michael Boodro.

She began her career at Fairchild Publications' European office in Paris. During the 1990s, she became a senior editor at American Vogue, where she was considered the likely successor to Anna Wintour as editor-in-chief. She later became the editor of Harper's Bazaar instead, one of the youngest editors of a fashion magazine ever, for two years. In 2011, her book Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style was published by Clarkson Potter.

In the late 1990s, disagreements between the two over the magazine's direction became more entrenched. Betts felt the magazine was losing its focus on fashion, while Wintour thought the popular culture angles Betts wanted were beneath Vogue's readers. "I think Anna views her ideal reader as an Anne Bass type," said a Vogue staffer later. "She thinks the Vogue reader doesn't give a shit about hip hop". Wintour began pairing Betts with other, more junior Vogue editors, whose journalistic credentials Betts had found lacking in comparison to her own. She especially disliked Plum Sykes, whom she reportedly described as "a pretentious airhead".

Betts was born and raised in New York City. Her father, Hobart Betts, was a prominent architect; her mother Glynne was a photographer. She attended Princeton University, where she majored in European history and began writing and reporting for The Daily Princetonian. After graduating in 1986, she went to work in France as a freelance journalist for Metropolitan Home, European Travel & Life and the International Herald Tribune. An article she wrote for one of these publications about boar hunting in Brittany caught the attention of publishing mogul John Fairchild. He hired her as a features writer for Fairchild Publications' Paris bureau, overseeing fashion coverage for Women's Wear Daily, W and M magazines.

Kate Betts (born March 8, 1964) is an American fashion journalist. Currently she is a contributing editor at Time and The Daily Beast, among other freelance writing positions, and reporting on fashion for CNN. She lives in New York with her family.