Why 2025 Was Such A Good Year For Fashion And Media Gossip

Remember that viral moment in July when a kiss cam at a Coldplay concert caught a married CEO of a company you’d never heard of canoodling with a colleague?

How could you not? The internet was lit on fire. It was pop culture you could talk about with almost anyone — your barista, your colleagues, even your parents. It had all the elements of good gossip: cringeworthy evidence and high-status subjects who are unconnected to your life. 

And there were complexities to debate: Would things have blown over if they didn’t react so awkwardly? And then there was a twist, when the company in question, Astronomer, tried to own the narrative by hiring Gwyneth Paltrow to appear in an ad.

In December, Kristin Cabot, the woman in the video, began a media tour explaining how awful the aftermath was for her. Some people, both in her town and total strangers, turned very cruel and even threatening. It was inarguably dreadful for her and her family, and I feel for them.

But for those of us who never knew her name and bore her no ill will, it’s hard to deny that collective scuttlebutt felt a bit like a release. The scandal was, in the grand scheme of things, rather innocent — and it drew people together in a way that felt like a throwback to an era when we all shared more cultural touchstones, like weekly TV shows.

Why did it hit such a nerve? I have a theory.

See, the gossip that has played out in front of Americans lately has been far less fun. Vanity Fair recently published an interview with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who called Vice President JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist” and said President Donald Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality.” (The administration has stood by Wiles, who maintains the quotes were taken out of context.) It’s high school stuff, but with big potential consequences: Don’t forget we found out the US was going to launch airstrikes in Yemen because someone invited the wrong person to a group chat.

It’s exhausting — and frankly, scary. I think that’s why our culture yearns for lower-stakes gossip, like the Coldplay kiss cam. 

I’m a former professional gossip. My first job was as a tabloid reporter for the New York Daily News, and I will be the first to admit to having fun with dish. I like it so much, I once made a cameo on Gossip Girl playing myself. 

Here’s how it works: There are four tiers of gossip in America. First, we have everyday melodramas, which include the smalltime kerfuffles that animate your family and your group texts, the kind chronicled by the wonderful podcast Normal Gossip. Then there’s celebrity gossip, about people you have no connection to — actors, athletes and reality TV personalities. In that, you participate as a fan. 

Then there is world-affairs gossip, which has been our nerve-fraying norm lately. Politics has never felt more driven by personality conflicts and alignments: Trump hit it off with Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, so New Yorkers may not have to face a fight over congestion pricing after all. But the president got in an on-camera argument with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and afterward ordered a pause of US assistance to Ukraine. It all feels very high-stakes. 

Enter refreshing mid-tier gossip. The subjects must be notable enough for you to follow them, but they can’t directly change your life or the fate of nations. Most people outside their sphere of influence may not even know who they are. We’d been missing this category — and it’s made a real comeback this year.

Industry gossip is a perfect example. The guessing games around which designers would take over the major fashion houses made luxury fun to talk about again, even as the companies themselves have been facing major economic headwinds. In-the-know writers like Lauren Sherman at Puck and Substack’s Amy Odell enriched the narratives with insight and incremental scoops on dramas that at once seemed corporate and personal.

Take the saga of longtime Miu Miu creative head Dario Vitale, a once-beloved protégé of Miuccia Prada. Like all the best mid-tier gossip, this tale has several chapters. First, Vitale shocked the runway elite by decamping from Prada SpA in January to take over Versace when Donatella stepped down after nearly 28 years. Within days, rumors surfaced that Prada was making moves to acquire Versace. Vitale staged one well-received show in his new role. But in December, when Prada closed its acquisition, Vitale was immediately out. Now that’s tea.

In media it’s been the same. There were the drawing-room debates over who would take over Vogue and Vanity Fair. Puck News acquired Air Mail — meaning that Puck entrepreneur Jon Kelly now controls a media property founded by former VF editor Graydon Carter, a man whose briefcase he once toted as an assistant.

David Ellison brought in the lightning rod Bari Weiss to remake CBS News in her own image, and CNN may be her next target. Vanity Fair hired former New York political scribe Olivia Nuzzi and scored the first excerpt to her memoir, American Canto, only to let her go after her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, accused her of journalistic misconduct in post after Substack post. It was a classic scandal, and Nuzzi’s lawyers said they wouldn’t dignify the accusations with a response. (Nuzzi hosted a six-episode Bloomberg Originals series in 2024.) 

A certain kind of gossip, the sort that filled blog posts on Gawker and the pink pages of the New York Observer in the early 2000s, returned with a vengeance.

Until the early aughts, New York City felt like the center of a gossip galaxy. It was a pulsating orb full of characters who  sparked friction, pulled one another into their gravitational axes and occasionally imploded. Media was at the nucleus, but everything was within its sights: real estate, finance, fashion, sports, politics, restaurants, entertainment.

Even silly flukes had their moment in the sun, like when an intern at the law firm Skadden accidentally emailed 20 partners about how he was “busy doing jack sh**” all day. The elevators at Condé Nast and Goldman Sachs got their own personas. It was all chronicled in a sprawling soap opera by outlets like New York Post’s Page Six, New York, Spy and the New York Observer and, later, websites like Gawker, Dealbreaker, Fashionista, Gothamist and so on. 

If you were a person of influence in this era, you knew you were at risk of being the subject of gossip. And for the most part, everyone took this as the cost of doing business.

“In the golden age of New York gossip, which wasn’t that long ago, there was a sense that if you were a public figure in New York, you kind of took your licks, especially from the tabloids,” says Ben Widdicombe, a former columnist at the New York Daily News.  “It was a badge of pride that Page Six might take shots at you.”

Restaurant owners, reality stars, high-powered publicists, business moguls — they all worked with the gossip columns to plant items about themselves, their clients, their friends and their enemies. In the early 2000s I worked at Rush & Molloy, the Daily News’ answer to Page Six, during the time when Trump would race to pick up the phone himself when you called. The singer Courtney Love would ring us just to chat — for an hour at a time. Nightlife ringleader Amy Sacco let me have my 25th birthday party at Bungalow 8.

At a perfume launch at Henri Bendel in 2004, as a fledgling reporter, I was told to approach Kathy Hilton and ask what she thought about her daughter Paris’ just-released sex tape. Reluctantly, I did. I don’t remember what Kathy said, and I can’t find it on the internet, thankfully. All I remember is that she didn’t walk away from me. In fact, we had a whole chat about it.

Why did all of this end? In his brilliant memoir, Gatecrasher, Widdicombe explains it well: The reporting got too cruel, and eyes went elsewhere.

Over the last decade and a half, online media weakened the tabloid newspapers and many local publications that peddled in mid-tier gossip. Social media offered a more direct connection between celebrities and fans, cutting out the middlemen of supermarket weeklies and glossy monthly magazines. Major surviving publications like the New York Times, which used to run a juicy media column and even a gossip-adjacent page called Boldface Names, began to shy away from dish.

The rich and powerful also grew thinner skins. The snarkiest of all the online gossip sites, Gawker, which at its height boasted 70 million page views a month, could be ruthless in its judgment — and for a while, it offered a tool where readers could update a map in real time when they spotted a celebrity on the streets of New York, literally called Gawker Stalker. For prominent people, this felt too invasive, even dangerous.

Gawker published articles that were “very painful and paralyzing for people who were targeted,” billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel told the Times in 2016, just after he helped Hulk Hogan sue the site out of existence over a leaked sex tape.

“The Thiel chilling effect was a proof of concept for other billionaires that they can fight back and win,” says Jessica Coen, who was the editor of Gawker and later at sister site Jezebel. “Now it’s common practice, right up to the White House.”

Trump, who used to call tabloids under a phony name to plant items about himself, has now extracted multimillion-dollar settlements from ABC and CBS, and has lawsuits pending against the Times, the Wall Street Journal and the BBC. In 2024, financier Bill Ackman’s team issued a 77-page letter of demands to Business Insider  after it alleged that his wife, Neri Oxman, engaged in plagiarism in her MIT dissertation. (BI parent company Axel Springer stood by the reporting.)

It’s ironic that billionaires helped kill mid-tier gossip, when now it feels like our world-tier gossip is so often about billionaires. These new masters of the universe fill their weddings with celebrities, hang out at the White House, and influence policies on tariffs and AI. In the case of Elon Musk, they fire thousands of Americans while lobbing schoolyard insults around on X and waving around a chainsaw onstage. 

You can be forgiven for wanting to go back to gossiping about a cocky law intern who cc’ed the wrong people at his firm. 

This backdrop, along with the rise of individualized newsletter platforms like Substack, help explain why mid-tier gossip is seemingly everywhere again. Emily Sundberg, who writes what might be the most influential Substack among the finance, fashion and media elite in New York, includes delightfully blasé drips of dish about nightlife impresarios, magazine editors, bank CEOs and content creators with casual equanimity. She even employs  a party reporter. 

The media-gossip landscape has become so ripe that old-school columnists are on the rise again, publishing a frothy mix of solid reporting, educated guesses and … stuff that’s not quite right. Stalwarts Dylan Byers at Puck, Maxwell Tani of Semafor and Oliver Darcy of Status have been ready to meet the moment. And in February, Lachlan Cartwright, a proud hack who has worked at the Daily Beast and the UK Sun, launched his own media-gossip website, Breaker Media. Since then, he has rattled off scoops about Olivia Nuzzi and the acquisition of Air Mail, and a hush-hush dinner between Rupert Murdoch and Trump.

Although he has certainly been a thorn in the side of media giants, the establishment seems to be willing to play Cartwright’s game. Mega-editors like Daily Beast founder Tina Brown, former Hollywood Reporter co-president Janice Min and the New Yorker’s David Remnick have appeared on the Breaker podcast.

Because media people know: The secret of mid-tier gossip is that, while sometimes harmful or incorrect, if it’s about you, it generally means you’re on the upswing — or have the potential to be.