It’s a few days before Thanksgiving and a couple of weeks after Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in the US election. From her downtown Manhattan office in One World Trade Center, home of publishing empire Condé Nast, the global executive director of Glamour magazine, Samantha Barry, is putting a hopeful spin on events.
After the election, the Cork woman gathered her team, many of whom were distraught by another Trump victory. “A lot of them were understandably upset. They talked about the despair of maybe never seeing a woman be president in their lifetime. I had to put on my editor-in-chief hat. And I was like, look, does this give him, Donald Trump, a mandate to rule? Absolutely. But do we have something that’s really special that not everybody has? We have a platform and we can take solace in that ... there’s a moment of self-care that’s happening at the moment.”
Since 1939, Glamour has had a storied history of feminist activism, from campaigning for reproductive rights to covering female candidates on both sides of America’s political divide.
About the spectre of Trump 2.0, she adds: “In my conversations with my team, I keep reminding them there are people all over the world who don’t have a voice like we have. We get to bring joy and do fun things and we get to fight for the things we believe in. And that is something that ultimately makes me feel better, getting out of bed in the morning.”
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That bed in question is in an apartment she owns in Gramercy Park, something she could only have dreamt of owning as a girl growing up on a council estate in Ballincollig. Last October, the Corkonian was elevated from editor-in-chief to Glamour’s first global executive director, a role that gives her oversight of the brand in Mexico, Latin America, Spain, Germany and the UK.
Since landing the coveted editor job at Glamour in 2018, Barry has shepherded the magazine into the digital age, making the bold if anticipated move to wind down the print offering – the last print magazine came out in January 2019 – and increasing the audience across all online platforms.
Glamour’s digital audience has grown exponentially since Barry took charge. There are a number of metrics used to measure success, including unique monthly visitors to the website, but perhaps the most impressive is the brand’s number of You Tube channel subscribers – at almost five million, that figure is at least five times greater than when she took the helm.
Alongside the all-important audience figures she mentions “editor metrics, how relevant is our brand and what are we fighting for around the world? Whether that’s reproductive rights in the US or image-based consent in the UK or the fight against a misogynistic work culture in Mexico. What are the stories we’re really proud of? Because sometimes they are not always the ones that correlate with the audience engagement metrics, or revenue-driving metrics. For me it’s about being successful at both. If you take your eye off one, it’s to the detriment of the other.”
Barry walks to and from work most days, making calls to her friends and family – “I’m a caller not a texter,” she explains – or listening to Cork’s Red FM to keep in touch with home. She used to have a personal trainer but has ditched that approach in favour of those daily walks and a weekend Taylor Swift-themed soul cycle class. Her diary is, unsurprisingly, packed. She lists a few appointments this week: calls with her team in Mexico and Europe, a meeting with feminist firebrands in Gloria Steinem’s home, a book event, the launch of a fashion label and a short Thanksgiving trip to France.
Now in her early 40s, hard work and tenacity have characterised her ascent. Growing up in a home where “storytelling was everything”, she studied first at UCC, graduating with an arts degree before completing a journalism masters at DCU.
The world of notions that sometimes gets judged in Ireland is embraced here – that makes me happy and it’s something I’ve leaned into
Her college work placement led to night shifts in RTÉ’s newsroom – she has spoken before about being rejected by the national broadcaster after twice trying to land a staff job. She went off travelling after those rejections, which led to a radio job in Papua New Guinea. A stint with the BBC in London followed, but it was her years with CNN in New York (she ran their social media department at one point) that caught the eye of the bigwigs at Condé Nast.
Anna Wintour, the fabled Vogue editor who is Conde Naste’s head of content, headhunted Barry from CNN. She famously called Barry “fearless”, which became the title of an RTÉ documentary that was made about her journey from Cork to New York.
In Barry’s early conversations with Wintour, they discussed the personal contract that comes with the job. “There’s not a moment where I’m out in the world and I’m not representing Glamour. Yes, I’m Samantha Barry the girl from Cork, but I am also Samantha Barry editor-in-chief of Glamour, so that’s the way I go out into the world. I don’t get to switch it off. It’s not a character, it’s my identity. There are more and more jobs like that. This is what editorial jobs look like now.”
When I ask the obligatory question about what Wintour is really like, she says, “She’s a fascinating character for a lot of people. For me, she’s my boss. She’s the person I see every week, the person that pushes me to be better and drives me forward.”
Now well settled into the role, Barry is one of the most well-connected media people in America. Earlier this year, she travelled to Malawi with her close friend human rights lawyer Amal Clooney (Melinda Gates and Michelle Obama were also on that trip), writing about their campaign to end child marriage in the region. She has interviewed Hillary Clinton several times and co-hosted a lunch with Kamala Harris in her home.
More recently she had the inspired idea to bring the mothers of some of America’s biggest superstars together for the annual Glamour Women of the Year event, garnering worldwide coverage for a feature including Beyoncé’s mother Tina Knowles and Billie Eilish’s mother Maggie Baird.
Her arms are probably black and blue from the amount of “pinch me” moments she’s had in the past six years, but sitting beside Beyoncé, chair-dancing, at Women of the Year last October was the pinnacle. “Beyoncé has a ‘suck the oxygen out of the room’ level of celebrity,” says Barry of the memory, while also recognising that celebrities “are just people”. She says this, of course, as a nonchalant New Yorker who on her walk to work will often see the likes of actors Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively dropping their kids to school.
Barry has been in New York for 10 years now, but in all that time her parents have never visited for Christmas. Until now. “I’ve finally managed to convince them,” she says, beaming. The itinerary is being plotted meticulously, including a dinner at the swanky Polo Bar restaurant.
She’s looking forward to having her parents in town and to Festivus, an annual get-together organised by her core friendship group – “my New York family” – which includes many Irish ex-pats. It’s a dress-up event. Barry is going as George Costanza from Seinfeld because of the scene in the comedy series where George talks about “going at himself” while reading a copy of his mother’s Glamour magazine.
After 10 years in New York, what are the best and worst parts of her life there? “I don’t think everywhere encourages ambition the way New York does. The world of notions that sometimes gets judged in Ireland is embraced here – that makes me happy and it’s something I’ve leaned into.” The flip side is “the hamster wheel of being always ‘on’. I need to make sure to take time for self-care and take a second for myself”. She mentions weekend facials and downtime with that New York “family” as two essential pick-me-ups.
She is open and generous with time in interviews – but personal relationships, her assistant told me during a “pre-call” to set up this meeting, are not up for discussion. This might be due to the fact that she was caught slightly off guard in a recent radio interview with Miriam O’Callaghan, who asked about Barry’s current romantic partner. When I mention it, she says, “That’s the one thing that always get skewed, no matter what I say about it ... and I feel like I give a lot in this job, being the ambassador to the brand. And if there’s one little part that I can slice off that’s just for me, I think it would be that.”
Barry is on much chattier ground talking about professional matters. Her approach has been to take tough roles – that stint in Papua New Guinea took her well out of her comfort zone – and ask questions later. In terms of ambition, it’s a path she endorses. “I think sometimes as women we are reluctant – and you see this borne out in statistics – to take on something that feels too big for us. I’ve seen lots of mediocre men doing great jobs, so my advice is take the risk, be uncomfortable, jump in head first. That’s what has always worked for me.”
She has “no idea” what is next. “I know I have this amazing job. I couldn’t tell you what five or 10 years down the road looks like.”
Whatever about Barry’s own trajectory, the next four years for her adopted home appears rife with uncertainty. Does the Trump presidency feel like a cloud over her life in America now?
“I don’t know if I characterise it that way,” she says. “Remember, I’ve lived through four years of Trump before. So has America. So have women – and not to be like Pollyannaish about it, but I come back to the fact that I’m an editor-in-chief. I get to tell stories, I get to talk to women. I get to use a platform in a way that I feel is good. So I’m probably a little bit more hopeful than maybe people that don’t get that opportunity.”
Donald Trump will not be living, as Americans like to say, rent-free in Samantha Barry’s head. “I spend less time thinking about how I feel about him than about the stories I want to tell around women ... I spent a lot of time thinking about Trump in 2016, in the first year of Trump’s presidency, around social media at CNN. I spent every waking hour in that year wondering and thinking about Donald Trump.
“I’m doing less thinking about him this time and I’m thinking more about the stories I can tell around women, that’s my self care in this situation ... like, we’re talking about this because I got a job as a global editorial director. I’m so lucky. I’m lucky that I get to go to work every day and work with amazing women telling spectacular stories. And I get to do that no matter who is in the White House. I get to do that, all around the world. So that’s what I’m thinking about.”
