Love was fashion's loudest magazine — when its founder left, it went silent five years

Katie Grand launched Love in 2009 under Condé Nast International — a biannual of high fashion built on her eye and her nerve, opening with Beth Ditto on the cover. For eleven years it was fashion's loudest gloss: bold editorial stances, visual experiments, covers that started arguments. Issue 24, in the summer of 2020, was her last: 'the most important magazine I have ever produced,' she said. 'The one that I can't improve on.'

On September 4, 2020, Grand announced she was leaving. 'The world has changed, and I have changed, and what is important is now so clear,' she said. 'But it's time for something new, it's time for something different.' Earlier that year Ben Cobb and Pierre A. M'Pelé had joined the masthead — but no successor was ever named.

What followed was silence: for nearly five years Love published nothing at all. A title Condé Nast had spent a decade building simply sat on the shelf, its brand preserved and its product gone. The hiatus only ended in September 2025, when Love returned as an independently published biannual under Juan Costa Paz and Nordine Benotmane of the Paris agency Convoy — no longer a Condé Nast book, relaunched from outside the house that made it.