He left GQ as a fashion editor. He comes back holding the pen for every edition on earth.
There is a particular kind of exit that is not really an exit. Brandon Tan walked out of GQ in the autumn of 2024 with three years of styling behind him and a title at Hearst waiting, and the door he closed was never locked. Twenty months later he has walked back through it, and the room has been rearranged in his favor.
Tan has been named global fashion director of GQ, the Condé Nast title where he served as fashion editor from 2022 to 2024. He arrives from Hearst Magazines, where he directed fashion for Cosmopolitan and Seventeen. He succeeds Miles Pope, who left last month for the activewear brand Vuori as vice president of style, talent and creative.
The distance between fashion editor and global fashion director is not a step. It is a change in altitude. GQ publishes across editions in London, Milan, Taipei, Seoul, Sydney, Mexico City, Tokyo, Mumbai, Paris and beyond. Tan is now the person whose eye sets the temperature for all of it.
He is inheriting a magazine mid-renovation.
In January, Will Welch announced he was leaving after six years at the top of GQ and a decade and a half at the company, decamping to Paris to work with Pharrell Williams. Welch had spent his tenure arguing, loudly and expensively, for a wider definition of how men could dress and be looked at. In February, Adam Baidawi was named global editorial director, arriving from the deputy role and from British GQ, where he had been head of editorial content since 2021. Before that he built GQ Middle East and reported for the New York Times out of Australia. Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief creative officer, framed him as an editor who would go after received wisdom about masculinity, celebrity, sport and fashion.
What follows a new editor is always the same weather. By spring the departures had started: Samuel Hine to New York magazine, Pope to Vuori, others shown the door. Baidawi’s first print issue lands in September.
So Tan is not simply a rehire. He is one of the first structural decisions of a new administration, and the choice says something about where the title thinks its authority lives. Not in affiliate links. In clothes, and in the person who knows how to put them on a body.
Courtesy of Condé Nast
Tan’s résumé reads like someone who refused to wait for permission.
He graduated from NYU and landed at V Magazine as associate digital editor, writing and building the digital side of a publication that had been putting Winona Ryder and Lady Gaga on its covers since 1999. He styled independently for i-D, W, Vogue Italia, Nike and The North Face. He became the stylist behind Omar Apollo and Sombr, artists whose images are as carefully constructed as their records.
Then GQ, from 2022, where he styled front-of-book, fashion stories and cover shoots not only for the American edition but for the British, Taiwanese, Italian and Australian ones. He was already working across borders before anyone handed him a global title.
In October 2024, Willa Bennett, newly installed as editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and Seventeen, made him her first significant hire. It was a reunion: Tan had consulted for GQ while Bennett ran its social department from 2020 to 2022. At Hearst he took on two brands and an enormous young audience, delivering Cosmopolitan’s Romance Issue, its 60th Anniversary issue, a run of covers aimed at readers who decide what is beautiful before the industry catches up.
Twenty months. Two brands. Then the call to come home with more power than he left with.
For readers of this magazine, the more interesting archive is the personal one.
In May 2021, for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Tan styled a story called Unbound with photographer Alexander Cody Nguyen for W. The team was entirely Asian: model Charlie Nishimura, makeup artist Miki Ishikura, hair artist Chika Keisuke. The images were made in Chinatown, at Seward Park, on Doyers Street, in front of the peking duck windows at Wu’s Wonton King. The stated intention was to unfasten Asian American identity from the Western gaze.
Tan called the project “a love letter and reclamation for me, if you will.” He described growing up going to a Buddhist temple with his father near Division Street, and living for weeks in that same neighborhood as an adult without recognizing it, until his father pointed it out. For a long time, he said, he kept those cultural and familial parts of himself sealed away from the work. He had begun, deliberately, to unseal them.
That is the sentence worth holding onto now. A man who once compartmentalized his origins from his craft is now the person deciding how masculinity looks in Taipei, in Seoul, in Milan, in a magazine that has been telling men what to want since 1931.
Global fashion director is a job about repetition. Season after season, cover after cover, the same decisions accumulate into a worldview: who gets photographed, who gets dressed, which body reads as authority, which face reads as the future. GQ’s international editions give that worldview a reach few titles can match.
Tan has spent a career styling artists whose presence complicates the old template. He has built a story that put Asian faces in Chinatown and refused to translate them for anyone. He has worked a youth market where the audience is already ahead of the institution.
He returns to a magazine that is rewriting itself, under an editor hired to challenge what it thought it knew, at a moment when the old menswear authority is being tested by everything at once.
The homecoming is the headline. The real story is what he does with the room now that he is not asking to be in it.
Brandon Tan begins as global fashion director of GQ. Adam Baidawi’s first print issue as global editorial director publishes in September.
