In scenes reminiscent of Andrea Sachs at the beginning of The Devil Wears Prada, a 25-year-old Chloe Malle turned up to her interview at Vogue wearing black tights (an Anna Wintour no-no), boots that were falling apart and a “very boring” dress.
“I think back to my interview at Vogue and I’m a little embarrassed,” Malle, now 39, said as she looked back at the 2011 grilling with Wintour, for a position as a social editor.
“You’re supposed to never wear black. I wore black,” Malle said in 2014. “It was in March and so cold, so I wore black tights and these black J. Crew suede booties, which were fine, but were sort of falling apart. And then I wore this very boring, short—not super short, but short-ish—Diane von Furstenberg collared dress with a gray and white striped blazer.”
“It was plain, but it was fine,” she added. “But then I wore this white-orange pashmina and this orange beaded bag that I thought were really cool…I consider myself more of a ‘fashion girl’ now, but my evolution’s been almost by osmosis.”
Malle has risen through the ranks of the fashion Bible—from social editor to podcast host and editor of Vogue.com—and is currently the frontrunner to take over from Wintour as the new head of editorial content for U.S. Vogue. The staffer who landed Naomi Biden’s 2022 wedding at the White House and a Lauren Sanchez interview ahead of her nuptials to Jeff Bezos, could soon shape the fashion world.
The Ivy League-educated New Yorker – the daughter of Murphy Brown star Candice Bergen and the late French film director Louis Malle – leads a glamorous life, according to the photos that adorn her Instagram.
She often vacations at the family home in the South of France, frequents the beaches of Montauk in the Hampton and enjoys fine dining in some of the hottest spots in New York.
But for Malle, a wife and mother of two, the party-girl lifestyle that is part and parcel of being a Vogue editor in the big city doesn’t come naturally.
During her interview with Wintour, the fashion mogul asked what she liked doing in her free time.
“I answered truthfully and said ‘I like to sleep and cook,’” Malle told The New York Post.
A glammed-up photo of Malle taking a selfie in a grandiose-looking bathroom attests to this. “Back in my pajamas watching Miss Marple but still thinking about the time I dressed up THREE nights in a row!” she captioned the 2022 photo.
As social editor at Vogue, Malle’s role saw her forced to mingle several times a week, which was a shock to her system.
“I work on the best-dressed lists and write party coverage for Vogue.com, which is so funny because I used to hate going out,” she told beauty site Into the Gloss in 2014. “I’m such a morning person. But now that I decide what parties to cover for the website, I’m usually out three to four nights a week.”
Malle’s early childhood was spent in Los Angeles, where her mom relocated them from New York when Malle was only three to shoot Murphy Brown. Her father, the Academy Award-nominated director Louis Malle, lived in France because he “didn’t like living or working in Hollywood,” Bergen said in a 2015 interview with Dallas News. The director would travel between Paris and L.A. every other month to visit his wife and daughter.
“People who don’t know better think it’s a glamorous arrangement,” Bergen said in a 1993 interview with Cosmopolitan magazine. “But long-distance communication puts a strain on the marriage. That we’ve made it at all is a testament to how much we both wanted it.”
Malle, an only child, was close with her father and was 10 when he died of lymphoma in 1995.
Malle and her mom moved back to New York five years later, where she attended Riverdale High School. “I was always a big reader—I was an only child, so it was just me, my dog Lois, and my books,” Malle said.
As a teenager, dads of Malle’s friends would fawn over her mother, she told The New York Times.
“I grew up with my friends’ dads saying ‘Oh, my God, I remember when your mom was young. She was a knockout,’” Malle said. “I think [Bergen] had great insecurity around the fact that people have always focused on that.”
She studied comparative literature and writing at Brown University. “When I graduated, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,” Malle said. “I was always interested in writing—I edited the weekly paper at Brown and loved that.”
After briefly considering a career in public health, Malle landed an internship at the New York Observer and was later hired to cover real estate. From there, she became a freelance writer, filing pieces for The New York Times Style section and landing bylines in Vogue. Then her big break came in 2011 for the social editor role.
“I was hesitant when I was interviewing, because fashion is not one of my main interests in life, and I wanted to be a writer more than an editor, but I was so seduced by the Vogue machine that I couldn’t resist,” Malle said.
As her career was flourishing, so was her personal life. Malle’s boyfriend of four years, asset manager Graham Albert, proposed to her on New Year’s Day in 2014.
“He said, ‘I have a question. I think we should get married.’ And my first response was, ‘That’s not a question!’” Malle told Vogue in 2015. “I know I’m a brat, but I’m an editor—what do you want from me? Then I said, ‘Oh wow, this is happening.’ I don’t think I ever actually said ‘yes,’ there was no need.”
Malle added that Albert presented the ring from his pocket in a Kleenex. “A detail that makes my mother shudder and yell, ‘A KLEENEX!’ every time she hears it,” she joked.
The couple wed at the family’s 16th-century stone manor in Le Coual, southwestern France, in the same room her parents Bergen and Louis Malle married in 1980. It was a lavish but intimate four-day affair with just 40 guests.
“I grew up spending every summer there and the minute I turn down the driveway my heart leaps—I get so excited,” Malle said. “It’s a visceral reaction, I just love being there more than anything.”
In May 2020, Malle and Albert welcomed their first child, Louis Albert, named after Malle’s late father. They had a second child, Alice, in April 2022, according to PEOPLE.
“Mom of two is really the most time-consuming occupation at the moment, which I’m leaning into,” she told the outlet last year. “Now I’ve just decided … [to] embrace the fact that they’re going to take most of my time and my logistical mental space.”
Bergen is a doting grandmother to Malle’s children and sees her grandkids regularly, according to social media.
Malle is also not shy about her politics, she has spoken out against Trump and posted left-leaning clothing and messaging on social media.
The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Malle asked guest Jack Schlossberg on the podcast The Run Through, “What would you say to people who are struggling this week and advice on getting through it?”
Malle then suggested an article about how to talk to your children about the election. “I really struggled with that this morning,” she admitted.
She posted a photo on January 21, 2017, preparing to attend the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. to protest Trump’s first inauguration. “Keep Your Tiny Hands Off My Rights,” the placard Malle is holding reads.
Another photo shows Malle wearing a “Hillary Clinton” sweatshirt while holding her two children on the couch.
Wintour, a Democratic fundraiser, has never shied away from politics and raised millions for the party in 2024. She has previously said it’s important to “take a stand” when deciding which influential women in politics to feature on the magazine’s cover.
“We profile women in the magazine that we believe in the stand that they’re taking on issues. We support them in the fact that we feel that they are leaders,” she told CNN in 2019.
Wintour was spotted at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in May to meet with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to talk about the impact of tariffs on the fashion industry.
Now Malle has made it to the “final rounds” of interviews to take the top job, according to Page Six, it remains to be seen how she’ll navigate being at the helm of American Vogue while juggling personal politics.
As for Wintour, the 75-year-old is reportedly not going too far, and will remain as Condé Nast’s global chief content officer and Vogue’s global editorial director, which may have come as welcome news to Malle.
“I actually love working with Anna, because I love someone telling me exactly what needs to be done and exactly what she thinks about something,” Malle said of her boss. “There’s no indecision. There’s no ambiguity.”
