On the coldest night in November, The Trouble Club brought together the brightest minds – women who had
come not for comfort, but for clarity. The event featured two figures who know the industry from the inside out: Laura Brown, former Editor-in-Chief of InStyle, and Kristina O’Neill, longtime Editor-in-Chief of WSJ Magazine. They were in London to speak about their new book: All the Cool Girls Get Fired, in conversation with The Trouble Club’s Owner and Director, Ellie Newton. Brown and O’Neill walked onstage with the ease of two women who have already lived through the worst of it and found something sharper on the other side. The tone was clear and exacting. They weren’t there to soothe anyone, but to describe what the reality of work really is, what happens when it ends, and what remains when the job disappears.
The Rise, the Shift, and the Firing
Before they became the names shaping major American magazines, Brown and O’Neill were interns, assistants,
and junior staffers – first in, last out, paid little, expected to endure a carousel of eccentric personalities.
Fashion media at the time was a place built on instinct, hierarchy, and the unspoken art of surviving rooms
where confidence mattered more than credentials. Brown, who arrived in New York with no contacts and an Australian accent that marked her as an outsider, learned early that the people who seemed intimidating weren’t always the ones with real authority. “You realise they’re just people,” she said. “Sometimes very talented, sometimes very fragile.” O’Neill, more internal in her style, built her career through a calm steadiness that made her indispensable to the editors she worked for. Their chemistry was visible even in their early days. One of the stories they shared – now part of their mutual mythology – was the Marc Jacobs show in September 2001. O’Neill had a legitimate seat; Brown walked in without one. They met in that charged atmosphere, the height of pre-digital fashion, where being in the room mattered as much as having something to say. For years, they rode the industry at its peak. Magazines controlled the conversation. Editors were gatekeepers. Influence was managed from the top. They produced work that travelled globally long before social platforms existed. “We were breaking the internet before the internet existed,” Brown joked. But nothing in media stays static – new platforms arrived.
They learned to think in multiple directions: print, digital, celebrity, commerce. They rebuilt roles around storytelling rather than format. They kept moving while the ground shifted under them. But adaptation didn’t protect them from the larger truth. When contraction occurs, institutions don’t always distinguish between the competent and the exceptional. They cut for reasons that have nothing to do with merit. Brown was fired on Zoom in February 2022. She received the usual predictable clichés: restructuring, streamlining, reallocation. She took it in with a kind of calm that can only come from knowing exactly who she is. Within minutes, she told her team the line that has since become a central thesis of the book: “Your work is your own. Your value is your own. Don’t give that power away.”
O’Neill’s firing was in person. She walked into the meeting thinking she was presenting strategy, not concluding her tenure. When handed a stack of documents to sign, she declined. “Now?” she said. “No.” She texted Brown under the table: Getting the boot. Both women refused the theatre of institutional decorum. They wanted the truth, not the performance. “Say it plainly,” O’Neill said. “I got fired.”
They understood something most people take years to absorb: you recover faster when you stop pretending.
What Women Like Them Learn the Hard Way
This was the section of the evening where the room leaned in. Brown and O’Neill were offering clarity.
The first lesson: identity cannot rest on a job title. When a role becomes the centre of gravity, the firing feels like an erasure. If your self-definition is too narrow, the loss becomes larger than it needs to be.
The second: value does not come from institutions. It is not conferred. It is not borrowed. It is not given by a boss or a masthead. Value is portable. It belongs to the person, not the role.
The third: reinvention requires honesty, not performance. You cannot rebuild from denial. You can only rebuild
from clarity.
Brown’s reinvention began before the firing. She had already registered her media company. She knew she
didn’t want to anchor her future to a single structure again. After leaving InStyle, she stepped back and reassessed what she wanted her work to mean. She wasn’t in a hurry. She was building toward something that had room for her full range, not just her editorial past. O’Neill’s reinvention was lateral and clean. She moved into Sotheby’s as Head of Media, proving that editorial intelligence travels far outside the magazine world. She didn’t change who she was. She simply applied her discipline to a new setting.
Both women made a distinction the audience understood immediately: power is something you hold; empowerment is something people like to talk about. The first is internal. The second is atmospheric. They prefer the first. Not because they failed. Because they were undeniably excellent in a forcibly changing environment that could no longer sustain excellence.
Lessons From Two Media Executives Who Survived the Cycle
As for the “cool girls,” the term isn’t about personality or aesthetics. It refers to the women who do the work:
competence, delivery, and visibility. The ones who carry the weight. The ones who deliver more than they’re
asked to. The ones who become indispensable, visible, central – and therefore, paradoxically, exposed when
the chopping block appears. Women who raise the standard in a workplace, and in doing so, inadvertently
make themselves the most exposed when circumstances change. The room carried its own stories. A woman with two MAs who has been looking for meaningful work for fifteen years. An HR director who spoke with precision: “Treat yourself as the business.” A renewables professional who has been fired, rehired, and remains unbending in her expectations of herself and others. They were proof that Brown and O’Neill weren’t describing theory – they were describing what many women already know. It was the reminder that will, intelligence, and discipline don’t evaporate with a job title.
Fired or not, the women who built something once will build again – and more often than not, they build something better.
About the Trouble Club: The Trouble Club is a community for people who love ideas, conversation and connection. We host world-class talks with leading female thinkers, writers and experts on subjects ranging from psychology, history and crime to literature, politics, the environment, media, current affairs, global issues and identity. Alongside our events, we bring members together for dinners, debates and news round-ups – creating space for intelligent, curious people to engage with the ideas shaping the world today.
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