“When you have an Asian father, the options are doctor, engineer or lawyer. The fourth option is failure,” says Farrah Storr, who by that definition is certainly a failure.
Yet instead she is a very smart, very successful cookie. A Salford lass, the third child of four via Amritsar and Pakistan on her dad’s side of the family (he started off with a corner shop and ended up a property developer), and an English mother trying to work as a teacher: “The concept of the ‘juggling’ mother is a cliché now, of course, but juggling was exactly what my mother did,” she recalls.
“It was a little like East is East … People still used the word Paki so I shied away from my Asian roots. It was only when I was into my 20s that I embraced being mixed race.”
Farrah headed south after Bury girls’ grammar school and the local college for A-levels – because she could mix with boys there – to Kings College London, before launching her assault on the world of women’s mags, working on Good Housekeeping, Eve, Glamour, Marie Claire and Top Santé.
“I am a print person at heart. My interest is in human stories,” Farrah says; and more specifically, “I’ve always been interested – this is going to make me sound terribly pervy – in people’s sex lives, because I think you find out a great deal about people through that.”
In July 2015 she was made editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, three years after joining the Hearst organisation to launch Women’s Health on a shoestring. “Incredibly small team,” she remembers. “We’re talking like, you know, three people in a room.”
Farrah immediately began to revamp Cosmo, getting rid of the sex-technique features she saw as old-fashioned – remarking, memorably, that “In a world of online porn, people are not going to Cosmo for tips on how to give a blow job” – and even abolishing the iconic nude male centrefold (grandfathered by Burt Reynolds), replacing it with women’s accounts of real sex experiences – which she titled “My Best Sex Ever”.
No less than 80 per cent of the long-time staff quit when confronted by this abrupt change of direction away from breathless listicles and career-success secrets, towards what Farrah called long-form, updated Gonzo journalism. But her new staff – and five brave holdovers – stuck with the project and dragged the magazine by its dayglo hairband into the 21st century, finding a fecund new middle ground of 20-30 year-old women between Cosmo’s wide-eyed teen fans and its rump of long-term older ladies who’d been faithfully subscribing for decades.
Famously, Farrah is the kryptonite of the Superwoman generation’s “have-it-all” ideal of children and career. It’s particularly ironic that she steered the magazine that forged the liberating but imprisoning feminine motto away from it.
Now Farrah asserts, simply and forthrightly, that you probably cannot have both, but that either course is fine if you make an informed choice. “For me, ‘having it all’, is deciding what the things are that you think you need, to have the life that you want. That's having it all-ish.”
In Farrah’s case, after unsuccessfully trying to conceive, she and husband Will (the writer and ex-Loaded journalist – it was a mag-match) decided to bypass IVF treatment in 2015, and so at 36 years of age she more or less gave up on having kids.
She is realistic, anyway, about the fact that being a mother would have made her less of an editor, just as a high-flying career would have made her less of a mother had things turned out another way.
In June she left Cosmo to become editor of UK Elle (three to four years is the maximum for an editor before she runs out of ideas and needs to move on to a fresh title, Farrah believes). After winning not one but two Editor-of-the-Year awards in 2018, the move has to be seen as a well-earned promotion, as she remains in the bosom of Hearst Magazines UK, helming her third title so far.
Farrah adores but is unafraid of digital, seeing print and online as different species seeking different audiences and forms of attention. “A magazine is like a really high-end, Michelin-starred meal, and online stuff is more like Nando’s,” she explains. You can of course love both, but one should not replace the other. Like motherhood and an all-consuming career.
Toward the end of her custodianship of Cosmo she wrote an “anti-fragile” memoir, The Discomfort Zone: How To Get What You Want by Living Fearlessly. And living fearlessly means choosing what you can’t have as well as what you can rather than existing in an anxious fantasy.
Her life advice is “Don’t be defined by anything other than the quality of your work,” although sometimes you are unavoidably defined by other things.
Last year she also told the Irish Times, “Of course I’m trying to do more for people of colour. But at the same time, I personally have never felt like I’ve ever been discriminated against for being a woman of colour. But the world now sees me as a representative of that.”
