Powerhouse Jill-of-all-trades Lena Dunham announced plans today to launch Lenny, an e-newsletter catering to young women that will blast weekly musings on “feminism, style, health, politics, friendship, and everything else” to her hordes of loyal fans—and undoubtedly picked apart by her equally loyal naysayers—this coming fall. Dunham has long been a champion of feminism that doesn’t limit women from being interested and invested in the so-called high and low, and wants Lenny to reflect that contemporary climate.
“People who want to talk about radical politics but also want to talk about fashion and also want to talk about Rihanna, and also understand that all of those things can be happening at the same time,” Dunham says in a recent interview with Buzzfeed concerning Lenny’s hopeful audience. She cited her tour for her wildly successful Not That Kind of Girl novel as inspiration for Lenny, throughout which she was equally bombarded by requests for beauty tips as much as she was prodded for her political views.
Pairing up yet again with Girls showrunner Jenni Konner, Lenny will start out self-funded by Dunham and Konner, but will slowly add on advertisers that fit Lenny’s ethos as well as an e-commerce arm that supports women designers and artists. While Laia Garcia of Rookie and writer/women’s issues activist Doreen St. Félix make up the rest of Lenny’s small, but mighty editorial team, Dunham, in an unsurprising move, will be tapping her impressive and extensive network of A-list friends and fellow creatives as contributors. And if Lenny editor-in-chief Jessica Grose’s name-dropping of a diverse trio of media standouts to Buzzfeed—Rookie, Goop, and Grantland—as inspiration for the nascent newsletter is any indication, this means the inaugural Lenny letter could likely be a smash of 2016 political primer, hair tips from Haim, pop culture dissections from Tavi Gevinson, the latest and greatest in reproductive rights, Taylor Swift’s guide to girl gangs…Or a girl can dream.
