Cate Blanchett has stepped into many roles. It’s part of why she’s so enigmatic; you simply cannot predict what pivot she’ll lean into next. One day she might play a sexy spy in the criminally underrated Steven Soderbergh film Black Bag, or a bounty hunter in the video game adaptation of Borderlands. And the next? A visiting professor at Oxford. (Seriously, she really has gone IRL academia mother.) 

There’s usually logic to how Blanchett zigs or zags. But man, does her next role feel like a Mad Libs exercise: Cate Blanchett will oversee Stories She Tells, a literary magazine of essays by women that’ll launch its inaugural issue in 2027 through a partnership with the University of Tokyo.

Ah, and it’s all being funded and released by UNIQLO. 

This feels very club random on paper, no pun intended, but we can’t say it doesn’t fit the moment. Just last week, Chanel released its 300-page second volume of Art & Culture, its free magazine of essays, interviews, and original photography. That publication is the latest in a lineage of fashion-backed print publications produced for over 50 years, with one goal: to amass a kind of artsy, cultural cachet that nice clothes alone can’t attain. This isn’t even UNIQLO’s first foray into print; its free biannual LifeWear Magazine launched in 2019 and is overseen by Takahiro Kinoshita, the former editor-in-chief of the supremely influential Japanese style publication Popeye.  

Stories She Tells is tied to a worthy cause. As Reese Witherspoon once said, “Women's stories matter,” and matter they do in this project. Each essay will be picked through an open call, and some contributors will receive financial support and mentorship. Blanchett even makes sense for this; as she said during a press conference: “I read a lot.  I peddle in language as an actor.”

Logical! And yet, launching a literary magazine funded by Fast Retailing, whose annual operating profits recently hit $4.70 billion, feels like fishing with dynamite. You’ll still eat, but the proposed aim to “share diverse voices and perspectives across genders and generations, fostering new dialogue and connections” lives in the shadow of the fast-fashion behemoth backing it. 

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