It comes down to this: Nina Garcia and Anne Slowey played for separate teams under the same owner. Garcia, the former Elle fashion director who's now connected to the magazine in name only, was a protege of creative director Gilles Bensimon, who did not time to check his wristwatch for incoming Elle editor Robbie Myers, who arrived in 2000. Slowey, the fashion news editor and star of Elle's new fall reality show Stylista, is in the Myers camp, though perhaps only because she wasn't in the Bensimon camp.

Which isn't to say these two never got along — they did — but in the end, it explains why we've heard handfuls of stories, about both sides, trading gossip about each other.

All of this gets nicely wrapped up in this week's New York, where endless gossip items, of both the blind and named variety, lead up to a chronological history of how we got here. Here … where?

To the point where Garcia — who is heading to Marie Claire so she can 1) continue working in fashion publishing; and 2) stay with Project Runway — can trade muted barbs in public.

Here's Garcia on Slowey:

“The difference between me and Anne Slowey,” Garcia says carefully, “is that I never sought this out. I never wanted to be famous.”

And here's Slowey on Garcia — maybe. In fact, she's quoting James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, though in our conspiracy theory-laden minds, we can only guess who it's aimed at:

My indolence has sunk into grosser sluggishness, and my dissipation spread into wilder negligence. My thoughts have been clouded with sensuality; and … my appetites have predominated over my reason. A kind of strange oblivion has overspread me, so that I know not what has become of the last year; and perceive that incidents and intelligence pass over me without leaving any impression.

The last year, of course, has seen Garcia forcibly removed the magazine, where she was only hanging on because of Elle's relationship with Runway. But there were happier times:

Slowey and Garcia were smoking buddies when they started working together at Elle in the late nineties. But they were always quite different from one another. Staffers often reference a pair of videos on the magazine’s Website that peeked inside the closets of Elle editors as proof of how incompatible they are: Slowey’s is small, East Village, overflowing with vintage finds; Garcia’s is cavernous, color-coded, and situated in an apartment overlooking Central Park. [...]

Of course, these kinds of differences do not mortal enemies make, until you turn the cameras on a dysfunctional office. When Jean-Luc Lagardère’s death in 2003 left the family business to his son Arnaud, the influence of Bensimon was immediately diminished. There was a feeling that his “essence of woman” aesthetic—which tended to favor a combination of untamed hair, smoky eyeliner, liberally applied bronzer, and a casual ensemble that had the effect of making cover subjects all look a little like Cindy Crawford—had had its day. And in 2005 a new business director was hired and immediately went to work slashing budgets. Assistants were barred from working excessive overtime, a vital supplement to their $20,000 salaries. Layoffs followed; at one point even the receptionist on one of the magazine’s floors was fired, replaced by a cardboard sign.

The bright spot was Project Runway. The show had helped restore Elle to its No. 2 position among fashion magazines, and expanded the scope of its ad-sales model, justifying publisher Carol Smith’s belief in it. The Elle team was packaging magazine ads in tandem with the Bravo team that sold the show. And Garcia, long loved by luxury-brand advertisers like Prada and Chanel, was expanding her appeal among mass advertisers, who began asking for her attendance at their events.

Nevertheless, there seemed to be ever more pressure to attract new ad dollars, which brings us to the launch of Elle Accessories in mid-2005, and what Elle staffers saw as a critical flash point in the Bensimon-Myers power struggle. Smith had decided to start an ancillary biannual focused on accessories to further expand the brand and bring in more revenue. Bensimon’s wife, a model-socialite named Kelly Killoren-Bensimon, was named editor-in-chief. Cue the office screaming matches. Sources say Garcia upbraided Jack Kliger in a successful bid to get her name placed atop Killoren-Bensimon’s on the masthead for its inaugural issue, and that Killoren-Bensimon did her own share of yelling during an epic shouting match with Garcia over the supplement in the summer of 2005. But the power shift was already under way. By the beginning of 2006, Killoren-Bensimon (who, incidentally, will join the cast of The Real Housewives of New York City this fall) was out of the picture at the magazine. By the end of that year, the Bensimons’ marriage had broken up, and Gilles Bensimon had been demoted and replaced by a talented young art director–about–town named Joe Zee. And when the dust settled, Anne Slowey, who had been floating around the upper echelons of the Elle Accessories masthead, was the one who snagged the top spot. “It was a big shift for her,” says a former colleague. “It suddenly put her in charge of a staff, and in front of advertisers.” And, if only because she had nothing to do with Bensimon or Nina Garcia, in the good graces of Robbie Myers.

[New York]