As the longtime editor in chief of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter was accustomed to big expenses: chauffeured town cars, five-star hotel stays, writer salaries that stretched into the mid six-figures. But in early 2001, he wondered if he had gone too far.
Annie Leibovitz, the magazine’s chief photographer, had run up a $475,000 bill on a cover shoot involving 10 world-famous actresses — Nicole Kidman, Penélope Cruz, Sophia Loren — and an elaborate stage set, complete with a mantelpiece and a genuine John Singer Sargent painting, which was flown from Los Angeles to New York to London. (“It was like Vietnam, the expenses,” Mr. Carter recalled.) Now, he needed to tell his boss, S.I. Newhouse Jr., the billionaire owner and patron of Condé Nast, about the latest line item on his tab.
“I do have to talk to you about something,” Mr. Carter said as the men sat down for lunch. “It’s a good-news-bad-news situation.”
“What’s the bad news?” Mr. Newhouse asked.
“Well, I think we just shot the most expensive cover in magazine history.”
A pause. “What’s the good news?”
“It looks like a $475,000 cover.”
It was the equivalent of roughly $850,000 today. Mr. Newhouse was fine with it.
At its 1990s and 2000s peak, Condé Nast captivated tens of millions of readers with its glossy manuals to the good life: Vogue and GQ for fashion, Vanity Fair for celebrity, Gourmet for food, Architectural Digest for real estate. Editors like Anna Wintour, Tina Brown and Mr. Carter were the ultimate cultural gatekeepers, venerated and feared.
All that influence didn’t come cheap. To sell his magazines’ upper-class fantasies to the masses, Mr. Newhouse — a mercurial connoisseur who collected Rothkos and wore sweatshirts to the office — bankrolled a kind of dream life for the workers in his employ. When Art Cooper, the editor of GQ, hosted dinners in Milan in the 1990s, he flew out his food critic for the sole purpose of selecting the wine pairings. Ron Galotti, the Condé adman who inspired Mr. Big from “Sex and the City,” shipped his Ferrari Testarossa to Colorado to impress an advertiser. The photographer Irving Penn smashed a hundred Cartier glasses in pursuit of the perfect shard.
Outsiders who scoffed at this profligacy misunderstood the masquerade. Condé’s editors were the original influencers, their lives a top-to-bottom marketing campaign for the company that hired them. All those limousines and Concorde flights serviced an illusion: that the readers who subscribed and the brands that advertised could possess a piece of this glamorous world. The decadence was the point — and when it dwindled, so did the power of Condé Nast.
Today, the company is a husk of its former self. Many of its magazines have closed or been riddled by layoffs; its authority has been all but demolished by the web. When Mr. Carter’s successor at Vanity Fair, Radhika Jones, abruptly stepped down this spring, questions swirled over whether the job, once a crown jewel of journalism, was still desirable. (Some prominent editors like Janice Min said no.)
On Thursday, another pillar shifted: Ms. Wintour stunned the fashion world by announcing she would relinquish her editorship of American Vogue, the role she has occupied for 37 years. Ms. Wintour is not going anywhere: She remains Vogue’s global editorial director and continues to oversee every Condé title, save for The New Yorker. (She also made a point of saying she would keep her current office and its Clarice Cliff pottery.)
Still, it was the first real sign of succession planning — a Condé conclave, as one editor joked — and a reminder that Ms. Wintour, arguably the last link to the company’s glory years, will not be around forever. Nowadays, magazine writers are more likely to stay at a Radisson than the Ritz. When the new editor of Vanity Fair, Mark Guiducci, starts on Monday, he will be expected to follow what was once a very un-Condé edict: do more with less.
And yet, judging by the global headlines that heralded Ms. Wintour’s change in title, the company’s legend remains a source of fascination. We still live in the world that Condé bequeathed to us: the world of the Vanity Fair Oscar party and Vogue’s Met Gala, a world obsessed with status and celebrity and consumption — a world that has persisted even as the monoculture has faded, and the only gatekeepers left to credit or blame are ourselves.
‘You’re not in Page Six enough.’
After Condé Nast purchased the pioneering tech magazine Wired in 1998, its editor, Katrina Heron, flew to New York to meet her new bosses. She was immediately chastised for booking a room at a modest Midtown hotel. At an executive’s urging, she switched to the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue, which was several times the price.
“Good,” the executive told her. “When people have breakfast with you, they want you to be staying at the St. Regis.”
Writers on assignment were encouraged to FedEx luggage to their destination, rather than schlep it on the plane. A Vanity Fair writer, reporting a story in London, lived for a month with her husband and children at the Dorchester, the prestigious hotel overlooking Hyde Park; a separate room was reserved for their nanny on the Newhouse dime.
When Mr. Carter traveled to, say, the Four Seasons in Milan, an assistant sometimes arrived a day early to prepare his hotel suite, so that he would be greeted with the same tablescape of sharpened pencils and customized stationery at his usual Manhattan desk. Assistants traveled with thousands of dollars in petty cash, the better to untangle any unforeseen snags; Jon Kelly, a former Carter aide who now runs the upscale subscription newsletter Puck, recalled bribing a Venetian gondolier with 1,000 euros to help recover a confidential magazine prototype that had been misplaced.
There were house accounts at restaurants like the Four Seasons — where Condé personnel were never presented with a bill, because the meals were charged directly to the company — and a constant stream of floral deliveries and cashmere holiday gifts. Dominique Browning, a former editor of House & Garden, was once hauled into an executive’s office for a reprimand: “You’re not in Page Six enough. We need to see you wearing more designer clothing.”
Magazines kept aristocrats on the payroll to facilitate access to jet-set playgrounds like Corfu and Mustique. If Architectural Digest wanted to photograph the private gardens of, say, a minor European royal, it helped to have Prince Michael of Greece as a contributor. Some employees, because of either wealth or eccentricity, didn’t bother to cash their payroll checks at all. One Vogue contributing editor asked that her payments simply be forwarded to the New York City Ballet.
Black town cars, queued and purring outside the Condé office, became a Gordon Gekko-era symbol of the company and its swagger. Eliot Kaplan, a GQ editor in the 1980s, took a Condé car to his chiropractor twice a week, and it waited outside until he was done. Another editor charged Condé for an empty car to ferry him his evening Chinese takeout. When Mr. Newhouse got wind of that one, he shrugged: It was important to keep valued employees happy.
When the editor Polly Mellen joined Vogue in 1966, she was sent to Japan for five weeks with Richard Avedon and the model Veruschka, where they traveled first-class, accompanied by enormous trunks of furs carried by local laborers.
“Money,” Ms. Mellen, who died in December, said in an interview before her death, “was not something that was given a thought.”
‘Do it all grandly!’
This mandate to live expensively had deep roots.
The company’s namesake, Condé Montrose Nast, was a Gilded Age striver from St. Louis who purchased a sleepy society gazette called Vogue in 1909 and made it an arbiter of women’s fashion; later, he added Vanity Fair and the décor journal House & Garden. As America grew more affluent, Mr. Nast recognized that class anxiety could be lucratively exploited. As one colleague put it: “He didn’t want a big circulation. He wanted a good one.”
Edward Steichen, the Annie Leibovitz of his era, had a $35,000 photography contract with Condé Nast in 1923, the equivalent of about $650,000 today. In 1928, Nast offered Vogue’s editor, Edna Woolman Chase, $100,000 — roughly $1.8 million in today’s dollars — to build a country home on Long Island. Decades later, Mr. Newhouse approved multimillion-dollar mortgages so that his editors could be housed in style in the West Village or on the Upper East Side. Even some favored writers, like The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, received assistance.
Ms. Heron, the Wired editor, accepted an interest-free loan for a down payment on a San Francisco apartment. When she left the magazine three years later, nobody at the company asked her for the money back. After she sold the apartment, Ms. Heron mailed a cashier’s check to Condé as reimbursement; the accounting office called and asked her what the money was for. The company had no record of it.
Alexander Liberman, the editorial director of Condé Nast from the 1960s through the 1990s, espoused a philosophy of excess. He once called Grace Mirabella, who had succeeded Diana Vreeland as the editor of Vogue, with advice for a trip to Paris: “Take the Concorde. Spend a lot of money. Get yourself there in the most expensive way possible, take pictures over ten times if you need to. Do it all grandly!”
In the 1980s, a Condé executive tried to rein in spending with a novel accounting system; Mr. Liberman summoned them to his office, raised the new budget form above his head and theatrically tore it in half.
‘Of course it’s going to be an elephant.’
In 1998, Fortune magazine uncovered an inconvenient fact: Condé Nast did not make much money.
The world’s most glamorous magazine publisher ended 1996 with just $55 million in profit on $750 million in revenue. When the Fortune reporters, Joseph Nocera and Peter Elkind, included losses at The New Yorker (which at the time was in a separate division of the Newhouse empire), the magazines’ profit margin across all of the Newhouse magazines nose-dived to roughly 5 percent. Rival magazine publishers had margins that were three to four times higher. Cosmopolitan, published by Hearst, made about as much money in 1997 as every Condé title combined.
The Newhouses’ holding company, Advance, was and continues to be private. But the Fortune article showed how Mr. Newhouse had supported his status-seeking magazines with revenue from his family’s more lucrative holdings in regional newspapers and cable television.
This fiscal magical thinking came to a halt with the 2008 crash. The rise of the internet and the cratering of print advertising combined to doom Portfolio, a Condé business magazine launched in 2007 at a cost estimated between $100 million and $150 million. For its first issue, Portfolio paid Tom Wolfe a rumored $12 a word for an essay about hedge funders. Its first sentence read as follows: “Not bam bam bam bam bam bam, but bama bampa barama bam bammity bam bam bammity barampa.”
The joke around the office was that the nonsense opening “was $200 right there.” The full piece ran 7,400 words, netting Mr. Wolfe roughly twice an average newspaper reporter’s annual salary.
In September 2008, shortly before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Portfolio rented an elephant to illustrate an article about JPMorgan Chase’s credit derivatives desk, because the editors had decided on the headline “The $58 Trillion Elephant in the Room.” Condé spent about $30,000 photographing the pachyderm, instead of using a stock image. “There wasn’t really any hesitation,” recalled the photographer, Phillip Toledano. “Of course it’s going to be an elephant.” The ” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>resulting image did not even make the cover. (Portfolio’s editor, Joanne Lipman, said she did not authorize the shoot.) By the time the issue ran, the economy was in crisis; Portfolio soon shut down.
Even then, Condé kept spending — a crumbling palace throwing a final bacchanalia before the coup. For the 2013 Vanity Fair Oscar party, the magazine arranged for an orchard to fit its apples with tools that interrupted the natural flow of red pigment. A vise, molded in the form of two Art Deco letters, left the mature fruit imprinted with a monogram: “V.F.” The apples were then flown to California for distribution to the A-list attendees. In 2016, midlevel New York employees still booked luxe Beverly Hills hotels for 10-day work trips; the following year, Condé Nast was reported to have lost more than $120 million.
Eventually, the veneer of excess collapsed. Self, Teen Vogue, Glamour and Allure eliminated print editions. Fact-checkers, copy editors and photo teams at every publication (save The New Yorker) were rolled into a central office, a cost-saving measure that rivals like Hearst had instituted years earlier. Magazines shaved budgets by dropping Microsoft Word in exchange for the cheaper Google Docs. Layoffs became routine.
These days, Condé’s stewards face challenges unthinkable to their predecessors. What a magazine looks like on the newsstand (or in the hands of a print subscriber) matters less than how it appears on an iPhone: Vanity Fair’s foldout Hollywood covers, like Ms. Leibovitz’s $475,000 extravaganza, are now an awkward horizontal fit for vertical screens.
And the perks, the ones that made magazine life fun, have vanished. In 2015, GQ flew its staff to Tulum, Mexico, for a three-day retreat. The outing was later downgraded to a winter day in upstate New York; now it’s gone entirely. At Vanity Fair, employees once received Anya Hindmarch totes and plush beach towels as holiday gifts; no more. One editor said the most telling sign of change was that employees no longer even tried to put in for big expenses; it’s ingrained in their thinking to save money from the start.
Yet this Potemkin version of Condé Nast still frustrates and fascinates the chattering classes. Younger people may say Vogue barely matters, but who appears on its cover, and how they are dressed, can cause a stir online, as it did when the magazine featured Kamala Harris, then the vice president-elect, and the first lady, Jill Biden, this past summer.
Magazines may have yielded to more egalitarian social media, but status anxiety is as potent as ever. The iPhone brought the means of glamour production to the masses, and the masses chose to replicate the universe that Condé Nast popularized: airbrushed, brand-name-laden and full of F.O.M.O., where pretty people do pretty things in pretty places without you.
Condé itself is trying to adapt, embracing mobile-first video and investing in I.R.L. experiences like Vogue World, a traveling, celebrity-soaked fashion show. Ironically, the company’s less-glamorous magazines are bright spots. The New Yorker breaks news and generates significant income. (According to a person briefed on the numbers, the magazine’s circulation revenue more than doubled in the five years after a full-fledged paywall was introduced in 2014.) Wired has reported aggressively on Elon Musk’s chaotic foray into the federal bureaucracy.
In 2006, the Newhouses acquired a then-obscure website called Reddit for roughly $10 million. The start-up, a jumble of text-heavy message boards, allows anonymous commenters to weigh in on any topic imaginable.
By 2012, Reddit had more than three billion page views each month. In March 2024, it went public, with the Newhouses reaping a windfall of roughly $2.1 billion. A $10 million bet had yielded a 210-times return. To the extent that the Newhouses can keep bankrolling Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker into the next decade, it may be thanks to a shrewd bet on an internet company whose scruffy egalitarianism is the antithesis of Condé’s top-down, we-know-best approach.
The cost of creating a Reddit post? Zero.
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
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