When Vogue tastemaker Anna Wintour announced late last month that she would be stepping down as editor in chief after 37 years, the news sent shock waves through the media business and fashion world.
Wintour, who will remain chief content officer for Condé Nast and global editorial director for Vogue, is a grand symbol of a magazine empire that includes Wired and Vanity Fair: a demanding, glamorous longtime chair of the Met Gala who has set fashion trends and made world-famous designers, some of whom she helped create, bow and tremble. She covers news, she creates news, she is news. Predictably enough, word of her changing status ignited frenzied speculation about who might take on the newly created role of U.S. head of editorial content for Vogue and eventually succeed her.
Condé Nast, which publishes enough other glossy magazines to fill a newsstand (if any still exist), remains very much alive, and it’s the subject of Michael M. Grynbaum’s new book “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America.” But as Grynbaum makes clear in his book, the Condé sway isn’t quite what it used to be. The company’s most powerful editors, including Graydon Carter (Vanity Fair) and Tina Brown (Vanity Fair and then the New Yorker), have stepped aside. More importantly, the rise of TikTok, Instagram and the like have created a world where almost anyone with an opportunist’s instinct can be an influencer.
“The means of glamour production were brought to the masses,” Grynbaum tells The Times in an interview taking place after Wintour’s announcement. “If you look at TikTok and Instagram, a lot of people are re-creating the status fantasies that Condé Nast was notorious for: the real estate tours of somebody’s mansion that are right out of Architectural Digest, or the fit check and outfit of the day that ascended from GQ, Vogue and Glamour.”
The man most responsible for the Condé Nast that readers know today was Samuel Irving “S.I.” Newhouse Jr., better known as Si. The son of a first-generation American who built a massively successful newspaper chain and purchased Condé Nast in 1959, Si took the family’s rather sleepy and traditional magazine business and injected a shot of sex, celebrity and pizzazz. The Newhouses were for many years seen as arrivistes and interlopers, a perception tinged with antisemitism; New Yorker institution A.J. Liebling, himself Jewish, labeled the elder Newhouse a “journalist chiffonier” — a rag picker.
When Si took over as chairman of Condé Nast in 1975 — and then bought the New Yorker in 1985 — he set about to become a sort of outsider’s insider, obsessed with status and the good life and determined to shape a collection of magazines that represented aspirational living. And he insisted that his most valuable employees walk the walk. To work at the company at its peak was to live extravagantly by a journalist’s standards.
Grynbaum, who writes about media, politics and culture for the New York Times and grew up reading Condé Nast magazines, was struck hard by that extravagance. “I was writing about magazine editors who had 24-hour town car service, limousines that would drive them around to their appointments, wait outside at the sidewalk while they ate a giant lunch at the Four Seasons restaurant, and it all got expensed back to Condé Nast,” he says. “Empire of the Elite” is laden with comical examples of privilege. One of my favorites: the Vogue editor who “charged her assistant with the less than exalted task of removing the blueberries from her morning muffin; the editor preferred the essence of blueberries, she explained, but not the berries themselves.”
The Condé Nast glory era really kicked off in the 1980s, as conspicuous consumption swept through the land. “The idealism of the 1960s was yielding to the materialism of the 1980s, a new preoccupation with the navel-gazing, ego-stroking life,” Grynbaum writes. But much of Newhouse’s approach now seems like standard operating procedure. When he bought the New Yorker, a set-in-its-ways magazine with a limited readership and articles that could take up half an issue, it had largely turned up its nose at the idea of soliciting new subscribers. He tapped Tina Brown, a brash Brit then serving as Vanity Fair editor, to run the magazine in 1992. This set off culture clashes that resonated throughout the industry — and yielded some piquant anecdotes.
For example: Some at the magazine were aghast when Brown assigned Jeffrey Toobin to cover the O.J. Simpson murder trial, a subject they saw as beneath the magazine’s standards. Critic George W.S. Trow actually resigned, accusing Brown of kissing “the ass of celebrity culture.” Brown responded that she was distraught, “but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.”
Newhouse, who died in 2017, made FOMO fun. It should be noted that he also helped create Donald Trump. GQ featured him on its cover when he was, as Grynbaum writes, “a provincial curiosity”; of more consequence, Newhouse, as the owner of Random House, came up with the idea for “The Art of the Deal,” the 1987 Trump business manifesto ghostwritten by magazine journalist Tony Schwartz.
Wintour has been a powerful force in the Condé Nast machine; her turning over the daily reins of U.S. Vogue signals even more change for a company that has seen plenty of it. “I think it is an acknowledgment on her part that she won’t be around forever, and that there needs to be some kind of succession plan in place,” Grynbaum says. “It’s amazing how much the influence and power of Vogue is predicated on this one individual and her relationships and her sway.”
Condé Nast isn’t what it used to be, because print isn’t what it used to be. Like so many legacy media companies, it hemorrhaged money as it proved slow to adjust to the digital revolution. At times “Empire of the Elite” reads like an ode to the sensuous experience of reading a high-quality glossy magazine, and wondering who might be on next month’s cover and what (or who) they’ll be wearing. Condé Nast still means quality. But the age of empire is mostly over.
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