The pink ribbon is a globally recognized symbol of breast cancer awareness. Its ubiquity is in large part due to Condé Nast.
In 1992, Alexandra Penney, then the editor in chief of Self, was compiling a feature on breakthroughs in breast cancer research for her October issue. The cause was important to her—she had friends who had battled the disease, and some who had died from it, and it had also claimed the life of Self’s founding editor, Phyllis Starr Wilson, in 1988. The red ribbon symbolizing AIDS had recently entered the mainstream, and a woman in California, Charlotte Haley, had gained notice for mailing out peach-colored “breast cancer awareness ribbons” from her dining room to bring attention to the paltry funding dedicated to the disease. Penney called Haley and offered to join forces on a national ribbon campaign—to which Haley said no. Condé Nast, she explained, was too commercial. Undeterred, Penney conferred with Condé’s lawyers, who advised that a change in color would allow the idea to go forward. “I was sitting there thinking—what’s very female?” Penney recalled. “Pink. It got into my head.”
Penney called Si Newhouse and pitched him on the idea of binding an actual pink ribbon into every copy of the October issue. Si told her to forget it—think of the cost! So, Penney contacted Evelyn Lauder, the cosmetics magnate and a major Condé advertiser, who had herself survived breast cancer and become active in the cause of finding a cure. A year earlier, the women had collaborated on an issue of Self that included a “cancer-cure report,” with articles on mammograms and new treatment methods. Lauder told Penney that she would distribute 1.5 million pink ribbons at her cosmetic counters around the country, with a card describing how to perform a breast self-exam. The October 1992 cover of Self touted a “Hot Celebrity Workout” and “10 Ways to Find Real Love”—and the image of a pink satin ribbon, “pinned” to the cover with a trompe-l’oeil safety pin, with a message: “Support Breast Cancer Awareness Month.” Readers were invited to send a self-addressed envelope to the Condé offices and receive a pink ribbon back. “Wear this ribbon,” Penney wrote in her editor’s letter, “and make a difference.”
The collaboration between Self and Lauder spawned a cascade of activism that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for research in the thirty-three years since. Every October, pink is ubiquitous, from police departments touting pink handcuffs, to pink-painted fire trucks at local parades—even a pink spotlight aimed at the White House. Charlotte Haley’s refusal to cooperate with Penney also presaged future criticisms of so-called “pinkwashing”—the idea that corporations exploit the feel-good branding of the ribbon to project an image of good citizenship, while doing little to remove carcinogens from their products or fund research to prevent or alleviate the effects of the disease. That the pink ribbon emerged from the image-obsessed corridors of Condé Nast adds another layer of irony—and yet, the movement may never have become as successful without Condé’s power, access, and reach.
“At the time, we all knew somebody who had died; the statistics were terrifying,” Penney recalled. “And nobody was talking about breast cancer.” Looking back thirty years later, she felt only pride. “All I ever thought about was that the ribbon was everywhere,” she said. “Look at what one idea could do.”
The ribbon was a testament to the extraordinary impact that Condé Nast was having on the culture in the 1990s. Ten years after he brought aboard Tina, Anna, and Art Cooper at GQ, Si had seen the clout of his empire expand well beyond expectations. International editions of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and GQ were on newsstands in Europe, Asia, and South America. Condé had muddled through an advertising dip in the 1990 recession and come out the other end, launching a new title, Allure, as the economy began to recover. Allure was arguably the first beauty magazine to take a journalistic approach to the then-burgeoning world of cosmetics. At seventy-eight, Alex, then in the twilight of his career, became deeply involved in its development, calling its editor, a former New York Times journalist named Linda Wells, at odd hours to impart sporadic nuggets of inspiration. Wells might answer her phone only to hear Alex say two words—“Dash! Vitality!”—and then a dial tone. Alex would call back a moment later, shout, “Style! Verve!” and hang up again.
Overseeing Allure’s avant-garde design was Polly Mellen, the exacting Vogue editor who issued pronouncements like “I’m feeling the color toast!” and had been responsible for, among other indelible images, the famous Avedon photograph of Nastassja Kinski erotically entangled with a snake. The British editor Grace Coddington had recently arrived at Anna Wintour’s Vogue, and by Mellen’s recollection, did not wish to work alongside her. So Si called Mellen to his office and suggested she join Allure as creative director.
“I don’t want to go there, Si,” Mellen replied.
“Well, what would you like, Polly?”
“I’d like my own magazine.”
“Let’s do this as an interim thing,” Si replied, diplomatically. Mellen stayed for eight years.
The debut issue, in March 1991, was a signature Condé high/low blend of luscious visuals and literary writing—elevated craftsmanship applied to the most superficial of subjects. Wells commissioned an essay by Betty Friedan, who wrote about why feminists “don’t have to go to war against love or lipstick.” Allure was engineered to reassure readers that caring about the way they looked was consistent with leading an enlightened life. “Beauty is news,” Wells wrote in her introductory note. “It is frivolous and serious, a mirror of society and a bit of frippery.” What better slogan for Condé Nast itself?
Allure secured its true legacy in 1996, when Wells dreamed up the Best of Beauty awards, a mix of service journalism and clever marketing. The cosmetics industry was booming—Sephora would open its first New York City boutique in 1998—and Wells felt shoppers needed a guide to the enormous number of products flooding the market. Initially, Si hated the idea. “This is going to be career suicide,” he told Wells when she pitched him on the awards. Allure relied on cosmetic companies to advertise; what would L’Oréal think if the magazine told readers to buy a Lauder lipstick instead?
When the first batch of awards were published, in October 1996, Allure did no marketing or promotion, and some Condé executives privately hoped the feature would vanish into the ether. (Even Wells, in a letter to readers, acknowledged the awards could prove “a bold, even foolhardy move.”) Fearing a backlash, Wells sent hand-delivered copies of the issue to the presidents of Chanel and Estée Lauder, accompanied by sprays of flowers. She needn’t have worried: the companies began calling to report that readers were tearing out pages from the Allure awards to use as a reference guide when they shopped in a store. To Wells’s shock, the cosmetic brands now wanted to reproduce the Allure seal of approval on the labels of their own products, and were willing to pay Condé Nast for the privilege. The perceived authority of Best of Beauty would soon create significant revenue for Allure—yet another successful monetization of Condé’s aura of exclusivity. “The seal did more for the magazine than everything else,” Wells told me. “I think the seal was responsible for keeping the magazine alive for so long.” Indeed, Condé Nast shut down Allure’s print magazine in 2022. The Best of Beauty awards, considered the Oscars of the cosmetics world, live on.
AT VOGUE, ANNA WINTOUR was also wielding her power to shape the industry her magazine covered.
The reach of Condé Nast allowed Anna to single-handedly determine the fates of many designers—and therefore whose clothes would be coveted by the new class of American strivers. Vogue had always maintained close relations with the luxury world; in the 1960s, Diana Vreeland wooed Seventh Avenue garmentos and even provided them with sketches of her preferred designs. Ruth Ansel, a Vogue art director, recalled an anecdote about Vreeland glancing out a window at women on a Manhattan sidewalk and pointing out their footwear. “You see those women in those go-go boots?” Vreeland said. “I made them!”
Anna went further: she not only placed her preferred designers in Vogue, she also recommended their services to the executives who were forging today’s modern fashion conglomerates. Anna put John Galliano in touch with the mogul Bernard Arnault, who hired Galliano to design for Givenchy and Dior. Marc Jacobs, another early Anna favorite, was later selected by Arnault to run Louis Vuitton. “She was the discoverer,” Arnault said of Anna’s influence. (Jacobs was never shy about being in Anna’s debt. After one runway show, he raced to Anna’s seat and dropped to his knees, beseeching her, “How did I do?”) After Michael Kors, discovered by Anna back in her New York magazine days, ran into financial problems in the mid-1990s, Anna talked him up to her industry contacts and later helped midwife a $100 million sale of his company. When Anna organized Vogue’s hundredth-birthday party at the New York Public Library, in 1992, Karl Lagerfeld made a twenty-four-hour trip from Paris to attend. “I just came for Anna Wintour,” he said. “For a one-night stand.”
For the cover of Vogue’s centennial issue, Anna winkingly restaged a classic Irving Penn photograph with a bevy of supermodels—but instead of couture, the women were clad in mass-market jeans and dress shirts from the Gap. This was the new high/low Vogue, the fashion corollary to Tina’s postmodern Vanity Fair: the imprimatur of Condé Nast updated for a more informal era of elite living.I Debutante balls and other vestiges of Mrs. Astor’s New York had yielded to Wall Streeters in Japanese suits ordering bottle service at Tribeca nightclubs. Inside 350 Madison, even Alex Liberman had taken to wearing Comme des Garçons. And Anna was about to project these social shifts onto an even bigger national stage.
The Costume Institute gala, held annually by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was for years the kind of fusty, high-WASP ritual of philanthropy and cheek-kissing that seemed to only exist in the pages of an Edith Wharton novel. Its roots date to 1948, when the museum threw a midnight ball in the Rainbow Room and charged guests fifty dollars a head. Vogue’s editor at the time, Edna Woolman Chase, was on the first organizing committee, and the magazine’s ties to the event deepened after Diana Vreeland became a special consultant to the institute following her Condé defenestration. Vreeland jazzed up the soiree, but the scene remained a redoubt of aging fixtures of New York society, basically as parochial as an Upper East Side tradition could get.
When Pat Buckley (wife of William F.) stepped aside in 1995, after seventeen years in charge, Anna was asked to help reimagine the event for a new era. The idea stemmed from a pair of Anna’s best-connected friends: Oscar and Annette de la Renta, the fashion designer and his socialite wife, who were donors to the Costume Institute and well acquainted with the Vogue editor’s skills. (For years, Anna has vacationed at a villa designed by de la Renta in the Dominican Republic.) Anna was an important figure in the fashion world, but conveniently not a designer whose presence might pose a conflict of interest as the museum decided whose clothes to feature in each year’s exhibit. Anna’s instinct was to re-create, in the decorous and imposing halls of the Met’s Fifth Avenue home, the imaginative fashion fantasies that played out in the lavish pages of her magazine. She persuaded Chanel and Versace—loyal Vogue advertisers, whose clothes Anna frequently wore—to contribute $500,000 to sponsor the event; Robert Isabell, the party planner who had devised several of Tina’s Vanity Fair fetes, confected a gigantic Christmas tree of roses.
Anna flexed her editor-in-chief powers to haul in several gossip columns’ worth of fashion stars and celebrities as guests. Karl Lagerfeld, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein turned up, along with Claudia Schiffer, Richard Gere, and Henry Kravis. Kate Moss vanished into a ladies’ room as her escort, Marc Jacobs, and a Vogue editor hollered her name outside, and Barry Diller struggled to reach his dinner table amid the sea of eight hundred well-groomed attendees. André Leon Talley, the on-again, off-again Vogue editor and Anna’s on-again, off-again consigliere, coolly observed the proceedings and offered a reporter a prescient remark.
“This,” Talley declared, “is Anna Wintour’s great ascension into the social firmament.”
Si Newhouse was there that night, too. His parents had attended balls like this, upper-crust events that were staples of the Park Avenue calendar. Now Si, as Anna’s patron and benefactor, had become the event’s de facto host. The guests still joked about Si’s mumbling and his awkward mien, but it was a nervous laughter. Si was now the sovereign of this elite, his will carried in the fiefs of fashion, entertainment, and celebrity by regents like Anna Wintour. Increasingly, the American zeitgeist was produced, packaged, choreographed, and marketed by the forces of Condé Nast.
Frank DiGiacomo, who chronicled the Met Gala’s transformation for The New York Observer, sensed “the collective coming-out for a new social order,” a contemporary elite “whose position in the food chain is determined not by bloodlines but by blood, sweat, tears and a big bank account.” The night before Anna’s Met debut, the cable channel VH1 had staged the first live telecast of its fashion awards. The ceremony seemed to cement the marriage of fashion and mainstream popular culture that Anna had been driving forward with her celebrity-flecked Vogue. “The future is, after all, getting the clothes and images to the masses,” one nominee told The New York Times. “My own personal goal is go mass. I’m not interested in being limited, insidery.” Madonna, whose Vogue cover in 1989 had irked Grace Mirabella and repulsed Richard Avedon, received an award as Karl Lagerfeld and Gianni Versace sat in the audience and applauded. The Times’s fashion critic, Amy Spindler—whose role at the newspaper had only been created a year before, in recognition of the growing mainstream interest in the field—approved of the cultural amalgamation that the award show represented. “Fashion needs to be a part of a wider creative world,” she wrote, “or it’s only relevant to itself.”
That the mainstreaming of fashion also happened to be the mainstreaming of Anna Wintour was a testament to Anna’s unusual combination of editorial and entrepreneurial skills—and, for Condé Nast, a very happy alignment of incentives. As fashion got bigger, Vogue got fatter: more and more advertisers flocked to its pages, including the new luxury conglomerates that benefited from the growing public fascination with designers and stylists. Anna, in turn, used the Met Gala to further expand her once-provincial world. After a year off in 1996, when her rival Liz Tilberis of Harper’s Bazaar took over hosting duties, Anna returned to the gala in 1997 with the most potent weapon in her celebrity arsenal: Madonna. The Material Girl was a neat fit to perform at that year’s Costume Institute show, “Gianni Versace,” a tribute to the recently murdered designer: both were agitators of Italian heritage who subverted Catholic iconography in their work. But the idea of unleashing a provocateur like Madonna in the Met’s hallowed galleries proved too much for one doyenne. Jayne Wrightsman, a major collector and donor, took umbrage at this intrusion of low culture into high, and reportedly threatened to resign from the museum’s board. In a sign of the times, the Met sided with its newer patron, Anna Wintour. Madonna attended that year’s gala, and when a reporter asked about the dustup, the pop star shrugged.
“I don’t even know who Jayne Wrightsman is,” she said.
Anna next took charge of the event in 1999, the year she turned fifty, and she never again relinquished control. The 1999 edition was the fullest expression yet of how she viewed her role at Vogue: not merely an editor, but a grand convener of the culture. Her guests included Gwyneth Paltrow, Liam Neeson, Harvey Weinstein, Henry Kissinger, Jerry Seinfeld, and Ellen Barkin, a crew that ranged well beyond the runway. Perhaps Anna had sensed Si’s satisfaction with the success of Graydon Carter’s Oscar parties, and felt a need to compete. There are those around Anna who say she has an intrinsic need to outdo her own last act. Whatever the reason, Anna topped herself by arranging a performance by Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, who sang his hit “I’ll Be Missing You” alongside a live children’s choir. After Combs left the stage, he was accosted by a towering white man in a tuxedo.
“Hello, Puff Daddy,” the man said. “I’m David Koch.” The billionaire industrialist smiled at the rapper. “You’re a helluva performer.”
Embedded in this moment were the seeds of what the Met Gala would become under Anna: a globally recognized spectacle and a staggering demonstration of Condé Nast’s cultural sway. Even as Condé shrank and its magazines’ influence ebbed—as Vogue itself drifted from its central role in the fashion world—the Met Gala reached new levels of opulence. In 2010, Anna installed a thirty-foot-tall hot-air balloon from South Dakota in one of the museum’s interior courts. Today, the red carpet is covered live on television and The New York Times dedicates more than a dozen staff members to a live blog of the proceedings. As with its Condé cousin, the VF Oscar party, an invitation to the Met Gala is now among the most coveted tickets on earth. Minuscule details, like the order in which stars approach the carpeted staircase, are decided by Anna alone. George and Amal Clooney were granted a private bar so that they could decompress away from the crowd; a stash of European Coca-Cola was locked in an office so that Karl Lagerfeld could enjoy his favorite beverage. In total, Anna’s Met Gala has raised more than $250 million for the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, making the event one of the world’s most successful philanthropic efforts in support of a cultural institution. As the excess increased, so have the prices; the ticket that cost fifty dollars in 1948 was $75,000 in 2024. Even Nan Kempner, the wealthy socialite, eventually became uneasy about the sheer scale of it.
“I just think it’s terribly expensive, and I’ve been doing this party for God knows how many years,” she said in 2003. “It seems to me it’s gotten a little out of hand.”
BY 1998, CONDÉ NAST HAD set its sights on a new home for its glossy brand of luxury consumption: the former Soviet Union.
The idea of launching a Vogue Russia may have seemed odd, given the country’s history of vilifying Western decadence. But the collapse of Communism had ushered in a nascent market economy that was birthing a new leisure class. Designer brands from Europe opened boutiques in a glitzy Moscow mall, and oligarchs’ wives and girlfriends wanted the looks from Paris runways. Vogue executives sensed opportunity—and, amazingly, given the potential for ironic disaster, allowed a BBC camera crew to tag along. The ensuing documentary, To Russia with Vogue, is an eye-popping testament to the stumbles of Western businesses seeking riches in the new Russia and the grandiosity of Condé Nast, a company convinced of its civilizing powers in a harsh and unchic world.
“I feel a sense of mission that I don’t feel in other places,” Si’s cousin Jonathan Newhouse, who led the international division, tells the camera as he tours the penthouse offices in Moscow that Condé leased for its local Vogue staff. “We talk about the fight between Communism and capitalism, or between totalitarianism and freedom,” Newhouse continues. “But there was another battle, and that is the battle between ugliness and beauty. Without beauty, people suffer. And I think one of the reasons Communism fell was not only economic, or political—but because it was so ugly.”
British Vogue staff members were flown in from London to train the Russian hires, including a domineering editor in chief with an Anna Wintour–like bob. Condé paid $2 million for billboards and television ads—one slogan was “In Russia. At Long Last.”—and organized an elaborate launch party with guests like Donatella Versace and Karl Lagerfeld, to be held at a museum of Russian history on Red Square. The Vogue Russia team was busy ordering decorations and flowers from England when, days before the first issue’s debut, the Russian economy collapsed. “They devalued the ruble?” asks a dumbfounded party planner. “This morning?!”
The Western luxury goods advertised in the magazine doubled in price overnight. As bread lines and bank runs break out in Moscow, the BBC crew catches Vogue editors debating whether to use a photo of the actress Julia Ormond for their next cover, and if the picture looks too much like something that would run in Cosmopolitan. Despite a “crisis discount” for advertisers, sales dry up. After the Red Square party is canceled, Jonathan Newhouse flies in to rally his troops. “Russia has a culture, a history, a greatness which few nations can equal, and a future, a great future,” he says, noting his family’s Russian ancestry. “One can’t expect a transition from seventy years of Communism to a free-market society to be smooth.” He continues, “We have kind of a sense of mission, that what we’re doing really is important to the life of the people here…. We think Vogue matters, and in this country, Vogue is going to matter a lot.” Newhouse was correct, to a point: Vogue Russia survived its initial crisis and eventually reached 800,000 readers, and Condé Nast added Cyrillic editions of GQ, Tatler, Glamour, and Architectural Digest, a full suite of lifestyle porn for Russia’s new rich. But after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 and enforced draconian censorship laws, Condé shut down its entire Russian operation. Even Vogue could not art-direct its way out of that one.
Condé’s foray into Russia is understandable in light of the company’s strategy for international growth: when a country with an emerging capitalist economy developed a new upper-middle-class, Condé Nast was there to swoop in with its guides to a lavish lifestyle. Luxury brands, themselves seeking a foothold in these regions, used the magazines to introduce their products to a fresh consumer base. Local readers felt affirmed that the likes of Vogue and Vanity Fair—world-famous emblems of the elite—considered their country worthy of attention and investment. In the BBC documentary, a Russian Vogue editor can be seen crying with joy as she flips through the pages of the inaugural issue. Condé’s entry was a sign that a country had arrived.
It was all in keeping with the company’s imperial moment. By the start of the 2000s, the sun never set on Si’s global empire. Vogue had spawned editions across Europe, Asia, South America, and the South Pacific; one could do worse to trace the rise of global consumerism by dating the magazine’s subsequent outposts in China (2005), India (2007), and the Persian Gulf states (2017). “The Arabs deserve their Vogue, and they’ve deserved it for a long, long time,” said Vogue Arabia’s first editor in chief. Condé relied on a licensing model not unlike the Four Seasons hotel chain: while the properties were often locally owned, the proprietors were trained in the high standards expected of the brand, traveling to New York or London to watch more experienced Vogue editors in action. And unlike Si’s profligate kingdom in Manhattan, the international division, run by Jonathan Newhouse from Condé’s British headquarters, Vogue House, was reportedly profitable. “We covered our poor American brothers and sisters,” quipped Bernd Runge, a former Condé executive who helped launch dozens of its global magazines.
There was precedent for this international reach. In the early years, Condé Montrose Nast shipped copies of American Vogue to London for distribution across Europe, until naval conflict broke out in the early years of World War I and nonessential imports like magazines were cut off. Nast responded by founding British Vogue in 1916, the first European edition of any major American fashion magazine. (Harper’s Bazaar did not expand to Britain until 1929.) He followed with Vogue Paris in 1920, cementing the power of the Condé brand across three fashion capitals. Because Gilded Age Americans fetishized European design and taste, ideas about style typically traveled westward across the Atlantic; Nast’s magazines helped reverse that flow, for the first time granting editors in New York a say in European trends. “Vogue carries to the four corners of an eagerly waiting world the secrets of the distinguished circle united through its efforts,” the French poet Paul Géraldy wrote in 1923. Well before the rise of luxury conglomerates like LVMH, Condé magazines were serving as an early adhesive for the global elite.
AS HIS KINGDOM EXPANDED, Si decided he needed a palace to match.
Condé Nast had occupied its 350 Madison Avenue building for over twenty years, its entrance aptly nestled in between the flagship stores of the old-money men’s clothiers Brooks Brothers and Paul Stuart. In 1996, the powerful developer Douglas Durst decided to build an office tower on a dilapidated site at the corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway, above the shuttered husk of a Nathan’s Famous hot dog franchise. This was a big bet: Times Square, once the bustling heart of Manhattan, had dwindled into a seedy district populated by porn shops and third-run movie theaters, a symbol of New York’s urban decay. Si smelled an opportunity. Condé Nast had the mystique that city officials hoped could revive that section of Midtown, and Durst was on the hunt for a big-name tenant to attract investment. The 350 Madison office, meanwhile, was aging and cramped, with the Newhouses forced to lease space in neighboring buildings to accommodate their growing stable. Si secured a below-market rent, naming rights for the building, and millions of dollars in state and local tax breaks. In exchange, Condé Nast would move two blocks west to Times Square.
It might as well have been New Jersey. Inside the company’s status-crazed halls, editors agonized over the gaucheness of their new location and whether Condé’s coveted 880 telephone prefix would move with them. (In the early 1990s, “880 Girls” was a common phrase in certain Manhattan social circles, referring to young women who worked at Condé with access to the hottest fashion and beauty products. The 880 prefix did not make it to the new building, although the 212 area code remained.) The added distance to Mangia, the high-end Italian lunch spot that delivered hundreds of dollars’ worth of grilled eggplant each day to Condé staffers, was a matter of intense debate. An internal booklet about the move took pains to reassure editors that their new individual offices would contain sufficient closet space for their coats.
Si, however, viewed the new headquarters, dubbed 4 Times Square, as an opportunity to announce his company’s dominance to the world. He spent an estimated $100 million on airy, light-filled interiors and state-of-the-art environmental features like solar panels and sustainable wood furniture. At 350 Madison, the windows opened to the street so editors could smoke at their desks; at 4 Times Square, they were sealed shut to minimize energy use. (One person familiar with Si’s office swears that he installed a sole working window so that his pet pug could breathe fresh air.) Still, Si was aware of the grumbling. One day, over lunch, he and James Truman—Condé’s editorial director and the man Si had put in charge of the relocation—hit upon an idea to make the move more palatable. They would build a cafeteria.
For a company whose backbiting culture was often compared to a high school, this was almost too on the nose. But dining had long played a crucial role in the Condé Nast mythology. Alex Liberman’s insistence that Tina Brown sit in the correct tier of the Four Seasons Grill Room (floor level, never mezzanine) had given way, by the early 1990s, to the much-studied seating hierarchy of 44, the restaurant at the Royalton Hotel that became known as “Club Condé.” The restaurant, which opened in 1991, was steeped in Condé Nast: its British proprietor, Brian McNally, was longtime friends with Anna Wintour, who once put McNally’s wife and daughter on the cover of House & Garden, with an accompanying feature written by Truman. Anna’s patronage on opening day announced the arrival of an all-important new spot for the company.
Starting in 1992, the power triumvirate of Anna, Tina, and Graydon permanently occupied three of the Royalton’s coveted lime-green banquettes; the fourth was left open for whichever A-lister had a reservation that day, although it was always available for Si in case he decided to come by. McNally kept a hefty folder at the hostess stand with a frequently updated directory of every Condé masthead. “Sometimes, Brian would ask, ‘Whose number is this?’ when a reservation would come in,” recalled Gabé Doppelt, a former Condé editor. “I would look it up in the directory, and I’d say, ‘Oh, a junior editor at Glamour,’ which basically informed him that he could put them near the kitchen.” VIPs, meanwhile, received service fit for a sultan. When Anna walked in for lunch, a cappuccino would be waiting at her table when she sat down. This was the result of an elaborate behind-the-scenes ballet: Because Anna sometimes arrived early or late, a designated kitchen worker began preparing cappuccinos ten minutes before her stated reservation time. If the drink sat for two minutes with no sign of Anna, it would be dumped out (or sent to another unsuspecting diner) and a new one was made. Dana Brown, who worked at the Royalton as a barback before joining Vanity Fair, calculated that nearly a dozen cappuccinos might be drawn and discarded in order to coordinate this perfect handoff.
To create his own hotspot inside 4 Times Square, Si had one person in mind: Frank Gehry, the world-renowned architect who at the time had never completed a project in New York City. Si and his wife, Victoria, an architectural historian, had met Gehry at a dinner party in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, where they discovered mutual passions for contemporary art and classical music. In 1995, Si and Victoria commissioned Gehry to build a new country home for them on the waterfront in Bellport, Long Island. The project fizzled, so Si, eager to find another collaboration, proposed that Gehry take on the new Condé offices instead. Gehry demurred, but when Truman suggested a cafeteria, the architect was intrigued. He knew that a project involving Condé Nast was sure to attract outsize publicity, and that Si’s taste for cutting-edge design meant he could indulge his more imaginative and costly whims.
The result was the most scrutinized and celebrated corporate cafeteria in the world. Gehry’s design, hashed out over several brainstorming sessions with Si, Victoria, and Truman, called for thirty-nine imitation-leather banquettes; highly amused by all the attention paid to the Royalton’s seating chart, Gehry had decided that in his Condé canteen, nearly every table would be a booth. Blue titanium panels grew like stalactites from the room’s perimeter walls, creating recesses that housed the lush banquettes and seemed to encourage furtive gossip. Seventy-six unique panels of sinuous Venetian glass dangled overhead, and the tabletops were made of taxi-yellow plastic laminate, perhaps a nod to the industrious city outside. Informed by Truman that Condé employed “mostly young women who were quite conscious of their appearance and their body shape,” Gehry decided to affix distorted mirrors to the columns bracketing the cafeteria’s exit doors, so that passersby looked smaller and thinner. “It was a very witty architectural gesture,” Truman recalled. “He created something that encouraged performance, and made people look good and feel good.” Idiosyncrasy, the indulgence of the rich, also had its place: garlic was banned from the cafeteria kitchens solely because Si abhorred it. Depending on who you ask, Si spent anywhere from $10 million to $30 million to enact Gehry’s avant-garde vision. Truman laughed when I suggested that Si may have wanted an in-house dining room so he could save money on all those pricey lunches at the Royalton.
“There was no cost savings involved in this cafeteria, I assure you,” he said.
When it opened, in 2000, Gehry’s cafeteria received its own architectural review in The New York Times. “The company’s fashion and beauty magazines offer monthly reflections on the human form as a universal intersection between nature and culture,” wrote Herbert Muschamp. “Gehry has provided an ideal background for those who put out these primers in cultivation.” An invitation to eat in this private sanctum of the Condé elite became a new status symbol in New York. Journalists offered inventive interpretations of the abstract design, with one describing the space as “slightly vaginal, accented by hanging chrome lamps which look like Fallopian tubes.” According to Truman, Gehry’s inspiration was more ecclesiastical than erotic. Early in the planning process, Gehry presented Truman and Si with a postcard of a Bellini portrait of Jesus wearing a blue robe; the architect pointed out Jesus’s elbow, where the garment’s sleeve concertinaed into a series of subtle folds. “Jesus was forgotten fairly quickly,” Truman said, “but the beauty of the color and texture of the folds was the inspiration.”
As always, Condé Nast was a trendsetter: in the years after it signed a lease at Times Square, the neighborhood became one of Manhattan’s hottest commercial districts, with MTV, Reuters, and ABC News all moving in. And the endless tabloid coverage of the cafeteria’s seating arrangements and celebrity sightings highlighted the ongoing public fascination with Condé Nast itself. What was it like to work with editors who spawned a thousand gossip items, who glided through the streets of Manhattan and Paris in the back seats of town cars, who paraded in custom Chanel suits and Manolo Blahniks in front of the paparazzi? Vanity Fair made celebrities of Hollywood agents and Wall Street corporate raiders; Vogue made A-listers of couturiers. Now, thanks to Tina, Anna, and Graydon, the stardust was falling on another once-obscure class of cultural gatekeepers: magazine editors. Life inside Condé Nast was becoming more decadent, more lavish, and more scrutinized than its Gilded Age progenitors could ever have imagined.