For decades, Condé Nast editors in chief oriented their work lives around the monthly “print order” meeting, where every page of a magazine’s forthcoming issue would be laid out end to end on a series of whiteboards, awaiting the scrutiny of Si Newhouse. Si often arrived for these sessions in his usual slouchy sweatshirt and baseball cap, his feet sometimes clad only in socks; his editors wore the chicest outfits from their fashion closets, and some women summoned a full hair-and-makeup crew so they would attend looking their best. A five-star general reviewing his platoon, Si peered at the pages with rapt intensity, examining every headline, caption, and layout, clocking the transitions between words and photographs and ads: proprietor, connoisseur, and critic all at once.
The ritual was an apt expression of Condé’s obsessive focus on the art and craft of print magazines—a craft that was inexorably receding into the past.
Si died on October 1, 2017, at eighty-nine. In his final years, his cognitive skills had begun to decline, and he had gradually relinquished his duties as the Medici of Condé Nast. His daily exercises fell off, and, eventually, he lost the ability to speak and walk. His wife, Victoria, took him on visits to the farm of the actress Isabella Rossellini, where he appeared to enjoy the animals. Si’s brother, Donald, later shared that Si had been diagnosed in 2014 with a progressive form of dementia. “He knew what was coming,” Donald said after Si’s death. “We all knew what was coming.” At Si’s memorial service, the attendees included Ralph Lauren, David Geffen, Leonard Lauder, Jeff Koons, and Diane von Furstenberg. Speakers recounted Si and Victoria’s ardent devotion to their dogs—first Nero, and later Cicero—who often flew with them to the classical music festivals in Vienna and Salzburg.
“My father was not an easy man to know,” his daughter, Pamela Mensch, said at his funeral. “He was not comfortable with intimacy, or with other people’s emotions.”
Mensch described Si’s favorite play as Henry V, Shakespeare’s history of an immature and undisciplined prince who feuds with and defies his controlling father, and ultimately inherits the kingdom and leads his country to untold glory. It’s easy to see why Si embraced this narrative. The world has produced many billionaire businessmen, but few who were willing to pour a personal fortune into a company of creative eccentrics, to encourage profligacy in the name of beauty, to emphasize the accumulation of status over the accumulation of profits. From his privileged but anxious childhood onward, Si had yearned to find a place in the American establishment, and to prove wrong a hard-driving father disappointed by an eldest son whose tastes ran to finery and restaurants and “women’s magazines.” And because Alex Liberman took him under his wing, Si absorbed a specific postwar European ideal of social status and aesthetic excellence. At its peak, Condé Nast manifested Alex’s mission of bringing continental refinement and sophistication to a prosaic America, propelled by the fortune of a striver.
As early as the mid-1990s, Si predicted that his cousin Jonathan Newhouse “will take my place” atop Condé Nast upon his retirement. Like Si, Jonathan was a magazine purist and aesthete. His father, Norman Newhouse, one of Sam’s younger brothers, oversaw The Times-Picayune; Jonathan dropped out of Yale to join the family business, starting at Condé Nast when Vanity Fair relaunched in 1983. He moved through The New Yorker, Gourmet, and Details, and then transferred to Paris in 1990 to lead Condé’s international arm, eventually settling in London. There, Jonathan—easily recognized by his buzz cut, bow tie, and suspenders—became a fixture of the European social scene. Nicholas Coleridge, the Old Etonian who led Condé Nast in Britain (and was an old Tatler chum of Tina Brown), took Jonathan under his wing, introducing him to top designers like Nicolas Ghesquière.
Jonathan’s interest in fashion, art, and culture seemed to position him as a natural heir to Si, but it was not to be. By 2017, Condé Nast had to focus as much on cutting costs as creating beautiful magazines. Donald Newhouse’s son, Steven, was roughly the same age as Jonathan; he was less of a social butterfly, but he was an early adopter of the internet, and had been trusted to look after more lucrative arms of the family empire. (Jonathan’s $100 million e-commerce venture at Style.com, meanwhile, had collapsed after less than a year.) In 2019, Steven was elevated to copresident of Advance, sharing the title with his father. Jonathan was named as Condé Nast’s chairman, but the industry view was that Steven was now firmly in charge.
Steven has evinced a protectiveness toward his family’s trophy properties; when rumors arose in 2022 that Jay Penske, owner of Rolling Stone and Variety, wanted to buy Vanity Fair, a person close to Steven said he would never sell off a publication that he considered key to the Newhouse family’s legacy. Still, Donald Newhouse turned ninety-five in 2024—he no longer holds a title at Advance—and no one is quite sure what his descendants will do after his death. Thanks primarily to investments made by Donald, and later Steven, the Newhouses do not necessarily need to worry about Condé Nast being in the red. In 2015, Advance sold its cable TV business to Charter Communications, the telecom giant, in a $10.4 billion deal, with the Newhouses retaining a significant minority stake in the combined company. The family were also early investors in Discovery Inc., which in 2022 merged with WarnerMedia to create Warner Bros. Discovery, an entertainment conglomerate encompassing HBO, CNN, and the Warner Bros. movie studio. The Newhouses are currently among the company’s largest outside shareholders.
Ironically, the family also collected a windfall from a shrewd bet on an internet company whose scruffy egalitarianism was the antithesis of Condé’s we-know-best airs. A Condé business executive learned about Reddit a few months after the website’s founding in 2005; its creators were just out of college and sharing a cramped apartment near Boston. When an email from Condé corporate arrived out of the blue, the founders had to google the name Condé Nast. Steven Newhouse was impressed with Reddit’s user base of young, educated men, an audience that he believed could complement Condé’s army of female readers. After a few months of negotiations, Condé Nast acquired Reddit for roughly $10 million in 2006. Steven intentionally kept his purchase at arm’s length, allowing its founders to work from California away from Condé’s more analog-minded executives in New York. The site’s visual quality was barely better than Craigslist. But by 2012, Reddit boasted more than three billion page views each month, and Barack Obama, running for re-election, participated in the site’s popular “Ask Me Anything” feature. When Condé spun out Reddit in 2011, Advance Publications retained a roughly one-third stake.
In March 2024, Reddit went public—with the Newhouse family reaping a windfall of roughly $2.1 billion. Steven’s $10 million bet had yielded a 210-times return. To the degree that the Newhouses can keep bankrolling Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker into the next decade, it may be the success of an anarchic, low-fi social media platform that guarantees it.
FOR ALL THE ELEGIES DIRECTED toward the golden age of Condé Nast, we continue to live in the culture that it made. The iPhone brought the means of glamour production to the masses, and the masses chose to replicate the status markers that Condé Nast popularized. Influencers and TikTok stars bring their followers on house tours that resemble old Architectural Digest spreads. Celebrities post provocative photographs and envy-inducing travelogues that would not be out of place in Vanity Fair or Traveler. Athletes arrive for press conferences in elaborate designer outfits straight from GQ. American politics merged with American entertainment—the ultimate expression of Tina’s old formula of high/low—and a man with deep ties to the Condé ecosystem, Donald Trump, achieved its biggest starring role.
But the company’s diminution is also a loss.
There is no doubt that media benefits from a new diversity of voices, both in the creation of culture and the curation of it. But as a reporter at The New York Times, I’ve seen firsthand the effects of fragmentation in our society. Americans no longer share the same facts, much less the same magazines. Liberation came at the cost of unity; we are suspicious of one another, alienated and apart. It may seem shallow to put Condé Nast in the same group as the information gatekeepers, like newspapers and broadcast networks, that once controlled national debates over politics and public policy. But Condé’s waning clout is symptomatic of a broader collapse of community engendered by the fall of our media institutions. For all its faults, Condé brought discernment to the culture. It imported the avant-garde to Midwestern dentists’ offices, and brought peerless writing and reporting and arts criticism to mass-circulation publications. Now in the waiting room we read our phones, where an algorithm spits back content based on what we’ve already seen. We’re cosseted by a computer’s bloodless taste. Who challenges us? What broadens our tastes, our sense of the world? Who are our gatekeepers?
What if the answer is no one? For all our choices, are we more enlightened or less? With so many voices, who, really, is being heard?
The lavish lifestyles portrayed in Condé magazines were in some ways more benign than the ones depicted on social media, because the magazine version was so self-evidently a fantasy. Few Condé readers believed that the world as portrayed by Helmut Newton or Annie Leibovitz was an attainable goal. One could admire Condé’s dream worlds, or use them as inspiration, whereas the images depicted on Instagram are often intended as envy-inducing glimpses into real life. Here are people you know, or maybe a mutual friend or an old classmate, straining to convince you of the perfection of their vacations, their partners, their clothes, their homes. Glossy magazines never implied that an average person could have all of what they portrayed. Condé Nast offered vicarious thrills. But in the post-gatekeeper era, the old elite status fantasies have shifted from aspirations to expectations, with all the commensurate pressures that come with that shift.
In late 2024, a leading luxury goods analyst, Luca Solca, published a chilling report on younger consumers and the fashion and retail sector. Solca argued that the long-term market prospects for luxury goods were bright—because the alienation, insecurity, and nihilism instilled in young people by social media had created an eager base of new consumers. “Exposure on social media is reducing people’s self-assurance and magnifying their insecurity,” he wrote. “Narcissism is emerging as a defense against these deep-rooted fears.” For all the revelry in some quarters that Condé’s elitist world has crumbled, the supposedly more egalitarian sphere of social media has found new ways to replicate the striving and status-seeking culture that Condé magazines were often blamed for. Bonnie Morrison, an editor who worked at Self and Men’s Vogue, calls this “the democratization of elitism,” and notes that nowadays, Instagram can be “an endless scroll of things to buy, or things to want.” Instead of being obsolesced by the culture, the Condé creed was absorbed by it: its values of elite fantasy, sophistication, and social combat now spring forth from the thousands of digital outlets that saturate our daily lives.
The erosion of Condé has also meant the end of hundreds of jobs for writers, editors, journalists, and photographers. Creative work itself is increasingly commodified; the proliferation of DIY media platforms means that essays and photographs are worth less and less. Flawed as it was, Condé offered compensation, apprenticeship, and a platform for creatives to hone their best work. The artist Barbara Kruger, who worked as a designer at Mademoiselle early in her career, attributes her success in part to her time at Condé Nast. “I had no education as a designer, so it was really a learning experience for me, and an incredible opportunity,” she told me. “The fluencies that I developed in the art department at Mademoiselle, in my job as an editorial designer, morphed into my work as an artist.”
Another casualty is curation, at a moment where it is desperately needed. “Magazines, in my opinion, once were the chief emissaries of culture from month to month,” said Ruth Ansel, an art director for House & Garden, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. “They spoke of a wider world one could enter as a reader and be swept along by the inspiration and information.” Now, the algorithms that rank articles online reinforce individual readers’ assumptions and biases. The fire hose of digital media has yielded a siloed culture that feels increasingly flattened and incoherent. “What is boring about reading everything online—and it is boring—it’s just an uncalibrated list of stories,” says Tina Brown. “There’s no sense of hierarchy of any kind. You can’t splash a headline, you can’t splash a picture, and say, ‘This is the important thing today.’ You can’t create an energy of ‘Pay attention to this!’ ” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tina continues to defend the virtues of cultural gatekeepers. “There is a place, a necessary place in our culture, and without them—whether it’s in magazines, TV, movies, theater—the creative talents producing original, sometimes risky, material are orphaned,” she told me. “Gatekeepers have the power to say, ‘I am publishing it, green-lighting it because I love it, I believe in it and I have the ability to make it happen.’ ”
I WAS AT A PARTY in London in 2023 when I ran into Michael Bloomberg, whose New York City mayoralty I had covered for several years at The New York Times. He asked which Condé Nast characters I planned to feature in my book. When I told him Tina Brown, Bloomberg looked puzzled.
“I spoke at her funeral,” he said to me, matter-of-factly.
I explained that Tina was, in fact, alive.
“Oh!” Bloomberg’s face brightened. “I meant Helen Gurley Brown!”
Arguably, Tina never regained the cultural power she wielded during her days at Condé Nast. Her Talk magazine, funded by Harvey Weinstein, launched in 1999 with a massive celebrity-packed party beneath the Statue of Liberty and a debut cover that featured a trademark Tina high/low collage of Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and Gwyneth Paltrow posing in a bikini. But the magazine failed barely three years later, its bravado sapped by an advertising recession and the post-9/11 cultural malaise. Recently, Tina referred wryly to her exit from The New Yorker as “probably the dumbest career move of anybody’s life.” Tina wrote a popular biography of Princess Diana and then, in 2008, re-emerged as the editor of an online news site, The Daily Beast, which was backed by Barry Diller. The Beast attempted to translate Tina’s spunk to the web, but it was plagued by overspending and an ill-fated merger with Newsweek. Tina left in 2013 and founded an events business called Women in the World; she published her diary from her time at Vanity Fair and then created an investigative journalism conference named for her husband, Harry Evans, who died in 2020. Tina likes to stay abreast of the latest delivery systems for news and ideas, and in 2024 she started a Substack, Fresh Hell, where she posts semi-regular dispatches about a zeitgeist that still bears the influences of her transformative tenure at Condé Nast.
After his exit from Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter took a break in Provence; at one point, he approached the Newhouses about buying his old magazine, but nothing came of it. In 2019, Graydon co-founded Air Mail, an upscale online-only newsletter that has gained a dedicated following and spawned stylish brick-and-mortar retail offshoots in New York and London. In 2023, he successfully returned to the high-society trenches with a lavish party at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc during the Cannes Film Festival; the starry guest list (Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese) and subtle touches (custom-made ashtrays) were imported straight from Oscar extravaganzas of the past. His memoir, When the Going Was Good, became a bestseller in the spring of 2025, as readers responded to its nostalgic portrait of a lost era of excess. At a grand book party in Lower Manhattan—the kind of lavishly catered media soiree that rarely happens nowadays—Graydon received hosannas from the A-listers who once feared his poison pen. “I’ve known him when he was in charge of everything and very scary,” said the actress Candice Bergen, “and I love him when he is more benign.”
In April 2025, Radhika Jones surprised her staff by announcing that she would step down from the editorship of Vanity Fair. Forced to contend with shrinking budgets and layoffs, Jones had grown weary of managing decline. The magazine’s influence had faded, too: Movie stars (and politicians) now routinely bypass the traditional media to speak directly to fans; when they do appear in a publication like VF, they have the power to demand certain photographers and writers, ensuring the coverage is to their liking. Inside Condé, some senior figures acknowledged that Jones had never quite adapted to the public-facing aspect of her role—the impresario “it” factor that her predecessors relished. In 2019, her first year overseeing the magazine’s Oscar party, Jones was asked which celebrity she was most excited to meet. She answered Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google.
David Remnick has edited The New Yorker for more than a quarter century, ably navigating the institution through the convulsions of the media industry’s digital transformation. Against expectations, he made The New Yorker one of Condé’s few digital success stories, installing a paywall that now generates significant income. (According to a person briefed on the numbers, the magazine’s circulation revenues more than doubled in the five years after a full-fledged paywall was introduced in 2014.) The New Yorker Festival is an annual staple that attracts thousands of paying attendees and healthy revenues. Since magazines became eligible for the Pulitzer Prize in 2015, Remnick’s New Yorker has won eight of them, including the public service medal for Ronan Farrow’s 2017 investigation into the sexual predations of Tina’s old boss, Harvey Weinstein. The magazine celebrates its centennial year in 2025, and a Netflix crew has been invited to make a documentary to mark the occasion. As The New Yorker turns one hundred, Remnick is about to turn sixty-seven. He has said that he’d like to avoid the messy succession dramas of earlier eras.
And Anna remains. Decades after she was passed over to succeed Alex Liberman as editorial director, Anna now holds the lofty titles of chief content officer, Condé Nast, and global editorial director, Vogue, effectively occupying Alex’s old perch as Condé’s all-seeing creative force. She further consolidated her power when Condé ousted the editors in chief of many of Vogue’s international editions, including tastemakers like Vogue Paris’s Emmanuelle Alt. Vogues around the world now carry many of the same photo shoots, cover stars, and articles. Condé management called this a sensible decision, given the increasingly globalized nature of fashion and the arts. It was also an obvious cost-saving measure that resulted in hundreds of layoffs, and critics say the move devalued local voices while contributing to a lamentable homogenization of the magazines’ style and taste.
Anna has always had critics, and her oversight of a multitude of Condé titles has yielded mixed editorial and financial results. Yet after more than thirty-five years running American Vogue, there is no end in sight to her reign. Her sway with the world’s top designers and luxury conglomerates is without rival; in many ways, the ongoing influence of Condé Nast itself hinges on Anna alone. Challengers to her crown have consistently fallen by the wayside. In 2023, Edward Enninful, the celebrated editor of British Vogue, announced he would step down in favor of a fuzzy role as “global creative and cultural adviser.” Enninful, who is gay and Black, was widely credited for diversifying the models, designers, and photographers who appeared in his magazine, while maintaining a signature Condé edge and style. He had been viewed as Anna’s likely successor at American Vogue—so much so that at least one member of Condé Nast’s corporate board was taken aback when they heard about Enninful’s sidelined new role. The board member was concerned that the Newhouses had no clear succession plan in place for when Anna does finally step away, according to a person familiar with their thinking. Enninful’s departure was another clear signal that Anna has no plans to abdicate her role as Vogue’s editor in chief. “Do not give up the title,” she once advised a friend. “You never leave your title.”
Anna still works long days, tiring out much younger editors with relentless emails and phone calls. Her Vogue now includes a podcast, a mobile app, numerous sponsored events, and a revamped, popular website that engaged younger readers with clever ideas like hiring Jack Schlossberg, a Kennedy descendant and cheeky TikTok star, as a political correspondent. Her activism in Democratic politics has only grown; in 2024, Anna hosted a fundraiser for Joe Biden and coordinated a “Designers for Democracy” march in Manhattan, with a cameo from the First Lady. “No one has shaped this industry more than you,” Jill Biden told Anna, who was waving a small American flag. “Now you’re shaping the world.” When Donald Trump recaptured the presidency in November 2024, Anna was openly emotional and her voice cracked as she addressed the election result with her staff. Weeks later, in the final days of his tenure, Biden presented Anna with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors.
At a time of scarcity and decline in her industry, Anna has retained her taste for spectacle and the public enchantment it can generate. Ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics, she persuaded the Paris authorities to cordon off the entire Place Vendôme—a virtually unheard-of feat—to stage an elaborate Vogue-branded fashion show with Katy Perry, Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid, Serena Williams, and Sabrina Carpenter among the models. The local gendarmes were ready to shut down the proceedings if the event stretched past its allotted hour. Unsurprisingly, Anna pulled it off.
The only person at Condé Nast who still effectively outranks Anna is the company’s chief executive, Roger Lynch, a former streaming-music bigwig with no previous experience in magazines. Lynch, who was hired in 2019, has joined Anna in proclaiming a bright road ahead, talking up the digital growth of Condé’s brands and its efforts to adapt content for film and television. He argues that Condé will thrive as a multipronged entity in which magazines are merely one branch, coexisting with live conferences, membership clubs, and e-commerce tie-ins. The official word from management is that the old world of copious expense accounts and ruthless cultural elitism is an anachronism best forgotten. Even the title of “editor in chief” is being retired in favor of the bloodless “head of editorial content.”
“This is no longer a magazine company,” Lynch declared in 2022.
It was a rallying cry to embrace the future—and an epitaph for a glorious past.