For decades, one company in Manhattan told the world what to buy, what to value, what to wear, what to eat, even what to think. Before Instagram, before TikTok, there was the Condé Nast Publications, merchant of fantasies and supreme arbiter of sophistication. Vogue chose the designers whose clothes would be worn by millions around the world, and the models who became global icons of sex and femininity. Vanity Fair determined which moguls we envied and movie stars we worshiped. GQ made it okay for straight guys to care about clothes, Architectural Digest pioneered real estate porn, and The New Yorker elevated tabloid fare like the O. J. Simpson murder trial to the realm of serious journalism. Our contemporary Instagram culture—airbrushed, brand-name-laden, and full of FOMO, where pretty people do pretty things in pretty places without you—is a DIY replication of the universe that the celebrity editors of Condé Nast carefully created month after month, year after year.
At the peak of its powers, Condé Nast cultivated a mystique that captivated tens of millions of subscribers across four continents, with brands that became international symbols of class and glamour. Editors such as Tina Brown and Anna Wintour were venerated, celebrated, and feared, with unrivaled sway in determining who and what was elite, who was “in” and who was “out.” Their magazines were glossy manuals to the good life, defining our modern notions of class, consumerism, politics, lifestyle, and taste. To be featured by Condé Nast meant that one had arrived—as an actor, author, designer, thinker, or socialite. Condé Nast—even the name announced itself with a continental flair, that exotic accent above the e so redolent of fine living and superior judgment.
Never before had so much cultural influence been concentrated under one roof—and it never will happen again.
Now, Condé is a husk of its former self, its clout diminished, its magazines closed or riddled by layoffs. Staff uproars over race and class have punctured its once-impenetrable aura. Bon Appétit’s editor resigned in 2020 amid complaints of racial insensitivity and bias, and in 2021, unionized New Yorker employees, vexed by low wages, picketed Anna Wintour’s town house in Greenwich Village, chanting “Bosses wear Prada, workers get nada.” Condé’s chief architect and feared billionaire boss S. I. Newhouse Jr. is dead. Young people may vaguely know Condé Nast as the real-life inspiration for The Devil Wears Prada: the imperious bosses, obscene expense accounts, and ubiquitous town cars. Or they may not know of Condé Nast at all. While brand names such as Vanity Fair and Vogue persevere, the fundamental idea that a monthly package of pulp and ink, delivered via trucks and postal workers, could wield such influence is alien to anyone under the age of thirty.
And yet we still live in the world that Condé bequeathed to us: the world of the Vanity Fair Oscar party and Vogue’s Met Gala, Allure’s industry-standard Best of Beauty prizes and Condé Nast Traveler’s Readers’ Choice Awards, a world obsessed with status and celebrity and consumption—a world that has persisted even as old-line notions of “elitism” have become increasingly passé, and the only gatekeepers we can credit or blame for our present-day culture are ourselves.
How Condé Nast amassed so much power and influence—and why, at the height of its culture-shaping savvy, it failed to foresee the digital revolution that would devour it—is a saga of self-invention and raw ambition, clashing egos and a ruthless pursuit of excellence. It is a tale of outsiders who longed to be insiders, and eventually conquered the rarefied spheres they once yearned to join. It is the story of how one company defined a nation’s ideal image of itself.
WHEN AN AWKWARD SCION named Samuel Irving (“Si”) Newhouse Jr. inherited his father’s magazine business in 1979, Condé Nast was a faded Jazz Age icon, a second-tier publisher of women’s titles, already seven decades old, that clung like Miss Havisham to its past glories. Vogue was read by fashionistas, but had little impact on the zeitgeist. House & Garden was losing ground to a splashier, wealthier West Coast rival, Architectural Digest (not yet part of the Condé stable). Si had money, but little status; at around five foot six, he was diminutive, physically and socially. “So incredibly shy and inarticulate,” as one longtime Condé editor recalled. “So inarticulate it was shocking.” The Newhouse name was an afterthought in the power centers of Wall Street, Washington, and Hollywood, where the rival Time Inc. magazine empire held greater sway. And Si’s younger brother, Donald, controlled the real moneymaker of the family’s empire: the newspapers.
But Si viewed the Condé Nast magazines as vessels for his own fantasies of status and class, his backdoor entry into the establishment whose rituals he had studied through the social equivalent of a two-way mirror. Unlike other publishers, who were happy to attack the power elite, Si wanted to celebrate it. Or better yet: become it. His timing happened to be excellent. Si was taking over Condé Nast right on the cusp of the Reagan eighties, when the desultory post-Watergate seventies were yielding to an era of exuberant excess. A new generation of strivers had awoken to the pleasures of consumerism. If the pre-eighties East Coast establishment prized discretion, thrift, and subtlety—threadbare Shetland sweaters, shabby station wagons—the new elite was all about the flaunt. And Condé Nast, which itself had been founded in the era that spawned the term “conspicuous consumption,” was perfectly situated to supply the user manuals the nouveau needed.
To create this world, Si turned to strivers whose own yearnings for success and social dominance reflected the cult of aspiration their magazines fetishized. Americans’ idea of what it meant to be elite had long been shaped by the fantasies of outsiders: the splendid penthouses and tuxedoed balls of 1930s Hollywood movies were made by Jewish immigrant studio heads who were forced to build their industry on the other side of the country after the Eastern elite rejected them. The mythmakers of Condé Nast similarly willed their world into existence. Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter was raised middle-class in Ottawa and worked as a lineman on rural railways. Art Cooper, who took GQ from fashion trade rag to a global byword for the dapper male lifestyle, grew up a chubby Jewish kid in Pennsylvania coal country. Paige Rense, the mastermind of Architectural Digest, was born into abject Midwestern poverty. The New Yorker’s David Remnick was a New Jersey dentist’s son. And there was Alexander Liberman, Condé’s longtime editorial director, an unrepentant aesthete and spendthrift who tutored Si in all things tasteful, but, as a refugee from Bolshevik Russia, was always outrunning his own tragic past.
Si empowered his editors to fuel his new American fantasyland, urging experimentation and extravagance that competing publishers balked at and could not compete with. Not content to merely chronicle the establishment, Si insisted that the leading players of his empire emulate the lives of those they profiled. Hence the no-interest loans for West Village town houses and Long Island country retreats, and Wall Street–level perks like chauffeured town cars and fat expense accounts. The excess was legendary. For years, there simply were no budgets: Si’s billions funded an operation where sizzle and status often mattered more than breaking even. Feasts from gourmet provisioner Fauchon were trucked in to fashion shoots; editors zipped back and forth to Europe on the Concorde. Outsiders who scoffed at such profligacy misunderstood the rationale behind Si’s masquerade: for Tina Brown or Anna Wintour to earn the respect of the rich, they had to live like the rich. To shape taste, one had to embody taste. Condé Nast editors were the original influencers, their lives a top-to-bottom marketing campaign for the company that hired them.
Before individuals could amass millions of followers on Twitter or Instagram, Condé was the chief arbiter of the elite, its editors’ whims and signals relentlessly covered, dissected, and mimicked. Tina perfected the practice of hyping her magazine’s upcoming articles to outlets like The New York Times and the network morning shows, turning Vanity Fair stories into meta events—news in themselves. Her high/low sensibility—opulent, celebrity-centric, insiderish, buzzy—reshaped American journalism, demolishing cultural guardrails. Her editorial DNA eventually found its way into journalistic bastions such as The New York Times, which created its Styles section in 1992 in part to compete with Condé’s lifestyle content. Anna Wintour’s Vogue became the most powerful force in global fashion, championing upstarts like John Galliano and Alexander McQueen and helping them secure funding to start their own labels. Graydon’s guest list for the annual Vanity Fair Oscar party elevated movie stars to the A-list.
And the Condé empire played a key role in the fateful rise of a real estate developer named Donald J. Trump, who was a provincial curiosity before GQ featured him on its cover and Si Newhouse personally dreamed up The Art of the Deal, the book that launched Trump’s national stardom (and was published by a Newhouse-owned press). Trump, along with two of his three wives, later graced the covers of Vanity Fair and Vogue, and he proposed to Melania, the future First Lady, at Anna Wintour’s Met Gala, taking advantage of the enormous publicity surrounding the event. Indeed, Condé parties were covered relentlessly by other media outlets, with seating charts presented as a taxonomy of influence. This was especially remarkable given that these extravaganzas were, at heart, simple branding exercises meant to dazzle advertisers and advance the commercial prospects of Condé Nast magazines. No other publisher’s events approached this level of renown: Americans were not talking about a gala thrown by Hearst.
Inside Condé, editors jockeyed for the approval of Si, the “Sun King” whose court was the site of feuds, fiefs, and beheadings. Grace Mirabella, longtime editor of Vogue, learned from a five o’clock local news report that she had been replaced by Anna Wintour: the leading editor in American fashion undone in an instant. Si’s ouster of William Shawn from The New Yorker prompted one of the great literary revolts of the twentieth century. Ron Galotti, an ad honcho who inspired Sex and the City’s Mr. Big, was hired, fired, and rehired by Si in quick succession; Steve Florio, Condé’s chief executive, forced his own brother out of a job. A mercurial Medici who could be maddeningly opaque about his views, Si kept his talent nervous about where they stood. Editors compared the bottles of wine they received from Si at Christmas—who had gotten the more expensive cru? Decades of service could be swept aside the instant the publisher sensed that a title was losing too much money or generating too little buzz. Si so adored this internal competition that when he purchased Women’s Wear Daily in 1999, he asked its editor to gather gossip on Condé Nast—the better to keep tabs on his empire.
In 1999, the company moved to a sleek new skyscraper, 4 Times Square, that not only helped revive Midtown Manhattan’s fortunes—Condé’s influence even extended to urban planning—but also evoked the mid-century power of the Time & Life Building, perhaps the last time a magazine company had so flagrantly expressed its power and arrogance in expensive corporate architecture. The building’s centerpiece was a space-age cafeteria designed by Frank Gehry, which quickly became the most scrutinized corporate canteen on earth; an architectural review in The New York Times ran under the headline “Tray Chic.” By the time it opened, 4 Times Square was the flagship of an international empire, with outposts on multiple continents. In the new millennium, Vogue has expanded into Dubai, Mumbai, and Beijing—Condé colonization.
FOR SUBURBAN KIDS LIKE ME who grew up at the turn of the twenty-first century, Condé’s magazines were emissaries from a cosmopolitan world that shimmered just beyond our horizon: a monthly or weekly spectacle of temptations, refinement, sensual possibilities, and intellectual sophistication that set my imagination ablaze. The name Si Newhouse meant nothing to me, but Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker—and the writers, artists, and photographers whose work filled their pages—represented a world I yearned to join. Condé publications carried the promise that writing and journalism could be a glamorous trade, that nerdy kids like me could combine smarts with style, facts with flair. My parents may not have been rich or socially prominent, but they subscribed to The New Yorker and Architectural Digest, an economical way to demonstrate appreciation for superior taste. By age eleven, I’d started a magazine for my fifth-grade class—my own elementary-school version of Vanity Fair—commissioning articles from friends and distributing copies at the local library. When I finally made it to Manhattan—I could not wait to get to Manhattan—I met my future wife while she was writing at Vanity Fair. Fetching her for dates from the lobby of 4 Times Square, I watched Vogue’s coiffed gazelles and The New Yorker’s tweedy editors greet the purring town cars provided by their employer. These glimpses of Condé’s inner workings only intrigued me further. How had this company become so glamorous and influential—and why was it declining so fast? What would become of the fantasy realm it had loosed upon the world?
BY THE LATE 2000s, Si Newhouse’s notion of the elite had been shaping dreams and desires for nearly three decades. In 2007, when Condé launched Portfolio magazine—a celebration of swashbuckling corporate culture that promised to do for business journalism what Vanity Fair had done for covering Hollywood—Si reportedly committed more than $100 million to the project; Tom Wolfe was commissioned to write at a rumored twelve dollars a word. “We are the top-end publisher and it has served us well and I believe it will stand the test,” the company’s CEO, Charles Townsend, said in 2008.
It didn’t.
The internet demolished the notion of authority in American life—and the animating spirit of Condé Nast. Power has swung from institutions to the individual; what we covet is no longer beamed outward from a Manhattan office tower, but forged across a million digital byways on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook. Portfolio collapsed in 2009, barely two years after its debut. Condé Nast had thrived by showing Americans how to cultivate artistic, graceful, stylish lives. Now the internet had birthed a Warholian utopia where anyone can be famous and commune with the famous. The cultural elites who ran movie studios, programmed TV networks, and controlled FM radio playlists—the symbiotic stars of the Condé universe—not only lost relevance, but were refashioned into the villains of a populist revolution against yesterday’s cultural gatekeepers. Upstart bloggers such as Tavi Gevinson were among the first to prove that teenagers can dictate trends from their bedrooms without the infrastructure (or overhead) of a traditional media company behind them. Readers who grew up absorbing the company’s glamorous imagery—the product of lavish photo shoots and hundreds of hours of styling, editing, and design—can now reproduce a version of it on their Instagram and TikTok accounts in minutes.
And as American institutions came under increased scrutiny, Condé Nast faced its own internal reckoning over class and race. In June 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Anna Wintour apologized for publishing “hurtful or intolerant” material and acknowledged that “Vogue has not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators.” Bracing testimonials emerged from former Black staff members who critiqued the magazine’s culture of exclusivity and its elevation of Eurocentric notions of beauty—the very editorial model that had, until then, generated decades of success.
Si Newhouse died in 2017 at age eighty-nine, leaving behind descendants who did not share his infinite patience with financial losses. Budgets were tightened, titles shuttered, and staffers laid off. Vanity Fair’s Oscar party was pronounced “past its prime” by The New York Times. The Newhouses installed a new chief executive, Roger Lynch, from the digital music streamer Pandora, who had no experience in the magazine industry; he then pushed out the editors of Vogue editions in Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, and Spain. Today, Condé is in retrograde, even as the company’s apogee remains an object of fascination: a reminder of more vibrant days when the America it symbolized was the envy of the world. As Graydon Carter told me, reflecting on his career, “I miss the black-and-whiteness of the twentieth century.”
But the choices of Condé’s editors can still resonate. The gloss and voyeurism of Instagram is an updated version of the wealth porn epitomized by Condé Nast; our digital obsession with house tours and opulent lifestyles has its roots in Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Architectural Digest. Even the old-fashioned printed product makes an occasional splash: a Vogue cover of Kamala Harris, dressed casually in sneakers and a jacket, caused an uproar shortly before she was sworn in as the first female vice president. The chattering class still cared about how Condé Nast depicted its stars.
I did not set out to write an exhaustive encyclopedia of the company; inevitably, I have had to leave out the stories of certain people, and in some cases entire titles, that played significant roles across its 116-year history. This book is intended as an assessment of Condé Nast’s profound impact on American life. The Newhouses—many of them, anyway—were not receptive to my inquiries, and Condé Nast itself did not cooperate beyond confirming the corporate titles of three of its executives. Dozens of writers, editors, artists, publishers, and photographers—some of whom are still employed at Condé Nast—did help, and I am deeply grateful for their generosity. It’s been nearly fifty years since Si Newhouse began building his mythology of American power, desire, and exceptionalism. Consider this a guided tour through the dream life that he sowed.