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New York Times
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Juicy Chronicle of the Fat Decades at Condé Nast
EMPIRE OF THE ELITE: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, by Michael M. Grynbaum We may be facing a future without magazines, at least glossy ones, and passing into an era of disembodied media entities — an unholy maelstrom of websites, YouTube channels and, worst of all, podcasts. But the golden age of American magazines was very shiny indeed. In 'Empire of the Elite,' Michael M. Grynbaum, a media reporter at The New York Times, has written a lively if elegiac chronicle of Condé Nast, the parent company to Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and The New Yorker, among several other titles, too many of them now defunct. The book sketches its birth and early decades; its acquisition by the self-made newspaper magnate Samuel I. Newhouse in 1959; the dramas and triumphs of its fat decades under his heir, Si Jr.; and finally the deaths (Allure, Details, Domino, Lucky, Portfolio and Self all shuttered; the younger Newhouse himself gone in 2017 at age 89) and diminishments of this century, including the humanitarian crisis that resulted when the unlimited office supply of Orangina bottles was cut off. A newspaperman I used to work with liked to say that there are two types of media columnists — reporters who get the dish on newsroom gossip and critics who are philosophers of ink and pulp — but you never get the twain in one writer. Grynbaum belongs to the former category. When it comes to hirings and firings and office intrigues, the technical word for this book is juicy. He has all the details he can fit, and he has many of them from inside sources, both on the record and anonymous, even if much of it has been aired over the years in earlier tell-alls, screeds, biographies, diaries and gossip rags. 'Empire of the Elite' is weaker on questions of the company's aesthetics and editorial approaches; here Grynbaum tends to repeat the conventional wisdom, swallow the hype or, in matters of controversy, teach the debate. Grynbaum has given himself the task of mythologizing the mythmakers, where he might have chosen instead to demystify them. His prose style might best be described as 'magaziney.' Here's how he opens his chapter on the longtime editor of Vogue: 'The Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan is dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis. One spring morning in 2014, the high priests of a different era gathered by the temple's sandstone columns to hail another female deity: Anna Wintour.' For all his reporting, the editors and publishers who are his main characters emerge with their auras intact, even reinforced. Another problem is that all the myths are basically the same. An outsider journeys to the big city desperate to become an insider, and then transforms that inner circle into his or her own image by getting hired to run a magazine at Condé Nast. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Irish Times
08-07-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
How Condé Nast reinvented the glossy magazine, then lost its way
Anna Wintour's announcement 12 days ago that she would be stepping back after 37 years as editor in chief of Vogue sparked a flurry of 'end-of-an-era' think pieces. Most focused on the implications for the magazine itself. Some suggested the multimillion-dollar wedding of Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos , taking place at the same time in Venice, heralded the dawn of a new era of post-Wintour flamboyant excess among the 1 per cent. And others saw the news as final confirmation that the age of the blockbuster glossy magazine was over, and with it the reign of the world's leading magazine publisher, Condé Nast. Michael Grynbaum's new book, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America , is published this week. Grynbaum, a media correspondent with the New York Times , has produced a deeply researched history of the company in its imperial phase under proprietor Si Newhouse jnr, tracing its transformation from early 20th-century origins to its peak cultural influence and eventual decline. In 1959, Samuel Irving Newhouse snr purchased Condé Nast, primarily interested in its prestige In 1909, Condé Montrose Nast, a New York City-born publisher, bought Vogue, which had been launched in 1892 as a New York weekly journal of society and fashion news. Nast developed the model of 'class, not mass', targeting aspirational, affluent audiences. READ MORE In 1959, Samuel Irving Newhouse snr purchased Condé Nast, primarily interested in its prestige. His son, Newhouse jnr, formally assumed leadership of the magazine empire in 1975. Under his leadership, the company underwent a dramatic reinvention, reviving classic titles and launching cultural juggernauts. Newhouse reinvigorated Vanity Fair, launched Self, integrated Architectural Digest, and acquired the New Yorker. How the wealthy are buying up land to avoid inheritance tax Listen | 22:03 He hired editors from backgrounds – British, Jewish, Canadian – outside the traditional starchy Wasp [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] elites that had dominated the sector. Two English women had a particular impact: Wintour at Vogue and Tina Brown, who declared her mission was to 'make the sexy serious and the serious sexy', at Vanity Fair and then the New Yorker. They introduced a more dynamic and less stuffy London sensibility, embracing pop culture and celebrity rather than social class. Newhouse's lavish spending on editors, writers, photographers and extravagant parties became legendary Condé Nast began to celebrate 'accessible luxury' just as traditional couture was being supplanted by global conglomerates selling the high-end dream to the mid-market masses. The shift was symbolised by Madonna's landmark Vogue cover (1989), GQ's 1984 Donald Trump profile, and the New Yorker's extensive coverage of the OJ Simpson trial (1994). Newhouse's lavish spending on editors, writers, photographers and extravagant parties became legendary. Budgets, he said, were 'for the unimaginative'. The apotheosis was the Annie Liebowtz photoshoots for Vanity Fair, in which the aristocracy of the celebrity circuit were lit and framed with the reverence and attention to detail of a Renaissance altarpiece. They didn't know it at the time, of course, but the 1980s and 1990s would be the final chapter in the story of print media as a vector for immense profits and power. Magazines with hundreds of pages of advertising generated large revenues. Condé Nast was perfectly positioned at the nexus of the celebrity, fashion and luxury worlds. Vogue became synonymous with high fashion and street-style culture; GQ propelled the metrosexual wave of male spending on grooming products while Vanity Fair and the New Yorker helped accelerate the celebrity-industrial complex. Condé Nast tapped into status anxiety by offering readers access to elite culture, democratising luxury through its glossy pages. The publisher's lavish social gatherings, from Vanity Fair's Oscar soirées to the Met Gala, became glamorous Versailles-level spectacles. That 1984 GQ spread was a precursor to the Newhouse-owned Random House publishing Trump's bestselling The Art of the Deal This is a story of gossip, celebrity and wealth in fin de siecle Manhattan, so inevitably the current US president figures. Newhouse's closest confidant was Roy Cohn, the reptilian lawyer and fixer who made Trump his protege. That 1984 GQ spread was a precursor to the Newhouse-owned Random House publishing Trump's bestselling The Art of the Deal. Despite its dominance, the company signally failed to weather the shifting media landscape of the 21st century. The 2008 recession tainted luxury brands. Social media platforms began challenging traditional taste makers, decentralising cultural authority and undercutting Condé's gatekeeper status. While topline circulation figures for the flagship titles have avoided collapse, revenues have halved, the magazines have shrunk and publication frequency has been curtailed in reaction to slumping advert sales. By the time Newhouse died in 2017, New Yorker editor David Remnick confided that the company was in a state of 'dignified panic'. And by the mid-2020s, insiders admitted it 'is no longer a magazine company'. In Empire of the Elite, Grynbaum explores the personalities and unspoken etiquette that fortified Condé's allure: the dress codes, table manners, social fluency. Much of its power derived from status anxiety: one potential editorial hire felt they lost out after committing the cardinal sin at a lunch interview of using cutlery to eat asparagus. Grynbaum frames Condé Nast as a case study in how media shapes and monetises class aspirations, tying cultural identity to consumerism All of this was enforced by editors, like Graydon Carter, Brown's successor at Vanity Fair, who mostly came from outside traditional elites but relished being part of them. All this was brought to our screens in palatable form in The Devil Wears Prada , a thinly veiled satire on Wintour's management style (a sequel, with Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway reprising their roles, is reportedly in the works). Grynbaum frames Condé Nast as a case study in how media shapes and monetises class aspirations, tying cultural identity to consumerism. The company's rise and fall echo larger stories about the decline of print media and the emergence of conspicuous consumption as a form of entertainment in its own right. As legacy media recedes, Grynbaum offers a portrait of an empire built on luxe fantasy and creative ambition, brought to life by big personalities and lavish spending. It stands as both an elegy for the age of media's cultural dominance and a warning about the fragility of centralised power when the world changes.
The Guardian
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Empire of the Elite by Michael M Grynbaum – inside the glittering world of Condé Nast
Samuel Irving 'Si' Newhouse Jr became chair of Condé Nast, the magazine group owned by his father's media company, Advance Publications, in 1975. Under his stewardship, Condé's roster of glossy publications – titles such as Vogue, GQ and Glamour – broadened to include Architectural Digest, a revived Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Newhouse spent big in pursuit of clout, and his company's extravagant approach to expenses became the stuff of legend. Condé positioned itself as a gatekeeper of high-end living but, as Michael Grynbaum explains in Empire of the Elite, its success in the 80s and 90s was down to its willingness to embrace 'low' culture. Condé brought pop stars, television personalities and tabloid intrigue into the highbrow fold, reconstituting cultural capital to fit the sensibilities of an emerging yuppie class with little interest in ballet or opera. Several moments stand out, in retrospect: GQ's 1984 profile of Donald Trump, which paved the way for The Art of the Deal; Madonna's 1989 debut on the cover of Vogue; and the New Yorker's coverage of the OJ Simpson trial in 1994. Tina Brown, appointed editor of the New Yorker in 1992 after a decade at Vanity Fair, said she wanted 'to make the sexy serious and the serious sexy'. Purists bemoaned what they saw as a slide into vulgar sensationalism, but Grynbaum maintains Brown 'wasn't so much dumbing down the New Yorker as expanding the universe to which it applied its smarts'. That expansiveness was key to Condé's mission, and it succeeded so comprehensively that today we take it for granted. Anna Wintour's Vogue would 'elevate the idea of street-style fashion, and presage the industry of stylists and celebrity brand ambassadors that have come to dominate lifestyle media', and GQ's preppy, 'proto-Patrick Bateman materialism' popularised 'the metrosexuality, dandyism and male self-care that have since saturated the culture'. The glory started to fade in the 21st century. The company's acquisitive ethos looked out of touch after the 2008 crash ('Condé's metier was privilege, and privilege had become a dirty word'), and its underwhelming record on race came under scrutiny with the advent of Black Lives Matter. Social media democratised the means of cultural curation, undercutting the authority of established taste-makers. The book ends on a wistful note as Grynbaum contemplates the decline of print media, and the end of an era of plenty. A similar sentiment is expressed in the poignant title of a recent memoir by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, When the Going Was Good. Like Brown's The Vanity Fair Diaries (2017) before it, Carter's memoir offers a vivid, first-hand glimpse of the Condé social whirl. Both books have been praised for their anecdotal brio, and criticised for their namedropping smugness. It's a trade-off. Conversely, Empire of the Elite is a sober affair – an unflustered, chronological account of half a century's comings-and-goings – but has the merit of relative objectivity. The author, a correspondent by trade, keeps his focus on events and his opinions largely to himself; he neither grates nor delights. Gossip junkies and vicarious bon vivants will have more fun with Carter, but Empire of the Elite is a lucid introduction to this rarefied milieu and the people who inhabited it. It sounds like an exhausting world to navigate, 'a land of unspoken codes … The proper knotting of an ascot; the angle of a tie bar; how you dressed, how you spoke, where you went, who you knew – these considerations mattered deeply.' Grynbaum quotes one journalist who believes she missed out on an editorship because, during the interview lunch, she gauchely ate asparagus with cutlery rather than by hand. Tellingly, several of the key players in the Condé story were outsiders: Newhouse, who was Jewish, felt excluded from the Waspy top echelons of US society; Alex Liberman, the veteran editorial director who took Newhouse under his wing and schooled him in urbanity, had been a refugee from Soviet Russia; Carter was a pilot's son from Toronto. These arrivistes understood status anxiety, and astutely monetised it, offering readers an empowering sense of in-group membership for the modest price of a magazine subscription. And, because the United States is a nation built on clambering ambition, it worked. Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped the World by Michael M Grynbaum is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Times
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
‘Anna Wintour? I found her efforts to seem intimidating almost comical'
I have Anna Wintour to thank for bringing me firmly into the Condé Nast fold — and also for either inadvertently or advertently giving me reason to leave that fold 30 years later. We didn't meet the way normal people do. She essentially inherited me. When Condé Nast's chairman, Samuel Irving 'Si' Newhouse Jr, asked her to take over House & Garden in 1987, she was given a magazine with a charmed history and a number of staff and contract writers, me included. Lacking the discernment of previous editors of my freelance offerings, Anna kept me on contract when she took over. I found Anna in those days to be cosy, conspiratorial and completely enticing. My feelings toward her ran in opposition to the tagline 'Nuclear Wintour', which was then at the beginning of its long run. She was a great and loyal friend, and as a result, she had a lot of close friends. Also, she had gone out with Christopher Hitchens, a big validation in my book.
Bloomberg
16-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Condé Nast Was Always a House of Cards. One Man Kept It Standing for Too Long
Despite his vast riches, newspaper heir Samuel Irving 'Si' Newhouse Jr. didn't count for much in midcentury New York. The son of a self-made magnate who'd been publicly dismissed as a 'journalist chiffonier'—a ragpicker—he was a new-money Jew, stymied in society by a city stratified by race, religion and generational wealth. So when his father bought the enfeebled lifestyle publisher Condé Nast, Newhouse began 'to grasp the social possibilities uniquely available to him as the newly minted heir to Vogue,' writes Michael Grynbaum in his new book, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America (July 15, Simon & Schuster). 'Si had grown up all too conscious of the fine gradations of New York society, the invisible old-world barriers that had kept him, by all appearances a wealthy scion, still stuck on the outside looking in.' (Newhouse died in 2017.) Grynbaum, a veteran reporter for the New York Times, fills his chronicle of Newhouse's half-century at the helm of the legendary publisher with enough gossip and arcana to satisfy even the most devoted of Condé Nast obsessives. But added together, it all feels a little sad. Newhouse was, Grynbaum shows, a striver who hired other strivers to publish magazines for a nation of, yes, strivers. Seen from that angle, the many tales of excess and infighting among Newhouse's famous editors (Anna Wintour, Graydon Carter, Tina Brown) add up to less than the sum of their parts. However successfully these media titans chronicled and embodied the high life, they remained well-coiffed flunkies swanning about in a fragile house of cards. At the height of Condé's cultural impact (arguably in the 1990s), the company barely turned a profit; one executive claimed the entirety of Condé Nast earned less than a single Newhouse-owned newspaper, the Staten Island Advance. It was elite, certainly, but not so much an empire as an expensive Potemkin village: America's upper-middle-class taste and tastemakers, subsidized by a single man.
