In Empire of the Elite, Michael Grynbaum tracks Condé Nast’s decades of cultural dominance up through its decline today. Above, Vogue magazines at a newsstand during VOGUE World: New York in 2022.
Sean Zanni/Getty Images for Vogue
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Sean Zanni/Getty Images for Vogue
In June, Anna Wintour announced she was stepping away from her editor-in-chief role at Vogue — a position she’d held for nearly 40 years. The decision came as a surprise — and indicated a major moment of transition and succession in the magazine world.
“People no longer read print magazines the way they used to,” says New York Times correspondent Michael Grynbaum. “And Vogueit still is a global brand — it still has recognition around the world. But now there are thousands of influencers and social media channels where people get ideas about dressing and glamor and clothing and taste.”
In a new book, Grynbaum explores how Condé Nast publications were the arbiters of taste for decades in the U.S. “They were the tastemakers, they were the gatekeepers,” Grynbaum says. He says Condé Nast today is a husk of its former self — thanks in part to shifting tastes, and social media, which has provided a platform for celebrities and influencers.
Grynbaum’s new book is called Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America. He says he was curious about how “one of the great cultural institutions of 20th century America … such a powerful group of cultural tastemakers could so miss the changes in our culture and end up in this attenuated state that they’re in today.”
Interview highlights
On Condé Nast as the tastemaker
Condé Nast was … a group of self-appointed experts who worked in an office building in Manhattan, and they were the arbiters. … Here’s the movie you should be watching this month; Here’s a book you should be thinking about; Here’s a new celebrity that you should be tracking. This was a one-way street. Condé Nast was kind of built on this idea of authority. …
That was the presiding philosophy of the company going back to its founding in 1909. … Vogue magazine was created by a New York society set to essentially say: Here are the rules for being an elite person in New York City, an elite in America at the turn of the 20th century. And that really infused these magazines right up until, I would argue, the last 10, 15 years.
On the company’s longtime focus on luxury and consumption
The company’s history kind of goes back to the Gilded Age, which is when there first was an American leisure class, when there was a new group of Americans who were socially mobile, upwardly mobile, who had disposable income for the first time and were looking to find ways to express themselves through clothing, through interior decorating. So the company has a long history of appealing to this kind of upper middle brow audience. In the 1980s, this was the Gordon Gekko Wall Street era … a time when people were celebrating materialism, were celebrating consumption.
On the glamorous lifestyle of editors in Condé Nast’s heyday
I call them influencers before influencers. The idea was that the editor-in-chief, their entire life should be a top-to-bottom marketing campaign for their magazine and for Condé Nast, the company. … If you were editor-in-chief of a Condé Nast magazine, you had a full-time black town car on demand, usually with a driver that would take you out to any event you needed to go, wait for you on the sidewalk, pick you up, bring you home. You would fly first class to Europe or anywhere you need to go for travel. A lot of people had wardrobe allowances. If you were at the fashion magazines, I talked to editors who would come in with a $40,000 annual clothing allowance, and that was considered modest by Condé Nast standards back then. … To wear out at events, to meet with advertisers, to be out at fashion shows, to essentially wear the flag of Condé Nast, to project this idea that we were the best of the best, and you better listen to what we have to say.
On Condé Nast’s razor thin margins
All of the spending to outsiders seemed irrational and made no sense. … There was an internal logic to it, which is that Condé Nast was kind of predicated on a myth. And the entire organization for many years, it was built around propagating this idea that they were untouchable, that there was a mystique to everyone in this charmed company. And that’s what made readers want to subscribe to own a piece of that fantasy land. And it made the advertisers from luxury brands want to buy pages in these magazines, because they felt that they could make their products part of the fantasy. …Their profits were so razor thin. I mean, they were just barely in the black. And this is back when magazines were a hugely lucrative and profitable business. Condé Nast, they just spent. They spent on photo shoots. They felt that waste was an important part of creativity. That was one of the guiding maxims within the company.
On Anna Wintour putting celebrities on the cover of Vogue
Back in the ’80s, fashion was a very small, insular world. It really wasn’t part of our popular culture. Anna Wintour, when she took over Vogueshe started putting celebrities on the cover of the magazine. And I mean, that’s so common now. I didn’t even realize there was a time when that wasn’t true. …
Anna Wintour put Madonna on an early cover of her magazine, which a lot of the traditionalists actually were furious about. Because at the time, Madonna was seen as this controversial and sort of vulgar character. And Anna said that she’s one of the biggest celebrities of the world, and we’re going to dress her in a way that we felt was appropriate to Vogue magazine. And it was a huge, huge seller.
And that starts a period where celebrities start to really fill the pages of Vogue. And at the same time, fashion itself becomes celebrated. Fashion itself becomes, it gets up there with music and film, and it’s one of the, I guess, the popular arts that we follow. So that rise of fashion paralleled Anna’s own rise in prominence. It was kind of a mutually beneficial phenomenon.
On the way GQ, under editor Art Cooper, changed men’s style in the ’80s and ’90s
I talked to a lot of editors who worked back then — they were almost tricking straight men into reading a magazine about clothing and about grooming. So they would have bikini models and sex columns and sorts of things you might find in Playboy or another magazine like that. And in between, there’d be these literary articles about a double-breasted versus a single-breasted suit and what the best kind of socks you could wear to a party or a wedding. And it was like a system of sneaking in menswear into a straight man’s magazine. And it really took off, it was a phenomenon. It had a huge readership. That was a pretty major sea change in the way that men thought about clothes. … It was the start of “metrosexuality.” … Nowadays, think about the menswear influencers that we see on TikTok and Instagram. Think about athletes, the basketball stars who show off their brand new Thom Browne suits when they’re walking to the locker room. So I really trace a lot of that change to what happened at GQ under Condé Nast.
On what Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorkercalled “the mix”
The high-low blend is so absorbed into our media today that it’s almost hard to believe it didn’t exist back then. … Back in the early ’80s when there were only so many magazines and newspapers that we consumed, most of them were very specifically focused. And so you might get Time magazine to find out what happened in the news that week. You might read the Atlantic Monthly for something more literary. …
Tina Brown … created this blend where you would have a smart political profile about Gary Hart, who was trying to be the vice presidential candidate in 1984, and then a beautiful Annie Leibovitz photograph spread of, say, Daryl Hannah, and then a short story by Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal. And this was really unlike anything that was in the market back then. Readers hadn’t really experienced something like this. The fact that she blended high and low, popular culture, high culture, politics, celebrity, true crime. … It was all there in this beautifully packaged pulp and ink product that arrived through your mail slot once a month — and that was the zeitgeist.
On The New Yorker succeeding with the paywall model
It’s kind of an amazing turnaround because The New Yorker was starting to lose money when Condé Nast bought it. … The Newhouse family, which still controls Condé Nast, I really think they see The New Yorker as an heirloom. And I think they take very seriously their role as the stewards of it. [Editor] David Remnick encouraged the family to invest in an online website, and they introduced a paywall, a subscription service fairly early on compared to other magazines. … It really is a success story that is now one of the Condé magazines that, at least as of a few years ago, was turning a profit. I like to think of this as a nice sign about the enduring power of the written word, that great writing, great editing still has an audience, a devoted audience that’s willing to pay for it.
Sam Briger and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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