Condé Nast has had a big spring into summer.
On March 25, former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter released his memoir When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, which took readers through his 25 years at the helm of the magazine. On April 3, just over one week later, the editor-in-chief that succeeded Carter, Radhika Jones, announced that she would be stepping down from the top of the masthead at Vanity Fair. Then, on June 10, Mark Guiducci was named to the top job at Vanity Fair—though with a title different than editor-in-chief: global editorial director, which will see him lead not just the U.S. arm of the publication, but, as his title suggests, editions across the world.
But that’s not all. After 37 years as editor-in-chief at Vogue. Anna Wintour announced on June 26 that she was leaving that role, though she will still continue as Vogue’s global editorial director as well as chief content officer for Condé Nast.
Whew. All of this, and on July 15, New York Times media correspondent Michael Grynbaum’s buzzy book Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America hit shelves—the timing of which couldn’t have been better planned out if Grynbaum had orchestrated it himself. Naturally, when I speak to Grynbaum just under one week after his book launched into the ether, the topic of Wintour comes up.
“The challenge for whoever Anna Wintour’s successor will be is to imprint the idea of Vogue on a younger generation,” he tells me over the phone. Calling this moment in Condé Nast’s history “transitional and transformative” for the company, Grynbaum identifies Wintour as “the most important individual at Condé Nast today—and that’s not only because of her power in the fashion industry, but also her relationships with the luxury advertisers who provide a significant of the revenue for Condé Nast.”
Unquestionably, Wintour is a tough act to follow. Beyond being an editor-in-chief, Wintour—famous for her signature bob and her famous sunglasses—has become a bona fide celebrity herself. Grynbaum tells me that it’ll be difficult for any editor—or head of editorial content, as her successor will be known—to live up to her level of celebrity status. This means that when she does depart, “Vogue will have to find ways to maintain all those important relationships in the fashion world without its most valuable asset,” Grynbum says.
“On the other hand, I think some people inside Condé Nast are excited at the idea of a younger editor taking the reins who may have a different idea of the magazine than Anna has,” he adds. “And if you look at the history of Condé Nast editors who once seemed irreplaceable, [they]
were replaced and their successors reimagined the brand for a new era. So I think there are a lot of very young, talented magazine editors out there. The question is, can Condé Nast provide them with the monetary resources to create a publication that is as appealing and as stylish and glamorous as it was during its heyday?”
That—along with Wintour’s successor—is still to be determined.
“The spending was the point”
Let’s talk about Condé Nast’s heyday, shall we? Grynbaum does this with aplomb in Empire of the Elite, where he recounts when the company had enough money to FedEx writers’ suitcases ahead of them on business trips that they didn’t have to be troubled with carrying it on the airplane. Or the editors who had their assistants fly to Paris ahead of time to decorate their hotel suites so that, when they arrived, it would all be ordered to their liking. Photoshoots cost half a million dollars in catering and travel and set design, “almost like a short film just to create this kind of moment of surprise and delight for the reader,” Grynbaum says. Ahhh, those were the days. (Spoiler alert: those days are over.)
The stories of opulence are too many to count. A standout one for Grynbaum—one he says “tells you a lot about how the place operated”—was when, in the late 1990s, the editor-in-chief of WIRED, a new Condé Nast property at the time, flew from San Francisco to New York City to meet with her new bosses. She booked herself into a modest hotel in the city, “and when her bosses found out where she was staying, she was scolded,” Grynbaum says. “They said, ‘You aren’t spending enough.’” They demanded she move into the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue—probably three or four times the price, Grynbaum estimates.
“They said that when you meet with advertisers, they want you to be staying at the St. Regis,” he says. “And I think that story tells you about how perception was so important to Condé Nast in that it was actually worth it to spend more on hotels because of the image that projected.”
Condé Nast’s business model was exclusivity—to “create this desirable world of luxury and sophistication and charge readers and advertisers to be a part of it,” Grynbaum explains. The world inside Condé Nast’s offerings—not just Vogue and Vanity Fair but also The New Yorker, Allure, Glamour, Architectural Digest, and so on—was an ideal, a way of life to aspire to. “And it was a tremendously successful business model for many years, because this was how high-end advertisers could access an upper class audience or an audience that I call the upper class, or those who wish to join it,” Grynbaum says. Condé Nast dealt in social aspiration. It created a vision of the good life. It was materialistic. It elevated celebrities to mythical figure status. Magazines like those owned by Condé Nast were—and still are—also platforms for first-in-class writers, photographers and designers. “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,” Grynbaum writes in the book. In his words, the company wanted to have a “foothold in every sphere and phase of human life”; he adds, “to be featured by Condé Nast meant you had arrived.” He also adds in the book that at its peak, the company was “simultaneously dysfunctional and successful.”
“The spending was the point,” Grynbaum says of the bygone days of FedExing one’s suitcase ahead of themselves. “It was creating this idea of the company as a hugely glamorous place to work with glamorous people doing glamorous things that actually made readers so eager to subscribe and be a part of its world.”
It took a lot to even make it through the door, as Grynbaum outlines—and it got no less cutthroat once you were hired. Staying in the good graces of the top brass was a challenge; as Grynbaum put it, while there were certainly perks to being an editor-in-chief in the heyday, those at the top of the masthead “remained anxious, even at the top of the totem poll.” Grynbaum interviewed more than 200 people for the book, including several editors-in-chief. “They had all the perks—a free mortgage on their apartment, a free car, a wardrobe allowance,” he says. “But they often didn’t have time to enjoy it because they were working so hard.”
“And so, even at the top of the hierarchy at this company, I think there was a lot of fear in some cases about performing to the level that was expected,” Grynbaum continues. “It was really run like a medieval court, where all the courtiers were seeking the favor of the king.”
The king in question? Samuel Irving “S.I.” Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast during these years. Every year for Christmas, Newhouse would hold a holiday lunch for his editors and executives in the old Four Seasons restaurant. The seating chart every year was scrutinized to see which editors were seated in closest proximity to him.
“It was taken as a sign of how well they were performing,” Grynbaum says. “So, in some cases, these were the only times that these towering editors interacted in a lot of ways. Vogue, for instance, competed against Vanity Fair for the same readers, for the same advertisers. And there are stories about the sort of tricks that Condé magazines would pull on one another, either badmouthing each other to a clothing company that might advertise or signing exclusive contracts with photographers so that they wouldn’t go work for the in-house competition.”
Newhouse egged it on. “He relished the idea of pitting editors against one another and felt that it brought out their best performance,” Grynbaum tells me. “And so that was the management style that Condé Nast followed for many years.”
If Newhouse is the king of yesteryear, Wintour is the modern era’s undisputed queen. But what happens when the queen suddenly abdicates the throne?
“I don’t think it ever really left”
“In many ways, Anna is the monarch of Condé Nast today,” Grynbaum says, noting her oversight over every title in the pantheon except for, interestingly, The New Yorker. She helps titles choose editors; she helps craft their brand strategy. Though it’s no secret that magazines are struggling—to hear Grynbaum put it, even the crème de la crème Condé Nast is “at best breaking, even, perhaps, losing money”—Wintour has influence unlike any other in the business. Whoever comes behind her will have to build that capital, both monetarily and socially. And, because of where the industry sits, the deck is not stacked in their favor.
“If you look at a copy of Vogue today, it looks like a pamphlet compared to the phone book it used to be, with 900 pages of advertising,” Grynbaum says. “But I do think the choices that Vogue makes still resonate.”
Take, for example, when Vogue put Lauren Sánchez on its cover on the occasion of her wedding to Jeff Bezos last month. “It caused a stir,” Grynbaum says. It sparked conversation. It got people talking. People loved it, people hated it—but people were paying attention.
“It was striking to me that Vogue was again at the center of a cultural conversation,” he adds. “And I don’t think it ever really left.”
Though Grynbaum writes in Empire of the Elite that a powerhouse like Condé Nast “never will happen again,” there’s still much riding on the appointment of Wintour’s successor. Their biggest challenge? Appealing to the younger generation—the generation who never knew magazines in its heyday. When it comes to relevance, “I mean, I think for a generation over 40, it very much does still matter,” Grynbaum says. “It’s not a coincidence that Lauren Sánchez [who is 55 years old] agreed to provide Vogue an exclusive photoshoot, but would Lauren Sánchez’s kids feel the same way?”
“I do think there is now a younger generation of readers who aren’t reading print magazines at all and are less impressed by the old media powerhouses,” he continues. “So I think the challenge of Condé Nast moving forward is to educate younger readers that their brands still represent discernment and good taste.”
In writing Empire of the Elite, Grynbaum seeks to show that while Condé Nast “was not by any means a perfect place”—it mattered, and still matters, in terms of shaping culture.
“I do think that curation and discernment are still important for us to make sense of our culture,” he tells me. “And in a time where the internet is so chaotic, the benefit of curation, I think, is greater than ever.” In reading his book—which truly couldn’t have come out at a more interesting moment for Condé Nast—Grynbaum hopes “readers will question some of their own assumptions about the way that cultural influence works—and maybe also enjoy reading about a world that may not come around again.”