How Vanity Fair fell from grace under Anna Wintour

Telegraph

14-06-2025

'I certainly look at Vanity Fair and sometimes read it on the plane… Vanity Fair is a terrific magazine, but I'm not poring over it to see what they are doing.' So said American Vogue 's British supremo Anna Wintour in a 1997 interview with the fashion magazine R.O.M.E.
That's a view which has definitely gone out of style for the formidable fashion queen who reputedly inspired the fierce magazine editor in the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada. Having already overseen Vogue since 1988, in December 2020, Wintour, 75, was promoted to chief content officer at Condé Nast, handing her ultimate editorial responsibility for the global editions of Vanity Fair, among other titles.
Once a lavish, highly profitable pop culture blend of show business, politics and high society, Vanity Fair has, according to its critics, fallen in influence and quality. Plummeting news-stand sales and a decline in advertising revenue has left a publication fixated on money and status facing questions over its own relationship with those quintessential American themes.leto
Those questions intensified this week with the appointment of Mark Guiducci, 36, as Vanity Fair 's new editor (and first global editorial director), following the announcement in April by incumbent Radhika Jones that she was stepping down to pursue 'new goals'. It is not that Guiducci, a Southern Californian, who resembles a cross between actor Jim Carrey and a real estate reality television star, is perceived to be unfamiliar the magazine; rather that he's too familiar. Guiducci, who was formerly chief creative officer of Vogue, is a close friend of Bee Shaffer, Wintour's producer daughter. According to the media website Breaker, his nickname is 'The Anna Whisperer' on account of his closeness with his boss.
' Vanity Fair is best when it has an outsider-at-the insider's ball mindset,' says a former Vanity Fair staffer, citing previous editors Tina Brown and Graydon Carter. 'Tina arrived from England fresh from those waspish society exposés in Tatler; Graydon came from Canada and Spy [the satirical magazine he co-founded]. Much of what Mark has written has been about Condé Nast.'
One event that generated much discussion, according to former colleagues, was Guiducci's account for Vogue of Wintour and Shaffer's dinner for Tony Award nominees in 2017 at Wintour's New York home: 'Call it sweet success!' he concluded of the night celebrating Broadway's equivalent of the Oscars .
Guiducci, like Wintour, is an accomplished networker. An Anglophile, he studied at The Courtauld Institute of Art and counts Princess Beatrice and Eugenie as good friends. Just don't expect too many Vanity Fair exclusives about their beleaguered father. 'Mark's the ultimate Condé Nast company man – he even wrote Vogue features about tennis, Anna Wintour's favourite sport!' the former staffer says, adding, 'It's unfair to say it's over for him before he's begun but I wonder how revealing his Vanity Fair will be.'
Guiducci's predecessor Radhika Jones, who came from Time magazine, endured a rocky tenure. Tina Brown's Vanity Fair delivered exclusives about Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher and infamously persuaded a seven-months-pregnant Demi Moore to pose nude on the cover in 1991; Graydon Carter balanced long reads on Old Hollywood and coverage of corporate scandals with world exclusives on Michael Jackson's alleged sexual misconduct and the identity of Watergate's 'Deep Throat'.
Jones set out to broaden the editorial brief and include stories about people who were not rich and powerful. 'It feels like we have all this opportunity to tell new stories with new faces and new voices,' she declared upon becoming editor in 2017. New readers proved harder to come by, however. According to the New York Times, the magazine's print sales have declined. And, although digital subscriptions have increased, with overall circulation remaining steady at just over 1.2 million, online traffic is down 39 per cent in the last four years, according to the media measurement company Comscore.
Jones's Vanity Fair generated some exclusives but, as with last year's bizarrely-written scoop about late novelist Cormac McCarthy's relationship with a 16-year-old girl – which appeared to treat McCarthy's paedophilic interest in a teenager as a great love story – they often went viral for the wrong reasons.
While Vanity Fair always steered progressive in its politics, it has become even more stridently Left-wing online. Headlines have included 'After Thoroughly F---ing Over America, Mitch McConnell Decides to Treat Himself to a Break', 'Trump 2024: Why the Ex-President Should Never Be Allowed Within 1,000 Feet of the White House Again' and, earlier this week, 'Jacinda Ardern Is No Longer Campaigning for Office – Now It's for Humanity.'
' Vanity Fair under Tina and Graydon had plenty of buzz,' says New York society photographer Patrick McMullan. '[Under Jones] it became more politically correct, which is good in some ways, but I didn't feel compelled to read it as much.'
The ex-staffer questions the wokeness and political posturing: 'A few of us met up just after Trump got elected again and someone said the only definitive metric that Vanity Fair has made the world a better place is through the magazine becoming thinner in size, meaning less paper, less trees chopped down and less emissions!' The May 2025 edition contained 90 pages, compared with 176 pages in May 2015.
Jones's desire for a more inclusive publication aligned with a sense that the magazine needed a refresh after her predecessor's 25-year tenure. Her approach, however, was not universally well-received. 'The covers under [Radhika Jones] have been photographed badly to the extent that they are among the worst in modern magazine history', says veteran writer Roger Friedman, who covers Vanity Fair for the entertainment website Showbiz 411. 'I think that DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] stuff will surely go now.'
However, a source close to Vanity Fair says that Guiducci is intent on keeping the magazine as progressive as it was under his predecessor.
Sources say another factor behind Guiducci's appointment was the role he will play in shaping events hosted by the publication – the Vanity Fair Oscars party is still regularly attended by some of the ceremony's biggest stars. Part of his duties at Vogue involved organising Vogue World, a series of philanthropic artistic extravaganzas in big cities, including London in 2023. 'Vogue World is closer to a day of shopping than it is to the contents of the magazine,' says Friedman. 'If they were really serious they could have any number of qualified people who could be great editors for Vanity Fair. This is Anna saying she wants someone she can control.'
A source close to Vanity Fair says the interview process was long and rigorous and that Wintour would never have chosen Guiducci if he wasn't the best candidate for the job. A spokesperson for Vanity Fair says 'the staff are thrilled with the appointment'.
But Wintour's closeness to Guiducci remains a rich source of debate among fashionistas. Manhattan-based investment banker Euan Rellie, whose socialising resulted in him being nicknamed the 'Fashion Banker', says, 'I met Mark fleetingly – he was slick and polished. But Anna's M.O. these days is to surround herself with allies who she enjoys hiring and then promoting to the extent that it's in danger of becoming a social network.'
According to a former Condé Nast editorial executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, the predicament facing Vanity Fair has been caused by Wintour's elevation as global chief content officer, which resulted in her supervising international titles. 'Her assumption of total power coincided with a structural upheaval in the company,' he says. 'The budgets got centralised in New York and international editors had to defer to Vogue. Anna's a brilliant editor but her strategic ideas were not always informed by a huge amount of background knowledge.
'She would go on Zoom meetings and talk about how to cover subjects, such as sport, that she wasn't always an expert in.'
Another Vanity Fair contributor, speaking on condition of anonymity, adds that the magazine's feature ideas are often now commissioned and co-ordinated in conjunction with Vogue scheduling. 'If you want to write about an in-demand personality or event, Anna will have often secured the exclusive interview or photoshoot for Vogue and you'll need a fresh angle for your idea not to get [scrapped],' he says.
Of course controversy has accompanied Vanity Fair ever since it launched in 1913 (it was folded into Vogue in 1935 before being revived in 1983). In 2009, the actor Rupert Everett, who was listed on the magazine's masthead as a contributing editor, was sacked for telling the Daily Beast, 'Who does one have to f--- to get off that masthead?'
But the magazine long benefited from the luxurious excesses of magazine publishing with colossal editorial budgets and expenses. Joan Juliet Buck, a former contributing editor to Vanity Fair and editor of French Vogue, who wrote of her Condé Nast experiences in her memoir The Price of Illusion, recalls how a Vanity Fair Princess Diana cover story in 1989 arose: 'I said, 'I have this tax bill to pay', and Tina [Brown] said, 'I'll pay you enough to cover it if you write about Diana.'' Buck adds: 'Tina invented the buzz and the mix. The mix created the buzz. I wrote about the Paris Air Show for Vanity Fair, but she said, 'Martin [Amis] handed in his piece about Wimbledon before you handed in your piece about the Paris Air Show and I'm not running them both in the same issue – so you lose!''
Buck believes Vanity Fair has become the victim of changing tastes in reading habits: ' Vanity Fair used to gather together urgency and glamour into a single monthly object that created the thrill of the moment, and none of that exists anymore,' she says. 'With the end of magazines has come the end of moment itself.'
Compounding Vanity Fair 's current problems are that Graydon Carter's Air Mail website, launched in 2019, is evoking the spirit of his Vanity Fair – a recent story featured allegations of sexual misconduct by the Oscar-winning actor Jared Leto which he denies. Carter has also poached a raft of former Vanity Fair staffers. 'Last year at Cannes [Film Festival] Graydon threw a party for the 100 th anniversary of Warner Bros and they upstaged Vanity Fair,' says Friedman. 'This year Vanity Fair didn't throw a party at Cannes.'
Carter, who was indiscreet about Wintour in his recent memoir When the Going Was Good, nevertheless has declared Guiducci the 'perfect editor for Vanity Fair '. Brown called him a 'fabulous, fresh appointment with bags of fun and fresh ideas'.
And Dana Brown, a former Vanity Fair deputy editor, also agrees with Wintour's choice. 'Mark's first job out of college was a Vanity Fair assistant so he has VF in his genes,' he says. 'He's socially connected in the art and fashion worlds and being a very public face is a really important part of it - that's something the previous regime didn't understand.'
Patrick McMullan says: 'Everybody I know loves Mark so let's hope he brings the buzz back to Vanity Fair.'
In today's world, that might prove too tall an order. Asked on the Condé Nast website in 2023 about his plans for Vogue World, Guiducci answered, 'Sooner or later, someone will do a fashion show in space.' The cosmos can wait. For now restoring Vanity Fair to its former glory seems like the magazine equivalent of the moon shot.