Latest news with #InsideCondéNast
New York Post
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Inside the lavish Condé Nast life: Mirrors to make staffers look slimmer, competing for free Hugo Boss suits — and Anna Wintour's wasteful lunch
In the late 1990s, when billionaire publisher SI Newhouse decided to move his Condé Nast headquarters from 350 Madison Avenue to 4 Times Square, there were grumblings amongst staffers at Vogue, Vanity Fair and other magazines within the media empire. While the new location was only two blocks from the former headquarters, there were concerns that Times Square was seedy — and too far from a beloved upscale Italian restaurant, Mangia, from which staffers liked to order pricey grilled eggplant. There were also worries about whether the closet space in the new offices would be large enough to contain everyone's designer coats. 11 Anna Wintour and SI Newhouse attend a book party in 1990. Getty Images Advertisement To boost enthusiasm for the move, Newhouse and Condé's then editorial director James Truman had an idea: They would build an elaborate cafeteria for employees. The resulting dining area wasn't your standard feeding frenzy space. Newhouse hired star architect Frank Gehry to design it. The venue, rumored to cost as much as $30 million, featured 39 cozy banquettes — the better for gossiping. Seventy-six panels of Venetian glass glittered from the ceiling. And the pièce de résistance? The distorted mirrors on the columns were specially designed by Gehry — to make employees look thinner 11 The legendary Condé Nast cafeteria featured mirrors that made employees appear thinner. Brian Zak/NY Post Advertisement 'It was a very witty architectural gesture … that encouraged performance, and made people look and feel good,' Truman says in the new book, 'Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America,' by Michael M. Grynbaum (Simon & Schuster; out today). Grynbaum portrays the lavish spending at Condé Nast during its magazines heydays in the '80s, '90s and early aughts — and the jaw-dropping displays of excess enjoyed by editors including Vogue's Anna Wintour and Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter. '[Newhouse] empowered his editors to fuel his new American fantasyland, urging experimentation and extravagance that competing publishers balked at and could not compete with,' he writes. '[His] billions funded an operation where sizzle and status often mattered more than breaking even.' In 1989, famed photographer Annie Leibovitz was supposedly hesitant about renewing her contract with Vanity Fair and asked for a $250,000 raise. Newhouse told the magazine's then editor-in-chief, Tina Brown, to go along with it, saying 'Don't nickel and dime her.' Advertisement 11 Staffers initially weren't enthused about the headquarters moving to 4 Times Square. New York Post Alan Richman, a writer who started covering food for GQ in 1986, recalls going to Tokyo for two weeks in 2008 for the magazine. Upon returning, he filed an expense report for $14,000, prompting an editor to ask: 'Is that all?' Even more over-the-top, the magazine paid for Richman to travel to Milan and Florence for the Italian menswear shows, even though he didn't cover fashion. His role? To select wine that would suit GQ's editor, the late Art Cooper, when he entertained Italian advertisers. In NYC, Cooper was known to spend lunch holding court in his dedicated booth at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, where he would enjoy a martini and a very pricey bottle of Italian wine. It wasn't uncommon for the tab to more than $500, but no matter, it was charged straight to Condé. Advertisement '[Newhouse] liked his editors to live the upper-class-lifestyle they pedaled,' Grynbaum writes. 'He didn't have to tell Art Cooper twice.' 11 A new book looks at Condé Nast's heyday and the lavish life top editors enjoyed. Cooper even borrowed a million bucks from Condé to buy a second home in Connecticut, where he'd host staffers for summer getaways, sometimes pitting them against each other on the tennis court. One winner was awarded a Hugo Boss suit. Other top editors, including Carter and Wintour, also got favorable loans from the company to buy homes. Spending lavishly was the norm. Editors jetted to Europe on the Concorde and stayed at five-star hotels. Those who booked cheaper lodging were chastised. Staffers also dipped into petty cash and took limos all around town on the company dime. Grynbaum writes of editors, some of whom had dedicated drivers, using company cars to pick up Chinese takeout or go to the chiropractor — and 'at least one' assistant who made use of the tony transportation for a drug run. 11 Arthur Cooper, the late former Editor-in-Chief at GQ, was known for his extravagant taste in wine and $500 lunches at the Four Seasons. FilmMagic Advertisement 'As Si explained it,' he asserts, 'Condé did not have to answer to shareholder, and it was important to keep valued employees happy.' And the big spenders had the smallest details of their lives catered to. Carter, who served as Vanity Fair's editor-in-chief for 25 years, had an assistant meet his car each morning and carry his briefcase to his office, so that he could stroll through the lobby unencumbered. At the end of the day, the assistant would transport the briefcase to the car, after the editor asked, 'Will you do the honors?' Another key task for Carter's assistants was traveling ahead of him to prepare his suite at lavish hotels, stocking the desk with the same pencils and ashtray that the had in the NYC office. Advertisement Wintour, who recently shifted from Vogue's editor-in-chief to global editorial directorial, had to have her daily cappuccino perfectly timed. She had a standing lunch reservation at the Royalton, where a restaurant staffer would start making the drink 10 minutes ahead of her planned arrival, in case she was early. If the drink sat out for more than two minutes, it was tossed out, and a new one prepared. 11 Graydon Carter would have an assistant carry his briefcase from his town car to his office so he could walk through the lobby unencumbered. Corbis via Getty Images Sometimes Wintour ran so late that, a former employee at the Royalton told Grynbaum, as many as 12 cappuccinos might be made to get the timing just right. Wannabes looking to work at Condé, meanwhile, had to clear a high society bar for entry. Advertisement In the mid-1990s, those applying for an assistant job at Vogue faced an oral exam where they had to identify, on the spot, various people, places and elements of culture high and low, from a typed list of 178 entries. 'The ideal candidate would recognize Fassbinder as the New German Cinema director, Evan Dando as the lead singer of the Lemonheads, the Connaught as the luxury London hotel, and the opening sentence of Proust's 'Swann's Way,'' Grynbaum writes. Once in, those from common backgrounds sometimes had to be schooled to behave more like privileged WASPs and British aristocrats. 11 Photographer Annie Leibovitz (pictured with Carter) was known for her extravagant, expensive shoots. Getty Images for Vanity Fair Advertisement 'I had to learn how to speak like a Condé Nast person,' Jennifer Barnett, a Navy brat-turned-Teen Vogue editor, told Grynbaum. 'You never say anything to anyone directly.' When Carolyne Volpe arrive as a beauty assistant at Vogue in her early 20s, her boss told her there was already a Caroline at the magazine — and said she should go by her given first name, Lynden, instead, though no one in her life had ever called her that. 'She thought it was a chicer, more unique name, which it probably is,' Volpe says in the book. When employees were fired, it was handled with upper crust stealth. Alex Liberman, the publishing company's legendary editorial director, had a strategy where he would pop into someone's office just before going home time, gently touch their arm or shoulder and say something like, 'May I be frank, they're going to fire you tomorrow.' He'd then make a point of telling the person he wanted to keep in touch and arrange a lunch date, on the spot, for a few weeks out — somewhere fancy but public. 11 Anna Wintour with Newhouse (left) and designer Karl Lagerfeld attend the 'Seventh on Sale' event in 1990. Getty Images Photo shoots could be especially over-the-top and wasteful. Numerous samples of pricey baubles from Cartier were smashed for Irving Penn to get the shot just right. In the 1960s, Vogue editor-in-chief Diane Vreeland had Irving Penn reshoot an elaborate fashion spread not once but twice because the shade of green wasn't just right. In 1988, a Vogue team spent weeks in Kenya for a disastrous shoot featuring Kim Basinger in safari garb. Twenty-three trunks of clothes had to be shipped to Africa, and falcon was hired for the actress to hold — as her designer heels sunk into the mud and she feared it would attack her face. The following year, Tina Brown, then the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, had Leibovitz shoot 2,500 rolls film and fly 41,000 miles around the world— in first class, of course — to create a high-wattage portfolio of stars of the decade. 11 Wintour looked glam at a Fashion Week event in 1990 with designers Gianna Versace (from left), Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Lacroix. Getty Images Eventually, the purse strings had to be tightened. In 1996, the Wall Street Journal reported that nine of Condé's 14 magazines were unprofitable, and that the company had lost some $20 million in the fiscal year ending in 1994. Still, there was optimism. In 2007, Condé launched Portfolio magazine, with a reported $100 million behind it. Tom Wolfe was reportedly paid a whopping $12 per word to write a 7,400-word story for the new project. Its first sentence, which would have netted Wolfe more than $200? 'Not bam bam bam bam bam bam, but bama bampa barama bam bammity bam bam bammity barampa.' 11 Anna Wintour became co-chair of the Met Gala in 1995 and transformed the event into one of fashion's biggest nights. Getty Images 'We are the top-end publisher and it has served us well and I believe it will stand the test,' Charles Townsend, the CEO of Condé, said at the time. But, as Grynbaum notes, 'it didn't.' The final nail in the coffin was when Portfolio editors rented a live elephant for a photo shoot. A threatening pachyderm standing over a banker at a desk was meant to convey that credit derivatives were the 'elephant in the room' in the banking world. The magazine abruptly folded in 2009, in the depths of the recession, after two profitless years. Newhouse passed away in 2017 at age 89. That same year, the company was reported to have lost more than $120 million. 11 An elaborate photoshoot for Portfolio magazine put a real elephant in a financial office environment to illustrate the idea that credit derivatives are the 'elephant in the room.' Condé Nast Portfolio Two years prior, Condé Nast had left Times Square for 1 World Trade Center, where Self, Glamour, Teen Vogue and Allure were all reduced to online-only editions. Details and Lucky were shuttered. As Carter wrote earlier in his own book, 'When the Going Was Good,' earlier this year, 'You never know when you're in a golden age. You only realize it was a golden age when it's gone.'
Los Angeles Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Will there ever be another editor as powerful as Anna Wintour? ‘Elite' chronicles a fading empire
When Vogue tastemaker Anna Wintour announced late last month that she would be stepping down as editor in chief after 37 years, the news sent shock waves through the media business and fashion world. Wintour, who will remain chief content officer for Condé Nast and global editorial director for Vogue, is a grand symbol of a magazine empire that includes Wired and Vanity Fair: a demanding, glamorous longtime chair of the Met Gala who has set fashion trends and made world-famous designers, some of whom she helped create, bow and tremble. She covers news, she creates news, she is news. Predictably enough, word of her changing status ignited frenzied speculation about who might take on the newly created role of U.S. head of editorial content for Vogue and eventually succeed her. Condé Nast, which publishes enough other glossy magazines to fill a newsstand (if any still exist), remains very much alive, and it's the subject of Michael M. Grynbaum's new book 'Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America.' But as Grynbaum makes clear in his book, the Condé sway isn't quite what it used to be. The company's most powerful editors, including Graydon Carter (Vanity Fair) and Tina Brown (Vanity Fair and then the New Yorker), have stepped aside. More importantly, the rise of TikTok, Instagram and the like have created a world where almost anyone with an opportunist's instinct can be an influencer. 'The means of glamour production were brought to the masses,' Grynbaum tells The Times in an interview taking place after Wintour's announcement. 'If you look at TikTok and Instagram, a lot of people are re-creating the status fantasies that Condé Nast was notorious for: the real estate tours of somebody's mansion that are right out of Architectural Digest, or the fit check and outfit of the day that ascended from GQ, Vogue and Glamour.' The man most responsible for the Condé Nast that readers know today was Samuel Irving 'S.I.' Newhouse Jr., better known as Si. The son of a first-generation American who built a massively successful newspaper chain and purchased Condé Nast in 1959, Si took the family's rather sleepy and traditional magazine business and injected a shot of sex, celebrity and pizzazz. The Newhouses were for many years seen as arrivistes and interlopers, a perception tinged with antisemitism; New Yorker institution A.J. Liebling, himself Jewish, labeled the elder Newhouse a 'journalist chiffonier' — a rag picker. When Si took over as chairman of Condé Nast in 1975 — and then bought the New Yorker in 1985 — he set about to become a sort of outsider's insider, obsessed with status and the good life and determined to shape a collection of magazines that represented aspirational living. And he insisted that his most valuable employees walk the walk. To work at the company at its peak was to live extravagantly by a journalist's standards. Grynbaum, who writes about media, politics and culture for the New York Times and grew up reading Condé Nast magazines, was struck hard by that extravagance. 'I was writing about magazine editors who had 24-hour town car service, limousines that would drive them around to their appointments, wait outside at the sidewalk while they ate a giant lunch at the Four Seasons restaurant, and it all got expensed back to Condé Nast,' he says. 'Empire of the Elite' is laden with comical examples of privilege. One of my favorites: the Vogue editor who 'charged her assistant with the less than exalted task of removing the blueberries from her morning muffin; the editor preferred the essence of blueberries, she explained, but not the berries themselves.' The Condé Nast glory era really kicked off in the 1980s, as conspicuous consumption swept through the land. 'The idealism of the 1960s was yielding to the materialism of the 1980s, a new preoccupation with the navel-gazing, ego-stroking life,' Grynbaum writes. But much of Newhouse's approach now seems like standard operating procedure. When he bought the New Yorker, a set-in-its-ways magazine with a limited readership and articles that could take up half an issue, it had largely turned up its nose at the idea of soliciting new subscribers. He tapped Tina Brown, a brash Brit then serving as Vanity Fair editor, to run the magazine in 1992. This set off culture clashes that resonated throughout the industry — and yielded some piquant anecdotes. For example: Some at the magazine were aghast when Brown assigned Jeffrey Toobin to cover the O.J. Simpson murder trial, a subject they saw as beneath the magazine's standards. Critic George W.S. Trow actually resigned, accusing Brown of kissing 'the ass of celebrity culture.' Brown responded that she was distraught, 'but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.' Newhouse, who died in 2017, made FOMO fun. It should be noted that he also helped create Donald Trump. GQ featured him on its cover when he was, as Grynbaum writes, 'a provincial curiosity'; of more consequence, Newhouse, as the owner of Random House, came up with the idea for 'The Art of the Deal,' the 1987 Trump business manifesto ghostwritten by magazine journalist Tony Schwartz. Wintour has been a powerful force in the Condé Nast machine; her turning over the daily reins of U.S. Vogue signals even more change for a company that has seen plenty of it. 'I think it is an acknowledgment on her part that she won't be around forever, and that there needs to be some kind of succession plan in place,' Grynbaum says. 'It's amazing how much the influence and power of Vogue is predicated on this one individual and her relationships and her sway.' Condé Nast isn't what it used to be, because print isn't what it used to be. Like so many legacy media companies, it hemorrhaged money as it proved slow to adjust to the digital revolution. At times 'Empire of the Elite' reads like an ode to the sensuous experience of reading a high-quality glossy magazine, and wondering who might be on next month's cover and what (or who) they'll be wearing. Condé Nast still means quality. But the age of empire is mostly over.
Axios
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Michael Grynbaum's history of Condé Nast, "Empire of the Elite," coming July 15
A book four years in the making: New York Times media correspondent Michael Grynbaum will be out July 15 with " Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America." Why it matters: It's billed as a cultural history of Condé Nast — publisher of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue and GQ — as titan of the "once-glamorous magazine world," and "the profound influence of its magazines on the last half-century of American life." The book reveals how powerful editors including Graydon Carter, Anna Wintour and Tina Brown (cover photos, from left) " indelibly shaped our modern ideas of celebrity, fashion, class, and what it meant for Americans to aspire to 'the good life,'" Grynbaum tells Axios. Grynbaum, who joined The Times as an intern after Harvard, adds: "Condé was a lot like a movie studio in the Golden Age of Hollywood: a dream factory of artistic all-stars, overseen by a mercurial and sometimes brutal benefactor, whose creative output defined the nation's aspirations and tastes. It was the ultimate media gatekeeper — until the internet happened." "I love magazines, and I'm fascinated by how Americans decide who or what is elite," said Grynbaum, who also has covered presidential campaigns and City Hall. "I couldn't find a rigorously reported history of Condé's power and influence, so I decided to write one. The book is the result of four years of archival research and hundreds of interviews with Condé figures past and present." Behind the scenes: Grynbaum tells me he started the book proposal in January 2021 (a pandemic project!) and sold the book in September 2021. "I discovered [the late Condé owner] Si Newhouse's teenage letters, which I believe have never been published, in which Si writes about fighting with his father (Sam Newhouse, the newspaper magnate who bought Condé Nast) and admires his high school best friend, Roy Cohn," Grynbaum said. "I've got a one-act play written by [former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor] Tina Brown when she was 23 about a 'London career girl' who tries to break into Manhattan magazines. And an unpublished full-length screenplay by [legendary New Yorker reporter] Lillian Ross — about a literary magazine (like The New Yorker) that gets taken over by a glitzy businessman (like Si Newhouse and Condé Nast)."
