Lifestyle
How did Condé Nast go from dominance to decline? A new book explains
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 Vogue, it 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 Vogue, she 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 Yorker, called “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.
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
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A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
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In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
I took a kid’s camera to Paris Fashion Week, because was it ever really that serious? Yes and no. This men’s season happened during one of the hottest weeks in France’s recorded history, which inspired that specific brand of collective hysteria brought on by living through yet another unprecedented moment together — taking over our brains and ruining our plans to wear boots — and a grander reflection on what we were doing there and why. The throngs of teenagers doing back flips into the Canal Saint-Martin and playing soccer in the street set the mood for the week. If the world is ending, you might as well swim in dirty water and have fun doing it, no?
As far as the shows went, there was the coastal stoner energy of Tokyo-based Auralee — brightly colored leathers and furry flip-flops — that reminded me of the low-key elegance of hanging out in Southern California. At the Rick Owens show, Rick-heads made minimal weather-restrictive tweaks to their usual uniforms — platforms, leather, ground-grazing garments — making you appreciate the beauty in that level of ascetic dedication. Louis Vuitton built a literal beach as its runway, complete with sand and a giant wave that felt like a mirage: Is this a heat-induced hallucination or yet another buzzed-about set design under men’s creative director Pharrell Williams? At the Dries Van Noten show, there was an ice-cold beer fridge and popsicles, a chic and inspired detail only rivaled by a collection that was a breath of fresh air during a week where I Googled the symptoms of heat stroke more than once. The Willy Chavarria show was air-conditioned, pumped with Xinú perfume and felt expensive. Sven Marquardt, a Berlin photographer and Berghain’s most famous bouncer, was sitting in front of me, which I took as an incredibly good omen. The painted blue feet and Oakley collab sunglasses at the Kiko Kostadinov show felt auspicious as well.
A look from the Auralee show.
There were conversations floating around about how apocalyptic it felt sitting at a fashion show in over 100-degree Fahrenheit weather, our backs soaked, our minds dizzied, when the industry is responsible for something like 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The cognitive dissonance contributed to the thickness in the air that week.
At the Comme des Garçons show, called “If the War Were to End..,” models danced and ran and skipped out onto the runway for the finale, soundtracked by the joyous sound of children singing “You’re So Good to Me” by the Langley Schools Music Project. In that moment, we were happy, we were clapping, we might have even been hopeful. Humans have the capacity to hold a lot — a fan in one hand while attempting not to completely melt in the front row, and a fantasy that there might still be a future where we get to wear those leopard-print Dries shoes we fell in love with on the runway.
The moments before the Comme des Garçons show.
Comme des Garçons show attendees.
Comme des Garçons, head-to-toe.
The Comme des Garçons show.
The Dries Van Noten show.
A chic and inspired detail at the Dries Van Noten show: ice-cold beer.
Scenes from the ERL presentation.
The Kiko Kostadinov show.
Tapping in from Louis Vuitton beach.
Quavo at the Louis Vuitton show.
Scenes from after the Louis Vuitton show.
Scenes from the Louis Vuitton show.
Scenes from the Nahmias x Puma dinner at Gigi Paris.
Scenes from the On X Online Ceramics rave.
At Silencio to see Venezuelan DJ and producer Safety Trance.
The Willy Chavarria show.
Scenes from Willy Chavarria.
The throngs of teenagers doing back flips into the Canal Saint-Martin and playing soccer in the street set the mood for the week.
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