The sun might be setting on the lustred world of Condé Nast. A new book, Empire of the Elite, reveals how the kings and queens of the glittering castle, plump with hubris, failed to catch the digital wave that ultimately drowned them. One Vanity Fair writer described it as “the four horsemen of the magazine apocalypse”: the 2008/9 financial crisis, the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter. To understand why the world’s most beautiful and influential magazines fell off a high-rise hill, New York Times media writer Michael M. Grynbaum goes back to the very beginnings of the company.
Samuel Irving Newhouse, known as Si, was the son of a first-generation American who built a successful newspaper chain and bought Condé Nast in 1959. It was then a downscale, traditional magazine business, but Newhouse saw it as his ticket into high society. The Newhouses had long been regarded as vulgar arrivistes and were stained by antisemitism, even from the Jewish establishment. One grandee of that community sniffed that the elder Newhouse was a “journalist chiffonier”, a rag picker.
And so Si Newhouse set out to produce the classiest magazines that would reflect — nay, create — the most elite lifestyles. He hired the exquisitely cultured Alex Liberman, himself a Russian immigrant, who schooled Newhouse in culture and etiquette and oversaw all the editors like a gilded hawk. One aspirant editor told how she had been taken to lunch by Liberman, where he insisted that they order asparagus. She began eating it with a knife and fork and was horrified to see Liberman eating it with his fingers, the correct way. She’d failed the test. She didn’t get the job.
Because as a young man Newhouse had felt the sting of snobbery, he was determined to show the world that he was a cultivated man and an astute businessman. Condé Nast became, says Grynbaum, “a land of unspoken codes and Byzantine social rules, proficiency in which was required in order to succeed. The proper knotting of an ascot; the angle of a tie bar; how you dressed, how you spoke, where you went, who you knew — these considerations mattered deeply.” The company and its employees were defined by their mastery of perception and the minutest criteria of caste. It was built by outsiders wanting to get in.
Graydon Carter, one of its greatest editors, was an outsider, too. He started out life in Canada and once worked as a telephone lineman in rural Saskatchewan. “He was a conjurer: he dreamed of a fantasy Manhattan life, willed it into being and made himself the star of the show.” He turned VF into a culturally important vessel for the celebrity complex. And he learned to weaponise exclusivity. Invitations to the famous VF Oscar party are still bitterly fought for; a place on the annual Hollywood Issue gatefold cover still creates an unholy skirmish.
His predecessor was the platinum Valkyrie Tina Brown, fresh from the UK. And then there was Anna Wintour, another import from the UK, who has generated more column inches in her decades-long career than the royal family.
Top staffers lived like millionaires, with rents paid on fancy apartments and chauffeured cars at their beck and call. They had bottomless credit cards and a window in the building where they could draw any amount of cash. Once, on a shoot in India, a monkey clambered down a tree and grabbed a bag containing thousands of dollars out of a journalist’s pocket, enough for the rest of the team’s stay. The company just wired over thousands more. Budgets were for little people. There was no limit. But Grynbaum sounds a darker note. The majority of the Condé Nast workforce were women, but the executives who held the purse strings were all men. While women could rise to positions of massive influence, their power was limited to editorial. One complained that they were infantilised as “little ladies” and given a pat on the head.
Threatening clouds began to gather. The economic decimation caused by the 2008 market crash was one thing — after all, the magazines had weathered recessions in the past. But Condé Nast now faced a more existential threat: “Its métier was privilege, and privilege had become a dirty word.” Wealth porn, the lifeblood of Condé titles, was no longer sexy; in fact, it bordered on the obscene. Students who graduated into the 2008 devastation struggled to find work and economists predicted that this would curtail their lifetime earnings. They would never achieve those gleaming lives portrayed in the magazines. This was the fifth, more subtle horseman of the magazine apocalypse. Aspiration was strangled to death.
The powers that be — or were — failed to rise to the challenge of the internet, believing that advertisers would always want a thick, sheeny page to show off their products. Time after time they missed the digital boat. In one appalling example, a décor editor took a business plan to her bosses for a website where readers could gather all the ideas they found on the web into their own folder. She was laughed out of the office. Today, the market capitalisation of Pinterest is $22 billion.
Just a few of the magazines still survive, but Grynbaum demonstrates that we still live in the world that Condé bequeathed to us: the world of the VF Oscar party, Vogue’s Met Gala, and Allure’s once-groundbreaking Best of Beauty awards. It’s a world still obsessed with status and celebrity and consumption, but the old gatekeepers have given way to influencers and YouTube, TikTok, and Substacks.
“The means of glamour production were brought to the masses,” Grynbaum says. “If you look at TikTok and Instagram, a lot of people are re-creating the status fantasies that Condé Nast was notorious for: the 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.”
Brown (who herself has a terrific Substack) mourns the demise of curation. Reading everything online is just an uncalibrated list of stories. There is a vital place for gatekeepers, she says. Creative talents producing risky stuff are orphaned. “There’s no one to say, ‘I love it, I’m greenlighting it, Pay attention to this.’”
From the November edition of Wanted, 2025
