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Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America
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About This Book
From a New York Times media correspondent, a dishy history of the Condé Nast magazine empire, home of Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and more, focusing on its glitzy heyday from the 1980s through the 2000s.For decades, Condé Nast and its glittering magazines defined how to live the good life in America. The brilliant, complicated, striving characters behind Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, Architectural Digest, and many other titles manufactured a vision of luxury and sophistication that shaped consumer habits, cultural trends, intellectual attitudes, and political beliefs the world over. Condé's billionaire owner Si Newhouse and his stable of star editors, photographers, and writers were the gatekeepers who decided what and who mattered, and they offered those opinions to tens of millions of readers every month. They were the ultimate influencers—before social media changed everything. The magazines crowned celebrities by the dozens, patronized creative talent much as the Medicis had underwritten Renaissance artists, and supercharged opulent events like the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and the Met Gala, which came to rival any fete that Louis XIV ever hosted at Versailles. The book is full of fresh behind-the-scenes reporting about a plethora of boldface names and sets out to explain how Condé Nast established itself as a de facto American aristocracy, anointing an elite and dictating the culture they presided over. The colorful story of Condé Nast at its zenith and the profound way it influenced how Americans aspired to look, eat, decorate, date, marry, and even think, has never been examined deeply. Empire of the Elite is the first book-length history of an empire whose publications refashioned American notions of prestige, whose editors became celebrities themselves, and whose diminution offers a cautionary tale of class, hubris, and technological change, even as its aesthetic and ethos remain influential to this day.
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Reviews
"Grynbaum digs into the inner workings of Condé Nast in exquisite detail, tracing the career of editor Tina Brown, who helmed both Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and shedding light on the 'accusations of racial insensitivity' at Bon Appétit in 2020."
"Where once the publishing house was the life of the party, it is now a barely animated corpse, felled by the 2008 financial crash, the rise of the internet and a shift in public mood that no longer finds Condé Nast's veneration of wealth quite so appealing."
"A well-crafted portrait of a publishing house whose fortunes reflect those of the magazine industry as a whole."
"Lively if elegiac ..."
"A sober affair—an unflustered, chronological account of half a century's comings-and-goings—but has the merit of relative objectivity ..."
"Grynbaum's book details the rivalry between the likes of Carter, Wintour and the wonderful Tina Brown, but for some reason it only tells half the story ..."
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