Fresh Air - The Dominance & Decline Of The Condé Nast Magazine Empire

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

For decades, Condé Nast publications such as Vogue and Vanity Fair were consequential tastemakers. Writer Michael Grynbaum explores the heyday of these magazines and how they lost their footing. His book is Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You have your job, but you also have a life. And you're not just one thing. Neither is the Here and Now Anytime podcast. Every weekday, we break down the biggest story of the day and something else, like a new trend everyone's talking about. It's Here and Now Anytime, a daily podcast from NPR and WBUR. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. For decades, one company in Manhattan told the world what to buy, what to value, what to wear, what to eat, even what to think. That's how my

guest Michael Grinbaum opens his new book about Conde Nast publications. Grinbaum writes that quote, Vogue chose the designers whose clothes would be worn by millions around the world and the models who became global icons of sex and femininity. Vanity Fair determined which moguls we envied and movie stars we worshipped. GQ made it okay for straight guys to care about clothes. Architectural Digest pioneered estate porn, and the New Yorker elevated tabloid fare, like the O.J. Simpson murder trial, to the realm of serious journalism.

At the peak of its powers, Conde Nast cultivated a mystique that captivated tens of millions of subscribers across four continents with brands that became international symbols of class and glamour." Unquote. Grimbaum describes Conde Nast today with brands that became international symbols of class and glamour." Grinbaum describes Conde Nast today as a husk of its former self, in part because of how financial problems have reshaped tastes and how social media allows influencers to set

trends and celebrities to post their own news and photos. Grinbaum's new book is called Empire of the Elite, Inside Conde Nast, the media dynasty that reshaped America. He's a correspondent for the New York Times covering the intersection of media, politics, and culture. Michael Grinbaum, welcome to Fresh Air. What is the larger significance of Anna Wintour giving up her role as American Vogue's editorial director after 37 years, but keeping her title as global editorial director and chief content officer for Conde Nast. So she's still overseeing Wired, Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue,

and several more magazines, but not the New Yorker. She is stepping down from the role of editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, which she has held since 1988. And it is a sign that the company is now starting to think about succession. But it actually surprised me and it stunned many inside Conde Nast. I spoke to Vogue staffers who were blindsided. They got called into a 9 a.m. meeting and Anna Wintour said that she was making this seismic change in her title. And it speaks to this major transitional moment that

Conde Nast and really glossy magazines are enduring right now, writ large. People no longer read print magazines the way they used to. 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 glamour and clothing and taste. And this is kind of the central conflict that I wanted to explore in this book was, Conde Nast was, I argue, one of the great cultural institutions of 20th century America. I actually compare it to

the great Hollywood studios of the 30s, a culture factory that manufactured a vision of luxury and good taste and beamed it out to the rest of the country. And what I was curious about was how 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. AMT – You define the kind of style and status that define Conde Nast publications at its peak in the 80s and 90s as money, luxury, and celebrity. So, but you know money, luxury, and celebrity means different things to different people. So, what kind of money, luxury, and celebrity are we talking about? Yeah. Well, I mean, Kanye Nass was always, its magazines were always aimed, I put in

the book, as the upper classes and those that aspired to join them. And actually, I don't want to skip ahead, but 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, and the

magazines, especially Vanity Fair, which Tina Brown edited from 1983 to 1992, that really captured this flaunt of the era, a time when people were celebrating materialism, were celebrating consumption. One of the most interesting historical facts I stumbled on in my research was that the first issue of Tina Brown's Vanity Fair hit newsstands when the first episode of Lifestyles and the Rich and Famous debuted on American broadcast television. And I think that tells you everything you need to know. And she's somebody who intentionally tried to combine high and low culture.

And by low culture, I think you mean pop culture, street fashion. So talk a little bit about that combination and why it was something new. Tina Brown called this the mix. And actually, the high-low blend is so absorbed into our media today that it's almost hard to believe it didn't exist back then. If you think about on our phones on an average day on Instagram or TikTok, you will swipe through, you know, a long policy discussion about the Trump administration's latest move, and then you'll swipe to some feature about the Kardashians, and then you'll go to a swimsuit ad, and then you'll read something about menswear, and then you'll go back to something about what's happening

in India or Australia. That kind of, I almost call it a manic media landscape that we exist in today. 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 get Time magazine to find out what happened in the news that week. You might read the Atlantic Monthly for something more literary. What Tina Brown did when she came over, and she was this precocious editor from England, really in her late 20s, and a star over there who was imported by Conde Nast to run Vanity Fair magazine. And she created this blend where you would have a smart political profile about Gary Hart, who was running, who's trying to be the vice presidential

candidate in 1984, and then a beautiful Annie Leibovitz photograph spread of, say, Darryl Hannah. And then a short story by, you know, Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal. And this was really unlike anything that was in the market back then. You know, readers hadn't really experienced something like this. And the fact that she blended high and low, popular culture, high culture, politics, celebrity, true crime, all the genres that, if you look at the Apple podcast today, I mean, that's you look at the Apple Podcast today, I mean, that's what people are picking and choosing from, 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. You had it all laid out for you in an entertaining, edifying way. And I think that's what made Vanity Fair such a success back then. So having money and showing that you had money was very important to Cy Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast in the era

that we're talking about, the 80s, the 90s. And he wanted his editors to not only help set fashion trends, but to help choose which celebrities were important. He wanted his editors to be celebrities and to reflect the same kind of luxury that the people they were writing about had. And to help them do that, he kind of subsidized some of them to be able to afford things that would look like they were really wealthy. 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 Conde Nast, the company. So I'll give you a few examples. If you were editor-in-chief of a Conde 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 Conde Nast standards back then.

AMT – Clothing for themselves? BD – Yes. To wear out at events, you know, to meet with advertisers, to be out at fashion shows, to essentially wear the flag of Conde Nast to project this idea that we were the best of the best and you better listen to what we have to say. And Sineu has didn't skimp when it came to expenses in the magazine either. Like they actually rented an elephant and moved it into an office for a photo. I won't tell the whole story but you get the point of how extravagant that must be

to just cleaning up after the elephant would have cost a lot of money. You'd think that they would get a stock image, you know, you could easily. This was in 2008, so you could easily get a stock image off the internet of an elephant. But at Condé Nast, you had to do things right. So they spent $30,000 to rent an elephant, which they trucked from Connecticut down to Brooklyn for the photo shoot. And this all happened two weeks before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Danielle Pletka Right.

And this was about the kind of financial instruments that helped bankrupt financial institutions and caused the whole financial meltdown. The article was about the elephant in the room, thus the elephant. So these expenses took their toll on Conde Nast. In 1998, Fortune magazine uncovered that Conde Nast really wasn't making much money. Do you want to talk about what they were really making? Yeah. So all of the spending to outsiders seemed irrational and made no sense. How

could you be splashing out so much for fashion shoots and, you know, editors and writers to have these luxurious lives? There was an internal logic to it, which is that Conde Nast was all 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 charm 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. 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.

So there was a business model behind it. And I don't want to suggest that Sine Newhouse was overly wasteful. He didn't love to lose money. But what Fortune magazine discovered in 1998 is that compared to their rivals, and there's a Hearst, Time Life, some of the other big magazine empires, Conde Nast, 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.

Conde 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. And what Fortune magazine discovered is that, you know, it actually wasn't making a whole lot of money in the first place. I mean, it really wasn't as rich and wealthy as they made it out to be. So I kind of date that as one of the first moments where there were some dents in the armor, so to speak,

of what Conde Nast had. You could make the argument, and you do make it in the book, that Cy Newhouse, the owner of Conde Nast, helped turn Donald Trump into a national celebrity. He was profiled in GQ by Graydon Carter, who later became the editor of Vanity Fair. And also he owned the company that published the art of the deal.

Let's start with the profile. What was the profile by Graydon Carter in GQ like? And what was the cover photo like? And remind us of what year this was too. So in May 1984, GQ arrives on newsstands. There's a Richard Avedon portrait of this handsome 38-year-old businessman. He's in a suit. He has bushy eyebrows. He has kind of an ambiguous smile. And there's a big headline on the page, success, how sweet it is. The man in the photograph is Donald Trump. The profile inside is this portrait of a New York-era-viste,

this up-and-coming real estate developer who wears flashy cufflinks, drives around in a burgundy limousine with DJT vanity plates. And it's an incredible story. You know, Graydon Carter, who eventually had this years-long rivalry with Donald Trump because he used to make fun of him so much in his magazines, actually was one of the originators of this myth of Donald Trump because this was one of the first major national magazine articles that featured him. Was the tone snarky or admiring?

Well, it was dry. I'd say that. I would say that Graydon made clear that he was skeptical of this up and comer. He quotes him in the limousine, sort of driving past Trump Tower, admiring his own handiwork in this self-regarding way. So I think the basic DNA of this individual is present, even when we go back and read this story from 40 years ago.

And you think that it's likely that Cy Newhouse knew Donald Trump through Roy Cohn. When Cy Newhouse was in high school at the Horace Mann School for Boys, he and Roy Cohn went to the same school, they were very close friends. Roy Cohn legally represented legal aid to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the communist witch hunting era. And another thing Roy Cohn is famous for, in the 1950s when it was against federal policy to allow gay people to work in the federal government, Roy Cohn helped to expose people who were in the closet.

Danielle Pletka And of course, he's famous from the fictionalized version of him in Angels in America. He's one of the most notorious figures in 20th century America. Danielle Pletka And one of the most notorious closeted gay figures. Danielle Pletka That as well. And what very few people know is that he was Cy Newhouse's best friend for his entire life. They carpooled to school together when they were young teenagers.

And when Roy Cohn was on trial for corruption charges, Cy Newhouse sat in the courthouse day after day as a show of support. This was long after Roy Cohn had been disgraced. So it's very likely that Cy had met Trump at one of Cohn's parties. And what happens in 1984 is that Tsai, who kept very close track, by the way, of the sales of his magazines, he would sit there with a rubber finger actually going through the accounting numbers every month in his office, he saw that this GQ issue sold like gangbusters. For whatever reason, the readers, young men, presumably were responding to Donald Trump. And so he had bought Random

House, which was the prestigious New York publisher, and Cy Newhouse went to his executives and he said, this guy should write a book. And in fact, I spoke to the editor of Art of the Deal who told me that it was uniquely Cy Newhouse's idea that Trump create Art of the Deal, who told me that it was uniquely Cy Newhouse's idea that Trump create Art of the Deal. And describe what he did to try to sell Trump on the idea of having a book. So Trump was a little skeptical and he agreed to take a meeting in his Trump Tower office. So Cy Newhouse actually went in person. What they did was they brought a mock-up of a hardcover book. It was kind

of a big hefty, I think it was a Russian novel actually that they put kind of a fake dust jacket on. Danielle Pletka A big Trump dust jacket. Danielle Pletka It had a big photograph of Trump on it in the Trump Tower atrium and Trump kind of stares at it for a moment and he pauses and then he says, please make my name much bigger. And then he agreed. Cy paid him $500,000, which I don't have the math on hand, but I mean this was back in 1984. And when the book came out, there was a huge book party with all of New York

society under the waterfall in Trump Tower, where many years later he would come down the escalator. And there's some amazing photos of Cy Newhouse standing right there next to him. And this was the book that really catapulted Trump away from just being, you know, a tabloid curiosity and sort of an interest of New York City, but really into a national phenomenon. And it was on the bestseller list for just about two years. It earned millions for the company. It was a huge pop cultural phenomenon at the time. What's so interesting is, now, Sanyuas died in 2017. I wasn't able to interview him for the book.

But I did speak with his daughter. And I raised the subject of Art of the Deal and Sai's unseen hand in Trump's legacy. And she cringed when I brought it up with her. It was clearly a painful topic. She told me, I just don't know whether Trump would have gotten that show, The Apprentice, but for the success of the book. So my father, in a way, put Donald Trump on the map. It's a source of deep regret to everybody to think that, but how would he have ever

known? Yeah, and so it's interesting that you know like his his magazines create or help create celebrities in addition to Giving pre-existing celebrities a lot more coverage and then he buys Random House and Newhouse publishes the art of the deal On Random House, so it's it's a lot of sway. And let's not forget, too, so, you know, from that point on, there's an interesting symbiosis between Conde Nast magazines and Trump. First of all, Vanity Fair excerpted The Art of the Deal when it came out, so it got a boost from that. But going over the next 20, 30 years, you see Trump again and again turning up in Vogue

and Vanity Fair. He actually proposed to Melania on the red carpet of the Met Gala in 2011. So he sort of took advantage of the Vogue magazine PR machinery to bring more attention to the start of his third marriage. Well, let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is Michael Grinbaum, author of the new book Empire of the Elite, inside Conde Nast, the media dynasty that reshaped America. He's a correspondent for the New York Times, covering the intersection of media, politics, and culture. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry

Gross and this is Fresh Air. Most people have some album, some movie, some book from when they were young that helped shape how they came to see the world. That's no less true for the Code Switch crew. It's still really touching, and I cried rereading it. So, there. Listen as we revisit some of our old faves on Code Switch from NPR or wherever you get your podcast.

On this week's Wild Card podcast, comedian Mark Maron reflects on being content-ish. I can honestly say there's never been a better time in my life. I'm not even sure this one is that great. I'm Rachel Martin, Mark Maron's on Wild Card, the show where cards control the conversation. This message comes from the Kresge Foundation. Established 100 years ago, the Kresge Foundation works to expand equity and opportunity in cities across America. A century of impact, a future of opportunity. More at Kresge.org. So Tina Brown left Vanity Fair to become the

editor of The New Yorker and Graydon Carter became the editor of Vanity Fair. And while he was the editor of Vanity Fair, he created the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, which that's like a headline event on Oscar night. How did he decide to create it and how did it become such a really big deal? It actually came about because Graydon Carter himself was not so popular in Hollywood. And you know, these days people think of him as a gray eminence of the town and the party is you know, the most covered event on Oscar night. But Graydon had edited Spy Magazine and he had made fun of every celebrity and every

movie studio head under the sun. Often in very cruel language, you know, he used to refer to Barry Diller as gap-toothed every time that he showed up in spy magazine. So he takes over Vanity Fair, which a lot of people in Hollywood felt was very much part of their industry because of the way it promoted movie stars and films. And they were scared of Graydon. They thought this guy is coming in and he's mocked us to our faces. And so Graydon knew that he could only succeed at Vanity Fair if he got Hollywood back on his side.

And there was a famous Oscar watch party every year that Irving Swiftie Lazar, who was this famous agent from the old Hollywood days, very short, he wore these big oversized glasses. And he used to hold it every year in Beverly Hills and he died in 1993. And Graydon thought, well, somebody needs to host this party. Maybe Vanity Fair could be a part of it. So he convinced Morton's, which was this power steakhouse in West Hollywood, to rent him the space.

And he put on this party and he invited some of the big A-list stars at the time. And he got Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to come and Candice Bergen, Angelica Houston. And Graydon is an immensely, immensely charming and entertaining fellow. And I think he can flatter with the best of them. And he persuaded a lot of these A-listers to show up. And the party just took off. It became this gathering ground for not just who was in in Hollywood, but he started bringing in kind of curiosities. So Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, after he broke the Monica

Lewinsky story, Graydon invited him to the party. He would invite paparazzi photographers to come stake out the red carpet. It became more and more lavish and elaborate. Every year they would bring in caviar or derbs. And my favorite story about the VF party is that one year they actually hired an apple orchard to, there were red delicious apples being grown and they put a vice around the apple which stopped the pigment from flowing naturally. And after it was fully grown, the apple had the words Vanity Fair actually imprinted in the skin of the apple. They were then packed into straw-filled boxes shipped to West Hollywood and then distributed to the celebrities of the party basically as favors. I mean, this is, you're talking tens

of thousands of dollars. You can imagine all the interns and assistants who had to coordinate all this. And it was all to project this idea that this was the ultimate party. This was the ultimate place to be on Oscar night. AMT – Is it still? AMT – So, one of the reasons I wrote this book is because I think Conde Nast endures in our culture in a lot of strange ways. The Vanity Fair Oscar party still gets so much attention. Now I think there are many other parties now. And Graydon Carter left the magazine in 2017. It doesn't have quite the same cachet that it used to carry, especially back at a time before the internet, before we had so many other news outlets to choose from.

That said, if you look at lots of news websites, CNN, the New York Times, they always have a red carpet portfolio on Oscar night of all the celebrities who showed up. People pay attention to who gets invited, who doesn't. There's kind of this, almost like a chem trail of the Conde glamour that's still lingering in our culture. And the party is one of the final vestiges of it. So, Sinew House wanted to reproduce Vanity Fair success at Vogue magazine. The editor at the time was Grace Mirabella, who had taken over from Diana Vreeland. I want you to compare

the magazine as it was under Grace Mirabella with how it turned out to be after Anna Wintour took over. Well, let's go back to Diana Vreeland, who is one of the all-time famous fashion editors. And her Vogue in the 1960s was polychromatic, it was exotic, it really reflected kind of the explosion of color and culture that happened in that decade. But by the time the 1970s were starting, you know, a lot of women, a lot of readers of Vogue were now migrating into the workforce. There was a new professional class of women who were looking for more practical clothes

to wear to the office. And that's why Vreeland was fired in kind of this abrupt moment. She was ousted from the magazine and replaced by Grace Mirabella, who was known for her love of cashmere and beige. And she was fashionable, but it was sort of a more subdued palette. Diana Vreeland worked in an office that was entirely painted scarlet red. And the day Grace Mirabella moved in, she painted it beige. So that tells you about the changeover. But flash forward to the mid-1980s and Grace's style was starting to feel a little stale. There was a lot more flashiness, some might even say tawdryness, to the designers of the 1980s.

Christian Lacroix, Mirabella despised his designs and thought that it was a bad influence on the fashion world. And on women. She thought of it as anti-woman. What were Christian Lacroix's fashions like that made Grace Mabella think of them as anti-woman? So she felt that it almost made women into ornaments, that this was a male designer who was dressing up women in these impractical kind of glitzy sequin-filled outfits, and that the women were, it was sort of objectifying in them some ways, that it wasn't really empathetic, I guess, to sort of what a woman wanted to feel stylish and to feel good about herself.

The problem for Grace Mirabella, and I think there's, you know, if you talk to fashion historians, I mean, I don't necessarily think they would disagree. But I think Vogue needed to reflect the zeitgeist. One thing I found in writing about all these magazines is that when they fell out of the culture, when they felt out of step with it, you know, that was when readers started to, their attention started to go elsewhere. And Anna Wintour was seen as a much younger stylist, as somebody who, she had discovered Michael Kors and put him into magazines. She was a big champion of Comte de Garcon and Yoji Yamamoto, the

Japanese designers who are really transforming fashion in that era. And the other thing that I think is actually really fascinating about this moment when Anna takes over is that, you know, today people follow fashion shows online. They know which designer. There's a new designer at Dior. There's a new designer at Louis Vuitton. 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. But Vogue often just had models, just, you know, beautiful women, but not necessarily movie stars. And Anna Mentor 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, she's the biggest, 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. One of Anna Wintour's great achievements at Vogue was the Met Gala, which is still huge. And it's raised $250 million for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Fashion Institute. How did she come up with that idea?

And talk a little bit about what it's come to represent. Yeah. So it actually was kind of an old New York society ritual that had been around, I believe, since the 40s and was sort of the ladies who lunch, the Truman Capote swans, that sort of cohort were the rulers of the Metropolitan Gala. And in the 1990s, Pat Buckley, William Buckley's wife, stepped down as the chairwoman of it. And the Met was looking for someone with close ties to the fashion industry to take it over. And so they offered it to Anna Wintour. And what Anna did was she reimagined it more as a spectacle.

She saw it as a place where she could bring the biggest fashion designers and kind of mingle them with the biggest celebrities. She would bring in musicians and rap artists. She had Puff Daddy perform one year. There's a funny moment where David Koch, the billionaire philanthropist who was a big donor to the Met, he kind of bumps into Puff Daddy at a Met gala after a performance and they have this funny exchange. She, I guess, envisioned it in this much broader way that it could kind of bring attention to the world of fashion. It could be a showcase for what the world of couture was doing. And it's not lost on anyone that this also served to raise

the profile of Anna Wintour herself. While also raising money for a great cultural institution, it kind of had that uneasy mix of commercialism and a touch of cynicism, but also a celebration of the fashion arts that Vogue itself represents. You know, it's gotten to the point where I don't even think of it as fashion anymore because these are not clothes anyone could possibly wear in the real world. They're like elaborate fantasy costumes. Well, that's right. And actually, Graydon Carter has said this publicly. He's grumbled a bit about it because often what happens is Anna Wintour, who still, by the way, controls

every single detail of this event down to the seating chart and exactly what clothes they'll be wearing and who they'll be walking the red carpet with. Graydon Carter has noted that often Anna Wintour will call up an advertiser and say, you need to buy a table for this party. And they agree to do it in part because Anna Wintour is so powerful in the industry. And so, you know, I guess you could argue, well, it's going for a good cause. It's going to the Metropolitan Museum. But in a funny way, it's become kind of a tax for access to the world of vogue and to the upper echelon of the fashion

world. Danielle Pletka Well, let's take another short break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Michael Grinbaum, author of the new book Empire of the Elite, Inside Conde Nast, the media dynasty that reshaped America. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. It doesn't matter if you're a fan or not. We have to talk about season seven of Love Island USA.

It's a huge indication to me of this kind of generation of people who don't know how to be open and vulnerable. I'm Brittany Luce and on this episode of It's Been A Minute, I want to show you how reality TV is getting a little too real by revealing what it's really like to date today. Listen to the It's Been A Minute podcast today. You have a chapter about GQ and you write, it had been an open secret that GQ was geared toward and read mostly by gay men. What made it obvious but not explicit? GQ was founded as a quarterly magazine about men's fashion

and it was strapping beautiful male models and in the 1970spping beautiful male models. And in the 1970s, these male models were often splashing in water at the beach or they were diving into a swimming pool. And the focus, unlike most fashion magazines, was on these glistening male bodies, not the women who happened to be on the margins. I talked to the designer Tom. He describes a lot of the men in the pages as adonises in speedos.

Listen, I stand by that description. Tom Ford, the fashion designer, you know, he grew up in New Mexico. And he talked to me about being a young teenager, kind of realizing that he was gay and not having any gay culture anywhere near him where he grew up, and getting issues of GQ in the mail. And it was almost like to him kind of this beacon of this other world where gay men could live themselves, where they could be comfortable in their sexual identity. And I talked to a lot of gay men who, you know, found GQ something of a salvation when they were younger kids, particularly when they weren't growing up in a city that necessarily had gay culture.

The issue for Tsai Niu-Hau is when he bought GQ, and basically he said, well, look, I have all these female readers of Vogue. I need a magazine that appeals to men. He bought Gentleman's Quarterlyly and then he realized that it had this gay reputation to the extent that a lot of advertisers just didn't even want to buy ads for it. Danielle Pletka Tell the Philip Morris story. Danielle Pletka So, one of the early publishers of GQ was

a man named Jack Gleager. And he flew out to meet with advertisers and, you know, he was hoping that they would buy ads. And he went to Philip Morris, the big tobacco company, and he pitched the magazine. And the tobacco guy leaned back in his chair and he said, you want the Marlboro cowboy in your magazine, right? Kleger nods. Let me explain something to you, the man says. Your cowboys are not our cowboys. That's a very telling story. So what Tsai did was he hired a guy who used to run Penthouse. Yeah, you describe this as heteroizing the magazine. He hired a guy named Arthur Cooper, who was another outsider.

He grew up, he was one of the few Jews who grew up in a coal country town in rural Pennsylvania. And he loved magazines. He used to read Esquire when he was a kid. And he came to New York and he ended up editing Penthouse magazine for a while. And Sinews decided that this was the guy who was going to transform GQ. And what they essentially did was, 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, you know, bikini models and sort of sex columns and sorts of things you might find in Playboy or another magazine like that. And in between, there would be these literary articles about, you know, a double-breasted versus a single-breasted suit

and what the best kind of socks you could wear to, you know, a party or a wedding. And it was almost like a system of sneaking in the menswear into a straight man's magazine. And it really took off. It was a phenomenon. It had a huge readership. And that was like a pretty major sea change in the way that men thought about clothes. I kind of say it was the start of metrosexuality, which became a popular term in the 90s. But, you know, nowadays, I mean, think about the menswear influencers that we see on TikTok and Instagram. You know, think about athletes, the basketball stars who show off their brand new Tom Brown suits when they're, you know, walking to the locker room. So I really trace a lot of that change to what happened at GQ under Conde Nast.

Well, let's take another break here and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Michael Grinbaum, author of the new book, Empire of the Elite, inside Conde Nast, the media dynasty that reshaped America. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. These days, there's so much news, it can be hard to keep up with what it all means for you, your family, and your community. The Consider This podcast from NPR features our award-winning journalism.

Six days a week, we bring you a deep dive on a news story and provide the context and analysis that helps you make sense of the news. We get behind the headlines. We get to the truth. Listen to the Consider This podcast from NPR. Cy Newhouse always really loved the New Yorker. And so, you know, later in his career, he bought the New Yorker.

And the long-time editor of the New Yorker was William Sean. And one of the early things that Cy Newhouse did was basically encourage William Sean to retire and sooner than he really expected to. encourage William Sean to retire, and sooner than he really expected to, sooner than Sean really expected to retire. And it just strikes me, I know the New Yorker wasn't in great financial shape,

and I know that Zynewhouse thought it had become kind of out of date, that it wasn't reflecting what was happening in the world anymore. But it just still strikes me as odd that this magazine he reveres, he buys, and then, you know, basically asks the editor to like leave soon if you can. Yeah. So it's hard to overstate the controversy that this created when Cy Newhouse bought The New Yorker. It was really seen as this American treasure created when Cy Newhouse bought the New Yorker, it was really seen as this American treasure. And Cy Newhouse was viewed as this kind of Philistine

businessman who was going to come in and tear it apart. In terms of Sean, you know, at first, Cy had every intention of keeping him. And he even made pledges that he would not, you know, force Sean out. And the problem was that Sean just wasn't doing anything to make the place more exciting and bring in more readers. The New Yorker in the 80s had gotten a bit stale, even among its longtime readers. I think the issues would be piling up on coffee tables. They ran five-part series about wheat and corn and the staple crops. And when,

you know, I think Sinead was had a lot of personal anxiety about ousting Sean. I mean, not enough that he didn't go ahead and do it. But he also knew that the staff would hate him for it. And they did. And a lot of them quit. And there were a lot of writers who kind of never went back to it after that. The interesting thing is that the New Yorker was never like the big moneymaker, you know, like in the big extravagant magazine like Vogue or Vanity Fair. It was more serious, although it had humor in it. But it had, you know, more reporting, more very long pieces. It didn't have photographs, let alone flashy photographs.

Tina Brown became the editor of The New Yorker, then David Remnick. Well then Robert Gottlieb and then David Remnick, who's been the editor for what, 25 years or so? Yes, yes. And now The New Yorker's turning a profit. And you write that the paywall in The New Yorker's turning a profit. And you write that the paywall in The New Yorker is doing well. And I just find that really interesting,

that the more classic magazine is the one that isn't being as injured by social media and the lack of newsstands in America. It's kind of an amazing turnaround, because The New Yorker was starting to lose money when Conde Nast bought it. And under Tina Brown, who really revolutionized the magazine in the 1990s, it lost a huge amount of money. I mean, they were spending millions and millions on writers and photographers and travel and all of this. The Newhouse family, which still

controls Conde 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. 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. And I think because it's always been protected within the Conde Nast empire, I think it's – Cassini and I cared a lot about making sure it could still do the type of journalism that it does.

And it really is a success story that is now one of the Conde 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, you know, still has an audience, a devoted audience that's willing to pay for it. And in a funny way, you know, when we look at this next chapter of Conde Nast, wherever the company is going now, I mean, I think The New Yorker is right up there among the most successful of its titles. AMT – In the beginning of your book, you write about what the Conde Nast magazines meant to you. I think more specifically Vanity Fair.

And when you were in fifth grade, you wrote what you describe as your own version of Vanity Fair, getting people in your school to write pieces for it. I need to know what that looked like. Well, this was Bugbee Elementary in West Hartford, Connecticut. And my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Oppenheim, was very helpful with this. But I loved magazines. I mean, I always wanted to be a writer. And I think, you know, I grew up in the suburbs and, you know, I didn't have access to New York City. And I think, you know, those magazines were, it was a way to kind of explore a whole giant world out there. And I started this magazine for my fifth grade class and it was sort of photocopied.

I designed it on Microsoft Word and created photocopied pages. But this is what was so fascinating. I put out the first issue. It was at the school library. And all my classmates were reading it and they were so interested and then they all came to me and said they wanted to write for it. And they were all kind of asking to be a part of it. And kind of made me realize that, you know, running a magazine gave you a certain influence. You know, people kind of, it created a world that people

wanted to be a part of. And in a funny way, it was like this firsthand experience where I realized that media kind of allowed a writer to, you know, have some sway on the world around them. And I think that really stuck with me as I kind of grew up and decided that I wanted to go into journalism. Michael Grinbaum, it's really been great to talk with you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. Michael Grinbaum is the author of the new book,

Empire of the Elite, inside Conde Nast, the media dynasty that reshaped America. He's a New York Times correspondent, covering the intersection of media, politics, and culture. ["Fresh Air"] Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Meyers,

Roberta Shorrock, Anne Marie Boudinado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yacundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Sevey Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Thea Challener directed today's show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.