Condé Nast (1873–1942) began his magazine empire when
he purchased Vogue in 1909. Four years later he purchased House and Garden, which he helped transform into a leading interior design authority. In 1914, he introduced Vanity Fair, a magazine that quickly set publishing standards
in arts, politics, sports, and society. In 1939, he launched
Glamour, the last magazine he would personally develop
before his death. By 2005, Condé Nast Publications holdings included about twenty magazines, including Bon
Appetit, Conde Nast Traveler, GQ, Lucky, Mademoiselle,
Popular Mechanics, The New Yorker, Redbook, Self, Seventeen, and YM.
Condé Montrose Nast was born March 26, 1873, in New
York City but spent most of his early years in St. Louis.
He earned a law degree from Washington University after
earning his bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University. Spurning a law career, he accepted his friend Robert
Collier’s offer in 1898 to become advertising manager and
later business manager at Collier’s Weekly. During the next
nine years, he led the magazine to unprecedented financial
success.
In 1909 he bought Vogue, a small society magazine
founded in 1892, which he repositioned with the editorial
mission of helping high-income women dress fashionably.
After promoting Edna Chase to editor in 1914, they built
Vogue into the country’s most prestigious fashion magazine.
Nast’s enduring contribution to magazine publishing
was developing the concept of “class” publications directed
at particular groups of readers with common interests. He
shunned bulk readership in favor of attracting a select and
devoted group of readers of a high social profile. As he
pointed out in a 1913 essay, “A ‘class’ publication is nothing
more nor less than a publication that looks for its circulation only to those having in common a certain characteristic marked enough to group them into a class.”
Nast proved prophetic in a way he did not realize during
his lifetime. Following the advent of television, the decline
of general interest magazines and rise of specialized magazines became the most defining characteristic of American
magazine publishing.
Condé Nast Publications was purchased in 1979 by S. I.
Newhouse and became a division of Newhouse’s empire,
which also included newspapers, book publishers, and cable
television companies. Newhouse expanded its magazine
titles by purchasing Street & Smith Publications, Inc., a
publisher of sports magazines (1959); Gentleman’s Quarterly (1979); Tatler, a British monthly (1983); Gourmet
(1983); Details (1988); Architectural Digest (1993); and Bon
Appétit (1993). The company revived the Vanity Fair title in
1983, which had been merged with Vogue since 1936, and
launched Conde Nast Traveler in 1987 and Allure in 1991.
In mid-2005, the company launched Domino, a shelter
magazine aimed at first-time homeowners. It followed the
surprising success of Lucky, which the company started in
2001. The women’s magazine, which called itself “the magazine about shopping,” told readers how and where to buy
clothing, beauty items and household products. Advertising
Age named it the “Magazine of the Year” in 2003 after it surpassed one million subscribers during its first two years.
Further Reading
Maier, Thomas. Newhouse: All The Glitter, Power, and Glory
of America’s Richest Media Empire and The Secretive
Man Behind It. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Meeker, Richard H. Newspaperman: S.I. Newhouse and The
Business of News. New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1983.
Nourie, Alan, and Barbara Nourie, eds. American Mass-Market
Magazines. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990.
Seebohm, Caroline. The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and
Times of Condé Nast. New York: The Viking Press, 1982.
Tebbel, John William, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine
in America, 1741–1990. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991.
David E. Sumner