Few magazines have as interesting a history as Vanity Fair
(1868–1936, 1983– ). Since its founding almost a century
and a half ago, the publication has gone through a number
of different iterations, and in each instance it proved to be
one of the intriguing periodicals of its time.
Debuting in 1868 as a weekly magazine in Great Britain,
Vanity Fair’s coverage focused on politics, society, and literature. It was best known for its caricatures of prominent
figures by such artists as Thomas Nast, James Jacques Tissot, and Carlo Pellegrini. All told, more than two thousand
of these caricatures appeared in the publication, with a variety of subjects that included artists, athletes, royalty, actors,
soldiers, and scholars.
Thomas Nast bought the publication in 1913, renaming it Dress and Vanity Fair, but after only four issues the
magazine was transformed and relaunched in 1914 with
the original name under the editorial direction of Frank
Crowninshield. Crowninshield was one of the major cultural arbiters of his time and an ideal choice for editor. He
had, for example, organized the Armory Show in New York
City which introduced Cubism to the United States, and his
connections in the art world and Manhattan society were
legendary.
Under Crowninshield, Vanity Fair covered all the topics
he presumed to be part of an urbane and sophisticated conversation—art, sports, drama, humor—and he recruited the
most celebrated literati of the age as contributors, including e.e. cummings, Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, Theodore
Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H. L. Mencken, Edgar Allen
Poe, Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound, George Bernard Shaw,
and photographer Man Ray.
A victim of the Great Depression, Vanity Fair was
folded into Vogue in 1936, disappearing until the name was
revived in 1983 by Condé Nast Publishing as a somewhat
pretentious upscale society monthly. A year later, however,
Christina (Tina) Hambley Brown, formerly at Britain’s gossipy Tattler magazine, became the editor, and the publication quickly repositioned itself to respond to the American
obsession with celebrity, wealth, and scandal. Circulation
increased significantly under Brown’s editorship, as did the
stable of prominent writers she attracted from other magazines with notably generous contributors’ fees.
Brown departed to edit the New Yorker in 1992, and
Edward Graydon Carter, one of the original founders of
Spy magazine, became Vanity Fair’s editor. Carter continued Brown’s efforts by enlisting well-known writers such as
Gail Sheehy, Christopher Hitchens, David Halberstam, and
Marie Brenner, and by pursuing an eclectic editorial mix of
articles on high and low culture, celebrities, politics, travel,
and entertainment.
Harkening back to a strategy perfected by Crowninshield, who in the 1920s created society events for the magazine to cover, Carter’s Vanity Fair has kept the tradition
alive with its lavish annual post-Academy Awards party
in Hollywood. To its readers’ evident delight, no effort is
spared on either the party or the magazine’s coverage of it.