Vanity Fair

VANITY FAIR



Condé Nast began his empire by purchasing the men's fashion magazine Dress in 1913. He is said to have paid 3,000 dollars for the right to use the title "Vanity Fair" in the United States, but it is unknown whether the right was granted by an earlier English publication or some other source.

Condé Nast renamed the magazine Dress and Vanity Fair and published four issues in 1913. After a short period of inactivity it was relaunched in 1914 as Vanity Fair.

The magazine achieved great popularity under editor Frank Crowninshield. In 1919 Robert Benchley was tapped to become managing editor. He joined Dorothy Parker, who had come to the magazine from Vogue, and was the staff drama critic. Benchley hired future playwright Robert E. Sherwood, who had recently returned from World War I. The trio were among the original members of the Algonquin Round Table, which met at the Algonquin Hotel, on the same West 44th Street block as Condé Nast's offices.

Crowninshield attracted the best writers of the era. Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, Ferenc Molnár, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes all appeared in a single issue, July 1923.

Starting in 1925 Vanity Fair competed with The New Yorker as the American establishment's top culture chronicle. It contained writing by Thomas Wolfe, T. S. Eliot and P. G. Wodehouse, theatre criticisms by Dorothy Parker, and photographs by Edward Steichen; Claire Boothe Luce was its editor for some time.

In 1915 it published more pages of advertisements than any other U.S. magazine. It continued to thrive into the twenties. However, it became a casualty of the Great Depression, and in 1936 Vanity Fair was folded into Vogue and ceased publication.

The magazine was revived in its current form in the 1980s by Condé Nast Publications, under the ownership of Si Newhouse, and under editors Tina Brown (1984–1992) and E. Graydon Carter (since 1992).

Famous contributing photographers for the magazine include Bruce Weber, Annie Leibovitz, Mario Testino and the late Herb Ritts, all who have provided the magazine with a string of lavish covers and full-page portraits of current celebrities. Amongst the most famous of these was the August 1991 cover featuring a naked, pregnant Demi Moore, an image that to this day holds a spot in pop culture.

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