Empire of the Elite: Inside Cond Nast, the media dynasty that reshaped the world

(Hardback)

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For decades, Conde 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. Conde'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 Conde Nast established itself as a de facto American aristocracy, anointing an elite and dictating the culture they presided over.

The colorful story of Conde 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.

Author Bio

Michael Grynbaum is a media correspondent at the New York Times, which he joined as a staff writer at age 22. He covered the 2020 and 2016 presidential campaigns, and led the paper's coverage of Donald Trump's battles with the news media. He previously served as the Times' City Hall bureau chief, one of the youngest reporters to be appointed to that role. His scoops over the years have ranged from Graydon Carter's resignation from Vanity Fair to the revelation that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was driven in an SUV on his so-called "subway commute." He was the first journalist to report, in an exclusive interview with Steve Bannon, President Trump's use of the term "opposition party" to describe the American media.