Vanity Fair (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Vanity Fair magazine began not as the polished cultural institution it would become, but as a men's fashion magazine called Dress. Condé Montrose Nast bought it in 1913, renamed it, and built something that would outlast the Gilded Age, survive a Great Depression, disappear for nearly half a century, and then come back with arguably more ambition than before. What drives a magazine to fold, lie dormant for decades, and then return? What kind of publication names itself after a corrupt marketplace in a 17th-century Christian allegory? And how does a monthly periodical become the site where some of the most contentious legal, photographic, and journalistic battles of the modern era play out? Those questions run through every chapter of Vanity Fair's story.

• 2. Birth and Burial

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  Condé Montrose Nast paid for a struggling men's fashion title in 1913 and spent the next two decades turning it into something far more capacious. Through the 1920s, the magazine built a following substantial enough to reach a peak circulation of 90,000 copies. That number proved fragile. The Great Depression hammered advertising revenues across the publishing industry, and Vanity Fair was not spared. In December 1935, Nast announced the magazine would be absorbed into Vogue, beginning with the March 1936 issue. Vogue carried the Vanity Fair imprint internally until as late as the February 1983 issue, a quiet editorial ghost trailing behind its more durable sibling. The name itself had older and stranger roots than any of this suggests. John Bunyan gave the world Vanity Fair as a fictitious place governed by Beelzebub in Pilgrim's Progress, his 17th-century allegory. The 1847-48 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray gave the name a second, more widely known life. Nast's choice to borrow that name planted a literary self-awareness at the heart of the enterprise from the very first issue.

• 3. The Comeback

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  In June 1981, the Condé Nast company, then owned by S.I. Newhouse, announced it would bring Vanity Fair back. The first issue arrived on the 21st of February 1983, carrying a March cover date. Richard Locke, who had worked at The New York Times Book Review, edited that inaugural issue, but he lasted only three issues before being replaced by Leo Lerman, a veteran features editor from Vogue. Lerman's tenure was also brief. Tina Brown took over in 1984 and held the position until 1992. Graydon Carter followed, staying for an unusually long run from 1992 until 2017. Radhika Jones, formerly director of The New York Times book section, succeeded Carter and remained until 2025. Mark Guiducci, previously the creative editorial director of Vogue, became editor-in-chief in June 2025 following Jones's resignation. Each of these editors brought a distinct sensibility. Carter, whose tenure lasted 25 years, became so identified with the magazine's image that Toby Young's 2001 book about working for him was made into a 2008 film with Jeff Bridges playing Carter himself. During that era, Carter was known for encouraging his staff to spend extravagantly as a way of projecting the magazine's prestige. Vanity Fair employees unionized in 2022.

• 4. Journalism That Landed

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  Marie Brenner's 1996 article "The Man Who Knew Too Much" became one of the magazine's most consequential pieces of reporting. The exposé on the tobacco industry was later adapted into the 1999 film The Insider, starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe. Vanity Fair's May 2005 issue broke a story that had circulated as Washington rumor for three decades: it identified Mark Felt as the Watergate whistleblower known as Deep Throat, the source who leaked information leading to the 1974 resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon. Regular contributors over the years included Dominick Dunne, Sebastian Junger, Michael Wolff, Maureen Orth, and Christopher Hitchens. Celebrity interviews became a recurring feature, including a monthly Proust Questionnaire format. Notable interviews from the 21st century included Teri Hatcher, who discussed having been sexually abused as a child; Jennifer Aniston in her first interview after divorcing Brad Pitt; Anderson Cooper speaking about his brother's death; and Martha Stewart giving her first interview after leaving prison. Not all of the magazine's journalism went unchallenged. In 2015, Vanity Fair updated a published account by NBC News correspondent Richard Engel about his 2012 kidnapping in Syria, after it emerged he had misidentified his captors. Former contributing editor Vicky Ward stated in 2019 that her 2003 profile of Jeffrey Epstein had originally included on-the-record accounts from Annie and Maria Farmer, who had filed the earliest known criminal complaints about Epstein, but that those accounts were cut after Bill Clinton pressured editor Graydon Carter.

• 5. Photography and Controversy

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  Bruce Weber, Annie Leibovitz, Mario Testino, and Herb Ritts all built long associations with Vanity Fair's photography operation, producing lavish covers and portraits that defined the magazine's visual identity across decades. The most discussed single image in the magazine's photographic history is probably the 1991 portrait Leibovitz made of actress Demi Moore: naked and visibly pregnant on the cover. That photograph, titled More Demi Moore, entered broader culture as an image people referenced long after its initial publication. The April 1999 issue brought a different kind of attention, featuring actor Mike Myers dressed as a Hindu deity in a photo spread by David LaChapelle. Both the photographer and the magazine apologized after criticism followed. On the 25th of April 2008, Entertainment Tonight reported that a then-15-year-old Miley Cyrus had posed topless for a Leibovitz shoot. Disney issued a statement describing the session as a deliberate attempt to manipulate a 15-year-old to sell magazines. The New York Times published the full photograph on the 27th of April, and Cyrus released an apology describing the images as artistic in intent. Two days after that, The New York Times clarified that Cyrus had not actually been bare-breasted; she was wrapped in a bedsheet. A decade later, Cyrus reversed course entirely in an Instagram story: "IM NOT SORRY Fuck YOU #10YearsAgo". In January 2014, Twitter users accused Vanity Fair of altering Lupita Nyong'o's complexion in photographs taken by Leibovitz. Nyong'o responded positively about the images herself, and the magazine suggested the coloring was a product of bright set lighting rather than digital manipulation.

• 6. Legal Battles

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  Mohamed Al-Fayed, the businessman, launched a two-year legal battle against Condé Nast over a 1995 article by Maureen Orth titled "Holy War at Harrods", which included details of alleged sexual assaults attributed to Al-Fayed. The case had an unusual negotiating moment: Nicholas Coleridge, then chief executive of Condé Nast UK, met Al-Fayed's Director of Public Affairs, Michael Cole, in the steam baths of the Bath and Racquets Club in Mayfair. Both men checked that neither was carrying a covert listening device before discussing a possible settlement. No deal was reached that day. Al-Fayed dropped the case in December 1997 and provided a settlement, but Vanity Fair issued no apology and retracted nothing from the original article. The Roman Polanski libel case became notable for a different reason. A 2002 Vanity Fair article claimed that Polanski had made sexual advances toward a Norwegian model while traveling to the funeral of his wife Sharon Tate. The disputed passage was written by A. E. Hotchner, crediting a story told by Lewis H. Lapham, and described Polanski allegedly boasting at New York restaurant Elaine's in August 1969 that he could make the model "the next Sharon Tate". The trial opened on the 18th of July 2005. British courts ultimately found that the scene could not have occurred on the date given because Polanski had not dined at Elaine's until three weeks later than the article stated. Mia Farrow testified in the case, as did the Norwegian model. For the first time in English legal history, the court allowed Polanski to testify via video link from France, where he was living as a fugitive from U.S. law enforcement. The High Court in London awarded Polanski damages. Graydon Carter responded publicly, calling it remarkable that a man living in France could sue an American magazine in a British courtroom.

• 7. Events and Expansion

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  The Vanity Fair Oscar Party traces its origins to the invitation-only gatherings hosted by the late agent Irving Paul Lazar. The first Vanity Fair version took place in 1994, co-hosted by producer Steve Tisch at Morton's in West Hollywood. In its early years, Graydon Carter kept the dinner guest list to around 120. The party grew into one of the most closely watched events of awards season. In 2008, Vanity Fair canceled it out of sympathy with a Writers Guild of America strike. Between 2009 and 2013, the party was held at Sunset Tower. The 2014 gathering moved to a temporary 12,000-square-foot glass-walled structure at 8680 Sunset Boulevard. In 2021 the event was canceled again, this time because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In recent years, Vanity Fair and Bloomberg have co-hosted an after-party at the French ambassador's residence in Washington, D.C. following the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. On the video side, Condé Nast Entertainment launched a Vanity Fair YouTube channel in July 2013. That same year the company struck a deal with Investigation Discovery, a cable channel owned by Discovery Communications, to produce Vanity Fair Confidential, a crime and mystery documentary series drawing on the magazine's own archive of stories. Vanity Fair launched The Hive in June 2016 as a dedicated online hub for coverage of business, politics, and technology. By January 2017, The Hive had partnered with Cheddar online TV to produce a live weekly series called VF Hive on Cheddar. International editions now circulate in the United Kingdom since 1991, Italy since 2003, Spain since 2008, and France since 2013. The German edition, launched in February 2007 at a cost of 50 million euros, closed in 2009 after its weekly circulation fell from roughly half a million to under 200,000. That launch had been described at the time as the most expensive new magazine in Germany in years and Condé Nast's largest investment outside the United States. The Italian edition continues today as a weekly publication, the only Vanity Fair edition to publish on that schedule.