Condé Nast's Vanity Fair
Bali Beauty - One of the last issues of Condé Nast's Vanity Fair before it was absorbed by Vogue Condé Nast began his empire by purchasing the men's fashion magazine Dress in 1913. He is said to have paid $3,000 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.
Vanity Fair achieved great popularity under editor Frank Crowninshield. In 1919 Robert Benchley was tipped to become managing editor. He joined Dorothy Parker, who had come to t Vanity Fair 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.
Starting in 1925 Vanity Fair competed with The New Yorker as the American establishment's top culture chronicle. Vanity Fair 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.
Vanity Fair was the darling of advertisers; in 1915 it published more pages of ads 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. Modern revival
The American actress Demi Moore appeared on this famous Vanity Fair cover in August, 1991. Vanity Fair has enjoyed greater circulation, prestige and revenues, the latter attested by a plenitude of trendy advertisements. Vanity Fair further boasts a number of prestigious columnists including Christopher Hitchens and James Wolcott.
Glamour photographers such as Annie Leibovitz, Mario Testino and the late Herb Ritts have provided the magazine with a string of lavish covers and full-page portraits of current celebrities and forgotten heroes. Amongst the most famous of these was the August 1991 cover featuring a naked, pregnant, Demi Moore, an image that is replicated to this day.
Since its revival, the Vanity Fair has made news as well as told it. It was the subject of Toby Young's book, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, about his search for success, from 1995, in New York working for Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair.
The cover of Vanity Fair's annual Hollywood issue, an issue that each year assembles some of the biggest female names in American cinema to feature on its cover has been criticised somewhat. A feature in The Guardian about the 2005 Hollywood Edition said "I feel soiled gazing at this photograph, and it's not just jealousy. It reminded me of Caravaggio's famous chicken in the National Gallery; it's just as pornographic. Leibovitz's cover is a simply a casting couch, a homage to the blowjob values of 1950s Hollywood."
In keeping with this high-profile pre-Oscar event, Vanity Fair magazine also hosts an extremely exclusive Academy Awards after party.
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