Author Says Famed Editors of Condé Nast Were First Social Media Influencers

There was a time when the editors atop Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and GQ, were trend setters, and taste masters who were nearly as famous as the people they covered.

But as Michael M. Grynbaum tells it in his enlightening recent book, Empire of the Elite: Inside Conde Nast, the Media Dynasty That Shaped America those top editors were often outsiders who rose to the top of a media pyramid that catered to the country’s elites and in a very real sense emerged as influencers long before the term was invented.

As it says on the back of the book, which came out in paperback on July 28 with a new 20-page afterword, “For decades, one company in Manhattan told the world what to buy, what to value, what to wear, what to eat, even what to think.”

On the cover of, and explored throughout, the book are former Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter, Vogue icon,Anna Wintour, and Tina Brown of both The New Yorker and Vanity Fair fame.

Although they’re wearing couth party attire in the pictures on the cover, the editors were, as Grynbaum explains, outsiders who eventually made New York their own. As did Condé Montrose Nast himself, the man who founded the company in 1909.

“Condé Nast, the person, was also a major figure in New York society,” Grynbaum says during a recent interview via Zoom. “And so these magazines, in a lot of ways, were outgrowths of a much earlier era of elites in New York City. And they were always sort of a house organ of that.”

The magazines, Grynbaum continues, “purported to depict kind of the upper-class ideal, and the irony was that a lot of these editors came themselves from middle-class backgrounds. They were outsiders. This is a classic tale of an outsider who comes to New York City to make it, and to find success and achievement.”

Under the direction of its longtime chairman, Si Newhouse Jr., Condé Nast particularly blossomed in the latter half of the 20^th Century and into the 21^st.

Grynbaum, a national correspondent for the New York Times covering the intersection of politics and media, says Condé Nast “more so than almost any other media company, had this sheen of glamour, excitement, decadence, loose spending, and big budgets. And there’s always been a fascination with Condé Nast, even today, even now when the company is a lot smaller in influence than it used to be.

“Everyone is still interested in the lives of these editors and in the way the place works. And I wanted to capture all of that. I thought there were such great egos, characters, and just larger-than-life individuals that they would make up the cast of a really exciting history.”

One of these characters is Graydon Carter, the former longtime editor of Vanity Fair who last year released his own memoir of his Condé days, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines (Penguin, 2025).

Carter’s memoir charts his serene Canadian boyhood, arrival in New York in the frenzied ‘70s, and his eventual rise to the top of magazines in the ‘90s, including his 25-year tenure at Vanity Fair.

During that time, from 1992 to 2017, Carter significantly bolstered the already lauded Vanity Fair, combining incisive news coverage and longform investigative features with Hollywood glamour and what he called, The New Establishment which became a buzz generating issue every year.

He was part of a glamorous past, full of roving town cars, Annie Liebowitz photoshoots, and bright Met Galas, that has directly influenced the present of Uber rides, influencers, and shiny rings.

Grynbaum says, in fact, that the Condé crew were the original influencers. Of Si Newhouse, Jr., he says, “He realized that these magazines, which were kind of niche, New York publications, could really expand to the national audience.”

As he continues, “For many decades, Condé Nast really kind of defined what people aspired to, what Americans aspired to. And what it meant to be successful in America often was wearing the clothes that Vogue recommended, decorating your house the way Architectural Digest suggested. GQ was a guide for men and how they should dress, Self was about physical fitness and keeping yourself healthy. For any phase in life, Condé presented itself as the authority in that field.”

It was a golden age in which writers such as Michael Lewis, Nick Tosches, Dominic Dunne and Maureen Orth submitted masterful features and readers all over the country devoured the pages. There was also Bryan Burrough, Maria Brenner, Buzz Bissinger, and David Remnick who rose from Pulitzer Prize winning political writer and author to longtime New Yorker editor in chief.

Like all eras, however, it had to come to, if not, an end, then at least a final quarter. Specifically, with the rise of the internet and the attendant decrease in magazine sales, Condé experienced rolling shake-ups and downsizing as the new millennium loomed.

Today, there are, as Grynbaum says, “so many voices now on social media and on the internet that often, I think, for readers, it’s hard to sort through what’s quality and what’s not. I think the advantage of the internet is that it was democratizing in that Condé Nast was also a snobbish, very exclusive place, and you had to talk and act a certain way to succeed there. And, now, anyone can publish their opinions, weigh in, and publish themselves, essentially.”

Still, as one glance at the dwindling number of New York newsstand reveals, magazines still exist, and many of the best survivors are Condé Nast titles. “The print model of magazines, I don’t think, will come back in a way, in the form, that they once had,” Grynbaum says, “but something like Vogue- I think, people still trusted to be featured in Vogue really suggests a certain approval from the establishment. The same with Vanity Fair and GQ. These are still brands that mean a lot to people.”