Anyone who is anyone has walked through the chiselled gold entrance of Vogue House, the Mayfair office of Condé Nast magazines. Prime ministers, fashion designers, supermodels — even royalty.
Princess Diana used to lunch with top executives and tip off the paparazzi so they could photograph her when she left. “It was like the gateway to a dream,” said Edward Enninful, the outgoing editor-in-chief of British Vogue.
Not any more. Its glass doors closed for the last time last week after a riotous farewell party, and on Monday the writers and editors of Vogue, GQ, Tatler, Wired and other titles all move east to offices just off the Strand — 18 places away on the Monopoly board and half a social world apart. “Bittersweet? Of course,” said Enninful, who some staff say behaved like such a diva in Vogue House that he was nicknamed “the queen mother”.
He will not be walking the corridors like he owns them any more, having quit after losing a battle to oust Dame Anna Wintour as editor-in-chief of American Vogue. Next month’s issue of British Vogue will be the last to bear his name.
His parting shot is a cover of the new March issue featuring 40 of the world’s most famous women, among them Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Gigi Hadid, photographed together — a fashion and celebrity coup that Wintour has never managed to pull off. “His none-too-subtle message to his bosses is ‘You shouldn’t have let me go!’” a close friend says.
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Other boldface names, too, will no longer have corner offices decorated in 17 different shades of white: Vanessa Kingori, former chief business officer of Condé Nast UK, decamped to Google in November, shortly after Albert Read left as managing director.
Even John Groger — the ardent Arsenal fan who for the past 20 years has sat behind the Vogue House reception and greeted everyone from Tony Blair to Quentin Tarantino — has decided to retire, so will not be swapping London’s ritziest address for an office building shared with nerds from The Economist. “It’s a difficult time for everyone,” said one Condé Nast editor.
There is also turmoil at the publisher’s global head office in New York. Almost 400 union members held a 24-hour strike last month to protest against “unlawful bargaining tactics during negotiations” to lay off 300 employees and take other cost-reduction measures, including merging Condé Nast’s music criticism website Pitchfork with its men’s monthly, GQ.
Some staffers complained that when Wintour laid them off, she did not remove her trademark sunglasses to look them in the eye. “Condé Nasty,” one commented. The actress Anne Hathaway performed an epic luvvie flounce in support of the strikers by walking out of a Vanity Fair photo shoot when she heard about the industrial action. “She just got up from hair and make-up and left,” Variety magazine reported.
What’s going on?
Condé Nast is restructuring and retooling itself for what it sees as a new era of worldwide digital media. Wintour and Condé Nast chief executive Roger Lynch, a former banker and technology executive, are creating more standardised global print editions of each of the firm’s titles that they want to use as a “platform” to create new “digital assets” with worldwide appeal. These include films of the hit stories that each publishes, “click through and buy” shopping on its titles’ websites and splashy, ticketed events such as Vogue World.
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The London operations of Condé Nast, which used to oversee fiercely independent UK and international editions of its titles, now generate “local” stories, many of which are fed into Wintour, chief content officer, and her team in New York. There is no longer any need for a snazzy Mayfair office — nor, it seems, for a successor to Enninful as UK Vogue editor-in-chief; Chioma Nnadi, who replaces him, is merely “head of editorial content”, reporting to Wintour.
The moves have been controversial, to put it mildly. When Wintour and Lynch implemented their new strategy in earnest in 2021, Tina Brown, former editor of three Condé Nast titles — Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Tatler — warned that it was “suicidal” to try to create more standardised global print editions of its titles because “magazines work when they are in tune with local audiences. If you try to appeal to everyone, you end up so vanilla that you appeal to no one.”
Many Condé Nast journalists expressed worries that adding ecommerce links to stories risked making the titles’ websites look like “clickbait supermarkets”, as one GQ writer put it.
Media analysts also cautioned that diversifying into video would be tricky for a traditional publisher — not just because its expertise lies in print and relatively few magazine features ever make it on to the screen, but also because video is hard to monetise; most films are screened on third-party platforms such as YouTube, and these take a big share of any advertising revenue generated by a film.
The drama in London and New York has prompted many others to ask whether Lynch and Wintour’s strategy is working.
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Condé Nast’s stable of print magazines still exists — albeit without the strong national editions — “and that’s an achievement in itself when so many other print titles have folded,” said Douglas McCabe of Enders Analysis. InStyle and Marie Claire no longer have print editions and the once-mighty Sports Illustrated is on the brink of collapse.
The New Yorker remains a high-class weekly magazine and Tatler, edited by posh-chap-about-town Richard Dennen, is still a must-read for those who pronounce trousers “trysers”. Condé Nast Traveller, under Divia Thani, is benefiting from the post-pandemic lust for travel, while Katie Drummond, the new editor-in-chief of Wired, is praised by company insiders as “a dynamic digital newshound”.
But the financial success of the restructuring and the long-term editorial prospects are unclear.
Critics say that centralising magazine publishing in New York under Wintour, aged 74, has prompted the recent flight of top talent in the UK and the US. As a 51-year-old black, gay man, Enninful was regarded by many as the right leader to replace Wintour as global editor-in-chief of Vogue. “But Edward was getting increasingly fed up reporting to Anna,” said a close colleague. “When it became clear that Roger [Lynch] backed her and he could not dislodge her, he decided to leave the UK editor’s chair.” The London-based GQ editorial team assembled by the former editor Dylan Jones was “let go” after his departure in 2021, though the company says the magazine’s UK operation still has a large staff.
The cutbacks have left GQ — and the once all-conquering Vanity Fair — “thinner and without their trademark swagger”, McCabe said. GQ’s website, as many feared, increasingly features “listicles” of recommended products to buy.
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Meanwhile, Lynch’s relentless drive to generate more money from print assets has exposed conflicts of interest that have tarnished Condé Nast’s magazines. A feature that fiercely criticised David Zaslav, the Hollywood mogul who heads Warner Bros Discovery, was pulled just hours after it was published last year, following a complaint from Warner that it was inaccurate. Explaining the decision, GQ said the article had not been properly edited. It later emerged that Will Welch, the global editorial director of GQ, was working with Warner on a big-budget project to bring a GQ story to the big screen.
Getting a handle on the financial performance of Condé Nast is hard because it is a private company owned by the billionaire Newhouse family and does not publish detailed accounts. One thing looks clear, though: the “pivot to video”, hailed by Lynch as key to the future of the company, has not worked out as hoped.
Condé Nast has had some success turning magazine articles into films and TV series, notably The Secrets of Hillsong and High & Low — John Galliano. But Lynch conceded last year: “Video has been a volatile area of the industry. New video formats haven’t found monetisation models yet.”
Condé Nast’s Los Angeles-based film and video hub, Condé Nast Entertainment (CNE), is being “restructured”, Lynch says — corporate speak for “closed”, company insiders say. CNE’s boss, the former hotshot Disney executive Agnes Chu, left the firm last year.
Lynch wrote to staff recently to say that “taking additional steps to find efficiencies and reduce costs” is “difficult”, but would enable the company to “continue to invest in strategic growth areas and support the editorial core of our business”. The new global structure has created “new, diverse revenue streams” that are “leading us to what we expect will be our third straight year of overall revenue growth”.
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Company sources say that for the three years to 2022 the company has been break-even to revenue positive. Last year total subscriptions to Condé Nast titles were up 11 per cent, new digital subscriptions more than doubled and ecommerce rose by 44 per cent. Advertising, excluding print advertising, was “flat”. But Lynch has declined to give specific numbers, raising questions about the overall health of the company.
Amid all the uncertainty — including the hot-button issue for many of those heading to the new office: whether the ladies’ loos will have hair straighteners, as they did in Vogue House — what is the future of Condé Nast?
One thing is certain: its titles are too big to fail. “Vogue is Vogue and there will always be Vogue,” said McCabe. But he warned: “The magazines are not thriving and the firm’s strategy is worrying.”
Rather than working out how to build on its traditional strength as an elite, upscale publisher, “Condé Nast seems to be hell-bent on cutting costs and implementing a rolling global digital revolution to broaden its appeal, no matter what the cost in terms of talent erosion or editorial quality. That might flatter the bottom line in the short term, but is it a credible long-term strategy for a high-end global publisher?”
Many Condé Nast writers and editors argue that the firm needs a new owner and a new approach. Would the Newhouses sell? Those close to the family say they are split on the issue, with the London-based Jonathan Newhouse, who used to run the mighty Mayfair operation, potentially open to offers, while his cousin Steven, who runs the firm in New York, is opposed. A company spokesperson said simply, “Condé Nast is not for sale.”
Despite that, there is interest in a buyout. Apple is rumoured to have made an offer. Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates-backed funds are circling. But the clock is ticking, a former senior Condé Nast executive warned. “The only people who would buy Condé Nast will be from outside the media business, because no one in media would want to pay the premium the Newhouses will ask,” he said.
“To anyone outside media, Anna Wintour is Condé Nast’s talismanic leader. Any investor will want her there. It’s not impolite to ask how long will she — can she — stay in such a demanding global role? If I were the Newhouse family, I’d want to cash out while I could and move sooner rather than later.”
It would make a great cover story for one of Condé Nast’s titles.
This article was amended on February 16 2024
