The social media cannibalization of tastemaking and the destruction of our ability to read anything longer than an Instagram caption has prompted a mini wave of nostalgia for the old days of media elites.
Next week, New York Times media reporter Michael Grynbaum is publishing Empire of the Elite, a profile of the rise and fall of magazine publisher Condé Nast. Over the last week, I read through Grynbaum’s excellent book, which is littered with tidbits from the golden era of magazines, drawing out the personalities of the media’s ruling class.
In one anecdote, Grynbaum details Vogue’s Anna Wintour and her famously “brusque management style”: “One Vogue editor was in a meeting with Anna when the telephone rang; Anna answered, then grabbed a tube of lipstick and scrawled a message on a sheet of paper that she silently handed across the desk: ‘Please leave.’”
He’s topping it off with a party in the old Condé Nast cafeteria later this week.