Vanity Fair Magazine
I put this together long before the controversy over the cover they did on the Obamas. No matter my feelings about that cover I have long admired Vanity Fair.
1932 Greta Garbo Cover
In 2008, Vanity Fair celebrates its 95th anniversary—and its 25th as a relaunched publication. To showcase the photographic heritage of the magazine, London’s National Portrait Gallery has mounted an exhibition, “Vanity Fair Portraits, 1913–2008” (opening February 14, 2008), which will travel to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, in Edinburgh, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Portrait Gallery of Canberra, Australia. In the fall of 2008, the magazine will produce a special anniversary issue and a hardcover book, Vanity Fair: The Portraits.
“Vanity Fair” originally meant “a place or scene of ostentation or empty, idle amusement and frivolity”—a reference to the decadent fair in John Bunyan’s 1678 book, The Pilgrim’s Progress. By the 19th century, however, author William Makepeace Thackeray made “Vanity Fair” his own, borrowing the term to christen his widely read 1848 satirical novel, which was serialized at the time in Britain’s Punch magazine.
Vanity Fair, the magazine, appeared in three incarnations in the 1800s. First, it was a short-lived, Manhattan-based humorous weekly, published from 1859 to 1863. Next, in the U.K., from 1868 to 1914, Vanity Fair was the title of a periodical that became known as the cream of the period’s “society magazines,” best remembered for its witty prose and its caricatures of men (and occasionally women) of privilege. Sir Leslie (“Spy”) Ward, the magazine’s famed illustrator, believed that “when the history of the Victorian Era comes to be written in true perspective, the most faithful mirror and record of … the spirit of the times will be sought and found in Vanity Fair.” Finally, in 1890, another American version began weekly publication, reconceived as a theater magazine that boasted unabashedly of reaching “the vast, luxury-loving, money-spending multitude everywhere.”
In 1913, the dapper and visionary publisher Condé Nast, having already made a success of Vogue, bought the rights to the name and introduced a new hybrid journal, Dress & Vanity Fair, which had an undistinguished four-issue run. Revamped in 1914, Vanity Fair was yet again relaunched. In short order it became, under the stewardship of its canny and irrepressible editor, Frank Crowninshield, a cultural bellwether of the Jazz Age. Vanity Fair promoted the work of modern artists (Picasso, Brancusi) and illustrators (Miguel Covarrubias, Paolo Garretto), published essays by new literary lights (from Dorothy Parker and Gertrude Stein to D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley), and helped popularize and perfect the genre of celebrity portraiture through the pioneering work of photographers such as Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, and Baron de Meyer.
Beyond the pages of Vanity Fair, Crowninshield and Nast also spawned Manhattan “café society” at vibrant parties they threw for their acquaintances in the newly intersecting spheres of literature, the arts, sports, politics, cinema, and high society. Their magazine, throughout the 20s and into the 30s, became the gold standard for the so-called smart magazines of the era. “Vanity Fair,” wrote social historian Cleveland Amory, “was as accurate a barometer of its time as exists.” Then, alas, came the ravages of the Depression and the rise of Fascism. In 1936, V.F. suspended publication, considered a periodical too glib and urbane for the increasingly stormy times.
Vanity Fair was resurrected by the Condé Nast Publications a half-century later, in 1983, as a quirky cultural pastiche. Two editors (Richard Locke and Leo Lerman) tried their hands at the helm, with mixed results. Tina Brown took over in 1984 and gave the magazine a Reagan-era flair, appealing to the lavish tastes of readers in that go-go decade. Brown conscripted a stable of photographers (Annie Leibovitz, Harry Benson, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts among them), encouraged writers like Dominick Dunne, smacked celebrities on the cover, and offered a frothy bouillabaisse of scandal, wealth, and high and low culture. An international edition was launched in 1991.
In 1992, Graydon Carter, a veteran of both Time and Life, co-founder of Spy, and editor of The New York Observer, stepped in, bringing the magazine to new levels of journalistic prowess—and profitability. Carter assembled a group of A-list contributors, expanded the magazine’s mandate to cover news and world affairs, commissioned stunning photographic portfolios and definitive retrospective pieces, and inaugurated editorial franchises that have become V.F. cornerstones: the Hollywood Issue (accompanied each year by the star-studded Vanity Fair Oscar gala, currently the most famous annual party in the world), the New Establishment rankings (which rate moguls in the information-communications-entertainment sphere), special issues or major sections devoted to the environment and music, and the International Best-Dressed List.
With its mix of lively writing, bold portraiture, keen cultural intuition, in-depth reporting, and memorable profiles of the movers and shakers of the age, Vanity Fair has become, by many estimates, magazine journalism’s acknowledged arbiter of modern society, power, and personality.
David Friend is Vanity Fair’s editor of creative development. He is the author of Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11.
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Tuesday, 19 February 2008
One thing I do look forward to every month is the new Vanity Fair. Although I relish its sharp and witty writing, it's the photographs that I tear into first. They're always sumptuous and reveal so much about their subjects.
Indeed, some of the greatest portrait photographs of the 20th century were taken for, or published in, the magazine. A new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) gathers together 150 of these iconic images, from the magazine's beginnings in 1913 right up to date with the present cover. The photographs are arranged in period order (1913–1936 and then 1983, when the magazine relaunched, to the present) and offer a chance to see the work of such legendary photographers as Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Baron de Meyer, Man Ray, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Bruce Weber and Mario Testino, all reproduced in spectacular prints. So many of the featured portraits have seemingly become part of our very DNA, such as the Reagans dancing, Demi Moore proudly displaying her bump, Mario Testino’s shots of a relaxed Princess Diana, the pensive Virginia Woolf and Louise Brooks' feisty bob.
The sheer roster of celebrated subjects is staggering – in the first period come Einstein, Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Irving Berlin, Isadora Duncan, Noel Coward and so many more. The stars of the golden age of Hollywood, including Katherine Hepburn, Jean Harlow, Cary Grant and Garbo. Sports legends such as Jesse Owens and Babe Ruth. Dancers such as Nijinsky, Pavlova, Massine and Josephine Baker (looking like an Oscar come to sexy life). And then come the writers: Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce, Shaw, Hardy and Welles.
With the relaunch, the pictures become full of colour, life and a real sense of fun, and include Princess Diana, Tom Cruise, Helen Mirren, Julia Roberts, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Redgrave clan, Lance Armstrong and the Bush administration. The exhibition also reflects one of Vanity Fair's great strengths throughout its history – its ability to mix celebrities with authors, athletes, scientists, thinkers, business leaders and politicians.
Helen Mirren by Lord Snowdon, 1995
© Snowdon
If there's one criticism to be made of the exhibition, it's that the space may be rather too small. We experienced great difficulties in seeing the early pictures, as the logjam of people made progression agonisingly slow. But, if you're not too bothered about being a purist and seeing things in order, you can find gaps to tuck into here and there. And unlike many exhibitions where there's one star exhibit you can't get at, there's a gem to be found at every turn here.
As I wanted to spend even more time drinking in the portraits, I did succumb to the accompanying catalogue, which features all 150 of the exhibited shots, plus a number of additional ones, as well essays on the history of Vanity Fair’s commissioning of photographs, and it's well worth the £25 investment.
If seeing these wonderful images leaves you eager for more, the NPG will be hosting an exhibition devoted entirely to Annie Leibovitz's work later in the year ('Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life', October 16 to January 25). Her images have become as much a touchstone for the magazine in its new incarnation as those of Steichen did at the beginning of the 20th century, and this is the first exhibition where their work appears side by side.
Jean Harlow by George Hurrell, 1934 © Estate of George Hurrell, courtesy of George Hurrell Jr/Image Courtesy Condé Nast Archive
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
One thing I do look forward to every month is the new Vanity Fair. Although I relish its sharp and witty writing, it's the photographs that I tear into first. They're always sumptuous and reveal so much about their subjects.
Indeed, some of the greatest portrait photographs of the 20th century were taken for, or published in, the magazine. A new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) gathers together 150 of these iconic images, from the magazine's beginnings in 1913 right up to date with the present cover. The photographs are arranged in period order (1913–1936 and then 1983, when the magazine relaunched, to the present) and offer a chance to see the work of such legendary photographers as Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Baron de Meyer, Man Ray, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Bruce Weber and Mario Testino, all reproduced in spectacular prints. So many of the featured portraits have seemingly become part of our very DNA, such as the Reagans dancing, Demi Moore proudly displaying her bump, Mario Testino’s shots of a relaxed Princess Diana, the pensive Virginia Woolf and Louise Brooks' feisty bob.
The sheer roster of celebrated subjects is staggering – in the first period come Einstein, Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Irving Berlin, Isadora Duncan, Noel Coward and so many more. The stars of the golden age of Hollywood, including Katherine Hepburn, Jean Harlow, Cary Grant and Garbo. Sports legends such as Jesse Owens and Babe Ruth. Dancers such as Nijinsky, Pavlova, Massine and Josephine Baker (looking like an Oscar come to sexy life). And then come the writers: Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce, Shaw, Hardy and Welles.
With the relaunch, the pictures become full of colour, life and a real sense of fun, and include Princess Diana, Tom Cruise, Helen Mirren, Julia Roberts, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Redgrave clan, Lance Armstrong and the Bush administration. The exhibition also reflects one of Vanity Fair's great strengths throughout its history – its ability to mix celebrities with authors, athletes, scientists, thinkers, business leaders and politicians.
Helen Mirren by Lord Snowdon, 1995
© Snowdon
If there's one criticism to be made of the exhibition, it's that the space may be rather too small. We experienced great difficulties in seeing the early pictures, as the logjam of people made progression agonisingly slow. But, if you're not too bothered about being a purist and seeing things in order, you can find gaps to tuck into here and there. And unlike many exhibitions where there's one star exhibit you can't get at, there's a gem to be found at every turn here.
As I wanted to spend even more time drinking in the portraits, I did succumb to the accompanying catalogue, which features all 150 of the exhibited shots, plus a number of additional ones, as well essays on the history of Vanity Fair’s commissioning of photographs, and it's well worth the £25 investment.
If seeing these wonderful images leaves you eager for more, the NPG will be hosting an exhibition devoted entirely to Annie Leibovitz's work later in the year ('Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life', October 16 to January 25). Her images have become as much a touchstone for the magazine in its new incarnation as those of Steichen did at the beginning of the 20th century, and this is the first exhibition where their work appears side by side.
Jean Harlow by George Hurrell, 1934 © Estate of George Hurrell, courtesy of George Hurrell Jr/Image Courtesy Condé Nast Archive
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