Vanity Fair (magazine)
From Open Encyclopedia
Image:Vanity Fair August 1991.JPG Vanity Fair is a glossy American glamour magazine, published monthly. It offers a mixture of articles based on high-brow culture, jet-set and entertainment-business personalities, politics, and current affairs. The current editor-in-chief is E. Graydon Carter, and the current publisher is Louis Cona.
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History
The first magazine bearing the name Vanity Fair appeared in New York, as a humorous weekly, from 1860 to 1863. A British weekly Vanity Fair magazine began publication in 1868 by Thomas Gibson Bowles. Subtitled "A Weekly Show of Political, Social, and Literary Wares", it offered its Victorian and Edwardian era readership articles on fashion, current events, reviews of the theatre, new books, reports on social events, and the latest scandals, together with serialized fiction, word games, and other trivia.
Image:Knightley - Johansson - Vanity Fair.jpgHowever, the magazine was perhaps best known for its caricatures. More than two thousand of these caricatures appeared, of subjects that included artists, athletes, royalty, statesmen, scientists, authors, actors, soldiers and scholars. Produced by an international group of artists, the illustrations are considered the chief cultural legacy of the magazine and form a pictorial record of the period. Among the artists who contributed illustrations were Max Beerbohm, Sir Leslie Ward (who signed his work "Spy"), the Italians Carlo Pellegrini (known as "Ape") and Liborio Prosperi ("Lib"), the French artist James Jacques Tissot, and the American Thomas Nast.
After merging with Dress magazine in 1913 and temporarily losing its name, the first issue of Vanity Fair was published in New York City in January of 1914. It achieved great popularity under the ownership of publisher Condé Nast and editor Frank Crowninshield.
In 1919 Robert Benchley was tapped to become managing editor. He joined Dorothy Parker, who had come to the magazine 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. It 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.
However, the magazine was not a commercial success; it reportedly made a profit in only one of its 22 years under Nast, and never sold more than 99,000 copies. It became a casualty of the Great Depression, and in 1936 Vanity Fair ceased publication.
Contemporary revival
Image:Jennifer Aniston - Vanity Fair.jpg The magazine was revived in its current form in the 1980s by the revived Condé Nast Publications, under the ownership of Si Newhouse. Under editors Tina Brown (1984-1992) and E. Graydon Carter (since 1992), Vanity Fair enjoyed greater circulation, prestige and revenues, the latter attested by a thicket of trendy advertisements which make finding even the magazine's table of contents a formidable task.
Glamour photographers such as the late Herb Ritts, Annie Leibovitz and Mario Testino have provided the magazine with a string of lavish covers and full-page portraits of current celebrities and forgotten heroes.
In 1996, Marie Brenner wrote an exposé on the tobacco industry, entitled The Man Who Knew Too Much. This article was later adapted into a movie, The Insider (1999).
An article in the May 2005 edition revealed the identity of Deep Throat (W. Mark Felt), the source for the Washington Post articles on Watergate, which led to the 1974 resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon.
In 2005, Vanity Fair was found liable in a lawsuit brought in UK by film director Roman Polanski, who claimed the magazine had libelled him in an article published in 2002, accusing him of boorish behavior following the murder of his wife Sharon Tate in 1969. The case was more notable because Polanski was living in France as a fugitive from U.S. justice, and never appeared in the London court for fear he would be extradited to the U.S.
Vanity Fair also hosts an exclusive party after the Academy Awards are finished; being even an A-List celebrity in show business does not ensure an invitation.
Internal link
- Vanity Fair’s 50 greatest films of all time, September 2005
