A version of this post was published in The Dialectic in April 2023.
I’M NOT generally a reader of glossy magazines so it was to educate myself that I read Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983-1992, an illuminating look at the publishing industry and a candid chronicle of uptown New York during the 1980s. The insights provided by these revealing diaries convinced me that the print magazine is, at its best, a bona fide art form.
In 1988 I bought issue number one of the UK’s version of Hello! magazine. I was at a train station and needed something to read for my journey. For some reason I remember that it had a picture of Princess Anne on the front cover. Unlike some of the weightier fashion and society publications it was not too expensive for my pocket, and on leafing through it I noticed that unlike the tabloid newspapers of the time it did not rip to shreds the celebrities featured in it. Hello! allowed interviewees to project a heavily-curated image of themselves, and was not nasty or controversial. The photo spreads were glossy and copious, and I didn’t mind the shallow, sycophantic journalism. I only stopped buying it when I no longer recognised most of the celebrities featured in it. Other than that, my consumption of glossy mags was limited to those found in dentists’ waiting rooms and the colour supplements in weekend broadsheets (in the days when I actually bought a weekend broadsheet).
Brown’s book opened my eyes to the amount of work entailed in producing a quality magazine during the 1980s. Obtaining advertising revenue was a time-consuming necessity. In the case of Vanity Fair, advertising funded production and gave the product its aspirational quality, a shallow but well-established component of the industry. It was the decade of the fictional Wall Street trader Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street (1987). Gekko’s mantra, “Greed is good!”, torpedoed the ideals of the 1960s counterculture, seemingly forever, but that did not mean that good journalism could not operate within that environment. Revenue from advertising enabled the publisher and editor to afford the services of the best writers, journalists and photographers, and of course the images used in advertising added a great deal to the publication’s visual appeal. It was an interesting confluence of the frivolous and the serious, and when done well, an effective way of keeping the readership informed about all sorts of important subjects, including world events, as well as what was hot and what was not in consumerland.
Under the eight-year editorship of Brown, Vanity Fair’s circulation rose from 250 000 to 1.2 million; from twelve pages of advertising to two hundred. I’ll just let that sentence rest there for a moment. That is some achievement for a young editor. It was not only an obvious case of having the right person in the right job, but also a powerful illustration of the potential reach of an organ that could achieve this level of success.
Brown was only twenty-five when she became editor of London’s Tatler magazine. After she had made a success of that it was sold to the publishing company Condé Nast, under whose aegis she edited Vanity Fair. (She later went on to edit The New Yorker, founded The Daily Beast, and she now publishes a popular and entertaining Substack called Fresh Hell.) She had great instincts as an editor, and with her husband, the renowned British journalist Harold Evans, she attended social events as a necessary part of the job, building an intimate knowledge of what she calls “black tie Manhattan”.1 Here she found stories and doggedly pursued advertising revenue. She brought the writer and journalist Dominick Dunne on board as a regular contributor, and extracted Donald Trump’s2 The Art of the Deal, wryly observing that it was “bullshit, but it was authentic bullshit”.
Brown’s recipe for a successful magazine was straightforward, if challenging to sustain:
It had to have a sizzling, glamorous cover, it had to have a wonderful, reported piece that broke news, it had to have a cultural piece that was learning about something that was about to happen and you should know about. All of these things had to be there.
As the editor Brown was involved in all aspects of production, ensuring that headlines, captions and contents pages all played their part in drawing the reader in. A good cover photo was essential. I well remember walking down The Strand in central London in 1991 and being taken aback by a huge window display of the Vanity Fair cover of a pregnant, naked Demi Moore. The photographer Annie Leibovitz was responsible for the famously controversial image, and a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, along with Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton.
Quality magazines might actually be one of the cheaper, non-digital ways of consuming art and literature, so it will be a great shame if they drown in the wake of online media. For years I have subscribed to Private Eye, the UK’s primary source of investigative journalism and satire. It contains excellent jokes, is only published in physical form, and is sold at a very reasonable price.
Unlike Vanity Fair, it’s not very aspirational, unless you aspire to 100% cotton chinos and over-fifties travel insurance. It’s my only subscription to a print magazine, so I suppose I ought to put my money where my mouth is and consider taking out another; after all, you never miss the water till the well runs dry.
All quotes are from Tina Brown’s GBH Forum Network interview with Meredith Goldstein of the Boston Globe, 2018.
When I looked up an image of the first issue of Hello! magazine, just to make sure that my memory of it was correct, I noticed that it also featured the 47th POTUS’ wedding to Marla Maples. He’s everywhere!
There’s something so British about Private Eye and something so American about Vanity Fair but I have loved reading them both. I’ve always been a print junkie but even my consumption has declined.
I enjoyed this Jules and Tina Brown is a phenomenon isn’t she?
Jules! This subject is so near and dear to my heart. I adore print magazines. As a teen I was OBSESSED, mostly with fashion and music mags, or ones that had a cool factor like "Details," "Spy Magazine," "VOX," "NME," "Interview," and "Village Voice." My friends and I would cut them up, make collages, and decorate letters and envelopes that we mailed to each other. In fact, I took a career assessment quiz in High School and was told I should be a creative director at a magazine. I went to college to study magazine journalism and my first job was at a company that published trade magazines. Not quite as sexy as I'd imagined. My career ended up taking a different turn into entertainment marketing, but when I finally decided to give writing a go, the editor who first published one of my essays in a magazine had worked for Tina Brown at "Talk Magazine" back in the day. I still marvel at that couple of degrees of separation. TB is definitely a visionary and it's incredible how instrumental she was in shaping the business at such a young age. Inspiring! These days, we still get the print version of the "New York Times" on Sunday with the "New York Times Magazine" enclosed, "Los Angeles Magazine" (which has really gone down the tubes) and we subscribe to several magazines for Jared's mom, even though she has zero dollars, she loves to read "Town and Country" and see how the other half live. We were getting the physical "New Yorkers" too, but there's just no way to keep up, so we switched to digital only.