Vanity Fair (magazine)

Vanity Fair is a glossy American glamour magazine monthly that offers a mixture of articles 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.

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.

Related Topics:
New York, - 1860 - 1863. - British - 1868 - Thomas Gibson Bowles - Victorian - Edwardian - Serialized fiction - Word game

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However, 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 Italian Carlo Pellegrini (known as "Ape"), the French artist James Jacques Tissot, and the American Thomas Nast.

Related Topics:
Caricatures - Max Beerbohm - Leslie Ward - Carlo Pellegrini - James Jacques Tissot - Thomas Nast

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After merging with Dress magazine in 1913 and temporarily losing its name, Vanity Fair came to enjoy great popularity under the ownership of American publisher Condé Nast, starting in 1914.

Related Topics:
Condé Nast - 1914

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During this era 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.

Related Topics:
The New Yorker - Establishment's - Thomas Wolfe - T.S. Eliot - P.G. Wodehouse - Dorothy Parker - Edward Steichen - Claire Boothe Luce

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However, the magazine was not a commerical 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.

Related Topics:
Great Depression - 1936

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