Vanity Fair is an American monthly magazine of popular culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast in the United States.

The first version of Vanity Fair was published from 1913 to 1936, then it was merged into Vogue. Conde Nast then revived the title in 1983. Vanity Fair currently publishes four international editions which are circulated in the United Kingdom (since 1991), Italy (since 2003), Spain (since 2008) and France (since 2013).

History

Dress and Vanity Fair

Condé Montrose Nast began his magazine empire in 1913 when he purchased the men's fashion magazine Dress, which he renamed Dress and Vanity Fair and later Vanity Fair. The magazine thrived throughout the 1920s and reached a circulation of 90,000 copies at its peak. However, it became a casualty of the Great Depression and declining advertising revenues. Condé Nast announced in December 1935 that Vanity Fair would be folded into Vogue (circulation 156,000) beginning with the March 1936 issue, Vogue incorporated Vanity Fair till the February 1983 issue.

In 2008, Vanity Fair celebrated 95 years since its debut under Nast (as well as the 25th anniversary of its 1983 relaunch), and the magazine's photographic heritage was memorialized in an exhibition called "Vanity Fair Portraits, 1913–2008" at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The exhibition traveled to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia. Vanity Fair: The Portraits, a special jubilee issue and hardback book, was published in the fall of 2008.

Vanity Fair is a fictitious place ruled by Beelzebub in the book Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Later use of the name was influenced by the well-known 1847–48 novel of the same name by William Makepeace Thackeray.

Modern revival

In June 1981, the Condé Nast company (owned by S.I. Newhouse) announced plans to revive Vanity Fair. The first issue was released on February 21, 1983 (cover date March), edited by Richard Locke, formerly of The New York Times Book Review. After three issues, Locke was replaced by Leo Lerman, veteran features editor of Vogue. He was followed by editors Tina Brown (1984–1992), Graydon Carter (1992–2017) and Radhika Jones (2017 to 2025). Jones was previously the director of The New York Times book section. Vanity Fair employees unionized in 2022. Mark Guiducci, formerly the creative editorial director of Vogue, succeeded Jones as editor-in-chief in June 2025 following her resignation.

thumb|Vanity Fair logo, used from 2013 to 2025

Content and reception

Vanity Fair<nowiki/>'s articles cover a variety of topics. Regular writers and columnists have included Dominick Dunne, Sebastian Junger, Michael Wolff, Maureen Orth and Christopher Hitchens. In 1996, journalist Marie Brenner wrote "The Man Who Knew Too Much", an exposé on the tobacco industry which was adapted into the 1999 film The Insider starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe. Vanity Fairs May 2005 issue identified Mark Felt as the Watergate whistleblower "Deep Throat", who leaked information that led to the 1974 resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon. The magazine features candid interviews with celebrities, including a monthly Proust Questionnaire. In the 21st century, notable interviews include Teri Hatcher who revealed that she was sexually abused as a child, Jennifer Aniston in her first interview following her divorce from Brad Pitt, Anderson Cooper discussing his brother's death, and Martha Stewart's first interview after her release from prison.

In 2015, Vanity Fair had to update the account it had published by the NBC News correspondent Richard Engel about the disputed circumstances of his 2012 kidnapping in Syria, stating that he had misidentified his captors. In 2019, former contributing editor Vicky Ward said her 2003 profile of Jeffrey Epstein in Vanity Fair had included on-the-record accounts of Annie and Maria Farmer (who filed the earliest known criminal complaints about Epstein), but that they were later stricken from Ward's article after Bill Clinton pressured the magazine's editor Graydon Carter.

Representations in film and literature

The magazine was the subject of Toby Young's 2001 book, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, about his search for success in New York City while working for Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair. The book was made into a movie in 2008, with Jeff Bridges playing Carter. During his tenure, Carter was known for encouraging staff to spend lavishly to cultivate a public perception of the magazine as classy.

In 2017 former editor Tina Brown published "The Vanity Fair Diaries".

Photography

Famous contributing photographers for the magazine include Bruce Weber, Annie Leibovitz, Mario Testino and Herb Ritts, who have all provided the magazine with a string of lavish covers and full-page portraits of current celebrities. Among the most famous cover photographs is More Demi Moore, a 1991 portrait by Annie Leibovitz in which actress Demi Moore was naked and pregnant. The April 1999 issue featured an image of actor Mike Myers dressed as a Hindu deity for a photo spread by David LaChapelle. After criticism, both the photographer and the magazine apologized.