Condé Nast was bought for $5 million as an anniversary present
In 1959 the newspaper owner Samuel Newhouse bought Condé Nast for $5 million as a gift for his wife Mitzi, who adored Vogue. The publisher he acquired had started in 1909 with a single society weekly and now reaches hundreds of millions of people through titles from The New Yorker to Wired.
Condé Montrose Nast, a New York-born publisher, bought Vogue in 1909. It had launched in 1892 as a weekly chronicle of New York society and fashion. He ran it as the Vogue Company before creating Condé Nast Publications in 1922 as a holding company. Nast knew how to court wealthy readers and the advertisers who wanted them, and he steered Vogue toward becoming a leading authority on haute couture. In 1916 he launched British Vogue, making his firm the first to publish an overseas edition of an existing magazine.
Nast is widely credited with inventing the class publication: a magazine aimed at a particular social group or interest rather than the largest possible audience. His stable grew to include House and Garden, Vanity Fair and, in 1939, Glamour, the last title he personally introduced before his death in 1942. During the Depression the company experimented with typography, design and colour, and in 1932 Vogue ran its first full-colour cover photograph, by Edward Steichen, as photographs began replacing fashion drawings on its covers.
Under the Newhouse family and its private holding company, Advance Publications, the group kept expanding. It bought Brides in 1959, launched Self in 1979 and in 1983 revived Vanity Fair, which had closed in 1936. S. I. Newhouse Jr. became chairman in 1975. In 2000 the company moved to 4 Times Square, helping spur the area's redevelopment, and bought Fairchild Publications from Disney; Golf Digest followed for $435 million. It also acquired Reddit in 2006 and Ars Technica in 2008, while closing titles such as Mademoiselle and the American House and Garden.
Today Condé Nast is headquartered at One World Trade Center. Its brands reach more than 72 million print readers, 394 million digital users and 454 million people on social media. Anna Wintour, long Vogue's American editor, is its global chief content officer, and a film and television arm has operated since 2011.
Source: Condé Nast
