Conde Nast

Conde Montrose Nast invented the idea that a magazine should sell a small readership rather than a large one, which is the basis of most of the modern industry. He was a lawyer by training who made his reputation as advertising manager of Collier's Weekly, raising its revenue from five thousand dollars a year to over a million in a decade. In 1909 he bought Vogue, then a small New York society weekly, and did the opposite of what publishers did: he deliberately narrowed the readership to the wealthy and the fashion trade, and sold advertisers proximity to them at a premium rather than volume. The phrase for it now is class publishing. He bought or founded House and Garden, Vanity Fair, Glamour and British, French and other editions of Vogue, and he invested in printing quality - his own presses at Greenwich, colour work, and the photographers who made the magazines look the way they did, Steichen and Beaton and Horst among them. It was Nast who pulled Lee Miller out of the path of a car on a Manhattan street in 1927 and put her on the cover of Vogue within months. He lost most of his fortune in the crash of 1929 and had to be refinanced by a British investor, remaining as head of a company he no longer controlled. He died in 1942, and the company still carries his name. He introduced the first colour photograph on an American magazine cover in 1932. Vanity Fair was closed in 1936 and revived nearly fifty years later. The Conde Nast building at Times Square was built in 1999, long after him.

• Lived: 1873 CE – 1942 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: other