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- Vanity Fair remains a crown jewel for Condé Nast, enduring prestige despite shrinking ads and industry disruption.
- Radhika Jones departed after seven years, surprising the magazine world and prompting an immediate search for new leadership.
- Anna Wintour led the search with advice from David Remnick; several high-profile editors were considered.
- The role was reimagined as global editorial director, overseeing Vanity Fair’s editions in Britain, France, Italy and Spain.
- Mark Guiducci plans to marry traditional tools, like cover stars, long investigations and sophisticated visuals, with modern platforms, promising mischief and fun.
Vanity Fair has found its next editor. And it didn’t have to look very far.
Mark Guiducci, the creative editorial director at Vogue, which like Vanity Fair is published by Condé Nast, will take the top job at the glossy culture magazine at the end of the month, the company said on Tuesday.
Mr. Guiducci, 36, fills a role recently vacated by Radhika Jones, who led the magazine for seven years.
“There has never been a better moment for Vanity Fair than right now,” Mr. Guiducci (pronounced gwah-doo-chi) said in an interview. “You read the news every morning and it’s so operatic and it’s drama at scale — it feels like a co-production between Marcel Proust and Michael Bay.”
While the publishing business has been battered in recent decades, Vanity Fair remains one of the crown jewels for Condé Nast, and its editorship is still one of the most coveted jobs in American journalism. The magazine, a Jazz Age publication that Condé relaunched in 1983, has been defined by its high-profile editors, Tina Brown and Graydon Carter, and its celebration of excess, Hollywood and the power elite.
But the industry has diminished from its heights of glamour, hit by shrinking advertising pages, competition for attention from social media and belt-tightening across Condé. Some of the glitzy markers remain — the Vanity Fair Oscars party, with its mix of the biggest Hollywood stars and personalities, remains a hot ticket more than 30 years after it first began. The limitless expense accounts, however, are long gone.
On April 3, Ms. Jones, who had taken over Vanity Fair after Mr. Carter ended his 25-year run as editor, shocked the magazine world when she announced her decision to leave the job, saying she felt “the pull of new goals in my life” and had “a horror of staying too long at the party.” Under her leadership, during a time of immense disruption across the industry, Vanity Fair’s circulation largely remained steady. Ms. Jones focused on diversifying the outlet’s writers and the celebrities who appeared on its cover, though she was sometimes criticized for a lack of flair.
The guessing game over her replacement began immediately in media circles, with possible contenders including Noah Shachtman, the former editor in chief of Rolling Stone; Genevieve Smith, executive editor of New York magazine; and Will Welch, the global editorial director of GQ. Anna Wintour, the chief content officer of Condé and editor in chief of Vogue, led the search, and David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, helped to advise her.
Mr. Guiducci takes over a job that is very different from the one held by previous editors of Vanity Fair. He will be the first “global editorial director” at Vanity Fair — gone is the editor in chief title — and will oversee Vanity Fair in the United States as well as editions across the world, which include Britain, France, Italy and Spain.
Mr. Guiducci would not reveal any of his plans for the new post yet, but he said part of the challenge as he saw it was deciding how to tell stories.
“There are all these old-school tools that can be used in new ways,” Mr. Guiducci said. “Cover stars, long lead ambitious investigations, sophisticated visuals — those are all things you can’t do on Substack. The difference today is we create them for and publish them on modern platforms.”
Ms. Wintour said in a statement that great editors “inspire their colleagues to move with speed, dexterity and thrilling derring-do.”
“That’s the magic of Mark,” she said, “an energetic and creative editor at the center of his generation and a leader under whom Vanity Fair will grow in ways I can foresee and, no doubt, many ways I can’t.”
Mr. Guiducci started his career at Vanity Fair as an assistant and held a number of roles at Vogue, before becoming the editor in chief of Garage, an art publication owned by Vice Media. He returned to Vogue in 2020 as creative editorial director, and helped to start Vogue World, an annual fashion and cultural show.
He is a chairman of the Friends of the Costume Institute, a group that supports the museum and the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He grew up in Southern California and graduated from Princeton University.
Mr. Guiducci said he wanted to bring “a sense of mischief” to the job.
“We’re going to have fun,” he said. “I think that’s something we’re going to need in our culture right now.”
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