Condé Nast magazines have always been the arbiter of an aspirational high-flying lifestyle — a velvet rope in bound paper form.
But maybe it’s time to change the name to Commie Nast.
Teen Vogue is now a youth radicalization manual. Vanity Fair just compared proud socialist Zohran Mamdani to John F. Kennedy. GQ can’t get enough of lefty pols — including, this week, Chi Osse, the progressive city councilman who ran to defund the police — and radically extreme figures like anti-Israel streamer Hasan Piker.
The New Yorker invited Piker to take part in its eponymous festival later this month, despite him saying that America deserved 9/11 and dismissing the rapes that occurred on October 7.
It’s no secret that Condé has no bones about being an unofficial arm of the DNC, willfully ignoring any figure who doesn’t wear a D on their jersey.
But while there’s been a broader so-called vibe shift to the right and a growing identity crisis in the Democratic party, many of our once influential institutions are entrenched in the far left.
That was evident when Vanity Fair’s new editor, Mark Guiducci, reportedly floated putting First Lady Melania Trump on the magazine’s cover, triggering a staff uprising.
“’If [Guiducci] puts Melania on the cover, half of the editorial staff will walk out, I guarantee it,” one midlevel editor told the Daily Mail.
“I will walk out the motherf–king door, and half my staff will follow me … If I have to work bagging groceries at Trader Joe’s, I’ll do it … It sickens me,” the staffer reportedly said.
Instead, Mamdani got the cover treatment and a fawning profile.
GQ’s October issue is devoted to understanding masculinity, though much of their recent coverage mocks and dismisses the right’s “manosphere” concept as caricatures. (Naturally, they asked Pete Buttigieg to weigh in.)
And their idea of acceptable politics shines through in their choice of models.
Brooklyn’s Osse, a onetime member of the DSA, posed for a fall fashion story with his boyfriend. The magazine, which once put AOC on the cover, can’t get enough: This is his second time in GQ, following a story last year on men in short shorts.
Is this the breezy lifestyle treatment — or a profile-building exercise for a 27-year-old said to be eyeing a primary challenge to Rep Hakeem Jeffries in the midterms?
But short shorts are nothing compared to July’s thirsty bathtub photo of buff Piker — who is touted as fighting Trump, Israel, the “wannabe bad boys of the manosphere” and even the Dems.
He thinks “America might be cooked.“
The same could be said for the staff at Teen Vogue, which started out as a legitimate fashion monthly for stylish rich girls who seamlessly fit into the “Gossip Girl” universe.
But once Trump was elected in 2016, it turned into an angsty resistance site pushing intersectionality, social justice and radical politics.
In 2019, the editors offered the definitive guide to a time-honored American teen pastime: anal sex. On the site now is another coitus how-to, this time for the obese. “Yes fat people have sex. This is how they do it,” it reads.
Surrounding it are heartwarming tales about Greta Thunberg, police surveillance of activists in the 1960s and ’70s, and “The Best Place to Plan a Revolution” (apparently, it’s a knitting club).
GQ offers this headline: “Ken Burns loves America — and you can too.”
Which, of course, assumes their readership does not.
According to the new book “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America,” the company’s late, longtime chairman Si Newhouse had a mandate for his empire: “sizzle and status often mattered more than breaking even.”
Newhouse’s idea of status is very out of fashion these days. Champagne socialism is the season’s hottest look, at least in Condé Nast’s magazines.