The Treaty of Paris

Edward Enninful and anna wintour
Legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour and editor-in-chief of British Vogue, Edward Enninful. Photo: David Benett/Getty Images
Dylan Byers
September 28, 2022

Condé Nast was never the largest media player in New York, not by a longshot. But the Newhouse family’s privately held magazine kingdom was always the most fabulous, the most glamorous, and certainly the most decadent—the rows of towncars outside 350 Madison and then 4 Times Square; the extravagant office flowers flown in from Amsterdam for the biggest events; the privately financed apartment-or-townhouse deals for top creative and financial executives who had to embody the lives they portrayed; the corporate retreats in Milan, taking over Hotel Cipriani in Venice; those leaked Four Seasons holiday luncheon seating charts, where an editor’s proximity to Si Newhouse projected their status; well… those were the days. 

Back then, of course, Condé’s operations were inextricably entangled with the company’s unique confection of court politics and creative intrigue. Si, after all, was minutely involved with the various fiefdoms inside his business. He routinely presided over the “print order” meetings in which each title’s editor-in-chief and publisher would present the “book”—then an analog album of manually-inserted advertising and editorial pages—to an assembly of executives. And despite his enormous fortune and vast media holdings, he lunched monthly in the cafeteria (where garlic, to which he had a material distaste, was verboten) with his top editors at the booth behind the checkout station.