The Slow Death of Condé Nast's Secondary Titles and What It Means for Fashion Media

Condé Nast is deliberately shutting down secondary titles like Self and Glamour to focus resources on core brands like Vogue, Vanity Fair, and GQ—a strategy that mirrors how luxury advertising dried up when consumer brands moved to direct-to-consumer channels.

Summary of Annagram. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:15:02 — Self Magazine, which launched in 1979 as Condé’s leading wellness and fitness title, was shut down after becoming a minor brand that the company decided to discontinue.
• 00:15:40 — Fitness and wellness coverage migrated into general interest publications like Vogue and The Cut, leaving Self stuck between being a specialized publication nobody needed and a website nobody visited.
• 00:16:23 — Glamour was similarly gutted around the same time Self closed, becoming a skeleton website primarily filled with shopping affiliate links and barely any full-time staff.
• 00:17:40 — When consumer packaged goods companies stopped advertising in magazines and shifted to direct-to-consumer models, publications like Glamour and Self lost their primary revenue source.
• 00:18:33 — The core problem wasn’t just that wellness information became ubiquitous online—it’s that these magazines didn’t have a distinct editorial point of view beyond their category, unlike publications like New York Magazine or The Cut.
• 00:27:20 — Condé’s strategy of focusing on core titles like Vogue, GQ, and Vanity Fair makes financial sense, but the question remains whether they’re investing enough in those core brands to keep them culturally relevant.
• 00:40:29 — Chloe Meineck at Vogue is trying to balance the brand’s traditional exclusivity with modern accessibility through initiatives like book clubs and events that mix glamorous insiders with lottery-selected readers.
• 00:54:23 — GQ is in an uncertain transitional moment, losing talent to competitors like New York Magazine while facing questions about what a men’s lifestyle magazine should be in the current media landscape.

In depth

Why Self and Glamour actually died

The headline explanation for Self’s shutdown is almost boring: Condé CEO Roger Lynch framed it as a minor title getting cut so the company could concentrate resources on flagship brands 00:15:1600:15:35. But Grynbaum and Sherman push past that into a more interesting diagnosis. Grynbaum’s theory is that wellness and fitness content didn’t disappear, it migrated — into Vogue’s health coverage, into The Cut’s diet-and-fitness pieces, into general-interest style journalism that could absorb a health angle without needing a whole separate magazine to house it 00:15:4000:15:51. Self, in other words, became a victim of the very trend it helped pioneer back in 1979: once personal fitness became mainstream culture rather than a niche interest, there was no longer a reason to seek out a dedicated destination for it 00:20:19.

Sherman sharpens that point into something more structural: the problem wasn’t just saturation, it was that Self and Glamour never had a specific enough editorial point of view to survive once their subject matter went universal. She contrasts them with New York Magazine or The Cut, which have a governing sensibility that isn’t reducible to “beauty magazine” or “fitness magazine” — so when Jia Tolentino writes about deep-plane facelifts, it lands with an angle and a voice, something Self or Allure in their waning years increasingly lacked 00:19:0800:19:49. Sherman also flags the economic collapse underneath all this: CPG brands, once the financial backbone of magazines like Glamour, moved to direct-to-consumer marketing and simply stopped paying for print ad space, unlike luxury advertisers who kept spending on magazines partly out of relationship obligation rather than strict ROI 00:17:3600:18:33. That distinction — luxury sticking around for cachet, CPG leaving because it had cheaper options — explains why allure survives on beauty advertising while Self and Glamour didn’t have an equivalent lifeline 00:17:3000:18:20.

On Glamour specifically, Grynbaum cites his colleague Sapna Shamwari’s reporting that the magazine, once one of Condé’s most profitable titles in the 80s and 90s and effectively the moneymaker subsidizing Vogue’s expensive photo shoots, has been reduced to a skeleton crew churning out shopping links with almost no full-time staff 00:22:5300:23:44. Neither speaker treats this as simply cruel cost-cutting, though — Sherman argues bluntly that some brands should just be allowed to go dormant rather than propped up past their relevance, pointing out Vanity Fair itself sat dead for decades before its revival, so extinction isn’t necessarily a tragedy 00:24:2600:24:32.

The case for shrinking Condé — and its unresolved risk

Sherman’s headline judgment is that Condé’s strategy of narrowing focus onto Vogue, GQ, and Vanity Fair, while letting B-tier titles wither, is directionally correct 00:27:20. Grynbaum agrees in principle, framing it as a rational response to operating with less money and needing brands that still cut through culturally rather than spreading resources thin across titles that have lost their distinct niche 00:26:3000:26:53. But both immediately complicate their own endorsement. Sherman’s real question isn’t whether concentration is the right strategy — it’s whether Condé is actually executing on it, whether the surviving core titles are being resourced and staffed well enough to justify killing everything else 00:28:4700:28:54.

Bon Appétit becomes her test case for where the strategy goes wrong. She argues food culture is enormous right now and Bon Appétit should have been positioned as a marquee brand, recalling its extraordinary cultural moment a decade ago through personalities like Andy Baraghani, yet the magazine has lost that spark without collapsing the way Self or Glamour did 00:27:3200:28:12. Her point is that Condé isn’t simply choosing between life and death for titles — there’s a middle category of brands that are strategically important but currently mismanaged, and Bon Appétit sits there uncomfortably.

The events strategy gets scrutinized on similar terms. Sherman notes that Condé’s clearest current strength is live events — Vogue World being the obvious example — but she flags that events are notoriously hard to make genuinely profitable and don’t scale, so leaning on them raises the question of whether Condé’s leadership actually needs these brands to be profitable publications or is content to use them as marketing vehicles for a broader authority-and-prestige play 00:29:0600:29:45. Neither speaker resolves that tension. Sherman poses it almost rhetorically — is Vogue World’s cultural cachet the actual product now, more than the magazine itself — and Grynbaum doesn’t push back so much as acknowledge that the Newhouse family’s stated commitment to keeping Condé alive makes the answer matter more than it otherwise would 00:29:4500:29:50.

Chloe Malle’s high-wire act at Vogue

Both hosts treat Chloe Malle’s first year running Vogue as the most consequential ongoing experiment in the magazine world, and both hedge their praise carefully. Grynbaum discloses upfront that Malle is a close personal friend, which shapes but doesn’t disqualify his read: he’s struck by the Vogue book club, particularly a February event at the Chelsea Hotel built around Wuthering Heights, which mixed Vogue-world regulars like Derek Blasberg with readers selected by lottery and featured a live podcast taping with Emerald Fennell 00:39:3200:40:18. He frames this as Malle trying to solve an old contradiction — Vogue’s appeal was always its exclusivity, the sense that ordinary readers couldn’t sit at the cool table, but that posture doesn’t work in an internet culture that expects participation. He reaches for Mary McCarthy’s old description of Vogue as practicing “a snobbery for everyone,” arguing the book club captures exactly that balance of glamour and accessibility 00:41:2900:41:37.

Sherman’s assessment is more transactional. She separates brand management from content quality: she didn’t personally enjoy the Devil Wears Prada tie-in coverage and found it a bit sad as a piece of journalism, but she concedes it plainly made Vogue a bigger, more talked-about brand, and she’s willing to call that a win on Malle’s own terms even while disliking the execution 00:38:0300:38:18. That’s a real hedge, not false balance — she’s explicitly saying good brand management and good editorial can point in different directions, and Malle chose brand.

Both agree Malle’s job is structurally harder than Mark Guiducci’s at Vanity Fair, because Anna Wintour is still down the hall overseeing decisions, whereas Guiducci operates with something closer to full autonomy 00:41:5100:42:00. That asymmetry means, in Grynbaum’s view, that Malle can’t really be fairly judged as an editor until Wintour is fully out of the picture — a judgment Sherman doesn’t contest. The unresolved question both land on, without answering, is whether it actually matters that almost nobody is reading the print magazine itself, as long as the individual pieces — celebrity street style, Vogue Runway reviews — keep circulating and the brand keeps generating cultural conversation 00:38:0000:38:07. Sherman explicitly says she doesn’t know the answer.

Visual boldness as the thing everyone agrees is missing

One of the more pointed arguments in the conversation is about visual risk-taking, and here the two speakers build on each other rather than disagree. Grynbaum’s contention is historical: Condé was never the absolute cutting edge of fashion photography, but even its mainstream output in earlier eras — Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair in the 1980s, Steven Meisel’s work for Italian Vogue — produced images so provocative and memorable that they’ve stuck in cultural memory for decades, citing Whoopi Goldberg’s milk-bath cover as an example 00:49:4800:50:03. His claim is that as Condé grew larger and more global, a conservative instinct crept in that favored safety over striking imagery, even while individual photographs remained technically beautiful 00:50:2000:50:31.

Sherman picks this up and generalizes it into a rule: mass-market success now depends on feeling niche, and Vogue specifically needs editorial moments people want to physically pull out and pin on a wall — she cites a Gisele cover for W and a recent Gentlewoman shoot as recent examples of images that generated that kind of visceral, shareable reaction 00:48:4600:49:16. Her implicit critique is that Vogue currently produces plenty of content that gets clicked on — street style roundups, shoppable links — but not enough that gets regrammed or memorized the way those older images did, and she’s unsure whether that kind of image-making is even compatible with a magazine trying to also be financially disciplined and broadly relevant 00:49:2400:49:38.

Grynbaum goes further than Sherman here, arguing explicitly that Condé’s core titles — Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair — should consider “going for broke” and courting genuinely incendiary, provocative visual choices rather than staying inside safe mainstream guardrails, essentially proposing more risk than Sherman’s framing implies 00:50:3500:50:42. Sherman agrees with the diagnosis but stops short of endorsing recklessness — her formulation is narrower, that the work needs to feel special and niche-coded even when it’s serving a mass audience, which is a subtler and more manageable ask than Grynbaum’s call to be outright incendiary.

Hearst as an underrated competitor, and the Esquire opportunity

The conversation’s most speculative thread concerns Hearst, which both speakers treat as a chronically underrated publisher relative to Condé, but for different reasons. Grynbaum’s framing is institutional: Hearst has always been the less glamorous cousin because Condé indulged big personalities and big budgets in a way Hearst never did, and its culture was comparatively buttoned-up — he jokes that Condé is only now instituting travel-expense rules Hearst probably had in place twenty years ago 00:53:3700:54:03. Sherman’s framing is about talent and follow-through: she praises Stellene Volandes’s turnaround of Town & Country as one of the smartest jobs in the industry, achieved on a fraction of Vanity Fair’s budget, essentially beating VF at its own game of upper-class-behaving-badly coverage before Guiducci’s revival 00:58:0600:58:48. Grynbaum independently backs this up, comparing pre-Guiducci Town & Country favorably to Tatler under Kate Reardon for its cheeky, class-obsessed sensibility 00:58:5800:59:03.

Both flag Hearst’s recent hire of a content and experiential executive from NBCUniversal as a signal the company is consciously chasing Condé’s playbook — specifically the success of Vogue World and GQ’s Super Bowl programming — while noting Hearst’s own long-standing, lower-profile experiential presence at Cannes Lions 00:51:4700:52:19. Neither speaker is fully convinced this hire alone fixes anything; it’s presented as evidence of intent rather than proof of results.

Esquire draws the most optimism from both. Grynbaum sees a specific opening created by turmoil at GQ, where editorial leadership under Adam has led to a wave of departures — Sam Hine leaving for New York Magazine to build a men’s fashion issue, a design director also departing — leaving GQ in an uncertain transitional state that Esquire could exploit if it invests properly, especially given how much men’s-interest content has migrated online without a strong print anchor 00:54:2300:55:46. Sherman is more cautious about Condé’s GQ specifically, admitting she doesn’t yet have a formed opinion on Adam’s editorial direction and is waiting to see his first full issue and new hires before judging whether he’s the right fit, which keeps this thread genuinely open rather than resolved 00:36:3700:37:07. On Harper’s Bazaar, Sherman argues the interior editorial is strong but the covers aren’t striking enough to circulate the way they need to, and floats Melina Gilchrist’s hire as stylist as a promising but unproven bet on making Bazaar more of an insider, enthusiast-driven title 00:57:0100:57:44.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.