Conde Montrose Nast was an American magazine publisher. His magazines included "Collier's Weekly", "Lippincott's Monthly", "Travel", "New York Society", "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue".
Background
Conde Montrose Nast was born on March 26, 1873 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the third of four children and younger son of William Frederick Nast and Esther Ariadne (Benoist) Nast. His paternal grandfather, William Nast, a founder of German Methodism in the United States, had come from Württemberg in 1828. His father, born in Cincinnati, was an unsuccessful speculator-inventor. His mother's family was originally French and presumably Roman Catholic, since Nast was reared in that faith. He is said to have been named for a maternal forebear, André Auguste Condé, a military surgeon who had come to St. Louis in 1760.
Education
Condé Nast attended public schools in St. Louis--his mother's birthplace, to which the family moved in his early childhood. At the age of seventeen he enrolled in Georgetown University in Washington, D. C. , where he earned Bachelor of Arts degree in 1894 and a master's degree in 1895. He then entered the St. Louis Law School at Washington University and graduated in 1897. Nast did not remain long in St. Louis or the law.
Career
A Georgetown friend, Robert J. Collier, son of the publisher Peter Fenelon Collier, was given the editorship of the ailing Collier's Weekly in 1898 and persuaded Nast to come to New York as the magazine's advertising manager at $12 a week. Nast raised the advertising revenue from a level of $5, 500 a year when he arrived to more than $1, 000, 000 by 1905. His salary meanwhile reached $40, 000 a year. Two years later, in 1907, he left to develop his own enterprises. As early as 1904 Nast had been a co-founder of the Home Pattern Company, which manufactured and sold dress patterns.
In 1909 he bought a small New York society magazine called Vogue, which had been founded in 1892. Believing that advertisers would be attracted to a "class" magazine that could guarantee a selective, high-income readership, he resisted the temptation to dilute circulation by adding popular features. He determined that Vogue would offer one service: it would help well-to-do women dress fashionably. Nast was fortunate in choosing his editorial partners.
In 1914 he promoted Mrs. Edna Woolman Chase, a Vogue staff member, to editor. They were innovators in display and illustration and were successful in harnessing a variety of diverse and unruly talents. Nast's other great colleague was Frank Crowninshield, whom he asked to edit his second magazine acquisition, Dress & Vanity Fair. Crowninshield shortened the title to Vanity Fair and created a sophisticated monthly that covered "the things people talk about at parties"--entertainment, literature, society. Nast continually expanded his operations.
In 1914 he set up the Vogue Pattern Company; a year later he gained sole ownership of House and Garden. In 1916 he established the first overseas edition of Vogue in Britain, partly because the war had hampered distribution from New York.
A French Vogue was started in 1920 and, a year later, a more popular French magazine, Jardin des Modes. In that same year he purchased from Douglas C. McMurtrie a printing plant in Greenwich, Connecticut, which he subsequently enlarged into the Condé Nast Press. Nast's various holdings were consolidated in 1922 as Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
He also became president of a Manhattan real estate concern. Nast had invested in the stock market, and the crash of 1929 hit him hard, leaving him in debt and with his personal holdings in Condé Nast Publications threatened. Then the depression cut the company's revenues from more than $10, 000, 000 in 1930 to only $5, 558, 000 in 1933, and substantial profits became a loss of more than $500, 000. At the point of yielding control to creditors, Nast was rescued by Lord Camrose, an English press magnate, who bought an interest in the company and left Nast in charge.
For the rest of his life Nast worked relentlessly to reestablish the company's prosperity. In 1936 he merged the money-losing Vanity Fair into Vogue, relegating Crowninshield to an advisory post.
In 1939 Nast brought out a new magazine, Glamour, aimed at a relatively wide circulation among career girls. Meanwhile he poured out a stream of fault-finding memoranda that almost forced even Mrs. Chase to break with him.
He had established over the years a public reputation as a suave entertainer; his gatherings at 1040 Park Avenue were widely publicized for their rich assortments of the notable.
He died in New York at his penthouse apartment. His funeral was held at the Roman Catholic Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in that city; interment was at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery, Hawthorne, New York.
Achievements
Nast founded Condé Nast, a mass media company, now a subsidiary of Advance Publications, who published and maintained brands such as Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New Yorker. He built Vogue into the country's most prestigious fashion magazine, in fact creating a new culture of women's fashions.
Time called Nast a "superlative technician of the publishing world. " His single-mindedness in pursuing his concept of the class magazine was vindicated in the prosperity of his magazines after World War II.
Connections
His first wife, Jeanne Clarisse Coudert, whom he had married on August 20, 1902, divorced him in 1925. Their two children were Charles Coudert and Margarita Natica. On December 28, 1928, he married a young Vogue employee, Leslie Foster, and this marriage ended within five years. He was visiting the daughter of his second marriage, Leslie, at a camp when he suffered the most severe of a series of heart seizures.
