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Now Condé Nasters Must Find an Even Newer Media to Make Sense of Themselves
“For a few weeks in March and April, a strange fad took hold in the headquarters of Condé Nast Publications at 4 Times Square,” wrote Warren St. John in The New York Times during the spring of 2003. “After sharing elevator rides with Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, Condé Nast employees sat down at their desks and typed accounts of their vertical journeys with the fashion icon,” he continued…. Then the seas changed for the magazine world. McKinsey consultants and magazine closures followed and this year the company lost its position as this city’s top privately held fashion magazine publisher in terms of market share to less-glamorous Hearst…. But last weekend, more than eight years after the genesis of the Elevator Chronicles, someone on the Internet again began recording vignettes from Condé Nast’s elevators.
—This perfectly captures the very odd deja vu I've had all week. Life imitates depiction imitating depiction imitating life. What I enjoyed about the CondeElevator Twitter was that it read entirely as fiction. (And a particular kind of grandiose fiction.) It was all so improbable… which, to be fair, is just like real life. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't. But what's the difference when your identity rests so heavily on stories you're telling about yourself?
The highlight of an otherwise dismal stint at Vogue was getting into the Conde elevator one morning with a sobbing Plum Sykes. Oh, and evacuating on 9/11 with Anna Wintour, who was asked if she thought the shows that day would be cancelled.
It was what one imagines taking place on a Conde Elevator. And the things one imagines taking place on a Conde Elevator are ridiculous and amusing.
I can promise y'all that those things on the Conde Elevator twitter have actually happened. I worked at Conde earlier this year and have heard conversations very, very similar to those. Ridiculous.