Vanity Fair Century

Hitchens, Christopher “The VF Century“  Vanity Fair, The Portraits: A Century of Iconic Images, by Graydon Carter and the editors of Vanity Fair, 2008

    To modernity, then. Without attempting an exhaustive definition, one can mention experiments with language and form, diminished respect for religion, the celebration of the fully fledged individual personality, the spread of images that are made with celluloid rather than with paint or stone,… and—this perhaps above all—the loosening of sexual repression. Improvisation in music ceases to be frowned upon. Travel becomes a theme, even a need. The concept of speed is pervasive, as perhaps is the awareness of time being short. Easy money and new money are not thought of as necessarily immoral, and gambling becomes an art. (The implosion of the great casino of Wall Street in 1929 nearly replaces the Titanic of 1912 as the surpassing image.) Censorship, given the profusion and proliferation of means of communication, becomes almost a thing of the past. Its counterpart—Prohibition—is the occasion for something like mass civil disobedience in America, with the flaunting of the cocktail shaker and the speakeasy… An ambivalent phrase—“the loss of innocence”—becomes familiar. People start to wise up.

    Vanity Fair—born in 1914 (after four ill-conceived issues in 1913…) shuttered in 1936—had already ceased to be… (The current Vanity Fair was relaunched, with much fanfare, in 1983)…. Published by the dapper Condé Nast (who also owned Vogue) and edited by the urbane Frank Crowninshield, was therefore the right magazine at the right time: delighting and confounding readers with modern art (by the likes of Picasso, Braque, and Gauguin), modern writers (from Cocteau to Huxley, Colette to Benchley, Gertrude Stein to D. H. Lawrence), and stunning photographic portraiture. In time, the magazine would be called “as accurate a social barometer of its time as exists.”