[Archives] #479 Mark Guiducci | The 37-Year-Old Reinventing Vanity Fair for a Post-Print World

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Maintenant, placez l'épisode. Hello, everybody, thank you for listening the bold web, Today I'm welcoming Marc Widoucchi. Hello Marc. Hello Adrienne. Very happy to welcome you. To set the scene. It's an honor. Thank you for having me. Of course, of course. Where are we today? Marc. We are in the condense offices in Paris, the Rudi-Richie-Lieu, and we're on day 3 of Paris fashion week. On a been in the middle of a very interesting season full of debuts, and I've seen any show today. I saw the do your show today, there's two more this evening and do your was terrific. Jonathan Anderson is a visionary and it started with a film that documented the history of Dior from the man himself, to Yves Saint-Laurent, it showed Galiano, and owned Dior's history, intercut with horror films, and that was a really interesting device to, I don't know, speak to both the contemporary, the modernity of Dior, its connection to film, and to, I think, gives a hint to how he's going to interpret the legacy-revidential, but rather interpretive, but not reverential. So, who are you? What do you do? What's your title? You've got to bring your title, right? Yeah, that's right. I, as you said, my name is Marc Kuducci, I am the global editorial director of Vanity Fair. What does it mean? It means that I am the editor of Vanity Fair, not just in the US, but I work with the heads of editorial content here in France, Olivier, Simone, who's the head of content in Italy, of course. And Alberto in Spain, and we are working together for the first time. Cool. What is Vanity Fair? No, that's an odd question to begin with, but what is Vanity Fair? We all know Vanity Fair, it's like one hundred years old, right? It's quite old. More. Longer. Longer. Vanity Fair is a magazine. Yeah. In this day and age, with so many platforms and social media, video, podcasts, film and television, live events, all the ways that we can exist, I still like the word magazine. Yeah. You know, it's just the word doesn't just mean a print product anymore, it means more. Vanity Fair is a magazine about characters, why it is a magazine about technology, architectural digest is a magazine about homes, Vanity Fair is a story about characters, the most relevant people in our society that have amazing stories and we tell them. Okay. From politics to cinema to Hollywood, the arts, money, you know, it's, I think of it, less about the transactions, the financial transactions and the story of those deals, but more about the personalities, the characters that the culture behind those deals, politics and style to the world of style. I think it's a title that represents both intelligence and interest in style. You know? Of course. Vanity Fair was founded in 1914, it documented the jazz age through the crash and in the 30s ceased publication, it was for a while, it was part of Vogue, actually, for many years, it was part of Vogue, it was Vanity Fair, sorry, Vogue, including Vanity Fair would be, it was actually on the title of Vogue magazine in the 80s and at the time it was under a brilliant idea, they're called Frank Crown and Shell, who whose work I have actually returned to quite often recently and thinking about this job, you know, before I started, I was most fascinated with, you know, there was a couple of things like they had a feature called We Nominate for Oblivion, where they would take a person or a place or a thing that they wanted to cast out and it was a satirical column and so we're bringing that back. There were lots of little things that I saw in Crown and Shell's Vanity Fair that I loved. Like, oh, you know, the way that they talked about stock brokers at the time, in the 20s, you know, the stock market was up, up, up, up, up, up, Gatsby era, etc. Is the way that we talk about crypto guys, these fake, these, you know, pirates with fake money. It is who were encroaching upon polite society, showing up in their restaurants and showing up at their part, you know, that kind of thing. It's very interesting, the parallels between that era and ours, not just in business but also in politics. Of course. And so I looked a lot at Crown and Shell's VF and then in the 80s, after it had been dormant for nearly 50 years, they brought it back and there were a couple of false starts with a number of other thers before Tina Brown took it on. She was there until '92. Great and Carter, of course, was there for 25 years and then my predecessor, Ritika Jones. And you now? I want to understand before coming back to Vanity Fair, to your story. I mean, it's being such a young man, 36 years old, at this kind of job. I'm sorry to have that now, it's 37, but you still under 40 and still very young. I would like to understand a way to come from, where you were born, what did you study, what you wanted to do when you were a little boy and the young adults, tell me about these. Sure. I grew up in San Diego, Dalmar, La Jolla, North County, San Diego, and Sanitas. These were towns along the beach and my mom's family was from LA, but she had decided to leave Los Angeles. I think she wanted to raise us, my sister and me, in the choir their way, yeah. And it was a culture that was, it was a culture that was inspired by surfing, Mexican culture. Yeah. It was very near the border. And there was a university there, UCSD, that there was a lot of biotech in the, and those sort of the things knelted together, there was a beautiful place to retire. Okay. And it was a beautiful place to be a kid, but by the time I was 16, a bit boring, yeah. Yeah. And I was gay and, but not out, and I was searching for something identity extent for something that I thought was more interesting, or more exciting, and honestly, Vanity Fair, along with W Magazine, I remember my mom got W as well. We had Vanity Fair in the house, and it was like a escape into these stories about people that were changing the world, and I knew that was a way that I educated myself outside of school, outside it was an education in the world. And I went to Princeton, which is in New Jersey, near New York, and I went to New York all the time when I was in college. I studied art history, and I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I studied art history because I always loved it. I had amazing art history teacher in high school, Dr. Otto Mauer. He had been a priest and a translator for a pope. He was a fascinating guy, and I just fell in love with this idea that there was cultural remnants, that the way that art could reflect so much more of its time. It was these documents, whether they were paintings or sculptures or architecture that reflected everything that was happening in the era it was built, politics and money, and even entertainment in some ways, you could see all these cultural influences in whatever that artwork was. I studied art history in college, didn't know what I was going to do, interned at Christie's, I thought maybe I'd go be a scholar actually for a while, and when all, so many people at that time were going into banking and consulting, and I remember I had like an allergic reaction to a Goldman Sachs interview, it was a information session rather, and I was like I can't, this will never be me. This is not me. This is not me. I had been taking a journalism class at the time, but it really wasn't, I was just flipping through a copy of Vanity Fair as I had for, I don't know, that point ten years, and found the mast head. I came across the mast head one day as I was a senior and thought well this, this, and the journalism teacher I had at the time, knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone who knew Great and Carter, and I got an interview, and yeah, at the same time, my first job was at Vanity Fair. Wow. Okay. I started the day after I graduated, sorry, the Monday after I graduated, I graduated on Thursday and the Monday, I started work as the assistant to the managing editor, and it was like journalism school, learning everything, I feel like I'm of the last generation to actually know how to edit on paper, you know, notations and it was both immensely fun, you know, I remember still friends with the people that I was an assistant with at the time, and there were really serious moments too. There was a moment, in 2011, probably, when I got a call from, you know, said, "Hello Vanity Fair, I just picked up the phone, and I learned that it was a hospital in Mizrata in Libya, and that Tim Heatherington, the photographer, the war journalist, who was on the mast head of Vanity Fair, that he was in this hospital, and had been shelved by Kadafi, and that because he had this press pass on him, that we were the ones, you know, there was just the general line for Vanity Fair that I picked up, and we transferred it over to Graydon's office and the number of us gathered, and that was, he died that day, and so there were these moments of where I realized how serious the journalism was, in addition to all the fun that was had at Vanity Fair, you know, it's the Oscar party, and the. And Vanity Fair is very much this fine line in between the very serious things, and well, everything is serious at the end of it, because all you would say is very serious, you can be very fun, but it's quite a serious business. I would say that it's not a fine line between them, it's about doing both, you know. So these things can coexist, and there's a responsibility there to make sure that we are remain and continue to be a place for serious journalism. Of course. So tell me, you climb up the ladder at Vanity Fair? Oh, no, you've been together and I went to Vogue. No, I went to Vogue. There was a writing position at Vogue, and getting to write at Vanity Fair was not easy. So at the time, I thought I wanted to be a writer, and I was writing the table of contents and contributors notes and those kinds of things, writing for this website a little bit. But there was a writing position at Vogue in the features department where I went, I was there for five years, had a bunch of different positions, eventually left as the arts that are there, and at which point I went to Garage Magazine. What is Garage Magazine? So Garage Magazine was started by a brilliant woman called Dasha Tsukova. It was related to the originally to the Garage Museum in Moscow, that was an incredible building in Gorky Park. I actually never went, but I know it, and I know it's influence. It was a beacon for different minded people in Moscow at the time, and I would get these DMs from people on Instagram or Twitter who thought that I was the director of the museum, not the editor of the magazine, and they would say, "Thank you for this museum. It's the only place that I feel like I can be myself, you know, from trans people or queer people in Moscow." And it really was an amazing thing that Garage was an amazing museum, and at the time, the magazine had been sold to Vice Media, okay, so I worked for Vice, and it was the first time that I, it was this tiny team, I mean, like I think there were six of us maybe, and then we had some freelancers that would come in to work on the issues, but it was wonderful. I mean, I was 29 years old, and we were all a young team, and the thing I'm most proud of is what all those people have gone on to do. Rachel Taschen, who's a fashion critic for the Washington Post, Gabriella Crefe-Johnson, who's a brilliant stylist, Jared Elner was our assistant, he now works with all these starlets as a stylist, and just to see where they've all gone from then. But you know, the work was, it was an art and fashion magazine, so we always asked artists to work with celebrities using fashion, and we had a couple of great covers with Deena Lawson, the photographer with Rihanna, probably my favorite cover was with Simone Lee, the American sculptor, who made this, who actually got, she got her work out of the Guggenheim for the shoot, Ryan McGinley took the pictures, Law Roach styled, and it was Zendaya, and she sort of realized Zendaya as this kind of goddess in her, inside of her work, as well. And that's crazy, yeah, that was it. And then what else, there was a Billy Eilish cover, someone actually dropped out two weeks before that shoot, or sometime before that shoot, that we had to go to the press, and she was this young girl that had, I think she had 200,000 followers, and someone said, you should go see her show, I went to the concert that night, and I've never seen teenagers like that before, I thought I was seeing the Beatles, they were crazy. And so we put her on the cover, and now she's Billy Eilish. So that was a really important moment to understand what it was like to have a small team, trust them, trust yourself, trust your gut, and go for it. I, three years into that job, I went back to Vogue in the, right at the beginning of the pandemic, because what Anna Winter and Vogue were doing at the time was global, they were doing two things, they were, first of all, globalizing the magazine, so all of the additions were going to work together, and working under Anna all at once. And I remember the first meeting we all, we had with all the different editors of the different, different different Vogue's altogether, it was like the UN, it was like the Japanese delegation will now speak, the, you know. And the second thing that was happening was a real under Roger Lynch, a real move towards multi-platform thinking, understanding that video and social, film and TV events, all these things were as much expressions of what these magazines are as the print product. And so my job at Vogue was always thinking about all the ways that Vogue could be Vogue, in addition to other than the magazine. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. And you've been doing these for a few years and five years. And tell me, what has been the process to become what you are today? I mean, the interview process? Yeah. I mean, to be precise. So, what's the vision? I mean, what did they ask for? This is always been my dream job. Yeah. Yeah. I think Ben Efer is the most, I mean, I've been in love with this magazine since I was a kid. I've collected this magazine. Really? Yeah. I have almost every print issue. There are some that have eluded me. I recently got, there was a 1983 issue that had a date, it was a David Hockney cover. And I see it. It's just the two feet over a lake with different colored socks. That's the cover. It's a fan's hat. That one had eluded me for a long time. I recently got it. But anyway, I love this magazine. And so, my predecessor resigned on a Thursday. And by Monday, I had a vision document. I had a proposal for to take the job. To take the job. So, you properly yourself. I can't take the job. I just, you stand up. You stood up. Yeah. Yeah. I spent that weekend. I was actually at the dentist on the Friday, then at the following morning. And it was in the middle of the dentist chair, I got a call from a friend and said, you're going to do this, right? And I realized, I need to get out of this dentist chair and I need to go sit down and make a document. Yeah. And it was a print document that became a deck that became visual that, yeah, how many pages? You're putting to it. I want to say that. Yeah. Fifty seven pages. And it was everything about from what writers I would want and what covers I would want to do and what we would want to do with our events and what it could be. Yeah. So, what is it going to be? I think that Vanity Fair is going to be a magazine about these characters. Yeah. It is really what, that's what it's going to come down to, is down coming back to who, you know, I think about it, like, almost like the pantheon. You know, in Rome, the building, whether you just have all the gods and goddesses along that way. Yeah. Exactly. You have the same embarrass. And so, Vanity Fair needs to be that. Yeah. And it's heroes and villains and villains and court gestures and, you know, the people on the rise, the people, it's not, it's not vogue in that way, but it's not just a straight endorsement. Okay. It's the most relevant, most interesting stories that we can find. What did you dip dive into the archive of Vanity Fair? Did you spend some time? Yeah, absolutely. I felt like, you know, in fashion, whenever you talk to a designer about what they're up to, they always say, "Oh, you know, we went into the archive," and they find the house codes. Yeah. And I think that's totally true, actually, that the blueprint for this magazine, exists already. When I finished that proposal, I was telling you about, when I turned it in, I remember thinking that if I didn't get the job, I would have to owe it to myself to go do this project that I had just laid out. It's not going to be easy. Just on my own. Yeah. But it was going to be so much easier to do it with the backing of Condé Nast with the logo of Vanity Fair and the rich, rich archive that my predecessors have built. You know, I stand on the shoulder of giants now, of course, it's not starting from scratch. And so I look at the archive as a blueprint and it was so incredible, but the idea is that it needs to be done today for contemporary audiences with contemporary characters. So that means it will have to happen on TikTok and social and it might be a story, it might be something you watch or you listen to as well as read, but I'm really committed to doing what Vanity Fair did for me as a kid, you know, or a young person. Yeah. And oh, do you peak for characters? I think you have to stay completely immersed in what's happening in the world. You have to go out. Yeah, I always think whenever I'm meeting people, this is something I picked up from Anna Winter, when you meet people and interview them and wonder what they're up to, ask them what they do in their spare time and you want people who are out in the world. It's never a bad idea. You know, in that moment when it's like you have to go to the thing at 7pm or 8pm and you just want to cancel, you never regret going because you don't know who you're going to meet and what you're going to see out there and who you're going to talk to and with idea you're going to get. So New York is a great city for that. Yeah. You first yourself to go there. You just go out and there are so many things. It lost it for a few years after the pandemic. New York is back now. No, it's back. It has that. It has that energy again that you go out and you can do in five things in one night. You can go see a performance. You can go to a new restaurant or an old restaurant. You can see, you can go do a gallery opening. You can go to some conversation that all happens in a single night. Of course. Of course. Can you give me some names of the characters that you're going to show in the next t-shirt? When does this come out? Next week. Oh, maybe you tell me. You tell me. Okay. I'll give you this. Yeah. But we published yesterday a digital cover of Zoran Mamdani. He's a very polarizing figure. Democratic Socialist candidate for New York City Mayor. He is Ugandan born, which means he can't never run for president. And yet his approach, which is dynamic, absolutely relentlessly focused on the messaging of affordability in New York or the lack of affordability in New York, appealing to young people via just his charisma, his energy, but also social media. He's a star on social, has galvanized people in a way that as the Democrats writ large, national level are scrambling and searching for leaders and a vision. He is giving something. He is presenting something that people can react towards or against. But it has been so far very successful for him in New York, where Eric Adams, on Sunday, the incumbent, dropped out of the mayoral race. And so there's a Republican candidate that is more or less up to him and the independent candidate and the Cuomo former governor. So it's one of the most interesting stories and he's a fascinating character. The writer James Pogue, in the lead of the story, compares him to John F. Kennedy, and the way that he was telegenic and captivating and, you know, just his youth by comparison to this grizzled, running opponent, but also in the way that JFK pulled out like a magnet, the Catholic vote, that was very fractured in different demographics before. And Mamdani has pulled out a Muslim vote that has been from different communities that are not, that disparate groups that are not necessarily usually voting as one and represent nearly 10% of New York City's voters. So Andy's just gotten people that never vote to get out there. So my, you know, what's important is that the cover that we ran, the legend of Zoram was the title, it's actually quite skeptical if you read the story. It has moment, you know, there's a lot of skepticism baked into it. It's not an endorsement. It is an acknowledgement that he is one of the most relevant people in politics, in American politics today. Even though it's just a local race, there are national and possibly even international ramifications to what happens in that mayoral race. In terms of watching the cover of the legend of Zoram, what's it going to be your line in terms of creative direction? First and foremost, portraiture. Portraiture? Yeah. As this is a magazine based on people, characters and their stories, I think that portraiture is the foundation of the creative direction. And that does not mean that we just put people in a studio against a nice background and take a well lit picture. That is not an idea. If you look back at early Annie Leibovitz, who is the sort of house photographer of any fair, and still one of the most brilliant hardworking photographers, well, I've ever met, that the work that she did at VF in the '80s and '90s, particularly, is so idea-based, you know, simple ideas, but clever, well researched, thoughtful, and mean something. So let me take it to give you a few examples. Like putting what be Goldberg in a bathtub of milk is a highly political statement. But in terms of production value, that's just a simple, that's an easy picture to create. That's not a Cecil B. Demille production with 50 people in it, but it resonates because of what it says and who she was and what it meant to see that in the magazine. I just, on my way over here, actually, someone sent me Team Magazine, the New York Times style magazine, published a list of the most influential covers of all time, and I believe at the top of the list was Demille More by Annie Leibovitz, nude, pregnant, because that was such a statement about women's rights. You didn't see pregnant people like that. Pregnancy was something people hid. Intimission, yeah. Yeah. It was a very, which is so fascinating for people average, I think, probably similar ages, where we celebrate a plot and can't wait to see, I'm sad that Rihanna's had this baby because I love to pregnancy look so much, you know what I mean? It was amazing, yeah. So, we celebrate pregnant women and the idea, but at the time, the idea of seeing one on the magazine cover was really shocking and had impact. That's the kind of idea, no, that's a very specific. You can't do that all the time, no, but it's something to strive for, that whenever we approach portraiture, that we are saying something about both the person and the culture at large when you do it. And what is your input when it comes to covers? You're doing a brief to the photographer or you are on set with the photographer or do you work when it comes to covers? I think it can work any number of ways, good ideas can come from anywhere, so sometimes the photographer has the idea, sometimes we have the idea, sometimes an assistant in the photo department has an idea, and the best idea wins. I think it's really important to prepare that going into a shoot without ideas is never a good idea, but people do that. People just show up and feel it out, I don't know that that works. But I also don't tend to go this way. My energy, I think is. What do you put your energy? Well, I think that just in general, I think it makes people nervous. I want to make sure we do that right and everything, and it's better to just trust your team. And my time is better spent in the office. Yeah. All right. So you're going to. The fin. the fin. not so, so fin. but you are mostly magazine in the US, in Spain, in France, which means that you are wickly magazine, right? It is, yeah. And it's interesting because in France, in Italy and Spain, Benadé Fair has quite a specific identity in each country. Yeah. And can you tell us what is the identity for each in each country? Yeah, I don't want to speak for Olivier, Simone, and Alberto, but in France, Benadé Fair has a cinema focus and the politics focus, I know this. In Italy, the digital operation in Italy is so amazing, they reach 40 million unique page views, well, a month. The population of Italy is 60 million. So just the impact that Simone and his team are able to have on Italian culture. And it's very celebrity focus, but it's quite Catholic, lowercase C Catholic, and it's approach. They are prolific in their coverage. And in Spain, the culture is. there's a sense of society, regality, there's a lot of royals coverage. And it's interesting because all those things are Benadé Fair. Yeah. That all makes sense. But as we work together more and more, you'll start to see global moments where we are working on the same project altogether. And when we do that, you can offer your subjects more. You can offer your readers more because you're able to get more when you work together. I saw this at Vogue a lot. When we worked on global projects together, things go further. But what does it mean working on global projects for specific time, for. It could be. It could be certainly the Oscars party next year. We'll be more of a global. you'll see it more globally. All the media that comes from the Oscar party, all the videos, the articles, the pictures, we will make sure that they are as much Italian Benadé Fair as they are U.S. Benadé Fairs. That's a clear example to me. But you will probably start to see more. so for instance, in terms of cadence in the U.S. for our print issue, we are going to be publishing eight issues a year. And by doing so, we will be able to invest more into the paper quality of both the pages and the cover. We will have the same number of editorial pages. So that the magazines will be actually bigger. In doing so, I feel like what's so important now is that when we get our news on our phones, there's no question, right? I mean, the purpose of the magazine is almost go straight to the collectors item as someone who collects magazines. I want something that I'm going to hold on to for 10, 20, 30 years or more. And so creating a physical product that is worth that is worth doing. So those eight issues, the way I'm thinking about them, there will be four seasonal issues and winter, spring, summer, fall. And then four tent pull issues, one of which, of course, will be Hollywood. And then three that will determine with Alberto Simone and Olivier, those might be global projects that we work on together. You call them Tampole, Tampole Issue. Oh gosh, it's an awful word, tent pull, basically to thematic, big themes, big ideas. And how do you work with, concretely, how do you work with a French team, with a Italian team, with a Spanish team, so many different cultures, isn't it? Lots of phone calls. Yeah. We have a WhatsApp group. We meet weekly. And then we meet weekly individually and then we meet monthly with a global team. We've just hired a bunch of people in the US and a few of them have global roles, global creative director, global operations person, global social director. And meeting as much as we can without inhibiting anyone's work, it's communication. Yeah. Yeah. With your competitors at Vanity Fair, what have you over journals, magazines, you are competing with? You know, there are so many, actually, in a way you could say there are, everyone's our competitor, because we cover Hollywood, the arts, money, politics, styles. So you could say any publication that covers those realms is our competitor. And in a way, I find it easiest to say that there are only competitions. There's another way you could say it, that you could say that the internet companies, whether it's Google and Meta or the AI companies, those are our competitors. I think that it's just, even though I'm quite a competitive person, I don't really think that it's useful to keep score with your competition. I think keeping score with yourself is more important, making sure that you're doing better each month, each year, whatever it is that you're tracking upwards. That's, that's the only goal. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So when you, you're very first day, you started like a few weeks, few months ago, right? Almost exactly three months ago. Three months ago. Okay. That's 100 days, actually. You love this story, you know, the first 100 days, what have you done? What did you do for the last 100 day to make sure to implement your vision and your strategy on the long term? This is, they are very, very important days. I have been meeting so many writers, editors, photographers, contributors of various kinds, and really building the team, which means hiring. So we announced a wave of hires a couple weeks ago, there's lots of freelancers, but these were all internal full-time hires that we announced, and they are, they were everything from our global creative director, Jennifer Pastore, who's coming to us from WSJ Magazine, most recently, South of East Magazine, to Olivia Nutsi, who's a truly brilliant writer and editor, who's going to be out in Malibu, working from Los Angeles as our West Coast editor, to a number of other writer positions, a colleague of mine, Elise Taylor, is coming to us from Vogue as a senior staff writer, but a lot of the positions were actually foundational. They were people like we hired a social team, we hired operations people because web producer, people that will help us, you know, build a house for the writers and photographers to come. Okay. And what are the new formats you're going to implement, launch? Well, my first issue, quote unquote my first issue, I think that's kind of silly sometimes even though everyone asks, advertisers ask, but honestly, I think it's, the idea of my first issue doesn't really work for two reasons, one is that already, you know, everything we do is starting to have, I'm, my influence in it somewhere or some way, and the second reason is that my first issue, everything is a group project, you know, this is a team sport, there's no such thing as my because it's, I have, I've always loved that about journalism, about fashion as well, any kind of production, you need so many people to do it. Yeah. So anyway, but because it's being built this way, my first issue is our Hollywood issue, which comes out in November and is, we'll feature a new, different design elements feature. It uses the tradition of the Hollywood issue, which started back in the 90s in the tradition of, you, I don't want to give to me, but it uses the tradition of the Hollywood issue and I hope does it in a different way for, with different people, and you're going to do some Instagram, some TikTok, some videos, some, of course, this is, this is part of the game now, of course, of course, yes, you know, I was, I've been really interested in, we talked about to you are a little bit earlier, yeah, Jonathan, who is really brilliant, has been using Instagram's close friends to announce certain things for Dior. So to communicate, so they will drop previews of the menswear collection the day before the show, or there's something yesterday about the little, you know, some text about what we were going to see today, was dropped on Dior's close friends list, and it's so brilliant, because the influencers take pictures, screenshots of that, and then post to them their stories because they want everyone to know that they're a close friend of Dior's, of course, so clever, yeah, whereas if a PR had sent that and so, you know, which is, nobody cares, yeah, so I, I'm very curious in the idea of using existing communications tools in new ways, yeah, and other you use this new way of communicating for, because launching a new issue of a magazine doesn't sound like it's new and exciting anymore, I completely agree, so, I mean, string the cover, etc. How do you make it an event, and how do you orchestrate it to make it an event? Well, I think part of it, you know, roll out is very important, and you think about how the tease something and maybe give hints and, you know, you break your own embargo a little bit sometimes just to get people curious, and yet ultimately, Adrienne, it is really about the content, like what's the story, what's the picture, what's the point, and it's interesting the idea of making an impact these days, because you, there are some ways you can measure that, right? You can do new stand sales, which I think is kind of useless metric at this point. I don't even know where the new stands are in New York anymore, there's like custom magazines, I love that place, I love magazines, but it's new stands, they don't exist anymore. I think about the print product for subscribers, really. You could follow it by, you know, time spans, unique page views on the story online. You can follow it by Instagram and see how many likes and shares, but really, I think it actually comes down to gut feeling. You can feel if something has hit. It's exciting on it, yeah. It's more, it's really about the text messages that go around, and you can tell that people are talking about it, that's something that, as an editor, you want to cause conversation, useful conversation, discourse, that is going to move the cultural conversation forward or in a different direction. And I mean, people are communicating and talking all the time, it's getting very difficult to have some exciting and fresh news anymore. Or do you make an old story exciting or old character with air in the media all the time in the news, exciting? For example, Zoran, Zoran is a good example because he's, I guess, in the US, in New York City, he's always on the front page of all the news magazine, et cetera. And what did you manage to make it exciting, you know, because he's air every single day, you can look for him. Right. Okay. It's what I mean. Well, that is the beauty of a platform like Vanity Fair, like as a title, it can, usually you have more access. You have a writer like James Pogue who's going to make a huge difference. Yet make a huge difference and really help problem, you know, James is the kind of writer that he doesn't write in pull quotes. You can't just grab a sentence from James and say this represents what he thinks. It's very nuanced thinking. And it is, and Zoran recognized that and gave him a lot of access and it's a nuanced portrait. So, and by putting the logo on it, you know, we thought about, do you put the logo on it and make it a digital cover? Digital covers are most often used to make news, to announce something. We weren't announcing anything here, but it still was a moment that, or do we just run the story because it runs inside of our November issue. And we realized that by using the logo and putting it, making it a cover story, that changes. Yeah. So, that's it. That's how. The tool that magazines can use, of course, the, that dummy, more picture. The point of the brand. And the pregnant picture of dummy is a different story if she runs inside and not the cover. If they, if they ran a picture of her face on the cover and the, and the pregnant picture inside, it's a different thing. Hmm. I see. I see. So, you, we talk a little bit about it already, but diversification in a, in this magazine world, yeah, what do you diversify when it's fair, a magazine that's, when it's fair, you, you tell podcasts, okay, you have one else. I've just started. Yeah. So. All right. I've just started, but, but the business model of, of magazine today, yeah, absolutely. It's only, if I know, it's only an answer, I mean, brands putting ads into the magazine, right? The business model is that you are, you choose where you can be most impactful and you are there. So, not every story needs to exist on every platform. Some stories will be best told on audio, you know, in on the podcast or, and not, I don't know that you would actually want to read this interview that we're doing's written through, right? It could be a nice portrait. Well, I don't, okay, maybe, but, you know, not everything needs to be on every platform. Hmm. So, you find the story first, always start with the story. What is the story? And then what's the best way to tell it? And so sometimes that's a video. Sometimes that'll be written through piece because you know the great writer that's going to get it and sometimes it's a photo shoot, sometimes it's a photo essay, yeah. I like to think about treating serious topics with some measure of levity and topics that some people would consider frivolous with a measure of seriousness. And I think that that allows you to, it's just an approach that tends to give you an unexpected result. Hmm. I see. So, can you give me a master class, a lesson of ought to make it in a advantage fair? I mean, in the, in the media industry, I mean, putting yourself into the shoes of a, of a young grade rate who wants to replicate what you've done, according to you, would have been the way of doing what you managed to get there, actually. What would have been the keys for you? I think the keys have been curiosity. That word drives me more than anything else, yeah? Everything else is just that I'm genuinely want to know what's going on. And the sense of wanting to make sure something is excellent is, you know, you don't always achieve that. But whatever it is you're doing, writing a caption, working on a small shoot, you know, you're a social media that they're going to cover the show, making sure you do it, whatever it is, the smallest thing at the best possible level and delivering without complaining. That's recognized. People will, you know, when you become the person that your boss can rely on to get it done, you're going to get more work. That's, yeah. And you have to be the kind of person who wants more work. I guess there's probably some people who would prefer not to. Yeah. Of course. Of course. And I would like to understand as well something that I love to talk about it about in my podcast is, when did you allow yourself, you know, to be, to be, to take that kind of position? You know, at some point you need to have a click in your, in your head to tell yourself, okay, I am, I am the man. I am ready for that. I want to take it. I want to stand up and take the role. When you set a young gentleman, it can be, it can be something. Well, I wasn't looking to leave Vogue. I loved my job, but this was always my dream job and it became available. And so, and it can be available every 25 years, right? Sometimes. Yes, sometimes. You never know. And I didn't want to allow myself to take that risk. No, uh, ready or not, I jumped. That's it. That's it. A simple event. Yeah. All right. I actually thought, I had thought last year that I might have a baby and had been exploring that and then, uh, decided, now I've decided that I have a baby at the moment. So. A big baby. Yeah, a big baby. A family. A big family to take care. How many people is there at, uh, about 120 globally. Okay. And you, uh, you, you, you report the charity to an hour, right? An hour, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. Actually, funny enough, my reporting structure didn't change. Yeah. Can you tell us about your relationship with an hour into? Of course. Um, I met Anna, actually, when I was in college, when I was applying for the job at Vanity Fair, I was also interviewing at Vogue, um, in the end, the job at Vogue was a freelance job. The job at Vanity Fair was a full time one and I took the job at Vanity Fair, but, um, I've known her, you know, she, uh, rehired me then two years later. She hired me two years later. And, uh, I don't know if she took an interest in my ideas or if I just had the gumption to start sending ideas, uh, but I would drop memos in her inbox saying whether if we did this or whether we did that and slowly, you know, over, of course, the five years, we developed a professional relationship and she took an interest in me and, uh, especially the past five years that I've been back at Vogue, she's been an incredible mentor and has helped me professionally. She's helped me understand where I need to grow, how to be better. She's just inspiring as a person to just, when you think about just observing how she works, her work ethic, her, um, her commitment to creativity, her commitment to the people that she, that work around her and, uh, she's tough, but she's toughest on herself. And those are all, all qualities that I really, really want to embody. And, you know, there's, there's something people don't think about very much with about her, which I think is, you think about the Met Gala and how grand it is, but in fact, it's really an enormous fundraiser and her commitment throughout her career, whether it was Seventh On Sale, when she not only raised more than millions of dollars for HIV, AIDS research, but actually more importantly, got people to talk about it openly, uh, to all of her work at the Metropolitan Museum. There is, uh, there's a great sense in a lot of what Anna does, that it's bigger than herself. And that's something, and that she's working towards a larger goal. And I think that's something I'd like to bring to the end of the fair too. Or do you manage, uh, or do you use AI, uh, that's a good question. Yeah. So, uh, personally, I use AI all the time, uh, uh, like for what, for my, for like all, all manner of, uh, personal and professional uses, I use it as basically a thought partner sometimes. I'm like, has this idea ever been written about in this way? It can like, it can show you examples. It's not comprehensive, but it is very useful. And I also use it like Google, like everyone else, but I, I go back and forth with it, I have actual conversations with it. Which one do you use? I use chat GPT. Yeah. Um, so I, you know, I absolutely embrace the use of AI in that regard, um, at Vanity Fair, we use it for to assist with translations and, you know, in, in efficiency of ways, you know, ways to, to improve our efficiency. What's interesting about AI as a whole is that as AI overviews start to impact how people get their information, right? I'm no longer googling things. I ask AI. Of course. And therefore, we don't get, we being Vanity Fair or any other digital media company, don't get the, uh, clicks that come from when people Google things, they're not clicking through to our sites, they're just getting an AI overview that's based on our site. That impacts our traffic. And that's what people are talking about when they say Google zero or the Google apocalypse or search apocalypse, you know, these phrases are probably overblown. Um, the majority of our traffic still comes from search. Yeah, from search. But it means that we, it's, it's a mandate for, especially as I'm coming in new for us to build a strategy that drives direct traffic. People that are coming to Vanity Fair because they either know that's our story or they're interested. They, they trust us and want to know what's up. It's just with brand. Yeah. Yeah, they trust the brand and people that subscribe. That is harder to do than to, you know, see what the Google search terms are and write the story that somehow relates to your title based on the, and yet it ultimately is, is worthwhile and it means that people have, you have to make content that people are going to pay for. That's, that's what this business always was. You know, and I think that that's a really high bar and the right one for us to have. We just, your subscriber, by the way, sorry, we're your subscribers. Well, yes. I said earlier that the Vanity Fair is for people who want to feel and see themselves as both intelligent and stylish, that someone that I don't understand either that moves in the world that Vanity Fair covers or in their mind would like to, you know, and is willing to pay the ticket, the pay the ticket price to, to watch it all play out. Of course. So tell me about your, your, your way of living. You know, you look fit. Do you make a lot of sport or a day of Mark looks like, okay. I, I guess one thing, another thing I learned from Anna Winters is that they get it very early and like four, five, five, five. And I tend to read the paper. I still get my papers in print, actually, I get, you get the papers at the door. Yeah, I get the papers at the door. I get the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and I always read the Times first, the journal second, and the post is like dessert because it's very fun. Okay. Even though I don't agree with its politics, it's, it's a good read. Sometimes if I can't, if the, if the headline of the post is so good, the cover line, I'll just read it first. I get to the office really early, I actually drive a car in New York. I'm one of the rare, New Yorkers who drives, yeah, I drive a, what kind of guy it is? Oh, it's an old SUV, it's an old SUV, it's an old, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I have a parking lot near the office, like a outdoor lot. And I'm at the office, yeah, by, by eight before eight, usually. And these days it's been back-to-back meetings, but I've learned that I need to block out big chunks of the day just to read, copy, think, talk to people, let people drop in, I try to keep meetings really short, that, you know, you get, you get what you need, done. And I actually work out in the afternoon, usually, after work. Why? Because I just like, when I wake up in the morning, I honestly, you want to be focussed, I want to be focussed. Put all the energy into it. Into work. And then at the end of the day, I go to the gym and usually do a costume change and go out for the night. Okay, it's never stopped, and you don't drink alcohol, right? Very rarely. Very rarely. Yeah. To wake up at five at some point, you need to choose. You just knew that, because it's true. Of course. All right. I don't know if it's true or not, but it feels like we're at a turning point in history. I think we are. I mean, what do I know? I'm 37 years old. But I can tell you that when I was going back in the archives, spending a lot of time reading vanity fair from the 20s and 30s, it's the same kind of moment. It's, I know how dangerous, I recognise how dangerous it is to make that comparison. And I can't help but make it. I see it in the comparison of the coverage and and what we're experiencing. And you know, regardless of what happens after Donald Trump is president, it will be the return to normal will not be immediate in the best of scenarios. In terms of everything. Everything. Everything. Yeah. And you think it's a source of this, this, this turning point, Donald Trump Donald Trump. And the combined with the approaching, I was going to say approaching, but actually the arrival of an AI revolution that will impact every industry. Yeah. And I'm an eternal optimist. I really believe in that every challenge, everything that happens, everything is an opportunity. And so the opportunity is abound. And that's the way I'm thinking about all of, yeah, that what other way is there to approach life except everything is an opportunity. But you were telling, but it's also responsibility, it's an opportunity and the responsibility to be aware and to recognize the changes happening and take the, and to take the opportunity to help it move in a good direction. You were telling earlier that you can, you called, I mean, the ultimate thing is influence, so it's a bit the, yeah, the course of history. I mean, that's grand. Yeah. But influence the conversation. What do you want to, yeah, twin, where do you want, where do you want to influence the conversation and the story, extent? Well, the beauty of this title is that it operates across culture, right, where like there's no part of the culture that we would say, oh, we don't cover that. So when I've been spending time in the archives, from all eras, the two words, the two things that kind of are operative in what Vanity Fair does are this idea of glamour, you know, glamour is a very useful tool to bring people in and provocation that we are our purpose is to create conversation around something that either is not being talked about or to move the conversation that is being talked about forward in one way or another, and to especially in this day and age when reasonable respectful discourse is so rare and really threatened by the highest powers that there are, you know, our company is not subject to some of the same issues that other media companies are, and I'm being encouraged to go push the envelope. That's a responsibility. All right, thank you so much. And last question, to pass the button, as we say in English, who is the personality you would like to listen in this podcast? Oh, Jonathan Anderson, of course, Jonathan, thank you so much Marc and long life to you and good luck for your very first issue. Thank you Adrien. Take care. So nice to meet you. Okay. Take care. My name is Adrien Garcia and you've just listened to The Boldway. Find this episode in text and pictures at theboldway.fr, the boldways were created in innovation with business. Thank you for your trust and see you soon for a new episode.