Vanity Fair celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2013 as the quintessential modern magazine. Founded in 1913 and published until 1936 (when it was folded into Vogue), then revived in 1983, VF is one of Condé Nast's flagship publications and has exhaustively chronicled pop culture, society, politics, business, scandal and celebrity through periods of enormous change. Pentagram designed Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age, a new commemorative book published by Abrams that tells the story of the magazine’s extraordinary first century.
The designers worked closely on the book with Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s then editor-in-chief, and David Friend, editor of creative development, as well as Lenora Jane Estes, VF associate editor, and Chris Dixon, creative director. Vanity Fair has always published the best of the best in writing and images, and the main challenge in designing the book was having too much to choose from, all of it great.
“Take a dozen or so cultivated men and women…sit them down to dinner. What will these people say? Vanity Fair is that dinner!," declared a 1914 mission statement. The magazine has been guided by incredible editors over the years, from the legendary founding editor Frank “Crownie” Crowninshield, to Tina Brown and Graydon Carter, and the remarkable pool of talent that has worked for VF includes the writers and journalists Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, P. G. Wodehouse, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Dominick Dunne, and Christopher Hitchens; the photographers Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Annie Leibovitz and Mario Testino; and the illustrators Miguel Covarrubias, Edward Sorel, Bruce McCall, and Robert Risko, among many others.
The designers helped the editors shape the content of the book, paring down thousands of images and stories from over 600 issues into a lively mix that captures the spirit of the magazine. The finished book weighs in at 8.2 pounds, 456 pages and an oversized 11-by-14 inches.
The design organizes the magazine’s history by decade, reproducing iconic covers and spreads along with photographs and illustrations in a layout that echoes the format of the magazine. The middle of the book contains “Wisdom and Whimsy,” a section of over 850 notable quotes and excerpts that has been printed on thin Bible paper stock. The section effectively divides the book into two parts—the “Jazz Age” era prior to the magazine's hiatus, and the “Modern Age” of the 1980s revival—and ranges from a 1913 anecdote about the actress Sarah Bernhardt to a 2012 profile of Aung San Suu Kyi.
The endpapers feature Vanity Fair’s signature group portraits of notable personages, opening with an illustration by Miguel Covarrubias from 1933 and closing with one by André Carrilho from 2013. Typography has been set in Didot, Futura, and VF Times, a custom font used by the magazine. The book is also available in a special deluxe edition with a linen cover.
