Vanity Fair, The Bezos Met Gala, and the Politics of Condé Nast
Lots of political stories are emanating from Condé Nast these days. I sat down with comedians and cultural critics Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton of the "Good Noticings" podcast to discuss.
This is an edited excerpt of my conversation with Good Noticings podcast hosts Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton for the Back Row podcast. You can watch or listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Follow the show so you don’t miss a single episode. If you like the pod, please leave a rating and a review, which takes ten seconds and really helps other people find the show.
In a recent meeting at Condé Nast, according to a person familiar with her remarks, Anna Wintour told her team, “We shouldn’t be afraid to court controversy.”
The company certainly has been checking that off the to-do list quite capably as we wrap up 2025. Vanity Fair recently published a big two-part story by Chris Whipple, drawn from 11 on-the-record interviews with Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles, that the New York Times called “explosive.” The photos by Christopher Anderson are also a journalistic achievement, and have been dissected and studied perhaps more than the story itself. I can’t remember the last time the public spent this much time analyzing portraiture.
In the background to what I can only assume are champagne glasses clinking over the Vanity Fair win (under its new head of editorial content Mark Guiducci), Anna Wintour is planning the Met Gala, which Lauren Sánchez Bezos and Jeff Bezos are underwriting. Sánchez Bezos is reportedly getting very involved in the whole affair, and a Met source tells me that museum officials seem to go out of their way to thank and praise the Bezoses whenever they come up in meetings with staff.
Anyway, Condé Nast is closing the year on an explosive note, which seems not bad for a legacy media company that’s been managing decline since the Great Recession. I asked comedians and cultural critics Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton of the excellent Good Noticings podcast to come on the Back Row pod to discuss it all with me. They’ve been covering the Ellisons’ takeover of CBS, the Olivia Nuzzi Vanity Fair saga, and the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger, and I had a good time discussing all of this with them.
You can follow the Good Noticings podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
What do you make of this epic political story coming out of Vanity Fair?
Claire: I guess I’m excited to see [it] with the death of Teen Vogue. Vanity Fair is a storied publication that marries the glamorous with the political and does interesting, important journalism. And it feels exciting — like somebody’s rising from the ashes to kind of take back U.S. media [from a rightward, billionaire-orchestrated shift].
I enjoyed the Good Noticings episode you did where you talked about Olivia Nuzzi and that whole saga, which recently wrapped up with her leaving Vanity Fair.
Claire: Ashley’s take was, you can’t fire her because you found out she had an [alleged] affair with a person she was reporting on when you only hired her because of the [alleged] affair with the person. It was such a stunt casting. To do stunt casting with your editing team is preposterous.
I think that this Susie Wiles story is such an achievement because it’s the facts. It’s showing versus telling, as we say in media. And I think that the photos did that, too. Mark Guiducci, the new editor of Vanity Fair, is also an interesting figure in all of this because he’s not a traditional editor. His big achievement working at Vogue for Anna Wintour, who’s still his boss as Condé’s Global Chief Content Officer, was architecting Vogue World. Did you look at the men’s Hollywood issue he published?
Ashley: I think I saw mostly people just being like, why was A$AP Rocky wearing socks on the beach?
The New York Times sort of shaded them for putting Jeremy Allen White in, it was called in the magazine, archival/vintage Abercrombie & Fitch khaki shorts.
Ashley: I didn’t even know Abercrombie & Fitch was archived. I did hear a lot about it and I don’t think that there have been that many covers I’ve heard that much about.
Claire: That’s what it’s important. I feel like it’s not even about getting people to read anything anymore. It’s just about the discourse.
I think it’s interesting to compare this excellently done Vanity Fair package — an achievement of journalism and effort and artistic vision and reporting — with the Lauren Sánchez wedding story in Vogue (which I called “confidently oblivious” in Back Row). She and Jeff Bezos are underwriting the Met Gala in 2026, and people are not happy. What was your reaction when you found out they’d be funding that event?
Ashley: I felt very like, “Well, who was paying for it before? And why are they less evil than the Bezoses?” There’s this idea that it used to be pure and now the millions of dollars are coming from somewhere evil.
Claire: Obviously, I wish there wasn’t a Bezos at all, but I guess at the end of the day, I’d rather him put his money into the Met Gala than outer space, to be frank. Her in a dress doesn’t hurt me me as much as literally the pollution of their rocket ship.
I’d rather give Jeff Bezos the Met Gala if he’ll give his employees toilet breaks. [Him funding the Met]’s not my biggest problem with him.
Did you read the story about Lauren Sánchez for the wedding? Vogue is not going to do anything critical. They are never going to publish photos like the ones Vanity Fair published of the Trump administration. They’re only going to write, basically, a puff piece, and that’s what they did on her. Clearly Anna has been courting them, and people do have a problem with that. But polite society feels over. There’s not really any more Upper East Side Mrs. Astors. Lauren Sánchez is kind of the new Mrs. Astor.
Claire: I had a funny conversation with somebody talking about podcasts and she goes, “I have podcasts I like and every host has something I kind of disagree with them about, and I just get that news from other people.“ And I do feel if you’re hoping for a hit piece on Lauren Sánchez’s plastic surgery, it’s everywhere else.
Ashley: I wonder if Vogue kind of bowing down in that arena — that’s why there is a magazine group. Vogue wouldn’t cover interior design every single [month], that’s why they have Architectural Digest. So for Vogue to cover Lauren Sánchez Bezos in a flattering way, and then for Vanity Fair to swoop in with artistic criticism of the Trump administration — that’s why the two magazines are separate magazines.
Mark Guiducci is making a lot more of a splash than Chloe Malle in terms of the product that he’s putting out. Chloe Malle’s the new head of editorial content for Vogue, succeeding Anna. We’re not really seeing innovation or splashy stuff yet from her.
Claire: Is the feeling from you that it’s because she’s still so under Anna’s thumb that she couldn’t if she wanted to?
Yes.
Ashley: We were also speculating that she was chosen is because she wasn’t going to shake up from the Anna Wintour Vogue. She’s just another operator doing exactly what Anna would’ve done.
I don’t know her and I hear she’s very well liked and lovely. But can you imagine Anna Wintour gives you Vogue and then she’s just… right there? She’s like 20 feet away in her office with her assistants outside, planning the Met Gala.
Ashley: “Are you going to green light that story? Oh, okay. I wouldn’t.”
Claire: I feel Anna did not leave on a high note. So I can imagine it’s very hard to pick a successor. You have Edward Enninful, who people loved in England, and this idea that on your way down, you’d pick somebody who would be such a breath of fresh air — that’s your nightmare, right? To have this incredible legacy, then the first headline when you’re gone is like, “Finally, look how much better it is without you.“
Part of the reason that people are mad about the Bezoses’ Met Gala funding is because Bezos has been an ally of Trump. Amazon paid $40 million for that Melania documentary, the trailer for which just came out. There’s flashes of fashion in it, right? We see her boots, we see sketches of her inaugural dress by Hervé Pierre. I think she’s trying to position herself as a fashion figure.
I do think that what she wears is relevant for fashion because it’s so visible. I think the industry wants to dress her for that visibility more than they did in Trump 1.0.
Claire: And the truth is she’s quite striking. She wears clothes well.
I think she’s trying to position herself in this way maybe because she didn’t get it from Condé Nast, from Vogue, from Anna, from fashion proper the first time.
When Chloe Malle got the Vogue head of editorial content title, the New York Times asked her if she would put Melania on the cover, which is a bit of a gotcha question — there’s no real “right” answer to that question, so I get why she didn’t answer — but she didn’t answer. Do you think that Vogue would do that?
Claire: Yeah. Why not? I kind of feel Anna seems to be in the trenches saying, “Alright, deals with the devil.” Honestly, I think I’d rather see Melania than Lauren Bezos, to be honest, because at least Melania has a look that’s interesting and she is the president’s wife. She is a person that goes in the history books.
Ashley: With Lauren Sánchez, you’re like, Oh, we’re just putting billionaires wives on the cover of the magazine now. At least the First Lady of the United States is a Thing.
Hear more on the Karoline Leavitt lip injection discourse, what’s up with the Met Gala live stream, and more in the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
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Was it my imagination or did Vogue do a big spread on Melania when she married Trump? I remember reading it in an actual print magazine and that's about all I remember.
Regarding Melania Trump and Vogue:
Being “a Thing” and being “in the history books” is not a reason to anoint someone with cultural prestige. History is full of people who are “in the books” because institutions chose to normalize them.
A Vogue cover or a glossy fashion framing isn’t neutral documentation; it’s legitimation. It’s how power gets laundered into taste—how an administration’s record gets softened into “a look,” “a vibe,” “an icon.” That’s the “deal with the devil” Claire is describing, and we should be honest about what that means: complicity. When you convert politics into aesthetics, you help make despicable policies feel ordinary and survivable to polite society.
Yes, she’s visible. Yes, what she wears is seen. But treating that visibility as fashion content—especially in the context of a $40M documentary deal and a broader effort to rebrand—would function as an endorsement of the project she represents. There’s a difference between reporting what she wore and staging her as a glamorous subject. One is observation; the other is validation.
And if we’re talking about what ends up “in the history books,” it won’t just be the Trumps. It will also be the institutions that decided that the moral stakes could be edited out for access, relevance, and clicks.