In an exquisite 30-room penthouse on Park Avenue death came last week to Condé Nast. He was 68; an amiable host; as publisher of Vogue, House & Garden, et al., a superlative technician of the publishing world. For a generation he was the man from whom millions of American women got most of their ideas, directly or indirectly, about the desirable American standard of living.
The apartment in which he died was the perfect complement to his publishing business and an index to the variety of his taste. There he entertained the same people for whom he published Vogue. There to his elaborate dinners, dances, cocktail parties, came socialites, Hollywoodites, Broadwayites, statesmen, royalty. The star of a Broadway opening was as thrilled by an after-theater party at Condé Nast's as she was by the first-night applause. The apartment which he himself planned to the last detail was so arranged he could entertain 100 cocktail guests on the roof, a dinner party of 50, another couple of hundred in the ballroom, all at the same time. Amidst 18th-Century French paintings, Chinese screens and a slightly rococo splendor, Condé Nast presided, bald and genial, peering sphinxlike through pince-nez glasses, the arbiter of his world.
But to Nast, society was only the work of evenings. The daylight was for publishing, and this was hard work. In the area he created, and in which he was lord, Nast became as expert as an assayer. His primary task as a publisher was to choose editors who best knew how to choose—out of the flooding hundreds of fashion ideas, from ruffles to shoes to dinner-table glassware—the fashions which had that indefinable "smartness" which he could sense, almost by smell. Then he—and they—went to work on the presentation—to "bait the editorial pages," as he once unblushingly said, "in such a way as to lift out of all the millions of Americans just the 100,000 cultivated people who can buy these quality goods,"
Vogue ran far ahead of this chill and modest ambition. Throughout the '20s and '30s, in its pages Nast decided what made fashion-sense in the welter of Parisian, New York and Hollywood ideas, about everything from decor to dogs. The Dest-dressed women in all U.S. towns were Vogue subscribers; stores fought to listed as outlets for goods advertised in Vogue, and thus the Nast judgments set patterns far beyond Vogue's own cirulation of a few hundred thousand. To his own women-readers Nast brought the excitement of modern art, from Seurat to Modigliani and to Covarrubias, the breath-taking photography of Steichen, Beaton, Lohse, Baron Hoyningen-Huene; and the vivid drama of fashion-drawings by Carl Ericsson, Sigrid Grafstrom, Count René Bouët-Willaumez and many others, which in turn influenced all U.S. advertising art. Vogue became a feminine bible of taste. Even its cheesecake was cool and cultured: cheesecake prettily iced. Technician Nast became a millionaire.