Three of The Met’s most visited exhibitions were organized by the Costume Institute. Soon, museumgoers will be able to relish fashion almost as soon as they enter the building. In addition to announcing the department’s upcoming show (and de facto Met Gala topic)—“Costume Art”—the Metropolitan Museum of Art inaugurated the Condé M. Nast Galleries, the new permanent first-floor home for fashion exhibitions, in the presence of the late publisher’s daughter Leslie Bonham Carter and members of her family. “For all of us at Condé Nast,” said Roger Lynch, the company’s chief executive, “this is a full-circle moment.… Our company and The Met have worked together to elevate fashion from craft to art form, making it part of our shared story.”
Born in New York City in 1873 and raised in St. Louis, Nast was a self-made man with a seemingly innate talent for promotion and a facility with numbers. “He lusted over mathematics,” recalled Edna Woolman Chase, Vogue’s editor in chief from 1914 to 1952, in her memoirs and noted that early in his career the publisher was known as Figure Jim. In 1907, 10 years after he moved to New York to make his fortune, Nast was heralded as not only the highest-salaried young man in the world but also, in the publishing world, the greatest expert in the country on national advertising.
After years of negotiations, in 1909 Nast acquired Vogue from founder Arthur Turnure’s estate. All of his magazines, which by 1920 included House Garden, Vanity Fair, and British and French editions of Vogue, prospered thanks to his theory of “class publications,” which he published in 1913. While all Condé Nast titles catered to elevated tastes, class in this context meant cohorts based on interest. The publisher was more interested in cultivating passionately engaged audiences than chasing circulation numbers: quality over quantity, in short.
In pursuing excellence in all areas of the business, Nast was responsible for advances in art and technology. Caroline Seebohm, one of his biographers, has claimed not only that Nast “gave fashion photography artistic legitimacy, a publishing achievement that transformed the photographic literature” but also that it was through his “vigorous interest that fashion photography later found its way into the galleries and museums.” Supporting this argument, she quoted Horst P. Horst, who wrote, “Photography owes him an incalculable debt. In the early days of Vogue and Vanity Fair, it was he who persuaded Baron de Meyer and Commander Edward Steichen literally to create fashion photography.”
Taking beautiful images wasn’t enough; Nast wanted the photographs printed on good-quality paper using the best reproduction techniques. So in 1921 he acquired a printing company in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, that he transformed into a state-of-the-art facility. Next up was perfecting color printing in the company’s own photoengraving plant. “By insisting on the best-quality paper and printing, Nast paved the way for the success of the art magazine,” Seebohm wrote. “His publications proved that a connection between fashion and art was not only plausible but promotable.”
Outside of work, Nast and Frank Crowninshield——his good friend who was one of the organizers of the 1913 Armory Show at which Cubism debuted in America and who became the editor of Vanity Fair—were key figures in café society, especially after the publisher started hosting lavish parties. “He was the first person—well, maybe not the first person—but he was famous for mixing high society with people who worked with the arts,” Nast’s daughter Leslie Bonham Carter told Vogue. “One of the minor things that struck me very much was that he brought together in his famous parties Groucho Marx and Mrs. Vanderbilt.” (The invitation list to the Met Gala is similarly varied.) From 1925, the setting for these Gatsbyesque entertainments was Nast’s 30-room penthouse at 1040 Park Avenue. Decorated by Elsie de Wolfe, it featured a ballroom with a parquet floor imported from France and 18th-century hand-painted Chinese wallpaper recovered from an English estate.
Known to most as Condé, to Bonham Carter he was simply Dad. “It was a lovely relationship,” she recalls. “He was wonderful to me. He used to take me for an ice cream soda in Madison Avenue at Schrafft’s, and we had great fun. He was very gentle, very loving, very interested. And therefore I loved him very much.” The feeling was mutual; as Chase wrote, Nast’s “affection for [Leslie] was the true happiness of his last years.”
Nast, who was married twice, was father to three children. Charles Coudert Nast and Natica Nast (later Warburg) were born in 1903 and 1905, respectively, during his first marriage to Clarisse Coudert. In 1928 the publisher, then 55, married the 21-year-old Leslie Foster. Their daughter, Bonham Carter, was born in 1930 and is named after her mother. The two were known as Big Leslie and Little Leslie.
“My father justified to himself marrying somebody so very much younger because he was a millionaire,” explained Bonham Carter. “Then came the crash [in 1929], and he lost everything. I remember the exhaustion he felt in desperately trying to piece it together. It was at that point [in 1932] that he [practically delivered my mother] into my stepfather’s arms, because he felt so terrible, not only being unable any longer to give her all the things she loved but also that his time was so taken up. He was desperately trying to [salvage his company].”
Big Leslie’s new husband was British Lieutenant Colonel Reginald “Rex” Benson, a dashing banker, polo player, and diplomat. Little Leslie spent her summers with her mother, traveling by ship (once under the care of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy). Bonham Carter, who attended the Brearley School, lived with her father in his “wonderful apartment” until she was 11, when, with her father’s health failing, she joined her mother and stepsiblings in Washington, where Benson was a British military attaché. They later moved to England in 1943.
In 1949, Bonham Carter married Lord St. Just, whom she had met three years prior at a country dance and with whom she had one daughter. When her marriage was dissolved in 1955, she wed Mark Bonham Carter, with whom she had three daughters and was “very happy indeed.” Some credit for this auspicious match must be given to Big Leslie, who unwittingly made the introduction. “At the time,” Leslie Bonham Carter recounted, “we lived in Sussex and Anthony Eden lived very close by. My mother had invited them to dinner, and she was scratching her head trying to think of someone who’d interest him. She knew that Mark was a very clever and very political young man—his grandfather was Asquith, the prime minister. I’d never met him. She invited Mark for the weekend entirely in order to meet Anthony, and that’s how it all started.”
Leslie Bonham Carter’s relationship with fashion goes much further back. “I always cared [how I looked] from the very beginning,” she said. “I remember even at school dictating to everybody else what they should wear.” Her granddaughter Flo Phillips calls Leslie Bonham Carter “the most elegant lady I’ve ever known. I often turn up after work, bedraggled after a day of juggling, to find her resplendent in her chair, almost regal. An inspiration to all—forget being 95.”
The inauguration of the Condé M. Nast Galleries is a historic moment for The Met and for the family. “You can imagine how exciting it is for me,” said Leslie Bonham Carter a week before the event. How might Nast have felt about it? “Well, he would’ve been very pleased, wouldn’t he?”
Below, highlights from the lives in fashion of Condé Montrose Nast and his daughter Leslie Bonham Carter.
1873
Condé Montrose Nast, the third of four children of William F. Nast and Esther Benoist Nast, was born in New York City. He was raised in St. Louis.
1892
Vogue was established by Arthur Baldwin Turnure, a Princetonian, member of the Four Hundred, and founder of the Grolier Club (devoted to book arts). “The definite object is the establishment of a dignified authentic journal of society, fashion, and the ceremonial side of life, that is to be for the present, mainly pictorial,” he wrote in the inaugural issue of December 27, 1892.
1891–1895
Nast attended Georgetown University. He received his BA in 1894 and MA the following year, upon which he moved back home and studied law at Washington University. He graduated and was admitted to the bar in 1897.
1897
After a brief stint with a printing plant his brother had invested in, Nast accepted the invitation of his college friend, Robert Collier, to move to New York and work at Collier’s Weekly with a starting salary of $12 a week. His success was such that, in his seven years with the company, Nast was promoted to advertising manager and then business manager.
1902
Nast married Clarisse Onativia Coudert, who was described by The Canton Press-News at the time as “one of the most charming young women of the Tuxedo colony. Miss Coudert is also a favorite in fashionable Paris, where she has spent several seasons with her sister, the Marquise de Choiseul. Miss Coudert is of mixed American and French blood and is very vivacious and beautiful…. She is a conspicuous figure at all of the exclusive affairs given by the Four Hundred.” The couple had two children, Charles Coudert Nast and Natica Nast (later Warburg). Nast and his wife were estranged for many years before their 1925 divorce.
1907
Nast left Collier’s to focus on the Home Pattern Company, which he had organized in 1904. In September, a newspaper headline declared Nast to be the highest-salaried young man in the world. The accompanying article tracked the businessman’s “rise from a job at a clerk’s hire, $12 a week, to a position with a salary nearly that of the president of the United States.” The writer asserted that “Mr. Nast is known to the publishing world as perhaps the greatest expert in the country on national advertising.”
1909
After four years of negotiation with Turnure’s estate, Nast acquired Vogue. His name first appeared in the June 24 issue.
1910
Although it was primarily filled with illustrations, Vogue began crediting photographers. Nast’s biographer Caroline Seebohm calls the publisher not only a patron of photographers but a man who “personally trained, directed, and disciplined [them] according to his personal vision and private standards.” Supporting her claim, she published a statement Horst P. Horst made decades later. He wrote: “No other publisher has ever demonstrated a courage comparable to the late Condé Nast. Photography owes him an incalculable debt. In the early days of Vogue and Vanity Fair, it was he who persuaded Baron de Meyer and Commander Edward Steichen literally to create fashion photography.… Indeed, there is not one significant contemporary name in photography that has not appeared on the pages of the Nast magazines. And until the day of his death, Mr. Nast remained creatively restless, always foreseeing inevitable change long before anybody else, always demanding—and getting—new results from old artists, always seeking out young talent and giving it rich and unpredictable opportunities.”
1913
Nast, whose writings were used in business-school textbooks, published his theory of “class publications” in a trade journal. Seebohm credits Nast with the concept of special-interest magazines. His argument—which he put spectacularly into practice at Vogue—was quality over quantity. American society, the publisher wrote, “divides not only along the lines of wealth, education, and refinement, but classifies itself even more strongly along lines of interests.… And a ‘class publication’ is nothing more nor less than a publication that looks for its circulation only to those having in common a certain characteristic marked enough to group them into a class. That common characteristic may be almost anything: religion, a particular line of business, community of residence, common pursuit, or some common interest. When I say a class publication ‘looks’ to one of these classes for its circulation, I state it very mildly; as a matter of fact, the publisher, the editor, the advertising manager and circulation man must conspire not only to get all their readers from the one particular class to which the magazine is dedicated, but rigorously to exclude all others.”
1914
Vanity Fair debuted. Its editor, Frank Crowninshield, said its mission was “first, to believe in the progress and promise of American life, and second, to chronicle that progress cheerfully, truthfully, and entertainingly.”
1916
British Vogue was launched, followed by Paris Vogue in 1920.
1921
Nast acquired a printing company and 31 and a half acres of land in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, and started transforming it. According to a contemporary source, it was “regarded as a model printing and booking establishment.” Nast’s daughter, Leslie Bonham Carter, remembers the press as being “one of the great, great prides of his life.”
1922
When Condé Nast Publications, Inc. was established this year, its impact on American culture was already recognized. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat published “5,000,000 New Homes Needed in America: Magazines Playing Big Part in Developing Household Art.” In it, House Garden is mentioned as being “owned and published by Condé Nast, who is also the owner and publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair—making a group of magazines which are edited up to the intelligence of the most appreciative minds of the times. These magazines not only meet an existing need for wider information in regards to all the details of beautiful home-making, but create an interest in and capacity for achieving the finer type of homes, gardens, and decoration, as well as a more gracious cultivated existence.”
1923
The French government bestowed the order of the chevalier of the Legion of Honor on Condé Nast in recognition of his “encouragement of French culture.” Writing for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1938, Paris correspondent Olga Clark wrote: “It is asserted in Paris, and not without justice, that after the war Condé Nast was an important factor in saving French ‘couture,’ or assisting in its re-establishment.… After the war Nast helped French’ couture.’… By consistently putting French style ideas before the American and English publics in Vogue, he influenced American and English buyers to come to France.”
1925
Nast moved into a 30-room penthouse at 1040 Park Avenue that has been described by The New York Times as not only “a nexus for café society when it was built” but the city’s “most famous [penthouse] in its day and remains a benchmark for architectural historians.” “Penthouse owners are the new aristocracy,” remarked Dorthy Draper in a 1930 issue of Vogue.
The apartment was decorated by Elsie de Wolfe (who became Lady Mendel and lived in Villa Trianon at Versailles). It became the site of legendary celebrations. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “the parties of Condé Nast rivaled in their way the fabled balls of the Nineties.” The mix of society and artistic communities was much commented on at the time, as in a 1928 piece that ran in The Plain Dealer, which read: “At the Park Avenue ball of Condé Nast, the publisher, are to be found Mrs. Graham Fair Vanderbilt, society leader of the highest consequence; Miss Helen Morgan, dancer, whose night club has been raided for the usual reasons; and many artists, authors, critics, players, smart people of wealth, barons, princes, jazz specialists and celebrities of fad. Mr. Nast, high priest of feminine extravagances and luxurious living, likes to mix them all up when he throws a party. They have a wonderful time.”
After Nast’s death in 1942, a society hostess and columnist wrote: “Condé’s visiting list was the most elastic and expansive volume I know. He was a party conspirator with me many times during our long and close friendship. His penthouse was an ideal setting for the parties he gave…. Condé was the bridge for more beautiful unknown blondes to cross to careers of fame than I can remember.”
1927
The year that Condé Nast Publications went public, the publisher bought an estate in Sands Point, Long Island.
1928
Nast, 55, married Leslie Foster, the 21-year-old daughter of his friends, Albert Volney and Grace Foster of Lake Forest, Illinois. In a 1930 article describing her work as director of design at Contempora, a business connecting artists with manufacturers, Mrs. Nast is described as being “very pretty, young, very blond and wide-eyed.” “Social life doesn’t hold enough,” she told the Brooklyn Eagle. “I prefer to spend my time doing something I can feel is really creative. Besides that, to live in New York and not have a job is almost impossible. Life is such a forward-going affair here. We must be doing things.”
1929
Black Friday wiped out Condé Nast’s fortune and control of the company. The following year a Goldman Sachs banker became director of Condé Nast Publications.
1930
Leslie Maud Nast (today Leslie Bonham Carter) was born. Vogue editor and Nast favorite Carmel Snow was chosen to be her godmother.
1932
Foster Nast, having quietly divorced Nast (who was then desperately fighting to keep afloat), married Rex (Reginald) Benson, a polo-playing banker, war hero, diplomat, sometime head of British secret service in France, and pal of Cole Porter. Nast’s biographer Susan Roland wrote that Nast had seen the love triangle among Leslie, Benson, and himself “as a perfect solution to their collective problems. As only someone who truly loves another can do, he set her free—with his heartfelt blessings.” And according to Edna Woolman Chase, who worked with Nast from 1909, his second wife’s “affection for Condé was real and lasted out his lifetime.”
1933
Through baker Leo d’Erlanger, Nast came to a silent arrangement with editor and publisher Lord Camrose (who, The Times reported, began his journalistic career as a cub reporter at the age of 14). Camrose’s loan allowed Nast to take a controlling stake in CNP and regain editorial control of his magazines.
1934
Nast, The New York Times would later report, “was voted by a jury of tailors one of 10 of America’s best-dressed men.”
1937
Nast was among those recognized by the New York League of Business and Professional Women for their “liberal attitude toward women in business.”
1941
With Nast’s health deteriorating, Leslie Nast moved to Washington, where her stepfather, Lieutenant Colonel Rex Benson, had been stationed as military attaché and her mother worked as vice chairman of British War Relief.
1942
Death of Condé Nast. “Condé was the kindliest of men—gentle, understanding, and a brilliant business mind,” wrote Elsa Maxwell in memoriam. “Obviously for a man to have produced several splendid magazines, which even today are copied by other publishers and will always serve as models—particularly Vogue–of the best there was during the era of elegance, models to help us retain our sense of beauty, to be the promulgator of the more raffine touches to life’s sometimes sordid pictures.… That, I submit, was no small thing. Mr. Nast, like Aladdin, gave every woman, high and low, the blueprint to a dream with which they might escape grim reality and become Cinderellas overnight.… What Condé meant to New York, not only on the social scene but in every phase of public, professional, or civic life, will be more and more appreciated as time goes on.”
And The Boston Globe published a letter to the editor that read, in part, “Mr. Nast did more to inculcate in women the ideals and practicality of good taste in dressing than any other person, or all the fashion schools of the country put together. Mr. Nast was a pioneer. His watchword was simplicity, his constant warning reminded women of all graduations of income that ‘the most expensive dress you buy is the dress you never wear.’… Always in the vanguard, he never overlooked the artfulness of the simple line and the absence of geegaws. He gave the woman of modest means the satisfaction of ‘being in the know’ by presenting to her the photographs of the leading women of fashion and importance. The great strides in color photography and printing evinced in the magazines made history.”
1948
Leslie Nast graduated from Brearley. In June she made her debut in London. Vogue wrote: “There was dancing in the famous Regency library of Mr. Chips Channon’s [a conservative politician and diarist] beautiful house on Belgrave Square, where Mrs. Rex Benson gave a dance for her debutante daughter, Leslie Nast. A green-and-white tent decorated with reeds and lit by candles was built out beyond the blue-and-silver dining room, a replica of a room in the Amalienburg Palace in Munich.” In December she came out in Chicago at a party hosted by her maternal grandparents.
1949
Leslie Nast, age 18, married Lord St. Just (Peter George Gernfell), whom she had met three years prior at a country dance. (Once known as “the shyest peer,” he started a television production company in 1954.) Of the wedding Vogue reported that “there were two very young flower girls and six bridesmaids in green organdie; the bride went up the aisle on the arm of her stepfather, Lieutenant Colonel Rex Benson. Her wedding dress, made for her in New York by Bergdorf Goodman, was of ivory satin with a pale ivory lace jacket: her tulle veil floated from a tiny arc of flowers; instead of the traditional bouquet, she carried a prayer book.” The pair had a daughter, Laura Claire Grenfell.
1955
Following the dissolution of her marriage, Leslie Nast, the former Lady St. Just, married Mark Bonham Carter, then a 33-year-old working in publishing, to whom her mother had introduced her. (In 1943, as a POW in Italy, Bonham Carter executed a daring escape, scaling a wall and trekking through enemy territory, in order to rejoin the British army.) The grandson of the one-time prime minister Lord Asquith, Bonham Carter first threw his hat into the political ring in 1945. Unsuccessful, he studied at Oxford and Chicago University. Writing in 1959, The Bolton News, commented that Bonham Carter’s “marriage to Leslie Nast was a marriage of litterateurs, his bride being the daughter of the late Condé Nast, the distinguished American publisher who founded Vogue.” The couple had three daughters: the current Jane Bonham Carter, Virginia Bonham Carter (now Brand), and Eliza Bonham Carter.
1958
Mark Bonham Carter became an MP after winning a seat for Torrington, Devon. “From the standpoint of political attraction,” wrote The New York Times, “Mr. Bonham Carter has one other qualification that no one else in British politics can match. He can charm the voters.” Four years later Leslie Bonham Carter would stand as a liberal for Queens Gate in South Kensington.
1959
Mr. and Mrs. Samuel I. Newhouse bought a majority stake in CNP.
