Condé Nast Archive

With over eight-million assets amassed from more than 50 magazine titles, the Condé Nast Archive is both unique and extensive. The collections, representing more than 100 years of history, are comprised of photographs, illustrations, cartoons, slides, correspondence, video, printed matter, and ephemera that touch on subjects from fashion and interior design to cooking and travel. All communicate the excellence for which the company has been known, since its founding in 1909 by Condé Montrose Nast.

Aggregated, the artists represented in the Archive form a virtual who’s who of the leading twentieth-century talents in the fields of fashion, interior and portrait photography, and illustration. Among them is Horst P. Horst, who once credited Nast as helping to establish fashion photography as a field. Indeed, the hands-on publisher fostered the careers of such pioneers as Baron Adolph de Meyer and Edward Steichen. Later, Irving Penn would find a home at Vogue, as would Helmut Newton, Gordon Parks and Richard Avedon. Many contributors, like Arthur Elgort and Tyler Mitchell, for example, appear in more than one title.

Vogue was the first publication in the company’s portfolio, and fashion—for women and men—remains an important content area for the business, though not its only one; literature, current events, the arts, sport, food, and modern design are also important subject areas that today attract more than 140 million consumers across the company’s industry-leading print, digital, and video brands. In constant use by the staff, and open by appointment to scholars and researchers, the Condé Nast Archive is the repository of these brands’ collective excellence.