Banality Fair

A Disappointing Launch for Condé Nast in Germany

By Markus Brauck

Part 3: A Magazine with an Identity Crisis

And what about Vanity Fair? The magazine can't decide. Should it opt for trashy tabloid journalism? Should it aim for a staid and respectable image? Poschardt doesn't want to lose face in front of his high-society friends, but he doesn't want to put off the masses either. The danger in the strategy of trying to please both, though, is that you either win everyone's heart or none at all. In any case,Vanity Fair's milking of clichés doesn't increase the experiment's chances of success.

"Art is the high society's new must-have accessory," special correspondent Schönburg writes in a feature about the Biennale art fair in Venice in one recent issue. And editor-in-chief Poschardt has this to say about Kate Moss: "I was at a party celebrating the 40th birthday of Kate's agent and chatted with her. A guest came over to us and handed each of us a glass of champagne. It was Diddy -- that is, back then he still called himself Puff Daddy."

Things get thoroughly ridiculous when the magazine spills its celebrity sauce over the German backwoods: "We love (the eastern German state of) Saxony because Dresden has a high society again." To prove it, 12 people -- from the commissioner for foreigners to German opera singer and entertainer Gunther Emmerlich -- were searched out and assembled for a group portrait, pluckily commented on by the editors as follows: "The photo shoot in the vestibule of the Semper Opera House was a joyful reunion." The desperate search for glamour, it seems, is also the new must-have accessory of the editors.

And then it's merry old uncle Poschi's turn again: "The global economic boom is curing Germans of their depression. And that's pleasant to watch. Even global warming, a horrific development, makes a contribution in the form of plentiful sunshine."

Supermodels, super Saxony, sunshine. Those are the success stories by which the editor-in-chief wants to revive the spirit of last year's World Cup in Germany. More or less, as one finds out every Thursday. That's when the magazine hits the stand and Poschardt calls together his editors to critique the new issue. And it's also the time when things stop being so super. His motto: Criticism is a gift. And it's one he sure likes giving. He regularly lectures his staff on the great stories featured in Stern and the weekly Die Zeit, stories printed while his editors and reporters were asleep at the wheel.