In January of 2018, just a few weeks after Radhika Jones began her unlikely appointment as editor of Vanity Fair and was still feeling her way into Graydon Carter’s once-august throne, I flew to New York for an introductory engagement and diplomatic overture. (At the time, I covered the media for CNN.) After ascending the heights of One World Trade—Condé Nast’s downsized home after grander piles at 4 Times Square and 350 Madison—I was let out on the 41st floor and escorted to a vast corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows and a grand bespoke curvilinear tan wooden desk. The office had been designed for Graydon by his architect, Basil Walter, and it alone probably would have been more than enough to lure Radhika from her sleepy former job in the New York Times books department. We talked a lot about the office, and the sweeping views of the Hudson and New York Harbor, and then I asked the questions that ostensibly justified my visit: What was her vision? What did she intend to do with the magazine? How did she hope to make her mark? I suppose you can’t expect a newly minted editor to have all those answers right away, much less to share them with someone she’s just met—and a reporter, no less—but I was nevertheless struck by her answer: “What do you think I should do?” she asked. The response stuck with me as an emblem of the short, enigmatic, and hasty search that produced her appointment. At the time, Condé Nast executives couldn’t quite ponder VF without Graydon, and a number of batshit crazy names had been suggested—Richard Plepler, Jon Stewart, etcetera—at the outset. David Remnick had been involved, but his role was always overstated. (David is too smart to put his neck out for another editor.) Anyway, Jones wasn’t the sort of person who’d been dreaming of editing Vanity Fair for long stretches. She seemed as surprised by her appointment as everyone else, and ideas for what to do with the joint were quite literally still dawning on her. Her desk often carried old copies of the magazine so she could study up. Shortly after our meeting, Radhika was relocated to a smaller, windowless interior office on the 27th floor, which seemed more commensurate with her stature and the diminution of the brand. Graydon was a historic talent whose style and sensibility matched the towering coif of his Robert Risko caricature—very much a star of the society that he and his writers chronicled for a quarter-century. His own predecessor, Tina Brown, had transformed the magazine into a culture-defining paragon of journalism, making herself the symbol of the industry’s golden age in the process. From the start, Radhika seemed like a mismatched inheritor of this pedigree. When she was appointed by Anna Wintour, both Condé Nast and the media tried to play up the contrast between Jones and Carter. In this narrative, Jones was younger and primed to remake the brand for a new generation. And yet these weren’t quite the relevant distinctions. As Carter has recounted in his fittingly timed memoir, When the Going Was Good, he was a middle-class kid from the provinces of Canada who descended upon New York with a Moss Hart–style affection for the high points of American culture—Hollywood, the literary world, bohemia, the Kennedys, the scandals and fashions of the wealthy. Jones, for her part, had gone to private school in Greenwich, customarily dropped her Harvard degree into conversations, received a PhD in English, and highlighted her time in the musty warrens of The Paris Review. If Graydon was a bon vivant, she was a bookworm. Anyway, even years after our initial meeting, she never quite articulated her thesis for the magazine. Yes, her Vanity Fair would be younger and more diverse, and she deserves ample credit for that. But she never learned the financial equation that Carter had mastered during his era. In the simplest form, he recognized that Hollywood studios needed editorial vessels to promote their slates, and that the fashion houses would spend tens of millions in advertising in exchange for fashion credits in celebrity shoots—and this financial alchemy would afford him the budget to create the muscular long-form journalism that attracted the cosmopolitan readership that made it all work. This machinery led to around $200 million in annual domestic revenue at Vanity Fair’s peak, and a brand that seemed on par with far larger entities, like HBO. If Carter’s tenure was known for the Hollywood issue, the New Establishment List, the Oscar party, the Deep Throat exposé, the Jennifer Aniston interview, the anti-Bush reportage, the Suri Cruise disclosure, and the big Caitlyn Jenner reveal, among other highlights, the Jones tenure was about… trying to do more with less, while also complaining about the excesses of the Carter era. Vanity Fair covers started to feature illustrations or stock photography. The VF Summit was deprecated. Star journalists vanished. In her exit memo, Jones characterized the era differently. On Thursday, she announced that she had made the “difficult decision” to leave Vanity Fair later this spring. She credited herself with accomplishing virtually all of the goals she’d set for the magazine seven years earlier, and called Vanity Fair a “thriving modern publication” with a robust social media presence, studio business, “powerhouse” video department, and “an epic party machine.” “Those of you who know me well know that I can be a little restless, once a mission is accomplished,” she wrote. “And I have always had a horror of staying too long at the party.”

Jones’s strange fit at VF was an open secret from the moment she arrived. Weeks before her start date, she attended a holiday party thrown by VF publisher Chris Mitchell and hung out in the corner shyly, only reluctantly introducing herself to junior employees. (She would exhibit similar wallflower tendencies toward the celebrities at her inaugural Oscar party, which I observed firsthand.) Her initial introduction to the staff was a stilted affair—former Condé Nast C.E.O. Bob Sauerberg was no toastmaster himself—that resulted in the whole fox tights fiasco. She then laid off a large part of Carter’s brain trust and slogged through the hard work of replacing them with employees at half their salary. It didn’t take long for the cruel Condé Nast whisper circuit to kick into high gear. It didn’t help that former company president Pam Drucker Mann doubted Jones’s commercial chops. Her decision to put Lena Waithe on the cover of her inaugural issue may have garnered controversy, but the real affront was that the product itself became so irrelevant to the culture that no one seemed to care. Indeed, even the Oscar party has lost its luster, and now serves as a mid-station for a photo op on the way to more exclusive and enjoyable parties. Jones obviously had to manage through a fair amount of needless bullshit: countless reorganizations, only some of which were successful; the industry’s broadening malaise; a C.E.O. transition, Covid, etcetera. And, to be sure, the industry’s downfall was already well underway when Graydon left. But Radhika’s insecurity and lack of vision seemed to dramatically accelerate the decline. And, unfortunately, it fit a larger pattern at Condé Nast. Ever since she moved into her corporate role as artistic director, Anna Wintour has had a difficult time locating talent to replace its once legendary editors. The Graydon-to-Radhika delta is probably about the same as the Cindi Leive-to-Sam Barry ratio or the Linda Wells-to-Michelle Lee decline, though it certainly hits a lot harder at a historic title like Vanity Fair. This era has been ending for a generation, of course, but it didn’t have to go out quite like this.