When Vanity Fair Was Great

Wow. Now this is how it’s done.

I just got a copy of the new coffee table book Vanity Fair 100, and it is a stunner. The book is a retrospective on Vanity Fair magazine, which was founded in 1913 and for its first twenty-two years was edited by Francis Welch “Crownie” Crowninshield. Crowninshield was an author, raconteur, and one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art. Crownie, as Vanity Fair 100 notes, “would help bring modernism and the mad delights of the Roaring Twenties kicking and screaming into American life.”