1980's Media | Brown, Tina 1953-

MAGAZINE EDITOR

A Magazine for the 1980s.

One of the most talked about and controversial magazines of the 1980s was Vanity Fair, which editor in chief Tina Brown turned into a near-perfect representation of the interests and tastes of the "yuppie" (young urban professional) or "me" generation. She successfully exploited their obsession with wealth, status, and celebrity to create a magazine that became notorious for publishing stories about Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and long intellectual think pieces next to starstruck movie-celebrity profiles or pictures such as Roseanne and Tom Arnold mud wrestling. As Brown told an interviewer in 1989, "My kind of editing comes very much from the tradition of the eclectic magazine which mixes culture, arts, business—all those things—with an overriding point of view," and, she added, bringing an irreverent viewpoint to "stuffy subjects" can "really make a lot of waves"...