Condé Nast’s Reality Check, Potential Cuts

Vogue Magazine, the largest Condé Nast publication, is filled with glossy photos of women jumping up in colorful leggings and grand fur coats. It’s a reverence for expensive things and a platform on which editorial staffs can glorify peacock feathers and brightly colored eye shadows. It makes life more interesting.  It makes life more vibrant. As a reader, I constantly drool over the unattainable Chanel couture evening gown, so expensive they won’t even list the price, and imagine the day I will marry a duke wealthy enough to buy me 50 of them.  Vogue is everything fantasy and awe-inspiring.

The buzzkill consultants at McKinsey, however, recently arrived at Condé Nast on their high horses to squash any sense of whimsy this publisher has established.   The McKinsey company, staffed with a bevy hot, young guys, analyzes redundancies across publications, determines which cuts are necessary and steers the magazines (illogically) away from over-consumption. In other words, the consultants express that 5-25% in budget cuts will occur across all of Condé Nast’s magazine.  For Vogue, this means a serious scaling back on grand photo shoots and lavish hotel stays for Anna Wintour.

According to a Condé Nast employee interviewed by The New York Observer:

You could tell that they know that there is a lot of waste here,” said another staffer who talked to the McKinsey minions. “The questions they asked were all based on duplications of effort. Things like, ‘Do people really need that?’ ‘What if you didn’t do XYZ?’

Of course there is nothing logical about spending $100,000 for pictures of micro minis worn on top of the pyramids.  That’s the beauty of it all.  Clearly, these McKinsey consultants are heralding in a dark era of simple summer dresses paired with sensible pumps.  Goodbye “ethnic” prints and thigh-high stilleto boots.  You’ll be missed.