Turnure’s New York weekly and Condé Nast’s purchase.

Vogue began as a New York weekly. A Library of Congress blog post published on 1 April 2024, written by the Kluge Fellow Samira Spatzek, describes the founder Arthur B. Turnure as a Princeton socialite and businessman who set out to publish a New York social gazette, and dates the first issue of American Vogue to 17 December 1892, with Josephine Redding as editor from 1892 to 1900. English Wikipedia gives the same date and gives the founder’s full name as Arthur Baldwin Turnure.

The early magazine was broader than fashion. The Library of Congress post lists fashion articles for both women and men, sections on etiquette, political commentary, book and theatre reviews, music criticism, interior design and advertising, together with serialized fiction, and notes photographs by the Boston photographer F. Holland Day in the issue of 13 October 1898. Wikipedia says the magazine aimed at New York’s upper class and those who wished to join it, and that it covered sport and social affairs for male readers alongside fashion.

Ownership changed in 1909, when the New York publisher Condé Montrose Nast bought the title. Wikipedia’s article on the company says Condé Nast traces its roots to that purchase, and its article on the magazine says Nast turned Vogue into a women’s magazine and began overseas editions in the 1910s. It dates British Vogue to 1916, when wartime shipping made deliveries to Europe difficult and printing for the European market moved to England, and French Vogue to 1920.

Condé Nast itself later changed hands. Wikipedia says Samuel I. Newhouse bought the company in 1959 and merged it with his family’s privately held holding company, Advance Publications, which still owns it. Advance has owned Vogue, through Condé Nast, since 1959.

Monthly publication, Anna Wintour and a new title in 2025.

Through the twentieth century Vogue was shaped by a line of editors. Wikipedia names the critic Frank Crowninshield, who had edited Vanity Fair, among its editors after Nast’s purchase; Jessica Daves as editor-in-chief through the 1950s; and Diana Vreeland, who joined in 1962 and became editor-in-chief after Daves left in December that year. In 1973, Wikipedia says, Vogue became a monthly, and under Grace Mirabella, it says, the magazine changed its interviews, arts coverage and articles to address working women.

In July 1988, according to Wikipedia, Anna Wintour was named editor-in-chief. She later took on wider jobs at the parent company. On 26 June 2025 WWD reported that Vogue said it would seek a head of editorial content for American Vogue, a role that, Wikipedia says, replaced the editor-in-chief title, and that Wintour would remain chief content officer for Condé Nast and global editorial director of Vogue. Vogue announced in September 2025 that Chloe Malle would take that head of editorial content role.

The publishing rhythm has changed again. Wikipedia, citing Vogue Business in October 2025, says the American magazine now publishes eight issues a year, with combined summer and winter issues, and that it is based at One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, the Condé Nast headquarters. The Vogue name also runs across editions in other countries, and across sister titles such as Teen Vogue, which Wikipedia lists among Condé Nast’s brands.

Wikipedia records that the name is usually styled in capital letters, as VOGUE, in running text as well as on the cover.

Mastheads, cover grids and section furniture.

A printed title carries its identity in a handful of recurring elements. The masthead or nameplate is the title set across the top of a cover or front page, often drawn as custom lettering rather than typed from a stock font, and it is usually protected as a trademark. Around it sit the dateline, issue details and, on a newspaper, the ears on either side of the nameplate.

Magazine covers tend to follow a cover grid: a fixed zone for the masthead, a main image, a lead line and a column of cover lines that tease the stories inside. Some titles let the image overlap the masthead, which only works when the lettering is familiar enough to be read when partly hidden.

Inside, a headline typeface and a text face are paired for contrast, and section furniture — folios, running heads, section labels, rules, bylines and pull quotes — repeats from page to page so readers can find their way. Digital editions reuse these pieces as logos, favicons, app icons and social avatars, so a publisher can keep a compact monogram or short form of the name beside the full nameplate.

From illustrated lettering to a fixed Didone banner.

The clearest account of the Vogue masthead comes from the designer Abbott Miller, writing in the design magazine Eye (no. 65, 2007) in an essay titled “Through thick and thin: fashion and type”. Miller says that on Vogue’s early covers, before photography took over, illustrators drew lettering to suit the style of each illustration, and that the habit carried on as photographers and designers took over the covers, with type treated as part of the whole design.

He dates the change to the mid-1950s. As late as 1955, Miller writes, Vogue covers still moved between serif and sans-serif faces, script lettering and illustrated or photographic letters; after 1955 the magazine appears to have settled on a consistent all-capitals banner set in Didone lettering, which he says has stayed fixed apart from minor details ever since. Didone is the family of high-contrast serif faces whose name joins those of the printers Didot and Bodoni, with heavy vertical strokes and hairline serifs. Wikipedia’s article on the Didot typeface says Vogue used Didot on covers several times from the 1940s and that it became permanent in 1955.

Miller also names the art director behind the magazine’s modern layout. Mehemed Fehmy Agha, he writes, art directed Vogue from 1929 to 1942 and, with Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar, is credited with bringing a Modernist approach to layout, photography and type to American magazines. Miller writes that the extreme thick-and-thin structure of a Didone face reduces the visual mass of the letters, so a word set in it lies over a photograph like a veil, which he calls particularly useful for magazine covers. He adds that Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar both continue to dress themselves in the style.

For a design guide, Vogue shows how a title that once let every cover artist redraw its name came to fix one all-capitals Didone banner and keep it for decades. Compare it with The New Yorker, its Condé Nast stablemate, and The New York Times, another New York nameplate. For this guide we use masthead black, ivory and muted gilt with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Vogue’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.