The Industry Imagining The Future Of W Magazine

Stefano Ronchi, editor of W magazine, has had just about enough, albeit in an unmussed, well- mannered, and not terribly bothered sort of way. It was the afternoon of August 9, the day after the magazine’s owner, the once mythically flush publishing firm of Condé Nast, had called a companywide meeting to run through various ways to save itself (most of which has already been leaked) after losing $120 million last year. Back-office functions were to be merged, seven of the company’s 23 floors at 1 World Trade Center would be sublet, and three magazines—Golf Digest, Brides and W—were going to be sold.

- Carl Swanson

Tonchi had asked me over to his exquisite midtown apartment to explain how the news was “quite liberating in certain ways.” W, you see, isn’t being dumped: It’s more of a conscious uncoupling. It just wasn’t working anymore. And he wanted to give me his pitch for why, in an #influencer-dominated, fingerswipe age, W is, or could be, a viable brand for someone new (and, presumably, rich) to make a fresh start with.

But first, the apartment: It has 14-foot ceilings, and all of its circa-1885 moldings and leaded-glass windows are intact. There’s a subdued Catherine Opie photograph in the foyer, a David Salle over the fireplace, and a gorgeously weeping Teresita Fernandez installation studding the walls of the dining room. The art world’s favorite architect, Annabelle Selldorf, did the renovation. Tonchi and his husband, the art dealer David Maupin (the artists in the house tend to be represented by Lehmann Maupin), bought it seven years ago, after they had their twin girls and no longer fit in their place on West 12th Street. “We couldn’t find anything downtown,” he says. “And up here everything was on sale.” Later, Tonchi mischievously shows me an empty apartment on his floor, wires dangling from the ceiling, papers scattered on the floor. He’s clearly fascinated by the building’s haunted opulence.

With a circulation of 460,000, W has always been a yacht compared to Condé Nast’s big-circ consumer cruise ships like Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Glamour. He tells me that even after Vogue editor Anna Wintour took over as the company’s artistic director in 2013, she was too busy trying to juggle digital business models to pay