Spanning Time: 'Vanity Fair' Publishes Full Digital Archive
- by Melynda Fuller , May 17, 2019
Jones writes: “Don’t let anyone tell you that time machines don’t exist. We call ours by another name: the Vanity Fair archive. In seconds, it will whisk you to the Jazz Age, to the go-go '80s, to the time Mark Felt confessed he was the guy they called Deep Throat.”
The archive spans the magazine’s launch in 1913 as Dress & Vanity Fair and includes work from P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker, poet A.A. Milne and photographer Annie Leibovitz, covering more than 700 issues.
The platform allows users to bookmark stories to read later and create their own shareable digital collections.
“You can chart your own narrative arcs from the early 20th century to the early 21st — the shifting nature of influence and aspiration, from the lofty refinements of high culture to the delicious depths of low,” writes Jones.
The archive features “curated pages focused on [Vanity Fair’s] signature topics and voices, from “Crime & Punishment” to Christopher Hitchens.”
Access to the archive is free for the first month by creating an account. Following the trail period, it will be absorbed in a Vanity Fair membership.
Jones writes: “Magazines evolve the way living things do, in concert with and response to the changing world around us—but they retain their core DNA, and the archive records its imprint.”
