Graydon Carter
Co-editor & Founder, Air Mail
Twenty-five years at the top of the glossy magazines, from high society to high-impact journalism.
Graydon Carter is co-founder of Air Mail. After starting an award-winning magazine in his native Canada, he moved to the US to write for for Time, then Life. In 1986, he launched the satirical monthly Spy, which specialised in irreverent takes on the media, entertainment and high society, then in 1992 he succeeded Tina Brown as the editor of Vanity Fair. During his 25 years as editor, the magazine won dozens of national and international awards, and Graydon himself was nominated to the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame. He stepped down from Vanity Fair in 2017, and recently launched Air Mail, a digital weekly concentrating on covering lifestyle stories with “sophistication, authority and wit”. In this in-depth interview, he talks about launching a digital-only publication while sticking to the high journalistic and production values of a glossy magazine, discusses his turbulent relationship with Donald Trump from the early days of a Vanity Fair profile to the presidency, and describes the origins of the now-famous Vanity Fair Oscars party.