Condé Montrose Nast

Condé Montrose Nast (March 26, 1873 – September 19, 1942) was an American publisher, entrepreneur and business magnate. He was known for founding Condé Nast, a mass media company, now a subsidiary of Advance Publications, who published and maintained brands such as Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New Yorker.

Named after his uncle Condé L. Benoist, Condé Montrose Nast was born in New York City to a family of Midwestern origin. His father, William F. Nast (son of the German-born Methodist leader William Nast) was an inventor who had served as U.S. attaché in Berlin. His mother, the former Esther A. Benoist, was a daughter of pioneering St. Louis banker Louis Auguste Benoist and a descendant of a prominent French family that emigrated to Canada and then to Missouri.

He had three siblings: Louis, Ethel, and Estelle.

Nast's aunt financed his studies at Georgetown University, from which he graduated in 1894. During his studies, he was the first president of Georgetown's early student government, The Yard, and he was a member of Georgetown's debating organization, the Philodemic Society. He stayed on an extra year to receive a Master's degree from Georgetown in 1895. He went on to earn a law degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1897.

Nast did not take well to law, and upon graduation he got a job working for a former Georgetown classmate, Robert Collier, as advertising manager for Collier's Weekly (1898–1907). Over the course of a decade he increased the advertising revenue 100-fold. He published books and Lippincott's Monthly Magazine with Robert M. McBride (McBride, Nast & Co.). After leaving Collier's, Nast bought Vogue, then a small New York society magazine, transforming it into one of America's premier fashion magazines.

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