Twentieth-century magazine editors dictated cultural standards rather than reflecting public taste

Evidence

In the twentieth century, magazines such as Vogue, GQ, and The New Yorker set the standards of sophistication for elite society, and that meant that editors dictated what the public wanted rather than responding to its existing desires. Vanity Fair’s Dana Brown described these celebrity editors of the 1990s as “the arbiters of taste, the translators of culture and style to the culture-and-style-hungry masses. They decided what was cool, what was important, what was necessary, what made it onto their pages, what people would be talking about, watching, reading, wearing, thinking.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 370

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: This is the baseline against which Marx’s status-dynamics mechanism operates — the gatekeeper era that the internet then dissolves. Connects to the ‘death of the sellout’ idea central to the reader’s goal.

Related

• Twentieth-century taste was dictated top-down by magazine editors, not discovered from below (similarity 0.95)
• Industrial-era curatorial gatekeepers gave way to unvetted self-serve advertising platforms. (similarity 0.79)