A Look At Conde Nast’s Efforts To Bring Technology To Fashion Media

Jamie Pallot

Compared with other British media editors in New York, Jamie Pallot, editorial director of Condé Nast Digital, maintains a low profile. Once headed for a career in academia, he diverted to New York and now, more than two decades later, he oversees the publishing group’s three standalone websites: fashion destination Style.com, culinary site Epicurious, and Concierge, which is devoted to travel. What is more, he oversees them at a profit and with more than 10 million unique users.

His bright, 15th-floor corner office in a monolithic former JP Morgan Chase building looks up Sixth Avenue to Central Park. It’s decorated with publishing awards and books on photography and architecture. But there’s nothing that speaks of a craze for power that characterizes similar offices. The only thing that signals that this is a significant crossroads for the worlds of fashion, food, luxury and travel is a box from Gucci that has been sitting there for long enough to acquire a layer of dust.

Pallot is the dapper, 50-year-old son of a Jersey farmer. “I grew up digging potatoes,” he recalls. He arrived in America in October 1987 as a scholar attached to a visiting William Wordsworth exhibition. But the day of the opening was Black Monday; few of the invited bankers turned up. “They were throwing themselves out of windows,” Pallot says.

Since then he’s worked in digital publishing, at News Corp (NSDQ: NWS). Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), People magazine and now for the Newhouse family, publishers of such legendary titles as Vanity Fair, Vogue and the New Yorker.

He might, on the face of it, seem a rather unlikely figure to have been drawn into such a glittering beau monde. He recalls getting the call from Condé Nast, a name he says has an “undeniable allure, though I knew nothing about fashion at that point”.

On his way to the subsequent interview with an unnamed (but identifiable) editor-in-chief for the job, a salesman at People pointed out he was wearing pleated trousers. “I had to run home to change. It would have been a terrible fashion faux pas

This article originally appeared in Guardian.

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