Nicholas David Coleridge is chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum, chairman of the Prince of Wales' Campaign for Wool and chairman of the Gilbert Trust for the Arts. He is an ambassador for the Landmark Trust and a patron of the Elephant Family. From 1989–2019, he was successively editorial director of Condé Nast Britain, managing director, Condé Nast Britain, vice president, Condé Nast International and president, Condé Nast International, the division of Condé Nast which publishes 139 magazines in 27 international markets, and over 100 websites. British Condé Nast publishes numerous titles including Vogue, Vanity Fair, House & Garden, Tatler, The World of Interiors, Condé Nast Traveller, Glamour, GQ, Brides, Wired, Love and GQ Style, as well as owning the Johansens hotel guides and the Condé Nast College of Fashion and Design. From 2017-2019, he was chairman of Condé Nast Britain. He has been chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum since 2015, having been a trustee from 2012–2015. He has been chairman of the Campaign for Wool since 2013.
Life and career
Coleridge was born in London, the son of David Coleridge, who was chairman of Lloyd's of London in the late 1980s, and descended from a brother of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He is the eldest of three brothers, and educated at Ashdown House, Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied theology and history of art; however, due to a back injury, he was not able to sit his finals. As an Eton schoolboy, he won the Jeremy Thorpe Cup for debating with his school friend Craig Brown, though the trophy was later re-named when Thorpe's reputation fell under a shadow. He has written fourteen books, both fiction and non-fiction, based largely upon either his professional life or social novels. The Fashion Conspiracy was the Number One bestseller, hardback non-fiction. His autobiography, titled The Glossy Years : Magazines, Museums and Selective Memoirs published September 2019 by Penguin Fig Tree, was #No 1 in Art Books, #No 1 in Fashion Books, #No 1 in Showbiz Biography. It was described by The Sunday Times as “the most entertaining book of the year”. He has been chairman of the PPA – the magazine publishers' association – and chairman of the British Fashion Council. He was founding chairman of Fashion Rocks, the fashion and rock music extravaganza, which raised more than £3 million for the Prince's Trust charity. He was on the advisory board for the Concert for Diana, Wembley Stadium 2007. He has been a member of the Council of the Royal College of Art, and a member of the trading board of the Prince's Trust. He was a director of PressBof, the parent organisation of the Press Complaints Commission, 2007-2014. While on assignment making a television documentary about Tamil terrorism in Sri Lanka in 1984, he was arrested and jailed for ten days in Welikada prison, Colombo, where he embarked upon writing a collection of short stories, '. As a journalist, he has been an irregular contributor to The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator and the Financial Times. In 1976, between school and university, he was a cub reporter on the Falmouth Packet newspaper in Cornwall. From 1979-1982 he was Associate Editor of the Tatler, working for then editor Tina Brown; from 1982–85 he was a columnist at the Evening Standard; 1986–1989 he was editor of Harpers & Queen magazine, a Hearst title, before joining Condé Nast. In 2002 he suggested that the then Sunday Times fashion editor, Colin McDowell, was habitually too negative about British fashion designers. This drew criticism from McDowell, who accused Coleridge of jingoism. He was described by Campaign magazine in 2012 as “magazines' most compelling advocate for almost two decades”.
Personal life
He is married to the healer and author Georgia Metcalfe and has four children, Alexander, Freddie, Sophie and Tommy. They live in Chelsea, London, and in Worcestershire. The December 2007 issue of Condé Nast's World of Interiors magazine contains a feature on his country house, the 1709 Wolverton Hall in Worcestershire. In 2019, he commissioned a garden Folly, a 46 foot writing tower, in a Tudor-Georgian-Jacobean style, by the architect Quinlan Terry. He has seven godchildren, and his novel Godchildren was dedicated to them. Two of the godchildren, Cara Delevingne and Edie Campbell, are now well known British models. Another of his godchildren, journalist Ned Donovan, became engaged to Princess Raiyah bint Al Hussein of Jordan, in 2019.
