Mr. Brown, who labored at Vanity Fair for greater than 20 years, beginning as Mr. Carter’s assistant in 1994, mentioned that working there partly required you to be a polymath — to have “specific knowledge” of various industries and social scenes and to know “how the world works.” The job additionally concerned being a dwelling embodiment of the fashionable world created by its prime editors.

Now, in line with Mr. South’s pitch, Standard wanted culturally astute storytellers and worldbuilders. People who may burnish the fame of an organization with a subsidiary, Siplast, that labored on the roofs of notable buildings just like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Moynihan Train Hall.

Ms. Kseniak consulted initially and came aboard in late 2019. Already on employees was Harrison Vail, a member of her workforce at Vanity Fair whom Mr. South had contacted. Others, like Ms. Switzer and Mr. Gilmore, who’s now chief of employees for Mr. Millstone, quickly adopted.

Mr. Vail is now again working for Mr. Carter because the communications director at Air Mail. Ms. Kseniak, Ms. Switzer, Mr. Gilmore and Mr. South, by way of a spokesman for Standard, declined to remark for this text.

Mr. Brown, 50, who chronicled his time at Vanity Fair in a memoir, “Dilettante,” was initially shocked when he heard some former colleagues have been working for an industrial agency, he mentioned, however he understood the enchantment. By then, the golden age of journal publishing was over, killed by the web and social media, and the famously lavish budgets and salaries have been vanishing.

“I tell you, if I had gotten a call from Standard Industries, offering me a job with a great salary and benefits, I would have been, like, ‘Screw it. I’m in the roofing business now,’” Mr. Brown mentioned. (Some of his colleagues who left Vanity Fair did transition into jobs extra just like what they’d been doing. Aimée Bell, a deputy editor, became a vice president at Gallery Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint. Krista Smith, the journal’s government West Coast editor, went to work for Netflix.)