Although magazine culture is dead, and along with it the influence of invented events like “The September Issue,” it was still a shock when the most recent Vogue cover appeared on social media. The shocking thing wasn’t that there were a bunch of supermodels on the covers of American and British Vogue. The supes still regularly appear in editorials, advertisements, and their own staged social media images, and they’ve all been on multiple covers of multiple Vogues in recent years.
No, the shocking thing is, obviously, that the covers are both completely hideous!!!!! JAYSUS CRIMINY!! Dressed in black, wearing carefully distributed global designers (Italian, French, British, and American), and posing in a strange silver void, Linda, Cindy, Christy, and Naomi look as if they’re in a parody skit about supermodels in an elevator headed to a penthouse wake. I keep expecting one of them to light a cigarette and say, “I’m tired of pretending to be sad this bitch is dead,” before another one replies, “I’m tired of going to funerals that aren’t yours.” Maybe I’m thinking of AbFab. Maybe an AI will turn this into an SNL skit.
The cover line also had strong funeral vibes. “The Greatest of Time?” They didn’t die in a plane crash, Vogue! It’s a magazine cover! Lighten up!
Twitter provided the best reactions:
This is giving board meeting in the pilot episode of a tv show about a modeling agency run by former supermodels. DEFUND AMERICAN VOGUE.
We used to be a country. A proper country.
The waiter at Nobu took this pic with Naomi’s phone before the check came.
Are you having a fashion disaster? Were you injured in a catastrophic catwalk collision? The offices of Evangelista, Crawford, Turlington & Campbell can get you the compensation you deserve!
Evangelista, Crawford, Turlington, and Campbell are, of course, not lawyers. They’re women who gained wealth and fame by winning a genetic beauty lottery, then working hard to exploit, and be exploited for, that beauty. They weren’t the first models to become rich and famous—the world had already seen Veruschka, Iman, Cheryl Teigs, and Christy Brinkley—but they were the first models to take up so much cultural space, and the first to earn the astronomical amounts they were paid.
It’s hard to overstate the cultural impact the supermodels had. For me, the last few years of the 80s and the first few of the 90s were caught up with buying Manic Panic and being a punk rock believer. I didn’t have a TV or read mainstream media and yet I knew all about these ladies. They were inescapable. It is kind of intense that the British Vogue cover, the Freedom 90 video, and Linda Evangelista saying, “We don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day” all happened in the same year.
There were also the celebrity boyfriends, the runway antics, the fashion and beauty contracts, the Super Bowl commercial, and more. And there was Cindy Crawford on House of Style.
For research purposes, I watched this episode from 1993, which features the current Vogue cover stars, along with Beverly Johnson and Lauren Hutton.
The conversation touches on a bunch of interesting topics and then skips past them, but I’ll note them here because they matter: All of the women mention having been poorly and inappropriately treated; Naomi Campbell says editors would tell her they had had a black model on the cover three years ago so they couldn’t book her; Cindy says feminists criticized her for doing things like Playboy, but she thinks feminism is what empowered her to make the choice to do Playboy. (She was a third wave feminist.)
What really struck me is that in 1993—a full thirty years before the Vogue funeral—they are already talking about their careers ending. Cindy is worried they might be eclipsed by the “waifs,” a group of newer models including Amber Valletta, Shalom Harlow, and Kate Moss, who were supposedly a grungy antithesis to the OG supermodels. She says, “These young girls, they’ve got stringy hair, no makeup, this blank expression, staring into the camera…. What does that mean for us?”
I can’t tell if Cindy actually believed her modeling career was in jeopardy (and I get that modeling is—or wasn’t—a career that lasts a lifetime) or if she was just trying to get the conversation going, but CAN YOU IMAGINE? Just a few minutes earlier Cindy was wondering if she and her friends are promoting an unrealistic ideal, and now she’s worried there’s a new unrealistic ideal in town? Cindy this is how capitalism turns women against each other! Even pretty women!
When Cindy asked if she and her fellow supermodels were responsible for promoting an unrealistic ideal, no one would really respond, and you can see why. I mean, in one sense the answer is obvious. Yes! Yes, Cindy, supermodels do promote an unrealistic ideal. They’re the highly-paid human faces for companies that want us to feel like we aren’t good enough, but we will be if we buy the magazine, skirt, vacation, or whatever it is, on offer. It’s not fair that models get so much of the blame for this, but you gotta take some.
Lauren Hutton tried to soothe their worries about the waifs by saying, “People will be interested in seeing what kind of women you turn into,” and she could not have been more right. Here we are, thirty years later, looking at what kind of women they turned into.
They are all still modeling, as we know. They are also moms, CEOs, survivors, influencers, and promoting their new series, The Super Models, on Apple TV+. And here is where things get really unrealistic. Because how do four cis women in their fifties appear on so many magazine covers and do so many interviews where they talk about aging and never ever mention menopause?
What the fuck?
I might be wrong, but I searched high and low and I can’t find any of them ever talking about it, and it’s weird. Maybe they’re all holding out until they have brand deals. Lauren Hutton was an menopause girl boss when she became an HRT spokesmodel back in the early 2000s and she was only 46 at the time.
Ultimately, it’s the selective silences about aging that make me feel sad when I look at this cover. It’s sad that they don’t talk about menopause. It’s sad that I wanted them to. It’s sad that none of them, after more than thirty years in the business, felt empowered enough to say, “Please don’t photoshop me into looking absolutely terrifying on the cover of Vogue.”
When the supermodels danced off the covers and into the culture, they were excited to be seen as real women, not mannequins—but only up to a point, I guess. Vanessa Friedman wrote about the cover in the NYT, saying:
[I}t’s hard not to think that here was a lost opportunity to embrace all of the hallmarks of our humanity, not to mention transparency about what we are faking (or not). Fixing a wrinkle here, some crow’s-feet there, may seem like a little thing. But it’s part of what chips away at our shared sense of truth.”
She’s talking about alterations to the photograph, but it’s not the only reality that got distorted.
Movie of the Week
The nineties were the heyday of movies about making movies, and I kind of love all of them? Dangerous Game is one of Madonna’s best films, if not the actual best, Swimming with Sharks is terrific, plus there’s Get Shorty, The Player, Barton Fink, Boogie Nights, Ed Wood, Bowfinger, and probably more that I missed. But Living in Oblivion is especially bleak and hilarious and it really is so much like those creative endeavors where you go from “Let’s make something great!” to “Let me get through this day.” Also James LeGros as CHAD PALOMINO cannot be missed!
You can see it various places. I know it’s on YouTube and also on Tubi.
Artist of the Week
Mary Miss is one of my favorite artists. As she says in this video, she is deeply concerned with place, and her practice combines community work, reverence for the natural world, and resistant adaptations to the built environment to reveal a future that’s within our grasp if we come together.
Her Tibbetts Brook project began with a series of walks along the currently hidden Bronx waterway, led by scientists, artists, historians, and community leaders. It’s grown to combine urban planning, ecological restoration, a locally-sourced audio tour, and more. I participated in the community tapestry project, in a very small way, and it was beautiful. We were each sent a square of burlap and other supplies, along with a map showing which part of the brook we were working on. On Zoom calls and in private, we embroidered native plants and street scapes, then sent in our squares to be combined into the final piece. To be thinking of regeneration while making art in community with others during the pandemic was a gift—I’ll forever be grateful.
Miss’s body of work is large and complex, and defies traditional art history and authorship models. If I met you in person I would not shut up about her!!!! Luckily MoMA just put up this video of her talking about her practice, which is a good introduction.
To learn more about Mary Miss, you can visit her website, and her City as Living Laboratory, which organizes and funds artist-led sustainability projects. Like her, they lack pretension and offer lots of ways to participate, whether just by viewing, or going on a walk, or imagining how place functions in your life.
Deep Links
Magazines aren’t all the way out. Great editors like Kaitlyn Greenidge still commission great pieces like “Heat Is Not a Metaphor,” by Alexis Pauline Gumbel, author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals. Don’t miss it.
I enjoyed this David Lynch PSA on littering.
Christy DeGallerie, who wrote this wrenching, loving piece in the NYT about the weight of a mother’s dreams, also has a substack called Really Bad Taste, check it out.
Tyler Mitchell, who was the first Black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover when he photographed Beyoncé in September 2018, did an episode of the David Zwirner podcast with Antwaun Sargent that’s worth listening to. He talks about how the cover came about, how he’s negotiating his career, and both he and Sargent list a dizzying number of incredible photographers I’d mostly never heard of and subsequently had a delightful time discovering.
See everyone Friday!
I'm glad I found your page. I'm pondering a piece on these women myself, since I am right in their age range and their rise influenced me during that same time period. I'd have loved more on the reality of aging (menopause, love/sex, and the dignity/indignity we all will face with our faces).
Thanks for all of this - really loved your take on the Vogue covers. I grew up in the 80s and remember the reign of the super models very well. I have always looked forward to the September issue because the cover is usually something great (gorgeous photo, great or surprising model/celebrity, etc.). I was SO disappointed with this year's and you nailed all the reasons why. Who on earth thought this was the best they could do? What in the world were all of them thinking???? And yes, was it so impossible to believe they could have done some thoughtful interviews with these women about aging?
Just such a missed opportunity all the around. (I couldn't help but think the ghost of Isabella Blow was screaming "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE???" Grace Coddington probably had to pour herself a drink when she saw it.)