There are usually many debates about airbrushed models and celebrities appearing on the covers of fashion magazines. Yet one of the covers for US Vogue's September issue may not trigger such comments. To mark the magazine's 125th anniversary, the publication commissioned four covers for the most important issue of the whole year, three of them feature photographs of actress Jennifer Lawrence by Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber and duo Inez and Vinoodh.
The fourth cover is instead a painting of the actress by John Currin. Lawrence looks like an elegant lady in it: in the portrait she is wearing a voluminous blouse, a rather cumbersome red-and-white Miu Miu fur hat and she is holding a purse. Currin, who doesn't usually care about his paintings actually looking like the people he is portraying, stated that he made sure Lawrence's portrait genuinely looked like her.
Now, there are people who will like the choice of actress and people who will hate it; people who will say the painting looks like her and fans who will disagree, in the same way as some readers may love the style Currin chose for this artwork and others who will deeply dislike it. But the point of this cover is actually the fact that it reopens more arty possibilities in the fashion world, possibilities left behind many decades ago.
In the past Vogue often commissioned to famous illustrators and painters its covers: you may remember lovely and elegant covers by Helen Dryden, Georges Lepape, Harriet Maserol, George Plank, Eduardo Benito and Carl Oscar August Erickson.
Between the 1930 and the '70s Salvador Dalí created several iconic and surreal covers featuring his female figures with flower heads, but also a morphed image of Marilyn Monroe and Chairman Mao as one face (the Marilyn-Mao image fascinated Andy Warhol and was created by photographer Phillippe Halsman in 1952 at Dalí's request).
Giorgio de Chirico's art appears on the November 1935 issue, while Andy Warhol was behind the image of Caroline of Monaco for the December 1983 issue of the French edition.
So suddenly the possibility (and the hope) of seeing new covers commissioned to different artists or illustrators comes back: who knows, apart from raising the cultural level and offering more variety to readers, it may even prompt people to rush to the newsagents to actually buy a physical copy of the magazine and treat it as a genuinely collectible item.
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