Whether it’s a celebrity who bares all or a model who goes against the conventional stereotypes, fashion magazines always like to blue the boundaries when it comes to their monthly cover stars. Looking good isn’t enough nowadays, with more and more glossy titles engaging in shocking publicity stunts to get their covers to be the talk of the town.
From Demi posing stark, showing off her August 1991 baby bump, to Lebron James being the first black man to appear on the cover of Vogue in 2008, we’ve composed a list of 5 which made headlines… quite literally.
Source: Vanity FairVanity Fair, August 1991: Demi Moore
This cover was shot by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. The August cover on which Moore bared her seven month pregnant body sparked a heated debate. Many critics labelled the cover shameful and some stores sent the issue back, or only sold the issue with a brown paper bag covering the image. Others came to Moore’s defense professing the cover was a beautiful celebration of womanhood and made other women feel comfortable with their bodies. Moore was one of the first to pose nude for a maternity shot and the cover went on to become one of the most memorable magazine covers of all time. The now iconic photo has been replicated many times by other celebrities and women.
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Source: Rolling StoneRolling Stone, January 2006: The Passion of Kanye West
Rolling Stone’s January 2006 cover image titled “The Passion of Kanye West,” features the rapper bloodied wearing a crown of thorns. The cover seems to be in keeping with his current Yeezus alias but the tone of the image didn’t sit well with the public and in particular with religious followers. It has been said the image could have been an attempt to pay tribute to Christ the Saviour but what comes more from the image is Kanye himself being depicted as the Saviour. The cover was in bad taste and implies Kanye has a large ego, an implication which seems quite fitting in light of the singers mike-grabbing antics at the 2009 VMA’s.
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Source: VogueVogue, April 2008: King Kong Cover
This cover of supermodel Gisele Bundchen and NBA star Lebron James was one of Vogue’s most controbversial covers. James was the first black man to appear on the cover of American Vogue and this positive achievement of James’s soon became a negative. It was considered to be a racist portrayal of “King Kong”. April 2008’s Vogue was a ‘Shape’ issue and the cover was supposed to celebrate health and fitness by showcasing two stars with excellent bodies. The cover however was deemed by many as racially insensitive in the view that it depicted a negative and threatening stereotype of black men.
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Source: VogueVogue, February 214: Lena Dunham Cover
Controversy over Girl’s creator, Lena Dunham’s Vogue cover of February 2014 began when feminist site Jezebel placed a £10,000 bounty on the un-retouched photos in an attempt to publicly reveal Vogue’s unrealistic portrayal of women. It appears the images were not overly photoshopped and Jezebel were criticised for the insensitive stunt. Dunham herself spoke up stating “Vogue isn’t the place that we go to look at realistic women,” Dunham . “Vogue is the place that we go to look at beautiful clothes and fancy places and escapism and so I feel like if the story reflects me.”
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Source: JalouseJalouse, April 2014: Thylane Blondeau
It is nearly three years after Thylane Blondeau’s controversial Vogue Paris spread and she has landed her first grown-up fashion cover with Jalouse magazine. Vogue Paris’s beauty editorial featured a heavily made up Thylane dressed in gold, wearing stilettos and posing seductively on a bed. The editorial was criticised for it’s highly inappropriate images and sexualisation of a young child. Whilst the Jalouse cover is a lot more tame than the provocative Vogue spread Thylane is still just 12 years old. The new Jalouse cover inevitably brings up the debate of how young is too young to be a model and the pressure on children to grow up.
