T 25
Four editors, a creative director and a visual artist met to debate and discuss the best of print media — and its enduring legacy.
T 25
Four editors, a creative director and a visual artist met to debate and discuss the best of print media — and its enduring legacy.
By Kurt SollerLiz BrownJason ChenJames DraneyMiguel MoralesLaura Regensdorf and
Despite all the groaning that “print is dead,” many people seem captivated by magazines lately: When Anna Wintour relinquished her editorship in June of Vogue, which she’s overseen for 37 years, it was national news; a memoir by the former Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter and a dishy nonfiction chronicle (by the New York Times reporter Michael M. Grynbaum) of Carter’s ex-employer, the luxury magazine publisher Condé Nast, made many summer reading lists. And even if magazines don’t hold the same cultural sway — or profits or attention spans — they once did, it’s undeniable that the people who make them, and the stories and images they’ve made, still have much to show us, not just about how we read and see, but about how we live. This has been true for nearly two centuries: Popular magazines like Scientific American and The Atlantic have both been continuously published since the mid-1800s.
A magazine is nothing without its cover, of course. That’s why, for the latest installment of our T 25 series, we convened a panel of experts — Gayle King, 70, who, in addition to co-hosting CBS Mornings, is the editor at large for Oprah Daily, the current version of O, the Oprah Magazine; Patrick Li, 56, T’s creative director; Adam Moss, 68, the former editor of New York magazine and, before that, The New York Times Magazine; David Remnick, 66, the editor of The New Yorker; and Martha Rosler, 82, a New York-based conceptual artist whose work has long commented on and incorporated magazines and other forms of mass media — to choose the most influential magazine covers of all time. Before they submitted their own long lists of at least 10 nominees, I’d told them that they could select one another’s work but not their own. We also decided to limit the conversation to English-language publications, although the unranked list of 25 covers that follows, which we fought over in a Times conference room for several hours on a rainy May afternoon, includes only American publications.
That doesn’t mean we overlooked the importance of British magazines (see all of the panelists’ nominees here, with further commentary), notably the 1990 issue of The Face on which a 16-year-old model named Kate Moss debuted. But it was scrapped in favor of covers that were both more indelible — “I want people looking at this list and going, ‘Oh, yes, I remember that,’ ” King says — and more reflective of a time when magazine covers both broke and drove the conversations of the day, whether in politics, culture, fashion, food, sports or other realms. What you won’t find below, for example, are any Covid-19 covers, in part because, as Remnick says, “at a certain point, you start to reach an image proliferation [online], and so you can’t help but feel that the internet undermines the power of magazines in various different ways.” Also omitted: digital-only covers that have become popular in recent years as magazines have evolved beyond their native format.
Originally, we’d hoped to restrict the finalists to one per magazine, but as we kept debating, it became obvious that some titles had more impact than others — either because they inspired countless magazine editors and art directors, or because they were able to capture and harness a national moment in a way that feels impossible in our more fragmented era, or because they were run by teams of people all willing to court controversy and take the risks necessary to produce lasting creative work. “It’s hard to say they’re influential, but what does influential mean anyway?” Moss asked the group in an email he sent after our meeting. He was defending some 1930s Fortune covers he’d brought up but also, I think, encapsulating the project as a whole: “That was the question we were all grappling with, to little resolution. These don’t clarify our answer, but they’re very cool, and it’s just a game, anyway.” — Kurt Soller
This conversation has been edited and condensed. Though numbered, the entries below aren’t ranked; the covers appear roughly in the order in which they were discussed.
David Remnick: [The nominations] were surprising to me, because there are some that are always listed. It was nice to see things I hadn’t seen before.
Adam Moss: My feeling is some covers are famous for a reason, so we shouldn’t disqualify them.
Patrick Li: I think we’re going to see a lot of provocative images. And that makes a great cover. But now [with technology], if you can imagine that image, you can easily will it into being.
Moss: An amazing cover is [expletive] hard to do, so even if you can imagine an image …
Remnick: I discovered this with politics. You’d think in the age of Trump, the world would be filled with great political images.
Gayle King: You know what I liked about looking at our covers, guys? There were so many where I said, “I almost picked that one.”
Li: Before you came in, Gayle, we were talking about technology and AI and how easy it could be to make some of these images now, like Andy Warhol in a can of Campbell’s Soup [for Esquire’s May 1969 issue]. So how is everything going to change? Can we still rely on the shock of an image to make it one of the best covers? I’m also interested in how these kinds of images represent the brand of the magazine.
Moss: That’s very important, and that comes with consistency, obviously.
1. Muhammad Ali, Esquire, April 1968
In late 1967, months after Muhammad Ali refused a U.S. Army draft order on religious grounds and found himself excommunicated from boxing for the next three years, he slipped back into a pair of shiny white Everlast shorts. He was on set for Esquire with the photographer Carl Fischer and the art director George Lois — the adman provocateur and freelance art director whose genius for landing a visual punch defined the magazine’s covers in the ’60s. (He memorably put an ironic halo on Joe McCarthy’s lawyer Roy Cohn, among other things.) Here, the goal was to convince the Muslim athlete to assume the role of Saint Sebastian, with Francesco Botticini’s c. 1465 painting of the martyr as a particular reference point. After Ali agreed, they just had to figure out how to realistically stick him with a half-dozen arrows, an effect achieved with a combination of glue and fishing line. Once known for his trash-talking bravado, the boxer had emerged as a celebrity athlete with a cause: “I’m taking a stand for what I believe in and being one thousand percent for the freedom of the black people,” he told the writer Leonard Shecter in the accompanying story. Soon after the issue arrived on newsstands, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, giving the photograph a prophetic charge. — Laura Regensdorf
Remnick: That was one of the great lunches of my life — George Lois.
Moss: I mean, he was fun. He was incredibly, you know, self-regarding, but …
Remnick: And it’s only a very short period of time that he [makes Esquire’s covers], like [10] years or so.
Moss: [Esquire’s editor] Harold Hayes would meet with him over the contents of the issue, and George would say: “I think I could make something out of this [story].” He’d send it back to Hayes, who wasn’t allowed to veto him more than once.
Kurt Soller: And they were such craft projects.
Remnick: If you really had to pick a master of magazine covers … and I think George Lois would rise from the dead and agree with me.
Moss: I agree with David on this, but that’s because Esquire was what I grew up with: I’m highly influenced by the fact that a magazine’s job was to have a point of view; this was the magazine that taught me all magazines ought to.
Remnick: And the timing of the [Ali cover]: He’s been alienated, he’s a martyr, he’s Saint Sebastian —
Moss: It would be a decision [for us to choose this over Warhol in the soup can, also by Lois], which in some ways is the most famous magazine cover of all time.
Soller: But is there something to be said, though, about covers that push the boundaries of good taste? About doing things that you maybe couldn’t get away with today?
2. “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog,” National Lampoon, January 1973
A spinoff from The Harvard Lampoon, the university’s now 150-year-old humor magazine, National Lampoon launched in 1970 and quickly distinguished itself with an ethos that people found either amusing or appalling or both. Its most famous cover, for its “Death” issue in 1973, features an uneasy-looking dog, Mr. Cheeseface, with a gun held to his head and the line “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” National Lampoon frequently skewered politicians and celebrities — it ran a fake ad for a Volkswagen that floated like a water beetle, with the copy “If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he’d be president today” — but here the staff were making fun of themselves as magazine makers. Covers are, after all, about compelling someone to pick up the issue, and why not satirize that with a desperate joke told at the expense of an adorable pet? Ed Bluestone, a stand-up comic and Lampoon staffer, came up with the idea; the picture was taken by the photographer Ronald G. Harris, who said that because Cheeseface is side-eyeing the revolver rather than staring straight ahead, the joke lands. The cover would inspire future magazines, from Spy to George, to keep testing the limits of satire. — Miguel Morales
Moss: If you don’t have a reaction to a cover in some visceral, emotional way, it’s not working. So, yeah, sometimes that can be sophomoric — the National Lampoon cover is idiotically sophomoric. Fantastic cover.
Remnick: No dogs were killed in the making of this cover.
King: With the gun issue, I don’t know if you could get away with this today.
Soller: Also, Patrick, in terms of what you were saying about a cover representing the brand of a magazine —
Remnick: For us, that’s changed. There came a time in the early decades of The New Yorker under Harold Ross [who founded and ran the magazine from 1925 to 1951], where the covers were absolutely effervescent of New York and beautifully rendered. At a certain point, William Shawn wanted the covers to be anti-covers.
Moss: One great thing The New Yorker has going for it is that it has an illustrated cover style that’s nearly unique among all magazines at this point. That allows a certain amount of room for an editor to make it their own or for it to play in a moment without actually trashing the brand.
Soller: Is there a New Yorker cover that you all feel rises above the rest? And maybe David doesn’t get to decide on this.
3. “Moment of Joy,” The New Yorker, July 8 & 15, 2013
In June 2013, a pair of Supreme Court rulings (in Windsor v. United States and Hollingsworth v. Perry) established states’ rights to protect marriage equality, leading to the federal recognition of same-sex unions two years later. To mark the moment, The New Yorker chose an updated version of a cover illustration that the American artist Jack Hunter had submitted to a Tumblr account run by the magazine’s longtime art editor, Françoise Mouly, and her daughter, Nadja Spiegelman. The final cover showed the beloved odd couple of “Sesame Street,” Bert and Ernie, who’ve shared an apartment since 1969, sitting in a darkened living room, Ernie’s head resting on Bert’s shoulder, their silhouettes illuminated by a televised image of the nine justices in black and white. Rather than being explicitly celebratory, the image was muted and domestic. It winked at long-swirling speculation around the characters’ relationship status (“Sesame Street”’s production company’s response, from 2011: “Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics […] they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation”) while validating the experience of the many queer couples who’d followed the cases with hope and trepidation. The image was not without its detractors, who claimed the magazine had trivialized a long legal struggle. But for many others, Hunter’s sweet and earnest cover expressed the true impact of the court’s decision. — Michael Snyder
Moss: Bert and Ernie — when The New Yorker is able to do its thing and intersect with something extremely topical …
King: And look at what they’re watching.
Remnick: And Bert and Ernie, that joke had been made for years.
Moss: It’s a perfect New Yorker cover of David’s days, and it’s a beautifully executed picture.
Li: It works on so many levels and it speaks to so many different audiences. It’s really good — and it educates people.
4. Ellen DeGeneres, Time, April 14, 1997
The ABC sitcom “Ellen” had wrapped its third season and concern was growing within the network and its parent company, Disney, over a decline in viewership. DeGeneres later recalled Disney chief Michael Eisner proposing a solution: Ellen Morgan, the show’s protagonist, should get a dog. DeGeneres had a better idea, one that would solve the show’s identity problem and her own: She and her on-screen alter-ego would reveal they were gay. Her chosen platform was the cover of Time magazine (which then had a circulation of roughly four million) on which readers saw a beaming DeGeneres and the line “Yep, I’m Gay.” That combination of words — casual, declarative and written in the first person — suggested a future where coming out, even as a TV star, would be much less newsworthy. Unfortunately, the public wasn’t fully there yet, as evidenced by some letters to the editor. “Your report was an affront to decency in general and the troubled family unit in particular. … Shame on you, Time!” read one of them. DeGeneres shared the cover on social media in 2022, on the 25th anniversary of the issue, which by that point was widely understood to have eased the way for others wanting to live more freely. “I remember coming out,” she wrote, before joking, “I don’t, however, remember saying ‘Yep.’” — M.M.
King: I still like Ellen’s “Yep, I’m Gay,” because saying that publicly was so shocking at the time — that it was the cover — and then she ended up being ostracized.
Moss: And the power of the word “yep” — I want to talk about language.
King: It wasn’t “yay” or “yes,” and it was spelled “y-e-p,” as opposed to “y-u-p.” I liked that.
Soller: Can we talk a little bit about the way a cover itself can create news? You know, this came out and then she came out on her show. When I was growing up, it was like this cover itself was the news. And Gayle, a lot of your covers are from Time.
King: I didn’t mean to do that, but I’m always drawn to their covers: I think they do a good job.
Moss: You think of “Is God Dead?” [in 1966]. They created a moment, rather than responded to a moment. Secularism had overwhelmed America, and Time, like Walter Cronkite, could make a statement, and then it would be true — or seem to be true.
Soller: Patrick, as the creative director here, from a design perspective, what do you think makes a text-only cover work?
5. “Oh My God — We Hit a Little Girl,” Esquire, October 1966
In December 1965, nearly a year after the U.S. first deployed combat troops to Vietnam, the reporter John Sack began basic training with the soldiers of M Company in Fort Dix, N.J. He didn’t come back from the experience opposed to the war, but in October 1966, when Esquire published his 33,000-word exposé about his journey with the men through the jungles of Vietnam, the narrative spoke for itself. On M’s first operation, a soldier launched a grenade into a hut and made the company’s first kill. “Oh my God — we hit a little girl,” said one of the men in horror. For the cover, Lois pivoted from his original design and printed that quote in bold white type on a black background. Few magazine covers force the viewer to consider the full weight of words alone. (Time’s text-only cover “Is God Dead?,” which had come out only six months earlier, may have inspired Lois). Here both the line and the styling captured the senselessness of the Vietnam War, while the “we” implicated the reader. It was among the first anti-Vietnam War magazine covers, and while you never see the girl herself, of course, you can’t read it without grieving for her. — Jason Chen
Li: There are so few modern versions of [text-based covers], where it’s so minimal. But, “Oh my God — we hit a little girl,” that was amazing. It’s so indelible, right? Like this idea of the language becoming the image you create.
King: I was very drawn to the words. It made me think, “What is this about?”
Martha Rosler: Apologies, I’m late, the oral surgeon on Thursday told me I’d be fine by Monday.
Moss: I’ve also just come from the oral surgeon — emergency root canal.
Remnick: Blame it on The New York Times.
Soller: You just love magazines that much.
Li: We were talking about text-only covers — of course, typographically, I love seeing that.
Rosler: Me, too. I included a few ridiculous examples. There’s no such thing as most influential: Mostly my question is, will a cover appeal to its self-selected readers, and does it comport with what’s inside the magazine? So my point is that I’m noncompliant.
Remnick: That’s not what your dentist said.
Soller: But there was some overlap between you and Adam, for instance. You both picked Life’s fetus cover — you chose a lot from Life magazine, Martha.
6. “Drama of Life Before Birth,” Life, April 30, 1965
In the early 1950s, the Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson made a remarkable claim to the incredulous editors of Life: He was going to document the stages of human reproduction in full color. It took 12 years of experimenting with wide-angled optics and macro lenses, but he eventually made good on his word. In April 1965, the magazine published his extraordinary cover image of an 18-week-old fetus, luminous in its amniotic sac, seemingly floating through space, along with an extensive photo essay. Nilsson had worked closely with a Stockholm hospital, where he had a makeshift studio set up. He’d get a call when a woman had had a miscarriage or came in for an abortion, which had been legally permissible in Sweden since 1938 if the woman’s life was in danger. The photographer would then rush over with his Hasselblad camera. Only one image in the photo essay was of a live fetus in utero. All the others, including the groundbreaking cover, were of fetuses that had been surgically removed. In the 1980s, after learning that his pictures were being used at anti-abortion demonstrations, Nilsson refused to allow them to be republished. He continued to pioneer scientific photography, though, placing tiny cameras in flowers, tracking a coronary thrombosis and shooting close-ups of the H5N1 virus. When asked directly about his views on the beginning of life, Nilsson, who died in 2017, said, “It depends on yourself. I’m just a journalist telling you things.” — Liz Brown
King: I remember this, too.
Rosler: That made a huge splash at the time. Also what’s interesting, of course, is that virtually all the fetuses that’re photographed are no longer extant. It was either post-abortion or miscarriage, which was not discussed much because it was a downer. You couldn’t say the word “abortion” in 1965, but definitely this had a huge impact.
Moss: I do think you have to distinguish between those covers that are themselves the thing [like many of Life’s most famous images] and those that are just responding to an incredible moment.
Soller: One of the interesting things about all of your nominees is there are many, for instance, Vietnam War covers. But there’s just one Covid cover, maybe because a lot of that imagery we’d already seen on the internet.
Remnick: There is a lot of Vietnam, but maybe that’s showing our childhoods.
Soller: Well, that was also the heyday of magazines.
Remnick: Watch your mouth.
7. “9/11/2001,” The New Yorker, Sept. 24, 2001
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Mouly and her husband, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, had just left their SoHo apartment when they saw a plane fly into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Soon after, the couple found themselves trying to distill the violence into a magazine cover. At first, Remnick’s art editor considered the idea of an entirely black cover: What kind of illustration could do justice to the attack? But within days the couple had come up with another idea — Spiegelman suggested some kind of black-on-black treatment, and Mouly mocked up a dark silhouette of the towers set against a slightly less varnished black background. Only in certain light would the lost buildings emerge. Mouly later explained that she’s “always been captivated by how a simple drawing can cut through the torrent of images that we see every single day.” Not only did the cover capture the emotional gravity of the event, but it also encapsulated the collective effort required to produce a magazine in difficult conditions: The magazine’s pre-press manager, Greg Captain, drove 15 hours to the Kentucky printing press to ensure the ink densities achieved just the right effect. — James Draney
Li: The story of this is fantastic. I mean, to me, as a magazine maker, the fact that this went to press days later or something was extraordinary.
Remnick: The first idea was to do all black, and then Francoise and Art conspired on something much more interesting. And accomplished that in a very short period of time.
King: I went back and forth between this one and the Time one where the plane’s hitting the buildings: That still gives me goose bumps.
Rosler: This is about reaction, not about event.
Moss: Reaction is what it’s all about, right? A movement on the part of the editors to encapsulate — to make it make sense for readers.
Li: So what you’re saying is, an extraordinary image is not enough to be on this list?
Moss: My own brief was just, is it one of the all-time great covers? I’m making a distinction between a picture and a magazine cover because a magazine cover is, to me, an editor’s intervention.
8. Eliot Spitzer, New York, March 24, 2008
When, in March 2008, New York governor Eliot Spitzer was unmasked as Client 9 in a prostitution scandal, Moss, then New York magazine’s editor in chief, scrapped the cover planned for the next issue. Jody Quon, who’s now the creative director of the magazine, reached out to a handful of artists and illustrators, soliciting concepts for a replacement. The winner was Barbara Kruger, whose early start in magazines — she was Mademoiselle’s head designer at 22 — informed her style as an artist: images overlaid with text, typically in red-and-white Futura Bold Italic, which probe truisms of power and gender. Kruger replied to Quon an hour later, amending a portrait of Spitzer (photographed by Henry Leutwyler) with two simple interventions: the word “BRAIN” and an arrow pointing at his crotch. As a Spitzer appointee said of the governor’s undoing in the accompanying story, “I don’t know that we need to overanalyze it. At its base it’s an old story.” — L.R.
Moss: We did a competition: He resigned on a Monday; we had to close the magazine on Thursday night. So we said to five artists and illustrators, make us a cover.
Remnick: This killed me, because I thought I had such a better one. Two magazines with competing dick jokes —
Moss: Once in a lifetime! I had nothing to do with this except to say yes to Barbara Kruger. She said to Jody, “Just give me a picture of Spitzer standing.” When Jody brought it into my office, I said, “OK, stop the competition.”
Li: As a cover, you couldn’t get more immediate.
Rosler: [Kruger] comes out of magazine design.
Moss: It’s not surprising she’s a great magazine-cover maker: She makes art out of the same text-image conversation.
9. Caitlyn Jenner, Vanity Fair, July 2015
Tabloids speculated endlessly over the changing appearance of Olympian turned reality dad Bruce Jenner in 2014. Tasteless as the coverage of Jenner’s lengthening hair, painted fingernails and shrinking Adam’s apple was, the physical transformation was undeniable, and yet the patriarch of the Kardashian-Jenners wouldn’t confirm anything publicly. By early 2015, there were rumblings of an imminent announcement: A docuseries was in the works, a Diane Sawyer sit-down arranged. But it turned out Jenner had also been secretly meeting with the Vanity Fair writer Buzz Bissinger for a profile. To prevent leaks, the magazine employed intense confidentiality measures, limiting knowledge of the project to eight staffers, isolating work on the story to one offline computer and hiring a security firm to guard Jenner’s Malibu home. The July cover — an Annie Leibovitz photograph of Jenner posed like a classic Hollywood pinup in a white satin corset, for which Lauren Bacall had served as a reference — had the simple headline “Call Me Caitlyn,” written by Vanity Fair’s editor in chief, Graydon Carter. With those three words, Jenner wrested back her narrative, became the face of a movement and ignited a groundbreaking discussion around gender identity. For many, Caitlyn was the first trans person they’d gotten to know. And Vanity Fair proved that not only could a century-old publication still deliver a scoop, it could also lead one of the biggest conversations of the era. — J.C.
Soller: We need to talk about influence more broadly. You think of the Caitlyn Jenner cover, which Gayle chose. That opened a conversation about gender in America that was simply not happening. That’s a different kind of influence than the influence you were talking about, Adam, which is about influence in the making of magazines.
Rosler: This is an incredibly successful cover, don’t get me wrong —
Moss: And degree of difficulty! I was reading about this cover in Graydon [Carter]’s book last night. They heard rumors that Jenner was transitioning and basically made a secret offer: Come out on the cover of Vanity Fair.
King: It was extraordinary at the time. To me, Demi Moore’s pregnancy was one of those, too.
Moss: Absolutely. [Jenner and Moore] are sort of in the same vein — a shocking image that crystallized a new idea, or reveled in one.
10. Demi Moore, Vanity Fair, August 1991
Demi Moore was pregnant with her second child when she and Leibovitz, at the end of a long portrait session in 1991, decided to try a few shots in the nude. Tina Brown, Vanity Fair’s editor in chief (who’d just had her second child) selected one of them for the magazine’s August cover, and Moore was thrilled. Fresh off the success of “Ghost” (1990), she didn’t anticipate the backlash. Several supermarket chains refused to stock the magazine, citing concerns over exposing “very young children” to the image of Moore, hands placed over her left breast and under her belly. The actress would soon be hit with criticism after criticism: for demanding a fair wage on her 1996 film “Striptease” (industry leaders dubbed her “Gimme Moore”); for her shaved head in “G.I. Jane” (1997); for her marriage to a younger man, the actor Ashton Kutcher, which prompted tabloids to scrutinize every inch of her for signs of cosmetic surgery. After many years of this, Moore’s Oscar nomination for the 2024 body-horror film “The Substance” felt like something of a vindication. As does the fact that, in the decades since this cover appeared, countless women, famous and not, have paid homage to Leibovitz’s image, whether in magazines or on social media. There’s no longer any question of whether a pregnant body can be seen as sexy — or seen at all. — M.S.
Soller: As someone who books a lot of covers — it’s so hard to get people to do anything these days. Like the idea that you could even get somebody to do this, or get Caitlyn to come out …
Rosler: It’s funny that all of the ones we’re talking about are women. These are about women and women’s rights. I’ll just leave that there.
King: You didn’t see pregnant women in the nude doing that [back then] —
Rosler: Pregnant women were always concealed, with their empire tops.
King: You weren’t trying to flaunt your baby bump, that’s for sure.
Remnick: That term is … so People magazine.
Soller: No one chose People magazine, which I thought was interesting.
King: I almost chose Mia [Farrow, in 1974], the first one.
Moss: It’s a new era of celebrity culture!
11. Yoko Ono and John Lennon, Rolling Stone, Jan. 22, 1981
In the early afternoon of Dec. 8, 1980, Leibovitz, on assignment for Rolling Stone, visited John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their Upper West Side apartment’s sunny morning room. The ensuing photo shoot, as Lennon told Leibovitz after seeing some test Polaroids, “captured our relationship exactly.” Just hours later, Lennon would be killed by Mark David Chapman outside the couple’s building. So, when the Jan. 22, 1981 issue of the magazine was published, its cover portrait instantly became an elegy for the star — and the countercultural era he and the Beatles represented. It depicts Ono, fully clothed, lying on a white carpet with her nude husband curled up around her. Leibovitz intended the picture as a visual echo of the image of the couple kissing that had been used for the cover of Lennon and Ono’s album “Double Fantasy” (1980). And though Rolling Stone’s editor in chief, Jann Wenner, had originally wanted to feature Lennon alone, the musician had insisted on being photographed with his wife. Today, Leibovitz’s portrait endures as a testament to the musician’s singular devotion to Ono and a monument to the vulnerability inherent in any creative partnership. — J.D.
Moss: For its moment, this was a gigantic cover. Lennon had died, you know, a minute and a half before this. And the coincidence [was] that it was going to be on the cover anyway, because they had just released an album together. I worked at Rolling Stone at the time as a fact-checker, so I kind of remember that.
Remnick: Whatever became of Rolling Stone years later, Jann Wenner’s insight, which he deserves enormous credit for, is that the counterculture was the culture in the ’60s. And Lennon dying was the end of something. This image encapsulated that relationship [with Ono], which had special meaning if you were a Beatles fan: a kind of child nestling up to its maternal/lover figure. And then everybody was complicit in it: Leibovitz, the photographer; Lennon; Ono, who herself is a conceptual artist. It’s a very deliberate image. It was huge in the moment and hasn’t left many minds since.
Li: I’d also like to point out that there are no cover lines.
King: I bet they had cover lines before he died.
12. Madonna, Interview, June 1990
The June 1990 cover of Interview landed in the middle of Madonna’s controversial Blond Ambition tour, capturing what was fast becoming her signature onstage move. The previous month, in Toronto, the pop artist had gotten a warning from local police: “If I touch my crotch during the show, I’m going to be arrested,” she was filmed telling her dancers backstage in her 1991 documentary, “Madonna: Truth or Dare,” defiant in her platinum ponytail and pointy Jean Paul Gaultier corset. (She went for it anyway, without consequence.) On the newsstands, that stereotypically macho gesture felt less transgressive, with Madonna, shot by Herb Ritts, playing a vintage cabaret performer in beaded false lashes and a clownish polka-dot bolero. The magazine added a slim red exclamation point after the singer’s name — emphasizing her shock value — and in the accompanying interview the star told the writer Glenn O’Brien, “I do think someone is protecting me. I don’t know if it’s an angel. It could be the Devil.” During another performance around that time, she told the crowd, “What’s the big deal? You can get upset when I try to grab your crotch. When I grab my crotch, it just means: ‘This is my space.’ ” — L.R.
Moss: I would separate out the fact that it was Madonna and look at [this cover] in the context of, “How do you do a superstar?”
Li: I just like the purity of this — at the height of Madonna’s powers, it’s pretty remarkable. I ended up having a lot of crotch-grabbers on my list. But I couldn’t ignore [the creative director] Fabien Baron’s Interview — I’m not sure how influential it is design-wise, but for me it’s absolutely one of the most memorable covers.
13. “Cosby: The Women; An Unwelcome Sisterhood,” New York, July 27-Aug. 9, 2015
One after another, each woman, dressed in black, took a seat, placed her hands in her lap, and looked into the camera. It was the spring of 2015, two years before #MeToo took over Twitter, and Quon had hired Amanda Demme to shoot an extraordinary series of portraits. For decades, stories about Cosby drugging and assaulting women had circulated in the entertainment world, but the TV star, comedian and Jell-O spokesman’s power was so absolute that it was hard to envision they’d ever break through to the public. And yet after a short riff by the comic Hannibal Buress about Cosby’s history made the rounds on the internet, something shifted: Women were coming forward with harrowing accounts, and instead of other people ignoring or dismissing them, they were actually listening. Quon wanted a cover story that focused not on the famous assailant but on these women. It was an immense undertaking in terms of managing logistics and building trust, but 35 out of the 46 who’d spoken publicly agreed to participate, and the magazine soon scheduled shoots in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York. Demme had the idea of showing the subjects against a stark background, though it wasn’t until she, and later the art department, saw the portraits en masse that the final image came into being: a tableau of four rows with an empty chair at the very end — both a symbol of those not pictured and an acknowledgment that the reckoning had barely begun. — L.B.
Remnick: I can tell you, as a magazine editor, [it’s incredible] to get all these people together and to accomplish this. And the strikingness and the multiplicity of the people; if it had been a Barry Blitt drawing, it would not have the same effect.
Moss: This was [all] Jody Quon, who is just amazing. You know, there was some conversation about Bill Cosby’s history, but Jody and the photographer, Amanda Demme, and a reporter, Noreen Malone, went and tracked down every woman who had allegations against Cosby and managed to convince 35 of them to pose for the cover.
King: But did you do it at one time or in pieces?
Moss: They did it in groups. To me, what’s so amazing about this cover — and what I love the most — is the empty chair, which represents the entire #MeToo movement that was to come.
Soller: How did that chair come about?
Moss: It came about for two reasons, one of which we should always talk about, which is the logistical: It evened out the line. Also, the photographer had the metaphor in mind.
Remnick: There are a lot of great New York magazine covers: There was the flood [and blackout, after Hurricane Sandy, in 2012], a simple helicopter photograph —
Soller: The Iwan Baan? That’s my favorite —
Remnick: And a lot of very funny things that New York has done over time, and even consumer-y things that have a certain flair. And I’m not saying this in a competitive sense, but I fell backward in my chair when I saw [the Cosby cover], because it encapsulated the moment and the crime and the outrage and the subsequent solidarity like nothing else I’d seen.
14. “View of the World From 9th Avenue,” The New Yorker, March 29, 1976
The 1970s were a good decade for New York City maps. In 1972, the Italian designer Massimo Vignelli and his associates distilled the jumble of subway routes into tidy colorful lines — an ordered landscape that didn’t always correspond to the reality above ground. Four years later, the Romanian-born American artist Saul Steinberg brought his imagined slice of Manhattan to the cover of The New Yorker. Like the Vignelli map, “View of the World From 9th Avenue” was all the more legible and beloved for its geographic inaccuracies. The hand-drawn scene looks west over a few fastidiously detailed city blocks. But after the Hudson River comes a nearly featureless expanse, save for a smattering of names (of airport hubs, cowboy states), a narrow strip of Pacific Ocean and distant doughy lumps (China, Japan, Russia). Here was Steinberg’s genius at work, zeroing in on a familiar phenomenon — in this case, New York’s collective myopia. “That was his goal,” said Mouly of Steinberg’s commissions for The New Yorker, which published its first drawing of his in 1941: “To make images so iconic that they live on in our brains as units of thoughts.” A contributor to the magazine for nearly six decades and a lodestar among subsequent generations of artists (the cartoonist and illustrator Liana Finck dubbed him “the winking philosopher”), Steinberg remains best known for his gently skewering “View,” reproductions of which have been hung on countless Manhattan walls — and lots of other places, too. — L.R.
Rosler: There’s the incredibly popular poster. Now you look at this and you go, “Eh, I don’t know.” You think, “What’s the point?”
Remnick: The point remains the point — about provincialism in New York. And it’s relevant to the recent elections.
Rosler: The ones we’ve chosen are reflective of the taste of today, which is about flatness.
Remnick: I would argue that Saul Steinberg, as a graphic artist — and I can say this, I promise you, apart from The New Yorker — is superior to anyone in what he was doing. In terms of drawing, his language is distinct. His style is lasting. There’s a craziness to it. It doesn’t feel dated. I wish he would be resurrected from the dead and start doing it all over again.
King: For me, though, guys, I like a cover that when you look at it, you know instantly what it says and what it means. I don’t want to have to translate, read or get an explanation. This one wouldn’t make my list.
Remnick: That’s like saying, though, “I wouldn’t want to look at Hieronymus Bosch.” You look at the detail and the little narrative interplays and that has immense meaning.
King: In a painting! But if I’m walking and just looking at the newsstand …
Moss: Well, The New Yorker, of course, doesn’t have to worry about that.
Remnick: By the way, neither does anybody else. Because these days the newsstand is nearly a memory.
Li: If we go back to the idea of influential, this really talks to me. It’s quintessentially The New Yorker. And it literally visualizes The New Yorker, all New Yorkers, as the center of the universe.
Moss: It’s practically a mission statement for the magazine.
15. “Aviation as Seen by Monkeys,” Fortune, January 1931
In 1930, several months after the stock market crashed, Henry Luce launched Fortune. It was hardly an auspicious moment for a lush new magazine devoted to the machinations of American corporations, but the media magnate insisted there was a ready audience. Until then, business publications had been trade journals filled with dry statistics. Luce, who’d co-founded Time seven years earlier, understood that the movement of capital was of great interest to those moving it — and that a magazine itself could be a status object. Some 30,000 people subscribed to the inaugural 184-page issue, all willing to pay a dollar (nearly $20 today) per issue. Here was a publication about money that itself felt like money, with its thick paper stock, grand proportions (11 by 14 inches) and vibrant illustrated covers commissioned from artists (Antonio Petruccelli, Ervine Metzl) and displaying railroads, smokestacks, steamships and other emblems of enterprise with glorious creativity. In Neal Bose’s January 1931 cover, a classic example of the magazine’s sensibility, a troupe of monkeys scramble to catch a glimpse of a then-novel phenomenon: an airplane soaring overhead. As the years passed, styles changed, but Fortune held onto its aesthetic mission: In July 1965, Walter Allner, the publication’s Bauhaus-trained art director, designed the first magazine cover using computer graphics. Its depiction of ascending arrows was less whimsical than the monkeys, but the image nonetheless conveyed energy and delight — a far cry from the cold graphics and interchangeable portraits of CEOs and other power players that peer out from most business publications today. — L.B.
Rosler: The Fortune cover [Adam] chose was fabulous.
Remnick: And their format was the size of a bedsheet.
Moss: When you find them in a flea market or something, they’re so satisfying. The [1930s] era of the magazine was just a sequence of fantastic covers. This one is very clever — aviation must’ve seemed so peculiar at the time.
King: But, Adam, without cover lines, I don’t know what I’m looking at or what it means.
Moss: I’ve looked through every one of the early Fortune covers, and they’re just delightful, most illustrating an industry, some new, some in transition. They’re so radically different from what Fortune covers became, what all covers — except, in a sense, The New Yorker — became.
16. Marilyn Monroe, Avant Garde, March 1968
When the American photographer Bert Stern and Marilyn Monroe met in the summer of 1962 for a Vogue feature, he was more interested in the woman than in the clothes. A suite at Hollywood’s Hotel Bel-Air served as the set, and he brought along a suitcase full of necklaces and scarves — accessories that suggested easygoing spontaneity when compared to the magazine’s chosen dresses and furs. (A second day of shooting with some of those items followed.) The resulting portraits were luminous and unguarded, rare qualities (back then and especially now) when it came to celebrity subjects. Monroe reviewed a number of the contact sheets, striking out frames with an orange X, though she died by overdose before the issue was published. The roughly 2,500 photos from “The Last Sitting” defined Stern’s career but left him unsatisfied: “They never quite communicated the dazzling image of Marilyn that existed in my mind’s eye,” he explained in a 1968 issue of Avant Garde, a short-lived magazine edited and published by Ralph Ginzburg in collaboration with the designer Herb Lubalin. (The latter’s slanted logo gave rise to a typeface of the same name.) A forerunner to zine culture and art-book publishing, Avant Garde offered Stern another chance to get it right by running “The Marilyn Monroe Trip,” a collection of experimental, acid-colored serigraphs, based on his original images, that brought the screen star into the pop-psychedelic era. By contrast, the cover struck an unassuming note, with kraft-style paper in lieu of the usual glossy stock and a palette of umber tones informed by the Southern California landscape: Marilyn Monroe, a natural beauty at last finding her light. — L.R.
Li: In terms of the art of magazine-making, this is an important cover. The silk screen of Marilyn on kraft paper is by my favorite designer, the legendary designer and magazine maker Herb Lubalin. It’s a very short-lived publication [just 14 issues between 1968 and 1971]. They probably spent all their money on this cover.
Moss: I agree — beautiful.
17. Produce, Gourmet, May 1969
Gourmet, the self-described magazine of good living, was established in 1941, a time when Americans would soon be forced to ration staples like sugar and coffee, and few were fussing over haute cuisine. That didn’t stop the founder and publishing veteran Earle MacAusland from selling his vision of food as fantasy, which, in the midst of wartime deprivation, clearly appealed to readers. By the early ’60s, the magazine, under the eye of its executive editor Jane Montant, had distinguished itself with its rich photography and focus on travel, both of which come to life on the magazine’s May 1969 cover. Shot by the British photographer Ronny Jaques, it shows a stone ledge running along a sky-scrimmed reflecting pool — part of the 1,900-year-old remains of the Roman emperor Hadrian’s villa complex near Tivoli — lain with immaculate produce, from crisp green beans to bright red tomatoes to Rosa Bianca eggplants, all of which gleam like mythological spoils. The setting was Italy, but the style recalled that of the Dutch masters. Along with the rest of the issue, which included writing by the chef and author James Beard, the cover helped create an era — one we’re still in, as a quick scroll will attest — where food was serious, seductive and a marker of status. — M.M.
Li: This is a whole category that we here at T love, the adulation and the still life of beautiful living and food. And this is such an improbable picture of produce among the ancient ruins, clearly styled to perfection. It’s just a great synthesis of the purpose of Gourmet magazine.
Soller: Also, Instagram wouldn’t exist without this. The idea of the veneration of food.
King: I always thought Martha Stewart had the best covers in the home entertaining space.
Li: Well, this is just so much earlier, right?
Rosler: And this is for the aspiration and consumption of luxury: It’s a worthy subject at a time when that was a relatively new idea.
18. “Planet or Plastic?,” National Geographic, June 2018
The image inside the iconic yellow frame is simple and familiar — an iceberg rising out of the ocean — but then comes the chilling double take: This is actually a gargantuan plastic bag. The Mexican artist Jorge Gamboa first created the photo illustration in 2017 for a group show at a Mexican college; later that year, it won a prize at a Bolivian design biennial. Afterward, National Geographic published it on its cover to mark the launch of its #planetorplastic campaign to reduce single-use plastic. Within a day of Vaughn Wallace, the magazine’s photo editor, sharing the cover on Twitter, it had gone viral. The clever optical illusion also delivers a primal shock: This could be a still from a horror movie, one in which an ordinary plastic bag has taken on monstrous force — a mutant of our own making. In 2018, when Gamboa’s “Iceberg Plástico” was published, the magazine reported that 18 billion pounds of plastic were entering the world’s oceans per year. Today, the global conservancy group Oceana estimates that figure to be 33 billion. — L.B.
Rosler: There was one [National Geographic cover] that I thought all of us would pick, and therefore I didn’t: The Afghan girl with the green eyes [from 1985].
Moss: I like this better, though: It’s conceptual.
King: This one makes you think; I’d never seen it.
19. Sheryl Lee, Lara Flynn Boyle and Peggy Lipton, TV Guide, Sept. 8-14, 1990
In 1990, the most-watched shows on television were “Roseanne,” “The Cosby Show” and “Cheers.” With the surreal, operatic “Twin Peaks,” which premiered that April and combined neo-noir and psychological horror, the director David Lynch, along with co-creator Mark Frost, forever transformed a TV landscape awash in sentiment and moralizing. And while the show never quite achieved mass popularity (after 36 million people watched the two-hour premiere, its ratings faltered), it had its claim on the culture. When three of the show’s female stars appeared on the digest-size cover of TV Guide on the eve of its second season in September 1990 — in a stacked, slightly gauzy composition photographed by Mario Casilli that nodded to the homecoming queen portrait of Laura Palmer that appears in the show — it was the ultimate expression of the experimental crossing over into the mainstream. At the time, TV Guide had the third-largest circulation of any publication in the country (with 15.8 million readers in the first half of that year), and this magazine of channel listings had created something beautiful, poignant and weird: Lynchian, in other words. Now, the cover also harks back to a time when watching just about anything was a more collective experience, and one very much buoyed by print, whether TV Guide or its glossier counterparts. The next month, the women of “Twin Peaks” made the cover of Rolling Stone. — J.C.
Li: This, to me, is this synthesis of transgression and normalcy. This idea of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” characters on the cover of the most mass magazine out there. How weird and how perfect.
Remnick: Was “Twin Peaks” a big ratings success?
Moss: For an ambitious, arty show, it was.
King: It wasn’t fringe! People loved “Twin Peaks.” That [1991] finale, people went nuts to see it.
Moss: For a person who just loves all kinds of magazines, it’s gratifying to see TV Guide on this list.
20. Michaela Bercu, Vogue, November 1988
For 17 years, Grace Mirabella ruled Vogue as editor in chief, and her covers dependably featured a big-haired, big-eyed model with a Mona Lisa expression and cheeks only slightly less painted than her lips, carefully framed on a white studio background and often shot by Richard Avedon. When Anna Wintour, who replaced Mirabella in the summer of 1988, debuted her first issue in November, she obliterated her predecessor’s visual legacy with a single image. Gone were the famous heroines (Isabella Rossellini, Paulina Porizkova), and in their place was the 18-year-old Israeli model Michaela Bercu, her spontaneous smile so wide she looked like she was squinting, her wavy blond hair swept across her neck, because the Peter Lindbergh photo had been taken outside. The details have become fashion lore — that Bercu, as styled by Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, wore stonewashed $50 Guess jeans with a $10,000 haute couture bejeweled Christian Lacroix jacket because the piece’s matching skirt didn’t fit; that Wintour’s cover presaged “high-low” long before Karl Lagerfeld for H&M; that the magazine’s printers called Vogue to ensure the cover wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t. And the breezy, relatable image, which so firmly set the standard it now appears unremarkable, sent a clear message that a new reign had begun. — J.C.
Remnick: Anna Wintour’s first Vogue cover …
Li: That declaration of high and low. This was an influence … is an influence.
King: Because I just look at it and I go, “OK, 1988.” Is the model a name we know?
Li: Not really.
Soller: And we can’t avoid the elephant in the room …
King: Anna?
Soller: She still works there — her influence.
Moss: If it really was such a great departure, which I didn’t know, that’s amazing. You’ve convinced me.
King: But if it wasn’t Anna Wintour’s first cover, would we pick it?
Remnick: It graphically broke away from the kind of highly stylized society —
Rosler: She’s smiling —
Remnick: She’s wearing jeans.
21. “Boy With Baby Carriage,” The Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1916
Norman Rockwell’s first cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, “Boy With Baby Carriage,” depicts a stern boy dressed up in dapper attire pushing a pram past two other boys in baseball uniforms. One of the players tips his hat, flaunting his leisure, while the other looks on, gaptoothed and amused. Previous Post covers often featured idealized portraits of women at leisure in sterile poses easily mistaken for advertisements. This one showed the dynamic friction of urban life in the United States, injecting an element of narrative realism into the magazine’s style. Rockwell biographer Deborah Solomon ranked it among the artist’s most “psychologically intense” works. Look again at the faces: The boy pushing the carriage is weighed down by his responsibilities; the jeering kids, meanwhile, aren’t necessarily bullies. The illustrator, who was 22 when he sold the image to the Post, went on to produce hundreds of their covers, which all told a story while straddling the line between everyday life and nostalgia. (Think of the bare-bottomed young patient inspecting his local doctor’s framed credentials in 1958’s “Before the Shot”). But “Boy With Baby Carriage” set the Rockwellian tone, evolving the look of magazines and, arguably, America’s imagination of itself. — J.D.
Remnick: It’s interesting. We now publish Kadir Nelson, a Black artist who celebrates and explores Black life and history in ways that remind me of Norman Rockwell to some degree. And we really should represent Rockwell — his imprint on magazine covers, which is obviously before our time, lasted for 40 or 50 years.
King: That’s not my favorite cover, but I like anything Norman Rockwell.
Remnick: The classic is the Thanksgiving one [from 1943], which gets played with a lot.
King: But this one’s his first. I like that.
22. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ebony, May 1968
Founded by the businessman John H. Johnson in 1945, Ebony would become one of the most popular magazines among Black Americans, long ignored or maligned by other national publications. Given this, the magazine’s initial aim of showing “the positive everyday achievements from Harlem to Hollywood” was political in its own way, but beginning with the Civil Rights Movement, it increasingly covered history and politics head-on. After the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Time didn’t put him on its cover. Life did, but only afforded him seven of its 100-plus pages. And The Atlantic, a magazine founded by abolitionists, hardly mentioned his passing. Ebony, by contrast, chose a spare photo of King, his hand under his chin, for its May 1968 cover. The picture had been taken by Moneta Sleet Jr., a longtime staff photographer whom Coretta Scott King reportedly requested document her husband’s funeral. (Sleet’s picture of the widow holding her daughter during the service won him a Pulitzer Prize.) Inside the issue, the magazine ran two features on King and included the conclusion to the prescient “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech he’d delivered the night before his death — “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!” — turning Ebony’s pages into an instrument of mourning, a memento that kept his image and final words alive. — M.M.
Remnick: [It comes up] anytime Ebony is discussed — it’s a pretty classical cover. It might not be the greatest, but its timing was …
King: It is iconic.
Remnick: Life magazine was, for the midcentury, the magazine of imagery. It was the magazine that every middle-class American would get. But there were other formations of it, obviously: Ebony and Time magazine also held central places in the imaginations of their readers.
23. Brandi Chastain, Sports Illustrated, July 19, 1999
When the U.S. faced China in a packed Rose Bowl stadium for the final match of the 1999 Women’s World Cup, mainstream media was starting to grasp that there was a growing and enthusiastic audience for women’s sports. An estimated 40 million people were watching the television broadcast, and the photographer Robert Beck was in the stadium to take pictures for Sports Illustrated of the crowd, which included President Bill Clinton in a V.I.P. box. After the goalless game went into overtime and then a penalty shootout, Beck, despite not having credentials to be on the field, slipped through the stands to get a closer vantage point just as the shooters were lining up. It was a 4-4 tie when Brandi Chastain’s shot sailed past the goalkeeper Gao Hong and into the net. The crowd exploded and an ecstatic Chastain ripped off her shirt, displayed her sports bra and dropped to her knees. That’s when Beck took his shot. Certainly, in the era of lad mags, readers were used to looking at barely clothed women. This, though, was a complete departure from the usual commodified female form: Chastain had taken her shirt off to celebrate. Plenty of soccer players had done the same before her, except they weren’t women. So not only did Beck’s photo capture an astonishing moment in women’s sports — it offered a generation of young girls seeing Sports Illustrated a new vision of themselves. — L.B.
King: I like the bliss, the joy, the fact that she took off her top.
Remnick: We’re light on Sports Illustrated. There was a period where Neil Leifer and a couple of sports photographers took astonishing boxing photographs.
King: Where you can see the sweat coming off their faces.
Remnick: I think it’s great to have women in sports, too, on this list.
King: You just don’t know if this is the right one?
Remnick: The Sports Illustrated ones I’m going to think of are very male, to be honest with you.
King: That’s what I think is fun about this.
Remnick: Sure, and this was an iconic sports moment.
24. “Women in Revolt,” Newsweek, March 23, 1970
Newsweek harnessed the force of the women’s lib movement with this March 1970 cover, featuring a photo-illustration of a woman tinged in revolution-red, her raised fist busting through the ring of the female gender symbol, an ancient astrological symbol for Venus popularized by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century to help him differentiate between male and female plants. Above it was the line “Women in Revolt,” a characterization that, as it turned out, also applied to the Newsweek staff. On the day the issue was released, 46 female employees, having held covert meetings in the office bathroom and at a nearby restaurant called the Women’s Exchange before seeking the help of the lawyer Eleanor Holmes Norton, announced that they were filing a lawsuit against the magazine for gender discrimination. In those days, women at the magazine were secretaries, fact-checkers or mail girls (Nora Ephron had been one for the editor in chief Osborn Elliott in 1962) while men were writers and editors. In an exception that proved the rule, the “Women in Revolt” cover story had been written by a woman, Helen Dudar, though she wasn’t a staffer but a freelancer — and the wife of a Newsweek editor. The cover, then, was immediately linked to an instance of feminism in action. And in addition to changing things at Newsweek — Lynn Povich, who went on to write a book, “The Good Girls Revolt” (2013), about the case, was named its first female senior editor in 1975 — the suit precipitated similar ones against Time Inc., Reader’s Digest, The New York Times and other press outlets. — J.C.
Remnick: Ms. magazine had a number of good covers, particularly early on. The first one [in 1972], with the [woman resembling a] multi-armed Hindu goddess, is very memorable to me, but now that might be an image that’s overused.
Rosler: I like [the Newsweek image] better actually.
Remnick: And it was 1970, two years before Ms. started.
Rosler: And it’s important.
Soller: Because of the lawsuit …
Moss: I just think it’s more successful.
25. “The Doe Eye,” Vogue, January 1950
In the 1930s, Vogue moved away from illustrated covers, eventually adopting its now-familiar formula: a photograph of a model or celebrity (or several) layered over or under the slender serifs of the publication’s nameplate. But for its January 1950 issue, Alexander Liberman, Vogue’s art director and an accomplished multidisciplinary artist in his own right — he loved Modernism — oversaw an image by Erwin Blumenfeld that reduced the face of the supermodel Jean Patchett to its most minimal. A shadowed green eye, an arched eyebrow, cherry-red lips and a birthmark were made to float over a white void in an abstraction of the so-called doe-eyed look. Before emigrating to New York to escape World War II, the German-born Blumenfeld had spent his formative years in Amsterdam, where he threw himself into the Dada movement, making drawings, photographs and collages that combined political commentary with a humorous approach to the human form. In one 1932 work, he cut the eyes, mouth and nose from a black-and-white photo of a woman and shifted them around the frame. With his Vogue cover, produced almost two decades later, he took that idea (moving Patchett’s birthmark from the upper right to the lower left side of her face) and made it feel fresh, opening new possibilities for fashion photography experimentation. — M.S.
Moss: I looked at old Vogues and Harper’s Bazaars and threw some in because I thought we should be talking about fashion covers, because they’re so crucial to the magazine medium.
Soller: So are we going to include this one?
Moss: I vote for the [1940] Vogue bathing suit one.
King: Me too.
Li: For me, the Blumenfeld.
Rosler: Yeah, this is timeless.
Moss: Martha thinks this is timeless — all right.
Kurt Soller is the deputy editor of T Magazine.
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