The Year 'Vogue' Lost the Plot

About that winter cover.

This week, Back Row is publishing a special series taking a look back at 2024 and the first half of the decade. Believe it: we’re just about halfway through the 2020s. And fashion has had us drowning in creative director news and brown sweaters. More to come on all that, but today, we’re talking Vogue. (Thank you to subscribers who weighed in on the latest cover in the wonderfully entertaining Back Row chat!)

Previously in this series:

The Year of Mess

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Vogue’s December/January digital cover features seven models wearing white tops and jeans with the headline, “Fashion Gets Real: Creativity for Everyone.” It has been giving and giving the week since its release — but for mostly reasons Vogue didn’t intend. Online commenters maligned it for looking like a Gap ad (only one of the pieces — a $70 Gap shirt on Loli Bahia — was Gap) thanks to the headline “A First Look at Zac Posen’s Gap.” People wondered if Gap bought the cover, but Vogue doesn’t sell the cover to brands, it uses it to editorially support designers they like, even if editorial support is influenced by advertising spend.

French content creator Lyas has a video going viral in which he reads the headline and says, “Creativity?” before holding up his hands in disbelief. The video has been liked by nearly 5,000 people as I write. Fashion bigwigs like former French Vogue editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld and stylist Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, who styled Anna Wintour’s first-ever Vogue cover in 1988, left comments:

The cover went with a story by Hannah Jackson who wrote, “In fashion, a kind of paradigm shift is taking place, with the old markers—exclusivity, luxury, aspiration—now being joined by ingenuity, affordability, and accessibility: It’s the democratization of fashion.” As evidence she cites Posen at Gap and former Givenchy designer Claire Waight Keller at Uniqlo. None of the items photographed in the story cost more than $1,000.

I don’t think this is a terrible conceit! Luxury fashion has never been more expensive, and most people can’t buy it. The editorial was created by great people, like stylist Camilla Nickerson and photographers Inez and Vinoodh. Vogue was likely attempting to reprise one of its greatest hits — this April 1992 cover styled by Grace Coddington, featuring ten supermodels in white shirts and jeans because, as Anna explained, “casual sportswear was all the rage.”

But it missed, the way so many of Vogue’s covers missed in 2024, suggesting the magazine is in for a rough rest of the decade.