Cover stories: a history of magazine design

By Michael Watts

In August 1991 a Vanity Fair cover story on the actress Demi Moore sent the conservative American magazine industry into one of its periodic fits of morality. The startling photograph, by Annie Leibovitz, showed Moore naked and hugely pregnant. No Hollywood star had ever appeared like this on the front of a mainstream magazine. “It seems we have broken the last taboo,” declared Tina Brown, Vanity Fair’s editor. But the suits were worried. Offended distributors disguised the cover with a wrapper, as though it were pornography. Was it sexual objectification, a declaration of female empowerment or a celebration of family values? Maybe it was all of those, but mainly it turned out to be good business. Vanity Fair’s sales leapt by 200,000 copies.

The story appears in “Uncovered”, a selective history of “revolutionary” covers from the past seven decades with accounts by the people who made them. There are some familiar images, among them Esquire’s “martyrdom” cover of Muhammed Ali from 1968, when he was facing prison for dodging his draft to Vietnam. George Lois, Esquire’s art director, cast Ali as a latter-day Saint Sebastian, his body pierced by arrows, claiming that it would give heart to millions of young American men with similar doubts about going to war.