Black Covers Matter

BY: Claire Connors

This month, the highly anticipated September issues of the biggest international fashion magazines landed in our mailboxes and on newsstands with a giant BANG! Why the noise? Ten of those covers have spectacular women of color gracing them, including Black Panther‘s Lupita Nyong’o, Girls Trip‘s Tiffany Haddish, and Black-ish‘s Tracee Ellis Ross. This number of black beauties on magazines, especially on the all-important, ad-packed September issue, is nothing short of a revolution in the publishing world. If you think I’m exaggerating, let’s take a look back at the racially biased history of fashion magazines, shall we?

Full disclosure: I’ve been an entertainment editor booking magazine covers for thirty years. So while my opinions on covers and the celebrities who grace them are slightly biased, they are also well-informed. My first celebrity cover was for Seventeen magazine in 1989: the young (obviously), smart, and recently engaged—to Johnny Depp!—Winona Ryder. At the time, the fashion/lifestyle publication only put one or two famous faces on the cover each year, the rest were occupied by models. In fact, in the late 80s-early 90s, most fashion magazines featured supermodels rather than actors or musicians on their covers. The turning point to “all things celebrity” was Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair, a salacious, fame-worshipping magazine that reinvented the celebrity profile and celebrity photography. The rest of the publishing world followed suit, tout suite.

Besides the occasional Whitney Houston, the majority of women on Seventeen were white. Being a good, Chicago-raised liberal, I used to ask my editor-in-chief, Midge Richardson, why we didn’t have more women of color on the covers. She’d repeat to me the same mantra, “The reason no one puts African Americans on covers, is that they don’t sell. It’s publishing’s dirty secret.” In my mind, the dirty secret was how rampant racism was in magazine publishing. Editors and publishers, no matter how liberal they saw themselves, would pass on featuring huge black stars on covers, or banish them to FOB (front of book) or worse, BOB (back of book) placement because of their skin color. Midge also added, “Seventeen has 10% black readers so I try to have 10% black covers.” In my 8 years there we had a handful of African American cover stars, including the young upstart, Will Smith, but it was always, ALWAYS a fight.

In my entire career, the biggest star I’ve ever booked has to be Beyoncé. There were some super shady “negotiations” that happened in the process between my publisher at the time and Beyoncé’s team. I won’t say the word but it rhymes with blackmail. As for the shoot and the interview, it was all in Beyoncé’s control. We got to pick the photographer but she approved him; her stylist (a fabulous, talented man!) dressed her; her H&M glammed her; and our 30-minute in-person interview was scrutinized by her handlers and filmed in its entirety.

Despite Beyoncé’s mass appeal at the time—she had just appeared on both Vogue and GQ covers—she didn’t sell well. It didn’t “tank,” as we hate to call a terrible-selling cover in the biz, but it was not the mind-blowing results we had expected. Interestingly, Beyoncé’s Destiny’s Child co-singer, Kelly Rowland, who appeared on another cover I booked that year, sold like hotcakes, far beyond our expectations. So it wasn’t the color of their skin that determined how well their covers sold, it was their likability to the reader. Back then, Beyoncé came across as a smart cookie, but Kelly was a warm, yummy one.

Since then, another black cover star has emerged, singer/songwriter and fashion queen, Rihanna. Her’s and Beyonce’s crossover appeal has made them both “good gets,” cover-speak for a hot seller. And in the post-#Oscarssowhite era, black actors and singers are now considered valuable “gets,” a change the current editor-in chiefs of magazines like Glamour, British Vogue, Marie Claire, and Elle Canada are embracing.

Which brings us to the significance of these beautiful faces beaming out at us from the normally #magazinessowhite. The exciting, historical, and  revolutionary message is this: not only are black women cover-worthy, they sell magazines. It’s about time we figured that out, isn’t it?