VANITY FAIR & BREONNA TAYLOR
The Cover Everyone Is Talking About
Vanity Fair, the popular culture, fashion and current affairs publication, has been around for more than 100 years. It’s a magazine known for excellent writing, in-depth reporting and glossy covers of celebrities, social icons and world leaders. It is fair to say the September issue is the most coveted. It’s the issue that forecasts what’s to come and it shows off the pull the magazine has with advertisers. The buzz around Vanity Fair’s September cover is taking over social media. This time an illustration of Breonna Taylor graces the cover. The 26-year-old Black woman was shot and killed by police in her Louisville, Kentucky home on March 13th, and is now a symbol of systemic racism and police brutality. Despite the outpouring of support for Taylor and continued pressure on Louisville’s attorney general, no arrests or charges have been made against the officers involved in the shooting.
Taylor, for the Vanity Fair cover, is immortalized in a painting by artist Amy Sherald. She is the same artist who famously painted a portrait of Michelle Obama for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In a behind-the-cover interview, Sherald says she sees this portrait as a contribution to the “moment and to activism—producing this image keeps Breonna alive forever.”
For this VF issue, Editor-in-Chief, Radhika Jones, turned to best-selling author and prominent voice on race, Ta-Nehisi Coates, to take on the role of guest editor. In a recent interview on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Coates explained it was essential to go beyond the shooting. It was about the humanization of Breonna Taylor. “It is very important for people to be reminded that there was an actual life taken…they shot a human being with a mother, a little sister, a man she had been with for some time, with relations in the community, they shot a person,” said Coates. Drawing from a series of interviews with Taylor’s mother Tamika Palmer, “Coates retells Breonna’s story in a way that only a mother can,” the magazine said in a statement. Acclaimed photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier photographed Taylor’s family and her boyfriend Kenneth Walker holding the engagement ring he planned to give Breonna.
“We wanted to capture the spirit of these months that have revealed real problems in the American system. If you didn’t believe in systemic racism before now, if you didn’t believe that our healthcare didn’t need reforming, if you look around now, you probably do believe it,” said Jones. The special issue was assembled with notable Black artists and writers including Eve L. Ewing, Ava Duverney, Josie Duffy Rice, Jesmyn Ward and Bomani Jones in order to lend different perspectives. The issue also takes a more in-depth look at art, activism and power in 21st century America.
Radhika Jones said the issue was created as a keepsake and wants people to feel “provoked” and to feel “challenged” and to reexamine “old positions” or some “old prejudices” and hopes the arguments in the issue will make people think.
The September issue of Vanity Fair hits newsstands September 1st.