Gets the pandemic made the glossy fashion magazine cover irrelevant?

Vogue Italia started the trend when it ran its April 2020 issue with an ordinary white cover. No photo, no headlines, just the title on a pure white page, as a tribute to the victims of Covid-19.

Then American Vogue used a graphic of an individual red rose on its June/July 2020 cover, under the headline “Our common thread”. The image was shot by Irving Penn in 1970.

Does this mean that the original fashion magazine cover - all glossy and glamorous - is shifting towards something less predictable, less hard sell and a lot more "authentic"?

But first, exactly what is a traditional fashion magazine cover? It is a professionally taken image of a model or celebrity, wearing clothes come up with by a stylist, and with hair and make-up by dedicated professionals.

The location could be in a studio, with lighting that took two assistants three hours to create, or from location, somewhere wistful and fabulous, that required the long car journey or plane ride to get to.

The resulting images will be the work of a team of people, endlessly hovering, constantly checking and adjusting bits of clothing here, a stray hair there, to get the perfect result. Once taken, the image is then retouched to eliminate any perceived flaws, from spots and dark circles beneath the eyes to creases in clothing.

It is, in place, an totally artificial image, polished and buffed to an unrealistic sheen. As supermodel (and mother to fellow model Kaia Gerber) Cindy Crawford once famously said: “Even I don’t appear to be me when I awaken."

Covers featuring celebrities frequently have faces blurred with Photoshop or lifted and tightened with cosmetic tinkering, offering another artificial vision of beauty that seemingly no mere mortal could obtain.

But then, as the entire enormity of Covid-19 commenced to unfold, these shoots stopped almost overnight, as flights were cancelled and persons thought we would socially distance themselves. Far-off spots were suddenly unreachable, as were models and photographers, scattered around the world.

The style magazine is a symbiotic extension of the style industry (neither can truly exist without the other), and with stores closed and borders shut, there followed a scrabble from brands and titles to rethink, reposition and locate a suitable "tone". Suddenly, extolling the wonders of the most recent Oscar de la Renta gown or new Gucci handbag felt a little, well, off the mark.

This weekend, the former editor of French Vogue, Carine Roitfeld, hosted her gross annual CR Fashion amfAR fundraising runway show, entitled CR Runway with amFAR against Covid-19: Fashion Unites. Normally playing out as a lavish catwalk event, watched by guests who had donated large sums to the charity for the privilege, this year it was a very different affair.

With models now all stuck in the home and clothes struggling to be delivered, the show became a bunch of famous faces (think Halima Aden, Winnie Harlow, Natasha Poly and Karlie Kloss) doing their own make-up and donning their own clothes, before strutting up and down their living rooms, hallways and kitchens.

Being models, the make-up and clothes were all still inevitably fabulous, nonetheless it showed an extremely human side to these normally perfect women that was endearing to view.

Similarly, too, the recent One World: Together in the home online music event that saw The Rolling Stones, Elton John and Lady Gaga, amongst others, belting out tunes from their own houses, emphasised the human connection, as we glimpsed flashes of houses and paid attention to mistakes, something conspicuously absent at large-scale events and glossy fashion shoots.

Now, as the new reality of a post-coronavirus world is needs to tentatively unfold, and we are mindful of proximity and the consumption of hand sanitiser, are we looking for something more meaningful, more relatable, more authentic?

Are we sick and tired of seeing Botoxed celebrities, underlying our very own flaws and imperfections with their plastic symmetry? Instead, do we have now crave seeing people who are as lost, nervous and unsure as ourselves?

No one includes a magic ball on what the future holds, but what's beginning to become apparent is that the world most of us had, pre Covid-19, is currently gone, perhaps forever. Even though we wait nervously, perhaps we are craving glimpses of real people, without artifice and trappings, unafraid showing their vulnerability.

How the glossy fashion cover will fit into this new world remains to be seen, but there is a strong chance that while it could be images of models, they'll be wearing normal clothes, in a standard environment, and wearing little if any make-up. As we search for answers to what comes next, perhaps we will see some solace in not aspiring to be something we are not, but instead becoming more comfortable with who we are already.