How Our Favorite Magazines Have Evolved With the Times
Decades ago — and for some, over a century ago — magazines like Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, Seventeen, Vogue, and GQ were already on newsstands, but you wouldn’t recognize them. They not only reflected different beauty standards and publishing developments of their time, but also reflected other social and cultural values — such as nationalistic self-representation — within the advertisements, texts, and images. As noted by aesthetics scholar Katya Mandoki, “Not merely a source of information, nor mere description of clothes and styles, fashion magazines are personal invitations to visit and dwell in social and individual imaginaries.”
Blogger Karen X. Cheng and graphic designer Jerry Gabra recently compiled magazine covers across each decade — as far back as the 1900s — giving us a succinct summary of how some of our favorite periodicals have evolved over time.
Cosmopolitan: 1930s to Present
Cosmopolitan was actually founded as a family magazine in 1866, re-emerged as a literary journal in the 1900s, and became a women’s magazine in the 1960s. When legendary editor Helen Gurley Brown became editor in chief in 1965, she re-invented it for modern single career women — readers just like herself who were working class girls using scrappiness and sexual prowess to hustle. Before running the magazine, Brown wrote a bestselling book called Sex and the Single Girl, which urged women to embrace — and enjoy! — sex without shame. “How could any woman not be a feminist?” she once said in an interview on her 20th anniversary at the magazine. “The girl I’m editing for wants to be known for herself. If that’s not a feminist message, I don’t know what is.” These days, under Hearst powerhouse editor Joanna Coles, Cosmopolitan is still devoted to helping women their best lives — and causing some controversy at the same time. Most recently, Coles spoke out against heiress Victoria Hearst, who is working with the National Center on Sexual Exploitation to cover up the Cosmo cover lines on newsstands. “It sends a signal to young women that their sexuality is shameful,” she said. “We’re not just about sex, we’re about empowering women in all aspects of their lives.”
Seventeen: 1940s to Present
Seventeen was the first teen magazine in the United States, and when it made its debut in September 1944, towards the end of the Second World War, founding editor Helen Valentine wanted to inspire girls ages 10 to 19 to become intrepid working women and model citizens, a value that many of them had already embraced in support of the war effort. Within one year, the magazine had a circulation of one million. “It was time to treat children as adults,” Valentine had said in an interview. Seventeen is oftentimes credited with creating a clothing manufacturing industry geared towards teens, with implications seen in other teen magazines nowadays. The magazine has gone through many iterations and editorships, but the logo has stayed the same, and many of today’s top stars, from Will Smith to Brooke Shields, made their teen debut on the cover of Seventeen. Cover models on Seventeen tend be approachable and smiling at the viewer, oftentimes in active poses that hearken back to the publication’s working girl roots.
Vogue: 1900s to Present
Media mogul Condé Montrose Nast bought weekly newspaper Vogue in 1905 and turned it into a bi-weekly magazine, in addition to launching international editions in the 1910s. Almost immediately, Vogue became revolutionarily for its usage of photography — which also meant that it had a repertoire of fashion models. “Fashion illustration has gone from being one of the sole means of fashion communication to having a very minor role,” Historian Laird Borelli noted in 2000. “The first photographic cover of Vogue was a watershed in the history of fashion illustration and a watershed mark of its decline.” In the 1960s, the legendary Diana Vreeland became editor in chief, bringing the sexual revolution of downtown youth to its pages. Anna Wintour became editor in chief in July 1988, with her inaugural issue featuring Israeli model Michaela Bercu, loose hair flying, in an ornamented Christian Lacroix jacket and a pair of worn-in jeans styled by Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele. Three-quarters of her body was in the photograph, which a dramatic change from the face-only images of the 1970s and 1980. The Yale University-funded Robots Reading Vogue project generated the pixel averages of the faces of 1970s and 1980s Vogue, discovering that positioning, gaze, and head angles were all the same. Still under Wintour’s leadership and dedication to high revenue, Vogue has championed celebrity cover stars like Kim Kardashian, though supermodels like Karlie Kloss make occasional appearances too.
Vanity Fair: 1910s to Present
It is important to know that the first iteration of Vanity Fair, published from 1913 to 1936, had little to do with the modern magazine. It started as a high society magazine and a magazine of culture that competed with the New Yorker, but merged with Vogue in the 1930s due to poor circulation during the Great Depression. In 1983, Condé Nast revived it as a pop culture, entertainment, and politics magazine. Famous photographers like Bruce Weber, Annie Leibovitz, Mario Testino, and Herb Ritts have furnished the covers with dazzling images of celebrities, including the famous and oft-imitated “More Demi Moore” August 1991 cover by Leibovitz, which featured the actress naked and pregnant. Most recently, Vanity Fair broke the internet with its July 2015 Caitlyn Jenner “Call Me Caitlyn” cover, shot again by Leibovitz. While the magazine has distanced itself from its pure upper-class society roots, it still remains a barometer of society at large.
GQ: 1950s to Present
As noted by Cheng, men’s lifestyle magazine GQ, formerly Gentlemen’s Quarterly, didn’t start featuring scantily clad women until the 1990s. Originally, it was called Apparel Arts, and it was a trade magazine for men’s fashion manufacturers and retailers. Condé Nast bought the publication from Esquire, Inc. in 1957 and made it into GQ, a consumer magazine, and editor Art Cooper sought to expand its scope beyond fashion. The covers featured a lot of men in crisp suits — a Mad Men enthusiast’s dream! When former Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor Nonnie Moore was hired in 1984, she started styling more casual and younger looks into the publication. Eventually it evolved into putting racy images of celebrity women on the cover, a stylistic choice that other magazines, from Maxim to Esquire, have followed suit. Cover lines like “Wake Up to Jessica Alba” and “Starring the World’s Most Voluptuous Virgin (!): Adriana Lima” sit alongside cover lines like “An Exclusive Look Inside the Last Days of the Bush White House.” It’s not a surprise that under editor Jim Nelson’s leadership, GQ’s won several National Magazine Awards. That said, men’s magazine Maxim, under the leadership of former women’s magazines editor Kate Lanphear, recently put Idris Elba — its first man — on the cover, so perhaps the tables will turn at GQ, as well. Scantily clad men deserve a chance on the cover, too.
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