The September issues of fashion magazines are often considered the most important. They show the major fashion trends and are packed full of more advertisements than other issues. They are considered the largest and most influential.
One of the notable things about the covers of many of the highest-circulation North American magazines this year is that a) a handful of the women on the covers are women, not girls, and are over 40; and b) Halle Berry is on the cover of American Vogue. At 44, she is the oldest woman to appear on the cover in the past 10 years and she is the first black woman to appear on a September issue of Vogue since Naomi Campbell did in 1989.
A few more of the September 2010 covers:
What I like so much about featuring women like Roberts, Aniston, Berry, and Lopez on magazine covers is that — assuming you at least sort of subscribe to the idea that cover models are aspirational in some way – these are women with voices, experience, successful careers they’ve crafted over decades, children, marriages, and break-ups. They are worth aspiring to be like because they are more than only beautiful.
A struggling 25-year-old can aspire to be like a successful, beautiful 40-something. But a successful, beautiful 40-something ought not to aspire to be like a voice-less, name-less 20-year-old who is merely an object of beauty or Hollywood fad.
Reuters put out a great article saturated with magazine stats, which you might enjoy. Here’s a little snippet:
Indeed, the age of a cover subject seems to show that older often can be better. On InStyle’scovers, 40-year-old Gwen Stefani outsold 25-year-olds Scarlett Johansson and Leona Lewis (648,000, 579,000 and 610,000, respectively) — and all three were outsold by Jennifer Lopez, who was 40 when she was on the cover in September and sold a whopping 853,000 copies (though September, as mentioned, usually is the biggest month).
I also enjoyed seeing Freida Pinto on the cover of September’s T Magazine:
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