I always knew I’d be on the cover of the September issue,” says Precious Lee, exuding the serene self-assurance of a woman who’s gotten used to her dreams coming true. “I won’t say I never doubted it would happen, but on a deeper level, I just knew.” From one angle, what Lee says makes perfect sense: The Atlanta native is not only stunning—she also boasts that oh-so-rare talent for transmitting charisma directly through the lens. The same can be said of the seven other distinctively transfixing models who joined Lee at the Vogue offices for this celebratory shoot, staged as New York City began shaking off its pandemic doldrums. “This is so nuts,” says Kaia Gerber, cracking up as she and her fellow cover stars shimmy around cubicles in their formalwear, vibing to a disco beat. And, from a different angle, a historical one, it is nuts: To see Anok Yai, Ariel Nicholson, Bella Hadid, Lola Leon, Sherry Shi, Yumi Nu, and Gerber and Lee posing together, collectively representing what you might call American beauty now, is to feel present at the revolution. The barricades have fallen. Welcome to the new world. It is tempting to pan across the faces on these pages and see the shattering of beauty norms: There’s no dominant type, no singular standard for readers to measure themselves against. For far too long, that standard was bone-thin, painfully
young, cisgender, and, by an overwhelming margin, white. Such uniformity now seems outrageous, both antiquated and out of sync with a culture rejoicing in the hard-fought visibility of people who mirror the splendid multiplicity of our modern global society. Yet the mind snags on this idea that beauty norms have gone out the window: There is still, of course, currency in being a slim, conventionally pretty white woman, as most-followed female TikTok stars Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae might attest. On Instagram, lingerie ads featuring women with voluptuous fat rolls alternate with others for products promising speedy post-pandemic weight loss. There’s work yet to do on this front.
On the other hand, it’s insufficient to describe the radical makeover of runways and magazines in terms of diversity and inclusion—words that can carry a whiff of tokenism about them. What stands out about the women on this cover is that they’re not reducible to kind; each is a unique superstar with her own story to tell, of which her beauty is merely a part. That’s the breakthrough we’re witnessing: the transformation of the model from object to subject. For the first time in history, she is meeting our gaze.
Virtually everyone I spoke to for this story—models, designers, casting directors, agents—credits social media with upending their business. Platforms such as Instagram have not only allowed users to voice a previously pent-up demand for broader representation; as casting directors Daniel Peddle and Drew Dasent point out, they have changed the very nature of modeling. “People notice a model, and they look up her profile,” says street scout Peddle, who formed an agency, The Secret Gallery, with Dasent in 2001. “That’s been incorporated into the casting process,” Dasent adds. “Now brands look for models who are entertaining on TikTok or who align with their values—if a company is trying to position itself as a leader on sustainability, they’ll want to use models who are vocal on the issue of climate change.”
Social media’s kaleidoscopic influencer economy has also given designers unprecedented freedom to cast whomever they like—whatever size, age, ethnicity, or gender they may be—in their shows or campaigns. “There was never only one type of person who had that thing,” says designer Victor Glemaud, “that magical talent to elevate the clothes they happen to be wearing. If you look at someone like Precious, you think—God, she always should have been a star. Why were we so stupidly fixated on who could fit the samples?”
But social media is not, on its own, responsible for the tectonic shifts rattling the fashion landscape. You have to account for star quality—that intangible that famously prompted makeup artist Pat McGrath to pluck Paloma Elsesser from a sea of Instagram selfie-posters. “People are dead wrong if they think modeling is as simple as standing in front of a camera,” attests Yai, who was herself discovered when a shot of her at the 2017 Howard University homecoming celebration went viral. “Like any art, it’s a form of expression—it’s like silent acting, really,” she says. “I didn’t get where I am just because of Instagram.”
Meanwhile, the same apps democratizing beauty have also given us “Instagram Face,” as writer Jia Tolentino described the platform’s omnipresent filtered pout, along with #thinspiration and an army of trolls with nothing better to do than, say, hurl invective at Lola Leon for not shaving her armpits. (“Yeah, come at me, bro,” says Leon of this and similar incidents.) And to be clear: It wasn’t an algorithm that determined that the face of modern beauty in fashion would change; it was an emerging generation of American designers ardent in the belief that fashion belongs to everyone—and that it’s better, fresher, and more interesting when it “incorporates a range of perspectives,” as Christopher John Rogers says. This view has since been given establishment imprimatur by the likes of Gucci’s Alessandro Michele and Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia, but it generated here, in the States, among the same millennials and Gen Z’ers who have pushed social-justice movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter to the political foreground.
“It’s like street protest taken to the runway,” says Rio Uribe, whose spring 2021 Gypsy Sport show—a virtual event, due to the pandemic—featured an all-Latinx cast, with the designer making a special effort to include Indigenous models in the mix. “My generation, we’re not going to support a fashion institution if we don’t feel seen, or if we feel like the ‘diversity’ is inauthentic.” As in, the people modeling the clothes must bear some relation to the people who created them—and to the customer. “With our brand being built on principles of inclusivity, we understand the importance of representation in an industry that has historically been exclusive,” says the team behind the New York City–based brand Area, who preferred to speak collectively. “Area resonates with so many different people around the world, so it is important that our casting is an accurate reflection of this.”
These shifts in model casting “track with changes we’re seeing all across our culture,” as casting director Jennifer Venditti observes. Long one of the fashion industry’s secret weapons for finding “real people” to star in shoots and shows—experience she now brings to bear working with film directors such as Andrea Arnold and the Safdie Brothers—Venditti believes that current disruptions are a byproduct of the rise of more conscious forms of consumption. “We want our purchases to mean something,” she says. “Likewise, the models who are connecting right now—there’s always a person beyond the façade. People are asking, What do you stand for? Where do you come from? Who are you?
Lola Leon, daughter of Madonna, has followed in her mother’s footsteps as a dancer and an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, but in all other respects stubbornly insists on cutting her own path. Yai, born in Egypt while her family awaited political asylum in the U.S. and now a muse to designers such as Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli, took up martial arts during the pandemic but also likes to paint, drawing inspiration from Renaissance masters. A similar creative streak runs through Sherry Shi, though her taste favors anime—she might become an animator, she says. Yumi Nu is a singer-songwriter who just released the summery single “Pots & Pans” and plans on launching an ethical plus-size clothing line; Kaia Gerber reads books backstage at fashion shows and forged her close friendship with Ariel Nicholson out of a mutual dislike of small talk. “We like talking about ideas,” says Nicholson, a budding writer and actor. Bella Hadid likes to journal in the form of poetry—“It’s a way of getting at my emotions without it being total nonsense,” she explains—and Precious Lee really likes her hometown, championing Atlanta as a cultural nerve center to rival New York and L.A. (“You’ve got to come down and see what’s going on here,” she insists.) What all these women share, however, is a fierce desire not to be pigeonholed.
