Models Are Back on This Season’s Magazine Covers

Photo: W Magazine, Glamour

Fashion magazines’ “letters to the editor” columns always seem to comprise about 30 percent people writing in to complain about how models are never on covers anymore. Well, they’ll have to find a new thing to carp about, because this crop of fall issues features more models than the “Bad Blood” video. Dazed and Confused unveiled Molly Bair and Lineisy Montero on its Autumn cover, and mainstream magazines, too, are opting for runway faces on their key September books. Gigi Hadid is touted as the “Post-It Girl” (not to be confused with Romy and Michele) on the new issue of W, while Karlie Kloss fronts Glamour, opposite the coverline “From Fashion Darling to Female Force.”

The trend gained steam last year when Vogue put Kloss, Joan Smalls, and Cara Delevingne — before she was a capital-A Actress — on its “Instagirls”-themed cover. Kate Upton, Kendall Jenner, and Linda Evangelista have scored major covers in the past year as well. But the credit is largely due to the celebrity-fication of models, whom we can now follow on Instagram the same way we follow celebrities via paparazzi. Of course, sometimes that can be a burden, according to Hadid, who tells the magazine that she’s wary of alienating her 4 million followers. “All the companies I work for want me to guarantee how much I’ll post for them, but I’m not going to force my career onto the people who follow me,” she says. “I refuse to do 40 Instagram posts about any campaign.” Considering we’re already drowning in models’ workouts, makeup-free moments, and pasta-eating odysseys, we thank you for that, Gigi.

Models Are Back on This Season’s Magazine Covers