Famous magazine covers and what made each of them work

The issue of Esquire dated April 1968 reached newsstands on 4 April. That was the day Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis, and the cover showed Muhammad Ali tied up and pierced by six arrows. Art director George Lois and photographer Carl Fischer had posed him as Saint Sebastian, after a fifteenth-century painting, to make a point about a man who had been stripped of his title for refusing the draft. Nobody planned the date. It still changed how the cover was read.

That is the pattern with most famous magazine covers. The picture matters, but so does what was happening outside the picture on the day of publication. This page runs through the covers that people keep coming back to, grouped by what they did rather than by date, and says where the accounts disagree.

The photograph that outlived the day

Rolling Stone’s cover of 22 January 1981 is the clearest example. Annie Leibovitz photographed John Lennon and Yoko Ono on 8 December 1980, hours before he was shot, and the issue carried her picture of Lennon naked and curled against Ono. A cover that would have been an ordinary celebrity feature became a record, and it is why Leibovitz calls it the photograph of her life.

National Geographic’s June 1985 cover works differently. Steve McCurry took it in a refugee camp near Peshawar in 1984. The girl in the red headscarf stares directly into the lens, with the magazine’s yellow border closing the frame. For seventeen years nobody knew her name. In 2002 a magazine team found Sharbat Gula in Afghanistan, and the account of the photograph describes how her identity was confirmed by iris recognition. The picture had been a global image for years before anyone could say who she was.

The cover that sold the editor

Anna Wintour’s first issue of American Vogue, dated November 1988, is an example of a cover announcing a person. Peter Lindbergh photographed the model Michaela Bercu in an expensive Christian Lacroix jacket and a pair of stonewashed jeans, with her eyes half shut and her head turned away. Vogue had not put jeans on the cover before, and readers took the picture as a statement. The jeans were, by most accounts, a last-minute change after the planned skirt did not fit.

Lindbergh’s British Vogue cover of January 1990 did something similar for the supermodel. Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz, Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford stand together in black and white, in their own jeans and shirts. Editor Liz Tilberis asked him for a picture of the decade ahead. You can read more about the magazine’s history on the page about Vogue.

Covers that are only type, or only ink

Not all of them need a face. Time’s cover of 8 April 1966 asked Is God Dead? in red capitals on black, and nothing else. The cover story was by John T. Elson, the magazine’s religion editor, and the question did the work of a headline and an image at once.

Then there is The New Yorker. Its black cover of 24 September 2001, by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, prints the silhouettes of the two towers in a darker black over a black page. You see them only if you tilt the issue to the light. In a sense it is a cover that cannot be photographed properly, which is why a screen shows less than a copy in the hand. The magazine’s first cover, from 21 February 1925, is its opposite: a bright drawing by Rea Irvin of a dandy studying a butterfly.

Covers that went wrong, or nearly did

Time’s cover page for 27 June 1994 shows O. J. Simpson’s police booking photograph worked over by the photo-illustrator Matt Mahurin. He darkened it and burned the corners. Newsweek printed the original that week, and the two covers lay next to each other in shops. Critics said Time had made Simpson look darker, and the magazine’s editor said no racial implication was intended. The edition on the stands was quietly swapped for one using the plain photograph, according to reports at the time. Mahurin’s intention, as distinct from the effect, is the part still argued over.

Janet Jackson’s Rolling Stone cover of 16 September 1993 sits somewhere between success and scandal. Patrick Demarchelier photographed her in sepia with a man’s hands over her bare chest, and the hands belonged to her husband, Rene Elizondo. It was one of the most reproduced pop covers of the 1990s. Vanity Fair’s August 1991 cover, by Leibovitz again, showed Demi Moore pregnant and naked, with the line More Demi Moore; the argument over whether such a picture belonged on a newsstand lasted longer than the issue.

British covers, and the guest edit

British covers are harder to place in lists compiled in New York, and they should be. The Face began on 1 May 1980 under Nick Logan with Jerry Dammers of The Specials on the front, photographed by Chalkie Davies. It was a monthly about music, style and the people who wore it, and it looked unlike the established glossies. For the broader field, the list of best fashion magazines puts it in context.

British Vogue’s September 2019 issue is the most discussed British cover of recent years. The Duchess of Sussex guest-edited it, picked fifteen women for the front and left a sixteenth space as a mirror, so that the buyer looking at the cover saw themselves. She was the first person to guest-edit that issue. It is a cover about a cover.

The first covers

Some of the most famous covers are simply the first. The opening issue of Time, dated 3 March 1923, carried a portrait of Joseph G. Cannon, a retired Speaker of the US House of Representatives, and the red border that now frames the title arrived in 1927. Life began on 23 November 1936 with Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana. A building project stood where a face would normally have been, which told buyers that this was a magazine about pictures.

The British equivalent is humbler. The Radio Times first appeared on 28 September 1923 at twopence, listing the programmes of six BBC wireless stations, and according to its history on Wikipedia the print run of 250,000 sold out almost at once. Nobody has ever put it on a list of great covers, and on the day it did not need to be.

American Vogue’s first colour photograph on the cover, in July 1932, deserves a place beside these. Edward Steichen photographed a swimmer throwing a beach ball, and the cover marked a change from drawn covers to photographic ones that other titles followed.

Breaking the frame

A famous cover is often famous because the magazine changed one of its own rules for a day. Time’s red border has been recoloured only a few times since 1927. According to the magazine’s Wikipedia entry it turned black after the attacks of September 2001, green for Earth Day in 2008 and silver for the issue naming Barack Obama Person of the Year. Because the frame never moves otherwise, each change reads as a statement before a word is read.

The New Yorker did the same with ink rather than colour. It kept its title and its format and altered only the black. Esquire went at it from the other side: George Lois designed more than ninety of its covers between 1962 and 1973, each built around one blunt idea. Between them these approaches give two rules that hold for most of the covers named here. Keep the frame steady for long enough that readers learn it, and break it only when something has happened.

Look at your own bookshelf or a pile in a waiting room and test it. The covers you remember will mostly be the ones where the title stayed put and the picture moved.

Who ranks them

Lists of famous covers exist because editors like to argue. The American Society of Magazine Editors polled its members and published a ranking of the best covers of the previous forty years; Wikipedia’s entry on The New Yorker notes that the September 2001 cover was placed among the top ten. Such rankings reward ideas and craft. They say little about which issue sold, and it is worth remembering that when you read a top-ten list: the ones that win are the ones editors admire, which is not quite the same thing as what readers picked up.

The table

A word on credit

Lois produced more than ninety covers for Esquire between 1962 and 1973, and the Ali cover is the best known. His account of who did what on other campaigns has been disputed: the New York Times printed a correction in 2008 about two advertising campaigns he had said were his. That does not touch the Esquire covers, but it is a reminder that stories about famous work get tidied. If a cover is credited to one person, check whether a photographer, an editor and an art director each have a claim.

For the full anatomy of how such covers are assembled, the guide to magazine covers takes each part in turn. The page on the New York Times Magazine covers another American title. If you are planning one of your own, the notes on publishing your own magazine say what a cover costs in decisions, not money.

If you ever find the black New Yorker issue in a back-issue shop, hold it under a lamp before you buy it.