On the Runway: Vanity Fair’s September Cover Sells Something. And Not Only What It Says.

And yet that does make it hard not to wonder, when you add the celebrity to the clothes to the photographer, if the cover is effectively … a Louis Vuitton ad.

Magazines have long blurred the line between commerce and editorial content, tacitly supporting advertisers in their fashion shoots. Recently, some have begun venturing into e-commerce with various products in their pages (sometimes even taking a cut of each transaction). Stylists and photographers who produce editorial shoots are often the same ones behind ad campaigns.

But synergy like this, where the dots are connected out in the open, is rare. According to the magazine, though, it was not by design, but by accident.

Vanity Fair chose Ms. Schorr to shoot the cover in May, before it was aware that she had shot the Vuitton ad campaign, which was unveiled in mid-June. The magazine was drawn to her both because of her aesthetic and because she was one of the few photographers in fashion to speak out when the Harvey Weinstein revelations broke, demanding that fashion take responsibility for its own actions.

This is also, presumably, part of what drew Vuitton to her, since a number of previous ad campaigns had been shot by Bruce Weber, a photographer accused of abuse by more than a dozen men in an investigation in The New York Times.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/style/vanity-fair-michelle-williams-louis-vuitton.html?partner=rss&emc=rss