Why Are So Many Vogue Cover Stories Written by Men?

When Margot Robbie popped up in The Big Short last year for a 60-second cameo—by definition, playing herself—to explain what “shorting” a bond means while drinking Dom Pérignon in the bathtub of a billionaire’s Malibu condo, I subconsciously shorted her. Here, it seemed, was that girl who invites you to stare and then tells you to fuck off if you stare for too long.

Take a moment with that last sentence. Moving on:

The fact that just two years prior she so ferociously inhabited the role of the hottest gold digger in the history of cinema in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, permanently lodging herself in the collective male libido, served only to reinforce my concern that she might be some new breed of high-maintenance superpredator. Thankfully, the cameo turned out to be a clever little lie in a movie all about big fat ones. This was Margot Robbie playing her caricature—the retrograde Playboy fantasy in permanent soft-focus.

It comes as a surprise, then—a relief, even—to meet Robbie in April on the Santa Monica Pier and discover that she’s not remotely like the manipulative sex kittens she’s been so eerily good at portraying on the screen.

This intro sets up a sort of respectability redemption, entirely in Van Meter’s estimation, as well as a device in his narrative arc, as Robbie goes—and again, purely in his estimation—from being said “manipulative sex kitten” to someone with “hustle—resourcefulness, mixed with ambition and a little naïveté.”

This is not to say a cover subject should not be criticized or even shaded—Caity Weaver’s extremely shady Justin Bieber piece for GQ is one of the best celebrity profiles I can remember reading. But I bristled at Van Meter’s implied short-order chauvinism. Vogue cultivates itself as the vision of propriety, and rarely tends towards negativity about its carefully curated, impeccably styled topics. Such stereotyping read, first of all, as vehemently off-brand. As anyone who followed the Kim Kardashian Vogue saga knows, which held that Kim was persona non grata until Kanye was part of the deal, people make the cover of Vogue because Anna Wintour herself has anointed you.

In other words, we are accustomed to the conventions of this anointment: the breathlessness, the awe, the notion of being dishy and intimate but also kept mysteriously at bay. But a profile like Robbie’s makes us remember who exactly is writing the terms of this ritual, speaking for these carefully pruned avatars of Vogue’s influence in the fashion and entertainment worlds. How is it possible that the people who put Vogue’s taste in covers into words in the feature well are so frequently men?

Almost every Vogue cover story in the last three years has been written by a man—most frequently the contributing editor Van Meter and Jason Gay, a renowned writer, editor and sports columnist who gave us last month’s odd Taylor Swift profile, written from her best friend’s wedding. There’s also Hamish Bowles, Vogue’s longtime international editor, who is truly a delight to read and seems to make more sense on fashion stories—but I counted the magazine’s last 50 issues, dating back to its May 2012 issue, and of that 50:

• 34 Vogue cover stories were written by men;
• 12 were written by women;
• four covers did not include a written-through feature;
• with one, possibly two, exceptions, all of the cover writers were white.

It’s a given that, in the magazine world, the majority of plum stories are assigned to men. And of course magazines will farm out those stories to contributing editors before freelancers as a cost-saving measure, if nothing else. But for contrast, in the last two and a half years of Elle, Vogue’s main competitor, only six total stories were written by men, the rest by women.

And much of the rest of Vogue is written, edited, and run by women, including Features Director Eve MacSweeney and a host of editors under the “Features” masthead that are almost entirely women. Between the women writers on staff at the magazine and an additional small army at Vogue.com, the publication is not hurting for excellent women writers, including those who do very serious reporting in-book, such as Heidi Mitchell’s memorable profile on Marilyn Mosby in last year’s July issue. But as ever, the piece that garners the most interest and carries the most weight is almost always the cover.

This gender breakdown is significant in part because women’s magazines are largely still thought of as unserious compared to men’s magazines, with the one major exception being Vogue, which enjoys both the prestige and the budget to keep it at the top of the women’s magazine game. And Vogue readers like myself want to read more women writing about the women the institution deems fitting for the cover, want to read women writers who are as accomplished as these men; as any journalist can tell you, the dynamic of an interview will shift relative to whom is performing it, and under what circumstances. Vogue has never precisely been about sisterhood, but Wintour seems to espouse liberal politics, relatively speaking, and she is in the business of elevating women by the very nature of her institution. That these impulses don’t seem to extend much to the writing of the most important story in the magazine is confounding, and incongruous.

Further, if men are almost exclusively allowed to write these stories—and, as a result, shape the narratives of the women successful enough to have landed on the cover of Vogue—what does it say about how the magazine views our ability to reflect them? Someone beautiful and muted, her outsize importance and degrees of seriousness relayed to you by a man.