There’s one fact to know about the cover of Vanity Fair’s 32nd Hollywood issue: It’s all about men.
Why men, now? Well, according to Mark Guiducci, a camera-ready 37-year-old who was appointed Vanity Fair’s new editor in June, the male movie star has come down to earth. And that itself says something about how Hollywood has evolved.
“For a long time Hollywood was the land of make believe,” Mr. Guiducci, who was previously the creative editorial director at Vogue, said in an interview. “It was historically the place that people went to become someone else, to choose a different name to, assume a different identity.”
In his opinion, those days are over. The molded, studio-system matinee idols are long gone.
“There’s no Rock Hudson’s anymore,” he added, stating the obvious in referencing a Hollywood icon who died a few years before Mr. Guiducci was even born.
So what is the male actor now? He’s is your “internet boyfriend.” He lives at your level. Or at least your phone screen. If today’s manosphere caricatures are steroidal and snickering, the young actors looking at you over a series of three covers are your amiable bros next door.
They’re a comely dozen, these actors, billed, per the covers, as “our new class of leading men.” (More breathless is the bold type above: “Let’s Hear it For the Boys!”) The Hollywood issue, a yearly doorstop seen as the starting gun of Oscar campaigning season, is being unveiled today. It arrives on newsstands in early December.
In a spread shot by Theo Wenner and styled by Tom Guinness, Riz Ahmed answers a call in a Tom Ford robe and A$AP Rocky is in Malibu in a Dior hussar jacket. Glen Powell and Callum Turner, both wearing shorts and blazers, splash in a swimming pool. Jonathan Bailey and Harris Dickinson laze together in matching dinner jackets and safety orange trousers like two escapees of a “Great Gatsby” remake. But the scenes, laid out as a collage of snapshots, feel more “Dawson’s Creek,” than West Egg. The lack of women makes some images come off a touch homoerotic. (A conspicuously-placed oar only underscores that feeling.)
On the pages inside, the men of Hollywood smirk at the camera, their hair is mussed and their Saint Laurent tuxedo jackets are worn, oh-so-laissez-faire, with vintage jeans. Jeremy Allen White is shirtless. The images have a nostalgic, catalog-y quality, like a yellowing Abercrombie & Fitch ad campaign (in fact, the story has four “vintage” Abercrombie & Fitch credits). They’re chummy friends, fleeing a wedding party to race barefoot down the beach, or pull you in to do some light plotting on the grass. It’s their world, but you’re supposed to want to join it.
As the author Ottessa Moshfegh writes in an accompanying essay, “Today’s leading men aren’t unreachable idols. They feel like real people, very special people who hover just half an inch beyond our grasp.”
Guided by an editor, photographer and stylist who are all under 40 (and often wearing clothes designed by men around this age) the photo shoot simmers with an early aughts energy.
“I wanted to just be a little looser,” said Mr. Guiducci.
The magazine’s new, updated logo also calls back to Mr. Guiducci’s youth, referencing a font that was first used in the April 2000 issue.
But this is Hollywood today, not 25 years ago. The issue, the first under Mr. Guiducci’s total direction, arrives at a time when both industries involved — movies and magazines — stand as shells of their former, glorious selves.
It has been yet another year with slumping box office returns from non-franchise films, which have showcased many of the actors that appear on this cover. The bankable “movie star,” once a plentiful resource, seems to be going the way of the dodo.
Tellingly, the weekend before the debut of this cover, Tom Cruise, at 63, was given an honorary Oscar at the 2025 Governors Awards. As Hollywood continues to laud actors of Mr. Cruise’s vintage, its star machine seems to have stalled and the search for a successor (or better still, successors) continues.
Likewise, it is a period of transition at Condé Nast, Vanity Fair’s parent company. The company’s princeliest properties have now been placed in the hands of two elder millennials, with Mr. Guiducci at Vanity Fair and Chloe Malle, 40, at Vogue. Both were given newly conceived titles rather than editor in chief.
Still, for Vanity Fair, the Hollywood issue remains consequential. Alongside the magazine’s annual Oscar party, started in 1994 as a way for then-editor-in-chief Graydon Carter to ingratiate himself, and his magazine, to Hollywood types (spoiler: it worked), this issue keeps Vanity Fair as a vital gatekeeper to the hallowed, if hollowing out, realm of movie stardom. Mr. Guiducci, a native of Southern California, who started his career in publishing at Vanity Fair 15 years ago, stressed that the Oscar party will continue.
The Hollywood issue in Mr. Guiducci’s hands largely sticks to form. Even its big all-male cast has been done several times before, going back to 1996.
But to focus on men now hardly seems accidental. Mr. Guiducci’s Vanity Fair lands in a media landscape brimming with hand-wringing articles and podcasts about what makes young men tick, and more gravely, if they need saving.
“I do think it relates to the wider conversation,” said Mr. Guiducci, who noted that he too listens to podcasts by Scott Galloway, a self-optimizing 61-year-old who has become a prophet of young male ambition and anxiety.
Mr. Guiducci stressed, however, that he’s focused on Hollywood here. He knows he will not solve the broader crisis of man through softly lit images of Paul Mescal crying a single tear in a Gucci blazer.
“It’s not that serious,” Mr. Guiducci said.
Jacob Gallagher is a Times reporter covering fashion and style.
The post Men? In Hollywood? You Don’t Say. appeared first on New York Times.
