Despite all the groaning that “print is dead,” many people seem captivated by magazines lately: When Anna Wintour relinquished her editorship in June of Vogue, which she’s overseen for 37 years, it was national news; a memoir by the former Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter and a dishy nonfiction chronicle (by the New York Times reporter Michael M. Grynbaum) of Carter’s ex-employer, the luxury magazine publisher Condé Nast, made many summer reading lists. And even if magazines don’t hold the same cultural sway — or profits or attention spans — they once did, it’s undeniable that the people who make them, and the stories and images they’ve made, still have much to show us, not just about how we read and see, but about how we live. This has been true for nearly two centuries: Popular magazines like Scientific American and The Atlantic have both been continuously published since the mid-1800s.
A magazine is nothing without its cover, of course. That’s why, for the latest installment of our T 25 series, we convened a panel of experts — Gayle King, 70, who, in addition to co-hosting CBS Mornings, is the editor at large for Oprah Daily, the current version of O, the Oprah Magazine; Patrick Li, 56, T’s creative director; Adam Moss, 68, the former editor of New York magazine and, before that, The New York Times Magazine; David Remnick, 66, the editor of The New Yorker; and Martha Rosler, 82, a New York-based conceptual artist whose work has long commented on and incorporated magazines and other forms of mass media — to choose the most influential magazine covers of all time. Before they submitted their own long lists of at least 10 nominees, I’d told them that they could select one another’s work but not their own. We also decided to limit the conversation to English-language publications, although the unranked list of 25 covers that follows, which we fought over in a Times conference room for several hours on a rainy May afternoon, includes only American publications.
That doesn’t mean we overlooked the importance of British magazines (see all of the panelists’ nominees here, with further commentary), notably the 1990 issue of The Face on which a 16-year-old model named Kate Moss debuted. But it was scrapped in favor of covers that were both more indelible — “I want people looking at this list and going, ‘Oh, yes, I remember that,’ ” King says — and more reflective of a time when magazine covers both broke and drove the conversations of the day, whether in politics, culture, fashion, food, sports or other realms. What you won’t find below, for example, are any Covid-19 covers, in part because, as Remnick says, “at a certain point, you start to reach an image proliferation [online], and so you can’t help but feel that the internet undermines the power of magazines in various different ways.” Also omitted: digital-only covers that have become popular in recent years as magazines have evolved beyond their native format.
Originally, we’d hoped to restrict the finalists to one per magazine, but as we kept debating, it became obvious that some titles had more impact than others — either because they inspired countless magazine editors and art directors, or because they were able to capture and harness a national moment in a way that feels impossible in our more fragmented era, or because they were run by teams of people all willing to court controversy and take the risks necessary to produce lasting creative work. “It’s hard to say they’re influential, but what does influential mean anyway?” Moss asked the group in an email he sent after our meeting. He was defending some 1930s Fortune covers he’d brought up but also, I think, encapsulating the project as a whole: “That was the question we were all grappling with, to little resolution. These don’t clarify our answer, but they’re very cool, and it’s just a game, anyway.” — Kurt Soller
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