What Goes Into Styling a Cover Shoot

Debates over a recent Vanity Fair cover featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez miss the type of capital that is being exchanged.

The conservative media backlash to Vanity Fair’s December cover, featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a white satin suit by the brand Aliétte, was swift. Their ire this time was aimed at the expensive high-fashion clothing Ocasio-Cortez was styled in for the shoot, which, according to the Daily Mail’s calculations, totaled $14,000. “So happy that AOC is upholding the long-established hypocritical tradition of Socialists who believe Socialism is for poor while they enjoy the fruits of Capitalism,” seethed one right-wing Twitter user. “Ensuring everyone has a livable wage doesn’t mean you have to dress in Salvation Army,” replied a supporter.

This same conflict has played out so many times before that one might simply leave it at that: The conservative media’s vitriol against a politician who represents virtually every principle they oppose seems inevitable and, at this point, unremarkable. Once again, a female politician’s appearance had become a battlefield on social media, the left countering the right with the argument that the expensive clothes did not detract from Ocasio-Cortez’s political stance.

When I glanced at some of the images from the story on VF’s website that accompany a lengthy interview, my eyes landed on a pair of sling-back stilettos that Ocasio-Cortez wears in a couple of the shots. They were my shoe of choice for the women I dressed when I worked as a stylist: I loved them because the sharp point of the toe visually extends the leg of the wearer, regardless of one’s body type. I called up a friend, a former styling colleague, and asked him what he thought of the debate. He laughed. “What did they expect? It’s Vanity Fair.”

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Despite a high level of mainstream familiarity with the fashion industry, there remain fundamental misunderstandings about many of the industry’s core functions and key players — including the process of styling magazine editorials like the Ocasio-Cortez cover story, who benefits from them, and how. This confusion is evidenced not only by Ocasio-Cortez’s detractors but also by most of her supporters: both sides debated whether it was ethical or not for a socialist-leaning Democrat to own $14,000 worth of luxury brand clothing. Largely absent from the discussion was the fact that when a celebrity or model is shot in a fashion editorial, the clothing isn’t purchased by that individual: the garments are selected by the stylist, and then loaned out by the brand’s press relations department. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t own the items from that shoot, nor did she likely have a say about which brands were featured.

The mechanisms of an editorial photo shoot are admittedly esoteric, and for the most part the only window people have into these events are found in movies like Zoolander or Blowup. The visual concept for a cover story at a magazine like Vanity Fair is planned out by the title’s fashion editor, usually in conjunction with the editor-in-chief, as well as the individual stylist (the “sittings editor”) who will be working directly with the subject. The actual garments (“samples”) are loaned out to said stylist by a brand’s PR showroom. The process is colloquially known as “pulling” clothes or press samples, and in principle it goes something like this: You request a garment from the brand’s PR, your request is approved, you receive the item, shoot it, and then return it. It’s quite common for a brand to gift one of those samples to the celebrity after the shoot, but it’s nonetheless important to delineate the difference between a loaned sample and a purchased garment.

In reality, it’s not quite so simple: successfully pulling samples from Prada or Dior requires building a reputation as a stylist that takes years to secure and an enormous amount of energy (and adulation) to maintain. But the fact remains that when a celebrity poses for a Vanity Fair cover, wearing a brand and affording it are not the same thing. Behind the scenes, the actual retail cost of the garments is meaningless to the players who were involved with selecting them. The real currency of high-visibility placement, such as a cover, on a popular and relevant public figure, such as a well-known politician, is exposure.

Exposure means different things for each member of this exchange. For the subject, it means a new audience. For the magazine, it means, among other things, sustained advertiser interest. For the stylist, increased clout in the industry — with PR associates and directors, easier access to sought-after photographers, models, casting directors, set designers, hair and make-up teams, and so on. You’re also more in-demand with commercial clients, who like to hire freelancers who style prestigious celebrities for prestigious magazines.

The party who stands to gain the most in this exchange, in most cases, is the brand. Typically, only advertisers or prospective advertisers have their products featured on the cover: such real estate is critical to their survival, and expensive to support. It’s rare for a fledging brand to succeed (or a legacy brand to maintain its relevance) without the support of public figures sporting their wares. This is as true today for a brand like Aliétte as it was for Chanel in the 1910s. It’s not exactly the most ethical system — the firewall between advertising and ostensibly neutral, independent editorial opinion has all but disintegrated — but the VF fashion team did manage to do some good with this opportunity.

The Ocasio-Cortez shoot appears to have afforded the fashion team a rare opportunity to pull samples from designers that normally would not be considered for such placement. Smaller independent brands that are helmed by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ creative directors — Wales Bonner, Christopher John Rogers, Aliétte, and jewelry brand MATEO — were prioritized, none of whom are advertisers in the magazine. Established, corporate labels like Carolina Herrera and Bulgari were also included, but to a much lesser extent than they normally appear in VF cover shoots. The November 2020 cover story featuring Gal Godot in Saint Laurent, for instance, included just one item by a designer of color.

The value of this placement is worth far more to the independent brands than the dollar value of the clothes, and in the context of the exposure economy, the fashion team’s decision does merit applause. Moreover, judging Ocasio-Cortez to be falling short of a moral structure (or not) for wearing expensive clothing on the cover of a fashion magazine is a little bit like believing an advertisement is somehow not intended to manipulate you. She might have been the face of this particular exchange of exposure capital, but when you peel back a few layers, you see that the mechanisms that put a brand in front of viewers’ eyes operate independently of whoever is being shot on the cover.

Apart from this explanation, if you actually consider Ocasio-Cortez’s economic policy proposals for how private sector industries (such as consumer goods) should be run, the prospect of owning high-end clothes does not necessarily clash with her stance. “It’s important to delineate that you can be in the private sector and be a democratically socialist business. Worker co-operatives are a perfect example of that,” she stated in a 2019 MSNBC interview, in response to a query about which industries should be handled by the government and which should be handled by the private sector. “It’s not that public sector is democratically socialist and the private sector is not, it’s really about a more nuanced understanding about how our economy should work.” It’s unlikely that corporate conglomerates such as LVMH plan on embracing worker co-operatives anytime soon (or ever), but it’s important to consider Ocasio-Cortez’s ideas as much as we do her appearance.

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While researching other cover stories Ocasio-Cortez has appeared in, I came upon one that ran in New York Magazine in January 2020. She’s wearing a suit on this cover as well, all black, with a small red pin on her left lapel that looks like a bottle cap. The photographer has caught her in mid-smile, toothy and endearing. It took me a moment to realize that she almost certainly wasn’t styled for this image (there are specific hints that a stylist or art director is trained to notice); these garments, and the pin, belong to her. There are no credits in the story listing fashion brands, either — just a few images of her at a variety of gatherings over the course of her career.

In one of them, she wears a pair of pointy black stilettos again, and I wonder if those might be her shoe of choice as well. Maybe it’s just because I’m from New York, but I prefer the black suit visually to the white satin one by Aliétte. Since Ocasio-Cortez wore her own clothing, the New York Magazine cover wasn’t able to grant valuable exposure to emerging brands, but there’s something about this image that is more appealing to me, even as a stylist. Since there was less manufacturing required for this photograph than there was for the VF cover, there’s more room for her own persona to fill it up. It helps, of course, that she already has a good sense of style, but her easy confidence in this image is also part of the allure.

I’m reminded of a line from a Glenn O’Brien interview with Another Magazine from 2011: “Fashion is about conformity, and style is about non-conformity. Fashion is quite superficial, whereas style goes to the deep heart of things.” The difference between the covers falls into these two categories. The New York Magazine photograph unintentionally achieves what the Vanity Fair shot was supposed to have accomplished for their advertisers: the only thing I could think about was how much I wanted to run out and buy a black suit.

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