Iman Magazine Covers: Iconic Appearances Shaping Fashion

Iman's first American Vogue cover ran in August 1976, photographed by Norman Parkinson against a flat white studio backdrop in the magazine's New York office. The styling, by the long-running American Vogue fashion director Polly Mellen, was deliberately stripped back: a single ivory silk caftan, hair pulled high in a turban, no jewellery, no setting. The decision Mellen and the editor-in-chief Grace Mirabella had made, to introduce the new Somali-born model in the cleanest possible visual register, ran against the broader 1976 American editorial vocabulary, which had been routinely styling its few non-white covers in ethnographic or costume references. The Parkinson cover refused both readings.

What followed across the next decade was the most concentrated cover archive any African-born model had assembled in the recorded history of American and European fashion publishing. Helmut Newton's Vogue Paris covers, Richard Avedon's American editorial portfolios, the Versace campaign work shot by Steven Meisel, the Vogue Italia covers under Franca Sozzani's later editorship, and the eventual 2017 Vogue Arabia inaugural issue cover all sit in the same archive. The total cover count, by any conservative estimate of the working senior fashion-press community, runs past 200 covers across the broader 1976-to-2024 period.

The August 1976 American Vogue debut

The August 1976 American Vogue cover was the working public introduction of Iman to the broader American editorial industry. Wilhelmina Cooper, who ran Wilhelmina Models in New York, had signed Iman in late 1975 after the Peter Beard photographs taken in Nairobi had circulated through the senior American fashion-editorial community. Grace Mirabella, who had been running American Vogue since 1971, had positioned the Iman introduction across multiple editorial cycles before commissioning the Parkinson cover.

The cover was, in industry terms, an unusual editorial decision. American Vogue had not run a Black-cover model since the Beverly Johnson cover of August 1974, and the broader 1976 editorial cycle had been substantially less diverse than the post-civil-rights press cycles of the late 1960s. The Iman cover was the working continuation of the Mirabella editorial framework that the Johnson cover had begun; the two covers together formed the institutional working argument for a more diverse American Vogue cover register that the broader 1980s would inherit.

For the philanthropic-and-business side of Iman's career the cover archive sits alongside, our profile of Iman's philanthropic record covers the work the cover record has continued to draw on.

The Helmut Newton Vogue Paris covers

Helmut Newton, the Berlin-born photographer who had been shooting for Vogue Paris under Francine Crescent's editorship since the late 1960s, photographed Iman for the December 1977 cover and for the broader 1977-to-1982 Vogue Paris editorial cycle. The December 1977 cover, shot at the Hôtel Lutetia in Paris, placed Iman in a Saint Laurent black tuxedo jacket and ivory blouse against a textured stone wall; the styling was theatrical, dramatic, and quintessentially Newton.

The Newton Vogue Paris work was the formal editorial counterpart to the broader Newton-Saint Laurent commercial portfolio that Iman was working inside through the same period. Newton had photographed the Saint Laurent Le Smoking tuxedo campaign in 1975; the 1977 Iman Vogue Paris cover extended the same visual register into the editorial cover work. The Newton-Iman editorial archive, by the close of the 1980s, ran across more than thirty individual Vogue Paris portfolios and several Vogue Italia covers.

The Richard Avedon work

Richard Avedon, who had been shooting for American Vogue since 1966 and was the most institutionally important American fashion photographer of the post-1965 era, photographed Iman across roughly fifteen years of editorial-and-commercial work. The 1989 American Vogue cover, shot in Avedon's Manhattan studio against the white backdrop he had been using since 1947, is the single most-republished image in the broader Iman cover archive. The shoot, styled by Liz Tilberis (who had moved to American Vogue briefly between her British Vogue and Harper's Bazaar editorships), placed Iman in a single black turtleneck with no jewellery.

The Avedon-Iman working relationship ran across the broader In the American West portrait portfolio (1984), the Versace advertising campaigns (1987-to-1992), the Calvin Klein editorial cycle (1985-to-1989), and the broader Vogue and Harper's Bazaar editorial framework through the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the time Avedon died in October 2004, the Iman archive inside his working portfolio was one of the larger single-model bodies of work in the broader Avedon record.

The Versace campaign cycle, 1987 to 1992

Gianni Versace's working relationship with Iman ran across the broader 1985-to-1992 advertising-and-runway cycle, with the Steven Meisel-shot Spring 1991 Versace campaign as the most-circulated single piece of work in the archive. Versace had been positioning his brand through the 1980s around a deliberate visual-vocabulary integration of multiple racial-and-cultural references; the Iman casting decisions were a working part of that broader brand-direction framework.

The Versace work also extended Iman's runway tenure into the broader Versace Spring-and-Fall Milan-Fashion-Week cycle through the late 1980s. Iman walked the Versace Spring 1988, Fall 1988, Spring 1989 and broader 1990-and-1991 ready-to-wear shows; her appearance in the Spring 1989 closing look, a draped silk jersey gown that Versace had designed specifically for her, sits in several of the broader senior fashion-trade-press retrospectives of the Versace working career.

For the parallel Versace coverage, our profile of Naomi Campbell's modeling career covers the cohort that worked alongside Iman across the Versace runway cycle.

The 1989 retirement, and the post-modeling cover cycle

Iman publicly retired from working modeling in 1989, with the May 1989 Vogue cover serving as her last formal cover-shoot as a working model. The retirement was structured around her decision to develop the cosmetics-business plan that would launch as IMAN Cosmetics in 1994 and around her desire to spend more time with her then-eleven-year-old daughter Zulekha Haywood, born during her marriage to the NBA player Spencer Haywood (1977-to-1987).

The post-1989 cover record, however, has been substantially larger than most working models accumulate after a formal retirement announcement. The 1992 Vogue April cover with David Bowie, photographed shortly after their marriage in Lausanne in April 1992; the 1995 Vogue Italia cover shot by Steven Meisel for the magazine's anniversary issue; the 2003 Essence cover for the magazine's Black-women's-magazine 33rd-anniversary issue; the 2010 i-D cover for the magazine's 30th-anniversary issue; the 2014 Harper's Bazaar "Icons" issue cover that ran in the September issue; the 2017 Vogue Arabia inaugural issue cover under Princess Deena Aljuhani Abdulaziz's founding editorship; and the broader 2020 British Vogue April issue cover under Edward Enninful all sit in the post-retirement cover archive.

The 2017 Vogue Arabia inaugural issue cover

The Vogue Arabia inaugural issue, which launched in March 2017 under Princess Deena Aljuhani Abdulaziz's founding editorship, featured Iman on the cover photographed by Mariano Vivanco. The cover was structurally important to the broader regional fashion-publishing infrastructure: Vogue Arabia was Condé Nast's first dedicated Arabic-language edition, and the casting decision placed an African-born model rather than an Arab-region model on the inaugural cover, with the working visual reference to the broader Arab-African heritage that Iman's Somali background connected to.

The cover ran across the broader 2017 regional fashion-trade-press cycle as one of the more institutionally significant covers of the year. The subsequent Vogue Arabia editorial framework under Manuel Arnaut's editorship (from October 2017) continued the broader regional-fashion-industry development the inaugural Iman cover had launched.

The 2020 British Vogue Edward Enninful collaboration

The April 2020 British Vogue cover, shot by Steven Meisel and styled by Edward Enninful, placed Iman on the magazine's Forces for Change cover series alongside Naomi Campbell, Adut Akech, Adwoa Aboah and the broader Edward Enninful-led editorial framework. The cover ran as part of the broader Enninful 2017-to-2024 British Vogue editorial cycle that had been substantially reshaping the magazine's working cover-casting framework toward a more diverse working register.

The 2020 cover was the working public endorsement of the long Enninful-Iman relationship. Enninful, who had started at i-D magazine at eighteen in 1990 and had been working inside the fashion-editorial scene Iman had helped build through the late 1970s and 1980s, structured the cover as a tribute to the institutional infrastructure the senior fashion-press community had built across the previous four decades.

The 2022 Pirelli Calendar

The 2022 Pirelli Calendar, photographed by Bryan Adams in Vancouver in November 2021, featured Iman alongside Cher, Grimes, Saweetie, St. Vincent, and Rita Ora on the Adams-curated roster. The calendar, which has run as one of the more institutionally important annual fashion-photography commissions since the 1964 inaugural edition, placed Iman in a setting the Pirelli archive had not regularly featured her inside before.

The 2022 calendar appearance extended the cover archive into the fine-art-photography register the Pirelli has been operating inside since the Robert Freson and Sarah Moon calendars of the late 1960s. The Adams-Iman working relationship continued through the Adams-Bowie friendship that had been part of the Iman-David Bowie household.

What the cover archive teaches the industry

The Iman cover archive is structurally interesting partly because it spans an unusually long working horizon and partly because the working decisions that organised it were deliberately institutional. The 1976 American Vogue cover was structurally an institutional editorial decision rather than a celebrity-press placement; the 2017 Vogue Arabia inaugural cover was structurally a regional-editorial-development decision; the 2020 British Vogue Enninful cover was structurally a working tribute to the broader four-decade infrastructure the senior fashion-press community had built.

The contemporary working-supermodel cohort has continued to draw on the Iman cover framework for the model of how a working cover archive can support a longer-tenure career. The 35-year-plus Christy Turlington, 30-year-plus Naomi Campbell, and 40-year-plus Iman archives have all demonstrated that the working cover-archive can extend through multiple decades when the institutional editorial relationships are deliberately maintained.

For the parallel cover archive, our profile of Kate Moss's magazine covers covers the British-and-American cover work of the next-generation working supermodel cohort.