Magazine Covers, 2019 vs. 1994
The Clintons were having their first year in the White House. Barbara Streisand was on her first full concert tour. Supermodels were at the peak of their powers as the celebrity craze of major magazines had yet to solidify. It was 1994 and magazines were in their heyday.
Essentially the Internet before the Internet was a thing, there were a lot of magazines 25 years ago. A research report from 2005 put the number of monthlies and weeklies published in the U.S. at 11,000. Today, that number is just around 7,000, a decrease of about 40 percent.
Here, WWD compares magazines from 2019 to their 1994 iterations. From cover lines to photography styles to depictions of women in general, some things have certainly changed. Looking through the Cosmos of 1994, the insistence of cleavage is the most striking. While a few of the covers this year show some skin, the magazine has largely moved away from the overt sexualization of its cover stars. Elle had yet to be acquired by Hearst in 1994, but the magazine of today differs in a number of ways, most notably a cleaner look with very few cover lines and typically brighter colors that have taken hold. 1994 was a time of transition for Esquire, as is 2019. Then Hearst had recently poached Edward Kosner from New York Magazine to run the title, and quickly turned to a white background to set it apart, along with featuring the occasional woman. Now, the magazine again has a new editor in Michael Sebastian, whose ideas for the publication are not yet apparent. Under his predecessor Jay Fielden, Esquire was focused on celebrity portraits. GQ, too, used to feature the occasional woman. It may be a better thing that it stopped considering a 1994 feature on the entire gender asked “What makes them tick, makes them crazy, rocks their world — and why are they so angry?” The cover went on to refer to the decade as the “paranoid, PC Nineties” and claimed “loving women has never been dicier.” One can’t help but wonder what Geena Davis, who had produced and starred in “Thelma & Louise” in 1991, thought of her profile appearing next to that. both then part of the now dissolved Time Inc. Nearly everything about the magazine’s overall look has been revamped, save for the typeface of the name itself.