Sara Stewart

Sara Stewart

Fashion & Beauty

Why Lena Dunham shouldn’t pose for Vogue

By now, we know a couple of sartorial truths about Lena Dunham: she cleans up nice when not playing her disheveled “Girls” character, and she doesn’t take the fashion world overly seriously.

Take this query to her million-plus Twitter followers, on Emmys dress selection: “Should I do a backwards tux a la Celine Dion or a fringed t-shirt dress from family vacay to Puerto Vallarta?”

Also, this one: “You’d believe me if I told you this bra on my head was fashion from a high end milliner.”

So, then, it’s strange to hear that she’s reportedly in talks with Anna Wintour to appear on the cover of Vogue, that bastion of perilously thin cover girls and highly serious haute couture. It’s unclear when the cover would appear, but with “Girls” returning on January 12, it could be as early as the new year.

“[Anna] is willing to violate a lot of Vogue traditions to do it, including putting her on the cover even though she doesn’t really conform to the body type that Vogue has featured for most of its history,” RadarOnline quoted an insider as saying, in its report that Wintour was hosting a “top secret” dinner for Dunham. “Anna’s perspective is that they need each other.”

Anna Wintour (left) and Lena Dunham set the Internet ablaze after being photographed at the 2013 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Event in LA.
Anna Wintour (left) and Lena Dunham set the Internet ablaze after being photographed at the 2013 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Event in LA.

You hear that, Lena? She needs you. And you should tell Anna “no thanks.”

As the triple-threat star and creator of one of HBO’s hottest shows, Dunham has risen over the past couple of years to become one of the strongest female voices in popular culture. Her frank and funny approach to millennial angst — in her show, on her Twitter feed, in essays for the New Yorker and, soon, in a new book of advice and essays — has changed the cultural conversation. What does a feminist look like? Like her.

She certainly doesn’t need to do the old-fashioned stint of humbling herself before the Vogue gods. It’s not like they’re going to play by her rules anyway — and her rules are what’s hot these days, not theirs. Dunham may have earned the cover of a major magazine, but it isn’t Vogue — it’s Time. Furthermore, Time would allow Dunham to appear as she is. Vogue would shoehorn her into their own ideas of beauty.

“It is likely that they’ll set up Dunham’s photo shoot to make it as aligned with the ‘traditional’ image as possible,” says Dr. Jingsi Christina Wu, assistant professor of Journalism, Media Studies, and Public Relations at Hofstra University.

Even if Anna makes some sort of grandiose exception for Lena — allowing her to appear un-airbrushed, perhaps, or to retain her curves — the photo shoot would still appear “special,” says Andi Ziesler, co-founder and editorial/creative director at Bitch Media, and its monthly magazine of the same name.

“Fashion magazines can and do pay lip service to what they call ‘real bodies,’ but they exoticize those bodies by making any instance of their appearance the entire story,” she says. “Serena Williams has been on Vogue’s cover, as has Jennifer Hudson; Adele was on the cover of British Vogue — where the photo was cropped to show mostly her face.

“What they all have in common was they were framed as physical outliers, notable more for bucking Vogue’s notorious equation of thinness and fashion than for their specific talents and successes.”

But, in the event that Dunham’s in favor of glamorizing herself for a shoot, she should make Anna work for it. Demand that she hand over the editorial reins, too. You’re a writer, Lena; you’ve got a new book coming out. Guest edit the issue and make it your own. Show us what a millennial Vogue would look like.

It’s a publication badly in need of an update, especially regarding its view of women with bodies that don’t conform to the status quo. The mag’s cover of Kate Winslet this month has already garnered backlash for its obvious over-Photoshopping of the 38-year-old star, who famously protested back in 2003 when GQ whittled down her legs in a cover photo.

Last year, Adele got similar treatment in a Vogue cover that saw the curvy British singer sporting hollowed-out cheekbones and a tiny waist, a portrait that was particularly ironic given her earlier comment responding to designer Karl Lagerfeld calling her fat: “I’ve never wanted to look like models on the cover of magazines. I represent the majority of women and I’m very proud of that.”

And, perhaps most famously, there was Oprah Winfrey’s appearance on the cover in 1998; Wintour herself confessed that she ordered the talk-show host to slim down before the shoot. “I suggested that it might be an idea that she lose a little bit of weight,” the editor told “60 Minutes” in an interview. “I said simply that you might feel more comfortable. She was a trooper! She totally welcomed the idea, and she went on a very stringent diet. It was one of our most successful covers ever.”

Lena's pull with Millennials would make her a great catch for Vogue, but what would the "Girls" creator get out of the deal?
Lena’s pull with Millennials would make her a great catch for Vogue, but what would the “Girls” creator get out of the deal?

This fall, there was also a minor uproar over Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s appearance in the magazine, posed upside down in a come-hither pose. The shot prompted Time magazine to publicly ask, “Is it feminist for a powerful woman to pose for a fashion magazine?”

Dunham isn’t a CEO, but with her 600,000-plus viewership and Twitter army, she commands a considerably wider swath of public attention — and is thus a potentially more influential role model — than Mayer, which begs the question of whether she’d be diluting her brand by agreeing to play by Wintour’s retro rules.

“It’s a step forward for women to make headway into the fashion industry through their talent and intellect, rather than their looks — but it may send the wrong message if their image ends up ‘beautified’ or ‘mainstreamed,’” says Wu.

Besides, Dunham has often cracked wise about her disdain for traditional beauty standards, displaying a perspective that’s light-years ahead of the fashion industry’s relentless insistence that looks are everything, and that one body type is the right body type.

In a March interview with Playboy, she said she didn’t think she’d want to look like a Victoria’s Secret model: “I don’t want to go through life wondering if people are talking to me because I have a big rack. Not being the babest person in the world creates a nice barrier. The people who talk to you are the people who are interested in you. It must be a big burden in some ways to look that way and be in public.”

It’s also a big burden to be the one who’s weighed down with so many expectations from so many camps, Zeisler points out.

“We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if there were more women like Lena Dunham in the spotlight,” she says. “By that I don’t mean just more women who aren’t a size zero, but also more women who have her qualities of confidence and ambition. If that were the case, Lena Dunham’s work could exist without being a referendum on young women and sexuality and feminism — and, obviously, body size.”

We’ll never know what went on at Wintour’s “top secret” dinner — and it remains to be seen whether the cover will happen — but we like to imagine Dunham responding to Anna’s passive-aggressive weight loss suggestions by quoting her “Girls” character.

“No, I have not tried a lot to lose weight. I decided I’d have some other concerns in my life, okay?”