Superstar young actor Timothée Chalamet graces the cover of British Vogue’s October issue this year, but this isn’t your typical magazine cover: Chalamet, who’s starring in the upcoming Dune franchise sequel, is the first man ever to appear alone on the cover of British Vogue, a choice, Editor-in-Chief Edward Enninful says, that was made very carefully after much deliberation.
“I always held off from a man-only print magazine cover,” Enninful, who became the publication’s first Black Editor-in-Chief in 2017, said in his editor’s note. “Forever conscious of Vogue being a space that celebrates women first, I didn’t want it to be a stunt or a statement. Yet, in turn, it increasingly felt to me that there was something at best old-fashioned, at worst dangerously retro, about these tired old gender boxes. Fashion doesn’t always work that way—is every last piece in your wardrobe strictly designed for the gender with which you identify? I doubt it.”
And so, Enninful waited until the time was exactly right to tap a male star for the cover, and Chalamet, whose angular beauty and demographic-spanning appeal has landed him in big-budged franchises and tender indies alike, is an inspired choice.
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Legendary fashion photographer Steven Meisel has captured Chalamet in an impish, flirty state, whether playfully pulling a vintage T-shirt aside to expose his chest or vamping in Stella McCartney chain mail.
In the accompanying interview, Chalamet says: “I had a delusional dream in my early teenage years to have, in my late teenage years, an acting career. And in my late teenage years, working on Homeland and starting to do theatre in New York, I felt like I reduced my goal to something more realistic, which was to work in theatre and hopefully make enough money doing either a TV show or something I could sustain myself [with]. And then it felt like every dream came true, exponentially. And then life is moving at six million miles per hour.”
He adds that “the ways I feel older than 26 I have always felt,” he says, relaxing. “It’s not like I feel like I’ve had some mental breakthrough that has given me perspective. The perspective that feels ‘old man’, I feel like I was born with it.”
Upon observing Chalamet’s seduction of the camera, the first reference that sprang to mind was the iconic, controversial 1981 Calvin Klein ads in which a young Brooke Shields intoned: “You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”
Like Harry Styles, Jacob Elordi and other modern heartthrobs, Chalamet has been effusively praised for rocking adventurous, unconventional ensembles that point towards the dissolution of the gender binary: earlier this month, the Call Me By Your Name star was snapped flaunting his skinny traps in a red backless Haider Ackerman jumpsuit.
But beyond his street credentials, Enninful said, Chalamet has an effusive, highly individual energy that makes it easy for him to play with fashion in a way that feels authentic. “Sure, we played with gender, incorporated womenswear and generally had a ball,” Enninful wrote of the cover shoot, “but for Timothée it all felt like the most natural space in the world.”
