'Damn. A shoot with a clear theme and actual personality??' one reader wrote beneath Hilary Duff's new PAPER cover on Reddit. 'It's not even my birthday!'
That reaction says as much about the week the cover landed in as it does about the cover. It went up on Monday 26 October, shot by Anna Koblish and styled by Jason Rembert, with makeup by Kelsey Deenihan and hair by Barb Thompson. Duff crouches in a lilac lace minidress by Margot Fin, stacked with Pandora charm bracelets, against a wall of pink glitter, plastic gems and foil stars.
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by u/skermahger from discussion
in whatthefrockk
She is 39, in the middle of a comeback year she says surprised her, and this is her first cover of it. luck... or something arrived in February, her first studio album in a decade, and the Lucky Me Tour now runs to November 2027.
The Week Three Covers Looked the Same
Earlier in the month, three titles ran covers shot by the same photographer, the Hungarian artist Szilveszter Makó, inside a single week. Elle ran Hunter Schafer. WSJ Magazine followed three days later with Gigi Hadid, on its November digital cover. Vogue ran Jenna Ortega on its November cover after that.
All three used the boxed-in, painterly setup Makó is known for, which left them looking like variations on one template. The same Balenciaga Couture feather dress turned up in both Ortega's Vogue shoot and Hadid's WSJ Magazine feature.
The industry reaction was not generous. 'This is a giant screw-up,' one fashion media source said. 'I have never, ever, ever seen anything like this before,' said another. A third was blunter still: 'There is a lack of creativity with all these magazines. It seems like a big coincidence or a big joke.'
A source close to the Hadid shoot pushed back, saying that cover was conceived in March and shot in July, and that 'any visual similarities across Szilveszter's work are a reflection of his well-known signature aesthetic.'
Why This Keeps Happening
The explanations on offer all come back to money. Observers have put it down to budget cuts and to the fading of the arrangements that once kept a photographer's signature look tied to a single publisher.
The staffing tells the same story. One former magazine editor recalls four staff photographers in her newsroom in the 1990s, alongside editors, sub-editors and proofreaders. As the advertising money went, four photographers became one, and what survives a cut like that is the shot that works, repeated.
In one recent trade piece on why covers have become interchangeable, PAPER was among the few titles named as still doing something else. Duff's shoot is the kind of thing that keeps it on the list: a clear idea, executed loudly, with a set built rather than hired.
What Readers Liked, and What They Didn't
The praise was not for the clothes. It was for her face.
'I don't really care all that much about the fashion but we've got distinct expressions!' one reader wrote. 'I call that a win.' What people kept returning to was what the retouching had left alone. 'There's crinkles and wrinkles and dimples in some of the expressions,' one reader wrote, 'like there's a couple real facial expressions that aren't airbrushed to hell.'
The styling is where the goodwill stopped. 'The fits are uninspired. I think they could have balanced the gem makeup with some more interesting looks, especially because the gems aren't that over-the-top,' one of the sharper critiques read. 'That being said, I love Hilary and I think she modeled well!'
The crystals along her brows, the charm bracelets and the Y2K staging were what people wanted to copy. The clothes underneath were the part nobody mentioned without a caveat.
Twenty-One Years of Pink
One reader recognised the look from somewhere. 'This gave me flashbacks to her Candie's campaign model era,' she wrote.
Duff fronted the shoe label from June 2005, photographed for print advertisements surrounded by pink shopping bags. She was a teenager then, selling sandals. She is 39 now, selling an album, and the colour has not changed.
What has changed is how rare it looks to build a set at all.
