Inde Navarrette's new magazine cover landed to a warm reception on Thursday, 15 October drawing tens of thousands of likes within hours. Then the fashion forums got hold of it, and one verdict kept surfacing: 'I love her but is really boring. Lifeless photoshoot.'
The 25-year-old actress appears on the cover of W's New Originals issue, photographed by Frank Lebon and styled by Allia Alliata di Montereale, wearing head-to-toe Dior Couture. In the images, she is folded into a purple box, sometimes crouching, sometimes stretched flat against its walls, in pieces by Dior, Versace, Marc Jacobs and Dolce & Gabbana.
The box is where the argument started. On a fashion subreddit, hundreds of upvotes went to comments calling the set claustrophobic and the styling flat, with several asking why a magazine celebrating new talent had chosen to shut its cover star inside a cube.
Her Face Was the Point
The specific complaint was not about the clothes. Navarrette broke out this year as Nikki Freeman in the horror film Obsession, which has taken more than $500 million worldwide and won her a Critics' Choice Super Award. Clips of her reactions became memes, and she has said she now sends one to her own father.
That is why the stillness grated. 'The sad thing is she got known for her expressive face in the movie, and then they do this,' one commenter wrote. 'What's the point of having a good actress/model if you don't know how to direct a photoshoot?'
Others pointed the finger at the shoot rather than the subject. 'Inde has super expressive mannerisms, they had to direct and choose the photos without expression,' read one widely upvoted reply, while another suggested performers are now being actively directed away from showing anything at all.
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The Comparison That Caught On
The most popular comment in the thread took a different route, joking that the blank expression made her hard to tell apart from Millie Bobby Brown. A reply calling the look 'like MBB and Olivia Rodrigo had a baby' drew hundreds of upvotes of its own, and one person admitted they had mistaken the cover for Rodrigo before recognising Brown further in.
It was a backhanded way of making the same point. A magazine issue built around originality had produced a cover that reminded people of two other famous faces.
Some Say the Box Is the Idea
Not everyone read it as a failure. One commenter argued the sequence has a narrative, pointing out that Navarrette appears to be climbing out by the final frame. 'She's too big for the box as well,' they wrote. 'She's literally going outside of the box... I swear media literacy and visual education are dead.'
The magazine's own framing supports that reading. Its subtitle describes Navarrette as moving into the big leagues by thinking, and acting, outside the box. The concept was deliberate, and the escape was built into it.
Others simply liked the pictures. 'I can't believe people don't like this. It's giving 90s album shoot and I love it,' one wrote, with a reply agreeing the direction felt like a 'gen x soft club' record sleeve. Away from the forum, the response was far kinder, with comments on the magazine's own post running from 'Amazing shot' to 'Turned out incredible'.
A Cover About Being Boxed In
The split comes down to what the box is doing. Read one way, it is a metaphor a rising star is escaping. Read another, it is a cage that hides the thing that made her famous in the first place.
Navarrette has not responded to the criticism, and in the accompanying interview she sounds unbothered by most things at the moment. She describes sudden fame as 'a little overwhelming sometimes', and says that 'every day feels like the best day of my life so far'.
