Cover Girl

A cover girl is a woman whose photograph features on the front cover of a magazine. She may be a model, celebrity or entertainer. more...

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The term first appeared in English in 1915. A less commonly used antonym is cover boy.

Types of cover girl

Women feature on the cover of the majority of general-interest magazines in the west for both men and women, although there are notable exceptions discussed below.

Celebrities feature on the cover of magazines such as Redbook for women, or Gentlemen's Quarterly, Maxim or Esquire for men. The use of royalty or aristocracy is linked to this: the primary objective is recognition.

Some magazines for women feature an unknown model that represents the style of the magazine, such as Seventeen. A parallel to this trend is reflected in men’s magazines like Men's Fitness or Sports Illustrated.

An intermediate category is the use of a model or who is recognizable because of their exposure in magazines or advertising, a strategy often adopted by Elle magazine.

In most cases, the objective is to maximize sales and differentiation, while also expressing the brand values of the title.

Editorial approaches and the market-place

Editorial decisions concerning the positioning of the magazine in the market-place are a key influence on the portrayal of women on the cover.

In the 20th century, numerous women's magazines would feature royalty or aristocracy on their covers. In the 1980s and 1990s, Diana, Princess of Wales would be a popular cover choice—but usually for weeklies, usually shot by paparazzi, so strictly these were not "cover girl" images. However, there were exceptions where authorized portraits of royalty, such as Diana, Princess Beatrice and Queen Elizabeth II, were taken for Vogue, Tatler and Harper's Bazaar. Despite public complaints about exploitation in the 1990s, publishers have not shied away from using royalty when possible.

New men’s style magazines founded in the 1980s, like Arena and Gentlemen's Quarterly rarely featured women on the cover, and where they did they were intended not to be sexually provocative, deliberately distancing the magazine from ‘top shelf’ soft core pornographic magazines. Notably Esquire’s first edition featured a photograph of Brigitte Bardot that was over thirty years old. However, this trend changed during the 1990s, initially with Loaded in the UK, followed by FHM. GQ’s UK edition was eventually forced to follow suit.

Later Peter Howarth, UK editor of Esquire famously removed semi-naked women from the covers in a move to once again differentiate the magazine from the competition. The result was a drop in sales but an increase in advertising revenue, as the magazine was able to attract advertisers for more high-end products than before.

Read more at Wikipedia.org