Home » What Zendaya’s two Vogue covers reveal about the fashion bible’s transatlantic rivalry

What Zendaya’s two Vogue covers reveal about the fashion bible’s transatlantic rivalry

What Zendaya’s two Vogue covers reveal about the fashion bible’s transatlantic rivalry

Move over, Beyoncé. Step aside, Taylor Swift. The latest celebrity to have been granted the rare honour of two simultaneous Vogue covers is Zendaya, cementing her status as the most in-demand star right now.

It is a privilege afforded to very few: there was Adele in 2021 – all smouldering bombshell on the then-editor Edward Enninful’s British Vogue cover, and in a sweeping Valentino ballgown on Anna Wintour’s American one – both were ambitious, and many in the fashion industry read them as battle lines being drawn.

Then there was the supermodel quartet of Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell in September last year, in which identical images were used on the British and American editions. Presumably it’s such a coup getting the four women on to one set that Wintour wanted to make the most of the photos. (Condé Nast would probably prefer it if we quietly glossed over that one other time, in 2016, when on learning that American Vogue was to make Rihanna its April cover star, the then-British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman pulled her May Rihanna cover forward by a month so she didn’t run hers second.)

Back to Zendaya, though, whose two covers couldn’t be more different. The American one, shot by Annie Leibovitz, shows Zendaya in a Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda rose dress – it’s all polished elegance and glamour, consistent with Adele’s US cover and Wintour’s longstanding vision.