Media organizations can find themselves in ironic situations when writing about gender equality — pointing out disparities in the world at large while struggling with it internally. That’s where editor-in-chief Cindi Leive says the top women at Glamour found themselves this fall.
In her opening letter for the magazine’s February issue, Leive says the brand is one of the first to cry foul at the lack of female representation but has had some troubling stats of its own: Only 37% of the photographers for the print pages this fall were women. In addition, women only made up 32% of the hairstylists.
“Gender equality is on all of our minds. It’s really important to me that Glamour not just talk the talk about female empowerment, but that we also walk the walk,” she told USA TODAY in an email. “So we’ve decided to support women in the most meaningful way we can: by hiring them. From first page to our last every photo we commissioned for the February issue was created by women: photographers, stylists, hair, makeup, everything.”
Though they still featured some male talent, notably on the cover.
Allison Williams, Zosia Mamet, Lena Dunham and Jemima Kirke are wearing pieces from the spring 2017 collection by Marc Jacobs for the cover feature, and first lady Michelle Obama’s makeup artist Carl Ray is featured in a piece about leaving the White House.
So why wasn’t a female designer chosen to dress the women-led cast of Girls?
“For this issue we focused on our hiring,” Leive explained. “We wanted to ensure that everybody we employed for the issue content was female.”
“Our female contributors were then given free rein to choose whatever fashion items they liked,” she continued, “which included in this story, not just Marc Jacobs but also Prada and Fenty,” both of which are helmed by female designers.
Dunham hailed the women-led issue for another reason: The absence of Photoshopping. “Thank you to the women in Hollywood (and on Instagram!) leading the way, inspiring and normalizing the female form in EVERY form, and thank you to @glamourmag for letting my cellulite do the damn thing on news stands everywhere today,” she wrote on Instagram.
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