Dogs Win September Cover Battle as Vogue Faces AI-Face and Nepo Baby Backlash

Q: What hidden flaw made Vogue's highly anticipated homage to a legendary 1992 cover feel completely lifeless to modern readers?

It felt lifeless because the homage copied the lineage, not the magic: readers saw a studio-made, over-polished image with no real story, setting, or chemistry. The new Vogue US cover put Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere—children of the couple from Herb Ritts’s 1992 cover—against a neutral grey backdrop in a tightly controlled Steven Meisel shoot. Online criticism focused less on the casting idea than on the execution. Compared with the 1992 original, which was praised for its sense of place, emotional charge, and narrative, the new version was seen as flat, static, and emotionally restrained. That points to the deeper flaw. Vogue leaned on nostalgia and famous parentage, but modern audiences are increasingly resistant to imagery that feels manufactured. Fashion stylist Marian Kwei said viewers are tired of the “sameness” of celebrity photography, where heavy retouching and polished surfaces can make images feel unreal. The web coverage echoed that reaction, describing the cover as studio-bound, washed out, and lacking depth. In other words, the problem was not simply that it referenced a classic. It was that the homage mistook resemblance for vitality. The original cover conveyed a relationship and a moment; the new one mostly conveyed concept and branding. In a cultural moment when readers are rewarding authenticity—even on a dog magazine cover—that absence of spontaneity made Vogue’s tribute feel dead on arrival.

1 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Aug 21

Dogue’s September covers featuring Bad Bunny’s beagle Sansa and other celebrity dogs drew broad praise, outshining heavily scrutinized September issues from British Vogue and Vogue US.
Critics targeted Nicole Kidman’s British Vogue cover over apparent airbrushing and an “AI” look, while Vogue US’s Kaia Gerber-Homer Gere cover was faulted as bland and too reliant on 2 celebrity offspring.
59-year-old Kidman’s cover also split viewers between seeing overdue representation of older women and seeing age erased by retouching, reflecting a wider backlash against uniform, poreless “Instagram face” aesthetics.
Experts said dogs feel more authentic in an era of AI-generated models, body-image politics and online fatigue, making canine covers easier to embrace, share and meme.
Dogue, launched in 2019, has tapped that mood as September covers carry outsized cultural weight and readers demand more story, character and realism from fashion magazines.