Demi Moore

FLASHBACK

Atruly great magazine cover surprises, even shocks, and connects in a nano-second. A glance at the image by photographer Annie Leibovitz that graced the August 1991 issue of Vanity Fair, depicting a famous movie star beautifully bursting with life and proudly flaunting her body, was an instant culture buster—and damn the expected primal screams of those constipated critics, cranky subscribers, and tidqety newsstand buyers, who the editors and publishers surely knew would regard a pregnant female body as "grotesque and obscene." Demi Moore's hand bra helped to elegantly frame the focal point of this startlingly dramatic symbol of female empowerment. To me, quite simply, it was a brave image on the cover of a great magazine—a stunning work of art that conveyed a potent message that challenged a repressed society.

In the 1960s, whenever I was creating what I knew would be a controversial cover for Esquire magazine (witness Muhammad Ali posing as the tortured martyr Saint Sebastian), I would warn the editor that the image would inevitably cause "trouble." Harold Hayes would always react by saying, "Yeaaaahhhh!" Twenty years ago this month, when I pulled my copy of Vanity Fair out of my mailbox, I heard myself whisper, "Yeaaaahhhh!"

GEORGE LOIS