Culture Jam – 2008 Vogue Cover

The image shown below is a controversial Vogue magazine cover from April 2008, featuring basketball mega-star LeBron James and supermodel Gisele Bündchen. Below, I will deconstruct the cover, as there is so much to critique in this problematic advertisement.

Vogue is a classic American magazine that has been around since 1892, and has been known for its fashion and style, and for conforming to heteronormative white Americana culture. This magazine cover exemplifies that perfectly. I will go through the three most striking problems I find with this image, beginning with the symbolism of the people themselves.

James is a very tall, athletically-built African-American man, posing with a very aggressive facial expression flexing his muscles, with one arm wrapped around Bündchen, who is a tall, beautiful, slim white woman, posed in a submissive stance next to James. The aggressive, dominant, large black male next to the dainty, submissive white woman is a perpetuation of an old racial stereotype that has been around since the days of the American Civil War. When you look at this image, Bündchen looks small and helpless next to the aggressive and almost scary-looking James. The way these two people are positioned, from head to toe, tells an old, white story of black male aggression towards white women, that was and continues to be commonly used to incriminate black males in American society.

The next troubling aspect of this image is the ‘Perfect Fit, Dressing for every shape from size 0 to 16’. This bothers me instantly because it closes off the human form into a dichotomy of “natural vs unnatural”, the natural bodies being those that fit into American sizes 0 to 16, and the unnatural bodies being those that fit clothing outside of these sizes. This is horribly marginalizing to those folks whose bodies are smaller or larger than these standard sizes, or to those who need custom-fit clothing, etc. This ad could make these people feel like they do not deserve or can not possibly find their ‘perfect fit’ in clothing, which is bullshit and discriminating.

The final issue I will address is the fact that this issue is called the “Shape Issue” and it features a pro athlete and a supermodel as the cultural mascots of exemplary body shapes. This is so problematic because it perpetuates the idea that these two hetero-gender-normative, low body fat human forms are the pinnacles of the human form. Meanwhile, we as feminists understand that the human body comes in so many different shapes, sizes, and colours, and there is no one “ideal” body in the world; this idea is extremely subjective. To show these two people as the ideal human forms is marginalizing to anyone who does not look like them.

The Jammed image below:

In this image, I chose to alter the three problems I discussed with the advertisement, described above. To start, I added a speech bubble in front of James and Bündchen that says “Our physical forms are being used to perpetuate heteronormative stereotypes!” This is to showcase the fact that their bodies, in these chosen positions, do in fact support racist, sexist, classist stereotypes.

The next alteration was the ‘Perfect Fit’ section on the left. Instead of originally saying ‘Perfect Fit, Dressing for every shape from size 0 to 16’, I changed it to say, “Perfect Fit (As long as you fit a shape from size 0 to 16)”. This demonstrates that not everyone fits into sizes 0-16, and this ad marginalizes those who do not physically fit these sizes.

Finally, I changed the bottom type from ‘Secrets of the Best Bodies’ to instead read, “These are Society’s Best Bodies”. I think this bluntly shows that in the eyes of society, these two cis people’s bodies are the pinnacles of the human form. In other words, if you want to have the “best” body, you should look like one of these two people. 

This advertisement is toxic from top to bottom, and I hope this jammed version of the image speaks a little more truly and blatantly about the real intentions of this magazine cover.