Vogue

The Smithsonian Libraries Research Annex holds more than a hundred years of Vogue magazine, as well as thousands of other periodicals essential for research into American history, but few are as special as the August 1974 issue of Vogue featuring Beverly Ann Johnson on the cover. Johnson had been working as a model for several years, scoring the cover of Glamour magazine in 1971 while she was still attending Northeastern University. As the first African American model on the cover of U.S. Vogue, her appearance initiated a blitz of major magazines putting African American women on their covers. Even though Black supermodel Donyale Luna’s appearance on the cover of British Vogue in March 1966 eclipsed Johnson’s by eight and half years, it is Johnson’s 1974 Vogue cover that endures as the spark that ignited Black inclusion in high fashion. However, it was to be but one wave in the ebb and flow of racial equity since then. In a June 2020 Washington Post opinion piece, Johnson, as a proud iconoclast, asserts the importance of challenging the ongoing racism in the fashion industry today.