Usually, a first lady looking radiant on the cover of Vogue is a PR coup for any presidential administration and a carefully-cultivated statement for a magazine that primarily covers fashion but also insists on its seriousness and depth.
There have been some huge, unenforced errors in first lady features–profiling Asma al-Assad as a cosmopolitan “rose in the desert” as her dictator husband slaughtered thousands of Syrian civilians may have been the biggest–but generally, respected first lady + tasteful Vogue treatment = mutually beneficial. And it would have been for first lady Jill Biden, who looks equal parts chic, powerful, and beatific in a Suffragette-white tuxedo dress in front of a cream-plaster backdrop, her name in font so large it is dwarfed only slightly by the Vogue logo, and augmented by a quote that was meant to be a feminist rallying cry: “We will decide our future.”
Except the cover dropped just days after her husband gave a debate performance so disastrous that there is widespread talk of replacing him on the ticket, and as Jill, Joe, and the Biden family gathered at Camp David to hash out next steps. “We will decide our future” suddenly takes on a different implication—not that voters generally and women specifically will decide the nation’s future, but that a small, tight-knit family will decide for the rest of us.
