The brief from British Vogue's editor was a single cover image to define the new decade. One woman, one face, one announcement. Peter Lindbergh told Liz Tilberis that one wouldn't do it, that the idea of a defining beauty had broadened past anything a single model could carry, and that he wanted five. Tilberis agreed. That was the whole negotiation, and everything else followed from it.

The shoot happened on a warm Sunday in November 1989 in the Meatpacking District in New York, which at the time still smelled like meat. Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford stood on the cobbles between cold-store loading bays. Brana Wolf styled them in Giorgio di Sant'Angelo bodysuits and Levi's jeans. Christiaan did the hair, which is to say he mostly left it alone. The film was black and white. There was no retouching to speak of and no makeup worth mentioning. The whole thing read as a refusal of the decade that had just ended.

That was the trick, and the reason this particular cover, of all the supermodel group shots that would follow, is the one people still treat as the origin event. The 1980s glamour vocabulary, the big hair and the shoulder pads and the heavy contouring, hadn't been argued with so much as quietly stepped past. Lindbergh just photographed five women standing next to each other in plain clothes on a Sunday, and the previous aesthetic stopped being viable overnight. You couldn't run a 1988-style cover after this without looking dated. That's the part the trade press took a while to catch up with.

It also did a thing the industry hadn't quite worked out how to do yet, which was to treat the models as a collective. Until roughly this moment, fashion campaigns and magazine covers trafficked in single faces; a model was a person you booked, not a group you assembled. The Lindbergh cover made the supermodels legible as a category, a shorthand, a unit of cultural reference that worked even when the names underneath weren't fully distinguishable to the general public. Within months, George Michael had hired all five for the Freedom! '90 video, directed by David Fincher, which is the same idea (these five women, this specific assembly) carried forward into pop. Versace would do the runway version in Milan the following year, with the same collective logic. The category was set.

What Lindbergh said about it later, in a Guardian interview in 2016, was that he never felt he was changing anything. It came together effortlessly, was how he put it, all intuition. I take that to mean the change was already in the room and the picture was just where it became visible. The 1980s ended on a Sunday in November in a part of New York that no longer exists in the form it did then, and the people responsible thought they were just doing their jobs.

There is a footnote that matters. Anna Wintour had recently taken over US Vogue, and one of her early acts as editor was to publish a Lindbergh photograph the previous regime had rejected, shot in white shirts on the beach at Santa Monica. That picture and this one are essentially the same argument made twice on either side of the Atlantic. The American version ran first, in the August 1988 issue, and it was the British cover eighteen months later that got read as the manifesto. Sometimes the later iteration is the one that takes.

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