Was Timothée Chalamet’s Vogue cover really so out of this world?
The actor, who wore Celine against a celestial backdrop, seemed to be referencing something - or someone - quite specific.
On the December cover of Vogue, a turtlenecked Timothée Chalamet stands atop a swirling planet. Wispy nebulas pass behind the glowering 29-year-old actor, who is dressed in brown leather boots (one conspicuously unlaced), an alabaster topcoat and floral embroidered jeans, all by the French fashion house Celine.
He is a heart-throb, beaming down on us from the planet Zod.
Shot by the perennial Vogue contributor Annie Leibovitz, the cover has proved divisive. Online, people likened it to galaxy-print leggings. Some wondered if it was really the cover; others questioned if it was the work of artificial intelligence. (A typical kneejerk reaction to most anything posted online these days, though nothing indicated as much.)
Whenever a man appears alone on the cover of Vogue, it elicits strong reactions. In 2020, Harry Styles fronted the magazine in a Gucci dress, igniting weeks of hotheaded discourse about gender norms.
This December issue is rolling out during a thorny chapter for America’s weightiest fashion publication, which this week announced Teen Vogue was being folded into its parent website and recently appointed a new head of editorial content, Chloe Malle.
The conversation around Chalamet’s cover, though, has been more mirthful than fraught. There is a sort of pleasure in wondering what exactly this celestial image is supposed to be referencing. To me, it evokes the green-screen-heavy 2001 movie Spy Kids, or the cover of Kid Cudi’s 2009 album Man on the Moon. Chalamet is an avowed fan of the spaced-out rapper.
The inside photographs are more austere, depicting the buzz-cutted actor wandering through City, Michael Heizer’s titanic art installation in the Nevada desert. In these black-and-white shots, Chalamet, who next leads Marty Supreme, an Oscar-buzzy film about a pingpong prodigy, is diminutive in the shadow of Heizer’s gargantuan forms. He is an isolated explorer in a Tom Ford trucker jacket (price not listed).
Those desolate images appear to be playing off Chalamet’s role in the Dune trilogy, while the cover projects the young star, Hollywood’s heir to the leading man title, as a celeb at intergalactic scale.
Yet the cover also conjures something else. Or rather someone else. Wearing a not-quite-camel topcoat and slouching jeans tucked into boots, the actor, styled by Eric McNeal, is dressed an awful lot like Kanye West circa 2012.
Beyond Vogue, there is something very “Yeezus” about Chalamet’s image lately. Last month, he was photographed in a pair of tan tactical boots that were near dupes of what Ye wore a decade ago. His bunchy sweatpants, his designer leather work jackets – even his recent taste for Hermès bags – all echo various Ye fashion statements of yore.
To say that the fashion industry struggles to discuss Ye would be an understatement. His incendiary, antisemitic comments have rightfully made him a pariah. Yet it is also true that any time someone throws on a dusty, earth-toned sweater, or a pair of gummy clogs, they are, in some regard, reaffirming West’s influence.
This is especially true for men of Chalamet’s generation, who were teens during the rapper’s rise, and had their tastes shaped by him. The two men, at least at one point, had a passing relationship, dining together alongside Kid Cudi and Pete Davidson in 2019.
(Chalamet has also been dating Ye’s former sister-in-law Kylie Jenner, who has two children with Travis Scott, a onetime protege of West.)
Rappers like Ye seem to have inspired not only Chalamet’s style but the way he markets himself. Here’s a young actor who treats a movie release like an album rollout. He has created inscrutable pseudo-music videos of himself dancing shirtless to the Black Eyed Peas, or shouting “Best in the World!” to the camera while wearing a leather tracksuit in a pumpkin hue.
He has made merch for at least two movies, including Marty Supreme. Developed, per the Vogue profile, with his stylist Taylor McNeill and the designer Doni Nahmias, it includes windbreakers and sweats that seem to have their own logo of a man playing pingpong, a la Michael Jordan’s “Jumpman”.
The outfits he has worn to promote these movies verge on performance art. For his Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, he faithfully recreated some of the folk singer’s oddball looks, cosplaying as Dylan in an egg-shaped beanie and grey plaid scarf.
Last December, appearing in Dylan’s home state of Minnesota, he wore a blue and orange striped Ralph Lauren rugby shirt. Perceptive fans noted that Ye wore the exact same long-sleeved polo two decades earlier on MTV’s TRL.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jacob Gallagher
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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