British Vogue is Honoring Essential Workers on the Cover of Its July Issue

For the July issue of British Vogue, the iconic fashion magazine has decided to do something a bit differently. Rather than featuring models and high-fashion, they’re using the opportunity to honor three front-line heroes: a train driver, a midwife, and a supermarket assistant.

Fashion designer and editor-in-chief of British Vogue, Edward Enninful, explained the decision to swap models for key workers in an Editor’s letter.

“Here at Vogue we are, perhaps, not most famous for chronicling the minutiae of everyday life,” writes Enniful. “Though our pages are always filled with lived experience – joy, sadness and drama – first and foremost, Vogue proudly waves the flag for fashion, in all its empowering, escapist, lavish and identity-affording capabilities. We will always do that – this issue included. But this moment required something extra special, too: a moment of thanks.”

And so instead of featuring high-fashion on the cover, they’re featuring three women who were suddenly identified as essential—though, in truth, they always were—amid the pandemic: Narguis Horsford, a train driver on the London Overground, Rachel Millar, a community midwife in east London, and Anisa Omar, a supermarket worker in King’s Cross.

You can see all three versions of the July 2020 cover below and meet the trio in the video up top:

The portraits were captured over the course of 10 days by fashion and documentary photographer Jamie Hawkesworth, who travelled around London by bicycle in order to meet each of his subjects and “capture, at an appropriate social distance, the faces of those whose bravery, or simple commitment to carrying on, has helped so many.”

To learn more about each of the three essential workers featured on the cover of next month’s Vogue, or hear more about why the magazine felt it was their duty to share these three womens’ stories, click here.