1. The Faces of Vanity Fair

2. The Faces of Vanity Fair Launched in 1913, Vanity Fair helped put the “ jazz ” in the Jazz Age. Its second incarnation, born in 1983, has been held to even higher standards. To commemorate the modern magazine ’ s 25th anniversary, VF.com offers a sampling of these legendary images. Related: “ The V.F. Century, ” by Christopher Hitchens.

3. DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS JR. AND JOAN CRAWFORD This 1929 frame of newlyweds Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was years ahead of its time. Shot by Nickolas Muray, it is obviously posed. The subjects have been nudged into position too precisely. Yet the picture feels candid—like a photojournalistic image from mid-century—and is one of the rare horizontal portraits published in Vanity Fair during the 20s. The following July, Fairbanks, who, like his father, sometimes wrote articles for Vanity Fair, would reveal in an essay about his new wife: “She will stand by a belief with Trojan ferocity.… When she is depressed she falls into an all-consuming depth of melancholy out of which it is practically impossible to recover her. At these times she has long crying spells.… She is extraordinarily nervous.… She is intolerant of people’s weaknesses.… She has a tendency to dramatize any anecdote which she may relate.… She is a ten-year-old girl who has put on her mother’s dress—and has done it convincingly.” The couple would divorce four years later. By Nickolas Muray, 1929; Vanity Fair, October 1929;

4. ADELE AND FRED ASTAIRE They first shared a dance floor in 1904. Adele was seven; her brother, Fred, only five. But an act suddenly took wing. “Delly,” Fred Astaire later remarked, “danced like a feather and this, coupled with her genius for comedy, made her … one of the outstanding musical comedy gals of all time.” Possessed of the most masterful footwork ever to grace a vaudeville stage or a Hollywood back lot, the debonair Astaire, who would later make Ginger Rogers his ballroom alter ego, was a staple in a magazine that revered the top hat and the tux. For this 1926 take, however, the Astaires, fresh off a European tour, chose outfits that were decidedly continental. By James Abbe, 1926; Vanity Fair, September 1927;

5. NANCY AND RONALD REAGAN Photographer Harry Benson, who has taken pictures of every president since Eisenhower, remembers it this way: “When Vanity Fair asked me to photograph President and Mrs. Reagan for a cover story in 1985, I knew they would give us only a short time. As it turned out, they stopped by on their way to a state dinner and stayed exactly six minutes. Before they arrived, a backdrop of white no-seam paper was set up in a small room off the main ballroom, and as they entered, I put on a tape of Frank Sinatra singing ‘Nancy (With the Laughing Face).’ That brought smiles to their faces, and they started dancing. Their aides hadn’t expected all of this—in fact, they would have turned me down had I mentioned the concept beforehand—but once the thing was set in motion, they were afraid to interrupt.” Click. Nancy kicks up her heels. Click. Print. The cover shot of the First Couple dancing—epitomizing the Hollywood panache that had swept over Washington—helped turn around the fortunes of the then fledgling magazine. By Harry Benson, 1985; Vanity Fair, June 1985;

6. KATE WINSLET Few would have attempted anything as daring. Not only did Annie Leibovitz have the wiles to coax Kate Winslet into a water tank—re-envisioning her role as Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic —but the photographer decided to keep the frame wide enough to reveal the brilliant artifice behind it all. Oscar nomination for Winslet (one of five!); kudos to Leibovitz . By Annie Leibovitz, 1998; Vanity Fair, April 1998; © Annie Leibovitz

7. BILL CLINTON In the waning days of his presidency, Bill Clinton sat down with Vanity Fair to personally caption a selection of unpublished pictures taken by White House photographers. The diamond in the rough: this William Vasta shot of the commander in chief bicycling through the Old Executive Office Building during the taping of a video (later shown at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner) that satirized his idle hours as a lame duck. By William Vasta, 2000; Vanity Fair, December 2000;

8. LOUIS ARMSTRONG Louis Armstrong was the Merlin of the Jazz Age, the musician most responsible for placing a nation under the spell of its first native art form. If ever the spirit of the energetic, gravel-voiced Satchmo coalesced into one iconic image from the period, it was in this 1935 classic, a lingering blast of light and shade by photographer Anton Bruehl. Bruehl, who had honed his craft on advertising shoots, knew just how to play the three-note chord of the Armstrong theme: the terse geometry of the horn, the ever present cool-down cloth, and jazz’s magic lips and smile, bright—and slightly divine—like the light from above. By Anton Bruehl, 1935; Vanity Fair, November 1935;

9. KATE MOSS This Vanity Fair caption accompanied the smoldering 1935 Bruehl-Borges image (photographed on the set of the film Desire ) on which this picture was based: “Mary Magdalene Dietrich—called Marlene—was born in Berlin two days after Christmas [1901]. As a child, she studied the violin, but grew up to be a singer of chansons vulgaires in Berlin music halls. In 1929, Josef von Sternberg saw her in a German theatre and hired her for the lead opposite Emil Jannings in the film The Blue Angel. Then he brought her to America to make Morocco. The rest is history. Somehow, from the complete inertia of her movements and her expressionless face, comes a mysterious emanation which is deadly to the male.” Deadly indeed. Here, British model Kate Moss does Dietrich Reconfigured, in this 2006 study by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Wrote A. A. Gill, in his essay introducing the image: “No tears. No excuses. Kate Moss looked out from a thousand pages of editorial vilification, and then a thousand more of luxury advertising, and didn’t dignify a single word [of press criticism]. There is an old, stiff-lipped, patrician motto that could be stitched on her pillow: NEVER EXPLAIN, NEVER COMPLAIN.… No words—just a picture.” By Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, 2006; Vanity Fair, September 2006;

10. KATE MOSS Photographed in New York City by Craig McDean for the December 2005 issue.

11. JULIANNE MOORE Though they revere her for four Academy Award–nominated roles (in Boogie Nights, The End of the Affair, Far from Heaven, and The Hours ), Vanity Fair’ s readers have a soft spot for one particular turn: Julianne Moore’s portrayal of the nude harem girl in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s masterpiece La Grande Odalisque. Photographer Michael Thompson’s study ran in the magazine in 2000; Ingres’s original, from 1814, hangs in the Louvre. By Michael Thompson, 2000; Vanity Fair, April 2000

12. KATHARINE HEPBURN Four-time Oscar winner Katharine Hepburn (shown here in a classic Cecil Beaton portrait) was the subject of one of the wittiest barbs ever dashed off by a Vanity Fair writer. Said onetime drama critic Dorothy Parker, of an early performance: “Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.” By Cecil Beaton, 1935; Vanity Fair, July 1935;

13. CARY GRANT In 1932, a young British actor named Archie Leach quit the Broadway stage, jumped in a yellow Packard, and headed west. Two years later, his name and image transmuted through the magic of a Paramount movie contract, he was beaming from the pages of Vanity Fair. The headline: “Cary Grant—‘Warm, dark and handsome.’ ” (Comedienne Mae West, encountering, in her words, “a sensational-looking man … the best thing I’d seen out there,” had insisted that he appear with her in She Done Him Wrong. Within months, Grant was fielding one of cinema’s most resonant propositions: “Why don’t you come up sometime, see me?”) This picture by George Hoyningen-Huene conveyed what photo collector John Kobal has described as a “beckoning and inviting” energy. Said Kobal of a comparable Cary Grant still (by Robert Coburn) from 1935: “The young Cary Grant, emerging from second leads to stardom, is caught … at that moment of transition: feminine softness subtly shifting into a masculine … sweatered sexiness … ” Incomparably charming in scores of classic comedies and suspense films, Grant would spend decades fine-tuning his graceful, urbane persona, a style he first adopted through careful observation of Noël Coward’s mannerisms. As Grant once remarked, with customary aplomb, “I play myself to perfection.” By George Hoyningen-Huene, 1934; Vanity Fair, November 1934;

14. JOE LOUIS The editors didn’t pull punches. In a 1926 edict, they asserted, “There appears to have grown up, in this country, a certain feeling against the prize-ring—a feeling which Vanity Fair does not at all share. In a soft and over-civilized age, prize-fighting and football seem to be the sole remaining masculine notes, excellent correctives, both, for a far too pampered age.” That sentiment achieved its apotheosis in the person of Joe Louis. Attuned to fame’s modulations across the culture, the magazine often presented personalities like Louis at the very onset of their celebrity. And Louis, having become a professional boxer only 14 months before this Lusha Nelson image was published, in October 1935, was appropriately depicted in profile in the reflected glare of the ring—and the oncoming limelight. The 21-year-old had just entered boxing’s upper echelons by leveling Primo Carnera; by June 1937, Louis would knock out James J. Braddock to take the heavyweight title. Louis went on to defend it, without defeat, 25 times over the next 12 years. By Lusha Nelson, 1935; Vanity Fair, October 1935;

15. JEAN HARLOW The magazine characterized “platinum blonde siren” Jean Harlow as having been “first exploited on the screen for various anatomical reasons.” Harlow, however, much more than met the hungry eye. Breaking in with producer Hal Roach at 16, then quickly landing her first big break (Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels ), she developed into a respected screen comedienne. Her life was cut short at 26 by complications from uremic poisoning. In this iconic Hollywood image from 1934, photographer George Hurrell realized that the ideal prop for the sultry Harlow was a horizontal companion. Although Hurrell used sidelight here to simulate a roaring fire (to pretend that Harlow was merely lounging around at home on a winter night), he was known for his pioneering work with a new photographic tool, the boom light, which gave his pictures a peculiar clarity and coolness, as if illuminated by moonbeams. That nocturnal incandescence and pinpoint sharpness (in contrast to the gauzy diffusion many of his peers preferred) transformed Hurrell from a creator of studio publicity stills to a master of the glamour portrait. By George Hurrell, 1934; Vanity Fair, January 1935

16. GLORIA SWANSON Over time, this Edward Steichen portrait has taken on masterpiece status. Created in 1924, just as the first feature-length sound movies were emerging—effectively truncating the actress’s brilliant silent-film career—this image caught the essential Gloria Swanson: haunting and inscrutable, forever veiled in the whisper of a distant era. Steichen’s photograph has elements of turn-of-the-century pictorialism (moody and delicate, the subject seeming to peer from the darkness, as if from jungle foliage), yet it also projects modernist boldness, with its pin-sharp precision and graphic severity. By Edward Steichen, 1924; Vanity Fair, February 1928;

17. SLAVIC BEAUTIES From left: Natalia Vodianova, Carmen Kass, Karolina Kurkova, Euguenia Volodina, Hana Soukupova, Marija Vujovic, Natasha Poly, Valentina Zelyaeva, and Inguna Butane. Photographed in the Bahamas by Patrick Demarchelier for the April 2005 issue.

18. NATALIA VODIANOVA Photographed in Herefordshire, England, by Patrick Demarchelier for the January 2005 issue

19. IMAN ’ S WOMEN IN BLACK Bottom row, from far left: Gail O ’ Neill, Karen Alexander, Shakara, Clara Benjamin, Naomi Campbell, Iman. Center row: Kadra, Kara Young, Cynthia Bailey, Tyra Banks, Liya, Beverly Johnson. Top row: Oluchi, Katouch é , Adia, Noemi. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the book I Am Iman, by Iman, excerpted in the September 2001 issue

20. CINDY CRAWFORD Photographed in Los Angeles by Herb Ritts for the August 1994 issue. CINDY CRAWFORD Photographed by Michel Comte for the April 1992 issue.

21. AMANDA SEYFRIED Age: 22. Hometown: Allentown, Pennsylvania. Breakthrough roles: Karen in Mean Girls, Sarah on HBO ’ s Big Love. Upcoming film: Mamma Mia! EMMA ROBERTS Age: 17. Hometown: Rhinebeck, New York. Breakthrough roles: Addie Singer on Nickelodeon ’ s Unfabulous, title role in Nancy Drew. Upcoming film: Wild Child. BLAKE LIVELY Age: 20. Hometown: Burbank, California. Breakthrough roles: Bridget in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Serena van der Woodsen in Gossip Girl. Upcoming film: Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. KRISTEN STEWART Age: 18. Hometown: North Hollywood, California. Breakthrough roles: Jodie Foster ’ s daughter in Panic Room, Tracy in Into the Wild. Upcoming films: Twilight, Adventureland, and What Just Happened. Bright Young Hollywood

22. KEVIN JONAS Age: 20. Hometown: Wyckoff, New Jersey. Big breaks: Jonas Brothers album (featuring “ S.O.S. ” ), Miley Cyrus – Hannah Montana tour. Upcoming projects: Disney Channel series J.O.N.A.S., Disney Channel movie Camp Rock. First “ Hollywood ” moment? “ Doing Oprah. NICK JONAS Age: 15. First “ Hollywood ” moment? “ Meeting the president was pretty cool. ” JOE JONAS Age: 18. First “ Hollywood ” moment? “ We met Celine Dion at the American Music Awards. She started singing our music, and we ’ re like, ‘ Whoa, that ’ s Celine Dion! ’ ” Inspirations? “ Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees. He ’ s from a brother band, so he ’ s kind of a mentor to us. ” Trinity