Vanity Fair Did Not Have to Make Nicole Kidman Look Like This

Vanity Fair’s latest Hollywood Issue, which comes equipped with eight different covers, has one cover featuring Being the Ricardos star Nicole Kidman resembling a digital painting of herself that some crypto bro would definitely sell as an NFT. The airbrushing of this cover alone makes a compelling case that print media deserves to die.

We know that Kidman has a human body as it is dressed head-to-toe in Miu Miu, but that figure appears quite flattened and even slightly robotic. On Thursday, upon all of the covers—which run the gamut in weirdness—hitting Twitter, critics began to share their thoughts in droves on how the magazine portrayed Kidman. Some compared her appearance to that of the automaton she played in 2004’s The Stepford Wives. Others couldn’t help but wonder what the fuck was going on with her knees.

Jezebel contacted Vanity Fair’s parent company Conde Nast for comment and will update this post if we hear back.

Now, Kidman is 54 and will be 55 in June. She’s 5’11” and has always been thin. But this cover has continued the conversation online that magazines still perpetuate impossible beauty standards. One person wrote: “No 54-year-old’s body looks like that, not even Nicole Kidman’s. Why are we still doing this sh*t?” Another suggested that Kidman employed a body double.

I agree that Kidman does not look like that—because she has more muscle, tendons, and bones than the photo retouchers allowed her. Sure, she is still that thin in real life, and has even more defined abs. There are no doubt other women in their 50s who look like that, too. (Granted, many of them are probably wealthy with trainers and chefs and even plastic surgeons, but they exist.) And commenting on people’s thinness is arguably just as toxic as commenting on people’s fatness.

Even digital covers for web-based outlets still get photoshopped, but it’s a lot harder when you have companion video which accurately captures how the person appeared on set. Kidman’s story has its own video where you can see that she is a three-dimensional being, but that apparently couldn’t stop the Vanity Fair art department, to quote icon of excess Kendall Roy, from going nut nut. That’s enough of this, thank you.