Why Elle's lesbian kiss cover is a major breakthrough for fashion

This month’s issue of ELLE UK is a vision in polka dots. Set against a white background with bold black text around, it features two women clad in monochrome outfits. Their hands are curved gently around each other’s shoulders and their eyes are closed. Their lips press tightly together. 

This portrait of a kiss shouldn’t feel remarkable, and yet it is. The photo accompanies the magazine’s cover story about model Aweng Ade-Chuol and her wife Lexy. 

Aweng, whose family fled the Sudanese civil war and were granted asylum in Australia in 2006, is currently a sought-after face in the fashion industry. Hitting the limelight after walking in Vetements’ AW18 show, she’s gone on to front campaigns for brands including Fenty and Ralph Lauren, and recently appeared in Beyonce’s visual album Black is King. And In December of last year she and Lexy got married: Aweng wearing a white Kwaidan Editions suit, Lexy in a caped white dress by Pyer Moss.

This image of the happily wedded couple is a beautiful one. It is moving too: marking (or maybe reflecting) a welcome sea change in the fashion world. Although fashion is famously known as a queer-friendly space, home to a plethora of LGBTQ+ designers, photographers, editors, stylists, models, make-up artists and more, it has often been gay men who have achieved the most visibility within the industry. 

In fact, up until relatively recently, finding much evidence – let alone positive representation - of lesbians and bisexual women in the fashion world has proved surprisingly tricky. There were Dorothy Todd and Madge Garland, of course: the visionary couple who edited British Vogue for a short-lived period in the 1920s. Models in the much later twentieth century as well, like Gia Carangi and Jenny Shimizu. The odd iconic image too, like the 1993 cover of Vanity Fair featuring lesbian musician k.d. lang being given a very close shave by supermodel Cindy Crawford. 

However, it’s only been in more recent years that out queer women in the fashion world haven’t felt like notable exceptions, or individuals whose identity was framed more as a fleeting trend or salacious gossip than a simple question of who they loved and dated. 

From the comparatively more tolerant shores of 2020 this may seem hard to compute. But then again, one has to remember that there’s a reason why a cover like this remains not just rare but actively boundary breaking.  After all, just eight years ago style.com was merrily putting out pieces proclaiming lesbian chic as the hot new look (ominous opening line: “lesbians! They’re everywhere”) – somewhat inexplicably crediting the ‘trend’ to the rising popularity of combat boots. 

At around the same time, LOVE magazine published an editorial titled ‘Les is More,’ which largely revolved around making crude sex jokes under the guise of tongue-in-cheek irreverence. 

The fashion world has been a haven to many, but that’s never stopped it being homophobic either. Sometimes, still, I wonder whether I might have come out sooner had lesbianism not so clearly been a punchline when I was a fashion-obsessed teenager who didn’t understand why I felt so utterly out of place around my peers. 

Perhaps that’s why I am moved by this cover. It’s not the first fashion magazine to feature two women kissing. LOVE magazine did also feature Kate Moss kissing transgender model Lea T back in 2011 (I’ll give them that), while Vogue Italia’s trio of September 2017 covers included an actual gay male couple and a pretty tepid embrace between supermodels Lily Aldridge and Vittoria Ceretti (better acknowledgement was found that same year in an essay on vogue.com on the growing number of out lesbian models, accompanied by a photo series featuring models including Ruth Bell and Erika Linder.) 

But this cover featuring Aweng and Lexy is perhaps the first mainstream fashion magazine appearance to be so firmly – and queerly – contextualized. The kiss makes a great image. It’s also a defiant statement. The accompanying interview is an intimate and deeply moving account of the women’s first year of marriage. Within it, Aweng talks honestly about a suicide attempt earlier this year, and the horrific homophobic backlash she has faced within the South Sudanese community for marrying a woman and talking openly about being a lesbian. Her words are devastating, but the images of her and her wife together are joyous, buoyant. They embody unity, tenderness, passion, a refusal to be cowed. 

Kisses have always been strange markers of progress. It was only as recently as 1994 that Liverpool-set soap opera Brookside made history airing an episode featuring a female same-sex kiss. Although the first kiss between women to grace British TV screens had come twenty years prior in a BBC drama titled Girl in 1974, this was the first time such a thing had been shown pre 9pm watershed: acknowledged as being suitable for all, rather than relegated to the realm of adults-only content. 

Queer people of all stripes have often been told that so many of the normal things we do like kiss or hold hands – things that straight people do daily without thinking – are somehow inappropriate, or immediately suggestive of sex. Previous generations within the LGBTQ+ community have had to fight inch by inch not just to be granted the same legal rights, but the same ability to enjoy small, simple things like public acknowledgments of intimacy and companionship. 

Sometimes, when I see images like these, I think about those battles, and the extraordinary effort required to achieve progress. And I feel overwhelmingly grateful that I could pop down to the newsagents and see this magazine cover sitting there on the shelf: at once totally normal, yet still, somehow, quietly extraordinary. 

The January issue of ELLE UK is on sale now

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