First Lady Jill Biden is Vogue’s cover star this month

The image is saintly.

In a white tuxedo gown by Ralph Lauren Collection – the upscale arm of the American designer’s empire, and a frequent label in the first lady’s wardrobe – Jill Biden, on her second print cover of Vogue magazine since her husband Joe Biden took office in 2020, gazes upward, projecting a mix of strength and hope, in a picture by veteran fashion photographer Norman Jean Roy.

Women in politics and media have worn white so often and for so many reasons that it ceases to mean much anymore. But here, it burnishes the image of the first lady as dedicated, but not arrogant. Pure. A saviour, even: the only person who truly has her husband’s ear. Who can convince him whether he should press ahead with a campaign in deep crisis since last week’s debate, or step aside.

It is a striking, fascinatingly out-of-character image in its storytelling, for both the magazine and the first lady. It will dismay the candidate’s detractors from both parties – people always anger at the sight of expensive clothes, forgetting the reach and potential for revelatory image-making of women’s magazines like Vogueand the religious undertones are startling.

But it may be the most accurate image of Jill Biden right now, of what she means to her husband and – for better and for worse – for her party.

“We will decide our future,” the cover line reads. This was obviously intended as a statement of power through unity – the portraits and profile were reported in April – but one that also, through sheer coincidence, hints at the choice that the president and his wife have to make over the next few months. Should Biden step aside, or is the response to his disastrous debate performance another example of the media misunderstanding, or underestimating, the lifelong politician? A note in italics at the top of the piece notes that the reporter, Maya Singer, spoke with Biden again the day before the piece was published online, and that she said that the couple “will not let those 90 minutes define the four years he’s been president. We will continue to fight”.

This is an unusual moment for both the magazine and Biden. While Michelle Obama appeared on three Vogue covers – one during her husband’s first term, March 2009; and two during her husband’s second, April 2013 and December 2016 – this is the first time that a first lady has appeared on two covers during her husband’s first four years, the first in June 2021. Technically, it’s the third time she has appeared on a Vogue cover: in November 2022, when Hunter Biden’s daughter Naomi Biden was married at the White House, Vogue photographed the first lady and her granddaughter in their wedding regalia, along with a soft-focus story on the proceedings. (Roy took those images, as well.) Voguein fact, was exclusively given access to the Bidens the day before the wedding – a decision that rankled many reporters in its suggestion that the Bidens were restricting access to a White House event.

Those images were friendly, familial. In her first cover, she wore a more bohemian floral dress and grinned. In the second, she embraced her granddaughter. They positioned her as a teacher, a grandmother (or even, in the absence of Naomi Biden’s mother, Kathleen Buhle, in the digital cover, a matriarch), a working woman, an approachable figure. A person.