Why did Vogue put Lerbon and Giselle enacting a century of de-humanized super-corporeal blackness and complicit victim femininity on its cover, a canvas scrutinized in both production and consumption by more people the world over every month than perhaps any other? Because Annie Leibovitz thought it might be provocative. And provocative it has been. The Internet is a-buzz with speculation and conjecture about a not-so-subtly encoded visual semiotics of King-Kong-ism. Is Vogue saying, with Lerbon’s unbridled physicality, that black men are benevolent, misguided apes? No. Of course not. Don’t be daft.

The image is about power. What Vogue has to say—and I will certainly concede that it has something to say—is, as ever, about women and beauty. This image, like all the other images in the so-called “shape” issue, animates the beauty-power dichotomy that has kept Vogue in business lo these many years: ebullient submission is beautiful, physical strength is something more, well, male. And something blacker. The critocracy of the web is right to notice that race and gender are at play on the cover of Vogue, but only a modicum of credit is due. Indeed, when have race and gender not been part of a Vogue cover?