How to Power Dress Megyn Kelly

How to Power Dress Megyn Kelly

Our cover shoot with the Fox News host took its inspiration from Katharine Hepburn, Diane Sawyer, and more.

Vanity Fair’s February 2016 Megyn Kelly cover shoot posed a very modern fashion quandary to fashion and style director Jessica Diehl: How does a woman draw attention to her clothing without sacrificing respect for her intellect?

Kelly is well suited to answer the challenge. The Fox News star, after all, has made a name for herself by harnessing her contradictions as her arsenal: she’s pretty and intelligent, likable and combative, partisan and widely admired. She is performing a unique routine in the art of the feminist balancing act (even if she wouldn’t self-apply the f-word). But how does one translate that equilibrium—a brand of glamour that keeps one’s brain front and center—into clothes?

Diehl turned to classic luxury designers like Valentino, Carolina Herrera, and Ralph Lauren, drawing on the history of classic American sportswear for a look of grace and control that maintains a certain femininity.

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For the all-important cover, Diehl dressed Kelly in black off-the-shoulder Oscar de la Renta top, her head perched on her hand as if she’s facing the world from behind the news desk. "I didn’t want to put her in a gown," Diehl says. "It felt really debutante-y. I didn’t want to do anything to diminish the fact that this is a hard-working, professional, incredibly intelligent woman." And the bare shoulders offered the image the shot of va-va-voom, however subtle, that’s requisite for a magazine cover. "There’s something quite beautiful about accentuating a subtle feature, and who doesn’t love a good clavicle and shoulder?" Diehl says. "It worked for Scarlett O’Hara."

Ultimately, though, Diehl’s favorite axiom about what makes a great cover reigned: "It really has to do with the fact that it should feel like a portrait of a person rather than a picture of a dress."

Diehl was conscious that this was a significant moment in the crafting of Kelly’s image. She appears not only nightly to a growing audience on Fox, but is also expanding into a larger role on the national stage as one of Donald Trump’s major adversaries, and one of cable news’s toughest interviewers. And while a haircut is only a haircut, Kelly also recently swapped her suburbia chic mane for a sleek crop worthy of a Hitchcock blonde. Diehl picked up that classic American sportswear look as a note for the shoot’s opening spread, in which Kelly reclines in a chair in a Valentino blouse with white pajama piping and white CH Carolina Herrera trousers.

"It’s a very, sort of a Kate Hepburn look," Diehl says. "That’s sort of who I kept thinking about—women I admire who certainly weren’t damsels in distress. She’s definitely not a damsel in distress."

Photographer Patrick Demarchelier’s other work with women like Kim Basinger,Nicole Kidman, and Lady Diana was also a key reference. "We try to find inspiration in sort of the most timeless of his images, just to bring out her softness," Diehl says. "I thought it was important to highlight that there’s a lot of strength there, but it doesn’t necessarily have to translate into anything masculine

That sense of gender ambiguity makes for one of the spread’s most intriguing looks: Kelly in a Burberry tuxedo, in a nod to Helmut Newton’s famed images of women in Yves Saint Laurent’s seminal Le Smoking suits. "They’re a little bit more mysterious than a skinny, little black dress," Diehl says.

That air of mystery was an important element for a woman whom America sees nightly on television. "I think anyone you see on television, because they’re in your living room, the American public sort of presumes they know you and judge you. And they don’t know anyone," Diehl says. "I think it’s smart to retain a sense of mystery when everybody thinks they know you."

Kelly’s shoot may recall another landmark Vanity Fair moment, when Diane Sawyerposed on the September 1987 cover in a black Calvin Klein dress, her shoulders bare and pearls draped over her collarbones. Sawyer’s star turn was roundly criticized as undue glamorization of a mere media mortal, which seems hard to imagine today. Yet the question of how women should balance power and allure somehow remains a central question in pop culture.

"I do know that I like to encourage people or empower people that we shoot to look and feel the most confident they can," Diehl says. "Because when confidence is unshakable, criticism of any kind isn’t that interesting, or even important."

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