There is something almost ceremonially correct about the pairing at the centre of Vogue Australia‘s September 2026 issue: Kylie Minogue on the cover, photographed by Lachlan Bailey, with editor-in-chief Christine Centenera handling the styling herself. An Australian icon, an Australian photographer, the Australian fashion magazine’s most weighted edition of the year. The logic feels self-evident, and yet it lands with genuine pleasure precisely because it is so well executed.
Centenera, who took the helm in late 2022, has assembled a run of cover subjects that reads like a considered statement of intent: Pamela Anderson, Hoyeon Jung, Milly Alcock, Anne Hathaway, Hailey Bieber, Margot Robbie. Each choice carries its own register, its own argument about what a fashion magazine should be doing at this moment. Minogue, for the September issue, feels like a different kind of argument altogether, one about rootedness, about the pleasure of returning to something that has lasted.
Two Covers, Two Moods, One Kylie Minogue
The September issue runs two covers, and the contrast between them is worth attending to. The first sees Minogue smiling directly at the camera in a Connor Ives T-shirt and Chanel sunglasses: casual, warm, immediately legible. The second cover moves outdoors and escalates the fashion considerably, with Minogue in Duran Lantink’s Jean Paul Gaultier, a combination that arrives with its own art-historical freight, given Gaultier’s long history of dressing performers who exist somewhere between pop and spectacle.
Bailey, who has become something of a Vogue Australia regular, has a particular gift for rendering his subjects at ease without sacrificing the sense that something considered is taking place. His work on this shoot seems to confirm that: the first cover especially reads as relaxed rather than careless, a distinction that matters and that some readers, it must be said, were not entirely persuaded by.
The Forum Responds: Warmth, Reservations, and a Case for Casual
The reaction on theFashionSpot’s forums, where cover reveals have long been subject to the kind of granular, invested criticism that most editorial meetings could benefit from, ran the usual range. Forum member vogue28 was unreserved in their enthusiasm: ‘An Australian icon, photographed by another Australian great for Vogue Australia’s September issue, just feels oh so right.’ The same poster praised Bailey’s handling of his subject specifically, calling the first cover ‘a breath of fresh air.’ Prada Melodies offered a more compressed endorsement: ‘MOTHER! Absolutely love.’
Dissent arrived, as it tends to, from the direction of propriety. Forum member marsnoop2 raised the question of register directly: ‘The first editorial photo would have made a better cover. I love Kylie, but this is supposed to be Vogue. Can we not elevate it a little here, people?’ Royal-Galliano, more succinctly, wondered whether the whole thing was ‘a tad too casual.’
The disagreement maps onto a tension that has been present in fashion magazine culture for some time now: whether the September issue, the industry’s most symbolically loaded publication of the year, should double down on aspiration and remove, or whether accessibility and warmth constitute their own kind of statement. Centenera, on the evidence of this cover, appears to be making a case for the latter, at least in one of the two versions she has put into the world. The second cover, with its Gaultier and its outdoor setting, offers the elevation the sceptics wanted. That both exist side by side is itself an answer of sorts.
Minogue, for her part, has spent the better part of four decades negotiating exactly this tension between the polished and the approachable, which may be why the pairing feels apt in ways that go beyond the biographical convenience of matching an Australian subject to an Australian magazine and an Australian photographer. The September issue is available now via Vogue Australia.
