Classic Vogue covers

It's known as fashion's Bible - Vogue magazine, where the elite and the aspiring alike turn for the style of the moment. Now the magazine is taking note of 120 years of covers to kick off a year-long anniversary celebration in 2012.

Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour, International Editor-at-Large Hamish Bowles and contributor Dodie Kazanjian have compiled a book of the magazine's most famous covers, "Vogue: The Covers," published by Abrams.

Conde Nast is also placing the magazine's entire 120-year run online in a new venture, voguearchive.com.

Pictured at left: Vogue's cover, April 1950.

The cover of the first issue of Vogue magazine, dated December 17, 1892.

Started as a weekly magazine for high society New Yorkers, early Vogue covers featured well-polished young women known as "Gibson girls," named after the illustrator who created the look.

Art deco and the jazz age inspired covers in the coming decades, but everything changed in July 1932 with the first color photo cover, by photographer Edward Steichen.

Since then, legendary photographers like Cecil Beaton, Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Bruce Weber, Herb Ritts, Steven Meisel, Annie Leibovitz and Mario Testino have shot the most famous cover in fashion.

When Anna Wintour took over the magazine, her first cover for the November 1988 issue was very unusual for Vogue - an outtake from a non-cover shoot featuring an Israeli model wearing jeans that caught her attention.

"To me it just said, 'This is something new. This is something different," Wintour told CBS News correspondent Serena Altschul. "And I remember the printers called us up because they thought we'd made a mistake - just wanting to check that that actually WAS the cover!"

The cover of Vogue's September 2007 issue, which was the largest in Vogue's history - containing 840 pages and weighing in at five pounds.

The magazine is celebrating its 120th anniversary with the launch of Vogue Archive, an online collection of every page from the fashion Bible's history.

"Vogue: The Covers" by Dodie Kazanjian, with a foreword by Vogue's International Editor-at-Large Hamish Bowles, has been published by Abrams.

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