Timothée Chalamet stares us down while floating somewhere in a vibrantly colored universe from the December 2025 U.S. Vogue cover. His gaze is as intense as it would be if the backdrop was a Victorian garden, a red brick wall in New York City, or even just a blank curtain. There is nothing in his eyes to suggest that he acknowledges the childish ridiculousness of his outfit and background. The fashion enthusiasts took this cover as an affront and a sign of the fall of Vogue as an institution after the departure of its iconic long-term Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour. The casual Timothée Chalamet fan was confused, the ultrafans were ecstatic – what a disruptor, what a changemaker, this Mr. Chalamet is!

The concept of the cover story is “The Universe According to Timothée Chalamet”. The title suggests that the actor will offer some grand insight, likely on fashion given Vogue’s purpose. Yet, the piece reads more like a detached, humorless explainer-biography built on old intel. The photos shot by Annie Leibovitz, another visionary and icon at Vogue, are nothing like the cover. Set in City, an enormous site-specific sculpture by artist Michael Heizer deep in the Nevada desert, the images are abstract, almost monochrome and dark. Only one other black-and-white photo carries the same ridiculousness, with Chalamet again suspended in air, this time wearing a tracksuit that would make any Slav envious.

Leibovitz received some criticism from the general public for allowing a Vogue photoshoot to spiral into chaos. In an interview with Business of Fashion, the photographer commented that it was the hardest shoot she had ever done. For one, the creator of the piece was resistant to the idea that a fashion photoshoot should take place in a monument whose creation took 50 years. But she persisted, thinking that “it was important to say where we are right now. You know, it’s been pretty dark in America. I did not mean to be bleak, but Michael Heizer’s piece is not romantic.”

Yet Heizer had nothing to worry about. The photoshoot ended up not being centered around fashion at all. The pieces are credited to be by some big brands, like Celine and Tom Ford, but they might as well have been by H&M or Zara, the way most of the images feature only Chalamet’s shadow or his dwarfed figure next to all the concrete of the art installation.

We should probably not care about this issue much. A cover of Vogue is hideous, what of it? But consider the kind of funds that go into a cover story for an internationally recognized publication. At the very least, it is expected that the expense would go towards the salaries of the crew, the (probably sizable) commissions of the star photographer and celebrity model, the travel, the clothes, the space. But for this photoshoot in particular, Timothée Chalamet was flown in from France to Nevada, with all the props making a similar journey, only to be silhouettes and shadows.

For a photoshoot that claims to be trying to make a statement, it loses track of its premise. In comparison, Robert Pattinson (referred to as inspiration to Chalamet in his latest projects, maybe even including this shoot) did a similarly unflattering and chaotic shoot for GQ in 2022. Yet, the theme was carried out through the issue, the styling matched and the story – one depicting Pattinson as an enigmatic agent of chaos. Chalamet’s attempt of recreating this vision fails on all accounts because it tries too hard to be artistic and creatively aesthetic. It ends up being bland, pointless and, most devastatingly, inhuman.

In an era when art created by people is sourced by big corporations and fed to AI models to train from, creating art that is indistinguishable from something a machine would conjure up, and then calling it social commentary is not only offensive to the audience, it is worrying. It is like dangling all the money spent on the project in front of a hungry child. And we are all hungry for creative fashion, creative art and creative people.

The artworks left on cave walls are one of the few traits that set our ancestors apart from other animals. Eliminating the human from the art, one of our defining characteristics as a species, is the ultimate resignation to the clutches of corporate greed. Now is the time for us to demand a Timothée Chalamet that is suspended on visible wires from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (if he absolutely must be suspended in air), not to settle for poorly done photoshop of a machine-colored image of a nebula. Because this is not how the human eye would perceive the beauty of the universe.