THE UNION JACK COVER: BRITISH FASHION AT FULL VOLUME

In late 2001, Mario Testino photographed what would become one of the most defining images in British fashion history. Published as the January 2002 issue of British Vogue, the fold-out cover titled Fashion’s Force brought together eighteen British models under a single, unmistakable symbol: the Union Jack.

It was not a portrait of an individual, nor a celebration of trend. It was an image of collective presence. Testino captured a moment when British fashion spoke loudly, collectively, and without apology. A moment when it was not a series of isolated talents, but a force moving together.

The cover featured eighteen models who, at the time, were not yet canonised as icons but were already shaping the visual language of the era. Together, they became something else entirely. Kate Moss, still early in a new phase of her career, stood alongside Naomi Campbell. Stella Tennant, Erin O’Connor, Alek Wek, Karen Elson, Sophie Dahl, Jodie Kidd, Cecilia Chancellor, Elizabeth Jagger, Jacquetta Wheeler, Jade Parfitt, Liberty Ross, Vivien Solari, Rosemary Ferguson, Jasmine Guinness, Lisa Ratcliffe, and Georgina Cooper. Different energies, different trajectories, gathered into a single frame.

The styling amplified that sense of unity. The garments were created by a generation of British designers who were redefining luxury and authorship at the time. Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Paul Smith, Matthew Williamson, and Philip Treacy transformed the Union Jack from national emblem into fashion language. Not costume, but construction. Not irony, but confidence.

The timing mattered. Britain had entered the new millennium with renewed cultural momentum. Music, art, fashion, and photography were colliding with an energy that felt collective rather than individual. Testino’s image did not isolate a single star. Instead, it treated British fashion as a force in itself. Plural, loud, and unapologetically visible.

What gives the image its lasting power is scale. Bodies are pressed together. Patterns repeat. The flag fragments and multiplies across fabric, skin, and movement. Testino’s instinct to work with groups turns the photograph into something architectural. Identity is built through proximity. Meaning emerges through accumulation.

Inside the magazine, a line accompanied the story: “What better way for patriotism to run wild?” Read today, it lands differently. Not as a provocation, but as a record of a specific cultural confidence. The early 2000s were a time of self-assurance in Britain, when fashion, music, and art moved with visible momentum. Patriotism here was not exclusionary or defensive. It was expressive. Playful. Fashion-led. A declaration made through creativity rather than rhetoric.

That instinct to work with groups had long been part of Testino’s visual vocabulary. It was precisely this approach that caught the attention of German artist Andreas Gursky, who at the time was reshaping contemporary photography through scale, digital intervention, and repetition. Testino had met Gursky through his work in Berlin and admired how he multiplied images to produce impact. Gursky, in turn, was intrigued by Testino’s use of collective presence.

Gursky asked to photograph Testino at work and joined the British Vogue shoot. He arrived with his wife, explaining that they worked together as a team. The magazine, unfamiliar with his practice, allowed it without much expectation. When the photograph later returned, Gursky explained that the image was hers. The story was never fully clarified. But the anecdote matters less than what it signals: fashion photography and contemporary art observing each other closely, borrowing scale, ambition, and method.

What endures about the Union Jack cover is not simply its cast or its styling, but its sense of occasion. It was one of the last moments when British models appeared together in this way. Not as a retrospective. Not as a reunion. But as a present-tense declaration.

The photograph’s afterlife reflects that significance. The January 2002 British Vogue cover has become a highly sought-after collector’s object, often traded as a standalone print, framed and preserved. Detached from the magazine, it still holds. Its value was never dependent on novelty, but on what it captured. Original issues are sought after, but the image persists because it recorded British fashion at full volume. Before fragmentation. Before algorithmic isolation. Before the industry learned to speak in singles rather than choruses.

There have been many powerful British fashion images since. Few have attempted this scale of togetherness. Fewer still have succeeded.

Testino’s photograph does not argue for a return to that moment. It simply records it. Calmly. Confidently. With the clarity of someone who understood, even then, that what he was photographing was not just fashion, but a cultural temperature.

And temperatures, once felt, are hard to forget.

Credits: Stylist - Lucinda Chambers | Makeup: Tom Pecheux |Hair: Marc Lopez