Actress Evan Rachel Wood has just thrown some serious shade on one of Vanity Fair’s most famous covers – revealing the pretty depressing reality of being involved in their yearly youth shoots.
The cover in question is this iconic masterpiece from 2003 and features stars including the Olsen Twins, Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan at the height of her Mean Girls glory. You will definitely have seen it (probably accompany with a #tbt hashtag), but what you might not have been aware of is how harrowing Evan Rachel Wood found the experience of being involved in the cover shoot. Yesterday, she highjacked a Twitter user’s #neverforget tweet about the picture to shine a light on the way media prematurely sexualise young women.
It’s a pretty brutal indication of how some young young women were treated and, yes, maybe exploited at a time when they were all at their most vulnerable. Amanda Bynes – who was also on the cover – was placed in an involuntary psychiatric unit in the last few days, Mary-Kate Olsen had a very high profile battle with anorexia a year after the cover shoot and we don’t need to tell you that Lindsay Lohan has struggled with implications of being a child star. Which just goes to show how problematic the way we treat young female stars is - and what an impact it can have on the rest of their lives.
Luckily, Evan has since worked with *Vanity Fair *again and had a much nicer experience and now says she’s ‘found her voice’ and is much happier, which is great news. But the idea of being lined up and judged like that aged 15? Grim. It was bad enough building up the courage to get on the bus to school when we had a particularly brutal spot. All things considered, Evan seems remarkably well adjusted.
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Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.