Dolly Parton, Cover Girl Forever

Good golly, Miss Dolly! Please say it isn’t so! As of last night, flags across the country have been ordered to half-staff for the passing of our dearly beloved Dolly Parton. That doesn’t make any sense—Dolly Parton was supposed to live forever. And of course, Dolly Parton will live forever, but…yesterday was simply too soon.

We all know Dolly to be the rhinestone-swinging, big-haired, big-hearted voice of the every-person. But just like us, she loved reading (50 books a year!). She loved books so much that she founded Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, inspired by her father, who never learned to read or write. The Imagination Library mails free books to children from birth to 5 years old. What started as a focus on children in Tennessee has grown into over 300 million books gifted worldwide.

Dolly Parton for Vogue, 1994. Photo by Herb Ritts

With her love of reading, we’re choosing to believe she also loved magazines. Glossy pages, matte pages, tabloids, editorials, you name it. And we believe that because, over the course of her beautiful life, Dolly served us with some of the greatest editorials to ever hit the newsstand. Hair to heaven, nails for days, rhinestones wherever rhinestones could possibly go.

Below are some of our favorites.

Dolly + Andy Warhol is a match made in heaven (ugh, no pun intended…). Unfortunately, this cover came out two years after Andy’s passing. We know he loved it from above. How could you not with photos by Herb Ritts?? STUNNING! (The duo would later reunite for Vogue in 1994.) The way the light bouncing off her robe looks like a cigarette… we know Dolly would never, but a very Interview touch nonetheless. Plus, Dolly takes to the Beverly Hills Hotel for an interview by William Stadiem (former Interview columnist and author of Marilyn Monroe Confidential). It gave us the brilliant quote, “I look totally artificial but I’m totally real.” Look back at the full story here.

“I look totally artificial but I’m totally real.”

This spread + cover for Out is juicy and sensual, with Dolly playing a mix between lost cowgirl and corporate muse. It’s also a bit hard to come by. Some of the best photos came from this listing…if any of you inquire, please report back asap. The cover’s legacy lives on, too: it was recreated with Orville Peck in 2022 (also for Out). Photos by Dah Len, according to our research.

1997 was a great year for the delicious combination of Dolly Parton and Magazines. She continued dipping her toe into the avant-garde (most of us would call this alt these days), with her cover shoot for Paper by David LaChapelle.

Now here’s the plot twist… Paper has posted the above blue image as the cover, but our sleuthing has led me to a post from stylist Robert Behar that seems to show a physical copy with a different cover. Does anyone know the truth???

Anyways, enjoy more from the shoot!

This 2021 W cover is Dolly at 75 and still operating at maximum Dolly. Photographed by Harmony Korine (random, but we’ll take it), styled by Allia Alliata di Montereale, and profiled by the legendary Lynn Hirschberg for The Originals Issue. The profile is full of little scenes getting at the magic of being Dolly: impossibly glamorous, and just like everybody else. A particular vignette that stuck with me:

She shook her wrist so that the diamonds caught the light, and the bracelet fell to the floor. “See what happens when I wear the real stuff?!” Parton joked, as everyone in sight scrambled to pick it up. “I’m a rhinestone girl!” Parton started singing a few bars of “Rhinestone Cowboy,” and the guard swooned. “You can drop my bracelet anytime,” he said.

Whew!!!!

In full blonde-bombshell-meets-American-icon mode, Dolly graces the June 1991 cover of Vanity Fair. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, written by Kevin Sessums, and styled by Marina Schiano, Dolly descends on Fort Hood, Texas. Dolly is the American Dream in heels: country singer, movie star, sex symbol, businesswoman, and—at the time—commander (is that where the military creative direction came from, or was it the bombshell…I digress) of a reported $100 million empire.

Kevin Sessums gets some incredible Dolly-isms out of her, but perhaps none better than this, after asking about her acting ambitions:

“I’m never going to be a Meryl Streep.” She pauses and makes sure I am staring right back at her. “But then, she’ll never be a Dolly Parton either.”

Correct!!!!!

And shoutout to Vanity Fair for putting actual resources behind digitizing its archive. So many incredible magazine stories now exist online only as grainy scans, eBay listings, or screenshots passed around the internet (how most of this article was put together…).

Dolly is nothing if not strategic. Coinciding with the release of her TWENTIETH album, Dolly took to the October cover of Playboy. Wearing the signature bunny ears, Dolly became the first country singer to pose for the magazine.

And because Dolly is Dolly, she recreated the shoot more than 40 years later, as a birthday present for her husband. Back came the bunny suit, with a new photo framed alongside the original cover, which she presented to her husband over dinner. We only really see the back of Carl Dean’s head—which tracks, considering the man spent nearly six decades married to the icon while remaining almost completely out of the spotlight. She posted about it on X (then Twitter), which also seems to be when Dolly learned about #HotGirlSummer…

(Editor’s note: I would love to talk to whoever runs Dolly’s social)

This cover from Clash—featuring a great profile by Simon Harper—where they did an amazing job using archival images (Dolly obviously declined to be photographed… been there). It seems like it may still be available for purchase? Godspeed.

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