- VP Kamala Harris felt "wounded" and "belittled" by her Vogue cover image, a forthcoming book reports.
- A top adviser relayed Harris' displeasure directly to Vogue's editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
- The controversial cover photo showed Harris casually dressed with a heavily draped background.
Vice President Kamala Harris felt "belittled" and "wounded" by the cover photo of her that Vogue selected for its February 2021 issue and dispatched a top aide to complain to Anna Wintour, according to a forthcoming book.
Politico's West Wing Playbook newsletter previewed excerpts of "This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future" by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, set for release in May, that detail Harris' reaction to the controversial Vogue cover.
The image, shot by photographer Tyler Mitchell, featured Harris casually dressed in a Donald Deal pantsuit and Converse sneakers in front of a background that featured draped green and pink fabrics in a nod to Harris' college sorority colors.
But when the image leaked online in January 2021, it reportedly caught Harris' team off guard and garnered immediate criticism. Some of Harris' allies and other critics charged that both the choice of Harris dressed more casually failed to give her the respect and gravitas that she deserved, and that the lighting and background portrayed the vice president-elect in an unflattering light.
"Harris was wounded," the authors wrote. "She felt belittled by the magazine, asking aides: Would Vogue depict another world leader this way?"
Harris' then-top spokeswoman Symone Sanders, now an MSNBC host, went directly to Wintour, Vogue's editorial director and editor-in-chief, to relay Harris' displeasure with the image, according to the book. Wintour, for her part, told Sanders that she'd selected the photo herself and thought it made Harris more "relatable," the book said.
"The team at Vogue loved the images Tyler Mitchell shot and felt the more informal image captured Vice President-elect Harris's authentic, approachable nature — which we feel is one of the hallmarks of the Biden/Harris administration," a Vogue spokesperson also said in a public statement at the time.
But amid the mounting criticism, the magazine picked a different image from Harris' Vogue shoot showing the vice president more formally dressed in a powder blue pantsuit with a simpler gold background as the cover photo for the digital issue and a special, limited edition print issue to commemorate the inauguration.
The Vogue incident also exacerbated tensions between Harris' office and the West Wing, a major theme of the book.
When Harris' chief of staff Tina Flournoy caught wind of the uproar over the cover image, she raised the issue to an unnamed "senior Biden campaign official," the book said. But, with the COVID-19 pandemic still raging and the nation still reeling over the January 6 insurrection, "[t]he Biden adviser told Flournoy that this was not the time to be going to war with Vogue over a comparatively trivial aesthetic issue."
"Tina, the adviser said, these are first-world problems," the authors recounted.
A representative for Vogue did not immediately return Insider's request for comment.
In the excerpts of the book reviewed by Politico, the authors also reported that Harris felt disrespected by White House aides not standing when she walked into a room as they did for Biden. Flournoy took the issue up with senior White House adviser Anita Dunn.
The authors reveal more details about Harris' dissatisfaction and frustrations with the portfolio of issues she was assigned to handle, which includes voting rights, immigration, and the US' relations with the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
Harris, they wrote, was "resigned to the assignment" of the Northern Triangle nations and "did not hesitate to chide Biden" for portraying her as "border czar."