Cindy Sherman’s and Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley

For a hundred years of New Yorker history (except once, in 2000, for our seventy-fifth anniversary), our covers have featured drawings, not photographs. For the September 1 & 8, 2025, special centenary issue titled “The Culture Industry,” we decided to break with tradition. Cindy Sherman’s “Being Eustace” is her take on “Eustace Tilley,” the dandy drawn by Rea Irvin to launch the magazine, in February, 1925, which has been repeated for decades on headers and on the cover of anniversary issues and has become a well-known masthead.

“It was quite a challenge. There have been so many variations on Eustace, I thought it would make it easier, but actually it made it harder to find my own,” Sherman told me. “I hoped the idea would come as I was working on it. I tried many things—found the hat but then the jackets didn’t go with it until I tried this one,” Sherman continued, pointing to a jacket that she got from the Salvation Army in the early two-thousands. She mentioned that she originally intended to make a Eustacian nose with prosthetics but happened to find just the right thing in her precious nose collection. (Sherman’s studio also features shelves of found and altered dolls’ heads and other curios.)

Since the first variation of Eustace by R. Crumb in 1994, there have been forty-five interpretations published on the cover; yet Sherman’s is the first one where the character is peering into a mirror. Sherman is thrilled to have broken new ground. “I was ready to quit, but once I found the jacket, hat, nose, and my Clarissa Bronfman butterfly ring—that’s when it all fell into place,” she added, laughing.

For more covers featuring Eustace Tilley, see below:

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