Blue sky fills the space around Estelle Lefébure on this Grazia cover. Her black top slips below one shoulder, a large hoop earring catches the light, and windblown hair crosses her face without interrupting the smile. The date beside the masthead reads 9/8/1987: 9 August, following the Italian day/month convention. A detachable holiday beauty supplement supplies the cover's biggest promise. Its white lettering runs diagonally across the black fabric, leaving most of the face and sky clear.

Lefébure was only about two years into modelling. ELLE's interview with her that year describes how quickly she had found success in Paris and America, dividing her time between Paris and New York. She recalled hesitating for a long time before accepting an agent's offer to model. The magazine's own archive records another cover with Hispard on 6 July 1987, just over a month before this issue.

Hispard brought a much longer working history. Born in 1938, he entered a photographic laboratory at fifteen and worked professionally for Le Jardin des Modes at eighteen. That puts roughly thirty years of fashion photography behind him here. His work would continue well into the following decade, including photographs of Kate Moss in 1995.

Inside, Bellissime in vacanza brings the camera closer. The smile gives way to parted lips and a sideways gaze; loose strands run across her forehead and eyes. I prefer it to the cover for the warm brown background and the way the hair breaks up the portrait. The crop takes away the cover's expanse of blue and almost all the clothing, concentrating the colour in her skin and hair.

The blue returns later in the feature, darkened almost to navy, on the hair page headed I capelli. She is in profile with her head tipped back and her eyes closed, and the smile from the cover has opened into a laugh. Wet hair swept back off her face falls in long strands down her back, and a pale blue towel is draped below one bare shoulder.

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