“I’m so sick of people shaming women for being sensitive or vulnerable. It’s so bizarre to me,” Winona Ryder tells Heather Havrilesky, the Cut’s “Ask Polly” columnist, in the fall fashion issue, about the press and its tendency to pathologize female emotions. Havrilesky, writing her first cover story for New York Magazine, says she could have happily talked to Ryder for many hours: “She was so nice and so smart. And very able to analyze different cultural oddities. We had a great conversation.”
Ryder, who stars in Netflix’s Stranger Things, posed for the cover of New York’s fall fashion issue, which was shot by Norman Jean Roy and styled by Victoria Bartlett. On photographing Ryder, and creating the cover image, photography director Jody Quon says, “We wanted to make classic portraits to elegantly capture the essence of the woman that has been so embedded in our collective memory.” Quon says she felt Norman Jean Roy’s purist approach to portraiture would be a good fit for the shoot, as well as “his ability to engage with his subject, and gradually bring out their character during the dance that unfolds between photographer and his subject.”