Marissa Mayer took the stage with talk show host Charlie Rose at IAB's Advertising Week conference on Tuesday to discuss her strategy for Yahoo (key word: "mobile"). Toward the end, the talk turned to gender and leadership. Rose asked Mayer whether she hass felt the impact of her gender on her career, and about the story behind her head-turning Vogue photo shoot.
The photo, which appeared in Vogue's September issue, featured Mayer arranged upside-down on a garden chaise. The pose, combined with the body-hugging, cobalt blue sheath dress she's wearing, draws attention away from her face and to her body — inappropriate for the CEO of a major tech company, many said.
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"Will we see Larry Page on the cover of Vogue?" Rose asked.
"It wasn't the cover," Mayer corrected, clearly embarrassed. She went on to say that the photo was unplanned and "out of necessity." The photographer Mikael Jansson's assignment was to capture an unconventional CEO in an unconventional pose — sitting ladylike on the chaise wasn't going to cut it. When Jansson suggested she lay upside down, she hesitated. He assured her it would "look good" and so she went for it.
Call it a story of photographer manipulation, then. Mayer wouldn't be the first: Former president Bill Clinton agreed to cover Esquire's memorable December 2000 issue with a "dignified" headshot. But in the clever hands of photographer Platon Antoniou, who asked Clinton to "show him the love" at the end of the shoot, it turned into something far different.
Image: EMMANUEL DUNAND/Getty Images