Emma Stone!

For the first time since January 2008, the cover of Vanity Fair this month features an individual working actress under the age of 30. Hello, Emma Stone! (We're still kind of figuring out which one you are!) One wonders if something's gotten in the water at Vanity Fair--the magazine's typical nostalgia for dead celebrities (last year saw Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, and--sigh--Marilyn Monroe covers) has been replaced by nostalgia for the late-nineties days in which untested stars used to romp across the cover. Teenage Natalie Portman! A near-unknown Charlize Theron!

2011 Vanity Fair is getting a little riskier than the dead-and/or-hyperfamous formula it had landed on in the past couple of years (excepting big group shots, which always have had and always will have a few random unknowns in there). This year saw covers by desperate post-celebrity Rob Lowe, neither (yet) dead nor (now) hyperfamous, as well as, randomly, the costume-loving pop singer Katy Perry. Risk! Oddity! The nineties are back! Between Ms.

Gretchen Mol!

Stone and Ms. Perry, one of them stands a decent chance of going the way not of Ms. Portman but of Gretchen Mol--the anonymous starlet granted a cover and fashion spread in the magazine, then not heard from again.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_