‘The Odyssey’ Star Elliot Page Heads to the Bathhouse for ‘New York’ Magazine’s Debut Men’s Style Issue Cover

Men’s fashion magazines tend to follow a familiar script of sharp tailoring, studio lighting and one carefully posed star. ‘New York’ magazine took a different route with its first standalone Men’s Style Issue, and the results are already lighting up feeds.

The 89-page print edition skips the usual men’s fashion tropes in favor of the narrative journalism the magazine has published for decades. It also ships with 4 different covers rather than a single traditional cover star, and editor-in-chief David Haskell is confident it will be a success.

Elliot Page for The Men’s Style Issue of New York Magazine

📸: Ryan McGinley pic.twitter.com/WjUZLVjYnQ

— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) September 28, 2026

One of those covers stars Elliot Page, photographed by Ryan McGinley. The images went viral on Monday. The main cover shows Page shirtless in blue striped shorts, arms crossed in front of a rustic wooden door, while a second image has him leaning beside a mirror in a tiled room.

The cover line places him at the Russian & Turkish Baths, and it teases a lineup of stories that includes ‘The Armani Succession’, ‘The Chrome Flippers’ and a piece on Alex Katz and Wisdom Kaye. Another line promises that McGinley himself “sweats it out.” The headline frames the whole issue as a look at getting dressed and undressed again.

For our inaugural “Men’s Style Issue,” we shvitzed and kibitzted with some of New York’s most stylish men at the Russian & Turkish Baths in the East Village, where photographer Ryan McGinley captured it all: https://t.co/11QSqJZE58 pic.twitter.com/sAiIyETaRJ

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) September 28, 2026

For the inaugural issue, the magazine said it spent time with some of New York’s most stylish men at the East Village bathhouse, where McGinley photographed the whole thing. It is a fitting backdrop for an issue about clothes coming on and off.

The bare-bones facility sits in the basement of a tenement on Tenth Street and has been drawing New Yorkers to sweat since 1892. Two owners run it on alternate weeks. Its regulars have ranged from gangsters to hipsters and from artists to politicians.

McGinley is a natural fit for that unfiltered setting. He landed a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art at just 25, and he has spent years turning his camera on celebrities for major magazines.

See our very-little-fashion shoot in the baths with regulars and newcomers, including Troye Sivan, Christopher Abbott, Mike Faist, Marlon James, Francesco Clemente, Elliot Page, Rashid Johnson, Eddie Huang, and more. https://t.co/i563OEjvNx pic.twitter.com/LGkYFohCMf

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) September 28, 2026

The cover lands in the middle of a full year for Page. He attended the New York premiere of Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ in July, and he also narrates and co-executive produces ‘Second Nature’, a documentary exploring how long-held assumptions about sex, gender and sexuality in nature often fail to reflect reality.

Page explained to Democracy Now! that he joined the project partly because he found it “so affirming as a trans and queer person.” In a separate conversation with The Trevor Project, he described his greatest joy as “feeling present in a way that I didn’t imagine possible before.”

That sense of presence carries through the bathhouse images, which lean on steam, tile and unguarded expressions instead of studio gloss. It is a very different mood from a typical style-issue cover.

The reaction has extra context because of what happened in July. A viral image claiming to show Page on the August Men’s Health cover turned out to be false, and the magazine confirmed it never published it. Netizens pointed out that the picture looked AI-generated.

The ‘New York’ images arrive with a named photographer and a cover line naming the location, which makes them easy to tell apart from that hoax. It also shows how quickly a magazine cover can become the internet’s main event.

Between the unusual setting, the 4-cover approach and one of the year’s more talked-about stars, the debut Men’s Style Issue has already become a conversation starter. Whether it becomes a new annual tradition for ‘New York’ is something only its sales will answer.

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