Martha Stewart and Miriam Margolyes are diverse cover stars

Last month, however, it made international waves by putting Martha Stewart on the front of its Swimsuit Issue. 

Edited with the idea of "diversity" in mind, Sports Illustrated put Stewart on the cover due to her age. Former jailbird Martha Stewart is white, upper middle class, rich and famous but she ticks the diversity box due to being 81. And we all know how men's magazines love an ageing woman.

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Stewart's cover photo certainly was designed to belie her years. In it she is wearing a tight white swimsuit, an orange billowing cape (I don't know much about fashion but is it a cape?), her hair bouffant and her complexion plumply young.

Her boobs are on show, but in a sexually alluring way. Our own Miriam Margolyes has now joined in by gracing the cover of Vogue magazine. She, in pictures inside the magazine, has her boobs on show but in a non-threatening Calendar Girls kind of way, covered by buns. 

Margolyes, who, in her interview with the magazine, said she's glad to be gay because being gay ensures she's unconventional, looks like she is having an absolutely marvellous time throughout. 

She follows in the footsteps of Dame Judi Dench - in whose shadow we all languish - who, at 85, was the oldest star to appear on British Vogue's cover in the magazine's 104-year history.

Dame Judi did not have her boobs out but she is straight, and therefore conventional and convention generally dictates that 85-year-olds don't pose in the never-never. 

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(When I say "out", in case you haven't seen the pictures, I do repeat that they are coyly semi-covered by what look like Danish pastries but you get the sense the shoot director will have had to argue for this. Margolyes seems the kind of broad quite happy to go full frontal).

Coverage of Margolyes's cover story has focused far more on what she said than what she looks like. What she said is certainly interesting but that's not the reason her looks have been overlooked.

Rather, as a character actress, she's not counted as a sexpot and so her ageing face and figure draw far less scrutiny. She's a card, old Miriam, and look at her there, with her buns out. Such larks. 

There has still, though, been praise at how someone so elderly is having a chance at being on a magazine cover. Praise has been funnelled towards both Vogue and Sport Illustrated for taking a stand against the strictures that dictate women who feature in such publications must be nubile and slender, youthful and smooth. 

It sticks right in the craw, any suggestion that these magazines are doing good works. They are taking a stand against a problem almost entirely created and then facilitated by them and their ilk. 

We measure how sexually attractive women continue to be as they age on the social capital they are given by the beauty and fashion industries. It takes a strong woman indeed not to influenced by what they see and what absorb from the kinds of messages published by glossy magazines. 

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When we discuss the issue of whether sexualisation of women is empowering or harmful, we rarely do it in the context of OAPs. Yet the Martha Stewart cover attracted headlines because Stewart looked so "good" for her age. Margolyes's went comparatively unremarked because she looks largely like a woman of 81 - with the help of a pro make-up team - would look. 

It shows that, no matter how old or how talented or what the achievements, her one dominant attribute is what she does - or doesn't - look like. I don't criticise Stewart for refusing to go gently into the goodnight of female ageing but it's hard to praise attempts at diversity when they come from one cover star on one magazine or two then fizzle out after a season.

Being "old" might be so in this year but change is only meaningful when magazines ensure age diversity never goes out of style.