Cover-up campaign

Lindsay Lohan wants you to know that she's all right. Reminiscing about the series of scandals that have nearly derailed her career, she is all contrition. "When I look back on this last year, it's like what was I thinking?" she confided in the March issue of Harper's Bazaar. "I've learned so much, though, like learning to live my life a different way."

No need to take her word for it. Images speak persuasively, and in the case of Lohan, they do what they can to counter the perception that she is a train wreck.

The cover, shot soon after Lohan's third round in rehab is the most sophisticated of a trio of recent magazine covers to feature the troubled star – including a near-nude shot by Bert Stern for New York magazine and a provocative pose for Paper. She is the latest Hollywood celebrity to seek to overcome scandal through the redemptive power of fashion imagery. Last June, six months after her arrest for drink-driving, Nicole Richie modelled on the cover of Bazaar with Paris Hilton. In September, not long after Britney Spears's first go at rehab and her divorce from Kevin Federline, Spears vamped up for Allure, the beauty magazine. Drew Barrymore, a recent cover girl for American Vogue, first graced the magazine's front in 2005 when many readers still recalled her years of drug abuse.

"A cover on Vogue or Bazaar, I think of it as the new celebrity rehab," says Liz Rosenberg, the publicist for Madonna. "Some people go to Utah," she says, a reference to the Cirque Lodge detox programme, where Lohan was treated. "Others go to Smashbox and do a photo shoot."

The audience for such makeovers is not just the ticket-buying public. The glamorous covers are also aimed at movie executives. "A person in a position to greenlight a movie project might say, 'Oh, I guess she's turning her life around,'" Rosenberg says.

That is Lohan's hope. Her publicist, Leslie Sloane Zelnik says: "Her appearance on Bazaar is part of a strategic repositioning." It is an attempt to recast the actress as the pulled-together antithesis of the bad girl who was scolded in 2006 by a producer for failing to show up on the set of Georgia Rule.

"Right now I just want to find a great script, a great role," Lohan said in the March issue of Paper. She is shooting Dare to Love Me, a movie about a tango star, but has not completed a movie since starring last summer in the horror flop I Know Who Killed Me.

"Fashion can put a calm, fresh and vital face on a recovering soul," says Sally Singer, the fashion features director for Vogue.

Lohan, 21, looks mature and confident on the cover of Bazaar. Such a laboriously constructed image, thanks to make-up artists and digital retouchers, is meant to serve as a corrective measure to counteract the sometimes ugly images of celebrities in tabloid weeklies. "As a publicist, I would be high-fiving myself for getting Lohan on the cover of Harper's Bazaar," says Chris Miller, Drew Barrymore's manager and publicist.

He added that it can eventually translate not just to film roles but to advertising contracts. Barrymore, who wrote directly to Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, to campaign for a cover in 2005 is the current face of Gucci fine jewellery and of CoverGirl cosmetics.

More than a talk show appearance or a stroll along the red carpet, a magazine photo shoot, with its army of enablers to select the right clothing and make-up, casts a performer in the best light. "It's a safe atmosphere where the star has some control of her image," says Zelnik.

Winona Ryder must have thought so. Last August, five years after a trial and conviction for shoplifting, she was persuaded by Vogue's editors to pose for the cover. It was Singer's job to reassure her. "Before the shoot I told her, You can show your face to the world in the context of clothes in which you look beautiful," she recalls. If an actress is hoping to dust herself off after a fall, she adds, "this is a good way to do it".

Of course it also pays returns for the magazines, as scandal-craving readers snap up the issues, which often promise a star's first on-the-record account of her troubles. And if the interview is anodyne – or even nonexistent – there are always the pictures.

The kid-glove treatment from fashion magazines has long made them popular with public figures who have suffered a reversal, especially when they are seen as women scorned. For them, "the best revenge is looking good," Singer says. In 1990, Vogue put Ivana Trump on its cover weeks after her highly publicised split with Donald Trump, who had left her for a model. The magazine photographed Hillary Clinton in 1998, in the aftermath of her husband's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Jennifer Aniston scored her Vogue cover in April 2006, just after separating from Brad Pitt.

Alas, readers' approval is not an assurance of a career comeback. Ryder has not been in a hit movie since her conviction, despite the Vogue cover. Fashion, and the reader, can be forgiving. Movie executives? Not necessarily. A star like Lohan, certainly, can hope to rehabilitate her image through fashion, says Robert Green, an executive producer of Mad Money. "But until she gets in a movie and it makes a lot of money, no one in the industry is going to care."

Green had considered casting Lohan in Mad Money, but the idea "was made moot by the fact that at the time she was not insurable." Her off-camera behaviour was seen to be so irresponsible that the underwriters of film production budgets would not issue a policy.

"I told myself, OK, let's call Katie Holmes," Green says. "She may have a weird personal life, but nobody thinks she's not going to show up on time."

Green is sceptical that a fashion makeover holds much sway with industry power brokers. "I don't think Lindsay Lohan can overcome the things she's done in her personal life by being on the cover of a fashion magazine," he says.

Some of his peers are more generous, however. "People know that with fashion, a lot of retouching goes on," says Alison Owen, the producer of The Other Boleyn Girl. "Still, if you see someone in a magazine looking healthier than they have for some time, consciously or subconsciously it makes you think, 'Oh, this person is back in the ring; they want to be considered.' That is going to have an effect on you."