Rio is the second studio album by Duran Duran, released on May 10, 1982 through EMI. Duran Duran themselves do not appear on the front cover of Rio, which was a stylistic departure from their debut and most albums at the time; the band felt that photographs and the music videos would suffice.
Instead, the cover artwork is a portrait of a woman with striking make-up, a large smile and black hair. It was painted by artist Patrick Nagel, who was commissioned by the band after co-manager Paul Berrow discovered his work while browsing a Playboy magazine; Nagel was a regular contributor to the magazine at the time. Creating what became known as his trademark style, Nagel presented two options: a woman with a flower in her hair sitting sideways and the chosen shot of a woman smiling. Nick Rhodes recalled, “We all said instantly: ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s the cover.’” 42 years later, the woman’s identity has finally been revealed.
The big reveal was announced by Monica Moynihan, a Nagel historian and art broker who runs the definitive Patrick Nagel Arts website and Instagram. The cover girl’s mysterious identity was actually uncovered by another Instagram account, @nagel_angel, aka Nagel expert Mark Walker, who Moynihan said “deserves all the credit” and “spent $$$ and countless hours” in a hungry-like-the-wolf quest to hunt down the original lady with the cherry ice cream smile.
“ Today we publicly reveal Duran Duran’s Rio May 1982 album cover image source from Vogue Paris, February 1981,” Moynihan wrote on Instagram before adding that the image stemmed from a multi-page editorial in the magazine.
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| Marcie Hunt in an Angelo Tarlazzi fashion spread for the French edition of Vogue, February 1981. |
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| Marcie Hunt in an Angelo Tarlazzi fashion spread for the French edition of Vogue, February 1981. |
Walker, who’d been “buying a lot of various fashion magazines from the era that Pat might have purchased: Everything from European versions of Vogue, to Linea Italiana to American magazines like GQ, Glamour, and U.S. Vogue,” tracked down the album cover’s original source image — a multi-page editorial spread for Angelo Tarlazzi in the February 1981 issue of Vogue Paris. “I saw that smile. I saw those eyes, those eyes that I’d stared at hundreds of times by this point in my life, hundreds if not thousands of times. I’ve been entranced by this magical woman for over 40 years. I knew it was her,” Walker posted on his own Instagram account.
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