Bey, Quiet

New York: The biggest Vogue of the year, the vaunted September issue (832 pages, 4 pounds, 3 ounces), is now on the stands. On its cover is arguably the biggest star of the moment, Beyonce.

Among celebrity profiles, Vogue is very nearly the holy grail. Submitting to a top-tier magazine profile means a peek behind the well-guarded curtain, a soul-baring interview plus a few hours gamely spent on publicist-arranged fun. For Vogue, they have fed elephants (Reese Witherspoon), browsed Birkins (Anne Hathaway), even wept, albeit over onions cut in a cooking class (Scarlett Johansson).

It is part of the bargain struck between celebrities and the news media, where face time and a few juicy first-person revelations are traded for a starring role.

But inside Vogue's September issue, Beyonce says not a word.

The magazine's photo shoot with her is accompanied instead by a short essay on her star quality by Margo Jefferson, who won a Pulitzer for criticism while at The New York Times. "It was definitely posed to me as ... call it a think piece if you want," said Jefferson, reached by phone. "I had no contact with her camp."

This is unusual for Vogue. A review of five years' worth of cover articles indicates that she is the only celebrity cover star not to submit to some type of interview (and on the occasion of her first Vogue cover, in 2013, she did). When models appear on the cover, as in the case of last September's issue, they typically do not get the same profile treatment, but even the "Instagirls" of September 2014 - Cara Delevingne, Karlie Kloss, et al. - answered a few questions online. Not only did Michelle Obama agree to an interview when she appeared on the cover in 2013, she even brought along her husband.

It may be unusual for Vogue, whose representatives declined to comment, but it is no longer unusual for Beyonce. At some imperceptible point around 2013 to 2014, she appears to have stopped giving face-to-face interviews. A member of her team told a reporter in May that despite numerous appearances, she had not answered a direct question in more than a year. Her publicist declined to clarify this stance. (When Beyonce does answer questions, it tends to be in writing or, for TV, taped.)

If she is avoiding the news media, it is not avoiding her. Her music scales the charts, and her media domination continues on her terms. In her not-talking mode, she has appeared on the covers of, and in lavish photo shoots for, Time, Out, CR Fashion Book and T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

For these magazines, working around a silent star has required dexterity. CR Fashion Book had poet Forrest Gander "remix" written statements from her into a kind of free verse. Out profiled her team, the long-serving and devoted operators of the Beyoncé machine (and was granted a Q&A with her by email).

"In some ways, it made her more present and real than if I'd only been granted a single interview with her," Aaron Hicklin, Out's editor and the article's author, wrote from a vacation abroad.

Why has Beyonce gone mum? Even if the public expects an unreasonable amount of disclosure from its icons, few of her fellow celebrities have followed her lead. She may have concluded that face-to-face interviews are not in her interest. (She keeps an archive of all of her media mentions and all photos of herself.) She occasionally comes off daffy, as when she told GQ in 2013, "I'm more powerful than my mind can even digest and understand."

Jefferson said: "She has to be studying how effective her interviews have been so far. She may have decided that they do not contribute as dazzlingly to the portrait of Beyonce as the other stuff. It's a perfectly reasonable decision."

She added that having seen the HBO special Beyonce: Life Is But a Dream, "I'm not at all surprised. That is a deeply micromanaged documentary."

With social media, celebrities can make an end-run around traditional media.

"People are getting more savvy," said Jesse Parker Stowell, a vice president at Full Picture, which represents high-profile talent including Heidi Klum and Adriana Lima. "They have their own form of media. They can just put it out on Instagram." (Beyonce has 43.5 million followers on Instagram; she tends to post mostly photos of herself, many without comment.)

Others see her choice as empowered. Daphne A Brooks, a Yale University professor who teaches a class on black women and popular music culture that includes Beyonce's music (she is on sabbatical, finishing a book that will, in part, discuss Beyonce), views her inaccessibility as a hard-won privilege, a reclamation of privacy not historically accorded to African-American women.

"She's been able to reach this level of stardom in which she's managed - in a way that I really think is unique even among other black women entertainers - hypervisibility and inaccessibility simultaneously," Brooks said.

She called it "refreshing" to think that Beyonce's reticence in the news media would challenge her listeners "to think about the art first" as opposed to fostering a presumption about "getting closer to the entertainer."

Beyonce, via her spokeswoman, declined to comment.