Glamour South Africa just shot a full digital cover on a phone. Not a phone filming behind the scenes while a real camera did the work. The phone was the camera.
The cover star is TV presenter and content creator Chanley Wong, and the device doing the heavy lifting was Samsung’s new Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra. It is the foldable’s first professional cover job, and a fashion shoot is not a gentle place to start. Skin tones, detail and dynamic range all have to be spot on, because magazine readers notice everything.
Anyone who has been near a fashion shoot knows the usual setup. Heavy camera bodies, a bag of lenses, external monitors and enough tethering cables to trip the entire styling team. The Fold8 Ultra squeezes most of that into one handheld device.
The specs are serious: a 200MP wide camera, a 50MP ultra-wide lens and a 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom, plus 2x optical-quality zoom. That let the photographer switch perspectives on the spot, while Samsung’s ProVisual Engine handled detail, lighting and natural skin tones in real time.
The clever bit is the fold. Normally you squint at a tiny camera screen or plug into a separate monitor. Here you open the phone and get an 8-inch display to check composition, focus and detail right there on set. Shoot, unfold, look, done.
Thobeka Phanyeko, Features Editor at Glamour South Africa, says the partnership let the team rethink what is possible in fashion journalism. She credits the clarity, colour accuracy and speed of the phone, plus that big screen for reviewing high-res images, with making the shoot seamless.
Watch the behind the scenes reel on Instagram
And honestly, look at the pictures. Chanley wears finger waves, oversized denim, a hot pink blazer dress and sharp tailoring, and none of it looks like it came off a phone. That is either a compliment to the camera or to Chanley. Probably both.
This is not Samsung’s first time doing this in South African media either. In 2021, GQ South Africa shot its May/June dual covers, fashion spreads and behind the scenes content on the Galaxy S21 Ultra. In 2022, GQ returned for an outdoor cover shoot on the S22 Ultra, while Glamour used the same phone for its Disruptors issue. In 2024, Samsung moved into film with Ekhaya, a South African short film shot entirely on the Galaxy S24 Ultra.
What I find interesting is what this means for everyone who is not a magazine. If a fashion title trusts a phone with its cover, the gap between “proper” equipment and what sits in your pocket is getting very small. Creativity still needs vision and talent. It just needs a lot less luggage.
For Chanley, it is a gorgeous spotlight. For Glamour, it is a modern way to tell a fashion story. For the rest of us, it is a gentle reminder to stop blaming the camera.
