JCPenney’s Other September Issue swaps models for real teachers

Every September the fashion magazines publish their fattest issues of the year, stacked with models, celebrities and the season’s runway. JCPenney has answered with “The Other September Issue”, a fashion spread whose models are real teachers from San Marcos, Texas, wearing clothes the retailer actually sells at prices they could actually pay.

The issue fronts a new campaign, “Everyone Deserves a Better Deal”, which broke on 16 September. Marisa Thalberg, chief customer and marketing officer at parent company Catalyst Brands, calls it the next evolution of the “Yes, JCPenney” platform launched in April 2025, which set the department store up as the affordable, accessible answer to fashion industry norms, as Adweek reported. The film went up on JCPenney’s own channel the day before.

Teachers are a shrewd choice of hero. They are underpaid, universally liked, and shopping for a September wardrobe at exactly the moment the campaign runs, so the casting does the strategy’s work without a word of copy. It also lands a quiet dig at the September issue tradition itself, which celebrates clothes most readers will never buy.

Real people in place of models is a route with a long record, from Dove to Whistles’ fifty street-cast women last week. The difference here is that JCPenney is not selling self-esteem. It is selling a price, and the teachers are proof the price is real, which is a more honest use of the device than most.

JCPenney has spent two years trying to make a mid-market department store feel like a point of view rather than a place your parents shopped, in a category that has already lost Sears and most of its peers. A platform built on affordability has an obvious weakness: every discounter can say it. Building it on who the affordability is for is harder to copy.