Open that famous record sleeve and there he is. Michael Jackson leaning back in a crisp white suit, one knee bent, looking straight into the camera. It turned into one of the most famous album covers ever made. Most folks assume a suit like that came off a Hollywood wardrobe rack, or out of Michael’s own closet.
It didn’t.
The man behind the camera that day was Dick Zimmerman, a Los Angeles photographer known for his portraits of big stars. He shot the “Thriller” cover on July 22, 1982. The session ran about six hours across three different setups, and Quincy Jones, the legendary producer who made the album with Michael, had the final say on which picture would end up on the front.
Now here’s the part the photo never tells you.
When it came time to settle on what Michael would wear, he looked over at Zimmerman and liked what he saw. “That’s the look I like, do we have anything like that?” Michael asked. The wardrobe racks were full, but nothing on them matched. So the two of them fixed it in the simplest way you could think of.
Zimmerman was wearing the suit himself. As it turned out, he and Michael were the same size. So he took it right off and handed it over, and the photographer’s own suit became the one on the cover of the biggest-selling album in history.
Dick Zimmerman walks through the whole shoot in the clip below, from that first setup to the moment the picture finally came together.
Here is the photographer who shot the cover, telling how it all happened.
Dick Zimmerman on creating the “Thriller” cover with Michael
The suit wasn’t the only surprise in the room. For the fold-out photo inside, Michael picked a six-week-old tiger cub and spent much of the day quietly worried the little thing would scratch his face. That gave Zimmerman a job on top of taking pictures. “Throughout the session I had to get Michael to forget about getting scratched, and to focus his attention on me and my camera,” he said.
When the right frame finally showed up, Quincy knew it on sight. “That’s your cover, Michael!” he said. A few months later Michael sent the photographer a short, warm note: “Thank you for creating my very beautiful album cover.”
If you want to hear how that single shot got picked out of a whole day’s work, Zimmerman lays it out here.
How the final cover frame was chosen
The suit had a long life after the shoot. It was a Hugo Boss, and Zimmerman held onto it for years. In 2001 he put it up for an online auction, but the bidding never reached his reserve price, so it didn’t sell that day. Hugo Boss later brought the suit back, releasing a new edition of it in 2018 for fans who wanted a piece of that cover for themselves.