SEP

JUST FALL

B 832
ROMANCE

BEYONCÉ PAGES OF
AND THE ART WILDLY
OF GLOBAL WONDERFUL
DOMINATION LOOKS

Forces
oƒ Fashion
THE RULE-BREAKERS
DEFINING THE WAY WE
DRESS NOW
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248
VOGUE.COM

364
EDITOR’S LETTER

404
TAKE YOUR PIC
The models, athletes,
actors, tastemakers, and
editors who contributed
to our “Forces of Fashion”
portfolio sent us their
favorite selfies—click,
filter, post!

416, 442

FAS HI O N ED I TO R: G RAC E CO D DI NGTO N. H AIR , PAUL H ANLON; MAKEUP, LUCIA PIERONI FOR CLÉ D E PEAU BEAUTÉ. D ETAILS, SEE IN T HIS ISSU E .
MASTHEAD

454
TALKING BACK
Letters from readers

468
CONTRIBUTORS

488
UP FRONT
Her first marriage (to
a man) was a disaster,
but head over heels
with a new girlfriend,
Gabrielle Hamilton is
ready to try again

502
MEMOIR
In this excerpt from
her upcoming book
M Train, Patti Smith
recalls how, as a poet,
musician, and new wife,
she made a pilgrimage
to French Guiana

516
LIVES
Szelena Gray, the feisty
COO of bipartisan Super
PAC Mayday, aims to fix
our broken campaign-
finance system—right now.
Robert Sullivan reports
C O N T I N U E D >1 6 6

Kicking
into GEAR
HUSTLE & BUSTLE, P. 732
MODEL LIYA KEBEDE WEARS A GIVENCHY BY
RICCARDO TISCI CORSET TOP AND A ROCHAS
SKIRT. PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID SIMS.

112 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

 september
Beyond
THE
BLUE LAKE EFFECT, P. 774
CINDY CRAWFORD’S DAUGHTER,
KAIA, IN A DRESS BY WHIT.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY CARTER SMITH.

554
NOSTALGIA
For Val Brelinski, who
grew up in an evangelical
community, a stolen
photograph of Marisa
Berenson epitomized
all the freedoms

S I T TI NG S E D I TO R: MI RA N DA B RO OKS. HA I R, HA RRY JOSH FO R HA R RYJ OS H.COM; MAKEUP, H UNG VANNGO FOR CK ONE COLOR COSMETICS. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
she was denied

flash
566
IT GIRL
Billie Lourd

571
TALKING FASHION
Cascading high-wattage
paillettes reveal a new
breed of disco dream
girl; retro neckties add
a touch of fifties-era
insouciance (page 580);
turn-of-the-century
detailing gets a modern
592 an eccentrically elegant 632
SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY line. By Sarah Mower CHAIN REACTION
recast with crisp lace and From outbreak-gripped
high collars (page 590) Liberia to earthquake-torn 622 Paco Rabanne hears
the call of disco cool
EN PLEIN AIR
572 Nepal, Kelly Suter goes
where no one else wants to The sculptor Marie
632
ART Christophe moved
A new crop of chic,
young ceramists is
594 her family from Paris to
SNAKE CHARMERS
Marc Alary and
THE HAMISH FILES a bucolic 19th-century
Spinelli Kilcollin band
reinventing the potter’s country mansion—
together on jewelry
view
wheel with delicate, and she hasn’t
634
handmade wares looked back. Hamish

580 602
Bowles reports
WHEN IN CHROME
BOOK READY, STEADY 628 As a Frank Gehry
retrospective opens,
Kelly Klein’s photographs With his chic and elegantly EASY RIDER
capture the world sensual pieces and his Mulberry’s latest designers meld their
beyond the lens new handbag collection, collaboration revs high work with his legacy
Joseph Altuzarra proves
582 that slow but sure wins the 630 636
TNT race. By Robert Sullivan SHOPPING WITH IN THE CLUB
Paging through the first MARGOT Nicholas Kirkwood’s
monograph dedicated 610 Lynn Yaeger takes a couture collection
to her historic family TWO FOR THE SHOW fanciful spin around town will walk you back
schloss, Elisabeth TNT Katie Hillier and with fall style heroine to the future
recalls a life less ordinary Luella Bartley launch Margot Tenenbaum C O N T I N U E D >2 24

166 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM


638 Lucia Pica is bringing a
cool new attitude to Chanel
664
STYLE ETHICS STREAKS OF GENIUS
A new collection from
Erdem blooms naturally
654 As his own salon is set
to open, the dye is cast
SEOUL SEARCHING
for the legendary colorist
Thanks to these three
beauty Korean beauty Web
Christophe Robin
& health sites, ahead-of-the-
curve imports are just
664
GAME ON
a click away. Celia
640 Ellenberg signs on
A new book takes the
video-game debate
FALL FORECAST
The products, places, and 656 to the next level
people to know this season THE BOTTOM LINE
Weary of looking back in
666
646 anger, Marcia DeSanctis
LET THEM EAT FAT
Endurance athletes
SAINT LUCIA embarks on a dedicated have long sworn by
With her singular beauty regimen in pursuit of the ketogenic—or “fat
vision, the makeup artist hindquarterly perfection burner”—diet, which takes
Atkins to the extreme.
Elizabeth Weil tests it out
people are
talkıng about
673
TALENT
The Force is clearly with
Star Wars newcomers
Daisy Ridley and
John Boyega
677
ART
Genieve Figgis’s paintings
are ghostly, cheeky
677
MOVIES & TV
Fall brings no shortage
of magnetic antiheroes
682
SCENE
Worth-the-wait openings
from five top chefs
682
DANCE
Choreographer Myles
Thatcher pirouettes
into the spotlight
682
TRAVEL
Take the long way with
bespoke road trips
across the States
Anchors AWAY! ALL IN THE TIMING, P. 770
684
UP NEXT
Perla Haney-Jardine lights
TREVOR NOAH IN BURBERRY LONDON.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY PATRICK DEMARCHELIER. up the screen in Steve Jobs
224 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
september
684
DESIGN
Three artisans
reinvent traditional
crafts
686
PERFORMANCE
The stage is set for
fresh takes on
opera and ballet
686
TENNIS
Borna Coric is
one to watch at
the U.S. Open
692
PHOTOGRAPHY
“Irving Penn: Beyond
Beauty” exposes a new
side of the legend
692
BOOKS
Fall fiction examines
how we live now
692
MUSIC
Lianne La Havas
returns to her roots
fashion
& features
697
FORCES OF
FASHION
We now live amid a
democracy of
images—how we
encounter style has
been irrevocably
changed, and has
irrevocably changed
how we dress. “Forces
of Fashion” is a first-
of-its-kind portfolio,
from those defining
the look of a new era
732
HUSTLE & BUSTLE
Victoriana is the new
buzzword, with today’s
social buccaneers
wearing flared sleeves
and florals, flounces
and jet—and old lace
made new again
C O N T I N U E D >24 0
VOGUE.COM

Enchanted FOREST
MODEL RAQUEL ZIMMERMANN WEARS AN ERDEM COAT.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY MIKAEL JANSSON.
744
INTO THE WOODS
The season’s new long
and cozy coats—all red-
rose embroidery, Maid
Marian belts, and folkloric
patchwork—are touched
with the fairy-tale romance
of a lost, sunken forest
756
B STRONG
Moving, morphing,
leading, flaunting; such
is the power of Beyoncé
that just one letter tells
us who she is. Margo
Jefferson explores what
it takes to run the world
240 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
september
INTO THE WOODS, P. 744
762
MAKING HER CASE
She waited a grueling
166 days to be confirmed,
but Loretta Lynch’s tenure
as attorney general is
off to a dramatic start.
Emily Bazelon reports
766
BELLA DONNA
In her upcoming
memoir, design icon
Donna Karan reflects
on her early days in
fashion, creating her
groundbreaking label—
and looks forward to
her latest chapter
770
ALL IN THE
index
TIMING
As Jon Stewart
808
SHINE ON
steps down from From embellished
The Daily Show, Nathan sunglasses to micro-
Heller catches up studded slippers, the new
with his heir apparent, accessories have as much
the young South African pop as end-of-summer
comic Trevor Noah fireworks. Send off
774 the season with sparkle!
LAKE EFFECT
For Cindy Crawford
830
IN THIS ISSUE
and family, a lakeside
getaway in central
Ontario is dressed-down,
832
LAST LOOK
off-the-radar bliss. Rob
Haskell flies in for a
cover look
summer weekend
782
EMPIRE RISES BEAUTY
The stars of TV’s
hottest hip-hop drama, QUEEN
its creator Lee Daniels,
and the musician The
Weeknd step out in
sensational style. By
Jonathan Van Meter
ZI M ME RMA N N : FAS HI O N E DI TOR : TA BI TH A S IM M ON S. H A I R, MA RC LO P EZ ; M A KEU P, H ANNAH MUR RAY. PRODUCED BY NORTH SIX EUROPE.
792
FEATURE
PERFECT
As forward-thinking
cosmetic surgery
welcomes a new era of
subtlety over shock
value, two women
explore the facial
details that continue Beyoncé wears a Marc
to define us Jacobs dress and coat.
To get this look, try:
794
Dream Wonder
STEAL OF Foundation, Face Studio
THE MONTH Master Hi-Light in Nude,
With a spate of new Eye Studio Brow Drama
films, Elizabeth Debicki brow mascara, The
reveals what’s found Blushed Nudes eye-
in translation shadow palette, Eye
Studio Lasting Drama
796 Waterproof Gel Pencil
WHAT TO in Sleek Onyx, Lash
WEAR WHERE Sensational Washable
Nothing signifies the Mascara, Color
approach of fall quite Sensational Rebel Bloom
like time-honored lipstick in Barely Bloomed.
tweed. As Kendall Jenner All by Maybelline New
shows us, though, the York. Hair, Kim Kimble;
textile has been updated makeup, Francesca Tolot.
via rainbows of color Details, see In This Issue.
and pinpoints of Photographer:
sparkle—and all with Mario Testino.
an air of easygoing, Fashion Editor:
early-autumnal fun Tonne Goodman.
VOGUE.COM
 DESTINY’S
CHILD
A PHOTO
FROM THE
SINGER’S
INSTAGRAM
ACCOUNT.

video

bey Queen Go behind the scenes

of our September
shoot with Beyoncé.
The most powerful
woman in music
gives us an exclusive
look at the making
of this iconic cover.

CELEBRITY STYLE
All of the star sightings worth noting are
registered, distilled, and analyzed daily.
It happens so fast that it feels like real time.

CULTURE PREVIEW
Our seasonal report covers this
fall’s important TV and film premieres,
the New York and Toronto film festivals,
the Emmy Awards, and the biggest
music, literary, and art happenings.

TAKING it to EARTH MOTHER

CRAWFORD AND
HER DAUGHTER,
Model
the STREETS
KAIA GERBER, IN
VOGUE, 2004.
HOME

BEYO N CÉ : COU RT ESY O F B EYON C É/ © IN STAG RA M . C RAW FO RD A ND GE RB ER : PATR ICK D EMARCH ELIER .
The most talked-about looks are often Cindy Crawford
spotted outside the shows. Every day, we takes us on a tour
identify the best street style seen at the of her low-key lake
spring 2016 collections on Vogue.com. house two hours
outside Toronto.
Here she spends
time with her
husband, Rande
Gerber, and their
two teenagers,
waterskiing,
paddleboarding,
and hanging out
on the dock. To see
more of how Cindy
lives the simple life,
go to Vogue.com.

WALK WITH ME
PHOTOGRAPHED
BY PHIL OH,
VOGUE.COM, 2015.

248 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VO G U E .C O M >2 6 2

 NAOMI
CAMPBELL,
CHRISTY
TURLINGTON,
AND LINDA
EVANGELISTA,
PHOTOGRAPHED
BY ROXANNE
LOWIT, 1990.

JOHN GALLIANO,
1993.

CHANEL, 2003. CAROLINA

HERRERA, 2006.

CHRISTIAN
LACROIX, 2004. VOGUE BURBERRY,
2015.
A LL OT HE RS : ROBE RT FA I R ER .
BU RBE RRY: K EV I N TAC HMA N .

Just in time for the start of the spring 2016 womenswear shows comes Vogue Runway. A new section
GA LLI A N O: DA N LECCA .

of Vogue.com, Vogue Runway features enhanced coverage of all the major Fashion Weeks in New York,
London, Milan, and Paris—including menswear—as well as emerging Fashion Weeks in far-flung locales like Sydney,
Stockholm, and São Paulo. Look to Vogue Runway for reviews from our top critics, world-class street-style photography,
more daily fashion news, and features that will make you feel like you’re sitting front row, including live-streamed videos,
instant photos straight from the catwalk, and immediate analysis of all the top designers’ looks. Want more? Vogue
Runway has the industry’s most complete archive: more than 12,000 collections dating back to 2000. Start clicking!

262 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VO G U E .C O M >2 9 8

 RAINBOW BRIGHT
CARA DELEVINGNE,
WEARING RODARTE,
PHOTOGRAPHED
BY PATRICK
DEMARCHELIER
IN VOGUE, 2015.

All
glitters
THAT

The ante has officially been upped.

Silhouettes that are typically filed
under “work appropriate” have
gotten the glamour treatment.
Think sequins, shine, and lots of
embellishments. Go to Vogue.com
to see the office transformed into
our own private discotheque.

BLUE CRUSH
MOODY,
DIRECTED BY
ALVARO COLOM,
WEDDED Bliss
From St.-Tropez to St. Barth’s, Brooklyn to Bluffton, S.C., the
VOGUE.COM,
2015.
weddings we cover are both aspirational and inspirational.
Plus, we highlight the best planners in the business, the
perfect venues, the prettiest hair and makeup ideas, our
favorite engagement rings, and much, much more.
HAPPILY EVER AFTER
LAUREN AND ANDRÉS
SANTO DOMINGO,
PHOTOGRAPHED
BY ARTHUR ELGORT
IN VOGUE, 2008.

video
Color THEORY
We asked editorial makeup artist and English cool girl
Hannah Murray to break the conventional summer-
beauty rules, and she delivered. In a series of video
shorts, she demonstrates enough out-of-the-box makeup
statements on model Vanessa Moody—from a dash
of lavender on the lids to a painterly bolt of Pop Art–blue
eyeliner—to carry you through the rest of the season.

298 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015

letter from the editor

Forces
to
Reckon
Wıth
O
ver the last
few months,
an army
o f Vo g u e
editors and
photogra-
phers has
been shooting many of the de-
signers, models, and musicians
whose unique and powerful
work defines not only how we
get dressed every day, but who
shapes fashion right now: from

FAS HI O N ED I TOR : TON N E G OO D MA N . HA I R, KI M KI M BLE ; MA KEU P, F RA NC ESCA TO LOT.

Marc Jacobs to FKA Twigs;
Ralph Lauren to Uniqlo; Al-
exander Wang to the mod-
els who are also social-media
stars—namely Kendall Jenner,
Cara Delevingne, Gigi Hadid,
and Karlie Kloss. Unsurpris-
ingly, this project, which we have
called “Forces of Fashion” (page
697), was an enormous undertaking, with more than a few pop culture in general, and music RUN THE WORLD
BEYONCÉ, IN A GIVENCHY
nail-biting moments on the way to making a picture happen. specifically, has had. Who better, BY RICCARDO TISCI
That said, I’m absolutely thrilled with the results, and to all then, to be our September cover JACKET, PHOTOGRAPHED
BY MARIO TESTINO.
those who contributed to this portfolio, thank you. star than Beyoncé, who makes not
I’m particularly pleased with “Forces of Fashion” be- one but two appearances in this issue (one with good friend
cause it is very much a reflection of how we see the world Riccardo Tisci in the “Forces” portfolio). As writer Margo
today—it has the same sense of surprise and diversity that Jefferson (whose stunning new memoir, Negroland, I urge
one experiences when scrolling through the constant flow you all to read) details in her thoughtful essay (“B Strong,”
of wildly different images on Instagram. The portfolio also page 756), Beyoncé is not only a role model who is a daz-
makes explicit the globalization and democratization that zling singer and performer, but a cultural touchstone for our
have transformed fashion, not to mention the impact that times as well. E D I TO R ’ S L E T T E R >3 8 0

364 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

letter from the editor
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 3 6 4
That latter description
could also apply to the televi-
sion show Empire, which has
plenty of fans here at Vogue.
You don’t need me to tell you
how gloriously addictive it is
to watch, a pleasure none of
us feel at all guilty about own-
ing up to. Yet like so many
other series in the past that
have connected in a major way
with a vast audience, Empire
carries deeper societal and
political themes beneath its
impossibly glossy and gaudy
surface. Jonathan Van Meter
visited the set of the show he
calls “a hip-hop King Lear”
(“Empire Rises,” page 782),
and he gets to the heart of the
matter when he writes about
how this record-breaking
EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
televisual success arrived in JOURDAN DUNN AND TERRENCE
a year when we’re seeing the HOWARD, PHOTOGRAPHED
BY MARIO TESTINO.
broader cultural impact of
hip-hop as well as recognizing
and combating the all-too-prevalent hatefulness of racism. DYNAMIC DUO
PUBLIC SCHOOL’S
When we first began work on this issue, none of us could MAXWELL OSBORNE
have foreseen the tragic events that would unfold in Balti- (STANDING, LEFT)
AND DAO-YI CHOW
more and Charleston, South Carolina—events that have (KNEELING) WITH
horrified the world. Two very different figures speak mov- JOAN SMALLS
AND DEV HYNES,

EM P I R E: FASH I ON ED I TOR : CA M I LLA N I CK ERSO N . HA I R, O RI BE FOR OR IB E H A IR CAR E. MAKEUP, D OTTI. MENSWEAR

ingly of their experience of racial inequality in this issue: PHOTOGRAPHED BY
our new attorney general, Loretta Lynch, the first African- BRUCE WEBER.

E D ITO R, MI CH A E L P HI LOUZE . PU BLI C SCH OO L: FASH I O N ED I TO R: P H YLLI S P OSNI CK; H AIR , J ENNIFER YEPEZ ;
American woman to assume that role (“Making Her Case,”
by Emily Bazelon, page 762), and Trevor Noah, the South
African comedian who takes over from Jon Stewart as host

MA K EU P, A LI C E LA N E . LYN CH : S IT T I N G S ED I TO R: M A RK GU IDUCC I . D E TA I LS, S EE IN TH IS ISSUE.

of The Daily Show this autumn (“All in the Timing,” by
Nathan Heller, page 770). E D I TO R ’ S L E T T E R >3 9 8

LAYING DOWN
THE LAW
LORETTA LYNCH,
PHOTOGRAPHED BY
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ.

VOGUE.COM
letter from the editor

BOSS LADIES
ABOVE: CINDY CRAWFORD WITH HER CHILDREN,
PRESLEY AND KAIA, PHOTOGRAPHED BY
CARTER SMITH. RIGHT: DONNA KARAN,
PHOTOGRAPHED BY WAYNE MASER, VOGUE, 1992.

C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 3 8 0
Both of them, in their own ways, are hav-
ing to act quickly in their new roles. Lynch,
because of the political maneuverings that
led to the long delay in her appointment, is
facing a potentially curbed period in office,
yet as she rightly points out, “the issues are
too large and too immediate” for her not
to be decisive and dynamic. Noah, mean-
while, is a young man whose very birth, to
an African Xhosan mother and a Cauca-
sian Swiss father, was technically illegal
under apartheid. He arrives in a country
where he is confronted, literally and meta-
phorically, with a new landscape to make
sense of. We wish them both every success. the Public School designers, Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell

HA R RYJ OSH .COM; MA KEU P, HU N G VA N N G O FO R C K O NE COLO R COS ME T ICS.

Lastly, we bring you stories of two women whose lives Osborne, who incidentally also feature in “Forces of Fash-

C RAW FO RD : SI T T IN G S E D ITO R: MI RA N DA BRO O KS. H A I R, HA R RY JOSH FO R

have been long intertwined with that of Vogue: the model/ ion.”) The talent, the warmth, the self-deprecation, the
entrepreneur Cindy Crawford and the designer Donna honesty, the humor, the drive, and the determination to do
Karan. I sometimes feel that the mark of a successful model something meaningful whenever and wherever she could—
isn’t just the fame she enjoys at the peak of her career but I think of all this when I think of Donna. She, too, has
how she conducts her life after that, in which case Cindy written a book that tells her story, and it is by turns mov-
has been hugely successful; for seventeen years she’s been ing, insightful, and hilarious, yet always, always heartfelt.
happily married to Rande Gerber, with whom she has two I’d say I will miss her terribly, but knowing Donna, she’s
lovely children, the whole family living an idyllic life between likely already got a million schemes in the works. Hardly
California and Canada. We offer a glimpse of the latter in surprising. When you’re a true force of fashion, nothing
“Lake Effect,” by Rob Haskell (page 774). Cindy is about holds you back.
to publish a book chronicling her career, and while it will
certainly remind everyone of what a tremendous model
she was, the beauty and happiness she radiates now tell an
equally compelling story.
I have to admit I felt great sadness when Donna told me
that she was stepping down from designing her own label.
(DKNY will continue on, the design being handled by

398 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

forces of fashion
We asked a few of the models, athletes, actors, tastemakers,

TAKE Your Pic

and editors who contributed to this month’s “Forces of
Fashion” portfolio for their favorite selfies—click, filter,

© I NSTAG RA M. COU RT ESY OF P HYL LI S P OS N I CK . COU RT ESY OF TA B I T HA SI M MON S. COURTESY OF OD ELL BECKH AM, J R . COURTESY OF J OAN SMALLS/ © INSTAGRAM. COURTESY O F HE LE N A SU RIC/ © IN STAG RAM. COU RT ESY O F MARK HO LGAT E .
post! See their work and more starting on page 697.

COU RTESY OF CA RA D ELEV I N GN E / © I N STAG RA M. COU RT ESY O F KE NDA LL J EN N ER / © INSTAGRAM. COURTESY OF KAR LIE KLOSS. COURTESY OF MAR K GUIDUCCI/ © INSTAGRAM. COU RT ESY O F N ICHO LAS HOU LT. COU RT ESY O F FE I FE I SU N /
Cara Delevingne @ caradelevingne Kendall Jenner @kendalljenner Karlie Kloss @karliekloss

Mark Guiducci @ guiducci

Gigi Hadid @ gigihadid Nicholas Hoult @NicholasHoult Fei Fei Sun @ feifeisun

Phyllis Posnick @phyllis_posnick Tabitha Simmons @ tabithasimmons Odell Beckham, Jr. @iam_objxiii

Joan Smalls @joansmalls

Riccardo Tisci @riccardotisci17 Helena Suric @helenasuric Mark Holgate @markholgatenyc

404 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

 ANNA WINTOUR
Editor in Chief

Creative Director GRACE CODDINGTON

Design Director RAÚL MARTINEZ
Fashion Director TONNE GOODMAN Features Director EVE MacSWEENEY
Market Director, Fashion and Accessories VIRGINIA SMITH
Executive Fashion Editor PHYLLIS POSNICK International Editor at Large HAMISH BOWLES
Fashion News Director MARK HOLGATE
Creative Digital Director SALLY SINGER
Fashion
Fashion News Editor EMMA ELWICK-BATES Bookings Director HELENA SURIC Senior Accessories Editor SELBY DRUMMOND
Market Editor MAYA SASAKI Fashion Writer NICK REMSEN Menswear Editor MICHAEL PHILOUZE
Home Market Editor REBECCA STADLEN Associate Accessories Editors GRACE FULLER, WILLOW LINDLEY
Associate Market Editors GRACE GIVENS, ALEXANDRA MICHLER, EMMA MORRISON
Fashion Market Manager TAYLOR ANGINO Accessories Associate SARA KLAUSING Bookings Associate FIONA LENNON
Fashion Associates LAUREN BELLAMY, ALEXANDRA CRONAN, GABRIELLA KAREFA-JOHNSON
Beauty
Beauty Director CELIA ELLENBERG
Beauty Writer LAURA REGENSDORF Beauty Assistant ARDEN FANNING
Features
Culture Editor VALERIE STEIKER Senior Editors TAYLOR ANTRIM, LAUREN MECHLING, JOYCE RUBIN (Copy), COREY SEYMOUR
Entertainment Editor JILLIAN DEMLING Social Editor CHLOE MALLE
Style Editor at Large ELISABETH VON THURN UND TAXIS Food Critic JEFFREY STEINGARTEN Arts Editor MARK GUIDUCCI
Assistant Editor KATE GUADAGNINO Features Associates LILI GÖKSENIN, ELIZABETH INGLESE
Features Assistants SAMANTHA LONDON, MADELEINE LUCKEL, LILAH RAMZI, LAUREN SANCHEZ
Art
Deputy Design Director ALBERTO ORTA
Art Director MARTIN HOOPS
Associate Art Director NOBI KASHIWAGI Designer JENNIFER DONNELLY
Executive Photography Director IVAN SHAW Production Director, Visuals ALLISON BROWN
Photo Editor ALEX O’NEILL Photo Editor, Research MAUREEN SONGCO Photo Researcher TIM HERZOG
Producer JENNIFER GREIM Assistant Photo Editor LIANA BLUM Assistant to the Design Director ROSEMARY HANSEN
Vogue.com
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Contributing Editors ROSAMOND BERNIER, MIRANDA BROOKS, SARAH BROWN,
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talking back
THE AMANDA SHOW
In her work from comedies to dramas,
Amanda Seyfried consistently demon-
strates that she is an actress of great tal-
ent [“A Place in the Sun,” by Jonathan
Van Meter, photographed by Mario
Testino, June]. Who knew that the girl
who broke out as the dimwitted Karen
Smith in Mean Girls would become
one of Hollywood’s biggest stars? But
more important, underneath all of her
beauty and talent, Seyfried shows us
that she is a regular person, trying to
get by in everyday life.
Sydney Kramer
Philadelphia, PA
454 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
Letters from Readers
A PLACE IN THE SUN
AMANDA SEYFRIED IN
DIOR. PHOTOGRAPHED
BY MARIO TESTINO.
VOGUE’s June cover had a powerful
impact on the whole issue. Dior’s blue
perforated patent leather top, along
with Seyfried’s freshly rumpled hair,
effortlessly captured the season and
set the issue’s tone. There’s no question
that this alluring image made me want
to open the magazine right away.
Ian Cavazos
Monterrey, Nuevo Leon
Mexico
I really enjoyed the article on Amanda
Seyfried. The actress has intrigued me
through her many unexpected transi-
tions, and Mario Testino’s photographs
were stunning and beguiling. They were
a welcome surprise after “Wild World”
[photographed by Mikael Jansson,
June]. If you wanted to feature bohe-
mian camping, there are many real art-
ists you could have included who would
have made the shots much more inter-
esting. Using a cookie-cutter model did
nothing for me, even though this is the
kind of piece I usually crave.
Elena Acevedo Dalcourt
San Diego, CA
I loved how Amanda Seyfried’s warm
personality and free spirit instantly
took over this piece. As a fifteen-
year-old girl, I was empowered to see
VOGUE feature an actress with a
distinctive look and unusual sense of
beauty. What an incredible role model
for young women around the world.
Elizabeth Reinhardt
Brisbane, Australia
L.A. STORIES
I was so happy to read “Valley Girl,”
by Chiara Barzini [Nostalgia, June].
Four months ago, I moved to Los An-
geles from Kiev, Ukraine. Even though
I thought I was well prepared for the
change, I am still struggling. But deep
down, I know this difficult time will be
worth it in the end. Ms. Barzini’s article
came as a sign that I am on the right
track—an encouraging hug from an
older, wiser friend. I just wish I could
hug this friend back.
Olga Baker
Malibu, CA
Thank you for publishing “Valley
Girl.” Los Angeles may be known for
its traffic and celebrity stints in rehab,
but there is a charm to the city that
often gets overlooked. I, like the au-
thor and many others, moved here not
knowing what to expect but have come
to love the endless summer, stunning
land, and beautiful people (some on
the inside, some on the outside).
Carla DiGiacomo
Beverly Hills, CA
TAKING THE REINS
It was so inspiring to read about a
man like Peter Copping [“Fresh Heir,”
by Hamish Bowles, photographed by
Annie Leibovitz, June]. The article was
a wonderful tribute L E T T E R S > 4 6 2
VOGUE.COM
talking back Letters from Readers
to the late Oscar de la Renta, while
also focusing on the fact that Cop-
ping wants to debut his own ideas
and stay in touch with the house’s
roots. I love how he recognizes the
need to continually grow and remain
open-minded. I do wish the piece had
focused more on Copping’s work,
rather than on his homes—but nev-
ertheless, the story made me excited
to see what is to come from the Oscar
de la Renta brand.
Cate Waters
Boston, MA
MADE FOR THE SHADE
Your article on skin cancer treatment
and prevention is to be lauded for its
462 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
message [“Ban de Soleil,” by Sarah
Brown, photographed by Tim Walker,
June]. However, I noticed that photo-
dynamic therapy was not among the
treatments the author cited. I under-
went this procedure six weeks ago in
my dermatologist’s office. Not only
are the red, scaly areas of precancer-
ous cells completely gone, but my
skin is smooth and glowing, and my
deepest wrinkles have softened notice-
ably. The downtime is considerable (48
hours indoors after the procedure, and
peeling can last more than a month).
But the results, from both a health and
beauty standpoint, are well worth it.
Sue Lyon-Boggs
Fort Worth, TX
LATIN LESSONS
NATIVE PERUVIAN FOODS.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY
ERIC BOMAN.
“Ban de Soleil” really hit home for
me. However, my experience with the
chemotherapy drug Efudex was very
different from the mild treatment rep-
resented in your article. I first saw a
small rough spot on my collarbone and
mentioned it to my dermatologist, who
advised me to try the drug. I did not ex-
pect the effect the treatment had on my
skin. I’ve learned since then that wear-
ing a hat, seeking the shady spot at the
pool, and wearing sunscreen are not
the end of the world—and just might
save my life.
Carrie Hammonds
Ashland, KY
A HOUSE BY THE SEA
Bliss has many faces. The piece on
the Corsican home of Karl Fournier
and Olivier Marty [“Rough Magic,”
by Hamish Bowles, photographed
by François Halard, June], who aptly
named their architectural firm Studio
KO, gives new meaning to roughing
it—which I would gladly do in those
lush surroundings!
Lori Agostini
Chicago, IL
PLENTY TO GO AROUND
Thank you for the article on Peruvian
food in your June issue [“Latin Lessons,”
by Jeffrey Steingarten, photographed
by Eric Boman]. I teach American
Civilization to 1865 at the University of
Alabama. The mention of Peru as the
birthplace of the potato and cacao made
me smile, as this is exactly what I want
the students to know: Food, like people,
is often reinvented as it moves through
time. Reading your article, I realized this
piece could be a primary source, since
even new documents count as a way to
understand how people live in a certain
period. Thanks for reminding me, and I
hope students as well, how people from
different places encounter and enjoy
food no matter our differences.
Sharony Green
Tuscaloosa, AL
VOGUE welcomes letters from its readers.
Address all mail to Letters, VOGUE Magazine,
1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007,
or via email to Talkingback@vogue.com. Please
include your name, address, and a daytime
phone number. Letters may be edited for length
and clarity and may be published or used in any
medium. All submissions become the property
of the publication and will not be returned.
VOGUE.COM
contributors
The WEEKND

T
he question is no longer if Taylor Swift’s fa-
mous friends will make guest appearances at
her concerts; the question is how many will be
there. At one recent performance at MetLife
Stadium, for instance, Lena Dunham strutted
alongside Gigi Hadid, Hailee Steinfeld, and Lily Aldridge
before the high priestess of pop summoned the U.S.
women’s national soccer team to her runway of a stage,
the newly victorious athletes brandishing an American
flag taller than most of Swift’s fans. The biggest surprise
appearance of the night, however, was Abel Tesfaye, who
goes by his stage name The Weeknd. Watching Swift’s
legions chant the innuendo-laden lyrics of “Can’t Feel
My Face”—the first single off his latest LP, the much-
anticipated Beauty Behind the Madness—made it clear
that the mainstream momentum behind the mysterious
Ontario-born R&B virtuoso is reaching a fever pitch.
Just days later, that was confirmed when Tesfaye’s track
reached the top spot on iTunes’s songs chart.
“Abel has an incredible talent for creating music for
the masses without losing his credibility,” says producer
Savan Kotecha, a pop-music savant who helped shep-
herd The Weeknd’s new album. “It’s a tightrope that he’s
becoming a master of.” A onetime force behind Drake’s
moody rap music, Tesfaye wields a wounded lyricism
of his own and a voice that has prompted comparisons
to Prince and Michael Jackson. Some might even say
that his hair alone deserves icon status. But with Beauty
Behind the Madness, which features production by Max
THE WEEKND,
Martin, the Swede largely responsible for Ms. Swift’s own WEARING
metamorphosis from country star to global powerhouse, A DOLCE &
GABBANA SUIT.
The Weeknd is set to become the poster child of post- PHOTOGRAPHED
modern R&B and another symbol of its integration into BY MARIO
TESTINO
the music machine.—MARK GUIDUCCI

ELLENBERG WITH
HER RESCUED
CELIA Ellenberg
PET, LOLA, IN This issue marks the first for
VINEGAR HILL,
Vogue’s new Beauty Director. The

O RI BE H A I R CA RE ; MA KEUP, DOT TI . ME N SW EA R ED I TO R, M IC HA E L P HI LOUZE .

BROOKLYN

E LLE NB ERG : ZACKE RY MI CH A EL. SI T T IN G S ED I TO R: A LE XA N D RA CRO NA N .

raven-haired Brooklynite, who
T HE W E EK ND : FASH I ON E D I TO R: CA M I LLA N I CKE RSO N . H A I R, O RI B E FO R
previously lent her sense of chic
to Style.com, Net-a-Porter, and
WSJ Magazine, looks forward to
HAIR AND MAKEUP: INGEBORG. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.

infusing Vogue’s beauty pages with

“a bit of unexpected newness.” “I
want people to look to this section
for what’s next,” she says. As for
her own aesthetics? In true cool-
girl form, she opts for minimalism,
accenting a bare face with a singular
statement feature. “Whether that’s
a cat eye or a strong lip, I like that
juxtaposition a lot.”—ELIZABETH INGLESE

CONTRIBUTORS> 476

VOGUE.COM
 contributors BAZELON,
PHOTOGRAPHED
BY NINA SUBIN
RAQUEL Zimmermann
“Dartmoor National Park is one of the
most enchanting places I have ever
been. The lush greenery of the moss-
covered forest was just breathtaking!”
THE MODEL ON THE LOCATION FOR “INTO THE WOODS,” PAGE 744

Emily BAZELON
“What struck me most about
Loretta Lynch is her ability to look ZIMMERMANN
IN YVES SAINT
LAURENT,
you in the eye—and keep looking.” PHOTOGRAPHED
BY BRUCE WEBER,
THE WRITER ON HER EXPERIENCE WITH THE ATTORNEY VOGUE, 2012
GENERAL (“MAKING HER CASE,” PAGE 762)

TESTINO IN
BEVERLY HILLS
MARIO Testino
“I wanted to capture a
strong, sexy Beyoncé,
and I wanted to have
her input—I wanted
her to be a part of
the whole process.
She was up for all the
ideas we proposed.”
T ESTI NO : COURT ESY O F M A RI O T EST I N O/ © IN STAG RA M

THE PHOTOGRAPHER ON HIS COVER SHOOT

CONTRIBUTORS>4 82

476 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

 contributors

Elizabeth
DEBICKI
“I’m really
nomadic and it’s
a bit mad. But
regardless of
how exhausted
you are, it’s also
a great way to
DEBICKI, WEARING live your life.”
AN H&M TOP AND
A DEMYLEE SKIRT. THE ACTRESS ON HER
PHOTOGRAPHED ITINERANT LIFESTYLE
BY SCOTT TRINDLE (“STEAL OF THE
MONTH,” PAGE 794)

DAVID Sims

D E BI CK I : FAS HI O N E D ITO R: SA RA M OO N V ES. HA I R, LU KE H ERS HESO N ; M A KEUP, LAUR EN PARSONS. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
SIMS,
PHOTOGRAPHED
BY JULIAN DANN
“The direction
fashion is moving
in still varies
from house to
house, but I can’t
help noticing that
there’s a lot more
‘looking back’ on
design for ideas.
We’re all doing it.”
SIMS, A CONTRIBUTING
PHOTOGRAPHER FOR
“FORCES OF FASHION”
(PAGE 697), ON TRENDS
IN THE INDUSTRY

482 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

up front
I do.
I don’t.
I do.
Her first marriage
(to a man) was a
disaster, but in the
wake of a historic
Supreme Court
ruling, and head
over heels with
a new girlfriend,
GABRIELLE
HAMILTON is
ready to try again.
T
he first marriage I knew, my own parents’, I
mostly and most vividly remember the end-
ing of. Enraged, my father cleared the laden
lunch table in one sweep of his arm—mustard,
cornichons, radishes, salami, hard-boiled egg,
scattered across the terra-cotta floor—and
walked outside; my mother dropped her chin to her chest,
rolled her eyes, and operatically guffawed. A Maria Callas of
derision and scorn.
There are a few earlier, less dramatic impressions I have of
that final period of their marriage: my dad’s china dinner plate,
at the table set for seven, unused and awaiting his arrival home
from work, still sitting there empty long after the remaining six
of us had finished eating, clearing, scraping, washing, drying,
and putting away. My mom’s separate bedroom up in the attic-
like turret of the house, with a slanted skylight view over the
woods of rural Pennsylvania. Our annual monthlong summer
vacations to France that my dad paid for but didn’t join except
for one slim fraction of, and in the photos of those vacations
the six of us are glowing from weeks of sun and baguettes and
moules and frites and Camembert and he’s looking pale and
jet-lagged and unable to catch up.
I was not paying attention to their disintegrating marriage;
I was having just the very best time coming alive, no longer a
488 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
HEART ON FIRE
THE AUTHOR AT HER
CELEBRATED
RESTAURANT, PRUNE,
IN MANHATTAN.
baby forced to take afternoon naps, but a real kid, with three
fascinating, unruly older brothers who swore and smoked
and drove, and a teenage sister with a record player, and my
own three-speed bike.
At dinner parties my parents were, each of them, indi-
vidually, gorgeous and funny and charming, and they each
glittered their own significant wattage: my mother the French
ballet dancer with the cat-eye black liner of the era, and the
hair pulled back in a perfect chignon, and the heavily used Le
Creuset pots simmering on the stove with coq au vin. And my
father, with his sideburns and the aviator sunglasses, design-
ing the sets for Broadway shows, taking us to Manhattan
at Christmas to eat chicken Kiev at the Russian Tea Room.
They shone bright, those two, but not with each other or for
each other or to each other.
I couldn’t say that I noticed at the time, but when I was a
little older and sifting through the rubble of their divorce,
it seemed that they didn’t live much of life together, in
tandem. She raised the children; he was at work. He went
skiing; she stayed home. I saw them hug, once. And kiss—
not even once.
JU LI A G I LLA R D
It must have been dazzling to have known them earlier
on, when they were building their life, but I am the young-
est of their five children, and by the time U P F R O N T> 4 9 3
VOGUE.COM
 up front Love, Actually
I was waking up to it, their marriage, it was Dijon mustard
streaked across the kitchen floor.
Divorced, the house sold and its contents dispersed, in-
cluding most of the children, my mom moved to Vermont.
She had met the outside limit of what she could muster for
the Sake of the Kids. My brother and I, the two remaining
youngest in the family, eventually settled into a summer with
our dad, who had started dating at the counterswing of the
pendulum: women with lazy posture and jangly bracelets who
wore their hair down. No matter how blasé you can pretend
to be at thirteen, it is still just too weird to have some 27-year-
old “gal,” as he called them, whistle into your dad’s kitchen
in the morning and introduce herself, while your own mom
is decamped to the hills, four states away. By the time I hit
puberty I was already ardent and not inarticulate about how
differently I’d do it, and how much better, when I got married.
I daydreamed of it nearly
pathologically. While I was
finishing high school, and
while I was backpacking
around the world defer-
ring college, and while I was
starting to get serious about
college, I was constantly, rig-
orously, ongoingly, vividly
preoccupied with who my
man would turn out to be,
and how totally righteous and
successful my own marriage
would prove.
It would be—unsurpris-
ingly—identical to the one
I had just lost. I wanted the
same stampede of children,
the same big rambling house
(I still, at 49 years old, want
that house), and I envisioned
everything about it, from the TRUE ROMANCE
FOR HAMILTON (RIGHT) AND ASHLEY MERRIMAN, WHOM
hugging and the kissing and SHE MET IN 2014, IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT.
the forthright dinner-table
conversation—to the old chicken simmering in wine on the
back burner, the boots and raincoats in the mudroom, and
the nuisance of the prolific mulberry tree at the mailbox.
This hi-res image I had of that robust marriage to a big,
handsome husband went straight to the dogs, because in my
20s I ended up being gay.
T
he girls I loved, I loved so much and they loved
me. And we were so many of the things I had
insisted, as a thirteen-year-old, married people
ME LA N I E DUN E A /CP I @ M YLASTSU P P ER
should be to and for each other. But still, at that
time, it was a given that to be gay was, by defini-
tion, to be forever unmarried and childless. We all knew some
discreet elderly couple who had lived together for decades, as
spinsters or curious eternal bachelors, but same-sex marriage
was not yet a political agenda. When you realized you were
gay and when you became determined to declare it and live it,
you prepared yourself by first fearing and then tremendously
grieving the loss of all that would not be yours.
VOGUE.COM
And then you got right on with the gay part of being gay—
feeling free, exhilarated, and ballistically happy.
At least, that’s what I did.
Once I found myself out on the margins, you couldn’t have
paid nor beaten me back into the main text of the story; I
wouldn’t have gotten married under any circumstances. In
that era, both the language and the stance of homosexual-
ity were changing and were persuasively anti-marriage; we
were becoming proudly “queer” instead of the slightly more
oblique “gay”; we were insistently opposed to the hetero-
normative and we wanted nothing to do with our straight
cohort, who seemed unenviable in their monogamous,
marital confines, having dull and infrequent sex, bickering
unbecomingly in the aisles of Ikea. The devastation of the
AIDS epidemic was not minor. If you were radically active,
specifically in ACT UP, you were throwing the cremated
remains of our dead onto the
White House lawn in protest
of our government’s criminal,
shameful indifference to our
lives. We had our hands full
with our funerals, hardly our
weddings.
The other part, though, is
that I had also had a pretty
serious feminist education by
the time I finished college—
and I mean the pissed-off
Marxist, militant kind of
feminism. Red lipstick and
high heels were tools of the
patriarchy, as were you if you
had either in your dorm-room
closet. This was the “I am no-
body’s piece of property” type
of feminism, not the sexy fun
kind that Taylor Swift is now
enjoying.
And yet, after all of that,
some fifteen years later, in
2002, just weeks after my long-term girlfriend at the time and
I had finally sorted out our breakup, I got married to an Italian
man. He was smart, extremely educated, urbane, liberal—but
still, I did not want to do it, and I did not go gladly. He not
only had some urgent green-card issues, he also had a powerful
and particular way of talking me out of what I deeply knew.
And for the next ten years we lived a marriage that I can only
describe as despicable and debasing, for both of us, equally.
We didn’t live together, we didn’t really meet each other’s
friends or know each other’s work—he never asked me about
my writing, he barely ate my cooking. I have never been as
cruel and shrill and violent as I was during this time, and I have
never been so emotionally starved and intellectually dismissed.
And the really incredible part is that through it all, I recog-
nized that I could love it. Not him, but it. Marriage.
I worked doggedly to stay focused on the bright spots.
With intention and in quick succession, we had two
children: beautiful, beloved, remarkable, adored, thank-
God-we-had-the-good-sense-to-do-that U P F R O N T> 4 9 4
VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
493
up front Love, Actually
children. We spent summers in magnificent Italy; I loved his
mother; he was an excellent father. . . . I plumped up those
thin pillows, and, as they say, lied in the bed I had made for
myself as long as I could.
I just did not want what was plainly in front of me to be
true: I did not like this man. If I allowed myself to face it I
would have had to reckon with it, to reckon with it would
have created the imperative to act, to act would have been to
divorce, and to divorce would have been to create children of
divorce. I direct you back to the kitchen of my ten-year-old
self, the startling clatter of lunch across the kitchen floor.
The adamant and ardent sureness of how I would succeed
at my own marriage.
When we were drawing up our divorce agreement, finally,
we had to sort not one single mutual possession—no furni-
ture, no joint bank account, no artwork, no heirlooms, no
vehicles. For tax purposes, we each claimed one of our colos-
sally loved and cherished children, and that was the extent of
what we had in common.
In December of 2014, I met Ashley Merriman, and had
one of those experiences you’ve occasionally heard about
and cocked your eyebrow at with unconcealed skepticism:
From across a crowded room I saw her and couldn’t take my
eyes off her.
I knew in the first five minutes, before barely even speak-
ing to her, that she was The One. The rest is a torture to
have to say out loud, not because it’s too personal or some-
how profane or even sexually graphic, but because every-
thing we immediately did, the staggering transgression
against caution, feminism, queer politics, and general
prudence, is ridiculous:
I told her I loved her on the first date. I got her name tat-
tooed across my heart. Not to be outdone, she got my name
and my address tattooed on hers. I introduced her to my
children, straightaway. Three months to the day after we met,
she brought her grandfather’s gold ring with the family crest
and put it right on my finger. I took a week to get the guts to
ask if she’d wear one too, and then there we were at Tiffany
on Fifth Avenue having another exact one made, from the
original wax imprint that they still had in the vault upstairs
from her grandfather. We even wept.
Thirty years of contraindicating feminism and politics,
a dirty decade of my own dismal marital experience, and
my own parents’ divorce still had somehow not managed to
completely derail me from what I have been wanting to be
since I was a thirteen-year-old girl: a Marrier, a Family Man.
I
n June 2015, seven months after Ashley and I had
already given each other the rings and tattooed our
flesh and wept our tears, the Supreme Court legalized
gay marriage across the entire country, and what had
been inconceivable 30 years ago was now possible,
not just for some couples in some certain states, but
for everybody in all of them.
Ashley’s own parents had divorced by the time she was
three. Her father remarried once, and her mother went on to
remarry, and divorce, twice more by the time Ashley was sev-
enteen. While in college, she interned in the public-policy de-
partment of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Community
494 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
Services Center and wrote a 30-page paper arguing that until
there was parity in employment and housing protection for
gays—which there still isn’t today—we shouldn’t be spending
so much of our political fight on gay marriage.
Some fifteen years into her career as a chef, her stance
hadn’t much changed. During the taping of an episode of
the television show Top Chef in which the surprise challenge
was to cater a Las Vegas bachelorette party, she lamented, on
national television, the ongoing fact that she and at least two
of her teammates still couldn’t have weddings of their own.
There’s a good joke in here somewhere, about how many
cynical, indifferent, politically astute lesbians it takes to pull
off a marriage proposal. But I’m chuckling more about two
accomplished chefs now giddily planning their wedding.
There will be no overcooked, chalky salmon, to be sure. My
kids, now nine and eleven, have never known an actual effec-
tive marriage, with life lived in tandem and forthright dinner-
What I don’t know is what to call my
bride. I dislike the flaccid neutrality of
“spouse.” It sounds so—legal
table conversation and everybody under the same roof. It will
be interesting to watch them watch this one. Having been in
that awkward kitchen in the morning, alone with your dad’s
new “gal,” I know exactly what not to do.
What I don’t know is what to call my bride. I dislike the
flaccid neutrality of “spouse.” It sounds so—legal.
And the ambiguity of “partner” always strikes me as
ashamed and closeted. At a party when someone you are
meeting for the first time refers to their “partner,” I never
know if they mean business or pleasure.
But if I called Ashley “my wife” we would both burst out
laughing.
Ashley is a six-footer, a 165-pounder, a college rower and
basketball player, but no matter how butch, how “queer,” how
constantly mistaken at airport security . . . , the word husband,
obviously, is out of the question. Until I find it, the right
phrase, the one we’ve settled for—and delight in—is Mr. Mine.
After 30 years, it turns out that the things that I think a mar-
riage should be are not that different from what I thought at
thirteen, except I now have a bit less to say about the scenery—
I couldn’t give a damn if it’s coq au vin on that back burner or
canned soup—and a lot more to say about the content.
We have done some pretty big, sad regretting that we had
to wait our whole lives to meet each other. And have shared
many an incredulous, indignant hour that this—this immea-
surably kind and luminously thoughtful thing that we and
thousands of others exactly like us have been doing—has
been so long denied an equal legal status and protection, for
the mere fact of our same sex.
But then having to wait gave me the time to become excep-
tionally clear and unwaveringly determined about the things
I know our marriage can be.
I know and believe everything now that I knew and be-
lieved then, but now I don’t have to waste 30 years—none of
us do—talking myself out of knowing it. 
VOGUE.COM
memoir
At Home in the World
In this excerpt from her upcoming book M Train, PATTI SMITH recalls how,
as a poet, musician, and new wife, she made a pilgrimage to French Guiana.
I
n 1965 I had come to New York City from South
Jersey just to roam around, and nothing seemed
more romantic than to write poetry in a Greenwich
Village café. I finally got the courage to enter Caffè
Dante on MacDougal Street. The walls were cov-
ered with printed murals of the city of Florence and
scenes from The Divine Comedy.
A few years later I would sit by a low window that looked
out into a small alley, reading Mrabet’s The Beach Café. A
young fish-seller named Driss meets a reclusive, uncongenial
codger who has a café with only one table and one chair
on a rocky stretch of shore near Tangier. The slow-moving
atmosphere surrounding the café captivated me. Like Driss,
I dreamed of opening a place of my own: the Café Nerval,
a small haven where poets and travelers might find the sim-
plicity of asylum.
I imagined threadbare Persian rugs on wide-planked floors,
two long wood tables with benches, a few smaller tables, and
an oven for baking bread. No music no menus. Just silence
black coffee olive oil fresh mint brown bread. Photographs
adorning the walls: a melancholic portrait of the café’s name-
sake, and a smaller image of the forlorn poet Paul Verlaine in
his overcoat, slumped before a glass of absinthe.
502 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
FREE SPIRIT
THE AUTHOR, IN FRONT
OF SAINT-LAURENT
PRISON, SHOT BY FRED
SONIC SMITH, 1981.
In 1978 I came into a little money and was able to pay
a security deposit toward the lease of a one-story building
on East Tenth Street. It had once been a beauty parlor but
stood empty save for three white ceiling fans and a few folding
chairs. My brother, Todd, and I whitewashed the walls and
waxed the wood floors. Two wide skylights flooded the space
with light. I spent several days sitting beneath them at a card
table, drinking deli coffee and plotting my next move.
In the end I was obliged to abandon my café. Two years be-
fore, I had met the musician Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit. It was
an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my
life. My yearning for him permeated everything—my poems,
my songs, my heart. We endured a parallel existence, shuttling
F RE DE RI C K S MI T H/ PATT I S MI T H A RCHI V E
back and forth between New York and Detroit, brief rendez-
vous that always ended in wrenching separations. Just as I was
mapping out where to install a sink and a coffee machine, Fred
implored me to come and live with him in Detroit. I said good-
bye to New York City and the aspirations it contained. I packed
what was most precious and left all else behind. I didn’t mind.
The solitary hours I’d spent drinking coffee at the card table,
awash in the radiance of my café dream, were enough for me.
Some months before our first wedding anniversary Fred
told me that if I promised to give him a M E M O I R > 5 0 6
VOGUE.COM
memoir On the Road
child he would first take me anywhere in the world. I chose
Saint-Laurent du Maroni, a border town in northwest French
Guiana. I had long wished to see the remains of the French
penal colony where hard-core criminals were once shipped
before being transferred to Devil’s Island. In The Thief’s
Journal Jean Genet had written of Saint-Laurent as hallowed
ground and of its inmates with devotional empathy. He had
ascended the ladder toward them: reform school, petty thief,
and three-time loser; but as he was sentenced, the prison
he’d held in such reverence was closed, the last living inmates
returned to France. Genet served his time in Fresnes Prison.
Devastated, he wrote: I am shorn of my infamy.
A
t 70, Genet was reportedly in poor health and
most likely would never go to Saint-Laurent
himself. I envisioned bringing him its earth and
stone. Though often amused by my quixotic
notions, Fred did not make light of this self-
imposed task. He agreed without argument. I wrote a letter
to William Burroughs, whom I had known since my early
20s. William, close to Genet and possessing his own romantic
sensibility, promised to assist me in delivering the stones.
Preparing for our trip, Fred and I spent our days in the
Detroit Public Library studying the history of Suriname and
French Guiana. Fred bought maps, khaki clothing, traveler’s
checks, and a compass; cut his long, lank hair; and bought
a French dictionary. When he embraced an idea he looked
at things from every angle. He did not read Genet, however.
He left that up to me.
We flew on a Sunday to Miami and stayed for two nights
in a roadside motel. We ate red beans and yellow rice in Little
Havana and visited Crocodile World. The short stay readied
us for the extreme heat we were about to face. In Grenada
and Haiti, all passengers had to deplane while the hold was
searched for smuggled goods. We finally landed in Suriname
at dawn; a handful of young soldiers armed with automatic
weapons waited as we were herded into a bus that transported
us to a vetted hotel. The first anniversary of the 1980 military
coup that overthrew the democratic government was loom-
ing: an anniversary just days before our own.
After a few days bending in the heat of the capital city of
Paramaribo, a guide drove us 150 kilometers to the town
of Albina on the west bank of the Maroni River bordering
French Guiana. The pink sky was veined in lightning. Our
guide found a young boy who agreed to take us across by
pirogue, a long dugout canoe. We pushed off in a light rain that
swiftly escalated into a torrential downpour. The boy handed
me an umbrella and warned us not to trail our fingers in the
water. I suddenly noticed the river teeming with tiny black
fish. Piranha! He laughed as I quickly withdrew my hand.
In an hour or so the boy dropped us off at the foot of a
muddy embankment. He dragged his pirogue onto land
and joined some workers beneath a length of black oilcloth
stretched over four wooden posts. They seemed amused by
our momentary confusion and pointed us in the direction
of the main road. As we struggled up a slippery knoll, the
calypso beat of Mighty Swallow’s “Soca Dance” wafted from
a boom box. We tramped through the empty town, finally
taking cover in a bar. Two men were drinking Calvados. Fred
506 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
engaged in a broken French-English conversation with a
leathery-skinned fellow who presided over the nearby turtle
reserves. As the rains subsided, the owner of the local hotel
appeared, offering his services. Then a younger, sulkier ver-
sion emerged to take our bags, and we followed them along
a muddied trail down a hill to our lodgings. We had not even
booked a hotel and yet a room awaited us.
The Hôtel Galibi was spartan yet comfortable. A small
bottle of watered-down cognac and two plastic cups were set
on the dresser. Spent, we slept, even as the returning rain beat
relentlessly upon the corrugated tin roof. The morning sun
was strong. I left our clothes to dry on the patio and spread
the contents of our pockets on a small table: damp receipts,
dismembered fruits, Fred’s ever-present guitar picks.
Around noon a cement worker drove us outside the ruins
of the Saint-Laurent prison. There were a few stray chickens
scratching in the dirt and an overturned bicycle, but no one
seemed to be around. Our driver entered with us through
a low stone archway and then just slipped away. The com-
pound had the air of a tragically defunct boomtown. Fred
and I moved about in alchemical silence, mindful not to
disturb the reigning spirits.
In search of the right stones, I entered the solitary cells,
examining the faded graffiti tattooing the walls. Hairy balls,
cocks with wings, the prime organ of Genet’s angels. Not here,
I thought. I looked around for Fred. He had found a small
graveyard. I saw him paused before a headstone that read, son
your mother is praying for you. He stood there for a long
time looking up at the sky. I left him alone and inspected the
outbuildings, finally choosing the earthen floor of the mass
As we approached Kourou we sensed
a shift. We were entering a military zone
cell to gather the stones. It was a dank place the size of a small
airplane hangar. Heavy, rusted chains were anchored into the
walls illuminated by slim shafts of light. Yet there was still some
scent of life: manure, earth, and an array of scuttling beetles.
I dug a few inches seeking stones that might have been
pressed by the hard-calloused feet of the inmates or the soles
of heavy boots worn by the guards. I carefully chose three
and put them in an oversize Gitanes matchbox, leaving the
bits of earth clinging to them. Fred offered his handkerchief
to wipe the dirt from my hands and then made a little sack for
the matchbox. He placed it in my hands, the first step toward
placing them in the hands of Genet.
We didn’t stay long in Saint-Laurent. We went seaside but
the turtle reserves were off-limits, as they were spawning. Fred
spent a lot of time in the bar, talking to the fellows. The men
seemed to respect him, regarding him without irony. He had
that effect on other men. I was content just sitting on a crate
outside the bar staring down an empty street I had never seen
and might never see again.
For the most part I kept to myself. Occasionally I caught
glimpses of the maid, a barefoot girl with long, dark hair.
She smiled and gestured but spoke no English. She tidied our
room and washed our clothes. In gratitude I gave her one of
my bracelets, a gold chain with a four-leaf M E M O I R > 5 1 3
VOGUE.COM
 memoir On the Road
clover, which I saw dangling from her wrist as we departed.
There was no rail service in French Guiana. The fellow
from the bar had found us a driver, who carried himself like
an extra in The Harder They Come with a cocked cap, aviator
sunglasses, and a leopard-print shirt. We arranged a price
and he agreed to drive us the 268 kilometers to Cayenne. He
insisted our bags stay with him in the front seat of his beat-
up tan Peugeot as chickens were normally transported in the
trunk. We drove along Route Nationale, listening to reggae
on a station riddled with static.
Every once in a while I untied the handkerchief to look at
the Gitanes matchbox with its silhouette of a Gypsy posturing
with her tambourine in a swirl of indigo-tinged smoke. But
I did not open it. I pictured a small yet triumphal moment
passing the stones to Genet. Fred held my hand as we wound
through dense forests and passed short, sturdy Amerindians
balancing iguanas squarely
on their heads. We traveled
through a tiny commune that
had just a few houses and one
six-foot crucifix. We asked the
driver to stop. He got out and
examined his tires. Fred took
a photograph of the sign that
read tonate. population 9,
and I said a little prayer.
T
he primary mis-
sion accom-
plished, we had
no ultimate des-
tination; we were
free. But as we approached
Kourou we sensed a shift.
We were entering a military zone and hit a checkpoint. The
driver’s identity card was inspected and after an interminable
stretch of silence we were ordered to get out of the car. Two of-
ficers searched the front and back seats, finding a switchblade
with a broken spring in the glove box. That can’t be so bad, I
thought, but as they knocked on the trunk our driver became
markedly agitated. Dead chickens? Maybe drugs. They circled
around the car, and then asked him for the keys. He threw
them in a shallow ravine and bolted but was swiftly wrestled
to the ground. I glanced sidelong at Fred. He betrayed no
emotion and I followed his lead.
They opened the trunk. Inside was a man who looked to
be in his early 30s curled up like a slug in a rusting conch
shell. He seemed terrified as they poked him with a rifle and
ordered him to get out. We were all herded to the police head-
quarters, put in separate rooms, and interrogated in French.
The commander arrived, and we were brought before him.
He was barrel-chested with dark, sad eyes and a thick mus-
tache that dominated his careworn face. Fred quickly took
stock of things. I slipped into the role of compliant female, for
in this obscure annex of the Foreign Legion it was definitely
© AWA L É/ FLI C KR
a man’s world. I watched silently as the human contraband,
stripped and shackled, was led away. Fred was ordered into
the commander’s office. He turned and looked at me. stay
calm was the message telegraphed from his pale blue eyes.
VOGUE.COM
An officer brought in our bags, and another wearing
white gloves went through everything. I sat holding the
handkerchief, relieved I was not asked to surrender it. An
interrogator brought me a black coffee on an oval tray with
an inlay of a blue butterfly and entered the commander’s
office. I could see Fred’s profile. After a time they all came
out. They seemed in amiable spirits. The commander gave
Fred a manly embrace and we were placed in a private car.
Neither of us said a word as we pulled into the capital city
of Cayenne. Fred had the address of a hotel given to him by
the commander. We were dropped off at the foot of a hill.
It’s somewhere up there, the driver motioned, and we carried
our bags up the stone steps.
—What did you two talk about? I asked.
—I really can’t say for sure, he only spoke French.
—How did you communicate?
—Cognac.
PARADISE FOUND Fred seemed deep in
THE LUSH COASTAL LANDSCAPE
OF FRENCH GUIANA. thought.
—I know that you are
concerned about the fate of
the driver, he said, but it’s out
of our hands. He placed us
in real jeopardy and in the
end my concern was for you.
—Oh, I wasn’t afraid.
—Yes, he said, that’s why I
was concerned.
The hotel was to our lik-
ing. We drank French brandy
from a paper sack and slept
wrapped in layers of mos-
quito netting. In the morning
we explored Cayenne. It was
Carnival time, and the city was all but deserted. Overcrowded
ferries departed for Devil’s Island. Calypso music poured
from a mammoth disco in the shape of an armadillo. There
were a few small souvenir stands with identical fare: thin,
red blankets made in China and metallic blue raincoats. But
mostly there were lighters, all kinds of lighters, with images
of parrots, spaceships, and men of the Foreign Legion. There
was nothing much to keep one there, yet we stayed in Cayenne
until our anniversary as if bewitched.
On our last Sunday, women in bright dresses and men in
top hats were celebrating the end of Carnival. Following their
makeshift parade on foot, we ended up at Rémire-Montjoly,
a commune southeast of the city. The revelers dispersed. Fred
and I stood mesmerized by the emptiness of the long, sweep-
ing beaches. It was a perfect day for our anniversary and I
couldn’t help thinking it was the perfect spot for a beach café.
Fred went on before me, whistling to a black dog somewhat
up ahead. There was no sign of his master. Fred threw a stick
into the water and the dog fetched it. I knelt down in the sand
and sketched out plans for an imaginary café with my finger. 
From the book M Train by Patti Smith. © 2015 by Patti
Smith. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf
Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC.
VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
513
 lives
On
the
Money
Szelena Gray, the
feisty COO of
bipartisan Super PAC
Mayday, aims to fix
our broken campaign-
finance system—
right now. ROBERT
SULLIVAN reports.
T
hough Szelena Gray is only 30, she seems to
have lived through a thousand elections—
enough that she can sit down with you in
a café just off Harvard Square and dia-
gram a whole other American political
landscape. On this afternoon, Gray, a ris-
ing star among professional activists, is
describing the pernicious influence of Super PACs. “A Super
PAC is basically a vehicle for hijacking the democratic elec-
tion process,” she says. “We want to hijack the process back.”
Tall, with long dark hair, and dressed in jeans and a T-
shirt, Gray nonetheless has the air of a woman wearing
Charles James in a noir film. She’s talking about campaign-
finance machinations with a theorist’s passion as she de-
scribes the project that has occupied her since last year:
Mayday, a crowd-funded, nonpartisan Super PAC (Political
Action Committee) designed expressly to “end all Super
PACs.” (Super PACs are fund-raising entities with no limits
on what they can spend to elect or defeat candidates; they
require constant fund-raising, and typically make politicians
beholden to their biggest donors.)
The escalation of this raise-and-spend mentality is noth-
ing short of astonishing: While Mitt Romney’s Super PAC
raised $12 million in the first six months of 2011 during the
last election cycle, Jeb Bush’s Super PAC has already raised
$103 million—the GDP of a small nation. At the moment,
Hillary Clinton’s Super PAC fund-raising is far behind at
more than $24 million—but with both individuals and
516 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
corporations now free to donate mil- BULLISH ON REFORM
lions at a time (before the landmark GRAY IN FRONT OF
ARTURO DI MODICA’S
2010 Supreme Court ruling in the CHARGING BULL.
Citizens United case, donations were PHOTOGRAPHED
ANTON CORBIJN.
BY
capped at $5,000), those numbers SITTINGS EDITOR:
PHYLLIS POSNICK.
are about to escalate tremendously
once the campaign season begins in earnest. And with 96
percent of Americans agreeing on the dire need for reform,
campaign finance has become one of the few hot-button
issues candidates from both parties are talking about—in
the hopes of, as Hillary for America spokesperson Chris-
tina Reynolds says, “stopping the endless flow of secret,
HA I R , TA MA RA MC N AUG HTO N; M A KEU P, A LI C E LA N E. CH ARG IN G BUL L
(DETAIL) © ARTURO DI MODICA, 1989. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.
unaccountable money into our political system.”
Talk about a fix generally revolves hazily around the
need for a constitutional amendment to impose limits on
spending—something Clinton, for one, has long been on the
record as supporting. Such a fix, though, given the glacial
pace of constitutional reform, would likely be a generation
away. “Amending the constitution is a 20-year fight,” says
Gray. She aims to fix the system now.
Gray, Mayday’s chief operating officer, works as quickly
as she thinks and talks: Within just 65 days of its launch in a
turnkey office in Harvard Square last May 1, the organiza-
tion—using primarily social media and blogging—crowd-
funded an astounding $7 million, working with the Obama
campaigns’ famed digital strategists Stephen Geer and Dan
McSwain, among others. Earlier this year at SXSW (note
the millennial targeting), Mayday announced L I V E S > 5 5 1
VOGUE.COM
lives True to Reform
the launch of its wildly ambitious second phase: by year’s
end, lining up 218 reform-minded candidates in the House—
enough for a so-called simple majority—who, with the right
presidential leadership, can fix our broken campaign-finance
system within one election cycle.
It’s a tall task, but like many young strategists today, Gray
builds light and tactile machines; Mayday is mean and lean
and takes things one political season at a time. Most recently,
she and her team have been working with their 70,000 sup-
porters to build local and regional support. Meanwhile,
they’re mining their data to both find the voters who care
and engineer ways to fire them up. “We’re looking at how to
better model the type of person who could be engaged and
motivated,” says Gray.
G
ray was born in Orlando, Florida, her father
an artist and Hungarian political refugee, her
French-born mother an occasional runway
model in Paris. As a child she lived in L.A.,
Nice, and eventually Cocoa Beach, Florida,
near her maternal grandfather, who was a nuclear engineer
at NASA. A sense of justice announced itself early: Gray
was suspended from school twice at the age of eleven, once
for protesting the fact that only girls were required to practice
cartwheels in gym class. “I thought my teacher was exercising
a certain amount of sexism in the way he ran things,” she says.
“I had disciplinary problems, yes—I was also a straight-A stu-
dent.” After a degree in religion and women’s studies from the
University of Florida, she entered Harvard Divinity School,
hoping to become a religion professor. As Rawi Abdelal, a
political economist who taught a graduate seminar on politics
in post-Communist countries, remembers, “Szelena was far
and away the person whom everybody wanted to hear. She’s
brilliant, incredibly insightful, and genuinely visionary.”
By the time she graduated, Gray was steeped in critical
theory—but unprepared to make the rent. “I knew more
about Hannah Arendt than how to write a memo,” she says.
But she is a quick study, and in 2010 she answered a job list-
ing for an economist’s personal assistant. Lawrence Lessig,
the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard and a
renowned Internet-freedom advocate, hired her immediately.
In a little more than a year she was running Rootstrikers,
a nonprofit that Lessig had started with Joe Trippi, the
Democratic political consultant, after Lessig had pivoted
to the cause of election-finance reform. Three years later,
Lessig and company notched up his reform ideas, and Gray
was running Mayday. “She understands how people feel,”
Lessig says, “and she makes them feel respected.” On their
first day Lessig and Gray and a group of others, including
the noted Republican political strategist Mark McKinnon,
raised $200,000.
One hundred and fifty-three legislators have already co-
signed reform legislation. “By 2016, we need 70 new allies for
reform,” Gray says. (“That’s pretty ambitious,” she admits in
her next breath.) Once elected, those congressional reformers
will pass PAC-restrictive legislation under a new president
whose feet have been—and this is where Mayday’s upcoming
grassroots efforts come in— held to the finance-reform fire
during the campaign.
VOGUE.COM
John Pudner, the executive director of the finance-reform
nonprofit Take Back Our Republic, who also engineered
the defeat of Eric Cantor in last year’s midterms, is one of
many Republicans with an eye on what Gray is doing with
Mayday—and how she’s doing it. “They’re a very impressive,
very strategic organization,” Pudner says, “and they’re going
to be very successful.”
Meanwhile, Gray is only adding to her political plate,
most recently by signing on with a new campaign called
Run for America. Headed up by 26-year-old writer, film-
maker, and activist David Burstein, RFA aims to recruit
twelve leaders from his generation to run for the House
in 2016. It’s not hard to spot the synergy that Gray sees
between the twin missions—both are about reengaging
people in the reality of politics; both require the sort of
hypercharged skills and speed of execution that she has
in abundance.
“Obviously, it’s a huge challenge,” she said—speaking
of RFA, though she may as well have been talking about
everything she does. “But it’s all young people, and politics is
a radically fast-moving landscape. There’s a lot of creativity
right now—and a lot of desire to really make change.” When
I checked in with Gray again in July, she was—after almost
continuous stints of shuttle advocacy between New York
and Washington—about to take a smartphone-free trip with
her boyfriend to the wilds of Puerto Rico (“completely off
the grid,” she said) before dedicating herself wholly to the
While Mitt Romney’s Super PAC
raised $12 million in the first
six months of 2011 during the last
election cycle, Jeb Bush’s Super PAC
has already raised $103 million—
the GDP of a small nation
2016 election fight. She’d been working her way through
Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and Zephyr Teachout’s
Corruption in America, along with Steinbeck’s East of Eden
(“I love that matter-of-fact, clear-eyed lens,” she says of
Steinbeck). But she was also ecstatic about Mayday’s lat-
est inroads: In the previous week two more senators and
three more Representatives had cosponsored campaign
finance–reform legislation. With the rest of her team, she
was also orchestrating the Super PAC’s next phase, as they
transitioned from voter mobilization and organization to
putting their money behind carefully selected campaigns.
Though it may be structurally radical, Gray considers her
mission far more practical and pragmatic than partisan. She
likes to point out that the 1948 Congress, famously labeled
“do nothing” by Harry Truman, passed 900 or so bills;
last year our Congress, mired in politicized fund-raising,
passed 224. “We’re in it to win it because we have to,” she
says. “Whenever anybody says, ‘Oh, our democracy doesn’t
work,’ I just want to say, ‘I’m sorry—it has to work, and I’m
going to be here until it does.’ ” 
VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
551
nostalgia

I
n the summer of 1970,
when I was nearly four-
teen, I spent my morn-
ings in a church basement
teaching vacation Bible
study to grade-schoolers
and my afternoons in a
corner of the public library, poring
over back issues of Vogue. The pe-
riodical room’s only other habitual
occupants were two retired farmers
who dozed with their hands folded
across their overall bibs. We delib-
erately ignored one another as we
engaged in our silent pastimes.
While Seventeen and Mademoi-
selle featured models that looked
like the popular girls in my town—
all smooth hair and sweet, docile
smiles—the ordinary rules of femi-
ninity didn’t apply to the women in
Vogue. They wore feathered head-
dresses and velvet cloaks and mini-
skirts made of metal. They lunged
and scowled through forests and
souks and ballrooms, unconcerned
about summers spent detasseling
corn or next year’s Algebra II class.
Even in our conservative pocket
of rural Idaho, where the sixties
only showed up midway through
the seventies, my family and I were
considered strange. My parents
were devout evangelical Christians,
and our modest clothing, out-of-

Untamed
date hairstyles, and nonparticipa- SHINING ARMOR
BERENSON, IN
tion in nearly every popular activity EMANUEL UNGARO,
cemented our outsider status. My PHOTOGRAPHED
BY IRVING PENN FOR
father soberly pushed an old rotary VOGUE, 1969.

Heart
mower across our front lawn in a
long-sleeved shirt and tie. My mother eschewed all makeup
and bared her legs and upper arms only when medically nec-
essary. According to our church manual, we evangelicals were
to be “in the world, but not of the world.” Circuses, bowling
alleys, card playing, dancing, swimming, makeup, flashy
jewelry, and immodest dressing of any kind were forbidden.
I adhered to the rules, yet I dreamed of escape. My fan-
For VAL BRELINSKI, who grewup in
tasies involved living in a high-ceilinged, many-windowed an evangelical community, a stolen
apartment and wearing minidresses with colored tights and
platform Mary Janes. I would be a painter and visit museums photograph of Marisa Berenson epitomized
and coffee shops and bars, where I would meet strangers all the freedoms she was denied.
who smoked exotic-smelling cigarettes. I had no idea how I
would become this fascinating person, but I knew that this
CO ND É N AST A RC HI V E

kind of life was possible because I had seen it all in the pages
of Vogue. With a razor blade that I’d filched from my father’s
Gillette, I took to stealthily slicing my favorite photos out of
the magazine and sliding them into the battered Pee-Chee
folder I stored in the back of my basement bedroom closet.
After several months of these library visits, I came home from
school one day to find my mother standing in my bedroom,
my Pee-Chee folder on the bedspread. Next to it was a pho-
tograph of Marisa Berenson wearing an armored miniskirt,
a peace-sign body ornament, and little N O S TA L G I A > 5 6 0

554 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

nostalgia True Religion
else. Her wildly untamed, Medusa-like hair and face-paint eye
makeup gave her the daring, self-possessed look of a queen
who feasted on nothing but air and the bones of her enemies.
Of all the photographs I had collected, this was my absolute
favorite, in no small part because Marisa’s faraway eyes and
feral hair seemed idealized versions of my own.
My mother crossed her arms and looked away from the
offending image. “What is this?” she asked.
“It’s fashion,” I whispered, as if this explained everything.
My mother made a dismissive sound. She scooped up the
evidence and marched up the stairs.
There was no place set for me at the dinner table that eve-
ning. I went to church-choir practice, as I did every Wednes-
day night. When I came home, I found the front door to our
house locked, the back door too. Most distressing of all was
the grocery bag on the porch step. Inside the brown paper
bag were two skirts, a sweater, and a wool jacket. I stared
uncomprehendingly at these items until I realized that this
was what I was supposed to wear while I lived somewhere else.
I sat on the cold step, grocery bag on my lap, and con-
templated my options. I could ring the doorbell and face
my mother’s scowl, or scratch at my younger sister’s window
screen to see if she would let me in. Instead, I found myself
unlatching the back gate and heading toward the trash cans.
The folder was at the very bottom, its contents amaz-
ingly undamaged. I pulled out my prized possession: Marisa
Berenson in all her glory, her eyes devoid of shame. She
felt no responsibility for the ways in which her half-nudity
might be received, for she had done nothing wrong. She was
merely and positively and freely herself—something I might
someday be as well. I carefully folded the photo and placed
it inside my shirt, then unlatched the gate and walked toward
my younger sister’s window.
A
s I grew older, my parents’ restrictions became
increasingly confining: If I dared to listen to
the popular station on my transistor radio or
talk too long on the phone with a boy, I would
find myself banished once again from family
mealtimes. Grocery bags and locked doors became more and
more common, and I was desperate to find ways to subdue
this sting. My first move involved waitressing at our town’s
surf-and-turf restaurant, a place of employment my parents
couldn’t object to, since it didn’t serve alcohol and the wait-
resses wore ankle-length gingham dresses.
One evening when I was seventeen, I came home from
work, my tips jingling in my pocket, and saw another grocery
bag on the porch. That morning a friend of mine had driven
me to work. He had been smoking a cigarette as he waited
outside our house, and my mother had obviously seen him.
I paused for a moment and then picked up the paper bag.
This time I walked down the street to the house of a fellow
waitress, where I lived for the next two years, working, going
to school, learning to cook, and sleeping on a couch in a
cramped but brightly painted hallway. At night I kept the win-
dow in my little makeshift bedroom uncurtained and open.
Here I slowly shed my fears of private censure and public
shame, and began to live a different life. My father demanded
I return, but I resisted the urge to fall back into the safety of
560 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
my childhood home. Instead, I hung the minidresses I’d paid
for myself on the hooks above my bed. I studied for and got
my long-delayed driver’s license. I cut my hair and asked my
roommate to teach me how to use makeup.
As I continued to distance myself from the tenets of my
background, my new, more modern appearance and worldly
actions met with my parents’ consternation. After graduat-
ing with a degree in English from the tiny evangelical college
where my father was dean, I decided to take a writing class at
a university the next town over. As an undergraduate, I had
studied only classic works of literature. The morally ambigu-
ous stories of such contemporary writers as Ann Beattie and
Raymond Carver were revelatory to me.
I began writing my own fiction and submitted to the En-
glish Journal’s literary contest a story about a young girl who
knows far more about the world than her parochial parents
Her eyes were devoid of shame. She
felt no responsibility for the ways in which
her half-nudity might be received
suspect. The judge awarded the story first prize and offered
me a scholarship to graduate school. Eventually, I moved
into a high-ceilinged, many-windowed apartment in San
Francisco, much like the one I had dreamed of.
I accepted a teaching job at Stanford and daily joined
the other black-clad, cosmopolitan commuters heading to
Silicon Valley. Here I taught the children of actresses and
politicians, had drinks with heads of Fortune 500 companies,
and worked alongside Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize–winning
writers. Each night I returned to my apartment, where I read
and wrote and dreamed some more. My earlier, cloistered life
in Idaho now seemed more imaginary than anything I had
invented in my fiction. My parents finally quit asking me if I
was attending church or meeting any nice evangelical friends.
They didn’t mention the wine bottles they saw on my kitchen
shelf during their one visit to California.
Not too long ago, my mother and I sat outside on my
parents’ patio, reminiscing about days gone by. In the six
years since I had left Idaho, my father had suffered a major
health scare and my younger sister had moved to Las Vegas
to pursue a Ph.D. in creative writing. In the past, my parents
would have responded to such developments with insularity
and hostility, but now they seemed surprisingly determined
to operate from a position of acceptance. “Remember when
you kicked me out for having that Marisa Berenson picture?”
I asked my mother. “Oh, that,” she said, and gave an uncon-
cerned wave of her hand. I yelped in amazement. The cause
of our first serious estrangement, a photograph of liberated
feminine beauty representing everything I desired and my
mother despised, was now something we were laughing about.
“What was so important about that photo anyway?” she
asked when we quieted down. I’d needed Marisa in the same
way that my mother needed religion, as a reminder of some-
thing grander and more glorious than the life either of us
knew. “She was just so beautiful” was all that came out. The
rest was left unsaid. 
VOGUE.COM
FL A SH
EDITOR: CHLOE MALLE

MA R I A N O V I VA NCO. FAS HI O N ED I TO R: K AT HRYN N E A LE. HA I R, JE FF FRA N C IS ; M AKEUP, CH R ISTIAN MCCULLOCH . PH OTOGRAPH ED AT AURORA, BROOKLYN. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSU E .
IT
GIRL
Billie

T
wenty-three-year-old
Billie Lourd thought she
knew Hollywood from
every which way—
through the business
acumen of her father,
Creative Artists Agency partner Bryan
Lourd, and the creative lens of her
mother, actress Carrie Fisher—and was
pretty sure it wasn’t for her. Though she
acted throughout elementary and high
school, she gravitated toward business
and music at NYU. So she surprised
everyone (including her parents, both
of whom advised against a Hollywood
career) when she auditioned for—and

Lourd landed a spot in—Star Wars: The

Force Awakens. FLASH>571

STEP RIGHT UP
THE ACTRESS IN WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN, IN A
566 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 CREATURES OF THE WIND DRESS AND JIMMY CHOO BOOTS.
 FL ASH
Lourd is, big surprise, mum about
any details on the film, but says she “fell
in love with the whole vibe of being on
set” alongside her mother, who reprised
her role as Princess Leia. “Between
scenes she’d be looking at me, making
sure I was OK, because it was the first
set I’d ever been on—but I was doing
the same thing for her,” she says. “We
were taking care of each other.”
This month, she stars alongside
Emma Roberts, Ariana Grande, and
Lea Michele in Ryan Murphy’s latest
camp-horror joyride series, Scream
Queens. She plays a blasé minion—a
role that likely required very little ad-
ditional effort from her in the sass-and-
sarcasm department. “This is the only
hip thing I am contributing to fash-
ion,” she says sardonically, pointing to
her silk bomber jacket adorned with
an embroidered sumo wrestler. She
also likes Prabal Gurung and Miu Miu
but sticks to Reformation dresses and
boots when she’s in L.A., where she
splits her time between her parents’ re-
spective houses—at her mom’s, grand-
mother Debbie Reynolds’s house is
HEM I NGWAY: P I E RRE SU U/ © G ET T Y I MAGES ; G RI MES : A DA M K AT Z SI N D IN G/LE 21ÈME. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
DELEVINGNE: TAYLOR HILL/ © GETTY IMAGES; JENNER: DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/ © GETTY IMAGES;
CARA
DELEVINGNE
IN SAINT
LAURENT.
G O TO VO G U E . C O M TO VO T E
FO R YO U R FAVO R I T E LO O K I N
O U R 1 0 - B E S T- D R E S S E D L I S T,
U P DAT E D E V E R Y M O N DAY
It Girl
also on the property. “We all have La
Scala chopped salads and talk movies,”
says Lourd.
Reynolds also had trepidations
about her granddaughter’s entering the
business. “When I started acting, she
pulled out her writings from when she
was sixteen and said, ‘Dear, if you’re
going to be acting, I want you to read
through this first. Out loud,’ ” Lourd
says, adopting her grandmother’s gen-
teel lilt. “I start reading—‘MGM lot,’
whatever date—and it’s all in the second
person: ‘You’re sitting in a chair; they’re
pulling at your eyebrows, your hair.
You have a wig and a corset on and it’s
6:00 a.m. and you can’t breathe and
all you want to do is be a gym teacher,
but somehow you’ve ended up a movie
star.’ And my grandmother says, ‘Do
you still want to be an actress?’ And
I say, ‘I think so!’ I’m not sure if it’s
still like this. I don’t think they’re go-
ing to pull my eyebrows out anymore.”
—MOLLY CREEDEN FLASH>572
LOURD AND LADY
IN AN OHNE TITEL TURTLENECK
AND A FRAME DENIM SUEDE SKIRT.
Tıtle
Sequins
KENDALL
JENNER
IN CALVIN GRIMES IN
KLEIN DIOR HAUTE
COLLECTION. COUTURE.
CASCADING
DREE HIGH-WATTAGE
PAILLETTES REVEAL
HEMINGWAY
IN NINA
RICCI.
A NEW BREED OF
DISCO DREAM GIRL.
FL ASH Art
GLAZED OVER
FROM LEFT: HELEN LEVI IN HER SUNSET
PARK STUDIO; MULTICOLOR CERAMIC
TUMBLERS BY SUZANNE SULLIVAN.
Earth, SPIN, and Fire
With their delicate, handmade wares, this crop of chic, young
ceramists is reinventing the potter’s wheel.
C
eramics is having a moment. Sure, recent
archaeological finds in China—shards of
20,000-year-old pottery that predate the
advent of farming—tell us that ceramics
has likely had a few such moments, but still,
this one feels big. It’s as if the antidote to
our relentless connectedness is somehow to
touch, to hold hand-shaped and fingerprinted things in our
hands. I should know: I’m married to a ceramist raised on
a wheel in the Pacific Northwest; we now live in Brooklyn,
the borough where things are made, and I eat and drink
only from the delicate porcelain wares that she meticulously
decorates with abstract etchings and drawings.
572 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
LEVI : Z AC KE RY MI CHA E L. SI TT I N G S E DI TOR : JESSI CA D OS R EM ED I OS. HA I R , A N D R E GUNN. MAKEUP, ALLIE SMITH ; CERAMIC TUMBLERS: COURTESY OF KOROMIKO; TABLEWAR E: COU RT ESY O F HE ALT HY HARLEQU IN ; JUG : G RAN T CO RN E T T.
PITCHER PERFECT
ABOVE: ASSORTED STRIPED TABLEWARE
BY BROOKE WINFREY. BELOW: A PAINTED
PORCELAIN JUG BY AMANDA MOFFAT.
Of course, her comrades-in-kilns can appreciate the re-
cent boomlet. “It’s so good for us practicing,” says Romy
Northover, a Long Island City–based ceramist. “I feel like
we’re in the right place at the right time.” Northover began
selling pieces three years ago after moving to New York
from England, where she grew up modeling clay. “Ten years
ago, there weren’t the avenues to explore,” she says. Once in
America, though, she immersed herself in Japanese styles at
Manhattan’s Togei Kyoshitsu studio, founded her own com-
pany, called No., out of her studio (her line is sold at The Pri-
mary Essentials in Brooklyn and online), and began working
on projects with everyone from Calvin Klein to Shino Takeda.
“It’s an inexhaustible medium,” she says. F L A S H > 5 74
VOGUE.COM
FL ASH Art
AMAZING VASE
LEFT: A CERAMIC SCULPTURE
BY FRANCESCA DIMATTIO.
BELOW: A FREE-FORM PORCELAIN
BOWL BY ISABEL HALLEY.
RARE FORMS
ABOVE: THE SCULPTOR FRANCESCA
DIMATTIO. RIGHT: A GILDED TUMBLER
BY ROMY NORTHOVER. BELOW:
VASES BY CASSIE GRIFFIN.
Rebekah Miles studied art in graduate school in Portland,
Oregon, ground zero for cool contemporary ceramics, and
went on to create hand-painted ceramic book covers in col-
laboration with Rodarte, among other work in porcelain.
A big fan of the 86-year-old Venezuelan ceramist Magdalena
Suarez Frimkess, Miles is a hand-builder, meaning she’s
off the wheel. “I make the forms and then think of them as
canvases that I’ve been working on,” she says.
“I mostly just do my own thing.”
“It still baffles my brain that in 2015 I can live
in New York City and be a potter,” says Brooke
Winfrey, a Tulsa native. Part of the reason she
(and others) can do that is Instagram, which
Winfrey uses both to troll for ideas and to mar-
ket the wares that result, while still marveling at
her medium’s ancientness. “Thousands of years
D I MAT T I O: N OA G RI F FEL. CERA MI C SCU L PTU RE : IN STA LLAT I O N V I EW, FRA N CESCA D IMATTIO: TABLE SETTINGS AND FLOWER AR RANGING, SALON 94 BOWERY, MARCH 17–APRIL 21, 2012.
old, and yet we are still doing it almost the same
way,” she says. Then again, it’s hard to know if
Mayan ceramists working in the sixth century
faced the Catch-22 that ceramists in Sunset Park,
Brooklyn, now do: To stay small and personal,
or to hire staff and risk diluting one’s singular
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK; BOWL: COURTESY OF OF A KIND, OFAKIND.COM; TUMBLER: ROMY NORTHOVER; VASES: TIM H OUT.
craft and vision? Helen Levi began to move a
lot more of her work when Steven Alan started
featuring it in one of his stores, but now she can’t
fill her kiln fast enough. “It’s a conundrum,” she says. Certain
ceramists’ pieces, meanwhile, are beginning to inch closer and
closer to the price of fine art. Lena Dunham recently ribbed
her old friend and Delusional Downtown Divas costar Isabel
Halley for the exoticism of her hand-built 22K gold–trimmed
Seder plates—“NO ONE CAN PASSOVER! get it?” Dun-
ham tweeted—but in a more serious moment pronounced her
friend’s bowls, which start at $350, “perfect.”
Artists who use ceramics in their work, meanwhile, are once
again breaking out. “Most materials don’t have the breadth,”
says Francesca DiMattio, whose chandelier-esque assemblages
will show at the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London next
month. DiMattio, a painter whose mother (Tamara DiMattio)
and father-in-law (Kurt Weiser) are both ceramists, savors her
struggles with clay. “It is such a fight to torture something to
get it to do what you want it to do,” she says.
Cassie Griffin started working with clay as a kid in Pennsyl-
vania under the tutelage of her aunt, Patricia Griffin, a wildlife
painter. Though she’s since moved away from the functional
pieces of her youth, she stuck to the wheel, reveling in the
process of “taking something massive—like 20 pounds of
clay—and turning it into something that doesn’t take up space
in an aggressive way.” The end result is abstract work based
on the functional: large vessel-like objects collapsing under
the idea of themselves, on the verge of a liberation from form.
(She opens at Patrick Parrish gallery this month.)
When I stopped into the studio space Griffin shares with
my wife, Suzanne Sullivan, to chat, both women rhapsodized
about their love of clay (which, by the way, is the stuff of the
Earth). “It feels good,” said Suzanne. “And from there it’s a
question of whether you can do it—it’s a challenge.”
“It’s a natural process to fall in love with the material,”
Griffin said. “It’s soothing, it’s calming—and then you start
moving in a direction.”—ROBERT SULLIVAN FLASH>580
VOGUE.COM
FL ASH Book

LifeStudies
B
efore Instagram made
photographers of us all, Kelly
Klein carried an Instamatic
snap camera everywhere she
went, from the Caribbean to
the CFDA awards. Yet even the
glamour shots in Photographs by Kelly Klein
(Rizzoli), a memoir in pictures, have an easy,
unstudied air—“I’ve always been more of
a naturalist,” she says. Unlike her previous
collections, such as the splashy coffee-table
book Pools, they also have an intimate feel.
In one shot, friendly moguls Barry Diller,
David Geffen, Sandy Gallin, and Calvin
Klein (Kelly’s ex-husband) appear, mid-nap,
on various sofa chairs aboard the Midnight
Saga. Another, more bittersweet, shows
a fresh-faced Carolyn Bessette sporting
beachy waves and a nineties jumper. If these
scenes seem like a lifetime ago, Klein has
included photos of her seven-year-old son,
Lukas, whom she’s teaching to ocean-swim
at their East Hampton home this summer.
Once Lukas is a bit older, she hopes to hit
the road again with both him and her trusty

PA LE RMO : WAYN E TI P P ET TS/R EX USA ; A RT E RTON : RAY- BA N / © GE T TY I MAGES; EATON: MICH AEL LOCCISANO/ © GETTY IMAGES.
iPhone in tow. “There are more adventures
to see,” she says.—KATE GUADAGNINO

BOOK: © P H OTOGRA P H S BY K EL LY K L EI N, BY K ELLY K LEI N, RI ZZO LI N EW YO R K, 20 15. VIERA-NEWTON: MARCY SWINGLE;

WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
KLEIN’S PORTRAIT OF CAROLYN BESSETTE,
TAKEN IN NEW YORK CITY, 1996.

KNOTS Landing
OLIVIA
PALERMO
IN DIOR.

GEMMA COURTNEY
ARTERTON EATON IN
IN A COACH.
HARLEY VINTAGE
VIERA- SCARF.
NEWTON IN
A VINTAGE
SCARF.
RETRO NECKTIES, A
CASUAL STAND-IN FOR
GEMS AND JEWELS, FLASH>582

ADD A TOUCH OF FIFTIES-

ERA INSOUCIANCE.
FL ASH SPEAK, MEMORY
FOR HIS BOOK ON MY FAMILY’S CASTLE, OUR FRIEND
TODD EBERLE PHOTOGRAPHED ME IN MY MOTHER’S
CHRISTIAN LACROIX COUTURE AND HEIRLOOM
TIARA (THE ONE AND ONLY TIME I’VE WORN IT).

© TO D D E BE RLE FROM H OUS E O F TH UR N UN D TAX I S, RIZZOLI, 2015. ARTWORK: THOMAS RUFF, © 2015 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/VG BILD-KUNST, BONN.
TNT
Paging through the first monograph dedicated to her historic family

F
schloss, Elisabeth TNT recalls a life less ordinary.
rom an early age, I knew my childhood was
a little different. None of my classmates, for
instance, made their way to school past tour-
ists and a museum guide in their courtyard.
When I had my tenth-birthday party, the hot
topic among my friends was not how much
candy we’d eaten but how many rooms the
castle had (“Really? 500?”) and the racy contemporary art
my mother hung everywhere. Some said they were too scared
to come back for a sleepover (a painting of a decaying corpse
hung on the wall of my bedroom).
But I’m not complaining—and I understand how incred-
ibly fortunate I was. Schloss St. Emmeram was an amazing
place to be a child. There was hide-and-seek in the courtyard,
pinball machines tucked away in the entrance hall, and the
nursery was a long corridor overflowing with toys. I loved
the amazing Jeff Koons lobster painting outside, and my
mother’s office had another Koons, my all-time favorite: a
Popples sculpture (conveniently, neither scared F L A S H > 5 8 6
HOUSE PROUD
THE PALACE OF ST. EMMERAM, IN REGENSBURG, GERMANY,
WHERE MY FAMILY HAS LIVED FOR TWO CENTURIES.
 FL ASH TNT
my friends). One Christmas, to our greatest delight, my
mum even had two little Shetland ponies awaiting us in our
entrance hall, grazing on some hay underneath a Christmas
tree. Oh, and parked here or there would be the odd Harley-
Davidson—my mum being a big biker and friendly with
the local rockers. Occasionally she even picked us up from
school on a Harley, revving the engine and causing a scene in
the schoolyard. I was torn between pride and mortification
(but on the whole I loved it).
And I loved my mother’s guests—many of them artists like
George Condo, who played ice hockey with us on the frozen
pond, or Keith Haring, who became a hero of ours when he
decorated our nursery door with a black felt pen and then
passed the pen to us. My mother was appalled, but what
could she say? Keith started it!
When I became a teenager, I found things to complain
about (would I have been teenager if I hadn’t?). Like the fact
that there was a porter guarding the castle around the clock.
Boyfriends and late nights had to be meticulously planned,
and secret escapes required careful logistics F L A S H > 5 8 8

GRAND CENTRAL
ABOVE: A VIEW OF
THE EAST WING’S
STATEROOMS, WHICH
WERE DESIGNED
BETWEEN 1816 AND
1873. RIGHT: A LIBRARY
IN THE ABBEY HAS A
FRESCOED CEILING BY
THE BAROQUE-PERIOD
PAINTER COSMAS
DAMIAN ASAM.

TRUE COLORS
© TO D D E BE RLE FROM H OUS E O F TH UR N UN D TAX I S, RI Z ZO LI , 2015.
FROM FAR LEFT:
A GILDED NEO-
ROCOCO STAIRCASE
CONNECTS THE
FIRST AND SECOND
FLOORS; A PORTRAIT
OF MY ANCESTOR
AND NAMESAKE,
EMPRESS
ELISABETH, HANGS
IN THE SILVER
BREAKFAST ROOM.

586 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015

FL ASH TNT
(sometimes these involved leaping the fence that ringed the
park behind the castle. Only later did I realize there were
cameras watching over us there, too).
All along, I was enchanted by my parents’ parties. We’d
sit down to dinners in the rococo ballroom, with enormous
crystal chandeliers bathing us in a golden light. Later we
would pass along a string of beautiful rooms—our favorite
being the one with a golden four-poster bed with deep-green
curtains and a golden swan on each side. I adored that bed
even though my siblings and I told each other that an ances-
tor had passed away on it and that her ghost never left.
I would borrow pieces from my mother’s couture collection
for these occasions and, later, for the yearly boar hunts, too.
Did my sister and I fight over dresses? Of course! I always
wanted to be the first to wear, say, a flower-embroidered
ECLECTIC COLLECTIONS
LEFT TO RIGHT: THE PORCELAIN ROOM IN THE SOUTH WING. THE
BOWLING ALLEY, A FAVORITE SPACE FOR LATE-NIGHT PARTIES. MY MUM’S
HARLEY-DAVIDSON AND JEFF KOONS’S MOUSTACHE LOBSTERS (2003).
Lacroix but never seemed to get the chance, as she had al-
ready gotten there first and danced in everything till the wee
hours. Many of the best pieces were, alas, a little worse for
wear. The one we both were most attached to, though, was a
simple, slightly worn-out gray cardigan belonging to our late
father. We took turns with it traveling between home, board-
ing schools, and, later, Madrid, Paris, and beyond.
My mother recently had the idea of having the castle
photographed by our friend Todd Eberle, for a book (to be
published by Rizzoli in November). Todd wanted portraits
of my sister and me wearing gowns, jewelry, and tiaras.
I was hesitant at first, but the whole thing was incredibly
fun (and as for the tiaras, it was the only time in my life
Mum let me wear these heirlooms, so why not?). Todd later
confided that my sister was initially photographed without
a tiara and, seeing my images, pleaded to be reshot. “That’s
what I call a case of tiara envy,” he joked. I didn’t quite
believe him, but it made for a good laugh.  F L A S H > 5 9 0
THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL
THE DRAWING ROOM COMMINGLES
FORMAL PORTRAITURE WITH MUM’S
CHEEKY CONTEMPORARY ART.
© TO D D E BE RLE FROM H OUS E O F TH UR N UN D TAX I S, RI Z ZO LI , 2015.
FL ASH Talking Fashion

TILDA
SWINTON IN
VALENTINO.

ROSAMUND
PIKE IN
GIVENCHY.

ROONEY
MARA IN SOPHIE
ALEXANDER AUSTER IN
MCQUEEN. VINTAGE.

P I KE : CHI N A FOTO P RESS/ © G ET T Y I MAGES ; M A RA : VE N TU RE LL I/ © W IR EI M AG E ; SWINTON: AGOSTINO FABIO/ © GC IMAGES; AUSTER : NEIL RASMUS/BFA.COM;
VICTOR

PERMINOVA AND XI: JULIEN BOUDET/BFA.COM; SOBIESKI: REX USA; RUDNICKA: SANDRA SEMBURG; JACOBS: ADAM KATZ SINDING/LE 21ÈME.
Turn-of-the-century detailing gets a modern recast with crisp lace and high collars.

VICTORIAN

LEELEE MING XI IN
SOBIESKI ALEXANDER
IN DIOR. WANG.

OLA RUDNICKA
ELENA IN VINTAGE.
PERMINOVA
IN ELIE
SAAB.

LOLITA
JACOBS IN
COPERNI.

590 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 FLASH>592

FL ASH Social Responsibility
Brave New Girl
From outbreak-gripped Liberia to earthquake-torn Nepal,
Kelly Suter goes where no one else wants to.
K
elly Suter is terrified of spiders. She also cannot
stand dirty laundry. Yet this tenacious nurse
from Michigan has spent the past five years at
the epicenter of every major natural disaster
and epidemic in the developing world. Only 30
years old, she is a prized asset of the International Medical
Corps, one of the largest first-responder organizations on
the planet—think the Red Cross with a Navy SEAL ap-
proach to emergency aid. Among the IMC’s ranks of 7,800,
plus a deployment roster of thousands of medical workers,
Suter is the most fervent, the one willing to helicopter in while
mountains still crumble and calmly strategize next steps.
Suter recently returned from assignment in Nepal, where
the 7.8-magnitude Gorkha earthquake killed 8,800 and
injured some 22,000. Overseeing the heavily hit region of
Dhading, Suter would board a helicopter and head into
a remote mountain village with a small team to set up her
tent and a mobile medical clinic in whatever safe structure
remained. She’d sometimes see about 200 patients in two
days, then board another chopper, restock with whatever
limited supplies were available at base camp, and head back
out to a different village. The aftershocks were relentless. “All
of the aid workers had a packed bag, carried their passport
with them at all times, and slept in something they could run
through the streets in,” she recalls.
And that was a “comparatively fun” assignment, she says.
(In her spare time, she hiked to Everest base camp.) Suter’s
first deployment with the IMC came after she received her
nursing degree in 2008. A few weeks after the earthquake hit
Haiti in January 2010, Suter was on a plane bound for Port-
au-Prince. She witnessed unimaginable suffering—one night
she spent two hours rocking an abandoned preterm newborn
until the baby girl gently passed away. “I learned quite a bit
in Haiti, including that sometimes having empathy is more
important than administering medical care,” she says. That
592 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
compassion was put to use during her one-month assignment
in war-torn South Sudan, where she ran a primary-health
clinic serving 20,000 internally displaced people.
Just as Ebola began ripping through West Africa, Suter
flew to Liberia. Along with treating the sick, she was one of
the lead clinical trainers for teams as diverse as the German
army and the United States Public Health Service. “You never
get used to seeing patients die,” she says, recalling the day she
entered a contamination unit to find an improving patient
suddenly coughing blood. “She looked up at me,” says Suter,
“and, without warning, fell backward onto her bed—never
taking another breath.”
Suter went home for her quarantine; weeks later she
took her North Face go-bag—filled with medical essentials
and clothing, plus peanut butter, laundry detergent, and a
READY, WILLING, LABELED
FROM LEFT: KELLY SUTER HELPS AN INJURED EARTHQUAKE
SURVIVOR DISEMBARK FROM AN IMC HELICOPTER IN KATHMANDU;
A COLLEAGUE WRITES SUTER’S NAME ON HER FOREHEAD
TO HELP PATIENTS RECOGNIZE HER IN THE EBOLA WARD.
clothesline—and headed to Nepal. “Everyone has something
that helps keep them sane, and mine is clean clothes,” she says.
Suter no longer has to live out of her duffel. This summer,
IMC created a full-time job specifically tailored to her skills,
as the senior adviser for medical planning and preparedness.
“It’s my first big-girl job,” she jokes. Suter now helps the mas-
sive organization pre-stage the best possible response for
wherever the next war or disease or earthquake should hit. She
can finally go for her beloved evening runs—“hard to do in a
I N TE RN AT IO N A L M ED I CA L COR PS ( 2 )
country that has just experienced a disaster”—and she and
her sister, who plans to move in with her, hope to start taking
hip-hop dance classes together. She may be sitting at a desk
in Washington, D.C., but she has her eyes on the field. “I told
them I’d only sign the contract provided it wouldn’t prevent
me from being deployed,” says Suter. She’s hoping to go to
Yemen, a failing state where bombs rain down daily. “Don’t
tell my mom,” she pleads.—HEIDI MITCHELL
VOGUE.COM
 CULTURE WARRIOR
LEFT: THE AUTHOR, DRESSED
TO KILL IN TRADITIONAL
SAMURAI ARMOR, AT USAGI
JUKU IN KYOTO. ABOVE: SHERRY
YAMAGUCHI, BENEATH A CANOPY
OF VERMILION TORII AT FUSHIMI
INARI-TAISHA IN KYOTO.

smocks from a boutique in

an arcade of shops on Aoya-
ma. (I still bitterly regret that
I didn’t splurge my modeling
money on one.)
Suffice it to say, then, that
I was long overdue for a visit,
so when a trio of artistically

Turning
minded friends suggested
that I join them for a romp
through the country to ex-
plore Tokyo, Kyoto, and the
art island of Naoshima, I

JAPANESE
leaped at the opportunity.
First stop was Tokyo’s
Park Hyatt—the setting, of
course, for Sofia Coppola’s
Lost in Translation—from
which to admire the endless,

T
he last time I traveled to Japan, I was an unknowable city from a perch in the clouds before heading
eighteen-year-old London club kid enlisted off to marvel at the starchitect triumphs in the Aoyama
COURTESY OF HAMISH BOWLES (2)

by the hip Tokyo menswear designer Takeo
Kikuchi to parade in his fashion show along
with an unruly gaggle of fellow urchins. The
very notion requires a stretch of the imagina-
tion, I know, but ever after I remembered getting hopelessly
lost in streets with no numbers—and that an exciting new
designer with a label inscrutably called Comme des Garçons
was selling rustic-looking Tess of the D’Urbervilles farmers’
neighborhood. Among them: Herzog & de Meuron’s faceted
Prada store and recently unveiled, flap-fronted Miu Miu bou-
tique; Comme’s swirling glass aquarium by Future Systems;
Dior’s transparent tower by SANAA; and Vuitton’s fretted
tower by Jun Aoki—all of them sandwiched by the jewel-box
Nezu Museum, set in startlingly serene gardens, at one end
and by the madcap kawaii girls of Harajuku on the other,
in Victorian-doll looks complete with mini H A M I S H > 5 9 8

594 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

the hamish files

EAST MEETS WEST world—along with the elegantly

crinolines, bonnets, and parasols. There were more historic
treasures to be drooled over in the Tokyo National Museum’s
complex—particularly Yoshio Taniguchi’s superb 1999 Gal-
lery of Horyuji Treasures. Nighttime fun, though, tended
more toward the kitsch, including the Shibuya district’s
Trump Room nightclub and karaoke sung in tiny little bars
that seat half a dozen patrons at most.
Thence a palate cleanser on the mist-shrouded island of
Naoshima, where a giant Yayoi Kusama pumpkin greets
the arriving ferry and the revered architect Tadao Ando has
built a series of structures to showcase art—including the
sublimely beautiful subterranean Chichu Art Museum, with
site-specific installations by James Turrell and Walter De
ZEN PARADISE
Maria and a room hung with
THE FAMED KOKEDERA five ravishing Monet water-lily
GARDENS AT SAIHOJI TEMPLE paintings, which may be one
ABOVE: YAYOI KUSAMA’S POP-
ART PUMPKIN ON NAOSHIMA. ascetic hotel Benesse House.
LEFT: PERFORMERS AT From there it was off via bullet
THE INVITATION-ONLY
WACHIGAIYA TEAHOUSE. train to Kyoto to stay in a storied
traditional ryokan. My cicerone,
the indefatigable Sherry Yamaguchi, producer of the NHK
World television series Forbidden Kyoto and aficionada of all
things cultural, had prepared an itinerary that was daunting
even by my no-stone-left-unturned standards. Sherry greeted
me at the Kyoto station dressed as a kimonoed figure out of
a Hokusai, her hair in a lacquered French pleat and geta-like
sandals on her fast-moving feet, and whisked us off to the
legendary Kitcho restaurant for a thirteen-course lunch.
After that came a relentless tour of one breathtaking temple
and garden after another, many off the tourist-beaten track,
along with a treasury of craft houses, including the traditional
samurai armory of Usagi Juku, the hand-painted kimonos of
the designer Makoto Mori, and the complex textiles of Hosoo
(founded in 1688). Once robe-makers to the imperial court
of Kyoto, the fabric house now collaborates with the artist
Teresita Fernández; the architect Peter Marino on interiors

IN KYOTO FEATURE MORE
THAN 120 TYPES OF MOSS.
of the small wonders of the
KUSA M A : KOSU KE OK A HA RA /T H E NEW YOR K TI M ES/REDUX PICTURES. ALL OTHERS: COURTESY OF HAMISH BOWLES.
textiles for Dior, Vuitton, and Chanel; and designers such as
Thom Browne and Rei Kawakubo.
Another highlight: the archive of the Kyoto
Costume Institute, which the Louis Vuitton
men’s design team had just visited on an inspi-
ration trip. The breathtaking collection runs
the gamut from an Elizabethan bodice embroi-
dered with caterpillars and three-dimensional
peas in their pods to Schiaparelli’s Lesage-
embroidered 1938 “sun king” cape and a trove
of early Comme, Yohji, and Miyake clothes,
along with the mad, whimsical shoes of Tokio
Kumagaï (heels like ice-cream cones, uppers
like layers of raw beef: Gaga before Gaga).
At our next stop, magic: In a candlelit
seventeenth-century room, attended by
two young girls (kamuro) dressed in red, we
were treated to an electrifying audience with
Kisaragi Dayu, one of five remaining tayu-,
or most senior geisha, who made her studied
appearance following eight hours of elaborate
hair and makeup, danced, played the kokyu,
and sang (revealing her startlingly blackened
teeth) before serving us tea, her every gesture
a study in elegance.
Then to Tokyo once more, staying this time
in the 1962 Hotel Okura, a H A M I S H > 6 0 0

VOGUE.COM
the hamish files
triumph of Mad Men–era high style that brought together
the best architects and textile, lighting, and furniture designers
of the day under the direction of Yoshiro Taniguchi (Yoshio’s
father) to create a single masterly Gesamtkunstwerk. Alas,
despite an international outcry from aesthetes, the building is
slated for the wrecking ball this month—to be replaced with a
towering new edifice just in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Finally, I remembered the late Japanese supermodel Sayo-
ko Yamaguchi twirling slowly down the Thierry Mugler
runway in the early eighties like the ballerina atop a music
box—or performing some sort of strange interpretive dance
for Issey Miyake—and being struck both by her exquisite
beauty (she was a longtime face of Shiseido cosmetics) and
by her innate sense of drama. So it was a delight to discover,
at Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art, an exhibition
paying homage to her legacy as a muse not only to design-
ers and photographers but to movie and theater directors
and video artists as well. Sayoko, who described herself
as a “Wearist,” indeed took the wearing of clothes to the
level of performance art—an apt icon in this extraordinary
country, where so much revolves around the twin ideas of
performance and refined aesthetics. 

Good Graces

STILLER AND TENNANT: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ. COVER: COURTESY OF PHAIDON. TENNANT: ARTHUR ELGORT.
INSIDE STORY
ABOVE: THE BOOK’S COVER.
LEFT: MAKING COUTURE
COMICAL WITH BEN STILLER
AND STELLA TENNANT IN
“FUNNY FACE,” OCTOBER 2001.

DIVING IN
When Edition 7L, Karl Lagerfeld’s copublishing arm with TENNANT’S LEAP OF
Steidl, unveiled Grace: Thirty Years of Fashion at Vogue in FAITH IN OCTOBER
2002, the fashionable world went wild. With a limited print 1995’S “HIGH-
TONED TWEEDS.”
run, bookshop shelves around the world were denuded at
lightning speed of this celebration of Vogue’s revered—and
indefatigable—Creative Director’s epic fashion essays, which
included unforgettable collaborations with photographers
including Bruce Weber, Helmut Newton, Ellen von
Unwerth, and Arthur Elgort. Today, copies available
online start at $1,750 and rise to a giddying $10,000.
“I thought that was a little overpriced,” says Coddington,
laughing. And so she persuaded Phaidon to reprint the
book exactly as it appeared back in the day (and for the
less-swoon-inducing sum of $150). Already planned for next
year: a companion volume of post-2002 material containing
some of Coddington’s most beloved shoots, including
Annie Leibovitz’s December 2003 “Alice in Wonderland”
portfolio starring Natalia Vodianova, along with Grace’s
work with Steven Klein, David Sims, Craig McDean, and
Steven Meisel. Make space on your bookshelves now.—H.B.

600 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

 SHARP SHOOTER
CAROLINE TRENTINI WITH
ALTUZARRA’S GHIANDA
KNOT SADDLEBAG ($2,195;
BARNEYS.COM). ALTUZARRA
COAT, DRESS, AND BOOTS.

EDITOR: MARK HOLGATE

Ready,
STEADY

G REG O RY HA R RI S. FAS HI O N ED I TO R: TO NY I RV I N E. HA I R, TO MO JI DA I . M A KEUP, KARAN FRANJ OLA. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

FROM HIS CHIC AND ELEGANTLY
SENSUAL PIECES TO HIS NEW
HANDBAG COLLECTION,
JOSEPH ALTUZARRA PROVES
THAT SLOW BUT SURE WINS THE
RACE. BY ROBERT SULLIVAN.

H
e’s calm—which, in the fashion
world, is its own kind of crazy.
This is his thing, at least in his
sunny studio in Manhattan’s
SoHo on a quiet morning. In-
stead of throwing tantrums, he
spends a considerable amount of time not talking.
At other moments, of course, he’s chatty (get him
going on Jurassic World or, really, any sci-fi film
and you’ll have trouble getting him to stop). But
Joseph Altuzarra is an expert at listening.
He also possesses what is, sadly, often not a
terribly fashionable quality: a sort of unflappable
kindness. At a casting—dressed in jeans and a
plain gray sweatshirt, his arms folded, his head
tilted, his eyes paying close attention—he seems
to be considering not only his practical needs but
the models’ feelings as well. “It’s the way I used
to think back when I was applying V I E W > 6 0 7

602 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

 The Stealth Star
to colleges,” he tells me. “You have to say, ‘They are deciding
whether or not to accept me, but I am also deciding whether
or not to accept them.’ ”
“Even when things have been tough, Joseph has managed
to keep an even keel,” says Daniella Vitale, COO of Barneys
New York. “And he’s gracious, which is not something I can
say about everybody.”
And though things have been tough—try starting a fashion
line during a recession sometime—Altuzarra, 32, has patient-
ly built his company while steering clear of the temptations
for a quick expansion or a race to accessorize. Fashion’s fi-
nancial powers have taken notice, as evidenced by the French
G REG O RY HA R RI S ( 2 ) . D E TA I LS, S EE I N T HI S ISSUE .
luxury-goods powerhouse Kering’s decision to back him in
2013. “I was convinced Joseph had the potential to be one of
the most influential designers of his generation,” François-
Henri Pinault, Kering’s CEO, tells me.
In the last few seasons, Altuzarra has been hitting his stride
and honing his signatures: the silhouette, nipped in at the
waist; the tailoring; the slit of the pencil skirt; the splashes of
color and flashes of skin. He has studied his customer—and
he has listened. “Our two big pillars are that I’m half French
and half American,” he says. “In looking at the United States
through the eyes of a Francophone, there’s a kind of fetishiza-
tion of the U.S. There’s also a strong sexual undertone to
VOGUE.COM
EASY STREET
LEFT: TRENTINI WEARS every collection—a carnal quality. The
AN ALTUZARRA JACKET, Altuzarra woman is very comfortable
TOP, SKIRT, CROCODILE
HOBO BAG, AND BOOTS. with her body.”
ABOVE: THE DESIGNER The proof is in fans like Rihanna
IN NEW YORK CITY.
and Naomi Watts, along with Nicole
Kidman, who praised the pleating in the white crepe dress
with satin inset she wore at Cannes earlier this year as “femi-
nine, beautiful, sexy—and wonderful to wear.”
Altuzarra was born and raised in Paris by a French-Basque
father and a Chinese-American mother. According to Karen
Altuzarra, who now serves on the board of her son’s company,
Joseph’s childhood was a book-filled one, dominated with the
adventures of Corto Maltese, a sailor-adventurer who starred
in Italian graphic novels, and The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses,
based on a Plains Indian girl—transnational influences, to be
sure. Altuzarra showed little interest in fashion until, while
studying art history at Swarthmore College, he began design-
ing costumes for the school’s theater. After graduating he
interned at Marc Jacobs and worked as a freelance designer at
Proenza Schouler and then as first assistant to Riccardo Tisci
at Givenchy. When he launched his own line in 2008—and
went on to win the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award shortly
thereafter—critics immediately dubbed him a star to watch.
Vanessa Traina Snow, who now works as Altuzarra’s
stylist, met the designer when he was assisting at Givenchy.
“He’s always been very curious,” she says. “He asks a lot of
questions. You don’t find that in everyone, which is surpris-
ing, but he’s always wanted to learn more about everything.”
The bag is a good example. For a long time he resisted mak-
ing a bag, despite the world’s collective clamor for accessories.
Instead, he listened to the people who told him not to rush. “I
am a very one-story-at-a-time person,” he says, “and I didn’t
really want to do one until I felt like the clothing was taken care
of.” So again he sat down to consider his customer—what she
wears, why she likes Altuzarra. Then and only then came the
bags, starting with a line inspired by bull ropes. V I E W > 6 0 8
VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
607
 The Stealth Star

“I don’t know what I was looking for,” Altuzarra says,

GENE GENIE
ABOVE: ALTUZARRA (STANDING)
grinning. He is sitting in his spare, well-lit office talking
about how he found himself one afternoon in the middle of
last year on a Web site selling bull ropes—and he’s getting a
tiny bit agitated remembering the anxiety he felt when call-
ing the man in New Mexico who was selling them to place
his order. “I really didn’t sound like a cowboy,” he says. “I
actually said I wanted to buy them for a friend.” The ropes
ended up inspiring the handles of his bag, while antique
French cigarette lighters inspired the hardware. The bags,
which debuted on Altuzarra’s fall 2015 runway, are prov-
ing an instant hit on Instagram and elsewhere; Barneys is
selling them exclusively.
At that fall show, Altuzarra riffed on a cavalcade of so-
ciety icons—Gloria Vanderbilt, Babe Paley, Slim Keith,
and the rest of Truman Capote’s swans—in pieces that
managed to be at once rock solid and playful: shearling-

C HI LD HO OD : COU RT ESY O F JOSE P H A LT UZ A RRA ( 2) . TO N Y AWA RDS: A N D REW H. WALKER / © GETTY IMAGES. WED D ING: R EBECCA WALKER & ANGI WELSCH FOR IRA LIPPKE STUDIOS.
WITH HIS FAMILY IN JAPAN, 1989. collared jackets and long skirts with just-as-long slits;
LEFT: THE ALREADY STYLISH
FUTURE DESIGNER AT AGE THREE. Prince of Wales checked coats, followed by more leather;
white and black lace with high patrician
collars; a gold-shimmered red dress with
plunging neckline in Tibetan braided vel-
vet dévoré—dévoré being from the Latin,
“to devour.” “I wanted to do something
almost overly frilly in the tops, but with a
counterpoint,” Altuzarra said afterward.
“I feel very strongly that if it doesn’t have
a counterpoint, you won’t wear it.”
Backstage, the room filled with the fash-
ion usuals, along with Altuzarra’s mother—
and her mother—and an executive from
Kering. Altuzarra walked in a few minutes
later, laughing. (“Sometimes he’s the most
relaxed of any of us,” a staffer tells me.) Al-
tuzarra’s husband of nearly a year, real es-
tate investor and developer Seth Weissman,
also 32, recounted the couple’s morning
nerve-calming ritual. “We go out for iced
coffee and walk the dogs,” he said.
MODEL BEHAVIOR
ABOVE: WITH VANESSA AXENTE Altuzarra’s steadiness—having the kind
AT THE 2015 TONY AWARDS. of life that allows him to sketch for hours
RIGHT: THE DESIGNER IN
VOGUE, 2011. PHOTOGRAPHED and deal with production chains and fit-
BY NORMAN JEAN ROY. tings while still having time to hit the gym—
comes, he says, from being married. “It’s
grounded me,” he says. “I had less perspective on things
before, and was a little more emotional.” (Of course, mar-
riage brings challenges as well—say, forcing your husband to
sit through a sci-fi flick that even Will Smith couldn’t save, an
ordeal Weissman survived by reading The New York Times
on his iPhone underneath his sweater.)
When I see the designer in midsummer, he has just re-
turned from New Mexico, where he felt powerfully inspired
by the spareness and scale of the terrain and spent some time
with the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. “The dialogue between
her paintings and the austere landscape was really powerful,”
JOINED TOGETHER
Altuzarra says. And the rope guy?
LEFT: ALTUZARRA “I didn’t see him,” he says, laugh-
AND HUSBAND SETH ing. “I should have. Next time—I’m
WEISSMAN (CENTER) ON
THEIR WEDDING DAY. going back.”  VIEW>610

VOGUE.COM
 FRINGE ELEMENT
EDIE CAMPBELL WEARS A
HILLIER BARTLEY JACKET
($2,500), DRESS WITH
FRINGED SCARF ($3,410),
AND PYTHON BAG ($2,170);
MATCHESFASHION.COM.

DAV I D SI M S. FAS HI O N E DI TO R: LU EL LA BA RT LEY. HA I R, PAU L H A NLO N ; M A KEU P, LUCIA PIERONI FOR CLÉ D E PEAU BEAUTÉ. PRODUCED BY ART H OUSE. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSU E .
F
or the first time, I feel I’ve
done something that is
wholly me.” Luella Bart-
ley’s blonde-haired head
is cocked as she consid-
ers a tuxedo suit with a
cropped jacket, a pair of trousers that
end in an ankle tie, and a crisp white

TWO for
shirt with a cravat. “It’s dapper and
rakish, but with a kind of rock-’n’-roll
femininity about it,” she says. “The fab-
ric is the sort Savile Row tailors use—
you don’t feel it until you wear it, but
then you understand the quality. It feels
like it’s time for something authentic,

the
KATIE HILLIER AND with longevity.”

Show
Then she grins, wrinkling the cor-
LUELLA BARTLEY ners of her blue eyes. “But if you’d told
LAUNCH AN me ten years ago I’d be basing some-
ECCENTRICALLY thing on this, I’d probably have said,
‘Ugh—how middle-aged!’ ”
ELEGANT NEW LINE. Katie Hillier, Bartley’s longtime
BY SARAH MOWER. friend and codesigner VIEW>620

610 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

 Classic Quirk

in arms, nods and laughs. She’s come PATCH WORK

CAMPBELL WEARS
over to Luella’s to talk about their A HILLIER BARTLEY
WOOL SWEATER
brand-new joint venture, Hillier Bart- ($1,545), VELVET
ley. Light is streaming through the TROUSERS ($925),
AND BUNNY CLUTCH
kitchen windows of the Georgian town ($765); SWEATER
house in London that Bartley shares AND CLUTCH AT
MATCHESFASHION.COM.
with the photographer David Sims and
their three children. Hillier, meanwhile,
perches at the kitchen counter. “This
is an intimate, quiet sort of label,” she
carefully stresses. “Calm and modest—
no excess and no fuss.”
To those who haven’t been follow-
ing the latest ins and outs at the top of
fashion, this might come as rather sur-
prising news. Bartley and Hillier were
last seen in the noisy glare of New
York Fashion Week in February as
they took their bows as creative direc-
tors of Marc by Marc Jaobs—which
was then promptly absorbed into the
main Marc Jacobs collection (to which
Hillier still contributes).
So here they are, doing just about
the opposite of what you might expect
from the girls known as ace channelers
of quirky, youth-culty trends. Bartley
couldn’t look more blissfully relieved
as she spells out the differences. “I still
have moments of being an indie kid,
but I’m 42! I want to be feminine—or
womanly. I wanted to work out what
that meant,” she says, pointing out a
long satin 1930s-ish dress trimmed
with pearl buttons. “I can’t remember
when I last wore an evening dress! But
this feels real to me.”
To be clear, Hillier and Bartley
aren’t abandoning their very British

instincts for the eccentric generation-
al subtext—they’re simply imbuing
them with a classic sense and work-
ing with beautiful fabrics, along with
shapes they want to keep repeating
and refining. There’s a melton great-
coat, a camel-hair dressing-gown
coat complete with silk-tasseled tie-
came across a page that describes him
as walking a line between vanity and
vagrancy—and I just jumped about,
shouting, ‘That’s it!’ ”
Though there’s always room for
sparky humor in the Hillier Bartley
world, there’s no mistaking the fact
that this is an enterprise they’re tak-
DAV I D SI M S ( 2 ) . D E TA I LS, S EE I N T HI S ISSUE .

belt, an army-surplus khaki sweater
with green velvet shoulder patches,
a gray tailored tweed suit with wide,
cropped pants.
These are clothes they imagine be-
DOUBLE ing lived-in with a bit of “loucheness
TROUBLE and insouciance,” Bartley declares. “I
FROM LEFT:
LUELLA love that thing of people who wear very
BARTLEY AND
KATIE HILLIER
good clothes carelessly. I was reading
IN LONDON. a biography of Lucian Freud and
ing very seriously: It’s their own in-
vestment, their own chance to speak
directly to like-minded women without
the machinery of a corporation around
them. Hillier, for her part, says it means
she can go to town with the construc-
tion and quality of the bags. “I didn’t
want to be restricted,” she says. “I’m
really just enjoying that freedom to do
exactly what I want.”  VIEW>622

620 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

 en PLEIN air
THE SCULPTOR MARIE CHRISTOPHE MOVED HER FAMILY
FROM PARIS TO A BUCOLIC 19TH-CENTURY COUNTRY MANSION—
AND SHE HASN’T LOOKED BACK. HAMISH BOWLES REPORTS.
I
never dreamed about the countryside!” exclaims
the sculptor Marie Christophe, nestled on a sofa
in the soft-pink living room of her house, which
just happens to be embowered in far-flung Gas-
cony, in la France profonde. Christophe was per-
fectly happy with her Parisian life, raising her
sons, Joseph, now thirteen, and Raoul, eight, in a
stylishly converted studio house in Clichy. But her husband,
the interior designer Emmanuel Fenasse, was brought up
outside Toulouse and had long dreamed of returning.
Fenasse set off hopefully on epic house-finding missions,
622 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
PASCAL CHEVALLIER. SITTINGS EDITOR: HAMISH BOWLES. FLOWERS: SAINT FIACRE FLEURISTE, TOULOUSE. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.
SUNFLOWER POWER
CHRISTOPHE, IN AN ETRO
DRESS ($3,110; SAKS
FIFTH AVENUE STORES),
WITH HER SON RAOUL
AND A WIRE AVIARY OF
HER OWN DESIGN.
variously falling for a rambling eighteenth-century château,
an exquisite Directoire pavilion with a domed rotunda,
and even the handsome de Chirico–esque ruin of a mag-
nificent brick barn—all of which his wife vetoed, deeming
them impractically large and impossible to manage or in
need of too much work. At long last, though, he found
a mid–nineteenth century mansion with a pink-washed
stucco facade and unusual Gothic fenestration—a house for
a latter-day Madame Bovary, the north facade abutting a
pretty courtyard entranceway with wrought-iron railings and
a southern aspect rising to a knoll crowned by a V I E W > 6 2 4
VOGUE.COM
 Toulouse, Toujours

GOOD ENERGY
ABOVE: WITH SONS JOSEPH AND RAOUL ON THE BACK
LAWN OF THEIR TOULOUSE HOME. RIGHT: POP-BRIGHT
EERO SAARINEN CHAIRS IN THE LIVING ROOM.

centuries-old cedar of Lebanon. The former

home of a family with eleven children, it had
been empty for 20 years. Still, the price was
prohibitive—until two years later, when the
owners, delighted that a new young family
would breathe life into the forlorn beauty,
accepted a lowball offer, and Christophe,
Fenasse, Joseph, and Raoul set off for a new
life where wild boar forage in the woodland,
snakes lurk in the undergrowth, and it takes
Fenasse six hours to mow the rolling park- FINE FEATHERS
CHRISTOPHE’S AVIAN
land lawns. “It’s really wild country here,” says Christophe. WIRE SCULPTURES PERCH
Indoors, a boldly colored contemporary serenity reigns. IN HER BEDROOM.
The house is furnished with prototypes of iconic pieces
of Knoll furniture by such designers as Florence Knoll
and Eero Saarinen (all of which Fenasse inherited from his
parents, who had the brand’s concession in Algeria in the
sixties), mixed with locally sourced antiques and treasures
gleaned from their global travels—including textiles sleuthed
in India and Moroccan rugs and hand-woven bedspreads
found on holidays spent in Tangier with Christophe’s best
friend, Bruno Frisoni.
Christophe, who commandeered the house’s handsome
former billiard room as her light-flooded studio, grew up
in her native Alsace, the daughter of an architect, before
heading off to Paris to study drawing at the celebrated
Academie Julian and later sculpture at the ATEP École de
Communication Visuelle. Her fragile-seeming pieces, care-
fully wrought with pliers from thin strips of metal wire and
occasionally embellished with wooden or crystal beads, have
an almost spectral presence. (“I think of my VIEW>626

624 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

 Toulouse, Toujours

SPACE ODYSSEY
LEFT: JOSEPH IN THE work as drawing in space,” she says.) A giant birdcage hung
STAIRCASE HALL. ABOVE:
CYAN, YELLOW, AND from a sycamore tree above an alfresco picnic table magically
HERMÈS-ORANGE HUES reveals itself—along with the bedazzled finches lighting on
ADD GRAPHIC PUNCH AS
A STUFFED GOOSE PEEKS its swings—only as guests draw closer to lunch.
OUT FROM THE HALLWAY. Her scrupulously color-coordinated walk-in country
closet, filled with Frisoni shoes and decidedly unrural pieces
from Céline, Lanvin, and Valentino, reveals the passion
that accidentally launched her career soon after gradua-
tion, when she conceived an idea for a Christmas-window
project thronged with penguins and bears for Victoire, a
favorite fashion store in Paris’s elegant Place des Victoires.
The finished project was subsequently spotted by Jean-
Louis Dumas—then the artistic director and chairman of
Hermès—who soon commissioned a quartet of life-size
horses for the brand’s Los Angeles flagship. (Christophe has
since worked with Cartier, Dior, Vuitton, Guerlain, Baccarat,
and Roger Vivier, among others.)
Her newest pieces, which depict creatures ranging from a
tiny finch to an elephant, are currently being exhibited along-
side works by photographer Nicolas Guilbert at the Flair gal-
lery in Arles. Later this month, her art can also be seen at Creel
and Gow on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in complement
to a wunderkammer filled with avian taxidermy and silvered
natural shells—while around the corner her bijoux-garlanded
giraffe graces the windows of the jewel-box boutique of her
friend the fine-jewelry designer Marie-Hélène de Taillac.
Outside her studio, works in progress include a vegetable
garden and a tree house (inspired by one she saw at the artist
Yto Barrada’s home in Tangier) in one of the immemorial
yews dotting the property. The joys of rural living, it seems,
are growing on her. “Even if you are
REINVENTING working, you are a bit on holiday here
THE WHEELS
CHRISTOPHE, WITH because you are free,” Christophe
HER ETHEREAL WIRE says, before laughing and noting that
BIKE SCULPTURE,
WEARS A BROCK most of her clients have no idea when
COLLECTION DRESS, they communicate with her that she’s
$2,400; A’MAREE’S,
NEWPORT BEACH, CA. planted firmly in the middle of the
ROGER VIVIER FRINGED countryside.
BOOTS, $2,095;
ROGER VIVIER, NYC. “It’s my secret!”  VIEW>628

VOGUE.COM
 INITIAL
ATTRACTION
GEORGIA MAY
JAGGER WEARS

Easy
HER SIGNATURE
MULBERRY
LEATHER JACKET
AND MULBERRY
SKIRT ($880;
MULBERRY.COM).

RIDER
MULBERRY’S LATEST
COLLABORATION REVS HIGH.

R
ebellion is the only
thing that keeps
you alive!” cries a
leather-clad Mari-
anne Faithfull in the
1968 Franco-British
classic The Girl on a Motorcycle. Stok-
ing that flame in 2015 is Mulberry,
which has teamed up with model
Georgia May Jagger to create cus-
tomizable, made-in-Italy biker jackets.
“I want people to feel it’s their own,”
says Jagger, who worked with French
graphic artist Bruno Michaud to cre-
ate the three hand-painted motifs of
an owl, fox, and bee that gently ac-
knowledge Mulberry’s bucolic West
Country heritage. Jagger is throwing
her jackets—each of which takes six
weeks to create—over both hoodies
and evening dresses. “The boyish lon-
ger line and wide-cut sleeves mean they

MA K EU P, M IRA NDA JOYCE . P HOTO G RA P HE D AT ACE CA FÉ LO ND O N . D E TA I LS, S EE IN TH IS ISSUE.

can go over everything,” she says.
The model, who closed Cha-

O LI V ER H A D LEE P EA RC H. FAS HI ON E DI TOR : VI CTO RI A YOUN G. HA I R, A LE X BROW NSELL;

nel’s resort 2011 show in St.-
Tropez on a Harley, is also
a vintage-jacket collec-
tor fond of both the silk
bombers she’s picked up in
Japan and the seventies and
eighties leathers that have
migrated from the wardrobes
of her mother, Jerry Hall, and
her father, Mick. Now she’s
created her own. “My style
is more functional than
wild,” she says with a wide
grin, though her jackets’
exuberant jewel-colored silk
linings nod to her newfound
love of interiors: Her first
home is decorated in equal-
ly arresting hues.—EMMA
ELWICK-BATES VIEW>630

628 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

Shopping with
LYNN YAEGER TAKES
A FANCIFUL SPIN
AROUND TOWN WITH
FALL STYLE HEROINE
MARGOT TENENBAUM.
M
argot Tenen-
baum called me
on my landline
the other day,
fairly bursting
with enthusi-
asm. “Let’s go shopping, Lynn!”
she exclaimed. “Everything I love,
everything I invented—it all seems
to be in the stores right now!”
Of course, she is completely right:
This season, countless designers are
ogling her brilliantly original fashion
sense, a singular aesthetic that has
entranced us since we first met Mar-
got and her family in 2001 in Wes
Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.
This unique style, which might be
described as transgressive lady dress-
ing, is a shotgun wedding of studied
innocence and faintly arch sophisti-
cation. With her ubiquitous belted
fur trench, her oversize structured
handbag, her polo-shirt dresses, her
630 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
MARGOT
TENENBAUMS: EVER ETT COLLECTION; BAG, CLIP, AND GLOVES: J OH N MAN N O. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .
NEW TRICKS
IN PLACE OF HER OLD WARES,
TENENBAUM (GWYNETH PALTROW)
WEARS A VAN CLEEF & ARPELS CLIP
AND OSCAR DE LA RENTA GLOVES,
AND CARRIES A FENDI BAG.
flat loafers, and her sleek pageboy
held in place with a schoolgirl bar-
rette, Tenenbaum actively subverts,
in a most adorable fashion, the
Ur-matronly codes of another era.
At Gucci, one of the strongest
purveyors of Margot style, design-
er Alessandro Michele argues for
classic mink paired with pseudo-
intellectual spectacles; at Miu Miu,
short-handled bags enhance long,
lean overcoats; at Bally, a weasel
fur thrown over a sweater is a direct
homage (a runway model also wore
a sweatband in honor of Margot’s
brother Richie). There are Tenen-
baum-worthy loafers, turquoise and
tasseled, at Max Mara; at Gucci,
they even sprout fur.
Margot and I make a date to
have a drink at the Oak V I E W > 6 3 2
ROYAL TREATMENT
THE MARGOT LOOK IN VOGUE, 2015.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMIE HAWKESWORTH.

Room and then hit some high-end
shops. (If you are raising a perfectly
plucked eyebrow just about now, it
might interest you to know that I hang
out with fictional characters all the
time. I visit London galleries with Julia
Flyte; I hit the fleas in Morocco with
Ilsa Lund; I spend summers on the
Lido with Tadzio.) She shows up in her
trademark ensemble, and though the
barman gives her a fishy look—who
wears a fur coat when it’s 70 degrees
out?—Margot doesn’t blink a raccoon-
rimmed eye.
We swallow our gin rickeys quickly
and head out to find her a new hand-
bag—she is worried, she tells me, that
overreliance on her tan Birkin will has-
ten its dissolution. And besides, what
girl doesn’t want a new bag once in a
while? Precise in her desires—“I hate
a sloppy, slouchy sack,” she declares.
“I need to hear the click of a clasp!”—
she also requires, given her well-known
penchant for flying the coop, some-
thing large enough to accommodate a
camisole and a toothbrush. At Fendi
on Madison Avenue, she falls for a
geometric intarsia calf-hair Peekaboo
purse that quickly finds its way into the
backseat of her town car.
Next up are some gloves to pro-
tect Margot’s dainty fingers. (Careful
watchers of the film may recall that
poor Margot is missing a digit, which
makes this stylish accessory a necessity,
not just a fashionable flourish.)
“Sometimes I feel like my outfit—
loafers, fur, polo dress; loafers, fur, polo
dress—gets, well, a little tiresome, even
for me,” she confesses at Oscar de la
Renta, unexpectedly zeroing in on a
pair of over-the-elbow numbers in a
startling shade of purple.
It’s almost time to head back uptown
to the spooky mansion where Margot
still lives with her family, but we have
one last stop: the hallowed halls of Van
Cleef & Arpels. Since her coiffure de-
pends on a humbly deployed barrette,
she goes straight to the clips counter,
where I find her trembling at the sight of
a dragonfly rendered in pink sapphires
and diamonds, ready to alight on her
polished head. When I ask her what it
is about this piece that is so enchanting,
she smiles enigmatically and says, “Why
should earrings be the only things that
flash near your face?”  VIEW>634
632 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
Retro Active
Chain
Reaction
T
he reinvention of
Paco Rabanne’s
iconic chain mail
continues. This
time, creative di-
rector Julien Dossena trans-
ports Rabanne’s love of metal
to the ear. “I wanted to explore
handcraft in big volumes, but
still maintain the sharpness,”
says Dossena. The result?
Eight crafted-and-welded
chain-link earrings that meld
medieval mesh with disco glam
in slinky shapes and punchy
palettes—each reminiscent
of the silvery metallic dresses
made famous by Rabanne in
the sixties. “All you need is one
earring with a pair of jeans
and a white T-shirt,” says Dos-
sena of the riveted, shimmery SINGLE MINDED
elements. “It’s a supple jewel.” PACO RABANNE MESH
EARRINGS, $180 EACH;
—RACHEL WALDMAN BLAKE, CHICAGO.
Snake Charmers
JO HN MA N N O ( 2 ) . D ETA I LS, S EE IN TH IS ISSUE.
It’s not often that collaborations originate in Vegas, but when
Marc Alary and Spinelli Kilcollin got to talking when they both found
themselves there for work in June, it was, as Kilcollin says, “one of
those moments where everything just falls into place naturally.” Cut
to the launch of MASK (“It’s a nice amalgamation of our names,” says
Kilcollin), a collection of five rings that is a kind of perfect admixture
of both brands’ design aesthetics: Kilcollin’s stackable link rings and
Alary’s quirky animal kingdom. Interlocking bands rendered in precious
metals (and occasionally pavé), coiled in the form of jewel-encrusted
slithering serpents? They’ll have you wrapped around their finger. —R.W.
BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
MASK 18K GOLD-AND-
DIAMOND LINKED RINGS;
BARNEYS NEW YORK STORES.
FO R FA S H I O N N E W S A N D
F E AT U R E S , G O TO VO G U E . C O M
 COIL AND WATER
DAVID YURMAN
NECKLACE, $4,800;
DAVID YURMAN, NYC.

When in
CHROME
O
n Instagram, the hashtag #frankgehry shows
up about 65,000 times—making him one of
the most posted architects out there, along-
side other big names like Le Corbusier and
Frank Lloyd Wright. To scroll through the
feed, all sundered shapes and torquing
sails, is to be awash in ribbony luster: The structures—
celebrated in a new retrospective at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art this month—are bona fide
global icons as much as they are mere dwellings, office
buildings, or museums. HEAVY METAL
ABOVE: GEHRY’S GUGGENHEIM
As it happens, mirrors of Gehry’s scale and shim- MUSEUM IN BILBAO, SPAIN. LEFT:
mer are also seen in fall’s jewelry, with designers PROENZA SCHOULER BRACELET,
$730; PROENZA SCHOULER, NYC.
offering their own—albeit tinier—versions of BELOW: HORSE-HEAD CONFERENCE
mercurial monuments. “I was inspired by the ROOM BY GEHRY, VOGUE, 2006.
colors of his buildings, especially by the sunset
glow off his residential tower in New York,” says
Narciso Rodriguez of his collection’s Möbius-strip
necklaces, which gleam in buffed silver or brushed

NEC KLACE : COU RT ESY O F DAV I D YU RM AN. GUGGENH EIM: MAR K

gold. David Yurman’s light-cradling argent dégradé

MAWSO N/ © G ET T Y I MAG ES. HO RS E- H EAD : ROLAND H ALBE.

collars recall that same structure at 8 Spruce Street; Pro-

A LL OT HE RS : J O HN M A NN O. D ETA I LS, S EE IN TH IS ISSUE.

enza Schouler, meanwhile, evokes Gehry’s Guggenheim
Bilbao through graphic metal cuffs with jutting, high-polish
finishes. Even Roberto Coin’s Golden Gate ring features a
smooth facade with a gridded underbelly—much like the
boned-glass chrysalis of Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuit-
ton, another Gehry design. And just as his edifices add
a brazen flash to the cityscape, so, too, does this jew-
elry to your wardrobe. (Try a ripple of steel over a
silken slip dress for a jolt of what Rodriguez calls
“refined structural grace.”) There must be
something in the glare.—NICK REMSEN
VIEW>636

ELLIPTICAL FORCE
RIGHT: NARCISO RODRIGUEZ
MÖBIUS CHOKER. ROBERTO
COIN GOLDEN GATE RING,
$2,200; (212) 486-4545.

634 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015


IN the CLUB
I
n the second Back to the
Future movie, the date they
jump ahead to is October 21,
2015,” says a grinning Nicho-
las Kirkwood, scanning his
very first couture footwear
collection, which was shown discreet-
ly in Paris in July. “I feel like we really
need to get a DeLorean and throw
some kind of party.”
Even without such an anniver-
sary, a fete seems justified: Kirk-
wood’s fantastic ten-pair capsule
absolutely explodes with eighties ex-
cess and iconography, from jagged
fluorescent heels spelling out neon to
crystal-pixelated vamps of chomp-
ing Pac-Men to rubber panels that—
somehow—gracefully reinterpret Star
Wars technology. “I need to see the
new-new one—I was quite obsessed
with Star Wars,” says the designer,
admittedly excited for December’s
636 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
GLOW WITH
THE FLOW
NICHOLAS KIRKWOOD
NEON CITY SANDAL;
BERGDORF
GOODMAN, NYC.
The Force Awakens, which he hadn’t
yet heard about when he conceived
the couture project—ditto with
this summer’s retro arcade–centric
flick Pixels. “I was really just think-
ing about being age ten,” Kirk-
wood adds. “When I was ten, those
movies and video games . . . they
were everything.”
The shoes—many of them built
atop Kirkwood’s trademark shark-
fin platform—are available only
G O RMA N ST UD I O. D ETA I LS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E .
on a made-to-order basis. “We’re
a decade old, so I wanted to do
something special based on my sig-
natures,” he says. (They’ll arrive, like
action figures, in their own toylike
boxes.) And Back to the Future fans,
worry not: One of the models—
replete with leather-tread sole and a
neoprene tongue—is an overt hom-
age to the franchise. Its name: Back
To The Sneaker. —N.R. V I E W > 6 3 8
VOGUE.COM
 style
ethics
S
ometimes it seems as if
eco- might as well be a four-
letter word. Stubbornly
connoting earth tones and
itchy knits, the prefix is, as
Erdem Moralioglu puts it,

HA I R , LU KE HE RS HESON : MA KEU P, M I RA N DA J OYCE . P HOTOG RA P H ED AT TO M ST UART- SMITH ’S BAR N GAR D EN AT SERGE H ILL IN
HE RT FO RDSHI RE. P RO DUC ED BY SYLV I A FA RAGO LT D. S ET D ES IG N, DAV I D W H I T E AT STR EETERS. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
“just not very chic.” This season he’s
helping change that with a new capsule
collection that is anything but homely. A
master of ladylike updates to the boho
wardrobe of many a London girl—
Sienna Miller among them—Erdem
has now conjured twelve ethically and
sustainably produced looks without
compromising his aesthetic. Conceived
in conjunction with Livia Firth and her
Green Carpet Challenge, they range
from duck egg–blue dresses covered in
cherry-blossom prints to a variety of
floral lace concoctions in cocktail, tea,
and full lengths—and the results verge
on couture. “There’s a dress cut on the
bias and another strapless one that’s
hand-embroidered with a Watteau
back,” Erdem explains. The dresses will
debut at the Wallace Collection, Lon-
don’s answer to the Frick, on the same
day as Erdem’s spring 2016 collection.
“I want to take the idea of ‘eco-’ and
turn it on its head,” he says. Consider
this a headstand.—MARK GUIDUCCI
FIELD OF DREAMS
SIENNA MILLER WEARS AN ERDEM
SILK DRESS; BARNEYS NEW YORK
STORES. THE FRYE COMPANY BOOTS.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANGELO PENNETTA.
FASHION EDITOR: CAMILLA NICKERSON.

638 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

 Beauty
EDITOR: CELIA ELLENBERG

FA L L F O R E C A S T
The products, places, and people to know this season.

THE RIPE
STUFF
MODEL XIAO
WEN JU. HAIR,
GARREN AT
GARREN NY FOR
R+CO.; MAKEUP,
DICK PAGE
FOR SHISEIDO.
PHOTOGRAPHED
BY INEZ AND
VINOODH.

Deep If you’ve been missing the runway’s

Impact

regularly scheduled, bold backstage

programming for the past few
seasons, some news: Color is back
for fall. “We’re ready for makeup that
is decorative again,” says the makeup
artist Dick Page, who custom-
blended the burnished black-cherry
lip shown here. And how better to dip
back into the spectrum than with a
fearless, darker-than-dark spin on
classic red? Set against fur stoles and
decadent beading, models’ bordeaux
mouths at Marc Jacobs looked “chic
and elegant, in an off way,” according
JU: FAS HI O N E DI TO R: P H YLLI S P OS NI C K. ST I LL L I FES:

to François Nars, Jacobs’s confidant

in matters of maquillage. That
LUCAS V I SSE R. D E TA I LS, SE E I N T HI S I SSU E.

description is equally apt for Chanel’s

cult-classic shimmering aubergine
nail lacquer, Vamp, which will lend its
moody hue to a suite of products
later this year that can be individually
paired with stripped-down skin or
doubled up on lips and eyes. Page is
a fan of playing fast and loose with
powerful pigment. “Makeup is really
about experimentation,” he
says.—LAURA REGENSDORF
BACKGROUND, FROM TOP: LANCÔME GRANDIÔSE MASCARA; L’ORÉAL BE AUT Y>6 42
PARIS COLOUR RICHE LIPCOLOUR; MAC STUDIO NAIL LACQUER.
 FA L L F O R E C A S T

Object
Lesson
Christian Louboutin’s instantly
memorable nail-polish bottle—
crowned by a six-inch stiletto-like
spike—proved that the shoe guru’s eye
for the fantastical extends beyond
footwear. This month, he brings his
flair for nth-degree design to lipstick,
reimagining the traditional bullet as a
hyperembellished keepsake that THE SPA AT NIHIWATU
OVERLOOKS THE
melds Art Deco craftsmanship and INDIAN OCEAN.
Middle Eastern luxe. Available in three
finishes—satin, matte, and sheer
(LEFT)—the hydrating, murumuru
seed butter–enriched formulas come
in more than 30 wearable shades,
SPA Safari
Should you find yourself at the eco-luxury surf resort Nihiwatu in
including the house’s signature red, Sumba, a mere 28 hours of air travel away from New York, consider
Rouge Louboutin, named after the going a bit farther. One of the Indonesian island property’s newest
designer’s trademarked soles. offerings is a full-day beauty voyage that begins with an hour-long hike
“Gesture is always a thing I have in through spectacular hills and rice fields. Keep forging on until you reach
mind when I’m designing,” Louboutin the spa, a cluster of private pavilions perched on a jagged cliffside. You
says, referencing the cinematic act of can spend up to five hours immersed in a flight of treatments including
applying lipstick—which, as far as he’s the coconut oil–and–lavender Softening Salt Glow body scrub; the
concerned, should be viewed as “a Hydrating Hair Smoothie made with rosemary oil and avocado; and the
new way to speak with your hands.” yogurt-and-cucumber Sunburn Soother. No need to keep your bliss in
$90; christianlouboutin.com.—L.R. check; the return trip is in a Jeep. nihiwatu.com.—CLAIRE HOFFMAN

Message in aBottle Byredo founder Ben Gorham is having

what you might call a good year. The
fragrance designer branched out into
leather goods in February, just a few
months before opening his New York
flagship store in SoHo. And the tall,
heavily inked Swede isn’t done yet. For

LI PST I C K: LUCAS V I SS ER . S PA : COU RT ESY O F NI HI WAT U. P E RFU ME : GO RM A N STU D I O.

his brand’s first charitable initiative,
Gorham has teamed up with Freja
Beha Erichsen on a woodsy
Turkish-rose eau inspired by the
Danish supermodel and her work with
the nonprofit group Doctors Without
Borders. Five percent of the scent’s
net revenues will go to the global
organization, which dispatches
humanitarian aid and health care to
those who need it most. Called Rose
of No Man’s Land, the perfume takes
its name from one of Gorham’s
tattoos—a cross bearing the same
inscription, with a nurse and the titular
bloom in the center—which was a
popular way for soldiers in world wars
ERICHSEN, to honor the field nurses who saved
PHOTOGRAPHED BY their lives. Says Gorham, “It’s nice to
LACHLAN BAILEY IN
VOGUE, 2013. INSET:
be able to contribute to people who
BYREDO’S ROSE OF are doing important work.” $145;
NO MAN’S LAND. byredo.com.—CELIA ELLENBERG

BE AUT Y>6 4 4
 Beauty FA L L F O R E C A S T

Studio Tıme
A quick perusal of New York trainer Nicole Winhoffer’s Instagram
account includes a recent post-class group portrait. The caption
reads, JUST ANOTHER SUNDAY AT #NWCHURCH. The analogy works well
for the fitness star tasked with chiseling Madonna’s famously ageless
CARA
DELEVINGNE, body for five years; Winhoffer, who joined Adidas by Stella McCartney
PHOTOGRAPHED as its first global ambassador in 2014, has garnered a number of
BY MARIO
TESTINO. devoted congregants of late—Rachel Weisz, Charlotte Ronson, and
Spike Jonze among them. After leading her impossible-to-book
workouts at a rented space downtown, Winhoffer is finally getting a
place of her own. The NoHo studio, set to open later this fall, will offer
her signature classes—dimly lit power hours that blend intense
muscle toning and club-friendly cardio—as well as new offerings, like
interval training and dance choreography. With a juice-and-coffee
bar in the works, the space is intended to be “like a sanctuary inside
New York,” Winhoffer says, albeit a high-energy iteration sound-
tracked by the dulcet tones of Rihanna. nicolewinhoffer.com.—L.R.

Bigger inTEXAS
Joanna Czech is used to taking her skin-perfecting show on the
road. Since following her heart from New York to Dallas in 2012, Kate
Winslet and Uma Thurman’s longtime facialist has been honing her
LED–light therapy, sapphire-peel, and microcurrent skills between
the Texas metropolis’s Neiman Marcus salon and a monthly residence
at New York’s Core Club. But Czech’s local loyalists had other ideas.
“My Dallas clients were the catalyst,” the Polish-born aesthetician

W I N HO FFER : COU RT ESY O F AD IDAS BY STELLA MCCARTNEY. MASK: LUCAS VISSER .

reveals of what drove her to open her own space. The 2,000-
square-foot Victory Park boutique and spa features a streamlined
menu of offerings customized with Biologique Recherche’s Skin
Instant computer analysis to determine individual needs in the way
of hydration, elasticity, and pigmentation. Also on heavy rotation:
Czech’s confidence and firmness of touch, which she plans to
WINHOFFER, IN
export—first to the West Coast, then to London. So much for settling ADIDAS BY STELLA
down. Joanna Czech spa, 2410 Victory Park Lane, Dallas.—C.E. MCCARTNEY.
BE AUT Y>6 4 6

Mask
Much like Catholic motifs and the
occasional Rottweiler print, black
Calais lace has been an integral part
of Riccardo Tisci’s oeuvre during his
tenure at Givenchy. The dark, romantic
Appeal fabric makes regular appearances
on the designer’s runway, which
has sparked something of a face-
adornment movement of late thanks
to the makeup artist Pat McGrath,
who glued pearls and precious stones
to models’ skin at the brand’s fall
show. For the multitasking textile’s
next act, it will moonlight as the star
of the French house’s Masque
Dentelle, a Calais-lace appliqué that
doubles as an absorbent sheet mask
when saturated with Givenchy’s
firming black algae sap–rich Le Soin
Noir serum. Fresh, radiant renewal
takes only about 20 minutes of
continuous wear, but you may find
yourself compelled to leave the
extravagant accessory on a touch
longer.—ARDEN FANNING
Beauty Makeup

Saint
WITH HER SINGULAR BEAUTY VISION, THE MAKEUP ARTIST
Lucia

P I CA : HA I R , H OLL I S MI T H; M A KEU P, LUC IA P I CA FO R C HA N EL. A X EN T E: FAS HI ON E D ITOR : TONNE GOOD MAN. H AIR , CH R ISTIAAN; MAKEUP, LUCIA PICA. PRODUCED BY INGR ID D EUSS PRO DUCT IO N . D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .
LUCIA PICA IS BRINGING A COOL NEW ATTITUDE TO CHANEL.
scene until she safely turns a corner, whereupon she bursts
into a fit of can-you-actually-believe-I-did-that giggles.
Bold pops of color are her thing, and Pica—who will be
responsible for conceptualizing and developing Chanel’s
cosmetics—represents something of a brave move for
the French luxury house. She thinks nothing of applying
glossy acid orange to lips, dusting lids in canary yellow
ombréd-out to sooty black, or artistically painting a single
stroke of Wite-Out white just below brows with the style
of an Abstract Expressionist. But that’s not all she can do;
Pica can just as skillfully turn her hand to a natural no-
makeup makeup look. It’s a versatility honed on set with
photographers Mario Testino, Mikael Jansson, Alasdair
McLellan, and Willy Vanderperre, and backstage at shows
like Roksanda and Peter Pilotto. She’s also behind Chanel’s
beauty campaigns, making up the faces of Keira Knightley
and the model Sigrid Agren. BE AUT Y>6 4 8

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

LEFT: MAKEUP ARTIST LUCIA PICA, IN A CHANEL JACKET AND A
MARGARET HOWELL SCARF. PHOTOGRAPHED BY DANIEL JACKSON.
FASHION EDITOR: SARA MOONVES. BELOW: VANESSA AXENTE
IN MAKEUP BY LUCIA PICA. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO.

L
ucia Pica’s big love of color should hardly
set alarm bells ringing. And yet it has. Liter-
ally. At London’s Tate Modern. It’s a Satur-
day afternoon, and in her attempt to really
inspect the brushstrokes and exacting un-
dertones of a Sonia Delaunay masterpiece,
Chanel’s new global creative makeup and
color designer has accidentally tripped the security borders,
and the alarm is now reverberating across the busy exhibition
hall. Mortified, the Italian makeup artist slides away from the

646 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015

Beauty Makeup

At lunch at Brawn, one of her favorite local restaurants, “I knew she would be a star,” says Tilbury. “She’s got
not far from her home in neighboring Dalston, East London, creative vision and really knows her art, film, and fashion
she’s wearing vintage black Levi’s 615s paired with a chic references. It’s been great to see her develop her own makeup
white turtleneck. Her oversize stone-colored trench from style over the years, which has a fresh, cool edge to it.” Plus,
Armani menswear is jauntily accessorized with Margaret she adds, “I love her naughty sense of humor!”
Howell’s foldaway trilby and—what else?—Chanel’s classic Though Pica’s first full collection for Chanel won’t
monochrome ballet flats and 2.55 bag. “I’m launch until late 2016, she is already clear
really into black and white at the moment,” “Coco Chanel was on one thing: “I want the lineup to be mod-
she says, smiling and sipping an Americano. ern and very straightforward. I want it to
“I’ve been Chanelified. such a punk in the be super now, precise, and strong.” In prep-
“Coco Chanel was such a punk in the way way that she aration, she has been spending her time
that she approached style and feminism,” Pica approached style and creating mood boards, gathering visuals
continues. “She gave power to women, made that inspire her. Her references are broad:
it about how we wanted to look and not about feminism. She gave Art Deco postcards, images of Brutalist

PA I N T I NG : SON I A D EL AU N AY, E L ECTR I C P R I SM S, 1 9 13. DAV I S M US EU M AT W E L L ES L EY CO L L EG E , W E L L ES L EY, M A . G I F T O F M R . T H EO D O R E RACO OS I N . © P RACUSA ; A L L OT H E RS : LUCAS V I SS E R .

dressing to please others. She pioneered that, power to women, architecture, a snap of an edgy young girl
and it couldn’t have been easy.” The heavy-
fringed brunette pauses before adding, “Yes—
made it about how we spotted in an L.A. nightclub, a series of
Polaroids of single-stem flowers pulled
I’m reading a lot of her biographies. . . . ” wanted to look” from the vast congratulatory bouquets
Pica, who grew up in Naples, was always she received when news broke of her ap-
interested in makeup but didn’t consider it as a career until pointment, and a handwritten note from an ex-boyfriend.
much later. She moved at 22 to London, where she wait- When we duck into the florist Grace & Thorn on Hackney
ressed, working the night shift at Soho’s lively Cafe Boheme. Road, a spriggy purple shamrock—otherwise known as
After completing a brief makeup course, she did a stint at a love plant—catches her eye. “Everything translates to a
Shu Uemura’s counter and assisted a roll call of legendary palette or a lipstick,” she says. “Whatever I look at, I see
female makeup artists, including Charlotte Tilbury. makeup.”—SARAH HARRIS BE AUT Y>6 5 4

Mixed
Media

ABOVE: SONIA DELAUNAY’S ELECTRIC PRISMS, 1913. CLOCKWISE FROM

CENTER RIGHT: CHANEL BRUSH #19, ROUGE ALLURE LIP COLOUR IN
PASSION, SOFT TOUCH EYE SHADOWS IN ADMIRATION AND PULSION, NAIL
COLOUR IN PIRATE, AND LES EXCLUSIFS DE CHANEL EAU DE COLOGNE.

648 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015

 Beauty Skin

SEOUL SEARCHING
THANKS TO THESE THREE KOREAN BEAUTY
WEB SITES, AHEAD-OF-THE-CURVE IMPORTS ARE
JUST A CLICK AWAY. BY CELIA ELLENBERG.

1
The Download: Green-leaning K-beauty with authority.
The Backstory: Cofounded by L’Oréal Korea alums
Christine Chang and Sarah Lee, Glow Recipe merges
America’s growing taste for natural products with
Seoul-backed science that goes beyond “interesting
stories and cute packaging.”
The Essentials: Ultraconcentrated ampoules
like the propolis-packed radiance enhancer from the
Korean brand LJH, and new-era sheet masks like
Whamisa’s organic, waterless, and cottonless face
saver made entirely of mineral-rich sea kelp mixed
Glow with hydrating essence.
The Next Big Thing: If Chang and Lee have anything
Recipe to say about it, #rubbermasking will be a trending
topic as they popularize water-activated, rubberized
powders that conform to facial contours, allowing
GLOWRECIPE.COM active ingredients to be absorbed without evaporating.
FROM NEAR RIGHT:
Ditto Jeju Island, the lush South Korean landscape

2
BLOSSOM JEJU CAMELLIA
SEED OIL; JEJU ISLAND. being leveraged by a new crop of niche beauty brands.

The Download: Exclusive brands with

a premium on prestige.
The Backstory: Harvard Business School–educated
Alicia Yoon launched Peach and Lily in 2012 as a
pipeline for what she calls “real innovation.” “We look for
companies that have the capability to make something
other than a ‘me too’ product,” the 33-year-old explains of
her stringent sourcing process.
The Essentials: Shangpree’s hydrogel eye masks,
which use extracts of black pearl and gold to fight fine
lines while brightening; the precious Geumjin thermal
water in Cremorlab’s moisturizing Melting Cream;
and May Coop’s Raw Sauce, a fast-absorbing emulsion
Peach
made from 93 percent maple-tree sap that promotes
and
stronger, dewier skin.
The Next Big Thing: Educational empowerment,
not sensationalism. Yoon foresees the knowledge behind
Lily
PEACHANDLILY.COM
Korean women’s legendary, product-heavy routines

3
LEFT: FOUNDER
becoming just as prized as their oft-exoticized ingredients. ALICIA YOON.

The Download: Accessible product picks

steeped in local culture.
BOTTLE: GORMAN STUDIO. JEJU: COURTESY OF JEJU SPECIAL

The Backstory: California-born Charlotte Cho fell in love

with Korean beauty after a job at Samsung exposed her
SE LF- G OV ER NI N G P ROV IN C E. YO O N: HYE- RYOU NG M IN .

to Seoul’s skin-care obsessives. “I developed a genuine

interest in the products, and I just wanted to share that
with people,” the 30-year-old explains of Soko Glam, her
three-year-old beauty-and-lifestyle destination.
The Essentials: Banila Co. Clean It Zero’s debris-
removing cleansing-balm-and-oil-in-one; Lioele’s

Soko hydrating overnight Waterdrop Sleeping Pack;

and The Little Book of Skin Care: Korean Beauty
Secrets for Healthy, Glowing Skin (William Morrow)—
Glam Cho’s debut tome, which bows in November.
The Next Big Thing: Cho is betting on nonliquid
SOKOGLAM.COM cleansing sticks, like Su:m37°’s fermented damask-
RIGHT: ROSE, A STAR rose twist-up tube. Also worth watching: Korea’s
SKIN-CARE INGREDIENT.
PHOTOGRAPH BY deftness at navigating the intersection of color and
IRVING PENN. complexion care.
BE AUT Y>6 56
Beauty Fitness
I
am lying facedown on my bedroom carpet, legs
bent with toes wedged against the wall, and Stu-
art McGill, Ph.D., is coaching me over the phone
from Ontario, Canada.
“Pretend you have a $100 bill in your glu-
teal crease,” he says. His voice is clinical but
reassuring.
“My what?” I ask.
He translates into the vernacular. (Yes, you’ve
guessed correctly.) I have enlisted McGill, whose life’s work
includes the study of the muscles of the derrière, to elucidate
the less obvious advantages of a shapely, fit behind. In addi-
tion to guiding me through rear-improving floor moves like
hip bridges and the clamshell, he gives me some astounding
news: I thought my brain was forgetting things? It turns out
I may also have a case of gluteal amnesia. This condition,
coined by McGill, describes a loop where pain in the hips and
back causes the butt muscles to shut off, which in turn results
in more back, hip, and even knee pain. In other words, the
price of a flabby, squashed, and atrophying bottom—mine
656 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
The
Bottom Line
Weary of looking back
in anger, Marcia DeSanctis
embarks on a dedicated
regimen in pursuit of
hindquarterly perfection.
RUMPUS RAISED
CYCLING AND YOGA CAN HELP,
BUT MUSCLE BUILDING REQUIRES
RESISTANCE TRAINING. PHOTOGRAPHED
BY IRVING PENN FOR VOGUE, 1994.
and anyone else’s who sits most of her waking life—can her-
ald disaster in the lower body.
A few weeks earlier, I’d hired a trainer to help me focus on
lifting and rounding my behind. It’s grown slack in midlife,
often affixed to the driver’s seat heading to my children’s track
meets and crew regattas, and rarely to my own workouts. My
motivation was pure vanity: The rear of my vintage Agnès
B. leather trousers, which once filled out with curves, now
called to mind a deflating balloon. I sought the shape that
Spanx gives me, with lean, firm dents in just the right places.
Given that I don’t have the stomach for implants or injections,
I needed to sweat my way there. And now, thanks to McGill,
I understand my discipline includes a mental component I’d
not yet considered. To become iron-hard, he says, we must
first train the brain to focus on this most esteemed—but
CO ND É N AST A RC HI V E
jilted—body part. Hence, the imaginary C-note concealed
under my Odile de Changy briefs. “You have to remember,
whenever possible, to squeeze robustly,” McGill says. So
lately, whether I’m going upstairs, counting sheep, rising
from chairs, or watching Veep, “Contract B E A U T Y > 6 6 2
VOGUE.COM
Beauty Fitness
the glutes!” is my rallying cry, to amplify the results of my
dedicated rump regimen.
A curvy bum is sexy, but it’s advantageous to have a strong
one, too. The glutes are the largest muscle group and the pri-
mary stabilizer for the body. They control the hips, the pelvis,
the knee, and by extension the back. And so my trainer and I
have agreed to meet a few times a week at my gym in Litchfield,
Connecticut, while I simultaneously sample several other
programs known to boost the backside. At the start of my all-
natural rump lift, I am advised by Bret Contreras, an author
and expert in all that is gluteal, to take a “before” picture because
inches don’t tell the whole story. “You can gain muscle and lose
fat and your measurement doesn’t change, but you look way
better,” says the Phoenix-based trainer. So, feet planted on the
cold kitchen tiles, I enlist my husband to snap away at my bot-
tom. All but one image goes straight to the electronic trash bin.
Artists from ancient Greek sculptors to Edouard Manet
and Helmut Newton have long shown the female behind to be
a most enduring muse. As anyone who has not been marooned
on a life raft knows, the backside claims the center of the galaxy
these days: fashion, fitness—heaven knows, Instagram. This
preeminence reached its apotheosis at the 2015 Met gala, when
I swing the kettlebell and bring my weight forward.
“ THE GLUTES ALWAYS WANT TO CHEAT,”says my trainer
Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian West, and Jennifer Lopez in their
respective Givenchy, Cavalli, and Versace semi-sheer dresses
exhibited their jolie rondeur to the gasps (and envy) of the rest
of humanity. This trifecta of hindquarterly perfection further
fueled womankind’s ongoing rush to gyms the planet over.
“I’ve definitely noticed a huge increase lately in the de-
mand for a firmer, rounder, perkier butt,” says Lisa Hirsch,
owner of the Studio (MDR), three Los Angeles fitness stu-
dios that are affiliates of the very popular Sebastien Lagree
method, whose Megaformer workouts are renowned for
sculpting a superathletic derrière. A contingent of New York
City women who yearn for glorious backsides flock to The
Class by Taryn Toomey. If seeing is truth, the strong, gor-
geous bottoms I envied at the downtown space prove that
her exhaustive (and exhausting) allover regimen also helps. “I
don’t want to bulk the butt; I want to lift it,” says Toomey, a
36-year-old mother of two whose seat could pass for a work
of marble. “Almost carve it out.”
A
nd then there are the site-specific classes.
The high priest of target practice is New
York’s Leandro Carvalho, a former Merce
Cunningham dancer whose Brazil Butt Lift
method is designed to round and reshape
to dazzling effect, most prominently on the
fleet of Victoria’s Secret models he has trained. My lackluster,
five-decades-old specimen causes him no concern. “There are
no hopeless butts, only hopeless people who don’t want to do
the hard work,” Carvalho says as I gasp for breath warming
up on a steeply inclined treadmill at the start of my hour-long
session. “I’ve never seen a behind that couldn’t be fixed.”
662 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
Brenda Vongova, who works in the Secretary General’s
office at the United Nations, teaches her Bumbum Lift at
private homes. Many of her moves—with names like “fla-
mingo,” “rainbow,” and “sailboat”—are based on her past
as a synchronized swimmer. Where Carvalho incorporates
free weights and Cybex machines, Vongova’s program is
designed for efficiency on the floor of your bedroom. When
I finish my session, Vongova congratulates me on completing
500 lifts in 20 minutes.
Still, there are no shortcuts for a determined lazybones
like me to reverse a flattened seat into something more three-
dimensional. Pure resistance training is required to build up
the three gluteal muscles: the maximus; the medius, which
frames the hips; and the minimus, which attaches to the leg.
My local gym has all the intimidating hardware, and Peter
Bergamo, my trainer, guides me through exercises and repeti-
tions. I warm up doing squats on the TRX, careful to activate
glutes on the way up, rather than my quads, which I have been
told to use on the way down. More squats with a heavy rope
on both shoulders, Volga boatman–style. Bent-leg Jane Fonda
kicks behind me, and yes, I feel the burn. The “fire hydrant” is
effective, if unlovely. My favorites are bridges for the opportu-
nity to take five on the floor. I swing the kettlebell up and down
while flexing the butt muscles and too often, put my weight
forward rather than on the back of my heels. “The glutes
always want to cheat,” says Peter. No, Pete, I do. But I resolve
to improve: three times a week, for 30 minutes, plus two more
weekly at home, remembering McGill’s advice to contract the
muscle group even, for example, while sitting in traffic.
All this bottom-centricity becomes a tad monotonous
after several weeks. So I wonder if I might switch it up for,
say, a cycling class. “Does spin work for your glutes? Does
Pilates? Does yoga? Yes, it all works. But nothing works like
resistance training,” says Contreras. “To get that 3-D, perky,
round look, that’s straight-up muscle building. You need to
be doing exercises that target the area.” His comment makes
me curious to know if one could ever overattend to one’s as-
sets. “In 28 years of training, I’ve never heard a woman say,
‘My butt is too round and muscular,’ ” he says with a laugh.
I’m a long way from that, but this new deliberate focus,
both physical and mental, has forced an absolute shift in my
approach. It’s astounding how lazily I used to walk, stand
in line at the market, or climb the stairs—on my toes rather
than my heels—and how simple it is to shift my weight back
so I can feel the glutes flex. More remarkable, though, is my
backside. I can’t overstate this: The butt is incredibly, emi-
nently transformable. The experts told me, and I am proof: If
you work it, it will grow. Two months into my experiment, the
photos are beginning to show definition where there used to
be flesh. My husband/photographer has noticed, my trainer is
proud, and I’m a little stunned. More than that, my glutes are
doing the job they were built to do—hold me up and fill out
the back of my favorite leather trousers.  BE AUT Y>66 4
VOGUE.COM
Beauty Hair

COLOR: HAIR, JULIEN D’YS FOR JULIEN D’YS; MAKEUP, AARON DE MEY. BOTTLE: LUCAS VISSER. GAME ON: PIALHOVIK/ © GETTY IMAGES. DETAI LS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .
HIGHLIGHT REEL
FROM FAR LEFT: A STUDY IN COLOR, PHOTOGRAPHED
BY PATRICK DEMARCHELIER; FASHION EDITOR: PHYLLIS
POSNICK. CHRISTOPHE ROBIN’S NEW REGENERATING
HAIR FINISH LOTION WITH HIBISCUS VINEGAR.

Tuesday for Robin, a consultant for L’Oréal Paris

and an independent product formulator who has
experienced similarly boldfaced brushes over the
course of his decades-spanning career. Catherine
Deneuve is not just a client; she’s also a collabora-
tor. “It’s made for her by her,” Robin says of the
screen legend’s hand in his popular Hydratant
Santal, a split end–minimizing moisture cream
that, along with his entire namesake brand, will
roll out to Sephora stores across the U.S. for the first time in
September. (His Cleansing Purifying Scrub with Sea Salt is
currently the store’s top-selling hair product in France.)
This fall will see yet another milestone for the 44-year-old
Frenchman: After six years in a discreet suite at Paris’s lav-
ish Hôtel Le Meurice, Robin will unveil a 1,400-square-foot
retail and treatment destination, designed to finely calibrate
exclusivity with accessibility. Located on Rue Bachaumont,
Streaks of a stone-paved street in the increasingly gentrified Second

GENIUS
Arrondissement, the venue will boast the personal touch
Robin felt he lost with the overambitious, three-floor salon
on Paris’s Left Bank that opened in 2007 and promptly shut-
tered in 2009. While the new eight-chair space, fabricated by
architect François Bosc, comes with a stealth back entrance

B
efore jetting from Paris to Rome for Valentino’s
Haute Couture show in July, the actress Tilda
Swinton paid a visit to her long-time colorist
Christophe Robin. Newly bleached following
a stint with black hair for a role, Swinton was
hoping to return to her signature shade of pale blonde when
Robin’s next appointment materialized early in the form of
Alber Elbaz. The Lanvin creative director books time with
the coiffeur when his gray bits need styling. It was an average
for Robin’s high-profile clientele, a giant stucco clamshell
basin in the salon’s street-facing boutique keeps the vibe
deliberately equal-opportunistic: Visitors can wash their hair
with products like Robin’s cult Cleansing Mask with Lemon
and then opt for a chic chignon or DIY blow-dry styled
with his latest launch—a trio of botanical-vinegar finishing
lotions—at no cost. The leave-in spray that refreshes hair
while adding shine was his idea; but Robin gives full credit
for its name to Deneuve.—AMY VERNER BE AUT Y>666

Book

Game ON
T
o the dismay of parents the world over, video games are engineered to be addictive. Yet in her
new book, SuperBetter (Penguin Press), Jane McGonigal lays out the controversial idea that
playing video games in limited amounts can benefit our mental health. “In games, we approach
obstacles with optimism and a willingness to learn, rather than feeling threatened,” says the 37-
year-old game designer, who has become the poster girl for a provocative new realm of research.
It all started six years ago, when McGonigal suffered a concussion and then fell into a depression. So she
created Jane the Concussion Slayer, a highly personalized program in which McGonigal battled her “bad
guys” (crowded rooms, bright lights) and collected mood-boosting “power-ups” (cuddling her sheepdog,
snacking on walnuts). Her spirits rose in step with her score, and after a year the former recreational
jogger was training for her first half-marathon. “That was when I truly felt like myself,” says McGonigal.
Now nearly half a million people have played her game (renamed SuperBetter), and the National
Institutes of Health has funded studies into using it to treat patients suffering from brain injuries. Between
speaking commitments, McGonigal is busy caring for her six-month-old twin daughters and taking long
walks. “We have a rule at home: one hour of physical activity for every hour of screen time,” she explains,
lending weight to her insistence on calling her weakness for Candy Crush a “strength.”—ELIZABETH SVOBODA
Beauty Health

Let
Them
Eat
FAT Endurance
athletes have long
sworn by the
ketogenic—or
“fat burner”—
diet, which takes
Atkins to the
extreme. Elizabeth
Weil tests it out.

C
ontemporary diets are bewildering—aloe
water at 6:00 a.m., fast until three, only
600 calories on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
I’d assiduously avoided all this rigid meal-
CREAM TEAM
THE KETOGENIC PLAN IS HEAVY ON CHARCUTERIE, FRIED
AVOCADOS, AND CHEESE-AND-BUTTER ROLL-UPS.
The ketogenic, or high-fat, diet has long been a favorite
Q I U YA N G. P RO P ST YLI ST: CL A A RTJ E L I ND HOUT.

planning, choosing to eat instead like
Michael Pollan, if Michael Pollan were a
Frenchwoman with an excellent sense of
portion control. But then I reconsidered
my stance. Impressed by the slimmed-down Robin Wright and
LeBron James, I decided to follow their leads and turn myself
into a fat burner—a person whose body runs by burning fat
instead of carbs. My new diet was said to lead to not only a
sculpted body but increased happiness and better sex. Yet it had
rules, strict rules, and it left me disoriented, mistrusting two of
life’s most common measuring devices, the clock and the scale.
among ultraendurance athletes. Lately, it’s been adopted by
saner types, too—or at least those who’d like to look like they
ran a half-marathon last weekend. This diet involves consum-
ing only 5 percent of calories from carbs and only 15 percent
from protein. Doing this requires not only a shift in menu but
an altered logic: Eating fat does not make you fat; eating fat
makes you burn fat.
This dietary koan was delivered to me by the Duke Uni-
versity bariatric physician Eric Westman, M.D. I took as
my fat-burning bible a book he coauthored called Keto
Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits B E A U T Y > 6 6 8

666 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

Beauty Health
of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet. The book pledged not only
weight loss but also better skin and slower aging. In strict
accordance with the text, I began consuming a couple eggs, a
quarter stick of butter, half an avocado, and six slices of ba-
con a day. Eating as many calories as I wanted total, albeit in
the right ratio, I dropped a few pounds in a week, too. But I
was having a hard time accepting some of Keto Clarity’s ad-
vice. What to do when craving a piece of fruit? (And believe
me, I craved; oranges have never looked so good.) “Roll up
a slice of full-fat cheese with grass-fed butter in the middle.”
The idea of becoming a fat burner sounds modestly science-
fictional, not to mention superhero-ish, but the research is
sound. To put the biology in its most basic terms: Our bodies
have two fuel tanks, one for sugars and one
for fats. If you eat mostly carbohydrates—
grains, fruits, vegetables, starches, legumes—
What to do when
then you’ll burn mainly sugar for fuel. Those craving a piece
stores typically contain enough energy for of fruit? And
about a day. Once the sugar is gone, we feel
hungry, tired, and weak. Meanwhile, for the believe me, I craved;
most part, our fat just sits there, since insulin,
the hormone produced by metabolizing car-
oranges have never
bohydrates, blocks our bodies from burning looked so good
fat. “Has there ever been a more unfortunate
homonym? One word means two very different things: the
fat we eat and the fat on our bodies,” Nina Teicholz writes in
The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in
a Healthy Diet. “It’s so hard for our brains to fully grasp that
there are two entirely separate definitions of fat.”
A
s Cate Shanahan, M.D., author of Food
Rules: A Doctor’s Guide to Healthy Eating
and a consultant to professional athletes
on becoming a fat burner, told me, a typical
five-foot-five-inch, 120-pound woman car-
ries on her body well over 100,000 calories
of fat. And maddeningly, those literal and metaphoric saddle-
bags remain out of reach.
Much of this is old news to metabolism aficionados, in-
cluding people who have or study seizure conditions; they
have known for around 100 years that a brain fueled by fats
(or actually by ketones, the by-product of burning fats) rather
than by carbohydrates is less prone to seize. More famously,
dear departed Dr. Robert Atkins, who died in 2003, pro-
moted a ketogenic diet, much to the shock and horror of his
physician peers, who were then positive, and wrong, that a
low-fat regimen (remember the 1980s favorite the Scarsdale
diet, with its smorgasbords of grapefruit and toast?) was the
best way to lose weight. Meanwhile, Atkins enjoyed a loyal,
rich, and famous clientele, and he sold millions of books
because, however kooky his high-fat protocol seemed, the
regimen produced results. Near the end of his career, Atkins
invited Westman, then a fellow in internal medicine at Duke
University Medical Center, to study his clinic’s data. West-
man confirmed that, indeed, Atkins was right: Consuming
85 percent of one’s calories from fat causes a person to lose
weight. Of course, Atkins was less of an extremist than
contemporary keto promoters—after the first two weeks
on his diet, he allowed people to add melons and beans, and
668 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
once a person was within ten pounds of her target weight, he
opened up the pantry to include sweet potatoes, pineapple,
even (whole-wheat) pasta. But keto followers eat high-fat for
years, even label themselves as leading a high-fat, low-carb
lifestyle—HFLC, if you must. Some doctors believe high-fat
diets increase risk of heart disease, but says Westman, “You
can think of your metabolism as having an accelerator and a
brake. You speed up, or lose weight, when you burn fat. When
you eat carbohydrates, you put your foot on the brake.”
Years before picking up Keto Clarity, I’d accepted the
sad adult reality that eating bread is basically like eating
Oreos, so I’d cut back on flour and sugar. (Apart from juice
cleanses, pretty much every major weight-loss program re-
stricts carbs.) But you know the 80/20 rule?
The corollary for the ketogenic diet is that
the last 5 percent is 100 percent of the night-
mare. Eating some fat: great. Eating a lot of
fat: fantastic! Consuming almost exclusively
fat, delicious as pâté might be: I’d rather live
on kale, thank you very much.
Still, I love cheese, and through my first
week, I remained cheery. Greek yogurt, sa-
lami, sunflower seeds, salad with lots of dress-
ing, roasted nuts; what’s not to like? Then I
started to crack. I stared like a puppy while my husband ate a
poached egg on toast—toast! I slapped my children’s fingers
away while I hoarded my small clutch of raspberries (a very
low-sugar fruit) and whipped cream as an after-dinner treat.
Consulting Keto Clarity for menu ideas sent me toward despair.
Pan-fried avocados; keto pizza with a pork-rind crust. How
did this become my life? I felt sluggish and fuzzy-brained—so
much so that while swimming laps, I was so off my pace and
out of it that I became convinced that the pool clock was slow.
To check on my progress, I bought a package of Ketostix,
little strips of plastic and paper that work like pregnancy
tests, except instead of revealing a plus sign in the presence
of pregnancy hormones, they turn pink upon detecting ke-
tones. And for the first week, sadly, no pink, just beige, which
was not surprising. (Westman warned me that it takes your
body a little while to become efficient at burning fat.) Still, I
wanted a good grade.
I doubled down. I nixed the raspberries. I cut back on nuts
(secret carbs). After a while my Ketostix started turning dark
pink. I still couldn’t push hard at the gym—HFLC athletes
complain about this, too—but I was back to my wedding
weight. I can’t say I aged more slowly or that my skin magi-
cally regained its smooth, youthful glow, but I will say that I
ate unlimited charcuterie and felt terrific.
The problem, as always with all extreme diets, is that the
regimen is antisocial. My ketogenic run broke down while
I was celebrating with friends in San Francisco’s China-
town: a big birthday, buns stuffed with Peking duck. I was
so happy to be a normal human again, to no longer be a
diet- and self-consumed bore. But should the duck-bun
lifestyle become a problem—and let’s not kid ourselves; it
will—I have a plan in place. I will take a long trip to France,
where I’ll eat only pâté. Then I’ll fly home and stock my re-
frigerator with cheese-and-butter roll-ups. I’ll make bacon,
too. Please come visit me. 
FO R B E AU T Y N E W S A N D F E AT U R E S ,
G O T O VO G U E . C O M
 people are talking about EDITOR: VALERIE STEIKER

ALL SMILES
BOYEGA, IN
A BURBERRY
LONDON SHIRT;
RIDLEY, IN A
RAG & BONE
SWEATER AND
A REBECCA
MINKOFF SKIRT.
CO LUM BI N E G OL DS MI T H. SI TT I N G S E DI TOR : SA L LY LYN D LEY. HA I R, RO B ERT V E TI CA; MAKEUP, MAI QUYNH . PH OTOGRAPH ED AT PALIH OUSE SANTA MONICA. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH I S ISSU E .

talent

Out
of
n 1977, when Star Wars came out, nobody dreamed quickly succeeded onstage
Sight
The Force is clearly
that George Lucas’s jaunty piece of pop culture was announc- and -screen, acting in William
ing the future—billion-dollar movie franchises about good Boyd’s Six Parties at the Na- with Star Wars
and evil, characters marketable as action figures. “It’s a space
opera!” enthuses John Boyega, who, along with fellow Lon-
tional Theatre, starring in an
HBO pilot for Spike Lee, and newcomers
doner Daisy Ridley, stars in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Born a month apart in 1992 in London, Ridley and Boyega
playing an utterly convincing
Watts ex-con in the American
Daisy Ridley and
play, respectively, Rey and Finn, the central characters in indie Imperial Dreams. For John Boyega.
J. J. Abrams’s avidly awaited sequel, which takes place 30 her part, Ridley seemed to
years after Return of the Jedi and brings back Harrison Ford, appear from nowhere. “It’s a great place to come from!” she
Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill in their original roles. (Fur- says with a laugh. “Nobody has any expectations of me until
ther details remain under lock and key.) At lunch on their way they see the film.” In fact, she didn’t start acting seriously un-
to San Diego Comic-Con, Ridley and Boyega exude the hu- til late in high school. By the time of her Star Wars audition,
mor and spirited decency you’d expect of screen heroes. In her she’d done a couple of short films, an indie horror picture,
black dress and Star Wars sneakers (“I’m already branding and some TV episodes. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Ken-
myself,” she jokes), the slim Ridley has classic English looks nedy found her to be “a genuinely warm, wonderful girl to
that have prompted comparisons to Keira Knightley. “With hang out with—I knew she had something we were looking
me, it’s Shia LaBeouf,” cracks the well-built Boyega, sporting for.” But Ridley also brings grit to the role. “When you’re
a porkpie hat and a boldly patterned Maharishi shirt. in the Abu Dhabi desert and the cameras are rolling, most
The son of Nigerian parents (his dad’s a minister), Boyega newcomers would go ‘Aaaahh’ in fear,” Boyega observes.
began acting at ten, studied at Theatre Peckham, and rather “But not Daisy. She’s there.” C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 6 7 7

VOGUE.COM VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015

673
 people are talking about
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 6 7 3
talent
As Abrams says, “To find someone
to shoulder a Star Wars movie, you
need to find people who can make you
laugh and show emotions and do ac-
tion and also handle the pressure of
starring in Star Wars. It’s like finding
someone who can compete in every
event in the Olympics.”
There’s no doubt the franchise rock-
ets its stars to a whole new stratosphere
of fame (just ask Natalie Portman).
“We’re in the calm-before-the-storm
moment,” Boyega says, “where we
can walk on the street and nobody
recognizes us.” Ridley adds, “It’s nice
to be on this journey with someone
else, for sure—it makes it seem less
insane.” Until the movie’s December
A RT: G E N I EV E FI G G I S. H OUSE, 20 15. ACRYLI C ON CA N VAS. COU RT ESY O F T HE A RT I ST. T V: © NEW PICTUR ES/CH ANNEL 4 FOR MASTE RPIECE IN ASSOCIATION WITH ALL3MED IA INTER NATION AL.
release, Boyega is considering theatrical
projects—“I haven’t been onstage in
two years,” he laments—while Ridley is
still choosy, trying to chart a career like
that of Felicity Jones. And will they be
returning to that galaxy far, far away?
“The studio needs to plan ahead,”
says Boyega. “But we’re actors from
London, so we just think about the
next gig.” He laughs. “Of course, if
Star Wars calls, we’ll say, ‘Sure, we’ll
come.’ ”—JOHN POWERS
GOING
Rogue
This fall
brings no
shortage
of magnetic
antiheroes.
art
Double
TAKE
All of a sudden—Genieve
Figgis. A 43-year-old
Irish artist whose work
was virtually unknown
until last year, Figgis has
recently shown her deeply
strange, boldly figurative
paintings alongside works
by John Currin and Dana
Schutz. In November
the artist has her first
big-time solo show,
opening at the Almine
Rech Gallery in London.
SURFACE After graduating in 2012 from Dublin’s National College
TENSION
FIGGIS’S
of Art and Design, Figgis posted a few of her humor-
HOUSE, 2015. laced images on Twitter. Richard Prince saw one, of a
lady with a long-beaked bird. “He secret-messaged me
to say, ‘Could I buy that?’ ” she says. Prince also organized her first
American show last summer, and New York’s Half gallery took her on.
Figgis met her future husband when they were both seventeen. They
had two children, and she held off going to college until she was 30. The
paintings poured out of her after that, their subjects often snatched from
history—Regency dandies in top hats, Gainsborough ladies whose faces
dissolve in masses of luscious pigment. “Growing up in the shadow of
Britain, I’m obviously very interested in their costumes and their castles,”
she says from her Dublin studio. “I’ve been struggling with paint for over
a decade, but it’s somewhat coming together now.”—DODIE KAZANJIAN
movies & television
s uperheroes might reign at
the box office, but it’s the
morally and psychologi-
cally ambiguous characters who
inspire our greatest obsessions.
Take Ralph Whelan (Henry
series about the War on Drugs.
Boyd Holbrook plays a DEA
agent who narrates the story in
a down-home baritone—and
discovers a truth already em-
braced by his enjoyably louche
Lloyd-Hughes), the suave civil DEA partner (Game of Thrones
servant of Indian Summers
(PBS), a hit British series set in
standout Pedro Pascal): In car-
tel land, even good guys must
1932 Simla, where colonials flee do very bad things.
to escape the heat. Though he Or must they? In Sicario, a
seems a sound-enough chap, we heart-pounding new movie by
soon grasp that Ralph, abetted Denis Villeneuve, Emily Blunt
by the owner of the all-white stars as a true-blue FBI agent
Royal Simla Club (Julie Walters), recruited by an elite squad, ad-
has grander schemes in mind. vised by an unsettlingly myste-
If you prefer a full-fledged rious man known as Alejandro
sociopath, Netflix offers Pablo (Benicio del Toro), that does anti-
Escobar (Wagner Moura), the cartel black ops in Mexico. As
real-life Colombian cartel boss her character passes from dismay
who was devoted to helping to anger to bone-rattling terror,
the poor—except when he was Blunt etches a stinging portrait of
having them murdered. He’s a woman who refuses to believe
the big game being hunted in that the way to be a hero is to act
Narcos, a stylish, gripping new like a villain.—J.P. PATA > 6 8 2
DOWN THE GARDEN PATH
HENRY LLOYD-HUGHES AND JEMIMA WEST
PLAY SIBLINGS IN A CHANGING INDIA.
 people are talking about
GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT
ABCV’S FENNEL–AND–
SHAVED BEET CARPACCIO.
dance
Mounting two new ballets in as many weeks could
stress any choreographer, let alone a 25-year-old
on the cusp of his breakout moment. But Myles
Thatcher, a sandy-haired corps member of San
Francisco Ballet, is approaching the task with wit
and efficiency. “Around premieres I usually don’t
sleep, so I’m hoping I can get all my not-sleeping done
together,” he says. September brings his first work
for Joffrey Ballet, with a propulsive Steve Reich score.
Then he heads east to present his NYCB debut,
set to an early piano quartet by William Walton.

WITH A TWIST
THATCHER
BY THE SAN
FRANCISCO BAY.

NO Reservations
scene

a ll-star chefs stake fresh claims on New York. As the Eataly
empire expands, Mario Batali returns to his restaurant roots
with La Sirena, at the Maritime Hotel, calling it “a calm,
clubby trattoria in the middle of a very frenetic place.” Jean-Georges
Vongerichten debuts abcv, a spinoff of ABC Kitchen featuring a
boldly executed vegetarian menu. “It was just trendy 25 years ago,”
he says. “But today it’s part of life.” Farther south, Joël Robuchon’s
Parisian favorite L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon reestablishes a foothold,
this time in Battery Park City, while Atlanta transplant Guenter
Seeger brings his unusual pairings (think king crab with vanilla) to
the Meatpacking District. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, Aska creator
Fredrik Berselius resurfaces with a new Scandinavian spot; its chic
tasting menu is sure to lure you across the river.—LILI GÖKSENIN
SCENE: ABC HOME. ABCV DESIGNED BY ABC CREATIVE. DANCE: OLIVER ENDAHL OF BALLET ZAIDA. TRAVEL: © SEAN PAVONE/ALAMY. DETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
UP
and Away
It’s a high-water mark in an already thrilling year for
the young talent, whose year-long mentorship under
Alexei Ratmansky comes to a close in December—
just in time for him to pull on his dancing shoes for
Nutcracker season. Maintaining this double life may
be “fascinatingly complicated,” but, Thatcher adds,
“what’s most gratifying is getting to that creative
mental space with the dancers, where time stops and
you’re discovering things together.”—LAURA REGENSDORF

A life-changing drive from Boston to

GREEN LIGHT
LIVE OAKS New Orleans inspired Brit Sam Highley
AT A GEORGIAN to launch All Roads North, which
ESTATE. arranges bespoke American road trips,
right down to the car—from a Chevy
Corvette Stingray to a Tesla—and the
playlist. Start in Charleston, head down

travel
to Savannah, and end at the Golden
Isles of Georgia, with a private tour of
the Penn Center (the first school in

Take the Long Route America for freed slaves), and grilled
oysters along the way. Out West, a
Grand Canyon expedition can include
private lodgings and a personal trail
guide. “Many Americans drive from
San Francisco to Big Sur or have
a ranch holiday in Montana,” says
Highley. “That does not do America
justice.” allroadsnorth.com; rates
start at $3,295 per person for ten
days.—GISELA WILLIAMS PATA > 6 8 4
 PROMOT ION

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 people are talking about
up next
BRIGHT IDEAS
FROM TOP: AELFIE RUG,
ANNA KARLIN CARAFE,
AND TWIGG’S BINDERY
CUSTOM JOURNALS.

Family
CODE
Perla Haney-Jardine
lights up the screen
in Steve Jobs.

MAT T HEW KRI STA LL . S I TT I N G S ED I TO R: ZA RA ZACHRI SSO N . H A I R, BR I A N BU EN AV E NT URA . MAKEUP, J UNKO KIOKA FOR CH ANEL LES BEIGES;
MOD MOOD
y dad filmed it on his iPhone,” says Perla Haney- THE ACTRESS
Jardine, with a knowing laugh, of her audition to play Steve IN A JIL SANDER

RUG : G O RMA N ST UD I O ; J OUR NA LS : LUCAS VI SSE R; CA RA FE : COURTESY O F J O NAT HA N TASKER . D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
NAVY COAT.
Jobs’s daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs in Danny Boyle’s upcoming
biopic. After landing the role, the eighteen-year-old immersed herself in Aaron
Sorkin’s charged script, loosely based on Walter Isaacson’s biography. Conceived
in three parts, each centered on a key Apple launch, the film strives for a more
nuanced view of the tech pioneer (Michael Fassbender), who was a complicated
father. “Lisa’s the only one who can take him on, in a way,” says Haney-Jardine,
who appears in the climactic third act. Born in Brazil and raised in North Caro-
lina, Haney-Jardine got her first break early on, as the young daughter of Beatrix
Kiddo (Uma Thurman) in Kill Bill Vol. 2. Steve Jobs comes at another pivotal
moment: Before starting at Barnard College next fall, she’s planning to travel in
Europe and Morocco. She’ll take with her fond memories of being on set, from

MATERIAL
Fassbender’s impromptu Bowie renditions to the collective fascination with pe-
design

riod props. “It was cool seeing everybody whip out their phones and take pictures
of the old computers,” she says. “Very meta.”—L.R.

Ease
A trio of up-and-coming designers is making
old-school crafts feel new again. At her
Fort Greene studio, Jonna Twigg uses a hot
stamper to personalize hand-bound journals.
“Not everything belongs on the cloud!” she
says, and yet her work is a far cry from the
dusty old volumes you might find in a club
library. Her modern twist? Vibrant waxed
thread stitched zigzag along cloth bindings.
An antique-rug dealer and scholar inspired
Aelfie Oudghiri to come up with her own
designs, which reinterpret traditional, earth-
toned flat weaves with contemporary pops
of pastel. Named for a female spirit in a
West African faith, her latest collection
features graphic tribal patterns of
marigold, cobalt, and lavender.
British-born Anna Karlin is another
advocate of the personal touch. A self-
taught multidisciplinarian best known for
furniture and lighting, she seems able to
make anything she can dream. Her latest
foray, into colorful handblown glass, has
resulted in a line of sleek, two-tone carafes.
Eight glasses a day never looked this
good.—REBECCA STADLEN PATA > 6 8 6
 people are talking about
performance

tennis
Teen
SPIRIT
Borna Coric is
one to watch
at the U.S. Open.

PASSION PLAY

STAGE

© CH RI ST I E ’S I MAG ES/ BRI D G E MA N IM AG ES. T EN N I S: LON N Y SP E N CE . S I T TI NG S ED ITOR : SAM RANGER . GROOMING, J ODY TAYLOR . D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
OTHELLO’S FIRST
SUSPICION,
BY JAMES

Craft CLARKE HOOK.

P E RFO RMA N C E: OTH E LLO’S F I RST SUSPI CI ON: JAMES CLARKE HOOK (1819–1907 ). OIL ON PANEL, 53.3 CM X 41.8 CM. PRIVATE COLLECTION, PHOTO
For its newest revival of Verdi’s
Otello, the Met turned to
Bartlett Sher—“some pipsqueak
American boy who works on
Broadway,” he deadpans. To
push it “further into the twenty-
first century,” the director and
his team are punching up the
tale’s psychodrama. Set designer
Es Devlin has constructed
labyrinthine glasslike rooms that
catch the light just so. Costume
designer Catherine Zuber dresses
Desdemona (rising soprano Sonya
Yoncheva) in red at a ball but in call him Borna ‘Identity’ Coric,” says the tennis coach and NET GAME
a pale nightgown for the final
commentator Brad Gilbert. “He reminds me of a mini Djoker.” THE PLAYER WEARS
A CANALI SWEATER
scene. “It has this epic opening
and very intimate ending, and it’s
In both his hyperathletic agility, reflective of a childhood spent AND J.CREW
SWEATPANTS.
a beautiful sweep from one to the on clay courts, and his steep rise—the past year has seen the
other,” says Sher. Across town, at eighteen-year-old defeat Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal, both in two sets—the
the Park Avenue Armory, another young Croatian does bear similarities to this year’s Wimbledon champion. Djokovic
dream team has assembled (see page 730) himself has said that hitting with Coric “is like playing myself.” “They
for Tree of Codes, Wayne even have the same hair,” Gilbert adds.
McGregor’s new genre-bending The highest-ranked teenager on the ATP circuit (thirty-sixth), Coric is clearly
ballet, inspired by Jonathan motivated. Even when he was a child, “you could see in his eyes he wanted nothing
Safran Foer’s riff on Bruno more than to win,” says his agent, Lawrence Frankopan. “He fights till the last point.”
Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, Small wonder that boxing is Coric’s favorite sport or that a tattoo on his bicep reads,
which concerns the theme of in gothic typeface, there is nothing worse in life than being ordinary. “He’s a
light. To that end, art star Olafur
phenom,” agrees broadcaster Justin Gimelstob, “and he looks like he’s cut out of
Eliasson has fashioned bright,
translucent disks that move like stone.” When asked who his own tennis idol is, Coric responds instantly: “I’ve been
planets onstage, while Jamie xx watching Goran Ivanisevic since I was four years old.” His fellow Croat, who in 2001
created the electric score. In- became the only man ever to win Wimbledon as a wild card, is equally loyal to Coric.
the-know teenagers flocked to “Borna is the leader of this new generation,” he says, referring to the spate of rising
the Manchester premiere this young talent, including Alexander Zverev, Thanasi Kokkinakis, and Dominic Thiem.
summer and Eliasson, who did a “I’m just lucky Borna happens to be from Croatia.”—MARK GUIDUCCI PATA > 6 9 2
lot of break dancing in his younger
years, can relate: “I think it’s a
lovely mix.”—KATE GUADAGNINO VOGUE.COM
 people are talking about
The
photography

books
A deeply-in-debt col-
lege grad of mysteri-
WAY ous parentage joins a
WikiLeaks-like group
We in Jonathan Franzen’s
Live corrosive Purity (FSG),
which moves from East
Now Germany’s Stasiland
to an increasingly to-
talitarian America. A former fash-
ion model and a war vet navigate a
drought-devastated California from
an abandoned Hollywood Hills man-
sion in Claire Vaye Watkins’s masterly
first novel, Gold Fame Citrus (River-
head), which suggests it’s not simply

P HOTO G RA P HY: I RV I N G P E N N, SH OP S IG N: SH OE , NEW YORK, ABOUT 1939. GELATIN SILVER PRINT MADE 1990, 7 3 ⁄ 4 ″ X 7 3 ⁄ 8 ″. SMITH SONIAN AMER ICAN ART MUSEUM, GIFT OF TH E IRVING PEN N FOU N DAT IO N .
water we’re thirsty for. The false icons

© TH E I RV I N G P E N N FOU N DAT I ON . BO O KS : GO RM A N STU D I O. MUSI C: C LA RE S HI LLA N D. SI TTI NGS ED ITOR . H ANNA KELIFA. H AIR , NAOKI KOMIYA; MAKEUP, J ENNY COOMBS. D ETAILS, SEE IN T HIS ISSU E .
of the digital age come under scrutiny
in Pulitzer Prize–winner Adam John-
son’s virtuoso story collection, Fortune
Smiles (Random House), while an eco-
nomic bust forces newlyweds to sign
their lives over to a penal contractor in
Margaret Atwood’s mordant romance
The Heart Goes Last (Nan A. Talese).
Sometimes the past feels anything
but nostalgic. “She was so tired of
the old way of telling stories.... She
JUMP STREET

SHOP Talk SHOP SIGN: SHOE, NEW

YORK, ABOUT 1939.
needed something messier, something
sharper, something like a bomb going
In 1990, Merry Foresta, then-curator of photography at the Smithsonian off,” thinks the French-born wife of a
American Art Museum, was wrapping up some work at Irving Penn’s studio
when he offered, “Oh, you might be interested in seeing these.” These
turned out to be some of his earliest photos—of New York and Philadelphia
but also Mexico and a list of Southern cities in between. Penn had set out
about 50 years earlier, taking the train and poking around with his camera
at stops along the way. The results are Penn photographs that are initially
not like other Penn photographs, until they are. Many feature sleepy
storefronts—a barber’s, a dress shop—that look as though the world was
already passing them by. “They’re kind of Walker Evans meets Atget,
pre–Robert Frank,” says Foresta, guest curator for “Irving Penn: Beyond
Beauty,” which opens at the Smithsonian next month before traveling
on to Dallas, Cambridge, Nashville, and Wichita.—ROBERT SULLIVAN
playwright in Lauren Groff’s wine-dark
Fates and Furies (Riverhead). Solace
comes fleetingly for the survivors of a
Big LOVE music wedding-day fire in Bill Clegg’s unex-
pectedly tender fiction debut, Did You
Ever Have a Family (Scout Press), and
It’s been three years since Lianne La
Havas, who’s opened for Bon Iver and private acts of dissidence (a smuggled
Robert Plant, released her acclaimed mix tape, say) become heroic in Antho-
debut. More recently, she took time to ny Marra’s era-spanning portrait of the
travel, making a fruitful stop in her USSR, The Tsar of Love and Techno
grandparents’ native Jamaica. There, (Hogarth). Finally, the 1980 earthquake
between servings of green bananas at in southern Italy is the centerpiece of
Freddie McGregor’s Kingston studios, she Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost
fine-tuned her sophomore album, partly Child (Europa Editions), the stunning
produced by Paul Epworth and Mark final installment of her Neapolitan se-
Batson. Blood features heavy-winded
ries, in which a half-century of vendet-
pipes and romantic guitar riffs that draw
tas and social change comes to bear on
from a host of influences—growing up in
London, La Havas played along to Bob THE VOICE the fissuring identities of two friends.
Dylan, while her mother favored Bob LA HAVAS “Where is it written that lives should
IN A MARY
Marley. Of the new work she says, “I played KATRANTZOU have a meaning?” Lila asks Elena, who
like I’ve never played, and sang like I’ve TURTLENECK answers her question by authoring their
AND SKIRT.
never sung.”—GABRIELLA KAREFA-JOHNSON story.—MEGAN O’GRADY
 September 2015

We now live amid a democracy of images. Every moment

of every day, a kaleidoscopic river of visuals—from Instagram
and thousands of other streaming-media sites—flows endlessly
over us as we swipe through Crayola-colored nail art at the
New York shows, then the wildflower headdresses of the Omo
tribes of Ethiopia, then Cara Delevingne’s latest cheeky selfies.
How we encounter style has been irrevocably changed—and has
irrevocably changed how we dress. It isn’t about pronouncements
from on high, it’s about rhythm and speed and individuality.
It’s about egalitarianism. What follows, then, is a new kind
of portfolio—one that brings together the designers, models, and
personalities who, through their vision and the courage of their
aesthetic convictions, are defining the fashion of our era.

oƒ
 R I C C A R D O T I S C I of GI V E NC H Y
W
hen Ric-
cardo Tisci was invited to breakfast by
Hubert de Givenchy at the beginning
of Tisci’s tenure at Givenchy in 2005,
the courtly house namesake gave him
two sterling pieces of advice. “Don’t
forget where you’re from,” Givenchy
told him, “and be yourself.” Tisci took
those words to heart, promptly moving
the label away from the tidy Audrey
Hepburn perfectionism that had been
its calling card and embracing instead
his own love of a certain gothic magic,
his fascination with the urban bling
of contemporary hip-hop culture, his
profound Catholicism, and a passion
for strong women engendered while he
grew up with a powerful mother and
eight sisters.
A decade later, Hubert de Given-
chy’s counsel seems unusually prescient:
Tisci’s influence is ubiquitous. His re-
spect for the power of the street and his
translation of its sartorial codes into
high fashion have rippled throughout
the industry, while that formative—and
enduring—family influence has led to
creative collaborations and friendships
with the artists and beauties defining
today’s cultural world, from Marina
Abramović (the ageless high priestess
of durational art) to the performers
whom he dresses both on- and offstage,
from Madonna, Kanye West, and Ri-
hanna to Jay Z and Beyoncé. Mean-
while, the impressive roster of models
he has discovered and championed,
including Joan Smalls, Lara Stone, Lea
T, Lakshmi Menon, and his longtime
muse Mariacarla Boscono, reflects his
early (and enduring) embrace of diver-
sity and fluid notions of gender iden-
tity—both concepts that the rest of
the world is, at long last, waking up to.
EMPIRE STATE OF MIND
Riccardo Tisci and Beyoncé in New York City. Beyoncé wears an
embroidered Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci dress and earrings. Hair, Neal Farinah;
makeup, Sir John. Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY A N TO N C O R B I J N
The indefatigable Tisci has lately
been charged with designing many of
his brand’s flagship stores—New York,
Rome, Milan, and London among
them—reflecting his interest in the
architect-designer Carlo Scarpa as well
as his own collections of the works
of Carlo Mollino and Gio Ponti, but
his design has also touched a broader
audience through his ongoing collabo-
ration with Nike. He touched his own
heart with the elaborate costume (lav-
ished with 3,000 hours’ worth of gold
embroidery) for a devotional figure
of the Madonna of Grace that he de-
signed and gifted to his parents’ home-
town church in Palagianello, Puglia, in
Italy’s raw south.
For spring 2016, Tisci is bringing his
vision to Manhattan. “I’m obsessed
with America, and it’s been my dream
to show in New York for a long time,”
he says, citing the significance of the
“I’m obsessed with
America,” Tisci says.
“It’s been my dream
to show in New York
for a long time”
American market for Hubert de Given-
chy, who presented his first collection
in the city in 1956 and built his name
on the patronage of such élégantes as
Jacqueline Kennedy, Diana Vreeland,
Jayne Wrightsman, Deeda Blair, Lau-
ren Bacall, and Bunny Mellon. Ever
the mix master, Tisci will be presenting
not only women’s ready-to-wear but
his powerful menswear and exquisite
haute couture as well—all in collabora-
tion with Abramović.
His show falls on the eleventh of
September. “It’s a very symbolic day
for the world and for America and for
New York especially,” says Tisci, “and
so the message is about love. Some-
times I go very dark with my design,
but this—I wouldn’t say it’s romantic,
but it’s very serene.”—HAMISH BOWLES
DE TA I LS, SE E I N T HI S I SSU E
 R A F S I M O N S of DIOR
P E T E R C O P P I N G of
OSCAR DE LA RENTA
S A R A H B U R T O N of
ALEXANDER M C QUEEN
Any one of these three designers
could turn out a masterly
tome titled Rules of the House—a
diplomatic yet daring treatise
on the best way to inhabit a new home
that will never bear your name
but nonetheless needs to be infused
with your spirit, your taste, your
vision of how things should be.
During the past five years,
Simons, Copping, and Burton
have done just that, to spectacular
effect, often starting their tenures
when their respective houses
were facing dark and emotionally
charged days. Far from hindering
any of them, such challenges
have inspired them to create work
infused with beauty, originality,
and a femininity that resonates in
ways both powerful and meaningful
for the twenty-first century.
FROM FAR LEFT: Caroline Trentini in Dior,
Karlie Kloss in Oscar de la Renta, and
Vanessa Axente in Alexander McQueen.
Hair, Duffy; makeup, Hannah Murray.
Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY
JA M I E H AW K E S WO R T H

D ETA ILS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E

D ETA ILS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E

H E D I S L I M A N E of S A I N T L AU R E N T
“If I can hear one good song, I can see the clothes.” So says Hedi Slimane, who clearly has a knack for producing smash hits. For
the last few years he has been rocking the house founded by Yves Saint Laurent with audacious riffs on the contemporary
musical landscape—particularly that of his adopted home of California—shaking the ghosts out of the woodwork in the process
and letting Saint Laurent live and breathe again in the twenty-first century. (One other impact: Slimane has made the fashion
world reevaluate its attitude toward Los Angeles: “[It] was always quite dismissive of it, borderline condescending. Apparently the
mind-set has changed. A good thing.”) The mixing of his aural leanings—“Music has always been my main interest and
expertise”—into the classic YSL wardrobe now roots it in the rhythm of the street. “I thought the conceptual approach was
irrelevant in our current time,” he says. “I just keep following my principle of reality.”
Singer Mish Way of White Lung wears a Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane mink coat.
Hair, Paul Hanlon; makeup, Lucia Pieroni. Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY DAV I D S I M S
 D ETA ILS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E

S H A Y N E O L I V E R of HO OD BY A I R
Since launching Hood By Air in 2006, Shayne Oliver has made it his bold business to celebrate and appropriate subcultures—from
a Brooklyn-centric focus on the club to a gender-amorphous reimagining of the street—without sacrificing an iota of authenticity.
“When someone in the room is uncomfortable, that’s when we know the direction we should be taking,” he says. Oliver’s groundbreaking
collections—packed with deconstructed and elevated takes on work-, court-, and daywear like cutout hoodies or mangled and logo-
stamped jeans—are equal parts decadence and agitprop. “It’s always about challenging,” he says, “and about pushing something that
feels abrasive, even argumentative.” The magic in Hood By Air, though, is that it still looks and feels stylish, even glamorous.
Odell Beckham, Jr., wears a Hood By Air denim jacket ($1,375) and jeans ($1,055). Jourdan Dunn wears a Hood By Air mohair
sweater ($770) and leather cargo pants ($1,790). Hair, Akki; makeup, Dotti. Fashion Editor: Tabitha Simmons.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY M A R I O T E S T I N O
 MARIA GRAZIA
C H I U R I and
P I E R PAO L O
P I C C I O L I of
VA L E N T I NO
The resting face of Valentino
under creative codirectors
Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria
Grazia Chiuri—one of chaste
beauty—affirms a covered-up
aesthetic that has had a
profound effect on fashion.
The duo’s impeccable sense
of propriety, romance, and
discreet historicism—high
necklines, slender torsos, and
Guinevere dresses (as modeled
here by Raquel Zimmermann)—
has placed the Roman house
back at the fore on the runway
and the red carpet.
“The designer narrates the
ideals of beauty of their time,”
says Piccioli, who with Chiuri
has helmed the label since
2008. Their simple silhouettes
stand alone—or act as canvases
for the ravishing embroideries
and embellishments created
at the house’s atelier. “Fashion
becomes culture by going
beyond an image—by proposing
values and conveying
emotions,” says Chiuri.
Zimmermann wears
a chiffon Valentino dress.
Hair, Julien d’Ys;
makeup, Sam Bryant.
Fashion Editor: Phyllis Posnick.
P H OTO G R A P H E D
BY T I M WA L K E R
D ETA ILS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E

703
 THE SHOW
MUST GO ON
FROM LEFT: Madison
Stubbington, Rianne
Van Rompaey, Natalie
Westling, Karen Elson,
and Maggie Rizer.
Jacobs’s fall 2015
collection was half Diana
Vreeland, half Mary
Poppins. All clothes and
accessories by Marc
Jacobs. Hair, Jimmy
Paul; makeup, Dick
Page. Fashion Editor:
Grace Coddington.

D ETA I LS, S EE I N T HI S I SSU E

 M A R C JAC O B S

I
had a wonderful night’s sleep last
night with Neville, my dog. We
cuddled all night.” Marc Jacobs
is sitting at an oblong table in
his Spring Street office, smok-
ing down a Marlboro Gold in
delicate, frenzied puffs. “Woke
up this morning feeling good, looking
forward to a day that wasn’t stressful
but maybe a little bit tedious.”
Tediousness is discomfiting to Ja-
cobs, perhaps fashion’s greatest living
showman, the designer whose inspired
riffs on pop culture have turned him
into an icon himself. At his namesake
brand, he has perfected a style both
immediate and immersive. Today, he’s
rolling out his fall campaign (crisp crepe
pleated skirts, sequined tweeds: half
Diana Vreeland, half Mary Poppins).
David Sims shot Cher, Willow Smith,
and Winona Ryder, among others,
against a garnet-red background, and
the result is different from anything Ja-
cobs has done before. “I tend to change
directions a lot, but I feel that I consis-
tently change,” he says. His hair, in the
latest of many incarnations, is now
close-trimmed and parted, and he has
a neat beard. At first he fretted about
the campaign’s randomness, but now he
is pleased: “I have this weird mind that
worries and then finds calm.”
Jacobs has a magic for transform-
ing a dreamy nostalgia for past styles
into an edgy, buzzy newness. It will
come in handy as he folds Marc by
Marc Jacobs into the main label, as
requested by his new CEO in March.
“I’m not really sure how to do it,” he
says, smothering his cigarette. “But
this is where the creative and the busi-
ness have to work hand in hand.”
Jacobs is often transparent about
his struggles, but the world got a fresh
window onto his inner life when he
joined Instagram. “I’d been a little cyni-
cal about social media,” he says. “But
there’s something about fashion that’s
like, ‘You love it till you hate it, and you
hate it till you love it.’ ” Tonight he’ll get
dinner with Bianca Del Rio, a favor-
ite drag queen; the two were in touch
after Jacobs commented on Del Rio’s
stream. Pensively, Jacobs fishes out
another Marlboro: Time for the sec-
ond course. “But then, I do know, after
being in therapy for 43 years,” he says,
“I love attention.” —NATHAN HELLER

P H OTO G R A P H E D BY
PETER LINDBERGH
 D ETA I LS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E

P H O E B E P H I L O of C É L I N E
“I have no idea what the future holds,” says Céline’s Phoebe Philo. “I follow my intuition and instinct on a
day-by-day basis.” That stance has paid off in a major way for Philo, as she has divined the way women want to look by
allowing for all sorts of seemingly contradictory impulses—utility and opulence, androgyny and femininity (albeit
ironically gestured)—to harmoniously coexist, all the while serving everything up with killer accessories. Despite her own
lower-than-low-key profile, the designer herself—bare-faced, sneaker-soled, a considered wisp of hair falling over her
face—is the perfect example of what it means to dress and live in Céline; a woman who, in the words of Elizabeth Peyton
(who drew Philo’s portrait, ABOVE), “is a very particular artist with a vision of how the world should look.”
PHOEBE, 201 5, BY ELIZ ABE TH PE Y TON
 JOHN
GALLIAN O
of M A I S ON
M A RGIEL A
John Galliano’s debut this
year at Maison Margiela (now
sans Martin) has yielded
nothing short of fireworks.
Though the appointment may
have seemed improbable at
first—how would the pensive
codes of Margiela read from
within the splash and fanfare of
a Galliano garment?—it’s all
turned out rather fantastically.
Take, for instance, the
big-bowed burlap sacks and
netted illusion dresses at July’s
couture show, the perfect
hybrids of Galliano’s
showmanship and Margiela’s
penchant for repurposing objets
trouvés. Chalk it up to Galliano’s
long-standing reverence for the
brand: When he first started
wearing Margiela, in the
nineties, “I always felt that I was
buying into something that
I wouldn’t see millions of people
wearing,” he says. “The emotion
of it really appealed to me.”
Model Fei Fei Sun wears a
Maison Margiela “Artisanal”
designed by John Galliano dress
coat and heels. Hair, Akki;
makeup, Hiromi Ueda.
Fashion Editor: Grace Coddington.
P H OTO G R A P H E D
BY DAV I D S I M S
D ETA I LS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E
 DAO -YI C H OW
a nd M A X W E L L
O S B O R N E of
PU BL IC S C HOOL

I
t’s an interesting time,” says
Public School’s Maxwell Os-
borne, his signature blacked-out
sunglasses giving nothing away.
“People are wearing H&M
T-shirts under their runway
jackets.” He’s pointing to the
ongoing democratization of dressing
and design—something he and co-
founder Dao-Yi Chow find intrigu-
ing for a particularly personal reason:
“This mix of high and low aligns so
closely with our original vision, in
terms of both what we do and how
we see our clothes being worn,” says
Chow. “Timingwise, it feels right.”
Their progressive synthesis of ideas
has propelled them in a kind of hyper-
speed from a freshman collection in
2008 that remixed traditional gentle-
manly elements with a coolly casual
swagger—a long-sleeved slub tee, for
example, was treated with studded
inset plackets—to the CFDA/Vogue
Fashion Fund title in 2013, a dedi-
cated expansion into womenswear in
2014, and the 2014 CFDA award for
menswear. At this month’s New York
Fashion Week, they’ll add another
class to their curriculum as they reveal
their debut efforts as heads of another
forward-thinking (albeit much larger)
outfit: DKNY.
“There’s a common energy, and
DE TA I LS, S EE I N T HI S ISSUE

we both wave that New York flag,”

says Osborne of Public School’s and
DKNY’s shared sensibilities. “How-
ever,” adds Chow, “we’ll use our touch-
stones—but it’s going to be totally
different.” A feeling to rival the antici-
pation? That’s easy: the buildup to the
first day of school.—NICK REMSEN

SQUAD UP
FROM LEFT: Joan Smalls, Dao-Yi Chow,
Dev Hynes, and Maxwell Osborne.
Smalls wears a Public School dress
and boots. Hynes wears a Public School
coat ($1,595), sweater ($375),
shirt ($375), and pants ($495). Hair,
Jennifer Yepez; makeup, Alice Lane.
Fashion Editor: Phyllis Posnick.

P H OTO G R A P H E D
BY B R U C E W E B E R

709
 KARLIE
KLOSS
Since she first walked
Calvin Klein’s runway (and
then went on to walk 31
others) at the age of fifteen,
Kloss’s image has gone
from girl next door
to—in the lineage of
Cindy and Christie—
supermodern supermodel.
Adored by designers and by
her 2.8 million Instagram
followers (and her BFF
Taylor Swift), Kloss (here in
Calvin Klein Collection),
now 23, has been at the
forefront of model
philanthropy for years with
both Karlie’s Kookies and,
more recently, her Kode
with Karlie scholarship.
Even more recent: her own
just-launched YouTube
channel, Klossy, which
offers behind-the-scenes
access to Kloss’s hectic life.
Hair, Luke Hersheson;
makeup, Miranda Joyce.
Fashion Editor:
Camilla Nickerson.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY
A N G E LO P E N N E T TA
CAR A
DELEVINGNE
What does a
successful model look
like and act like today?
With her high times
and high cheekbones,
London-born Cara
Delevingne represents
her life—and fairly
defines her era—with
her approachable and
authentic harnessing of
social media (15.6 million
Instagram followers
and counting). “I don’t
want to be a cliché,” says
Delevingne, 23, here in
Prada. “Stop labeling and
start living.” In addition to
her modeling career,
a string of upcoming film
roles will soon see her
disrupt Hollywood—in
her own charming
D ETA I LS, S EE I N T HI S I SSU E

fashion, of course.
Hair, Garren; makeup,
Dick Page. Fashion Editor:
Tonne Goodman.
P H OTO G R A P H E D
BY PAT R I C K
DEMARCHELIER
 A L E S S A N D R O M I C H E L E of G UC C I
In a little more than six months, Alessandro Michele has revolutionized the storied house of Gucci. The previously unknown
designer debuted his first collection only five days after the astonishing news of his appointment and, with it, jolted a heritage brand right
into the future. “The world has changed,” Michele explains. “There is a great urgency to find a bit of poetry. Sexuality has turned into
sensuality, and there is a marvelous anarchy that characterizes young people.” That anarchy manifests itself in gender-bending pussycat
bows, copious rings, geek-chic eyeglasses, and candy-colored furs. But Michele’s very presence at the helm of Gucci is more radical
than any mere piece of clothing—it might just pave the way for other anonymous designers to be called up to the main stage.
Actress Elle Fanning wears a Gucci dress ($4,600), glasses, and earrings.
Hair, Holli Smith; makeup, Sally Branka. Fashion Editor: Sara Moonves.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY A N G E LO P E N N E T TA
D ETA I LS, S EE I N TH I S I SSU E
 M I U C C IA P R ADA
Words rarely do justice to the disorienting details of a Prada collection. “Tweedy synthetics,”
“minimalist embellishments,” “retrofuturism”: Mere descriptions fall short. The clothes themselves, though, reflect
an ever-surprising alchemy that has redefined the entire notion of bourgeois chic. “My work is about a continuous
research,” Miuccia Prada says, “not only of opposites, but of every new possibility.” The intelligence and subversive
humor of her designs have done nothing less than give us a new prism through which to view sexuality and femininity,
while Prada’s recently opened museum complex in Milan is already reorienting that city’s center of gravity.
British musician FKA Twigs, meanwhile, has a similar knack for eluding categories and, like Prada, understands
that “mystery is essential to everything interesting.”
FKA Twigs wears a Prada top ($980), pants ($1,040), and shoes. Hair, Soichi;
makeup, Yadim. Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY I N E Z A N D V I N O O D H

713
 K A R L L A G E R F E L D of C H A N E L
The magic ingredient that has kept the mercurial Karl Lagerfeld ahead of the curve at the innovative and iconoclastic
house of Chanel for over thirty years: Youth. Ever culturally attuned, Lagerfeld, now 81, perpetually preempts the
moment with the speed of a 19-year old—this is, after all, a man whose beloved Birman cat, Choupette, has her own
Instagram account. (His latest muse, Kendall Jenner—also 19, as it happens—is herself the perfect social media storm,
with more than 31 million followers on Instagram.) “The newer generation is less pretentious; they are open, and
very nice people,” says Lagerfeld. “Fashion’s dictators are out—and grotesque. It is now a non-stop dialogue.”
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY K A R L L AG E R F E L D
 GIGI
H A D I D and
KE N DALL
JENNER
Models, no longer voiceless
faces, have become
industrious, independent
Instagirls—an ethos
epitomized by the rise of Gigi
Hadid and Kendall Jenner
(OPPOSITE). Hadid, 20, was
just two years old when she
made her modeling debut as
a towheaded Guess Kids girl.
Now, with admirers like Tom
Ford and Steven Meisel, the
Malibu native has grown into
the babe that fashion has
long been looking for—
Claudia Schiffer for the age
of social media. “I was the
one who taught my agents
about Instagram,” she says.
For Jenner, meanwhile,
celebrity is as American and
as close to home as
apple pie, though she only
began to realize her
influence after her debut at
Marc Jacobs’s show eighteen
months ago. We’ve been
along for the ride ever since.
Gigi Hadid wears a
La Perla silk-satin slip,
$817. Hair, Thomas Dunkin;
makeup, Francelle.
Fashion Editor: Karen Kaiser.
P H OTO G R A P H E D
BY S E B A S T I A N K I M
D ETA I LS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E
716
 MICHAEL KORS
Trends may come and trends may go, but Michael Kors—the gregarious designer and ever-present fashion celebrity—can
D ETA I LS, S EE I N T HI S I SSU E

continually be counted on to deliver the chicest possible imaginings of American sportswear. He’s built a bona fide kingdom out
of clean-line dresses, versatile and uncomplicated handbags, and even charming, boyish watches from his ability to take the
pulse of his customers. “I’ve always thought that halfway through any given decade,” Kors says, “the fashion really comes into
its own.” How does this hold up, then, at the midpoint of the 2Kteens? “We’re in fast times,” he says. “People are craving
something opulent yet personal—and, honestly, with a touch of optimism.”
All clothes and accessories by Michael Kors. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.
N OT A RT, 2 0 1 5 , BY J O H N B A L D E S S A R I
 STELLA
MCCARTNEY
In fourteen years, Stella
McCartney has built a fashion
house with both an elegant
voice and a singular consciousness.
In addition to her refusal to
create clothes for what she calls
“cookie-cutter women,”
McCartney personifies the
relaxed, sensual aesthetic of her
collections, and as a result,
women simply relate to her. Her
sophisticated feminine-masculine
counterpoints traverse
terrain from Parisian runways to
gym bags across the globe
(thanks to the success of her
Adidas collaboration, now in its
twelfth year). “We can use
design as a way to encourage,
challenge—and also be more
responsible,” says the mother of
four and longtime advocate
of animal rights and eco-causes.
“Fashion needs to look
beyond a runway to consider
the bigger picture.”
Raquel Zimmermann wears a
Stella McCartney embroidered
dress, $4,080. Hair, David von
Cannon; makeup, Gucci Westman.
Fashion Editor: Tabitha Simmons.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY
PAT R I C K D E M A R C H E L I E R

D ETA I LS, SE E I N T HI S I SSUE

D E TA I LS, S E E I N T H I S I S SU E

TOM FORD
The era-defining Tom Ford consistently discovers new ways to ignite desire, and always marches to his own chiseled-jawed drummer.
Earlier this year, for instance, he dared show in Los Angeles during Oscar week, when most editors were in Europe. “Customers today
are more responsive to what Rihanna is posting on her Instagram than to fashion shows or even critics’ reviews,” the designer says. Ford
is also, of course, a film director, with a thriller, Nocturnal Animals, shooting in L.A. later this year. “His imagination is more powerful than
any reality,” says actor Nicholas Hoult, who starred in Ford’s 2009 directorial debut, A Single Man. “Tom builds imaginary worlds.”
Nicholas Hoult wears a Tom Ford suit. Grooming, Kayla MiChele. Fashion Editor: Michael Philouze.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY T H EO W E N N E R
 A L E X A N D E R WA N G
“It’s rare for me to stop and think about what we’ve accomplished,” says Alexander Wang.
“We’re just grateful to be in business!” Humility aside, the 31-year-old wunderkind has,
in the space of a decade, created a label that has become globally synonymous with
urban cool. Despite Wang’s very of-his-generation use of the collective and inclusive
we, to everyone else it’s all about him and how he holds court at the center of the
hippest gang in the universe. And though the increasingly sophisticated bravura of his
namesake collections may owe something to his being at Balenciaga in Paris, ultimately
Wang is a fashion designer in love with fashion. “I always knew I wanted to do it,” he
says of being a designer. “Nothing interested me more.”
FROM NEAR RIGHT: Kendrick Lamar and Anna Ewers (with Alexander Wang) wearing
Alexander Wang. Hair, Duffy; makeup, Lotten Holmqvist. Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY A L A S DA I R M C L E L L A N

C H R I S T O P H E R K A N E a n d J.W. A N D E R S O N
In less than a decade, the edgy beauty of London-based Jonathan Anderson and Christopher
Kane—as modeled here by, respectively, Lily James (ABOVE LEFT) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw—
has redefined luxury for a new generation. The unpredictable and arresting collections of
the 33-year-old Kane have taken him from Central Saint Martins to securing a major backer
D ETA I LS, S EE I N T HI S I SSU E

(Kering) to opening his own Mayfair store. The 30-year-old Anderson, meanwhile, as creative
director of both the LVMH-owned Spanish house of Loewe and his own namesake label, has
crafted an arsenal of surreal and perverse touches into a provocative vision. “Fashion has
had to become more agile,” he says. “You have to break the rules.”
Hair, Luke Hersheson; makeup, Miranda Joyce. Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY A N G E LO P E N N E T TA
 REI
K AWA K U B O
When Kawakubo, who has
spent almost a half century
astonishing the fashion world
with her radical vision at Comme
des Garçons, opened the first
Dover Street Market, in London’s
Mayfair in 2004 (she has since
added outposts in Tokyo, Beijing,
and New York), it was immediately
apparent that her shopkeeper
sensibility was as transgressive
as her groundbreaking—and
rule-breaking—designs. Who
else would shake up traditional
notions of retailing by hanging a
bejeweled Prada tunic a few feet
away from a deliberately battered
Supreme tee? Kawakubo stated
that her goal was to create “an
ongoing atmosphere of beautiful
chaos,” and the shop’s wildly
eclectic merchandise, wed to
an extremely sophisticated
curatorial eye, is in fact beautifully
chaotic—and chaotically beautiful.
In an age when so many of us
are relying more and more on
the Internet, an enterprise like
DSM offers the kind of electric
charge of retail excitement
that clicking ADD TO BASKET
can never hope to replicate.
All clothes and accessories by
Comme des Garçons. Hair, makeup,
and hair lace created by Julien d’Ys.
Fashion Editor: Phyllis Posnick.
P H OTO G R A P H E D
BY T I M WA L K E R
D ETA I LS, S EE I N T HI S I SSU E

723
 D ETA I LS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E

N I C O L A S G H E S Q U I È R E of L OU I S V U I T T ON
“Designers are the markers of their time,” says Nicolas Ghesquière, who joined Louis Vuitton as artistic director in late 2013. The first
strike of his counterintuitive genius: revamping one of the most recognizable luxury logos in the world, giving the very notion of branding
a supremely modern and directional twist. In a mere two years, the Frenchman’s anticipatory vision has managed the trick of making
the global megabrand seem effortless while keeping it truly Parisian. Never one to hide behind the intricacies of his craft, Ghesquière
maintains that he is simply propelled by “the desire to propose answers to the ever-present question ‘What to wear?’ ”
Adèle Exarchopoulos wears a Louis Vuitton coat, turtleneck, and skirt. Hair, Akki; makeup, Hiromi Ueda. Fashion Editor: Grace Coddington.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY DAV I D S I M S
 CHRISTOPHER
B A I L E Y of
BU R BE R RY
With an early adopter’s talent
for social media and mobile
functionality, Burberry’s chief
creative and executive officer,
Christopher Bailey, has defined
the house as the world leader in
determining how fashion
interacts with tech—something
he speaks about with
unabashed enthusiasm.
“Technology transcends
borders and languages,” Bailey
says. “It unifies how we
experience the world.” He’s
been especially adept at
grafting the digital arena’s
D ETA I LS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E

myriad branches with

Burberry’s deeply sunk English
roots—from pioneering the
live-streaming of runway shows
to the now widely adapted
order-off-the-catwalk concept.
“Right now, the world of 3-D
printing is completely
fascinating,” he says. “It’s
having a real impact on our
design process—and it’s
opening up new opportunities.”
Edie Campbell wears a Burberry
trench coat. Hair, Julien d’Ys;
makeup, Sam Bryant. Fashion
Editor: Phyllis Posnick.
P H OTO G R A P H E D
BY T I M WA L K E R
D ETA I LS, S EE I N T HI S I SSU E
 D O M E N I C O D O LC E & S T E FA N O GA B BA N A
D
omenico Dolce
is sitting in the exact spot—the end
seat of a long gray sofa in the extrava-
gant barocco salon in Milan—where
he made his ill-chosen remarks about
“synthetic” children and gay parent-
hood to an Italian journalist in March
that rocketed him and Stefano Gab-
bana to the position of fashion’s most-
hated figures of 2015. Today he pushes
his glasses to the top of his head and
says, “I am so sorry. It was not my in-
tention to offend anyone.”
The repercussions of his now-
notorious remarks, coming from a
gay, Sicilian Catholic designer, have
assumed huge proportions in this, the
most remarkable year of breakthrough
and celebration for LGBTQ liberation.
On May 23, the Republic of Ireland,
a Catholic country, overwhelmingly
voted to legalize same-sex marriage. On
June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
that same-sex couples could marry na-
tionwide. On April 24, Bruce Jenner
came out as the transgender woman we
now know as Caitlyn. An incensed Sir
Elton John, husband of David Furnish
and father of two sons conceived by
IVF, read Dolce’s comments, published
in Panorama magazine. He excoriat-
ed the designers over Instagram and
called for a boycott, stirring support
and dismay from Martina Navratilo-
va, Madonna, Ricky Martin, Victoria
Beckham, and many others. It was diffi-
cult for a liberal community to fathom:
Why would anyone who is homosexual
put forth an opinion, in ugly language,
that seemed to disparage the freedom
of same-sex couples to become parents?
Regarding the IVF children his com-
ments insulted, Dolce expresses re-
morse and says he understands the hurt
his words have caused. “I’ve done some
soul-searching. I’ve talked to Stefano
Adriana Lima with her daughter Valentina. Lima wears a Dolce & Gabbana silk dress, purse, and shoes. Valentina wears a
Dolce & Gabbana Children’s floral dress. Hair, Recine; makeup, Aaron de Mey. Fashion Editor: Tabitha Simmons.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY B R U C E W E B E R
a lot about this. I’ve realized that my
words were inappropriate, and I apolo-
gize. They are just kids,” he continues.
“You don’t need labels, baby labels.” He
acknowledges that others should have
the chance to create families with the aid
of science. “I think everybody chooses
for themselves. I don’t know everything
about IVF, but I love it when people are
happy. It’s like medicine. Science has
been put on the table to help people.”
Stefano Gabbana, tanned and mus-
cular in a pair of print trousers and a
fitted T-shirt, shoots forward vigor-
ously from a gilded, thronelike chair
across the coffee table from Dolce to
add his point of view. “When they ask
if I wanted to be a parent, I say yes, of
course, why not? But it’s not possible in
Italy,” one of the few Western Europe-
an countries in which same-sex unions
are still illegal. (A bill is under discus-
“I’ve done some soul-
searching,” says Dolce.
“I’ve realized my words
were inappropriate,
and I apologize”
sion to make single-parent adoption
possible.) This, among other obstacles,
stymied Gabbana’s serious hopes of
becoming a dad. “I had thought of
going to California and having a baby,
but I couldn’t bring the baby back to
Italy, because you need the mother’s
passport. I asked about adoption in
Italy. It’s very hard for a straight couple
here—imagine if you are gay!”
As for Dolce, it is tempting to see his
apology as prompted by public pres-
sure or by the fear of losing business.
But he holds to the conviction that cer-
tain choices other gay men and women
are taking are personally not open to
him because of his Catholic beliefs.
Dolce’s spirituality is a meditative con-
solation, one he will talk about only
when pressed, he says. “I never use my
faith for advertising.” Gabbana, unlike
Dolce, does not regularly attend church
but, like most Italians, grew up steeped
FLOWER GIRLS
in its culture. “Both our mothers wore
medallions of the Virgin in their bras,”
he says, “for protection.”
And they’re off on a riff. “It’s our
tradition,” declares Dolce. “It’s in our
blood,” Gabbana adds. It’s also, of
course, in the DNA, in the rather appo-
site cliché, of the whole Dolce & Gab-
bana brand—a proposition that, for
four decades now, they have brilliantly
wrought out of nostalgia for everything
traditionally Italian. Their collections
revolve affectionately around la fami-
glia, in all its infants-to-elders dressing
for every possible fiesta and holiday. It
comes, literally, from a sincere place—
Dolce’s memories of being brought up
in a village in Sicily, the son of a tailor,
and sparked by the image-making cre-
ativity of Gabbana, the son of hard-
working blue-collar Milanese parents.
The pair of young lovers found
each other in the boom time of Milan
fashion in the early 1980s. They had
arranged to meet for the first time in a
nightclub, where Gabbana was seeking
advice about how to break into fashion.
A few months later, he was off to Sicily
to spend Christmas with the Dolce fam-
ily. (When her son first confessed to her
that he thought he was gay, Mamma
Dolce had counseled him to “go and try
it! If you don’t try it, you won’t know.”)
These two men, whose joint repu-
tations have been on Internet trial as
something between religious reaction-
aries and gay traitors these past few
months, were also, Gabbana reminds
us, the first male designers in Italy to
come out as a couple. (They are no lon-
ger romantically linked.) “We made our
first interview saying we are gay in 1999.
It was a question, can you imagine, so
late?” Gabbana says. “We lived togeth-
er, and we talked about love, not sex or
being gay. And it was headline TV news
in Italy. But for us, it was normal!”
Evidently chastened, Dolce con-
siders the gulf between doctrine and
the lives we live now. “Bah!” he ex-
claims. “Who needs an institution
to tell us how to love?” And then, re-
flectively: “We shouldn’t become too
rigid. We need to understand, accept
everyone.”— SARAH MOWER
 JACK
McCOLLOUGH
and L A Z A R O
HERNANDEZ
of PR OE N Z A
S C HOU L E R
Proenza Schouler’s Jack
McCollough and Lazaro
Hernandez are the new
standard-bearers for what it
means to be a young global
fashion powerhouse. Proof of
the claim? The clothes, which
over the past decade have
come to be known for a
surfer-slouch meets Gotham-
hip aesthetic tailored to PYTs
in search of artfully dashed
dresses or metallic pleated
skirts. (When your fan club
runs from Lauren Santo
Domingo to Kristen Stewart
and from Grimes to Beyoncé,
you’re doing something right.)
Having launched swimwear
last summer, they’re now
working on their first perfume.
“We just try to stay fluid,” says
Hernandez. “The rules are
always changing.”
Model Julia Bergshoeff wears
a Proenza Schouler knit dress
($3,450), felt coat ($3,250),
and mules. Hair, Paul Hanlon;
makeup, Lucia Pieroni. Fashion
Editor: Grace Coddington.
P H OTO G R A P H E D
BY DAV I D S I M S

D ETA I LS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E

D ETA I LS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E

R ALPH L AURE N
The mere mention of the name Ralph Lauren summons vivid tableaux of idyllic, dream-state Americana—an equestrienne in her
perfectly broken-in jeans, say, framed by a jagged Teton horizon, or a graceful athlete in her slim-fit piqué polo, topspinning and
volleying away under a cloud-dotted East Coast sky. The RL ethos, of course, becomes all the more impressive when one takes into
account the astounding fact that Lauren—who is also the first designer to think on a truly international scale—has been creating and
honing it for nearly 50 years (the company was founded in 1967). His latest focus? To diversify his far-reaching empire: “You have to
keep moving,” says the man who’s lately reinvented himself as a restaurateur, opening up three outposts, including the Polo Bar on
Manhattan’s East Fifty-fifth Street, one of the hottest tables in town. “It’s exciting to step out—the change never stops.”
Dree Hemingway wears a Ralph Lauren Collection denim dress ($2,190) and riding boots. Ralph Lauren ribbed
tank and prairie skirt. Hair, Shay Ashual. Makeup, Jeanine Lobell. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY PAT R I C K D E M A R C H E L I E R
 U N IQL O a nd
N O VA K
D J O KOV I C

A
fter winning his third
Wimbledon title in
July, Novak Djokovic
donned a white jacket
with a royal purple
trim—a nod to the tournament’s
livery—from Uniqlo, his apparel
sponsor. It was a simpatico look for
the world’s number-one tennis player:
The Tokyo-based company has come
to provide the blueprint for global cos-
mopolitan wardrobes—and, with more
than 1,500 stores (and six more arriv-
ing in the U.S. this fall), it’s become a
venerable international force of its own.
Off-court, Djokovic has also seen
a number of milestones lately. Last
year he announced the arrival of his
first child, Stefan—with wife Jelena
Djokovic, née Ristic—via social me-
dia. Additionally, the Novak Djokovic
Foundation—his Belgrade-based phil-
anthropic organization, which focuses
on early-childhood education and wel-
fare under the directorship of Jelena—
opened its latest School of Life this
past summer in Vladičin Han, Serbia.
“Less than 10 percent of children
from the poorest households in Ser-
bia attend early-education programs,”
Jelena says. “A new building is simply
the beginning.” The foundation’s initia-
tives extend far beyond the classroom
door, from the implementation of mo-
bile teaching technology to reducing or
eliminating preschool fees. “It is easy
to lose one’s compass in life,” Jelena
adds. “We see misfortune—and we are
really lucky that we can do something
about it.” The NDF will also continue
to grow its alliance with UNICEF
(Djokovic has served as an ambassa-
dor for the humanitarian agency since
2011) and is about to launch a cam-
paign to highlight youth-development
issues globally, a roster of achievements
ever more impressive when one consid-
ers the tennis star’s age. “I’m 28; I feel
good,” Djokovic said after Wimble-
don’s trophy ceremony. Then he added
a flash of that tenacious, all-star mettle:
“I’m going to try to push my own limits
and see how far I can go.” —N.R.
D ETA I LS, S EE I N T HI S I SSU E

BALANCE OF POWER
Djokovic, photographed in Wimbledon,
wears Uniqlo shorts, $50; Uniqlo, NYC.
Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick.

P H OTO G R A P H E D BY
A N TO N C O R B I J N
RULE
BRITANNIA
Queen Victoria herself
set the mode for more:
more silks, more
nosegays, more buttons,
more trims. That’s the
lavish spirit behind this
look—but its modern
interpretation has a loose,
uncorseted freedom our
suffragette forebears
could only dream of.
Model Liya Kebede
wears an Alexander
McQueen organza dress;
Alexander McQueen,
NYC. Sorel boots.
Fashion Editor:
Grace Coddington.

H U S T L E

Victoriana is the new buzzword, with today’s social buccaneers wearing flared sleeves and
 ROYAL
TREATMENT
All-over florals,
looking rather like
Aesthetic Movement
wallpaper, are a
lush—and young—
idea for big nights.
Gucci georgette
dress; select Gucci
boutiques. Details,
see In This Issue.

B U S T L E

florals, flounces and jet—and old lace made new again. Photographed by David Sims.
 JET SET
While it was the longing
for dear, departed
Prince Albert that
sparked the Victorian
vogue for mourning
colors and jet jewelry,
today’s glittery black
looks shout “after-
party,” not “tragic love.”
Givenchy embroidered
coat and wool trousers
734 ($1,690); givenchy.com.
Pierre Hardy sneakers.
 FIT TO BE TIED
High necklines—from
dickeys to assorted
face-framing flounces
and ruffled jabots—
pique our interest.
Chanel black jacket with
white bow collar, ruffled
skirt, and dark-gray
jeans ($1,300); select
Chanel boutiques.
Timberland boots.
Details, see In This Issue.
TOPSY-TURVY
Does this satin
quilting remind you
of a duchess in her
dressing gown—or a
Houdini-in-training
planning a great
escape? Either way,
it’s fun and it works.
Céline reversible coat,
satin skirt ($2,100),
and sneakers;
Céline, NYC.
IMMODEST
PROPOSAL
While prim Victorians
are said to have
draped their pianos
lest any leg show, this
sheer piano-shawl
dress reveals rather
more limb than an old
Steinway. Valentino
embroidered silk dress;
valentino.com. Details,
see In This Issue.
BELLE OF
THE BALL
Amazingly, wrists
(like necks, napes,
and ankles) are again
erogenous zones—
with flared sleeves
and ruffled cuffs
possessing all the
drama of Thackeray.
Donna Karan New
York turtleneck
dress; Donna Karan
New York stores.

738
QUEEN FOR A DAY
Brocade, metallic
embroidery, overlayerings
of lace—the complexity
of heavily worked
fabrics like these adds
another dimension
of decadence. Dries Van
Noten embroidered dress
($1,805) and brocade
skirt ($1,045); dress at
Blake, Chicago, and skirt
at Capitol, Charlotte, NC.
Details, see In This Issue.
 GREAT
EXPECTATIONS
The ideal of elegance
has reemerged
recently—with the
stakes substantially
elevated. For a grand
affair, we love the
look of an opera coat.
Marni silk-and-wool
dress ($3,590) and silk
blouse ($1,130); dress
at Marni boutiques
and blouse at Neiman
Marcus stores. Marc
Jacobs skirt, $3,600;
Marc Jacobs stores.
WUTHERING
HEIGHTS
The elongated line
is what this is about:
stretching the
silhouette from chin
to toe. Wearing lug
boots or thick-soled
sneakers adds even
more height (and hints
at the rebel beneath
the velvet). Chloé dress,
$3,795; Bergdorf
Goodman, NYC. Louis
Vuitton turtleneck;
select Louis Vuitton
boutiques. Details,
see In This Issue.
THIS OLD THING
How did granny details
suddenly become
so compelling? Who
thought we’d all
be craving lace-
antimacassar chic?
With fresh eyes, old
tropes come to life.
Alberta Ferretti mohair
blouse ($990) and
skirt ($1,490); Alberta
Ferretti, Los Angeles.
PORTRAIT
OF A LADY
The ultimate sartorial
emblem of the era—
puffy sleeves—looks
rather disco-warrior
when paired with
slithery sequins. Louis
Vuitton embroidered
shirt, sequined skirt,
belt, and boots;
select Louis Vuitton
boutiques. In this
story: makeup, Lucia
Pieroni for Clé de
Peau Beauté; hair,
Paul Hanlon. Details,
see In This Issue.

743
I n t o Wo o d s the
The season’s new long and cozy coats—all red-rose embroidery,
Maid Marian belts, and folkloric patchwork—are touched with the fairy-tale
romance of a lost, sunken forest. Photographed by Mikael Jansson.

I PUT A SPELL ON YOU

Softness and bundling are
what we’re after. Model Raquel
Zimmermann wears a Preen by
Thornton Bregazzi shearling-
and-wool coat and lace-up
turtleneck sweater ($1,076); coat
at preenbythorntonbregazzi
.com. Proenza Schouler wool
skirt, $1,390; Proenza Schouler,
NYC. Delfina Delettrez earring.
Perrin Paris gloves. UGG socks.
Details, see In This Issue.
Fashion Editor: Tabitha Simmons.
 RAPUNZEL,
RAPUNZEL
Let down your hair—
and your hemlines.
Emporio Armani
rabbit-fur coat;
Emporio Armani
stores. Marc Jacobs
skirt, $2,800; Marc
Jacobs stores.
746 Lanvin belt. Christian
Louboutin boots.
A KING’S RANSOM
A once-upon-a-time
richness informs
the color palette.
Salvatore Ferragamo
mink coat; Salvatore
Ferragamo boutiques.
Rebecca Taylor
Lurex chiffon skirt,
$595; Rebecca
Taylor stores. Details,
see In This Issue.
BRIAR ROSE
Classic motifs like
red blossoms are
everywhere this
fall. Burberry silk-
cotton coat, $4,495;
burberry.com.
Salvatore Ferragamo
pleated-leather skirt;
Salvatore Ferragamo
boutiques. Calvin
748 thigh-
Klein Collection 748
high leather boots.
AS YOU WISH
The cord belt, knotted
at the waist, delivers
a Princess Bride
effect. Etro leather-
and-snakeskin coat
and sequined-silk
dress; Etro, NYC. Marc
Jacobs belt. Details,
see In This Issue.
DAMSEL IN
THIS DRESS
Over the river and
through the woods—
in rich, kaleidoscopic
color. Fendi coat;
Fendi, NYC. Marni
dress, $2,780;
Carla Martinengo,
Dallas. Altuzarra
bag. Gaspar
gloves. Rochas
boots. Details, see
In This Issue.
GLITTER BUGS
Crystalline insects
lend both whimsy
and luxury. Max Mara
fox-fur-trimmed alpaca
coat, $4,990; Max
Mara, NYC. Miriam
Haskell for Patch
NYC brooches.
BEAUTY NOTE
Brace your hair for
the modern elements.
Redken Extreme Anti-
Snap leave-in treatment
protects against
damage from hot tools
and harsh dyes.
GOLDILOCKS
PRINCIPLE
Note the playful
buttons: not too big,
definitely not too
small; in fact, just
right. Calvin Klein
Collection calf-hair
peacoat; Calvin Klein
Collection, NYC.
DKNY pleated skirt,
$175; select DKNY
stores. Details, 753
see In This Issue.
SPREAD
YOUR WINGS
Forest-creature
details add to the
enchanted mood for
fall. Valentino silk
coat, wool sweater
($1,690), and pleated
skirt; Valentino
boutiques. Marc
Jacobs shoes.
EVER AFTER
The patterns
could have been
hand-stitched by
Cinderella’s mice.
Lanvin fur coat,
tassel belt, and satin
dress; Lanvin, NYC.
In this story: hair,
Marc Lopez; makeup,
Hannah Murray.
Produced by North
Six Europe. Details, 755
see In This Issue.
FLAWLESS
Queen Bey, drawing
on her elite-street
style and athletic
prowess, will add a
fashion partnership
with Topshop to
her empire next
year. Details, see
In This Issue.
Fashion Editor:
Tonne Goodman.
 B S t r o n g
Moving, morphing, leading, flaunting; such is the power of Beyoncé
that just one letter tells us who she is. Margo Jefferson explores what it takes
to run the world. Photographed by Mario Testino.
 hat do we want from the glamorous,
powerful women we call divas or icons or cultural forces? We want them to want—and in our
names get—everything they possibly can. Success in work and love. Sexual pleasure. Money
and power. We want them to embody multiple fantasies. We want them to make us believe
that exciting realities are just around the corner.
It used to be that the great pop stars with fashion and style gave us small variations on one
grand theme. Tina Turner: minidresses and honey tresses. Janis Joplin: boas, bangles, and
bell-bottoms. Cher: spangled striptease getups with mythic Third World touches. Nowadays
fashion isn’t about the grand theme, it’s about juxtaposition, and it’s filled with allusions to
movie and art history; to music and dance styles; to iconographies of race and ethnicity,
religion and gender. Madonna opened the door to this collage approach. Today we see it in
the wigs, masks, and sculpted costumes of Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj, the restless dazzle
of Rihanna’s couture choices. And, of course, in the music, dance, decor, and looks of the
ultimate streamed collage: Beyoncé.
“There is a magnetic presence to her,” says her collaborator and friend Givenchy’s
Riccardo Tisci. “I like to think that I know what Marilyn Monroe or Bettie Page did to a
room by walking into it because I’m pretty sure that’s what Beyoncé has.” Her affect is both
timeless and wholly of-the-moment. “I have always been obsessed with opposites, contrasts,
impossible equations, and difficult conversations,” adds Tisci, who has worked with Beyoncé
to produce ever more spectacular expressions of who she is—see her outrageously conceived
crystal-embroidered nude illusion dress at May’s Met gala, or any number of her innovative
runway-to-reinvention stage outfits. In an age when roles and styles morph as quickly as
computer images, she’s a shape-shifting virtuoso. She can evoke Rita Hayworth or Naomi
Campbell, flappers and B-girls. She can be a blonde, a brunette, or both; she wears cornrows
and cascading curls and a decorous ponytail; she samples an Audrey Hepburn pixie cut or
an Erykah Badu–esque gele.
Her appropriation and assemblage are based on the understanding that a mass audience
is a mass of niche audiences. Each has its own history, with its own desires, and she empow-
ers them all. “Her appeal crosses art forms, genders, and generations,” says the designer
Stella McCartney. “She’s the whole package: primal, rare, delicate, beautiful, and powerful.”

758
 The pop-goddess pantheon still has its rebel-dominatrices in Madonna, Rihanna, and Nicki
Minaj. Their fans are their subjects, and they never hesitate to throw shade. Beyoncé belongs
to the new breed that’s anti-dominatrix, even nurturing. “The word diva is used for so many
female performers, and it often means they have reputations for being difficult,” observes
Marc Jacobs, whose dress Beyoncé is wearing on this magazine’s cover, “but she exudes
charm and a lovable quality.” Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift speak constantly and
tenderly of their fans’ needs and vulnerabilities. At times it can feel almost pious.
Beyoncé works hard to show us she is a Nice Person. There are intriguing moments in
her self-produced documentary, Beyoncé: Life Is But a Dream, where rehearsals are going
wrong and her notes for her team (“I have a million,” she says flatly) are not being attended
to. She sees that being polite is not working: “You can be fair, but me being polite was not
me being fair to myself,” she remarks. Beyoncé calls another meeting, but we don’t see what
happens. If there was to be a moment of delicious, scrupulously fair Not Niceness, it never
came. The camera had turned away.
The possible Not Niceness residing in Beyoncé she reserves for her music. There, she’s a
powerhouse. She can sneer. She can outstrut and stare down any man in the film frame. Call
her, in the songs, She Who Must be Obeyed—in the palace, in the bedroom, in the hood, on
the road, and on the runway. Her lyrics keep the narratives and the moods changing. Her
videos give us material to enact a range of dreams with: how to dress, how to talk, how to
succeed in business without really appearing to try; how to fall in love or lust without sur-
rendering our will; how to work up the courage to do something we’ve never done before.

“Her appeal crosses art forms, genders, and generations,”says Stella McCartney.
“She’s primal, rare, delicate, beautiful, and powerful”
In “Flawless,” a near-stream-of-consciousness song about, among other things, her
thwarted teen show-business dream, she reaches out further and gives us words from the
novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s elegant TEDx talk, “We Should All Be Feminists.”
(“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, ‘You can
have ambition but not too much. . . . ’ ”) Asked how she feels about Beyoncé’s influence, Ngozi
Adichie responds, “Feminism is still very much a contested idea, and to have it taken on by
a pop icon with her enormous influence over young lives can’t hurt the cause for equality.”
Beyoncé opens up room for a lot of cultural conversations. The sexuality she flaunts has
raised the ire of conservatives and even some women, who feel she’s playing into demeaning
racial and gender stereotypes. (Sometimes on her own, sometimes with Jay Z.) But the most
powerful thing about her persona is the unabashed pleasure she takes in her own body: its
beauty, its power, its versatility. It’s an exuberance reminiscent of Josephine Baker, who coolly
noted that most people’s derrières were only good to sit on. “It is the intelligence of my body
that I have exploited,” Baker declared—and she was right. Marilyn Minter, whose bawdy grit-
and-glitter work Beyoncé and Jay Z collect, observes that “as an artist who dirties up sanitized
images, I am fascinated with Beyoncé’s control.”
Her life evokes show-business narratives we already know and love. There’s the girl-group
trajectory that ends when a star is born. The drably named Gumm Sisters give rise to Judy
Garland. The Supremes recede and Diana Ross becomes The Supreme Being. Once there
were three, but the real Child of Destiny is Beyoncé. There’s the gossip-generating marriage-
of-the-stars paradigm. Is it a love story? Is it a mutually beneficial union between two powerful
kingdoms? Can it possibly last? And there’s an interesting racial story here, too, perfect for the
age of Obama, at whose 2009 inaugural ball Beyoncé channeled Etta James’s glorious “At
Last.” People often Google the question “Is Beyoncé black?” The answer is as complicatedly
simple as race history in America. Beyoncé is what we now call African-American, and like
many African-Americans she is also of mixed—Native American and French—ancestry.
She is a talented, disciplined performer. She’s a wife, a mother, and—at the same time—
an avatar for single women. And, as all of this proves, she’s a superb businesswoman.
What her future holds is an open question. Beyoncé watchers and worshippers specu-
late: Will she add jazz, pop, and rock standards to her repertoire? Will she make good on
her acting talent in the projected remake of A Star Is Born, directed by Bradley Cooper?
We know what we want from her. The most interesting question is: What does she want
from—and for—herself? 

759
THE SHAPE
OF THINGS
Beyoncé in a wool
dress by Stella
McCartney. “She
has an energy,”
the designer says
of her. “When you
watch her, it’s
like fireworks.”
SIREN SONG
Giving good
silhouette in an
Atelier Versace
embroidered tulle
dress. In this story:
hair, Kim Kimble;
makeup, Francesca
Tolot. Set design,
Jack Flanagan.
Produced by Erick
Jussen for GE
Projects. Details,
see In This Issue.
Ma k i n g
He r
Case
She waited a grueling 166 days to be
confirmed, but Loretta Lynch’s tenure as
attorney general is off to a dramatic start.
Emily Bazelon reports.
Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

I
t’s late on a July afternoon in Durham, North
Carolina, and Loretta Lynch, the country’s new
attorney general, is trying to warm up a room of
stony-faced police officers. This Southern city is
Lynch’s hometown, and she’s spent the day hav-
ing lunch with her parents, who live nearby in
a modest brick house, and indulging in a bit of
local-girl-made-good celebration. She attend-
ed a roundtable with community leaders who
squeezed her shoulders and hugged her, and
posed for pictures with local reporters. This encounter, with
rows of seated police officers, is a little different. “I promise
not to take too much of your time,” she says, flanked by an
American flag, wearing a navy sheath with matching blazer
and navy slingbacks, which boost her height, of barely five
feet, by a couple of inches. “Just because I’m the daughter of
a Baptist minister doesn’t mean I’ll go on long.”
That wins her a few smiles. But when she asks for ques-
tions, the room turns silent. The fact is Lynch carries some
baggage when it comes to police. Some is inherited—Lynch’s
predecessor Eric Holder came down hard on law enforcement
in Cleveland and in Ferguson, Missouri—and some she’s ac-
quired on her own by opening an inquiry into the Baltimore
Police Department following the death of Freddie Gray.
The atmosphere in the room is wary, and it’s Lynch who
has to break the silence. “OK, let me ask you a few ques-
tions,” she says, looking an officer seated before her in the
eye. “How long have you been a police officer? Why did you
want this job?” For a couple of beats, it’s not clear whether
he’ll answer. Lynch holds the cop’s gaze, and it’s the quality
of her attention, its patience and respect, that seems to move
him to speak. “My father and brother were officers,” he says,
“so you could say it’s the family business.” As she directs the
conversation around the room, the police talk with increasing
candor. A young black woman says she became a cop five

762
 THE HAND
OF JUSTICE
The country’s
first female
African-American
attorney general,
photographed in
her hometown
of Durham,
North Carolina.
Produced by
Kevin Cullen.
Sittings Editor:
Mark Guiducci.
 years ago “because I saw my family treated unfairly, and I
wanted to be on the front lines in making change.” An older
white man tells Lynch that when he was a boy of eleven, “my
stepfather beat my mother to a pulp, and a police officer ar-
rested him.” A fourth officer describes fleeing Cyprus at the
age of four and resolving that one day, “I would protect my
family and my society.” Lynch listens patiently, and by the
end it’s obvious she has made an impression. Several heads
nod as she says in closing: “The lines that divide the police
and the community can be so artificial.”
“I wonder if they’d heard one another’s stories before,” she
says to me that evening, as we fly back to Washington, D.C.,
in a government plane (call it Air Force Four). She and her
husband of eight years, Stephen Hargrove, formerly an on-
air technician for the Showtime network, who affably came
along for the trip, have been recounting the day. (When I
introduced myself to Hargrove at the police event, he gave me
THE TIES THAT BIND
“My foundation from my family,” says Lynch, pictured here with her parents, Lorenzo
and Lorine Lynch, “was watching my father never back down from a fight locally.”
a courteous handshake and then won himself good-husband
points, in my book, by turning his attention to Lynch as she
began speaking.) The couple is drinking pink lemonade,
and Lynch is still wearing her suit jacket and slingbacks. The
encounter with the Durham police is clearly on her mind.
Lynch spoke earlier about training officers on the effects of
unconscious racial bias, and we muse for a moment about
whether absorbing other cops’ personal narratives, on a
racially diverse force, might be a place to start.
In one sense, it’s a miracle that Lynch is on this plane at
all. After President Obama selected her last November, she
waited more than five months to be confirmed, longer than
the seven previous nominees for the job combined. Lynch’s
record was never the problem: At 56, she’d done two stints
as U.S. attorney in Brooklyn for New York’s Eastern Dis-
trict, where she was well liked and oversaw major terrorism,
764
Mafia, and public-corruption prosecutions. Republicans
approved of the fact that she had no personal ties to the
president—and yet Lynch found herself in Washington’s
version of purgatory, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell held up her nomination in an effort to wring
concessions from Democrats on immigration and abortion.
By the time she finally won the Senate’s approval in April by
a vote of 56 to 43, less than two years remained in Obama’s
presidency. Though it’s possible she could stay on (what do
you think, Hillary Clinton?), Lynch has to assume that her
clock is ticking along with the president’s.
That means the time is now to ask how she will make an
impact. The only moment she bristles in talking to me, just a
bit, is when I ask how she can avoid a caretaker role. “The is-
sues are too large and too immediate,” Lynch says firmly. This
is the next day, in her Washington office—which she’s still in
the process of decorating, with a portrait of herself and her
mother and a small collection of art: an engraved
elephant statuette from a trip to Israel and a pair of
bronze cats from Benin. Referring to the nation’s
many enemies, she says, “They don’t have a calendar
that says, ‘In eighteen months we’re done seeking to
rain terror on the United States. In eighteen months
we’re done trying to defraud America or crack their
cyber codes.’ ”
In fact, Lynch’s term is already off to a dra-
matic start. She dominated the news at the end of
May by accusing top officials in the international
soccer organization, FIFA, of rank corruption.
Announcing the 47-count indictment, Lynch
looked unflappable—even as if she was having a
good time—and the confidence and the sweep of
her presentation made her a worldwide phenom-
enon. She may be the Obama official most likely
to be confused with a country singer, but she is
also now “FIFA hunter,” as a German headline
put it. At the finals of the Women’s World Cup, a
LY NC H FA M I LY: S ET DES I G N , M A RY H OWA RD. LYNC H A N D O BA MA : P E TE M A ROV I CH - POOL/ © GETTY IMAGES.
three-foot cutout of Lynch’s head bobbed in the
stands. “This cutout was a rock star,” the fan who
made the image told NPR. “Everyone wanted a
picture with it.”
Winning over soccer fans is easy. Lynch’s effort
to charm the officers in Durham suggests the true
test she’s facing: how to improve police-community
relationships. On that front, Lynch appears to be
sounding a significantly different note from that
of Holder, who often spoke with heat—more so than the
president—about inequality in the criminal-justice system.
Civil rights leaders cheered Holder, but he became a lightning
rod for conservatives: Republicans in the House voted him in
contempt of Congress in 2012.
Republican expectations for change are high. “Fresh lead-
ership was really needed at the Department of Justice,” says
Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of ten GOP members
who supported Lynch’s nomination. Taking a swing at Hold-
er, she adds, “Attorney General Lynch has the background
as a career prosecutor, and as someone who was not chosen
because she is part of the president’s inner circle, to rebuild
relationships across the aisle.”
Obama’s “inner circle” sees the dynamic differently. “What
the Republicans did to Eric Holder was totally unjustified,”
says Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s longtime senior adviser and
confidante. But she too thinks Lynch has an opportunity. black valedictorian—but again, kept the truth from their
“Loretta has a stellar reputation for working with everyone,” daughter. “As a preacher, I had seen some black people who
Jarrett says, calling Lynch (perhaps less helpfully, given the were mad,” Reverend Lynch explains. “And once you get

L
ways of Washington) “one of my favorite people.” angry, you don’t think as well, and you don’t study as well
or grow as fast.”
oretta Lynch can trace her ancestry back More difficult for her parents was Lynch’s push to go to
at least five generations in North Carolina, Harvard instead of the University of North Carolina, where
and her family history bears the hallmarks she was offered a full scholarship. “As a pastor of a church,
of African-American struggle and resis- I was on a very limited salary, so I said, ‘My gracious!’ ”
tance. Lynch’s great-great-grandfather, her father remembers. Lynch says she was determined to
a free black man, fell in love with a slave broaden her horizons: “Quite frankly, I needed to build my
and reentered bondage to marry her. He own world.” She asked to live with freshmen from various
was first in a long family line of Baptist parts of the country and drew support from a core of black
ministers. Her grandfather, a sharecropper, opened his church classmates. “We could really just hang out, as small-town
to hide black men wanted by the law. “They didn’t think they girls coming to the big time,” says her classmate Dana Scott
would get a fair deal in court,” says Lynch’s father, the Rev- Saulsberry, now a school administrator in St. Louis, who
erend Lorenzo Lynch. “Loretta grew up hearing that story, remains a close friend. She and Lynch sang in the college gos-
and I know it stuck in her mind.”
When Lynch and her two brothers were young,
in the 1960s, their father held civil-rights meetings
at home. He also ran (unsuccessfully) for mayor
of Durham against a white candidate in 1973 on a
platform of government reform. “My foundation
from my family,” Lynch tells me, “was watching my
father never back down from a fight locally. My dad
felt that there should be an opposition candidate,
that if he had that view and he really believed it, he
should live up to it, which is how I came home from
school one day to see the headline that my dad was
running for mayor.”
Lynch and her brothers also watched their par-
ents earn graduate degrees. “Their emphasis was
that we live in a society with racism, that is clear, but
your job is to better yourself,” said Leonzo Lynch,
53, the attorney general’s brother and the fifth min-
ister in the family. “You got an education, you did
your best, and that would lift you above society’s
view of your color.” One summer, because the fam-
ily owned only one car, her mother relocated to
Greensboro, North Carolina, for several weeks, to
finish the coursework for a master’s degree in library
studies. Lynch remembers complaining about her
father’s cooking. “We would come down for break- POWER OF ATTORNEY
fast, and there would be chicken and string beans. President Obama meets with Lynch in the Oval Office in April—
You know, you’re kids. So you’re like, ‘Why are we days after the Senate finally confirmed her by a vote of 56 to 43.
eating this? What’s going on?’ ” she says. “But we all
knew that our mother was doing something that she really pel choir (the attorney general was a first alto) and were two
wanted, and it was important to her.” of the founding eleven members of the Cambridge chapter
In the end, Lynch learned a lesson from her mother of the black sorority Delta Sigma Theta.
about defying gender expectations. In the South, she says, Known for its record of public service, Delta counts sev-
“there’s very much a view, sometimes, as to what little girls eral former and current members of Congress among its
should do, or what women should do, and you really do members. The emphasis on leadership was a natural fit for
not have to accept that.” Lynch, say her sorority sisters, who turned out for her confir-
Meanwhile, Lynch’s parents shielded her, as best they mation hearing wearing the group’s signature colors, crimson
could, from racism. In fourth grade, she says, when she per- and cream. “Loretta was a fully formed adult when we were
formed well on a standardized test, her school, refusing to nineteen years old,” says Sharon Malone, a fellow found-
believe the score, asked her to retake it. “My parents never ing member of the Delta chapter who is an obstetrician-
told me why,” says Lynch, who then got a higher score. At gynecologist and the wife of Eric Holder. “The Loretta you
graduation her school decided that she would share the see now, composed and mature and measured—she was
honor of valedictorian with two other students, one white like that 35 years ago.” Lynch’s friends remember a playful
and one black, she says. Her parents learned that this deci- side as well. “She was a cheerleader for the basketball team
sion, too, was based on race—the school didn’t want a single when the cheerleaders didn’t C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 8 2 8

765
 Bella Donna
In her upcoming memoir, design icon Donna Karan
reflects on her early days in fashion, creating her groundbreaking
label—and embarking on her latest chapter.

WOMAN TO WOMAN
Donna Karan with her daughter, Gabby, Vogue, 1996. OPPOSITE: A resplendent Cate Blanchett wears a gold Donna Karan
New York strapless evening dress for the December 2009 cover of Vogue. Photographs by Annie Leibovitz.
 Finding Her Fit in Fashion
A young Donna is hired by Anne Klein—
and winds up in the top job.
The first thing I learned when I took the job as chief assistant
to Anne Klein in 1971 was that she was the boss. Yes, she had
her investors, and her husband and business manager, Chip.
But Anne was as much an entrepreneur as she was a designer.
She controlled every aspect of her company—which clothes
were sold and where, how they were presented—and every-
one reported to her. I admired her strength and appreciated
how much she sweated the details. Nothing was too small for
her to have an opinion about, from the positioning of darts
and buttons on a blouse to the coffee mugs we used in the
showroom. She didn’t miss a trick.
Anne liked to design at night. Often, it would be just her,
me, and a model. She’d go into a zone and fit for hours and
hours, a practice I picked up from watching her. I’d pass her
pins, and she would work painstakingly on the model. Be-
cause of Anne I, too, became a stickler for fit. To me, fitting
is sculpture, a three-dimensional creation on a body.
Where Anne was all about silhouette, I was passionate
for fabric—and she let me shop in Europe. When it came to
inspiration, she’d say, “God gave you two eyes; use them!” In
many ways she was like her predecessor Claire McCardell,
another great American fashion icon. Neither could separate
being a woman from the clothes they designed. Clothes can
and should be beautiful, but they only work if you want to
wear them in your everyday life.
“Donna, I plan to travel for a while,” Anne said one day in
the late spring of 1972. “I need you to do holiday on your
own.” With Anne away, I felt free, and my mind raced with
design ideas. My collection was couture in feeling, with
every piece artisanal and special. I used my favorite col-
ors—black, white, red, and vicuña—and incorporated lots
of embroidery and leather. That collection foreshadowed
my future. The truth was Anne hadn’t been traveling that
summer; she had breast cancer.
Right around this time, my husband Mark and I learned
that I was pregnant. I couldn’t have been happier. I was go-
ing to be a mother—the thing I wanted more than anything.
I fully intended to be a stay-at-home mom. Because Anne
wasn’t well, I worked even longer hours than usual, heading
home at midnight or later. I wanted to prepare as much as
possible for my maternity leave.
While I was in labor on Long Island, Anne was at Mount
Sinai in Manhattan with pneumonia—and no one was at
work. Our pre-fall collection was due that very week. We
spoke on the phone hospital to hospital, discussed how many
buttons should be on a double-breasted navy cashmere coat.
Gabby, all of ten pounds, had no sooner popped out than
our investor Gunther Oppenheim called my hospital room
in that deep German voice of his: “Donna, ve need you to
come back to vork.”
“Would you like to know if I had a boy or a girl?” I asked.
“It’s a girl.”
I checked with my doctor, who forbade me to go back to
work so soon.
When I told Gunther, he said, “OK, ve come to you,”
and less than a week later the whole staff arrived at the new
768
house Mark and I had moved to in Lawrence, Long Island.
I had the bagels and lox all spread out. I assumed they were
coming to coo over Gabby and maybe bring flowers and a
casserole. Then I saw the trucks arrive, the racks of clothes
being wheeled up my driveway. This was business.
We cleared out my dining room so we could use it as a
design studio. Betty Hanson, our head of sales, walked in and
immediately answered the phone in the kitchen.
“Um, OK. Yes,” I heard her say. Her face fell. She hung
up and looked all around, clearly unsure of what to say. She
came closer. “Anne died.”
The shock hit me, and I started shaking and couldn’t stop.
Anne died? How could that be? She was only 51. She was going
to be fine. At least I thought she was. Betty knelt by my side.
“Donna, listen,” she said in a soothing voice. “This is
terrible, but you need to finish the collection. The stores are
waiting. Anne would have wanted you to.”
Then it dawned on me. Everyone knew. They knew all
along that Anne was dying. And no one told me. I never
got to say goodbye to her. She was my teacher, my mentor,
my everything. I was 25 years old, had just given birth, and
Anne was dead.
A whirlwind. A 24/7 storm of madness. Those are the only
ways I can describe the chaotic days and weeks that followed.
All my dreams of being a stay-at-home mom had gone out
the window. I had to deliver the pre-fall collection, then face
the big one—fall—set to show in May 1974.
I didn’t channel Anne in any way while designing that
collection; I was still too numb for that. But I did call upon
every lesson she taught me. I designed for flexibility, creating
mix-and-match sportswear a woman could wear multiple
ways. I knew I had to put my own stamp on this collection, so
I made it a little hipper, a little cooler. I wanted the collection
to feel young and sexy.
On the day of the show, all my usual insecurities washed
over me. Who was I to take on Anne’s legacy? Would every-
one laugh at me for even trying? During the presentation in
our showroom, I frantically fussed over each model before
I let her walk out from behind the curtain, and I held my
breath until I sent out the last girl. My work was done. I felt
naked, exposed, and horribly vulnerable.
Then, out of the darkness, over the music, I could hear the
start of applause, and it grew and grew. The reaction was im-
mediate and overwhelming. Someone handed me a bouquet
of white roses. When I stepped out onto the runway for my
bow, people stood. Blinded by the lights and the emotion, I
trembled and tried not to fall over. The collection was a hit.
Birth, death. Death, birth. The same year I married my sec-
ond husband, the sculptor Stephan Weiss—in 1983—my con-
tract with Anne Klein & Co. came up for renewal. I saw this
as an opportunity to redefine my future. Creatively, I wanted
to design a small collection of clothes for me and my friends;
I was tired of designing for other people. I wanted to explore
what I wanted to wear, which was basically a Danskin leotard
with a large scarf wrapped around my hips—the same way I
dressed in high school! I also wanted fluid, flexible clothes to
take me through my nonstop days, especially when I was on
the road. Like every urban working woman I knew, I went
straight from the office to dinner. Last, and this was huge, I
wanted clothes that made me feel sleek and sophisticated. At
the same time, I didn’t want to give up my professional success
 and security. Couldn’t I have a little collection under the Anne
Klein umbrella, a place to pour out my creative juices? I took
the idea to my bosses.
The answer was an unequivocal no. They wanted my full
attention on Anne Klein. They were protecting their brand;
I understood. But I hated hearing the word no. My law-
yer, Charles Ballon, who had been Anne’s personal law-
yer as well, said, “Stay or go, Donna. They need you to
make a decision.” Several months later, when we were in
the midst of preparing our spring 1985 show, the phone
rang. “Donna, Mr. Taki and Mr. Mori would like to see
you right away.” This wasn’t a request; it was an order.
“Donna, you’re fired,” Mr. Taki said, staring right at me.
“Excuse me?” I was sure I had misheard.
“This back-and-forth has gone on too long,” added Mr.
Mori. “We’ve made the decision for you. We’re not renewing
your contract. It’s clear your soul isn’t here anymore.”
Before I could fully digest what was happening, he contin-
ued, “We believe in you, Donna. Which is why we would be
happy to support you in your own company”—and that’s
what they ultimately did.
Stunned, I stumbled back to the design room. I called
Stephan to come and pick me up, then gathered my things
and headed to the elevator. I was blank with shock.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY GORMAN STUDIO. 1993: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ.
“Donna, I’m just not seeing the bad side. This is great
news,” Stephan said later that night after dinner. “It’s every-
thing you’ve dreamed about.” I loved Stephan’s fearlessness,
but I was terrified. I didn’t know the first thing about running
a company.
2007: CRAIG MCDEAN. 1995: STEVEN MEISEL.
“Put the business equation out of your mind,” Stephan
said. “You have me. I’m your partner. I’ll protect you. You
just need to design.”
“Stephan, I love you, but you’re not exactly a business-
man,” I said. “You’re an artist. You need to spend more time
in the studio, not less.”
“Business is creative, Donna. This will be my art for a
while. We’ll start it right here,” he said, hitting the table. “We
can do this; I just know it.”
“What if we can’t?” I whispered.
“Then we fail,” he said, smiling with that ever-present
twinkle in his eyes. “Never be afraid to fail. That is the first
step to succeeding.”
At that moment, at our dining table, the Donna Karan
Company was born.
I’ll Take Manhattan
Karan launches her namesake brand—and
revolutionizes the way women dress.
New husband. New company. New job. All in New York, a
place where ten million things happen at once. At 36 years
old, I was a wife, a mother, and a designer starting over.
For me, the best part about being busy is that I don’t have
time to think. I just do. And there was so much to do. First I
had to secure the right people, because you’re only as good
as the team behind you. Next I had to find a space and set
up a design room. Then I had to create a sample room from
URBAN CHIC, REAL-LIFE GLAMOUR
FROM LEFT: A Donna Karan Couture gown, Vogue, 2007;
Karan’s strong, versatile collection in Vogue, 1995; the
designer with her late husband, Stephan Weiss, 1993.
scratch, hire fitting models, recruit salespeople, and hire
merchandising and production teams. Budget everything
and plan a timeline, a marketing strategy, a retail rollout.
Gather supplies—design, office, backroom. Develop a brand
strategy—we didn’t even have a company name.
The obvious thing was to put my name on the label,
but it didn’t seem like enough. When you’ve been design-
ing under another name for so long, you feel protected.
It’s not you out there; it’s your job. One day I saw one of
the shoeboxes stacked in our studio’s black kitchen for
our upcoming show. maud frizon paris london, it said.
Suddenly, it hit me. “Hey, what about Donna Karan New
York?” I said it aloud. “Donna Karan New York.” That
sounded bigger than me. C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 8 2 8
769
 CHARM
OFFENSIVE
“I describe his
style as ‘sneaky,’ ”
says his friend and
fellow comedian
Neal Brennan.
“It’s polite, but it’s
a bit of a Trojan
horse, in that it’s
more cutting than
his accent and his
dimples would
have you believe.”
Noah in Burberry
London. Details,
see In This Issue.
Sittings Editor:
Phyllis Posnick.

uring the minutes before a
show at the Comedy Cellar, the narrow sidewalk outside fills
with passersby—slowly at first, then all at once, like ducks
around a spray of bread crumbs. A huddle of men near the
curb roils with laughter. A gangly busker circulates, telling
bad jokes. Suddenly, an S.U.V. docks on the opposite side of
MacDougal Street, and another comedygoer—a little late,
as usual—bounds out. Wearing brown khakis and a navy
zip-up hoodie trimmed with yellow, he is tall and built like a
J.V. athlete, with close-cropped hair and a dimpled, good-boy
grin. This is Trevor Noah, who, at 31, will soon take the reins
of The Daily Show, which Jon Stewart has led to national
glory over the past sixteen years.
“Great to see you, man,” the bouncer says to Noah. They
briskly embrace. A female friend accompanies Noah, and
together they clatter downstairs and squeeze into a booth,
close to the stage. It’s nearly midnight, and the M.C. gets
down to business. “Give it up for Ryan Hamilton!” he calls.
Noah applauds loudly from his seat. “He’s one of my favor-
ites,” he says. “Very smart.”
Hamilton, a rising Mormon comic, fences with the notion
that people who make it in New York can make it anywhere.
“Maybe New York City is the easiest place to make it,” he
says. “You pop out of the subway and go, Oh! The streets
have numbers! I see six delis! I think I’m going to make it!”
Noah gives a whooping laugh, and the comic’s eyes meet his
across the stage. Over the past year or so, Hamilton has scored
gigs on Conan and The Late Late Show, but he performs in
large part in small clubs. Once, Jon Stewart was a rising comic
like this, making hopeful forays onto the Cellar stage. Now it
is Noah, a club star but a screen newcomer, who’s snagged the
job that hundreds of comedians would give anything to win.
Since being selected, in March, to take the helm of what
in many ways is Comedy Central’s flagship show—and the
ALL
IN
THE
TIMING
As Jon Stewart steps
down from The Daily Show,
Nathan Heller catches up
with his heir apparent, the
young South African comic
Trevor Noah. Photographed
by Patrick Demarchelier.
most politically influential comedy program on TV—Noah
has been an object of both fascination and perplexity. His se-
lection was instantly controversial. He’s green, for one thing:
Noah will be the youngest comic anchor in an evening slot.
And although he’s been billed as the most famous comedian
in South Africa, where he grew up and until recently lived,
he remains unknown to most Americans. In his 2013 com-
edy special African American, which made its U.S. debut on
Netflix and other streaming media, Noah poked fun at this
country’s caricaturish conception of “Africa.” “Have you
seen those commercials? Those UNICEF ads?” he asked.
“You just see this horrible village, dirty; these old, rusting
buildings; these sad black people. And I’m looking, and I’m
like, Ew, where’s that—Cleveland?”
At Comedy Central, Noah’s internationalism was seen
as an asset: One of Jon Stewart’s signatures has been close,
critical attention to a world beyond the 50 states, and Noah, a
student of America but not a product of its thought, seemed a
fit. “He brings a really wide perspective,” says Michele Gane-
less, Comedy Central’s president. “We want a show that’s
multiplatform—how will it feel a little more contemporary,
a little more reflective of the news as it arrives now?” As a
millennial, Noah comes with a strong social-media presence;
he promises a new point of view at a moment when the Old
Guard is moving on. (Stewart’s partner-in-crime Stephen Col-
bert takes over Letterman’s recently vacated seat this month.)
“If you think about it like a classic car, a Mercedes in 1970
looks very different from a Mercedes in 2015,” Ganeless says.
“I describe his style as ‘sneaky.’ It seems polite—it is
polite—but it’s a bit of a Trojan horse, in that it’s more cut-
ting than his accent and his dimples would have you believe,”
Neal Brennan, an Emmy-nominated comedian, writer, and
director who’s become a close creative confidant of Noah’s,
says. When they first met, Brennan warned him that it was
771
hard for a foreign comic to succeed in the U.S.: Many British
comedians had achieved some success, but none had really
become household names. “Then John Oliver basically did
it, and now people are more open.” (James Corden’s recent
popularity probably hasn’t hurt, either.)
Back at the Cellar, a progression of young comics passes
Noah, many reaching out their hands for a quiet greeting.
When Joe List, in a depressive drawl, complains about a
vigorous sexual maneuver (“It was like she was riding a bike
with a flat tire”), Noah catapults forward, doubled over.
After recovering, he disappears into the hallway.
The M.C. takes the stage again. “Give it up for the one and
only Trevor Noah!” he shouts.
Heads turn in surprise. Noah decided to go on only min-
utes earlier. Now he strides onto the stage and opens with
some observational humor. He lampoons New York subway
etiquette—“If they look at you, you have to look away.”
Noah’s style at the microphone is warm and even-keeled. He
turns to L.A., and larger concerns.
The last time he was in California, Noah says, he was
pulled over by a cop while driving. “I’m very scared of
police right now in America, because I don’t want to die,”
he deadpans. As a foreigner, he says, he’s terrified of inadver-
tently doing the thing that gets unarmed black men shot for
no reason. As the laughter mounts, Noah describes rolling
down the window and flopping his whole torso out it, arms
dangling down like a rag doll. When the officer asked him
if he knew why he’d been stopped, he said, “Is it because
I’m black?”
The Cellar audience cracks up, won over by the bemused-
foreigner act and the effortlessness with which he sidled up
to the most charged issue in American domestic politics. Just
as quickly as Noah started, he stops. “Thanks for having
me!” he says. There is a huge cheer.
“Another dream of mine: One day, I’ll be on The Daily
Show,” the M.C. says, reclaiming the stage. “You can say it
to the universe. Can you say it to a microphone when the
new host is listening?”
A
Noah, however, has already left the room.
nother night, nearby, Noah gets din-
ner at a Sullivan Street sushi joint
in the Village. The place is filled
with N.Y.U. kids, sake-bombing in
the early spring. Here, the waiters
know his favorites: salmon sashimi,
rainbow naruto, crab spider rolls.
In July, Noah moved into an apart-
ment, on the West Side, and although The Daily Show
brings a more demanding schedule, he’s experienced the
change as a settling-down. For the first time since he began
to tour, half a decade ago, Noah no longer has to pick his
clothes based on what can stay wrinkle-free in a suitcase.
(He likes Tiger of Sweden, though in a pinch a Hugo Boss
suit fits him off the rack.) He’s been putting himself through
something of a crash course in contemporary American
social thought; books on his nightstand over the summer
included Mating in Captivity, SuperFreakonomics, Outliers,
and a biography of JFK. His first taste of the pressure of
his new position came within days of its announcement:
Reporters combed through six years of Noah’s Twitter posts
and discovered some unsettling jokes.
772
“South Africans know how to recycle like Israel knows
how to be peaceful,” he complained in 2010. Last year he
retweeted the statement “When a woman is loved correctly,
she becomes ten times the woman she was before” and added
the comment “So she gets fat?” Some Daily Show diehards
found these tweets offensive, and Comedy Central issued a
statement in defense of Noah’s comic judgment.
“I realized, when people don’t know you and you’re now
going to be a part of their lives,” Noah says, “they try to form
a picture, taking whatever little information they have.” Since
joining Twitter in 2009, he has posted some 9,000 tweets. “I
always say to people, ‘Do you think my two million followers
would not have called me into order had I been sexist or racist
or anything-ist along the way?’ ”
Noah is accustomed to trying to explain who he is, begin-
ning with his upbringing. When he was born, in 1984, in
Johannesburg, South Africa was deep in the social prison
of apartheid. The constraints of legal segregation touched
him personally: His mother is both Xhosa and Jewish, and
his father is Swiss. (The Swiss, he likes to joke onstage, love
chocolate.) Their relationship was illegal, and, technically,
so was his existence. “I was born a crime,” he says in African
American. If police appeared when he was out walking with
his parents, his father would cross to the opposite side of the
street and his mother would drop his hand. (“I felt like a bag
of weed,” he jokes.) He saw his father only sometimes, on
weekends; during the week, he lived with his mother’s family
in Soweto, the city’s infamous black slum, sharing a shack
with multiple cousins.
Then 1994 arrived, the year when Nelson Mandela led his
country past apartheid. “I knew it was life-changing. I didn’t
know why,” Noah says. “When you’re ten years old, you don’t
know that you’re not able to sit on a bench reserved for white
people. I was at an age where the only authority in my life
was my mom. That was my battle—how to get her off my
back.” Yet the changes in the way he lived became clear when
the family moved out of Soweto, into a lovely new suburban
house. “I was twelve years old,” Noah says, “and this was the
first time I wasn’t sleeping in a room with five of my cousins
and peeing into a bucket at night.”
Noah had always been known as a funny kid, the clown
in the schoolyard. But until his teens he’d never thought of it
as a serious pursuit. “It was literally a friend who said to me,
‘You need to get onstage and make these jokes.’ I was like,
‘That makes no sense. I tell you the jokes.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but
you need to tell them to everyone.’ ” Noah shakes his head.
“I didn’t understand that.”
Noah gave his first stand-up performance during the week-
ly comedy hour in a Johannesburg jazz club. As he tells it, he
walked onstage, and everything changed. “I didn’t know what
I was going to say, or how to say it. I knew nothing about
structure, punch lines, pull-backs—none of the mechanics.
All I knew is, as soon as I started talking I was home,” he says.
Even comic masters describe years of failure, working
toward their first, precious laughs. Noah’s early success—by
the age of 20, he was hosting a popular TV program for
kids, and by 25, he was selling out theaters and hosting the
SAFTAs (South Africa’s version of the BAFTAs), though
he briefly drove a cab between—earned him a reputation
for overconfidence. “The arrogance that this man shows
is ridiculous,” Mel Miller, an older South African comic,
says in You Laugh but It’s True, a 2011 documentary about
South African comedy, by David Paul Meyer, that centers
on Noah’s preparations for his first one-man show. In the
U.S., Noah observes, “modesty is not something you’re
often afforded. You have to believe you’re the best in order
for anyone to notice you. Whereas in South Africa, you have
the luxury of having others telling you how good you are.”
Meyer had come to South Africa in 2008 with vague ideas
about documenting how the country’s struggles were reflected
in its humor, and when he happened into one of Noah’s early
club performances, he was blown away. “That being said,
I was still shocked when Trevor got the Daily Show job. I
figured he would become president of South Africa first.”
In 2009, Meyer, who went on to film Noah’s comedy
specials, also persuaded him to try his hand at an American
tour. “He has a gift in that he can explain foreign concepts
to an unknowing audience and simultaneously make them
laugh,” Meyer says. Noah went to a few clubs in L.A. and
found that people there laughed, too. “Over time, you start
to realize a lot of the challenges we face
are so similar,” Noah says. “South Af-
rica and America are both struggling “I’m a quarterback,”
with race and race relations and how to
address the injustices of the past. We’re
he says of joining
still trying to find ways to establish
equality between men and women—in
the Daily Show team.
terms of the pay gaps and how society “I don’t need to score
perceives us. There are conversations
I have in America where I go, ‘This is the touchdown. I just
exactly like being back home.’ ”
Noah toured 40 states in 2011: He need to spot the pass”
wanted, he said, to learn America. In
African American, he speaks about his admiration for Ameri-
can black culture—“the coolest black in the world”—and his
efforts to blend in. (On landing in New York, he says, he was
immediately mistaken for a Puerto Rican.) Noah can imitate
his Xhosa mother, white South Africans, Valley girls, and the
English of the American inner city. In African American, he
even speaks, persuasively, in Japanese.
Like much American television, The Daily Show airs in
South Africa with a one-day delay, and Noah, “a nighttime
person” by habit, began to watch it in 2009, at the sugges-
tion of Meyer, an early fan. (Meyer has just joined The Daily
Show as a field producer.) A few years later, while on tour
in the U.K., Noah got a call from Jon Stewart. “He starts
up with truly the most modest introduction: ‘I don’t know
if you’ve heard of me. I do a little show called The Daily
Show,’ ” Noah recalls. “I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m a huge fan.’ And
he said, ‘Yes, and you should be. It’s one of the best shows
on TV!’ ” Stewart asked whether he might be interested in
performing a segment. Noah, on tour, couldn’t do it. “It’s like
your dream girl comes along, but you’re happy in a relation-
ship,” he says. “I just had to take it as a compliment and say,
‘Maybe in another life.’ ”
Stewart invited Noah to come to the studio when he was
next in New York. “It’s akin to Willy Wonka and the Choco-
late Factory,” Noah says. “I remember thinking, I could nev-
er do this. And Jon said, ‘Well, one step at a time.’ ” Months
later, Noah did a quick segment. “I was hooked,” he says.
Since then, Noah, who had a long relationship end around
the time he got the Daily Show offer, has turned his focus seri-
ously toward his craft. “I’ve never been afraid to fall in love,
nor impatient to find it,” he says. “Right now, the love of my
life, and the most demanding woman I’ve ever been with, is
comedy. She’s never fully mine. I think I know her, but there
are moments when I realize I still have a lot to learn.”
His work has kept him company during his years away
from home—and during returns under sometimes-trying cir-
cumstances. When Noah was a teenager, his mother married a
man, the father of Noah’s two younger half-brothers. Slowly,
the relationship became abusive. “I had never seen anything
like that. I’d always thought of women as the stronger and
more powerful sex, because that’s what I grew up with.” Fi-
nally, his mother left her husband and found a house of her
own; but in 2009, while she was returning from church, her
ex-husband appeared out of nowhere and shot her twice, in
the head and the pelvis. “I guess with adrenaline, she managed
to run and get into the car. My brother jumped in, and he
drove her to the hospital,” Noah recalls. “I was literally bawl-
ing. She wakes up from a coma, and she says, ‘Oh, please, stop
crying.’ And I say, ‘How can I not cry?
I almost lost you.’ And she says, ‘Yes,
but you must always look on the bright
side. . . . At least now, you’re officially
the best-looking person in the family.’ ”
His family has kept a wry perspective
on his international success. “I think my
grandmother would be as happy if it
was the principal of my school calling
to say I’d gotten good marks,” Noah
says. Neither of his parents has ever
seen him perform; the one time Noah
invited his mother to watch him on-
stage, she declined. “She said, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘I
tell jokes.’ ‘Don’t you tell jokes at home?’ ‘I do!’ ‘Well, so why
would I go out to get what I can get at home?’ ”
For Noah, though, The Daily Show is more than an exten-
sion of the dinner table—it’s a different and vertiginous kind
of stage. Recently, he says, he asked Stewart, “ ‘Do you even
think I can do this?’ And he said, ‘They wouldn’t have asked
you if I didn’t say, “I believe in this guy.” You are my guy.’ ”
When Stewart got his first show, he pointed out to Noah, he
was a 30-year-old comedian on the road. Today, Noah, who
grew up on soccer but has since become an avid basketball
fan, uses a sports analogy to talk about the change: You
don’t hire a rookie to replace the team’s M.V.P. You’re hoping
that the rookie, in time, grows into a valuable player himself.
While Noah says that the show’s voice will be his own, he
plans to reinstate a stable of roving reporters, as in Stewart’s
early days, and to keep existing writers. “I’m a quarterback,”
he says. “I don’t need to score the touchdown. I just need to
spot the pass.”
Politically, Noah says, he and Stewart are cut from the
same cloth: “We will come to the same conclusions, but the
formula to get there will be completely different. Jon said
it the other day. He said, ‘I’m just tired. I’m angry, and I’m
tired. I’m tired that there hasn’t been change.’ ” Noah is still
young and fresh and eager to rise.
“There’s a fantastic moment where, when you’re with Jon
in the chair, you look into his eyes, and he’s just a performer,”
Noah says. “It’s you and it’s him. You’re both comedians.
He doesn’t have seventeen years on you. He’s not the host
of a show. He’s just Jon, and you’re just Trevor. And you go,
‘Let’s do this.’ ” 
773
Lake
Effect For Cindy
Crawford and
family an island
getaway in
central Ontario is
dressed-down,
off-the-radar
bliss. Rob Haskell
flies in for a
summer weekend.
Photographed by
Carter Smith.

FAR AND AWAY

Crawford with
her two children,
Presley, sixteen,
and Kaia, thirteen.
Presley wears
Orlebar Brown swim
trunks. Cindy wears
an Eres swimsuit.
Kaia wears a
Solid & Striped
swimsuit. Details,
see In This Issue.
Sittings Editor:
Miranda Brooks.
W
hen Cindy Crawford docks
her powerboat at a lake-
side convenience store in
a tiny Canadian village,
grabs a few homemade
cinnamon doughnuts, then
speeds off into a perfect
July afternoon, it’s hard
not to think of the iconic 1991 Pepsi commercial in which
the model emerged from a red Lamborghini to quench her
thirst at a gas-station vending machine.
But in this quiet summer community in central Ontario,
where seven years ago she and her husband, Rande Gerber,
built a house on a granite island blanketed in soft moss and
studded with wild blueberry bushes, Cindy would prefer to
be as underwhelming as her natural gifts allow. For about a
month every summer, she wears no makeup, she makes no
plans, she sits hour after uninterrupted hour on the dock or
takes “granny swims,” as she calls them, with the friends she
sees here but nowhere else, their husbands circling protec-
tively on their paddleboards. “You’re the real you up here,”
she explains as Rande’s Wakesetter carves through the spar-
kling lake. “You never have your game face on, your party
face. When you’re getting dragged behind a boat on an inner
tube, it’s hard to have much of a facade.”
The wind has given her a big eighties blow-out—classic
Cindy, but here the coiffure of every woman who travels by
speedboat. Though time has brought a chiseled refinement
to her features, her face remains one of the most familiar
on the planet. Cindy is, of course, one of the few women for
whom the word supermodel is not overstatement; a darling
of designers and editors, she has also had tremendous ver-
satility, offering proof, long before Gisele Bündchen, that
a clever model can turn herself into a global brand. Sexy
but approachable, Cindy was, and indeed is, the nice girl in
the naughty body, her enormous appeal magnified by the
knowledge that she was also her high school’s valedicto-
rian. Despite a few bumps in the road—a highly publicized
divorce from Richard Gere, a misbegotten entrée into Hol-
lywood in Fair Game—she has made a graceful exit from
fashion’s inner sancta. She does assorted campaigns and
editorial work, she helms a successful furniture line, and
she is a partner in the skin-care line Meaningful Beauty, but
notwithstanding an impressive collection of old Alaïa she
has set aside for her daughter, fashion has receded somewhat
from view. “I have friends who know what the season’s It bag
is going to be months before it comes out,” she says, “and
that was just never me.”
We are in a part of Canada known as cottage country,
for more than a century the weekend colony of moneyed
Torontonians who built clapboard homes on the shoreline
and painted them so dark they all but disappeared into the
pines. It’s a place of stunning beauty and, for a certain kind of
visitor, comforting remoteness; dotted among the Brahmins,
a handful of Hollywood big shots have sought privacy along
these shores. “That anonymity is certainly nice,” Cindy says,
“though these days I’m the perfect amount of famous: enough
to get a dinner reservation but not enough to get hassled.”

O CANADA
“You’re the real you up here,” says Crawford of life
with her family on the lake. Details, see In This Issue.

776
THE SIMPLE LIFE
Dark wood and an
overhead canoe
give the dining
room a traditional
lake-house feel.
 ON THE
WATERFRONT
The uniform
at the lake is
casual. “I have a
swimsuit on no
matter what,”
she says. Details,
see In This Issue.
 Cindy and Rande, a successful entertainment entrepre- had his boating license since age nine); there is cliff diving
neur, have no particular reason to be here, except that they nearby, bass fishing, logrolling, and wake surfing. When
fell for the place thirteen years ago when friends invited them they’re bored with straight-up waterskiing, the kids will tow
for a week. Despite living in Malibu the rest of the year, they their friends on trash-can lids. At sunset, the family piles into
are lake people at their core: Rande spent his boyhood sum- a boat with drinks and snacks; perhaps they’ll see friends on
mers at sleepaway camp in New Hampshire, while Cindy a dock somewhere and pull up for an hour. Back at home,
waxes nostalgic about the cabin her family used to rent in a there is shuffleboard in the screened-in porch, and Cindy and
mosquito-plagued corner of Minnesota. Up here, residents Kaia have a puzzle going. Rande is in charge of the playlist; a
are called cottagers. “I like to think that we’re especially hard- near-constant mix of classic rock, from Crosby, Stills, Nash
core,” says Cindy, “because we’re island cottagers. There’s no & Young to Pearl Jam, pipes out of invisible speakers. (Kaia:
getting into the car and going to the movies when it rains.” “I’ve been listening to those songs my entire life.”)
The seven-acre plot, when the Gerbers bought it, con- The community’s prevailing social ritual is the “dock-
tained a dilapidated fishing cabin with linoleum floors. tail” party, as lakeside soirees are called. “There’s a golf
“The Old Guard doesn’t touch their houses,” Rande says. club that we’re not members of,” Cindy says, “and if there
The Gerbers studied the local are Old Guard ladies having
vernacular of shingled, two- tea somewhere, I haven’t been
story boathouses and rustic invited.” The uniform is in-
hunting lodges and settled on variably casual: swimsuits and
a discreet log cabin with dark cover-ups. Sometimes the kids
timber interiors. Alfredo Pare- chuckle when Cindy comes out
des, a Ralph Lauren executive of the house in nothing but her
and good friend, helped with bikini, Muk Luks, and garden-
the decorating. “Every house ing gloves to pull thistles from
here is a Ralph Lauren ad al- the badminton lawn—a Bruce
ready,” Cindy remarks. Weber shoot come to life.
The couple, who have now Last summer, Cindy spent
designed seven houses togeth- much of her time here writ-
er, from the Upper East Side to ing a book, which debuts
Cabo San Lucas, think about this month. Called Becoming
their living spaces differently. (Rizzoli), it marries 150 of her
“Rande pictures every place modeling images with some 50
filled with people socializing,” short essays on topics such as
Cindy explains, “and I’m al- posing nude, grappling with
ways saying, ‘But what about the arrival of digital photog-
when no one is here? Then raphy, and aging. “I’m turning
where are we sitting?’ ” Here 50 next year,” she says, “and
they agreed on a warmly ap- at this point I feel I’ve learned
pointed chalet with brass lan- a few lessons worth sharing.”
terns, miniature canoes, and In one fascinating essay, she
dream catchers made by the discusses the feeling of fraud-
local Ojibwa tribe. The seat of ulence that often dogged her
an old leather club chair is up- LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER early on. “There’s that ‘Emper-
holstered in a Pendleton blan- Crawford, wearing a Rag & Bone/Jean T-shirt, or’s New Clothes’ thing,” she
ket, and a credenza from a bar with Kaia, in a Whit dress. explains. “I remember finding
Rande once owned in Aspen myself sitting next to Valentino
stands beside a lounger from a former house of Cindy’s in at dinner, or spilling a glass of wine on Julian Schnabel’s
DeKalb, Illinois, the town where she grew up. Tacked onto white suit in Paris, and I’d think, When are they going to
a bulletin board is a thank-you note from friends across the figure out that I’m just Cindy from DeKalb?”
lake inscribed on a curling piece of birch bark—the custom- And she explores the subject of her own iconicity with a
ary local stationery. sometimes poignant candor. “There are days—not up here,
Months before their annual trip, really as soon as spring thankfully—when I feel I need to deliver that Cindy Crawford
break begins to wind down, the family starts thinking about thing,” she says. “But I’ve gained so much confidence with
the wild blueberries, the doughnuts, a nutty cheese called age. That’s something I never felt early on, even if my gen-
Niagara Gold, and the poutine at a greasy spoon near the eration of models was paid to radiate it—the shoulder pads,
marina. Presley, sixteen, and Kaia, thirteen, fling themselves glamazon, hair out to there, boobs up to here. It would have
into the water the second the seaplane skids onto the surface been nice to have all that confidence in my 20-year-old body.”
of the lake. It’s the only time of year, Rande says, when the If the passage of time is on her mind, at the lake, at least, it
kids don’t turn on the television or pick up their phones. slows to a standstill. Cindy never puts her watch on, and there
Cindy makes her famous banana bread before the kids are no clocks anywhere in the house—something that Rande
are up. Water sports from the expansive east-facing dock learned to insist upon when he was a nightlife impresario.
dominate the daylight hours: Presley likes to cruise the lake “The point here is to slow everything down,” Cindy says.
in his Whaler (though he just learned to drive a car, he has “Life moves quickly, but it will wait.” 

780
LEAP OF FAITH
Presley and Kaia cliff
diving—a favorite
lake activity. In this
story: hair, Harry Josh
for harryjosh.com;
makeup, Hung Vanngo
for ck one color
cosmetics. Details,
see In This Issue.
EMPIRE
T H E S TA R S O F T V ’S
HOTTEST HIP- HOP
D R A M A , I T S C R E AT O R
L E E DA N I E L S, A N D
THE MUSICIAN THE
WEEKND STEP OUT IN
S E N S AT I ON A L S T Y L E .
B Y J O N AT H A N VA N M E T E R .
PHOTOGRAPHED
BY MAR I O TE S TI N O.

FAMILY MATTERS
Daniels with the Lyon clan,
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Camilla
Marks (Naomi Campbell), Lucious
(Terrence Howard), his ex-wife,
LOS A NG E LES; S EA N KEL LY, NEW YO RK.

Cookie (Taraji P. Henson), and their

A RT WO RK: KE HI N DE W I LEY STU D I O,

sons, Andre (Trai Byers), Jamal

N EW YORK ; RO BE RTS & TI LTO N,

(Jussie Smollett), and Hakeem

(Bryshere Y. Gray). On Campbell:
Emilio Pucci dress. On Henson:
Michael Kors Collection cape.
Boss dress. FAR RIGHT: The
Weeknd and model Jourdan
Dunn (in a Balmain bodysuit and
pants). Details, see In This Issue.
Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.
RISES
 or those of us who lived through that
time in the mid-nineties when hip-hop
was still dangerously real enough to get
you killed at a Vibe-magazine party
(Biggie Smalls) or at an intersection in
Las Vegas (Tupac), but was also juuust
mainstream enough to be featured in
Sprite ads, there was something in-
credibly surreal about watching the
BET Awards in late June. Right after
a middle-aged Puff Daddy performed
in an old-school red tracksuit with Lil’
Kim, Mase, and Faith Evans for a trib-
ute to Bad Boy Records, the label he
started 20 years ago, the cast of Empire
came out to perform songs from their
hit TV show, one seemingly drawn from the biographies of
Jay Z, Suge Knight, and, yes, Puffy—though the last is the
only one who reportedly threatened to sue Fox for “stealing
my life story.” When Dr. Dre is an Apple executive and Jay Z
is worth half a billion dollars, the drug-dealer-turned-rapper-
turned-ultra-rich-record-mogul narrative is but one thread
of the American Dream. Turns out no one owns that story.
As everyone knows by now, Empire centers on Lucious
Lyon, his ex-wife, Cookie, and their three children, Andre,
Jamal, and Hakeem, as they work and sing and backstab to
control their billion-dollar Empire, a record label that was
built on drug money earned back when Lucious
and Cookie were newlywed nobodies in the TH E S H OW I S A B R I LLIANT MAS H - U P —
City of Brotherly Love. And who doesn’t love
a do-rags-to-riches story, especially if it’s soapy- PA R T S O P R A N O S , PA R T G L E E , PA R T
smart, trashtastic, and beautifully produced? DY N A S T Y. W H AT R E A L LY M A K E S I T P O P
As everyone also knows, the show grabbed the
world by the throat in January and refused to let I S I T S O B S E S S I O N W I T H FA S H I O N
go. By the time the season finale aired in March,
with seventeen million people glued to their sets, it became
the first show in the history of the Nielsen ratings to gather
a bigger audience with each episode. Empire is not just a suc-
cess, it’s a cultural touch point, the opposite of a generation
gap—a TV show for the whole motherlovin’ family.
Part of what makes the show so much fun to watch is
that it is a brilliant mash-up—part Sopranos, part Glee, part
Dynasty—bursting with allusions to the last 50 years of popu-
lar culture: Berry Gordy, Good Times/The Jeffersons, Ameri-
can Idol, the Jacksons, GoodFellas, Rihanna and Chris Brown,
just to name a lot. At the same time, Empire does not shy away
from sociopolitical issues (race, homophobia, mental illness).
But the show also rattles the chandeliers because it isn’t afraid
to let rip with all of those dark, delicious tropes of Greek
tragedy and eighties nighttime soaps—power, greed, betrayal,
lust, hate, shame—all of it poured into the fresh container of
urban black upward mobility. A hip-hop King Lear, as it were.
But what really makes Empire pop off the screen is its
obsession with fashion, its desire to nail the gestalt of Ghetto
Fabulous, a term that was coined in the early nineties to
describe a new kind of hip-hop artist, personified by Mary
J. Blige. I was the founding editor of Vibe back then, a maga-
zine started by Quincy Jones and Time Inc. to capture a
paradigm shift—all those fly B-boys and -girls who jumped
on the luxury-fashion boom and put their own spin on it—
moving beyond the fat gold chain and baseball cap toward
a more louche, aspirational glamour defined by flamboyant
784
fur, leather, logos, and loud prints. Think Tom Ford during
his Gucci salad days. And who was Miss Blige’s consigliere?
Puffy. No wonder he feels ripped off.
As personified by Taraji P. Henson’s Cookie, who struts
around in thigh-high python stiletto boots, ferocious animal
prints, and a fedora strategically dipped below one eye, the
show has demonstrated that Ghetto Fabulousness refuses
to become stale or cliché. Like J.Lo, it is aging marvelously.
When the director Lee Daniels (Precious, The Butler) first
pitched the idea for Empire to Fox, he told the executives that
he wanted to define music, art, and fashion from an African-
American perspective. “Because I have been to Oprah’s house,
and I have been to Puffy’s,” he tells me, “and I have been to
my aunt Dot’s on Forty-sixth and Walnut in the projects of
Philadelphia, and there’s a common thread. You can go down
to the hood and still find gangsters’ girls who ain’t got two
nickels, but the Louis Vuitton bag is fierce, and they will have
the mink. I wanted to say: This is what people are wearing.”
Nowhere was Empire’s impact on the fashion world more
evident than at the CFDA awards this summer, a show that
featured lengthy sermons on street style from Kanye West and
Pharrell. Henson presented an award and absolutely killed it
in a crimson cutout racerback Vera Wang dress. She later told
a reporter backstage: “I don’t wear any more print, thanks
to Cookie.” Just as Hitchcock once defined the chilly mid-
century blonde, in Cookie, Daniels has found the perfect high-
strung drama queen through which to encapsulate an era.
No matter how rude or shady or diabolical Cookie is, it
is the pathos, that wounded pumping heart, that Henson
brings to the role that keeps the character from becoming
ridiculous—and earned her an Emmy nod. “It’s all about
Taraji’s choices,” says Terrence Howard, “because you never
know where she’s going to come from; it might be an in-
telligent perspective, or an observant one, or a strategic,
emotional, or defensive one. What Taraji has created with
Cookie is that girl who’s had to come up by whatever means
necessary—she’s given her a public forum.”
Working with cocreator Danny Strong, Daniels based
Cookie on his grandmother. “She was a gangster, basically—a
corrupt politician in the sixties and seventies who got blacks
to come out to vote. My earliest memory was her on the
phone with Frank Rizzo, the mayor of Philly, and my grand-
mother saying, ‘Motherfucker, you better come down here
with my money before I shoot yo ass.’ Back then you didn’t
talk to white people like that.”
But Henson had no interest in doing Empire at first. “I was
done with television,” she says. “I was like, ‘I don’t like being
trapped in a little box. I’m a movie star!’ ” She was also put off
by the script. She was especially shocked—as we all were—by
a flashback scene in which the younger Lucious, embarrassed
by his five-year-old son Jamal’s coming into the living room in
his mother’s clothing during a party, picks him up, carries him
outside, and throws him into a trash can. “I was like, ‘Obama
is going to hate us,’ ” says Henson. “I really had issues.” But
 BACK STORY
Lee Daniels
drew from his
Philadelphia past
to ground the
show. On Dunn:
Calvin Klein
Collection dress.
 LEADER OF THE PACK
Howard’s Lucious will stop
at nothing to protect his
billion-dollar hip-hop label.
On Dunn: Ralph Lauren
Collection dress. Rag &
Bone T-shirt. J. Mendel fox
boa. On Howard: Paul Stuart
overcoat. Tom Ford shirt.
Ralph Lauren trousers.
Christian Louboutin shoes.
Details, see In This Issue.
 she eventually saw past the incendiary material and sensed
an opportunity. “Once I dealt with the fear, I sat down and
really thought about what this show could possibly do to
prime-time network television if it was done right. I just took
Cookie in and said, ‘It is very important that this woman be
played precisely. You must show the why. Because if you miss
that, she’s just a stereotype.’ ”
What keeps Empire from devolving into a cartoon, though,
is the impeccable Bonnie and Clyde chemistry between How-
ard and Henson. The two met ten years ago while filming
Hustle & Flow, the film about a Memphis pimp with aspi-
rations to become a rapper that earned Howard an Oscar
nomination. (Henson would have to wait another three years
to get recognized by the academy, when she was nominated
for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Queenie
in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.) “I’ve always wanted
to give Taraji credit for my nomination,” says Howard. “She
made it possible for me not to have to overemphasize the fact
that I was a pimp. All I had to do was come into the room.
She did half the work for me.”
Henson told the producers it was Howard or nothing: “We
have a connection. He reminds me so much of my father. I
just felt we needed that. A lot of the stuff we do is just in how

T
we look at each other, and that can’t be written.”

he other thing that can’t be written is

the show’s perfect-storm timing. A lot
has changed since the early nineties. The
Obamas are in the White House, for one.
For another, hip-hop has triumphed. All
one need do is note that Dope was the toast
of Sundance or that Baz Luhrmann’s tele-
vision series The Get Down is coming next
year or that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is electrify-
ing Broadway. And yet we are in a long, difficult season
of wrestling with the pain of racism, from reckoning with
widespread police brutality to coming to grips with the op-
pressive symbolism of the Confederate flag.
One thing that hasn’t necessarily changed is hip-hop’s
deeply rooted homophobia. The decision by Lee Daniels
to tackle this issue head-on—by giving homophobic Lu-
cious a gay son, Jamal (Jussie Smollett)—seems to me to
be the bravest thing I’ve seen TV do in a long while. It’s had
a startling impact, including on the very star of the show.
“I’ll just be honest,” Howard says. “I was raised behind the
homophobic curtain. When I was like eight years old, my
father stood me and my three brothers in front of him. ‘Are
any of y’all some sissies? If I find out any of you are some
sissies, I’ll cut your throat.’ From the moment when they
had the guys kissing in the first 20 minutes of the pilot, I
was like, ‘You’re going to lose everyone. Black people are
going to change the channel! Men are going to change the
STREET SMARTS
channel!’ I had the same views that had been programmed
Like the big music
into so many of us. And then Jussie became my best, best
personalities friend. It was like seeing life from a whole other perspective.
featured on Empire, I was never a bigot before. At least I didn’t think I was. But I
The Weeknd travels was definitely prejudiced. I wouldn’t have allowed my son to
with an entourage.
FROM FAR LEFT: have a gay friend . . . in the past. And now I’d be like, ‘That’s
Lamar Taylor, Patrick your friend.’ Something’s changed in me.”
McMorrow, Liban Perhaps that’s why the show feels so visceral. A lot of the
Ali-Shiekh, and
Devon Charles. On
drama is real. The actor Jussie Smollett came out—publicly in
Dunn: Michael Kors real life and as a plotline—only C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 8 2 9
Collection dress.
Harry Winston
bracelets. Details, 789
see In This Issue.
 ON THE PROWL
Naomi Campbell,
NEAR LEFT, stars as
a London designer
involved with the
youngest Lyon son,
Hakeem. On Dunn:
Proenza Schouler
dress. On Campbell:
Givenchy by Riccardo
Tisci marabou jacket
and lizard-skin bag.
Nina Ricci dress.
 SMOOTH MOVES
The three brothers vie for
power. On Dunn: Diane
von Furstenberg dress.
Jacob & Co. necklace.
On Campbell: Marchesa
dress. Jacob & Co.
necklace. In this story:
hair, Oribe for Oribe Hair
Care; makeup, Dotti.
Production design, Jack
Flanagan. Produced
by Gabriel Hill for GE
Projects. Menswear
Editor: Michael Philouze.
Details, see In This Issue.
 E y e to e y E
As forward-thinking cosmetic surgery expands on the definition—and
promise—of an eye lift, two women weigh the benefits of subtly tweaking their
lines of vision. Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier.
T HE L ONG V IEW
By Leslie Camhi
People say the legs are the last to go, but I had assumed my
eyes—blue flecked with gold, and animated, I hope, by intel-
ligence and passion—would lead me, relatively intact, across
the fearful threshold of the years.
In truth, they had always had their faults. My baby pic-
tures, for example, show me smiling delightedly, blissfully
unaware of the dark circles that ring my infant peepers.
Looking back, I have to wonder—was my life in the womb
so utterly exhausting?
In my 20s, and well beyond them, this “natural eye shad-
ow” was something of an asset—a hint of smoldering mys-
tery, the gift of my Mediterranean ancestors. But as I grew
older, I worried that my avatar was slowly transforming, from
Theda Bara (silent cinema’s Cleopatra) to Lon Chaney (its
Phantom of the Opera).
Still, I resisted having my eyes professionally assessed. I
hadn’t the time. And then, I worked as an art critic. I prized
those eyes most of all for their keen vision, for the powers
of observation that brought me—via a painting by Sonia
Delaunay or Piero della Francesca, a dress by Charles James
or a frescoed Italian ceiling—a daily harvest of beauty or
abjection to transform into words.
I was past 40 by the time maternal love, combined with
the realization that I was sending my son to nursery school
with dirty fingernails, prompted my first chagrined visit to
an optician. More recently, during a year we spent in Paris, a
handsome French ophthalmologist came to my aid when a
rare, unsightly condition posed yet another threat to my eyes’
beauty—a mild xanthelasma. He used lasers to burn away the
small deposits of fat underneath the skin, hereditary in my
case and impossible to diet away. (They came back, alas, but
my crush on him helped me through the long Parisian winter.)
Mostly, though, I consider myself lucky. I have been
spared crow’s-feet. (Not enough smiling?) I have a couple
of tiny lines under my eyes, but in truth they don’t keep me
awake at night—a good thing according to Lola Montez,
the nineteenth-century “Spanish dancer” and the mistress
to a composer and a king. “Sleep is the great enkindler of
‘woman’s most charming light,’ ” she informs us in her book
The Arts of Beauty; or, Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet.
Having learned, only lately, to wield a brow pencil skill-
fully, I wouldn’t swear off C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 8 2 9
792
T H E N E W L OOK
By Sandra Ballentine
Challenged as I may be in other areas, I’ve always liked my
eyes. They’re a good size—not too big, or too small. As for
their color, I’ve been told (by an Italian lover, naturally) that
they resemble Lake Como in winter, which is to say they’re a
moody blue. My mother called them my best feature.
“Take care of your eyes,” Mom advised. And I have—
steadfastly avoiding the sun, consuming carrot juice by the li-
ter, taking supplements, and dabbing on all manner of miracle
salves. An early adopter of Botox, I got my first shots seven-
teen years ago in a swanky dermatology office on London’s
Harley Street (not being able to scowl really does help keep
wrinkles at bay). But there comes a point when chilled cucum-
bers, caffeine creams, and even pricey injectables don’t cut it
anymore. When, following a three-month “holiday,” a close
friend announced that she had had her eyes done, I began
scanning other women’s eyes for evidence of cosmetic inter-
vention while simultaneously taking a closer look at my own.
“There’s a lot of good surgery around,” says Manhattan-
based oculofacial surgeon Ebby Elahi, M.D., during a recent
consult. “The trouble is you don’t see it.” A bad eye job, on
the other hand, is unmistakable. Just ask a certain Oscar-
winning actress who had what appeared to be a botched
blepharoplasty earlier this year. Designed to “open up” the
eye and reduce hooding, wrinkles, and pouches, the old-
school technique generally involves excising upper- and/
or lower-lid skin, fat, and muscle. But it can lead to loss of
volume, brow droop, and “scleral show” (more visible eye
white)—not to mention gossip-blog infamy.
I wasn’t ready for eye work; then gravity started affect-
ing my makeup regimen. I still worship at the eighties rock
altar when it comes to my lids, and with Siouxsie Sioux
(she of the Banshees fame) as my patron saint of pigment,
I’ve never shied away from lashes, liner, or mascara; you
name it, I own it. As Elahi assures me that the new think-
ing around eye surgery involves redraping existing skin
and fat as opposed to cutting and pulling, the prospect of
ocular rejuvenation all of a sudden feels feasible. When
patients don’t have enough tissue to work with, or have
excessive under-eye hollowing, Elahi turns to 3D model-
ing and printing to make state-of-the-art custom implant
devices that help restore volume by pushing the eyeball
forward in its socket. C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 8 2 9
SIGHT
MAINTENANCE
A new wave of
imperceptible
cosmetic procedures
is making eye surgery
increasingly appealing.
Model Caroline
Trentini in a mask by
Undercover and a
headpiece designed
by Julien d’Ys. Hair,
Julien d’Ys for Julien
d’Ys; Makeup, Linda
Cantello for Giorgio
Armani Beauty.
Fashion Editor:
Phyllis Posnick.
Lady in
Waitıng
With a spate of new
films, Elizabeth Debicki
reveals what’s found in
translation. Photographed
by Scott Trindle.

E
lizabeth Debicki is al-
ways adapting. Seeming-
ly immune to jet lag, the
Paris-born Australian
actress ostensibly lives
in Sydney but is just as
often in L.A. or London—or on lo-
cation somewhere like Naples, where
she’s recently learned how to procure
the finest sfogliatella (“It’s like a heart
attack for breakfast,” she says).
“The moment you stop smiling to
yourself about having landed in Man-
hattan,” Debicki, 25, says over coffee
on Crosby Street, “you should prob-
ably choose a different profession. I
don’t even want a vacation.” She’s
equally versatile when it comes to her
look, having lately chopped her flaxen
mane into a bob that better frames her
patrician features—which today are
further complemented by python-y
green sunglasses from Bulgari.
Debicki’s work, too, seems to be a
series of adaptations: from her break-
out role as a raven-haired Jordan
Baker in Baz Luhrmann’s envisioning
of The Great Gatsby to a turn in Guy
Ritchie’s new update of The Man from
U.N.C.L.E. to Justin Kurzel’s grisly
version of Macbeth, which premiered
at Cannes earlier this year. Even now,
as Debicki prepares the AMC mini-
series The Night Manager, she carries
the John le Carré novel upon which
it is based everywhere she goes. (“It’s
my bible,” she says.) Also in her Prada
bag is Miriam Toews’s novel All My
P RO DUC E D BY T HE P RO DUCT I ON CLUB

Puny Sorrows, lent to her recently by SPLENDOR IN

a friend while she was in Marrakech. THE GRASS
“I find it so luxurious to read a book Debicki wears a Hilfiger
that has nothing to do with what I’m Collection dress ($460;
212-223-1824) and
working on,” she says. “That’s a kind Albertus Swanepoel hat.
of nirvana.”—MARK GUIDUCCI Hair, Luke Hersheson;
makeup, Lauren Parsons.
Details, see In This Issue.
794 Fashion Editor:
Sara Moonves.
STE A L of t he MONTH
 What to Wear Where

Instant
Classic
Nothing signifies
the approach of fall
quite like time-
honored tweed.
As Kendall Jenner
shows us, though,
the textile has
been updated via
rainbows of color and
pinpoints of
sparkle—and all with
an air of easygoing,
early-autumnal fun.
Photographed by
Inez and Vinoodh.
THRILL OF THE HUNT
Tweed made its name as outdoor gear for the ruling classes, but you
won’t be seeing this at a quail shoot. Rather, sport it at Shotgun, the
new gourmet Southern restaurant opening off London’s Carnaby
Street this month. Michael Kors Collection feather-embroidered dress,
hat, and bag; select Michael Kors stores. Details, see In This Issue.
Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.
INSIDE THE LINES
Despite its angular and
gridded pattern, tweed
can be sculpted into sharp
forms as seen on this pencil
skirt—which is guaranteed
to speak sartorial volumes
at the opening of MoMA’s
new “Picasso Sculpture”
exhibition. CH Carolina
Herrera wool coat ($1,280),
silk blouse ($495), and
high-waisted skirt ($695);
CH Carolina Herrera,
Beverly Hills. Rochas belt.
Maison Margiela shoes.
CHECK ME OUT
These trousers are
perfectly fit for cozying up
at a matinee of the rousing
adventure drama Everest,
starring Jake Gyllenhaal
and Keira Knightley. Hilfiger
Collection polo shirt
($260) and wool pants
($560); Tommy Hilfiger,
NYC. Jutta Neumann
belt. Derek Lam heels.
Details, see In This Issue.
BEAUTY NOTE
A well-framed brow adds
strength to soft features.
Estée Lauder’s Double
Wear Stay-in-Place Brow
Lift Duo slim-line pencil
defines and highlights.

799
 TRUE COLORS
A two-tone black-and-white
scheme gives a traditional
tweed car coat a zippy
spin, while cardinal-red and
canary-yellow accents up
the palette punch. Take the
combo for a browse around
the massive new Mark
Rothko retrospective at
the Museum of Fine Arts
in Houston (and don’t
leave town without a side
trip to the masterly Rothko
Chapel). Giambattista Valli
coat, $3,780; Saks Fifth
Avenue, San Francisco.
Prada shirt, $560; select
Prada boutiques. J.Crew
wool skirt, $138; jcrew
.com. Balenciaga bag.
Louis Vuitton ring.
LET ’ER RIP
This sexy, shredded
rethink of the schoolgirl
skirt is definitely against
the dress code—and
makes for a lightweight
and playful option for
celebrating to the tunes
of Ed Sheeran and others
at the Global Citizen
Festival in New York’s
Central Park, which
aims to lessen poverty
worldwide. Dior poplin
shirt ($1,200), fringed
skirt ($1,150), necklace,
and stretch patent-leather
boots; Dior boutiques. 801
Details, see In This Issue.
MAD FOR PLAID
Warm and fuzzy is
very buzzy—and oddly
appropriate for the
Broadway premiere of
Sam Shepard’s Fool for
Love, which stars Nina
Arianda and Sam Rockwell
as fate-crossed lovers
on the cold, hard edge of
the Mojave Desert. Marc
Jacobs wool-and-alpaca
coat with mohair sleeves
($2,800), pleated skirt
($1,400), bag, gloves,
belt, and lace-up pumps;
Marc Jacobs stores.
COVER STORY
Last century, Chanel
brought plaid from the
moors to Le Cirque. Now
the house is bringing it
straight downtown with a
sequined anorak—a chic
disguise for sneaking out
to the movies to see Emily
Blunt play an FBI agent
in the new border-crime
thriller Sicario. Chanel
sequined-wool coat,
mohair sweater ($2,300),
skirt ($1,500), wool bag,
and fingerless gloves;
select Chanel boutiques.
Details, see In This Issue.
BACKHAND
COMPLEMENT
It’s a good day when a
designer can successfully
sportify a traditional
tweed suit—and an even
better one when you
wear said suit to take
in tennis’s U.S. Open,
which unfolds in New
York early this month.
Erdem frayed-edge
jacket ($2,830) and
lace-trim skirt ($2,495);
net-a-porter.com. Dior
bag. Derek Lam boots.
MATERIALS GIRL
The shape of this girlish
kilt isn’t exactly radical,
but its pairing with a
cheetah blouse skews
it in an eye-catching
direction. We couldn’t
imagine a better bet for
dancing to Madonna
as she performs in
New York—at Madison
Square Garden and at
the Barclays Center—
this month. Miu Miu
ruffled blouse ($1,140),
skirt ($2,265), earrings,
bag, and slingbacks;
select Miu Miu boutiques.
Details, see In This Issue.

805
 ENCORE, ENCORE!
Traditional black-and-
white houndstooth had
its mod moments in
the go-go 1960s and
New Wave 1980s, but
burgundy and candy-
pink? This nonconformist
color quirk is absolutely
of-the-moment—and
tailor-made for taking
in the Roundabout
Theatre Company’s
revival of Pinter’s Old
Times, starring Clive
Owen in his Broadway
debut. Prada A-line
dress ($3,700), leather
gloves, and brooches;
select Prada boutiques.
TIME AFTER TIME
Dark, feathery fringes
create a stylish yin/yang
with boldly graphic
tweed below—a perfect
dose of then-and-now
anachronism for checking
out The Langford, the
new retro-snazzy hotel
in downtown Miami.
Balenciaga tank dress,
bolero jacket, and earrings;
Balenciaga, NYC. In
this story: hair, Garren
at Garren New York for
R+Co.; makeup, Yumi Lee.
Details, see In This Issue.
Index
EDITOR: SELBY DRUMMOND
Jeweled Pins 2

1. Chanel brooches
and dress; select
Chanel boutiques.
2. Erickson
Beamon pin ($328)
and fringed brooch
($553); Laura
Gambucci, La Jolla,
CA. Dsquared2
brooch, $395;
Dsquared2, NYC.

P ET E R KLEI N FO R FRA NK RE PS. P RO DUCED BY L A LA LA N D. B LA ZER : GO RM A N STU D I O. P I N : COURTESY OF MAR IE-H ÉLÈNE
Maje blazer, $625;

DE TA I LL AC. BRO OC H: J OH N MA N N O. S HOU ROUK BROO C HES: COU RT ESY O F S HOU ROUK. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
FA N N I NG : HA I R, H OLL I S MI T H; MA KEUP, SA LLY BRA NK A . P H OTO GRA P HED AT T HE MA LI BU COUNTRY INN. SET D ESIGN,
Maje stores.
1 3. Marie-Hélène de
Taillac pin; Capitol,
Charlotte, NC.
4. Oscar de la
Renta brooch,
$595; select
Oscar de la Renta
boutiques.
5. Shourouk
brooches,
$249–$488; eshop
.shourouk.com.
Photographer:
4
Angelo Pennetta.
Fashion Editor:

Shine
Sara Moonves.

ON
From embellished sunglasses to micro-
studded slippers, the new accessories have
5 as much pop as end-of-summer fireworks.
Send off the season with sparkle!
808 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
 Index Decorated Shoes

1
FA NN I N G: P HOTO G RA P HED AT T HE M A LI BU COU N TRY I N N. SA N DA L : COU RT ESY OF CH AR LOTTE OLYMPIA. GOLD SANDAL: COURTESY OF TORY BURCH . PUMP: COURTESY OF BR IAN AT WO O D. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .

2
1. Céline top, skirt,
earrings ($490),
and shoes; Céline,
NYC. Cartier watch.
Steamline Luggage
carry-on and
stowaway bags.
2. Charlotte
Olympia sandals,
$1,065; Charlotte
Olympia stores.
3. Tory Burch
sandals, $650;
Tory Burch stores.
4. Brian Atwood
pumps, $1,995;
brianatwood.com.

Elle’s Picks
Actress Elle Fanning,
seventeen, likes to adorn
herself in “anything playful
and girly”—from a go-to mini
box bag to her grandma’s
“otherworldly” diamond
choker. She’s also started
a “pin project”—dressing
a cropped eighties denim
jacket with a mix of
brooches and badges.

3
4
 Index Embellished Bags

1 1. Maison Margiela
jacket, playsuit,
and beret; select
Maison Margiela
boutiques. Dries
Van Noten bag,
$985; Opening
Ceremony, NYC.
2. Dior bag; select
Dior boutiques.
3. BCBG Max Azria
clutch, $198; BCBG
Max Azria stores.
4. Fendi baguette;
3 fendi.com.
5. Tod’s bag;
Tod’s boutiques.

D I O R: COURT ESY O F D I O R. TO D’S: COU RT ESY O F TO D’S. A LL OT HE RS : J O HN M A NNO. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

816 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 4 VOGUE.COM

Index Gem Necklaces 2

1. Miu Miu earrings

($560), necklace
($1,715), and dress; 4
select Miu Miu
boutiques.
2. Fallon garnet
necklace, $360;
fivestoryny.com.
3. Fallon peridot
necklace, $360;
fivestoryny.com.
4. Fallon jet-stone
necklace, $360;
fivestoryny.com.
5. Bottega
Veneta necklace;
(800) 845-6790.
6. Eddie Borgo
necklace, $275;
eddieborgo.com.

FALLON NECKLACES: COURTESY OF FIVESTORY. BOTTEGA

FA NN I N G: P HOTO G RA P HED AT C HATE AU M A RMO N T.

VENETA: JOHN MANNO. EDDIE BORGO: COURTESY

OF EDDIE BORGO. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.

818 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM

 Index Studded Slip-ons
1

SL I D E: COU RT ESY O F NE T-A- P ORT ER. BO OT: COU RT ESY OF SA M ED E LM A N. A LL OT HERS: J OH N MANNO. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
3

4
1. Etro vest ($1,204) and shirt ($797);
Etro, NYC. Tom Ford skirt; Tom Ford, NYC.
Rodarte sunglasses. Bottega Veneta
shoes, $1,980; (800) 845-6790. Louis
Vuitton suitcase. 2. Giuseppe Zanotti
Design slippers, $1,095; Giuseppe Zanotti
Design, NYC. 3. Jimmy Choo flats, $625;
select Jimmy Choo stores. 4. Rochas 5
slides, $1,175; net-a-porter.com. 5. Sam
Edelman boots, $140; samedelman.com.
Index Topping It Off 2

BE A N I E: COU RTESY OF JE NN I FE R B EHR. SU N G LASSES: COU RT ESY O F SU N GL ASS H UT. SCAR F: J OH N MANNO.
1. Chloé blazer;
Chloé, Las Vegas.

HA I R P I NS : COURT ESY O F LA RKS PU R & HAW K. H AT: G O RMA N ST U DI O. DE TA I LS, SE E IN TH IS ISSUE.

Bottega Veneta
shirt, $1,250; (800)
845-6790. Lanvin
hat, $1,485; Neiman
Marcus stores.
2. Jennifer Behr
beanie, $675;
jenniferbehr.com.
3. Dolce & Gabbana
sunglasses; select
Sunglass Hut stores.
4. Hermès scarf,
$185; Hermès
boutiques.
5. Larkspur & Hawk
hairpins, $1,400
(set of three);
larkspurandhawk
.com.
6. Albertus
5 Swanepoel
hat, $500; pr@
albertusswanepoel
.com.

826 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 6 C H EC K O U T VO G U E . C O M FO R

M O R E S H O P PA B L E L O O K S
MAKING HER CASE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 765
even have uniforms,” her friend Scott
Saulsberry says. A few years ago, for
a presentation at a conference of the
country’s U.S. attorneys, Lynch offered
photographic proof: a portrait of her-
self grinning in a pyramid of Harvard
cheerleaders.
Lynch’s father was surprised when his
daughter, who’d majored in English and
American literature and had interned at
CBS, told him she wanted to go to Har-
vard Law School—but he agreed to help
pay for that degree, too. After graduation,
Lynch spent five years at a corporate law
firm. She made the decision to leave after
a fateful Friday evening in 1990. It was
a period of her life, years before she got
married, when she was devoting herself to
work and treating personal relationships
as secondary. (“Back then, it sort of felt
like you had to choose,” Scott Saulsberry
says.) “I was pushing, pushing to make
a deadline, and I literally passed out at
my desk. My face hit the desk, actually,”
Lynch says. “I spent the night in the hospi-
tal hooked up to an IV, and the diagnosis
was exhaustion and dehydration. When
the prescription is to get some rest, and
you’re a young law-firm associate, it’s hard
to figure out how to fit that in. So I spent
the night watching the IV and thinking. I
really did enjoy what I was doing, but was
it the highest and best use of my abilities?
If I was going to pass out at work, was this
really what I wanted to be doing?”
Lynch moved to the U.S. attorney’s office
in Brooklyn, working out of the base-
ment and traveling to Long Island for
narcotics cases. Then she was chosen for
the team of prosecutors that tried five
white police officers in 1999 for the vio-
lent assault on Haitian immigrant Ab-
ner Louima. The outcome was mixed:
One officer, who was accused of forcing
a broom into Louima, pled guilty mid-
trial and received a 30-year sentence, but
three others were acquitted, and a fourth
succeeded in reversing his conviction on
appeal. Lynch, however, earned praise
for a strong, passionate summation. “She
had to respond to everything the defense
threw at us,” remembers Alan Vinegrad,
her successor in Brooklyn, who worked
with Lynch for 25 years. “Some support-
ers of the police were upset by what she
said, but she never let that get to her.”
The same year, President Bill Clinton
tapped Lynch for U.S. attorney, and she
took the helm in her Brooklyn office. She
left when the presidency changed hands,
as political appointees usually do, and re-
turned to private practice, becoming chief
828 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
federal prosecutor in Brooklyn for a sec-
ond time in 2010, at President Obama’s
request. Perhaps the strongest criticism
of Lynch involves a decision she made at
this point in her career not to press charg-
es. In 2012, a Senate investigation of the
multinational bank HSBC turned up evi-
dence of money-laundering in the hun-
dreds of millions. “At the time, it was the
biggest money-laundering bank-fraud
case anyone had seen,” says University
of Virginia law professor Brandon Gar-
rett, author of the book Too Big to Jail.
“Money was going through HSBC to
drug cartels, to terrorists, to every terrible
place you can think of.”
Yet Lynch opted for a settlement
agreement: HSBC would pay $1.9 bil-
lion in fines and agree to independent
monitoring for five years. The deal drew
criticism from both left and right. “If
you launder nearly a billion dollars for
drug cartels and violate our international
sanctions, your company pays a fine and
you go home and sleep in your own bed
at night,” said Senator Elizabeth War-
ren, Democrat from Massachusetts, in
2013. Republicans revived the issue dur-
ing Lynch’s confirmation hearings, saying
she demonstrated “a pattern of lax en-
forcement of mega banks,” in the words
of Senator David Vitter, Republican of
Louisiana. “This is exactly the opposite
message Wall Street should be hearing
from the Justice Department.”
When I ask Lynch about the HSBC
settlement, she points out that overseas
transactions can be difficult to prosecute
(though this didn’t stop her from going
after FIFA). She also says that the in-
dependent monitor’s reports on HSBC,
which are public, provide a template
of accountability for other banks. “We
know that corporate America looks at
those,” Lynch says. In April, however,
the monitoring showed that HSBC has
been slow to change. “It’s not like they
can point to a clear success, because this
bank isn’t fixed,” Garrett says.
Whatever the merits of the HSBC
deal, and of the subsequent deal she cut
with banks over a price-fixing scheme,
Lynch—much like the president who
appointed her—has not made cracking
down on Wall Street a stated priority.
Her focus, she says, will be human traf-
ficking, cybersecurity, national security,
and police-community relations. (In July,
she made news announcing federal hate-
crime charges against Dylann Roof for
killing nine worshippers at an African-
American church in Charleston, South
Carolina.)
There’s also a Justice Department with
more than 110,000 employees to run.
On the plane home from Durham, she
could not resist saying to her staff, “There
is so much to do.” Though she also told
them to take vacations. “Then I have to
turn around and apply the same advice
to myself,” Lynch said ruefully. She no
longer passes out at her desk, but she still
has to make a conscious effort to stop
working and read one of the mysteries
she’s fond of. Her family helps. Lynch’s
father attended every one of her trials
in New York, bringing her sandwiches
every time. Lynch met her husband at
police headquarters there, at an event they
both attended to celebrate the promo-
tion of a mutual friend on the force, and
they swam with sharks at Bora Bora on
their honeymoon after getting married
on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas.
She cherishes meals with him at their new
home in the Washington, D.C., area—not
to mention watching the odd episode of
Scandal—and takes trips with his two
kids, ages 20 and 21. She knows, though,
that she can’t ask her stepchildren for too
much togetherness. “They’re at the point
where they sometimes question why they
should spend time with anyone over the
age of 40,” she jokes.
Maybe it’s time to bring out the ten-
nis rackets. Lynch learned to play after
law school. It’s not an easy sport to pick
up as an adult, but Lynch was, as usual,
determined. “I always wanted to play, so
I thought, I’m just going to get a racket
and go,” she said. In Brooklyn, she had a
regular foursome for singles and doubles.
Though she hasn’t found hitting partners
yet in Washington, she’s on the lookout.
After all, she says, “you can always get
better.” 
BELLA DONNA
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 769
Our design mission was perfection, not
quantity. I wanted a concise wardrobe.
Whatever the piece, it had to be the only
one of that kind you’d need. That was
key, because I wanted fewer pieces that
could do more things: an entire day-into-
evening wardrobe in seven pieces. Each
item had to be flexible and ready to shift
in attitude and purpose, depending on
what you teamed it with. It had to have a
mix of masculine and feminine, because
there’s nothing sexier than a woman in a
man’s jacket, coat, shirt, or sweater. And
it had to accentuate the positive and de-
lete the negative, because that gives you
confidence. And for the urban woman,
confidence was power.
I called them my seven “easy” pieces:
The bodysuit; the wrap-and-tie skirt; the
pants; the tailored jacket; the suede wrap
jacket; the camel coat; the gold sequined
VOGUE.COM
skirt. Easy—but let’s be clear: Designing
them was anything but.
There were more pieces: a fabulous
swing coat. A draped, wrap-front tunic. A
cuffed-at-the-hip full skirt. Sensuous eve-
ning dresses. But those seven were the core
essentials, the chic uniform. Structure was
kept to a minimum, which was unusual
for the day; I wanted everything to feel
like a second skin, with nothing pulling at
you as you moved. It was a new kind of
classicism—like a man’s wardrobe, but
tailored for a strong woman.
Just days before our first show, in May
1985, we moved into our new headquar-
ters, which had been designed by the ar-
chitect Nicholas Goldsmith. Nothing
said we’d arrived more than moving into
550 Seventh Avenue. All the big names
were headquartered there: Oscar, Ralph,
Bill Blass. 550’s fourteenth floor hap-
pened to be available, so we grabbed it.
Inspired by an interactive exhibit
by Jonathan Borofsky at the Whitney
Museum, I had all the models lounging
on different platforms in nothing but
bodysuits. When everyone was seated,
the girls started getting dressed, add-
ing layer upon layer. The clothes came
alive right in front of the audience. The
whole thing was a blur for me—I was
backstage, just trying to remember not
to forget anything. It ended with what
would become our signature show song:
Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind.”
As I walked the runway, I wasn’t the
only one crying. Stephan; Dawn Mello
from Bergdorf; Polly Mellen, the leg-
endary fashion editor and stylist; Car-
rie Donovan from The New York Times
Magazine . . . the audience gave me a
teary standing ovation that seemed to
last forever. We had three shows that
day—the rooms were tiny—and each
one ended the same way. In that moment,
I felt universally accepted and validated,
but I also felt like my fate was truly sealed.
Whether I liked it or not, this would be
my life’s work.
To Be Continued . . .
Karan leaves her label and
changes up her future.
There have been rumors for a while about
me stepping down, but I just couldn’t let
go. Until now. Just as I’m releasing my life
story to the world, I’m saying goodbye to
Donna Karan New York. I need to close
one chapter to begin the next: nurturing
Urban Zen, the company and the foun-
dation, as well as my philanthropic pur-
suits. Long story short, the collection’s
been put on hold, at least for a while. It
was the right decision at the right time.
I knew I’d be sad, but it was truly
VOGUE.COM
heartbreaking. I had to say goodbye to
the people who have become my family,
who have stood beside me through every
professional up and down, every good
and bad review, and the many CEOs and
management teams. On a personal level,
one of my most emotional moments
was walking into the design room and
seeing all the gorgeous fabrics that had
just arrived from Europe for the spring
collection that wouldn’t be. I immedi-
ately started touching the luxe textures,
and within minutes began draping them
on a mannequin. I couldn’t help myself.
September 2015 will be only the second
season since I was nineteen—the other
was 9/11—that I have not presented a
spring show.
I’ve been asking myself, who and what
is Donna Karan? Is it a brand? A dress?
A person? Where does my story go from
here? I wish I could tell you I have it all
mapped out, but I don’t. I’m nervous and
confused, but excited.
For more than 30 years, I signed my
fashion-show press releases, “To be
continued. . . . ” That was the only way
I could let a collection go down the run-
way, because my creative process is on-
going. I am never done. There’s always
something to add: a last-minute thought,
an idea I need more time to execute. I feel
that way now. There’s so much I want
to do: hotels, condos, furniture, and yes,
fashion. But my biggest focus is on Ur-
ban Zen and its three initiatives: health
care, education, and preserving culture.
And I’ll never stop designing my Urban
Zen fashion collection—after all, I need
something to wear. 
From My Journey by Donna Karan,
© 2015, published by Ballantine Books,
an imprint of Random House, a division
of Penguin Random House LLC.
EMPIRE RISES
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 789
once the show began airing. “I talked to
my mom and I talked to Lee and Taraji
before I went on Ellen,” Smollett says.
“Not for approval. But I respect and love
them so much that their support means
a lot. It’s deep and it’s happy and it’s sad
and it’s strange—growing up, you are
bred to feel alone. You’re trained to feel
that you’re less than. And that’s when
it’s the village’s job—and I don’t mean
the West Village!—to cradle their arms
around you and let you know that you’re
not just OK, but you’re perfect.”
When I ask Daniels why he thinks the
show has become such a phenomenon, he
hesitates for a moment, as if afraid that
whatever he says will be misunderstood.
And then he says this: “When you get put
in a trash can and told you’re nothing at
five years old, nothing scares you. You
are fearless. You have to listen to your
inner voice. And the minute you start
listening to the establishment, and the
minute you start buying into what ‘they’
believe, is when you lose. So you have to
be willing to risk it all—all the time.” 
THE LONG VIEW
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 792
other forms of nonsurgical intervention.
As for surgery, well, I recall a bit too viv-
idly a scene in the classic Dalí/Buñuel Sur-
realist film Un Chien Andalou involving a
cow’s naked eyeball, a razor blade, and a
dark cloud passing over the moon to ever
go there. In fact, I believe what my eyes
need most of all right now—other than
interesting things to look at, a bit of make-
up, and some flattering light—is a bigger
audience to recognize their true worth. 
THE NEW LOOK
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 792
Having my eyeballs manually reposi-
tioned is not high on my bucket list, but
with my beloved MAC Paint Pots hold-
ing on for dear life to upper lids that have
started resembling an overripe peach, I
persevere and make another call.
This one is to Chia Chi Kao, M.D.,
a Santa Monica–based plastic surgeon
known for his light touch and deft use
of fat transfer. My eyes widen as he tells
me about a new technique that requires
micro-incisions around the temple and a
volumizing layer of cell-rich “powdered
sugar fat,” which is fine enough to inject
under even the most delicate skin. Per-
haps it’s the mention of fat and sugar,
but the idea of new-era eye detailing is
sounding more and more appetizing—
especially when I get a line on non- and
minimally invasive radio-frequency de-
vices, like Profound, which is undergoing
clinical trials and increasingly bandied
about in cosmetic-surgery circles.
Manhattan dermatologist Macrene
Alexiades, M.D., calls the thermometer-
tipped needles that heat skin to a con-
stant 67° Celsius “one-stop shopping for
the eye.” Addressing slackness, crow’s-
feet, and crepey skin in a single treatment
(unlike the six to eight treatments similar
devices require for optimal benefits), the
wandlike tool reaches the optimal tem-
perature for the production of new col-
lagen and elastin with no risk of burning.
It’s enough to compel me to book my
own “holiday,” an event I plan on cele-
brating by cuing up some Robert Smith
and going for my drawer of smudgy Dior-
show Pro Liners with renewed gusto. 
VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
829
in this issue
Table of contents 112: On Kebede: Givenchy by
Riccardo Tisci top, $2,490; Givenchy, NYC. Ro-
chas skirt, $3,100; Capitol, Charlotte, NC. 240:
On Zimmermann: Erdem coat, $5,040; Neiman
Marcus stores. Cover look 240: Manicure, Lisa
Logan. On Beyoncé: Marc Jacobs dress ($12,000)
and coat ($4,800); Marc Jacobs stores. Editor’s
letter 364: On Beyoncé: Givenchy by Riccardo
Tisci jacket, price upon request; givenchy.com.
Louis Vuitton dress, price upon request; select
Louis Vuitton boutiques. 380: On Dunn: Marc
Jacobs coat ($7,800) and dress ($5,800); Marc
Jacobs stores. Chanel bag, $7,000; select Chanel
boutiques. Contributors 482: On Debicki: Top,
$50; hm.com. Skirt, $295; hampdenclothing.com.
Cole Haan shoes, $170; colehaan.com. Lives 516:
On Gray: Thomas Pink shirt, $195; Thomas Pink
stores. Flash 566: Dress, $2,600; Ikram, Chi-
cago. Boots, $995; select Jimmy Choo boutiques.
571: Turtleneck, $350; Neiman Marcus stores.
Skirt, $549; Nordstrom stores. Alice + Olivia by
Stacey Bendet jacket, $796; aliceandolivia.com.
Mulberry boots, $780; Mulberry, NYC. 572:
On Levi: Trademark earrings, $85; trade-mark
.com. Derek Lam 10 Crosby jumpsuit ($550) and
shirt ($395); Derek Lam 10 Crosby, NYC. Tum-
blers, $40; Mociun, Brooklyn. Dish ($32), salad
plate ($50), and dinner plate ($74); btwceramics
.com. Jug, $495; amandamoffatpottery.com.
574: Bowl; isabelhalley.com. Tumbler, $63; romyno
.com. Vases, $180–$300; Dimes, NYC. View 602:
Manicure, Naomi Yasuda. Coat ($3,995), dress
($2,295), and boots (price upon request); coat
and dress at Barneys New York stores; boots at
altuzarra.com. 607: Jacket ($2,995), top ($695),
skirt ($1,195), bag ($28,000), and boots (price
upon request); jacket at Bergdorf Goodman,
NYC; top and bag at Barneys New York stores;
skirt at neimanmarcus.com; boots at altuzarra
.com. 610: Manicure, Marian Newman. 620:
Trousers at hillierbartley.com. 628: Photographed
at Ace Café London, ace-cafe-london.com. Mul-
berry Georgia May Jagger Collection jacket,
by special order at (646) 669-8380. 630: Clip,
$33,800; Van Cleef & Arpels boutiques. Gloves,
price upon request; Oscar de la Renta boutiques.
Bag, $7,250; Fendi, NYC. 632: Gold ($140) and
pink earrings; justoneeye.com. Rings, $9,500.
634: Choker, similar styles at narcisorodriguez
.com. 636: Price upon request. 638: Manicure,
Adam Slee for Rimmel London. Dress, $6,240.
Boots, $278; thefryecompany.com. Beauty 640:
Altuzarra jacket, $1,995; Neiman Marcus stores.
New York Vintage hat, $125; (212) 647-1107.
Undercover earrings, $208; undercoverism.com.
Lancôme Grandiôse Mascara in Mon Regard
Parisien. L’Oréal Paris Colour Riche Lipcolour
in Zoe’s Red. M.A.C. Studio Nail Lacquer in
Vintage Vamp. 646: Manicure, Rica Romain.
Jacket, $4,650; select Chanel boutiques. 664:
Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane shoes and socks.
PATA 673: On Ridley: Sweater, $275; shopbop
.com. Skirt, $228; Rebecca Minkoff, NYC.
Manolo Blahnik sandals, $795; neimanmarcus
.com. On Boyega: Shirt, $350; us.burberry.com.
Rag & Bone jeans, $195; Rag & Bone stores. 682:
Dinnerware by Ash Cloud, Dbo, and abcv col-
lection; abcmkt, NYC. 684: Coat, $1,080; Jil
Sander, NYC. Milly dress, $375; Milly, NYC.
830 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015
ASOS turtleneck, $33; us.asos.com. Ben-Amun
by Isaac Manevitz earrings, $220; ben-amun
.com. Rug, $89–$1,189; aelfie.com. Carafe, $330;
annakarlin.com. Journals, $375; twiggsbindery
.com. 686: Sweater, $600; Canali, NYC. Sweat-
pants, $70; jcrew.com. Pierre Hardy sneakers,
$545; thecorner.com. 692: Turtleneck ($870) and
skirt ($3,450); turtleneck, similar styles at Al-
bright Fashion Library, NYC; skirt at Just One
Eye, L.A.
FORCES OF FASHION
698–699: For Riccardo Tisci: Grooming, Clau-
dia Lake. Produced by The Custom Family.
Production design, Piers Hanmer. Manicure,
Lisa Logan. Dress (price upon request) and ear-
rings ($595); dress at givenchy.com; earrings at
Saks Fifth Avenue stores. 700: Photographed
at Silver Point Beach Club, Atlantic Beach, NY.
Produced by Marcus Ward for North Six. Set
design, Piers Hanmer. Hair, Duffy for Vidal
Sassoon. Manicure, Megumi Yamamoto. On
Trentini: Dress, $3,500; select Dior boutiques.
Manolo Blahnik flats, $645; Manolo Blahnik,
NYC. On Kloss: Dress; personalshopper@odlr
.com for information. On Axente: Dress; (212)
645-1797. 701: Produced by Art House. Makeup,
Lucia Pieroni for Clé de Peau Beauté. Manicure,
Megumi Yamamoto. Coat, price upon request;
Saint Laurent, NYC. 702: Manicure, Gina Vi-
viano for Chanel Le Vernis. Clothes; hoodbyair
.com. 703: Produced by Padbury Production.
Set Design, Emma Roach for Streeters. Mani-
cure, Trish Lomax. Dress, $24,000; Valentino,
NYC. 704–705: Hair, Jimmy Paul for Bumble
and Bumble. Makeup, Dick Page for Shiseido.
Produced by Ricardo D. Martins for North Six.
From left: On Stubbington: Jacket ($8,000), skirt
($2,100), and pochette ($3,800). On Van Rom-
paey: Jacket ($9,000), skirt ($4,800), and skunk-
fur bag ($6,200). On Westling: Coat ($4,200),
skirt ($3,600), and crocodile bag ($10,000). On
Elson: Dress, $9,000. On Rizer: Vest ($18,000),
sweater ($550), skirt ($1,800), and studded bag
($3,200); clothes at Marc Jacobs stores; pochette
and crocodile bags at marcjacobs.com; skunk-
fur bag at Marc Jacobs stores; studded bag at
Saks Fifth Avenue stores. 706: Elizabeth Peyton.
Phoebe, 2015. Colored pencil and pastel on paper,
9" x 6". ©  Elizabeth Peyton. Courtesy of the
artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and
Brussels. 707: Produced by Art House. Manicure,
Anatole Rainey. Dress coat and heels, priced
upon request; select Maison Margiela boutiques.
708–709: Produced by Elizabeth Murphy for
Little Bear. On Smalls: Dress (price upon re-
quest) and boots ($565); publicschoolnyc
.com. On Hynes: Coat at Steven Alan, NYC;
sweater at Odin, NYC; shirt at Saks Fifth Av-
enue stores; pants at Bergdorf Goodman, NYC.
710: Kloss: Photographed at Beach Studios,
London. Produced by Sylvia Farago Ltd. Set
design, David White for Streeters. Manicure,
Adam Slee for Rimmel London. On Kloss: Top
($1,650) and skirt ($1,450); Calvin Klein Col-
lection, NYC. Converse sneakers, $40; converse
.com. Delevingne: Hair, Garren at Garren New
York for R+Co. Makeup: Dick Page for Shi-
seido. Produced by PRODn at Art + Commerce.
Set design, Mary Howard. Manicure, Debo-
rah Lippmann. On Delevingne: Dress, $4,380;
select Prada boutiques. 711: Photographed at
Chateau Marmont, West Hollywood. Produced
by Lalaland. Set design, Peter Klein for Frank
Reps. Manicure, Tom Bachik for L’Oréal Paris.
Dress, glasses, and earrings ($1,450); select Gucci
boutiques. Cartier watch, $8,750; cartier.us.
712–713: Manicure, Megumi Yamamoto. Top,
pants, and shoes (priced upon request); select
Prada boutiques. 714: Jacket ($10,400) and skirt;
select Chanel boutiques. 715: Photographed at
the Waldorf Astoria, New York. Slip; La Perla
boutiques. 716–717: John Baldessari. NOT ART,
2015. © John Baldessari. 718: Photographed
at Storm King Arts Center. Manicure, Rieko
Okusa. Dress, Stella McCartney, NYC. Lace
dress (underneath), $1,250; Coco Pari, Red
Bank, NJ. 719: Jacket ($7,990), shirt ($790), pants
($1,440), and bow tie ($250); Tom Ford, NYC.
720: Photographed at 5 Hertford Street, London.
Produced by Sylvia Farago Ltd. Manicure, Jenny
Longworth. On James: Blouse ($775) and skirt
($740); j-w-anderson.com. On Mbatha-Raw:
Top ($4,485) and skirt ($4,500); Neiman Marcus
stores. 721: Hair, Duffy for Vidal Sassoon. Pho-
tographed at the Forum, Kentish Town, Lon-
don. Produced by AND Production London.
Manicure, Jenny Longworth. On Lamar: Leather
hoodie ($2,595), pants (price upon request), and
boots ($595); Alexander Wang, NYC. On Ewers:
Jacket ($7,995) and dress ($7,995); Alexander
Wang, NYC. 722–723: Produced by Padbury
Production. Set design, Emma Roach at Street-
ers. Clockwise from left: Wool-and-acrylic dress,
$9,040. Lace dress, $21,575. Blouse and pants,
$5,975. Wool dress, $6,120. Cotton-nylon dress,
$21,720. On all: PVC shoes, $485. Clothes and
accessories at Dover Street Market New York.
724: Produced by Art House. Manicure, Ana-
tole Rainey. Coat, turtleneck, skirt, and earring,
priced upon request; select Louis Vuitton bou-
tiques 725: Set design, Emma Roach at Streeters.
Robot by Tech Works FX Studios. Produced by
Padbury Production. 726–727: Photographed
at Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart. Pro-
duced by Dawn Boller for Little Bear. Set design,
Dimitri Levas. Manicure, Isis Antelo. On Adri-
ana: Dress ($5,495), earrings ($795), necklace
($2,150), purse ($675), and shoes ($795); select
Dolce & Gabbana boutiques. On Valentina:
Dress, $1,245; select Dolce & Gabbana bou-
tiques. 728: Makeup, Lucia Pieroni for Clé de
Peau Beauté. Tights ($350), cuff ($690), bangle
($730), and shoes ($895); Proenza Schouler,
NYC. 729: Hair, Shay Ashual for Wella Profes-
sionals. Photographed at the Kennedy Farm,
Franklin, TN. Produced by Lisa A. York. Set
design, Mary Howard Studio. Manicure, Anita-
Manicure. Tank and skirt, priced upon request.
Boots ($1,100); all at select Ralph Lauren stores.
730–731: Produced by 10-4inc, London.
HUSTLE & BUSTLE
In this story: manicure, Adam Slee for Rim-
mel London. 732: Dress ($10,445) and earrings
(price upon request); earrings at givenchy.com.
Boots, $150; sorel.com. 733: Dress, $8,500. 734:
Coat, price upon request. Sneakers, $575; Pierre
VOGUE.COM
 Hardy, NYC. 735: Jacket ($11,050) and skirt
($18,350). Boots, $200; Timberland stores. 736:
Coat ($5,600) and sneakers ($980). 737: Dress,
$21,000. 738: Dress, $6,800. 741: Turtleneck,
price upon request. 743: Shirt, skirt, belt, and
boots, priced upon request.
INTO THE WOODS
744–745: Coat ($5,317) and turtleneck; turtle-
neck at modaoperandi.com. Earring, price upon
request; Opening Ceremony, NYC. Gloves, $650;
Perrin Paris, NYC. Socks, $40; uggaustralia.com.
746: Coat, $8,145. Belt, $690; Lanvin, NYC.
Boots, price upon request; christianlouboutin
A WORD ABOUT DISCOUNTERS W H IL E VO GUE T HO ROUG HLY R ES EA RCHES T HE COMPANIES MENTIONED IN ITS PAGES, WE CANNOT GUARANTEE TH E AUTH ENTICITY OF MERCH AN D IS E SO LD BY D ISCOUN T E RS.
EMPIRE RISES
In this story: manicure, Lisa Jachno for Labnails.
For Campbell: Makeup, Fran Cooper. Mani-
cure, Lisa Peña-Wong. For Henson: Makeup,
Ashunta Sheriff. For Howard: Grooming, Diana
Schmidtke. For Smollett: Grooming, Nil Muir.
For Gray: Grooming, Garrick Dixon. 782–783:
On Campbell: Dress, $9,200; Emilio Pucci,
NYC. On Henson: Cape, $5,995; select Michael
Kors stores. Dress, $9,995; Hugo Boss stores. Ja-
cob & Co. necklace; Jacob & Co., NYC. Aquaz-
zura heels, $1,350; Saks Fifth Avenue stores. On
Dunn: Bodysuit ($1,220) and pants ($17,700);
Barneys New York, NYC. Erickson Beamon
Ray-Ban sunglasses, $160; sunglasshut.com.
790: On Dunn: Dress ($12,500), bra ($375), and
briefs ($315); Proenza Schouler, NYC. On Camp-
bell: Marabou jacket ($6,990) and bag ($2,940);
jacket at Givenchy, NYC; bag at givenchy
.com. Dress, $3,990; Neiman Marcus, Beverly
Hills. Marc Jacobs sandals, $770; Marc Jacobs
stores. 791: On Dunn: Dress, $1,600; saks.com.
Necklace; Jacob & Co., NYC. On Campbell:
Dress, price upon request; marchesa.com. Neck-
lace; Jacob & Co., NYC. On Smollett: Calvin
Klein Underwear T-shirt, $40 for pack of three;
calvinklein.com. J.J. Hat Center fedora, $275;
jjhatcenter.com.

.com. 747: Coat, price upon request. 748: Skirt,
$5,590. Boots, $2,595; Calvin Klein Collection,
NYC. 749: Coat ($13,686) and dress ($61,612).
750–751: Coat, price upon request. Bag, $2,995;
Barneys New York, NYC. Gloves, $1,050;
gaspargloves.com. Boots, $2,145; rochas.com.
752: Brooches, $460 each; miriamhaskell.com.
AS I S A LWAYS T HE CAS E I N PURCHASI N G A N I T EM FRO M A NYW H ER E OT HE R T HA N TH E AUTH OR IZ ED STOR E, TH E BUYER TAKES A R ISK AND SH OULD USE CAUTION WH EN D OING SO.
brooches (in hair); $553 each; Laura Gambucci,
La Jolla, CA. On Daniels: Tom Ford tuxedo
($5,330), shirt ($560), and bowtie ($250); Tom
Ford, NYC. On Howard: Ermenegildo Zegna
jacket ($2,895), trousers ($725), and tie ($205);
Ermenegildo Zegna stores. Tom Ford shirt, $720:
Tom Ford, NYC. Rolex watch, $46,150; rolex
STEAL OF THE MONTH
794–795: Manicure, Sophy Robson. Albertus
Swanepoel hat, $400; sanctuaryofstyle.com.
WHAT TO WEAR WHERE
In this story: manicure, Gina Viviano for Chanel

753: Peacoat, $12,550. 754: Coat ($5,290) and
skirt ($6,990). Marni turtleneck, $470; Barneys
New York stores. Shoes, $740; Marc Jacobs
stores. 755: Coat ($49,985) and dress ($6,500).
B STRONG
In this story: manicure, Lisa Logan. 760: Dress,
$3,995; Stella McCartney, NYC. 761: Dress;
atelier@versace.it for information.
ALL IN THE TIMING
770: Jacket ($995), shirt ($350), and trousers
($395); burberry.com. J.J. Hat Center cap, $75;
J.J. Hat Center, NYC. Paul Smith tie, $170; Paul
Smith, NYC. Alexander Olch suspenders, $150;
nordstrom.com.
LAKE EFFECT
In this story: manicure, Yuko Aoki. 774–775:
On Presley: Swim trunks, $240; orlebarbrown
.com. On Crawford: Swimsuit, $490; Eres bou-
tiques. On Kaia: Swimsuit, $158; net-a-porter
.com. 776–777: On Kaia: Saint James top, $90;
Saint James, NYC. On Rande: Orlebar Brown
swim trunks, $240; orlebarbrown.com. On Kaia:
J.Crew swimsuit, $98; jcrew.com. On Crawford:
Gap shirt, $60, gap.com. Tory Burch swimsuit,
$225; Tory Burch stores. 779: On Crawford:
Rails shirt, $138; railsclothing.com. Citizens
of Humanity shorts, $188; citizensofhumanity
.com. 78 0: On Crawford: T-shirt, $125;
rag-bone.com. On Kaia: Dress, $368; Concrete
+ Water, Brooklyn. Stetson hat, $150; stetson
.com. Jutta Neumann belt, $200; jn-ny.com.
.com. On Byers: Calvin Klein Collection tuxedo
($1,725) and shirt ($350); Calvin Klein Collec-
tion, NYC. Calvin Klein White Label tie, $65;
calvinklein.com. On The Weeknd: Dolce & Gab-
bana suit, $2,695; select Dolce & Gabbana bou-
tiques. Burberry London shirt, $295; burberry
.com. J.Crew tie, $70; jcrew.com. Chrome Hearts
ring, $695; Chrome Hearts, NYC. On Smol-
lett: Calvin Klein Collection suit ($1,550), shirt
($395), and shoes ($515); Calvin Klein Collec-
tion, NYC. On Gray: Versus Versace jacket,
$925, Versace, NYC. Giuseppe Zanotti Design
pants ($2,350) and sneakers ($1,075); Giuseppe
Zanotti Design boutiques. Calvin Klein Under-
wear tank top, $40 for pack of three; calvinklein
.com. Jacob & Co. necklace; Jacob & Co.,
NYC. Rolex by Beladora, $9,950; beladora
.com. Artwork: Matthew Kutzin Custom
Framing Service, Van Nuys, CA. D’Andrea
Visual Communications, Cypress, CA. 785: On
Dunn: Dress, price upon request; Calvin Klein
Collection, NYC. 786–787: On Dunn: Dress,
$9,990; select Ralph Lauren stores. T-shirt,
$85; rag-bone.com. Boa, price upon request; J.
Mendel, NYC. Marc Jacobs shoes, $770; Marc
Jacobs stores. On Howard: Overcoat, $3,984;
Paul Stuart, Chicago. Ralph Lauren trousers,
$795; similar styles at select Ralph Lauren
stores. Beladora cuff links, $1,550; beladora
.com. Christian Louboutin shoes, $945;
christianlouboutin.com. 788–789: On Dunn:
Dress, $9,995; Michael Kors stores. Harry Win-
ston diamond bracelets ($19,800–$405,000);
Harry Winston boutiques. On The Weeknd:
Le Vernis. 796–797: Dress ($8,500), hat (price
upon request), and bag ($1,650). 798: Belt, $925;
rochas.com. Shoes, $1,895; Maison Margiela bou-
tiques. 799: Jutta Neumann belt, $210; jn-ny.com.
Heels, price upon request; Derek Lam, NYC. 800:
Bag, $3,750; Neiman Marcus, Dallas. Ring, $705;
select Louis Vuitton boutiques. 801: Necklace,
$1,950, and boots, $1,960. 802: Bag ($5,000) and
pumps ($740). 803: Coat ($25,750), bag (price
upon request), and gloves ($700). 804: Bag,
$3,850; select Dior boutiques. Boots, price upon
request; Derek Lam, NYC. 805: Earrings ($360),
bag ($3,335), and shoes ($950). 806: Brooches
($360–$505) and gloves ($675). 807: Dress
($7,850), jacket ($6,650), and earrings ($885).
Index: Manicure, Tom Bachik for L’Oréal
Paris. 808: 1. Brooches ($350 –$1,950) and
dress ($4,600). American Apparel beret, $24;
americanapparel.com. 3. Pin, $4,245. 813: Top
($2,350), skirt ($8,100), and shoes ($3,200).
Cartier watch, $8,750; Cartier boutiques.
Carry-On ($360) and Stowaway ($390) bags;
steamlineluggage.com. 816: 1. Jacket ($2,465),
playsuit ($3,095), and beret ($2,465). 2. Bag,
$4,300. 4. Baguette, $2,450. 5. Bag, $2,600. 818:
1. Dress, $2,420. 5. Necklace, $4,100. 824: 1.
Skirt, $4,290. Sunglasses, price upon request;
rodarte.net. Suitcase, price upon request; select
Louis Vuitton boutiques. 826: 1. Blazer, $3,495.
3. Sunglasses, $2,800. Last look: 832: Bag, price
upon request; select Louis Vuitton boutiques.
ALL PRICES APPROXIMATE

VOGUE IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2015 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE
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Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. S. I. Newhouse, Jr., Chairman; Charles H. Townsend, Chief Executive Officer; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President; David E. Geithner, Chief Financial
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VOGUE.COM VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015

831
Last Look
EDITOR: VIRGINIA SMITH

Louis Vuitton
bag

F
ew things trump
the lazy-day,
warm-weather bliss
imparted by sun
rays pirouetting
as mercurial
shadows along
the pool floor. At Louis Vuitton,
Nicolas Ghesquière playfully
interprets this aquatic reverie in
the form of a spectacular purse
D E TA I LS, S EE I N TH I S I SSU E

by bending wiggles of turquoise

and noir over channeled cyan
Epi leather. Whether you’re
tanning by the shore or toasting
with aperitifs à la piscine, it’s
guaranteed to make a splash. 
PHOTOGRAPHED BY ERIC BOMAN

832 VOGUE SEPTEMBER 2015 VOGUE.COM