MARGOT ROBBIE

THE SUMMER OF BARBIE

THE GETAWAY
FASHION TAKES TO THE ROAD
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 Summer 2023

FAS HIO N E DITOR: MAX O RT EGA. HAIR, ALEX B ROWNS E LL; MAKEU P, RAOUL AL E JANDRE; ADDI TI ON AL G ROO MIN G FO R WHIT E, KC FE E .
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THIS MUST BE THE PLACE
JEREMY ALLEN WHITE MEANS BUSINESS IN A VERSACE BLAZER AND PANTS. MODEL REBECCA LONGENDYKE KEEPS A WATCHFUL EYE
IN A VALENTINO SWEATER, SHIRT, AND SKIRT. ALEXANDER McQUEEN BAG. PHOTOGRAPHED BY NORMAN JEAN ROY.

40 54 74 skirts capture 126 playing the bride

Editor’s Letter Nose in a Book Hello, Barbie! the mood—and Take Two or playing hooky
Perfumers It’s the movie of the mountains— Stella McCartney on the back
44 capture a literary the summer—and of Sichuan and Chinese of a motorcycle
Remembrance scent. By the role Margot designer Shie Lyu
Michael Roberts Mattie Kahn Robbie was born 104 repurpose and 136
lived life as it to play. Abby Postcards reinvent each The Get
should be lived: 56 Aguirre goes on From Italy other’s work. By Outfit your
with savage wit Novel a playdate Short dresses and Laura Hawkins honeymoon (or
and endless élan Occupations with Hollywood’s breezy blouses minimoon,
Summer’s indomitable signal a summer 130 or babymoon)
48 best books heroine of sun-kissed Just One Thing with all things
Woman to days, and nights Model Vittoria light and breezy
Woman 58 86 mad with mischief Ceretti and her
For Ulla Johnson, Brushing Up Meet Me in Dior dress are 142
there’s no Keep your Senegal 116 equally at ease Last Look
feminine without ponytail high (and The electric Something’s
the feminist. your worries low) streets and placid Cooking
By Lynn Yaeger beaches of Dakar The Bear’s Jeremy
62 call for a vivid, Allen White is Cover Look Hello, Dolly
52 Night Night? textured wardrobe an irresistible Margot Robbie wears a Versace dress.
Made in Kyiv Resting well throwback—both Chopard Haute Joaillerie earring. Hair, Shay
Gunia Project is has become 98 grounded and Ashual; makeup, Pati Dubroff using Chanel.
a Ukrainian the ultimate Country Pursuits perfectly suited to Details, see In This Issue.
label fusing folk aspiration. Prim jackets la vie bohème. Photographer: Ethan James Green.
with fashion By Chloe Malle and romantic By Marley Marius Fashion Editor: Gabriella Karefa-Johnson.

32 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM

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DILLARD’S
MACY’S
ULTA
Letter From the Editor
Life Fantastic
THIS WILL BE THE SUMMER of Barbie—that’s been
clear at least since set photographs of Margot Robbie
and Ryan Gosling dressed in rather startling neon skates
caused a frenzy online. It’s good and wise to be wary
of hype, but the excitement around Barbie, which opens
in July, is hard not to be caught up in. Here is a doll that
has meant so much to so many, a cultural icon that has
grown up alongside us and reflected the times she found
herself in. Barbie’s a mirror. She tells us who we are and
who we’ve been. Her history is our history.
And so much pink! Not since Elsa Schiaparelli has a
color had such cultural currency. Robbie looks incredible
in pink, of course, and I am thrilled to have her on our
cover this month, photographed by Ethan James Green
and styled by Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. It will come as
no surprise that Robbie is much more than Barbie’s star.
Her production company, LuckyChap, brought this
long-discussed Hollywood project to fruition, and Robbie
played a central role in persuading Greta Gerwig to be
writer (with her partner, Noah Baumbach) and director.
What an inspired choice—and what a signal that Barbie
would be more than a mere summertime diversion.
40 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM
PRETTY IN PINK
LEFT: MARGOT ROBBIE IN VERSACE. ABOVE,
IN BUTTONS: ROBBIE WEARS SERGIO HUDSON.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY ETHAN JAMES GREEN.
Gerwig is the filmmaker behind both Lady
Bird and Little Women—movies that had
much to say about womanhood, empowerment,
growing up, and coming into your own.
I was lucky enough to see about 20 minutes
of Barbie before we went to press. The film
was not yet done, but what I saw convinced
me that Robbie is in command of her
PRO DUC ED BY ROSCO PRO DUCTIO N. CRE ATIVE CON CE PT AND SE T DES IG N : J UL IA WAG NER . DE TAILS, SE E IN TH IS ISSUE.
charismatic powers, and that the movie is
self-aware and modern. You simply can’t
FAS HIO N E DITOR: GAB RIE LLA KAREFA-JO HN SO N. H AIR, S HAY ASHUAL; MAKEUP, PATI DUB ROFF US ING C H ANE L .
imagine anything more colorful. (As you’ll read in Abby
Aguirre’s profile of Robbie, the look was guided by
classic soundstage Technicolor musicals such as The Red
Shoes and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.) The pinks and
blues and sunshine yellows made me think of someone
I would have loved to have with me: my friend of many
decades Michael Roberts, who we lost in April, and who
used color in his work as well as anyone I’ve ever known.
Three of Michael’s closest friends remember him in the
pages that follow. Before he settled in Sicily—the island
he made his home—he was something of a nomad in the
fashion world, and I had him as a houseguest on more
than one occasion. Michael traveled light and might take
you up on your invitation to stay the night, and then
extend that visit for months. An editor and photographer
and illustrator who had an exacting eye, a cutting wit,
and a fierce and rare loyalty, Michael was a friend one made
for life, and his illustrations and assemblages for Vogue,
Tatler, The New Yorker, and more are brilliant and delightful
reminders of his playful, anarchic spirit.
Remembrance
Michael Roberts,
1948–2023
He was a bit of everything—fashion
editor, stylist, photographer, illustrator,
writer—and lived life as it should
be: with savage wit and endless élan.
RUPERT EVERETT
I first came across Michael waiting in line to get into
London’s Embassy Club in 1978. I was a startled faun of
18 and he was the fashion editor of The Sunday Times.
I cowered in the shadows as he wafted past the queue in
a flotilla of fabulous fashion freaks towards the coat
check, exuding a strange international glamour, dressed
in a blazer, a button-down collar, and a tightly knotted
tie. Suddenly we were introduced and Michael looked me
up and down. (I was smaller in those days.) “Did anyone
tell you that you look like Snow White?”
“No.”
“With a touch of Anne Frank. Very peculiar.”
Before I could answer he had swept on.
Despite this inauspicious beginning, we soon became
great friends.
When Michael started taking photographs I was his
willing model. My posing technique—borrowed from
Gloria Swanson—made him shriek as I looked daggers
at the lens from under my brow. “Why don’t we try
something different?” he said after a few moments. “Un.
Deux. Trois. JUMP.”
Jumping and looking daggers was beyond me.
Pretty soon though, as my career took off, he became
my personal photographer. I didn’t make a move without
Michael. He shot the cover of my first book. One
44 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM
CUT ABOVE
“HE WAS ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T EXIST
WITHOUT A PROJECT.” ROBERTS
IN 2015, PHOTOGRAPHED BY MILO OSBORN.
dissolute summer evening in Saint-Tropez he showed up
to shoot me for American GQ. I had completely forgotten
he was coming and was on my way out. Michael came
along. At nine the next morning we were just about to go
to bed when he suddenly reappeared ready for the day’s
shoot. Before I had the chance to say that I wasn’t in the
mood and could we reschedule, he jumped in: “Well, you
could knock me down with a feather.”
“What do you mean?”
“I am just amazed at how professional you are.
I thought you would be in bed—but no. Here you are,
ready to go.”
“But Michael…”
“Don’t be modest. You’re a real trouper. Let’s go.”
Within minutes we were on the beach and I was
jumping out of the sea. Finally, I could do “Un, deux,
trois, JUMP” and look daggers.
“J’adore,” said Michael at the end of the day and passed
© MILO OS BORN .
out for 16 hours.
Since those long-ago days we have been all over the
world together. We both moved to Paris at the same time.
I discovered Sicily through Michael. In 2018 I was > 4 6
Remembrance
at the Taormina film festival, and had been lucky enough We first started doing projects together in 1994 when
to receive a lifetime achievement award. It was huge Anna Wintour asked me to do an exhibition of all my
and wouldn’t fit into my suitcase. Michael was sitting in work for Vogue, back to when I started there in 1968.
my room taking pictures. I then followed that with a book of the same, which
“The awards are getting bigger,” I said. Michael art-directed, designed, and edited with me. He
“And the movies got smaller!” quipped Michael. “Are arrived in New York from London one hot summer’s
you ready for your close-up, Miss DeMille?” day and came directly to my office where I had all the tear
And he took the last photo. sheets from my career carefully organized. He heaved
In the past few years the breakneck pace slowed down, this huge pile onto his lap and started going through
but he was one of those people who didn’t exist without a them, saying, “In! Out! Out! In! Out! Horrendous!
project. A new book. A series of collages. Another You can’t be serious! Out!” and so on. But after about
GingerNutz story. The last time I saw Michael we were 10 minutes he fell fast asleep and all my precious filing
in Palermo for the release of what was to be his last book methods went to pieces, as the sheets fell through his
of photographs. It was a three-day event. He was clearly fingers and onto the floor in a chaotic heap.
not well. We drove back to Taormina at the end, and We survived, and our friendship was firmly cemented.
I could tell he was spent. He and I went on to do my second book 10 years later.
“When will I see you again?” I was taking the night Both of the covers had amazing cutout portraits of me by
train to Rome. Michael. I did manage to get my own back a little later
“Never, probably,” he answered, laughing. when he asked me to work on his Mr. Snippy book, where
He was right. @ I edited out all of his pictures of naked guys. It was a
wonderful book, mostly of his paper cutouts from the
New Yorker days—beautiful, irreverent, and so, so funny.
GRACE CODDINGTON Over the years we only fell out once, when he did a
Michael was a huge part of my life. Our relationship drawing of me from behind for the British Sunday Times.
goes back to the early ’70s when he stayed in my house in I was wearing my usual uniform of a very tight Azzedine
London. He kept me company after my husband Willie Alaïa skirt, a white shirt, and had huge frizzy red hair in
Christie had left me. Michael came for a couple of nights full bloom. Unmistakably me, even though he had added
and stayed six months, and we formed a good few inches onto my hips.
a bond from then on. I gave him a In the caption he wrote, There are
room at the top of the house, but he Mr. Snippy was a certain fashion editors who should
never got farther than the couch in know better. I was furious and hurt
the living room, preferring to sleep
wonderful book, mostly (though it did encourage me to lose
there and watch TV all night long. of his paper cutouts a few pounds). Years later when
Years later, writing my memoir,
I discovered Michael hadn’t changed
from The New Yorker— he was drawing my doppelgänger,
the orangutan GingerNutz, he
habits. He stayed with me in Long beautiful, irreverent, drew her with the same Alaïa skirt
Island where he had The Simpsons and white shirt on, but this time
blaring late into the night. When I
and so, so funny round, he added hairy legs. We
went to turn it off at 3 a.m., because laughed until we cried.
I couldn’t sleep, I found him on the sofa with his eyes firmly As I write this, I struggle to get across how amazing
closed, holding on to the remote. I tried to gouge it out of Michael was at so many things and how much I adore
his hand, but he held on even tighter. Next day, he berated him. I just wish he was here to help me. After all, there is
me for being so boring, and going to bed so early. That no one in the world who wrote in my voice better than he
period was really the happiest and most fun, talking about did. And he certainly would have enjoyed writing this. @
the old days, which he remembered better than me—
including all my old boyfriends. Michael would make
up stories about them when I couldn’t think what to say. GABÉ DOPPELT
Michael could also be infuriating to the point that Michael was my first boss at Tatler magazine in London.
I would have to get in my car, drive down the road out of I was 17, had failed at the latter part of my education,
earshot, and scream and scream. He was not an easy guest and the only diploma I possessed was from a typing course.
to have around. He had an aversion to bugs, which he Which was perfect because Michael had no need for
claimed were in hordes outside my front door. He never academics. He introduced me, as assistant, to the world
ventured into the garden or into the pool. And he could of fashion, albeit his version of it!
never find anything he liked to eat, none of the beautiful Sure, he was chaotic. The overflowing ashtrays, my
fresh fruit or vegetables available in the Hamptons in desk drawers filled with his uncashed paychecks. I had no
the summer—no sweet tomatoes, no delicious white corn, idea how he survived, but since he slept in the fashion
just peaches, marinated in lemon juice with a little sugar, closet most nights and ate my lunch before I could, maybe
which was his diet for his entire stay. he never needed those checks.

46 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM

 DRAWING ATTENTION
CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: AN ILLUSTRATION BY
ROBERTS FOR VOGUE, FEBRUARY 1984; A COVER
FOR THE NEW YORKER; ARTWORK FROM
HIS GINGERNUTZ SERIES WITH CODDINGTON.
Still, out of all the chaos something wildly creative
always came. His wonderful, witty drawings; a
screamingly funny set of headlines that would inform
a story we would then run off and shoot; a T-shirt
collection for the retailer Joseph; and eventually his
photography—his brilliance and creativity never ended.
At night, he would window-shop and come to work
the next day with a laundry list of items for me to call in
for a shoot: “the tweed coat on the second mannequin
from the left in the fourth window on the Brompton
Road side of Harrods, all the diamond pendants in
the windows of Harry Winston.” This was how he styled
his shoots; nothing was ever done in a conventional
way. Somewhere in my garage in Los Angeles I have all
the notebooks I kept during my years working for him.
They are full of Polaroids and lists of the nutty things he
had me do as his assistant.
He was so naughty too. I remember being on holiday in
South Africa and getting a panic call from Tina Brown,
then editor in chief of Tatler, asking me to come back to
London and control Michael. He was so upset about
not getting the number of pages he wanted for a story
that he flushed the film down the toilet and disappeared.
It was my job to find him, and the film. I only found
Michael. The film was long gone down the drain.
The one time Michael ever got angry with me was
some 40 years later when I told him that I thought
his drawing for the invitation to a surprise 75th birthday
dinner for our mutual friend Grace Coddington was
offensive. He’d drawn an orangutan, named GingerNutz,
with long flowing red frizzy hair like Grace’s. It was
dressed only in a diaper. I loved the monkey, but I told
him I thought the diaper could be offensive to a 75-year-
old. A vicious email followed, telling me that I had not
aged well, lost my sense of humor, and, basically, to go to
hell. He then promptly sent the drawings to Grace,
who fell in love with them, and she and Michael went on
to collaborate on three hugely successful GingerNutz
books. Thankfully, Michael forgave me!
That was Michael, and I was so damn lucky to have
had those formative glorious years with him. @
47

Woman to Woman
For New York–based designer
Ulla Johnson, there’s no feminine without
the feminist. By Lynn Yaeger.
A
friend of mine, a jewelry historian, is often
called upon to give talks or chair panels. When
a gig comes up at the last minute and she has,
like most of us, nothing to wear, she hustles
down to a certain shop on Bleecker Street and picks up
what she calls “an Ulla.”
She is not alone in her reliance on a dress from Ulla John-
son, whose designs—at once vaguely frilly but not ridicu-
lous, pretty but not sticky, bohemian but never unkempt—
more and more reflect how women want to look today. No
longer bound by the arcane rules of appropriateness (nor
forced to troop around in “basics”), they—okay, we—are
free to don a puff sleeve and, nevertheless, be taken seriously.
48 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM
CHECK MATE
“I firmly believe women
dress for themselves,”
says Ulla Johnson,
wearing her Danai dress.
Johnson, 49, is among a cadre of
female designers who are answering
that age-old question: What do women
want? We are thinking here of peo-
ple like Catherine Holstein at Khaite,
Nili Lotan, sisters Nicky and Simone
of the eponymous Zimmermann—
women who, like Johnson, launched
their highly successful businesses with
little industry fanfare. These designers
owe their popularity not to the din of
social media or the relentless shilling
of so-called influencers, but to the
clothes themselves.
“I really care about every detail—
where the pockets go, where the zipper
is; I put scuba pulls on the zips so you
don’t have to ask someone to help you,”
Johnson explains. “I firmly believe
women dress for themselves—they
want to look amazing for themselves.
If you wear something that makes you
feel you can be truly seen for who
you are? Well, then—my work is done.”
Johnson’s best-selling printed dress-
es, her newly launched sustainable
premium denim, her woven bags and
shell drop earrings, are sold at more
than 500 stores worldwide, with the
business remaining fiercely indepen-
dent and wholly self-owned. Her latest
venture is an airy, 3,000-square-foot
shop in West Hollywood boasting a solarium designed
by Kelly Wearstler and a garden created by Johnson’s
friend Miranda Brooks, the landscape architect.
The day I visit Johnson in her vast Lower Manhattan
atelier, she takes me down a corridor crammed with frothy
antique dresses that inspire her—a perp walk that fills
me with delight and desire. We settle into her office, and
through the glass wall I can see her staff busily conferring,
many of them young women of different shapes and sizes
clad in Ullas. Johnson, who is willowy and has long, fair
hair, is sporting a beige dress in a bold print that bears a
fleeting resemblance to a zebra stripe, and though it has
neo-Victorian sleeves it is also narrow through the body,
eschewing the dreaded vintage-nightie effect. Around her
neck is a 19th-century gold collar worked to look like
lace; on her wrists and fingers are a mix of deeply personal
COURTESY OF ULLA JO HN SO N.
baubles amid a crush of signed Cartier pieces.
The designer grew up in Manhattan. Her parents were
archaeologists, and she had a peripatetic childhood, trav-
eling the world with them. ( Johnson recalls looking at
the folk costumes that her mother, who is Serbian, col-
lected, and realizing then and there that she wanted to get
more in touch with handcrafts.) A love of hitting the >
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 road has informed her own life, too: When her daughter
was an infant, Johnson made her way to Cuzco, once the
center of the Inca empire. “People said you can’t take
a six-week-old there, but I had my baby with me. The
women there knit, the men weave. It was a major turning
point in my career—I started working with artisans there,
and in India.”
Though at one point she thought she might become an
ob-gyn, she majored in psychology and women’s studies at
the University of Michigan—and the combination, she
says, led her to examine fashion and how it makes women
feel. After graduating, she came back to New York and
took a job at the Feminist Press, but couldn’t live on
the salary—a munificent $14,000 a year—“so I ended
up getting a retail job. I love retail,” Johnson says, “and
it was such a wonderful time in New York in the late
1990s: There were all these boutiques focusing on young
designers—Steven Alan, TG-170. I was starting to make
little things myself, taking draping and sewing classes. You
didn’t have to have a big venture capital investment—I
would just go to Midtown, find
a patternmaker; I learned how
to order Italian fabrics—I cared
about fabric, but wanted a price
point that wasn’t exclusionary.
I was really just designing for
myself and some friends, but I
showed my stuff on the floor of
Barneys, and they picked it up.”
It has not al way s been a
smooth road. “I feel like I’ve
lived a million lives since then—
September 11, and then, just as
my business was building, the
stock market collapse—I’ve re-
invented myself quite a number
of times.” Not to mention having
three children in short order—
Soren, now 17; Asher, 13; and
Agnes, 11. They live, with John-
son’s husband, consultant Zach
Miner, and a vizsla named Daph-
ne, in a 19th-century Brooklyn
row house, a sunny refuge full of plants with works by art-
ists including Sheila Hicks on the walls. Custom shelves
in the den hold the couple’s extensive library. “I’m such a
gatherer,” the designer says. “Between my husband and me,
I think we might drown in our books.”
Johnson’s designs touched a nerve during the pandemic,
when cheerfulness was hard to come by. The online busi-
ness grew—she says, proudly, that she didn’t have to fur-
lough a single employee—while the designer herself met
the situation with characteristic style: “I got fully dressed
during COVID—I would stand on my stoop in a full look.
COURTESY OF ULLA JO HN SO N.
I felt, more than ever, that what fashion does is lift us up
and make us feel like the best version of ourselves: a vision
of ourselves doing exciting things.”
The most exciting thing she is doing at the moment is the
new LA store, which is meant to be comfy and welcoming,
yes—but not without a certain laid-back splendor. Brooks,
who also designed the small yard of Johnson’s Brooklyn
ALL IN THE FAMILY
above: Johnson and her daughter,
Agnes, on a plant-sourcing trip
to Malibu—where the designer also
found the silk floss tree now in
her LA store. left: Johnson with her
mother in Morocco in 1977.
house, had big plans for the shop’s
outdoor space, but alas: The gor-
geous garden that Johnson and
Brooks intended to create out
of an existing parking lot was
blocked by the city of West Hol-
lywood and is now a far smaller
endeavor, boasting only a silk
floss tree with thorny pink flow-
ers and a dragon tree. Still, the
entranceway will feature silvery
foliage and a cloud hedge of olive
trees. “It’s meant to be intimate
and soft,” Brooks says.
Intimate and soft, but also sur-
prising and thought-provoking. The new space sprawls over
two stories, the color scheme is deep gold and terra-cotta,
and there is a tree front and center in the main room, a
way of bringing the outside in. Wearstler says that she and
Johnson wanted the shop to embody an earnest roster of
“California sun, organic texture, residential essence, and an
artisanal hand.” This last tenet is perhaps the most import-
ant, since the works of local creatives are integral: Among
them, artist Ross Hansen was commissioned to create the
resin entry table; ceramist Brittany Mojo contributed one
of her signature sculptures. “Ulla and I both love working
with artists, because they push you forward,” Wearstler says.
This new store—full of light! Salons where you can
hang out and watch your friends try things on!—is meant
to allow for all manner of creative experimentation. “I
think there is something joyful, optimistic, and powerful
about what we do,” Johnson says. “We can be wildly fem-
inine and still be strong.” @
 Made in
Kyiv

W
Ukrainian tile work. Among
them are trident symbols, or
tryzub—seen in Ukraine’s coat
of arms. A necklace with a fist-
shaped pendant evokes the vil-
lage superstition that hiding your

morale was at stake.

that first day,” says

Kamenska. “Al- MYTH MAKING
most all of them from top: Gunia
took something of Project’s Natasha In March, the pair were
ours—an accessory, Kamenska (left)
or a scarf, or a little A pitcher, plate,
small bag. To them, and bowl from their
it was like taking a ceramics line.
piece of Ukraine.”

TOP: PH OTO GRAPH ED BY DE N IS MANO KHA. ALL IMAG ES: COURTESY GU NIA P ROJ ECT.

52 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM

MAGNUM NON-DAIRY MINI.
CHOCOLATE TREATS
WITHOUT THE DAIRY.

MORE

ice cream
 Nose in a Book
In the digital age, paper is at risk of becoming a limited-edition fragrance—
and perfumers have taken note. Mattie Kahn sniffs the stacks.
T
he basement smelled like old
paint and metal; glue, news-
print, vanilla, sea-kissed sweat.
A sign propped up on a table
upstairs had drawn me down there,
looking for spoils: “Books, $1 Each.”
I was in Cape Cod for the summer
and 10. After some dignified begging,
I was granted an advance on allow-
ance. I selected 20 books.
It took me months to work through
the haul, which included a battered-up
Roald Dahl box set and an illustrated
version of The Secret Garden. Each
time I opened one, I was back in the
basement, treasure hunting. I started
to prefer old books to new, not just for
the inscriptions to strangers, but for
that smell. Old books turned stories
into portals; until then, I hadn’t known
reading could feel like time travel.
Science hasn’t cracked wormholes,
but it has deconstructed the scents that
54 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM
make the experience of old books so
appealing. Cecilia Bembibre, a lecturer
at the UCL Institute for Sustainable
Heritage, specializes in the preserva-
tion of historic smells and spends
much of her time breaking down their
particular compositions. In our digital
era, old books meet her research qual-
ifications; paper is at risk of becoming
a limited-edition fragrance.
“We have found that there are some
chemical compounds that keep com-
ing up,” she explains. Like vanillin,
which smells of vanilla; furfural, which
is “like bread, almost cookie-like”;
acid for undertones that linger, like
vinegar; and hexenol, which evokes
fresh-cut grass. There are compounds
SCENTS AND SENSIBILITY
Model Natalia Vodianova and actor
Juno Temple, photographed
by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, 2012.
that smell like marzipan and oth-
ers that reek of must and mold and
threaten to ferment the ambrosial.
Bembibre samples the air in ancient
libraries and cathedrals—not so far
off from the sources of inspiration
that have driven brands to attempt
to distill that Cape Cod basement
funk. In 2011, German publisher
Steidl and Wallpaper partnered with
Karl Lagerfeld and perfumer Geza
Schoen to create the one-off scent
Paper Passion. “I am a paper freak,”
Lagerfeld declared at the time. It was
reported that it took Schoen 17 tries
to balance the cacophonic smells of
the Steidl headquarters in Göttingen
on which the fragrance was based. In
2017, Byredo produced a run of its
Bibliothèque candle as a perfume,
responding to rabid customer demand.
It was so popular the scent was added
to its permanent collection. For > 5 6
 its Replica line, Maison Margiela
debuted the ASMR-inducing Whis-
pers in the Library—an ode to low-lit
libraries and wooden desks. Commod-
ity Fragrances decided to sell scents for
purists—not just the spare Book, but
Paper too. Earlier this spring, Elorea
introduced a line, Forgotten Words,
based on poetic Korean phrases that
have fallen out of fashion, while Dip-
tyque unveiled L’Eau Papier—its
own act of olfactive translation. The
f ragrance celebrates the moment
that “ink soaks into a sheet of white
paper” and includes white musks but
also cereal notes and the roasted seed
extract of sesame for depth. Acclaimed
nose Fabrice Pellegrin set out to con-
jure the “sensations and emotions that
a beautiful piece of white paper pro-
vides” when he developed the scent.
“I thought about how to translate the
texture of the paper, its velvetiness, its
whiteness, and also its meeting with
the ink,” he tells me. And therein, per-
haps, lies another part of the appeal:
A scent that evokes the written word
holds the promise not just of stories
told but those that are to come.
Novel
Occupations
Finding purpose
I (Riverhead Books),
alienated world.—lisa wong macabasco
56 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM
Bembibre’s job is to safeguard, not
speculate, but it doesn’t surprise her
that people are drawn to these fra-
grances. “Reading is a practice we
value,” she tells me from her perch
in one of the London libraries where
she works. “Often, it evokes pleasant
memories—all of that world captured
A scent that evokes
the written word holds
the promise not just
of stories told but those
that are to come
in a little sniff.” She means that scent
is emotional; not just a sequence of
chemicals, but an expression of nos-
talgia and blinkered recollection.
She has proven it. Not long ago, she
conducted an experiment in which
she visited the rare-books room at
St. Paul’s Cathedral with a perfumer
friend. Bembibre collected data, sam-
pling the room’s chemical properties
with scientific techniques, while the
Little Monsters (Avid Reader Press), Brodeur
perfumer sniffed, constructing her
own more subjective interpretation.
The perfumes—which smelled not at
all alike—were then bottled and sam-
pled by a group of 30 people who were
asked which was more effective at
recalling the smell of old books. The
results split down the middle—50-50.
Bembibre has seen the candles and
the perfumes; she used to chafe at
their base notes. But the experiment
changed her mind. “Perhaps it’s not
the descriptors that we’re looking for,
but the feeling.”
In the introduction to Alain Corbin’s
masterful compendium of historical
scents, The Foul and the Fragrant, the
scholar Roy Porter laments that “his-
tory comes deodorized.” He frets that
we’re losing our sense of the past as we
lose touch with its smells—its funk
and finesse, the putrid and the plea-
surable. I’ve been back in dark librar-
ies these past few months, researching
a new project. In the quiet moments,
I feel almost bathed in the resin and
salt; moldering spines and wrinkled
pages. Porter craves just a hint of the
odor. So do I. @
The Imposters
is that manuscript, a
in-stories interrupted by diary
Adrienne Brodeur knows her way
PE NGUIN RAN DO M HOUS E . LITTLE M ON STE RS : COURTESY O F AV ID RE ADE R PRESS.
THE IM POSTE RS: COURTESY OF LI TTLE , BROW N. H OLD ING PATTERN: COURT ESY OF
 Brushing Up
Keep your ponytail high and
your worries low.
I
know what you’re thinking. A ponytail ? What am I,
12? But we’re not talking about tying your hair up for
HIIT class or staggering through your skin care rou-
tine. These are ponytails with purpose: high-swinging,
high-gloss arrangements with their roots in high fashion.
(Less Disney Channel, more Madonna’s Blond Ambition
tour.) Ponytails have topped off all sorts of glamorous
folks lately, from runway stars like Irina Shayk at Mugler’s
fall show to Jill Kortleve at Alexander McQueen—who
also sported a spine-tracing hip-length style on her April
British Vogue cover. Add in red carpet looks by Florence
Pugh and Rihanna, a dash of street style omnipresence
(looking at you, Bella Hadid), and you’ve got a recipe for
a bona fide moment for the topped-off mane.
I can vouch. At the pre-Oscars parties in Los Angeles I
attended this spring, I lost count of the tight-as-anything
ponytails cresting the faces in attendance. And about
those faces! The prominent cheekbones weren’t all due to
clever contouring or Ozempic abuse. “You know,” one vis-
ibly tautened friend confided, swinging her own rope of
tresses over her shoulder, “a tight pony in the right hands
is like a facelift without the downtime—it’s like how old
screen idols and drag queens used to tape.” (Not for noth-
ing, there is even a plastic surgery procedure using absorb-
able threads dubbed the “Ponytail Lift.”) It’s all just about
enough to make a girl grab her hair and yank.
That’s a relatively new impulse for me: In my life, the
ponytail’s arrival signified an adolescent independence
from the (admittedly very cute) matching bobs my sister
and I previously wore with our lace-collared smock-front
dresses and opaque white tights. Once I was allowed to
grow out my hair, I pulled it back and forgot all about it. In
the wider scope of history, the ponytail’s precise provenance
is a bit hazy. Some hair historians have pointed to ancient
Greece for the style’s origins, but it’s easy enough to believe
that any Homo erectus in possession of long tresses might
have wanted to keep them at bay one way or another.
The pony “always feels modern if it’s done well,” says
stylist Cyndia Harvey, who refers to herself as a “hair engi-
neer,” and crafted those swishy signifiers for Mugler. “A
ponytail is a look that can be sexy, elevated, and, of course,
powerful,” she says, but it could just as quickly add a “hard,
boyish, and masculine, or youthful, easy, and effortless
58 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM
element,” depending on angle and positioning. If you want
a minimalist look, for example, Harvey recommends trying
a low, sleek pony. For the full Mugler “snatched” effect,
prep the scalp with a reinforcing root serum and follow
with the product (hairspray, gel, etc.) best suited to your
texture—then blow out, hoist, smooth, and secure. Short
hair? Try extensions, like Harvey did with Hunter Schafer
for Mugler’s new Angel Elixir fragrance campaign.
Stylist Teddi Cranford says the expensive-looking pony-
tail is one of her go-tos when cool-girl clients like Behati
Prinsloo come looking for a head-turning look. I, too,
would like to turn heads, and I would also like a lift—of
the hair, spirits, and face! For a friend’s engagement party,
I ditch my regular long, loose look in favor of a rich, full
ponytail. I follow Cranford’s advice for a decadent blow-
out at home, washing my hair with a hydrating shampoo
and conditioner before blowing it dry with a large round
brush, making sure the roots are straight and voluminous
before smoothing everything out and tying it back.
“It’s all about the base,” says Cranford, “and tending
to your hairline, and covering the elastic, and finding the
exact right position for your face.” The finished effect
BRUC E WE BE R/TRUN K ARC HIVE .
is sophisticated and somehow a little more serious than
I expected. My hair feels like an extra accessory, adding
poise, movement, and—dare I
say—youthful exuberance in
THE SWING OF THINGS
its sway? Turns out flying high
Kate Moss models an
aspirational power pony (and tight) suits me just fine.
in Vogue, 1996. —alessandra codinha
Night Night?
From the Oura Ring to
infrasonic devices to smart
mattresses, resting well
has become the ultimate
aspiration. By Chloe Malle.

O
n the Saturday before the
Oscars, celebrity stylist
Kate Young made a dif-
ficult decision. It wasn’t
about the silk tulle cape that her cli-
ent Michelle Williams would wear. It
was about her Oura Ring, a biohack-
ing tool that measures everything
from steps to body temperature to,
most popularly, sleep. She decided to BED TIME a 50 percent increase in patients since
take it off. A recumbent Devyn Garcia, 2020. “In the past, sleep was seen as
The reason? During the busy lead- photographed by Larissa something we can easily discard, and
Hofmann, Vogue, October 2022.
up to the ceremony, her sleep scores never prioritize.” But in lockdown
had been appallingly low. “My HRV people found they had more time to
[Heart Rate Variability] basically Oura, fitted with sensors that gather sleep—and also a higher incidence of
said I should go to the hospital,” she biometric data such as heart rate, tem- stress-induced sleeplessness. Accord-
says. She’d compared scores with a perature, and minutes of REM slum- ing to the Centers for Disease Con-
Chanel publicist at the brand’s annual ber, satisfies a newfound fixation: to trol, a third of American adults are PH OTO GRAPH ED BY LARISSA HO FMANN, VO GUE, OCTO BE R 202 2.

pre-Oscar dinner at the Beverly Hills
Hotel’s Polo Lounge, and decided to
go without for the rest of Hollywood’s
big weekend. The anxiety was too
much. “I was like, This isn’t helpful
right now,” she remembers.
Young is not the first nor the last to
obsess over the Oura, a roughly $300
titanium band that not only conjures
certain Lord of the Ring associations,
but for the wellness-minded, is noth-
ing less than the one ring to rule them
all. If the fashion world once adhered
to the belief that you’ll sleep when
you’re dead, or at most, dead tired, the
relentlessly optimize—and discuss—
sleep. “I feel like half the people in
fashion are wearing Oura Rings
now,” says Young. Social media sug-
gests the same. It wasn’t long ago that
Kim Kardashian shared her gleaming
sleep score of 93 on Instagram only to
be reposted by an awestruck Gwyneth
Paltrow: “Okay WHAT?? I thought I
was killing it at this @ouraring game.”
“The pandemic brought home the
importance of sleep,” says Ana C.
Krieger, MD, director for the Center
for Sleep Medicine at Weill Cornell
in New York, where she says she’s had
sleep-deprived, routinely getting
fewer than the recommended seven to
eight hours per night.
That data hasn’t changed much
in a decade. What has changed is
the way we talk about sleep. One
such conversation happened over
a recent dinner with “several tech
CEOs,” Arianna Huffington tells
me. “One of them mentioned that
he gets seven hours every night. One
overheard that, turned around, and
practically shouted—‘I get eight!’
And then another said, ‘Nine! I get
nine!’ It was like a bidding war > 6 6

62 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM

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 had broken out.” Huffington’s com-
pany Thrive Global advises individ-
uals and corporations on how to be
the best-rested versions of them-
selves. From her perspective, sleep
today is regarded as a measure of
success, the next frontier in an age
of biohacking. Even Jeff Bezos has
said his nightly eight hours are good
for Amazon shareholders.
“There’s an earlier bedtime vibe
happening here for sure,” says Kelly
Sawyer Patricof, the LA-based copres-
ident of nonprofit Baby2Baby. She
was also in attendance at Chanel’s
pre-Oscar dinner, pairing her cream
tweed Chanel minidress and gold
chain-link belt with a gold Oura Ring.
“People are wearing them with reg-
ular jewelry, it’s become part of your
wardrobe,” she says, recalling the time
her Oura was mistaken for Cartier.
(The brand did a collaboration with
Gucci in 2021 with interlocking Gs
embossed on the ring’s surface.)
“I’m so into my sleep,” she admits,
boasting that most days she gets a
Crown, Oura’s trophy for a sleep
score of 85 or higher. (She also wears
a plush silk Drowsy eye mask and
takes Olly ’s melatonin gummies
nightly.) Hill House’s Nell Diamond,
who has made a business on the belief
that bedtime is prime time, has a daily
group text chain with two friends
where they share their Oura Ring
scores. (She notes hers is routinely
the highest.) “I’ve always loved any
technology that can help me track
things,” she says. “I’ve always been an
optimization girlie.”
La Ligne cofounder and CEO
Molly Howard says her Eight Sleep
smart mattress is her “full wellness
and self-care routine at this point,”
and that a busy work life and baby
made her realize how sleep-deprived
she was. “We’re all control freaks,” says
Howard, who sleeps hot and has her
Eight Sleep set to 5 degrees colder
than neutral. “Before these devices,
you got what you got and it felt like
there wasn’t anything you could do
about it. Now you feel like you can
have some control.”
A fashionable lifestyle used to be
built around the tenets of travel and
late-night meals. That’s shifting. “The
red-eye from LA used to be so popu-
lar,” notes Krieger. “Now people won’t
sacrifice a good night’s sleep—they’ll
66 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM
work on the plane instead.” Sawyer
Patricof says she was horrified to see
her Oura score dip to 46 when she
flew to Paris for Fashion Week last
year. “It made me never want to travel
again!” Hotels are scrambling to add
sleep aids to their list of amenities:
Utah’s Amangiri has a sleep doctor,
The Cadogan in London a sleep con-
cierge, and The Spa at the Four Sea-
sons New York Downtown offers an
in-house sleep hypnotist.
I got an Oura Ring in June 2021
to replace a clunky Fitbit. The biggest
revelation was that time in bed does
not equal time asleep. In my naive ear-
lier days, if I went to bed at 10 p.m.
and woke up at 6 a.m., I calculated
eight hours of sleep. Not so, says the
Oura! In fact, on a recent night only
six hours and 32 minutes registered
Sleep today is
regarded as a measure
of success, the
next frontier in an age
of biohacking
on the Oura app’s bar graph, mapping
my deep, REM, and light sleep in
shades of sea blue. I was reminded of
a 3 a.m. squall from my one-year-old
and the 5 a.m. jolt when Lloyd, our
Saint Bernard mutt, leaped onto the
bed and positioned himself squarely
at my feet.
Wearable sleep trackers are one
thing; high-tech mattresses are an-
other. I was especially eager to try the
Eight Sleep, so beloved by La Ligne’s
Howard, which uses water to heat
and cool its separate halves. The in-
tensive installation of the Pod Cover,
which goes over your current mat-
tress, itself induced a good night’s rest
(by the time we were done with the
straps, hooks, and zippers, my husband
and I may as well have set up an S&M
den). Eight Sleep’s temperature mod-
ulation created a perfectly calibrated
cocoon and eliminated my nightly
3 a.m. maneuver where I jut my leg
outside the covers to cool down.
I also tried the Therabody Smart-
Goggles, which resemble a VR head-
set crossed with an eye mask and
delightfully massaged my temples
and heated my face. (When my hus-
band borrowed them, he was snoring
within two minutes and had to be
prodded.) Then there is the mysteri-
ous Somavedic device that looks like
a giant jar of expensive skin cream
but apparently neutralizes digital
pollution through its core of crystals
and other minerals. There’s Sensate,
a computer mouse–shaped tool that
uses infrasonic therapy to build stress
resilience, and the Apollo, a vibrating
wristband that uses sound waves to
soothe. And, of course, there are any
number of things to eat and drink and
chew on—from magnesium powder
to melatonin gummies to CBD tea.
It’s all a bit overwhelming. “We
have to be careful. Many of the wear-
ables have never been validated, so
we can’t rely on their data,” warns
Krieger, noting that the metrics for
measuring deep sleep can vary from
device to device. TV producer Karah
Preiss returned her Oura Ring within
a month. “When you wear these bio-
metric costumes, all of a sudden you’re
so aware of what you are lacking,” she
tells me. “It’s like having a scale. Scales
don’t make losing weight easier. They
make losing weight more miserable.”
“To me it’s just the internet trying
to capitalize on common sense,” says
Ottessa Moshfegh, author of the
2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relax-
ation, about a woman who sedates
herself into a year of sleep to reset
her life. “The idea that an electronic
device would be monitoring my sleep,
that it would know more about me
than I would? I find that deeply dis-
turbing.” Moshfegh says she sleeps
three to nine hours a night, noting she
has a sleeping disorder and reaches
for “whatever sleeping aids are
going to knock me out. This whole
thing with fasting and biohacking,”
she adds, “I really think it’s for people
who are bored.”
Nevertheless, fans of her novel
come up to her on book tours to talk
about sleep. “So many of us have this
delicate and tenuous relationship with
sleep,” she says. “It’s the time of day
we’re the most vulnerable. We’re at
the mercy of our subconscious. Sleep
is this thing we do in private, and we
think our problems regarding sleep
are so unique.” She laughs. “But, in
fact, no one wants to hear about our
sleep problems.” @
 Ambition guides her

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 It’s the movie of the summer, and
the role Margot Robbie was born to play.
Or not exactly—as Abby Aguirre
discovers on a roller-skating, ice-cream
playdate with Hollywood’s most
indomitable heroine. Photographed
by Ethan James Green.
 TOY STORY
Robbie stars in
the Greta Gerwig–
directed Barbie,
due in theaters in
July. Valentino
Haute Couture
dress, gloves, and
shoes. Alessandra
Rich necklace.
Fashion Editor:
Gabriella
Karefa-Johnson.
 LIFE’S A RODEO
Robbie doesn’t
remember owning
a Barbie as a child.
“I don’t think
I did. My cousin
had a bunch.”
Maison Margiela
shirt and shoes.
 SPACE ODYSSEY
“It was literally
imaginative play,”
says Gerwig of
writing the Barbie
script with her
partner, Noah
Baumbach. Robbie
wears a Proenza
Schouler dress.
77
 argot Robbie
wasn’t a Barbie
fanatic as a child.
She’s not even sure
she owned a Bar-
bie. “I don’t think
I did,” she tells me one morning over
breakfast in Venice Beach. “I know
my cousin had a bunch of Barbies,
and I’d go to her house.” Growing up
on Australia’s Gold Coast, Robbie
spent a lot of time outside. She and
her cousin would make mud pies.
They’d play with trucks. And they’d
play with Barbies. Mostly they’d
build forts, “cubbies” to an Australian.
“Building cubbies was what we did
all day, every day.”
We are a couple of blocks from the
Venice boardwalk, at Great White,
an Australian-owned restaurant, and
I have asked Robbie what compelled
78
her to produce and star in a live-
action Barbie movie, due out this July.
“It wasn’t that I ever wanted to play
Barbie, or dreamt of being Barbie, or
anything like that,” the 32-year-old
actor says. “This is going to sound
stupid, but I really didn’t even think
about playing Barbie until years into
developing the project.”
It doesn’t sound stupid but it does
seem counterintuitive, the notion
that Robbie, whose breakout role in
The Wolf of Wall Street was described
in that movie’s script as “the hottest
blonde ever,” was not envisioning
herself in the role of Barbie when she
sought the film rights from Mattel.
And yet the person sitting across the
SUN’S OUT
Marni top. Norma Kamali brief. Sunglasses
from Bonnie Clyde.
table is not giving blonde bombshell.
Not in a conventional sense, anyway.
Robbie is dressed in a vintage long-
sleeve Harley-Davidson T-shirt and
a short body-con onesie, the sort of
thing a teenage wrestler might wear to
practice. “Makes me look like a giant
baby,” she says of the onesie at one
point. (It does nothing of the sort.)
On her feet are New Balance sneak-
ers and striped gym socks she recently
bought in Japan, which say “Are you
city boy?” around the ankles. Her hair
is pulled back in double French braids,
displaying dangly gold mermaid
earrings she got in Ibiza. Although
she is impossibly beautiful, Robbie’s
aura is sprite-like and a little feral. It’s
easy to imagine she just wandered
away from a traveling circus.
A certain beachy physicality was evi-
dent out of the gate. For this interview,
 MADE TO MEASURE
The film’s look is “a
mad fantasy of
gorgeousness,” says
Barbie set designer
Sarah Greenwood.
Robbie wears a
Carolina Herrera dress.
Paris Texas shoes.
 HOLD MY CALLS
“The key thing about
Barbie is that she dresses
with intention,” says
Jacqueline Durran, the
film’s costume designer.
Jacket, top, skirt,
belt, shoes, and tights,
all Saint Laurent by
Anthony Vaccarello.

80
HIGH FIVES
Chanel Haute
Couture dress.
Bracelet and
ring from Chanel
Fine Jewelry.
 CARRY ME
Eventually in the movie, Barbie has to
confront life in the real world. Marc Jacobs
dress. Christian Louboutin shoes.
Trunk set from SteamLine Luggage.
Robbie wanted to go Rollerblad-
ing. I assumed this meant we would
rent Rollerblades. Turns out Robbie
has her own, and that she thought
I might too. (I don’t.) Robbie then
offered to lend me her pair, because
she also owns old-school skates.
(Later, when I put on her Roller-
blades, I discover that they have no
brakes. “Wait, where are the brakes?” I
ask. “Ohhhhhhhh,” she says, letting out
a throaty laugh. “I forgot. I took the
brakes off because I hate to brake.”)
The plan was locked down. After
breakfast we would go skating on
the boardwalk, then walk to Robbie’s
favorite ice cream shop, Salt & Straw.
Robbie had to leave at 2 p.m. sharp, I
was warned. She had a 3 p.m. meet-
ing with the writer of Cocaine Bear,
Jimmy Warden, whose directorial
debut her company LuckyChap is
co-producing. That last combination
of details begins to convey the gen-
eral vibe of the actual Margot Rob-
bie: She’ll arrive with an assortment
of brake-less skates, and she’ll have a
hard out at two.
Between bites of avocado toast,
grilled Halloumi cheese, and
Australian-style bacon—“Crisp it up,”
she tells the waiter—Robbie delivers
the Barbie backstory with Glengarry
Glen Ross–esque speed. There were
previous attempts to make a Barbie
movie. Amy Schumer was attached
at one point. So was Anne Hatha-
way. Those projects never got off
the ground. Robbie kept tabs on the
status. As a producer, she saw huge
potential in the Barbie IP. “The word
itself is more globally recognized
than practically everything else other
than Coca-Cola.”
In 2018, Robbie sensed an opening.
So she had a meeting with the new
CEO of Mattel, Ynon Kreiz, at the
Polo Lounge. That meeting was about
pitching LuckyChap, the production
outfit she runs with her friend Josey
McNamara and her husband, Tom
Ackerley, to Mattel. “We’re Lucky-
Chap,” she says. “This is our company.
This is what we do. This is what we
stand for. This is why we should be
82
the ones to make a Barbie movie. And
this is how we’d go about it.”
LuckyChap didn’t have a specific
concept in mind, but they did know
this much. “We of course would want
to honor the 60-year legacy that this
brand has,” Robbie says. “But we have
to acknowledge that there are a lot of
people who aren’t fans of Barbie. And
in fact, aren’t just indifferent to Barbie.
They actively hate Barbie. And have a
real issue with Barbie. We need to find
a way to acknowledge that.”
There were bigger meetings with
Mattel, and then meetings with War-
ner Bros., where LuckyChap had a
first-look deal at the time. Eventu-
ally Robbie started talking to Greta
Gerwig about writing and directing.
“I was very scared it was going to be a
no,” Robbie says. “At the time this was
such a terrifying thing to take on. Peo-
ple were like, You’re going to do what?”
But Gerwig said yes, on the condition
that she could write the script with
her partner, Noah Baumbach. “It felt
sparky to me in some way that felt
kind of promising,” Gerwig tells me
later. “I was the one who said, Noah
and I will do this.” (Baumbach: “She
broke the news to me after we were
already doing it.”)
LuckyChap wanted Gerwig and
Baumbach to have full creative free-
dom. “At the same time,” Robbie says,
“we’ve got two very nervous ginor-
mous companies, Warner Bros. and
Mattel, being like: What’s their plan?
What are they going to do? What’s it
gonna be about? What’s she going to say?
They have a bazillion questions.” In
the end LuckyChap found a way to
structure a deal so that Gerwig and
Baumbach would be left alone to
write what they wanted, “which was
really fucking hard to do.”
Gerwig and Baumbach did share a
treatment, Robbie adds: “Greta wrote
an abstract poem about Barbie. And
when I say ‘abstract,’ I mean it was
super abstract.” (Gerwig declines
to read me the poem but offers that
it “shares some similarities with the
Apostles’ Creed.”) No one at Lucky-
Chap, Mattel, or Warner Bros. saw any
pages of the script until it was finished.
When I ask Gerwig and Baumbach
to describe their Barbie writing pro-
cess, the words “open” and “free” get
used a lot. The project seemed “wide
open,” Gerwig tells me. “There really
 Robbie “has a kind of fearlessness
that you can only get from literally
growing up swimming in
was this kind of open, free road that
shark-infested waters,”
we could keep building,” Baumbach
says. Part of it had to do with the fact
that their characters were dolls. “It’s
says Ryan Gosling
like you’re playing with dolls when
you’re writing something, and in this
case, of course, there was this extra
layer in that they were dolls,” Baum-
bach says. “It was literally imaginative
play,” Gerwig says. That they were
writing the script during lockdown
also mattered, Baumbach says. “We
were in the pandemic, and everybody
had the feeling of, Who knows what
the world is going to look like. That
fueled it as well. That feeling of: Well,
here goes nothing.”
Robbie and Ackerley read the
Barbie script at the same time. A
certain joke on page one sent their
jaws to the floor. “We just looked at
each other, pure panic on our faces,”
Robbie recalls. “We were like, Holy
fucking shit.” When Robbie finished
reading: “I think the first thing I said
to Tom was, This is so genius. It is such
a shame that we’re never going to be able
to make this movie.”
uckyChap did make the
movie, of course, and
it’s very much the one
Gerwig and Baumbach
wrote. (Alas, that joke
on page one is gone.)
If you saw the trailer released in
December, you’ve seen the opening of
the film. It’s a parody of the Dawn
of Man sequence from 2001: A Space
Odyssey. But instead of apes discover-
ing tools in the presence of a mono-
lith, little girls smash their baby dolls
in the presence of a gigantic Barbie.
Robbie-as-Barbie appears in a retro
black-and-white bathing suit and tow-
ering heels. She slowly lowers a pair of
white cat-eye sunglasses and winks.
I saw more of the movie one morn-
ing at the Warner Bros. lot. After
the Kubrick spoof we go on a romp
through Barbieland, “a mad fantasy of
gorgeousness,” as Sarah Greenwood,
the film’s set designer, puts it later.
Barbie wakes up in her Dreamhouse
84
and embarks on the Perfect Day,
accompanied by an original song
that serves as soundtrack. (I am not
allowed to say who sings it.) Every-
thing everywhere is infused with
pink. “I’ve never done such a deep
dive into pink in all my days,” Green-
wood says. Barbie’s perfectly fake,
color-saturated world retains many
of the quirks and physical limita-
tions of the toy version. Her environ-
ment isn’t always three-dimensional,
and the scale of everything is a bit
off. Barbie is a little too big for her
house and her car. When she takes
a shower, there is no water. Her bare
feet remain arched.
The swimsuit Robbie wears in the
Dawn of Woman sequence is a replica
of the one worn by the first Barbie
doll in 1959. Over the course of the
Perfect Day, Barbie changes clothes
constantly. The progression—poodle
skirt, disco look—amounts to a sur-
vey of Barbie fashion over time, says
Jacqueline Durran, the film’s costume
designer. (Wisely, the survey does not
include the more retrograde outfits
in Barbie’s past, such as the Slumber
Party ensemble of 1965, which came
with a little bathroom scale set at
110 pounds and a book titled How to
Lose Weight that advised: “Don’t eat.”)
“The key thing about Barbie is that
she dresses with intention,” Durran
tells me. “Barbie doesn’t dress for the
day. She dresses for the task.” The
task might involve a leisure activity,
or a form of employment. One scene
pokes fun at the way the Barbie uni-
verse seems to blur such distinctions.
“My job is just beach,” Ken explains.
Ken is played with daft aplomb by
Ryan Gosling. “The greatest version
of Ryan Gosling ever put on screen,”
in Robbie’s estimation. (Gosling: “Ken
wasn’t really on my bucket list. But
in fairness, I don’t have a bucket list.
So I thought I’d give it a shot.”) In
Barbieland, Ken is basically another
fashion accessory. “Barbie has a great
day every day,” we are told in voice-
over delivered by Helen Mirren. “Ken
only has a great day if Barbie looks
at him.” Mattel introduced the first
Ken doll in 1961, in response to letters
demanding Barbie get a boyfriend.
“Barbie was invented first,” Gerwig
points out. “Ken was invented after
Barbie, to burnish Barbie’s position in
our eyes and in the world. That kind
of creation myth is the opposite of the
creation myth in Genesis.”
Just as Barbie was given big boobs
but no nipples, Ken was given a
smooth “bulge,” as Mattel referred to
it at the time. Together, their peculiar
partial anatomy hints at a world of
grown-up things hidden from view.
Gerwig: “You feel that there’s some-
thing there, which is part of the allure.
It’s unclear how this all kinda works.
But it’s not without intrigue.” This
vague sense of mystery is captured in
a comical exchange Ken and Barbie
PRO DUC ED BY ROSCO PRO DUCTIO N. CRE ATIVE CON CE PT AND SE T DES IG N : J UL IA WAG NER .
have in front of her Dreamhouse. “I
thought I might stay over tonight,”
Ken says. “ W hy?” Barbie asks.
“Because we’re girlfriend-boyfriend,”
Ken says. “To do what?” Barbie asks.
“I’m actually not sure,” Ken says.
Barbie acquired friends over the
years. First came Midge, her longtime
best friend, and later Christie, one of
her first Black friends. (Mattel didn’t
introduce a Black Barbie until 1980,
and a forthcoming documentary,
Black Barbie, explores this legacy.)
When Gerwig took a tour of Mattel,
she learned that the vast majority of
dolls in its Barbie line are named Bar-
bie. “Now all of the dolls are Barbie.
All of them are Barbie, and Barbie is
everyone. Philosophically, I was like,
Well, now that’s interesting.” The more
she thought C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 3 8
LIFE FANTASTIC
Christopher John
Rogers dress. Miu
Miu shoes. In this
story: hair, Shay
Ashual; makeup,
Pati Dubroff using
Chanel. Details,
see In This Issue.
 The electric streets and placid beaches of Dakar yield a poetic beauty—
and a vivid, textured wardrobe to match the mood. Photographed by Nadine Ijewere.
 DAY TRIPPERS
from far left: Model
Mame Sané hitches a ride
on one of Dakar’s colorful
bush taxis, dressed
in a Thebe Magugu
jacket (netaporter.com)
and dress (twominds
nyc.com). Chanel bangles.
Model Anok Yai wears a
Proenza Schouler top and
skirt; proenzashouler
.com. Chanel necklaces
and earrings. Model
Sophia Makibdji in an
Ahluwalia jacket
(ahluwalia.world) and
shirt (ssense.com).
Fashion Editor:
Julia Sarr-Jamois.
 POETRY IN MOTION
BY DURO OLOWU
n a city littered with tailoring
ateliers and fabric and acces-
sories shops, Dakar’s styl-
ish locals are a sight for sore
eyes. Whenever I visit from
London, where I work as a
designer, I always head downtown
straight off the plane to experience
the elevated gaze and the graceful
posture of its boubou-clad women
(and equally graceful men) of all
ages—the scene on the street could
almost be something from director
Djibril Diop Mambéty’s iconic 1973
Senegalese film Touki Bouki.
It’s poetry in motion—whether
the poets are outfitted in artistically
embroidered and appliquéd guinea
brocade robes and tunics or in sharply
mismatched European fitted sepa-
rates, their confidence is friendly and
assured, never arrogant.
On weekdays, when the sun goes
down and the city’s heat is caressed
by ocean breezes, the Corniche Ouest
beach fills with people of all ages
working out, kicking a ball, strolling,
chatting, and flirting until night-
time falls. D uring the weekend,
though, the exhilarating palette of
Dakar street style explodes in every-
thing from potent fuchsias and bold
oranges and purples to eau de nile,
turquoise, and starched white—often
laced with trimmings and accessories
that accentuate the figure and limn
the personality of the wearer. Look
closely, and no boubou or caftan is
identical. Like a garden of overgrown
bougainvillea growing amid lilies and
hibiscus blossoms, the city becomes
an oasis of color as the actors in this
drama weave their way through the
traffic-jammed streets and overflow-
ing markets of downtown.
Another favorite destination of
mine is Saint-Louis (Ndar in Wolof,
the most widely spoken language
in Senegal), on an island—about
ON A ROLL
While model Mona Tougaard (opposite, left) makes the case for a perfect pattern match
in a Dsquared2 blouse and pants (dsquared2.com) and Susan Caplan earring,
model Ibrahim Kane catches a glance in a Dsquared2 vest, shirt, and pants; dsquared2.com.
88
four hours north f rom Dakar by
car—linked to the mainland by a
19th-century bridge. The intensely
colorful yet sublime architecture
(weathered and threatened by ris-
ing water levels) and slow pace here
always come as a welcome relief from
the hectic draw of Dakar.
At first glance, the island appears set
in times long-ago. Look closer, though,
and you’ll find that almost everything
here—from the morning call to prayer
to the boisterous sportswear-clad
youths and young schoolgirls in sharp,
rose-pink headscarves—dispels that
myth. I love to take a late-morning
stroll past the fish market in the old
town, with the flags on its vividly
painted fishing boats flapping violently
in the wind as proud fishermen stand
on deck after a successful return from
the overnight shift.
As they stroll slowly through
Saint-Louis’s winding streets, women
swathed in brilliantly mismatched
patterned-and-draped robes and
headscarves bring to mind the won-
derful modernist portraits of the
island’s photographers, including
Mama Casset and Adama Sylla—the
latter of whom, approaching 90, still
resides on the island, surrounded by
his influential body of work—just
two of many who have contributed
to the city’s outsize reputation as an
incubator of important photography
for more than a century.
The subjects of Casset’s and Syl-
la’s sublime black-and-white pho-
tographs, together with Senegal’s
beautiful, energetic, yet mysteri-
ously serene cities—and the highly
seductive style and personality of its
citizens—suggest that here, culture
is not defined by wealth, or position.
Rather, it revolves around a simple act,
both conscious yet, at the same time,
vaguely aloof: dressing to be remem-
bered long after leaving the room. @
KID STUFF
Tougaard is beachy
keen in a Chanel vest,
jacket, pants, shoes,
and earrings; Chanel
boutiques. opposite:
In the busy Sandaga
Market, Tougaard sends
up a flare for spiffy
suiting in a Moschino
blazer, blouse, and pants;
saksfifthavenue.com.
Yai, meanwhile, gives
good face in a denim
jumpsuit from Tolu
Coker; tolucoker.com.

90
ALL TOGETHER NOW
On la Plage Ouakam,
the madcap prints
of Yai’s Pucci jacket
and shirt (pucci.com)
meet the stabilizing
geometries of
Sindiso Khumalo pants
(netaporter.com)—
all of it adding up to a
look fit for voyaging.

93
 STITCHES IN TIME
Yai adds zest in a Dolce & Gabbana bra top, skirt, and earrings
(select Dolce & Gabbana boutiques). Tougaard pairs her Chloé sweater and dress (chloe.com)
with a Chanel collar necklace. opposite, from left: Tougaard and Yai in Chanel
looks and jewelry; Chanel boutiques. right photo: Tougaard wears an Andreas Kronthaler
for Vivienne Westwood cardigan, T-shirt, and skirt; viviennewestwood.com.
94
 STREET SMARTS
from left: Makibdji in a Max Mara jacket and shorts; maxmara.com. Model Kathia
Ndong in a Duro Olowu jacket and shirt; duroolowu.com. Raey pants;
matchesfashion.com. Sané wears an Etro jacket, vest, and pants; Etro Madison boutique.
96
 MOD SQUAD
Evoking the inventive
silhouettes and sprightly
colorways of the late
1960s, Tougaard is a
vision in her Rich Mnisi
jacket and pants (shop
.richmnisi.com) and
PRO DUC ED BY GE N ERATION X.

earring from Jennifer

Gibson Jewellery—as
is Yai in that thrillingly
textured Orange Culture
dress; orangeculture
.com.ng. In this story:
hair, Yann Turchi;
makeup, Hiromi Ueda.
Details, see In This Issue.
 STEP RIGHT UP
Model Pan Haowen
rides high in a
Ferragamo trench,
top, and leggings;
ferragamo.com. Loro
Piana bag. inset: Saint
Laurent by Anthony
Vaccarello coat
and pants; ysl.com.
Styling: Leon Tu.
Fashion Editors:
Alvin Yu and Lily Chou.

COUNTRY PURSUITS
Amid the wide grasslands and splendid mountains of Sichuan,
in southwestern China, prim jackets and long, romantic skirts outfit a passage
into pastoral paradise. Photographed by Reven Lei.
 ROAD RULES
Samuel Guì Yang
jacket; samuelguiyang
.com. Philosophy di
Lorenzo Serafini dress;
Neiman Marcus. Louis
Vuitton skirt, shoes,
and trunk; select Louis
Vuitton boutiques.
 ALL DOWN THE LINES
left: Haowen finds her
equilibrium in a Ferragamo
jacket and skirt; ferragamo
.com. below: Carolina
Herrera long-sleeve top;
carolinaherrera.com.

GETTING OUTSIDE
BY BELINDA HUIJUAN TANG

n the spring of 2018, after two years living in Bei-

jing as a graduate student, I began to experience
a crisis of self. I’d suffered an ignoble breakup
delivered via Instagram DM and planned soon to
leave China, the place I’d been happiest, to pursue
a writing career in America. I could find no solace
in a city of 21 million, bumping up at every turn against
another hurried body. On the subway or biking through
the sprawling city traffic, I felt jostled like a pinball. Even
when I retreated to a park, I was soon interrupted by pop
music blaring from speakers for a congregation of dancing
retirees, or a shopkeeper arguing with a customer.
I sought shelter in the countryside, in Anhui, the prov-
ince where my family is from, and where my grandma still
lived. It’s far from the beauty of the images on these pages,
but both places have a similar sense of untouched wilder-
ness. While China’s cities are testaments to the possibili- family. My life was carved out against the rhythms of the
ties of human will, Anhui is dominated by lush fields and earth around us, and we kept our days by the sun’s timing.
pastures—a reflection of a diverse and temperate climate. When I arrived in Anhui this time, the countryside
My family comes from the rice-growing region, where for replaced the clamor of the city with quiet comforts: the
centuries the landscape has been blanketed with verdant sound of the wind shaking the leaves as my grandma and
paddies. I wanted to walk alongside these swaying fields I turned on our bamboo mats, the clean air I breathed as
and turn my face to the wind. we strolled around the small lake behind her home. In the
I had once, when I was two, spent a year in Anhui, in my mornings, we’d walk to the neighborhood market and hag-
ancestral village, sent there by my overstretched parents, gle with the shopkeepers for our meat and vegetables. We
who were struggling to establish themselves in America. never purchased more than we could finish by day’s end.
There I was raised by my grandma, and I ran around with Whenever I told my friends where my family was from,
the other village kids barefoot in the dirt, surrounded by they would beg to visit, enchanted by the romance of a

100
 THROUGH A
GLASS, BRIGHTLY
Our traveler sets
her sights on the vast
Yuke Grassland
(and snow-capped
mountains beyond) in
a graphic Bottega
Veneta cape, matching
dress, and shoes;
bottegaveneta.com.
 TESTING THE WATERS
left: Gucci top; gucci.com.
below: Along the ancient
Tea Horse Road in Yingjing
County, Haowen stops
to commune with a babbling
brook in a patterned Gucci
jacket and skirt; gucci.com.
In this story: hair, Han Bin;
makeup, Mountain Gao.
Details, see In This Issue.

less hectic life. Once, a few of us had even hatched a plan

to start a communal farm. That spring, I took two Beijing
friends to my village. My older relatives greeted them with
plates of sunflower seeds, and we spent the warm afternoon
sitting around their courtyard on wooden benches, chatting
in the idle way of people who don’t have anywhere to rush
off to. I was picking up a conversation I’d left off at two, or
eight, or any of the times I’d returned. It had waited for me.
When finally the sky grew dark and we rose to return to
town, my relatives demanded: So soon? They’d planned to
kill a chicken for us.
My friends returned to Beijing, but I stayed a little
longer, dragged my clothes across the well-worn laun-
dry board a few more times. On one of my last days, my
grandma and I went out to Mushan, an evergreen island in
the lake near our village. We climbed hundreds of steps to
the tallest peak. From our vantage point, all was water, and
the cities lining the coast might as well have been from a
smaller, less important world.
On the train back to Beijing, I watched passengers
refresh their WeChat screens, making appointments with
all the people they’d have to see in the city. Already I missed
the landscape being rapidly replaced by tall buildings in
the train’s windows. That land had given me a lesson on
enduring. I understood why I’d been drawn there, why my
friends had wanted to come. We were living in a country
of 1.4 billion, where the life of cities takes on an urgent,
demanding logic. What we wanted instead was to feel the
vast and expansive sweep of the country, to let it teach us
of the temporality and smallness of our human concerns. @

102
P RODUCED BY JU LIE WANG.
LINE P RODUCE R: ANZI ZILI KONG.
LA DOLCE STRADA
Model Vittoria
Ceretti takes in the
long and winding
coastal road in
a jaunty pink Fendi
swimsuit and
skirt; fendi.com.
Fashion Editor:
Carlos Nazario.
Postcards From Italy
In the northern region of
Liguria, short dresses
and breezy blouses signal a
summer of sun-kissed
days—and nights mad with
mischief. Photographed
by Oliver Hadlee Pearch.

ROCK STARS
from left: While
Ceretti keeps it short
in a Michael Kors
Collection bodysuit
(michaelkors.com)
and Prada shorts
(prada.com), models
Nora Attal (in a
Supriya Lele catsuit;
supriyalele.com) and
Paloma Elsesser
(Alaïa top and skirt;
maison-alaia.com),
opt for a touch
more coverage.
 FRIENDS AND FAMILY
BY CHIARA BARZINI

y mother has Sicil-

ian origins. In our
family, “the beach”
always meant
the S outh, and
the South always
meant rural islands with impervious
access to water. When I look back on
childhood pictures, I see rocks (not
sand) and very naked people of all ages
and body types. My parents claimed
that vacationing anywhere that wasn’t
a sun-blasted lava rock in the middle
of the sea—with no electricity or run-
ning water or roads—was a sin.
“You don’t want to be like those peo-
ple that go on holiday in the North,”
they said to my brother and me. But
of course: We did. We wanted nothing
more than to be those people. In the
summertime, my friends went danc-
ing in nightclubs by the beach and
returned home with stories about wild
nights and flings with exotic-sounding
men. All we could report back on were
anecdotes about donkeys, water-well
politics, and unreliable boat schedules.
Eventually, as an adult, I acquired
my own taste for isolation, lava rocks,
and a bathing-suit-free lifestyle, but
before then I had to give myself the
chance to live the hedonistic sum-
mer that was my Mediterranean
birthright. Italy had been a place of
sensuality and perdition for everyone
from D.H. Lawrence to Paris Hil-
ton. Perhaps Alessandro Michele put
it best: “Virginia Woolf vacationed
here to escape conservative laws in
England—and there’s a reason why
Thomas Mann wrote Death in Venice
and not Death in Minneapolis.”
So the summer came when my
brother and I decided to ditch our FRAMES OF REFERENCE
family. We made a statement out of Model Anok Yai, in many-
it, heading as far north as our forever layered splendor, wears a
Southern minds would take us. We Chanel dress and belts;
Chanel boutiques. oPPoSIte:
went with our cousins and crammed On Ceretti, a Ferragamo
our clothes into tiny backpacks. On minidress (ferragamo.com)
our incredibly slow regional train, stops us right in our tracks.
we shared headphones, our Disc-
man playing Neapolitan hip-hop
on repeat, and saw every detail of

106
 THE LONG AND
SHORT OF IT
Yai walks the walk in
a fetching Prada
shirt and shorts;
prada.com. Tiffany
& Co. earrings.

108
 HAT TRICK
As Ceretti makes
clear, a Jacquemus
bucket hat is always
a bright idea. Attal,
though, leans more
romantic in a Loewe
top; loewe.com.
110
BRILLIANT FRIENDS
from far left: Attal,
Elsesser (in a Dries
Van Noten shirt;
driesvannoten.com),
Yai (in a Jacquemus
shirt; jacquemus.com),
Ceretti, and model
Ida Heiner embrace
summer—and
each other—in some
of the season’s
freshest colorways.
 the geolog y change outside the
window between one province and
another. When haystacks made way
for glimpses of sea on the other side
of the tracks, we knew we were get-
ting closer. (The train stations all had
impossibly articulated compound
names that usually ended with the
word Marittima.)
Once arrived, we took over a small
beach and soon found an abandoned
landing dock with wide wooden
planks. We fit one body per plank,
and the floorboards became our new
home, the epicenter of life, emotion,
and desire. It was the beginning of cell
phones. My cousin introduced me to
text messaging. We marveled at the
fact that we could write Ti Voglio Bene
on a tiny object, press Send, and know
that someone could be on the receiv-
ing end of that process. Life was slow,
but it was about to become a lot faster.
And we loved it.
At night, we had bonfires on the
beach with a bunch of German and
Norwegian kids who told us sto-
ries about forests and fjords. We
played mixtapes from an old boom
box, danced, fell madly in love, and
said things like, “Can’t you see? This
is meant to be.” Nothing was ever
just a coincidence. Everything was
charged with meaning—the smell
of the Mediterranean pines, juniper,
seaweed, citrus, myrtle, helichrysum,
and rosemary, and the sound of the
sea lapping, never in a rush or a bad
mood. We made older friends who
had cars and piled into tiny Cinque-
centos. We drove on curvy roads
and went to nightclubs with 1960s
designs. We saw the sun rise almost
every day, went to bed at seven in the
morning, and showed up on the beach
when everyone was getting ready to
leave. We were just like adults, except
we weren’t, and we cooked terrible
food for ourselves.
Every once in a while, someone
would crash a scooter or get in a fight
THE VIEW FROM HERE
with a local. I wrote long letters to
At the Church of San Giacomo
my parents in Sicily. I imagined them di Corte in Santa Margherita
perched on their isolated rocks under Ligure, Yai doesn’t lack for
the inescapable sun. Next year, I pep in her step, dressed in a
billowing Jacquemus shirt,
promise I will vacation with the don- pants, bag, shoes, and
keys, I said, but for now, just for now, earrings; jacquemus.com.
let me keep thinking that dancing in OPPOSITE: Against a striking
a decadent vintage disco with fading view, Heiner elevates her
Michael Kors Collection top
painted palm trees on the wall is the and skirt (michaelkors.com)
most important thing in the world. @ with a Tiffany & Co. cuff.

112
114
P RODUCED BY PA RTNE R FILM S. SP EC IAL THANKS TO GRUP P O FER ROV IE
DELLO STATO ITALIANE AND HOTEL G RAND BRISTOL RAPALLO.

NIGHT MOVES
Attal (left) in Giorgio
Armani; armani.com.
Yai (rIght) in a Nensi
Dojaka dress; fwrd
.com. oPPoSIte, from
left: Yai in Nensi
Dojaka. Heiner wears
a Coperni dress;
coperniparis.com.
Attal in Giorgio
Armani. In this story:
hair, Cyndia Harvey;
makeup, Ana
Takahashi. Details,
see In This Issue.
 Jeremy Allen White
of TV’s The Bear
is a leading man of the
throwback variety:
grounded, irresistible,
and perfectly
suited to la vie bohème.
By Marley Marius.
Photographed
by Norman Jean Roy.
 GOING PLACES
Jeremy Allen White—
starring this summer
in season two of
The Bear, with films
by Sean Durkin and
Christos Nikou to
follow—is a driving
force in a Calvin
Klein T-shirt. Model
Rebecca Longendyke
hangs back in
a Dolce & Gabbana
dress. Tory Burch bag.
Fashion Editor:
Max Ortega.
 onsider Hollywood’s
everyman. Jimmy Stew-
art was once the arche-
type; an actor whose
open face and Pennsyl-
vania drawl suggested a
deep humility, morality, Presbyterian-
ism. Jump ahead a generation, and the
likes of Dustin Hoffman, Robert De
Niro, and Al Pacino pushed that par-
adigm in a different direction. They
didn’t look like matinee idols, nor did
they act much like them; instead, they
evoked pure id.
Those guys, plus Sam Rockwell,
plus Sean Penn—instinctive actors,
their talents nearly uncontrolled—are
some of Jeremy Allen White’s favor-
ites: “I like watching something and
almost feeling nervous,” he tells me.
White has spoken about watching
and rewatching Pacino’s “unstillness”
in The Panic in Needle Park as he pre-
pared to play Carmen “Carmy” Ber-
zatto, the painfully tense young chef at
the center of FX’s The Bear. A break-
out hit last summer, the series’ tautly
paced action begins after Carmy, a
James Beard Award–winning phe-
nom, returns home to run his family’s
flagging sandwich shop, The Original
Beef of Chicagoland (known as “The
Beef ”), in the wake of his brother’s
suicide. Dropped into a quagmire
of unpaid bills, and a kitchen staff
that doesn’t really trust (or like) him,
Carmy wants to burn the whole place
down only slightly less than he wants
to save it.
Critics adored The Bear. Sales
of Italian beef sandwiches soared.
And Carmy was an online sensation:
People took one look at his fitted
T-shirts, motley tattoos, and greasy
hair, and swiftly cast him as a text-
book no-goodnik; the kind of emo-
tionally unavailable jerk that your
parents—and therapist—urged you
not to try to “fix.”

GET THE MESSAGE?

White wears a Bottega Veneta shirt
and pants. Longendyke takes note in
a Dior jacket and printed skirt.

119
IN MY ROOM
Longendyke
wears a Prada top,
pants, tie, and
shoes. White can’t
help but sit and
stare in a Gucci
T-shirt. A.P.C. jeans.
Church’s shoes.
121
 In reality, White, 32, is friendly,
attentive, and unfailingly polite. He
is the doting father of two young
girls, Ezer, four, and Dolores, two,
with actor Addison Timlin, his wife
of three years and friend of nearly 20.
(They attended the same performing
arts high school in Manhattan, first
meeting at 14.) Among his greatest
pleasures, he reveals with some embar-
rassment, is riding his fixed-gear bike.
The rift between who he is and
how he presents recalls that oft-cited
line from Flaubert: “Be regular and
orderly in your life, like a bourgeois,
so that you may be violent and origi-
nal in your work.” It also made sense
for this particular project. “As much
as we want to jump into a lot of the
toxic and sort of gnarly
things that happen in
the restaurant industry,
being able to couch that White is attentive, and
in somebody that’s as
naturally good and kind
as Jeremy was really
unfailingly polite—a
important,” says Chris-
topher Storer, The Bear’s
doting father of two girls.
creator, who has family
and close friends in the Among his greatest
business. “ When you
meet him he’s the sweet-
est kid ever, and he’s got
pleasures is riding his
these piercing eyes that
you can’t help but be fixed-gear bike
drawn to. But then you
see in his performance that he can
be equally charming and funny as he
can be scary and tense, which is really
tricky to do.”
To this Vogue writer, White looks
uncannily like Rudolf Nureyev in an
Irving Penn portrait from 1965—
the searching gaze, sculptural nose,
subtle pout—but in carriage and
general sensibility, there is something
Adam Driver-y or Oscar Isaac-ish
about him. He is obviously talented
(“I mean, Jeremy’s a very good actor,”
Ebon Moss-Bachrach, one of his
costars in The Bear, tells me almost
gravely), and gratified that people
have responded to his work, but he
has sort of backed into this whole
leading-man thing. At best, White
had aspired for consistency; not to
suddenly be inundated with movie
scripts. “I always felt like I was a good
enough actor to be on a TV show
or something,” he reflects. “I think
that’s what I sort of expected: I’ll
122
work and always be on a show, and
I felt very content with and grateful
for even just that. I certainly didn’t
expect…this.”
He is also disarmingly curious. At
one point during our winding con-
versation, he asks me if I feel, as an
interviewer, like I’m playing a kind
of character (I still don’t have a good
answer to this), and at the photo shoot
for this story, he was thrilled to dis-
cover that Norman Jean Roy was not
only a photographer, but also the pro-
prietor of Breadfolks, a well-regarded
bakery in Hudson, New York. (Hav-
ing submitted to intensive culinary
training in a string of world-class
kitchens for The Bear, White pretty
much knows what’s worth knowing
about good food.) “It’s, like, one of
the best bakeries in the country,” he
raves. “So, you know, all the photogra-
phy was going great, but very quickly
I realized this about him and we
started talking about bread.”
Although he’s primarily based in
Laurel Canyon—spending summers
and Christmases near Timlin’s family
in Queens—White still dresses like a
Brooklyn boy. (He and his younger
sister, Annabelle, grew up in Carroll
Gardens.) When we meet on a bright,
cold Saturday at Avec River North, a
Mediterranean-slash-New-American
restaurant just minutes east of Mr.
Beef, the Chicago mainstay that
inspired The Bear, White is wearing
a gray knit vest over a T-shirt, and a
big navy beanie over his dirty blond
curls. His arms and hands are cov-
ered in the fake tattoos that he wears
for the show, including a large “773”
for the local area code; he shows me
where a few of his real ones, like a
heart pierced with an arrow for Tim-
lin, have been covered with makeup.
The late winter sunlight catches a
thin gold chain around his neck,
which plays up the startling blue
of his eyes. (Storer is exactly right
about them.) He is familiar with the
menu here, so he helpfully places our
order: chorizo-stuffed Medjool dates
and Mexican prawns for him; a kale
salad and farfalle with braised mush-
rooms for me.
White admits that the company
he keeps these days has elevated his
look somewhat. “Chris Storer, he’s
like a pretty major menswear guy,” he
says. “It’s rubbed off on me a little bit.
I’m spending probably too much
money at Ralph Lau-
ren.” (Storer’s tastes
burrowed their way
into Carmy, too, who
sells off stacks of vin-
tage selvage denim to
pay his meat vendor in
The Bear’s pilot, and
sports pricey tees from
Merz b. Schwanen and
the Japanese-made
label Whitesville under
his apron.) Still, White
feels rather at home in
this denuded little cor-
ner of Chicago, a city
where he’s been work-
ing in fits and starts since booking the
Showtime series Shameless as a teen-
ager. (White played Phillip “Lip”
Gallagher, the gifted but rebellious
eldest son in a sprawling, working-
class Chicago family, across the gritty
comedy’s 11 seasons.) “It feels like
coming home, in a nice way,” he says,
naming a few of his favorite spots:
“There’s an Italian place, La Scarola,
that I really love, and Richard’s Bar,
which I found during maybe the sixth
season of Shameless—I smelled it. It’s
a bar that you can still smoke in.”
Inevitably, returning to The Bear
for its sophomore season was slightly
scary. (The new episodes air in June.)
“I called Joanna Calo, our showrunner,
sometime in the summer, when I just
realized, Oh, wow, this isn’t going away
anytime soon,” White says, spearing a
date. “And then I got here, and I was
talking to our camera operators, and I
was like, ‘It feels so easy that I’m almost
cautious of it.’” C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 4 0
READ ALL
ABOUT IT
White wears a
Valentino shirt,
pants, and tie.
Longendyke wears
a Miu Miu cardigan,
top, and skirt.
Mikimoto necklace.
On table: Dior bag.
SUPPER CLUB
White wears a Prada
blazer and pants.
Valentino shirt.
Longendyke wears a
Bottega Veneta sweater
and necklace. In this
story: hair, Alex
Brownsell; makeup,
Raoúl Alejandre;
additional grooming for
White, KC Fee. Details,
see In This Issue.

P RODUCED BY PAU L PR EI SS AT P REI SS C REATIVE . SET DESIGN: SP EN CER VROO M AN.

124
TAKE TWO The third installment of our creative-swap
project sees Stella McCartney and fledgling Chinese designer
Shie Lyu repurposing and reinventing each other’s work. By Laura Hawkins.

PIECES OF WORK
Stella McCartney
PRO DUC ED BY TH E CANVAS AG EN CY.

reimagined Shie Lyu’s

look as a denim
patchwork coat, worn
here by model Grace
Elizabeth. Hair, Joey
George; makeup, Kuma.
Photographed by
Norman Jean Roy.
Fashion Editor:
Max Ortega.
 MAKING CHANGE
Lyu transformed
McCartney’s
look into a corset
and skirt articulated
with brass hardware—
PRO DUC ED BY CAS EY H OMOVIC H .

as worn here by
model Estelle Chen.
Hair and makeup,
Yang Xinrui. Details,
see In This Issue.
Photographed by
Reven Lei.
Fashion Editor:
Tonne Goodman.
SHIE LYU’S
ORIGINAL
2022
ENSEMBLE
STELLA
McCARTNEY
Mc
UPCYCLED DENIM SWATCHES
hen Shanghai-and-Chengdu-based
womenswear designer Shie Lyu
received an email inviting her to
take part in a Vogue-initiated collab-
orative project with Stella McCart-
ney, her astonishment bordered on
disbelief. “I thought the message was spam!” exclaims
Lyu, who founded her label in 2020.
A short while later, in London, McCartney’s team
opened the first mystery box shipped from Lyu’s Chengdu
studio—which contained a fall 2022 floral-quilted
cropped jacket and coordinating miniskirt, an abstract
print top, gauzy black stockings, and chokers strung with
romantic pearls and steel hardware. “There was a moment
of pause where you think, Gosh, this has happened in such
a different part of the world,” says McCartney. “I could
see similarities in the dusty color palette and the tension
between the masculine and feminine. I was also blown away
by the love put into the look—the intricate stitchwork, the
level of detail.” Take, for example, the impressionistic print,
created using zoomed-in images of upcycled objects, like
beads and paillettes, that had been chilled in Lyu’s freezer.
“Shie cast a spell over our entire studio.”
Enchantment aside, when Lyu’s small team unpacked
McCartney’s summer 2023 runway look—an oversized
double-breasted suit in a Wall Street gray traceable-wool
128
mix, layered with a seductive top made from draped recy-
FAS HIO N E DITOR: MAX O RT EGA. HAIR, JOEY GEORGE ; MAKEU P, KU MA. P RODUC ED BY TH E CAN VAS AG E N CY.
clable brass chains—they were a bit intimidated by its
precise sophistication. “We don’t really produce tailoring,
so the look felt very challenging and out of our comfort
zone,” Lyu recalls of the ensemble, which nodded to the
golden halter necks and tank tops McCartney showcased
TOP LE FT: COU RTESY O F S HIE LYU. TO P RIG HT: PH OTO GRAPHE D BY N O RMAN JE AN ROY.
on the Chloé spring 2000 catwalk when she was creative
director of the Parisian maison.
Lyu wanted to celebrate the skilled construction behind
McCartney’s mannish suit, which also draws on the time
the designer spent training with bespoke tailors on Lon-
don’s Savile Row in the early ’90s. So her tailoring was
turned inside out, deconstructed, and dissected into a
glamorous tricolor corset and pencil skirt with a diaph-
anous train in newly incorporated polyester. “The white,
gray, and black fabric is from the shoulder padding, chest
plate, and linings of the jacket,” Lyu says.
McCartney was thrilled by the elevation of her suiting’s
concealed workings. “That extent of internal work—that’s
something we really pride ourselves in.”
A record 91 percent of McCartney’s summer 2023
collection was created using conscious materials—from
mycelium mushroom leather to regenerative cotton—
and as a pioneer and advocate of recycling and reuse, the
designer wanted to incorporate only second-life materi-
als into her transformation of Lyu’s look. To complement
 the uplifting hue of the quilted fabric in the two-piece,
McCartney looked to the surplus organic cotton denim
swatches in her London studio, creating a reversible belted
trench coat jigsawed with the pockets, waistbands, and
patches of about 30 pairs of jeans in a spectrum of blue,
along with embroidered trial swatches and samples of her
geometric S-wave denim jacquard. (The design echoes a
two-piece McCartney created as part of her spring 2021
A-Z Manifesto, with the phrase “R is for Repurpose”
stitched on a patchwork denim jacket and trousers crafted
with surplus from 2017 and 2019 collections.)
“Denim is ageless,” McCartney explains of what she
calls the “Stellafication” of Lyu’s garment into something
infinitely wearable.
McCartney’s repurpose-focused ethos is recognizable
in Lyu’s work, too. When the new Parsons graduate was
working on her debut Shanghai Fashion Week collection
at the height of the pandemic in 2020, she was unable to
source new materials.
“Everything was closed, transportation was impossible,
and I could only use what I had,” she says. “So I incorpo-
rated lots of acrylic, rubber, and Swarovski crystals left
over from my degree studies.” Lyu’s conscious approach
may have been one of necessity rather than ethos, but
she’s continued to evolve in her eco-awareness. To bring
A DOUBLE-BREASTED
SUIT FROM STELLA
McCARTNEY’S SUMMER
2023 COLLECTION
FAS HIO N E DITOR: TON N E GO ODMAN. HAIR AND MAKEU P: YAN G XIN RUI. PRO DUCE D BY CASEY H OMOV ICH .
TOP LE FT: MATTEO PRAN DO NI / B FA.COM. TOP RIGHT: PH OTO GRAPH E D BY REV EN L E I.
SHIE LYU
DECONSTRUCTED
THE SUIT’S
SHOULDER
a “hyper-feminine” and eveningwear-inclined element to
McCartney’s formal tailoring fabrics, she used a signa-
ture zero-waste cutting technique to create the gossamer
train of a skirt, which is constructed from squares that are
handworked with an origami effect over several days to
resemble butterflies or grooved shells. “Every inch of the
fabric is used,” Lyu says.
There’s a certain undoneness to both McCartney’s and
Lyu’s creations, the former relishing in a design “rough
around the edges,” with fraying fabrics and unfinished
hems, while Lyu took inspiration from what McCart-
ney called the “feminine slink” of her golden chain top,
incorporating buckles and metal-hoop lacing and adding
crisscrossing machine stitching and embroidery to trace
the female form like a feisty take on a tailor’s chalk.
The fact that their work together was a female-led cre-
ative exchange only adds to the joy. “There are so few
women heading up brands, let alone founders,” McCart-
ney laments. “But the majority of our team are women.”
“It’s been unbelievable,” adds Lyu, who hopes to meet
McCartney face to face—instead of communicating via
threads and fabrics—when the latter visits China later this
year. “I really want to try the trench coat on!”
“I promise to personally carry it in my hand luggage,”
McCartney says, smiling. @
129
WINDOW DRESSING
On top of the
gossamer Dior dress
(worn throughout;
Dior boutiques),
Ceretti sports a
jumper trimmed with
lace from Erdem
(erdem.com)—and a
Tiffany-set diamond
ring from Tiffany & Co.
Fashion Editor:
Tabitha Simmons.
 Model Vittoria Ceretti
and her Dior dress
are equally at ease playing
the bride or on the
back of a motorcycle—
the latest in our series of
outfits built around
a single (fabulous) piece.
Photographed
by Dan Martensen.

Just
One
Thing

SITTING ON
CEREMONY
Pair the same dress
with a veil, lace
Dior pumps, and Dior
Fine Jewelry, and
Ceretti is instantly
transformed into
a blushing bride.
 KINDRED SPIRITS
Layered with a leafy
trench coat, a Victoriana
hat, and a vintage-
esque purse, all by
Maison Margiela
(maisonmargiela.com),
Ceretti is a dashing
Miss Havisham—
with better luck. Her
friend, meanwhile,
mixes leopard and
lace with aplomb.
 RUNAWAY BRIDE
No cold feet here—
merely a bit of chill,
which Ceretti handles
with a chic Sacai
trench (kirnazabete
.com). Lace-up
boots from Dolce &
Gabbana give the
outfit even more edge.

133
 POCKET FULL
OF DREAMS
The age-old dilemma
of the pocket-less
dress is solved instantly
with the addition of
Isabel Marant cargo
pants (saksfifth
avenue.com). Amina
Muaddi’s modern-day
Cinderella pumps and
Tiffany & Co. cuffs
are the final touch.

ALL P RODUCTS FEATU RE D I N VOGU E ARE I NDE PE NDE NTLY SELECTED

BY OU R E DI TORS. HOWEV ER , W HE N YOU BUY SO METHING TH ROUGH
OUR R ETAIL LINKS, WE M AY EAR N AN AFFI LIATE COMMI SSION.

Scan to
see more from
this story.
 TAKE ME TO CHURCH
Ceretti’s dress serves as
the foundation for classic
moto accessories—a
fabulously fringed jacket
and sunglasses, both
from Versace (select
Versace boutiques). It’s a
look that teeters between
just married and just
because. In this story: hair,
Cim Mahony; makeup,
Lisa Houghton. Details,
see In This Issue.
P RODUCED BY LOU IS2 PA RIS.

135
The Get 2

Love Scene
Outfit your honeymoon
(or minimoon, or babymoon)
with all things

6
PH OTO GRAPH BY ANN IE LE IBOV ITZ, VO GU E, MARC H 2019.
PRO DUCTS : COURTESY O F BRAN DS/WE BSITES.

136 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM

 11
10

12

1. LOUIS VUITTON TRUNK SET;

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137
 HELLO, BARBIE!
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 84
about it, the more the multiplicity of
Barbies suggested “an expansive idea
of self that we could all learn from.”
During the casting process, Ger-
wig and Robbie looked for “Barbie
energy,” a certain ineffable combina-
tion of beauty and exuberance they
concluded is embodied in Gal Gadot.
Robbie: “Gal Gadot is Barbie energy.
Because Gal Gadot is so impossibly
beautiful, but you don’t hate her for
being that beautiful, because she’s so
genuinely sincere, and she’s so enthu-
siastically kind, that it’s almost dorky.
It’s like right before being a dork.”
(Gadot wasn’t available.) They found
their Barbies in Issa Rae, Hari Nef,
Emma Mackey, Dua Lipa, Sharon
Rooney, Ana Cruz Kayne, Alexandra
Shipp, Kate McKinnon, and others.
(There are multiple Kens too.) In this
menagerie, Rae is President Barbie.
Robbie is Stereotypical Barbie.
Before shooting began in London,
Gerwig threw a slumber party for
the Barbies at Claridge’s Hotel. The
Kens were invited to stop by, but not
to sleep over. (Gosling couldn’t make
it, so he sent a singing telegram in the
form of an older Scottish man in a kilt
who played bagpipes and delivered
the speech from Braveheart.) Once
production was underway, Lucky-
Chap hosted weekly movie screenings
at the Electric Cinema in Notting
Hill. Every Sunday morning, cast and
crew were invited to watch a movie
that served as a reference for Barbie.
They called this “movie church.”
Gerwig had a sense that Barbie was
being guided by old soundstage Tech-
nicolor musicals, so they watched a
bunch of those, most helpfully The
Red Shoes and The Umbrellas of Cher-
bourg. “They have such a high level
of what we came to call authentic
artificiality,” Gerwig says. “You have
a painted sky in a soundstage. Which
is an illusion, but it’s also really there.
The painted backdrop is really there.
The tangibility of the artifice is some-
thing that we kept going back to.” Her
director of photography, Rodrigo Pri-
eto, who shot The Wolf of Wall Street
and Babel and Argo and Brokeback
Mountain, created a special color
template for Barbie with this in mind.
Gerwig named it Techni-Barbie.
Every protagonist must go on a hero’s
journey, and Stereotypical Barbie is
138 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM
no exception. The first sign of trouble
arises during a group dance number.
Breezing through the choreography
at the front of the pack, she suddenly
turns to the other Barbies and asks:
“Do you guys ever think about dying?”
Later she wakes up and finds her feet
are no longer arched. “I have no con-
text for this but my heels are on the
ground,” she says. “You’re malfunc-
tioning,” another Barbie tells her.
Eventually Stereotypical Barbie
goes to the “real world.” I don’t know
why she is called to this particular
adventure, because I was allowed to
watch only the first 20 minutes of the
movie, and then, skipping ahead, her
first few moments in the other world. I
do know that Ken goes with her. If you
saw the images of Robbie and Gosling
Rollerblading on the Venice boardwalk
last summer in head-to-toe neon—the
photos that sparked a hot-pink #Bar-
biecore trend on TikTok and on actual
runways—you’ve caught a glimpse of
Barbie and Ken’s alien landing.
After breakfast, Robbie and I skate
over to the boardwalk. As expected,
Robbie is completely at ease on roller
skates. She took it up after she did a
bunch of the ice-skating in I, Tonya,
LuckyChap’s biopic about Tonya
Harding, and that’s why she doesn’t
like brakes. “I never had them on ice
skates, so it would mess me up.”
We pass the spot where she shot
the real-world scenes last year, then
pause at the skate-dance park and
watch the roller-dancers twirl. “I’ve
been in there once,” Robbie says when
I ask. “On Babylon, one of the back-
ground extras, she’s like a really cool
Instagram skater, and we were talking
about skating. I was like, Do you want
to go on the weekend and teach me some
tricks? And she was like, Yeah, sure. So
we went and she was kind of teaching
me how to dance on my skates.”
Over the course of the day, I repeat-
edly ask Robbie how she found her
character as Barbie. Later, through
interviews with the rest of the cast,
I begin to grasp that, in an ensemble
piece of this scale, no character exists
apart from the others. As Ana Cruz
Kayne explains, it’s about finding
one’s space within the group: “Like
the youngest child asks at Passover,
What makes this night different than
other nights? It’s like, What makes this
Barbie different than other Barbies?”
Hari Nef made a private decision
about who owns her Barbie. “A doll
collector,” Nef tells me. “A gay man in
his 50s who lives in a rent-controlled
apartment in the West Village.” She
took this cue from her costumes. “I
was given the most over-the-top,
fashion-y, crazy costumes. And I was
like, This is no child’s doll.” Also, her
Barbie seemed well-preserved. “I feel
like every week he has his two or three
friends over, maybe he’s a little lonely,
and he shows them my new outfit.
And I just kind of stay in my box.”
Gosling deflects when I ask how
he found his character—“It would
be very un-Ken of me to talk about
Ken”—but he does say that Robbie
did things to help. “She left a pink
present with a pink bow, from Barbie
to Ken, every day while we were film-
ing. They were all beach-related. Like
puka shells, or a sign that says ‘Pray for
surf.’ Because Ken’s job is just beach.
I’ve never quite figured out what that
means. But I felt like she was trying to
help Ken understand, through these
gifts that she was giving.”
Stereotypical Barbie was a tough
nut to crack. Usually Robbie finds
something called “animal work” help-
ful. Tonya was a pit bull in life and a
mustang on the ice. Nellie, Robbie’s
character in Babylon, was an octo-
pus and a honey badger. An octopus
because they are survivalists; they
have a lot of nerve endings; there’s
a fluidity to them; and they change
their appearance. A honey badger
because they have square backs and
thick skin. “They’re such an insane
animal,” Robbie says. “You can hit a
honey badger with a machete.” With
Barbie, animal work wasn’t useful.
Robbie tried a flamingo but didn’t
get anywhere. At one point she was
really struggling. “I was like, Greta, I
need to go on this whole character jour-
ney. And Greta was like, Oh, I have
a really good podcast for you.” Gerwig
sent Robbie an episode of This Amer-
ican Life, about a woman who doesn’t
introspect. “You know how you have a
voice in your head all the time?” Rob-
bie says. “This woman, she doesn’t
have that voice in her head.”
To sort out the sexiness question,
Robbie had to break it down. “I’m like,
Okay, she’s a doll. She’s a plastic doll.
She doesn’t have organs. If she doesn’t
have organs, she doesn’t have repro-
ductive organs. If she doesn’t have
reproductive organs, would she even
feel sexual desire? No, I don’t think she
could.” Therefore: “She is sexualized.
But she should never be sexy. People
can project sex onto her.” Thus: “Yes,
she can wear a short skirt, but because
it’s fun and pink. Not because she
wanted you to see her butt.”
I do glean a few details about the
rest of Barbie. The arc is partially
inspired by something Gerwig read
when she was a kid, in the 1994 best-
seller Reviving Ophelia. “My mom
would check out books f rom the
library about parenting, and then I
would read them,” Gerwig says. The
book describes an abrupt change that
happens in American girls when they
hit adolescence and begin to bend to
external expectations. “They’re funny
and brash and confident, and then
they just—stop,” Gerwig says. This
memory bubbled up early in the writ-
ing and Gerwig found it “jarring,” the
realization that this is where the story
had to go: “How is this journey the
same thing that a teenage girl feels?
All of a sudden, she thinks, Oh, I’m
not good enough.”
There’s a completely different color
template for the real world, Prieto
mentions when we speak. Techni-
Barbie is only for Barbie’s world. “We
wanted to create a distinctive look for
Barbie, for her world, as opposed to
the real world,” Prieto says.
Also, Robbie’s speech patterns
change. She brings this up when
describing Barbie’s non-accent. (Bar-
bie shouldn’t sound like she’s from
anywhere in particular, therefore:
“General American accent. It’s called
GenAm.”) At the start of the movie,
Barbie speaks in a higher register, and:
“Everything is very definite. There’s
no second thought. There’s no hesi-
tation.” Later, her voice lowers, and
there are more pauses.
Something major seems to happen
to the Kens. When I ask Gerwig how
she and Robbie defined Ken energy,
she cannot formulate a response with-
out laughing. “The Kens have a jour-
ney in front of them,” she eventually
says. “In the beginning of the movie,
nobody thinks about Ken. Nobody
worries about Ken. Ken doesn’t have
a house. Or a car. Or a job. Or any
power. And, um, that is gonna be sort
of unsustainable.”
New characters are introduced in
the real world. One is the CEO of
Mattel, played by Will Ferrell. Rob-
bie describes this character as: “Mis-
guided but in an innocent way. He
just cares about little girls and their
dreams in the least creepy way pos-
sible.” Another is Gloria, played by
America Ferrera. It’s unclear who
Gloria is, but she’s definitely not
a Barbie. “I think I can say that my
character has a very strong connec-
tion with Barbie,” Ferrera tells me. In
the pictures that went viral from the
Venice shoot, there are some of Rob-
bie and Ferrera Rollerblading side by
side, holding hands. Robbie is in a
pink denim cowgirl outfit.
When Robbie was in 12th grade, she
had to fill out a questionnaire about
her hopes and dreams. She recently
found her answers and pulls them up
on her phone when I ask how she got
into acting. We are walking back from
Salt & Straw, sea-salt-and-caramel
ice cream cones in hand. Robbie
reads in the high-pitched voice of her
younger self. “Interests: Hanging out
with friends. Future dream job: Hol-
lywood actress, events manager, hotel
owner.” The combination makes her
laugh. “Uh, yeah, I’m a multihyphen-
ate Hollywood actress–hotel owner–
events manager.”
One way to chart Robbie’s subse-
quent rise is as a series of gutsy moves.
In her audition for The Wolf of Wall
Street, she went off script and slapped
Leonardo DiCaprio across the face.
She had never met Quentin Taran-
tino when she wrote to him to say
how much she wanted to work with
him, and soon after, she was playing
Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in
Hollywood. When she shot a certain
scene in Babylon, she went off script
again and kissed Brad Pitt. Perhaps
Gosling puts it best: “She has a kind
of fearlessness that you can only get
from literally growing up swimming
in shark-infested waters.”
Robbie has a long list of directors
she’d like to work with, as an actor
and a producer. She’s working her way
through the list. “Greta was on that
list for a long time,” she says. “Damien
was on that list for a long time,” she
says, referring to Babylon’s Damien
Chazelle. Robbie recently ticked
another box on the list, Wes Ander-
son. She has a small role in Asteroid
City. “PTA is the big one I haven’t
ticked,” she says, referring to Paul
Thomas Anderson. “Is he aware?” I
ask. “He’s aware,” she says.
When Robbie is not working she is
often checking the websites of train
companies around the world. “All
I want to do is live on a train,” she
says. The Orient Express was on her
bucket list for a long time, and she
and Ackerley finally ticked that box
last year. They started in London on
the British Pullman—Wes Anderson
decorated one of the carriages and
Robbie wanted to ride in it—and then
took the Orient Express overnight
from Paris to Venice. “I was watching
the Sidney Lumet version of Murder
on the Orient Express while I was on
board, just because I’m a loser, and I
was, like, checking the background
of every shot,” Robbie says. In the
morning they woke up in Switzer-
land. “You literally wake up and you
open the window and it looks like The
Sound of Music.”
Their recent trip to Japan was
partly to ride the Seven Stars, a seven-
car train that goes across the island
of Kyushu. They also spent time in
Tokyo and Kyoto tracking down
noodle places Robbie had read about
on food blogs. They waited in line
for three and a half hours at one spot
in Tokyo to try its udon carbonara,
which sounded sacrilegious but
turned out to be “the greatest thing
that ever happened to me.” The noo-
dles were thick and silky, and came
with cracked pepper, a hunk of butter,
a mound of Parmesan, a raw egg, and
scallions. “And then they had a giant
tempura piece of bacon that was, like,
this big.” Robbie gestures to indicate
the magnitude of the bacon. “It was
like a foot-long sandwich from Sub-
way.” (Before she got a big part on an
Australian soap opera, Robbie worked
at a Subway in Melbourne.)
Robbie’s interest in food does not
extend to cooking. “In our friendship
group in LA and London, all the guys
cook, and love cooking, and are really
good at it,” she says. “And none of
the girls cook, and we love drinking,
and we’re really good at it.” Robbie
finds cooking stressful. She gets dis-
tracted easily: “Everything lights on
fire in the kitchen. I’m not even kid-
ding.” She’s lit three Christmas hams
on fire at this point. The last time
was because the cooked ham wasn’t
crispy enough. Ackerley has a lot of
kitchen gadgets around, including a
blowtorch. “So I was like, Great, I’ll
blowtorch it,” Robbie says. “Somehow
I even messed that up. The whole top
of it fell off. The lighter fluid went
on my hand. Everyone was scream-
ing. Weirdly, I wasn’t injured at all. It
139
 lit on fire and then I went like that.”
She brushes one hand with the other,
miming how she put the fire out. “It
was like a magic trick.”
I see Robbie once more a couple
weeks later, at a video shoot for a
Chanel beauty campaign. (She’s an
ambassador for the brand.) The shoot
is taking place in a studio in East
Hollywood. Robbie’s team is gath-
ered around a big monitor display-
ing the footage being shot in another
room. The Robbie onscreen appears
to be in a movie theater. She has on
black Chanel sunglasses and red lip-
stick, and her face takes up most of
the frame. It seems we are watching
Robbie watch a movie. Light from
the make-believe movie is flashing
across her face.
When the shoot breaks for lunch,
I meet Robbie in her dressing room.
She’s wearing a black chiffon polka-
dot blouse, matching pants, and black
patent leather ankle boots. I am now
so steeped in all things Barbie that all
I can think when I see her is: Chanel
Barbie. “You’ve changed form,” I say
as we sit down. “It’s a very different
version,” she says. The concept of
the campaign is abstract, Robbie says
when I ask if there is one. “It’s kind of
like: I’m in a car! I’m in a club. I’m in a
room! Is it a hotel? I don’t know! I’m in a
theater. I’m watching what we shot. And
now, I’m back to putting on lipstick.”
Between Chanel shoots, Robbie is
in producer mode. LuckyChap is in
the process of picture-locking Salt-
burn, the second film by Emerald
Fennell, who wrote and directed
Promising Young Woman. (Fennell
plays Midge in Barbie.) And they are
moving closer to finalizing a Barbie
cut. They’ve got three days of addi-
tional photography and a lot of mix-
ing ahead. “You have to start really
locking things in so that you can
start to send reels off,” she says. They
are still putting together the second
trailer. Then they’ll have to figure out
the rest of the marketing and release
strategy. The rollout will overtake
Robbie’s schedule by summer. “I’m
all Barbie from here until Barbie.” @
SOMETHING’S COOKING
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 122
Both he and Moss-Bachrach
describe the atmosphere on set as
nimble and alive; all told, White won’t
be in town filming for more than
about eight weeks. “There’s an energy
to the shoot that I think is important
for the content of what we’re mak-
ing,” Moss-Bachrach says. “There’s a
messiness and a chaotic-ness to our
show.” There is also a lot of laughter.
“I think we’re all trying to do the same
thing we did last season, which is just
work together and have a good time
together,” adds writer-comedian Ayo
Edebiri, who costars as Carmy’s eager
sous-chef, Sydney. “But I think we’re
all slightly more tired.”
Though expectations were rela-
tively low for season one—The Bear
didn’t have major stars attached, and
it was slated to premiere in sleepy
late June—White was “a little bit
of a nervous wreck for the whole
shoot,” he remembers. “I just felt
like I had so much to prove, com-
ing off of being on [Shameless] for
so long. I felt like I really needed to
take advantage of the opportunity.”
He channeled some of that insecu-
rity into Carmy, who has all of the
credentials to overhaul The Beef, but
none of his brother’s easy confidence.

In This Issue luggage.com. 85: Dress;

Table of Contents: 32:
On White: blazer and
pants; versace.com. On
Longendyke: sweater,
shirt, and skirt; Valentino
boutiques. Bag;
alexandermcqueen.com.
Cover Look: 32: Dress;
versace.com. Earring;
Chopard boutiques.
Manicurist: Tom Bachik
using Tweezerman.
Tailor: Irina Tshartaryan.
Editor’s Letter: 40: Left
photo: top and miniskirt;
versace.com. Chopard
Haute Joaillerie earring;
Chopard boutiques.
Right photo: Chanel
Haute Couture dress;
(800) 550-0005 for
information. In buttons:
jacket and shorts; sergio
hudson.com. Jimmy
Choo shoes; jimmychoo
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HELLO, BARBIE!
74–75: Dress,
gloves, and shoes;
Bergdorf Goodman.
Shoes; miumiu.com.
Manicurist: Tom Bachik
and earrings; versace
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from Beltbe; beltbestore
.com. On Tougaard:
.co.uk. Gillian Horsup
chain necklace; gillian
horsup.com. On Sané:
Gina shoes; gina.com.
using Tweezerman. collar necklace; select Versace necklaces;
+33 (155) 351-600 for Tailor: Irina Tshartaryan. Chanel boutiques. On versace.com. 97: On
information. Necklace; Kane: Orange Culture Tougaard: earring;
alessandrarich.com. MEET ME IN shirt and pants; jennifergibsonjewellery
76: Shirt and shoes; SENEGAL orangeculture.com.ng. .com. On Yai: 4element
masionmargiela.com. 86–87: On Sané: Bode hat; bode.com. earring; 4element.co.uk.
Kelsey Randall hat; Academy Costumes Gillian Horsup necklace; Manicurist: Mélinda
kelseyrandall.com. Kate earrings. Bangles; gillianhorsup.com. Santo.
Cate belt; kate-cate select Chanel boutiques. 95: Right photo: Falke
.com. 77: Dress; On Yai: earrings and socks. Nomasei shoes; COUNTRY
proenzaschouler.com. necklaces; select Chanel us.nomasei.com. PURSUITS
78: Top; marni.com. boutiques. Gillian Horsup Gillian Horsup belts; 98: Left photo: bag;
Brief; normakamali belt; gillianhorsup.com. gillianhorsup.com. loropiana.com. Hogan
.com. Sunglasses; On Makibdji: Jennifer Necklace from Jennifer shoe; hogan.cn. 100:
bonnieclyde.la. Versace Gibson Jewellery earring; Gibson Jewellery; Right photo: earring
earrings; versace.com. jennifergibsonjewellery jennifergibsonjewellery from Yanxue x
79: Dress; carolina .com. 89: On Tougaard: .com. 96: On Makibdji: Messential. 101: Saint
herrera.com. Shoes; earrings; susancaplan Lauren Perrin tights; Laurent by Anthony
paristexasbrand.com. .co.uk. On Kane: hat from laurenperrin.com. Vaccarello earring and
Chopard earrings; Blanc; blanc.gr. Loafers Larroudé shoes; cuff; ysl.com. 103:
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80: Jacket, top, skirt, Savile Row; arthursleep Costumes earrings.
belt, shoes, and tights; .com. 91: On Tougaard: Gillian Horsup POSTCARDS
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(800) 550-0005 for store.com. Chanel gillianhorsup.com. 105: On Ceretti: Prada
information. Bracelet choker and necklace; On Ndong: belt from sandals; prada.com.
and ring; select Chanel select Chanel boutiques. Beltbe; beltbestore Charlotte Chesnais
boutiques. Moschino Gillian Horsup chain .com. Dsquared2 necklace; charlotte
earrings. 82–83: Dress; necklace; gillianhorsup shoes; dsquared2.com. chesnais.com.
bergdorfgoodman .com. On Yai: earrings Earrings from On Attal and Elsseser:
.com. Shoes; christian from 4element earrings; 4element; 4element Birkenstock sandals;
louboutin.com. 4element.co.uk. .co.uk. Susan Caplan 1774.com. 108:
Trunk set; steamline 92–93: Versace belt necklace; susancaplan Earrings; tiffany.com.

140 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM

 Yet by the season one finale, a dra- at the SAGs, where his mother was Beyond The Bear, this ride con-
matic change in fortune, and the his date. (Both of White’s parents tinues: Among White’s forthcoming
hard-won respect of his employees, are former theater actors.) “On the projects are the spare indie Fremont,
have made him a different man. drive over, I [asked her], ‘Is there in which he has a small but notable
Season two promises more change: anybody you could meet that would role as a lonely mechanic (it will not
As The Beef transitions into The really just throw you?’ ” White says. surprise you to learn that he looks
Bear, a new restaurant concept over- Her very sensible response was Cate very natural in coveralls); Fingernails,
seen by Carmy, Sydney, and Richie Blanchett—who would later, to directed and cowritten by Chris-
(Moss-Bachrach), their loose canon White’s surprise and mild horror, walk tos Nikou for Apple TV+; and Sean
of a manager, “the crew undertakes right up to them. (He and Blanchett Durkin’s The Iron Claw, about the
transformational journeys of their had never met, but she coproduced Von Erich wrestling dynasty, with
own,” the official logline reads. Prac- Fingernails, a romantic sci-fi film that Zac Efron, Harris Dickinson, and
tically speaking, White explains, this he shot with Riz Ahmed and Jessie Lily James. White enjoyed learning
means “you’re spending so much time Buckley last year.) “I was kind of tak- the physical language of the ring from
with Carmy outside of the kitchen, ing the moment in as she was coming Chavo Guerrero Jr., a professional
which feels like a different person, over—and I turned over and my mom wrestler who also helped to train
and feels like a person that Carmy was just fully, like, sobbing.” the cast of Netflix’s GLOW. “Before
is not even really familiar with.” So White knows that he would be The Bear, I had never really focused
much of his identity has been tied up having a harder time handling all of that much on a skill for a job. And
in his work “that in everything else, this without Timlin and their girls it is such an amazing way to under-
he’s kind of like a baby.” tethering him to the ground. “I mean, stand character,” he says. “It feels like
Some 16 years into his professional Addison was a Broadway kid. She a cheat code or something.” Looking
career, White, too, is gingerly explor- was Annie on Broadway for years. ahead, he’d like to do a war movie one
ing new territory. This past winter, he She’s been doing it forever, and she’s day, and would love to try live theater.
was showered with the awards atten- been on the ride,” he says. “So she’s But first, he has about a month
tion that had long eluded Shameless, incredible and supportive and under- of shooting left on The Bear before
winning a Golden Globe, a Critics standing, I think, is the best word.” returning to Los Angeles. “I wish it
Choice Award, and a Screen Actors He tells me that he doesn’t entirely was longer this time,” he says, offer-
Guild Award for his performance in get how actors who date outside of ing a shy half-smile. “But yeah, I don’t
The Bear. He appreciated it, especially their profession do it. know. Everybody got busier.” @

109: On Ceretti: hat; SOMETHING’S mikimotoamerica 131: Shoes; Dior 3. Dress, $6,500.
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BY DISCOUN TE RS. AS IS ALWAYS THE CAS E IN PURC HAS IN G AN ITE M FROM A NY W HE RE OT H ER

Bottega Veneta earring; shirt, and skirt; Dior earring; jessica

A WOR D A BOUT D I SCOUN TERS W HILE VO GUE TH OROUGH LY RESE ARC HES T HE COM PAN IES

CONDÉ NAST IS
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Tailor: Marta Balduinotti. miumiu.com. Necklace; Rings; tiffany.com. price upon request.

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141
Last Look

Bulgari rings
ART DI RECTIO N: LAU RA DOAR DO.

Let’s raise a glass to these gumdrop-size cocktail rings by Bulgari High Jewelry. This quartet of cushion
cuts features glimmering center stones with pavé accents to take things to a more luminous level.
The pairings, from top to bottom: sapphire on sapphire, emerald on emerald, tanzanite on emerald, and
emerald on ruby—with a heavy scattering of diamonds throughout each. Wear them solo, pair
them up, or try them all at once—and there’s certainly no need to wait till five o’clock to slip them on.
P H OTO G RA P H E D BY N AC H O A L EG R E

142 SUMMER 2023 VOGUE.COM