Vogue - April 2014 USA

APR

SPRING CHIC

173

SELFIE-MADE

KATE UPTON

AND THE RISE OF THE SOCIAL-MEDIA SUPERMODEL

ROMANTIC, SPORTY, SURPRISING LOOKS AND FLATS WITH EVERYTHING!

THE SHAPE ISSUE

MINDY KALING EMILY BLUNT

PLUS THE FITTEST WOMAN ON EARTH

KIM & KANYE THEIR FASHIONABLE LIFE AND SURREAL TIMES

#WORLDSMOSTTALKEDABOUTCOUPLE

APRIL kanye west and kim kardashian, photographed in Los Angeles by Annie Leibovitz.

60 vogue.com 62 editor’s letter 74, 82 masthead 86 talking back

Letters from readers

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136 140 142

love and marriage keeping up with kimye, p. 208

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contributors up front

We all like to put of difcult tasks— but for Adam Green, chronic procrastination was threatening to unravel his life. So, at long last, he took action lives

America’s new ambassador to Libya, Deborah Jones, has taken on a demanding diplomatic post in the shadow of tragedy. By Suzy Hansen nostalgia

In 1954, the great American reporter Dorothy Thompson challenged the fashion world to fnd a working wardrobe for a busy size 20 journalist. By Janine di Giovanni

flash it girl

Iggy Azalea back home

Yasmin Sewell on her native Australia tnt

Elisabeth TNT takes to the Alps in Gstaad for an avantgarde art fair and a lavish wedding continued>48

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fAs hi on ed i tor : g rAce cod d i n gto n . h A i r, A n th on y t u rn er ; mA keup, A A ron d e mey for seph orA. grooming, ibn jAsper . mensweAr ed itor : r eneLou pAd orA.

104 110

152

154 158

Talking fashion

Stars shine in creations burnished bright sTreeT sTyling

view

heavy duTy

164

gyM dandy

168

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wide open

A looser trouser silhouette is breaking rank with the long, lean line of the skinny

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Lady Amanda Harlech and Dominic Jones’s jewelry line is steeped in the past under Their feeT

Luke Irwin’s English country garden is as lush and vibrant as his rug designs looMing large

paTTern perfecT

Carolina Herrera reissues her most beloved prints in a charming lineup of day clothes

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Bulgari looks to the maharajas—and maharanis—of India for its latest perfume The greaT cover-up

The biTTeresT pill

Plagued by anxiety and depression, Kelley McMillan developed a dependency on the very meds that were supposed to help her

second naTure

Henzel Studio teams up with art-world powerhouses to produce a line of chic, avant-garde foor coverings

Jewels & Juice

You can hide from the sun—or you can play. Laura Regensdorf on how to stay stylishly safe this season

When did handbags become the new kettlebells? When every other aspect of your life is styled, why should a workout wardrobe be any diferent?

The poliTics of polish

With complaints of weakened nails and concerns over UV lamps, gel manicures are under fre. Sandra Ballentine on the backlash—and the new solutions

The haMish files

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166

180

From Harlem to haute couture, hip-hop’s rising star A$AP Rocky has charmed the fashion world

beauty & health

199

199

people are talking about TalenT

Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost takes his place at the Weekend Update desk design

Oscar de la Renta’s masterly forals move to beguiling cocktail plates

selfiemade Follow me!, P. 244

Kate Upton, wearing Cushnie et ochs. Photographed by mario Testino.

200 Movies

Two long-standing couples rekindle the fame

200 TheaTer

Small-town dreams hit the big stage

202 Music

FKA Twigs brings her hypnotic sound Stateside

202 Travel

Try Where I’d Stay for a Parisian home away from home

202 Television

Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells play versions of themselves in HBO’s faux-reality series Doll & Em

204 books

This spring, novelists reinvent the fairy tale

204 arT

Nicholas Cullinan gives the Metropolitan Museum a modern twist

fashion & features

207 poinT of view 208 keeping up wiTh kiMye

From London to Paris to Los Angeles, Hamish Bowles joins Kim Kardashian and Kanye West in their quest for world domination— and the perfect wedding dress

222 ray of lighT

Here comes the sun—and with it dawns an uplifting, ultrafeminine moment that brings an adult spin to girlishly romantic pieces

234 Mindy over MaTTer

The vivacious, curvaceous comedienne Mindy Kaling loves to skewer everyone— especially herself. By Sandra Ballentine continued>56

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Fas hi on ed i Tor : Ton ne go o d ma n . ha i r , C hr isTi a a n; m a KeU P, ya d i m. d eTa ils, see in Th is issUe.

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APRIL

APRIL

fashioned herself a family home– meets–beachside colony along a wild stretch of coast in the Dominican Republic. By Rob Haskell

264 iron chef

Jefrey Steingarten has everything from fne copper saucepans to a Sichuan hot pot— but his humble cast-iron skillet is the only essential tool of the trade

268 sTeaL of

The monTh

240 shorT noTice

Political wunderkind (and occasional Girls actor) Audrey Gelman is barely fve feet tall. Good thing that accomplishments aren’t measured with a yardstick. By Lynn Yaeger

This side of paradise, p. 258

a breezy cottage on Celerie Kemble’s property in the dominican republic. photographed by françois halard.

236 The Big easy

Emily Blunt has won over Hollywood with her efortless wit and wry, British charm. Now she’s embarking on her most ambitious production yet: motherhood. Eve MacSweeney reports

238 game on

With Jay Z’s agency behind her, athletic dynamo Skylar Diggins is making plays on and of the basketball court. By Robert Sullivan

242

LofTy amBiTion

With a head for business and a body honed from boxing, the nearly six-foot-tall Virginie CourtinClarins aims to elevate the house of Mugler. Mark Holgate reports

244 foLLow me!

Kate Upton’s selfe-made rise has models going crazy for social

cover look wedding chic

media. But is all that tweeting selling any clothes? By Jonathan Van Meter

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Be they zipperlined oxfords or crisp white trainers, easygoing fats underscore the season’s efortless looks

power pLayer

For Annie Thorisdottir, the fttest woman on the planet, working out means pushing her body to the outer limits of performance—and crushing it. By Adam Green

256 The naTuraL

Michelle Williams makes her longawaited return to the stage in a Broadway revival of Cabaret. By Adam Green

258 This side of

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index a pLace in The sun

The new season ofers a swimsuit for every style

284 in This issue 286 LasT LooK

paradise

Designer Celerie Kemble has

Kim Kardashian wears a Lanvin Blanche Collection by alber elbaz ivory strapless techno– duchesse satin dress. Kanye West in a Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane blazer. To get this look, try: Even Better Makeup SPF 15, Kohl Shaper for Eyes in Black Kohl, High Impact Extreme Volume Mascara in Extreme Black, Instant Lift for Brows in Deep Brown, Chubby Stick Intense Moisturizing Lip Colour Balm in Curviest Caramel. All by Clinique. Hair, Anthony Turner; makeup, Aaron de Mey for Sephora. Grooming, Ibn Jasper. Menswear Editor: Renelou Padora. Details, see In This Issue. photographer: annie Leibovitz. fashion editor: grace coddington.

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270 KicKing BacK

s iT T i n g s ed i Tor : M ira nda B ro o Ks

sunny delight

A new designer collaboration is redefning notions of dressing for a fuller fgure

center of attention uPTOn, in A VideO direcTed bY Ab/cd/cd.

triple threAt

Think Kate Upton is a powerhouse all on her own? Now multiply that number by three. Watch the supermodel show off her dance moves with the help of two very familiar-looking backup dancers in this exclusive video for Vogue.com.

K ATE

my blue heaven TheOdOrA richArdS, PhOTOgrAPhed bY bruce Weber fOr VOgue, 2012.

fashion

guide: deNiM-A-dAY Your fashion prayers have been answered: Our editors select a perfect pair of jeans for every day in the month of April. Somewhere within these 30 wonderful, wearable options, your ideal awaits.

from the archives: the shape issue

for more than a decade, Vogue has been celebrating the female body (in all its many forms) in our annual Shape issue. See our favorite photographs in this portfolio— featuring women who run the gamut from tall to short, curvy to pregnant.

100+ under $100 for spring

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They call it spring cleaning for a reason; it’s time to unload the old to make room for the new. When it comes to your wardrobe, that need not mean cleaning out your wallet as well. here are our picks for more than 100 spring finds for under $100.

U pTo N : Fas hi o N e d i To r: KaTh ryN N e a le . ha i r , c hr isTi a a N; m a KeU p, ja mes K a li a r d os.

video

letter from the editor

all in the family kanye west, in prada pants, witH kim kardasHian and BaBy nOrtH, in nina ricci dresses. pHOtOgrapHed By annie leiBOvitz.

N

o doubt you have an opinion on the cover of this month’s Vogue. Everyone is going to have an opinion on this month’s cover. When it comes to Kim Kardashian and Kanye West (“Keeping Up with Kimye,” page 208), it’s impossible not to sail into controversial waters; for every ardent supporter there is a vociferous critic. Part of the pleasure of editing Vogue, one that lies in a long tradition of this magazine, is being able to feature those who defne the culture at any given moment, who stir things up, whose presence in the world shapes the way it looks and infuences the way we see it. I think we can all agree on the fact that

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that role is currently being played by Kim and Kanye to a T. (Or perhaps that should be to a K?) If I told you the levels of secrecy that went into planning this story, it would take up the entire issue, let alone this letter. Needless to say, Grace Coddington and Annie Leibovitz, who created a wonderful series of images of the couple and their adorable baby girl, North, and the intrepid Hamish Bowles, who interviewed Kanye and Kim at Sarah Burton’s Alexander McQueen atelier in London, Le Meurice hotel in Paris, and Kim’s mother’s house in Los Angeles, all took the subterfuge in their stride—Grace masters of and Hamish even donned Kanye-like disguise HamisH BOwles disguises at one point. As for the cover, and grace my o p i n i o n e d i t o r ’ s l e t t e r > 6 8 cOddingtOn gO undercOver fOr tHe kim-andkanye stOry.

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BOw les a n d cOd d i n gtOn : ji ll d e mli n g. de ta ils, se e i n tH is i ssu e.

Shaping today

tall order virginie courtinclarins in new york. givenchy by riccardo tisci top and skirt. cartier earrings. photographed by norman jean roy.

c o n t i n u e d f r o m pa g e 6 2

true to form

right: kate upton, is that it is both charming in calvin klein collection. and touching, and it was, I photographed by should add, entirely our idea mario testino. far right: icelandic to do it; you may have read crossfit superstar that Kanye begged me to annie thorisdottir. photographed put his fiancée on Vogue’s by bruce weber. cover. He did nothing of the sort. The gossip might make better reading, but the simple fact of the matter is that it isn’t true. There’s barely a strand of the modern media that the Kardashian Wests haven’t been able to master, and for good reason: Kanye is an amazing performer and cultural provocateur, while Kim, through her strength of character, has created a place for herself in the glare of the world’s spotlight, and it takes real guts to do that. So, too, has Kate Upton, whose rise to fame was powered by her clever and intuitive understanding of social media. I have never made any secret of the fact that I am a big fan of Kate’s, and in “Follow Me!” (page 244), Jonathan Van Meter contextualizes her story within today’s selfe generation, examining the way that models, and the fashion industry as a whole, are trying to capitalize on the millions of followers that the likes of Twitter and Instagram can deliver. Since this is our annual Shape Issue, we have other compelling fgures here whose sense of pride in their physicality is inspiring, such as the comedian Mindy Kaling (“Mindy over Matter,” page 234), the businesswoman Virginie CourtinClarins (“Lofty Ambition,” page 242), and the actress Emily Blunt (“The Big Easy,” page 236). One other individual who

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is immensely engaging is Annie Thorisdottir (“Power Player,” page 252), the only woman to win the CrossFit Games twice; because of that record-breaking achievement she has been hailed as the fttest woman in the world. Annie’s exercise regimen is punishing, training four hours a day, six days a week. It takes drive and determination to stick to that. And when it comes to the women that we feature this April, she is in good and like-minded company.

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cou rt i n - cla r i ns : fas hi o n ed i to r: sa ra m o o nv es. ha i r, ya nn i c k d’ i s ; m a keup, j unko kioka for ch anel beauté. th or isd ottir : fash ion ed itor : sara moonves. ha i r , g e ra ld d e coc k for li v i n g p ro o f; ma keup, reg i n e t ho rre . u pto n : fash ion ed itor : tonne good man. h air , ch r istiaan; makeup, yad im. d etails, see in th is i ssu e .

letter from the editor

ANNA WINTOUR Editor in Chief Creative Director GRACE CODDINGTON Design Director RAÚl MARTINEz Fashion Director TONNE GOODMAN Features Director EVE MacSWEENEY Market Director, Fashion and Accessories VIRGINIA SMITH Executive Fashion Editor PHYllIS POSNICK International Editor at Large HAMISH BOWlES Fashion News Director MARK HOlGATE Creative Digital Director SAllY SINGER

Fashion Accessories Director RICKIE DE SOlE Fashion News Editor EMIlY HOlT Bookings Director HElENA SuRIC Market Editors KEllY CONNOR, JESSICA SAIlER, CYNTHIA SMITH Accessories Editor SElBY DRuMMOND Home Editor MIEKE TEN HAVE Fashion Writer CHIOMA NNADI Associate Accessories Editor MAYA SASAKI Fashion Associate BEAu SAM Accessories Assistants SARA KlAuSING, AlExANDRA MICHlER Fashion Assistants lAuREN BEllAMY, AlExANDRA CRONAN, GRACE FullER, GRACE GIVENS, EMMA MORRISON

Beauty Beauty Director SARAH BROWN Beauty Writer lAuRA REGENSDORF

Features Culture Editor VAlERIE STEIKER Senior Editors TAYlOR ANTRIM, JOYCE RuBIN (Copy), COREY SEYMOuR, ABIGAIl WAlCH Entertainment Editor JIllIAN DEMlING Social Editor CHlOE MAllE Style Editor at Large ElISABETH VON THuRN uND TAxIS Food Critic JEFFREY STEINGARTEN Associate Entertainment Editor MARK GuIDuCCI Features Assistants AllY BETKER, THOMAS GEBREMEDHIN, KATE GuADAGNINO, ElIzABETH INGlESE, GABRIEllA KAREFA-JOHNSON

Art Art Director AlBERTO ORTA Deputy Art Director MARTIN HOOPS Senior Designer GABRIEllE MIRKIN Design Associate JENNIFER DONNEllY Photography Director IVAN SHAW Senior Producer AllISON BROWN Senior Photo Editor ANDREW GOlD Photo Editor, Research MAuREEN SONGCO

Vogue.com Site Director BEN BERENTSON Editor CAROlINE PAlMER Managing Editor AlExANDRA MACON Production Manager ANDEE OlSON Beauty Director CATHERINE PIERCY Senior Fashion Editor JORDEN BICKHAM Market Editor CHElSEA zAlOPANY Culture Editor THESSAlY lA FORCE Associate Editor PATRICIA GARCIA Research Editor EuGENIA MIRANDA Social Media Manager ANNE JOHNSON

Production/Copy/Research Production Director DAVID BYARS Digital Production Manager JASON ROE Deputy Copy Chief CAROlINE KIRK Senior Copy Editor lESlIE lIPTON Copy Editor DIEGO HADIS Fashion Credits Editor MElISSA RODRIGuEz Research Editor JulIE BRAMOWITz Research Associates JENNIFER CONRAD, HEATHER RABKIN

Special Projects/Editorial Development/Public Relations Director of Special Projects SYlVANA WARD DuRRETT Special Events Associate EADDY KIERNAN Editorial Business Manager CHRISTINE ARzENO Manager, Editorial Operations xAVIER GONzAlEz Director of Communications HIlDY KuRYK Executive Director, Brand Marketing JESSICA MARTINO Communications and Marketing Manager ElIzABETH FISCH Executive Assistant to the Editor in Chief lIlI GÖKSENIN Assistant to the Editor in Chief REY-HANNA VAKIlI European Editor FIONA DaRIN Fashion Associate CAMIlA lOPEz DE CARRIzOSA West Coast Director lISA lOVE West Coast Special Projects Editor JESSICA KANTOR Managing Editor jON glUck Executive Director, Editorial and Special Projects chRIsTIANe mAck Contributing Editors ROSAMOND BERNIER, MIRANDA BROOKS, ADAM GREEN, NATHAN HEllER, lAWREN HOWEll, REBECCA JOHNSON, DODIE KAzANJIAN, SHIRlEY lORD, CATIE MARRON, SARA MOONVES, SARAH MOWER, KATHRYN NEAlE, CAMIllA NICKERSON, MEGAN O’GRADY, JOHN POWERS, MARINA RuST, lAuREN SANTO DOMINGO, TABITHA SIMMONS, ROBERT SullIVAN, PluM SYKES, SuSAN TRAIN, JONATHAN VAN METER, SHEllEY WANGER, VICKI WOODS, lYNN YAEGER

ThOmAs j. WAllAce Editorial Director

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vogue.com

sUsAN d. plAgemANN Vice President, Publisher

Associate Publisher, Marketing kImbeRly fAsTINg beRg Associate Publisher, Advertising dAvId sTUckey Advertising Advertising Director BETH McClAIN Digital Director lINDSEY KINTNER Advertising Manager BORA PARK Executive Director, International Fashion and Business Development SuSAN CAPPA Executive Retail Director GERAlDINE RIzzO Executive Beauty Director lAuREN HulKOWER-BElNICK Beauty Director AMY KATz American Fashion Director JAMIE TIlSON ROSS Account Director MARIE lA FRANCE Account Manager MEREDITH RATH Assistant to the Publisher lENA JENSEN Advertising Coordinators NINA CAPACCHIONE, RACHEl GOODMAN International Fashion Coordinator STEPHANIE ROSEN Retail Coordinator AlExANDRA lANCI Advertising Assistants ISABEllE EDDY, SAMANTHA ANTOPOl, JIll BREITNER Advertising Tel: 212 286 2860 Advertising Fax: 212 286 6921 Business Director of Finance and Business Operations jOsIe mc gehee Senior Business Director lESlIE A. ROHR Associate Business Director MICHAEl NIES Advertising Services Managers WENDY HERRERA, CHRISTINE GuERCIO Creative Services Executive Director, Creative Services BONNIE ABRAMS Creative Director DElPHINE GESquIERE Director, Integrated Marketing JulIA STEDMAN Director of Creative Development RACHAEl KlEIN Director, Special Events and Partnerships BRIGID WAlSH Associate Director, Special Events CARA CROWlEY Promotion Directors MARK HARTNETT, SARAH RYAN Senior Promotion Managers KATHERINE GAlEOTTI, JIllIAN GlENN, EuNICE KIM, JAMIE KNOWlES Design Director JuAN CARlOS CASTRO Production Director SCOTT ASHWEll Senior Art Directors SARAH RuBY, AMElIA TuBB Senior Designer NANCY ROSENBERG Integrated Marketing Manager REBECCA ISquITH Associate Managers, Integrated Marketing KATHRYN NElSON, JIllIAN zuRCHER Associate Digital Art Director SHERRY FERRER Promotions Coordinator BRITTANY PEOPlES Promotions Assistant MARISSA PETRIEllO Marketing Executive Director of Marketing MElISSA HAlVERSON Associate Director of Marketing KATHRYN SHAW Senior Marketing Manager YI-MEI TRuxES Marketing Managers MEREDITH McCuE, AlExANDRIA GuRulE Associate Marketing Manager ANNA NATAlI SWANSON-DORNEMANN Marketing Assistant lINDSAY KASS Branch Offices San Francisco CATHY MuRRAY BANNON and SuSAN KETTlER, Directors, 50 Francisco St., San Francisco CA 94133 Tel: 415 955 8210 Fax: 415 982 5539 Midwest WENDY lEVY, Director, 875 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago Il 60611 Tel: 312 649 3522 Fax: 312 799 2703 Detroit STEPHANIE SCHulTz, Director, 2600 West Big Beaver Rd., Troy MI 48084 Tel: 248 458 7953 Fax: 248 637 2406 los Angeles CAROlINE BAlES, Director, 6300 Wilshire Blvd., los Angeles CA 90048 Tel: 323 965 3598 Fax: 323 965 4982 New England STEPHANIE COuGHlAN, RESPONSIBlE MEDIA 277 linden St., Suite 205, Wellesley MA 02482 Tel: 781 235 2429 Fax: 781 237 5798 Southeast PETER zuCKERMAN, z. MEDIA 1666 Kennedy Causeway, Suite 602, Miami Beach Fl 33141 Tel: 305 532 5566 Fax: 305 532 5223 Europe FlORENCE MOuVIER, Director, Europe 4 Place du Palais Bourbon, 75343 Paris Cedex 07 Tel: 331 4411 7846 Fax: 331 4705 4228 AlESSANDRO and RINAlDO MODENESE, Managers, Italy Via M. Malpighi 4, 20129 Milan Tel: 39 02 2951 3521 Fax: 39 02 204 9209 Published by Condé Nast Chairman s. I. NeWhOUse, jR. Chief Executive Ofcer chARles h. TOWNseNd President RObeRT A. sAUeRbeRg, jR. Chief Operating Ofcer/Chief Financial Ofcer JOHN W. BEllANDO President–Condé Nast Media Group & Chief Revenue Ofcer lOuIS CONA Chief Administrative Ofcer JIll BRIGHT Chief Technology Ofcer JOE SIMON EVP–Chief Integration Ofcer DREW SCHuTTE Senior Vice President–Operations & Strategic Sourcing DAVID ORlIN Managing Director–Real Estate ROBERT BENNIS Senior Vice President–Corporate Controller DAVID B. CHEMIDlIN Senior Vice President–Market Research SCOTT McDONAlD Senior Vice President–Finance JENNIFER GRAHAM Senior Vice President–Business Development JulIE MICHAlOWSKI Senior Vice President–Editorial Operations RICK lEVINE Senior Vice President–Human Resources JOANN MuRRAY Senior Vice President–Digital Technology NICK ROCKWEll Senior Vice President–Corporate Communications PATRICIA RÖCKENWAGNER Senior Vice President–Editorial Assets & Rights EDWARD KlARIS Vice President–CN Licensing JOHN KulHAWIK Vice President–Manufacturing GENA KEllY Vice President–Strategic Sourcing TONY TuRNER Vice President–Planning & Strategy SHEN-HSIN HuNG Vice President–Digital Platforms HAl DANzIGER Vice President–Digital Product Development CHRIS JONES Vice President–Human Resources PAul E. WOlFE Vice President–Human Resources NICOlE zuSSMAN Vice President–Special Projects PATTY NEWBuRGER Vice President–Digital Operations & Monetization CHRISTOPHER GuENTHER Vice President–Corporate Communications JOSEPH lIBONATI Condé Nast Media Group Vice President–Corporate Partnerships JOSH STINCHCOMB Vice President–Insights and Brand Strategy DANIEllA WEllS Vice President–Marketing Solutions PADRAIG CONNOllY Vice President–Finance JuDY SAFIR Condé Nast Consumer Marketing Executive Vice President MONICA RAY Vice President–Consumer Marketing GARY FOODIM Vice President–Planning & Operations MATTHEW HOFFMEYER Vice President–Consumer Marketing Promotion GINA SIMMONS Vice President–Marketing Analytics CHRISTOPHER REYNOlDS Condé Nast Entertainment Condé Nast Entertainment President DAWN OSTROFF Executive Vice President–Chief Operating Ofcer SAHAR ElHABASHI Executive Vice President–Motion Pictures JEREMY STECKlER Executive Vice President–Programming and Content Strategy, Digital Channels MICHAEl KlEIN Executive Vice President–Chief Digital Ofcer FRED SANTARPIA Executive Vice President Alternative TV JOE lABRACIO Chief Revenue Ofcer lISA VAlENTINO Senior Vice President–Business Development & Strategy WHITNEY HOWARD Vice President–Digital Video Operations lARRY BAACH Vice President–Technology MARVIN lI Vice President–Revenue Operations JASON BAIRD Vice President–Marketing MEI lEE Vice President–Production JED WEINTROB Vice President–Scripted TV GINA MARCHESCHI Vice President–Branded Content & Sales Marketing ANISSA E. FREY Published at 4 Times Square, New York NY 10036 SuBSCRIPTION INquIRIES: [email protected] or www.vogue.com/services or call (800) 234-2347. For Permissions and Reprint requests: (212) 630-5656; fax: (212) 630-5883. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to Vogue Magazine, 4 Times Square, New York NY 10036.

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talking back

letters from readers golden hour Cate blanChett, in a Céline top, photographed by Craig mcdean.

on the StairMaster (OK, 20 minutes). Please keep articles such as Jonathan Van Meter’s charming and revelatory profile of the amazing Cate Blanchett coming in the future. Juliane A. Cartaino Hillsboro, OH

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Jonathan Van Meter’s captivating article on the megatalented and lovely Cate Blanchett. It was a delight to learn more about one of the greatest actresses of our time. Furthermore, the accompanying fashion shoot was stunning. Well done, VOGUE. Lisa A. Karczewski Los Angeles, CA

modern family

carried away

I have long admired Jonathan Van Meter’s perceptive and exquisite celebrity profiles for VOGUE, so it should come as no surprise that I settled so easily into his piece on Cate Blanchett [“Golden Hour,” photographed by Craig McDean, January]. Rarely does one read the feature interviews in a glossy magazine and feel as though they were right there with the subject

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the entire time. The subtle way in which Van Meter picked up on Ms. Blanchett’s nuances was spectacular.

Thank you to Jessica Kerwin Jenkins for her honest and sensitive piece about adopting her daughters from Ethiopia [“A Long Road Home,” Up Front, January]. Friends who are currently in the process of adopting from there recently told me that the country is cracking down on international adoptions. This is devastating news, not only for the hopeful parents waiting to bring children home but also for the many orphans who will now see their chances of finding families decline dramatically. Moreover, the decision speaks to a troublesome trend worldwide, with many other countries taking steps to outlaw international adoptions. Finding families is essential for all children.

Abby Sheafer Chicago, IL

Kristen Barthel Boulder, CO

Like many others, I resolved to exercise more in the New Year and found that your January issue was the only reading material that could keep me sufciently entertained through a half hour

Jessica Kerwin Jenkins’s account of adopting two young sisters from Ethiopia was incredibly moving. My heart broke when I read about the difficulties the ta l k i n g b a C k > 9 7 vogue.com

letters from readers girls encountered as they let go of their old lives and adapted to new parents, but I was also cheered to learn that their community in Maine embraced them. It was a riveting story, and one that helped me understand the challenges faced by adoptive parents every day. Sue Zemliak Otter Rock, OR

intelligent design

Bravo! I have no idea why I resisted the iPad version of your magazine for so long. You are taking the classic high standards of VOGUE and making the quantum leap to the future of fashion journalism with zeal. I especially enjoyed the mixed-media feature with ballerina Sara Mearns, pirouetting to life before my eyes, and the exclusive indepth video of Tom Ford on his work process and life in the spotlight. This is premium content I can look forward to every month—I am thrilled to see where VOGUE goes next. Namella J. Kim Los Angeles, CA

talking back

this old house

Seven generations of my family have been born on Long Island. As a result, I have always found myself drawn to articles detailing the island’s older houses and the families who have breathed new life into them. My frst thought upon seeing the photos of Emilia Fanjul Pfeifer’s elegant estate was of the golden age of Long Island [“A Peaceable Kingdom,” by Chloe Malle, photographed by Oberto Gili, January]. Just imagine all the fabulous parties, the debutantes swanning down the stairs. A romantic home indeed! Barbara Brafman New York, NY

she’s all that

A job impeccably well done by Grace Coddington in “More Is More” [photographed by Craig McDean, January]. She managed to create visual cohesiveness from myriad textures and prints in the spring 2014 collections. As I turned the pages, I found myself wanting more and more (and more and more). Coddington is a constant

source of inspiration for me, and this spread further affirms her role as a fashion icon. Jordan Laudadio Chicago, IL

smoke screen

As a recent VOGUE subscriber, I’ve been extraordinarily happy with the magazine, surprised at my satisfaction with both the fashion content and the articles. However, it’s very disappointing that every issue I’ve received has contained at least one advertisement for cigarettes. I understand that magazines need advertisements as a source of revenue. Nonetheless, these cigarette ads are featured alongside many other luxury ads in a magazine that is seen by women as a guidebook to fashion, glamour, and “the good life.” As a result, it can be easy to confate cigarettes with a certain kind of desirable lifestyle. I urge you to consider removing cigarette ads from further issues. Heather Lipkovich Ann Arbor, MI ta l k i n g b a C k >1 0 0

a peaceable kingdom emilia fanjul pfeifler’s lush vegetable garden, photographed by oberto gili.

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talking back letters from readers It’s been years since I purchased a copy of VOGUE. But recently, overcome by the impulse—and sparked by my a d m i rat i o n of Cate Blanchett— I bought one. I was charmed by all the issue had to offer until I got to the cigarette ad. After that, as I flipped through the pages, I grew increasingly sour. Let me know when you are in a position to say no to cigarette ads. Anne Baker Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada

the great divide

Finally an article I can really wrap my arms and heart around. The he said, she said Carville/Matalin family mary matalin and james Carville, is a refreshing glimpse photographed by norman jean roy. of normalcy in a chaotic world [“He Said, She Said,” photographed by Norman being able to match his strength, charm, Jean Roy, January]. Just when I was or cool. But Nathan Heller’s luminous considering letting my subscription profile of the British actor Idris Elba lapse, you reminded me of why I subgave insight into how one man was able scribe to VOGUE in the first place. to embody the world leader—both in Thanks to the couple for opening up voice and in heart [“Leading the Way,” their fascinating lives to us. photographed by Anton Corbijn, JanuFranne Schwarb ary]. Mandela will forever be missed, Mt. Pleasant, SC but reading about Elba helped remedy, if only for a moment, the enormous feeling of grief at losing such a legend. Mary Matalin’s remark about her husLauren Sanchez band and money—“Once it comes in, he New York, NY never wants it to go out. Unless it’s your tax money”—as well as her righteously ignorant statement about the “Obama I’ve followed Idris Elba’s career for some economy,” had me rolling my eyes. I read time—from his turn as a drug lord in the rest of Carville’s portion of the book HBO’s The Wire to his most recent sucexcerpt and left it at that. I have no idea cess portraying the distinguished huhow someone could be so out of touch manitarian Nelson Mandela—so I was with reality. I hope New Orleans will give elated to see his talents recognized in the Matalin a better understanding of why January issue. While I’ve always apprecipeople pay taxes and why the rich need ated Elba’s detail and commitment to his to pay more than everyone else. craft, it was interesting to discover the Tracy Mackprang lengths he went to in order to truly capSpringfeld, OR ture Mandela’s unique mannerisms. I’m excited to see Elba continue to showcase his acting versatility (and, obviously, his moving tribute unquestionable good looks) as well as After Nelson Mandela’s recent passintroduce us to all of his other hidden ing, it’s impossible to imagine anyone

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talents—how surprising to learn of his early days as a DJ! Although, the question remains, how can I get him to DJ my next birthday party? Candice Lopez Charlotte, NC

tropical punch

Thank you for your sumptuous spread “Flower Girls” [photographed by Mikael Jansson, January]. It was the kind of style and beauty that I have sorely missed from VOGUE. After a solid fourteen years of reading celebrity worship and seeing edgy, cool fashion, I have grown weary and blasé about the magazine. But what I was craving was simply this— an elegant and down-to-earth collaboration of models and photographers. Kelly Daglish Brisbane, Queensland, Australia VOGUE welcomes letters from its readers. Address all mail to Letters, VOGUE Magazine, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036, or via e-mail to [email protected]. Please include your name, address, and a daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity and may be published or used in any medium. All submissions become the property of the publication and will not be returned.

vogue.com

ANNIE THORISDOTTIR

THORISDOTTIR, WEARING JASON WU, PHOTOGRAPHED BY BRUCE WEBER

“When I heard Vogue was interested in featuring me, I Googled to see if there was a sports edition of the magazine. I was so excited when I realized, no, it was the Vogue.” THE FITTEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD ON HER PROFILE, “POWER PLAYER,” BY ADAM GREEN (PAGE 252)

GREEN, PHOTOGRAPHED BY HUGH LIPPE

SARA MOONVES

ADAM GREEN

“I haven’t banished procrastination forever by writing about it, but the prospect of a public shaming turns out to be an excellent spur to keep going.” VOGUE’S THEATER CRITIC ON KICKING THE HABIT IN “LATE OR NEVER?” (UP FRONT, PAGE 110)

“Each subject brought a new element to the table,” says Contributing Fashion Editor Sara Moonves of the five portraits she styled for this month’s Shape portfolio (page 234). “Audrey Gelman even brought her grandma to the set!” In styling, Moonves lives by one rule: Revel in the unexpected. Such was the case as WNBA phenom Skylar Diggins stepped onto a basketball court wearing not her Tulsa Shock jersey but T by Alexander Wang, as Mindy Kaling posed glamorously on the set of her TV show draped in Dries Van Noten, and as a pregnant Emily Blunt smoldered in sheer Christy Rilling Studio. “My goal is to celebrate women and their bodies,” Moonves muses. “I like to have safe options and then some surprising ones. It’s a bonus when the surprising looks work out.” C O N T R I B U T O R S >1 0 8

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MOONVES, PHOTOGRAPHED BY JEFF HENRIKSON

TH OR ISD OTTIR : FASH ION ED ITOR : SARA MOONVES. HAIR, G E RALD D e CO CK FO R LIVIN G PRO O F; MAKEU P, REG IN E T HO RRE . GR EEN: SITTINGS ED ITOR : D ELPH INE DANH IER . GRO O MIN G, E RIKA SVE DJEVIK. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .

contributors

KARLIE KLOSS

“Going on location to Jamaica was like taking aVogue family vacation. Sasha was my partner in crime on set. I definitely picked up a few modeling pointers from her!”

KLOSS, WEARING MARC JACOBS, ON LOCATION WITH MODEL SASHA

THE MODEL ON SHOOTING “RAY OF LIGHT” (PAGE 222)

SADLI IN LONDON

CANDICE HUFFINE Posing in Isabel Toledo’s new designs for Lane Bryant in this issue’s Steal of the Month (page 268) felt for full-figured model Candice Huffine “like that special moment in a movie that the plot has been building to all along.” For a woman whose wardrobe consists of clever pairings of high street and high fashion, the collaboration between Toledo and the plussize retailer is a sign of increasing fluidity within the fashion industry—just the sort of evolution she’s championing. HUFFINE IN MIAMI

KARIM SADLI

“Shoes are crucial to a silhouette. I always pay great attention to them, as they can change or twist the whole perception of a look.” THE PHOTOGRAPHER ON “KICKING BACK” (PAGE 270)

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VOGUE.COM

KLOSS : M IK A E L JA NSSON . FASHI O N E D I TO R: CA M I LLA N I CKE RSO N . H A I R, JA MES P EC IS; MAKEUP, H ANNAH MUR RAY. SAD LI: COURTESY OF KAR IM SAD LI. H UFFINE: COURTESY OF CAN D ICE HU FFIN E . D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .

contributors

up front

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LATE OR NEVER? We all like to put off difficult tasks—but for Adam Green, chronic procrastination was threatening to unravel his life. So, at long last, he took action.

vogue.com

© ha l roac h st ud i os/sun se t bouleva r d/cor bi s

D

uring my senior year of high school, some friends and I started a rock band called Superior Beings. Our name may have been terrible, but we were pretty good. We started out playing dances in the school cafeteria and moved up to gigs at Max’s Kansas City. Our most popular song was a kind of ska-reggae tune called “Full Potential.” Its lyrics, largely made up of phrases culled from my report cards over the years, told the tale of a student’s inability to sit still, pay attention, or hand in work on time, punctuated by a repeated warning, one that had cropped up with harrowing frequency: “Your son is a very bright boy, but he’s not living up to his full potential.” The song struck a chord, I think, not just because all teenagers are fuckups but because procrastination—choosing to put of something difficult or unpleasant that we know is in our long-term best interest, in favor of something easy or feetingly pleasurable—is part of the human condition. Our brains are hardwired to respond to immediate threats, a key to our survival as a species, but they’re not very good at generating any sense of urgency about threats that lie waiting down the road. Similarly, something that we want today (a Cronut, say) will usually win out over something that we want in the future (a body that we’re not embarrassed to expose on the beach next summer). The authors of the Bible, who probably BEAT THE CLOCK harold lloyd on only got it written because Instagram and the set of the Angry Birds hadn’t been invented yet, un1923 silent movie safety last! derstood that procrastination stemmed both from an inability to think ahead (“The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold; therefore shall he beg in harvest, and have nothing”) and a disorder of the will. The Greeks called this tendency akrasia, though Socrates insisted that “no one who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action, better than the one he is following, will ever continue on his present course,” which leads me to suspect that he didn’t get out of the house much. We all procrastinate. But for some of us—about 20 percent of us, to be precise—procrastination is a chronic and malign force that threatens to undo the very fabric of our lives. A few of us have a real genius for it. If you are a psychologist who wants to study procrastination in all its complexity—the tangled intertwining of nature and nurture that causes it, its manifold and insidious manifestations, its destructive consequences, its response or lack thereof to diferent types of interventions—I’m a scientifc motherlode. My school years were a chaotic blur of unfnished homework, lost papers, forgotten assignments, U P f r o n t>1 1 8

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ABOUT TIME

and a general aura of looming catastrophe. My father had grown up with most of the same tendencies—he barely made it through high school and lasted only a week at City College—but he found a novel solution to his problem: a writing partner. For more than six decades, my father wrote Broadway and Hollywood musicals with Betty Comden, and though they were very much equal contributing partners, Betty had to compensate for his inability to sit still or stay focused. He’d show up at her brownstone every day at noon (how civilized), and she wouldn’t let him leave until they had done their day’s work. She typed (he never learned how) as he paced and smoked and talked. My father had essentially outsourced most of his brain’s executive functions. Somehow I managed to get through high school, get into an Ivy League college, and make it to graduation by the skin of my teeth and a lot of panicked all-nighters. After school, I took a page from my father’s book: When I was hired to write for Saturday Night Live, I teamed up with a very funny—and nonprocrastinating—woman named Margaret Oberman, and later, I wrote several screenplays with my friend John Weidman. But I had always wondered whether my father, despite achieving so much as part of a team, had given up something essential by never fnding out what he was capable of on his own. I decided to follow a diferent path. It didn’t work. I almost always turned in my writing drastically late, whether it was a screenplay or a magazine article. Once, I was in the waiting room of a producer’s ofce in Hollywood before a meeting and noticed a script of mine—the title was written down its spine—next to some other scripts on a shelf. I took it down to thumb through it, and there, on the title page below my name, was the note: “Great writer but a New York fake.”

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ver the years, I’ve made many attempts to conquer my problem, and I’ve amassed a world-class collection of self-help books on the subject. When I first signed up for conventional talk therapy, under the watchful gaze of a series of wall-mounted African masks in a series of Upper West Side ofces, it left me with more questions than answers about my selfdefeating behavior. Did it stem from fear of failure? How about fear of success? Was I unconsciously punishing my parents by denying them the gratification of seeing me do well? Or was I “putting of” happiness out of guilt to atone for my perceived sins? Was I crippled by low self-esteem? Or did I withhold my best eforts because I thought that I was special and the world owed me a living? Food for thought but thin gruel when it came time to sit down and write. In my early 30s, I hit a wall and found myself unable to work at all. A doctor diagnosed me with attention-deficit disorder, and it turned out that Adderall helped. So did creating a stable home life with my girlfriend, finding a good therapist, and taking up the practice of Zen Buddhism, whose discipline gave me structure and whose practice of meditation has allowed me, on rare occasions, to let my thoughts go and experience clarity and stillness—not an easy thing to do when, for no good reason, the 1980 disco hit “Funkytown” gets stuck in your head. Though writing remained an often agonizing

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endeavor, I was able to make a successful career at it, notably as this magazine’s theater critic. But I still continued to turn in work late. One recently published long-form profile took me so long to complete that, afterward, I sat down with a calculator and fgured out that I could have earned three times as much working the same number of hours at McDonald’s. When a Vogue colleague was moving to California not long ago, the ofce presented her with a mock Vogue cover, one of whose headlines was “Adam Green Meets a Deadline.” I chuckled good-naturedly when I heard about it, but it stung to realize that my name had become shorthand for “Don’t hold your breath.” Worse was the dread that I’d started to feel month after month as each new assignment

It’s not easy to experience clarity and stillness when the 1980 disco hit “Funkytown” gets stuck in your head rolled around, knowing that, despite my best intentions, I was probably going to put myself—not to mention my poor editor, my girlfriend, my dog, and a few lucky friends—through the wringer as I stalled, spun my wheels, and fnally fogged myself over the hurdles of self-doubt, self-contempt, and sheer terror to the fnish line. One afternoon last June, after almost leaving a large hole in the editorial well of a major national publication, I went surfng to try to unwind. I still felt bruised and of-kilter, but I hoped that this would restore my equilibrium. For some reason, even though it was a perfect day and beautiful waves were rolling by, I couldn’t bring myself to take any of them. I felt frightened, paralyzed. I’d start to paddle into a wave only to pull out at the last second, telling myself that I’d catch the next one. Suddenly, it struck me that the unridden waves were like all the moments of satisfaction, achievement, meaning, and joy that I had let pass me by. Procrastination, I realized, was costing me money, jobs, and opportunities; it was wearing on my personal relationships, keeping my anxiety level perpetually high, trapping me in an endless cycle of deadlines, and stopping me from using my talents, such as they were, to their fullest. Not living up to his full potential, indeed. As the waves continued to roll by, I thought to myself, I don’t want to live like this anymore. I don’t want to miss my life. And so, a few days later, when my editor told me that a colleague at the magazine had suggested that I write a piece about overcoming procrastination, I was more grateful than alarmed. I knew that I was setting myself up for a stif challenge, but I really wanted to change, and I was determined to use this as a lever. I had no interest in rehashing the past with a therapist. What I needed was someone to teach me concrete strategies and tactics, spur me on, and hold me accountable—a coach. I decided on an Englishman named Mark McGuinness, a poet and psychotherapist. Mark’s suggestions—freeing your mind by keeping a to-do list, establishing a routine for creative work, and building walls around your writing to protect it from the vicissitudes of daily life—were hardly U P f r o n t>1 2 0 vogue.com

up front

ABOUT TIME

revolutionary, but I knew that he had used them to overcome his own disorganization and support himself as a coach while continuing to write poetry. Good enough for me. Mark lives in London, so we talked via Skype. The first question he asked me during our initial phone session was “So, how’s your week been?” “Horrible,” I said with a grim laugh, “though I did fnish a piece, which I always do, but——” “But you sufer along the way.” “Yes, and everyone involved sufers, too.” My main goal, I told Mark, was to learn how to meet my deadlines, as well as to stop putting of larger projects that I’d left on the back burner, particularly a memoir that I was already very late—let’s say more than a year and leave it at that—turning in to the publisher. He asked, “If we could wave a magic wand and you were suddenly meeting deadlines, what diference would that make to your work and your life?” My answer, as Mark boiled it down for me after I had rambled for a while, was “less misery, more energy, more freedom, more time, more choices, more money, and a greater capacity to enjoy what I already have.”

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othing unleashes my energy like the promise of a fresh start. Before the next coaching call, I read Mark’s e-book Time Management for Creative People. Its basic idea is to create “buckets” to capture all your commitments, getting them out of your head and written down, and grouping individual tasks into projects, freeing you to focus on the present moment. I downloaded a program called Things (and the accompanying iPhone and iPad apps), and I quickly became so addicted to it that if I caught myself doing something that wasn’t on my list, I would stop and add it just so I could check it of. I also learned how to make a “time budget”—looking at when my projects were due, breaking them down into steps, fguring out how much time each step required, and, working backward, scheduling them in my calendar. When Mark and I next spoke, he was a little taken aback by my industry. “I’m probably in some kind of semi-manic honeymoon phase,” I told him, though the truth was that it gave me an almost beatifc serenity to watch my free-form days take on well-defned contours. The next step was to add contours to my writing. We agreed that from now on I would begin work no later than 9:00 a.m. and stop at one, devoting the afternoon to administrative tasks such as returning phone calls, getting theater tickets, sifting through pitches from publicists, and searching for vintage Adidas on eBay. I reluctantly agreed to Mark’s suggestion that I plug my ears to the siren call of the Internet during writing hours by blocking access to it with a program named Freedom, but his insistence that I put of answering all e-mails till the next day was more than I could handle. When my monthly deadlines came around, I was amazed to discover that I’d by and large stuck to my time budget, fnished my research and reporting, and left no major tasks in other realms undone or unscheduled to prey on my mind. It wasn’t quite “God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world,” but it was a big change from business as usual. I had two pieces to write, and now all I had to do was sit down and write them.

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Ten days later, I found myself back in the ocean, wondering where things had gone wrong. After all the preparation and efort, the writing had been as difcult and unpleasant as ever—in some ways more so, because as I blew past my deadlines, it started to sink in that the planning and the efciencies and the to-do lists weren’t going to save me. If there is a hell, it

If there is a hell, it involves being confronted by the same “Hand piece in!” item on your iPhone app day after day involves being confronted by the same “Hand piece in!” item on your iPhone Things app day after day as e-mails asking, “Where is it?” roll in. But after I’d caught a few waves, the bad juju started to dissipate. I began to see that it had been absurd to expect to banish procrastination and writer’s block forever in a few weeks. My procrastination involved more than just poor impulse control, namely vicious self-bullying, ruthless perfectionism, and, above all, paralyzing fear—or, as I like to call them, the tools of the writer’s trade. Success was still just a pinprick of light at the end of a long, dark tunnel, but at least I had set a process in motion. Mark seemed entirely unrufed when I reported how things had gone, which I found both infuriating and soothing. Fear, he explained, was a natural response to a threat. In order to move through it, we decided that I needed to write every day, whether I had a deadline or not. We instituted a method: as I turned to my memoir, I should pick a topic, set a timer for 25 minutes, and write without stopping or revising or evaluating whether what I was writing was any good, till the time ran out. I was free to reset the timer and do it again, but I didn’t have to. At the end of my morning writing, I’d draw an X on a piece of paper, and then, with a kind of Zen smugness, put my laptop and pencil back where they belonged. Fairly soon, I had pulled myself back from the precipice and miraculously, as my monthly assignments for Vogue came up, I had built up a sufcient head of steam to get them in on time, though one required telling a friend that I couldn’t join her at an art opening or go out for dinner unless I fnished by the end of the day. (I didn’t, and stayed home and plowed through, turning the article in at eleven-thirty that night to make it technically on time.) Writing is a habit now, one that I hope, and plan, to keep doing every day. I’m sure that it won’t be easy, and I know that I will slip up, possibly in a big way, from time to time, for which I apologize to all concerned parties in advance. But I also know that I’ve put myself on a path headed in the direction of reality and that I won’t turn back. One reality is that writing is hard. Another is that life is fnite; it comes with a deadline that can’t be put of. This is not breaking news, of course, but when you get a sudden and piercing intimation of mortality, as I did that day surfng in the ocean when I decided to change my ways, you understand why procrastination has been called “the thief of time.” It can be a hell of a motivator. @ vogue.com

lives

under pressure

O

n Libya’s Mediterranean coast, some 45 miles west of Tripoli and not far from the Tunisian border, a ten-car convoy arrives at the seaside ruins of Sabratha. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” says American Ambassador Deborah Jones as the imperial Roman city comes into view. The site is completely open, with remnants of ancient roads, homes, and tiled bathhouse foors remarkably intact. Jones spends much of her time barricaded in the American embassy in Tripoli, or sealed inside an armored Suburban, or shadowed by a bodyguard with shoulders like an airplane, so she is happy to be at her leisure after a busy morning of meetings. She grimaces at the sight of a tiny tour guide who could intrude on her freedom. “Oh, there he is. Looking mean,” she says, and then laughs. “I shouldn’t say that.”

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America’s new ambassador to Libya, Deborah Jones, has taken on a demanding diplomatic post in the shadow of tragedy. By Suzy Hansen.

The guide turns out to be good company—animated, keen to recite Arabic poetry—and Jones gamely engages him in conversation, testing her own expansive knowledge of history. She is dressed down, in cream corduroys, simple black boots, and a zip-up black sweater, and here in North Africa her thick blonde hair and broad smile l i v e s >1 2 4 vOgue.cOm

jo nes : f ra n co pag e t ti . he a d li n e : the wall street journal, ma rch 13, 2013.

woman in charge “This is The ulTimaTe poinT of my career” says jones (cenTer), phoTographed in The libyan ciTy of sabraTha.

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madame ambassador

mark her as an American. Jones is commanding, witty, and intimate; she hugs even strangers with force. Today, some 20 security operatives and bright-faced embassy personnel trail the ambassador. These days they rarely leave the embassy, and their delight is palpable. The staf members take photos of one another atop the windswept Roman stone, while the security team stays alert, climbing broken stairs, looking for things normal humans don’t know to look for.

The ambassador climbs into her car as the bodyguard shields her with his torso. She says firmly, “We have to go” Finally, the group, their spirits light, the sky darkening, head back to the parked convoy. This is when a rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire sounds in the near distance. Several heads jerk like rabbits. Jones’s bodyguard touches the gun at his hip. The ambassador climbs into her car as the bodyguard shields her with his torso. She says frmly, “We have to go.” A few operatives retrieve enormous guns from the backs of their vehicles. Someone yells to stragglers to hurry. Inside of fve minutes, the train of elephant-size cars has pulled onto the road. No one speaks in the ambassador’s, but as the minutes pass the danger seems to recede. Jones stares out the window with a practiced calm—eventually she checks her @SafraDeborah Twitter account. (Safra means “ambassador” in Arabic.) Her security detail receives word of a gun battle on the outskirts of Tripoli and has to fnd a detour. It will be a long drive back to the embassy. The sound of gunfre is common in post-dictatorship, postrevolutionary Libya. This is a country awash in weapons— “They are just everywhere,” says Jones—a place where, on September 11, 2012, Jones’s predecessor, Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, was killed in an ambush on the consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi. The attack set of months of controversy over whether Stevens had been adequately protected. It also drew attention to a glaring reality: Libya, which had triumphantly deposed Colonel Muammar Gaddafi with the help of the United States and NATO, was rapidly degenerating into a lawless state dominated by powerhungry, and in some cases extremist, militias. Jones’s post is now one of the most dangerous diplomatic assignments in the world. (Two weeks after the ambassador’s visit to Sabratha, a New Zealander and a Briton would be found shot dead on a nearby beach.) It is also one of the most difcult. To spend time with her is to understand the U.S. conundrum of balancing security and statesmanship in the post–Arab Spring Middle East. How can American diplomats do their jobs—represent U.S. values, accurately assess the situation on the ground—while staying safe? And how should the U.S., given its troubled history in the region, support a deeply unsettled country like Libya? As Secretary of State John Kerry said at Jones’s swearing-in last June,

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“It’s no secret that she is going to one of the toughest jobs in the foreign service.” But to the 57-year-old Jones, for whom the Libya assignment caps a three-decade-long diplomatic career, a risky and complex position is a reward, not a hardship post. “This is the ultimate point of my career,” she says, “to help shape history a little bit, to help guide it.” “She’s the best,” says Wendy Chamberlin, the frst female ambassador to Pakistan and currently president of the Middle East Institute in Washington. “If she hadn’t gone there, they would have tapped her to go to another hard place. She’s ebullient, she’s funny, she knows history, and she applies it. I fnd her one of the most perceptive diplomats I have encountered in my 30 years in the foreign service, and I think that’s why they were keen that she go to Libya.” In November, a month before I visit Jones in Tripoli, she and I meet in a grand apartment overlooking the Bosporus in Istanbul (a city where she served as consul general between 2005 and 2007). I ask her why she chose the diplomatic life. “It’s a love,” she says. “You start of taking pride in the fact that you can adapt and understand the challenges of another culture. Remember the part in Lawrence of Arabia when he’s burning himself with a match and he says, ‘The trick is not minding that it hurts’? It’s that kind of self-control; it’s I can prove myself and do this. But you go from a sense of selfaccomplishment to higher levels of being able to say, I have shaped a policy or helped create one. That comes later.” As the most powerful American in Libya, Jones spends long days consulting with Libyan ofcials, Prime Minister Ali Zeidan among them, on everything from trade agreements to the development of a reliable army and police force; at Zeidan’s request, the U.S. is helping to train thousands of Libyan soldiers. Arms reduction has also been a focus, and under Jones’s watch, the U.S. and Libya have scored a tangible victory on that front: the destruction of Libya’s Gaddafi-era cache of chemical weapons (a model for the ongoing international efort in Syria). Her days begin early, at 6:00 reading the news tickers from The New York Times and The Washington Post, and they typically end late—with meetings or working dinners at other, allied embassies. The Japanese ambassador’s residence in downtown Tripoli is a welcome mealtime appointment. “Japanese ambassadors have wonderful chefs,” she says.

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ones grew up in Arizona, in a family of nine children. She comes from a long line of Mormons on her father’s side, though she herself drifted away from the church in her 20s. Her father owned an advertising frm and then worked as a real estate developer, while her mother, a native of Buenos Aires, stayed home. “I was an utter tomboy,” Jones remembers. “My father taught me to hunt and shoot guns and to fx things; when I was sixteen, we rebuilt from scratch a 1956 Renault Dauphine.” After studying history at Brigham Young University, Jones passed the Foreign Service exam and began moving through postings in Argentina, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, where she served as ambassador. She speaks Arabic, Spanish, and French. l i v e s >1 2 6 vogue.com

madame ambassador

pair of aces jones and husband richard olson (cenTer), now u.s. ambassador To pakisTan, greeT u.s. airmen in dubai, 2009.

In 1990, Jones married another diplomat, Richard Olson, now the ambassador to Pakistan. They met at the State Department. “I knew the minute I saw him this was the man who would change my life,” she tells me. Together they eventually ended up in Riyadh, where they were stationed when Operation Desert Storm began. “We were fortunate because we both had security clearance and could talk about everything together,” she says. “Foreign Service ofcers are self-absorbed, no doubt about it. We live and breathe our work.”

“They are very sensitive to overreach here,” Jones says. “Libyans don’t want to be an American puppet, or anyone else’s” In 1992, Jones brought her eight-month-old daughter to a posting in Ethiopia, and three years later, in Washington, she had a second daughter. Both are now in college in the U.S. Because of security considerations Jones cannot reveal their names or where they live, though she proudly pulls out her iPhone to show me photos. She expresses amazement at how adventurous she and her husband were as young parents: traveling across the world with a six-week-old, or traversing Ethiopia and lining hotel rooms with sheets to protect the baby from feas. She remembers living in post–civil war Addis Ababa and needing to fnd a cow, and ensure it had clean straw, so that her daughter could have fresh milk. She also recalls more familiar embarrassments like being caught pumping breast milk at the State Department in Washington by a window washer. “There was juggling, no question about it,” she says. “We had a wonderful Ethiopian nanny who stayed with us for nine years—that was critical. And I went on leave without

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pay several times and postponed part of my career.” Eventually, both daughters attended boarding school in D.C. I suggest that they had a cool life.“It was cool and not so cool,” she says. “They are worldly and engaged and got to meet prime ministers and kings. But on the other hand [their parents] missed science-fair night and birthdays, and that’s not easy.” Jones looks pained as she considers the anxiety her daughters have felt when she and her husband have been posted in dangerous countries—as they both are now. “They have borne it very bravely and stoically,” she says. “We fnd out after the fact sometimes how upset they’ve been. We joke that one of us has to stay around—that’s Foreign Service black humor. That’s the way you get by.” She and Olson have had close calls. There was the time her husband was returning to Najaf from Baghdad in 2004 when his convoy was attacked (likely by militants connected to the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who had been targeting him). He narrowly escaped. In his car, she says, he left behind a Cartier watch—a gift for her—and was thrilled when American soldiers were able to retrieve it. In Tripoli, she shows it to me on her wrist. Theirs is not a traditional marriage—they have lived apart for nine years—and Jones readily admits that having “two ambassadorial egos” in a relationship can be difcult. “My daughters said, ‘We’re writing our autobiography. It’s called Surviving Executive Parents.’ It’s true! I can’t blame them.” The couple is effectively separated, yet Jones and Olson remain close. When I speak with her, she is preparing for a holiday trip to a house they keep in Santa Fe. All four will spend Christmas together.

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ripoli looks like many cities in the Mediterranean Middle East—caught between past imperial glory and modern, frenetic uncertainty. In the center of town, large squares and parks surround a grand seventh-century castle and an old city of crumbling, narrow stone streets. There are signs of the country’s oil wealth— fve-star hotels dot the corniche—but Tripoli is also visibly poor. Shabby residential apartments crowd the streets, and on either side of the highways, high-rise construction projects begun at the end of Gaddaf’s rule sit empty, their windows like hundreds of hollow eyes. Everywhere frozen construction cranes hang in the air. After Stevens’s death, the State Department moved the American embassy in Tripoli to a temporary site—a walled compound in an outlying residential neighborhood. Visiting means passing armed checkpoints and navigating cement barricades arranged in an obstacle course. Inside sun-bleached walls rimmed with razor wire, the Americans have done their best to create an alternative world of bungalows, l i v e s >1 2 8 vOgue.cOm

u.s. a i r forc e p hoto/t ech . sgt. ch a rles la r ki n sr .

lives

lives

madame ambassador

fountains, gazebos, and palm trees on trim green grass. The ambassador’s residence serves as the embassy’s headquarters and contains Jones’s modest ofce. Her Jack Russell terrier, Dusty, springs to attention when I enter. A photograph of Jones and President Obama hangs on the wall.

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learly, the Benghazi tragedy haunts Jones’s security team—especially, it strikes me, on the open road, where it is impossible to hide a dignitary’s presence. On the day trip that will include the tour of Sabratha, Jones’s convoy travels in a configuration designed to separate her Suburban from the trafc. I wonder how ordinary Libyans feel about this muscular parade on their streets. Whenever a passing car gets too close, Jones’s bodyguard, sitting in the passenger seat, presses a selection of buttons on his dashboard. One emits a beep, another a siren, another a recorded voice, declaiming a sentence in Arabic that roughly translates to “Get the hell away from the car.” Foreign Policy’s Libya analyst Mohamed Eljarh tells me he often hears friends and colleagues voicing concern for the new ambassador’s safety. “People are worried there could be another tragedy,” he says, and about what that would mean for Libya. The primary threat comes from anti-Western organizations like Ansar al-Sharia, the group that has been tied to the Benghazi attack. At the same time, a weak central government and tribal militias vying for power pose their own dangers to Libyans. Last fall, militia members abducted Prime Minister Zeidan from a fve-star Tripoli hotel (hours later he was released unharmed). It is those restive militias—many of which helped overthrow Gaddaf—that Libyans want to see integrated peacefully back into society. “Without active support from the U.S., Europe, and like-minded nations, Libya risks fragmenting into three broad regions dominated by diferent tribes,” says Anne-Marie Slaughter, an expert on foreign policy and head of the New America Foundation. “The Libyans themselves have shown remarkable resolve, taking to the streets to drive out militias and maintaining their determination to govern themselves. The U.S. has a real stake in helping the country stabilize and succeed.” Back in Washington, of course, there is disagreement on how to do just that. Some politicians, like Senator John McCain, urged a deeper commitment to Libya’s transition after the NATO intervention, and increasingly, many analysts wonder if the U.S. erred by not securing Libya’s borders and weapons. President Obama, however, has made it clear that American involvement throughout the Middle East should have limits. Jones acknowledges that there is a healthy distrust of the U.S. presence in Libya, in part because of America’s history in the Middle East and in part because of its ongoing war on terror. Last October, U.S. commandos kidnapped a suspected senior Al Qaeda member known as Abu Anas al-Libi in Tripoli, and some Libyans were furious about covert military activities on their home soil. “They are very sensitive to overreach here,” Jones says. “Libyans don’t want their country to be an American puppet, or anyone else’s.” It’s a careful balance she must strike—sell American values, even while conceding that many Libyans are wary of them.

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“There is the realpolitik point of view, like Kissinger,” she tells me, “which says we don’t care what happens inside of these countries as long as they aren’t a threat to us. Or we can take the Wilsonian stance that says everyone is entitled to the same freedoms.” It’s obvious that Jones endorses the rosier view of her country. “We are a revolutionary ideological power, and whether it’s Iran or the U.S., revolutionary ideological powers can make people uncomfortable. Because we have a message. We’re proselytizing. What could be more revolutionary than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” I get to see Jones’s talent for proselytizing in Sabratha, at a meeting with a commission of thuwar, former rebels who had fought to overthrow Gaddaf. All of them are men. She waves of questions about whether being a woman is strange in these circumstances: “I don’t know, because I don’t know what it’s like to be anything else,” she says. Jones often leaves her hair uncovered but follows the typical codes of conduct in the Muslim world: Let men put their hands out to you to shake; don’t touch men afectionately. She jokes with them in

She waves off questions about whether being a woman is strange in these circumstances: “I don’t know what it’s like to be anything else,” she says Arabic—teasing them that they should listen to their wives, reminding them that she’s patient because she is a mother— and their gentle faces betray no concern over the ambassador’s gender. What seems to matter is that she is a representative of the United States government. The former fghters sit politely in a circle. Many are dressed in suits, seemingly prepared to ask questions all day. “Before the revolution, there was a clear interest for the U.S. in removing Gaddaf,” one man says. “After the revolution, the majority of the Libyan community is no longer sure about what the U.S.’s interest is in Libya.” Jones replies carefully, “This is really your story that you’re writing,” but later, as if aware that more candor is needed, she elaborates: “We do have interests. If an American company comes and builds a business that creates jobs here, what’s wrong with that? As long as there’s a framework that makes it fair. I can’t promise that Americans aren’t always going to pitch to you their way of life, because that’s the way we are. You’ll have to live with that. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have control over your own country.” The men stare at her blankly. It is a slightly charged moment—but one Jones rises to. She’s a deft diplomat, aware that it is her job to champion Libyan autonomy, even as she herself embodies American military and economic infuence. “Pobre México. Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos,” she says in Spanish, quoting Porfrio Díaz, the nineteenthcentury president of Mexico. Then she translates: “Poor Mexico. So far from God and so close to the United States.” The men smile. @ vOgue.cOm

nostalgia

Leading the ChaRge FROM HER VOGUE SPREAD, tHOMPSOn in A PERiwinklEblUE cHiFFOn DRESS, PHOtOGRAPHED by FRAncES MclAUGHlin, 1955.

HEADLINES AND HEMLINES

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orothy Thompson was, in her own words— “on the further side of 50” and “a size 20”— hardly a spring chicken and hardly waifsh in 1954, when “the frst lady of American journalism,” as she was fondly called by America’s press, sat down and wrote one of her syndicated columns, On the Record, subtitled “I Wish They’d Remember Me.” In it she lamented the difculty of fnding fattering, fashionable clothes that could go from work to evenings out, and to formal and semiformal occasions, for anyone of her age and physical stature. It was unlike anything the great reporter had ever written; the stature she was known for was intellectual. One of the most

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widely read political columnists in the United States, she was deemed by Time magazine in 1939 to be one of the two most infuential woman in the country, along with the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. Vogue once described her, along with a colleague, Boake Carter, as “forces, stretching into shape, like tafy-pullers, the opinions of the country.” But opinionated or not, Dorothy Thompson was still a woman. She lived a heady social life of travel, writing, and lecturing, as well as being the wife of the artist Maxim Kopf. She was a busy grandmother. She was a public fgure. And she needed good clothes to wear. Thompson built a career in foreign journalism at a time when women barely existed in the feld. n O S tA l G i A >1 3 4 vogue.com

m c laug h li n- g i ll/con d é n ast a rchi ve

In 1954, the great American reporter Dorothy Thompson challenged the fashion world to find a working wardrobe for a busy size 20 journalist. By Janine di Giovanni.

nostalgia

LIFE LESSONS

She was the first American woman to run a foreign news bureau, in Berlin. She studied German. She stood up to Adolf Hitler. In 1934, she was expelled from Germany for her infammatory book about the dictator, in which she described the rising National Socialist party leader as: “. . . formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.” She returned to the United States and joined NBC, where she became one of the most popular radio personalities of the era. When Hitler invaded Poland, she stayed on the air for ffteen consecutive days and nights. She also had an unconventional private life, marrying three times (including a troubled second marriage to the Nobel Prize–winning author Sinclair Lewis, with whom she had a son) and working hard to balance motherhood, marriage, and her professional life, a predicament far less familiar at that time than it is today. And despite all her professional accomplishments, Thompson failed in one arena: She still could not fnd the perfect dress. After reading Thompson’s column, a Vogue editor posed a challenge: Why not take the American Cassandra— Thompson was so nicknamed for her ability to predict political outcomes—clothes shopping at Bergdorf Goodman? The task would be to fnd her six perfect pieces: blouses, dresses, coats, and hats that she could travel and live in comfortably. Thompson agreed and laid down her own criteria: She needed buttons on a good winter coat. “I’ve all I can do to manage typewriter and luggage without clutching a coat, too,” she claimed. And she wanted a few pretty dresses in which she could hit the lecture circuit without exposing her generous décolletage, and feminine blouses that would work under suits without making her look matronly. She wanted to come across as sophisticated but not like an aspiring glamour girl.

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he fact that Vogue could lure one of the most worthy-minded women of her generation on a shopping expedition, and then persuade her to pose in the treasured pieces, was rather remarkable. The modern equivalent might be getting the brilliant United Nations humanitarian chief, Valerie Amos, to submit to a makeover. But nothing about Dorothy Thompson was ever less than remarkable. I frst came across Thompson’s writing while at university studying international afairs, and she joined the pantheon of strong, independent, feisty women who became my role models. Like Lee Miller, Eve Arnold, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Martha Gellhorn, she had beaten an uncommon path. Like me, she was a foreign correspondent, a feminist, and the mother of an adored only son. She was a woman ahead of her time who lived a free-spirited, adventure-flled life. She also gave me a gift, albeit unwittingly, and long after her death. One particularly blue day in New York, when I was at an impasse in my life, I happened to take a nondescript cross street in midtown and chanced upon Thompson’s former home. There, gleaming in the light summer rain, was a round,

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red plaque on a building announcing that the celebrated journalist had once lived there. I had been walking down the street in tears, as it happened, because I was in an utter state of fux, wondering whether I was going to stay in France, my home, or move to America, the country where I was born. I was also embroiled in a complicated but passionate relationship. I was worried about my only child back in Paris, and feeling the conficting strains of motherhood and work. Then I saw it. And as I stood in front of her house, it seemed a sign of strength for me, sent from the heavens and from the late Thompson herself. A message. I went straight back to my hotel and began to read about Thompson’s life. The more I learned, the more I admired her fearlessness at a time when women usually stayed in the backseat. I admired

Pencil skirts, Thompson confided, were for Òthe slimhipped and long-thighed, after which, period, paragraphÓ the way she badgered her editors to give her a chance to play with the big boys. I admired how doggedly she attacked a story and would not let go. I admired how, above all, she was always her own person. And there was something else: Here she was on the pages of Vogue. She was candid enough to admit not only that she was larger than the average woman (a size 12 in those days was considered slim) but that she was not perfect. “Like masses of other women my age, I have silver-gray hair, and a fair skin,” she confded. She was tired of wearing black. Pencil skirts and “the huge, stif boufant skirts” popular at the time were for “the slim-hipped and long-thighed, after which, period, paragraph.” So Vogue took her shopping. They spent hours choosing Thompson’s wardrobe—a long periwinkle-blue dress with “a graceful fall” for lectures, a “fve o’clock dress” in black silk tafeta, a short dinner dress “that’s soft, becoming, correct” in amethyst lace, and a feminine pussy-bowed blouse that Thompson had yearned for in her column. Even then, the new wardrobe had to be taken to a tailor and altered. What strikes me the most about the story is not so much the price of the clothes (the blouses were $35 each), or even the fact that “slim-hipped” women were a size 12, as the pluck that it must have demanded for Thompson to take this leap of faith and put herself in the hands of sittings editors, risking her reputation as a serious professional woman in a man’s world to turn herself into a Vogue fashion subject. Thompson implicitly told me what to do: Be brave, don’t throw my life upside down for a man, go back to Paris and recharge my career. She once wrote that courage was “the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to afrm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good.” Looking through those photographs of a silvery grandmother, brave and noble, in a lovely size 20 dress with a stole thrown over her shoulder, I see nothing but pure courage. @ vogue.com

FLASH edItor: Chloe MAlle

ITGIRl

IGGY AzAleA

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nyone who has witnessed an Iggy Azalea concert can attest to the performance prowess of the 23-year-old Australian rapper, whose long-awaited debut, The New Classic, is out this month: A combination of spitfre lyrical delivery, wild dancers, and madcap costumes that look like Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda creations slashed into micro shorts, the entire spectacle verges on the gloriously obscene. But Azalea is also capable of some nimble Cinderella magic, swanning on the Grammys’ red carpet in a long Elie Saab dress of f l a s h >1 4 0

se a n t ho mas. fas hi o n e d ito r: st ella g re e ns pa n . h a i r, d e nn i s d evoy; ma k eu p, sus ie sobol. ph otograph ed at th e four seasons r estaurant, nyc. stage curtain: pablo p i casso, from a 19 1 9 fre nc h p roducti o n o f t he ba lle t le tricorne © 2014 estat e of pablo picasso/artists r igh ts society (ars), new yor k. d etails, see in th is issue.

painted lady azalea wears a Mary Katrantzou top and a rochas sKirt. jiMMy choo puMps.

FLASH

rapper’s delight left: Wearing chloÉ outside the brand’s spring 2014 shoW in paris. above: in elie saab.

BACK HOME

it girl white tulle embellished with pearls and beads, or at the Chloé show in Paris last September in subdued monochrome and minimal makeup. It’s a dichotomy utterly evident as Azalea prepares for her frst Vogue picture. Parked outside the Seagram Building’s temple of high modernism, Azalea confesses that she’s a “blonde-orexic” and insists that someone fetch L’Oréal Superior Preference variety 8A from the nearest Duane Reade so the hairstylist in attendance can touch up her color (later, the sink of the ladies’ room at the Four Seasons Restaurant will be employed to wash it out). Almost simultaneously, she’s deftly discussing her album-art visuals (“It’s old Fiorucci meets new Pucci meets Miami architecture . . .”). Given such references, the fashion community— quick to identify Azalea’s outsize high/low persona as a kind of Down Under transmutation of Nicki Minaj’s hip-hop Barbie doll—has come clamoring. When asked which of the Paris shows she’s been invited to this season, Azalea responds, with no hubris whatsoever, “All of them, I think.” The long list incudes Givenchy, Saint Laurent, Chanel, Miu Miu, and Louis Vuitton, and while her schedule will permit her to attend only a few, it’s crystal clear that she will be the one calling the fashion shots in her future. “I’m pretty psycho,” Azalea says of her control over her creative direction. “The thing is that even when nobody believed in me, I still had so much say—and obviously, my way is working.”—mark guiducci f l a s h >1 4 2

yasmin sewell’s australia

Lake House

Vue de Monde

LaVanduLa

This resort in Daylesford reminds me of Kellerman’s in Dirty Dancing. It’s very dreamy and idyllic— surrounded by the bush and native birds, it’s completely serene.

Dining at the masterly creation of chef extraordinaire Shannon Bennett is almost a theatrical experience, with the incredible service matching the breathtaking quality of the food.

An amazing restored European-style farm in the Victoria countryside, with Swiss-Italian influences. There are enormous fields of lavender covering the property, and rustic nineteenth-century stone buildings—it feels like another world.

Hepburn springs

field day the fashion consultant at lavandula lavender farm.

I find it so surreal to sit in a mineral spring and look out onto a vista dotted with thousands of butterflies. The Australian Aborigines say that each spring will give you a different health benefit.

WattaMoLLa JuMp rock in sydney’s royaL nationaL park

Part beach, part freshwater lagoon, with impressive rocky cliffs perfectly suited for flinging oneself into the water (though I should note that it’s dangerous— and illegal!).

MuseuM of conteMporary art

This building in Sydney is an art piece in itself—particularly its new five-story wing, designed by local architect Sam Marshall.

vogue.com

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he best thing about basing my life somewhere as metropolitan as london is that i appreciate australia even more each time i return. i tend to visit two states there: new south Wales, where i’m from, and victoria, where my husband, Kyle, is from. there’s this connectivity with nature that i love and that is so much a part of how we australians exist— everything from the way you exercise to the food you eat is a reminder of all the amazing things that spring from the earth.

TNT mountain view instagramming on the mountain. beloW: With alexia niedzielsKi, exploring the hirschhorn snoW village.

swiss miss the fair organizer olympia scarry, in dior, With her dog, nubi.

blue skies ugo rondinone’s toWer, one of the 30-odd WorKs in and around gstaad.

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ElisABEtH tNt tAKEs tO tHE Alps iN gstAAd fOr AN AvANtgArdE Art fAir ANd A lAvisH wEddiNg—HigH tiMEs iNdEEd.

he Swiss alpine village of Gstaad is known for A-list exclusivity, but it’s never been thought of as an edgy art-world hangout. Until the opening weekend of Elevation 1049, that is. The two organizers, artist Olympia Scarry and her boyfriend, the curator Neville Wakefield, had them all focking in, wearing black on black, in Alaïa and Céline boots, braving the icy paths and snowy peaks. Some 30 Swiss-born artists’ works were scattered throughout the village, in neighboring towns, even up on remote mountains. Why Gstaad? Being Swiss, Scarry has always drawn inspiration from the mountains, as did her grandfather the children’s-book author Richard Scarry. The opening weekend was jam-packed and dazzling. One night we were treated to cheese fondue and schnapps up on Wasserngrat mountain. The next was much less rustic, with Dior hosting a dinner at the nearby Grand Chalet, once owned by Balthus. I stood inside his preserved atelier, marveling at the scattered brushes and unfnished canvases, imagining the great painter had just gone for a walk. As dinner was served, guests nestled in corners talking about the day’s activities. One group show, for example, curated by Gianni Jetzer, former director of the Swiss Institute in New York, was installed inside an alpine hut so far up the mountain as to be virtually unreachable f l a s h >1 4 6

I n STAg rA MM I ng A nD ScA rry: cou rT ESy o f rAc hEl c hA n DlE r. ug o ro n D In onE, ThE MornIng of ThE PoEM, 20 14. Ph oTo: STEfAn AlTEnBurgEr Ph oTogrAPh y, zur Ich. hIrSchho rn An D T rE ES : cou rT ESy o f E lISABE T h Vo n T hu rn u n D TAx IS.

FLASH

crowning glory the church in neighboring rougemont. left and below: tatiana santo domingo and andrea casiraghi moments before taking their vows.

snow shoes below: i arrived in sensible footwear and an emilia wickstead dress.

the Marriage plot above: bianca brandolini d’adda (wearing dolce & gabbana alta moda) enters the church.

(unless you arrived on snowshoes). Other works were easier to access. Thomas Hirschhorn’s village, full of igloos and colorful snow creatures, was delightful and politically charged. My favorite activity was a chaotic adventure—totally unplanned. Olympia’s contribution was situated up by the Lauenensee, a place, according to folklore, where you go to cast away your sorrows. The invitation said we would be taken there by horse-drawn sleigh (very Doctor Zhivago). But with no sleighs in sight, my friends Alexia Niedzielski, Victoire de Pourtalès (fve months pregnant), Rachel Chandler Guinness, and a few fellow wanderers fgured we could walk there instead. Little did we know this would become a two-hour snow hike, with one of us in tears and all of us shouting at passing sleighs to have mercy on us. By the time we reached our destination, we were famished and exhausted. We wolfed the remains of the lunch (bowls of barley soup), took in Olympia’s very poetic work, a set of six golden profle poles planted in the ground as symbols of a construction that will never materialize, and of we went—this time tucked into a cozy sleigh. That wasn’t it for Gstaad. Tatiana Santo Domingo and Andrea Casiraghi’s wedding the following weekend had us all—Fabiola Beracasa, Margherita Missoni, Joséphine de la Baume, the Brandolinis—exchanging ideas for outfits. The frst night, up in a mountain hut, guests were madly dressed to suit the theme: sixties après-ski/The Pink Panther. I opted for a Valentino cape, turtleneck, stockings, moon boots, all in white. Giambattista Valli designed sixties-inspired ski looks for himself and several of the girls—and for the bride, of course. She looked fabulous in a leopard-print jumpsuit and big hair. For the main night, everyone dazzled in beautiful dresses, sipping cocktails in a room of mirrored foors and “snow”-covered trees. Moments later we were in a Tropicana–meets–Rio de Janeiro universe fit for a Baz Luhrmann production. Yes, it was one of those over-the-top extravaganzas (with every detail overseen by Tatiana’s mother, Vera Rechulski), but the joy the bride and groom exuded proved the biggest success. Tatiana told me, bobbing on the dance foor, that she’d dreamed of marrying in Gstaad since she was a little girl. Even her beautiful Valentino Haute Couture gown was steeped in personality. “Remember my Bali skirt, the one I had copied wherever I went?” Did I remember? We all loved it. The skirt was legendary. “That was my inspiration for the wedding dress.” A Balinese market fnd as inspiration for couture? It doesn’t get much cooler. @ f l a s h >1 4 8 vogue.com

ch urc h: re x usa /w i ll i schn e i d er /re x . c row n : courtesy o f casi rag h i tr io tumblr . vows: courtesy of elisabeth von th ur n und taxis. brand olini and tnt: p ix 4u/ © g e t t y imag es.

FLASHTNT

FLASH

TALKING FASHION

ROSIE HUNTINGTONWHITELEY IN SAINT LAURENT BY HEDI SLIMANE.

IMOGEN POOTS IN PROENZA SCHOULER. DIANE KRUGER IN CHANEL.

METAL DETECTORS STARS SHINE IN CREATIONS BURNISHED BRIGHT.

NAOMI WATTS IN GIVENCHY BY RICCARDO TISCI.

LUPITA NYONG’O IN LANVIN.

KAREN ELSON IN MARCHESA.

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G O TO VO G U E . C O M TO VOT E FO R YO U R FAVO R I T E O N O U R 1 0 B E S T D R E S S E D L I S T, U P DAT E D E V E R Y M O N DAY

VOD I A N OVA : REX USA /RI C HA RD YOU NG/RE X . E LSO N : DAV I D M . BE N ET T/ © G ET T Y I M AG ES. P O OTS: HA RO LD CUN N I N G HA M / © G ET T Y I MAG ES. WAT TS : JASO N LAV ER I S/ © GE T TY I M AG ES. N YO N G’O : DAV I D LI V I N G STON / © GE T T Y I M AG ES. HU N T IN GTO N-W HI T E LEY: KA RWA I TA N G/ © G ET T Y I M AG ES. K RUG E R: LUCA T EUC HM A NN / © GE T TY I M AG ES.

NATALIA VODIANOVA IN DIOR.

FLASH

Street Styling

I fashion killa a$ap rocky with girlfriend chanel iman (in j. mendel) at the mandela: long walk to freedom premiere in new york.

cool curator outside the dior haute couture (above) and dior homme shows in paris.

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f you want to know what’s going through the mind of A$AP Rocky when he sits front row at Dior Haute Couture, it’s best to let the 25-year-old rapper tell you himself: “What separates Raf Simons from other designers? And is he using some of the same aesthetics from his own line, or is it diferent and unique?” Though it’s a line of questioning occasionally punctuated with a “Man, that would look good on my girlfriend,” Rocky approaches fashion less like a shopper and more like an art collector whose personal style is as singular as his lyrical fow: At the men’s shows during Paris Fashion Week, he stepped out as comfortably in a pair of Rick Owens Adidas sneakers fresh of the runway as he did in an exquisitely tailored shimmering blue Dior Homme suit. He’s also been known to carry a Goyard pouch with a Saint Laurent varsity jacket, and when he began dating model Chanel Iman last fall, they immediately began dressing with the inimitable coordination of a couple that’s been together for decades. “We take things of the runway and add a street aesthetic to them,” he says. Since the release of his first mix tape in 2011, Rocky has collaborated with Simons on a limited-edition collection of sweaters and T-shirts and worked with Jeremy Scott on a series of black-winged Adidas sneakers. Meanwhile, “Fashion Killa”—a single off his 2013 debut album—name-dropped no fewer than 27 designers, with Isabel Marant, Linda Farrow, Vena Cava, and Balenciaga among them, and Donna Karan featured both the song and Rocky himself in her spring campaign. Still, Rocky’s interest remains in the art, rather than the business, of fashion; he speaks of the industry’s boldest risk-takers as heroes. “Every designer I have a relationship with is someone who I looked up to in my late teens,” he says. Though Rocky’s become infamous for fashing his gold smile from the front row, he credits Rick Owens’s wife, Michèle Lamy, for sporting the look “before I was even rapping.” Among his current loves: watching Alexander Wang grow his brand. (“It has substance,” Rocky pronounces knowingly.) Above all, though, in his newfound adult success, he feels a closer kinship than ever with the man whose clothes were a platform for an unknown young rapper from Harlem: Raf Simons. “I’m always eager to see what Raf has up in his crazy-genius brain,” Rocky says. “He’s never let me down.”—katherine bernard vogue.com

a $ a p ro cky a n d c ha n e l i ma n : ha n n a h th om so n. chri st ia n d i o r h au t e coutur e: acielle/styledumond e.com. d ior h omme: pier r e suu/ © getty images.

From Harlem to haute couture, hip-hop’s rising star A$AP Rocky has charmed the fashion world.

THE HAMISH FILES

ORGANIC ARRANGEMENT SARGE’S “ATOMIC GARDEN” NECKLACE, FASHIONED FROM ANTIQUE GOLD PLATE, PERSPEX, AND CRYSTAL, FALL 2014.

CROWNING JEWELS

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or nearly three decades, Detroit-born Vicki Sarge was the creative force behind the London-based branch of madcap costume jewelers Erickson Beamon, conjuring fantastical pieces for designers including John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Raf Simons at Jil Sander, and Dries Van Noten, as well as for an array of style mavens from Nan Kempner to Isabella Blow. Now, along with her business partner, Brooke Metcalfe, Vicki has branched out with her own collection and a jewel-box store designed by Brooke in eggplant and scarlet, featuring playful busts of eighteenth-century ladies (by sculptor Oriel Harwood) on which to display Vicki’s namesake designs. These include fabulous Decobling, Burmese-inspired, and armorial assemblage pieces; a Peruvian Indian– inspired collection for Mario Testino’s MATE Foundation; and a collection of hair ornaments for master hairdresser Sam McKnight (available exclusively on Net-a-porter) that invoke the fading fowers in his beloved gardens. Brava!

I FIRST SWOONED OVER LISA EISNER’S idiosyncratic taste back in the eighties, when, as Vogue’s junior Paris editor, she sported Garren’s asymmetric Flock of Seagulls haircut and donned gentlemen’s foulard dressing gowns and velvet slippers for the collections. The chameleon tastemaker and Wyoming native has long since relocated to Los Angeles, where she has championed creative free spirits as a mum, publisher, photographer, muse (to Isaac Mizrahi and Tom Ford)—and, now, bijoutière. It was glorious to catch up with her (in a mallard-green fox shako and vintage sixties Dalmatian-spot pony coat with grass-green pants) on a glacial Manhattan afternoon to admire the handcrafted pieces she fished out of her teal alligator carrier bag. Inspired by Big Sur in the seventies, Lisa’s jeweled creations— many of them in bronze set with turquoise—are “very artisan,” she tells me. “The hand, the texture—it’s like wearing something from a kelp bed!” The pieces—available at Maxfield in L.A. and Colette in Paris—are as remarkable as she is.—HAMISH BOWLES

PHOENIX RISING LISA EISNER AT HOME IN LOS ANGELES, PHOTOGRAPHED FOR VOGUE IN JUNE 1991. LEFT: THE DESIGNER’S HANDCRAFTED BRONZEAND-TURQUOISE NECKLACE, SPRING 2014.

PRECIOUS METALS

HE A D D RESS: RUV EN A FA N A DO R. “ATO MI C GA RD E N” NEC KLACE : COU RT ESY OF V I CKI SARGE. PH OENIX NECKLACE: COURTESY OF LISA EISNER . EISNER AT H OME: ER IC BOMAN. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .

CRYSTAL CLEAR AN ALEXANDER McQUEEN FOR GIVENCHY HEADDRESS, CREATED BY VICKI SARGE FOR ERICKSON BEAMON, 2000.

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EDITOR: maRk hOlgaTE

shape shifting

wide open A new, looser trouser silhouette is breaking ranks with the long, lean line of the skinny.

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broad way Model suvi koponen wears Marni trousers ($1,000), top ($790), belt, and sandals; Marni boutiques.

actually can wear them. For the non-Amazonian among us, that easy, breezy slouch is a lot harder to pull of than it looks. A full-legged trouser will, I’ve found, conceal the bulge of a runner’s calf but will not save you from the awkward bunching around full hips. Also, unless you were blessed by genetics with a 34-inch inseam, you can fnd yourself standing in a puddle of fabric. While my own legs don’t suggest a sideline career as a speed skater, put me into a room full of willowy fashion girls and my athletic thighs seem to take on Rambo-like proportions. It’s why I recently found myself in a new light-flled studio in Brooklyn Heights, retracing the dainty ballet maneuvers of my fve-year-old self on the quest for longer, v i e w >1 6 2 vogue.com

cra ig m c d ea n . fash i on e d i to r: g race cod d i n gton . ha i r, ju li e n d’ys fo r j u li en d’ys; m a keu p, p et e r p hi li ps. d eta i ls, se e i n t hi s i ssue .

n a recent shopping trip to SoHo, I found myself face-to-face with an existential crisis in the dressing room: Was I trying on jeans or testing out various shades of indigo body paint? The skinny has been a second skin for what seems like eons, but for women (like me) who don’t possess the physique of a baby gazelle, it’s never been a natural fit. If the spring collections are anything to go by, though, that airtight look may be loosening up. Pants have been slouching toward a new silhouette on the runways of Margiela and Marni, where models marched out in swishes of massive, origami-like trouser pleats and six-inch cufs, and for prefall they took even wider strides forward at Derek Lam and Calvin Klein Collection, with billowing cashmere pants cozy enough for slipping between the sheets. Even the more glamorous pairs came grounded with a Birkenstock-style clog and a nonchalance evocative of nineties grunge. Seeing it all unfurl so beautifully before my eyes, accompanied by sheer ribbedknit sweaters and charming spaghetti-strap tunics, should have flled me with a sense of relief, and yet. . . . Here’s the catch: Just beyond the question of how one wears these pants comes the more pressing matter of whether one

shape shifting

leaner pins. “People can call it a squat, but we call it a plié,” said Xtend Barre creator Andrea Rogers as I hastily turned my feet into second position. A combination of Pilates and traditional ballet, the method encompasses a 360-degree spectrum of leg-lengthening and -toning exercises that will incite both agony and ecstasy in those notoriously hard-to-engage muscles. When I raise my toes to a bent-legged relevé, the very spot where a baggy trouser would usually pinch my behind is aquiver—a sensation that’s enough to make me swap out running shoes for nonslip Pilates socks in the coming weeks.

heavy duty When did handbags become the new kettlebells?

LIFT oFF dior’s diorissiMo baG owes its HeFt to Metal aCCents and suMptuous, tHiCk CroCodile Hide.

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an you hold this for a moment?” asks my friend the Lady F., handing me her Givenchy Nightingale bag as we stroll around Paris’s Porte de Vanves fea market. Sure, Lady, I can hold it—but it takes both hands, and I am close to seeing stars. When empty, the Nightingale—which doesn’t

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And while the inch or so that I soon tightened up around my quads and glutes isn’t discernible to the naked eye, it is noticeable when I slip on a pair of full-legged samples at Derek Lam’s midtown showroom a month later. His new pants have just the right fare, and they sit on the hip in that sublime way that seems to channel Katharine Hepburn and Tilda Swinton—until Lam suggests a new standard-bearer of slouchy sex appeal. “Have you ever noticed how Stella Tennant has this innate swagger?” he asks. I have. And it’s living, breathing proof of the virtues of walking on the wide side.—chioma nnadi

have a frame or a chain handle or any other such element to add ounces—is only borderline heavy. But like so many of us, my friend has loaded it up with everything from an iPad to Westwood booties, and the result would daunt Laila Ali. Nor is Lady’s Givenchy alone in its staggering heft. In fact, it’s the dirty little secret of the high end–handbag universe: Carrying these behemoths, no matter how much you worship them, requires a real commitment. An evening with my Loewe by Junya Watanabe patchwork Amazona bag is a night when I am highly conscious of the tug on my arm; my vintage Fendi Selleria doctor’s bag is more art object than practical carryall. My friend C. confesses that while at frst she adored her Alexander Wang Diego bucket bag, “after, like, two weeks, I realized that the studs didn’t just look heavy—they were heavy,” she says, sighing. “It’s like running errands with a bowling ball.” Then again, the very heaviness of a bag can be a perverse badge of honor—why did you spend all that time in the gym developing those biceps, strengthening that back, if not to be able to swing a boulder from your shoulder? Why, though, is it so hard for a chic bag to be a light bag? Stuart Vevers, who spent a decade deconstructing handbags at Mulberry and Loewe and is now the executive creative director at Coach, admits to obsessing about weight issues. “I started working at the height of the It bag,” he remembers. “People were really suffering for their handbags.” Consumer complaints led him to begin weighing his creations: “Anything over a kilo is questionable—you can get away with 1.2 if there’s a lot going on.” Vevers also says that lighter doesn’t have to mean less stylish: He sources leathers as gossamer as fabric, and makes hardware fner by scooping out metal. Roger Vivier creative director Bruno Frisoni agrees, likening the design challenge to the recent quest to create outerwear both warmer and lighter. At the same time, though, when you spend a lot of money on a bag, he argues, “you want it to have some weight— just not a heavy weight.” I thought I’d employ a slightly more scientifc standard, and headed out into the feld to submit the new spring bags to a lift test. A staggeringly beautiful Céline that bears the misnomer Micro is clearly not intended for weaklings, while v i e w >1 6 4

vogue.com

s ebast i a n ma de r. fas hi o n ed i to r: j o rd en b i c kha m . m a keu p, ta li a s ho b rook. prop stylist: louie h innen. d etails, see in th is issue.

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shape shifting

finely tuned model hilary rhoda in lucas hugh clothing, jawbone uP24 wristband, and niKe free 5.0+ sneaKers.

a riotously printed Prada featuring a Hawaiian lady is adorable—though heavier than a lei. But Valentino’s satchel, punked up with studs, is surprisingly wispy, and a giant Givenchy hobo proves delightfully sylphlike. A Proenza Schouler PS Courier in python, meanwhile, is insanely chic and insanely light. And while their chains make a plethora of Chanel Boy bags far more substantial, a salesman confrms what I have always suspected: In handbags, as in life, love conquers all. Fondling the silvery straps, he informs me, in no uncertain terms, “No one has ever complained.”—lynn yaeger

leading lights Four featherweight options

bag name: saint laurent by hedi slimane “betty.” price: $1,890. weight: 1 pound, 2.7 ounces.

bag name: roger Vivier “Prismick.” price: $3,325. weight: 1 pound, 3 ounces.

bag name: marni “trunk.” price: $1,690. weight: 1 pound, 8.4 ounces.

gym dandy

When every other aspect of your life is styled, why should a workout wardrobe be any different?

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he right workout clothes can make your body look hotter,” said my friend. “Nike’s Legendary pants are better than Spanx.” If I needed any convincing to make over my gym look, that was a healthy start. For years I’d believed there was no use investing in clothes only to sweat in them with a bunch of strangers—and

as such, my standard workout uniform has been a ratty college-era Hofbräuhaus T-shirt paired with stretched-out yoga pants. On the other hand, I’ve been known to change twice before a Saturday-morning coffee run. Recently, though, with more and more pedigreed designers launching activewear collections, ftness junkies styling their reformer sessions for V i e w >1 6 6

vogue.com

n i colas ke rn . fash i on e d i to r: be au sa m . h a i r, c ha rli e taylor; ma keu p, e mi ka n e ko. s et d es i g n , da ni el g ra f f for ma ry howa rd st u d io. p hoto g ra p he d o n lo cat io n at l a pa lest ra , n yc. sa i nt lau ren t a n d m a rn i : ti m h ou t. a ll ot he rs: ma rko m a c p he rso n . de ta ils, se e i n th is i ssu e.

bag name: bottega Veneta “olimpia.” price: $5,250. weight: 1 pound, 5.8 ounces.

SHAPE SHIFTING

Instagram, and sports continuing to infuence the runway, I realized it was time to shape up. (There was also the hopeful thought that if I could shrink my silhouette simply by wearing the right leggings, maybe I’d never have to do lunges again.) I started with the Nike pants. More Zamboni than Spanx, they generously smoothed all the lumps and bumps on my thighs. Problem was, they were so constricting (a feature, not a bug, as snugness improves circulation) that my cellulite dimples became a relief map in the light-turquoise nylon and spandex. I’d wanted to break out of my boring black rut, but as it turns out, there’s a reason it’s the most popular color. Since I’m more comfortable with my shoulders and arms (and because it reminded me of my favorite shibori-dye shorts suit from Boy by Band of Outsiders’ spring 2013 show), I decided to try a marine-blue tie-dye tank by Athleta. When I caught my refection in the mirror at my weekly Alvin Ailey class, my new sleek fgure bore virtually no resemblance to my former sloppy self, yet somehow my personal style remained intact. What’s more, I found myself stirred to work harder and stretch farther. The only thing my Hofbräuhaus shirt triggered was a thirst for beer. “If you look cute, it’s motivating,” says makeup artist Gucci Westman, who color-coordinates her Nike sports bras, Rag & Bone tees, and killer 2XU compression tights for her cardio classes at the popular cross-training studio Body by Simone. Her Newton sneakers, however, are purely functional. As Lesley Logan, a trainer at Equinox, says, “If you’re in purely stylish shoes, you’re going to either get hurt or have an ineffective workout.” Kirna Zabête cofounder Sarah Easley, meanwhile, swears by Lucas Hugh, a line of high-performance gear started by Anjhe Mules, who got her start in Marc Jacobs’s swimwear department. (Mules also created the futuristic training getups Jennifer Lawrence wore in the latest Hunger Games.) In fact, Easley so strongly believes that gym clothes should be integrated into one’s wardrobe that she sells Lucas Hugh at Kirna Zabête, alongside ready-to-wear superstars like Christopher Kane and Givenchy. Regardless of how chic certain exercise clothes are becoming, though, one thing’s for sure: You won’t catch me in a crop top until they invent one that comes with six-pack abs.—emily holt

BEST WORKOUT RESOURCES CARBON38: The single best e-commerce site for stylish workoutwear, curated by a former Yves Saint Laurent employee and a Physique 57 trainer. carbon38.com. MICHI: This Canadian label’s daring mesh-panel leggings, almost verging on clubwear, are popular with body-conscious Angelenos. michiny.com.

TYR: For swim workouts, Elettra Wiedemann upgraded from a Speedo to a more flattering (but still practical) suit from this California company, cofounded by an Olympic medalist. tyr.com.

SPLITS59: The brainchild of Jonathan Schwartz, a marathoner and son of Calvin Klein cofounder Barry Schwartz, and Keith Peterson, a former Dolce & Gabbana marketing exec, this collection offers simple, colorful basics for yoga, Pilates, and dance. splits59.com.

BROOKS: Less of a forefoot running shoe than the Newton; their Lightweight line in particular promotes joint articulation. brooksrunning.com.

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GILDED ERA HARLECH AND JONES. BELOW: A HARLOT & BONES CUFF ($1,800) AND PENDANT NECKLACE ($685); NET-A-PORTER.COM.

Second Nature

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hen Dominic Jones and Lady Amanda Harlech first got together three years ago to discuss a possible collaboration, Jones brandished feathers, bones, and bugs, while Harlech proudly displayed treasures culled from the English countryside—a fossil, a leaf, a butterfly. When they began chatting, it was along the lines of “How does one cast a moth’s wing?” Jones, a London-based jewelry designer, and Harlech, a stylist, author, and Chanel creative consultant, share a deeply spiritual, almost mystical approach to the gothic accessories of the past—a reverence expressed in their inaugural jewelry collection, Harlot & Bones, which features poison rings and shield bracelets with ominous pointy edges. The pieces have a haunted quality, and though the necklaces have Elizabethan, Georgian, and Victorian antecedents— you would not be surprised to see them decorate the doomed white throat of a Pre-Raphaelite muse—Harlech is careful to note that they are not meant to be vintage reproductions. And while the sensibility may be esoteric, the spooky charm will be accessible to a wide audience, as the pieces are rendered in silver and semiprecious materials like black rhodium, marcasite, and turquoise. Nature, in all its glorious red tooth and claw, serves as an inspiration for both parties. Jones cites his delight in the strength and fragility of beetle wings, their veins like stained glass in what he calls “a hard defensive casing.” It’s a design evoked in the shield-shaped earrings, which dangle seductively from chains. Many of the pieces have moving parts. “Amanda likes multiple uses,” Jones says, so a poison bottle with a turquoise-studded lid unscrews to reveal a space for solid perfume or other exotic emollient, while rings and pendants offer tiny compartments—the better to conceal secret treasures.—L.Y. V I E W >1 6 8

VOGUE.COM

LON NY SP E N CE . S I T TI NG S ED I TO R: H A NN A KE LI FA . HA I R, N AO KI KO MI YA ; M A KEU P, LOTTEN H OLMQVIST. PRODUCED BY R ICH AR D KING FO R SN A P STU D I OS. JEW E LRY: COU RT ESY O F H A RLOT & BO N ES BY A M A NDA HA R LECH & D OMINIC J ONES. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

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under their feet Luke Irwin’s English country garden is as lush and vibrant as his rug designs.

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single look at Luke Irwin’s spellbinding rugs—modern wonders handmade on looms at the foothills of the Himalayas— makes clear the Dublin-born designer’s talent for meshing the best of both worlds. He’s set the wheels of an ancient craft spinning in a new direction, whether with carpets knotted in a plush cloud formation, bespoke and supersize ikat, or in the reimagining of the Stars and Stripes in Tibetan wool and silk—with the last piece presented to President Obama at the White House in 2009 as a gift from the Irish nation. v i e w >1 7 0 Gone FishinG left: the designer with his family by the river at their deverill valley garden. above: the georgian facade of their house. photographed by tim beddow.

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VIEW Wild Style

green acres right: the gardens near the back of the house are bordered by blossoming salvias and roses.

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meanwhile, lush hellebores and daphnes carpet the ground with blossoms even in the dead of winter. The fckle-yet-verdant wilderness was a 30-year labor of love for the property’s former owner—and it takes highly skilled green thumbs to nurture. “Shaping the outside of the house is so much harder than the inside because you have to think in four seasons,” says Irwin’s interior-designer wife, Alice, who was mesmerized by the explosion of rugosas and other roses when she frst laid eyes on the gardens, “but it’s very addictive. Now I catch myself reading gardening magazines in the bathtub—it’s become my yoga.” v i e w >1 74

blooming beauty above: the gardens’ exuberant foliage echoes irwin’s colorful rugs (right). below: otis, eight, and violet, five, amid their living, breathing playground.

t i m be d dow ( 3) . rug : courtesy o f lu ke i rw in . d eta i ls, s ee in t hi s i ssu e.

Fittingly enough, the Wiltshire house in southwest England is built on the best of both foundations and brings the most charming features of English country living together under one roof: Eighteenth-century cottage meets lofty Georgian manor. “The frst half was built around 1720, and then the rest almost 100 years later— and all in the space of 20 yards,” says Irwin, a former antiques dealer, while walking from the cozy fagstone-paved kitchen into the airy dining room, where the ceiling instantly doubles in height. “I love that it has these two distinct faces.” Ask Irwin to pick sides, though, and he’ll change the subject by throwing open the doors to the glorious gardens to reveal a setting, spread over almost seven acres straight out of a midsummer night’s dream, fresh with the scent of lavender and the sight of elms and weeping willows trailing leaves into a river teeming with trout. Under a cluster of chestnut trees on the Georgian side of the house, a sunny burst of yellow aconites and dafodils amid budding snowdrops and violets is the frst sign of spring; on the cottage side,

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DREAM WEAVER IRWIN’S MODERN IKAT DESIGNS HAVE BECOME A SIGNATURE. IKAT 4 RUG; LUKEIRWIN.COM.

CUTTING A RUG WORK BY MICKALENE THOMAS (WALL) AND ANSELM REYLE (FLOOR). CHAIR FROM NORDISKA GALLERIET.

LOOMING LARGE

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uring New York’s Frieze Art Fair in early May, Henzel Studio—the Gothenburg, Sweden–based producer of high-end rugs—will debut its Studio Collaborations series featuring the woven, reinterpreted work of a dozen art-world powerhouses. The concept was a simple one: Working with total creative freedom, each artist was tasked with providing an original image, which would then be converted into an approximately eight-by-ten-foot swath of silk and Himalayan wool. (Custom sizes are also available.) And though Helmut Lang’s lucid take on minimalism and the ink-centric virtuosity of Scott Campbell (the tattoo artist responsible for putting SpongeBob SquarePants on Marc Jacobs’s right arm) might seem at odds with the plushness of most home decor, the results prove rather smartly otherwise: The spectacular detail of these coverings—handwoven by Nepalese artisans—layers new meaning upon the term installation art. “There is no difference between the canvas and the carpet,” says Mickalene Thomas, whose throw depicts a bowed figure wreathed in muted wildflowers. “The ultimate goal is to create something beautiful.” And bold: Anselm Reyle, best known for his crinkled-foil paintings, sought to morph his signature metalwork into textile. “They’re extreme opposites,” he says. “The final product has something . . . absurd about it.” The same could be said for Juergen Teller’s mat, which exposes, quite literally, a lifelike Vivienne Westwood reclined in insouciant, birthday-suited majesty. The collagist Linder Sterling, meanwhile, whose Henzel submission frames the visage of a woman overlaid with bee-stung lips, even offers advice on styling: “The rug can be left casually on the floor or hung more formally on the wall,” she says. “If the former, it can be further customized by carefully positioning other objects upon its surface—a TV over the eye, perhaps, or a fruit bowl over the mouth.”—NICK REMSEN V I E W >1 7 8

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CU T TI N G A RUG : M A RCUS HA N SE N . P RO P ST YLI ST, SA Š A A N T I C´ . D RE A M W EAV E R: COU RT ESY O F LU KE I RW IN . D E TA I LS, S EE IN T HI S I SSU E.

For the couple’s two young children, it’s a particularly magical playground. Eight-year-old Otis is already an avid bird-watcher who perches in a tree at water’s edge to spot Egyptian egrets, while his fve-year-old sister, Violet, prefers pulling up carrots in the vegetable patch. “It’s all very much left to nature here—to the birds, bees, and everything else,” says Alice. “We think of it as a Switzerland for the animals!” (The only hunting parties you’ll fnd roaming the grounds are those in search of chocolate eggs at Easter time.) Though the property is a far cry from the manicured urban landscape of London’s Pimlico Road, where Irwin spends three days of each week at his showroom, the commute is a small price to pay for his family’s private pastoral idyll. “The joy of the country child is freedom, imagination, and innocence,” says Luke, who grew up in Ireland. “Our friends in London can’t just leave the door open and let their kids wander outside.” The couple have also brought the joy of the great outdoors inside their home. With heirloom-worthy suzani fabric hanging opposite the staircase next to vitrines full of butterfies, the walls themselves seem to be in full bloom, while Irwin’s rugs act like fower beds of color and texture beneath such antique treasures as a beautiful nineteenth-century French nursing chair. “We spend so much time looking at our phones and laptops and iPads that many of us have forgotten how to look at the world,” he says. “Now I can look out my window and see more shades of green woven into the landscape than I can count.”—c.n.

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pattern perfect

Carolina Herrera reissues her most beloved prints in a charming lineup of day clothes.

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ach one has a little story,” says Carolina Herrera, lovingly reminiscing over some of her best-selling prints of the last decade or so in her cream-and-cocoacolored Manhattan ofce. A handful of these greatest hits are being reissued this month in a capsule of upbeat cotton day clothes dubbed the Archive II Collection. Even without any background, Herrera’s imaginative patterns, which have ranged from simple line drawings of bistro chairs to playful cartoons of her miniature poodle, Gaspar, add both color and lightheartedness to the routine of dressing for daily life. That they are imbued with a bit of Herrera’s personal history only enhances their already signifcant appeal. (“Every time we have a print, they fly out the door,” Herrera says. “Women love them.”) The sparkling constellations set against a navy sky from her 2013 pre-fall collection, for instance, were born from a celestial Verdura compact, a birthday present from Herrera’s husband, Reinaldo. Though the designer originally scattered them across a long chifon dress destined for a black-tie afair, they’ve now been rendered in crisp poplin for pants that, with a sweatshirt and sneakers,

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could hit the greenmarket or a school drop-of. The green and yellow sparrows of spring 2012—now focked across a pretty sun frock and preppy shorts—are based on illustrations Herrera’s team unearthed on an eighteenth-century Japanese wall covering; abundant forals, meanwhile—soft renderings of antique botanical plates or bright cherry blossoms accompanied by swallows carrying love notes—refect Herrera’s passion for nature and gardening. Beyond these indelible images, the collection speaks to the designer’s signature understanding of clean, American style. “I made sure that everything is very simple,” Herrera says, “because when you have a lot of print, you cannot have things like big, elaborate sleeves.” In other words, it’s important that these clothes be worn, so that they inspire new stories. In 2005, when Herrera’s daughter Patricia Lansing was pregnant with her son Gerrit, she practically lived in her mother’s Swimming Ladies print; now she can wear new iterations splashed across a T-shirt or a full skirt. “Oh, the swimmers,” sighs Lansing with a dreamy, almost palpable afection. “They’re my favorite.”—emily holt

vogue.Com

ch a rli e e n g ma n . fash io n e d i to r: jo rd en bi ckha m . ha i r, ch a rli e taylor ; m a keu p, chi h o o ma e . se t desi gn , a n dr ew o nd re jca k fo r la la la n d a rt i sts. d e ta i ls, s ee in t hi s i ssu e.

wild world model jessica hart in a carolina herrera archive ii collection skirt ($690) and dress ($1,290); carolina herrera boutiques.

BEAUTY editOr: saraH brOWn

ThePolitics of Polish

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ike most New York women, I’m religious about weekly manicures, but unlike a lot of my peers, I’ve never been attracted to the long-lasting gel-polish variety. Blame it on my general fear of commitment, but the idea of seeing the same shade on my nails for two, even three weeks reminds me of a relationship well past its prime. I prefer the fush of new love (hello, Chanel Charivari) and tend to get drawn into quick dalliances with colors I know aren’t good for me (like this season’s milky pastels). I’m also wary of damaging my nails. While it’s true that plenty of women who use gel polish—formulas that go on like regular polish and stay on, chip-free and gleaming, until you, or more likely a professional, remove them—don’t experience any downside, many habitués have reported nails’ thinning and splitting, allergic reactions, and even fungus. The worst gel-related problem Manhattan dermatologist Gervaise

something for everyone spring’s new nail shades.

Gerstner, M.D., sees is onycholysis, when brittle, weakened nails lift from the nail bed. “This can create a moist breeding ground for fungus and even cause permanent damage to the nail bed,” she says. If anything gets under your nail, it can also lead to a nasty infection. “Let’s face it,” she continues, “gel polish can be damaging.” She cites the main culprits as “gluelike” chemicals in the actual polish, and the stripping removal process, which involves either wrapping or soaking nails for prolonged periods in industrial-strength acetone. Some of her patients also have a tendency to pick of the thick, car paint–like enamel, which takes layers of natural nail with it. The fallout isn’t limited to fngernails. Manhattan dermatologist Tabasum

Mir, M.D., attributes wrinkles she’s spotted around patients’ cuticles to the UV lamps used to cure polish during many gel manicures. “They look like the fine lines around a smoker’s mouth,” she says. “We protect our faces from UV rays, so why bake our hands and feet under them?” While the makers of UV-activated gel polishes insist that the lamps are safe—because skin is exposed to what they consider negligible amounts of light during services—dermatologists recommend applying sunscreen to hands and feet before placing them under the lights. It appears that technology is evolving in a healthier direction, though, with a number of next-generation gel services, like Essie Gel and Gelish, using LED lights, which don’t pose the same issues. CND’s new b e a u t y >1 8 4

g ra nt cor ne t t. p ro p st yli st, ja ni n e i v e rse n . ma n i cu ri st, ca nd i c e i d eh e n fo r d ebo ra h lippmann.

with complaints of weakened nails and concerns over uv lamps, gel manicures are under fire.sandra ballentine on the backlash—and the new solutions.

long-wearing Vinylux dries naturally, without requiring a lamp at all. Still, it’s enough to make me rethink my relationship with polish—all polish. So, for the frst time in years, I’m considering taking a break from the cacophony of color and shine and going bare. Despite growing numbers of rabid gelpolish devotees around the globe (their nails do, at least on the surface, always look immaculate), a mini-insurrection is brewing. Manhattan’s stylish Tenoverten nail salons do not offer gel polish on their menu, though their manicurists will remove it from clients’ nails, “which is as important as the application,” says co-owner Nadine Abramcyk. “We see a lot of damage caused by technicians scraping women’s nails to get the polish of. The products might be well formulated, but if you use a bad technician, it doesn’t matter.” Perhaps as a result, “We’re seeing a lot of women going back to natural nails,” she says, with many clients simply opting to wear the Foundation, the salon’s nude base coat. Nail guru Jin Soon Choi reports that many of the stylists and models

she works with have been eschewing color of late, too, opting for a “longish, rounded, natural or beige nail” she describes as “old-school.” Deborah Lippmann calls the new (old) shape the “Inez,” after photographer Inez van Lamsweerde’s long, perfectly fled ovals. Of course, this exotically chic new length—which also creates the illusion of slim, elongated fingers, a bonus— requires impeccable nail health. In order to bare nails that have taken a beating, you must coax them back into good shape. Rescue Beauty Lounge’s Ji Baek advocates a period of manicure abstinence. “Just push back your cuticles, apply nail strengthener, and for a treat, slather your hands in La Mer,” says Baek, who is lately sporting a round, natural nail herself. She also suggests that women over 35 take prenatal vitamins. “People survive on juice and a leaf of lettuce these days. They’re starving their nails.” Jane Park, founder of Seattle’s Julep Nail Parlors, created her Nail 911—a twopart punch in the form of a strengthening complex and serum—specifcally

SCENT

with “damaged or gel-ravaged nails” in mind. Still, for women who can’t bear to part with their chip-proof, mirror-like color, this spring witnesses the rise of the un-gels: polishes that mimic the sheen and longevity of salon gels without the unwanted side efects (most even come off with a swipe of regular remover). L’Oréal Extraordinaire Gel-Lacque features a flexible rubber-silicone formula; Sally Hansen’s Salon GelPolish comes with its own LED light. Deborah Lippmann’s Gel Lab base-and-topcoat duo seals in regular polish, imparting a cushiony, pumped-up gleam. While I’m still determined to cultivate longer, healthier—and yes, polish-free— nails this spring, I can see myself having the occasional fing with the un-gels. In fact, I’m already feeling the siren call of Dior’s new Vernis Gel Shine in Victoire #758, a decadent gold-fecked red named for the couturier’s favorite model from the ffties. When the romance starts to fizzle (as it always does), it’s nice to know another strong, shiny suitor will be right at my fngertips. @ B E A U T Y >1 8 6

JEWELS &JUICE

BULGARI LOTUSFLOWER BROOCH.

Bulgari looks to the maharajas—and maharanis—of India for its latest perfume.

as the world ever known more enthusiastic jewelry connoisseurs than the maharajas of India? These diamond-decked princes (and their princesses) really knew how to pile it on, showcasing their enormous wealth and power with cascading ropes of pearls, dazzling bazuband arm cuffs, and belts and swords shimmering with locally mined emeralds and rubies. The Maharaja of Patiala was famed for his legendary Art Deco bib-style necklace, a 1928 Cartier commission weighing nearly 1,000 carats; the Maharaja of Nawanagar, meanwhile, wore the hulking Tiger’s Eye diamond—in the aigrette of his plumed turban. When the glamorous Maharani Gayatri Devi, “the last queen of Jaipur,” went to the theater in London one evening in 1955, it was with a neckful of Bulgari diamonds. More than a half century later, Bulgari has returned to Jaipur— still the gem-cutting capital of the world—seeking inspiration for its latest scent. With notes of saffron, Indian tuberose, osmanthus, cypriol (a spicy-smelling papyrus plant used for millennia to perfume saris), and Sicilian mandarin, Omnia Indian Garnet was dreamed up as the olfactory embodiment of Mandarin garnets— rare stones the color of an Indian sunset.—SARAH BROWN

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OMNIA INDIAN GARNET.

GEM PALACE ABOVE: SIR YADAVINDRA SINGH, MAHARAJA OF PATIALA, C. 1940. BELOW: MAHARAJA SAWAI MAN SINGH AND HIS WIFE, MAHARANI GAYATRI DEVI, WITH THEIR CUSTOM ROLLS-ROYCE, IN JAIPUR.

BULGARI’S MUGHAL ERA–INSPIRED AUTUMN NECKLACE FEATURING MANDARIN GARNETS.

PORTRAIT: JOHN FASAL COLLECTION. ROLLS-ROYCE: ROLI BOOKS. PERFUME: TIM HOUT. ALL OTHERS: COURTESY OF BULGARI. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.

BEAUTY NAILS

BEAUTY

SUN STRATEGIES

TheGreatCover-Up

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fter a brush with basal-cell carcinoma last fall, Hugh Jackman Instagrammed a photo of his bandaged nose (27,900 likes), followed by a shout-out to his dermatologist and his wife, Deb, who insisted he “get the mark on my nose checked. Boy, was she right!” Who needs public-service announcements—or thank-you notes—when you have social media? More than two million Americans are diagnosed with skin cancer each year, and that rate is climbing. (Dermatologist Lisa Airan, M.D., says it’s “not necessarily a rise in incidence; it’s more a rise in detection. Sometimes people don’t

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HERE COMES THE SUN JULIA FRAUCHE, IN A CHANEL SWIMSUIT AND A HAT BY YESTADT MILLINERY FOR THE ROW, AT THE STANDARD SPA, MIAMI BEACH. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANGELO PENNETTA. FASHION EDITOR: SARA MOONVES.

realize the old sun exposure is leading to new skin cancer.”) Sunscreen—applied liberally and frequently—is our best defense, but Manhattan dermatologist Dennis Gross, M.D., warns it’s “not a coat of armor.” So, this season, we suggest expanding your arsenal beyond SPF, to include, say, a caftanand-wide-brim-hat ensemble (see The Row’s spring runway); a chic face-shielding visor (Marni); or any one of J.Crew’s or Pret-à-Surf’s graphic surf-to-street rash guards. We even found a long-sleeved swimsuit. B E A U T Y >1 8 8 SPF FOR ALL: SEE MORE OF THE LATEST SUNSCREENS IN THE VOGUE DIGITAL EDITION

HA I R , M A RKI S HKRE LI ; MA KEUP, LI SA HOUG HTON . P RO DUC ED BY S EL ECT SE RVI CES. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

YOU CAN HIDE FROM THE SUN—OR YOU CAN PLAY. LAURA REGENSDORF ON HOW TO STAY STYLISHLY SAFE THIS SEASON.

BEAUTY SUN STRATEGIES

GOLDEN GIRL SASHA PIVOVAROVA, IN A MARC JACOBS DRESS, PHOTOGRAPHED BY MIKAEL JANSSON. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: SISLEY PHYTOTOUCHE ILLUSION D’ÉTÉ; CLARINS RADIANCEPLUS GOLDEN GLOW BOOSTER; SENSAI SILKY BRONZE SELF TANNING FOR FACE; JAMES READ SLEEP MASK TAN.

THROW SOME SHADE “All my sports are outside: skiing, surfing, biking,” says the porcelainskinned Lisa Airan. In addition to a boatload of tried-and-true sunscreens (Ocean Potion, Badger, and Suntegrity among them), the New York–based derm is never without the right high-performance eyewear (for cycling, that’s HaberVision glasses; for surfing, a pair of Kurtis USA goggles, which tie onto her wetsuit). After all, cumulative sun exposure can lead to vision problems ranging from cataracts to pterygium—plus, the delicate skin around the eyes is often the first to age. The FDA doesn’t require sunglasses to have UV protection, so reading labels is key; when in doubt (or when buying vintage), swap in new lenses at the optometrist’s. Julie Woodward, M.D., chief of oculofacial surgery at Duke University Medical Center, also advocates sunscreens formulated specifically for the sensitive eye area. SkinCeuticals’ mousselike Physical Eye UV Defense, for which she tested prototypes, “actually acts as a very nice base for makeup,” she says. EYE CANDY FROM TOP: SUNGLASSES FROM STELLA McCARTNEY AND PRABAL GURUNG BY LINDA FARROW GALLERY.

ADD A SLEEVE

Surf-girl rash guards have become the de facto summer fashion statement from Malibu to Montauk. Not only do they provide an extra (waterproof) buffer against the sun, but the very best among them are made from UPF fabric—the textile equivalent to SPF. Mott 50 and J.Crew offer a winsomely sportif mix of stripes, florals, and solids (no matter if you prefer page-turning to paddle-boarding). Lisa Moore, designer of the Dallas-based start-up Cover, was inspired to create a longsleeved UPF 50+ maillot after her 23-year-old sister was diagnosed with a melanoma on her arm. Even those who seek refuge under the umbrella might want to stock up: According to a recent paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, an estimated 50 percent of UVA exposure occurs in the shade.

BEYOND SPF FROM TOP: MOTT 50 UPF 50 SWIM SHIRT; COVER UPF 50+ SWIMSUIT.

(RE)INTRODUCING SPF OIL Not long ago, the only oil destined for the beach bag smelled like a piña colada, boasted a single-digit SPF (if that), and fast-tracked your tan—and your wrinkles. Now, owing perhaps to beauty’s current infatuation with all things oil (for the face, the hair, the body), sunscreen oils have been recast as broad-spectrum SPFs for today’s sun-savvy set. L’Oréal Invisible Protect Dry Oil Spray SPF 50+ contains argan, sunflower, and grapeseed oils; Clarins Sunscreen Care Oil SPF 30 is also recommended for hair and scalp. A megadose of antioxidants in Supergoop!’s SPF 50 (left, out next month) helps counter free-radical damage at the outset. FO R DA I LY B E AU T Y N E W S A N D I D E A S , G O TO VO G U E . C O M

PIVOVAROVA: FASH ION ED ITOR , TABITH A SIMMONS. H AIR, EUG E N E SOU LE IMAN FOR WELLA PROFESSIONALS; MAKEUP, H ANNAH MUR RAY. SWIMSU IT: T IM H OUT. ALL OTH ERS: MAR KO M a c PH ERSON. D ETAILS, SE E IN T HIS ISSU E .

HERE’S TOA HEALTHY GLOW

While fair skin has had a major fashion moment (and will continue to, if Cate Blanchett, Emma Stone, and Jessica Chastain have anything to do with it), there’s no denying the pull of an outdoorsy golden glow come summer. Clarins’ new self-tanning concentrate lets you customize your color: Simply add a few drops to your daily moisturizer or sunscreen. Brand-new out of London, James Read’s CoQ10-powered sleep mask is a night cream/self tanner in one (he promises it won’t ruin your pillowcase). Kanebo’s Sensai sunless tanners rely on sugar-like erythrulose instead of DHA to impart a subtle, post-vacation warmth that lasts mere days, no commitment required. Or simply consider a few well-placed highlights, like a chicly burnished cheek (on Sasha, left). Sisley’s bronzing powder contains micronized particles for a featherlight finish.

BEAUTY HEALT H

thebitterestpill plagued by anxiety and depression, Kelley McMillan unwittingly developed a dependency on the very meds that were supposed to help her.

chemical romance XanaX prescriptions have risen 20 percent  since 2007. photograph by eric boMan.

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lmost four years to the day after I quit drinking, I visited my gynecologist for a routine annual exam. It was July 2012; I was 33 and exactly where I wanted to be: in love, writing for national magazines, and living the kind of adventurous life I’d always dreamed of. Two years earlier, I’d moved from New York City to Denver. My health was excellent (I was even training for a half Ironman), so I hadn’t bothered to fnd a general practitioner in my new city. I relied on my gynecologist for my few medical needs: blood work, breast exams, birth control, and my psychiatric prescriptions. After the standard poking and prodding, my doctor and I chitchatted for a bit; then she looked at me and said, “I’m worried you have a dependency on Klonopin. You’ve been on way too much of it for way too long.” Klonopin is a benzodiazepine, one of a family of antianxiety medications that includes Xanax, Valium, and Ativan. The National Alliance on Mental Illness warns that physical dependency may result after only two weeks of use, but some psychiatrists, like the one I used to see on the Upper West Side, dispense it as a long-term treatment for anxiety. I’d been taking 1.5 milligrams of Klonopin a day, a moderate dose, since I’d stopped drinking, though I’d been on and of it throughout my 20s to help assuage the disquietude I’d long battled. And it worked marvelously. Any self-defeating thoughts and stress about work, family, relationships—the tightness in my chest where my worry takes hold—were almost instantly dissipated once I popped one of those little yellow tablets. With my anxiety and drinking under control, my life bloomed. I traveled the world as a freelance writer—in a 24hour span that spring, I’d heli-skied in Alaska, then jumped on a plane to go on safari in Uganda. h e a lt h >1 9 2 vogue.com

BEAUTY HEALTH After many years single, I was dating a handsome captain of a Special Forces team. I was happier and more grounded than I’d ever been. But my doctor was concerned that during the previous six months, I’d reflled my Klonopin prescription early a few times, something she had to approve at each instance. Those early reflls, she said, had caught her attention for possible abuse. I was stunned. Sure, I’d reflled my scrip early on occasion, but only by a couple of days, ten days, tops. This was due in part to my hectic travel schedule, but also to the fact that I sometimes took a few more pills than prescribed, on nights when I couldn’t sleep or days when I felt particularly anxious. I never took Klonopin to get high; I took it “as needed,” as the label said to. My doctor said that she no longer felt comfortable prescribing Klonopin to me, and she handed me the business cards of a psychiatrist, an addiction specialist, and a general practitioner. To my dismay, after I’d successfully kicked one habit, my doctor was telling me I had to kick another. Alarming numbers of Americans are taking—and becoming hooked on— prescription pills, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). With more than 47 million prescriptions in 2011, Xanax is the eleventh most prescribed drug overall and the most popular psychiatric medication in the country. That’s a 20 percent jump since 2007. Women are more likely than men to take antianxiety medications: 7.3 percent of women between the ages of 20 and 44 and 11 percent of women 45 to 64 are on them, twice the number of men, according to a 2011 study by Express Scripts, a health-care company that tracks data from more than one billion prescriptions a year. The fallout from our afnity for anxiety meds is startling: In 2012, nearly seven million people abused psychotherapeutic drugs, and rehab visits involving benzodiazepines tripled between 1998 and 2008, according to SAMHSA. Part of the problem stems from the fact that we are the most anxious country in the world, or at least the country fastest to cling to medical diagnoses, with clinical anxiety affecting about

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40 million American adults in a given year, according to the most recent fgures from the National Institutes of Health. Anxiety is the most common psychiatric diagnosis in the United States, and one in three women will experience such a disorder in her lifetime. “If you wanted to design a culture that is anxiety-producing, stress-producing, mood disorder–producing, and stressful to the self-image of girls and women, you’d draw it up to look a lot like the United States,” says Colorado-based psychiatrist Scott Shannon, M.D., who founded the Wholeness Center, the country’s largest and most comprehensive integrative mental-health clinic. That’s where the pills come in. Benzodiazepines were frst introduced in the 1950s; today more than 94 million benzo prescriptions are dispensed annually, according to a 2012 report by IMS Health, a leading health care–research

I never took klonopIn to get hIgh; I took It “as needed,”as the label saId to company. The drug works by enhancing the efect of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), a neurotransmitter that helps calm the mind and body. GABA roams the brain looking for the right receptor to latch onto. When it does, its soothing efects are unleashed. Benzos attach to GABA receptors, amplifying the neurotransmitter’s efects and creating an infated sense of peace. “Benzos are cheap, easy, and don’t require any efort on the part of the patient,” says Franklin Schneier, M.D., a research psychiatrist in the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at New York State Psychiatric Institute. “They work rapidly, and they are efective. But they have several disadvantages, too.” For starters, there is little evidence that long-term benzo use cures anxiety. In fact, several small studies suggest that taking benzos on an ongoing basis can cause structural changes in the brain that may result in cognitive damage, according to psychiatrist Peter Breggin,

M.D., author of more than 40 articles on the subject and an outspoken critic of psychiatric drugs. One meta-analysis examining patients who had gotten of benzos found deterioration in every area of intellectual and cognitive testing it studied and suggested that the damage may be irreparable. And benzos may actually make your condition worse than before you started taking the drugs because they compromise your ability to deal with it, Breggin says.

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hile benzo manufacturers and some doctors believe that the drugs are benefcial if they’re used properly, they’re often prescribed for the wrong reasons; after all, we are a quick-fx culture that seeks immediate alleviation of symptoms. On top of that, general practitioners prescribe 65 percent of all antianxiety medications, and they’re often unable to provide sufcient monitoring and may be unfamiliar with medication protocols. Even therapeutic use can lead to addiction, abuse, and physical dependence, which happens when the body adapts in such a way that it needs the drug to function properly. Withdrawal symptoms can range from panic attacks and nausea to the more extreme—seizures and suicidal thoughts. Studies show that between 15 and 44 percent of long-term benzo users will develop a physical dependency on the drug. According to Breggin, getting of benzos is harder than quitting heroin. I was 29 and living in New York City when I gave up drinking. Mine wasn’t a rock-bottom falling-out but a gradual awakening to the realization that alcohol was getting in the way of the person I wanted to be. There were times when things could have gone terribly wrong and didn’t, but the most crippling part of my drinking was the massive anxiety hangovers I’d sufer after big nights out. The morning after, I would have a tightness in my chest that crept up my neck and into my head, where an electric sense of shame overwhelmed me to the point where being in my body was almost unbearable. There was something else that had been scratching at the h e a lt h >1 9 6 vogue.com

BEAUTY HEALTH raw spots in me for a couple of years. My drinking was starting to remind me of my mother, who had her own complicated relationship with alcohol, mental illness, and psychiatric medications. Like me, she wasn’t a vodka-in-the-morning drinker, but when she drank—usually California Chardonnays—she couldn’t stop. She’d get high and silly and then, at the drop of a dime, she’d turn mean, lashing out at those closest to her. It was so contrary to her fundamental nature— kind, compassionate, sensitive—and she hated herself for the times she hurt our family. But ultimately, no pill or drink, no amount of love, could soothe her sadness. When I was 22, she took her life. I worried that her sufering was a warning, a glimpse of what my future might be if I didn’t change things. After a fight with my boyfriend in July 2008, I woke up with a guilt-shameworry hangover that was becoming all too familiar, and I decided to stop drinking. There was no AA or rehab— my drinking never got out of control to the point where friends and family were concerned—just my own steely desire for a better life and the memory of my mother driving me toward it. I committed myself to giving my psych meds, which I’d taken of and on since my teens, a shot to work (alcohol can counteract antidepressants’ effects and worsen depression and anxiety). I wanted to tease apart how much of my unhappiness was a result of my lifestyle—late nights and alcohol aren’t a recipe for achieving balance—and how much of it was me. Given my mother’s mental-health history, I believed that I was genetically predisposed to depression and that psychiatric medications would right my chemically unbalanced brain. My issues, I was told by several doctors throughout my life, were like diabetes. You take medication to balance your brain as a diabetic would take insulin to manage blood glucose levels. (This notion, in fact, has never been proven, nor has the chemical-imbalance theory of depression and anxiety, says Breggin.) My mother gave me my frst benzo, Valium, when I was sixteen and came to her one night, unable to sleep. In the world I grew up in, psychiatric drugs promised healing, salvation, a cure—and I bought into all of it. So I didn’t hesitate when

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my psychiatrist prescribed me 100 milligrams of Zoloft and 1.5 milligrams of Klonopin. I was ready to do anything— give up drinking, recommit to my psych meds, run a marathon—to silence the voice of criticism and doubt that lived in my head; anything to be happy.

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ast-forward four years, and I left my gynecologist’s office frightened by the word dependency and immediately, rashly, cut my dose in half. I also made an appointment with Mary Braud, M.D., a psychiatrist well known in Denver for her holistic approach toward mental wellness. On a hot day in late July, Braud explained to me that my story of inadvertently becoming dependent on benzos was all too common. “I’ve seen a lot of people who are shocked and surprised that a medicine that they were given that they thought was OK is now creating a big problem for them.”

In the world I grew up In, psychIatrIc drugs promIsed healIng, salvatIon, a cure—and I bought Into all of It In her view, one that is gaining popularity among progressive psychiatrists and supported by new research, anxiety is a complex problem caused by an array of factors including genetic predispositions, digestive health, diet, and trauma. It’s not something you’re just born with, and it’s not something that benzos can truly fx. “The benzo is never going to heal anything or give the body what it truly needs to function better. And, in fact, it may actually stand in the way of that happening for people,” Braud said. Together, we started to unravel the roots of my angst, and I came to better understand how my mother’s instability had planted the seeds of my condition. The question of whether she would be there the next day was

often very real, and it helps explain the irrational uncertainty I feel about my future and relationships. I also started to realize there were incidents along the way that, in hindsight, should have been alarming. In 2012, two days into a ski trip in Telluride, Colorado, I ran out of Klonopin. That night, my brain felt like a bundle of frayed electric wires shooting sparks across my skull, I was overwhelmed by selfloathing, and I couldn’t sleep, despite the fact that I was exhausted after a day on the slopes and that I’d dosed myself with Tylenol PM. The next morning, I cut my trip short and drove home. What I didn’t understand then was that I was in benzo withdrawal. Some studies suggest that long-term benzo use may impair the body’s natural ability to produce and access GABA. When benzos are discontinued or the dose is lowered, the central nervous system may go into overdrive, causing withdrawal, which can even occur between pills if your body has developed a tolerance to your dose. More than a year after my gynecologist refused to renew my prescription, I’ve started to slowly taper my dose, with Braud’s guidance, and I’m down to .62 milligrams a day. I’ve revamped my diet, cutting back on refned sugar and cafeine, which really rev up my anxiety, as well as gluten and dairy, which recent studies indicate may cause inflammation in the gut that triggers mood disorders. I’ve started taking supplements like Pharma GABA (amazing), magnesium, and fsh oil, which studies suggest help the brain make the good chemicals that moderate mood and anxiety. I try to get at least eight hours of sleep a night. I ski, bike, run, climb mountains, and spend time in nature every chance I can. Here I am nearly six years alcoholfree and staring down a diferent beast, benzodiazepines. For the most part, giving up alcohol was easy and the results were almost immediate. But whenever I lower my Klonopin dose too rapidly, my world starts to teeter out of control. If I had known back in 2008 what I know now about benzos, I don’t think I would have filled all those prescriptions. Yet amid the fear of quitting, there’s a familiar feeling: that same desire for a better life and my mother’s whisper urging me toward it. @ vogue.com

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editOR: valeRie SteikeR

jost: p ra k as h shro ff. s i t ti ng s e d i to r: ma rcus teo. g ro o mi n g, pau l me r r itt for ch anel beauté. ph otograph ed on location at ro cke fe lle r ce nt e r, courtesy o f t i shm a n s p eye r. a ll ot hers: ma r ko m a c ph erson. d etails, see in th is issue.

New kid at the rock The wriTercomedian wears an alfred dunhill coaT and a ralph lauren black label shirT.

talent

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SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE’S CoLIN JoST TAkES HIS pLACE AT THE wEEkEND UpDATE DESk.

olin Jost , the

31-year-old Saturday Night Live head writer who replaces Seth Meyers on Weekend Update, is spring TV’s cleanestcut new face. In his first extended job on camera, he tails giants like Chevy Chase, Amy Poehler, and Tina Fey. “I actually saw Kevin Nealon last week,” Jost says. “He had things I didn’t think of. Like, What’s going to be your sign-of?” SNL has seen 21 anchors since 1975. “It’s obviously a very intimidating legacy,” Jost says one Friday, in 30 Rock’s ninth-foor greenroom. He’s friendly and energetic, with a mop of brown hair, a pencil behind one ear, and a Dennis the Menace smile. “But you vogue.Com

have to try not to get overwhelmed by it.” Jost joins Cecily Strong, a partnership that SNL creator and producer Lorne Michaels thinks has great potential: “He and Cecily have a natural chemistry together. He’s funny, he’s charming, he’s playful, and

you can see the intelligence.” Jost first arrived at SNL as a 23-year-old, after coldmailing the show a packet of sample material—twice. (“I sent in one that wasn’t even at the right time of year,” he says.) He was working at his hometown paper, the

pERENNIAL CHARm ith his most recent home collection, Oscar de la Renta shows that a masterly floral scheme is as beguiling on cocktail plates as on full-skirted dresses. Just launched, the line was inspired by hand-colored engravings and chromolithographs of boldly colored peonies from the new York botanical Garden archives. “it is one of the most romantic and feminine flowers,” says the designer, who’s also quite the gardener. “for me, it’s another form of creating and playing with color.”—mieke ten have

Staten Island Advance, but had served as president of the Harvard Lampoon. “I interviewed with Tina Fey and Andrew Steele,” he says: terrifying for a kid who’d grown up on the show. His brother, Casey, is also a comic—“I’m defnitely the straighter man of our duo,” Colin says— and his mother’s relatives are mostly Staten Island frefghters: “a very funny people.” While at SNL, Jost, who had acted in college, started doing after-hours stand-up. (Last summer he shot a feature comedy, Staten Island Summer, that he and his co–head writer, Rob Klein, did for Paramount.) The Update desk, he thinks, “is the closest thing to a stand-up vibe here. It’s very diferent from being holed up in a room, trying to figure out all these voices in your head.”—nathan heller paTa > 2 0 0

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fresh picks de la renTa’s plaTes, available on oscardelarenTa .com, in leTTuce (lefT) and indiGo.

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two long-standing couples rekindle the flame.

movies

T theater

hese days it’s hard for any vampire story to feel original, but Jim Jarmusch pulls it off in Only Lovers Left Alive, a sly, moody film that cares less about spooking us than about the pleasures and

from here to eternity

have made them so sophisticated that though they and their good friend Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt) positively devour the arts, they don’t attack people for blood (Adam buys it from medical sources). But things get tricky with the arrival of Eve’s fangbaring sister, Ava LADY BE GOOD Tilda SwinTon, (Mia Wasikowska). phoTographed by Jarmusch’s best in Karl lagerfeld for Vogue in nearly 20 years, Only 1993, STarS in JiM Lovers Left Alive JarMuSch’S laTeST. plays hipster in-jokes against finely wrought filmlongueurs of being undead. Moving between Tangier and making, giving blood-induced Detroit, the action revolves reveries a hallucinatory around an ageless couple: magic. Although ostensibly Adam (Tom Hiddleston), a about vampires, it’s actually world-weary musician, and about something profoundhis strong-willed partner, Eve, ly human: What keeps us played with alluring wit by going—art, curiosity, love— Tilda Swinton. The centuries in the face of passing time?

It’s a question one might ask the couple at the cent e r o f Rog e r M i c h el l ’s Le Week-End, a spiky but benevolent comedy about a trip to Paris taken by the doting Nick (Jim Broadbent) and his chilly wife, Meg (Lindsay Duncan). The jaunt soon exposes cracks in their marriage, especially when they meet Nick’s vain, successful friend Morgan (a very Jeff Goldblumy Jef Goldblum), who enhances Nick’s sense of failure and Meg’s sense of entrapment. Written by Hanif Kureishi, the movie unfolds like a gray-haired version of Before Midnight. While Broadbent wins us over as a figure of disappointed decency, it’s Duncan’s quietly ferocious Meg who fascinates us. Like her husband, we wonder if he can possibly win back her heart. —john powers paTa > 2 0 2

country living small-town dreams come to the Big stage.

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fter playing a disturbed teen in equus and a singing-and-dancing striver in how to Succeed in business without really Trying, daniel radcliffe returns to broadway as a deformed orphan with farfetched dreams of hollywood in Michael grandage’s revival of The Cripple of Inishmaan. Sentimental and savage, the Martin Mcdonagh comedy is set on an irish island whose inhabitants escape the crushing tedium of their lives through casual cruelty toward the lad called cripple billy. “ninety percent of the comedy comes from how tragic billy’s life is,” radcliffe says. “but it’s moving that his aspirations remain undiminished throughout.” radcliffe earned the best reviews of his career when the play ran on the west end last summer, and he’s eager to reprise the performance—though wary of one distinctly american custom. “no british actor can ever get used to the entrance applause,” he says. “with this play in particular, when i come shuffling out all bent and twisted, it could be quite odd.” proving that coastal ireland has nothing on rural america when it comes to existential loneliness, Michael c. hall, Marisa Tomei, Tracy letts, and Toni collette play couples whose lives intertwine without ever really connecting in

BAck tO thE BOArDs daniel radcliffe, ShoT by annie leiboViTz for Vogue, 2008.

will eno’s beautifully strange The Realistic Joneses. under the direction of the gifted Sam gold, it centers on bob (letts) and Jennifer (collette) and their younger neighbors John (hall) and pony (Tomei), who discover that not only do they share a last name (that would be Jones) but that both husbands suffer from the same fatal illness. Making his broadway debut, the pulitzer-finalist eno renders his characters’ struggle to know one another, themselves, and their place in the universe with loopy humor and poetic insight. it’s a true broadway rarity: a dazzling new play by a major american writer.—ADAM GREEN

showstopper the singer in her signature braids and a dolce & gabbana dress.

PEOPLE ARE

TALKING

ABOUT music dream street

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t’s a simpler life—very pretty, very quiet,” says Tahliah Barnett of her childhood in Gloucestershire, known for its rolling hills and castle ruins. “It’s magical, but I never quite ft in.” Under the moniker FKA Twigs, the 26-year-old Brit is still standing out, with eerie melodies and breathtaking videos that have made her one of music’s most intriguing new fgures. Her nickname dates from an early start in ballet. “When I danced, my bones cracked. Somebody named me Twigs because I was always snapping like one,” she says with a

laugh. After moving to London, she switched to music and in 2012 put out an EP that earned her comparisons to Aaliyah. It was the release of her critically acclaimed EP2, though, that revealed her as a category-shattering force. Coproduced by Arca, it combines the seemingly disparate sounds of nineties R & B and ambient electronica. Tracks like “Papi Pacify” and “Ultraviolet” explore female desire, while videos like “Water Me,” in which she sheds oversize tears in an homage to Alice in Wonderland, suggest she is less interested in entertaining than in

travel

being a provocateur. “I don’t care about looking beautiful. Make me look weird; exaggerate me,” Barnett says. She’s now putting the fnishing touches on her highly anticipated debut album, but in her downtime enjoys taking a dance class or listening to the likes of Édith Piaf and

television

april in paris

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l’Art De VIe a salon With a louis-PhiliPPe Mirror and an original Marble FirePlace.

t’s like having your own place, but with the amenities of a hotel,” says american expat ashley Maddox of the light-filled Parisian apartments her company Where I’d Stay offers for private rental. designed with the help of the interior architects at double g, the covetable addresses (two by the louvre and one in the sixth arrondissement) each feature at least two bedrooms, an eat-in kitchen, and touches both quintessentially Parisian and chicly modern: wooden parquet floors, patterned Popham design tiles, hermès wallpaper. as the apartments (which average $4,000 a week, a relative deal compared with $600 a night for a hotel room nearby) are often booked months in advance, Maddox plans to add to her stable there, and expand to Marrakech, italy, and the south of France. “i’ve already bought the domain names Where i’d eat and Where i’d shop,” she adds. whereidstay.com.—gISelA WIllIAmS

Antony and the Johnsons. Even with a nomination for the BBC’s Sound of 2014 prize, she retains a smalltown humility: “People talk about compromising their artistry, but I just believe in the compromise of being a decent person.”—thomas gebremedhin

Pata > 2 0 4

work AnD plAy Wells (leFt) and MortiMer as childhood Friends reunited.

country living a Friend liKe you

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ross entourage and all about eve, and you might get hbo’s bittersweet faux-reality series Doll & em, which stars emily Mortimer and her real-life friend dolly Wells as slightly fictionalized versions of themselves. Mortimer’s em is a british actress in hollywood who helps out her oldest pal, dolly (marvelously played by Wells), by flying her to l.a. and hiring her as her personal assistant. their happy reunion soon exposes bruised feelings and unexpected competition for the limelight. created by its stars, this charmingly observant, beautifully acted show offers a sneaky-deep portrait of women’s friendship—and a witty send-up of a hollywood caste system that honors self-absorption and entitlement. its approach may be gentle, but its truth carries a sting.—j.p.

mus i c: a n ge lo p e nn et ta . si t t in g s e di tor , vi cto ri a youn g. ha i r, t i na ou t e n; m a keu p, laur en parsons. p ro duc ed by sy lv i a fa rag o. t rave l: ju li e n haus her r. t el ev i s i o n: m isch a ri c ht er/ h bo. d etails, see in th is issue.

FKa twigs brings her hypnotic sound stateside.

PEOPLE ARE

ABOUT BOOKS ONCE UPON A TIME THIS SPRING, NOVELISTS REINVENT THE FAIRY TALE.

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o l l ow i n g i n t h e footsteps of Patrick Ness’s fable for grown-ups, The Crane Wife (Penguin Press), in which an injured bird and an enigmatic artist swoop into the lives of a London divorcé and his hilariously disaffected daughter, spring novels suggest that embracing joy—however fleeting—is the new happily ever after. Evil stepmothers get a freshly nuanced look in Helen Oyeyemi’s “Snow White” rewrite, Boy, Snow, Bird (Riverhead), the 1950s New England–set story of a newlywed whose discovery of her husband’s AfricanAmerican ancestry prompts a rash decision. A boy raised among birds is rescued and brought to pre–September 11 New York in Porochista Khakpour’s savagely funny,

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  VOGUE APRIL 2014

Persian folktale–inspired The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury), in which coming-of-age and frst love are complicated by dreams of fight and cravings for chocolate-covered crickets. A redheaded former indiemusic goddess—think Kim Gordon meets Connie Britton’s Rayna Jaymes—gets a second chance at rock-’n’roll mythology in Stacey D’Erasmo’s breakout latest, Wonderland (HMH), while the pursuit of transcendence in all kinds of forms—music, drugs, a McQueen minidress, and those things less tangible but no less powerfully felt— drives Michael Cunningham’s best novel in more than a decade, The Snow Queen (FSG), set amid a circle of young strivers in not-yetgentrifed Brooklyn. A teenage naïf ’s demise in a dark wood touches off Linn Ullmann’s The Cold Song (Other Press), in which the author, Ingmar Bergman’s daughter, conjures a stylish restaurateur mother, an inscrutable author father, and a grand house on the Norwegian seacoast. Finally, a young Australian woman raises sheep on a remote British island in Evie Wyld’s broodingly lyrical second novel, All the Birds, Singing (Pantheon), which casts a spellbinding breadcrumb trail back in time to reveal the origins of her banishment—and the darker mysteries of human nature.—megan o’grady

ART

MODERN MOMENT

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POINT OF VIEW THE MET’S CULLINAN, WHOSE MATISSE CUTOUT SHOW OPENS AT THE TATE MODERN THIS MONTH, IN BURBERRY LONDON. BELOW, MATISSE’S TWO MASKS (THE TOMATO), 1947.

ART: RACH EL CH AND LER . SITTINGS ED ITOR : H EID I BIVENS. GROOMING, STACI CH ILD FO R CHAN E L BE AU T É . PRO P ST YLIST, CO O PE R VASQU E Z FO R AN N E KOCH STUD IO. PH OTOGRAPH ED ON LOCATION AT R EBECCA QUAYTMAN STUD IO. MATISSE : HE N RI MAT ISS E , TWO MASKS (THE TOMATO), 1 947, MR. AN D MRS. D ONALD B. MAR RON, NEW YOR K © SUCCESSION H ENR I MATISSE/DACS 20 13. ALL OT HE RS : MARKO M a c PHE RSO N . D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .

TALKING

bout a year ago, Sheena Wagstaff, chairman of the Metropolitan Museum’s Modern and Contemporary Art department, imported one of her former hires from the Tate Modern. “I guess she didn’t learn from her mistake,” says 36-year-old Nicholas Cullinan, who’s curating the Met’s keenly anticipated opening show in 2016 at the Breuer building, which the Whitney is vacating later this year. Nobody knows yet what the show is, but it’s Cullinan’s idea, and it’s far from the only one he’s working on. His major show on Matisse’s late cutouts opens at the Tate this month and travels to MoMA in October. It’s the first big show of the works the artist made with scissors and painted paper since 1977. “Most artists develop a late style,” he says, “but Matisse developed a new medium. It’s an extraordinary final chapter.” Red-haired and boyish-looking in his Gieves & Hawkes suits, Cullinan grew up in Yorkshire—David Hockney country—before attending London’s Courtauld Institute, where he got his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. He had a fellowship at the Guggenheim before joining the Tate, where he worked with director Nicholas Serota on a groundbreaking Cy Twombly survey, in 2008. “He’s a very intuitive curator,” Serota says. When not building the Met’s contemporary collections, Cullinan takes in opera, jazz, and classical music along with the usual art-world openings and dinners. “I’m excited every day to be going to work,” he says. “What we’re building toward makes this a unique moment—in my life, for this department, and hopefully for the history of the Met.”—DODIE KAZANJIAN

point of view

OUR BODIES, OURSELVES

Everyone knows—and just in case, soap and cereal companies are constantly reminding us—that a woman’s happiness has a lot to do with how comfortable she is in her own skin. It’s true, of course: If we accept that our bodies are beautiful and celebrate them in all their divine individuality, we gain a genuine measure of joy and personal liberation (not to mention sexual magnetism).

In its more theatrical and boundary-breaking moments—yes, we’ll admit it—fashion doesn’t always help with that. (However rock-star we might have felt in an S&M-tight bandage dress and impending-hospital-visit heels, were we ever truly comfortable in them?) But this is not a moment for hard chic. Fashion today is letting down its hair and relaxing. It’s taking a few deep breaths of April air and issuing forth easier, looser silhouettes; lighter, gauzier fabrics; a softer kind of sophistication. Consider a long, cozy cardigan over a weightless silk ankle skirt, or a simple tank casually cinched under a pair of lazy and languid baggy trousers. And then consider that all these at-ease pieces can be worn—if you so choose—with sneakers, not stilettos. Can it be a challenge to jump aboard the self-love train and embrace our shape as triumphantly as our cover star or those heavenly creatures in our Shape portfolio? Sure—but that’s one battle well worth joining. This month’s fashion prescription, on the other hand, is easy peasy. 207

BABY MAKES THREE Radiant in white, the future Mrs. West cozies up with Kanye and North in a Nina Ricci satin dress embellished with organza and lace flowers. On Kanye: Prada leather pants, worn throughout. Fashion Editor: Grace Coddington.

Keeping Up With

Kimye

From London to Paris to Los Angeles, Hamish Bowles joins Kim Kardashian and Kanye West in their quest for world domination— and the perfect wedding dress. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

TRAINING DAY Surrounded by the Vogue team, Kim gets ready for her close-up while Kris Jenner entertains baby North. Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda corset dress with a lace, organza, and layered-tulle skirt. Details, see In This Issue.

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he fast-cooling Los Angeles afternoon air is flled with the scent of eucalyptus and mimosa, the gurgle of water as it tumbles down a fountain wall into a picture-perfect azure pool, the exultant strains of Pharrell Williams’s “Happy,” and a chorus of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” performed in unhappy a cappella by Annie Leibovitz and Kris Jenner. The frantic warblings of this unlikely duo are intended to entertain the geographically named North West, perched between her father, Kanye West, creative polyglot, and his fancée, North’s mother, Kim Kardashian, cultural phenomenon—or Kimye, as the media has dubbed the telegenic pair while it relentlessly tracks their every move. North (“Kanye’s side of the family calls her Nori,” says Kim) is poised on her mother’s knee, a knee that is currently enveloped in a fall of Lanvin satin the color and consistency of double cream, fashioned by Alber Elbaz into a wedding dress of ffties haute couture magnifcence. The dress is a ftting complement to Kim’s voluptuous movie-star beauty, with her fashing Ava Gardner looks and Sophia Loren fgure that have helped to establish a new contemporary body paradigm after an era of waifs. Small wonder that Kim idolizes Elizabeth Taylor, whom she frst became aware of as a supportive friend of Michael Jackson. Taylor once lent Kim her Cleopatra cape for a photo shoot, and Kim conducted Taylor’s last interview (by phone and e-mail), about her legendary jewels. “Everything seemed so selfless for her,” Kim remembers. “We talked about the jewelry and how it ultimately didn’t belong to her; she just wanted to help people.” When Taylor’s estate was sold to beneft the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, Kim even acquired some of those jewels herself. She also went to look at Taylor’s house. “It was just so enchanting,” she remembers, “with a garden with really pretty trellises and beautiful roses, but it wasn’t realistic for me to purchase. It only had a one-car garage.” Although North has inherited her father’s furrowed, quizzical brow, the pretty ten-month-old who is the focus of all this attention seems an island of preternatural serenity in the roiling sea of frenetic activity that is la vie Kimye. North’s parents have already involved her in their creative lives. “I take pictures of her all the time and dress her up,” says Kim. “I put Kanye’s big chains around her, and I put a little Louis bag and some Jordans, and I was like, ‘What up, 212

Daddy?’ ” Kanye, meanwhile, has made an adorable little stop-frame video of North caught in her natural movements that he’s edited to make it appear as if she’s break-dancing. “Anybody need anything?” asks the agelessly glamorous, apricot-skinned Kris, futtering eyelashes as thick, long, and lustrous as a hummingbird’s wings. “Water? Vodka? Get on my train!” she laughs. “Just kidding!” Kris (who, as Kim notes, “goes by the name of Lovey, not Grandma!”) is an astute businesswoman and an executive producer of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, now in its eighth season. Her home office is stacked with Kardashian product and magazine spreads—there is even a framed copy of her estranged husband Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner’s 1979 GQ cover. When Kim was an impressionable little girl, she remembers, her fashion-mad mom “would always wear really tight—she was into Vicky Tiel, Moschino, or Chanel—with huge Moschino heart earrings. She had an amazing body and was always so in shape. One time Kourtney and I sat in my mom’s closet—we must’ve been eight or nine—and we were like, ‘If Mom dies, we’re going to write down who gets what.’ We went through every last piece of her wardrobe. We were so mean then!” Kris, she recalls, was a frm but fun mother who gave her churchgoing daughters an idyllic childhood and a privileged life. Kim and her sisters would ride their bikes down to the Beverly Hills Hotel for breakfast and spend their days playing tennis or soccer. At one time or another Jay Leno, Bruce Springsteen, and Madonna were all neighbors. Madonna once gave a seven-year-old Kim and her sister Kourtney a box of her discarded fuorescent-rubber jewelry, although their school friends refused to believe its exciting provenance. “We had this amazing house in Beverly Hills,” says Kim. “My dream one day is to buy it back for my mom. I actually have to get to work to make that happen. That’s my fve-year plan. I want to knock on their door and say, ‘Will you please sell me this house?’ ” Kris’s present house is itself a camera-ready hymn to glamorous aspiration. “I’m obsessed with cozy,” she says, and the va-va-voom Deco interiors are flled with comfortable soft furnishings strewn with fur and cashmere throws and scattered with silk cushions. A fre blazes in the entrance hall, casting its fickering light on the giant marble checkerboard foor and catching the folds of the silver lamé curtains tied back with tassels of Swarovski jet-black crystals. Family pictures abound— Kris even has some framed images of her underwear-clad daughters from the 2011 Kardashian Kollection for Sears campaign shot by Leibovitz. Kim politely disabuses Annie of the notion that they might have been put here expressly for the shoot (“She’s always had them; she loves them,” she assures her). There is a wall densely hung with elaborately staged Christmas portraits of the ever-expanding Kardashian-Jenner family. “We’ve done it since I was born,” explains Kim, who stares out from her childhood pictures with an almost otherworldly beauty. Suddenly, however, those Kardashian girls are all grown up and vamping in body-con gowns. David LaChapelle, maestro of all-American kitsch, shot their most recent Christmas group. For the moment, Kim and Kanye are camping out chez Kris while their own rambling new manse in the hills of Bel Air is being readied for their burgeoning family. Kanye’s old house

has been deemed to have “no privacy and no space,” whereas Kris lives in a gated community trellised by horse walks and dotted with Disney-perfect stables. However, Kanye’s erstwhile home serves its purpose: “We use the whole bottom foor for storage,” says Kim, who keeps the majority of her wardrobe there. “We have a ‘walk in’ house!” Kanye jokes. It’s also, Kim admits, “the place that we go when we want to get away because there’s a lot going on at my mom’s house. His house is very calm and tonal.” Kris had just fnished decorating a spare bedroom at her house in lush draperies and dark jewel colors when North arrived, but graciously ceded a redo to the couple. Now Tord Boontje’s iconic Swarovski pink blossom chandelier twinkles above a Lucite crib and pale-colored shag-pile carpeting, all refected in a narcissism-nurturing mirrored wall. It would appear that Kanye applies the same collaborative spirit that informs his music to his decorating projects, as well as the concept of sampling. Claudio Silvestrin, the former partner of John Pawson, worked with him on the New York apartment he acquired a decade ago, transforming it into a serene minimalist tone poem in limestone and pear wood. Meanwhile he is working on the Paris apartment he has had for two years with Oana Stanescu, as well as Joseph Dirand, the design comet whose commercial projects include store concepts for Alexander Wang, Balmain, and Rick Owens, and who, in Kanye parlance, “killed it” with his Deco-fabulous scheme for Monsieur Bleu, the eatery of the moment at the Palais de Tokyo. Dirand “taught me about Corbusier and Jeanneret and Perriand,” says Kanye, “but he gets everything—bases everything of of Versailles.” The apartment’s foors were inspired by the distinguished Belgian antiquaire and interior designer Axel Vervoordt, whose exquisite, moated Kasteel van ’s-Gravenwezel, a showplace for his work, left Kanye suitably awed when he toured it a couple of years ago. All of them seem to have been consulted for Kimye’s Bel Air project, as well as Waldo Fernandez, Sandy Gallin, and Clint Nicholas. “I’m looking at all of this sci-f, retro-future stuf, muted color palettes” for both his homes and his music projects, says Kanye, nestled with his fancée in an accommodating banquette in Kris’s shagadelic den-cum-bar. “Starting to build one language, you know?” His aesthetic partnerships are as thoughtfully curated as his architect choices; Kanye collaborated with the performance artist Vanessa Beecroft on his 2013 Yeezus tour, fusing a plethora of ideas into a singular aesthetically cohesive concept. He considers his music “a sonic painting. I’m not music. I’m not fashion,” he explains. “I’m just art. Life is a giant art project.” Right now he is working on his logo with Peter Saville, the legendary art director famed for his collaborations with Joy Division in the eighties. “Album covers and stuf—that shit is serious to me,” he maintains. “Creativity is hard,” he observes. “The creative process— it’s like a relationship: It can be grueling, it can be extremely fun, it can be extremely fulflling, it can be extremely daunting. Do you want to put out currently acceptable stuf, or do you want to try to push toward the future and try to expand?

“You need new ideas,” he continues, relating the concept to his architectural projects, “but Sandy Gallin’s older, Axel Vervoordt is older, so they’ve lived. Claudio will be like, ‘I’ve been through three marriages—and we need to have two bathrooms!’ ” Kanye is surprised that this mix-and-match approach has raised eyebrows in the design world. “Wait a second; Walt Disney worked with a lot of diferent animators,” he notes. “When I work with music, I work with a lot of different people. If you work together, you can fnd something greater—and all people can win. “I’m really into fantasy, as you know. I’m obsessed with Walt Disney and Tim Burton and Hayao Miyazaki. Kim is like a fantasy, period,” he says. “She’s like a dream girl. And I think a dream girl should live in a dream world.” “I do live in a dream world,” says Kim. “The fact that I’m waking up tomorrow, shooting for Vogue, I get to play dress-up every single day of my life, have my dream fancé, my dream baby, you know?” Ten days earlier, Kim began her Vogue wedding-dress odyssey in London in the light-fooded atelier of Alexander McQueen’s Sarah Burton, where, under conditions of absolute secrecy, Catherine Middleton’s magnifcent dress for her marriage to Britain’s future king was conceived and fashioned. For Kim, Sarah has designed a dress with ostrich-feather panniers and a train, and a bodice of plumes, adapted from one in her debut collection that Daphne Guinness wore to the Met Costume Institute’s McQueen-themed gala in 2011. The feather tendrils have been sewn by hand onto a chifon base, and the imposing dress is light as a cloud. Kim arrived exultant, having successfully managed to throw off the 30 or so paparazzi that had been her nearconstant shadows. She evaded them by dodging into Selfridges (“It’s the only place I know here,” she said), where luckily she ran into a friend and they conspired to switch cars. “I’ve always been fne with it,” Kim tells me later of the constant paparazzi monitoring. “I think only when I got pregnant did I start to have a problem because they were so nasty to me—the things they would say. I’ve never really recovered. And they still say crazy things when I’m with my daughter and make it a scary situation. When you’re young and you’re riding around L.A. with your friends it’s fun and exciting, but now I’m in my 30s and don’t really care to go out and be seen or impress anybody.” Kim is wearing a pearl-buttoned Céline overcoat, black leggings, and a pair of beloved Margiela boots that Kanye bought for her in 2008 (“I was like, ‘What’s Margiela?’ back then,” she notes wryly), but all eyes are on The Ring, a prettily faceted ffteen-carat cushion-cut diamond that Kanye, after consulting a number of other jewelers, eventually chose from Lorraine Schwartz and had set to hover on a dainty mount. “He did so good,” says Kim, “I just stare at it all day.” Kanye presented it to her on her thirty-third birthday in the baseball stadium in San Francisco (where he was performing), fying the entire clan Kardashian in for support.

“Kim is like a fantasy, period,” says Kanye. “She’s like a dream girl. And I think a dream girl should live in a dream world”

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SCREEN TIME The camera-ready family gathers in North’s mirror-walled nursery. Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci ivory fox stole, sequined trompe l’oeil print skirt, and belt. On Kanye: Balmain T-shirt.

“It was the most special day of my life,” remembers Kim, who discovered a 50-piece orchestra waiting for her. “The lights go on and they start playing my favorite Lana Del Rey song, ‘Young and Beautiful,’ from The Great Gatsby. It just reminds me of us.” Kim thought that Kanye had hired Del Rey to serenade her for her birthday. “That’s so something he would do!” she says, suggesting he is even more romantic than a character in a movie. “Literally, he is the most romantic person I’ve ever even heard of.” But then the scoreboard fashed, pleeease marry meee!!!, and Kanye went down on bended knee.

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rom London, Kim decamped to Paris to join Kanye and meet with more designers who have created couture looks for the Vogue shoot. It is a city dear to the couple’s hearts. Kanye discovered it when Damon Dash took him to Europe some ten years ago, “before I even dropped the frst album. Paris is like the girl that’s rude to you at a bar at frst, and then you eventually fall in love with her the most.” It was a slow burn for Kim, too. “Now I absolutely love it,” she says, “but I remember the frst time I went it seemed like such a diferent world to me. Paris is the place we go when we want to get away,” she adds. “People don’t hound you here. At night when we’re jet-lagged we just throw on sweats and take a walk around the city and window-shop in the middle of the night.” They love the city so much, in fact, that they are planning their upcoming nuptials here. “People are probably assuming we’re going to have this massive wedding,” says Kim, “and I think that it will be— but intimate. Two hundred people—just all of our closest friends—a special night for us and all the people that really love us and that have supported us.” Intimate or not, Kim is planning multiple costume changes, and Kanye, naturally, is thinking iconic. The Louvre, perhaps, or Versailles. Or both. “We could get the Hall of Mirrors or something,” says Kanye. “We could turn up.” As the couple prepares for another round of fttings, their close friend and Kanye collaborator (on the artwork for the Watch the Throne album) Riccardo Tisci joins them for dinner with Pedro Almodóvar chez Azzedine Alaïa and takes the group around that fashion maestro’s emporium for a late-night shop. “I did a personal styling of Kim, all Alaïa,” Riccardo tells me, noting that the designer was naturally enamored of Kim’s hourglass proportions. “He was blown away: He loved.” Riccardo has some frm words of advice for Kanye on the subject of the actual dress his future bride will wear to the altar. Namely, not to get involved in the process. “Let her live; it’s her dress,” Riccardo counsels him, rushing in where angels fear to tread. “It’s got to be her dream, not your dream—a surprise when she walks up the aisle.” (“I’m very feminist, very ‘sister’ in that way!” Riccardo confdes.) As Kim tries on her dresses in a setting of Middletonian discretion and subterfuge at Le Meurice, “I decided to not have any opinions,” says a chastened Kanye playfully, installed on a gray sofa, when asked if he prefers the fat or the heel with the look. “Flat is cooler, no?” posits Riccardo, “but high heels will make her stronger.” c o n t i n u e d o n pa g e 2 8 2 216

RAVISHING Striking a graphic contrast with Kanye’s matte black Lamborghini , a Schiaparelli Haute Couture ivory silk chiffon sleeveless top and bouillonné skirt. On Kanye: Fear of God T-shirt.

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FLYING HIGH Sharing a private moment. Lanvin Blanche Collection by Alber Elbaz ivory strapless techno– duchesse satin dress. On Kanye: Louis Vuitton coat and Alternative Apparel hoodie. Details, see In This Issue.

MIDNIGHT IN parIs The couple’s getaway of choice. “When we’re jet-lagged we walk around and window-shop in the middle of the night,” says Kim. Alexander McQueen ivory feathered dress. On Kanye: Uma Wang coat. In this story: hair, Anthony Turner; makeup, Aaron de Mey for Sephora. Grooming: Ibn Jasper. Menswear Editor: Renelou Padora. Details, see In This Issue.

RAYOF LIGHT

Here comes the sun—and with it dawns an uplifting, ultrafeminine moment that brings an adult spin to girlishly romantic pieces, from white lace to winsome blooms. Photographed by Mikael Jansson.

PHOTO FINISH Intricate and tactile bobbin lace sheds its virgin-bride reputation when cut into a clean-lined, PVC-collared mini. On model Karlie Kloss: Dolce & Gabbana shift, $3,375; select Dolce & Gabbana boutiques. Céline sandals, worn throughout. On Sasha: Dress from Homespun Vintage. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.

RIDING HIGH The mood is baby’s-breath soft, as airy silks and featherweight knits— and a palette of cream and periwinkle— replace the hardedged, black/white minimalism of last spring. Dior fine cable-knit sweater dress, $3,700; Dior boutiques. Nina Ricci silk-and-mousseline dress; select Saks Fifth Avenue stores. On Sasha: Bonpoint top. Geminola printed dress.

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HANGING TIGHT From paisley to posies, small-scale prints haven’t been so relevant since the seventies heyday of folk rock. (This time around, though, they’re worn by grown-ups, not groupies.) Michael Kors cashmere-and-cotton vest ($595) and blossomprint georgette dress ($1,875); select Michael Kors stores. On Sasha: Jacadi Mary Janes. Details, see In This Issue.

IT’S A GIRL THING We delight in details like hand-cut appliqués on a leather crop top. Balenciaga calfskin shell ($3,350) and matching high-waisted shorts ($4,150); Balenciaga, NYC. On Sasha: Geminola dress. Albertus Swanepoel hat. Details, see In This Issue. BEAUTY NOTE

Tousled texture should be as easy as it looks. TIGI’s Pro Volume Powder shakes invisibly into layers for instant lift.

LOVES ME, LOVES ME NOT Incurable romantics and free spirits will want to pull the petals on this fabulously worked piece. Valentino white macramé shift; Valentino, L.A. Details, see In This issue.

HEAVENLY CREATURES Peekaboo sheers have been toyed with on many runways recently. The look here, though, isn’t about sex, but rather an innocent play of earthy (the embrace of a cozy knit) and divine (the floating silk skirt). Calvin Klein Collection alpaca-andcashmere sweater, $795; Calvin Klein Collection, NYC. Tory Burch silk-chiffon skirt, $495; toryburch.com. On Sasha: Michael Kors cardigan.

MOTHER OF INVENTION Pin-tuck pleating on the bodice breaks the punchy flower print into abstract fragments— while curving the waist into a feminine hourglass. Marni silk dress, $2,300; net-a-porter.com. On Sasha: Dress from Homespun Vintage. Details, see In This Issue.

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SHORE LEAVE A fine black filigree lifts up this ethereal look like the wings of a dove. Michael Kors cream mohair sweater, $1,495; select Michael Kors stores. Roberto Cavalli silk evening dress; Roberto Cavalli boutiques. On Sasha: Trico Field dress. In this story: hair, James Pecis; makeup, Hannah Murray. Produced by Oliver Hicks for North Six. Production design, Nick Des Jardins for Mary Howard Studio. Details, see In This Issue.

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COMEBACK QUEEN Kaling, mistress of the witty one-liner, believes more is more when dressing in character. Dries Van Noten blouse and skirt. Oscar de la Renta pumps. Hair, Lesly McMenamin; makeup, Ozzy Salvatierra. Photographed on the Universal Studios lot. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Sara Moonves.

MATTER The vivacious, curvaceous comedienne Mindy Kaling loves to skewer everyone, including—especially—herself. Portfolio photographed by Norman Jean Roy.

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feel the same way about clothes as I do about food,” quips Mindy Kaling. “I want everything.” To this end, the creator and star of the Fox comedy series The Mindy Project is attempting to try on (just about) everything at the designer Maria Cornejo’s store, Zero. “Oh, my God, I love this and this!” Kaling says of a hot-pink silk dress and black evening coat she’s plucked from the racks. “I want to shop in all my interviews now,” she says, laughing. The performer shares a go-for-broke fashion fearlessness with her on-screen doppelgänger, Dr. Mindy Lahiri, a clothes-, relationship-, and celebrity-obsessed ob-gyn who’s never met a sparkle, sequin, or polka dot she didn’t like, preferably piled on all at once. Kaling is the latest in a long line of exuberantly dressed television comediennes, including Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett (Bob Mackie designed all the costumes for Burnett’s 1970s show), for whom clothing equals comedic currency. Thirty-four-year-old Kaling may be freewheeling with her closet, but she takes her career seriously. A self-described overachiever, she earned six Emmy nominations as a writer and producer for The Office (she also acted in the series) and is the first IndianAmerican to have her own network show. She’s written a best-selling memoir—Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?—and is working on a sequel in her nonexistent spare time. Currently, there’s a bumper crop of brainy, funny women on TV, but Kaling’s character is less twee than Zooey Deschanel’s Jess, for example, and far more capable (and less complicated) than Lena Dunham’s Hannah. Like her creator, Dr. Lahiri is simultaneously smart and self-deprecating, and appeals to a vast swath of women. (Kaling has 2.77 million Twitter followers.) You want to hang out with her, have brunch. Kaling emerges from the dressing room in a voluminous printed dress and studies herself in the mirror. “It takes supreme confdence to put this on and not belt it,” she says. “When you’re dealing with volume, you really need to go shopping with friends.” Petite and a fuctuating size 10, Kaling spins a lot of her own body-image issues into The Mindy Project, and much of the humor on the show stems from her awareness that she isn’t a size 2 blonde. Her character seesaws between insecurity and an almost delusional self-confdence, and says things like “I don’t want cofee cake—I’m still full from that chia seed I had last night.” Wiggling back into her own fuchsia Trina Turk top and black Chanel miniskirt (accessorized with a favorite Chanel chain bag), Kaling says, “There’s a whole list of things I would probably change about myself. For example, I’m always trying to lose ffteen pounds. But I never need to be skinny. I don’t want to be skinny. I’m constantly in a state of self-improvement”—she does barre exercise and occasional spin classes—“but I don’t beat myself up over it.” When it comes to of-duty fashion, given the choice, she’d wear Marni every day, with chunky shoes and wooden bracelets. “It’s a fun expression of who I am,” she says. “Miu Miu slays me, too. It’s so playful. I love when your clothes can help you project that you’re witty—you know, when your outft does some of the work for you.” For big nights out, her go-to designers include Roland Mouret, Antonio Berardi, and David Meister. “When I’m at my thinnest, I tend to wear things that don’t show of my body. But when I’m bigger, I’ll go body-con, which comes from a place of ‘This is my perimeter, in case you were wondering if I was actually much bigger.’ ” As with her humor, Kaling’s not afraid to think outside the box when it comes to dressing in the public eye, favoring bold prints, short skirts, and slinky jersey. “It’s really tempting not to take chances. But I don’t want to be fearful. I don’t want my tombstone to say, she hid her imperfections well on the red carpet.” —sandra ballentine 235

CURVE APPEAL “She takes the work seriously, but she doesn’t take herself seriously at all,” says actor James Corden. Blunt wears a Christy Rilling Studio sheer slip over a Commando V-neck slip. Earrings from Gray & Davis, Ltd. Hair, Laini Reeves; makeup, Jenn Streicher. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Sara Moonves.

THE BIG

EASY Emily Blunt has won over Hollywood with her effortless wit and wry, British charm. Now she’s embarking on her most ambitious production yet: motherhood. Eve MacSweeney reports.

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t’s really the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me,” says Emily Blunt of imminent motherhood. Never mind her debut on the London stage at eighteen alongside Judi Dench, directed by Peter Hall; the Golden Globe she won for her performance in the BBC movie Gideon’s Daughter, with Bill Nighy; acting opposite Matt Damon, Ewan McGregor, Meryl Streep (twice), and swinging on wires in an “exosuit” with Tom Cruise in this summer’s sci-f spectacular Edge of Tomorrow. On a sunny January afternoon in Los Angeles, Blunt couldn’t be more excited about the baby “pretzeled in there,” as she puts it, a month or so away from birth. “I feel good,” she says, “although I do wake up feeling like my grandmother. I sleep with a fortress of pillows around me. I’ve got one of those huge C-shaped ones,” she adds. “My husband calls it Gary.” Blunt is dressed in a navy silk T-shirt and silk drawstring harem pants, an Isabel Marant cardigan-jacket that can accommodate a pregnancy in progress (it’s currently fastened a third of the way down), and gladiator sandals. Her toenails are painted a shade debatable between “fuorescent salmon” (my suggestion) and “undercooked salmon” (hers), and she is wearing a pair of Carrera sunglasses belonging to her husband, the actor and writer John Krasinski. We’re of to have cofee and take in a spot of maternity–and–post-maternity shopping, leaving Krasinski, newly sprung from a nine-year commitment on The Office, at home in his “writing cave” working on a movie script. Blunt frst grabbed our attention with her movie-stealing turn as a fashion-world assistant in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, when she was 22. (“I couldn’t have been more surprised that she was that young,” remarks Streep, who was struck by her “clear, confdent comic instincts. Her humor is self-defective in the manner of people much more veteran.”) Her line in that movie, “I’m hearing this [duck-quacking hand gesture] and I wanna hear this [finger and thumb pinched shut],” has become an immortal screen moment—as well as a useful tool in raising children. Everything about Blunt is infused with a pleasant irony, starting with her disembodied voice talking through the intercom at the gate

of her rental house in the Hollywood Hills (the couple’s permanent home nearby is under renovation), which is full of character: part warm welcome, part sardonic twang. It’s a quality that has enabled the 31-year-old Blunt to steer her way through a surprising variety of roles in a busy decade-plus career, from costume dramas to indie curiosities to big-budget thrillers to, most recently, the movie version of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods. Even in a four-square romantic comedy like 2012’s The Five-Year Engagement, in which she stars opposite Jason Segel, Blunt brings such idiosyncratic charm to the girlfriend role it’s as though she’s found a fresh way to throw out convention and make eccentricity mainstream. In person Blunt is relaxed and friendly, and she laughs a lot. She began acting to help conquer a childhood stutter, and her career took of virtually of its own accord. “She takes the work incredibly seriously, but she doesn’t take herself seriously at all,” observes James Corden, opposite whom she acts in Into the Woods. At a neighborhood café festooned with chintz and chandeliers, Blunt talks about the extraordinary year she’s had. “It’s hard to fnd fantastic female parts, and I feel like I found two of them,” she says. To prepare for Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow, she endured three months of Krav Maga martial-arts training and gymnastics before going to work in an 85-pound costume with assault weapons built onto the arms and legs, held together by a steel plate. The shoot was so physically demanding, she says, “I looked like an aerobics teacher by the end of it. It was almost unattractive.” Even Tom Cruise—here she inhales sharply and grits her teeth to keep smiling, in imitation of the tirelessly upbeat actor—admitted to her that he found it “a challenge.” Now, she says, “I understand what it takes to get in that kind of shape. And when I got pregnant, not long after I fnished the movie, it helped me to keep active.” The result is a gorgeous pregnant person: all lean, glowing limbs plus bump. In the earlier stages, she did core exercises and Pilates; lately she favors hiking in the hills, where she sometimes has to dodge paparazzi leaping out of bushes who can’t resist stalking a burgeoning Hollywood family. Blunt and Krasinski married three years ago at their friend George Clooney’s villa on Lake Como. Between their two careers, they have crisscrossed paths with many of the major names in Hollywood, from Judd Apatow’s circle to Matt Damon’s, Bradley Cooper, Jimmy Fallon, Amy Adams, Jennifer Aniston, and on. Since moving full-time to L.A. fve years ago—she previously lived in Vancouver as the girlfriend of the singer Michael Bublé—the British-born Blunt has made herself very much at home in her tight network of industry and non-industry friends. She orders a soy cappuccino (“I allow myself one cofee a day”) and gluten-free cookies—“I know everyone rolls their eyes, but I met a hippie doctor who suggested it, and it’s really helped me in the pregnancy.” Besides these peccadilloes, she takes a “non-fuss, non-intense” approach to the maternity business. “Everyone says don’t go online and read as few books as you possibly can,” she says, and she avoids neurotic health-andbeauty rituals in favor of “gallons of Kiehl’s Creme de Corps.” After racing around a postapocalyptic set looking like a weapon in human form, Blunt made Into the Woods during her second trimester, alongside an all-star cast including Corden, Johnny Depp, Streep, and Star Trek’s Chris Pine. “I’m playing a baker’s wife, so C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 8 3 237

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ou might not have guessed it if you saw Skylar Diggins in Los Angeles on Grammy night, but when her college career was wrapping up, a bunch of sports agents told her that a professional woman basketball player simply wasn’t marketable, was a dead end, and certainly not a red-carpet star. Diggins powered past that idea, getting on the phone with Roc Nation’s Jay Z, who made his very frst (and so far only) pitch to a female athlete. Since playing her rookie season as point guard with the Tulsa Shock, Diggins has been on ofense: guest interviewing for ESPN, modeling for Nike, talking about the fght against childhood obesity on Morning Joe. What’s the opposite of a dead end for a female athlete? “It means the possibilities are endless,” Diggins says. “It means there’s no mold for me. It means I can blaze my own trail. It means that I can knock down barriers. It means certain things are possible, and if I work at a certain level, they become probable.” It also means she gets to dress up, and hang out at Roc Nation tables with the likes of Rihanna, Lorde, and Jay Z himself. On Grammy night, the 23-year-old Diggins was dressed in Dolce & Gabbana— “a black, sleeveless halter dress,” she says, “beautiful”—but she really enjoys going with Diane von Furstenberg. “I feel like I am the model she’s making her dresses for,” she says. “Most of my life is spent in athletic gear, so I love it when I really get to be all glammed up.” She also likes the way her body works in a fashion situation. “I have an athletic body type, and that’s the look I’m kind of going for,” she says. “I just stay, obviously, really ft and eat really clean, so it shows in my muscle tone.” Diggins isn’t shy, never has been, and you can ask her mom, who took her to watch college tryouts in Indianapolis when her daughter was only ten. Skylar persuaded the organizers—and her mom—to let her loose on the court. “I thought, Oh, my gosh, they’re going to kill her!” recalls Renee Scott. Instead, Skylar got her frst letter of interest from a college coach. You can also ask her Tulsa Shock teammate Candice Wiggins. “On defense, she is going to make the other team miserable,” Wiggins says. “She has a cold, cold heart.” Diggins grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and went to Notre Dame, where she holds the title for all-time scoring leader. She still lives in her hometown—she commutes to Tulsa to play with the Shock—and if you dropped by her local gym and watched her go through her kettle bells, battle ropes, squats, ab circuits, and planks, you’d see a grueling of-season workout that is as much about cardio as strength. “I’m a very, very small person in the basketball world, fve feet nine. I am probably one of the three shortest on the court at all times. But I have quick hands, or so I’ve been told.” She has also been told she is scary strong. “When you see her you’re kind of intimidated by her strength, but it’s not huge, manly strength,” says Wiggins. “It’s like Wonder Woman. I call her Wonder Woman.” Diggins sat down for a moment of hydration while on a trip to New York—for that Morning Joe appearance; to toss the ball with Regis Philbin (Notre Dame ’53) on Fox Sports 1’s Crowd Goes Wild; to shoot hoops at the Malcolm X Shabazz High School in Newark with some of her young Twitter followers (she has nearly half a million); and fnally to catch the Nets from Jay Z’s seats at the Barclays Center: i.e., a full-court media press. Dressed in jeans and a Nike poncho that she has just worn in a campaign for the brand, she recalled playing with older boys when she was fve. “They didn’t pass me the ball at frst, so I didn’t have a chance to show them what I got. And then one game I got the ball. Everybody just drives right, drives right, and I had a wide-open lane on the left, so I laid up and made it. They passed it to me from that point on.” —robert sullivan

HOOP DREAMS “The possibilities are endless,” Diggins says. “There’s no mold for me.” She wears a T by Alexander Wang knit top and skirt. Hair, Deycke Heidorn; makeup, Keiko Hiramoto. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Sara Moonves.

GAME

ON With Jay Z’s agency behind her, athletic dynamo Skylar Diggins is making plays on and off the basketball court.

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t’s interesting to be a woman in politics and embrace fashion,” says Audrey Gelman in the living room of her Brooklyn apartment, sipping from a gelman for president mug that bears her portrait—a gift from a friend. “I think of it as an escape from banality, the way sports are. But you can talk about sports in a boardroom—if you talk about fashion, it takes on a stigma. It’s an insidious form of misogyny.” Gelman is many things: a political wunderkind who quit Oberlin College to work for Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid; the spokesperson for New York City comptroller Scott Stringer during his recent campaign; and an occasional actor, appearing on her BFF Lena Dunham’s Girls. (She now works as a vice-president at SKDKnickerbocker, a public afairs–and–political consulting frm.) In New York political circles, her accomplishments have frankly been astonishing. Not only was Gelman able to harness the power of social media to get her cool friends (many of whom, one suspects, were not losing sleep over who occupied the comptroller’s ofce) to come out and support Stringer—she’s also managed the tricky feat of making the world of politics seem fashy and fun. Where others may see irreconcilable contradictions, Gelman appears to embrace every facet of her extraordinary young life. What other 26-year-old has both visited the Obama White House (on more than a few occasions) and been a guest of Chanel at its latest Métiers d’Art show? Gelman’s outsize professional success is in direct disproportion to a physique so diminutive that a size 0 frequently swims on her. “A dedicated tailor is an absolute necessity—I always have to alter sleeves and legs,” she says. “I’m almost fve-one, and I look really young; I’m always fghting against impressions and assumptions.” To counter any notion that she is a mere adorable bit of fluff, Gelman—who relies upon twice-weekly barre classes, regular walks across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, and organic smoothies from Siggy’s Good Food in Brooklyn Heights to stay trim—employs what she calls her uniform: black turtleneck, neutral slacks, and Manolo slingbacks, usually topped with a streamlined blazer, plus “one thing that adds character”—these days, often a Céline envelope bag. A peek into her walk-in closet, though, tells another tale: Among the Jil Sander turtlenecks reside such seeming anomalies as a sublimely goofy Chanel plastic-and-tweed box bag and a pair of glittery brocade Prada shorts, while pristine shelves hold a fair sample of Gelman’s vast vintage metal band–tee collection (which she tailors herself using dental foss—“It’s an old punk-rock trick,” she says). For a Saturday afternoon of shopping in SoHo, Gelman is pairing the requisite turtle and slacks with No.6 clog boots. In the Chanel boutique, the serious conversation turns not to the early months of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration or the most recent Chris Christie revelations but rather to the conundrum of buying accessories when one is so petite. Gelman loves ballet fats despite their pancake soles, and wears them for work. “I wish I was more physically adept at wearing high heels,” she says, sighing. And though she fnds the tiny purses on the mannequins deeply cute, Gelman thinks they can make a small woman look dollish. At Acne, Gelman is distracted by a rough-hewn linen suit with a welter of oversize zippers. “I don’t know—nobody else in my ofce is wearing a burlap suit,” she says. “It’s pushing an edge.” At Kirna Zabête, she seizes upon a slightly long, slightly full Céline skirt that she decides she can’t live without. As the salesman wraps up her purchase, Gelman notices the gg allin for senate badge on his lapel and squeals with pleasure—thus proving that a woman who spends countless hours analyzing midterm elections can also have a soft spot for a notorious punk performer. “None of my colleagues would know who that is,” she says, laughing, “but I love it!”—lynn yaeger 240

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SCREEN SIREN Gelman is adept at multitasking between politics, acting—and shopping. Nina Ricci silk blouse and skirt. Jimmy Choo pumps. from far left: Bags by Miu Miu, Chanel, and Burberry Prorsum. Hair, Peter Gray; makeup, Romy Soleimani for beauty.com. Photographed at the Empire Diner, NYC. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Sara Moonves.

SHORT NOTICE

Political wunderkind (and occasional Girls actor) Audrey Gelman is barely five feet tall. Good thing that accomplishments—and enthusiasms—aren’t measured with a yardstick.

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ack in the day—around 1989, say—the only thing a Thierry Mugler woman had to worry about was the inverse relationship between the shoulders and waist of whatever she was wearing. The golden rule for this fabled creature—half Maria from Metropolis, half Marvel Comics Valkyrie— was the wider the former, the narrower the latter. Virginie Courtin-Clarins, just a sliver shy of six feet tall and faxen-haired, is as good an incarnation of the modern Mugler woman as any—maybe better. Her strict, high-intensity regimen of Muay Thai boxing has something of the superheroic about it, to be sure. Yet her preoccupation with proportions addresses an entirely diferent predicament: Will her pants stretch all the way to the end of her 34-inch inseam? As Mugler’s director of development, marketing, and communications, the 28-year-old Parisian is in constant need of what she calls “boardroom trousers”: pieces that exude a sense of propriety while underscoring the fact that she’s now running the show at an iconic fashion house. There she has been charged with hiring a new designer (the young David Koma, from Georgia—as in the former USSR, not the state of GA—whose frst collection, resort, will be seen in June) and making the Mugler name resonate in the fashion world once again (something she’s been working on with a personable and focused determination). Courtin-Clarins has relied on a few pairs of Mugler pants designed by the house’s former creative director Nicola Formichetti, their strict waist falling into wide, softly draped legs— ironically, the trousers were deemed too long to be commercially viable—while she’s also sourced tapered styles from 3.1 Phillip Lim and Altuzarra. All of these are worn with lean, structured jackets from the likes of Helmut Lang and Isabel Marant—“You want to keep your back straight to show that you are alert and listening,” she says— and high heels from Louis Vuitton or Tabitha Simmons. “I like to play with my size, to see how tall I can be.” Her towering physicality echoes her place in the echelons of power at Mugler. The house is part of the portfolio of companies in the family-owned Clarins Group, and as the granddaughter of the beauty brand’s founder, Jacques Courtin-Clarins, Virginie has been attending board meetings since she was eighteen. On her frequent trips to the corporate headquarters, though, she takes a low-key approach, swapping out the jackets for Carven shirts and Louis Vuitton fats. She’s wary of being perceived as a kind of princess, she says, “or, because I am tall and blonde, someone superfcial. I want people to pay attention to what I am saying, not what I am wearing.” While Courtin-Clarins still lives in the Boulogne apartment where she grew up with her mother and younger sister, Claire, after her parents separated, she now shares the space with her photographer fiancé, Ludovic Cesari, whom she’ll marry this summer in Italy. There are plenty of reminders of her close-knit family at home, not least in her closet, where she keeps several vintage Mugler pieces that once belonged to her mother, including a strict black hourglass jacket—its masculine white shirt-style collar only serving to emphasize its va-voom cut—and a khaki saharienne cotton shirtdress that, come warmer weather, Courtin-Clarins will wear with fats; spring, she says, “is the best time for tall girls—you can just wear jeans or leggings with loafers, and everything is chic and easy.” The other pieces in her closet are as refreshingly unpretentious as she is. This is hardly the wardrobe of a show pony, but rather that of a young, style-conscious executive learning when and where to push it. “We are a little less open here than in the U.S. When I am there, I feel like I can wear anything. In France, for instance, you never see anyone with tattoos in the ofce. I don’t have any. My sister has six, but then”—she starts to laugh—“she’s an artist.”—mark holgate

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HEIGHT OF STYLE Courtin-Clarins doesn’t shy from dressing to emphasize her stature. Dolce & Gabbana silk fringe dress and goldcoin belt. Manolo Blahnik heels. Hair, Yannick d’Is; makeup, Junko Kioka for Chanel Beauté. Produced by Kara Glynn. Production design, Viki Rutsch for Exposure NY. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Sara Moonves.

LOFTY AMBITION With a head for business and a body honed from boxing, the nearly six-foot-tall Virginie Courtin-Clarins aims to elevate the house of Mugler.

BACK STORY “She’s capitalized on the medium like no one has ever done before,” says John Demsey, group president at Estée Lauder Companies. Stella McCartney black jersey dress with keyhole back. Pilar Olaverri bracelet. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.

POST PERFECT “People think I’m an expert on social media,” says Upton, “but I am still trying to figure it out, too. How much do you want to put yourself out there?” Versace white silk-cady dress. Details, see In This Issue.

FOLLOW

ME!

WITH KATE UPTON’S SELFIE-MADE RISE, MODELS HAVE GONE CRAZY FOR SOCIAL MEDIA. BUT IS ALL THAT TWEETING SELLING ANY CLOTHES? BY JONATHAN VAN METER. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO.

Have you met Kate? Kate who? Upton! This is how it all begins, in Paris, way back in October (an eternity on Planet Fashion)—spring 2014 Chanel ready-towear, Grand Palais, 10:00 a.m. The show has not yet begun, editors are staring into their smartphones, and I am standing thisclose to Kate Upton but have somehow failed to recognize her. To be fair, not only is she not in a bikini, but she is totally covered up! The honey-blonde hair is coifed; the assets disappeared beneath a classic Chanel tweed jacket. The only thing missing is a briefcase. Trust me, you wouldn’t have recognized her either. Well, hello, lady. I’m the guy who’s writing about you, I say. “Then I guess I shouldn’t say anything too ofensive,” she says, four inches from my face, eyelashes afutter. And that is when I notice: Her Miami-blue eyes are yellow at the center, like an egg yolk. “I have sunfowers in my eyes,” she says in a this-oldthing voice. She stares for a second to see if I am in on the joke yet. “My favorite fowers are in my eyes! I can’t help it!” and then lets out one of her loud giggle-honks. In an instant, I get it: She is a modern-day Mae West– meets–Marilyn Monroe, the perfect larger-than-life avatar for our exhilarating (and vexing) social-media moment. Suddenly the lights dim and Upton, who is here as a front-row celebrity, scurries to her seat. Among the many peculiarities of this Instagram era is that one of the most famous models in the world almost never gets invited to walk the runway. When the music kicks up—bleep! bleep! bleep!—it’s like the sound of a million tweets going of at once. Around the perimeter of the football feld–length room are send-ups of bloated, supersize modern art. The Jay Z song “Picasso Baby” booms from the speakers, and the procession begins. An editor sitting next to me leans over and says, “The art world is so horrifying right now—this is perfect.” One girl after another, robots in identical wigs and makeup, marches past, all but indistinguishable from each other. I know that Joan Smalls and Liu Wen, whom I will chase after for this story, are in there somewhere, but I cannot make them out in the clone parade. Is fashion, at least as it is presented on the runway, really still doing this? The no-personality, samey-samey thing? Is it any wonder so many models have taken to Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and Tumblr to establish themselves as actual humans, with quirks, style, and interests all their own? No one should be the least bit surprised that Upton, who looks nothing like most models, has stormed the gates. The hunger for personality—for stars—in the modeling world is just that great. On the runway, the women are carrying Chanel bags covered with grafti, which puts me in mind of a time before the ubiquity of cell phones—the eighties—when the way for a model to become super was by dating a famous man (rock star, handsome actor) or by showing up at every A-list party and misbehaving. Or she could just be sassy and louche and say outrageous things to writers, like We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day, which, come to think of it, would have made the perfect tweet. Well under 140 characters, it was the 246

quote heard round the world. Evangelista, Campbell, and Turlington were household names back then—and they did it all without posting a single selfe. As the models make their laps, I grow distracted by the editor next to me, who is by now manipulating her phone with such intensity that she may as well be juggling chainsaws: Snap the look, type a description, post the look. Snap, type, post! Fully half of the faces in the front row are lit glow-stick blue from below by their iPads, which only heightens the sense that, like so many of us, the audience is torn between watching what’s happening right in front of them and participating in it in real-time, via their interweb machines. The next day I catch Marc Jacobs’s spooky-great farewell to Louis Vuitton, where he reprises the carousel staging from his spring 2012 collection. (Back then, Kate Moss was the last model to dismount her horse and stalk the circular runway. Today, it is Kate Upton who rides round and round, the cherry at the center, although she never gets of.) Seeing the carousel again, this time in all black, reminds me of something Jacobs said to me back then: “This merry-go-round idea is such a simple thought. It’s like, You get on it, it’s a pleasure, and it just kind of never ends—as long as you’re enjoying it.” The carousel—Planet Fashion—has been spinning at pretty much the same rate for as long as there have been Fashion Week schedules, which began in earnest by the 1930s. And while social media hasn’t sped up the wheel, exactly, it has caused the ride to be a lot more hectic. Snap, type, post! Once upon a time, Linda and Naomi could at least have a moment backstage after a show (and a glass of champagne and a cigarette) and share in the designer’s triumph: Genius! May-jah! Today, as Karlie Kloss puts it, models are required to be “almost like reporters,” documenting the scene with their iPhones. “Everything gets posted right away,” says Kloss, who has more than 700,000 followers on Instagram, where you might see her smiling in the Seahawks’ end zone during the Super Bowl or posing with Diane von Furstenberg after the designer’s fortiethanniversary-of-the-wrap-dress show. “You can post what’s happening before something even happens!” she adds. “When I was live-tweeting the Victoria’s Secret show, I think I gained 60,000 Instagram followers in a matter of hours. It’s shocking, the power of having a presence on these platforms.” Having a presence on these platforms may now be de rigueur, but, like the rest of us, most fashion designers did not immediately grasp the way social media were going to change everything. Prabal Gurung was an exception: He was one of the frst designers on Twitter, which really caught on shortly before his career began in 2009. Demi Moore, another early adopter of social media (thanks, no doubt, to her ex-husband the Twitter enthusiast Ashton Kutcher), wore one of Gurung’s dresses to her perfume launch in Paris. “In a tweet she said, ‘Wonderful young designer to look out for Prabal Gurung!’ ” he remembers. “I signed up just to say thank you, and I went from eighteen followers to 500. So I talked to my very small team. ‘There’s something here. We don’t have the budget for marketing or PR, but I think this is at our disposal.’ ” Four years later, when Gurung’s fall 2013 digital ad campaign featuring Bridget Hall was teased on Instagram in advance of his runway show, it sent a ripple through the fashion world. “It was just one piece at a time,” he says. “Twelve photos, and then fnally we showed her face.” Other blue-chip brands have been catching on. Oscar de la Renta also rolled out his fall

A I RP ORT: COU RTESY OF KAT E U PTO N / TW I T T ER . LOU I S VUI T TO N : C HP/ FA M EFLYNET PICTUR ES. MELBOUR NE CUP: COURTESY OF KATE UPTON/INSTAGRAM. SUP E R BOW L: COU RTESY OF KAT E U PTON . SO FT BA LL: C HRI ST I A N P E T E RS EN / © GETTY IMAGES. U.S. OPEN: COURTESY OF KAROLINA KUR KOVA/INSTAGRAM.

2013 campaign on Instagram, thanks largely to his senior vice president of global communications, Erika Bearman, a.k.a. @OscarPRGirl. “She started her Instagram account a long time ago,” says Sara Wilson, who oversees fashion companies and public fgures for both Instagram and Facebook. “She is the living, breathing embodiment of the Oscar lifestyle— but you also get this really amazing backstage view.” As Burberry’s Christopher Bailey, who’s celebrated for, among other things, the clever social-media spin he’s put on the classic English brand, points out, “Digital is part of the way we live, and it would be counterintuitive to pretend that it’s not— to do one thing in real life, and then have a business that didn’t refect that behavior.” For John Demsey, the group president at Estée Lauder Companies, it was Lady Gaga who t-t-t-telephoned with the wake-up call. Thanks to Gaga tweeting to her fans, MAC’s Viva Glam campaign raised $33 million for the company’s AIDS charity. “It was unprecedented,” Demsey says, which is why “today when we look to sign a modeling contract, it’s a prerequisite that our models are on social media.” Vicky Yang, who works for Elite, explains, “Brands are recognizing that models are the true middlemen between a young girl who might buy a bag and the brand itself. The models are communicating on social media: ‘Oh, I have this bag, and it’s cool.’ ” Given the frenzy around the possibilities of social media, models, and branding, it should come as no surprise that Demsey sounds positively Donald Trump–like in his enthusiasm about some big . . . news: In July, Kate Upton will follow Katie Holmes as the face of Bobbi Brown, a mash-up that he sees as near-perfect brand-to-celebrity synergy. Brown herself has a huge social-media following, a persona that is “earthy and no-nonsense,” says Demsey, and embraces “all shapes and sizes.” Likewise, Upton “has capitalized on the medium like no one has ever done before,” has a “big personality,” and is not “überthin.” He goes on, “She took a risk by putting herself out there in a fun, sexy way while always looking bombshell gorgeous and yet still somehow like the girl next door— we love the notion of Bobbi Brown and the Bombshell.” By the time I fnally catch up with the Bombshell again, it’s early December in Los Angeles. We meet at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and fnd a table in the lounge. It’s freakishly cold outside, so once again, Upton is all covered up: black Viktor & Rolf jacket, big scarf, leggings, and buckle-y black riding boots. You may not be able to tell from her Twitter feed, a high-low mix that occasionally veers dangerously close to soft-core, but social media’s favorite pinup girl used to be a serious equestrian, competing at a national level on the Paint Horse circuit. “It defnitely relates to what I’m doing now,” she says. “At a very young age I was traveling the country. It was our life. You have to be so dedicated. And that’s exactly what I did with modeling. I had a goal, and it’s a passion, and it’s become my life.” Thanks in large part to her canny use of social media, Upton, 21, is probably the closest thing that fashion has to a supermodel right now, and she’s done it with her own distinct body type and in her own distinct way. Though she’d signed with Elite at ffteen and made a splash in Sports Illustrated, it wasn’t—as everyone knows by now—until dippy videos appeared on YouTube of her doing the Dougie and the Cat Daddy that she truly became a sensation. (“A booby-star,” as a friend of mine likes to say.) When I ask about her unusual route to the top of the fashion heap, she insists that it was

TOP FLIGHT

above: Upton posted this

photograph of herself at an airport, 2012. right: Backstage at Marc Jacobs’s final show for Louis Vuitton at the Cour Carrée du Louvre in Paris, October 2013.

WINNING SHOTS left: With Coco Rocha at the 2013 Melbourne Cup. above: A candid from Upton’s Super Bowl photo diary for Vogue.com.

AMERICAN GIRL left: At a 2011 celebrity softball game. above: With Karolina Kurkova at last year’s U.S. Open.

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not calculated. “I had no clue,” she says. “I wasn’t the target audience. I grew up in Florida, where you walk around in fipfops and jean shorts. I didn’t know the fashion world. It really happened in an organic way, wanting to do jobs that I loved.” Given her 1.26 million Twitter followers, I had assumed that Upton had been a kid who always had a phone in her hand. “Who would I call?” she says. “I was out at the barn every day. I barely watched TV. People think I am an expert on social media, but I am still trying to fgure it out, too. How much do you want to put yourself out there?” She lets out a honk. “Well, I am out there. There’s no turning back for me.” Upton sometimes worries that one of the things that made her a star—her refreshingly unfiltered voice on Twitter— is being compromised by the success that her social-media persona has brought her, especially now that she is about to become the face of a major cosmetics brand. “Now I overthink it. Like, ‘Ugh, are people going to understand this joke?’ Before, I had no flter because I had, like, 100 followers.” From her self-deprecating humor to her game-for-anything spirit, Upton radiates an authenticity that has clearly struck a nerve. Despite the fact that she was raised in Florida and now has an apartment in New York, she has a very pronounced Midwestern aspect—that “nice” thing. Sure enough, her big extended family all now live in the same neighborhood in the same town in Michigan. Kate’s uncle, Fred Upton, a Republican congressman, lives next door to her parents, Jef and Shelley. It’s hard not to think about all of that when one watches some of her more notorious YouTube videos, not least of all the banned Carl’s Jr. ad in which she appears to be making love to an extra-spicy patty melt. When I ask her point-blank how Jef and Shelley feel about that stuf, she stammers for a bit. “Hold on, let me think,” she says. “Well, they never sit there and say, ‘Why did you do that?’ Because I always talk about things with them before I take a job. I don’t really ask for their permission.” She laughs. “But I will say, ‘I really want to do this.’ And they understand. It’s just part of my personality, and maybe some things I took too far, but . . . I like being sexy.” Is there anything she won’t do? “Yes, I defnitely have limits. But I never like to say never because I feel like I’m setting myself up. There’s a line between becoming, you know, a little cheap and cheesy versus being sexy. And I try to be very careful of that line.” Historically this hasn’t been an easy thing to pull of. Earlier we had walked by the famously weird statue of Marilyn Monroe outside the hotel in which she is shown at the peak of her wily-airhead-bombshell glory. I bring it up to Upton and suggest that, as a culture, we are still puzzling over whether or not it was Monroe’s volcanic sexuality that destroyed her— and if, as consumers of it, we were complicit. Upton leans in and looks me square in the eye: “Maybe it was drugs and alcohol that destroyed her. Maybe having no family support destroyed her.” She leans back. “What I try to do—and it took me a little while to learn—is to only do things I really believe in so that it’s more of a collaboration. That way, I’m not pretending to be someone I’m not. I’m not putting out this, Look at me! I’m sexy! and then feeling like a fake, which would lead to feeling depressed and empty inside.” Making a movie that trades of her smokin’-hot goofness would certainly appear to be a sign that, having conquered media old and new, Upton is ready to take her career to the next level. She’s had cameos in a couple of small flms, but later this month, she will star in the Nick Cassavetes comedy The 248

Other Woman, alongside Cameron Diaz and Leslie Mann, in which all three women discover they are being cheated on by the same man and plot revenge against him. When I saw the trailer in a packed theater over the holidays, the air got sucked out of the room as Upton, in a bikini, came bouncing down the beach in slow motion. It’s not exactly the role of a lifetime— more Bo Derek in 10 than Cher in Silkwood—but it’s a start. After all, Monroe had to take a lot of laughing-at-me-not-withme dumb-blonde parts before she got to Some Like It Hot.

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et’s admit it: Not everyone can be Kate Upton. So many of the girls who go into modeling are plucked from obscurity when they are very young, and most of them never make it anywhere near the top. As Elite’s Vicky Yang put it to me, “I think she’s an outlier. The group you are interviewing are 0.1 percent of the business.” Having written about the supermodels in the early nineties and then having looked at the industry again in 2007, I have sometimes worried that modeling was turning into a glamorous form of indentured servitude, with so many nameless, faceless women from the Czech Republic or southern Brazil walking show after show, with no real role other than to look exactly the same: mannequins, the worst cliché of the business. For models these days, social media ofer the promise of a diferent kind of career: one that is more connected, more fulflling, and, if they are lucky (and want it), lasts longer than three or four years. And while there’s nothing surprising about the fact that this new crop feels comfortable on social media—they are part of the generation that’s grown up on them—it still takes a certain mastery of the form (your own jargon, an irresistible personality) to really stand out. Even then, the top models might have only one million followers, as opposed to the tens of millions that actors and pop stars have. In the wake of Kate Upton’s social-media-fueled rise, models are grappling with exactly how to present themselves. “It’s a really interesting opportunity for them,” says Lara Cohen, Twitter’s head of TV and flm talent, “because it gives them a voice and makes them more three-dimensional. There’s no shortage of pictures of Coco Rocha out there, but to know that she likes watching New Girl humanizes her.” Everyone agrees that Rocha was the first high-fashion model to embrace social media across every platform. And you can tell from one look at her constantly updated Tumblr or Instagram feed that she unequivocally loves it. So does Liu Wen. “It’s just part of my life,” she says. Liu is not only China’s first supermodel, she is America’s first Chinese supermodel—the frst Chinese woman to walk the Victoria’s Secret runway, the first to become a global face of Estée Lauder, and also, along with Kloss, the current face of Coach. With 6.8 million followers on Weibo (China’s answer to Twitter), Liu also has, by far, the biggest social-media audience of any model—and, perhaps uncoincidentally, she seems to be the least conficted about it: “Before, on Instagram, only a thousand people like me. Right now it’s 280,000. I am very happy about that. Chinese people have a word. We say, Not you happy—you have to make everyone happy. To share the happy. That is very important.” Not every model fnds it so simple. Perhaps the most indemand model in the world, Joan Smalls is ranked number one on models.com but had only 170,000 Instagram followers

when I met her in Paris at Hôtel Costes during Fashion Week. Many of her adoring fans have no idea that she is Puerto Rican, the daughter of an accountant and a social worker who grew up in rural Hatillo. Smalls, wearing a camoufage button-down, a black trucker’s cap, supertight jeans, and a pair of boyish Céline shoes, tells me she is determined to change all of that with her presence on social media (and in fact her number of followers has since grown to more than 340,000). Like most of the models I spoke with, she resisted Twitter at frst. “Some people are so good at it, and I kind of envy that,” she says. “How are you so cheeky?” It is true that Twitter is not for the faint of heart—or the less verbally inclined. “There’s a reason why comedians and musicians have been the early adopters,” says Cohen. “They’re the ones who are most comfortable in front of an open microphone, which is basically what Twitter is.” Putting yourself out there as a model now means exposing yourself to an unprecedented level of scrutiny and criticism. Many models no longer read the comments on their feeds. And can you blame them? Scroll through and see if you feel better about humanity. “You have to kind of detach from what people think of you,” says Smalls, “because sometimes it’s just too hurtful. Opinions are like belly buttons: Everybody has one.” Especially when it comes to in-your-face sexuality. If Upton is a potent reminder that Sex Still Sells, not every model feels entirely comfortable with that equation. “You see some models’ profles and what they post,” says Smalls, “and it can

has completely transformed our experience of Fashion. As Zac Posen says, “I think the big transition started almost a decade ago, with the realization that fashion had gone beyond the industry and had become fashion-tainment.” Posen, of course, is a judge on Project Runway, a show whose success has served to point out that, surprisingly enough, untold millions are fascinated by how dresses are made—and how someone from Kalamazoo gets to Fashion Week. Last fall, things felt palpably diferent at New York Fashion Week by virtue of the fact that a giant screen at the tents at Lincoln Center “surfaced beautiful Instagram images from across the city,” says Instagram and Facebook’s Wilson, who is part of a whole new cadre of tech-savvy fashion people who make the rounds during the shows interfacing with brands, bloggers, and models. “The idea was to bring what was happening inside the tents, these rarefed places of fashion, outside to the public and vice versa. It was like this giant beautiful feedback loop.” The Instagram screen at Lincoln Center during Fashion Week this February was 27 feet wide. Along with lifting the curtain on fashion, social media have fundamentally altered its process. Jason Wu cast Christy Turlington in his last campaign after “getting to know her” on Instagram. They didn’t actually meet in the fesh until the day of the shoot. “She’s the kind of model I’m attracted to,” he says, “women who have a story behind them. It brings something to the clothes.” Designers are also responding to social media as a source of inspiration—Instamuse! “You see things

“NOW I OVERTHINK IT,”ADMITS UPTON.“BEFORE, I HAD NO FILTER BECAUSE I HAD 100 FOLLOWERS” be oversexualized to get more followers—and more jobs. I’m like, Now, was that necessary?” Thanks to social media, models have a whole new set of lines to draw. “I will do topless in pictures but not topless in video,” says Smalls. She gestures toward her breasts and mentions the ever-popular GIF memes. “I do not want to see these in motion!” But video is now often part of the fashion picture, literally. As Stuart Vevers, who recently left Loewe to be executive creative director at Coach, explains, social media has allowed for “campaigns to be much more 360,” he says. “It’s important now to tell a story, whether it’s with video or a hashtag or an Instagram post.” Models are often the lead characters in these stories. To tell their own stories, Instagram really has become the Twitter feed for those who prefer to say it with pictures. So whether it’s Cara Delevingne showcasing her new grillz and posting fifteen-second videos of herself partying on New Year’s Eve with Rihanna, Karlie Kloss and her boyfriend visiting shrines in Myanmar, or Joan Smalls relaxing with her mother in Puerto Rico, Instagram ofers a glimpse of these models’ peripatetic lives—and a hit of the voyeuristic thrill that is the strange pleasure of social media. “I follow all these girls,” says Prabal Gurung, “and when you see them together backstage or at an after-party, it brings you back to that glamorous world of fashion.” There’s no such thing as living in the moment anymore. Thanks to social media, every event, from the Super Bowl to the State of the Union, from the Olympics to your best friend’s wedding, now happens in real time and “real” time. It certainly

that you wouldn’t have been privy to before,” Wu says. “It’s like you get to fip through everyone’s photo albums constantly.” All of these mid-career designers are having to adapt, learning by necessity to work with the tools of this new era. “When I was younger, the only thing I went to were magazines,” says Thakoon Panichgul. “I’d go through them and see these beautiful images from Bruce Weber or Avedon. But the way that I absorb information now is through Instagram. And that is sort of translating to the way that I’m designing. The clothes are a bit more refective of that attitude of the street because of it.” There’s no doubt that social media have opened fashion up to new infuences—and infuencers, as stylish people are now called. But do selfes sell clothes? So far, the answer seems to be, not so much. Last August, the social media–news Web site Mashable posted a piece with the headline social media fails to drive sales for fashion brands. now what? Based on a study of nearly 250 “prestige” fashion brands over the last four years, the article revealed abysmal numbers: “Less than 0.25 percent of new customers have been acquired through Facebook and less than 0.01 percent from Twitter.” How to monetize fashion content on social media is a big topic these days at all the social-media platforms, where fashion represents no small percentage of their content. Of the more than 170 million blogs on Tumblr, for instance, posts tagged #fashion have generated 23.7 million notes in a single month. But so far, no one seems to have found an exact correlation between chatter and sales. As Twitter’s Cohen tells me, there’s a lot of talk around the halls about “what tweeting signifes in terms of ‘intent to buy.’ ” C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 8 4 249

AHEAD OF THE CURVE “There’s a line between becoming cheesy versus being sexy,” says Upton. “And I try to be very careful of that line.” Donna Karan New York terra-cotta silk halter dress. Robert Lee Morris cuff.

SHADOW DANCE Upton wears a Stella McCartney azure-blue jersey dress. In this story: hair, Christiaan; makeup, Yadim. Produced by Suzy Kang for GE Projects. Set design, Jack Flanagan for the Magnet Agency. Details, see In This Issue.

POWER PLAYER

For Annie Thorisdottir, the fittest woman on the planet, working out means pushing her body to the outer limits of performance— and crushing it. By Adam Green. Photographed by Bruce Weber.

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f you were to search a collection of stock images for the words women and exercise, you’d end up staring at a lot of willowy young moms standing in tree pose and skinny aerobics instructors brandishing pastel-colored dumbbells. Earlier this year, though, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s nonproft LeanIn.Org foundation teamed with Getty Images to create a collection of photos that portray women in a more empowering light. The athletes it depicts have actual, visible muscles, which they can be seen putting to use in pictures with such descriptions as “Woman pressing barbell overhead in CrossFit gym,” “Woman climbing rope in CrossFit gym,” and “Smiling group of friends working out in CrossFit gym.” CrossFit—the high-intensity workout that, depending on whom you ask, will either turn you into a superhuman or leave you in pieces—has clearly reached a tipping point as more and more women embrace its credo that, as one ofcially branded T-shirt puts it, “strength is beautiful.” But stock images are one thing. The face—and body—of that emerging paradigm belongs to Annie Thorisdottir, a 24-year-old Iceland native and two-time CrossFit Games champion who, after being sidelined by an injury last year, is returning to competition to try and reclaim her title as the fttest woman on Earth. That last name translates as “Thor’s daughter,” and one look at her as she goes through her paces in front of a crowd of buf hipsters in a Brooklyn gym last spring makes the connection to the hammer-wielding Norse god clear: the long, strawberryblonde hair; the ice-blue, almond-shaped eyes; and the complexion glowing with rude health, not to mention broad shoulders, powerful thighs, and take-no-prisoners abs. It’s a body built by (and for) hoisting barbells, fipping tractor tires, hauling sandbags, running, rowing, and, yes, swinging hammers. Thorisdottir is currently dominating, with relentless effciency, in a ten-minute contest of presses, dead lifts, and box jumps, against the American Lindsey Valenzuela (who will go on to fnish second at the 2013 Games). “CrossFit is about living a healthy life and fnding new ways to challenge myself,” Thorisdottir says, dressed for battle in a white tank top, tiny red shorts, and striped knee socks. “How can I push myself to fnd out what my body’s capable of? Where can it take me?”

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So far, it’s helped make her (along with the three-time men’s champion Rich Froning, a former frefghter from Tennessee) CrossFit’s frst real star, winning her endorsements from such brands as Reebok. The company has sent her around the world as an ambassador, added “Annie” sneakers and T-shirts to its line of apparel, and introduced her to a wider audience in a TV spot that shows her going head-to-head in the gym with former NFL wide receiver Chad Johnson. The CrossFit recipe was frst cooked up in the mid-nineties in a small gym in Santa Cruz, California, where an iconoclastic personal trainer named Greg Glassman tortured his clients with medieval workouts that combined weightlifting, gymnastics, and calisthenics. From the start, Glassman’s classes were equally divided between men and women—a ratio that’s held as CrossFit has exploded from a cultish regimen with a handful of afliate gyms (known as boxes) to a global phenomenon with more than 9,000 boxes worldwide. Along the way, it’s evolved into a competitive sport with an annual gladiatorial contest, the CrossFit Games, which ofers $275,000 to its champions along with those fttest-on-the-planet titles. Though Thorisdottir now lives and trains in Reykjavík, she spent the frst six years of her life in Vík í Mýrdal, a tiny coastal village two-and-a-half-hours southeast of the capital, and she learned how to navigate the world on its Viking-like terrain. She continues to be drawn to the outdoors (when it’s warm, she runs in the Esjan mountain range, which broods over Reykjavík from across the bay), particularly to spots where nature is at its most intense—Vík í Mýrdal’s wave-lashed black-sand beach, the breathtaking Gullfoss (Golden Falls). When the ice-capped volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in the spring of 2010, she and her family made a pilgrimage. “It’s insane how much power is in this earth, and you feel so close to it here,” she says. “It fows through you.” When I visit Thorisdottir in Reykjavík just before Christmas, she invites me to her parents’ house for a dinner party that includes her two older brothers and their wives and kids. The decor is Scandinavian modern meets ski lodge, replete with a rack of reindeer antlers mounted on the wall—a trophy from one of her father’s hunting expeditions. It is a strapping, healthy-looking clan, and I’m not surprised to learn that the entire assembled throng is devoted to CrossFit.

ROCK HARD Thorisdottir trains twice a day, with sessions lasting anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours. American Apparel sports bra and shorts. Reebok CrossFit sneakers. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Sara Moonves.

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oday she spends most of her time at the gym she co-owns, CrossFit Reykjavík, whose airplane hangar–size training foor is stocked with the tools of her trade— barbells, kettlebells, gymnastics rings, plyometric boxes, medicine balls, rowing ergometers. She trains for 90 minutes to two hours twice a day, five or six days a week, devoting morning sessions to metabolic conditioning and afternoons to strength, with a lot of mobility work and Instagram posts in between. (She also coaches three or four CrossFit classes a day.) Thorisdottir fuels all this activity with a Paleo-ish diet heavy on meat, chicken, fsh, and vegetables (but free of rice, bread, pasta, potatoes, and sugar), along with a lot of non-Paleo dairy (she needs the calories). She drinks alcohol only two or three times a year but treats herself to a cheat night of ice cream and chocolate cake every Saturday. Thorisdottir’s favorite training partner is her boyfriend, Frederik Aegidius, a 26-year-old biotechnology and business student from Denmark who also happens to be Europe’s top-ranked male CrossFit athlete. (They won their respective divisions at the Dubai Fitness Championship last fall, cementing their standing as CrossFit’s First Couple.) When I ask Aegidius how they met, he tells me that a female friend of his—as a joke—told him she’d found the perfect girl for him and then showed him a picture of Thorisdottir performing a dead lift at the 2009 Games. Thorisdottir covers her eyes. “I was pulling on the bar, and it made me look like I had this insane six-pack,” she says. “And Frederik looked at it and said, ‘I don’t know. . . .’ ” I point out that it probably didn’t help that the face one makes while hoisting a barbell loaded with a few hundred pounds is not one you’d put forward on, say, a dating profle. “Annie never makes a face,” Aegidius says. She also rarely wears anything but workout clothes. Thorisdottir swears she loves dressing up—and says that she’s come to learn what’s fattering to her body (sleeveless dresses that are clingy and low-cut) and what’s not (shirts too short to cover her midrif). And the Reebok Nanos on her feet notwithstanding, she’s got a thing for a diferent kind of high-performance shoe. “As a treat for winning the 2012 Games, I bought myself two pairs of heels—one Valentino and one Prada,” she says. As a child, Thorisdottir practiced gymnastics and made the national team before quitting at age ffteen because, as she puts it, “I knew that I would never be the best in the world.” She took up ballet, studying at the Icelandic Ballet School until one day in class when she caught a glimpse of her broad shoulders in the mirror and realized, she says, “this wasn’t the body of a ballerina.” Next she tried pole vaulting and became the national champion for two years running, with an eye on the 2012 Olympics. In the end, though, she decided “it was too much of one thing, over and over.”

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At a boot camp–style exercise class, she caught the eye of her instructor, Evert Víglundsson, a former soccer player and ballroom dancer who saw something in her immediately. “The efciency of her movement was just amazing— nothing wasted, no struggle,” he recalls. Víglundsson, who had recently discovered CrossFit, encouraged her to enter the upcoming CrossFit regionals, where, he says, “she absolutely crushed it,” winning herself a spot at the 2009 Games in Aromas, California. Thorisdottir, who would soon become known on the circuit as the indomitable “Iceland Annie,” worked her way up to winning frst place in the 2011 Games, and did it again in 2012. But a few months later she severely injured herself lifting weights. She had just set a personal record of nearly 285 pounds for her back squat and, as she puts it, “got greedy,” moving on to dead lifts without an adequate warm-up. “I could feel something moving in my back, and right away I knew that this was bad,” she says. When she collapsed to the foor and couldn’t move her legs, she started to panic. The pain was so intense that it took paramedics more than an hour to get her into an ambulance. An MRI revealed that she had a bulging disc in her back, and she spent the next week in bed on painkillers, crying. Within six weeks, though, she started rehab and returned to the gym; two months after that, she was competing in the CrossFit Open. But then she reinjured her back, this time causing nerve damage that rendered her left leg numb for months, forcing her to sit out the Games. While recovering, Thorisdottir found a pair of physical therapists in London who taught her a series of exercises designed to help nerves work more freely. Under the supervision of her coaches, she slowly returned to lifting light weights, focusing on proper form and incorporating exercises to strengthen the attachment of her core muscles to her spine. By the time I see her work out in Reykjavík, she is executing heavy snatches and thrusters with a well-oiled precision, power, and grace that she makes look efortless. Now, with little more than three months until the July Games in Carson, California, Thorisdottir can cleanand-jerk 210 pounds and is back to heavy dead lifts. “My legs are getting stronger really fast,” she says. “She doesn’t relax,” says Carl Paoli, Thorisdottir’s current gymnastics guru. “She thrives under pressure. When you take her to the edge where she’s about to break, she will turn around, look at you, and say, ‘Watch me do this.’ And she gets it done.” If Thorisdottir manages to get it done at this summer’s Games, it will mean another big payday, along with bragging rights as the frst three-time women’s champ. The renewed exposure will also give her the leverage to expand her roster of sponsorships beyond the realm of protein powders, knee braces, and CrossFit gear. That’s not what’s driving her, though. Looking back on the frst days after her injury, she remembers how vulnerable and helpless she felt, scared that she might never walk, much less compete, again. “Of course I want to win the Games, but I want to do it to show people that if there’s something you want, no matter what happens, you can fnd a way to do it—if there’s an obstacle in your way, you have to fgure out how to get over it.” She also wants to inspire women, especially young girls, to focus more on what their bodies can do than on how they look. “I’m not preaching that everyone should try to become a CrossFit champion,” she says. “But I want to show them that training can give them more confdence—and that being strong is beautiful.” @

BRUC E W EB ER ( 7 ) . P RO DUC E D BY DAW N BO LL ER FO R LI T T LE BE A R. P RO DUCTI O N D ESIGN, D IMITR I LEVAS.

By her family’s account, Thorisdottir showed signs of being a natural athlete when she was still in diapers, scudding across the foor on her backside instead of crawling. (“It was faster,” she explains.) Soon she was swinging from tabletops, climbing kitchen cabinets, and beating her brothers and cousins in pullup competitions arranged by her grandfather, once receiving a prize of the Icelandic equivalent of $27—a dollar for each pull-up. “If there was a challenge, especially one with a reward, I had to win it,” Thorisdottir says.

BUDDY SYSTEM “I usually just train with guys,” she says. “I’m not a big fan of training with other girls, for some reason.”

TRAIN. WIN. SMILE. REPEAT. Jason Wu sequined dress. below: American Apparel bra and shorts.

PALEO POWER “I eat very little processed food. A lot of meat, a lot of chicken, a lot of vegetables.” Shirt and hat from Western Costume Company. Ralph Lauren Black Label pants.

BALANCING ACT Thorisdottir took up ballet for a time, studying at the Icelandic Ballet School. Chanel bikini. far right: Reebok CrossFit bra. Rag & Bone track pants. In this story: hair, Gerald DeCock for Living Proof; makeup, Regine Thorre. Photographed at CrossFit Fort Lauderdale, the PlayGround Gym. Details, see In This Issue.

The Natural

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ichelle Williams may be a movie star, but she got her start on the boards with a San Diego youth theater, appearing in The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, and Sleeping Beauty. At ten, she performed a solo turn in a show-tune revue, taking center stage to belt the defiant title anthem from Cabaret, the 1966 musical about nightlife and Nazism in Weimar Berlin. “I’ve thankfully blocked out most of the details,” Williams says now, “but I do remember that I sang a very cheery version of the song—and that I wore a sequined tuxedo jacket.” Some 23 years later, the Oscar-nominated star of Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine, and My Week with Marilyn is getting another crack at the number—minus the sequins—as she makes her Broadway debut in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival. Which is why a recent afternoon fnds her in a Times Square rehearsal studio running through “Don’t Tell Mama,” one of the many gems from Kander and Ebb’s mordantly jazzy score. Sitting next to an upright piano and wearing a pointy wool cap, a slouchy T-shirt, patterned leggings, and T-strap Capezios, Williams looks more like a hipster elf turned chorus girl than one of the most radiantly beautiful and gifted screen actresses of our time. But she’s clearly in her element. “I love this room—I love that it has no mirrors, and I love the lack of self-consciousness that lives in it,” she says. “I imagine a sign over the door that says, mistakes are made here. With movies, each day you carve something in stone. This is a changing, moving, breathing thing that nobody can pin you to—and that’s a new sensation for me.” Newness is precisely what Williams brings to this Cabaret, a re-creation of Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall’s Tony-winning 1998 revival, with Alan Cumming reprising his lascivious and sinister turn as the epicene Emcee, who bids us “Willkommen,” and Studio 54 once again standing in for the seedy Kit Kat Klub, a symbol of the frenzied decadence that eased the way for Germany’s descent into madness. Williams’s acting is marked both by its invisibility and by the almost reckless courage with which she inhabits woundedness. It’s hard to imagine anyone bringing a fresher, more penetrating take to Sally Bowles, a wayward English songbird with a bruised spirit who takes up with a bisexual American writer (Bill Heck) and ruins everything. “She has a vulnerability and fragility—but also a kind of steeliness—that I fnd fascinating,” says Cumming of his costar. “She’s always completely in the moment, and because of that you believe every word that comes out of her mouth.” Though it’s a role that’s already been claimed by Liza

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Minnelli (who won an Oscar as Sally in Bob Fosse’s 1972 flm version) and reinvented by Natasha Richardson (who won a Tony for her heartbreaking performance in the earlier revival), Williams is undaunted. “A friend told me that when Natasha was debating whether or not to do this role, her mother said, ‘Darling, when they ask you to play Sally Bowles, you play Sally Bowles,’ ” she says. “So I pretended that Vanessa Redgrave was my mother and followed her advice—who knows when the chance will come around again?” Famous for her obsessive preparation, Williams spent four months before rehearsals working daily with singing and dancing coaches and immersing herself in the late-1920s world of Christopher Isherwood, whose Berlin Stories (along with John Van Druten’s stage adaptation I Am a Camera) inspired the musical. She also studied performance footage of such chanteuses as Marlene Dietrich and Anita Berber and spent a couple of days in Berlin walking the same streets of the Schöneberg that Isherwood haunted, snapping iPhone pics of the apartments where he lived with Jean Ross (his model for Sally Bowles) and spending evenings at Weimar-era dance halls and cabarets populated by aging strippers. “Berlin was the epicenter of sexual freedom,” Williams says. “Everything was permitted, all kinds were allowed—and I’m sure they were having a really great time before evil took root.” Though loath to pin down the essence of her elusive character, Williams does allow that she’s caught a few glimmers. “She decides she’s going to be billed as ‘The Toast of Mayfair,’ ” Williams says. “That’s what’s going to separate her from the other girls, make her special. It suggests talent, success, elegance. But she’s really just a few steps up from a call girl.” If Sally’s self-deception makes her tragic, her willful blindness to the wider world makes her a symptom of something far worse. “She’s somebody who won’t look past herself,” Williams explains. “As she famously says in the play, ‘Politics? But what has that to do with us?’ At the end, she’s alone, singing onstage while the city burns around her, still waiting to become a star.” Williams reconnected with her inner showgirl while rehearsing and flming a song medley for My Week with Marilyn and has been keeping her eye out for a musical ever since. “Singing and dancing take you out of your head—you’re too busy doing too many other things to be thinking, How am I doing? You’re just doing. It’s like meditation. When Cabaret came along, with these gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous songs—they’re so simple, but they tap into something deep and emotional—I knew that I wanted to follow that thing I tasted a few years ago.” And how’s that working out? “I haven’t been confronted with the nerves yet, so now the singing is just pure joy,” she says. “Honestly, it feels like being a kid. Now let’s see if I can be a kid onstage eight times a week.”—adam green

P RO DUCTI O N D ESI G N , P I E RS H A NM ER

Michelle Williams makes her long-awaited return to the stage in a new Broadway revival of Cabaret. Photographed by Craig McDean.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT Williams, between rehearsals, in a Cadolle bustier. Velvet coat from New York Vintage Inc. VBH ring with black diamonds. Boots from Early Halloween, NYC. Hair, Orlando Pita for Orlo Salon; makeup, Angela Levin for Chanel Beauté. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Phyllis Posnick.

THIS SIDE OF

PARADISE Designer Celerie Kemble has fashioned herself a family home– meets–beachside colony along a wild stretch of coast in the Dominican Republic. By Rob Haskell. Photographed by François Halard.

LION’S SHARE A central clubhouse anchors the property, which comprises the Kemble-Curry home as well as an ensemble of bungalows. The pool is edged in limestone and lined with tiles by Dan Droney. Sittings Editor: Miranda Brooks.

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ust before midnight, a 40-foot container arrives at a vast warehouse in Río San Juan, on the northern edge of the Dominican Republic. Its contents might best be described as Celeriana: Victorian wicker chairs with riotous fligree, tufted and tasseled ceramic garden stools, mirrors girded in oyster-shell mosaics, and other totems of genteel dilapidation that number among Celerie Kemble’s cherished possessions. By morning, Celerie herself, a New York decorator by way of Palm Beach, arrives to sift through it all, in a salmon-colored sundress and matching Havaianas, her hair wild from salt spray. At the sight of a needlepoint footstool sewn by her grandmother, her eyes glisten—ready tears are a Kemble family trait—and then she laughs. “This is not sadness,” she clarifes. “It’s sentiment.” Back at the beach, she has a new family bungalow to decorate in preparation for the arrival of her husband, three children, and assorted friends for a house party. A cantaloupe-colored Turkish rug fnds its way to a sitting room, along with a mirror upholstered in zebra skin, a pair of tole lamps, and a daybed topped by a wicker pagoda. Outside, a menagerie of faux-bois animals scatters over the lawn, which rolls right up to the sand. The house itself sits in what was once a dense jungle of sea grapes, orchids, elephant’s ears, and tall grayumbo trees (said to be able to forecast the weather by turning their giant leaves upside down just before it rains). It’s a crisp, gingerbready affair with a strong whif of the Antilles: The white clapboard is made from reclaimed tabla de palma, the wood of the royal palm tree, and the elaborate latticework is a hallmark of traditional Dominican architecture. Here it’s called tragaluz, which translates to “swallow the light,” though in fact these cheerful traceries scatter the sun’s rays to create astounding dappled efects on the walls and ceilings. Celerie gave her bungalow three gables in homage to the Palm Beach house that belonged to her great-great-grandfather Henry Maddock, one of that town’s earliest settlers. The peach–and–pale turquoise trim, meanwhile, recalls the Bermuda cottage of her grandmother, “an accomplished barefoot golfer and drinker,” says Celerie. That WASP world of broad porches, rusting white metal furniture, an excess of smoking accoutrements, and everything painted the color of sun-faded bathing suits permeates the atmosphere of this Dominican playground. Ten years ago, a friend from Santo Domingo called to tell Celerie and her fnancier husband, Boykin Curry, about an extraordinary opportunity: more than 2,000 acres of forest, bluff, and virgin sand where the Atlantic churns up threemeter waves and humpback whales convene for their annual conjugal visits. The government had put the land up for sale after abandoning plans for three 300-room hotels. Curry few down immediately, and two weeks later the couple and about 20 friends—from Moby to Mariska Hargitay, Richard Meier, and Charlie Rose—owned it all. “It must have looked really bad,” Celerie says now. “Investor husband and his wife who thinks she’s a decorator, inficting themselves in every predictable and tragic way on something pristine.” In the ensuing years, a few of those early investors decamped for vacation houses more proximal and less inchoate. Meanwhile, the couple forged ahead on their own home, which Celerie designed on a series of paper napkins. The family few down from New York for every New Year’s Eve, renting houses, throwing pig roasts on the beach, and bringing freworks 260

WILD AT HEART from left: Rascal, Wick, Zinnia, and Celerie (in Oscar de la Renta) navigate a mangrove-lined river near their home. PATTERN RECOGNITION Intricate latticework in the clubhouse’s bar, by Elric Endersby, echoes a floor of Dominican tile.

JUST KIDS Local surf star—and the family’s instructor—Eric Osterlund (left) plays with Wick (center) and family friend Joaquin.

SOMETHING BLUE Celerie and her children explore a coral island near Río San Juan.

I N T HI S STO RY: HA I R A N D M A KEUP, STACI CH I LD FO R CH A NE L B EAU T É. D E TA I LS, S E E I N T HI S I SSUE .

NEW SPIN The clubhouse library features palms of copper as well as a miniature nineteenth-century French carousel.

displays to the neighboring town square. They returned for every Carnaval, where soon they were judging the beauty pageant. Together with the rest of the investors, they established a road race, an art fair, a library, and a Montessori school. “We never wanted this to become paradise-comma-anywhere,” Celerie explains. “We wanted to feel like we were a part of the actual Dominican Republic, not just a beach at the edge of it.” WATER BABIES Zinnia and Wick soak in the Kemble-Currys’ oversize copper tub beneath an assortment of palm leaves.

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he metamorphosis of Playa Grande, as the beach has long been known, has been marked by near misses and happy accidents. There was the time when Bronson van Wyck, the über–event planner and Celerie’s best friend from their Groton days, took a horseback ride through the hills with Richard Meier. The intrepid septuagenarian architect scarcely noticed the edge of a clif through the foliage, and it was only by grabbing Meier’s belt and a vine that Bronson was able to save man and horse. Then there was the discovery of an ancient Taíno Indian village. Boykin and his friends funded an archaeological dig, which yielded jadeite arrowheads, tools carved from manatee bones, and a coin bearing the name of Queen Isabella I. Minted in Seville at the request of early Spanish explorers, it is believed to be the frst currency in the New World. While most of the Playa Grande shareholders have yet to get started on houses, a few, including Charlie Rose and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, told Celerie to do for them whatever she wished. The result is a cluster of cottages surrounding a sort of clubhouse where everyone can meet for lunch, a card game, a glass of wine, or a coconut stabbed with a straw. The club’s main pavilion contains a soaring great room with aqua-colored rafters and Dominican tile foors. A couple of vintage gessoed Italian chairs bought from the aristocratic antiquary Sybil de 262

Bourbon Parme, their legs studded with seashells, fank the console, while staghorn ferns and oxidized iron mirrors adorn the walls. Celerie commissioned a series of whimsical copper chandeliers from a local artisan, inspired by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka’s glass fowers in the Harvard Museum of Natural History. “They’re some of my favorite objects in the world,” she says, “sort of at the junction where jellyfsh meet fowers.” Next door, a chocolate-mint-toned library houses volumes running the gamut from Welcome to Your Facelift to a biography of Tolstoy. And an upstairs lounge ofers an ecstatic survey of the fbrous: chairs shaped like jai alai baskets, a woven-cane backgammon table, and a pair of rattan sofas that Celerie says may or may not be 1970s Gabriella Crespi (she doesn’t mind a knockof). A tramp-art cigarette table made from Labatt’s bottle caps is next to one sofa, and a taxidermied toucan sits under a cloche on the bar. On the walls hang outrageous papier-mâché Carnaval masks made by local teenagers. Celerie cautions housekeepers against polishing the verdigris of the copper and intercepts gardeners as they try to cut back grass between the fagstones. “Perfection, I think, makes people uncomfortable,” she says. It’s among the lessons she learned from the Palm Beach house of her childhood, a deconsecrated 1894 church that her mother, the decorator Mimi McMakin, filled with 1930s gambling tables, ten-foot-tall fringed umbrellas, and giant sisal rugs painted to look like Aubussons. Celerie—a name her mother invented one afternoon at Squam Lake in New Hampshire while eight months pregnant—spent her early years tagging along to fea markets and auctions. “My own career was an accident,” she explains. “I grew up totally unaware that there was a part of me that could only get fulfllment the same way.” Celerie and her mother are now partners in Kemble Interiors (with an illustrious client roster, as well as lines of furniture, accessories, rugs, fabric, and wallcoverings), and Celerie wonders if her six-year-old daughter, Zinnia, will catch the design bug, if she ever tires of catching lizards. For the Kemble-Currys’ children, visits to the Dominican Republic promise seemingly infnite adventure. Directly in front of the cottages, the ocean holds sunken cannons and the wreck of a French slave ship, while a concrete submarine station sits only a few meters to the west. Ravenel Boykin Curry V, age seven and better known as Rascal, is rarely anywhere but climbing almond trees, while Zinnia waits to receive gifts of tarantulas, land crabs, and brilliant green snakes trapped for her in the hills by groundskeepers. Three-year-old Wick, the Kemble-Currys’ younger son, is learning to face his fear of tide pools. (They call him the sand fea.) To friends who weren’t sure whether the Kemble-Currys would ever get running water, the assembled buildings argue eloquently for the power of persistence. “What Celerie has made here—it’s like the most wonderful thing from your childhood, and you wouldn’t know what to call it, and if you tried to create it you couldn’t, but she has,” says Van Wyck, who plans to put up a surf shack on the parcel he owns up the beach. Though the place seems designed for the making of new memories, its nostalgic treasures provide a stay against the modernizing of things. Time passes, yes, but it should be marked. At the end of another day spent rearranging furniture and tweaking paint colors, Celerie gazes up at a sky full of stars that feel especially close, and she turns toward the ensemble of white structures, now bathed in the dim gold light of lanterns carved out of calabash rinds. “It’s a day old,” she says of her Dominican home, “but there are generations of history in it.” @ HOUSE PROUD: SHOP SIMILAR DECOR IN THE VOGUE DIGITAL EDITION. DOWNLOAD IT NOW

SECRET GARDEN The locally made bed in the KembleCurry master bedroom draws inspiration from one in Celerie’s childhood home. It is dressed in Bellino linens and D. Porthault pillows.

Iron Chef Jeffrey Steingarten has stocked his kitchen with everything from fine copper saucepans to a Sichuan hot pot—but his humble cast-iron skillet is the only essential tool of the trade. Photographed by Eric Boman.

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have read that some people—mostly women, I believe, but I’m not sure—are so preoccupied with their own feet that they compulsively buy new shoes to put them into. As I understand it, these people have only two feet, just as I do. They can wear no more than one pair of shoes at a time, and yet they own dozens, scores, even hundreds. I am dumbfounded by people like them. In stark contrast, it is pots and pans and other cooking vessels that I fnd awfully diffcult to resist, or at least I once did. There is a pot or a pan for every purpose under the sun, and I believe that by now I possess a clear majority of them. Whenever I returned from expeditions foreign and domestic I would bring home a gleaming trophy or two of brass or copper, of iron or aluminum, of stainless steel or clay. Unlike shoes, many more than two pots can be used at the same time. Throughout the nineties, when I wrote about Paris as often as I was allowed to, I’d return from every trip with a new copper pot, lined with tin or stainless steel—or unlined, for confture—until I had a dozen of them in graduated sizes. And whenever a recipe called for a pot I lacked, I would rush out and fnd one—perhaps a stockpot even larger than my largest, or a covered copper pan designed solely for the preparation of pommes Anna. The vessels I valued most were ancient designs meant for only one iconic dish that had the power to sum up an entire cuisine, an entire world. Some of these are simple: a deep, wide brass Japanese bowl for frying tempura; lovely little gleaming spherical brass pots we found in India 30 years ago; a saç from Gaziantep in Turkey— like a blackened wok you invert over a flame to use as a domed griddle for cooking fatbreads. And there is a diferent couscoussier from every trip to Morocco. Have you ever tried a Sichuan hot pot? It requires a large copper bowl, thin and unlined and divided by a copper strip shaped into a yin-yang curve. One half is flled with a mild stock, probably made from pork bones, and the other with a spicy, pungent broth whose surface is paved with hot peppers. The bowl sits on a stand over a gas fame in the center of your table. My wife, Caron, and I were in a trim, white stucco family restaurant on the outskirts of Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province. There was a small stage for entertainment, 264

which on our evening was an amateur performance of Sichuan opera. The owner’s daughter handed us a typed, xeroxed menu—a three-page list of raw ingredients. We ordered three items whose English translations were helpful (sliced lamb, cabbage, and duck tongue), two that were not (one turned out to be slices of a local freshwater fsh), and a sixth one written in Chinese characters that Caron, with her command of Mandarin, was able to untangle into tofu. The owner’s daughter ignited the propane under our copper hot pot, then returned with our six plates of food, plus small bowls of cool roasted-sesame oil, and demonstrated that we were meant to cook a chunk or slice from our ingredients in one of the broths, then slide it into the sesame oil, fsh it out, and pop it into our mouths. The next day at Chengdu’s large central outdoor market we bought a well-worn copper Sichuan–hot pot bowl for a song. Filled with socks, it took up almost no room in my suitcase, and back home it kindled hours of powerful nostalgia for our dinner in Chengdu. We never cooked a Sichuan hot pot ourselves once we discovered that our bowl had been repaired with ill-ftting copper patches and would have allowed the scalding broth to leak out onto the table, then run into somebody’s lap. My favorite trophy is probably a heavy, wide copper disk, nearly two feet in diameter, with a thick rolled edge, all hand-hammered and lined with tin. It’s the type used on Italy’s Ligurian seacoast for baking farinata—a moist pancake of chickpea four, olive oil, water, and fresh green herbs—in the hottest wood-burning ovens I’ve ever seen. Back home, my own farinate have not succeeded famously, coming out wet and sloppy, the fault I’m sure of my oven, which strains at reaching temperatures in excess of 500° F. But the pan itself is magnifcent and extremely talented at baking the wonderful focaccia di Recco, a light, crisp, cheesy treat native to another stretch of the Ligurian coast (and perfected in Vogue, June 2011). But now my preoccupation with exotic pots and pans has clattered to a halt. The immediate reason is Caron. You know how sometimes you’re overcome by an attack of the-world-istoo-much-with-us-late-and-soon-getting-and-spending-welay-waste-our-powers type of feeling? Well, two months ago, Caron was morbidly aficted with it. I had a vague suspicion that something was up when she asked, out of the blue, “Why should we be squandering ridiculous sums of mortgage money for square footage on which you stockpile ungainly utensils you never, ever use?”

HOT STUFF Steingarten’s 40-year-old ten-inch cast-iron skillet is the most versatile pan in his collection.

“Not really never, ever,” I said. But I sympathized with her viewpoint. Don’t you sometimes look around your dwelling and start to feel choked and smothered and stifed and strangled by all the lifeless and inanimate things you surround yourself with, objects that once seemed valuable and now, at last, reveal themselves as trash and junk? She pointed to my treasured ten-inch black cast-iron frying pan, bought some 40 years ago at the old Sears Roebuck store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for about $6. “I’ll bet you could cook everything you ever cook right in that one pan,” she said. “How much do you wanna bet?” “You can’t bet against yourself, silly. You would take a dive just to win.” “OK, OK, OK,” I said. “Then I’ll bet that I can do it. For the next month, that skillet will be the only pot, pan, or similar cooking vessel I’ll be allowed to use. And I’ll cook nearly every night, sometimes twice a day.” It would be like a monthlong reality-TV show—but in a good way. I wondered why Iron Chef, which in my experience is, or used to be, the most sensible and instructive of all those shows, had not thought of this frst, making the ambitious young chefs mix and cook everything in wash buckets or thimbles or without any water or blindfolded.

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began to like the idea. I’d be able to cook whatever I wished without worrying about creating genius recipes. I would be guided only by my merest whim, caprice, or appetite. And my trusty black skillet would be like a faithful hunting dog, ever eager to respond to my subtlest gesture. A well-seasoned cast-iron skillet can be a griddle (for French toast and eggs and grilled cheese or griddle breads like pitas and homemade four tortillas), a deep fat fryer (obligatory for Southern-fried chicken, though a ten-inch skillet is deep enough for deep-frying only flat and skinny things like fresh anchovies, sardines, croutons, and fritters of every description), a roasting pan (ideal for chicken, large enough for a small turkey or most of a deboned leg of lamb), a pizza stone (Heston Blumenthal has a well-known recipe for pizza baked on the underside of an inverted cast-iron skillet while the broiler overhead melts the mozzarella, and J. Kenji López-Alt has created a scrumptious cast-iron pan pizza on the always spirited and informative seriouseats.com, where he is the chief creative ofcer), a gratin dish (that moves efortlessly from stove top to oven), a fameproof pie plate (handy for tarte Tatin), and, of course, a sauté pan (just wide enough for four crisp and juicy semiboneless quail from dartagnan.com). Before sailing out onto these uncharted seas, however, I chose two safe and familiar dishes. The frst is an easy, wonderful, and surprising thing to bake and to eat. It is usually known as a German Pancake (or sometimes unaccountably as a Dutch Baby—I prefer the former name because I shy away from imagining that I’m eating an actual live human baby from Holland), and it’s best described as a gigantic, sweet, lemony popover—or a light, sugared, pufy Yorkshire pudding. It’s so good that I’m amazed a year has gone by since I last made one. The second recipe is an authentic treasure from Charleston, South Carolina, and the neighboring Low Country, a skillet corn bread. The recipe comes from John Martin Taylor (author of Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking), who 20 years ago 266

successfully proselytized for his local cuisine among Northerners like me who, along with our other misconceptions about Southern food, thought of corn bread as sweet and cakelike. With two magnificent dishes under our belt, as it were, my confdence grew boundless. Could any food prove to be beyond the power of my ten-inch black cast-iron skillet? We would soon see. I returned to the frst dish I ever cooked from Marcella Hazan’s groundbreaking The Classic Italian Cook Book: The Art of Italian Cooking and the Italian Art of Eating. It was her pan-roasted chicken with rosemary and garlic. (Marcella explains that Italian home cooks, lacking useful ovens until well after World War II, used the stove top for pan roasting—really browning, followed by a sort of braising.) Back in 1973, and often since then, I’ve used a wide, modern, thirteen-inch stainless-steel pan for this dish. Now I would try it with my much smaller ten-inch cast-iron skillet, buying a diminutive bird and trimming it to ft. I began to wonder whether 40 years ago I should have bought an 11¾-inch black cast-iron pan instead. I still wonder. With Marcella on my mind, I thought of pasta. But nobody would boil noodles in a cast-iron skillet. Until now! I measured our skillet’s capacity (flling it with water to within a half-inch of the brim) at two quarts. Marcella writes that if you use insufcient water your pasta will turn out gummy. Then it came to me: a scrumptious batch of mac ’n’ cheese would be guaranteed to mask the pasta’s gumminess. It was at this point that I remembered an article in The New York Times by Harold McGee (whose book On Food and Cooking is still the frst place to go for answers about culinary science), recommending that noodles can be very happily cooked in only small amounts of water. Yes, this was heresy, and right there in The New York Times. But I tried it, with a pound of noodles, and it worked. Two advantages were that it took no time at all to bring one-and-a-half quarts of water to a boil (compared with the years I’ve stood at the stove, waiting for eight quarts of pasta water to bubble). And the pasta water that remained after I’d scooped out the cooked macaroni was extra-rich with starch and would prove valuable in many pasta-sauce recipes. The next issue was the cheese sauce. This can be made with Gruyère or with American Cheddar, and I’ve seen recipes calling for Roquefort or Kraft Singles—anything that melts. The most basic cheese sauce begins with a roux: four and butter heated in a saucepan until they foam and cook for a minute or two without darkening (as they would in Louisiana cooking). Then you whisk in some milk and simmer until it thickens. You’ve just made a béchamel sauce, not very diferent from a traditional American white sauce but with a French name, and in fact one of the French “mother sauces” from which so many others fow. If you stir (and melt) grated cheese into it, you’ve created sauce Mornay, the basic French (and American) cheese sauce and just what we need for macaroni. If you beat egg yolks into sauce Mornay, then fold in beaten egg whites, smooth the surface, sprinkle on a bit more grated cheese, and bake in a medium-hot oven, you will also have demonstrated that your ten-inch cast-iron pan is an ideal soufé dish. The longer I reveled in the fun of simple cooking and the joy of unbridled eating, the more I wondered if I wasn’t ignoring the elephant in the kitchen. And the elephant was this thing we call cast iron. How does it behave? And why? For nearly a month I had been cooking blind, like a Neanderthal. Indeed,

some experts believe that the Neanderthals never fgured out how to cook, which is one reason they faded away. Cast iron is iron that has been “cast”—melted and poured into a mold and cooled and unmolded. Iron is the most common metal on Earth, and the type used in cast iron is pig iron, an impure form that contains lots of carbon (about 3 percent) and silicon from the blast furnaces used to smelt it—to separate the metal from the ore. Cast iron is soft and eager to rust. What else is wrong with it? People used to think that cast-iron skillets had a unique talent for spreading heat quickly and evenly when set on a gas or electric burner. Some people still believe this. I once did. Not only is the idea completely wrong, but this should have been obvious to everybody, including me, who has ever cooked with a cast-iron pan. Two of my favorite writers on the science of cooking have demonstrated this in strikingly visual ways. Harold McGee cut out a circle of paper and ftted it into his cast-iron skillet. Dave Arnold, whose posts on the blog Cooking Issues are irresistible and informative, dusted the inside of his cast-iron skillet with four. Both set their pans on burners. And both showed that the patterns of charred paper and charred flour exactly mirrored the six- or eightfold star or circular pattern of the burner below the pan. The alternating hotter and cooler areas in cast iron guarantee that some food in the pan will get burned before the rest is fully cooked. (One way around this is to preheat your castiron skillet.) A related defect is that cast iron heats up slowly. In Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine, I learned about “specifc heat,” a concept that had embarrassingly eluded me throughout a lifetime of trying to understand how things work. The specifc heat capacity of a substance—whether iron or gold, air or water, milk or eggs or steak or ice—is the energy (usually heat) needed to raise a given amount of that substance by one degree. Cast iron has a medium-high specifc heat, but it is so heavy that it takes lots of energy to heat it up, and it will cool down slowly because the metal has to shed all this energy into the air, which is a very poor conductor. (Incidentally, stainless steel scores no better than cast iron, which is why expensive stainless-steel pans often have a disk of aluminum or copper fused to their bottoms to distribute the heat.)

for just $15.92, or $24.74 if the pan’s been preseasoned. (More about that before very long.) Cast-iron pans are incredibly sturdy, nearly indestructible, even when exposed to high heat. I’ve heard tales of pans that crack or warp, but none of mine have ever misbehaved like that. So it’s usually safe to buy a cast-iron pan at a fea market or garage sale (in those parts of the country where, I’ve read, everybody has a garage). Just make sure that rust hasn’t eaten clear through the cast iron. Cooking in iron pots and pans can help combat anemia, and as one article in the Journal of Nutrition put it, “Anemia resulting from severe iron defciency (ID) is the most prevalent and widespread nutrition-related health problem in infants and young children in low-income countries.” So iron pans (or iron inserts) have been distributed in rural areas of the developing world. This strategy can be quite efective as long as home cooks don’t revert to their lighter old aluminum pans. To read more about this, you can turn to page 23 of the January/February 2014 Atlantic. Cast-iron pans are nonstick. But this is true only after your pan has become extremely well seasoned and well worn, as mine is. A pan gets to be well seasoned through care and efort. Here’s how to season: When you buy a new cast-iron pan, wash it with soap and hot water, dry it and put it over high heat to evaporate residual water, let it cool, coat it liberally inside and out with vegetable oil or rendered animal fat, and put it over your highest heat, way past the oil’s smoke point. Remove it, let the pan cool, wipe off visible oil. Use it for a light cooking job, then season it again. The longer you cook with it, the better it will perform. Once a pan has been well seasoned, you may fearlessly boil water in it. After a year or so, you’ll forget all those neurotic warnings about handling and cleaning your cast-iron pan. But never give it a full-strength steel-wool-plus-dish-soap cleaning unless you intend to start seasoning all over again. If you do buy that old pan at a fea market, wash it vigorously with hot water, steel wool (even scouring powder), and strong detergent. When it’s clean and smooth and shows no sign of rust, season it as though it were a new pan. One of cast iron’s defciencies—its slowness to heat and cool—is also a great virtue. It’s favored for deep-frying because its temperature won’t vary as easily as that of an aluminum or stainless-steel pan, even in recipes that have you start with lots of cold butter or a cold batter (such as our skillet corn bread). If, on a foolish bet, you are forced to use your cast-iron pan for cooking everything, you’ll soon fnd an infnite number of new uses for it. One day I tried a roasted-cauliflower recipe, then remembered how much I adore caulifower, went immediately to my very favorite cooking site, food52.com, and launched into a shameless weeklong caulifower binge. We loved Dan Barber’s golden caulifower steaks; a wonderful, burnished whole-roasted cauliflower; Paul Bertolli’s cauliflower soup; and a cheesy cauliflower gratin—all of which will surely become lifelong companions. As will all the other delectable recipes I’ve already told you about—now in Vogue’s digital edition and posted on Vogue.com. @

With two magnificent dishes under our belt, as it were, my confidence was boundless. Could any food prove to be beyond the power of my skillet?

T

hose are the defects of my cast-iron pan. One other is that sizes much greater than ten inches are hard to lift. (And by the way, the size of a skillet, the diameter, is measured at the top outside edge of the pan, which is illogical because you cook the food inside the pan. The difference comes to at least an inch. The fabricators of pots and pans shortchange us by 10 percent or more. Where are the government regulators when we really need them? The IRS, the NSA, the NLRB, the FISA Court?) But cast iron possesses lots of impressive virtues. For one thing, cast iron is really inexpensive. It’s just pig iron, after all. A 10¼-inch skillet from Lodge (a very popular brand) sells

FOR MORE SKILLET RECIPES, DOWNLOAD THE VOGUE DIGITAL EDITION

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STEAL OF THE MONTH

Carte Blanche A new designer collaboration is redefining notions of dressing for a fuller figure. Photographed by Angelo Pennetta.

P RO DUC E D BY FI LL I N T HE BLA N K P RO DUCT I O N

I AHEAD OF THE CURVE Model Candice Huffine, at the Gramercy Park Hotel, wearing an Isabel Toledo Exclusively for Lane Bryant coat ($178) and dress ($128); select Lane Bryant stores. Jennifer Fisher choker, $225; jenniferfisherjewelry .com. Chloé ring, $350; Chloé boutiques. Diane von Furstenberg pumps, $325; DVF, NYC. Hair, Tamara McNaughton; makeup, Romy Soleimani. Details, see In This Issue. Sittings Editor: Tabitha Simmons.

n my culture, curves are a girl’s best friend,” says the Cubanborn designer Isabel Toledo. “I was really skinny as a teenager, so growing into a more womanly shape was a big plus.” With three sisters and fifteen aunts of all shapes and sizes, Toledo understood from an early age that personal style needn’t be restricted by the number on a hang tag—so when Lane Bryant approached her and her husband, Ruben, to collaborate on a plus-size collection, it was an instant ft. That said, you won’t find any prescribed notions of dressing curvy silhouettes here: With creamy white brocade coats and fattering broderie anglaise dresses, the two have upended the notion that full-fgured women should wear only plain black. “There are some archaic rules out there,” says model Candice Hufne, 29, who shot to fame after being photographed by Steven Meisel for the cover of Italian Vogue in 2011. Hufne rejects the idea that a curvier woman shouldn’t show off her arms, for example— and she certainly doesn’t believe that all clothes above a size 14 should come with a waist-cinching belt. Having racked up countless frequent-fier miles traveling to far-fung shoots, she’s become an intrepid global bargain hunter along the way. (She came home from her last trip to Istanbul with a suitcase laden with exotic local fnds to add to her wardrobe of such eye-catching American designs as an allover-print suit by Diane von Furstenberg.) Hufne calls this sharply tailored look “very Jackie O,” and she’s right, of course, though it was inspired by a dress that Toledo famously made for that other Mrs. O: First Lady Michelle Obama. —chioma nnadi 269

DIRECTOR’S CUT The no-fuss neutrality of a cardi-jacket, a slouchy trouser, and colorblocked brogues make way for a bold approach to casual dressing— perfect for taking in a screening or two at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. Daria Werbowy wears a Lanvin jersey jacket ($2,885) and pants ($1,775); Lanvin, NYC. Pierre Hardy brogues. Fashion Editor: Grace Coddington.

SWING EASY Take Peter Copping’s strong suit at Nina Ricci— ultrafine, subdued luxury— and add the relaxed ease of a Michael Kors sneaker. Then head off to golf’s Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. Nina Ricci wool sweater ($990) and skirt ($1,050); sweater at Barneys New York stores and skirt at Dover Street Market New York. Michael Kors trainers. Details, see In This Issue.

What to Wear Where

Kicking Back BE THEY ZIPPERLINED OXFORDS OR CRISP WHITE TRAINERS, EASYGOING FLATS UNDERSCORE THE SEASON’S EFFORTLESS LOOKS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY KARIM SADLI.

RAZZLE DAZZLE Louis Vuitton’s pre-fall collection blends classicism with sparkling color—and adds a sharp zipper trim to traditionally cut oxfords. Cap it all off with a mask for a night of dancing at the Save Venice ball at New York’s Pierre hotel. Louis Vuitton embellished dress ($3,250) and oxfords; select Louis Vuitton boutiques.

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ART AND SOUL Pairing a tank with wide-leg pants—and grounding it all with elegant slip-ons—is just the sort of streamlined originality we’ve become accustomed to from Céline. Demo the silhouette at the opening of the Brooklyn Museum’s Ai Weiwei exhibition. Céline top ($490), pants ($950), and flats; clothing at Céline, NYC. Details, see In This Issue.

COOL CUSTOMER An elegant assemblage of camel chesterfield, cuffed trousers, and blank-slate trainers is in perfect harmony with British singer-songwriter Sam Smith, who makes his way to L.A.’s Belasco Theater (his debut album drops later this spring). Michael Kors wool coat ($2,250), tropical wool pants ($795), and trainers; select Michael Kors stores. BEAUTY NOTE

Channel the season’s sporty sophistication with a high-def brow and luminous skin. Lancôme’s Le Crayon Poudre in Brunet blends the precision of a pencil with the finish of a powder.

LACE ’EM UP The sleek racing stripe is a nice go-between for the artful chunky knit and the sturdy perforated brogues— and just the sort of inventive mash-up made for Milan’s Salone del Mobile furniture fair. Céline sweater, $4,750; A’maree’s, Newport Beach, CA. Giorgio Armani pants, $1,745; Giorgio Armani boutiques. Grenson brogues. Details, see In This Issue.

MATCH POINT Throw this pajama-like ensemble on after an afternoon of fishing in the loch at tennis star Andy Murray’s new hotel, a century-old estate called Cromlix in Kinbuck, Scotland, near his birthplace. Calvin Klein Collection woolalpaca jacket ($4,625) and cashmereand-wool trousers ($1,495); Calvin Klein Collection, NYC.

P RO DUC ED BY P ROD N AT A RT + COM ME RC E.

GLOW FORTH The addition of a pair of oxfords to this striking Givenchy sheath both mellows and enhances its rosy, electric shine. The result: Just the right amount of fabulousness for the Broadway premiere of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, starring Neil Patrick Harris. Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci sequined dress and red fox jacket; Givenchy, Las Vegas. In this story: hair, Jimmy Paul for Bumble and Bumble; makeup, Diane Kendal. Set design, Gideon Ponte for the Magnet Agency. Details, see In This Issue.

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A Place in the Sun With references ranging from Gauguin to the markets of Marrakech, the new season offers a swimsuit for every style.

INDEX EDITOR: JESSICA SAILER

Eddie Borgo earrings, $375; net-a-porter.com.

KE BE D E A N D HA M MA M : M I KA E L JA NSSO N. EA RRI NG S : COU RT ESY O F E D DI E BO RG O. JAC KE T: COURTESY OF NET-A- PORTER . MICH AEL KORS BIKINI AND LIPSTICK: T I M HOU T. P LAT E : COURT ESY O F A N TH RO P OLOG IE . P OUC H: COURTESY O F M A RC JACO BS. A LL OTH ERS: MAR KO M a c PH ERSON. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

Marni jacket, $830; Marni boutiques.

Michael Kors bikini, $270; michaelkors.com.

Lipstick Queen lipstick in Jungle Queen, $22; spacenk.com. Ruan Hoffmann plate, $498; anthropologie.com. Marc Jacobs pouch, $350; Marc Jacobs stores.

Bantu maillot, $185; bantuwax.com.

LIYA KEBEDE AND IMAAN HAMMAM IN MAUI, VOGUE, 2014.

Chloé bikini, $265; Chloé, Bal Harbour, FL.

Tory Burch sandals, $295; toryburch.com. Laura Urbinati bathing suit, $274; lauraurbinati.com.

INDEX

Marni necklace, $470; Marni boutiques.

SAM ROLLINSON AND XIAO WEN JU, VOGUE, 2014.

Jo de Mer bandeau bikini, $230; California Sunshine, Brooklyn.

Michael Kors high-rise bikini, $353; select Neiman Marcus stores.

Coach sunglasses, $168; coach.com.

Banana Republic tote, $130; bananarepublic.com.

10 Crosby Derek Lam sandals, $295; Kin, Los Angeles.

Chanel Hydra Beauty Nourishing Lip Care, $50; Nordstrom stores.

Araks one-shoulder bathing suit, $350; saks.com.

RO LLI N SO N A N D J U: CRA I G M c D EA N . NEC KLACE : COU RT ESY O F M A RN I . MI C HA E L KO RS BI K I NI : TI M HOU T. SU N G LASSES : COU RT ESY O F COAC H. A RA KS BI KI N I : COU RT ESY O F A RA KS. A LL OT HERS: MA RKO M a c P H ERSO N .

Lands’ End coverup T-shirt, $39; landsend.com.

SASHA PIVOVAROVA IN JOSHUA TREE, VOGUE, 2014.

Valentino minidress; Valentino boutiques.

Etro earrings, $641; Etro boutiques.

Tooshie bikini, $202; tooshie.com.

P I VOVA ROVA : M I KA E L JA N SSO N. BAG, MI N I DR ESS, A N D L A P E RLA BAT HI NG SU I T: T I M HOU T. SA NDAL: COURTESY O F A N C I EN T G RE E K SA N DA LS. M I SSO NI BAT HI NG SUI T: COU RT ESY O F MATC HESFASH I O N.CO M. NECKLACE: COU RT ESY OF ROB ERT STO ET ZE L. A LL OTH E RS : M A RKO M a c P HERSO N. D ETA I LS, SE E I N T HI S I SSU E.

Ancient Greek Sandals flats, $255; intermixonline.com.

Miss Mochila bag, $325; missmochila.com. Missoni bathing suit, $500; matchesfashion.com.

Lele Sadoughi necklace, $345; lelesadoughi.com.

La Perla triangle top ($168) and bottoms ($164); laperla.com.

Eberjey triangle top ($89) and bottoms ($75); eberjey.com.

Valentino Garavani espadrilles; Valentino boutiques.

C H EC K O U T M O S T WA N T E D AT VO G U E . C O M FO R M O R E I N S P I R E D I T E M S U P DAT E D W E E K LY

keeping up with kimye continued from page 216

“I tried to do fats when I was pregnant,” says Kim. “Couldn’t do it.” Today the dresses that form the dream girl’s extravagant Vogue “wedding” trousseau are hanging in Mom’s closet in Los Angeles, with its mirror door covered in her daughters’ lipstick kisses. Ensconced in her mother’s commodious makeup chair the frst morning of the shoot, in the generous mirrored room arranged for just this purpose, surrendering to the ministrations of the hair and makeup team, Kim declares this to be “my favorite part of the day! If I could do this every day of the year I would.” (Her new manse includes just such a room, an improvement on the “years when we used to get ready in the kitchen.”) “I feel odd when I don’t wear makeup!” she says with a laugh. “I don’t recognize myself.” Kim is catching up with herself on dailymail.co.uk (“That is my favorite Web site of all time!”) but isn’t yet up to speed with all the Oscar movies. “I just love a romantic comedy and a love story,” she says, sighing. “I could watch love stories all day.” (That evening, she and Kanye go to the Westfeld Topanga mall to see Her, Spike Jonze’s love story about a lonely divorcé who falls for an operating-system avatar. They both adore it.) “There’s nothing that we love more than to just hang out and go to movies,” says Kim. “So we drive to Malibu or Santa Barbara and fgure out how to get to places alone.” Kim is astonished by the revelation that Woody Harrelson refuses to put a cell phone to his ear. “I’d rather have a few years of my life,” she avers. “We spend sometimes six or eight hours on the phone every day, especially with all of our traveling. We just sit on the phone and talk about anything and everything.” These freewheeling conversations must be riveting: The couple have such diferent takes on the world. “Will Tom Ford do another movie?” Kanye will wonder, for instance. “Creative people can create what they want. Directors are creative with color palettes, design sensibility, and of course photography and how to tell stories.” Kim’s engagement with Tom Ford’s oeuvre is more subjective. She has been

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an obsessive eBay shopper since she persuaded her father to lend her the money to invest in half a dozen pairs of Manolo Blahnik’s Timberlandinspired Oklamod ankle boots, as worn by Beyoncé in her 2003 “Bonnie & Clyde” video and J.Lo in “Jenny from the Block.” Kim immediately fipped them on eBay for a vast proft. She admits to an ongoing eBay addiction, shopping at night “as I’m falling asleep.” A year ago she craved a pair of Tom Ford boots but had to settle on them a size too small. She has finally acquired a pair in her size. “Two seasons past and I still love them and I don’t care.” As a couple, she and Kanye bonded over fashion, and her sensibility has, she says, been refined through their connection. “I liked a more glamorous aesthetic,” she says, “but I think that it’s simplifed, and I love that. I love evolving. I just think I’ve been educated a little bit better.” Mass is a concept central to her taste, but she says it is more nuanced now. “I love mixing high and low. I love going to Paris and fnding a great piece that I know no one else can fnd and then coming home and putting it with a skirt that I got for under 20 bucks at Sears, and it looks cool.” When Kim appears for her next shot, in a Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda gown, an eighteenth-century fantasia of tea-stained silk tulle and endless lengths of handmade lace, with ruffles at the elbows and a Madame du Barry neckline, there are oohs and aahs all around. “I just love to be so over-the-top,” says Kim. “It’s to die for,” says Kris. “You look so pretty, it’s crazy how pretty you look! I’m trying not to be the controlling mother,” she adds, laughing, as she adjusts the train. She needn’t worry: Kanye is giving her a run for her money. He is currently tweaking the gown’s sweetheart neckline, which he has likened to a McDonald’s M. “I want to make it heartshaped,” he says, “more graphic, more modern. You can still soften it with the chifon.” Kim’s eyes roll discreetly to the silver-leafed ceiling. “I’m really big on necklines,” says Kanye with masterly understatement. “I research T-shirt shapes because that’s what we do, me and my crew at Donda [the creative-design agency, named for his late mother, that, as Kanye once

tweeted, “will galvanize amazing thinkers and put them in a creative space to bounce their dreams and ideas . . .”]. We master T-shirts—the Yeezus-tour T-shirts, Pyrex, Been Trill, Fear of God, even normal T-shirts with nothing on them. We literally tailor T-shirts. We take that type of stuf superseriously. A neckline means the diference—for women and men.” Kanye abhors what he describes as a “mall-T-shirt neckline” and wears his own cut low enough to reveal a fash of Jacob the Jeweler’s diamond-encrusted heavy gold chain and an erogenous slice of his clavicle. “This is our form of cleavage, right here,” he explains. “Is that a really weird thing to be into—the neckline of a T-shirt?” he queries rhetorically. “Because, for a guy, all that matters is really jeans and a T-shirt, a nice suit every now and then, and working out. “What I love about being motivated by Kim,” says Kanye, “is I don’t rest on the laurels of creativity or just the product that I put out. I also think it’s important to work out. I don’t care how good of a thinker you are, you can’t ask someone else to work out for you!” After the frst day of shooting chez Kris, Kim is curled up with Kanye, wearing a robe and furry UGG flipfops—Kanye removed the bows, and now they look like Céline. He has an upcoming East Coast tour, so Kim will accompany him before she returns to shoot season nine of her show (a fve-month process). They have a nursery backstage at every venue so North “can be in the back while we watch the show,” says Kim. “She sleeps through it all: She has these little headphones.” The couple frst met in a recording studio in 2003, when Kim was with her good friend Brandy, for whom she onetime acted as stylist. Kim had a boyfriend at the time, so they didn’t connect romantically. “Basically, you know, she was always my favorite girl,” says Kanye. “There was no girl in the world that could pull me away from her.” “Awww,” purrs Kim, “that’s so cute.” Kanye later cast Kim as a scantily dressed Princess Leia in the pilot for Alligator Boots, a raunchy “hip-hop Muppet Show.” “I was like, Oh, my God. He’s really funny and he’s really cool,” remembers vogue.com

Kim. “It took a couple years for us to fgure it out . . . but we always stayed friends. They say the first year of a relationship is tough, but imagine adding so many people—just the world— into the mix.” When their friendship fnally segued into something else, Kanye experienced a new level of public scrutiny. “We both went from being single to being together—and also really public together,” he says. “The combination has just been . . . nuclear.” He is philosophical about the setbacks. “It’s hard to be the first,” he says. “And, yes, we want to be the frst and the best—that might come of the wrong way, but it’s true. You’re the one that runs into the woods for the frst time and comes back with all the scratches on your face,” he says by way of analogy. “But anytime they make a mockery of us, they are not looking at the ground we are breaking but just making jokes out of the scratches we got on our face.” “That’s what I love about him,” says Kim, “because every time he’ll say to me, ‘OK, it’s never been done before, but we will do it. We will be the frst.’ I feel like our whole lives are just meshed together,” she adds. “I think we really value and respect each other’s opinions.” For Kim, the hardest part of the relationship is “trying to keep the outside world from breaking into our bond.” “Once you get a wifey, your wifey basically runs your life. Everything you do is based on wifey,” says Kanye with a laugh. “It’s really interesting that we’re on the front lines of a few diferent concepts at the same time,” he continues, serious this time. “You’ve got the interracial thing; you have mega-media and mega– art crash; you have, you know, the Vogue–and–reality show combination. There’s a lot of new frontiers being broken in 2014.” But for Kanye, “that’s what the world is. That’s the future, this melting pot, crashing sensibilities together,” a vision of which he and Kim are the nonpareil exemplars. “She created something really powerful that the universe connected with,” he says, “and I created something that people connected with, and then when we combine our information. . . .We can vogue.com

help communicate and educate and just bring more dopeness in general. It’s really just about dopeness at the end of the day.”

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At the end of the day, Kanye is having a raw-food meal prepared, and Kim is in the kitchen eyeing the glass cake stands bearing cookies shaped like fsh, pigs, ice-cream cones, and frogs. Her sisters are calling left and right, suspicious that she has been of the radar for a day. This is a very close family. “What do you guys think I’m up to?” Kim asks them, disingenuously. “Kanye took me to a romantic dinner in the middle of nowhere, and we had something to eat.” Which wasn’t a lie, she tells me, sotto voce. “We had an In-N-Out burger!” @

the big easy continued from page 237

I fgured she must eat a lot of buns,” she says with a laugh. “By the end I was doing a lot of creeping behind trees and hiding behind other characters.” It’s time to go shopping, and Blunt has selected the showroom of Hatch, a mixed maternity/post-pregnancy and regular clothing line launched two years ago by Ariane Goldman that has picked up such chic fans as Gwen Stefani and Jessica Joffe. Hatch is responsible for Blunt’s silk outft today, and she’s looking for a few more pieces to take her through the coming months. Blunt describes her style as “bohemian tomboy, quite urban.” For herself she likes shopping at the small L.A. boutiques Creatures of Comfort and TenOverSix, buying young labels Rachel Comey, Alasdair, and Ryan Roche, while for the red carpet she’ll break out Oscar de la Renta, Prada, Alexander McQueen, or Givenchy. Having worked with the same team for years for these events, including the stylist Jessica Paster, she has her routine down. “I’m out of the house in an hour and ffteen minutes,” she says. Her looks tend to be unfussy, and her hair, which runs the gamut of colors from blonde to dark brown, is mostly worn long and natural. “I like to make simple choices with what I wear, and I like to look like me,” she says. c o n t i n u e d o n pa g e 2 8 4 vogue april 2014

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BEACH TOWEL This limited-edition D. Porthault cotton terry beach towel, generously sized at 120 x 180 cm, was commissioned by Vogue to celebrate 120 years in publication. The iconic illustration by Eduardo Garcia Benito graced Vogue’s July 15, 1926, cover and is one of many archival images on view with a subscription to the Vogue Archive (VogueArchive.com). On sale now at the Condé Nast Store. FOr mOrE iNFOrmATiON, ViSiT:

Vogue.com/beachtowel

For her latest pregnant outing, the previous day—a charity luncheon for Operation Smile—she wore a nude Dior dress with a neon-green lining. “It was stretchy, thank God.” At the Hatch showroom she chooses some long, fowing shirts she can imagine nesting in for some time. She hasn’t made plans to return to work yet but would like her next project to take her back to her roots on the stage, this time on Broadway. “I haven’t done a play for ten years. It’s so exposing, but it’s what I’m most interested in right now.” There are no limits to what she can do, says Into the Woods director Rob Marshall. “She’ll have it all. She will have a Maggie Smith career if she wants,” he predicts. “If you want a leading lady, and someone who has great humor and vulnerability and warmth and smarts, women aren’t really bred for that anymore. She stands alone in many ways.” In the showroom, it’s not all coziness and comfort. Not one to be typecast, Blunt picks out a sexy black silk jumpsuit and models it; then tries on a pair of leather leggings, as tight as can be beneath the baby bump. Gary would love them. @

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Indeed, there are now tech companies like ShopSense and RewardStyle that are focusing all their code-writing know-how on fguring out how to turn tweets and likes into dollars and cents.

Amber Venz created RewardStyle with her partner, Baxter Box. The nut they seem to have cracked is how to bring a “like” one step closer to a “buy” through an instantaneous e-mail of a product that has been liked. If the “liker” buys the product, the blogger or the magazine where it originally appeared gets a percentage of the sale. It’s a big if. Which also raises the question: Are models actually moving merchandise? “Interestingly enough, no,” says Venz. “It’s really the personal-style bloggers. And we’re talking about a 22-year-old girl from Utah who’s excelling as far as driving revenue for the brands.” One of the many strange paradoxes that the collision of fashion and social media has created is the so-called democratization of something that has for so long been built on exclusivity. “It’s kind of cool to be nice right now,” says social media–ist and Lucky editor in chief Eva Chen. “Look at Prabal Gurung and Alex Wang. Everyone feels like they can be part of their coolgirl clique. If you look at the brands that everyone’s talking about—Warby Parker, Toms shoes—there’s a sense of openness and transparency. It’s the Obama generation.” When it comes to modeling, this new mood has left room not only for Kate Upton to begin to grab magazine covers and beauty contracts back from pop and movie stars but for other outliers to dare to dream as well: girls like Charlotte Free, a.k.a. “Tumblr girl,”

who has hot-pink hair; Soo Joo Park, a platinum-blonde Korean-American who just hit 100,000 followers on Instagram; and Kelly Mittendorf, who updates her Tumblr seemingly every ffteen minutes. “It’s usually girls with a really striking look,” says Chen. “You see pictures of them at Coachella; they answer questions on Tumblr. They’re relatable.” But even in this social media–besotted world of ours, mystique still has value, doesn’t it? If, when it comes to models, Kate Upton is the bodacious—and gravity-defying—Marilyn Monroe and Cara Delevingne is the let-it-all-hang-out Lena Dunham, Kate Moss is the never-let-’em-seeyou-sweat Greta Garbo. She has not once tweeted or “liked” a single thing in her fabulous life, and yet she is, arguably, the most intriguing person modeling has ever known. “Kate is Kate,” as one fashion person put it to me. “She can do whatever she wants.” Like that pitch-perfect cover of Playboy that seemed to sell out on New York newsstands in one day. When I took my seat at Marc Jacobs’s Louis Vuitton farewell show back in October, I picked up the requisite folder of my chair and flipped through the list of models and looks. Included among the sheaf of exquisite black stationery was a letter from Jacobs. Its theme: “the showgirl in all of us.” Among the list of the 34 women who inspire him, Kate Moss was the only model who made the cut. @

IN THIS ISSUE Table of contents 48: On Upton: Dress, $2,395; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. Manicure, Lisa Jachno. Cover look 56: On Kardashian: Dress, $6,960; Lanvin, NYC. Editor’s letter 62: Dresses, priced upon request; ninaricci.com for information. On Kardashian: Manolo Blahnik heels. 68: On Courtin-Clarins: Embroidered top and skirt, priced upon request; Givenchy, Las Vegas. 18K white gold–and–platinum earrings with diamonds, price upon request; 800-CARTIER for information. Manolo Blahnik metallic-leather sandals, $695; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. On Upton: Dress, $5,295; Calvin Klein Collection, NYC. On

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Thorisdottir: American Apparel T-shirt, $18; americanapparel.com. Ralph Lauren Black Label pants, $495; select Ralph Lauren stores. Vintage sailor hat and belt from Western Costume Company, North Hollywood. Contributors 104: On Thorisdottir: Sequined halter dress, $5,275; net-a-porter .com. On Green: Maison Kitsuné jacket, $825; Maison Kitsuné at the NoMad, NYC. A.P.C. cotton shirt ($220) and pants ($310); A.P.C., NYC. Ovadia & Sons shoes, $595; chcmshop.com. 108: On Kloss: Printed blouse (price upon request) and skirt with lace inserts ($1,400); marcjacobs.com. Ann Demeulemeester by Elvis Pompilio

hat ($1,279) and veil ($761); Dover Street Market New York. Céline sandals, $740; select Neiman Marcus stores. On Sasha: Trico Field cotton dress, $194; Trico Field, NYC. Flash 136: Top, price upon request; farfetch.com. Skirt, $2,310; net-a-porter. com. Pumps, $595; jimmychoo.com. Hamish files 154: From top: Antique gold-plated necklace, $1,155; net-a-porter.com. Bronzeand-turquoise necklace, price upon request; Maxfeld, L.A. View 158: Top, belt ($160), and sandals ($820); top at Blake, Chicago. 162: Crocodile bag, $35,000; Dior boutiques. Manicure, Casey Herman. 164: Leather Betty bag; Saint Laurent, NYC. Snakeskin

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a wo r d a bo ut disco unt e rs W hi le Vogue t ho roug h ly rese a rc hes th e companies mentioned in its pages, We cannot guarantee th e auth enticity of merch an d is e so ld by d iscou n t e rs. as i s a lWays t he cas e i n purchasi n g a n i t e m fro m a nyW h e re oth er th a n th e auth or iz ed stor e, th e buyer takes a r isk and sh ould use caution Wh en d oing so.

Olimpia bag; Bottega Veneta boutiques. Snakeskin-and-suede bag with chain strap; Roger Vivier, NYC. Leather Trunk shoulder bag; Marni boutiques. On Rhoda: Hooded jacket ($385), sports bra ($140), and pants ($350); lucashugh.com. UP24 wristband, $150; jawbone.com. Sneakers, $100; nike .com. 166: Harlot & Bones by Amanda Harlech and Dominic Jones cuff ($1,800) and pendant necklace ($685); net-a-porter.com. 170: Luke Irwin Ikat 29 rug, price upon request; lukeirwin.com. 174: Ikat 4 rug, price upon request. 178: From near right: Ralph Lauren Blue Label silk crewneck, $125; select Ralph Lauren stores. Manolo Blahnik BB fats, $645; saks.com. Grenson metallic brogues, $425; grenson.co.uk. Beauty 184: Necklace and brooch; priced upon request; Bulgari boutiques. 186: Swimsuit, $950; select Chanel boutiques. 188: On Pivovarova: Dress, $2,500; marcjacobs.com. Swim shirt, $85: mott50.com. Swimsuit, $190; shopbop .com. Sunglasses, $320; Stella McCartney, NYC. Red-and-white sunglasses, $405; lindafarrow.com. PATA 199: Coat, $1,350; Alfred Dunhill, NYC. Shirt, $325; select Ralph Lauren stores. Bespoken tie, price upon request; bespokenclothiers.com. 202: Dress, $3,475; select Dolce & Gabbana boutiques. My Enemy by Chrishabana rings ($50–$80) and single earring, on top of ear ($50); nastygal.com. New York Adorned nose ring, $180; New York Adorned, NYC. Thakoon for Tasaki Danger small hoop earrings, price upon request; Jefrey, NYC. Manicure, Jenny Longworth. 204: Suit, $1,295; burberry.com. Brooks Brothers cotton shirt, $92; brooksbrothers.com. Church’s calfskin shoes, $710; Church’s, NYC.

keeping up with kimye 208 –209: Dress, price upon request; ninaricci.com for information. 210-211: On Kardashian: Dress; by special order at 01139-02-778-88-929. On North: Dolce & Gabbana Childrenswear dress, $1,105; select Dolce & Gabbana boutiques. 218–219: Dress, $6,960; Lanvin, NYC. 220 –221: Dress, price upon request; 011-44-20-73182222 for information. Manolo Blahnik heels.

RAy OF Light 222–223: On Sasha: Vintage linen dress, $90; homespunvintage.com. On Kloss: Sandals, $740; select Neiman Marcus stores.

224: Dress, $6,990. On Sasha: Cotton top, $195; Bonpoint, NYC. Cotton dress, $375; geminola.com for information. Antique printed scarf, price upon request; Southpaw Vintage, NYC. 225: On Sasha: Leather Mary Janes, $106; Jacadi, NYC. 227: Cotton dress, $375; geminola.com for information. Straw hat, $250; Albertus Swanepoel, NYC. 228–229: Shift, $7,500; also at Valentino, NYC and Palm Beach. 230: On Sasha: Mohair cardigan, $1,495; select Michael Kors stores. 231: On Sasha: Cotton-muslin dress, $85; homespunvintage.com. Leather Mary Janes, $106; Jacadi, NYC. 232–233: Dress, price upon request; similar styles at Roberto Cavalli boutiques. On Sasha: Cotton dress, $194; Trico Field, NYC.

robertleemorris.com. 251: Dress, $6,230; Stella McCartney, NYC. In this story: manicure, Lisa Jachno.

minDy OVeR mAtteR

257: Bustier, price upon request; Cadolle, Paris. Vintage coat, price upon request; (212) 647-1107. Boots; Early Halloween, NYC. Wolford 10 Stay-Up stockings ($49) and satin stocking belt ($105); wolford.com. Oxidized 18K–white gold ring with black diamonds, $21,700; VBH, NYC. Manicure, Megumi Yamamoto.

234 –235: Embroidered blouse ($1,280) and skirt ($1,835); select Barneys New York stores. Polka-dot pumps, $625; oscardelarenta.com. Manicure, Debbie Leavitt.

the Big eASy 237: V-neck slip, $88; select Neiman Marcus stores. Earrings, $500; Gray & Davis, Ltd., NYC. Manicure, Lisa Jachno.

gAme On 238–239: Cotton top ($245) and skirt ($325); Alexander Wang, NYC.

ShORt nOtiCe 240–241: Blouse ($1,890) and skirt ($1,950); Ikram, Chicago. Suede pumps, $595; select Jimmy Choo boutiques. Leather bag, $1,690; select Miu Miu boutiques. Lambskin flap bag, $2,000; select Chanel boutiques. Embellished-vinyl bag, $1,250; burberry.com.

LOFty AmBitiOn 243: Dress and belt, priced upon request; select Dolce & Gabbana boutiques. Leather heels, $725; Barneys New York stores. Manicure, Reiko Okusa.

FOLLOw me! 244: Dress, $3,495; Jefrey, NYC. Silver-andleather bracelet, $590; Derek Lam, NYC and pilarolaverri.com. 245: Dress with cutouts, $4,125; select Versace boutiques. 250: Dress, $2,995; Donna Karan New York boutiques. Leather–and–gold plated brass cuff, $750;

pOweR pLAyeR 253: Sports bra ($34) and shorts ($40); americanapparel.com. Nano 3.0 sneakers, $120; reebok.com. 255: From top: Sequined dress, $5,275; net-a-porter.com. Bra ($34) and shorts ($40); americanapparel.com. Shirt, hat, and belt from Western Costume Company, North Hollywood. Pants, $495; select Ralph Lauren stores. Bikini top ($350) and bottoms ($300); select Chanel boutiques. Skinny Racer bra, $42; reebok.com. Track pants, $395; Rag & Bone stores.

the nAtuRAL

thiS SiDe OF pARADiSe 260: On Celerie: Embroidered cotton-voile dress, $4,190; oscardelarenta.com.

SteAL OF the mOnth 268–269: Coat and dress; also at lanebryant .com/toledo. Manicure, Naomi Yasuda.

whAt tO weAR wheRe 270: Calf hair–and–leather brogues, $695; pierrehardy.com. 271: Trainers, $295; select Michael Kors stores. 272: Oxfords, $1,060. 273: Flats, $810; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. 275: Leather brogues, $405; grenson.co.uk. 277: Dress ($6,550) and jacket ($27,200). In this story: frame chair by Wouter Scheublin, $1,430 (for set of two); mattermatters.com. Manicure, Tracylee. I n d e x 2 7 9 : H al t e r b i k i n i ; s i m i l a r styles at Chloé, Bal Harbour, FL. 281: Embroidered-wool dress, $6,690. Espadrilles, $1,095. Halter bathing suit; also at Missoni boutiques. Last look 286: Loafers; Stella McCartney, NYC; (212) 255-1556 and stellamccartney.com. ALL PRICES APPROXIMATE.

VOGUE IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2014 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VOLUME 204, NO. 4. VOGUE (ISSN 0042-8000) is published monthly by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: The Condé Nast Building, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036. S. I. Newhouse, Jr., Chairman; Charles H. Townsend, Chief Executive Ofcer; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President; John W. Bellando, Chief Operating Ofcer & Chief Financial Ofcer; Jill Bright, Chief Administrative Ofcer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing ofces. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001. Canada Post: Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to P.O. Box 874, Station Main, Markham, ON L3P 8L4. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see DMM 707.4.12.5); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address corrections to VOGUE, P.O. Box 37720, Boone, IA 500370720. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK-ISSUE INQUIRIES: Please write to VOGUE, P.O. Box 37720, Boone, IA 50037-0720, call 800-234-2347, or e-mail [email protected]. Please give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. Subscribers: If the Post Ofce alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. If, during your subscription term or up to one year after the magazine becomes undeliverable, you are ever dissatisfed with your subscription, let us know. You will receive a full refund on all unmailed issues. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks after receipt of order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to VOGUE Magazine, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036. For reprints, please e-mai1 [email protected] or call 717-505-9701, ext: 101. For reuse permissions, please e-mail [email protected] or call 800-897-8666. Visit us online at www.vogue.com. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines on the World Wide Web, visit www.condenastdigital.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that ofer products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these ofers and/or information, please advise us at P.O. Box 37720, Boone, IA 50037-0720, or call 800-234-2347. VOGUE IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED ART WORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ART WORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS, UNLESS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY VOGUE IN WRITING. MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND OTHER MATERIALS SUBMITTED MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A SELF-ADDRESSED STAMPED ENVELOPE.

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LAST LOOK EDITOR: VIRGINIA SMITH

Stella McCartney, $525

U

D ETA I LS, S EE I N TH I S I SSU E

rban toughness” and “pastoral ease” don’t sound like the kind of design inspirations that play well together. In Stella McCartney’s deft hands, though, the dueling concepts not only mesh perfectly—they achieve a kind of synergistic kick. “When you live a city life, there is a moment when you realize you need a bit of softness,” McCartney says, referring to her family’s move from London to an organic farm when she and her siblings were children, as well as to her sporty shoes. Just don’t mistake that softness for all things pretty and bucolic. “It’s something that can be worn with attitude,” she adds. Hear that? Now you can stomp the concrete and the countryside. @ PHOTOGRAPHED BY ERIC BOMAN

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