MAY
WHO’S THAT GIRL? TAYLOR SWIFT AS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN HER BEFORE
TURN UP THE HEAT! BOMBSHELL DRESSES, HEAD-TURNING EARRINGS, AND SEXY STREET STYLE
THE MET GOES TECH THE COSTUME INSTITUTE’S STUNNING NEW SHOW
ZIKA WARRIOR THE DOCTOR AT THE CENTER OF THE EPIDEMIC
PLUS
GIGI HADID & ZAYN MALIK TAKE ITALY
may
Those
Who TRAVEL CHECK MATE, P. 186 MODEL GIGI HADID WITH BOYFRIEND ZAYN MALIK IN NAPLES, ITALY. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO.
VOGUE.COM
UP FRONT With a book about World War I under her belt and an ambitious biography on the way, Louisa Thomas was shaping up to be a fulltime historian. Then came an unexpected detour
MASTHEAD
EDITOR’S LETTER
TALKING BACK Reactions far and wide
CONTRIBUTORS
VOGUE.COM
LIVES Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq, Sierra Leone . . . war reporter Janine di Giovanni
has always been willing to work in conlict zones. But after ISIS, she asks, is the risk too great?
NOSTALGIA When she stumbled upon her mother’s secret past, Emily Bingham became ixated on a handsome Italian
flash IT SIBLINGS Willow and Jaden Smith
TALKING FASHION Towering platforms, rippling robes (page 122), and silk-and-satin bomber jackets (page 128)
TNT TNT calls on the experts to up her training game—and draws major inspiration from U.S. Olympic track-and-ield hopeful English Gardner
OPERA An ensemble cast of creative forces reimagines Verdi’s La Traviata for the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma
view LIGHT THE WAY Van Cleef & Arpels’s new collection of dramatic, sequined ine jewels shines, says Lynn Yaeger, toward a dazzling future CONTINUED>42
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
41
may
BLANC CANVAS Carolina Herrera and mytheresa.com collaborate to revisit some of the designer’s earliest collections
HEAVY ZEN Mikaela Bradbury, the founder of leisure label Arjuna.AG., debuts her new Lunar White collection
SLOUGH LOVE Looking for a quick skin ix? One word: exfoliate. Sarah Brown scrubs up for summer
beauty & health
REBEL SPIRIT L’Artisan Parfumeur celebrates four decades of fragrance trailblazing with a fresh look—and a new scent
UNDER WRAPS The new Milanese line Attico summons a world of deeply romantic robes and opulent vintage inds
MAKING A SPLASH Director Luca Guadagnino remakes La Piscine and turns a psychological thriller into spring’s cult fashion ilm. By Nathan Heller
DREAM WEAVING The latest wave in braids proves that one is never enough
EYE CANDY Technicolor-painted lashes to see and be seen
Z IS FOR ZIKA A doctor at the Zika epidemic’s ground zero is at the forefront of the discovery and treatment of this frightening disease. Juliana Barbassa reports
people are talkıng about TALENT Rebecca Ferguson takes a turn as the other woman in Stephen Frears’s period romp Florence Foster Jenkins
MOVIES Home isn’t all that sweet in High-Rise and The Family Fang
ART Carmen Herrera inally gets her moment in the sun
TRAVEL Forest Side opens in England’s tranquil Lake District
TENNIS Dominic Thiem is quietly making his way to the top
UP NEXT Vanessa Kirby lights up the stage and screen
THEATER Rupert Everett reprises his role as Oscar Wilde in The Judas Kiss
DANCE The L.A. Dance Project performs “Modern Living” at the Glass House
DESIGN Aussie designer Samantha Robinson specializes in one-of-a-kind porcelain CONTINUED>61
OUT on theTown EAR TO EAR, P. 240 MODEL KARLIE KLOSS IN A SAINT LAURENT BY HEDI SLIMANE JACKET AND A GIORGIO ARMANI DRESS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY PATRICK DEMARCHELIER.
may FOLLY À DEUX With its Persian, British, Indian, and Italian allusions, Katharine and William Rayner’s lavishly eclectic East Hampton garden bears witness to a passion for history and adventure. Written and photographed by Eric Boman
SOMETHING WILD From Paris to Tokyo to Copenhagen to Brooklyn, wines made with little to no chemical intervention— so-called natural wines—are the toast of the cognoscenti. Rob Haskell reports
index DESTINATION: WEDDING To have, to hold— and to travel in style. Take inspiration from these elegant, far-lung celebrations
IN THIS ISSUE
LAST LOOK
cover look SHAKE IT OFF
COVER LOOK: PRODUCED BY AC ROSS MEDIA PRODUCTION. SET DESIGN, ANDREA STANLEY FOR STREETERS.
Secret
Garden
wanton weekend in Naples with her real-life boyfriend, pop heartthrob Zayn Malik
FOLLY À DEUX, P. 214
THE EAST HAMPTON GARDEN OF KATHARINE AND WILLIAM RAYNER. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ERIC BOMAN.
fashion & features POINT OF VIEW
FULL CONTROL Pop queen, power broker, hater vanquisher—Taylor Swift’s star has never been brighter. On a trip to her childhood home, she wonders: What (on earth) will she do next? By Jason Gay
CHECK MATE Sweet and girlish—but with an unruly rock-’n’-roll history, too—plaids are a winning move for model Gigi Hadid’s
VOGUE.COM
NEW DIRECTION Zayn Malik, formerly the shy guy in the world’s biggest boy band, takes the lead
AN EYE FOR ALL SEASONS In his irst show as curator in charge of the Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton brings his signature insights to couture in the machine age. Nathan Heller meets our man at the Met
BRAND-NEW SONG AND DANCE Shuffle Along, choreographed by tapdancing legend Savion Glover, spectacularly reanimates the legendary, game-changing 1921 Broadway show of the same name. By Adam Green
RADICAL EQUALS Sarah Sze is an artist redeining sculpture. Siddhartha Mukherjee is a pioneering scientist and author. Together, they may just be the most brilliant couple in town. By Dodie Kazanjian
DRESS THE PART As traditional hairstyling techniques and accessories return to the runway with a modern attitude, Marina Rust considers a crown—and picks up some hair gel
SPECIAL FORCES The hottest high-performance streetwear is zipped, buckled, cropped, or dropped— and splashed in ampedup camoulage prints
MOMENT OF THE MONTH Pleat wave
WHAT TO WEAR WHERE Forget the studs—swing from the chandeliers with these romantic, gorgeously ornate danglers
Taylor Swift wears a Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane dress and Vetements boots. To get this look, try: Hydra Beauty Flash Perfecting Balm, Les Beiges Healthy Glow Foundation, Perles et Fantaisies Highlighter, Joues Contraste Powder Blush in Jersey, Crayon Sourcils Sculpting Eyebrow Pencil in Blond Clair, Quadra Eyeshadow in Tissé Cambon, Inimitable Mascara, Rouge Allure Lip Colour in Coromandel, Les Exclusifs de Chanel, Fresh Body Cream. All by Chanel Beauté. Hair, Shay Ashual; makeup, Aaron de Mey. Details, see In This Issue. Photographers: Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
61
MADE
Sync up with the May cover girl and Grammydecorated singer’s best moments in style, beauty, and more. You may know every word to each of her songs, but the musicindustry darling turned power player has come into a new look all her own.
the Party of the
YEAR
Experience the Met gala from every angle as we take you beyond the red carpet and behind the scenes at the biggest fashion event of the season. The 2016 exhibition, “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” gives visitors the opportunity to embrace the forward-thinking. Meanwhile, you can go to Vogue.com to see the most mesmerizing gowns in real time as guests make their way up the grand staircase at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
FKA TWIGS AND ROBERT PATTINSON, PHOTOGRAPHED BY PHIL OH, VOGUE.COM, 2015.
62
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
WORLD Traveler
No matter how meticulously you pack your suitcase, a truly unforgettable escape starts with an impeccably planned itinerary. Whether you’re considering a fivestar staycation or a multicity marathon, our Spring Travel Guide will help you streamline the process.
SW I FT: ME RT A LAS A N D M ARCUS P IG GOTT. FASH I O N ED I TO R: TO NN E GO O D MAN. H AIR , SH AY ASH UAL; MAKEUP, AARON DE MEY. PRODUCED BY AC ROSS MED IA PRODUCTION. S ET DESI G N , A N D REA STA NLEY FO R ST RE E TE RS. WO RLD T RAVE LE R: MI CHI EL H UISMAN AND VANESSA AXENTE: MAR IO TESTINO, VO GUE , 20 14. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
Taylor
ANNA WINTOUR Editor in Chief Design Director RAÚL MARTINEZ Fashion Director TONNE GOODMAN Features Director EVE MACSWEENEY Market Director, Fashion and Accessories VIRGINIA SMITH Executive Fashion Editor PHYLLIS POSNICK Style Director CAMILLA NICKERSON International Editor at Large HAMISH BOWLES Fashion News Director MARK HOLGATE Creative Digital Director SALLY SINGER Creative Director at Large GRACE CODDINGTON F A S H I O N /A C C E S S O R I E S Fashion News Editor EMMA ELWICK-BATES Fashion Bookings Director HELENA SURIC Accessories Director SELBY DRUMMOND Editors GRACE GIVENS, ALEXANDRA MICHLER, EMMA MORRISON, MAYA SASAKI Menswear Editor MICHAEL PHILOUZE Bookings Associate ERINA DIGBY Associate Market Editors SARA KLAUSING, WILLOW LINDLEY, FRANCESCA RAGAZZI Market Manager TAYLOR ANGINO Associates LAUREN BELLAMY, GABRIELLA K AREFA-JOHNSON, YOHANA LEBASI Fashion Writer RACHEL WALDMAN Fashion Market Assistant MADELINE SWANSON Home Market Associate SAMANTHA REES BEAUTY Beauty Director CELIA ELLENBERG Beauty Writer LAURA REGENSDORF Beauty Assistant ARDEN FANNING F E AT U R E S Culture Editor VALERIE STEIKER Senior Editors TAYLOR ANTRIM, LAUREN MECHLING, JOYCE RUBIN (Copy), COREY SEYMOUR Entertainment Bookings Director JILLIAN DEMLING Social Editor CHLOE MALLE Style Editor at Large ELISABETH VON THURN UND TAXIS Food Critic JEFFREY STEINGARTEN Arts Editor MARK GUIDUCCI Assistant Editor K ATE GUADAGNINO Assistant Entertainment Editor SAMANTHA LONDON Features Associates LILI GÖKSENIN, ELIZABETH INGLESE Features Assistants MADELEINE LUCKEL, LILAH RAMZI, LAUREN SANCHEZ ART Deputy Design Director ALBERTO ORTA Art Director MARTIN HOOPS Associate Art Director NOBI K ASHIWAGI Designer JENNIFER DONNELLY Executive Photography Director IVAN SHAW Photo Editor ALEX O’NEILL Photo Editor, Research MAUREEN SONGCO Photo Researcher TIM HERZOG Producers NIC BURDEKIN, JENNIFER GREIM Assistant Photo Editor LIANA BLUM Assistant to the Design Director ROSEMARY HANSEN VOGUE.COM Site Director BEN BERENTSON Managing Editor ALEXANDRA MACON Senior Director of Product NEHA SINGH Director of Engineering KENTON JACOBSEN Fashion News Director CHIOMA NNADI Director, Vogue Runway NICOLE PHELPS Executive Fashion Editor JORDEN BICKHAM Beauty Director CATHERINE PIERCY Culture Editor ABBY AGUIRRE Photography Director ANDREW GOLD Art Director FERNANDO DIAS DE SOUZA Director of Visual Production and Development ALLISON BROWN Fashion News Editor ALESSANDRA CODINHA Style Editor EDWARD BARSAMIAN Senior Fashion Writer MARJON CARLOS Market Editors KELLY CONNOR, CHELSEA ZALOPANY Accessories Editor BROOKE DANIELSON Archive Editor LAIRD BORRELLI-PERSSON Fashion News Writers KRISTIN ANDERSON, JANELLE OKWODU, LIANA SATENSTEIN, STEFF YOTK A Fashion News Associate EMILY FARRA Beauty Editor MACKENZIE WAGONER Beauty Writer MONICA KIM Beauty Assistant JENNA RENNERT Deputy Culture Editor JESSIE HEYMAN Senior Culture Writer JULIA FELSENTHAL Culture Writer PATRICIA GARCIA Living Editor VIRGINIA VAN ZANTEN Living Writer BROOKE BOBB Senior Photo Editor SUZANNE SHAHEEN Senior Visual Designer SARA JENDUSA Photo Editor EMILY ROSSER Associate Photo Editor SAMANTHA ADLER Associate Director, Digital Operations ANDEE OLSON Assistant Managing Editor OLIVIA WEISS Senior Producer CHRISTINA LIAO Producer MARIA WARD Social Media Director ANNE JOHNSON Social Media Manager, Vogue Runway LUCIE ZHANG Associate Social Media Manager ZOE TAUBMAN New Media Editor BEAU SAM Photo Producer SOPHIA LI Copy Chief LANI MEYER Research Editor LISA MACABASCO Associate Director, Audience Development BERKELEY BETHUNE Senior Manager, Analytics RACHEL LESAGE Product Manager BEN SMIT Senior Developers JEROME COVINGTON, GREGORY KILIAN Developers JE SUIS ENCRATEIA, SIMONE HILL, BEN MILTON P R O D U C T I O N / C O P Y/ R E S E A R C H
Deputy Managing Editor DAVID BYARS Digital Production Manager JASON ROE Production Designers COR HAZELAAR, SARA REDEN Deputy Copy Chief CAROLINE KIRK Senior Copy Editor LESLIE LIPTON Copy Editor DIEGO HADIS Research Director JENNIFER CONRAD Research Editors ALEXANDRA SANIDAD, COURTNEY MARCELLIN Fashion Credits Editor IVETTE MANNERS S P E C I A L P R O J E C T S / E D I T O R I A L D E V E L O P M E N T/C O M M U N I C AT I O N S Director of Special Projects SYLVANA WARD DURRETT Senior Events Manager EADDY KIERNAN Editorial Business Director MIRA ILIE Manager, Editorial Operations XAVIER GONZALEZ Contracts Manager ALEXA ELAM Editorial Business Coordinator JESSECA JONES Special Events Associate LINDSAY STALL Executive Director of Communications HILDY KURYK Director of Brand Marketing NEGAR MOHAMMADI Communications and Marketing Manager DANIK A OWSLEY Executive Assistant to the Editor in Chief GRACE HUNT Assistants to the Editor in Chief LOUISA STELLE, REBECCA UNGER European Editor FIONA DARIN Fashion Associates CAMILA HENNESSY, ANTHONY KLEIN West Coast Director LISA LOVE West Coast Associate CARA SANDERS
Managing Editor JON GLUCK Executive Director, Editorial and Special Projects CHRISTIANE MACK CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
ROSAMOND BERNIER, MIRANDA BROOKS, SARAH BROWN, ADAM GREEN, NATHAN HELLER, LAWREN HOWELL, CAROLINA IRVING, REBECCA JOHNSON, DODIE K AZANJIAN, SHIRLEY LORD, CATIE MARRON, SARA MOONVES, SARAH MOWER, MEGAN O’GRADY, JOHN POWERS, MARINA RUST, LAUREN SANTO DOMINGO, TABITHA SIMMONS, ROBERT SULLIVAN, PLUM SYKES, JONATHAN VAN METER, SHELLEY WANGER, JANE WITHERS, VICKI WOODS, LYNN YAEGER
66
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
VOGUE.COM
SUSAN D. PLAGEMANN
Chief Revenue Oicer and Publisher Associate Publisher, Marketing KIMBERLY FASTING BERG General Manager DAVID STUCKEY
ADVERTISING Executive Director, Digital Advertising KRISTEN ELLIOTT Advertising Director, Digital ELIZABETH MARVIN Executive Director, International Fashion and Business Development SUSAN CAPPA Executive Retail Director GERALDINE RIZZO Executive Beauty Director LAUREN HULKOWER-BELNICK Fashion Director JAMIE TILSON ROSS Luxury Director ROY KIM Senior Director, American Fashion and Beauty MARIE LA FRANCE American Fashion Manager LENA JOHNSON Account Managers BLAIR CHEMIDLIN, LYNDSEY NATALE Executive Assistants to the Publisher ANNIE MAYBELL, JEENA MARIE PENA Advertising Coordinator NINA CAPACCHIONE Retail Coordinator ELIZABETH ODACHOWSKI International Fashion Coordinator WILLIAM PRIGGE Advertising Assistants LILY MUMMERT, ELEANOR PEERY, GABRIELLE MIZRAHI Advertising Tel: 212 286 2860
BUSINESS Executive Director of Finance and Business Development SYLVIA W. CHAN Senior Business Director TERESA GRANDA Business Managers CHRISTINE GUERCIO, MERIDITH HAINES Advertising Services Manager PHILIP ZISMAN
C R E AT I V E S E R V I C E S Integrated Marketing Executive Director, Creative Services BONNIE ABRAMS Executive Director of Events, Partnerships, and Communications BRIGID WALSH Senior Director, Creative Development and Integrated Partnerships RACHAEL KLEIN Branded Content Director JANE HERMAN BISHOP Director, Integrated Marketing and Brand Development CATESBY CATOR Integrated Marketing Directors MARK HARTNETT, SARAH RYAN Director, Special Events CARA CROWLEY Senior Integrated Marketing Manager EUNICE KIM Digital Marketing Manager ELLYN PULEIO Integrated Marketing Manager LIAM MCKESSAR Integrated Marketing Assistants SHARTINIQUE CHLOE LEE, TARA MCDERMOT T Vogue Studio Creative Director DELPHINE GESQUIERE Director of Vogue Studio Services SCOT T ASHWELL Associate Creative Director SARAH RUBY Art Directors NANCY ROSENBERG, TIMOTHY SCHULTHEIS Copy Director DEENIE HARTZOG-MISLOCK Designer KELSEY REIFLER
MARKETING Executive Director of Marketing MELISSA HALVERSON Marketing Director YI-MEI TRUXES Senior Marketing Managers MEREDITH MCCUE, ALEX ANDRIA GURULE Marketing Managers ANNA NATALI SWANSON, LINDSAY K ASS
D I G I TA L A D S T R AT E G Y A N D P L A N N I N G Senior Digital Account Manager REBECCA ISQUITH Digital Account Manager COURTNEY CARROLL Associate Account Manager RYAN HOOVER Analysts, Sales Planning NIDA SAYED, REBECCA YOUNG, ALANA SCHARLOP, HAYLEY SAMELA BRANCH OFFICES San Francisco SUSAN KETTLER, Director, 50 Francisco St., San Francisco CA 94133 Tel: 415 955 8210 Fax: 415 982 5539 Midwest WENDY LEV Y, 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 MARJAN DIPIAZZA, Executive Director; K ATIE HUSA, Account Manager, West Coast, 6300 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90048 Tel: 323 965 3598 Fax: 323 965 4982 Southeast PETER ZUCKERMAN, Z. MEDIA 1666 Kennedy Causeway, Suite 602, Miami Beach FL 33141 Tel: 305 532 5566 Fax: 305 532 5223 Paris FLORENCE MOUVIER, Director, Europe 4 Place du Palais Bourbon, 75343 Paris Cedex 07 Tel: 331 4411 7846 Fax: 331 4705 4228 Milan 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 Emeritus S. I. NEWHOUSE, JR. Chairman CHARLES H. TOWNSEND President & Chief Executive Oicer ROBERT A. SAUERBERG, JR. Chief Financial Oicer DAVID E. GEITHNER Chief Marketing Oicer & President, Condé Nast Media Group EDWARD J. MENICHESCHI Chief Administrative Oicer JILL BRIGHT Executive Vice President/Chief Digital Oicer FRED SANTARPIA Executive Vice President–Consumer Marketing MONICA RAY Executive Vice President–Human Resources JOANN MURRAY Executive Vice President–Corporate Communications CAMERON BLANCHARD Senior Vice President–Business Operations DAVID ORLIN Senior Vice President–Corporate Controller DAVID B. CHEMIDLIN Senior Vice President–Managing Director–23 Stories JOSH STINCHCOMB Senior Vice President–Network Sales & Partnerships, CN & Chief Revenue Oicer, CNÉ LISA VALENTINO Senior Vice President–Financial Planning & Analysis SUZANNE REINHARDT Senior Vice President–Strategy–23 Stories PADRAIG CONNOLLY Senior Vice President–Ad Tech DAVID ADAMS Senior Vice President–Licensing CATHY HOFFMAN GLOSSER Senior Vice President–Research & Analytics STEPHANIE FRIED Senior Vice President– Digital Operations LARRY BAACH
C O N D É N A S T E N T E R TA I N M E N T President DAWN OSTROFF Executive Vice President–General Manager-Digital Video JOY MARCUS Executive Vice President–Chief Operating Oicer SAHAR ELHABASHI Executive Vice President–Motion Pictures JEREMY STECKLER Executive Vice President–Programming & Content Strategy/Digital Channels MICHAEL KLEIN Executive Vice President–Alternative TV JOE L ABRACIO Executive Vice President– CNÉ Studios AL EDGINGTON Senior Vice President–Marketing & Partner Management TEAL NEWLAND
C O N D É N A S T I N T E R N AT I O N A L Chairman and Chief Executive JONATHAN NEWHOUSE President NICHOLAS COLERIDGE Condé Nast is a global media company producing premium content for more than 263 million consumers in 30 markets. www.condenast.com www.condenastinternational.com Published at 1 World Trade Center, New York NY 10007. 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, 1 World Trade Center, New York NY 10007.
72
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
VOGUE.COM
letter from the editor
Scene STEALERS
78
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN ANDREW BOLTON, CURATOR IN CHARGE OF THE MET’S COSTUME INSTITUTE, IN A RESEARCH LIBRARY AT THE MUSEUM.
it is about the place of the handcrafted and the machine-made in fashion, and it is by turns both staggeringly beautiful and extremely perceptive in its examination of how the roles of technology and tradition play out in designers’ creative processes. Yet there’s a subtext to it that could also speak to Andrew’s own work as a museum curator—which is not so far from the daily tending of that seventeenth-century clock—about what has to be done in the present to keep the past alive and ticking. Given Vogue’s long-standing relationship to the Costume Institute, I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of working with Andrew for many years now, and he makes for a wonderful and entertaining partner in crime. His many ine qualities—he’s scholarly, yet pop-culturally attuned; intellectual, yet instinctive; highly kinetic, yet capable of intense calm—allow him to cut a swath through the Vatican-like operations of the museum E D I T O R ’ S L E T T E R > 8 3
VOGUE.COM
A NDY RYA N
O
ne of the funniest and most enduring memories I have of the 2006 Costume Institute exhibition, “AngloMania,” is of the machinations that took place to wind up a grandfather clock that was all but obscured by a lavish court gown by the House of Worth replete with an eleven-foot train. On each and every single day of the show’s run, this vast creation—most likely worn by a relative of George Washington to an afternoon court of Queen Victoria—was painstakingly navigated by the curator of clocks to access the clock’s operating mechanism. No other act quite demonstrates the time-honored (quite literally) way the Metropolitan Museum of Art operates: its respectfulness, its fastidiousness, and its adherence to a level of curatorial protocol that might seem peculiar and arcane to the outside world. The brilliant young Englishman behind “AngloMania,” Andrew Bolton, is now curator in charge of the Costume Institute there, and a decade on his latest show, “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” will open at the museum on May 5. Ostensibly
letter from the editor without losing the respect and admiration of his colleagues. He is also very British in the way he nimbly avoids the spotlight, preferring his labors to take the acclaim. But, Andrew, there is no way to avoid it now! This month allows two opportunities to see him shine. In Nathan Heller’s proile (“An Eye for All Seasons,” page 200), Andrew’s processes that brought “Manus x Machina” into being are revealed; we’re also allowed a glimpse into his life away from the museum with his partner, designer Thom Browne. (The closing scene of Nathan’s excellent piece made me think that Andrew and Thom’s new home will also be a little like “Manus x Machina”: rigorous reductivism versus the desire to decorate.) The other is in the Andrew Rossi documentary The First Monday in May, released nationally on April 15, and if any more proof was needed of Andrew’s humility, he still hasn’t—as I write this letter—seen even the roughest cut of the ilm. It tracks the many months that went into creating last year’s epic Costume Institute show, “China: Through the Looking Glass,” which brought record numbers of people into the museum. The ilm was coproduced by Vogue’s Director of Special Projects, Sylvana Durrett, who undertakes the organization of the gala that SAINT SLIMANE acts as a curtain-raiser to the museum show; THE DESIGNER, PHOTOGRAPHED Sylvana, thank you so very much for all that BY IRVING PENN, VOGUE, 2001. you do. It’s my hope that this documentary
DUR R ETT: KEVIN TACH MAN
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 7 8
TALL ORDER will give far deeper insight into the curatorial VOGUE’S SYLVANA process, as well as make clear that the work DURRETT, IN GIVENCHY, AT THE of the Costume Institute is much more than 2015 MET GALA. simply putting clothes on mannequins. One scene in particular has stayed with me: Andrew slowly, quietly, methodically checking on the exhibition before it opens in the half-light, a man lost in the possibility of his imagination—yet also very much rooted in the reality of the moment. The same could be said of the great designer Hedi Slimane, whose arrival in 2012 at Saint Laurent sent seismic shock waves throughout the fashion world. The truth is that fashion has been immeasurably enriched by his brand of provocative, youthful chic—as seen on Taylor Swift, cochair of this year’s Costume Institute gala, on our May cover (“Full Control,” page 176)— something which is undeniably his and his alone, not to mention an ability to plug directly into contemporary art and the underground music scene. Hedi might now be based out of Los Angeles, but he is most deinitely a man of the world, taking the kind of keen, sharp, cultured interest in how things are unfolding around him. He radically redeined what it meant to be the creative director of a storied house, and his departure from Saint Laurent leaves a huge gap. All I can say is that at Vogue we will miss him as much as we keenly await his return, whenever and wherever that may be.
VOGUE.COM
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
83
talking back 106K
RIDICULOUSLY
Good-looking Derek Zoolander came strutting back into our lives when he and Hansel crashed the fall 2015 Valentino show in Paris. In February Zoolander 2 had a star-studded premiere— and a Vogue cover (photographed by Annie Leibovitz). As Derek put it on Instagram: “In your face Hansel.”
ONE OF MY FAVORITE ISSUES @patriciaclaudinobickford
WHAT A FUN COVER, I LIKE IT! @fashioninfocus
INBOX from the
CANNOT WAIT TO GET THIS ISSUE! @fashiontechgirl
th MAN ON THE COVER OF VOGUE IN THE PAST YEARS
Go Vogue—and go Zoolander! I loved the February cover. It’s the best one in a long time and shows that Vogue knows how to plant its tongue firmly in its cheek. Bravo. ANN-MARIE NANSETT, WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND
Writing decadently without self-indulgence is a feat, and Jem Macy does just that in “Love, Italian Style” [Up Front, February]. The author’s descriptions are rich and opulent but the story itself reads with great honesty. Thank you, Jem, for your poignancy, and Vogue, for continuing your tradition of sharing top-notch, unexpected essays.
LOL! WOW THIS IS THE BEST 73 QUESTIONS, LITERALLY COULDN’T STOP LAUGHING @BONJOUR.SERA
TERRA ARNONE, OAKVILLE, ONTARIO, CANADA TA L K I N G B A C K > 8 6
84
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
VOGUE.COM
BE LLA I TA LI A : ELE N A KORCHE N KO/ I N DI E I MAG ES
I NEED THAT SUIT @bradyd11
talking back
168K
Screen QUEENS
THIS VIDEO IS MY OBSESSION @brittanylelamp
Havana
Nights Even as writer Tamar Adler’s story in our February issue on the emerging Cuban dining scene (“Cuba Libre”) got people talking in the food world—most notably via a segment on NPR’s The Splendid Table—the biggest developments were political. In March the president made a historic visit to our Caribbean neighbor after issuing new rules that make it easier and less expensive for American tourists to travel there. Commercial flights! If only we’d had that luxury when planning Tamar’s itinerary. . . . “Cuba Libre Part II,” we’re ready for you!
DO YOU FOLLOW VOGUE?
86
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
10.5M
7.31M
9.4M
355.5K
VOGUE welcomes correspondence from its readers. Address all mail to Letters, VOGUE Magazine, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007, or via email 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
DYN A MI C DUO: CASS BI RD, VOGUE .COM , 20 16. FUL L SE RV I N G : A ME LI A P EL Á EZ . N ATU RAL E ZA MUE RTA CO N PE Z (STIL L L IF E WITH F ISH), 1945. OIL ON HEAVY PAPER LAID DOWN ON BOARD. 22½" X 29½". © AMELIA PELÁEZ FOUNDATION. COURTESY OF CERNUDA ARTE, CORA L GABLES, FL.
The Kardashian-Jenner clan has perfected the art of making news with a single social-media post. So it makes sense that a Vogue.com Fashion Week video, House of Kendall, directed by Cass Bird and starring the second-youngest Jenner, made serious waves. “You have no idea how many times I’ve watched this,” commented @susannaavagyan on Instagram. See Kendall shave her legs in an SUV between shows! Goof around with Gigi! Eat McDonald’s topless! And catch glimpses of fall 2016 looks from the likes of Marc Jacobs and Gucci. “This is a masterpiece,” wrote @anitayepez99.
contributors FROM LEFT: MODELS HAMMAM, SOFIE, AND HARTZEL
Frederikke SOFIE “When I’m wearing a pleated skirt, I tend to add a little dance and jump to my walk.”
IMAAN Hammam “They’re made to twirl in!”
Grace HARTZEL
THE MODELS OF MOMENT OF THE MONTH (PAGE 238) ON PLEATED SKIRTS
DRUMMOND IN NYC
SELBY Drummond “The girls who were more romantic, we gave a tougher, futuristic earring, and the girls with modern styles, like CL, who has blue hair, we gave more romantic looks. At the end of the day, the girls’ personalities made the earrings very much their own.” THE ACCESSORIES DIRECTOR ON WORKING WITH CONTRIBUTING EDITOR SARA MOONVES ON WHAT TO WEAR WHERE, PAGE 240
88
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
KLAUSING IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS, PARIS
Sara KLAUSING “The fun part of my job is to reimagine what’s possible between fashion and technology. It’s about discovering that one idea or product that will change the world next.” THE ASSOCIATE MARKET EDITOR ON AN ISSUE EXPLORED IN THIS YEAR’S MET GALA (“AN EYE FOR ALL SEASONS,” PAGE 200)
VOGUE.COM
HA MM A M, SO FI E, H A RT ZE L: T HEO W E NN E R. FASHI O N E D I TO R: A LEX HA RRI NGTON. H AIR , ILKER AKYOL; MAKEUP, MAR ION ROBINE. P RO DUCE D BY AST RI D G RAS FO R N ORT H SI X. DRUM M ON D : BA RBA RA A N ASTACIO. KLAUSING: MEGAN CODY. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
“They remind me of sitting outside a French café drinking a cappuccino and writing in springtime.”
up front
The Accidental Sportswriter
With a book about World War I under her belt and an ambitious biography on the way, LOUISA THOMAS was shaping up to be a full-time historian. Then came an unexpected detour. he stadium was shaking, and inwardly, I was shaking too. Moments earlier, with the Seattle Seahawks leading the San Francisco 49ers by six points in the 2014 NFC Championship game, with seconds to go and San Francisco driving, Seattle’s cornerback Richard Sherman—nearly beaten by the receiver in the end zone—had lung himself into the air. As he spun, he tipped the ball into a teammate’s hands for an interception, saving Seattle’s
T 92
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
season and sending the Seahawks to the Super Bowl. Seismicactivity monitors located around the stadium spiked; I could feel the force of the crowd. In the press box, I looked at the cold cofee in my cup and watched it tremble. Or maybe I only sensed the vibration of my own nerves. My job was to quickly turn what had been so far the most exciting, important game of that year’s NFL playofs into a story that went beyond a recap of the score—a tough assignment for any sportswriter. But even though I was on the staf of an ESPN-owned U P F R O N T> 9 6
VOGUE.COM
RYA N P FLUGE R. SI T T IN G S ED I TO R: KAT I E BU RN ET T. HA I R, N E IL G RU P P ; M A KEUP, MELISSA SILVER . PH OTOGRAPH ED AT BARCLAYS CENTER , BROOKLYN. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH I S ISSU E .
ON THE BALL THE AUTHOR, IN A CAMILLA AND MARC DRESS.
up front Getting in the Game Web site, Grantland, I wasn’t sure I could call myself a sportswriter. Sportswriters made contacts, attended press conferences, had statistics at the ready. I was the author of a book about four brothers during World War I, and I was working on a biography of Louisa Catherine Adams, President John Quincy Adams’s wife. I’d studied poetry in college. I’d spent the previous day “reporting” by walking to Elliott Bay Book Company, where I had sat in the café and read the novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette and a couple of histories of Seattle. At Grantland, I often wrote about tennis, in a style that might be described, not always kindly, as “writerly.” Football was something else. Until I covered the NFL playofs, I had never been to a football game. In the press box, the sportswriters were studying replays, transcribing interviews, typing furiously. I looked at the document on my computer and tried to will words onto the page. I wrote a sentence, then erased it. I looked at my notes; my notes were worthless. I looked at the computer screens around me; most had inches of text. I turned back toward my empty screen. I tried to think of what I had just seen, but my memory of the game was only blur and static, as if the signal were cut. An email arrived from my editor, with the subject line so, cool game. The rest of the message was blank. Cool game? I thought, bewildered. That’s it? That’s all you’re going to give me? Ever since I’d arrived in Seattle that Friday, I’d been haunted by the sense that I’d landed there by accident. Part of this was fear, the conviction that if I wrote a story about football, my inexperience would show in every line. (And, as most female writers can tell you, men on Twitter—especially football fans on Twitter—are not always nice.) I was sure that every fan in a Seahawks jersey knew Earl Thomas’s 40 time at the 2010 draft combine, and that every
An email arrived from my editor, with the subject line SO, COOL GAME. The rest of the message was blank. Cool game? I thought, bewildered. That’s it? That’s all you’re going to give me? barista at the Starbucks across from my hotel could more easily discuss the team’s defensive gapping scheme than I could. But what was really stirring in me was something more complicated, and more unsettling, than a lack of conidence. The crowd was jumping and screaming, screaming just to be loud. On the TV above me, Sherman was shouting about his greatness. Around me, reporters were filling in the blanks of their pre-written stories. I thought of San Francisco’s NaVorro Bowman snapping his leg near the goal line with nine minutes to go, and of the gruesome replays on the Jumbotron while oficials tried to determine which team had possession of the ball. I thought about how much the outcome of this game meant to so many. It felt personal to millions of people who had played no part. In Seattle especially, becoming an extreme fan was a point of pride. Earlier, a local friend had told me that Seattle’s ixation on the Seahawks that season was “like the city’s collective
96
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
id exploding.” The game had been crazy, but wasn’t that really crazy? And yet it was so much a part of American life. I looked at the crowd, at the loggers and the tree huggers, the computer programmers and the punks, and at CenturyLink Field—pristine, impressive, a symbol of a proud, prosperous city. I thought of the years before the tech money had come, and the old, wretched Kingdome, now demolished; the city was still paying of the debt. Sports had brought this city so much joy, but at a cost. I thought of the way Seattle’s running back moved, low and silent and hunkered, and the electric grace of San Francisco’s undisciplined but talented quarterback. And I remembered how, in the inal moments of the game, the rest of the world had fallen away, and the end zone and descending pass were all that remained. I began to write. hen my friends, accustomed to hearing me speak passionately about religious revivalism in New York during the nineteenth century but not so passionately about, say, the New York Knicks, told me they’d never imagined that I’d become a sportswriter, I told them I’d never imagined it either. But that’s not quite true. Growing up in Washington, D.C., I had loved the Olympics. Obsessed is not too strong a word. I’d recorded dozens of hours of coverage to tide me through the long, bleak breaks between summer and winter games. (I recently opened a copy of Macbeth that I’d read in eighth grade and found, written in the margin, “51 weeks until the Olympics!”) As a child, I’d cartwheeled down the hall and triple-axeled (sort of) across the living-room loor. I’d whispered the motto—Citius, altius, fortius; “Faster, higher, stronger”—like an oath. As I grew older, my Olympics obsession became more general. I read the Washington Post sports page every morning; I listened to Orioles games on the radio while I did my homework. I watched college basketball and football on TV, and sat in the cheap seats to see the Washington Capitals. And in the summers and on Friday nights during my sophomore and junior years in high school, I worked part-time at the Washington Post sports section, doing research and unbylined work, the occasional story, and handling the phones. Sometimes, when I answer the phone now, I still feel compelled to say, as I did at the Post, “Sports!” But when I got to college, I stopped following sports altogether, almost immediately. I had papers to write and books to read, and I didn’t have in me whatever it was that made my friend sick with anxiety while watching his beloved Red Sox in the playofs. I started caring more about things I’d ignored in high school, like music and art. After college, I went to work at The New Yorker, where sports are mostly regarded with a shrug. I started writing historical noniction, spent hours in archives, became fascinated by the idea of entering, through rigorous scholarship and a sympathetic imagination, a time that informed our own but that we could never really know. The world seemed much bigger, and dropping a ball through a hoop or swimming 100 meters seemed to count for less. I wanted to be a writer, and I thought that suggested something more serious than sports. But I still ran, skied, and rock-climbed; I played softball in a media league for The New Yorker and then the U P F R O N T> 9 8
W
VOGUE.COM
up front Getting in the Game literary magazine The Paris Review. Years after my last high school tennis match, I started playing that again too. One night at a party in 2010, while I was telling the Web editor at The Paris Review how much I loved tennis, she asked if I wanted to write about the U.S. Open for the site. I’d never followed the pro circuits closely, not even in the days when I’d played competitively and watched SportsCenter on a loop, but it sounded like a nice break from World War I, where I had been spending most of my time. And it was fun, and new, and unexpected. I quickly realized that it wasn’t just a chance to watch tennis all day and call it work. It was a chance to test the limits of language, to describe movement and form, to pay attention to the shape of sentences, to write for the imagination. It was a chance, I quickly learned, to probe ideas, though at irst I did it very gently: female athletes and expectations of femininity; aesthetics; loneliness; the weather. I avoided analysis of the matches themselves almost completely in those irst few pieces, but I tried to write in a way that was unconstrained. And when an editor at a brand-new site, Grantland, asked me if I’d like to write for them during Wimbledon and then the U.S. Open, I leaped at the chance to keep trying. I started to watch tennis all the time—not only the slams but tournaments in Brisbane, Wuhan, Dubai. The more I watched, the more I actually saw. I became fascinated by the technical aspects of the game, the geometries, the players’ diferent styles, tendencies, and tics. I mapped their diferent emotional topographies. I became invested in the outcomes. I thought about why they won, and how they handled loss. Then I started watching, and writing about, other sports. The Olympics, baseball, basketball. We had freedom at Grantland, and my editors allowed me—pushed me—to use it. I was incredibly lucky to work with the people I did. The editors wanted to take risks. We all wanted to grow. They sent me to Florida for baseball’s spring training. They ran my meditation on crosscountry skiing. They sent me to watch Usain Bolt run. “I kinda want you to write about the Spurs during the NBA playofs,” my editor wrote me one April. “You know I don’t know anything about the NBA, right?” I replied. He said something about “fresh eyes” and told me to book lights to San Antonio and Portland for the second round. I went. I watched and listened and asked questions that I didn’t know the answers to. I wanted to learn, and when people sensed that, they tended to help—even the famously silent Spurs. had a lot of doubt. There are diferent ways to write about sports—not unlike history. You can faithfully and meticulously reconstruct a timeline of events, breaking down the various factors that led to speciic outcomes. Or you can step back and see the sweep of things. But this can be risky. It is like looking through the window at dusk: What you see irst, without noticing, is your own faint relection. I made mistakes. I sometimes shied from reporting, settling for speculation. I used desperate verbal lourishes. (Let us not speak of my piece about UConn’s Shabazz Napier.) I wasn’t funny like my Grantland colleagues, and I sometimes strained too hard to be serious. And I was an outsider—one of a few women in rooms full of men, and I felt the difference. I was
I 98
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
never unwelcome—if anything, the opposite—but I’d still cringe when I heard a guy casually use the word girl to mean “weak.” Nor was I always quite sure I wanted to belong. Often, while trying to describe Roger Federer’s forehand for the thirty-seventh time, I’d wish I were back in the Adams-family archives, tracing the crosscurrents of culture, economics, faith, coincidence, psychology, and individual will.
Sportswriting had changed me. It had taught me—among other things—about being in the right place at the right time, and about getting the right or wrong bounce. It taught me about resilience But I came to realize that writing about sports was a way to write about all of those things: economics, society, race, gender, and violence. Especially in the United States, athletes become avatars; teams, the vessels for our dreams and our disappointments. They stand for the best, and sometimes the worst, in us. But they are human and particular, too, full of laws and prone to doubts, placed in situations of unbelievable pressure, and forced to play it out. That drama can be the microcosm of the human drama. The funny thing is, I didn’t fully appreciate all of this until the chance was almost gone. I would work at Grantland for more than four years—nearly the site’s entire lifespan. I went from being an occasional contributor to a senior editor; I moved across the country for the job. What began as a lark became my life. I was lucky—for the people I worked with, for the chances I got. But luck is luck, and it can change. ESPN shut us down last October, in a tightly worded statement about redirecting resources. It wasn’t entirely a surprise. Our founder had left months before, and the company was in the midst of layofs. Still, what happened was abrupt and upending: Just like that, I was out of a job. I watched a lot of football that winter, and learned chess, and wondered what would come next. I thought, as I had years ago in Seattle, about how narratives are constructed, about what we can know, about what we can’t. I realized that sportswriting had changed me. It had taught me—among other things—about being in the right place at the right time, and about getting the right or wrong bounce. It taught me about resilience—about how to move on. I began to think that I hadn’t really become a serious writer until I started writing about sports—until I had to describe that luid forehand 37 times. Until I tried to make people see anew what they had already watched. It was the challenge of sitting in rooms full of sportswriters that forced me to try to igure out not only how to it in but how to stand out. Now I’m launched on my own, and much of what I’m working on has nothing to do with sports. Am I still a sportswriter? I sometimes wonder. Was I ever? But the truth is that it doesn’t matter. It’s all part of the same human drama, after all.
VOGUE.COM
IN THE TRENCHES THE AUTHOR REPORTING FROM KOSOVO IN 1999.
lives
On Dangerous Ground he message came via Facebook unexpectedly late on a recent Friday night when my son was safely asleep and my apartment in Paris was silent except for the whir of the dishwasher. “Janine . . . you were probably one of the last people to see my son alive . . . I would like to know more . . . We miss him very much.” The words were sent from Miami by Art Sotlof, whose son, Steven, a young and talented freelance journalist, was beheaded by the radical group ISIS in Syria in 2014. Art had just seen a documentary, 7 Days in Syria, that I made with several of my colleagues, in which his son briely appears. Steve was smart, funny, and kind. He spoke Arabic. He had worked in Yemen and Libya and had gone to Aleppo to report on the carnage irsthand. For that, his fate led him to a lonely desert with a gruesome murderer known as Jihadi John. A few weeks earlier, the gentle and much-loved reporter Jim Foley had met the same terrible fate. As I read Art’s message, I had a painful déjà vu: I had received a Facebook message from Steve a few days after he was kidnapped, in August 2013. But when I clicked on that message, it was not Steve who was writing me from inside Syria, but another colleague, Barak Bari, who had gotten access to Steve’s computer. It took me a while to register what Barak was saying. Steve had gone
T 102
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
“dark”—code for missing. Did I have any idea where he was planning to go and who he was with? When our colleagues disappear, there is a slow, agonizing piecing-together of precious details that might bring them back alive. I have been a war reporter for 25 years, and this is what it has come to: the realization that if you continue, you might be kidnapped, you might die. We always knew we took risks; we always tried to minimize those risks as best we could. But the war in Syria, and the rise of ISIS, have changed all that. I had met Steve in Aleppo on a freezing December afternoon, when stinking garbage was piled on the streets and people were selling plastic juice cartons of petrol. The shelling by government forces was heavy; there was not much food, electricity, or water. Hospitals kept getting bombed. There were no oicial schools, and the beautiful ancient buildings of Aleppo that had once been part of the Silk Road had been blitzed into rubble. There was such sorrow in the eyes of people, such rightful anger, such fear that nothing could make the nightmare stop. In the middle of this, Steve arrived. He was a chubby kid checking the basketball scores in Miami when he could get Internet, which made me laugh: a licker of humor in the midst of despair. He swiped some of the freeze-dried food I had bought at a camping store in Paris and deemed it delicious. He advised me L I V E S >1 0 4
VOGUE.COM
© A LEX MA JOL I/ MAGN U M P HOTOS
Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq, Sierra Leone . . . war reporter JANINE DI GIOVANNI has always been willing to work in conflict zones. But after ISIS, she asks, is the risk too great?
lives War Stories what to do about my son, who was obsessed with Legos but was not studying enough. “Take him for an ice cream.” Steve was just launching his career, but as an Arabic speaker, he had an advantage. He lived—he actually lived—in the chaos of Benghazi and jokingly said that dating there was hell. He laughed about his “jihadi” beard. One of the irst questions he asked me was “Have you been to the front line in Aleppo yet?” I could tell he was at the stage where war still fascinated him. I compared him to my younger self. When I began my career as a reporter during the irst Palestinian uprising in the early 1990s, my gravest worry was getting a rock thrown at my windshield as I drove through the West Bank, or being arrested by Israeli authorities. But that fear passed quickly, and soon I was driving down to Gaza in shared taxis packed in with Palestinians I did not know. I stayed for months in refugee camps, and when there was a “clash”—meaning a confrontation between Palestinian kids and the Israeli security forces, all I wanted to do was be there, in the irst line, getting tear-gassed or stoned by a hail of rocks. I wanted to see it, live it, feel it—how else could I write about it? Getting kidnapped never entered my mind. Later, in Bosnia, my fears were of mortars falling too close, of not being able to run in time, or of getting my knees shot at by a sniper, terrors that pale in retrospect when compared with Jihadi John’s knife. In Bosnia, I saw several of my colleagues wounded, killed, or emotionally wrecked from the constant barrage of shell ire, snipers, and rockets. But we still trekked up muddy hills to spend days in trenches with young soldiers whose enemies were so close we could see their lags. One fellow journalist, Corinne Dufka (now at Human Rights Watch), was injured by a mine in Central Bosnia. “It’s funny,” she said. “I never thought I would get hurt, because my mother loves me too much.” ut reporting in Syria was diferent. I knew that there were many places where journalists are not liked; in Mostar in 1993, there was a rumor that rebel soldiers had put a 50 Deutsche mark price tag (about $25) on our heads—insultingly low—but we were more or less tolerated. Writing press on your windscreen in duct tape seemed to provide an invisible shield—or so we thought. Perhaps we were naive, but we felt safer then. These days reporters in Syria are walking chattel, to be bought and sold. It is well known that France and Italy will often pay for their hostages; the U.S. and the U.K. refuse to, which does not stop ISIS and al-Nusra and other violent groups from abducting any nationality. We are distrusted on all sides. The Committee to Protect Journalists has named Syria and Iraq the deadliest conlicts to date for our profession, with sixteen killed in Syria last year. If you report in Syria, you have two choices. Either you cross the border illegally, with all the attendant risks, or you go to the regime side—meaning working out of Damascus—but that is limited to reporters who obtain visas. Visas are as rare and as precious as a fresh tomato in Aleppo. You are unlikely to be granted one if you are known to have entered opposition territory or have an agenda. Once I would cross borders blithely without visas, sneaking into Zimbabwe or Chechnya or Serbia without the proper documents. No longer.
B
104
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
Initially, I got several visas to go to the Damascus side. Having worked in Iraq during the dark days of Saddam, I knew something about countries with secret police. The Mukhabarat operated with impunity. I had dressed in the bathroom of my hotel room in Baghdad because of hidden cameras; I was careful what I said on the telephone because I knew someone in the basement was listening to every call I made and taking notes. I knew my driver was spying on me; I knew every person I saw or interviewed would be followed up with a visit or a phone call. Paranoia was a way of life. I was nervous in Damascus that irst trip. I knew I could encrypt my computer or get a diferent chip for my cell phone, but there was nothing I could do if the police decided to arrest me for whatever trumped-up reason. I did not sleep, and when I fell into a doze near dawn, I would wake up panting with fear. I threw myself into work to stop myself thinking. As I crawled through the battle zone of Homs, moving from one bombed-out house to another
When I began investigating war
crimes, you did not die for doing it, unless you were very unlucky. I had lived on that luck with a group of Syrian soldiers, I thought of Corinne’s words: My mother loves me, too, so I could not die. “Are you insane?” said my boyfriend in New York when I reached him on the phone. “This is Syria, not Bosnia. Go home.” After my fourth trip to the regime side, my ixer (a local guide and translator) also told me not to return. “You’ll ind yourself in jail if you come back here,” he said cheerfully. “It’s not worth it.” But it was worth it to me, and I sulked, then found alternate ways to get inside the country and into detention centers, soldiers’ barracks, and hospitals where the wounded and dying were being kept. Finally I realized it had to stop. My worries were no longer about getting my visa revoked, or being thrown out of the country and told never to return—which is what happened to me in Russia in 2000, after I reported the fall of Grozny. They were that someone would kill me for what I did. Before Syria, the irst question I would be asked at a conference or a forum on reporting conflict was whether being a woman made a diference when working in war zones or humanitarian disaster sites. I usually said the same thing—a stock answer about it having no impact, because I am weary of that question, and besides, I change my mind often about it. Being a woman did have an impact when I became a mother. Now I cannot spend months in the ield, and I weigh my decisions with care. Where once I wandered into jungles in Africa with rebel armies, now I fear being violated, raped, kidnapped. I am now terriied of the ten-year-old child soldiers with machetes and guns, whereas before I had scolded them. In February 2012, I received a phone call in the early morning while I was working out at a gym with a friend in Belgrade. The call was from a fellow journalist in Beirut. He told me that our colleague Marie Colvin had been killed a few hours earlier by a rocket blast in Homs. L I V E S >1 0 6
VOGUE.COM
lives War Stories The news left me raw, and I crouched near my locker while my friend tried to comfort me. I cut short my Belgrade visit, and my boyfriend drove me to the airport to get the next light to London. We stopped en route, and took a walk through a wood. He told me to start thinking about things diferently: If Marie, who was a stalwart in our profession, was dead, everything had changed. On the plane, I thought of how I had met Marie many years before by the photocopy machine at the London Sunday Times. She was older, glamorous, wearing a pale, tight Calvin Klein sheath dress, her frizzy hair straightened and clipped back in a sleek bun. “Hi, I’m Marie,” she said gruly. We went out for a few drinks, which turned into several bottles, then shared a cab home to our respective West London single-girl lats. After that, I picked her up in the morning in my battered Saab and we would drive to work in Wapping, usually silent in London traic because we were both hung over—collateral damage from the job. If we weren’t in the ield, we were anesthetizing ourselves from what we had seen in the ield. In those days, there was only a handful of women working the way we did, and I often felt I had no road map to tell me how to do it right—how to get the balance. Marie never had children, but she wanted them. I made a vow in my mid-30s that I was going to be a mother, and I would have a family with someone I loved madly. In August 2003, on the day that the UN was bombed in Baghdad—a city I had spent months living in earlier that year—I married Bruno Girodon, a French reporter I had met in Sarajevo. He understood me. Before we went to the registry oice, we both watched the news about Baghdad on TV, biting our nails with the same frustrated thought: We’re not there! uca, the child we had the following year, is now twelve and tells me he wants to be a reporter, like his father, like me. I jokingly tell him that it would be so much easier if he were a banker; I try to steer him to study his math and science more diligently so that he can become an engineer or a hedge-fund manager. But journalism is still an extraordinary profession, I tell him. Then I think of Marie, and of Reuters reporter Kurt Schork, who was murdered by rebel soldiers in Sierra Leone in 2000 when we were working there together, and of countless others. I think how I would feel if my son were kidnapped—if I had to reach out to a stranger living on another continent because, like Art Sotlof, I missed my son so fervently I needed to write to her on Facebook to get details of his last moments on Earth. One afternoon when my son and I were on holiday in Greece, I was watching the Libya drama unfold on the news when I saw Bruno (we had separated in 2010) being wheeled into a Tripoli hospital covered in blood. Qaddai had just fallen, and Bruno and I were taking turns reporting the conlict, having laid down a law when our son was born never to go to dangerous places at the same time. Bruno was in Tripoli on an empty street when he was shot by a sniper. Sky TV caught his bandaged head on camera. For an anxious few hours, I tried to ind vital information about my former husband, and inally his oice phoned me to tell me he had lost a lot of blood but was all right. He would be driven to Tunisia, then medevaced home to France. When he called me after
L
106
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
PLAY TIME DI GIOVANNI WITH HER SON, LUCA, IN PARIS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARCUS MAM, VOGUE, 2011.
his surgery, I was sobbing so hard he said, with a hint of gallows humor, “Are you crying because I am still alive?” But in fact, I was crying because of what I might have had to tell my son. I did have to tell my son that his father was shot that night, but that he was alive, and that he was coming home, and he would see him again. How to ind the right words to explain that a sniper had aimed his gun at his daddy’s head and ired? Luca listened quietly and said, “OK.” His sturdiness, his resolution—this is what my parents do—made me even sadder. Now when I go anywhere, the first thing Luca says to me is, “Mom, is it dangerous where you are?” Some people might call me irresponsible to report conlicts at all, and I would not know how to win that argument. I would have to say that when I started, when I began investigating war crimes and human rights abuses a long time ago, you did not die for doing it, unless you were very, very unlucky. And I had lived on that luck. What is clear is that we have to work a diferent way now. I would have liked to go to besieged areas of Syria and to have lived with the people as I did many years ago in Sarajevo. But the last time I ended up going somewhere illegal (I won’t say where), I had to crawl under a fence at dusk and ended up at the feet of a very large dog and a border guard with a gun pointed at me. He let me go after a few cold hours on the ground only after I begged him and told him I had to get home to my son. When I get discouraged, I think of George Orwell, or Martha Gellhorn, or countless other brave correspondents who went into the ield and just kept working. “Are you afraid?” people ask me, as often as they ask what it is like being a woman in a war zone. Of course I am afraid, all the time. But fear is just part of the equation. I always believed admitting that you were scared was part of being courageous. Janine di Giovanni’s The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria will be published by W. W. Norton & Company in May.
VOGUE.COM
nostalgia The Other Man When she stumbled upon her mother’s secret past, EMILY BINGHAM became fixated on a handsome Italian.
hen I was growing up in Kentucky in the early 1970s, my primaryschool brain couldn’t quite wrap itself around my immediate family. My father was the editor and publisher of The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times, continuing a dynastic tradition reaching back to his grandfather, and one that my generation was expected to carry forward. My mother, a Washington, D.C., native so striking that she earned pocket money as a model in her youth, was making her civic mark by saving historic Louisville architecture from the wrecking ball. They were both very busy. I had a sister three years younger, and then there were my brothers, ten and nine years older than me. It was the height of the counterculture, and they were playing in rock bands and experimenting with drugs. By the time I was six or seven, they were in constant circulation—leaving for a succession of boarding schools or coming home for vacations punctuated by recriminations over inadequate grades on one side and threats to drop out on the other. I was six when my father took the reins at the newspapers and we left our white clapboard house in a pleasant neighborhood of Louisville for the Bingham-family seat, a Georgian manor overlooking the Ohio River. The night we moved in, a bat came down the chimney in the bedroom that my sister and I shared and slapped against the white plaster walls. Our sixteen-year-old brother,
W
108
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
responding to our shrieks, swept it out the window. SMOLDERING LOOKS Cooperation of this sort dwindled over the follow- TELEGRAPHING ing years. Stiled conlict between my parents and my SENSUALITY AND GLAMOUR, brothers would devolve into screaming ights, slammed MARCELLO doors, and silences. On my way into a family dinner one MASTROIANNI, PHOTOGRAPHED night, I witnessed my usually eminently self-controlled BY IRVING PENN FOR father grab my brother, shouting and accusing him of VOGUE, 1963. things I couldn’t understand. I led upstairs to a bathroom and hid in one of the closets, trying to make sense of it all. Strangers looking at my fair-haired father and his towheaded little girls might have wondered how they were related to these olive-skinned teenagers. They didn’t much more resemble my mother, either, a honey blonde with blue eyes. I was about eight when I somehow learned the truth: My brothers were not my father’s sons. It took a long time to piece the story together. While studying art and architectural history in Florence during her junior year of college, my mother became involved with an Italian man. She discovered she was pregnant. They married and moved to Massachusetts, where a connection ofered my mother’s husband a job. He shirked work and, according to my mother, wasn’t faithful. My mother divorced him, compounding the initial breach in social mores. She and the little boys moved in with her parents, and he returned to Italy—for good. My father was making documentaries for NBC when he and my mother met. JFK’s assassination cast a shadow over their November 1963 wedding. Everyone moved N O S TA L G I A >1 1 0
VOGUE.COM
to Louisville, and my father, in a noble but perhaps ill-advised gesture, legally adopted the boys, which is how my sister and I came to share a home with our parents, a live-in maid, and a pair of half-Italian boys named Bingham. No calls or letters came to them from abroad. No father appeared to claim them, if only for lunch. Nobody talked to me about him. I was a bookworm, well behaved but wound tight emotionally. While my brothers increasingly criticized the “system” that included the family business, I absorbed the reality that— according to my father, and to my sophisticated and often exacting grandparents—they were not Binghams like me. This felt cruel. They deserved better, and I feared losing them for good. Hoping to bring everyone together, I imagined their father as the missing link. I would whisper his name to myself like a spell. He had loved my mother, after all, and he must love his children. Maybe he could dispel the tension that had coagulated around us. Every year around Christmas, my brothers’ Italian grandmother sent an extravagant golden cardboard box of Perugina chocolates. My mother wrote “Nonna” a thank-you letter updating her on the boys, but for weeks the box sat almost untouched on the sideboard in our dining room. It was my idea to go to boarding school. On weekends at the Coop bookstore in Harvard Square I lingered over a poster of Marcello Mastroianni from La Dolce Vita. I hadn’t yet seen his ilms, but he became a stand-in (and an erotically charged one) for a man who was at once walled of from my family yet ever-present within it. One summer in Louisville I made a breakthrough. No one was around that steamy day—my mother and father were out, and my brothers had long since decamped for California, where they were pursuing careers as musicians. Passing a glass-fronted bookcase in the broad upstairs hall that ran the width of our house, I leaned over and tried its door. When it didn’t budge, I found a barrette and popped the lock. Italian-vocabulary lists, schoolbooks and papers, and a passport with a photograph of my mother at almost my age fell out. She wore bright-red lipstick and looked like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief. I opened a photo album. Yellowed glue was all that was left in some spots, and a few ripped pictures told me someone had been edited out. Then I found him. In one snapshot he stood in a long overcoat among lealess trees, his dark hair falling partly across his forehead. The only other picture showed him in three-quarter proile, holding my eldest brother on one shoulder. My brothers’ father wasn’t just handsome, he was even handsomer than Mastroianni. Irving Penn took the portrait of the actor on page 108; it ran in Vogue in 1963, the year my parents married. His lips and bedroom eyes telegraph sensuality; his gorgeous mane and aquiline nose suggest careless nobility, and the almost beckoning gesture of his ingers, holding the cigarette while touching his lower lip, conveys something foreign and a little decadent. My attraction to him was another small betrayal. Glamorous and disillusioned, irresistible but perhaps unreliable, Mastroianni ofered a counterpoint to the world I knew. My freshman year of college, I signed up for an Italian class, and the next summer I self-consciously followed my mother’s footsteps to a foreign-study program in Florence. My mother told me before I left that she wouldn’t be giving me any contacts for her
110
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
irst husband or his family. Nonetheless, I imagined tracking him down and scoured the telephone directory in my pensione for the name, inding several matches. My hand shook as I dialed the irst number. Before anyone answered I hung up the receiver, feeling like a fool. Eventually a beguiling Neapolitan who worked the bar by Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti helped distract me from my mother’s story. Seven years later, however, I was again in Italy during a break in my graduate studies in North Carolina. A long-term relationship there was unraveling, and I had just cut my hair shockingly short. My eldest brother, now in his 30s, was in Italy, too, visiting his father as part of a longoverdue rapprochement. I rode alone by train to Lucca, where his father lived. My brother met me at the station and took me irst to meet his grandmother in her shuttered apartment overlooking the town’s oval piazza. I was moved by the warmth and sincerity of her embrace; she told ALL’S FAIR me she loved my mother. Next THE AUTHOR AND HER FATHER IN 1988. stop was the villa on the city’s outskirts where my brothers’ father lived. He wore a tailored lightgray wool suit over a red cashmere sweater and matching socks. His shoes were polished and his silver, still-thick hair was impeccably combed, exactly like Mastroianni’s. We sat outdoors on canvas reclining chairs, and he complimented my Italian. Later he took me through rooms where sheets covered the furniture and then to an anteroom with a tall window. He paged through photo albums of his dolce vita. One girlfriend after another hung on his arm, on beaches, on ski slopes, on city streets, and in palazzos. He wanted me to see his allure. He had waited more than two decades before marrying again, and his wife was some 20 years his junior. She cooked dinner, which we ate in the kitchen while their two small boys wove among the chair legs. He carped about the immigrants overrunning the country, and the way he questioned my brother didn’t sound very supportive to me. What kind of house did he have? Was he making money with his music? How much? His ego was staggering; how itting that his name, Massimo, translated literally, means “the most.” At nearly 70, he was the most physically attractive man I had ever seen. Of course my mother had fallen for him; I would have too. On the train back to my friends in Rome, I felt tired and realized how naive my expectations had been. Massimo wouldn’t be healing the wounds that for nearly 20 years I’d dreamed he could. It didn’t matter how beautiful he was. By year’s end I had dived into academic work and found the man I would marry. We toasted the New Year with moonshine in the Great Smoky Mountains, extinguishing, at last, my obsession with the Italian man.
VOGUE.COM
COU RT ESY O F EM I LY BI N G HA M
nostalgia Magnificent Obsession
FL A SH It Siblings Willow &Jaden Smith
A
t the ripe old ages of seventeen and fifteen, celeb progeny Jaden and Willow Smith have enjoyed their fair share of the spotlight, mugging for cameras and covering major magazines. Both have released albums; both have proliic, precisely curated Instagram accounts; and both have extended their reach this season through alliances with stately French fashion F L A S H >1 1 6
SHOW TIME WILLOW SMITH, FRONT ROW AT CHANEL; RIGHT: JADEN SMITH ARRIVES AT LOUIS VUITTON.
114
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
VOGUE.COM
WILLOW: R IND OFF/LE SEGR ETAIN/ © GETTY IMAGES. JAD EN: PIER R E SUU/ © GE T T Y IMAG ES.
EDITOR: CHLOE MALLE
FL ASH
It Siblings
behemoths Louis Vuitton and Chanel, cementing their status as our current arbiters of What the Kids Are Doing. The siblings’ Paris Fashion Week takeover began with Willow, who arrived at the Grand Palais wearing head-to-toe Chanel styled with her typical idiosyncratic lair: skintight jumpsuit, classic cap-toe boots, and ingerless gloves. “Getting dressed for the Chanel show was a piece of cake,” she says. “They have so many beautiful pieces that it my vibe perfectly.” The vibe in question is a proprietary blend of sylph and southern California, and it’s evidently an admixture that fills a niche in Chanel’s collection of brand ambassadors: Though Willow’s appearance at the show announced the partnership, it’s a relationship that’s been a couple of years in the making. Jaden, meanwhile, has already been a chiseled face of Louis Vuitton for some months. In January he appeared with models Sarah Brannon, Rianne Van Rompaey, and Jean Campbell, legs akimbo in a studded black kilt—the embodiment of transcendent androgyny. So when he turned up (in one of Nicolas Ghesquière’s envy-inducing motocross jackets) at the brand’s fall show, it wasn’t exactly a surprise, but it was a moment—further crystallization of fashion’s second-gen teen takeover (see also Lily-Rose Depp, Lourdes Leon). Willow, for her part, is handling the new experience with characteristic celestial charm. “My favorite part of the show,” she says sweetly, “was that everybody had a front-row seat.”—LILI GÖKSENIN F L A S H >1 2 0
High Life KATE FOLEY IN MIU MIU.
BEL POWLEY IN GUCCI.
ANDRA DAY IN MARC JACOBS.
ELIZABETH OLSEN IN GUCCI.
Towering platforms pair perfectly with minis, midis, and floor-length frocks, adding height—and disco dreaming—to any ensemble. 116
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
VOGUE.COM
I T S I BLI N G S: LA RRY BUSACCA / © G ET T Y IM AG ES. O LSE N : JACOP O RAULE/ © GETTY IMAGES. DAY: GEORGE CHI N S EE /W W D. FO LEY: DVORA / RE X /SHU T TE RSTOC K. P OW L EY: I AN GAVAN/GETTY IMAGES.
COORDINATED COOL BROTHER AND SISTER ATTEND A PRE-GRAMMY PARTY.
FL ASH
TNT Elisabeth TNT calls on the experts to up her training game—and draws major inspiration from U.S. Olympic track-and-field hopeful English Gardner. ho doesn’t dream of a body like Gisele’s? We all want to look it and youthful, with glowing skin, a toned core, and shiny hair. But one day, the research says low-intensity activity is king; next it’s short spurts of high intensity. There are the yoga-obsessed, the Pilates nuts, cardio true believers, and core-strength advocates. Who can keep up? The only thing every expert I have spoken to or trained with seems to agree on is that consistency is key. I count myself among the lucky—I actually enjoy exercising. But with the Olympics on the horizon and the Met gala approaching, I wondered what it would mean to train like a real athlete. I’ve never really tried it. I used to be a competitive horse-show jumper until I gave it up to attend boarding school—but that hardly counts. I do know that pushing a bit harder on someone else’s say-so is a daily part of an athlete’s life—and not mine. Let’s face it, there are mornings when staying tucked in bed under my cozy blanket for an extra hour seems much more reasonable than going for a run.
W
120
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
I called up Nike’s master trainer Traci Copeland, and she put together a six-week tailor-made plan that would work around my schedule and my various whereabouts. Through multiple time zones, consecutive Fashion Weeks, and bouts of jet lag I ran miles under the guidance of my Nike+ Running app and converted my hotel rooms into mini-gyms for quick spurts of action via the Nike+ Training Club app. When I had to sneak in a long run through Hyde Park after the Erdem show and before Christopher Kane, I did it. (That particular run was on a windy day, through typical London on-and-off drizzle, and no walk in the park—pun intended, naturally!) I never thought I could run at a consistently fast pace, or do HIIT (high-intensity interval training) over and over, or hammer out sprints on a diabolic self-powered manual treadmill called the Curve. (Those courtesy of Toby Huntington-Whiteley— yes, Rosie’s brother—who put me through ierce F L A S H >1 2 2 WANT MORE OF THE UNE XPECTED? FOLLOW TNT’S ADVENTURES AT VOGUE .COM/ TNT. BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE ALL- NEW 2016 CHE VROLET MALIBU.
GA RD N E R A N D TN T: CO LU M BI N E G O LDS M IT H. SI T T IN G S ED I TO R: SE A N KNI GH T. H AIR , SYLVIA WH EELER ; MAKEUP, TSIPPORAH LIEBMAN. SELFIE: COURTESY OF TNT. D ETAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .
LIKE THE WIND COMPARE AND DESPAIR, BUT GARDNER IS FULL OF ADVICE AND INSPIRATION, EGGING ME ON WITH MY TRAINING.
TNT
would love to have more of a social life. I’d love to date, share my drills at the Bulgari Hotel’s Workshop Gymnasium in Lonconfusions and the experiences of the day with someone.” But don.) Through it all I have felt shattered, then great, energetic, the sport puts such extreme physical and mental demands on full of beans, and then right back to shattered. My body has her that she has time for little else. “So I guess the hardest part is ached in areas I was never even aware existed. A spot on my realizing the sacriices you have to make and beleft foot has begun throbbing more or less continuously. But my mind has also started pacing disciplined enough to make them,” she said. “The hardest part ing with dissatisfaction when I’m not able to A large tattoo covering her shoulder blades move. Call me hooked on the endorphin high. reads pondus mundi, Latin for “the weight of the is realizing the My biggest inspiration came from training and this is not just a line. Gardner is a very sacrifices you have world,” with U.S. Olympic track-and-field hopeful contemplative, spiritual person. Meditation and prayer are key parts to her success. Every day at English Gardner, 23. She’s a two-time worldto make,”said p.m. she drops whatever she is doing to spend outdoor-championship silver medalist in the Gardner, “and being 4:00 an hour centering herself. She incorporated this 4 x 100-meter relay—a fierce, fast, and fabudisciplined enough ritual after her failed attempt to qualify for the lous young athlete who has been competing 2012 Olympics. “Something in me was not allowing since the age of seven. Not only is she physically to make them” me to cross that threshold,” she said. A period of awe-inspiring—her body, in little shorts and an self-relection followed. Her body is as it as it has athletic bra, is a study in anatomy and muscle ever been, but mental strength will be the diference for her in 2016. deinition—but her levelheadedness and devotion to her sport “I tell my younger siblings that great things come from being unare absolutely moving. As we stood there, lightly stretching on a track in Los Angeles, her big brown eyes attentively catching comfortable,” Gardner said thoughtfully before we part ways. “Let mine, I asked her what the hardest part of being an athlete was. training be an outlet; let go and have fun because that’s what it does “Discipline,” she said, “because so many things can deter you. I for me.” I’m on board this bandwagon—for today. F L A S H >1 2 4
Dream GIGI HADID IN BALMAIN.
SUKI WATERHOUSE IN ETRO.
KENDALL JENNER IN A PRINTED KIMONO.
BLAKE LIVELY IN RALPH & RUSSO.
Girls RIHANNA IN FLEAMADONNA.
Rippling robes are the latest “eveningwear” to boldly emerge from the boudoir.
GO TO VOGUE.COM TO VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE LOOK IN OUR 10-BEST-DRESSED LIST, POSTED EVERY MONDAY
RI HA N NA : N CP/STA R M A X /G C I MAG ES. JE N NE R: B ROA D I M AG E/ REX /SH UT T ERSTOCK. H AD ID : AKM- GSI. WATER H OUSE: PH OTOGRAPH ER GROUP/SPLASH NEWS. LIVELY: R EX/S HU T T E RSTO CK.
FL ASH
FL ASH
Opera
Alto LEADING LADIES BELOW: CECIL BEATON DESIGNED COSTUMES FOR THE METROPOLITAN OPERA’S 1966 PRODUCTION. RIGHT: DIRECTOR SOFIA COPPOLA IN VOGUE, 2011.
MODA An ensemble cast of creative forces reimagines Verdi’s La Traviata for the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.
SET THE STAGE ABOVE: THE TEATRO DELL’OPERA DI ROMA. LEFT: VALENTINO GARAVANI’S SKETCH FOR VIOLETTA’S COSTUME.
VOGUE.COM
COST UM E: CEC IL BE ATON /CO N D É N AST A RC HI V E . CO P P O LA : BE N TO M S. OP ERA: SILVIA LELLI. SKETCH : COURTESY OF VALENTINO.
O
n May 24, Soia Coppola will make her debut in live theater when she directs Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata for the storied Rome Opera. Conceived by Giancarlo Giammetti and Valentino Garavani as the first cultural outing for the foundation that bears their names, the production allows Valentino to realize a lifelong dream by designing the gowns for Violetta, the doomed heroine of Verdi’s 1853 masterpiece, which is based on La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas ils and inspired by the life of the writer’s sometime mistress, the beauteous Marie Duplessis. “The French-courtesan world, the party-girl aspect, is fun,” says Coppola. “I love a tragic romance.” Maison Valentino’s creative directors, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, meanwhile, who apprenticed alongside Valentino for a decade, will dress the rest of the cast in costumes largely made in the opera’s astonishing workshops—which hold 60,000 garments—while Nathan Crowley is designing the sets. “We have been growing up with the image of productions by Visconti, Zeirelli,” says Valentino, “with the designs of Piero Tosi and Lila de Nobili and the voice of Callas. We didn’t want something boring, and we don’t want something crazy. We love Soia’s work; we were aesthetically amazed by her Marie Antoinette,” he continues. “We know she can give a twist and an edge while respecting the world of Verdi.” Adds Piccioli: “With her subtle and romantic point of view, Soia’s Traviata is traditional, but more fragile and emotional.” “My dad always played opera in the house when I was growing up,” says Coppola, “so I feel I have some connection. But I was kind of terriied by the idea: It’s the opposite of how you make ilm, because in movies you have to cut to the chase, and in opera the drama, the emotion, is all so dragged out. It’s a big experiment for me—but I have such regard for Valentino, and I love what Pierpaolo and Maria Grazia are doing, and as a director it’s always good to push yourself. I couldn’t say no.” A trip to the Rome Opera, designed by the architect Achille Sfondrini and opened in 1880 (both Cavalleria Rusticana and Tosca were premiered there), assuaged some of her fears. “It’s like a little jewel box,” says Coppola. “It’s not daunting; it feels intimate.” For the Roman-born Chiuri and Piccioli, who celebrated the world of opera in their spring 2014 couture collection (55 looks representing 55 operas), the project gives them another opportunity to collaborate with artisans “whose craftsmanship is very close to our own in our couture,” as Chiuri says. “The costumes are so beautiful,” says Coppola, fresh from ittings with the soprano Francesca Dotto in Paris. “It’s really fun to be surrounded by that world.”—HAMISH BOWLES F L A S H >1 2 8
CHLOË GRACE MORETZ IN COACH 1941.
SOO JOO PARK IN ISABEL MARANT. SOFIA SANCHEZ DE BETAK IN VALENTINO.
LEILA YAVARI IN VALENTINO.
ANJA RUBIK IN VINTAGE.
GWEN STEFANI IN GIVENCHY BY RICCARDO TISCI. OLIVIA PALERMO IN TOPSHOP.
FLIGHT Crew Endless iterations of the silk and satin bomber jacket top off a candy-colored spring.
BRIE LARSON IN GUCCI.
LAURA LOVE IN VINTAGE.
ROSIE HUNTINGTONWHITELEY IN CHLOÉ.
GIGI HADID IN UNRAVEL.
MO RE TZ: S P RE A D P I CT UR ES/A KM -G S I . SA N C HEZ DE B ETA K: P H I L O H. RUB I K: MATTEO PRAND ONI/BFA.COM. LARSON: L IVE WITH K E L LY AN D MICHAE L/ER IC MCCAND LESS/D IS N EY/ABC HO ME E N T E RTAIN ME N T A ND T V D ISTR I BU TI O N . H UN T I N GTO N-W H I T ELEY: MAC I EL /A K M- G S I. ST EFA N I: FR ED D IE BAEZ /STARTRAKSPH OTO.COM. H AD ID : WAGNER AZ /TYJA/AKM- GSI. ALL OTH ERS: ACIE LLE /ST YLE DU MO N D E .CO M.
FL ASH Talking Fashion
CHR I ST I A N MACD O N A LD. FASH I O N ED I TO R: E LI N SVA HN . HA I R , TO MO J IDA I ; MAKEUP, MAKI RYOKE. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
EDITOR: MARK HOLGATE
SEQUINS OF EVENTS MODEL JULIA STEGNER WEARS VAN CLEEF & ARPELS BOUTON D’OR EARRINGS, RINGS, AND BRACELET; VAN CLEEF & ARPELS BOUTIQUES. NINA RICCI LEATHER DRESS, $4,200; SAKS FIFTH AVENUE, NYC.
LIGHT theWAY VAN CLEEF & ARPELS’S COLLECTION OF DRAMATIC, SEQUINED FINE JEWELS SHINES, SAYS LYNN YAEGER, TOWARD A DAZZLING FUTURE.
VOGUE.COM
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
131
hen Nicolas Bos, the current president and CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels, irst clapped eyes on a 1956 issue of Vogue with a cover featuring a pair of impossibly elegant, behatted models whose wrists and ears showed off Van Cleef baubles, he was pretty excited. And no wonder: The jewels in question, which looked at irst glance like little circles of gold with winking diamond centers, were shining examples of Van Cleef’s paillette collection, a staple of that storied house from the late 1930s until the late 1950s. Now the company is offering these little discs in their Bouton After all the d’Or collection—literally, Golden Butpunkish chains ton—launching this we’ve been month. “There is a whole set of inspiswaddled in rations within the lately, these patrimony of the house,” Bos says, expieces add a plaining that the new pieces and their vinwelcome blast tage antecedents have of quirky a common ancestor— the sequin, on which color, a shock their shape is based. of the new Those sequins, whether adorning a mid-century taffeta evening dress or lovCARDINAL RULES ingly reproduced in precious The abstract shape of the VOGUE’S 1956 COVER INSPIRED VAN CLEEF & metal and draped around the original pieces—their resolute ARPELS’S BOUTON D’OR neck, have a particular historimodernism a far cry from depicCOLLECTION. BELOW: VAN CLEEF & ARPELS cal significance. According to tions of birdies or flowers decoNECKLACE; VAN CLEEF Catherine Cariou, Van Cleef ’s dirating bodices, both popular at the & ARPELS BOUTIQUES. rector of heritage (she gets to go all time—were the perfect foil for long, over the world searching for rare and swishy Dior New Look dresses and midsigned VCA pieces—I want this job!), the century tailleurs. But if the first models heyday of the house’s paillette jewelry was were meant to enrich the fairly formal frocks immediately after the Second World War, when of 60 years ago, these new pieces could add a bright gold expressed a certain cheerfulness and welcome blast of quirky color, a shock of the new, sunniness in the air. at the throat of a Saint Laurent slip dress or peeking The latest bursts are available in two moods: rose gold out from the cuff of a Vetements hoodie. with carnelian and mother-of-pearl enhanced with diamonds After all the punkish chains we’ve been swaddled in lately, all the literally in-your-face street-infused jewelry we’ve been rocking, (which Bos describes as very warm and easy to wear) and yellow gold paired with black onyx and green chrysoprase and diamonds there is an undeniable appeal of something more individual, more (for a more architectural, slightly sharper brand of chic). Each set surprising, more creative—a different, more refined kind of rock, offers earrings, bracelets, rings, and statement pendants; sometimes, if you will. Bos describes the Bouton d’Or collection as emblemespecially in the case of the necklaces, there are tiny perforations in atic of the golden age of jewelry—whether or not he intends the the back of the piece to let natural light slip through. (A tip from pun, these shimmering discs give new life to the elusive promise the experts: When examining fine jewelry, be sure to flip the piece of peace and prosperity—and couldn’t we all use a little bejeweled over; the back should be as exquisite as the front.) optimism right now? V I E W >1 3 4
132
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
VOGUE.COM
COV ER: KA R EN RA D KA I /CO ND É N AST A RCHI V E . ST I LL L I FE: LUCAS V I SSE R . D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
W
SUITE LIFE A HERRERA-CLAD SARAH JESSICA PARKER AT THE PLAZA HOTEL, VOGUE, 2005. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ.
Blanc CANVAS
CRISP CRUSH DESPITE THE FRILLS, HERRERA’S SHIRT HAS AN UNRUFFLED ATTITUDE. CHARLIZE THERON IN VOGUE, 2007. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO.
TIME SHIFT MODEL KELLY GALE WEARS A DRESS INSPIRED BY THE DESIGNER’S 1980S COLLECTIONS THAT EASILY TRANSLATES TO TODAY. CAROLINA HERRERA FOR MYTHERESA.COM DRESS, $990; MYTHERESA.COM.
134
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
GA LE : CHRI STI A N MAC D O NA L D. FAS HI ON E DI TO R: EL I N SVA HN . HA I R, TO MO J IDAI; MAKEUP, MAKI RYOKE. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
W
hen mytheresa.com’s Justin O’Shea came knocking at Carolina Herrera’s door last summer with an idea for a collection designed specifically for the site, it was the glorious, gilded excess of 1980s Manhattan he had in his mind’s eye as its starting point. “I think he even had a photograph of me taken at Studio 54,” says Herrera, who loved the idea—with one proviso: “I did the eighties,” she said. “Let’s make it something for today.” So the gold evening dress, reimagined from Herrera’s 1981 label debut, uses the same lamé, yet the dress, with its jutting shoulder line and hard-edged glamour, is very 2016 (just add some towering platforms); ditto the long, pale-pink bias slip edged with chunky black rhinestones, which Herrera envisages worn with sneakers (which are, incidentally, also in the collection, rendered in jeweled claret velvet). Of the seventeen piece–strong collaboration, two are, unsurprisingly, in white cotton: a romantic lace blouse and a tunic dress with grommet lacing. But while Herrera is herself a long-term aicionado of the white cotton shirt, its inclusion here is more than personal. After all, what other fabric could be so easily denuded of period qualities, its snowy crispness forever signaling only the here and the now no matter what decade inspired the design?—MARK HOLGATE V I E W >1 3 6
Wraps
vintage clothing without being fussy or fusty. Ambrosio, 24, and Tordini, 31, both long-haired and devastatingly, if casually, chic (though they are too modest to say so, they have been the cynosure of street-style photographers’ lenses for years), based their irst collection on the sorts of antique details they have always adored. Their inaugural offerings include languid pannevelvet dresses with smocking at the shoulders, pink satin dressing gowns, and a reversible velvet-lined Rex rabbit greatcoat—with many of these pieces featuring embroidery hand-done in Bologna at the same factory that produces for Givenchy and Valentino. Maybe it is because they are the polar opposite of today’s ubiquitous athleisure that these deeply feminine garments seem so fresh: They have a one-off feeling, as if the wearer had unearthed a frail treasure from some deeply held secret source. Tordini says the collection is intended to evoke the wardrobes of diferent women in diferent cities. The pearls that dust a sea foam–green dress, for example, are meant to suggest the lights of New York—a sort of Broadway Boogie Woogie homage to the days of Studio 54. A white frock emblazoned with glittering stars, one LET IT FLOW of the standouts of the collection, is named Cher. DESIGNERS (FROM LEFT) GILDA AMBROSIO AND The ladies love a loose robe that can be tied over GIORGIA TORDINI IN jeans at noon or looped atop lingerie after midnight. ATTICO ROBES; THEATTICO .COM. PHOTOGRAPHED AT Tordini admits that one of her favorite ilms is Bertrand DIMORE GALLERY, MILAN. Bonello’s House of Pleasures, about an elegant Parisian The new Milanese line Attico summons a world of brothel circa 1900, but other references are rather less the furnishings at the avant-garde Dimore deeply romantic robes and opulent vintage finds. provocative: Gallery in Milan; nineteenth-century diamond tiaras; even classic black-and-white French loors. ometimes the best creations are the result of a happy acThe pair, who met in Milan (where they both attended fashion cident. So it was with a printed Attico slip dress, a gauzy school), decided to work together only last fall. By November, with exercise in milleleurs that dances provocatively of one Tordini living in Manhattan and Ambrosio still in Milan, they shoulder. Turns out its odd asymmetry emerged when were deep in eight-hour Skype calls. Despite their rather diferent one of its designers, Gilda Ambrosio, momentarily espersonal styles, a shared fantasy of soft and loating garments, of chewed an armhole and stuck her slender arm through thumping discos and silent gardens at twilight, made things easy. the commodious neckline, letting the fabric lop gently instead. “I’m superminimal,” Tordini says, “and Gilda likes very strong, “We like things a little wrong,” laughs Giorgia Tordini, the other weird pieces. But we never fought.”—L.Y. half of Attico, a new Italian line that takes its inspiration from V I E W >1 3 8
S 136
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
VOGUE.COM
BE NJA MI N V N UK . SC RE EN : COU RTESY OF 1ST D I BS.CO M. N ECKL AC E: ESTEVÃO D E SOUSA. MEIO AD ER EÇO- COLAR , 1865. PALÁCIO NACIONAL DA AJ UDA. D I REÇÃO- G E RA L D O PAT RI MÓ N I O CU LT URA L /A RQU I VO DE D O CUM E NTAÇÃO FOTOGRÁFICA (D GPC/APF). D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
UNDER
OUT OF THE ATTIC THE DUO’S FAVORITE THINGS INCLUDE A RICHARD HAAS FOUR-PANEL PAINTED SCREEN AND A NECKLACE OF STARS BELONGING TO THE ROYAL FAMILY OF PORTUGAL.
SPLASH DIRECTOR LUCA GUADAGNINO REMAKES LA PISCINE AND TURNS A PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER INTO SPRING’S CULT FASHION FILM. BY NATHAN HELLER.
S
ix years ago, in I Am Love, Tilda Swinton brought a lash of sartorial lightning to the screen while devouring a large and luscious basted prawn. Playing the stylish head of a bourgeois Milanese household, she appeared in a itted, vivid-red Jil Sander shift. The shrimp was cooked up by a younger man with whom she was about to fall in love. With John Adams’s “Fearful Symmetries” throbbing in the background, Swinton’s character sliced the prawn, let it pass between her lips, and gaped in pleasure as the lens drew close. It was the rare cinematic moment that’s an instant classic, and it established Luca Guadagnino, the director, as an artist with not just a brazen creativity but a new eye for the way fashion can live on ilm. Now we get another taste. Guadagnino’s next feature, A Bigger Splash, appears in U.S. theaters this month. Loosely a remake of Jacques Deray’s 1969 thriller La Piscine, it centers on four characters during a long, fraught holiday on Pantelleria, halfway between Italy and the North African coast. This time Swinton plays
138
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
A PLACE IN THE SUN RALPH FIENNES AND DAKOTA JOHNSON PLAY A FATHER AND DAUGHTER ON VACATION IN A BIGGER SPLASH.
Marianne Lane, a rock star recovering from vocal surgery and trying to escape the world with her boyfriend (Matthias Schoenaerts), a ilmmaker on the rebound from a crisis of his own. All at once their parched idyll is invaded by the manic Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes), a fun-time Freddy and old lame from Marianne’s wilder years, and his nubile teenage daughter (Dakota Johnson). Trouble comes to paradise. Where Deray’s film was a story of couples driven by desire, Guadagnino’s is more unsettling: a thriller about four people whose sins are to be caught in memory, tenderness, and time. As always with a Guadagnino ilm, some of the biggest unbilled stars are the clothes. “When you have to paint, with a stroke of the brush, your characters, you start from the way they look,” Guadagnino explains one afternoon, over a late lunch at the Mark Hotel in New York. (He lives in Crema, near Milan.) A Bigger Splash, like I Am Love, was costumed in collaboration with Raf Simons, and V I E W >1 4 0
VOGUE.COM
COU RT ESY O F FOX S E A RCH LI G HT P I CT UR ES. © 2016 T W E NT I ET H C EN T URY FOX FILM COR PORATION.
Making a
DIRECTOR’S CUT GUADAGNINO IN ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA COUTURE OVERCOAT, SHIRT, AND TROUSERS.
140
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
AWAY FROM IT ALL MATTHIAS SCHOENAERTS’S AND TILDA SWINTON‘S CHARACTERS ESCAPE TO PANTELLERIA.
learned to walk and talk in Ethiopia, where his family lived for ive years, before returning to Sicily—but he could pass for little else. He is a cinephile in mind and heart (he’s only ever dated other directors) but is not a snob (he wrote his university thesis on Jonathan Demme and hails Batman Returns as a masterwork). As a young director, Guadagnino was an obsessive storyboarder, but as he started to gain conidence, he took a more improvisatory approach on set. “His ideas are mischievous,” explains Dakota Johnson. “He wants to grab hold of the things that make people uncomfortable.” Guadagnino and Swinton have collaborated constantly since he cornered her at a consulate event during his university days, in Rome: He wanted to know why she hadn’t answered an offer to star in his student ilm. “He had been standing patiently by my elbow for at least 20 minutes during a long conversation I was drawn into by an oicial person,” Swinton says. “When I inally turned to speak to him, it was to a friend already made, a coconspirator.” Since then, their rapport has deepened. “We have a broader vocabulary between us now—not merely the cinema we are both inspired by, but also the work we have made together,” Swinton explains. “Luca conducts a ilm as he might a piece of music played by a widely spaced and wild-hearted orchestra. His eye for detail is everywhere.” “I am surprised every time I start shooting a movie with her,” Guadagnino says of their long creative affair. Swinton joined A Bigger Splash quite late but reinvented her role when she did. “Marianne was to be an actress and pretty talkative,” she explains. “It occurred to me that it might be interesting—in this claustrophobic atmosphere between these characters, where the struggle to communicate is paramount—if Marianne, positioned as a hinge between the others, could not speak. And if she were a musician whose voice had brought her and Harry together.” Swinton adds, “There is something pagan about her state here, uncharted and capable of lawless instincts.” V I E W >1 4 2
FO R FA S H I O N N E W S A N D F E AT U R E S , G O T O V O G U E . C O M
GUA DAG N I NO : BRE TT LLOY D. SI T T IN G S ED I TO R: Y LI AS N ACE R. H A I R, J OS EP H PUJALTE; GROOMING, CONSTANCE H AOND. FILM STILL: COURTESY OF FOX S E A RC HLI G HT P I CT UR ES. © 2016 TW E N TI ET H C E NT U RY FOX F I LM COR PORATION. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
the movie is sufused with washedout glamour. “In the beginning, we had a color palette and beautifully controlled costumes, but we decided to throw all of that away and have the pieces look like something thrown into a suitcase, which is really different from I Am Love,” says Giulia Piersanti, Guadagnino’s costume designer, who has her own knitwear line. “Luca has a strong aesthetic— he should add his own credit as a costume designer.” The clothes themselves were matched to the characters’ often troubled inner states of mind. For Swinton’s role, Piersanti and Guadagnino looked to Ingrid Bergman. “Even though she’s on an island, she’s purposely overdressed—she’s still a big star,” Piersanti says. Schoenaerts’s character, on the other hand, sticks to a uniform of T-shirts and jeans: “He’s trying to disappear in a way, and survive.” Johnson’s character was dressed with teenage insouciance, in clashing tops and bottoms and Lolita-like white shades; her father was made to appear scattered yet reined. For one sequence, they had Charvet, the empyrean French tailor, re-create a polka-dotted shirt once worn by Jean Giono—“because if you want to tell the story of that guy, he only wears, for sure, Charvet shirts,” says Guadagnino. He believes that fashion’s mandate—to shape a vision for the future by reaching into the past—shares a goal with the director’s work. La Piscine hardly struck Guadagnino when he irst saw it, at ifteen—“I didn’t like it,” he says—and he agreed to do the remake only after realizing that the story could be used to explore a subtler tangle of identity. “There was something that fascinated me: How do you lesh out power between people, when the power that drives the relationship is nostalgia for one another—or running away from nostalgia?” he asks. “They get together. They stay by the pool. They start to be sharks circling. And after a long, simmering raising of tension, the actual action breaks the surface.” Polished but uncoiffed, with a trim midnight-hued sweater and a coarse gray-dusted beard, Guadagnino doesn’t think of himself as an Italian director— his mother is Algerian, and he
The title A Bigger Splash refers to the eponymous David Hockney painting, showing a splash welling out of a swimming pool but not the person who created it. The afterefects of close bonds continue to fascinate Guadagnino, who in September will begin shooting his two-part remake of the 1977 Italian horror thriller Suspiria. (Guadagnino’s version will be in English.) The ilm, for years a fashion favorite, has enthralled him since the age of ten. “I was walking with some friends. There was this closed cinema, empty. There were these old, fading posters that, from a distance, caught my eye. What was that?” Seeing the Suspiria ad, he says, was his “coming-of-age.” “For me, it’s not a remake,” he says. “I’m having a very private conversation with myself.”
THE HEAT OF THE MOMENT A STILL FROM JACQUES DERAY’S 1969 LA PISCINE, WHICH STARRED ROMY SCHNEIDER AND ALAIN DELON.
Exercise-wise, little unnerves me quite like the prospect of mindful (read: s-l-o-w) workouts. Yet, in the name of research— and with the promise of nothing less than total enlightenment and bliss—a recent Friday evening found me standing outside Golden Bridge Yoga in SoHo, anticipating my first Kundaliniyoga experience. Luckily I am in the Zen-like company of Mikaela Bradbury, the 29-year-old founder of leisure label Arjuna.AG. “It’s a great way to call time on the week,” says the six-foot-tall, South Africa–born designer, who set out to create an athletic line aimed at today’s high-frequency lifestyles. We dress in her most recent collection, Lunar White—the name refers to the two primary ingredients in the collection, silver and milk (yes, as in the metal you wear and the liquid you drink)—and take our places alongside her yogi, Amanbir. Bradbury’s search for “a new luxury material for health-conscious consumers” took her from Silicon Valley to an upstate New York factory that works with military, medical, and electronics industries. The silver-coated fabric that resulted is meant to be worn as an extra protective layer, with the positively charged silver ions, some assert, helping to block electromagnetic radiation from our smartphones, kill germs, regulate body temperature, and reduce inflammation. The moisturizing, organic-milk protein, meanwhile, is spun into yarn and then combined with eco-viscose from sustainably harvested trees. Her minimal separates radiate the urban simplicity of early Helmut Lang or Prada Sport, with bodysuit, hoodie, and midi-skirt boasting an airy attractiveness lacking in most workout wear. “We have become so considerate about health, the environment, and taste when it comes to what we eat,” Bradbury says. “I would like to see people hold clothing to the same standards.” There are accessories, too, including a Monkey Mind Band to aid sleep, meditation, and travel. “If you wear it as a sleep mask on your flight, it will block out light and electrical pollution, as well as stave off any bacteria crawling around you,” Bradbury says. Spaceage hand guards, meanwhile, profess to neutralize the heat and electricity from your laptop while eliminating germs. Up next: a silver phone cover and specialized cycling clothes.—EMMA ELWICK-BATES SONIC YOUTH ARJUNA.AG’S POSE: ENLIGHTENED LUXURY. MODEL SOPHIA AHRENS IN ARJUNA.AG BRALETTE TOP ($203) AND SKIRT ($355); MATCHESFASHION.COM. SAINT LAURENT BY HEDI SLIMANE SNEAKERS. VOGUE.COM
A RJ U NA . AG : MACI E K KO BI ELSK I . FAS HI ON E DI TO R: A LE X HA RR I N GTON . H A I R, SH INGO SH IBATA; MA K EU P, V I RG I NI A YOUN G. L A P I SCI NE : © SC REE N P RO D/P H OTO NO N STO P/A LAMY. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
HEAVY Zen
Beauty EDITOR: CELIA ELLENBERG
Dream
WEAVING
The latest wave in braids proves that one is never enough.
n any other year, the braided pigtails worn by North West (who turns three next month) and Harper Beckham (going on ive) during the fall collections would have simply registered as childhood incarnate—Pippi Longstocking minus the coat-hanger wire. But precocious street-style icons that they are, fashion’s famous preschoolers proved to be early champions of beauty’s latest improbable fascination. Twin braids the length and width of a yardstick trailed out from beneath Beyoncé’s wide-brimmed black hat in her “Formation” video, released by surprise in early February. Five days later at Creatures of the Wind’s show, models sported a pair of tight-knit braids smoothed with Bumble and Bumble’s Brilliantine B E A U T Y >1 4 8
I
TWINNING WAYS FROM LEFT: MARINA POLKANOVA AND TAYLOR HILL, IN SWEATERS BY EDUN. HAIR, TOMOHIRO OHASHI; MAKEUP, ADRIEN PINAULT. PHOTOGRAPHED BY SCOTT TRINDLE. FASHION EDITOR: DELPHINE DANHIER. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.
144
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
Beauty
Hair
cream and inspired by Snoop Dogg—the latest rif on street culture where credit is due,” Tharps stresses. That said, “swapping and from designers Shane Gabier and Chris Peters. The fan club soon changing and borrowing different elements of different peocounted Katy Perry (pre-Grammys), Korean blogger sensation ple’s cultures,” she adds, “is how America became America.” Irene Kim (in shades of rainbow sherbet), and Karlie Kloss (front Kim Kimble, a Beyoncé glam-squad veteran, draws upon the row at Topshop Unique). But leave it to the mother of viral sensabraiding traditions in such diverse places as Amish communities tions—and the mother of North West—Kim Kardashian West to and India, not to mention her own childhood: “I used to wear two cause the biggest stir. After a photo of the two generations twinplaits during my adolescence.” Trading in an everyday braid for ning in double braids circulated on Instagram, Kardashian West a less-familiar twinset is also an exercise in self-transformation. hit the streets in an incandescent platinum “There’s something about them that makes a version, like a real-life Daenerys Targaryen woman feel powerful and ierce,” says KardashiTrading in an everyday commanding a devoted army of paparazzi. an West’s go-to stylist Jen Atkin. Or, as AnthoIf the basic braid is itself a global citizen, ny Turner, who created the Creatures look, puts braid for a less-familiar woven into the fabric of so many cultures— it: A woman in double braids “means business.” twinset is an exercise in Native American; China’s Manchu queue; So does Hailey Gates, an actress and jourself-transformation. the elaborate, sculptural styles of Nigeria—it nalist whose waist-grazing plaits—threaded follows that there’s an inherent need for diA woman in double braids with blue ribbon in Mexico City or framed by plomacy when discussing the prevalence of a diaphanous head scarf in the Democratic Re“means business” plaits. “Beauty is so personal, but it’s also public of Congo—have become her signature. so political,” confirms Lori L. Tharps, asIn her new Viceland series, States of Undress, sistant professor of journalism at Temple University and coGates ventures into politically charged regions under the guise of author of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in covering local Fashion Weeks and regularly resorts to a single braid America. “There’s obviously the conversation about cultural her crew calls “the snake.” The universally orthodox style allows appropriation when we talk about braids,” she explains, pointher to slip into precarious situations—interviewing a homophobic ing to the myriad “boxer braids” posts on social media of late: Russian lawmaker or an abusive Pakistani husband—without While some versions play off Hilary Swank’s ring-tested hair setting of alarms. “It’s been a weird ticket in,” she muses of her in Million Dollar Baby, other cornrow-inspired iterations have Trojan-horse asset, though that’s not the only upside. “Frankly, my sparked controversy for their failure to mention their origins. hair is also unruly,” admits Gates, alluding to braids’ oft-undersung Omitting a reference to the close-to-the-scalp braiding technique qualities: They’re humidity-proof, workout-resilient, and never not popularized during slavery forgoes an opportunity to “give credit beach-ready.—LAURA REGENSDORF B E A U T Y >1 5 2
EYE Candy
here is an undeniable appeal to the recent spree of Technicolor-painted eyes on spring runways like Giamba and 3.1 Phillip Lim—not to mention Fendi’s fall nod to Burning Man psychedelia—and it stems from a certain carefree sense of experimentation. “It’s not serious,” makeup artist Lloyd Simmonds says of the spirit behind these “bright, brash, futuristic” looks that take their cues from K-Pop stars, festival girls, and the street-influenced youth culture of the moment. Simmonds himself is not immune to their charms. As YSL Beauté’s creative director of makeup, he has channeled this chroma-pixie, no-rules attitude into Mascara Vinyl Couture, a collection of nine hyper-hued lash tints featuring a liquid technology that took four years to perfect. “The most exciting thing about the new formula is that the base is completely transparent,” explains Simmonds, speaking to each tube’s distinct lack of “cloudiness,” which is a common complaint among the colored-mascara faithful who are looking for clear, vibrant pigments without a white foundation. Each instantly covetable shade is designed to be worn alone or mixed and matched. Case in point: I’m the Craze, a vivid violet, makes hazel eyes pop when layered with I’m the Unpredictable, a rich aubergine.There are also two glitter topcoats, I’m the Fire, a warm gold, and I’m the Storm, a textured silver, that Simmonds describes as “a magic little sweater” for your lashes.—ARDEN FANNING
T
RAINBOW CONNECTION FROM FAR LEFT: LUSH, PRISMATIC LASHES, PHOTOGRAPHED BY BEN HASSETT, VOGUE, 2013. YSL BEAUTÉ MASCARA VINYL COUTURE IN I’M THE EXCITEMENT, I’M THE TROUBLE, I’M THE CRAZE, AND I’M THE MADNESS.
MASCA RA : COU RT ESY OF YS L B EAU T É. ST I LL LI F E: LUCAS V I SSE R.
Makeup
Beauty
Skin
SLOUGH Love
I
f you want to talk serious #SkinGoals, let’s discuss Rooney Mara’s alabaster complexion at the Oscars. The faultless inish of a Bernini comes to mind. When they cut to commercial, I did a quick enzyme peel. Exfoliation. It’s not the sexiest word. But it may be the single most important thing you can do for your face. Sloughing of dead skin that can cause congestion and dullness aids cellular turnover, which slows with age and prevents active skin-care ingredients from penetrating efectively. Though exfoliation has been associated with rubbing skin raw (those harsh apricot-seed scrubs) and stripping natural oils (the mighty chemical peel), a new approach advocates for products and procedures that leave your complexion smooth and often nourished, too.
152
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
Chemical exfoliants—like vitamin C, retinol, glycolic and lactic acids—found in many daily creams and cleansers brighten and accelerate skin shedding, while nonirritating fruit enzymes, like those in Radical Skincare’s weekly-use Express Delivery Enzyme Peel, gobble up dead cells like an army of Pac-Men. For deeper penetration, Kiehl’s Nightly Refining Micro-Peel Concentrate with quinoa-husk extract takes its cues from professional treatments. Ditto water peels, the latest craze from Korea. Inspired by a popular procedure that combines porevacuuming with an infusion of hydration, the buzzedabout products—like Yoon’s Dermaline Marine Complex Exfoliator, a giant single-use cotton swab drenched in seawater and lactic and glycolic acids—are big news Stateside. “We’ve run out of stock four times since we launched it two months ago,” says Christine Chang, cofounder of K-beauty e-commerce site Glow Recipe. At New York’s Core Club, aesthetician Dangene views microdermabrasion as basic maintenance—“like brushing your teeth.” The skin-polishing tool has periodically gotten a bad rap for being too abrasive, but the treatment can be revved up or dialed back accordingly for sensitivity. After microdermabrading every inch of my body on a recent visit, followed with a pass of the HydraFacial wand, which pushes cleanser and antioxidant serum into the pores, loosens any debris, and whisks it away, I left feeling smooth as a river stone. While the risk of overscrubbing is real—hitting your skin with chemical and manual exfoliation all at once can set of inlammation—the allure of a seal-like inish often trumps self-control. Despite its terrifying name, the relatively benign dermaplaning has found favor in the Upper East Side oice of Elizabeth Hale, M.D. Performed with a surgical blade and introduced to remove peach fuzz (and to create a smooth surface for makeup), “it’s kind of like shaving,” explains Hale. Those hairs do eventually grow back—and often with a prickle— although at-home maintenance is easy thanks to products like the Tinkle, an unfortunately named albeit foolproof plastic razor originally designed for eyebrow grooming. Alternating protocols can help the urge to overdo it; so can going back to basics, advises New York dermatologist Ellen Marmur, M.D. “At the end of the day, a washcloth is best,” says Marmur. “Use a nubby one with face cream. You’re giving yourself a mask, plus penetrating the ingredients into your skin with the massage. Dry skin will lake of, and you’ll be moisturized, too.” B E A U T Y >1 5 4 SURFACE VALUE A NEW BREED OF CHEMICAL AND MECHANICAL EXFOLIANTS SMOOTHS AND POLISHES SKIN WITHOUT STRIPPING IT. STILL LIFE WITH STEEL WOOL AND SANDPAPER, PHOTOGRAPHED BY QIU YANG.
VOGUE.COM
P RO P ST YLI ST, SA RA H-JA N E HO FF MA N N
Looking for a quick skin fix? One word: exfoliate. Sarah Brown scrubs up for summer.
Beauty
Fragrance SPRIG AWAKENING MAARTJE VERHOEF IN A LAVENDER MOHAWK. PHOTOGRAPHED BY WILLY VANDERPERRE. FASHION EDITOR: TABITHA SIMMONS. BELOW RIGHT: L’ARTISAN PARFUMEUR’S NEW BUCOLIQUES DE PROVENCE.
efore there was a niche fragrance market, there was L’Artisan Parfumeur. When French chemist and botanist Jean Laporte debuted a banana scent in 1976, the exercise in casual alchemy caught the attention of Paris’s Folies Bergère cabaret set. Mûre et Musc—the very irst fragrance to use blackberries—put him on the map two years later, and made his haute-bohemian headquarters the epicenter of Europe’s burgeoning underground perfume scene. This month, L’Artisan celebrates its fortieth anniversary by returning to its artisanal roots with a new store, a new look, and one very convincing new fragrance. Located at 167 Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris, the 200-square-foot boutique was inspired by Laporte’s original horticultural flagship and features a miniature indoor garden curated by French landscape designer Mathieu Gontier. (A similar motif will be installed at select Bloomingdale’s locations Stateside in June.) As for the 38 scents in L’Artisan’s catalog—including 1994’s iconic Premier Figuier, which introduced the world to ig notes—they have gone unchanged, save for an update to their original heptagonal flacons with weighty caps, which have been treated to a smoked-glass makeover. It’s a testament to the timelessness of the brand’s commitment to nuanced raw materials, which inspired perfumer Fabrice Pellegrin’s Bucoliques de Provence, the irst fragrance in L’Artisan’s limitededition series that will honor a different region of France every year. The earthy loral plows the area’s abundant lavender ields by way of Grasse’s leather market for an unexpected bite that is poised to attract a whole new generation of perfume radicals.—GRACE TIMOTHY H E A LT H >1 6 0
Rebel SPIRIT
B
L’Artisan Parfumeur celebrates four decades of fragrance trailblazing with a fresh look—and a new scent. 154
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
FO R B E AU T Y N E W S A N D F E AT U R E S , G O T O V O G U E . C O M
Health
Outbreak ONCE BITTEN THE AEDES AEGYPTI MOSQUITO, AMONG THE MOST WIDESPREAD, CARRIES THE VIRUS, ASSOCIATED WITH DEVASTATING BIRTH DEFECTS.
Z
is for
Zika
W
ho could dream up a scenario so dark? Tiny insects rising in hungry swarms, feeding on pregnant women and endangering the lives of hundreds of unborn babies. The efects of the Zika virus, currently manifesting itself in more than 50 countries, are playing out like a horror movie. Maternity wards are illing with infants with the small heads and underdeveloped brains symptomatic of microcephaly, an incurable condition. Women in increasing numbers are sick with fear, deferring pregnancy, canceling travel plans, desperate to avoid the prime culprit in spreading the epidemic: the Aedes aegypti mosquito, with its telltale white-marked legs. On the coast of northern Brazil, severely disabled infants, and the journalists who have come to watch them, are a common sight. Once a Dutch colony and the wealthy center of the world’s sugarcane industry, later known for its white-sand beaches and Carnaval revelry, Recife now is the capital of Zika’s global outbreak. It is also home to Vanessa van der Linden, M.D., the 46-year-old pediatric neurologist who was the irst to make the connection between the sudden surge in microcephalic babies and the mosquito-borne virus sweeping across Brazil and the Americas. Just after 7:30 on a recent Friday morning, having dropped of her two daughters at school, van der Linden shows up for work in her white coat, skinny black jeans, and signature four-inch heels at the single-story children’s rehabilitation center she runs on one of Recife’s islands in the delta of the Capibaribe River. The waiting
160
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
room is already packed, and its numbers will continue to swell as the day goes on. Bright tropical sunshine streams through the windows, and rows of bolted-down blue plastic chairs accommodate dozens of mothers, many of whom have been awake since before dawn and traveled up to three hours by bus to get here. Their babies, the patients, sleep or fuss on their laps. Microcephaly is a relatively rare condition that afects only one in many thousands of children. Van der Linden’s specialty is the pediatric brain, and during her 20-year career, she saw a case roughly every other month. Many were caused by genetic disorders or congenital infections, and brain scans showed the afected infants to have smaller versions of regular brains. But last year she started observing something diferent: brains that weren’t just smaller than normal, but whose contours deviated from the walnut formation she had come to expect in any brain, no matter how tiny. The irst patient who stumped her was a little boy whose parents brought him into her oice last August. CT scans revealed a brain with an alarmingly smooth surface and white, calcified patches marring the cortex. “I’d never seen anything like it,” says van der Linden, who speaks with the crisp eiciency of a workaholic who doesn’t stop for lunch and calls dinners with her family a rare treat. There were other mysterious aspects to this case. The baby had loose, excess skin draped over his head, and a distinct bony protuberance at the back of his skull. There was also the red, itchy rash the mother had reported during her irst month of pregnancy. After a month of tests, van der Linden was still at a loss. H E A LT H >1 6 2
VOGUE.COM
D IM I T RI OS ST E FA N I D I S/ © G ET T Y I M AG ES
A doctor at the epidemic’s ground zero is at the forefront of the discovery and treatment of this frightening disease. Juliana Barbassa reports.
Health
Outbreak
wasted no time, alerting public-health oicials, who in turn responded by setting up medical and research teams, and mobilizing an antimosquito task force whose quarter of a million agents have been visiting Brazilian homes to wipe out potential breeding grounds. In January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised American women who are either pregnant or hoping to be to avoid travel to most of Latin America and the Caribbean. The CDC’s Atlanta-based emergency operations center is on its highest level of alert, and President Obama has asked Congress to give $1.8 billion to ight Zika. More than eighteen companies and research institutes across the world are working on developing a vaccine. “We haven’t seen the peak of this epidemic, but the global support has been encouraging,” says Marcos Espinal, M.D., director of the department of communicable diseases of the World Health Organization’s Pan na van der Linden, M.D., a American Health Organization. lively, brown-eyed 75-yearThe role van der Linden played in all old who looks younger this is immeasurable. “She made all the than her age, swears that diference in the world,” says Joel Ernst, she had nothing to do with ON THE FRONT LINE LAST YEAR, VAN DER LINDEN BEGAN NOTICING M.D., director of the division of infecher daughter’s career choice—or those BABIES WITH BRAINS WHOSE CONTOURS WERE WORRYINGLY DIFFERENT. of her two other children, Vanessa’s tious diseases and immunology at NYU. twin sister and her brother, a pediatric “Doctors like her, who are noticing someendocrinologist and a pediatric neurologist, respectively. But she thing unusual and getting the attention of health authorities, have a admits that because she was a pediatric neurologist herself, marhuge impact. This applied in West Africa when Ebola was emerging. ried to the neurosurgeon who operated on her patients, family Zika would have been noticed eventually, but without Dr. van der dinners were often dedicated to debating surgery outcomes and Linden getting things started in the right direction, many more patient prognoses. “We tried to discuss other things; we really women and babies would be afected.” did,” she says, laughing, at the kitchen table of her light-illed In my hometown of Rio, an architect friend in her late 30s is apartment on the seventeenth loor of one of Recife’s modern delaying having a second child, while a television producer in my high-rises. “But it was hard to talk about anything other than circle who was newly pregnant requested a leave of absence and medicine.” packed her bags for Italy, where she would wait out Brazil’s rainy, While the number of microcephaly patients under the younger mosquito-heavy season. While I am C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 5 8 van der Linden’s care was multiplying, her mother walked into the maternity ward of Recife’s other public hospital in late September and saw seven babies with the same condition. The link between severe neurological damage in newborns and the mosquito-borne virus making inroads in the region made sense. Areas of risk Prevention Recife, a city whose name refers to the reefs (arrecifes in PortuFrom its outbreak in Recife, Most doctors advise women who guese) along its picturesque shore, has all the ingredients to hatch Brazil, the Zika epidemic are or plan to become pregnant has spread through Latin to stay away from areas with a mosquito-borne epidemic. It stretches out over estuaries, canals, America and the Caribbean. Zika. At a minimum, they should and riverbanks. Some of its poorest residents live in shacks perched Florida is at risk, with a wide avoid mosquitoes and use on stilts over stagnant, sewage-tinged canals. Regular tropical downswath of the U.S. to follow. condoms, as there have been a pours leave deep puddles among uncollected garbage. The region few cases of sexual transmission. had already been facing an epidemic of dengue fever, a disease also Signs Estimates for a vaccine range spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito but one that rarely leaves Common symptoms are from 18 months to ten years. fever, rash, joint pain, and lasting damage. What we don’t know conjunctivitis, yet most cases It was an epiphany that illed Vanessa van der Linden with both
Soon afterward, she was walking her regular rounds through the maternity ward of a state hospital when a startling sight stopped her. Here were three more babies with the same miniature heads. She ordered CT scans. They showed similar malformations and patterns. Some of the mothers also remembered sufering from a strange rash during their pregnancies. A rash—along with fever, joint pain, and headache—is a main symptom of the Zika virus, which had started spreading in Brazil earlier in the year. More cases appeared, with the same characteristics. Something horriic was happening—and proliferating. Van der Linden realized that she needed to do something, fast. So she picked up the phone and did what so many women do when they need help: She called her mother.
A
professional satisfaction and horror, she recalls. “When we’ve had a dengue epidemic here and we haven’t been able to control the mosquito, how are we going to control this disease?” she asked, her mind spinning into the future, toward generations of severely handicapped children born into a health system already in crisis. She
162
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
are asymptomatic. The WHO predicts between 2 million and 3 million infections this year. More than 4,800 microcephalic babies have been born in Brazil since last October.
Whether there is a definitive link between Zika and brain damage. Whether those infected become immune. How long a woman who is infected should wait before becoming pregnant.
VOGUE.COM
V I NC EN T CATA LA
Inside theEpidemic
people are talking about A ND R EAS LARSSON. SITTINGS EDITOR: VICTORIA YOUNG. HAIR, MARI OHASHI; MAKEUP, CIARA O’SHEA. PRODUCED BY CA LUM WALSH AT ROSCO PRODUCTION. D ETAILS, SE E IN T HIS ISSU E .
EDITOR: VALERIE STEIKER
CAFÉ SOCIETY THE SWEDISH ACTRESS IN AN ISABEL MARANT DRESS.
f
rom Greta Garbo to the freshly Oscared Alicia Vikander, Swedish actresses seem to possess an efortless blend of glamour and gravitas. The latest to captivate Hollywood is Rebecca Ferguson, who irst broke out as the title character in the Starz miniseries The White Queen. She then went against type, going mano a mano with Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation. Now she swerves again, in Stephen Frears’s Florence Foster Jenkins. “She got to me in a rather roundabout way,” says the director. “As she walked into the room, I thought, She’s exactly what we need.” Set in forties New York, the ilm follows the true story of a likable heiress, Florence (Meryl Streep), who, enabled by her husband (Hugh Grant, never better), deludes herself that she’s a concert-worthy singer. Ferguson plays Grant’s mistress with a sexy worldliness that jumps right of the screen. “Hugh is this mixture of wit and brilliance and grumpiness,” Ferguson tells me fondly from Norway, where she’s been shooting a Jo Nesbø adaptation, The Snowman, opposite Michael Fassbender. “When he’d get grumpy, I’d hit him on the arm, he’d come back at me, and then we’d laugh and go to work.” For his part, Grant appreciated their rapport. “She’s not deadly on the seriousness,” he says. The daughter of a Swedish lawyer father and an English mother who acted in some films, Ferguson fell into her career almost by accident at age fifteen, when her face was plucked out of a modeling catalog and she was ofered the lead in a Swedish TV series. “They were searching for a look and hoped I could act,” she says. They hit the jackpot. This fall will ind her costarring with Emily Blunt in The Girl on the Train (“It’s an emotional thriller that looks into women’s lives. I said, ‘If Em’s in it, I’m in it, and I don’t even need to read the script’ ”). She will also be shooting Life, a sci-i
VOGUE.COM
talent
SIREN Song Rebecca Ferguson takes a turn as the other woman in Stephen Frears’s period romp Florence Foster Jenkins. adventure in which she discovers signs of life on Mars with Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds. Whenever she can, she retreats to the southern-Sweden ishing village where she lives with her eight-year-old son, Isac. “I love coming home to a place where the news is not that I made a ilm,” she says, “but that Fisherman John caught a big eel.” —JOHN POWERS PATA >1 6 8
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
167
Le Corbusier called a house “a machine for living in.” The idea is taken to extremes in High-Rise, Ben Wheatley’s fascinating, sometimes messy adaptation of the J. G. Ballard novel. Set in a 1975 metropolis, it stars Tom Hiddleston as Robert Laing, a nattily tailored doctor who moves into a 40-story building whose architect (Jeremy Irons) designed it to be a self-contained community. Laing takes to the place, with its shops and swimming pools and sexy mum next door (Sienna Miller). But all too soon this modernist Eden starts crumbling. Ballard is better on mental atmosphere than tight plotting, and the film also suffers moments of drift. Yet it is filled with jaunty pleasures, as Hiddleston becomes an ordinary man set free not by the high-rise’s utopian purpose but by the anarchy it unleashes. The dysfunction is less cosmic in Jason Bateman’s The Family Fang. He and Nicole Kidman shine as siblings whose childhoods were spent starring in their parents’ performance art—and who finally get their day of reckoning. Tartly funny but charged with melancholy, this is one family film that owes more to Philip Larkin than Walt Disney—J.P.
art
TOP NOTCH HIDDLESTON, PHOTOGRAPHED BY PETER LINDBERGH FOR VOGUE, 2013.
SHAPE Shifter
Long after arriving at her signature hard-edged style in postwar Paris, Carmen Herrera appeared in “Concrete Realities,” a 2004 Tribeca group show that established her as a pioneer and expert formalist. “My turn was slow in coming,” says the Havana-born artist, who will be the subject of a survey at the Whitney in September. Her newest two-color diptychs and triptychs open Lisson Gallery’s New York space under the High Line this month, also the occasion of her 101st birthday. “Every morning I go to my table in front of a large window with the four or five orchids I grow in the sill,” she says. “I put ideas on paper, PATA >1 7 0 and time flies while I compose with shapes and colors.”—KATE GUADAGNINO OUT OF THE BOX A SELECTION OF WORKS TO BE DISPLAYED AT LISSON GALLERY NEW YORK.
168
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
VOGUE.COM
ART: CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM LEFT: CARMEN HERRERA. COSTA DEL SOL , 20 15, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 42” X 72” ; N O CHE VE RDE , 20 14. ACRYLIC ON CANVAS. 72” X 60 ” ; AL BA , 2014. AC RYLI C O N CA NVAS, 6 0 " X 72" ; B LU E A ND W H I TE ( TR I PTYC H) , 2014, ACRYLI C ON CANVAS. 84” X 84” (84” X 27. 9” EACH ). © CAR MEN H ER R ERA; COURTESY OF LISSON GALLERY.
movies
Homecoming
people are talking about
up next
people are talking about
Fresh TAKE
travel
Into theWOODS A LITTLE GREEN WILDFLOWERS ALONG THE SHORE OF A GRASMERE LAKE.
In the remote Lake District, where Wordsworth found solace in the woodlands and rolling hills, the village of Grasmere remains “part of the romantic dream of nineteenth-century England,” says Andrew Wildsmith, who’s restored a Gothic house there called Forest Side. The stone facade looks right out of Rebecca, but inside you’ll find a powdery-blue palette and lush Zoffany wallpaper. Double-glazed sash windows in the 20 suites offer views of the gardens, one of which supplies the restaurant, where Kevin Tickle serves up dishes like Old Winchester cheese with pickled allium flowers. Come morning, wander the misty grounds or take the path to Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage, but be sure to make it back in time for afternoon tea. theforestside.com.—KATE DONNELLY
tennis
ON
next generation.” But normal he is not. In February alone, he won titles in Buenos Aires and Acapulco, and within a year he’s shot up almost 40 places to a career-high ranking of thirteen, making him the youngest player in the top 20. “I call him Home Thiem,” says commentator Brad Gilbert. “He reminds me of Gasquet, with that one-handed backhand. And he’s strong as a bull. His opportunity is coming.” Thiem lost to Rafael Nadal in 2014 at Roland Garros, which he calls his favorite court to play. He returns to the French Open this month after defeating the Spaniard in Buenos Aires— on clay, no less. Rarely has a dark horse been so modest: “I’ll keep up the good work,” he says.—MARK GUIDUCCI
the Ball Rising tennis phenom Dominic Thiem is neither bombastic nor tattooed nor dating a more famous female player. Raised in the countryside outside Vienna, the 22-year-old is shy, supports Chelsea F.C., and believes that the surest way to win is by training every single day. As he puts it, “I’m maybe the most normal guy of the
170
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
JUMP TO IT THIEM MAKES A SHOT AT THIS YEAR’S AUSTRALIAN OPEN.
t
STANDING TALL THE ACTRESS IN AN ERDEM DRESS.
his month, director Benedict Andrews brings his hit London production of A Streetcar Named Desire to St. Ann’s Warehouse, with breakout star Vanessa Kirby as Stella, the watered-down wife caught between her hypermasculine husband (Ben Foster) and supercilious sister (Gillian Anderson). Andrews describes Stella as “the battleground of the piece,” but audiences should expect Kirby’s Stella to be a fighter. “She’s strong,” the 28-year-old Londoner says. “The way I see it, Stella is no doormat.” Nor is Kirby, according to her director: “Vanessa possesses a great emotional ferocity. There’s a dangerous glint in her eyes, a tigerish sensuality. You don’t know what she might do next.” Ofstage, Kirby will play Zelda Fitzgerald in Michael Grandage’s Genius, about Scribner’s editor Max Perkins, and then a “vivacious and vulnerable” Princess Margaret in Stephen Daldry and Peter Morgan’s The Crown, Netlix’s chronicle of Queen Elizabeth II. Kirby, who was nominated for the 2011 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Outstanding Newcomer for her performance in The Acid Test, admits that she’s never been quite as comfortable on set as she is onstage. For that, blame Anton Chekhov. Kirby was just twelve when she saw The Cherry Orchard, with Vanessa and Corin Redgrave, at the National Theatre. “I so believed in what they were doing onstage,” she remembers. “That moment was magic.”—M.G. PATA >1 7 2 VOGUE.COM
UP NEXT: ANDREAS LARSSON. SITTINGS EDITOR: SONNY GROO. HAIR, KARIN BIGLER; MAKEUP, NINNI NUMMELA. PRODUCED BY MATHILDE CA R LOT T I FO R ROSCO PRODUCTION. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE. TRAVEL: LINDA LYON/ © GETTY IMAGES. TENNIS: JOE CAST RO/EPA/NEWSCOM.
Vanessa Kirby lights up the stage and screen.
people are talking about
dance
theater
NEXT Act Rupert Everett reprises his role as Oscar Wilde in The Judas Kiss.
FINE AND DANDY THE ACTOR IN COSTUME AS THE PLAYWRIGHT-AESTHETE.
d
avid Hare’s The Judas Kiss considers two crucial moments in the life of Oscar Wilde. The first is a fatal evening at the Cadogan Hotel, where Wilde awaits arrest, charged with committing homosexual acts; while a friend begs him to leave, his willful young lover, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, urges him to stay and challenge Bosie’s hated father, the accuser. The second act finds a physically destroyed Wilde convalescing in Naples. I irst caught a spectacularly miscast version of it on Broadway in 1998, with a sonorous Liam Neeson as Wilde, and Tom Hollander as a petulant Bosie. When I saw director Neil Armield’s stylish revival in 2012 at London’s Hampstead Theatre, however, I was electriied by the poetry of Hare’s writing, and by Rupert Everett’s profoundly moving interpretation of the central role (The Guardian’s Michael Billington aptly described it as “the performance of his career”) as he bestrode the stage in costume designer Sue Blane’s in de siècle inery. Now this magisterial production is coming to BAM, with the 20-year-old Charlie Rowe newly cast as Bosie. “For me it’s David’s best play. His ear for dialogue is extraordinary,” says Everett, who’s been working on a self-penned Wilde biopic of his own. “It’s like playing tennis with a very good player—it bounces back at you!” Armield irst directed the play for his Belvoir theater company in Sydney. When Everett expressed an interest in the role, the director was excited to revisit it. “Rupert is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met,” he says. “To have somebody who understands wit playing Oscar brings a wonderful alignment of thought—it just feels so true.” —HAMISH BOWLES
172
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
FLORAL NOTES VINTAGE BOTANICAL FLOWER AND RAVY JUGS. SAMANTHAROBINSON .COM.AU.
design
PERFECT Pour From her sun-drenched Sydney studio, potter Samantha Robinson turns out handmade porcelain pieces of rare delicacy. Her newest collection of pitchers, jugs, and vases was inspired by nineteenthcentury studies of the Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.—SAMANTHA REES
THEATER: JOHAN PERSSON. DESIGN: COURTESY OF SAMANTHA ROBINSON. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.
Domestic BLISS For “Modern Living,” the dancers turned artists Gerard & Kelly didn’t want individual performers but a dance company. The piece examines intimacy within alternative domestic arrangements, and what is a company if not a sort of family? They got Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project to sign on, along with the Art Production Fund, then found their first site in the Schindler House in West Hollywood, built in the 1920s to house a two-couple commune. The work debuted there earlier this year. Now comes the second performance, to be staged at the Glass House, once the Connecticut home of Philip Johnson and David Whitney, and a gathering place for their closeted friends. “We like to think of it as hiding in plain sight,” says Kelly. If in California the dancers wore homespun garb in colors inspired by Paul Klee, here they’ll have suits and a subdued, mid-century modernist palette as they move in and around the house striking up abstract tableaus. Gerard & Kelly are often on the road and believe “Modern Living” was born of questions about their own setup. “There’s a desire for a home, but also wondering about what kind of home that would be,” says Gerard. Millepied, who is looking forward to being back in L.A. full-time, calls the piece “free-spirited.”—K.G.
SW I FT: ME RT A LAS A N D MA RCUS P IG GOTT. FASI ON ED I TOR : TON N E G O OD MA N. H AIR , SH AY ASH UAL. MAKEUP, AARON D E MEY. PRODUCED BY AC ROSS MEDIA PRODUCTION. SET DESIGN, ANDREA STANLEY FOR STREETERS. BOLTON: BLAINE DAVIS. DETAILS, SEE IN THE ISSUE.
May
TAYLOR SWIFT was one of the first celebrities to launch themselves like comets across the social-media universe a decade ago. Today, her Instagram followers number more than 70 million. As a pop juggernaut masterfully in command of her own screen personas, she’s the ideal cochair to lead the charge up the famous 28 steps of the Met this month for the Costume Institute’s “MANUS X MACHINA” gala. Homespun and high-tech, earthy and celestial: That’s Swift. And at the top of the stairs to meet her will be the exhibition’s curator, Andrew Bolton, who is quickly becoming a different kind of starmaker in the fashion world.
F
U
C O N T
L
L Pop queen, power broker, hater vanquisher— Taylor Swift’s star has never been brighter. On a trip to her childhood home, she wonders: What (on earth) will she do next? By Jason Gay. Photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. SILVER SIREN At the Grammys this year, Swift became the first woman in history to win Album of the Year twice. Vetements dress and boots. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.
T R O L
TRUTH BE TOLD “Going through different phases is one of my favorite things about fashion. I love how it can mark the passage of time.” Michael Kors Collection feathered shirtdress. Details, see In This Issue.
178
B
B
y now you know that the past few years have been extraordinary ones in the life of Taylor Swift. Even if you have only casual knowledge of Swift’s music—there may be six or seven souls left on the planet who can’t sing all the words to “Shake It Of”—you’re aware that Swift has become not only one of the most successful recording artists ever, but also an unrivaled power broker who has prevailed in a volatile media economy and brought today’s music overlords to heel. Swift’s 2015 stare-down of Apple—she declined to put her hit album 1989 on Apple’s nascent streamingmusic service when the company said it would not pay artists during its initial launch; Apple changed its policy immediately and paid everyone—was a seismic example of a single artist’s toppling corporate might. At 26, Swift is world famous, wealthy, critically celebrated, a style inluencer, and a cultural movement unto herself, recognizable everywhere she goes. She also has two awesome cats. And yet today, in this chapel atop a hill in Reading, Pennsylvania, Swift is none of those things. She is the maid of honor at the wedding of her childhood friend Britany Maack. Swift and Maack have known each other since Swift was ten days old and have stayed close—there are grainy home videos of the two romping around a crib together and, more recently, photos of them sitting side by side at the 2014 Grammys. Last spring, after Swift accepted Britany’s invitation to be maid of honor via Instagram— kids today!—she took Maack to Reem Acra, where Britany got itted for her custom hand-embroidered silk-tafeta wedding gown and Taylor for the blush-pink, cap-sleeved chifon maid-of-honor dress that she has on today (the itting was also Instagrammed, naturally). Swift has even known the groom, Benjamin LaManna, since kindergarten—she admits to having had a little crush on Ben way back then, when he was “that kid who sat next to me in class with the bowl cut and the Lego lunch box.” Swift hasn’t been to Reading in more than a decade; she was fourteen when she moved with her family to Nashville, on her way to becoming a celebrated country singer-songwriter and later blossoming into one of the biggest pop acts in music history. Returning to the place where you grew up can be a bit of a mind-bender for anyone, and Swift is no diferent. During a car ride earlier in the day, she excitedly pointed out landmarks: the creek where she and Britany used to play as kids; a weathered tree house in the front
yard of the former Maack family home; the piney woods she and her friends used to think were haunted. “It’s such a surreal, emotional thing,” Swift says. “When you’re a little kid, you’re riding the same roads to school every single day, hundreds of times. When you come back, you snap into that strange nostalgia.” And the church! There are nuns here at Sacred Heart Chapel who taught Swift in kindergarten. Many of the wedding guests have known her for just as long. To them, Swift is not the superstar who, a handful of days ago, stood on a stage in Los Angeles and accepted a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, the irst woman to win that prize twice. No, that maid of honor, currently fussing over and straightening out the train of the bride’s gown, is Taylor—Scott and Andrea Swift’s older kid, Austin’s big sister, who grew up barely a ive-minute drive away and used to go for ice cream at the Friendly’s down the street. To be clear: I’m not saying the people in this church aren’t aware that Scott and Andrea’s kid turned into, you know, Taylor Freakin’ Swift—it’s hilarious to watch the lower girls try to keep it together, and the nuns seem pretty jazzed, too—but that’s not the story today. Britany and Ben are. And the only evidence that the maid of honor is you-know-who is the paparazzi who have gathered at the bottom of the hill, hoping to snag a photo with their long lenses. We need to talk about the Christmas-tree farm. A treasured footnote to the Taylor Swift backstory is that she spent much of her childhood being raised at, of all places, a Christmas-tree nursery called Pine Ridge Farm. It is the kind of quaint, Norman Rockwell–ian detail that sounds a bit too precious, too good to be true. Weren’t her parents in inance? Didn’t she grow up in the burbs? How was this possibly real? Come on. The Christmas-tree farm is real. She showed me herself. It’s the morning of the wedding, and I am riding in an SUV with Swift and her mother, Andrea. Andrea is powering down the road, and Swift, dressed in a caramel-colored Reformation jacket and a pair of black jeans, is sitting passenger side. This area around Reading and its adjacent town, Wyomissing, is rich with pastoral roads marked by open ields and stone homes, and the kind of rolling countryside that makes you want to saddle up and ride a horse—which Swift did as a child. “That was kind of my mom’s thing,” Taylor says. “She really wanted me to be a horseback rider, and I did it competitively until I worked up the nerve at age twelve to tell her I didn’t really love it like she loved it. “I just wanted to make music and do theater,” she says. “So I’ve been a big disappointment.” “I’ve gotten over the bitterness, finally,” Andrea says sarcastically. Soon we arrive at a clearing with a barn and a small farmhouse. This is the place, they tell me. Taylor and Andrea have not made any calls or arrangements about visiting. It’s going to be a random drop-in from a pop star, like the Taylor Swift Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes or something. Taylor notices a man stepping into his car in the driveway. We pull up alongside, and Andrea rolls down her window. Taylor leans over. “I used to live here,” she says brightly. The man immediately gives what can only be described as a Holy crap–it’s–Taylor Swift look. “I know,” he says, as if on cue.
179
Everyone laughs. The man’s name is Dave Schaefer, and he has lived here with his wife, Debbie, for about six years. He invites us to have a look around, and we all pile out. “This must really bring back some memories,” Dave says. “Yeah, this is crazy,” Taylor says. She surveys the ields behind the driveway, which include a small grove of pine trees her parents once planted. They now look tall enough for Christmas at Rockefeller Center. “It’s beautiful.” This is where, Andrea tells me, Taylor Swift was brought home from the hospital in, well, 1989—I guess everyone knows the year of Taylor’s birth by now. The split-rail fence that’s still standing— Scott and Andrea built that themselves. Scott, a stockbroker, actually purchased and lived on the property before he’d met Andrea; on their irst date, she came to a party he hosted in the farmhouse. Debbie comes outside and introduces herself. “I always thought you might want to stop by,” she says. “But I never wanted to bother you.” The Schaefers confess they lived here for a while before they learned about the famous former resident. “The pizza guy told us,” Debbie says. “We had no idea.” She invites everyone inside. As we step into the cozy two-loor home, Taylor takes out her phone and starts ilming. There’s the living room where the Swifts put their family Christmas tree. There’s where they once put the piano. Casey, Dave and Debbie’s daughter, arrives. She actually owns the house with her husband and lives nearby. She’s thrilled but also beside herself that her two daughters are away skiing for the day. “You want to see your room?” Debbie asks Taylor. We go upstairs into a small corner room where a tiny Taylor used to demand three books and ive songs every night. Taylor gathers the family together to make a quick video for the Schaeffers’ granddaughters, Siena and Tarah. “Hi, Siena and Tarah,” Taylor says cheerily. “This used to be my room. We wish you were here so bad.” I can’t lie: All I can think of is Siena and Tarah returning from their ski trip to learn that Taylor Swift was hanging out at their grandparents’ house, and deciding right then they will never go skiing ever again. On the ride back, Andrea and Taylor sound almost overcome by what has just happened—by the sweet and polite and utterly un–freaked out mood of the whole experience. “My faith in humanity is restored,” Taylor says. And then she turns her head quickly away from the window: paparazzi. Yes: I should note that when we arrived at the farm, we were informed by a couple of Swift’s security people that there were at least a trio of uninvited photographers who had followed us to the location to catch some hot, sexy farm-visit action. To Swift, this is about as surprising as . . . what is the exact opposite of surprise? This is her constant state. She lives with it, adapts to it. Just a few years back, Swift was so excited about relocating to New York City—it was the creative basis for 1989—but when she’s in the city now, within a couple of days, there is a circus of photographers outside her apartment building. “But that kind of happens everywhere,” she says. The wedding ceremony has inished—Britany and Ben made it oicial to applause—and Swift and I have huddled downstairs at the church during a break before the reception.
180
WILDEST DREAMS Swift will cochair the Met gala on May 2. After that? “I’m excited about being able to relax for the first time in ten years.” Marchesa jeweled dress. Details, see In This Issue.
181
I ask her: When was the last time you were in a place where nobody in the press had any idea you were there—no reporters, no photographers? “Mmmm, Colorado’s good,” she says. “If I go somewhere and stay in a house, nobody knows.” Swift says she is ready to lie a little low. After the wedding, she will go to New York, where she will be spotted dining with her friend Lena Dunham, and then be seen a week later in Los Angeles with her brother, Austin, and her friend Lorde at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party. As for future plans . . . who knows? For the irst time in years, Swift is not sure exactly what is next. She is very much OK with this. So what the hell are you going to do with the rest of your life, Taylor Swift? “I have no idea,” she says, with a sigh that’s more blissful than anxious. “This is the irst time in ten years that I haven’t known. I just decided that after the past year, with all of the unbelievable things that happened . . . I decided I was going to live my life a little bit without the pressure on myself to create something.” Do not freak: Swift is not abandoning making music. Those who know her know this is chemically impossible. (“Her not being creative is one of the last things I’d ever worry about,” the musician and producer Jack Antonof tells me later.) “I’m always going to be writing songs,” Swift says. “The thing is, with me, I could very well come up with three things in the next two weeks and then jump back into the studio, and all of a sudden the next record is started. That’s an option, too.” But probably not for the moment. “I would really like to take a little time to learn things,” Swift says. “I have lots of short-term goals.” Such as? “I want to be a well-rounded person who can make a good drink.” (I can conirm from the wedding’s cocktail gathering that Taylor Swift enjoys an Old Fashioned and knows how to make one.) Anything else? “To be able to save somebody if they’re drowning,” she says. She’s completely serious. “So CPR, all the various kinds of chest compressions. People tell you little tips, but that’s diferent from actually taking a class and getting certiied.” Can you change a tire? “No. I should probably know how to do that. “I do things like this,” Swift says. Once, “I got it in my head that I couldn’t do a split, and I was really upset about it. And so I stretched every single day for a year until I could do a split. Somehow I feel better knowing that I can.” I ask her if she’d ever consider launching a fashion line. “Theoretically, yes,” she says. “But I would want it to be something that was relatable and accessible and everyday. I don’t see it being couture. I would want it to be relective of my style. And a lot of things I wear are not highly expensive.” In May, Swift will cochair the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s 2016 gala, for the exhibition “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology.” It is a topic Swift—easily one of the biggest style icons of the social-media era—understands better than most, from technology’s ability to shape trends to its growing inluence on creativity and design.
Swift’s personal style has, not surprisingly, matured over the course of her career, migrating from the early days of sundresses and, as she describes them, “bedazzled cowboy boots” to the vintage ifties vibe of a few years ago to the sleeker, street-conscious look she favors now. “I can look back at an old photo and tell you roughly what year it’s from,” Swift says. “Going through diferent phases is one of my favorite things about fashion. I love how it can mark the passage of time. It’s similar to my songs in that way— it all helps identify where I was at in diferent points of my life.” er style has never been deliberately provocative or fad-chasing—on the contrary, there’s always been a kind of efortless appropriateness to Swift, a quality she shares with her friend the Midwest-raised model Karlie Kloss—and yet it’s easy to see a curiosity about new things. Recently Swift cut her hair into a sharp bob, and she’s been seen strutting in a pair of Gothy, over-the-ankle Vetements boots that look stolen from the closet of Siouxsie Sioux. As usual, the changes are small, recognizable—a genius of Swift’s, from music to everything else, is experimentation without alienation. Swift’s style never tries too hard or appears publicity-craving; everyone’s already paying attention, anyway. Because I’m a hopeless cheeseball, I can’t help asking: Being part of this wedding, does it make Swift think about being married some day? For the past year, she has been seeing the Scottish DJ-producer Calvin Harris. Harris is not here with her, but in early March, he and Swift will post cutesy notices on social media—his on Snapchat; hers on Instagram—commemorating the one-year status of their relationship. Soon after, both will post photographs of an idyllic, whereabouts-unknown vacation in the tropics, with ts + aw written in the sand. (Harris’s given name is Adam Wiles.) “I’m just taking things as they come,” Swift says. “I’m in a magical relationship right now. And of course I want it to be ours, and low-key . . . this is the one thing that’s been mine about my personal life.” Swift’s friend Lorde thinks that Swift can only withdraw from music for so long.“We talk about this—in order to do good work, write these deeply personal records, we’re constantly in a place of metacognition. Sometimes it can feel like you’re a scholar writing a thesis about your own brain,” Lorde says. “So I think she’s going to try to pick up some new skills, maybe take courses in something. Tay is a big fan of taking time of until about month two—and then she gets this look in her eyes, and I know all the Dateline and frozen yogurt and mooching around is about to go out the window.” Here on a basement loor of the country club, where the bride is adjusting her gown, Swift and I hear the cocktail party gaining steam. A pair of bridesmaids stroll by. Swift gives them high ives. “Honestly, I never relax, and I’m excited about being able to relax for the irst time in ten years,” she says. Swift takes a sip of her Old Fashioned. “I feel relaxed right now.”
H
“There are a lot of really easy ways to dispel rumors,” says Swift. “If they say you have fake friendships, all you have to do is continue to be there for each other”
182
Just a few days before, Swift had been in the thick of it. In her Grammy acceptance speech for Album of the Year, she’d ofered stirring words to women in the audience, but also made what was presumed to be a less-than-veiled reply to Kanye West, who’d released a new song in which he’d bragged he’d made Swift famous and tackily theorized the pair would one day have sex. The story pinged around on social media for the next 72 hours and generally made me want to put a metal pail on my head and bang it loudly against a wall. Hadn’t this whole Kanye vs. Taylor nonsense—which began, of course, seven years ago, when West barged into Swift’s MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech to argue that Beyoncé should have won—been declared over? Taylor Nation was aghast. Austin Swift posted an Instagram video in which he casually tossed a pair of West’s Adidas Yeezy sneakers into the garbage. I tell Swift the whole thing reminded me of Al Pacino’s famous line as the aging Maia don Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III. “ ‘I thought I was out . . .’ ” Swift knows exactly where I am going and inishes it: “ ‘They pull me back in!’ “I think the world is so bored with the saga,” she goes on. “I don’t want to add anything to it, because then there’s just more.” I get why Swift would not want to fuel the dispute, but it’s not hard to see a connection between West’s credit-taking and the long tradition of men being dismissive— actively as well as subconsciously mansplainy—of the hard work and success of women. This is something Swift has become hardened to, having spent much of her early years being mainly recognized not for her songwriting gifts (which just about everyone now agrees are rare and special) but for who she was dating, her fame distilled into what Swift calls “my incredibly sexist Men–of–Taylor Swift slideshows.” “You know, I went out on a normal amount of dates in my early 20s, and I got absolutely slaughtered for it,” she says. “And it took a lot of hard work and altering my decision-making. I didn’t date for two and a half years. Should I have had to do that? No. “I guess what I wanted to call attention to in my speech at the Grammys was how it’s going to be diicult if you’re a woman who wants to achieve something in her life—no matter what,” she adds. The day after the awards, Swift went shopping at Barneys in Beverly Hills—“I was like, ‘I’m going to buy some nice shoes today’ ”—and says she was approached by a number of women, mothers in particular, who thanked her. “Their response was really beautiful. You never know what anyone’s response is going to be. So when it’s good, it’s really nice.” Swift has reached a level of fame at which unsolicited drama just inds her. The Men–of–Taylor Swift slideshows have calmed down, but she now takes grief for her “squad” of celebrity female friends, who, depending on the jab, are either too glam or too phony or some combination of the two. “Ugh,” Swift says when I bring it up. “I’ve had people say really hurtful things about me, and so I’ve kind of learned how to gauge it: ‘This is, like, low-to-medium-level hurtful.’ “There are a lot of really easy ways to dispel rumors,” she explains. “If they say you are pregnant, all you have to do is
continue to not be pregnant and not have a baby. If the rumor is that you have fake friendships, all you have to do is continue to be there for each other. And when we’re all friends in ifteen years and raising our kids together, maybe somebody will look back and go, ‘That was kind of ridiculous what we said about Taylor and her friends.’ ” It’s as if Swift has become so big, so enticing a target, that she is no longer a mere person but a cultural symbol from which anything can be demanded. Jack Antonof describes Swift’s status as “almost like being president.” He adds, “She’s the biggest, but a lot of people have been the biggest. Not a lot of people have been the biggest and the best, and she is.” All of that feels a million light-years away, here, back home, among friends, at Britany’s wedding. Before we part, Swift makes a request: She needs to practice her maid-of-honor speech. Now. And so, in a basement corridor at the country club, Swift recites her maid-of-honor speech, which she has memorized. I don’t have to tell you that Taylor Swift’s maidof-honor speech is great. Of course it’s great.
Before we part,Swift makes a request: She needs to practice her maid-of-honor speech. Now
Here’s one other thing about this wedding: Britany and Ben made the brilliant decision, which apparently is becoming a bit of a thing with twenty-irst-century nuptials, to politely ask their guests to not bring their phones. So from the ceremony to the receptions and the toasts, people actually paid attention to the bride and groom—they focused, laughed, existed in the now. “All of our guests were present,” Britany tells me later. “I truly attribute this to everyone unplugging from distractions and enjoying the moment.” When the time comes, Swift grabs the mic and delivers her maid-of-honor address with the unperturbed calm of someone who does this kind of thing before 50,000 people. She tells the story of having a crush on kindergarten-era Ben with his bowl cut and Lego lunch box. She talks about how, as toddlers, Britany was the physical one, and she was the verbal one. “Essentially what you had were these two babies who each made up for what the other lacked,” Swift says. “One couldn’t really walk. One couldn’t really talk. And interestingly enough, we assume those exact personas to this day when we are drunk . . . give us an hour.” The room goes crazy. A few beats later, Swift has everyone teary when she talks about the “real love” she sees between Britany and Ben. “Real love doesn’t mess with your head,” she says. “Real love just is. Real love just endures. Real love maintains. Real love takes it page by page.” (I told you it was a good speech.) Later on, there will be cake. Later on, there will be dancing, those lower girls getting a story that is going to totally blow their classmates’ minds at school on Monday. Later on, the wedding band will entice Swift to the stage, where she will sing “Shake It Of ” for her childhood friend on her wedding night and an audience that for the irst time in history isn’t waving 10,000 smartphones in her face. The night—the whole weekend—is storybook warm. You know the old Thomas Wolfe novel You Can’t Go Home Again? Sometimes it’s really true. But Taylor Swift did.
183
BLANK SPACE Going to her childhood home in Pennsylvania for the first time in more than a decade was “such a surreal, emotional thing,” says Swift. Calvin Klein Collection dress.
PRODUCED BY ACROSS MEDIA PRODUCTION. SET DESIGN, ANDREA STANLEY FOR STREETERS.
SITTING PRETTY Marc Jacobs sequined dress and shoes. In this story: hair, Shay Ashual; makeup, Aaron de Mey. Details, see In This Issue.
185
Check
Mate Sweet and girlish—but with an unruly rock-’n’-roll hıstory, too—plaids are a winning move for model Gigi Hadid’s wanton weekend in Naples with her real-life boyfriend, pop heartthrob Zayn Malik. Photographed by Mario Testino. THAT’S AMORE From tartan to tattersall, from wide windowpane (like this) to wee gingham, plaids are an eminently of-the-moment way to play with scale. Victoria Beckham dress, $3,600; victoriabeckham.com. Jennifer Fisher earrings. Miu Miu shoes. On Malik: Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane suit, shirt, and tie. Jimmy Choo shoes. Photographed at Villa Lucia. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.
WHEELER DEALER Thick-soled shoes, a.k.a. “creepers,” are still the ultimate rocker pairing with tight plaid pants. Miu Miu sheer polo shirt, $1,050; select Miu Miu boutiques. Only Hearts by Helena Stuart bralette, $55; Only Hearts, NYC. Louis Vuitton pants, select Louis Vuitton boutiques. L.Erickson USA head wrap. Bracelets by Hermès and Loren Stewart. Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci shoes. On Malik: The Leather Shop jacket. Save Khaki United T-shirt. Hermès bracelet.
P HOTO G RA P HE D AT V IL LA LUC I A
PILLOW TALK A classic picnic-blanket check, with a retro ultra-high waist: Is it because the signals are so totally all-American-naive that this, perversely, looks so sexy? Solid & Striped bikini top ($88) and bottoms ($88); solidandstriped.com. Details, see In This Issue.
Ne w Direction Zayn Malik, formerly the shy guy in the world’s biggest boy band, takes the lead. he sirocco is a North African wind that occasionally (but viciously) assails otherwise idyllic Mediterranean locales with gale-force storms. In late February, lo scirocco raged through Naples, rattling the windows of the Hotel Excelsior, where a Vogue team awaited the arrival of Gigi Hadid and her boyfriend, Zayn Malik. The pair, who join a storied tradition of bombshell models coupling with rebellious musicians, was trekking down from Milan, where Hadid had just walked Versace. “We ended up having to drive eight hours overnight,” Hadid recalls, “but if anyone could keep me entertained on a road trip without phone service or Wi-Fi, it’s Zayn.” On set the next morning, despite the hurricane conditions surrounding them, it was as if the clouds had parted so the sun could shine speciically on the smitten couple. A year ago, when he announced his departure from One Direction, tearful, even hysterical teenagers confessed broken hearts to Snapchat as they mourned the loss of “the mysterious one.” A year later and on the heels of his irst solo album (tellingly titled Mind of Mine), 23-year-old Malik is more sensationally popular than ever before. Celebrity blogs follow every iteration of his hair, be it cake-frosting pink or fully buzzed; his beard length; his divisive (and temporary) face tattoo; and his relationship with Hadid, who starred in the video for his irst single, “Pillowtalk.” Yet Malik is far more discreet than other bad-boy pop idols of late. “He’s not the kind of guy that’s going to seek out unnecessary attention,” says Malay, the producer who worked with Frank Ocean and John Legend before collaborating on Malik’s debut. “He’s more calculated.” The son of a Britis-Pakistani father and an English-Irish mother who converted to Islam, Malik speaks Urdu (and sings in the language on “Intermission: Flower,” from the new album) but keeps religion largely separate from his persona. When reached by phone, Malik understandably says that music is the foremost topic he wants to discuss. “I’m constantly writing and have been for the past six years,” he says. “It’s what I do to get me through a time, to keep momentum.” The result is something that more closely resembles the hazy R&B of the Weeknd—the musician who happens to be dating Hadid’s little sister, Bella— than anything One Direction ever put out. “The intention of this album is to make music that I would listen to myself,” Malik says. Cut back to Naples, where Malik and Hadid, all but inseparable, are living la dolce vita. “I’m used to shooting clothes in opposite seasons,” Hadid says. “But having my boyfriend there to keep me warm? That was a nice change.”—MARK GUIDUCCI
T
HOLIDAYS IN THE SUN Wide, turned-up cuffs of plaid on drainpipe leathers summon the anarchic spirit of the Sex Pistols. Hadid wears a Miu Miu gingham shirt, $640; select Miu Miu boutiques. Marc Jacobs pants ($350) and belt; select Marc Jacobs stores. On Malik: Gucci leather jacket. Ray-Ban sunglasses. Details, see In This Issue.
ONE-MAN SHOW “I’m constantly writing and have been for the past six years,” Malik says. “It’s what I do to get me through a time, to keep momentum.”
P HOTO G RA P HE D AT V IL LA LUC I A
ROOM WITH A VIEW In literature, Italy is where innocents abroad discover their sensual side. Well, this inside-out, dressed-in-a-hurry frock is very ingenue-gonea-bit-wild, too. Calvin Klein Collection dress; Calvin Klein Collection, NYC. On Malik: Ksubi jeans. IRO boots. Details, see In This Issue.
MAMBO ITALIANO A beautiful mash-up of influences (Spanish lace, British plaid, Italian hourglass), this is our vote for the season’s most appealing date dress. Miu Miu leather coat and shoes; select Miu Miu boutiques. Nina Ricci dress, $2,790; Barneys New York, NYC. Hermès bag. Charvet scarf. Selima Optique for Pamela Love sunglasses.
P HOTO G RA P HE D AT V IL LA LUC I A
QUANDO, QUANDO, QUANDO The varsity jacket gives this very Italian dress a retro-alluring, sweet-sixteen-during-the-Kennedy-administration vibe. Coach 1941 jacket, $750; select Coach stores. Dolce & Gabbana tulle dress; select Dolce & Gabbana boutiques. Brooches by Marc Jacobs and Erickson Beamon. Details, see In This Issue.
L’AVVENTURA Prada reimagines the boxy 1960s skirt suit, giving it a sharply asymmetrical, architectural cut in white silk and adding a somewhat daring wool plaid apron. Prada jacket ($2,490), skirt ($1,280), and apron ($980); select Prada boutiques. On Malik: Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane suit. Details, see In This Issue.
197
P HOTO G RA P HE D AT V IL LA LUC I A
THE X FACTOR There’s nothing Catholic-school-standard about any of these plaids. Each has some twist: rock-candy color, or an inside-out effect, or a swatch of clashing lace. Céline cutout top, $2,350; Céline, NYC. Miu Miu skirt ($1,200); select Miu Miu boutiques. On Malik: Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane shirt.
WHAT MAKES YOU BEAUTIFUL The only way to make ruby-red eyelet lace more romantic? Add a peekaboo pushup bra. Oscar de la Renta top, $1,090; select Oscar de la Renta boutiques. Malia Mills bikini top, $195; maliamills.com. Photographed at Hotel Excelsior in Naples. In this story: hair, Odile Gilbert; makeup, Lucia Pica for Chanel. Menswear Editor: Michael Philouze. Produced by 10-4inc. Set design, Jack Flanagan for the Magnet Agency. Details, see In This Issue. BEAUTY NOTE: The trick to Bardot-inspired hair is touchable texture. Micro-minerals in Garnier Fructis Sheer Set Hairspray give styles a soft, weightless hold.
A n
E
y e
F o
In his first show as curator in charge of the Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton brings his signature insights to couture in the machine age. Nathan Heller meets our man at the Met. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
GRAY AREA OPPOSITE: Bolton, photographed in the museum’s Robert Lehman Wing. FROM NEAR RIGHT: Prada silk-organdy dress, fall 2011; Yohji Yamamoto cottonmuslin wedding dress, spring 2000; Comme des Garçons cotton twill–and– canvas ensemble, spring 2013; Chanel Haute Couture silk tulle–and–organza wedding ensemble, fall 2005; Christian Dior Haute Couture silk taffeta–and–tulle dress, fall 1949. Grooming, Charlie Taylor. Details, see In This Issue. Sittings Editor: Tonne Goodman.
r
A l
l
S
e
a
s
o
n
s
DETAILS MATTER Bolton became fascinated by the idea that haute couture came into being during the same decade the modern sewing machine was perfected. On model Rianne Van Rompaey, Dior Haute Couture dress and shoes. Details, see In This Issue, Fashion Editor: Grace Coddington.
Fashion Portfolio Photographed by Steven Meisel
PERSONAL TOUCH Bolton adjusts an Alexander McQueen dress in a scene from The First Monday in May, a new documentary by Andrew Rossi that chronicles the making of last year’s “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibition.
COU RT ESY O F MAG N OLI A P ICT U RES
A
meeting is going on, deep in the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On one side of the table, two men sit in silence. Flat foam models set before them show what could be loor plans for a monument, or theater sets, or visions of an urban plaza. The man at the opposite end is wearing a tight-cut dark-gray suit, a tie with a tricolor clip, and a crisp white shirt unbuttoned at the wrists. His hair, chestnut, is neatly parted, and a pair of glasses are perched high on his nose. A giant papier-mâché likeness of Diana Vreeland sits at one wall, peering at the back of his neck as he thinks. “This is the most coherent,” he says suddenly, picking out a model in which mannequins on islands carve a path of movement through the room. “You walk down. You can have the toiles, tailleur, and lou”—muslins, tailoring, and dressmaking. “It also gives a lot of lexibility.” “We like this,” one of the men says. “Our interest is in being able to see everything immediately.” “It’s really about process,” says the man in the gray suit, growing more animated. He points toward another model. “I like the different levels here. Would you be able to stack them a bit?” He spins out his ideas in succession with a Northern English accent, like a jazz musician riing on a phrase. “You’d see these diferent sorts of steps. You’d see three diferent zones. . . .”
The man speaking is Andrew Bolton, who, after fourteen years as a star curator at the museum’s Costume Institute, ascended this winter to replace the retiring Harold Koda as curator in charge. The suit is by Thom Browne, his romantic partner, and the foam models, presented by the elite architecture irm OMA, are gallery renderings of the massive fashion exhibition “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” which he will unveil this month. The show, made possible by Apple, begins in concert with the Met ball. Through dozens of garments—some eminently wearable, others more lamboyant—it tells a new, surprising story about handcraft and machine work that upends commonplace understandings of the diference between ready-to-wear and couture. In the museum world, the 49-year-old Bolton is known as a wizard of a curator: a once-in-a-generation talent who can run his eye over 200 years’ worth of clothing, pick out 100 pieces, and arrange them in a show that families from Duluth ly in to see and that jaded experts ind entirely fresh. “Andrew has a rare ability to bridge intellectual discourse with public appeal,” says Thomas P. Campbell, the director of the Met since 2009. “The fashion world is so characterized by promotion and megawatt personalities, but Andrew remains humble and genuine and totally uninterested in all the glamour. He loves costume, and he brings an awareness of artistic, social, economic, and philosophical ideas into play.” The myth of Bolton began largely with his 2011 show “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” a blockbuster of a sort
203
the Costume Institute had never seen (661,509 visitors in three months, lines down the street). In casting McQueen not only as a designer but as a world-class creative artist, it redeined the institute’s relationship with the museum as a whole. In the past, Koda liked to say, the Costume Institute had been a girl who got all the dates but none of the respect. After McQueen, it was undeniably an artistic force within the Met. Bolton’s struggle to match his McQueen success in the institute’s show last year, “China: Through the Looking Glass”—a nuanced exploration of tradition and transcendence in fashion—is the subject of a buoyant new documentary by Andrew Rossi, The First Monday in May, appearing this spring. Weaving between preparations for the 2015 Met ball and the creation of the China show, the ilm illuminates Bolton’s months of preparation, from conception to his inal, moving walk through the completed exhibition. (Spoiler: Attendance topped out at an astonishing 815,992 visitors; both it and the McQueen show now stand among the ten most popular exhibitions in the Met’s entire history.) In “Manus x Machina,” Bolton’s challenge is not just to sustain this hot hand but to use it as a template. “We’ve experimented with levels of theatricality and audience engagement and technology that have redeined the potential of exhibition display,” Campbell says. “It will have repercussions far beyond the world of costume.” olton—the man in the unusual gray suit— appears to it within the ashy traditionalism of the Met both entirely and not at all: a key, perhaps, to how he’s modernized the Costume Institute’s shows without stepping on the institution’s toes. One day in midwinter, we meet for lunch in the Members Dining Room, an in-house restaurant with a giant wedge of window looking out over the trees of Central Park. The irst time Bolton saw the place, he mistook it for the “staf canteen” and thought that he had landed in the fanciest workplace in the world. A while back, he recalls, the restaurant closed for remodeling, and when it reopened, the staf was puzzled to ind it looking exactly the same, down to the crinkled, scalloped-top curtains known in Britain as “tarts’ knickers.” The invisible remod stands as a fond reminder of the stolid continuity of the museum: an institution that often embraces its past even in moments of change. Bolton is again wearing Thom Browne gray this afternoon, a trim cardigan buttoned professorially beneath his coat. If the quintessential Browne man is pole-backed and square-jawed—a businessman strapped in his daring lannel like a paratrooper in a harness—Bolton comes across as his arty, bendy cousin, chatty and inveterately self-efacing. The metal taps on the soles of his Browne wingtips patter on the museum’s loors as he walks. That, plus a slight woodiness at the knees (Bolton and Browne recently cut back on their beloved Central Park jogs, in deference to their middle-aged joints), gives him the aspect of a stringless marionette, a igure who might not exit the museum each evening so much as vanish into it, retreating to a hook somewhere among the mannequins to sleep. As it happens, Bolton didn’t leave the Met last night. He pulled an all-nighter at his desk, departed at 5:30 a.m., and stopped at the gym, as he does every morning. Then he returned to work. The deadline for the “Manus x Machina” catalog text is less than half a month away, and he has barely started. Bolton is a procrastinator
both by temperament and by method, and there were recently “raised voices” at the museum, he says, about how far behind things seemed to be: “Everything is always in my head, and sometimes I leave it in there too long. Once you put it down on paper, it’s always a relief, but I hate committing unless I really, really have to.” For a man who’s had no sleep, Bolton is in surprisingly izzy humor. He orders a green juice and an appetizer of tuna tartare, followed by his usual, the Gruyère soulé. “I tend to be a creature of habit,” he says; soulés are his weakness. Sweets, too: Colleagues have noticed that chocolates have a way of disappearing around the oice when Bolton works late. “Manus x Machina” began with a discovery he made a while ago, while studying Yves Saint Laurent’s original Mondrian dress up close, and took shape as an idea when he saw a long-train wedding dress, by Karl Lagerfeld, from Chanel’s fall 2014 couture collection. He had always assumed that the Mondrian dress was hand-sewn, and was shocked to ind that it was made almost entirely by machine.
B
204
GLOW IN THE DARK Dolce & Gabbana evening dresses from 2008 on display in “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” 2013.
“The only presence of the hand was the hem and part of the lining, and the zipper,” he says. “I began thinking that, in actual fact, the gap between high-end ready-to-wear and couture is getting smaller.” Lagerfeld’s wedding dress conirmed that belief. “When the model walked down the runway, it looked like a neoprene wedding dress, without any seams at all, and then she turned around, and there was a fourteen-foot train, all embroidered.” The pattern was computer-generated, but the embroidery was done by hand—450 hours of workmanship. For the May exhibition, Lagerfeld agreed to make an even longer version of the train, a breathtaking 20 feet, to be displayed in the museum’s majestic Medieval Sculpture Hall. (“It has to be reproportioned,” says
Lagerfeld. “It is laser cut, printed, hand painted, repainted, and embroidered.”) When Bolton realized that haute couture oicially came into being during the exact decade when the modern sewing machine was perfected, he began to understand that hand work and machine work had been playing of each other from the start. It wasn’t a case of two distinct traditions but a single one that, like twin ribbons spiraling around and against each other in a double helix, formed the DNA of modern fashion. That sort of revelation, scholarly in its nuance but fundamental in its implications, has become the mark of Bolton’s mind. He believes that every exhibition should be driven by the visual: You should be able to walk quickly through a show, reading nothing, and understand what the central argument is. For “Manus x Machina,” he took his organizing structure from Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia, or Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, published from 1751 to 1772. When it appeared, the encyclopedia was scandalous.
“PUNK” AND “MCQUEEN”: ERIC BOMAN. “A N G LOM A NI A” : RO BE RT FA I RE R.
ON WITH THE SHOW FROM LEFT: Ensembles embroidered with gold bullion and military braids from McQueen’s fall 2001 and fall 1994 collections, as seen in “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” 2011; a 1998 Christian Dior Haute Couture dress by John Galliano in a gallery from “AngloMania,” 2006.
“But the métiers that were in existence in the eighteenth century still deine the haute couture today: embroidery, featherwork, tailoring, and so forth.” The book suggested a schema for the exhibition—and a path toward the future of the craft. “Technology could enable us to radicalize the definition of what fashion means,” Bolton says, picking at his soulé, which looks to have wilted under the force of his enthusiasm. In Rossi’s film, he emerges as a dexterous collaborator, able to advance and enhance his own ideas through negotiations with artists and institutions on three continents. In the Members Dining Room,
he begins talking about other exhibitions he’d like to do. One idea is “Fear and Clothing,” an examination of how fashion answers its era’s lambent cultural anxieties. There aren’t many designers whose work could sustain a monographic exhibition, he thinks, but he’d love to do one focused on John Galliano. Then there’s the psyche itself. “Something I’ve always wanted to do very much is ‘Freud and Fashion.’ I would want to do it as a series of dreamscapes, based on his book of dreams. There have been so many models of fashion: sociological, literary. But there hasn’t really been one based on psychoanalysis.” The idea would be to explore a connection between materiality and one’s psychological state. “Volume, shape,” he says, eyes dancing. “I’d want it to be very Dalí-esque.” When Bolton was a child and had a fever, his nightmares were always about texture: rough, smooth. He grew up in Lancashire, a place where exquisite pastoral vistas abutted gritty Northern
industrialism. He was a fearful boy, frightened of other people and, perhaps, of life itself. He was shy. Bolton still considers the social aspect of his job the hardest part; he is, he thinks, a voyeur at his core, a man who’d rather study what is happening from a corner than ind himself an actor on the stage. Bolton remembers his childhood as quiet, long, Catholic, and innocent. His father worked on the publishing side of a newspaper, while his mother was a homemaker; his older brother was thought to be brilliant at math (he’s now a banker), and his older sister was excellent at languages (she’s now a teacher). Bolton was dismal at both—his French teacher once told him that he had the worst accent she had ever heard, and he’s been mortiied to speak the language since—but he developed other fascinations. As a teenager, he read Salinger, Forster, Woolf, Auden, Spender. He did not consider himself wildly literary;
205
WEDDING BELLE The pattern on the train was digitally generated and then embroidered by hand, which took 450 hours. A longer version—20 feet— will be a centerpiece of the new exhibition. Chanel Haute Couture dress and hat.
HIGH DEFINITION This dress’s cottonsateen and nude nylon mesh were machine- and handembroidered with laser-cut plastic strips hand-printed with black lines. Iris van Herpen Couture dress. United Nude x Iris van Herpen shoes. Details, see In This Issue.
poetry not by Auden troubled him in its irresolution. Much more often, he read magazines. He had no interest in the motions of high fashion. He loved youth culture, music culture, publications such as i-D and Arena and The Face. The fashion crept in sideways, from their coverage of the street. He admired the New Romantics (a.k.a. the Blitz Kids), who used their clothes to make a statement. On visits to London, he would watch the style punks parading on King’s Road, “warriors and dandies at the same time.” Catalogs of museum fashion crossed his path in late high school. Everyone was asking what he hoped to do. “I remember saying, ‘Oh, I’d like to work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute,’ ” Bolton recalls. He hadn’t visited America. He ended up at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich—not exactly London, where he’d hoped to land, but a place he grew to love. “East Anglia is not too dissimilar to Lancashire,” he says. “It’s very lat, so the light is very beautiful. It’s a strange, slightly otherworldly place.” Once, drinking at a pub with friends, he watched a farmer purchase a pint with a cabbage. A big lure was the Sainsbury collection, a compilation of art available for research by students, like him, pursuing an anthropology degree. He stayed on for a master’s. “He was someone you could talk to for hours and hours,” says Rachel Spence, a close friend at school who is now a poet and Financial Times art critic. She remembers a dispute about the erotic drama 9½ Weeks. Spence hated the film—despite never having seen it—but Bolton persuaded her that it deserved a closer look. “He would never take anything at face value. He was always questioning: Where does it come from, what are the politics that produce it?” As Bolton began his Ph.D., though, he began to have misgivings. “I thought, Four more years!” A friend of his came back from a research trip to Africa and extolled the joys of ieldwork. It sounded awful to Bolton. “He was very earthy. I thought, I’ve never been earthy. I never will be,” he says. “I’m a little bit too bourgeois to be an anthropologist, basically.” A curatorial-assistant job opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and Bolton applied, thinking he could work there for a year before inishing his Ph.D. He never returned to school. Bolton’s job was in the Far Eastern Department, a natural extension of his studies in non-Western art. “He was like a breath of fresh air because he was such a creative, innovative thinker,” says his V&A supervisor and mentor, Anna Jackson, now the keeper of the Asian Department. “Although we might have been able to teach him how to be a curator, he was full of amazing ideas. . . . I don’t think he realized how brilliant he was.” He focused on Chinese dress and costume and, for the next nine years, learned to curate, inagling a jump into the museum’s fashion department through a research post during his last year and a half. “All we had to do was write books and do shows,” he says. “It was just idyllic.” During a visit to New York, he met Harold Koda, who soon invited him to join the Costume Institute as an associate curator. On his second day in New York, in 2002, Bolton heard what sounded like a cap gun while walking to work. “I was tying my shoelace, and all of a sudden everyone came running past,” he
says. “I looked up and there were these guys with guns. People were running toward this fancy building for cover, and—typical New York—the doorman wouldn’t let them in. I thought, Oh, my goodness! That was my introduction to the city.” He was 35, and he had been an actual fashion curator less than two years. He worried about being too inexperienced to perform on his vocation’s main stage. Koda helped Bolton adapt his V&A skill set to the Met. “The American audience is very diferent than British and European audiences,” Koda explains. European audiences tend to self-select into museums. A huge, iconic museum like the Met functions as an entry gate for everyone who passes through New York. How could you design an exhibition that would draw those visitors in without losing intellectual edge? Koda taught Bolton to think of mannequins not as hangers but as proxies for the body. And he insisted on treating garments not as artifacts but as artworks. “At the V&A, fashion was a design discipline, very much steeped in cultural theory. The Met was about fashion being an art form,” Bolton says. “That was something really freeing.” Bolton internalized the lessons in a series of shows that he and Koda did together: “Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century,” “Chanel,” “Poiret: King of Fashion.” Koda realized that his protégé had reached a special kind of curatorial maturity when Bolton called him in, as usual, for inal adjustments to the McQueen-show displays, which presented the designer as a modern heir to nineteenth-century Romanticism. There was the wide-hipped raven-black feather ensemble, the cascading razor-clam dress. “I thought, He’s already nailed it,” Koda says. “The exhibitions he was responsible for after that? Those were Andrew Bolton exhibitions.”
“At the V&A, fashion was a design discipline,”says Bolton.“TheMet was about fashion being an art form. That was really freeing”
208
Not long after Bolton had begun to ind a place at the Met, he was asked to interview Thom Browne at a conference. Bolton had been following Browne’s work and admired his narrow silhouettes. “I thought he was saying something new about menswear,” he says. Hedi Slimane introduced his ultra-slim suits at Dior, and between the two of them, men’s relationship to their clothes was starting to change. “Often, an ideal body can be made through fashion, but with these, you really had to have an ideal body to get into the clothes,” Bolton explains. “There was a rigor to the physical side, in terms of exercise and dieting. I liked that.” He did the interview with interest but felt he never drew his subject out successfully. “Thom isn’t the most accessible of people,” he says. “You got a strong sense of his aesthetic. You got a strong sense of his critical process. But you didn’t get a sense of him.” Still, they became friends, and, in 2012, the friendship jolted into a romance. “I’m still surprised by it,” Bolton says. “I never thought I’d date somebody in my ield. But at the same time it makes sense. I’m so passionate about it. I can’t bear those people who say, ‘Oh, I want to switch my job.’ I don’t want to switch—at all.” Late one afternoon in winter, I meet Bolton in the couple’s parkside apartment, near Columbus Circle. He is in casual mode— his white shirt is tucked into jeans, C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 5 8
BACK TO THE FUTURE A Victorian silhouette features a white silk-elastene knit screenprinted with black geometric motifs transfer-printed with silver and black metal and acrylic discs and teardrops. Louis Vuitton dress and belt. Hair, Guido for Redken; makeup, Pat McGrath. Set design, Mary Howard. Produced by PRODn at Art + Commerce. Details, see In This Issue.
B R A N D - N E W S O N G A N D DA N C E SHUFFLE ALONG, CHOREOGR APHED BY TAP - DANCING LEGEND SAVION GLOVER, SPECTACUL ARLY REANIMATE S THE LEGENDARY, GAME - CHANGING 1921 BROADWAY SHOW OF THE SAME NAME. BY ADAM GREEN. PHOTOGR APHED BY ANTON CORBIJN.
n a hot July afternoon in an air-conditioned rehearsal studio on Forty-second Street, I ind myself in close proximity to genius, which is to say that I am sitting no more than ive feet away from the dancer and choreographer Savion Glover, in motion. The lithe, 42-yearold Glover, his dreadlocks gathered in a topknot, exudes elegance and an almost preternatural cool. The man widely considered the greatest tap dancer alive, our generation’s Fred Astaire, is demonstrating a combination of percussive steps in a tricky syncopated rhythm for a group of young African-American dancers. The occasion is a dance workshop for the highly anticipated, Broadway-bound musical Shuffle Along—which, among other things, marks the professional reunion, after 20 years, of Glover and the legendary director George C. Wolfe, with whom Glover created the 1996 hit Bring in ’Da Noise Bring in ’Da Funk. With Shuffle Along, Wolfe, who wrote and is directing the show, and Glover, in his irst outing as
210
solely a choreographer, are again examining our country’s racial legacy even as they celebrate their own showbiz heritage. Subtitled “The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed” and with a sensational cast led by Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, Brandon Victor Dixon, and Joshua Henry, it takes us behind the scenes of an epochal all-black production to show its improbable journey to Broadway. At today’s workshop—one of several that I attend over the next six months as the show evolves—Wolfe and Glover are working on a number from the second act about how Shuffle Along became a sensation among celebrities and helped turn Harlem into a chic destination for slumming whites. As a choreographer, Glover works by improvisation and by showing more than telling. “I think it’s not so much this,” Glover says, waggling his hips by way of demonstration, “but this.” He twitches his hips almost imperceptibly. “Some of you may not be able to help it, but let’s give it a try.” Asked to describe the vernacular of his choreography for Shuffle, Glover says, “It’s adding the steps and style of the past to the rhythms and sounds of today. It’s performing an old-school step with a new-school style—or maybe you take a step from today and execute it in a style from the past.” The result is a dazzling series of dance numbers that pulse with the technical virtuosity and visionary rhythms of Glover’s own performances—from a showstopping tap battle between competing dancers that calls to mind “The Dance at the Gym,” from West Side Story, to a lirty soft-shoe duet. “Savion is a living repository of the history of rhythm,” Wolfe says. “He got it
GIANT STEPS Savion Glover, the choreographer of Shuffle Along. “Savion is a living repository of the history of rhythm,” says the musical’s director, George C. Wolfe. Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick.
CASTING A SPELL LEFT TO RIGHT: Shuffle Along’s Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, Joshua Henry, and Brandon Victor Dixon.
from the guys who got it from the guys who got it from the guys. But he’s also a bridge to the future.” That, in fact, is a pretty good description of Wolfe’s aim with Shuffle—to reach into the past and bring back to life the ebullient spirit of a groundbreaking hit musical. With a book by the comedy team of F. E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles and songs by the team of lyricist Noble Sissle and composer Eubie Blake, the original show, which opened at the 63rd Street Theater on May 23, 1921, was the irst allblack Broadway production since 1908’s Bandanna Land. Despite a rudimentary plot involving a three-way mayoral race in a small Southern hamlet called Jimtown, it became an immediate smash with audiences both black and, more significant, white, drawing celebrities and society igures, and went on to run for 504 performances, generating so much traffic that
212
the city turned Sixty-third into a one-way street. Midnight shows were added on Wednesday to allow fellow performers in shows of their own, including actress and Ziegfeld Follies legend Fanny Brice, to see it, and it helped launch the careers of Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, and Florence Mills, who joined the cast midway through its run. In the era of Hamilton, and during a season that includes a variety of other racially diverse shows on Broadway, it can be hard to imagine how revolutionary Shuffle Along was in its day. It was the irst musical to feature a chorus of tapping, stomping, shimmying female hoofers (Florenz Ziegfeld hired them to teach his Follies girls how to shake their tail feathers). It was the irst to include a romantic duet, “Love Will Find a Way,” between a black man and woman, and it spawned a hit, “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” that
would go on to become Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign song. With Eubie Blake’s score—a spirited mix of ragtime and jazz—it was also the irst musical to bring homegrown syncopation to an art form still caught in the waltz time of European operetta. “These rhythms were alien but intrinsic to who we are as a culture, and they were on Broadway,” Wolfe says, “and they were changing Broadway.” The success of Shuffle opened the way for a decade of black musicals, and its rhythms became part of musical theater’s—which is to say popular music’s—DNA. “Once you teach syncopation, everybody can syncopate—George Gershwin, Irving Berlin,” Wolfe says. “Jazz gave Broadway—and America—its own musical language. It liberated American music.” The new show traces Shuffle’s bumpy road to Broadway and the unlikely, life-altering C O N T I N U E D O N PAG E 2 5 9
A STAR IS REBORN Six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald plays Lottie Gee, the headliner of the 1921 production. In this story: wigs, Mia Neal; makeup, Francelle; costumes, Ann Roth; makeup design, Natalie Young. Photographed at Greenpoint Loft, Brooklyn. Details, see In This Issue.
Folly à Deux
With its Persian, British, Indian, and Italian allusions, Katharine and William Rayner’s lavishly eclectic East Hampton garden bears witness to a passion for history and adventure. Written and photographed by Eric Boman. SECRET EDEN LEFT: The Hoops Walk, with poppies, hollyhocks, Nepeta, and roses, among many other plants. ABOVE: The path from the White Garden to the Mediterranean Walk, lined with Rosa ‘Mayor of Casterbridge’ and ‘Velvet Cloak’ smoke bush.
WATER’S EDGE Mounds of green separate the main house from the guest cottage—once a boathouse—on the shore of Georgica Pond.
A
t the end of a winding lane bordered by a tangle of honeysuckle and wild roses lies a magical garden far removed from a traditional East Hampton manicured showpiece. To the sounds of waves crashing on the beach, this one unfolds like the petals of a lower in surprising and delightful ways, a pleasure still fresh to its owners, Katharine and William Rayner. If Kathy had asked anyone whether it might be possible to create an intricately elaborate garden on the leeward side of a sand dune between the roaring Atlantic and Georgica Pond, she would have been told no. But Kathy didn’t ask—she went ahead and did just that. After renting Woody House for eight years, Kathy bought it in the late eighties not long before her marriage to Billy, and ixed it up just in time for the arrival of Hurricane Bob. In the decades since, the sloping terrain’s cutting garden and few lower beds have evolved into a magnificent confection of spaces, paths, vistas, bowers, and follies that invoke the garden cultures of England, Italy, Persia, and India. Not lacking in a garden pedigree—her mother, Anne Cox Chambers, created, with Peter Coats, Rosemary Verey, and Ryan Gainey, the celebrated 40-acre grounds of her Provençal home, Le Petit Fontanille—Kathy nurtured her interest in horticulture by visiting storied estates and reading voraciously on the subject. She admits to feeling most afected by the memoirs of Babur, founder of the Mogul empire, and the writings of Vita Sackville-West—representing a span of ive centuries. So she was very much at home within the walls of the Persian garden, as woven into ancient carpets, long before she traveled to Iran herself in fall 2015. Visiting the legendary gardens of Italy, Kathy understood that their reliance on architectural elements would be completely inappropriate if divorced from their stone villas, though some things could be borrowed. From Sissinghurst, she not only imported the idea of a White Garden, she realized that its tiny passages were just what she should adopt on Long Island because an intricate evergreen structure would help tame the winds and protect the plants. She moved the original cutting bed to make way for an open Italian Garden, complete with a shell-encrusted grotto created by Simon Verity from tufa, local seashells, quartz, and limestone, with dripping fountains and massive shell chairs on either side. Inspired by Villa Medicea di Castello in Florence, the garden makes a perfect spot for dinner on a moonlit night, with lanterns around the shimmering pool and the gray-green leaves of olive trees, silver-leafed licorice, and Artemisia glinting across the water. An existing walled herb garden became a Mogul enclave, inspired by India’s response to Persian influence and thus
217
HEAVENLY PLACE The Rayners have five dogs. Departed canine friends are laid to rest in the upper bed of the garden, among Clematis and ‘Albéric Barbier’ and ‘La Belle Sultane’ roses.
reflecting two cultures at once—there’s only so much space on a sand dune. A pair of marble elephants greets visitors at the garden’s upper level before they descend by a small, double lying staircase—evoking the one at Swan House in Kathy’s native Atlanta—that encircles a carved fountain in the shape of the Hindu deity Ganesha. His spouting trunk is the spring of a bridged rill running down the garden’s center, planted with lotus, water lilies, and water lettuces and leading to another fountain in the shape of a lotus lower lazily gurgling cooling water over its marble surface. This is a folly in the true sense of the word. Don’t be surprised to one day see a purely Persian paradise squeezed in somewhere, just as a new vegetable garden, with enclosures woven from the invasive phragmites that edge the pond, is already in the works. The project never has to end, because there was never a master plan. The Mogul garden is perhaps the most elaborate of all the spaces, and therefore also where the sound of ocean waves is the most unexpected; but you can step out of it and be somewhere very diferent at the swing of a gate—perhaps the almost tropical-looking Mediterranean Walk, with its rusticated oak arbor inspired by the gardening genius Gertrude Jekyll. Or the Dog Garden. Dogs are important to the Rayners, who have ive, and a standing order with the local pet-adoption society, ARF (Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons), to send along rescue Pekingese as they appear. The Hoops Walk, an homage to Monet’s garden at Giverny, is a glorious meandering grass path lanked by a colorful riot of poppies, old-fashioned hollyhocks, Rudbeckia, and Phlox, and, overhead, hoops covered in a burst of ive kinds of pink roses. ou can walk this garden and the changing light will keep you constantly entertained. From the Pear Tunnel, where espaliered fruit trees are interplanted with Rosa ‘Reine des Violettes’ and Clematis ‘Étoile Violette’ to hang as a purple fringe overhead, you will occasionally hear the squawks of guinea hens in their enclosure near the guest cottage (a former boathouse renamed the Pond House). You might even see a purple martin returning to one of the towering cluster of houses beyond the greenhouse, having eaten its daily quota of mosquitoes. Roses are everywhere in these gardens, and guests flock to visit, guided by Kathy’s accomplice of ifteen years in matters horticultural, John Hill, who ofers a litany of their names. The provenance of one beauty may not be on their curriculum: This stranger caught my eye on a corner trellis near the front door. Kathy tells me it started out as a nameless Korean-deli purchase, left behind in its little foil-wrapped plastic pot after a birthday luncheon. She took it home and put it in the ground. It has climbed up the trellis and opens its buds to look more like the Tudor rose of heraldry than Rosa ‘York and Lancaster.’ Cell phones don’t work well here, and more than once has a stray visitor kept the others waiting to sit down at the table. It is a playful spirit that has created these gardens, in consultation with both friends and highly respected professionals who share a similar passion, bandying about ideas like shuttlecocks in a never-ending game of badminton.
Y
SUN AND SHADE FROM TOP: The tea deck overlooks the pond and the creeping wisteria, beach plum, and Rosa rugosa that hold the dunes in place. An ocean view from the lawn above the beach.
220
LOOK EAST A walled herb plot was transformed into the Mogul Garden, filled with roses, honeysuckle, and variegated American agaves in urns.
i
Something
W
L D
From Paris to Tokyo to Copenhagen to Brooklyn, wines made with little to no chemical intervention—so-called natural wines—are the toast of the cognoscenti. Rob Haskell reports. Photographed by Eric Boman.
L
arge, wet snowlakes started to fall just as I left Paris, and by the time the car rolled through the medieval city of Blois, with its sharp spires, the whole of the Loire Valley wore a cloak of fog. I continued southward, past châteaus that looked like vague phantoms, or were those merely trees huddling in the gloom? Pierre Jancou, the conjurer of a succession of enormously popular Paris restaurants and wine bars—La Crèmerie, Racines, Vivant, Heimat, and a new project percolating on the Rue Servan as he recovers from a broken leg—had sent me here, explaining that if I wanted to understand natural wine, I’d need to visit Claude Courtois and his son Etienne. For lovers of natural wine—which, though its deinition is contested, might most simply be described as fermented grape juice with nothing added or removed in the making of it—Courtois’s vineyard in Soings-en-Sologne is holy territory. The man himself embodies an agrarian ideal, the ascetic farmer-vintner who devotes every day of the year to his vines or his cellar, a man with scant curiosity about who is drinking what in the Paris bars, whose only commercial ambition is to feed his family. Jancou irst tasted a Courtois vintage in 2002, and it was a sort of epiphany. (Naturalwine people always remember their conversion moment.) “Here was a wine that was so alive, so energetic, that was made with such love,” he remembers. “After that there was no going back.” If you have been to dinner in Copenhagen or Tokyo or Brooklyn or Montreal in the last few years, then you have probably drunk wines made with little to no chemical manipulation. The bottle arrives; maybe it has a funny name like You Are So Happy, a pét-nat (pétillant naturel, a naturally sparkling wine) from the Loire that I was served in Paris at Le Chateaubriand. In the glass, perhaps it looks a little thin, a little murky because it is uniltered, a little brown due to oxidation; perhaps it izzes unexpectedly or gives of a cidery funk. If you’re counting on something familiar, maybe you’re disappointed. “It’s like in the theater, when you break the fourth wall,” says Alice Feiring, a natural-wine maven whose new book, her third, is about the millennia-old winemaking tradition of Georgia. “Natural wine comes out and greets you. It can be fun or serious. It can taste like good, old-fashioned wine or not, but it has a certain frankness.” Like tomatoes in August, natural wine tastes of itself; it is in a sense a fresh product, its
222
internal life not stalled by chemicals in the ield or additives in the bottle. As a result, these wines are often thrilling to drink, fascinating and expressive, but they refuse to deliver a controlled experience, instead speaking loudest to those who enjoy the feeling of surprise at the table. I was greeted at Les Cailloux du Paradis, the Courtois vineyard, by Paradis himself, a Labrador retriever the color of the golden hunks of quartz that poke through the soil here and there and lend a lintiness to the wines. Etienne followed; with a wild nest of black hair, wearing a leece decimated by moths and mud-caked cargo pants, he was doing his insuicient best to hide a handsomeness much sighed over in natural-wine circles. Dog and winemaker led me into a small farmhouse, where we were joined by Claude, who snipped a sausage hanging by a string from the rafters and handed it to me along with a paring knife. “You’ll need energy,” he said, adding to my kit a Che Guevara lat cap and a pair of muck boots. The vineyard, in the February mud, wasn’t much to look at. The vines had been pruned back tightly, the gray soil churned by earthworms and dotted with lamb’s lettuce. Claude, whose grandparents on both sides were Burgundian winemakers, planted the irst rows of gamay and romorantin, a beloved local grape, 50 years ago. “I was born to do this,” he told me, “and I learned in the old way. After the war, chemistry came to the vineyards, and now most wine in France, all over the world, is poison, undrinkable. It tastes of the things added to it and not the grapes, not the ground. Maybe I’m too fragile. I can only eat food and drink wine that is clean. No doping. No Lance Armstrong stuf here.” A cynic might say that Claude’s far-left position is one he can afford to take. Making wine naturally, with no chemical protectors along the way, is a high-wire act. You can lose an entire vintage to a nasty bacterium or a wayward fermentation. But in the Loire land is cheap, or at least cheaper than in Burgundy or Bordeaux, and his vineyard is small, so if the worst happened, he’d survive. The irst growths of Bordeaux, on the other hand, have investors to appease and customers who expect a very specific product. Though in France big wine and natural wine exist more or less harmoniously, the issue can be polarizing. Those who drink natural wine rarely drink anything else. And those who scorn it do so with vitriol. Robert Parker, the world’s most inluential wine critic, has called natural wine a sham, a fraud, “vinofreakism.” Other critics dismiss the wines as the stuff that unwashed hippies make for
D ETA I LS, S EE IN TH I S I SSU E
FRUIT FOR THOUGHT Natural wines attract die-hard loyalists—and naysayers, such as renowned wine critic Robert Parker, who dismiss them out of hand.
22-year-olds with neck tattoos; they call them characterless at best, putrid at worst. A few years ago, all the winemakers of Burgundy were ordered to spray pesticides to prevent a disease called golden rot, and when the lone winemaker who refused inally won a protracted court battle, he was a hero in natural-wine circles—not in Burgundy, where a plague on his vineyard could have threatened hectares of priceless old grapes. “I admit that at irst, when you’re training, the world of conservative winemaking is very appealing,” says Isabelle Legeron, a London-based wine consultant and author of the book Natural Wine, who now organizes the major wine fair RAW. Legeron comes from a family of French cognac distillers and believes that her father, a farmer, died from overspraying his vines. “I remember being wowed by these dinners with the Petrus and Latour verticals,” she says, “but over time I became disenchanted with the wine industry because it is very much that—an industry, run by businessmen. Luckily, at the same time I came across this small, parallel world of real farmers who actually get their hands dirty. That all resonated with me.” After a walk through the Courtois fields and a visit to the cellar, where Etienne unstoppered the old oak barrels with their shrouds of white mold and siphoned out the maturing wines for us to taste, their perfumes closed up by the chill, we sat down for lunch. The main dish was a lavish stewed haunch of wild boar, hunted in the neighboring woods. Claude had questions about the United States. He wanted, irst of all, an update on our wines, conirmation that things really had started to change in California. Though more and more winemakers there are experimenting with low-intervention wine—those made by Hank Beckmeyer at La Clarine Farm in the Sierra Foothills are especially popular at the moment—the reigning Napa-Sonoma style remains antithetical to Claude’s: highly alcoholic, purple-black behemoths in big, heavy bottles, tasting of vanilla, oak, Smucker's, cherry cola. “We call the wines of California maquillés—heavily made up,” he explained before turning the conversation toward Donald Trump.
inesse.” Lapierre is a legend in natural winemaking, one of the so-called Gang of Four vintners in Beaujolais who, in the early 1980s, began to return to traditional winemaking methods there. These men were the acolytes of Jules Chauvet, the father of the natural-wine movement, a winemaker, a chemist, and, in the end, a sort of prophet, who in previous decades had published a few short treatises on making wine naturally. A goal shared by Chauvet, Lapierre, Puzelat, and now an exploding generation of young viticulturists is wine made cleanly and tasting of its terroir, the word they use to describe the sense of place—the soil, the climate, the conditions of a grape’s upbringing—that expresses itself in the glass. In theory, at least, only two things are necessary to make wine: grapes and yeast to promote the fermentation of the grapes. But in the last 50 years especially, technology has complicated matters. The spraying of chemical fertilizers and pesticides may have protected vineyards from blight, but it also wiped out indigenous yeast populations. As a result, winemakers started adding sachets of commercial yeast to their vats. According to Thierry, this practice efectively erases any sense of terroir. “When you use one of these yeasts,” he said, “your wine will taste the same whether it’s made in Croatia or Australia.” But that was partly the point. As the wine business grew in the last century, so did the methods for making wines that tasted familiar, predictable, salable. Reverse osmosis, acidiication, Mega Purpling, and additive use, to name just a few new tricks, joined a long list of older techniques such as chaptalization (adding sugar to increase alcohol content), iltering, and ining, the practice of clarifying wines by adding agents such as egg whites. High-tech engineering is especially common in Australia, whose minimally regulated industry cranks out what is derisively called “Frankenwine” (though to be fair, Australia now has an exploding natural-wine scene). But many of the techniques are tightly controlled or outlawed in France, where it is the use of sulfur in the winemaking process that divides the ultra-orthodox in the naturalwine movement from the mere low-interventionists. Sulites are used as preservatives—to kill undesired yeasts and bacteria, to silence the enzymes that turn grape juice brown, to guarantee more consistent lavors. Ancient Roman winemakers used sulites, and most of today’s vintners believe it would be simply reckless to make a wine without them. Feiring, though she admires it immensely, compares the complete disavowal of sulfur to Christian Science. “There can be an enormous cost to being principled,” she says. “To vinify without anything is one of the toughest things you can do,” says Pascaline Lepeltier, the wine director of Rouge Tomate Chelsea in New York and the rare master sommelier who is also a natural-wine champion. “You need an extreme precision in the farming, the picking, the sorting, and in the winery to protect your product. Unfortunately, a lot of people in the natural-wine movement are lazy. They think if they do nothing it’s going to be great. That’s not true.” At their best, natural wines taste marvelously vibrant. They are often more bitter than their traditional counterparts, more acidic and savory. Tasters speak of tea, of roots, of rocks, of crab apples
“After the war, chemistry came to the vineyards, and now most wine in France is poison, undrinkable,” says Courtois. “It tastes of the things added to it”
hat drives the natural-wine movement is a sort of combustion reaction between ethics and aesthetics, as the winemaker Thierry Puzelat explained to me the following day. Thierry and his wife, Cécile, live in nearby Les Montils, a hamlet of stucco houses with steep, clay-tiled roofs. He is more a man of the world than Claude Courtois, who had sent me on my way with a box of wines for his old confrere. Thierry cuts a familiar igure in Paris and at the natural-wine fairs, and the Puzelats own a wine bar in Orléans, Les Becs à Vin, that serves as a lively convergence point for the Loire Valley’s legion of natural winemakers and wine lovers. “When I started,” said Thierry, whose grandfather raised vines here, as did his grandfather’s grandfather, “I made wines the way I learned in school, using yeast, sulfur, enzymes, tartaric acid. And then in 1991 I visited Marcel Lapierre, and it was a revelation. The aromas of his wine were very pure and restrained, not too exuberant. Not everything revealed itself instantly. To me this was
W
224
over Fuji apples. People admire their complexity but sometimes call them noisy. A blogger I met in Paris with a passion for Beaujolais described learning to enjoy the wines as akin to learning to hear the beauty of punk rock. But the risk-taking can result in some dogs, as Bill Fitch, the wine director of Brooklyn's Vinegar Hill House and a part-time expat, told me at Le Baratin, in Paris’s Belleville neighborhood. The restaurant, whose name is hard to translate but essentially means “bullshit,” is fundamental to the Paris natural-wine scene. Its chef, Raquel Carena, a bespectacled Argentine with a silver ponytail, has been called the Yoda of Paris cooking. Michelin three-star types like Alain Ducasse and Olivier Roellinger disappear there after work for a plate of her famous veal brains, and this is also where the young stars of Paris’s food scene, chefs such as Bertrand Grébaut, Inaki Aizpitarte, and Sven Chartier, irst came to drink from a list of only natural wines. (Actually there is no list. Raquel’s husband, Philippe, will simply open what he thinks you should be drinking.) For a New Yorker or an Angeleno, the lighting—innumerable bright hanging globes—is a kind of death. A mosaic of diferent linoleums suices for a loor, and on the main wall there is a wonderful large painting of a wonderful large woman eating a watermelon. Nautical touches abound: a cobwebby model Riva, a sailish whose lacquer is dulled by dust. Philippe poured us a Chardonnay from the Jura that was made creamy from eighteen months spent on its own lees, the dead yeast cells usually ished out early on, followed by a topaz-colored elixir from Georgia. In the orange wine Bill felt he tasted excess reduction, a preventable chemical reaction that can be charming in small doses but can lend wine an aroma of sausage or rotten eggs or what one sommelier I spoke to described as a locker room with 20 teenage boys and no windows. Natural wines can go wrong in a few other ways. They can be oxidized and get vinegary. They can possess what is known as volatile acidity, giving them the smell of nail-polish remover. There can be a surfeit of barnyardy yeast. And then there is the problem known among wine geeks as goût de souris, or mousiness, which people compare to sour milk or dog breath. But brought into balance, these hints of a chaotic fermentation can make for fascinating wine. Bill likens the style to wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic system that prizes transience and imperfection: cracks in a teacup, fallen leaves in the garden. “These are not necessarily polished wines,” he said. “But some things that were once considered laws, and by some are still considered laws, can create very interesting efects.” A few minutes before midnight, a man in a tweed overcoat and Washingtonian hair wet from the rain walked into Le Baratin and settled straightaway at the bar. Philippe brought him a carafe of something cloudy, intriguing. This was François Morel, editor of the French wine journal Le Rouge et le Blanc and one of the early soldiers of the natural-wine crusade. “In the middle of the 1980s, we were drinking a lot, and we noticed that when we drank things that were made in this way, we didn’t have headaches the next day,” he told me. “We just felt better.” You hear this a lot from naturalwine folk, many of whom believe the stuf to be hangover-proof.
hree days later I was in Brooklyn, at a restaurant called the Four Horsemen, opened last summer by James Murphy of the electro-pop band LCD Soundsystem. For a place with fewer than 40 seats, the 300-wine list was surprising. There were all the names I kept hearing about in Paris: Brendan Tracey, a New Jersey native making wines in the Loire; Frank Cornelissen, a Belgian fanatic at work on the high slopes of Mount Etna whose wines taste like the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. It was a simultaneous reminder that the world of natural wine is small and familial and that the hipster vernacular is universal. Though these bottles have been lurking on the stylish margins for several years, a certain undeniability has lately come to natural wine, decisive proof of which arrived in February in the form of the Big Glou, New York’s irst natural-wine fair. Lee Campbell, the wine director for Andrew Tarlow’s restaurants, masterminded the event. “I think it came out of a generational shift, honestly,” says Campbell. “The millennials whom I’ve been serving at our restaurants don’t have that vanilla palate that many Americans grew up with. They’ve had bitter greens, better cheese. And so they’re not freaked out by these wines.” The previous fall, San Francisco’s Terroir, possibly the country’s irst natural-wine shop, hosted a small fair called Califermentation that showcased the wines of 30-odd California naturalists. This November, Isabelle Legeron is bringing the RAW fair to Bushwick. And yet natural wine, like other luxuries, must stay small. The winemakers themselves will tell you that to work this way, you have to tend to every step of the process yourself, handpicking the grapes so that not a single imperfect specimen gets introduced into the vat, fastidiously tending to vulnerable vines and to a brew that, without chemicals, is inherently unstable. It’s artisanal work, and production can never be greater than a farmer’s stamina. What’s more, many of the great restaurants of the world still have million-dollar cellars devoted to the prestige cuvées of Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Barolo; to have these bottles rejected in favor of a tiny vintage with a great story would be a crisis, and anyway, old pleasures are what their customers are after. But change begins on the vineyard, and now that the natural winemakers are nipping at the heels of their rich neighbors, a virtuous cycle has begun. “They used to make fun of us, and now in Bordeaux, people are inally understanding that to express terroir, the land has to be living,” says Thierry Puzelat. At the Four Horsemen, wine wonks are counting on something esoteric instead of a Domaine de la Romanée-Conti on which to unload a Wall Street bonus. (Though it just so happens that Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, king of all Burgundies, is farmed biodynamically, then sulfured.) Justin Chearno, the restaurant’s wine consultant, has noticed that even the suit-and-tie types from Manhattan are lately asking for something weird, something confrontational, an experience. “We’re at this moment in natural wine that reminds me of being a kid in the 1980s,” he says. “I loved the Smiths, and the jocks bullied me for it. Then, a couple of years later, the jocks loved them too.”
T
“The millennials whom I’ve been serving at our restaurants don’t have that vanilla palate,”says Campbell. “And so they’re not freaked out by these wines”
225
SAR AH S Z E I S AN ARTI S T R E DE FINING SCULP TUR E . S IDDHARTHA MUKHE RJE E I S A PIONE E RING SCIE NTI S T AND AUTHOR . TOGETHE R, THEY MAY JU S T BE THE MOS T BRILLIANT COUPLE IN TOWN. BY DODIE K A Z ANJIAN. PHOTOGR APHE D BY INE Z AND VINOODH.
R E A Q D U I C A L A S L
marriage of true minds is rare enough, but it’s rarer still when they come from opposite ends of the Earth. Sarah Sze was born in Boston, Siddhartha Mukherjee in New Delhi a year later. Sarah, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow, is an internationally admired artist who is redeining sculpture. Her intricate and sometimes very large structures are made from simple, everyday materials like wire, string, Q-tips, clay, congealed paint, fragmented photographs, video screens—fantastical constellations that appear to grow and change as you look at them, and suggest the ceaseless flow of information in the digital age. Siddhartha is a brilliant oncologist, scientist, and writer whose 2010 book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a three-part television documentary by Ken Burns. The Gene: An Intimate History, published this month, is a daring and highly personal voyage into the future of genetic research. “You have to choose your equal in life,” says their good friend the artist Rachel Feinstein, “and Sarah and Sid are deinitely that couple.” In Sarah’s industrial-size studio on Manhattan’s West Thirtyseventh Street, she has six projects under way. A vivid, dark-haired, superit 47-year-old in jeans and a navy Narciso Rodriguez jacket, she meets me at the elevator with Ginger, her lufy papillon, when I visit on a rainy afternoon in February. The place feels a little like a science lab, with experiments going on in diferent rooms—strings dipped in paint, hanging from the ceiling; an assistant cutting hard clay into square blocks; various inishes being tested. “I have nobody in the studio until two o’clock,” she tells me, “because all my good work, my thinking, happens in the morning.” She’s preparing for her September show at the Rose Art Museum, at Brandeis, making drawings for a site-speciic sculpture at the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York, and correcting galleys of a Phaidon monograph on her work, which comes out a week after Siddhartha’s The Gene. They’re each being interviewed onstage, eleven days apart, at the New York Public Library in May. “We’ll be watching to see who shows up for one or the other or both,” Siddhartha jokes. Sarah recently inished her design for the Ninety-sixth Street station of the new Second Avenue subway line, a project she’s been working on for the last eight years, and on which construction has now begun. We look at a photograph of the underground site. It’s a huge space, about 13,000 square feet. “They chose one artist per station,” she tells me. (Chuck Close is doing Eighty-sixth Street; Vik Muniz, Seventy-second Street.) She shows me a sample of the white Spanish tiles that will cover the walls, with her drawings baked into them in varying shades of blue, lavender, and gray. The spidery,
A
BEAUTIFUL MINDS Mukherjee, NEAR LEFT, and Sze, photographed in her New York studio next to a sculpture in progress. Hair, Jimmy Paul for Bumble and Bumble; makeup, Yumi Lee. Details, see In This Issue. Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick.
ininitely complex renderings, which are pinned to the studio wall, have the feeling of abstract blueprints—they suggest motion, speed, and futuristic landscapes. She has designed each of the station’s three entrances to look entirely diferent, so regular users can tell immediately where they are. A lot of Sarah’s sculptures have been ephemeral, but the Ninety-sixth Street station is permanent. As an artist she is interested in the interplay between the two; also between art and science, growth and decay, the material world and the virtual world of the Internet, all of which we inhabit simultaneously. Sarah’s cell phone rings. It’s Leela, her ten-year-old daughter, calling from school. “She’s meeting someone, and I haven’t let her have a cell phone, so I have to make the call,” she tells me after hanging up. Leela’s sister, Aria, who is six, already knows not to ask for one. Siddhartha (friends call him Sid; Sarah calls him Siddharth—as it is pronounced in India, without the inal a) feels the same way about cell phones. He also believes no child should have a Facebook account until he or she has read George Orwell’s 1984. Siddhartha knew Sarah’s work before he knew Sarah. He had seen it in London when he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and in several shows in New York when he was at Harvard Medical School. He’d become very interested in contemporary art, and Sarah’s sculptures fascinated him. “I was really dying to meet her,” he tells me. “That mind, that cosmic, cosmos-like mind of hers, has so many levels of complexity, and for a thousand reasons it was naturally appealing to me.” We’re sitting in his oice at Columbia University Medical Center, where he sees patients and has his own laboratory and team of
Soon after that, they started dating. By then, it was “2003ish,” as he says. (He’s addicted to “-ish.”) He had just inished his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and was working on stem cells, seeing patients with blood cancers, and collaborating with an outstanding group of peers studying cancer and immunology. Sarah, who had just won the MacArthur fellowship, had her own intellectual and artistic community in New York. Each of them was fascinated with the other’s world. “We were commuting back and forth in this crazy, mishmash way—one weekend here, two days there,” he remembers. “And I was starting to think about writing a book about my journey in medicine.” The Emperor of All Maladies, which took ive years, is a highly original work that combines science, personal experience, and inspired writing. The Guardian, which called it a “great and beautiful book,” wrote that “the notion of ‘popular science’ doesn’t come close to describing this achievement. It is literature.” Though they come from different backgrounds, Sarah and Siddhartha share very strong family ties. Sarah’s greatgrandfather, who had a waist-length queue, was the irst Chinese student to go to Cornell University. He became China’s minister to Britain and then ambassador to the United States. Her father, Chia-Ming Sze, was born in Shanghai; his family fled China when he was four, and resettled in the United States. He became an architect and married Judy Mossman, an Anglo-Scottish-Irish schoolteacher. Sarah and David, her older brother, grew up in Boston. (David, one of the irst investors in Facebook, is a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners.) Sarah went to Milton Academy as a day student and graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 1991. Throughout her childhood, she was “WE KNEW WE WERE GOING TO SPEND OUR constantly drawing—at the dinner table, on LIVES TOGETHER AND HAVE CHILDREN, ” SZE SAYS. the train, wherever she was. “There was a real social ethic in our fam“THE MARRIAGE PART WAS JUST A DETAIL” ily,” she says. “My father always said, ‘You can do whatever you want, but you have to do it extremely well.’ My mother said you have to give something research assistants. (“We’re trying to ind drugs that kill leukemia back—to culture, to society.” Sarah was no goody-goody. “I broke in humans,” he says.) The office is just big enough for his desk a lot of rules, and never got caught,” she remembers. She loved to and a cot, which is essential to the “dreamy” aspect of his writing dance and had her own free-form style of improvisational moveprocess. Bound galleys of The Gene lie on the desk. Siddhartha is notoriously dashing—ine-boned, with an unruly ment. (“She becomes somebody else when she dances,” Feinstein mop of black hair, expressive features, and a boiled-wool gray tells me, “almost like a voodoo priestess.”) But the immigrant coat that he hardly ever removes. He and Sarah can’t quite agree rigor of her background and her strict upbringing kept her in line. on when they irst met. He persuaded her assistant, Nell Breyer, Between Yale and the School of Visual Arts, where she got her whom he knew from graduate school, to take him to Sarah’s stuMFA in 1997, Sarah started and codirected a nonproit summer program for underprivileged kids from the worst public schools dio, but Sarah was out of town. A few weeks later, they met at a in Lowell, Massachusetts. She had never stopped painting, but Christmas party in Boston given by Breyer’s parents. (Nell’s father at SVA she came to understand that being very good at drawing is the Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer.) Sarah was there, and painting was not enough to make her an artist. The sculptor but so consumed with a new project that she barely noticed SidJackie Winsor, her teacher at SVA, said, “ ‘You’re all incredibly dhartha. Somehow, he knew they would eventually get together. talented,’ ” Sarah recalls. “ ‘But all that matters now is that you The deining moment came in 2002, at the Museum of Fine Arts, have the wherewithal to stay with your vision.’ And I realized, Who Boston, where she was having a show. cares if you can draw? It’s an amazing thing when you’re little, but “I go to the opening and I manage to get myself invited to the it’s just a skill. That’s why I stopped painting.” dinner afterward,” he tells me. As Sarah recalls it, “I got in my Sarah gave herself a ive-year deadline after graduation—if car, and this guy jumps in the front seat with me, and all my good she hadn’t become a real artist by then, she would do something friends are thinking, Who is this?” else. But her work attracted attention while she was still at SVA. “Sarah says I can be extremely persuasive,” Siddhartha conThe New York Times’s Roberta Smith singled out a piece of hers tinues. “I said, ‘I’m going to come and join you for dinner.’ There at the SoHo Annual in 1996, writing, “Don’t miss Sarah Sze’s seemed to be no resistance, so I just became an irresistible force.”
228
LEFT: SA RA H SZE . LA NDSCA PE OF EV EN TS SUSP EN DED I ND EFI NI TELY ( H AM M O CK ), 20 15. MIXED MED IA, ACRYLIC PAINT, STR ING, COR D, METAL, STONE, PH OTOGRAPH ; 115" X 1 90" X 42 ". I N STA LL AT I ON I N T HE GI A RD IN O D E LL E V ERGI NI , LA B I E NN A LE DI V E N EZ I A 20 15, “ALL TH E WOR LD’S FUTUR ES.” R IGH T: SARAH SZ E. N IGHT STAN DIN G, 20 15. ACRYLIC PAINT, ARCHIVAL PRIN TS, THREAD, STAINLESS STEEL, STONE, CANDY WRAPPER; 63" X 33" X 15". CH AL K L IN ES, 20 15. BLUE CH ALK, INSTRUCTIONS, CH ALK LINES; D IMENSIONS VAR IABLE. D ETAILS, SE E IN T HIS ISSU E .
BLUE PERIOD LEFT: Sarah Sze’s Landscape of Events Suspended Indefinitely (Hammock), 2015, installed in a quiet garden at last year’s Venice Biennale. RIGHT: Night Standing and Chalk Lines, 2015, seen last fall at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
installation . . . which seems to catalog a whole genus of newly discovered sea creatures.” It was made of toilet paper and spit— hundreds of small squares, molded into many diferent shapes, covering the loor, shelves, and windowsills in an out-of-the-way storage space. “I wanted to use things that had no intrinsic value,” she says. “It was like a blanket of snow, a piece that could be everywhere and massive, but so slight in its presence. You didn’t know where the work began and where it ended.” After 1997, recognition came very quickly. Her increasingly intricate sculptural accumulations began appearing in group exhibitions and solo shows here and abroad, and in 2013, she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Her fragile, proliferating accumulations of humble objects illed the American pavilion’s staid interior spaces and climbed up the wall outside like kudzu— or some unknown virus. Richard Serra told The New Yorker that Sarah Sze “is changing the potential of sculpture.” Seeing her work, he added, “was like seeing Twombly and Pollock in space.” Sarah and Siddhartha married at City Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2004. He told her to pick him up beforehand in the middle of the bridge between Boston and Cambridge—he was holding a bunch of lilies. “It was the first month gay marriage became legal—a wonderful thing,” she says, “so it was us and ten
lesbians.” They celebrated their marriage again soon afterward in New York, in the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park, and had a party at Sarah’s studio. She wore a long purple dress with an antique Indian scarf; he wore a Nehru jacket. Neither one of them remembers the exact date. “We knew we were going to spend our lives together and have children,” she says. “The marriage part was just a detail.” Siddhartha tells me, “It’s not necessary for everyone to have a partner. If I hadn’t met Sarah, I would be happily single.” Siddhartha’s parents had had an arranged marriage. His father, Sibeswar “Shibu” Mukherjee, was a penniless immigrant from East Bengal (now Bangladesh), whose mother had left the country just before India and Pakistan were separated by partition, in 1947. He got a job in Delhi with the Japanese multinational irm Mitsubishi and rose swiftly through the ranks to join the upper middle class. Siddhartha’s mother, Chandana “Tulu” Bannerjee, came from a more genteel family in West Bengal. When he and Ranu, his older sister, were growing up in one of the newly aluent areas of town, the household was dominated by their paternal grandmother. She and her adult son, who was schizophrenic, lived together in one room of the house. Siddhartha’s uncle’s schizophrenia, and another uncle’s bipolar condition, are an important part of The Gene. “This is my story,” he says. “It’s the story of illness in my family. It’s not told only C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 5 9
229
Dress thePart As traditional hairstyling techniques and accessories return to the runway with a modern attitude, Marina Rust consıders a crown—and picks up some hair gel.
he late-nineteenth-century band of laurel leaves was delicate—quite golden. “Etruscan Revival,” explained Rebecca Selva, chief creative oicer and P.R. director of Fred Leighton, where I’d stopped in to browse last December. tiaras for day! read the cover line of that month’s Vogue. (I would have attempted it only for night. But still.) The half-wreath would barely stay on my head. To really make it work, I’d need feats of engineering. And nerve. “Picture it with a white linen dress and strappy sandals in Rome in the summer,” Selva said. I could picture it, but it was on someone younger—with better hair. I thanked her, removed the lovely object, and left the store. I didn’t think about crowns again until February at Rodarte, where Laura and Kate Mulleavy showed them, gem-encrusted and anchored by sprays of fresh orchids and lilies at their fall show. They sat atop pale skin, aubergine lips, and Victorian-fairy hair. The whole thing was stunning. I began to second-guess my self-imposed ageism. If not now, then when? The recent round of collections seemed to mark a shift in hairstyling that rifed on more traditional notions of classic glamour with modern elements and personality-driven nuance. At Alexander McQueen, there were soft, sleek updos with hard-looking jewelry in the form of safety pins and chains. They were clunkier, punkier, than Roman goddess or wood nymph. But still romantic. And dark. The look was downright Goth at Marc Jacobs. Heavily gelled inger waves produced an efect that was menacing and creepy, like an antique doll with black lips. While I don’t see the point in having Lady Gaga in your show if you’re going to make her unrecognizable, the hair was indeed transformative, the collection a sensation. “In order to break the rules, you have to know them,” explained the hairstylist Guido Palau afterward, adding that many of the younger members of his team had not been trained in the traditional methods of the twenties, thirties, and forties. He’d had to hold special evening classes. I had to look some of this up. A inger wave (noun) is “a wave set in the hair using the ingers,” while a marcel wave (dated, noun) is “a deep artificial wave in the hair created by a curling iron.” Dated, indeed. It’s an old-fashioned idea, hairdressing. It makes me think of dressing a salad. But while I might not like the term, I do love my hairdresser, Kevin Lee, style director at the Julien Farel Restore Salon & Spa in New York. I had inger waves once in 2007, but extremely briely. The Costume Institute was honoring Poiret, so Kevin and I were, of course,
230
thinking 1920s. I’ve blocked out the details, but he remembers it this way: “I curled your dry hair, then manipulated the curls with my comb and ingers to get that inger-wave efect. That is when you had the meltdown.” This is true. In the mirror, I saw Granny, but not in a good way. I begged Kevin to change it, and he did until the hair was more in my comfort zone, which for that night was a woolly, dogeaten felt cloche. (Less Roaring Twenties, more thirties Dust Bowl.) The next morning I called Kevin. Had he seen the cover of the New York Post? Kate Bosworth. In Prada. Rocking glistening marcel waves. “Will you trust me now?” asked Kevin. Mea culpa. In retrospect, I balked not because I found the traditional aesthetic costumey or aging but because the transformation was drastic. For so long, it has been cool to look like you haven’t tried. Now efort is in. We’re wearing mulberry lipstick. Something’s changed. (I think it was when Lady Mary uttered the packing directions “Medium smart” on Downton Abbey, season six, then appeared at a London restaurant in a slinky dress with mesh overlay, her bob encircled by a wide gold band.) Considered strands also give clothes an edge. Retro inger waves tied into a loose, cloudy knot added an unexpected nostalgia to the balloon-sleeve blouses and cutaway capes at Consuelo Castiglioni’s well-received Marni show. The style recalled Joan Fontaine’s hair in Hitchcock’s 1940 psychological thriller, Rebecca. Ridged, glossy, perfectly side-swept, and not to be confused with the deranged Mrs. Danvers’s pinned-up plaits, it immediately identiied Fontaine as the heroine, someone you could root for. She looked cinematic. Womanly, even—a word that has, until recently, fallen out of favor with designers and hairstylists preferring the ring of “boyish” to the idea of an overtly feminine polish that evokes maturity, class, and a lot of hair gel. I admit, I’m afraid of gel. Why? “Gel dries very quickly,” explains Palau, advocating for a light movable formula, like Redken’s Velvet Gelatine 07 Cushioning Blow-Dry Gel, while ofering a piece of advice: “Start with just a little bit.” Gel seems friendlier when marketed as a treatment. AG Hair Texture Gloss boasts naturally derived antiaging seaberry oil. “Control and deine waves in a slightly haphazard, sexy kind of way,” it instructs, which I tried one rainy night when my usual roller set would not behave. (It wasn’t what I would call sexy, but my locks were controlled and, as usual, haphazard.) Waves were long and full but deinitely not grown-up at Dolce & Gabbana, where the clothes were C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 1
Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier
ROMANCING THE STONES Model Aya Jones in an Alexander McQueen corset and dress. Brooches (FROM TOP) Fred Leighton, Alexander McQueen, and Beladora. Hair, Julien d’Ys for Julien d’Ys; makeup, Dick Page for Shiseido. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Phyllis Posnick.
S
BASIC TRAINING The undercover colors function as neutrals, but the athletic fit and midriff-flaunting cut are far from dull. Model Anna Ewers wears a Céline crocheted crop top, $1,800; Céline, NYC. Ralph Lauren Collection drawstring suede pants, $2,790; select Ralph Lauren stores. Louis Vuitton fingerless gloves. Bracelets by Melet Mercantile, Ishi, and the Frye Company. Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.
P
E
C
I
A
L
BOMBSHELL BOMBER This short-andshrugged version of the iconic jacket is all about powerful shoulders drawing eyes to a taut waist. Balmain suede jacket; balmain.com. Alexander Wang bra top, $375; Alexander Wang, NYC. Michael Kors Collection floralcamo pants, $895; select Michael Kors stores. Details, see In This Issue.
F
O
R
C
E
S
The hottest high-performance streetwear is zipped, buckled, cropped, or dropped—and splashed in amped-up camouflage prints. Photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott.
WELL ARMED Bare your guns in a skimpy, private-firstclass tank top, but keep it boyish on the bottom with loosefitting pants. Bottega Veneta leopard-print top, $780; (800) 8456790. Alexander Wang flight-suit pants, $850; Alexander Wang; NYC. BEAUTY NOTE Bronzed, radiant skin doesn’t require days in the sun. Lancôme Tinted Self-Tanning Body Gel with Pure Vitamin E imparts a healthy glow in just half an hour.
234
BOOT CAMP Just as the U.S. Army recently revamped its combat uniform (with the new Operational Camouflage Pattern), designers have been updating their military traditions, too. Louis Vuitton added warrior feathers to a knit top and ankle zips to parachute-silk-like pants; select Louis Vuitton boutiques. Dr. Martens boots. Details, see In This Issue.
CHAIN OF COMMAND Some of these hardedged military pieces are elevated with glamour-girl hardware. Alexander Wang used chunky chain straps on this bra top ($375; Alexander Wang, NYC), while Tom Ford outlined his reconstructed cargo pants with zillions of zips ($1,950; Tom Ford, NYC).
SET DESIGN, HAPPY MASSEE FOR LALALAND ARTISTS. PRODUCED BY ACROSS MEDIA PRODUCTION.
SEMPER FINE Leave it to Versace to go military while still managing to stay faithful to the brand’s sexy ethos. Fatigue trousers are cut high and tight, and leopard print is turned into the world’s vampiest camo top (both at select Versace boutiques). American Eagle Outfitters belt. In this story: hair, Duffy; makeup, Lisa Eldridge for Lancôme. Details, see In This Issue.
Pleat Wave The Moment The sporty-yet-elegant plissé of pre-fall’s accordion-like skirts, equally fluttering and flattering, aims to put a playful dent in your wardrobe. “There is something about the strict linear structure of a pleated skirt that exaggerates the body’s natural curves,” says Zac Posen, “while bringing flirtation to the movement of each pleat.” From his edgy “Pepto pink” (Posen’s description) lamé to the feminine and finely foiled at Gucci—and every kind of crease in between—it’s clearly high time to get into the groove.
The Details FROM NEAR RIGHT: Model Grace Hartzel wears a Marni sleeveless sweater ($770) and shoes. Sweater at Barneys New York, NYC. ZAC Zac Posen lamé skirt, $425; zacposen .com. Model Imaan Hammam wears a Gucci sweatshirt ($2,200) and Lurex skirt ($2,200); select Gucci boutiques. Marni shoes. Model Frederikke Sofie wears a Valentino embroidered jacket; Valentino, NYC. A.L.C. metallic skirt, $595; Barneys New York, NYC. Marni shoes. Hair, Ilker Akyol; makeup, Marion Robine. Details, see In This Issue. Photographed by Theo Wenner. Fashion Editor: Alex Harrington.
P RO DUC ED BY AST RI D GRAS FO R N O RT H S I X
MOMENT OF THE MONTH
FINE FRILLS Old standards like pearls, ruffles, and buttons galore are given fresh life with heavily kohled eyes and devil-may-care hair. Don this lightly gothic look for the world premiere of singer, producer, and visual artist Anohni’s live show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Actress and musician Zoë Kravitz wears Alexander McQueen earrings, necklace, and dress. Earrings at alexandermcqueen.com. Necklace and dress at Alexander McQueen, NYC. Fashion Editor: Sara Moonves.
What to Wear Where
EAR
TO
EAR Forget the studs—swing from the chandeliers with these romantic, gorgeously ornate danglers. Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier.
FANTASTIC FILIGREE The jaunty monkey and glittering dove in this crystal menagerie—seen here on Lizzy Plapinger, one half of the alt-pop duo MS MR—seem to yearn for an indoor/outdoor affair, such as the New York Botanical Garden’s “Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas” exhibition. Gucci earrings, necklaces, rings, and dress; select Gucci boutiques. Details, see In This Issue.
What to Wear Where ARM (AND EAR) CANDY Soft curls and clean white broderie anglaise are the stuff of fairy tales—make them modern with earrings like slices of architectural silver. Wear with a friend to see the New York City Ballet perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Model Imaan Hammam (NEAR RIGHT) wears Proenza Schouler earrings, embroidered shirt ($3,800), and pants ($1,450). Model Frederikke Sofie wears Proenza Schouler earrings and cutout dress ($4,250). All at Proenza Schouler, NYC.
ICE QUEEN Antique-silver drops have a rococo appeal perfect for Cyrano de Bergerac at the Metropolitan Opera. Korean pop sensation CL wears Simon Teakle Fine Jewelry & Objects earrings; Simon Teakle, Greenwich, CT. Gucci shirt, $1,150; select Gucci boutiques. Details, see In This Issue. BEAUTY NOTE
Pastel hair is spring’s most customizable accessory. L’Oréal Paris Féria Shimmering Conditioning Colour Crème in Smokey Blue gives blondes a subdued steely tint.
THE VIEW FROM THE TOP Warmer weather means short sleeves, pretty flowers, and a resurgence of color and playful shapes. It also means the reopening of the Metropolitan Museum’s Roof Garden Bar—ideal for sipping a glass of rosé while donning rosé-colored eyelids. Model Grace Hartzel wears Monique Péan diamond earrings (ON TOP); Barneys New York, NYC. Sabine Getty star earrings; Fivestory, NYC. Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane cardigan ($4,550) and silk dress; Saint Laurent, NYC.
What to Wear Where 244
FULL CIRCLE This iteration of the backagain hoop earring, with its eye-popping drop, is a perfect complement to a lacy frock—and the perfect accessory for the Public Theater’s production of The Taming of the Shrew in Central Park. Singer Tinashe wears Michael Kors earrings; select Michael Kors stores. Erdem dress; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. Details, see In This Issue.
What to Wear Where ROCKS AND ROLL A disco-ball dress and a passel of funky gems will let you stand out in a sea of fangirls as Justin Bieber’s Purpose World Tour hits the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Model Karlie Kloss wears Dior earrings; select Dior boutiques. Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane leather jacket; Saint Laurent, NYC. Giorgio Armani sequined dress; select Giorgio Armani boutiques.
PRODUCED BY FILL IN TH E BLANK PRODUCTION
TWO OF A KIND Eclectic separates—from chunky knits to silky slips—are a fearless proposition custommade for the premiere of Tim Burton’s latest confection, Alice Through the Looking Glass. On models Vanessa Axente (LEFT) and Fei Fei Sun: Stephen Russell earrings; Stephen Russell, NYC. Axente wears a Miu Miu dress ($3,500); select Miu Miu boutiques. Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane shirt, $750; Saint Laurent, NYC. Sun wears a Boss dress; select Hugo Boss stores. Miu Miu shirt ($2,265); select Miu Miu boutiques. In this story: hair, Duffy; makeup, Sally Branka. Details, see In This Issue.
247
Index
DESTINATION:
Wedding
To have, to hold—and to travel in style. Take inspiration from these elegant, far-flung celebrations.
BLUE LAGOON FOUNDER & CEO OF GLOSSIER, EMILY MARRIED ARTIST DIEGO IN AN INTIMATE GATHERING AND WORE NARCISO RODRIGUEZ. “IT WAS JOYFUL. MY HUSBAND CREATED CERAMIC PLACE-SETTING TILES THAT BECAME KEEPSAKES.”
1. Peony stem, $8 per stem; Putnam & Putnam, NYC. 2. Edun dress, $1,350; mytheresa .com. 3. Francesco Russo heel, $995; Just One Eye, LA. 4. Knead to Make cake; kneadtomake.com for information. 5. Glossier Priming Moisturizer, $25; glossier.com. 6. Albertus Swanepoel hat, $160; theline.com. 7. Monique Péan ring; Barneys New York, NYC. 8. Draper James top, $165; draperjames.com. 9. Brooks Brothers pants, $198; brooksbrothers.com. 10. Oscar de la Renta salad/dessert plate, $42; oscardelarenta .com. 11. GlobeTrotter suitcase, globetrotter.com. 12. The Ocean View Club, Bahamas.
BAHAMAS Pared-back elegance on Harbour Island Emily Weiss & Diego Dueñas
WITH FLOWER GIRL: FRED RITCHIE. 1: _VILOR/ © GETTY IMAGES. 3 & 11: COURTESY OF NET-A-PORTER. 4: COURTESY OF KNEADTOMAKE.COM. 5 : CO U RT ESY O F G LOS S I E R . 6 : C O U RT ESY O F LYST. 7: CO U RT ESY O F BA R N EYS N EW YO R K . 10 : C O U RT ESY O F OS CA R D E L A R E N TA . 12 : JE NN Y GAG E & TOM B ET T ERTO N . W I TH D I EG O DU E Ñ AS: NOA H RA BI N OW IT Z . ALL OTH ERS: GOR MAN STUD IO. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
EDITOR: EMMA ELWICK-BATES
2 : LUCAS V ISS E R 3 : COU RT ESY O F FE RN A N DO JO RG E . 4 & 6 : COURTESY OF MODA OPERAND I. 5 : COURT ESY OF MA N OLO BLA HN I K . 7: COU RT ESY O F BU KH A RA- CAR PETS.COM. 8: COURTESY OF CO QU I CO QU I . 9 : COU RTESY OF AS P REY. A L L OT HERS: W I LLI A M SANCH EZ . D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
Index
1 1: LUCAS VI SS ER. 1 2 : COU RT ESY O F ACCO MPA N Y. 13 & 1 5 : COURTESY OF MATCH ESFASH ION.COM. 14 : COURTESY OF OLI VE R P EO P LES. 16 : COU RT ESY O F G OYA R D. 17: COURTESY OF SAKS FIFTH AVENUE. 18: COURTESY OF ASPREY. ALL OTHERS: WILLIAM SANCHEZ. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.
STREET PARTY ABOVE: FASHION CONSULTANT EUGENIA MARRIED ARCHITECT MARTIN IN BAVARIA AND MEXICO.“SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS IS FESTIVE, LIVELY, AND VERY MEXICAN!” SHE WORE CUSTOM JUAN CARLOS OBANDO AND CARRIED A FAN AND ROSARY. RIGHT: THE DUO SPED OFF IN A VINTAGE PORSCHE SPEEDSTER.
MEXICO A colorful celebration in Chiapas Eugenia González Ruiz-Olloqui & Martin Henn
1. The vibrant table setting at the reception. 2. Valentino headband; select Valentino boutiques. 3. Fernando Jorge earrings; fernandojorge .co.uk. 4. Ellery dress, $1,250; modaoperandi .com. 5. Manolo Blahnik heels, Manolo Blahnik, NYC. 6. Alessandra Rich bag; brownsfashion .com. 7. Rug; similar styles at onekingslane .com. 8. Coqui Coqui Rosas Frescas bath oil, $52; net-a-porter .com. 9. Asprey Cube Vide Poche, $125; asprey.com. 10. Templo de San Nicolás, Chiapas, Mexico. 11. Lane Bryant skirt, $80; Lane Bryant stores. 12. Brother Vellies sandal, $315; matchesfashion .com. 13. Pippa Holt caftan, $1,077, matchesfashion .com. 14. Oliver Peoples sunglasses, $405; Oliver Peoples boutiques. 15. Yosuzi hat, $395; barneys.com. 16. Goyard bag; Goyard boutiques. 17. Chloé blouse; Saks Fifth Avenue, NYC. 18. Asprey champagne flutes; asprey.com.
C H EC K O U T VO G U E . C O M FO R M O R E S H O P PA B L E L O O K S
Index
GERMANY A chic courthouse ceremony in Munich Eugenia González Ruiz-Olloqui & Martin Henn
1. Ralph Lauren Collection dress; select Ralph Lauren stores. 2. Percossi Papi earrings; Jaded Jewels, NYC. 3. Custom heart-shaped brezel (pretzels). 4. Cartier watch; cartier.us. 5. Luckybird Bakery; luckybirdbakes .com for information. 6. Palazzo glasses, $331; giberto .it. 7. Brock Collection dress; modaoperandi .com. 8. Jimmy Choo heel, $695; select Jimmy Choo boutiques. 9. Bonpoint jacket ($275), shirt ($140), and pants ($175); bonpoint.com. 10. David Yurman ring; David Yurman, NYC. 11. St. Peter’s Church in Munich.
1 & 8: G OR MA N ST U DI O. 2 . COURT ESY OF JA D ED JEW ELS. 3 : COU RT ESY O F EUG E NI A GONZ ÁLEZ . 4: COURTESY OF CARTIER . 5: BR IAN D ORSEY STUD IOS. 6: COURTESY OF ARTEMEST. 7: COU RT ESY O F MO DA OPERANDI. 9: COURTESY OF BONPOINT. 10: COURTESY OF DAVID YURMAN. 11: © GORAN BOGICEVIC ALAMY STOCK PHOTO. TOP LEFT: HEINZ VON HEYD ENABER . D ETAILS, SEE IN T HIS ISSU E .
DOUBLE DEUTSCH “MY HUSBAND WANTED TO SHARE HIS GERMAN UPBRINGING, WHICH HE LOVED. IN MEXICO, HE SAID HIS VOWS IN SPANISH, AND I SAID MINE IN GERMAN.”
Z IS FOR ZIKA CONTINUED FROM PAGE 162
not pregnant, I was shaken on a recent reporting trip along the southern Amazon when the ixer I was traveling with, a woman in her 50s, came down with the telltale signs: red, itchy spots and light fever. We went to a local pharmacy, and she was told to take ibuprofen and rest, the only treatment on offer. The symptoms cleared up within a week. Zika was first discovered in the 1940s, in Uganda’s forest of the same name. Conirmed cases were rare and limited to parts of Africa, Asia, and the Paciic islands until 2014, when an infected carrier visited Brazil. One mosquito bite was all it took to start an epidemic in which, scientists believe, the virus enters a pregnant woman’s placenta and damages the developing brain. The Zikacarrying mosquito thrives in the tropics and subtropics, including Florida’s Gulf Coast. It has even been found breeding in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The Pan American Health Organization predicts that Zika will spread to every country in the Americas except the inhospitable terrains of Canada and Chile. Where does this leave women who are pregnant or hoping to become so? Selfdetection is near impossible; only about a fifth of carriers develop symptoms. Tests are available, though they are elaborate and not entirely reliable. Doctors can use ultrasound imaging to determine if a fetus has microcephaly, but not until the end of the second trimester. One of the many unknowns is how long after becoming infected a woman should wait until becoming pregnant. While the virus exits the bloodstream after about a week, it has been found to linger in urine for several weeks afterward. “This suggests that your body doesn’t completely clear the virus,” says Andrew Pekosz, Ph.D., professor of microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “One of the risks we can’t quantify is whether, if you go to Brazil, you get infected, you recover, and then get pregnant a few weeks later, there may be Zika in places like the kidneys and saliva. By that point there’s likely a very minor chance of infection, but when we’re talking about pregnant women, we want to be as cautious as possible.” Meanwhile, van der Linden continues to see her patients during the day and stay up nights to write up the results of her work. She sees her daughters on Sundays, her only day of; she hasn’t exercised in three years, since she gave up the personal trainer with whom she worked out between 11:00 p.m. and midnight. “I miss exercise terribly, especially now that I am in my 40s,” she says.
258
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
For now she must run on stress and coffee. When this issue went to press, there were 863 conirmed cases of Zika-linked microcephaly in Brazil. Van der Linden’s clinic was treating 125 of them. Back in the waiting room, the mothers look up from their bundled charges, smile, and raise a chorus of “Good morning”s as van der Linden walks in: “Bom dia, doutora.” It is for her they save the questions that keep them up at night: Will my child ever walk? Will she raise her head or smile? Will she live to see her irst birthday? One of the mothers follows her into her small, spare oice. Swaddled in her arms is the irst patient of the day. “How’s our sleepyhead today?” van der Linden says, slipping her fingers around the dozing child and bringing him close for a hug. The mother’s exhaustion is etched into the lines of her face. The baby in the doctor’s hands, João Guilherme, is nearly four months old and has the same tiny skull as the babies waiting outside, but he also developed a complication: hydrocephalus. The luid that normally bathes the brain had begun to build up and inlate his head, requiring surgery. Like so much else regarding this new disease, this development may or may not be related. It is still too early to say. The doctor examines his faceted skull and gives her approval: The operation had gone well. She hands the baby back to his mother. “How are you?” she asks. “I am going crazy with worry,” the mother says, her voice cracking. “He cries and cries. Yesterday his eyes rolled back into his head. I don’t know what to do.” The doctor nods and writes out a prescription for the mother—a tranquilizer to get her through. Van der Linden, whose own children are ifteen and eleven, lets out a deep breath when the mother and child leave the room. “Patients come in here and ask, ‘Will my child walk?’ What can I say? ‘Forget walking; your child might never learn to swallow’?” she says. “I feel like I owe it to them to tell them the truth, or as much of it as I know.”
AN EYE FOR ALL SEASONS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 208
though he still wears a clipped Prince of Wales tie—and he is drinking tea from an enormous white cup. The apartment is furnished in a crisp, ascetic version of midcentury masculinity. A small cot, black leather with studs, sits near the window in the living room. A steel rack of Browne suits lines one wall, and on the other is a white folding screen that once belonged to Geofrey Beene. The oice, nearby, ofers a small desk pushed against the window, and
two angular chairs with an arrangement of metal cocktail goblets. One of the apartment’s secret luxuries is the window in its small kitchen, which has a sight line all the way to the fountain in Lincoln Center. If Bolton had been the decorator, he says, the place would be “much fancier.” “I’ve got very Catholic taste, and Thom has very Calvinist taste—even though he’s Catholic,” Bolton has explained. “But I don’t care as much, and he does, so he tends to win.” They are both neat freaks. (Bolton: “I’m a bit less neat than Thom, but that’s not hard.”) Of late, they have been in a state of high alarm because their miniature wirehaired-dachshund puppy, Hector, named after one of Bolton’s favorite childhood cartoons, has taken to urinating on the seagrass rug. “Everything revolves around him,” Bolton says mournfully. “He rules the house.” A few days earlier, Bolton presented the “Manus x Machina” exhibition to the press in the Met’s entrance hall. Being in the spotlight is not something he looks forward to—he shied from watching Rossi’s documentary until the inal days before its premiere—but he was interested in how the crowd reacted to ten sample garments lanking his talk. He’d planned to feature only four: an original Chanel suit; a Lagerfeld echo that combined 3-D printed elements with hand stitching; one Iris van Herpen piece; and an Yves Saint Laurent dress handinished with feathers. But because there’d been concern that these were visually too, well, beige, he’d added six more, including a wowie-zowie hand-pleated Raf Simons skirt and a color-blocked “flying-saucer” garment by Issey Miyake. He’d been pleased to note, with the faintest hint of smugness, that his original selections were, in fact, drawing more smartphone shots. From an academic anthropologist buried deep in a museum, he’d become a curator with a haunting sixth sense for the interests of the crowd. In his apartment, Bolton is trying to explain the mission for the Costume Institute that he hopes will come through in the show. “When I see what’s going on in the world, fashion-wise, everything is going so fast that you almost don’t have time to appreciate what you’re seeing,” he says. “So I think that by trying to focus on process, trying to focus on techniques, on the actual making of fashion, it’s a way of trying to make people look at it . . . This idea of fashion 24/7—it’s not a good thing, I think. It doesn’t encourage designers to step back and have original thoughts.” In order to tell the fashion world to slow down, ironically, Bolton has had to speed up. He is now past his catalog deadline by two weeks—a delay so dire that the parts of the books that don’t contain outstanding pages are already printing. Bolton has
VOGUE.COM
lately managed to squeeze in time to read Hanya Yanagihara’s tour de force A Little Life, but his schedule doesn’t leave time for much else—including his upcoming move into a new apartment. Ostensibly, Bolton is packing, though he never fully unpacked in the irst place. (He never does; the inality of it all makes him nervous.) He and Browne are currently refurbishing a larger place a few loors down and plan to make the move in late spring. Would I like to see it? “I’m always late every morning,” Bolton says as we pass a Linus bike, in the elevator bay, that is his primary transportation. He makes a point of visiting the Villa d’Este at Lake Como each July and hopes also to go on a safari in Tanzania, but he and Browne otherwise work away in the city. Downstairs, he unlocks the door of his new place. The main draw was the long, wraparound balcony deck, looking out over the park. (The main fear is that Hector may be carried of by urban birds of prey.) Inside, there is a large, L-shaped living room, with a wet bar; an oice with a magisterial bookshelf; and a pleasant kitchen. Bolton rushes around, opening closets and pointing out views. He and Browne will reface the master bath in marble. They’ll put exercise equipment in the extra bedroom and avoid the gym. As the plans accumulate, he gains excitement, until he simply stops and looks around with wonderment, caught in his dreams for a home that, like the empty galleries to which he gives his life, must be made entirely anew.
BRAND-NEW SONG AND DANCE CONTINUED FROM PAGE 212
success it found there, starting with a meeting between the two creative teams behind it, Sissle (Henry) and Blake (Dixon) and Miller (Mitchell) and Lyles (Porter), all of them vaudeville stars with a shared dream to write, direct, produce, and star in their own show. After their down-on-his luck manager persuades a down-on-his luck producer to invest some money in the enterprise (all the white roles are played, hilariously, by Brooks Ashmanskas), they cast the show, with the commanding soprano Lottie Gee (McDonald) as the female lead. Then they hit the road playing one-night stands in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and throughout Pennsylvania, sharing beds in leabag rooms and hocking their personal possessions to pay their train fare. Lottie Gee and the married Eubie Blake start a passionate romance, and by the time the show reaches New York, the company is $18,000 in debt. The irst act ends with the show’s triumphant opening night, and in the second act we see the aftermath of success, complete with professional ruptures, personal unhappiness, and, over the decades, a
VOGUE.COM
relegation of Shuffle Along to the status of footnote to history. This tale of showbiz paradise found and lost is, of course, helped along not just by Glover’s showstopping dance numbers but by Sissle and Blake’s glorious score—and a stellar cast of singers, including McDonald (whose six Tony awards include those for her performances in Porgy and Bess and, as Billie Holiday, in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill), Billy Porter (who won a Tony for his turn as the drag queen Lola in Kinky Boots), the great Brian Stokes Mitchell, and, in what should be a star-making performance, Adrienne Warren (last seen on the New York stage in Bring It On). In rehearsals, Wolfe provides a voluble, live-wire counterpoint to Glover’s laconic, laid-back vibe. During a run-through of an Election Day parade from the show within the show, the 61-year-old director leaps up and announces, “It’s got to be chaotic and shit,” and then breaks into a mildly demented cakewalk, linging his arms wildly. “You see?” he shouts. “Don’t come at me soft. Come at me!” Underneath the whirlwind, though, Wolfe has a clear vision of what he wants. At one point during the raucous silliness, he stops the proceedings and tells the cast, “It’s fun, and you’re all cutting loose and acting foolish—but you’re voting. You’re black people, and you’re voting. In 1921.” Throughout the workshop process, Wolfe imbued his team with a sense of history to help them bring the period to life. One morning, he took everyone to the Museum of Modern Art for a special screening of Lime Kiln Club Field Day—an unfinished and long-lost 1913 silent film starring the legendary comedian Bert Williams and an all-black cast—and a discussion afterward about, among other things, the meaning of blackface and the debt of this generation to black performers of the past. If you ask the new cast members what drew them to the show, their irst response is invariably the chance to work with Wolfe and Glover. But they are also eager to shine a light on this neglected corner of musical theater—and African-American—history. “I didn’t know anything about Shuffle Along and its influence,” McDonald says. “Not many people do. That’s the reason I signed on before there was even a complete script—I want to be a part of telling that story. It’s a way of honoring our ancestors.” “When I stepped onstage and spoke the line ‘The ghost of everyone who’s come before, who’s ever sung a note or danced a routine, you can feel it,’ this shudder went through my body,” Porter recalls. “Tears lew out of my eyes. To know that there was somebody else who felt the way you felt, who lived the way you lived and wanted to change
things, like you do—and did it. Now we’re doing it. It was the moment where I realized what I’m here for.” Wolfe, whose accomplishments include directing the New York premiere of Angels in America and running the Public Theater for more than a decade, has spent much of his career creating shows that examine the AfricanAmerican cultural experience, often with scathing acuity, from The Colored Museum to Jelly’s Last Jam to Bring in ’Da Noise. On the surface, Shuffle Along would seem to be of a piece with those shows, though Wolfe says, “There’s an exuberance to them, but it’s like an exuberant child playing with an Uzi. There’s something more innocent about Shuffle Along.” Ultimately, that innocence is what drew Wolfe to write the show, giving him a chance not just to rediscover a forgotten theatrical origin story but to touch base with his own beginnings as an aspiring playwright from Kentucky newly arrived in New York. “When you’re poor and you’re struggling and you’re trying to stake your claim, a kind of naïveté is essential,” Wolfe says. “There’s a kind of innocence that’s crucial to surviving—you’ve got to be sort of clueless and determined. I remember coming here and believing that everything was possible—I needed to believe that because I had no money and didn’t know anyone. All I had was a blind, wonderful faith. With Shuffle Along, I wanted to live inside that open heart.”
RADICAL EQUALS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 229
through the lens of science, because science is too small to accommodate it.” His grandmother was a “fierce character, an incredibly forceful woman,” he says. “You know that book about the Tiger Mom? She was the Tiger Grandmom.” Siddhartha describes himself as “a dreamy child, a little lost-ish. But I was a good student. The deining element in my childhood was music.” From the age of five, he was trained as a singer of classical Indian music. He took lessons every day when he came home from St. Columba’s School. After years of “boring as hell” vocal exercises, he began learning to improvise. “At a certain point,” he says, “you figure out that all that training was to give you the selfconidence to make music in your mind. I did lots of other things, and I was good-ish at them, but the two things I had passion for were music and reading.” He read Orwell, Primo Levi, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky. His grandmother’s death in 1985, which he describes as having “majesty and elegance” because of her moral control of the process, led him to think about medicine. He began reading books by the handful of doctors who wrote C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 0
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
259
in this
issue
Cover look 61: Dress, price upon request; Saint Laurent, NYC. Boots, $1,655; totokaelo.com. Manicure, Jin Soon Choi for JINsoon. Vogue.com 62: On Swift: Michael Kors Collection dress, $9,995; select Michael Kors stores. Contributors 88: On Soie: Giambattista Valli sweater, $1,225; modaoperandi .com. Up front 92: Dress, $699; camillaandmarc .com. Dior earrings, $440; select Dior boutiques. Flash 120: On Gardner: Nike sports jbra ($45) and shorts ($32); nike.com. On TNT: Nike shirt ($80) and tights ($105); nike.com. View 131: Earrings and ring with diamonds, onyx, and chrysoprase, priced upon request. Ring and bracelet with diamonds, carnelian, and mother-of-pearl, priced upon request. 132: Necklace with diamonds, carnelian, and mother-of-pearl, price upon request. 134:
260
too onerous, Sarah and Siddhartha decided to live in New York. “The decision was very clear,” Siddhartha says. “Sarah couldn’t live in Boston. I could imagine a life as a writer, a scientist, and a physician in New York. That was how the decision was made, because the ambience around the New York art world had to take priority, and I was happy to do it.” It was wrenching to leave the many important scientiic collaborations he was engaged in at Harvard Medical School, but he was soon recruited to join Columbia University Medical Center and to set up his own lab there. “Siddhartha is an extremely thoughtful and rigorous scientist who stays on top of the entire spectrum of cancer discipline,” says Azra Raza, M.D., a colleague at Columbia. “He is questioning, researching, learning, and then using all of this to explore fresh areas that could lead to new therapies for the patient.” When Sarah and Siddhartha’s second daughter, Aria, was born in 2010, they applied their creative energies to the delicate balancing of two very demanding careers and a growing family. “You’ve got to begin with the idea of radical equality—ifty-ifty,” Siddhartha says. “If you don’t, you’ve already lost.” Their schedules continually push them
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
Dr. Martens boots, $140; drmartens.com. 136: On Ambrosio: Robe, $1,354; also at Opening Ceremony, NYC. On Tordini: Robe, $2,378; also at net-a-porter .com. 140: Overcoat ($4,995), sweater ($1,150), shirt ($1,150), and trousers ($1,100); select Ermenegildo Zegna boutiques. Common Projects shoes, $411; similar styles at Hirshleifers, Manhasset, NY. 142: Skirt also at arjuna.ag. Sneakers, $545; Saint Laurent, NYC. Manicure, Riwako Kobayashi. Beauty 144: Sweaters, $650 each; Barneys New York, NYC. 148: Mascara, $29 each; yslbeautyus.com. PATA 167: Dress, $1,125; Isabel Marant, San Francisco. Spinelli Kilcollin sterlingsilver bracelet, $1,000; spinellikilcollin.com. Sergio Rossi boots, $1,490; sergiorossi.com. Joseph coat, $1,345; joseph-fashion .com. 172: Flower jug ($193)
and gravy jug ($87). On Kirby: Dress, $5,065; Saks Fifth Avenue, NYC. Ippolita earrings, $795; ippolita .com. John Hardy ring, $6,500; johnhardy.com. POINT OF VIEW 175: On Swift: Proenza Schouler dress, $16,000; Proenza Schouler, NYC. Vetements boots, $1,655; totokaelo.com. FULL CONTROL 176–177: Dress ($12,950) and boots ($1,655). Dress at matchesfashion.com. Boots at totokaelo.com. 178: Dress, $7,995, select Michael Kors stores. 180–181: Dress, $7,995; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. 184: Dress, price upon request. Calvin Klein Collection, NYC. 185: Dress ($12,000) and boots ($1,495); select Marc Jacobs stores. In this story, manicure, Jin Soon Choi for JINsoon. CHECK MATE 186–187: On Hadid: Earrings, $885; jenniferisherjewelry .com. Shoes, $775; miumiu .com. On Malik: Blazer ($2,490), shirt ($525),
toward chaos. Sarah, a tenured professor in Columbia’s graduate art program, is teaching two days a week this semester. They both travel the globe, often separately, for their work. The whole family goes to India every year. (They stay in the South Delhi house Siddhartha grew up in—Sarah loves the extended-family experience. This past winter, they took the children to Egypt, where Siddhartha’s sister’s husband is the Indian ambassador.) They’re up at 6:30 every morning to put Aria on the school bus, and Siddhartha drives Leela to her downtown school, circles back to take Sarah to her studio, then drives up to Columbia. Their social schedule spans several worlds— art, science, medicine, literature—and they are in great demand as a couple. People respond to Siddhartha’s impulsive intensity—he’s a demon Scrabble player—and to Sarah’s more free-spirited humor. One way to outwit chaos is a radical elimination of the nonessential. Siddhartha has mastered the two-word email for answering the countless invitations: “Apologies, unable.” “You can’t get lost in the everyday details,” Sarah says. “Sid and I are both totally like that, which can be not good with things like parking tickets. Sure, things are falling through the cracks all the time, but
trousers ($890), and tie ($245); Saint Laurent, NYC. Pamela Love sterling-silver ring ($325) and sterling silver–and–lapis ring ($200); pamelalove.com. Shoes, $725; select Jimmy Choo stores. 188: On Hadid: Pants, price upon request. Head wrap, $58; franceluxe .com. Hermès leather–and– silver plated bracelet, $1,150; select Hermès boutiques. Loren Stewart sterling-silver bracelet, $415; lorenstewart .com. Shoes, price upon request; givenchy.com. On Malik: Leather jacket, $650; What Goes Around Comes Around, NYC. Save Khaki United T-shirt, $45; savekhaki.com. Hermès bracelet, $19,000; select Hermès boutiques. 190–191: On Hadid: Belt, price upon request. On Malik: Leather jacket, $5,350; select Gucci boutiques. Burberry shirt, $325; burberry.com. Sunglasses, $150; sunglasshut.com. 193: On Hadid: Dress, price upon request. On Malik: Ksubi jeans, $256; ksubi.com (available in September). Boots, $610; Iro, NYC.
194: Coat ($6,845) and shoes ($775). Bag, $9,500; select Hermès boutiques. Scarf, price upon request; 011-33-1-4260-3070 for information. Sunglasses, $375; Selima Optique stores. 195: On Hadid: Dress, $6,945; select Dolce & Gabbana boutiques. Star brooch ($175) and heart brooch ($200); select Marc Jacobs stores. Safety-pin brooch, $253; ericksonbeamon.com. 196–197: On Malik: Jacket, $2,290; Saint Laurent, NYC. 198: On Malik: Shirt, $690; Saint Laurent, NYC. AN EYE FOR ALL SEASONS 202: Dress and shoes, priced upon request; (800) 929-DIOR for information. 206: Dress and hat, priced upon request; (800) 5500005 for information. 207: Dress, price upon request; Hotoveli, NYC. Shoes, $1,295; unitednude.com. 209: Dress and belt, priced upon request; select Louis Vuitton boutiques. In this story, manicure, Jin Soon Choi for JINsoon.
VOGUE.COM
A WORD ABOUT DISCOUNTERS W H I LE VO GU E THOROUGHLY RESEARCHES THE COMPANIES MENTIONED IN ITS PAGES, WE CANNOT GUA RA NT E E T HE AU T HEN T I C IT Y O F M ERCH A ND I S E SO LD BY D I SCOUN TE RS. AS IS ALWAYS TH E CASE IN PURCH ASING AN ITEM FROM A N YW HE RE OT HE R TH A N T HE AU TH OR I ZE D STO RE , T HE BUYE R TA KES A R ISK AND SH OULD USE CAUTION WH EN D OING SO.
beautifully, such as Oliver Sacks, Lewis Thomas, and Sherwin Nuland. Siddhartha had traveled a great deal with his parents, and he wanted to go to college in the United States. Choosing Stanford over Harvard (because of a brochure showing Harvard Square covered in snow—horrible!), he majored in science as an undergraduate and a graduate student. He continued his music studies for the irst two years, lying regularly to Delhi, but eventually that became too diicult. “You only become a great performer of Indian classical music at 40, 45, or 50,” he says. “Very sadly, I had to say goodbye.” He still practices almost daily and performs for friends at the musical evenings he and Sarah host every other month at their Chelsea loft for up to 75 people. Asked whether he feels more American than Indian by now, he says, “I feel misaligned with India on Mondays, America on Tuesdays, and with the world on Wednesdays.” When I say it’s annoying that he can do so many things well, he asks me if I know the story about the hedgehog and the fox. “The fox has many ideas, but the hedgehog has one big idea,” he says impishly. “I seem to be a hedgehog disguised as a fox.” In 2009, since commuting between the two cities with a young child had become
that doesn’t matter. The big things matter.” They discuss each other’s work. She reads his manuscripts, and he sees everything she’s doing in the studio. At a recent dinner they hosted in their apartment, Siddhartha was in the kitchen, cooking an ambitious ive-course meal that included such delicacies as pea foam and crème anglaise—for the chocolate soulés Sarah had made. He taught himself to cook when he was at Stanford, and he designed their extensive roof garden, with its arbors and meandering pathways. When Sarah was away for three months installing her 2013 show at the Venice Biennale, he also designed and installed a completely new kitchen. (He joined her for the last two months with the children and nanny; he tutored Leela in math and inished writing The Gene.) The new kitchen was a complete surprise to Sarah, and so was the beach house he bought in Mattituck, Long Island, at the same time. Hal Foster, the art critic and historian, and his wife, Sandy Tait, were at the dinner, but Sarah and Siddhartha’s close friends Zadie Smith and Nick Laird couldn’t make it because their babysitter had just quit. Sarah guided us through the eclectic art collection in the loft, Indian sculptures, and contemporary works mostly acquired by
BRAND-NEW SONG AND DANCE 213: Manicure, En Hui Li. SOMETHING WILD 223: Sagaform wine glass, $40 for set of four; houzz .com. RADICAL EQUALS 226–227: On Sze: Comme des Garçons shirt and Narciso Rodriguez pants. On Mukherjee: Fendi jacket. Left: Courtesy of the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Victoria Miro gallery. Photo: Mike Barnett. Right: Installation at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 2015. Courtesy of the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Photo: Jason Mandella. DRESS THE PART 231: Leather corset and
trading with her colleagues. The conversation at dinner ranged from critiquing the “Uninished” exhibition at the Met Breuer to the potential renaming of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton (because of Wilson’s racist actions) to Siddhartha’s recent meeting in London with Karl Ove Knausgaard. Aria came down from her bedroom in pajamas (Leela was studying) and drank a bowl of the mushroom soup with pea foam while standing at the table. Siddhartha had just returned from Delhi the night before, and it was getting late. As they walked us all to the elevator, he overheard Sarah tell me that she was leaving in the morning for Los Angeles to install a piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art. He said, looking very surprised, “You’re going to L.A. tomorrow?” She nodded, laughing. It was one of those details that had slipped through the cracks.
DRESS THE PART CONTINUED FROM PAGE 230
inspired by a fantasy-driven mix of Disney and street; the hair—with oddly placed barrettes and neon bangs—by youthful rebellion. Ah, rebellion. It’s at the root of every
dress (priced upon request) and hair slide ($395). Corset at 011-44-20-73182222 for information. Dress at Alexander McQueen, NYC. Hair slide at alexandermcqueen .com. Flower brooch, price upon request; (212) 2881872. Bird brooch, $7,750; beladora.com. SPECIAL FORCES 232: Fingerless gloves, price upon request; select Louis Vuitton boutiques. Braided bracelets, $64 each; Melet Mercantile, NYC. Leather bracelet, $105; loveadorned .com. Wrap cuff, $38; thefryecompany.com. 233: Jacket, price upon request. 235: Top and pants, priced upon request. Boots, $140; drmartens.com. 237: Top
and trousers, priced upon request. Belt, $20; ae.com. MOMENT OF THE MONTH 238–239: On Hartzel: Shoes, $800; Marni boutiques. Area ruched top, $525;
[email protected] for information. Lanvin earrings, $895; Lanvin, NYC. On Hammam: Shoes, $820; Marni boutiques. Ben-Amun by Isaac Manevitz earrings, $245; ben-amun.com. On Soie: Jacket, $12,500. Shoes, $820; net-a-porter .com. Ben-Amun by Isaac Manevitz earrings, $395; ben-amun.com. Manicure, Anatole Rainey. WHAT TO WEAR WHERE 240: Earrings ($1,595), necklace ($765), and dress ($7,375). Earrings at
pendulum swing. My own youth was spent in Oregon as part of the ield-hippie movement, where my mother took me after she left my father (and a very correct Georgetown) in 1966 in search of the counterculture. “I couldn’t go for one more day to the hairdresser,” she later explained. And I am pretty sure she never did. In my parents’ circle—Camelot—smooth, glamorous hair felt expected. When something is expected, it’s a chore. What my mother and my subsequent minimalist generation forgot about proper hairdressing is that it’s fun. YouTube now abounds with hipster bloggers who have picked up the torch for classic coifure. Perhaps I should have my twelve-year-old daughter, Lara, learn to do marcel waves? She asked for a curling iron for her birthday—and she’s watching YouTube anyway. The treated tendrils, the brooches, the crowns, the Hitchcockian sets also offer a counterpoint to the overwhelming mood of fashion at the moment, which seems unsettled. The appeal, perhaps, is as simple as an unconscious desire for the joy—leeting as it may be—of rituals that adorn, rather than strip away. I call Fred Leighton. Do they still have that wreath?
alexandermcqueen .com. Necklace and dress at Alexander McQueen, NYC. 241: Earrings ($1,760), necklaces ($830–$1,760), rings ($410–$650), and dress (price upon request). 242: On Hammam: earrings, $990. On Soie: earrings, $990. 243: Earrings, $11,800. 244: Diamond earrings, $34,840. 18K gold–and– topaz earrings, $9,200. Dress, price upon request. 245: Earrings, $250. Dress, $7,440. 246: Earrings, $810. Jacket, $6,990. Dress, price upon request. 247: On Axente: Earrings, price upon request. Miu Miu cardigan, $1,295; select Miu Miu boutiques. On Sun: Earrings, price upon request. Dress, price upon
request. Miu Miu cardigan, $1,295; select Miu Miu boutiques. In this story, manicure, Alicia Torello. INDEX 248: 4. Cake, price upon request. 7. Ring, $36,060. 254–255: 2. Headband, $3,875. 3. Earrings, $40,060. 5. Heels, price upon request; similar styles at Manolo Blahnik, NYC. 6. Bag, $1,750. 16. Bag, $4,990. 17. Blouse, $2,395. 18. Champagne lutes, $1,850 for six. 256: 1. Dress, $2,790. 2. Earrings, $1,732. 4. Watch, price upon request. 7. Dress, $3,190. 10. Ring, $10,000. LAST LOOK 262: Pouch; The Row, L.A. ALL PRICES APPROXIMATE.
VOGUE IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2016 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VOLUME 206, NO. 5. VOGUE (ISSN 0042-8000) is published monthly by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. S. I. Newhouse, Jr., Chairman Emeritus; Charles H. Townsend, Chairman; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President & Chief Executive Oicer; David E. Geithner, Chief Financial Oicer; Jill Bright, Chief Administrative Oicer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing oices. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see DMM 507.1.5.2); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address corrections to VOGUE, P.O. Box 37720, Boone, IA 50037-0720. 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 email
[email protected]. Please give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. Subscribers: If the Post Oice 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 dissatisied 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 four weeks after receipt of order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to VOGUE Magazine, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For reprints, please email
[email protected] or call Wright’s Media 877-652-5295. For reuse permissions, please email
[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 offer products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers 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.
VOGUE.COM
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
261
Last Look
The Row pouch, After what seemed like an interminable winter, sunny days are here again—specifically in the form of this hand-embroidered, double-faced satin pouch from The Row. With a bright palette in contrast to the reserved look of the rest of the label’s pre-fall collection, this luminous piece features a level of exaggerated embellishment seldom seen on the long, enveloping knits favored by the ladies Olsen. The many-layered silk stitching results in abstract blooms that appear to burst from their lustrous bed—making for a striking hand-held addition to even the most muted ensemble. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ERIC BOMAN
262
VO G U E M AY 2 0 1 6
D ETA I LS, S EE IN TH I S I SSU E
EDITOR: VIRGINIA SMITH
