Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2022 i Vanity Fair

IT WAS OCTOBER 2020, in a tented venue in Waynesville, North Carolina. Andrew Wakefield was set to present his documentary 1986: The Act, the latest in his anti-vaccination cinematic oeuvre, to a group of acolytes. This kind of personal appearance has long been the platform of choice for the handsome, charismatic Englishman, who connected the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism in an infamous retracted paper for the medical journal The Lancet. For years now, parents—mainly mothers—of children with autism and other perceived vaccine injuries have lined up to feel the touch of his hand, share their stories, take a selfie, even though he’s been exiled from the medical establishment. On that October night, supermodel Elle Macpherson, whom Wakefield introduced as “my girlfriend,” was called on to attest…

Diego Luna couldn’t trust the driver. He didn’t think he could trust anybody. And hadn’t he read something about an epidemic of eavesdroppers hacking phones? “That was just my paranoia,” the actor says now. “Not connected to reality.” Still, he pressed his phone so tightly to his ear that it made his face hot, as a voice from thousands of miles away told him secrets from another galaxy. The car was stuck in traffic on the top tier of a double-decker highway in Mexico City. “I was speaking in code words because I was trying not to say too much in the car,” says Luna. The words he was avoiding most strenuously were star and wars. Luna had played the dauntless Rebel spy Cassian Andor in the 2016 film Rogue…

As I write, six weeks have passed since the war began. We are starting to adjust. The death of a person becomes a statistic. It is impossible to adjust. We are watching the war online. The stories we encounter are emerging as if out of a ripped belly, multifaceted grief, without hierarchy. They block any means of perception. How to bear it? The young woman from Mariupol who was rescuing others, killed; wounded people; huge halls in Poland filled with refugees and their pets; children in Kharkiv living in the subway; the ghost buildings of Odesa; ruins everywhere. My writing cannot protect a single person under the bombs, a single house. The war is quicker than any speech against it. Today I again woke up at 5:07 a.m. as if…

IN IMPEACHMENT: American Crime Story, the downfall of a presidency begins in a crappy cubicle. After Sarah Paulson’s Linda Tripp is pushed out of her longtime White House job to toil at the Pentagon, we watch the woman who’d later expose Monica Lewinsky’s illicit affair with President Bill Clinton stew in her bunker-like nine-to-five digs and mull revenge. “It’s a severe diminishment for this person,” says show-runner Sarah Burgess. Adds the FX series’ production designer Jamie Walker McCall: “From the cozy luxury in the White House, she’s sent someplace massive and vast, like she’s just another number in the system.” From the real-life office-building frenzy of Apple TV+’s WeCrashed to more fantastical imaginings, TV shows set in immaculately designed offices reminded work-from-home audiences of what we’ve been missing. In Apple TV+’s…

HEIR MARRIAGE IS like Watergate,” Gaslit creator Robbie Pickering says of John and Martha Mitchell, played by Sean Penn and Julia Roberts in his retelling of the Nixon administration scandal. John Mitchell, the president’s attorney general, became infamous after Watergate, but even prior to that he and Martha were notorious around Washington as a hurricane of a couple. “Their marriage was fun to watch and fun to be in but also horrible,” Pickering says, comparing it to the thrill felt by all the president’s men. “Fascism is fucking fun for a while! That’s why people do it!” Gaslit takes a fresh approach to Watergate by focusing on two couples, the second being John and Maureen Dean, played by Dan Stevens and Betty Gilpin. “We’re going into the show assuming nobody…

HAIR PRODUCTS BY BO STEGALL THE COLLECTION (MARTIN, SHORT), HOUSE OF SKUFF (ALWYN, CLOUD, PATEL), IGK (JAMES), ORLANDO PITA PLAY (GOMEZ, HATHAWAY), REDKEN (LETO), SHEAMOISTURE (HENRY), STARRING BY TED GIBSON (ALL OTHER WOMEN EXCEPT SEYFRIED). MAKEUP PRODUCTS BY CLINIQUE (LE WIS), GIORGIO ARMANI BEAUTY (HATHAWAY), LANCÔME (SEYFRIED), RARE BEAUTY (GOMEZ), TOM FORD (BENTON, BRUNSON, JAMES), DIOR (ALL OTHER WOMEN). NAIL ENAMEL BY DIOR VERNIS (GOMEZ), OPI (HATHAWAY), CHANEL LE VERNIS (ALL OTHER WOMEN EXCEPT SEYFRIED). GROOMING PRODUCTS BY AUGUSTINUS BADER (LETO), BOY DE CHANEL (HENRY), DIOR (ALWYN), GLOSSIER (PATEL), LAMER (KEATON), LIMELIFE BY ALCONE (MARTIN, SHORT), TATCHA (CLOUD). SET DESIGN, ANTHONY ASARO. HAIR, RENATO CAMPORA (SEYFRIED), DANILO (JAMES), SHINYA NAKAGAWA (LETO), ORLANDO PITA (GOMEZ, HATHAWAY), TED GIBSON (ALL OTHER WOMEN). MAKEUP, RACHEL GOODWIN (LEWIS), MOLLY GREENWALD (DAVIS, EINBINDER, LYNSKEY), GENEVIEVE…

Alex MAJOLI “THE GREAT RESISTANCE,” P. 78 One moment lingers in Majoli’s mind from his time documenting Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Romania during the Russian invasion this spring. “I was touched by a father saying goodbye to his son in the Odesa train station,” the Magnum photographer says. “I was in tears taking that picture. The drama is everywhere; the pain is everywhere.” V.F. STAFF “THE LIFE OF THE PARTY,” P. 124 Clockwise from top left: V.F. entertainment director Caitlin Brody, assistant fashion editor Samantha Gasmer, senior visuals editor Cate Sturgess, market editor Kia D. Goosby, associate menswear director Miles Pope, fashion assistant Kaylyn Jade Study, and fashion director Nicole Chapoteau on location at the Beverly Estate in L.A. with photographer Nick Riley Bentham. Awol ERIZKU “FULL SUN,” P. 30…

THIS SPRING, DURING a junk-drawer clean-out, an orange gift card appeared like a Ghost of Wellness Past. A relic from an erstwhile juice chain, it called up the early 2010s, when liquid fasts reigned in fashionable circles. Detox was a buzzword, even as nay-saying doctors noted the body’s sufficient systems for such housekeeping. The methods, be it cayenne-dusted lemonade or hold-your-nose shakes, served as a secular rite: self-purification alongside a whittled frame. “Day two, you are the grumpiest bitch in the world,” the actor Piper Perabo told Allure in 2013, “but by day three, you’re so high, it’s awesome.” It wasn’t long before critics sniffed out hypocrisy within the health posturing. How could body positivity, then coming to the fore, coexist with hypocaloric (and paradoxically costly) programs that left people…

ONE DAY LAST JUNE, Patti Smith opened her laptop, typed a brief message to the thousands of readers of her Substack newsletter, and hit Send. “I would be grateful for any suggestions of songs you think I might try,” she wrote. “Have a good week-end!” Smith began using the rapidly expanding, increasingly influential, and sometimes controversial email publishing platform in March 2021. Coronavirus had put touring on hold, and Smith was working on The Melting, a sort of diary about life in the COVID era, when someone at Substack reached out. Smith was intrigued. Rather than pursuing a printed work that wouldn’t see the light of day for another year or two, she decided to publish The Melting on Substack in real time. She signed one of the company’s “pro”…

THE ESSEX SERPENT Apple TV+ Claire Danes’s character, Cora, cuts a handsome and out-of-place figure striding along a river in Essex, England, as she investigates what locals believe is the return of a deadly sea serpent. Cora is mourning (but not really) an abusive husband and trying, at last, to define who she is—so gray, fittingly, is the color of the day. THE GREAT Hulu Nicholas Hoult’s deposed czar Peter spends much of the historical comedy’s second season on the skids, trying to win back the crown Elle Fanning’s Catherine stole from him. But he does it in style, sporting statement pieces like this lustrous fur-trimmed coat—just the thing to combat a rough Russian winter. THE GOOD FIGHT Paramount+ Diane Lockhart, the formidable attorney played by Christine Baranski first on…

THE WALKING DEAD AMC Can you believe that after a decade-plus of daring rescues and gnarly deaths, AMC’s flagship drama is shuffling to an end—without a single character ever uttering the word zombie?! Here’s hoping Rick Grimes shows up for one last hurrah before the last bite. THIS IS US NBC With hugs and many tissues, the Pearson clan’s timeline-twisting saga—an old-fashioned feel-good weepie, which inspired imitators and made Sterling K. Brown a household name—has come to a close. Yet the slow cooker that so cruelly took patriarch Jack’s life remains at large. INSECURE HBO Issa Rae’s love letter to Los Angeles was as sure-footed as its characters were shaky, confidently following Rae’s Issa and Yvonne Orji’s Molly as they fumbled their way through adulthood. Like its protagonists, the show…

“I MAKE WORK for people to see, but the process is for me,” says Gio Swaby, the Bahamian portrait artist who positions Black joy as an act of resistance. Last spring, not long after starting as an MFA student at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, she sold out her solo debut at Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem: Her large-scale textiles unencumber Black femmes from the politicization of the Black female form. (Roxane Gay was among those collectors.) “The big moments have a lot of duality,” Swaby says. Her recent success, which arrived during a time of mourning, was one such moment. Her mother, whose work as a seamstress proved influential, passed away the year before the show. In Gio Swaby: Fresh Up, out from Rizzoli Electa in…

YOU PERHAPS ALREADY know the story of supermodel Lena Perminova. In case not, here’s a summary: When she was a teenager, Perminova was facing six years in a Siberian prison for selling ecstasy at Russian nightclubs until her dad asked Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB operative turned billionaire, for his help in her case. He helped. And by the time she was 18, Perminova and Lebedev, 27 years her senior, had fallen in love—“A Cinderella Story” was the Harper’s Bazaar headline. Twenty years later, Perminova is a mother of four, philanthropist, and world-renowned fashion influencer with 2.4 million Instagram followers—an “Insta-hero,” as Tatler magazine put it. Other Russian models have followed a similar arc. Irina Shayk was heralded as “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” in the pages of VMan magazine, “going…

On June 18, 2021, an evolutionary biologist named Jesse D. Bloom sent the draft of an unpublished scientific paper he’d written to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president of the United States. The paper he had written—known as a preprint, because it had yet to be peer-reviewed or published—contained sensitive revelations about the National Institutes of Health, the federal agency that oversees biomedical research. In the interest of transparency, he wanted Fauci, who helms an NIH sub-agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), to see it ahead of time. Under ordinary circumstances, the preprint might have sparked a respectful exchange of views. But this was no ordinary preprint, and no ordinary moment. More than a year into the pandemic, the genesis of SARS-CoV-2,…

IN LIFE & BETH, Amy Schumer’s almost 40-year-old character, Beth, never takes off her bra, even in the most intimate moments. Soon it’s revealed that her hang-up stems from a mortifying teenage memory—one pulled straight from Schumer’s life. “It was so humiliating and painful,” she tells Vanity Fair, “and it just kind of stuck with me.” So much of Hulu’s Life & Beth, which Schumer created, cowrote, and stars in, is inspired by the actor’s own experiences, from teenage cruelty to the strained relationship with her mother and her own battle with the hair-pulling disorder trichotillomania. But the series is also funny, finding laughter in those painful, messy memories. As the landscape of television has opened up over the past few years, confessional shows from the minds of singular creators…

What is your most marked characteristic? People tell me it’s my smile. When my face is in repose, I can look quite serious or sad. What is your idea of perfect happiness? Filling out this Proust Questionnaire. I try to be in the moment. What is your greatest fear? Being onstage and forgetting why I’m there. Which living person do you most admire? My partner, who’s helping me with this Proust Questionnaire. With which historical figure do you most identify? Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, Sappho. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Impatience. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Cruelty. What is your greatest extravagance? Amazon.com. What is your favorite journey? I adore Greece. My second favorite is London, where I did a show. Queen…