Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2022 i Vanity Fair

There’s a scene near the end of Olivia Wilde’s new film, Don’t Worry Darling, in which Olivia—a triple threat here, acting, directing, and producing—delivers a line that opened up a whole other dimension of the movie’s plot and also quietly tore at my heart. I was still thinking about it days later, when I read the first draft of Julie Miller’s excellent interview and recognized, in Olivia’s passion and candor, her ability to both see the big picture and to land on the exact words to convey a specific moment, a specific emotion or experience. Olivia appears in all her guises in Emma Summerton’s evocative photographs—playful, pensive, assured, seductive—inhabiting a range that, as a rising director, she is helping make possible for other actors too. We’re lucky to live in…

“LIKE MOTHER USED TO MAKE” Shirley Jackson “I find this short story even more unnerving than Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’ It was the inspiration for my story ‘G.’” ATLANTA FX “The world of Atlanta is like ours, but sometimes there’s an invisible car or a restaurant that serves human hands. The surreal elements are so nonchalantly, seamlessly incorporated.” MY BED Tracey Emin “This 1998 installation is the preserved artifact of the artist’s bed after a multiple-day bender instigated by a life crisis. I thought of the book as an artifact of a brief time period, a shedding of skin. Due to physical ailments, I had to write while lying down, and many stories came from my dreams.”…

AT THE END of July, the England women’s national team was en route to a European championship, and the Japanese British musician Rina Sawayama, though not a soccer fan, told her go-to makeup artist that she wanted to show her support. “I feel like doing something from the 2000s,” Mona Leanne recalls Sawayama saying, and Bend It Like Beckham— the box office smash from 2002—came to mind. It was a time, the pair remembered with some amusement, of pale, shimmery eye shadow and icy pink Nivea lip balm. Sawayama put on an England jersey, soccer-length socks, and London designer Martine Rose’s recent reinterpretation of Nike Shox (est. 2000); Leanne added a silver lip and frost-blue eye, teeing up a ready comparison to Sporty Spice. Such alchemy is also present in…

DEEDA BLAIR HAS had what she describes as an “interesting life.” From her Manhattan home, she recalls organizing JFK’s final presidential campaign event and fundraising for AIDS research during the early days of that pandemic. But she was also muse to Andy Warhol and Cecil Beaton, and summered with Hubert de Givenchy. She has filled 22 scrapbooks with images from nine decades of travels; she peruses them while watching MSNBC. (We speak the morning after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. “Last night,” she says, “I put down what I was looking at.”) Her book, Deeda Blair: Food, Flowers & Fantasy (Rizzoli), edited by Deborah Needleman, distills a life well lived. Tidy collages showcase inspirations—a Matisse, say, belonging to Mary Lasker, on whose foundation board Blair served as vice president—and photos from…

In the world of legacy fashion houses, each designer appointment marks a new era, whether the collections become soul-shifting or fall short of a match made in heaven. Ferragamo recently appointed 27-year-old Maximilian Davis as creative director following a year of restructuring, while the late Virgil Abloh left behind a void at Louis Vuitton menswear that’s yet to be filled (strong bets rest on Grace Wales Bonner or Martine Rose). Here’s a primer on some of the major swaps and shifts, from accessories to menswear to overall creative direction, that have shaped today’s fashion landscape. KEY…

THE SCENE AT Paris’s Palais Brongniart on a gleaming July afternoon is busy but not chaotic; organized but not rigid. The palatial neoclassical building, which once housed the Paris Stock Exchange, is being transformed for Fendi’s fall-winter 2022 haute couture show. In the days leading up to it, they’ve been using the space as an office and atelier. The lobby is reserved for staffers dressed in black, checking in models and members of the show’s production team and granting them all-building access with Fendi-emblazoned wristbands. In one sprawling room with wood floors and vaulted ceilings, Silvia Venturini Fendi—whose grandparents Adele and Edoardo founded the Italian house in 1925, and who currently serves as artistic director of menswear, accessories, and children—sits behind a table next to Kim Jones, artistic director of…

Miuccia Prada, a designer’s designer to her core, grew up trawling thrift stores for vintage pieces and developing an abiding love of supershort hemlines. In her fall-winter 2022 collection for Miu Miu, she returned to her roots in more ways than one: an array of internet-breaking mini shorts and skirts paraded down the runway, accompanied by a limited selection of one-of-a-kind upcycled embroidered and embellished leather jackets, each made from vintage pieces sourced secondhand. What’s old is brand-new again.…

THE SUNSET STRIP in the ’60s had a curious mascot twirling above the Sahara Hotel sign: a cowgirl visible from Gore Vidal’s room at the Chateau Marmont. “For me she is Hollywood, and mesmerizing,” says the title character in Myra Breckinridge, Vidal’s 1968 novel. Daniel Patrick Giles might agree, given the L.A. arcana infused into his new fragrance project, Perfumehead. The seven hand-poured extraits, debuting at Violet Grey, glimmer with lore. Cosmic Cowboy (musk, orris, cinnamon) takes cues from Myra, Orville Peck, and a Nudie-suited Robert Redford. Moon Flower imagines 3 a.m. blooms along a Runyon Canyon hike. “Over my shoulder is the Chateau Marmont,” Giles says from his home in West Hollywood, describing the legendary hotel as a nexus for Perfumehead’s “osmocosm.” Room No is an overt nod, with…

OUR MISSING HEARTS In Celeste Ng’s dystopian near future, ruled by an anti-“un-American” entity, a boy named Bird searches for his mother. “Someone was always watching, it seemed.” (Penguin) SHRINES OF GAIETY Post–WW I London sets the stage for Kate Atkinson’s expansive Jazz Age jaunt, which centers on “notorious Soho nightclub owner Nellie Coker” and her family, friends, and foes. (Doubleday) THE BOOK OF GOOSE When her childhood best friend dies giving birth, Agnès, a writer, revisits the choices and chance that led to their lives’ divergence in Yiyun Li’s story of human bonds and the wiles of storytelling. (FSG) LIBERATION DAY George Saunders returns to short-form fiction in this collection brimming with droll, psyche-plumbing wit: workplace theft and consequence; a writer out for revenge. (Random House) SWEET, SOFT, PLENTY…

The ancient Egyptians saw the scarab as an emblem of rebirth. This collaboration between Judith Leiber and Lanvin, created from an original mold cast by Leiber herself almost 40 years before her death in 2018, marries that storied symbolism with the more modern influence of Art Deco architecture. Taking as its base Leiber’s long-favored brass box, the bag winks Jazz Age glamour from each of its more than 10,000 European crystals, which took an artisan nearly a week to bead by hand. Long live a beetle as bright as the Chrysler Building, as big as the Ritz.…

“WHO’S THE BLONDE? Who’s the blonde? The blonde?” A swarm of men—lust or dollar signs in their eyes—clamors to know at a 1950 screening of The Asphalt Jungle, featuring the newly minted Marilyn Monroe. As Joyce Carol Oates writes the scene in her 2000 novel Blonde (a film adaptation by Andrew Dominik arrives this fall, starring Ana de Armas), that word hangs in the air: a metonym for Monroe’s experience of being harangued, adored, and frayed to the very cortex, a hazard of preserving her self-described “pillow-case white.” “That blonde,” the colorist Jenna Perry says, “it’s for a kept woman.” She is referring not to the Hollywood studio system (golden handcuffs of a peroxide sort) but to the tyranny of upkeep. Perry is known instead for her #NYCBlonde, a hand-painted, low-maintenance…

CONSTANCE WU From the star of Fresh Off the Boat and Hustlers: Making a Scene, a memoir in essays that range from finding compassion and acceptance at the Tuckahoe community theater to the strange disparity of not quite recognizing the woman portrayed in her own profiles, out from Scribner. PAUL NEWMAN Created with screenwriter Stewart Stern, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man (Knopf) is part oral history—contributors include Joanne Woodward, Elia Kazan, and dozens of others—and part memoir: Relationships, perceived personal failings, and more are on display. ALAN RICKMAN Madly, Deeply, out from Holt, collects more than two decades of diaries from the late British actor: anecdotes about film and theater parts, his 52-year relationship with his wife, and passing observations—that breakfast, for instance, is “always more fun in…