Innholdsfortegnelse for Sep-14 i Vanity Fair

Though contributing photographer Mario Testino has worked with model Natalia Vodianova (at the Paris shoot, top, and with Testino, above, left) on numerous occasions, for both high-fashion editorials and commercial campaigns, he still comes away impressed with the Russian-born beauty he photographed for this month’s cover and related article, “What Natalia Knows” (page 262). “This woman is a force of nature,” Testino says. “She has children, runs a charity, has a high-profle partner, works as a model. She carries on and the years don’t seem to go by.” In his portfolio for the International Best-Dressed List (page 272), Testino picks up where he left of in the last Style Issue. If 2013’s Best-Dressed portfolio was a night out, this year’s is the morning after. Set on the streets of New…

Iapplaud Monica Lewinsky’s candor, intelligence, and chutzpah [“Shame and Survival,” June]. As a fellow victim of public humiliation—I became a lawyer after many years in the justice system as an ofender; the press decided that the front-page story about me that was most relevant was my stint as a call girl, something I did to support my child and myself—I, too, am concerned with the skewed priorities of the press and society and the liberties they in general take with subjects’ privacy. The fact that women appear to be the most critical of one another is the ultimate humiliation and degradation. We need to spend more time standing up for one another and less time judging. KATHRYN L. SMITHEN Toronto, Ontario Iread with compassion Monica Lewinsky’s article about the humiliation…

What You Should Know About Peter Capaldi already knows what it’s like to be part of a phenomenon with a fervent fan base. His professional breakthrough came in Bill Forsyth’s enduringly beloved indie hit Local Hero (1983), a Scottish-seaside fable in which he played a tremulous oilcompany lackey, and he achieved bona fde U.K. stardom (and boutique renown among American Anglocomedy nerds) via Armando Iannucci’s TV series The Thick of It (2005–12), on which he played the splenetic, inventively profane (“Fuckity-bye!”) political spin doctor Malcolm Tucker. But Capaldi’s latest role has propelled him into a realm where the fans are truly, madly, deeply passionate—and, it must be said, geeky. He was tapped last year by the BBC to play the 12th incarnation of the title character of the 51-year-old sci-f…

Growing up in the Midwest during the 1950s and 1960s, I gave little thought to developments in Ukraine. In fact, it’s safe to say that until the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, I gave Ukraine no thought whatsoever. Even after 1991, all I could have told you was that Ukraine was an area of Russia (which isn’t even correct, it turns out) and there was a famous Ukrainian poet named Taras Shevchenko, whose name I knew because there was a large statue of him outside my apartment in Washington. If you’d told me that what was then called “the Ukraine” actually was a nation that had sufered appallingly under Stalin and was still under Moscow’s thumb, I would not have been astonished, but I wouldn’t have been moved…

WOMEN Cate Blanchett Beatrice Borromeo H.R.H. Crown Princess Mary of Denmark Michel le Dockery Audrey Gelman Vanessa Getty H.M. Queen Máxima of the Netherlands Lupita Nyong’o Emmy Rossum Emma Watson MEN Miguel Báez Vic tor Cruz Benedict Cumberbatch Idris Elba Nei l Pat rick Harris Jef fiKoons Henrik Lundqvist Eddie Redmayne Vito Schnabel Pharrell Williams PROFESSIONALS Sophia Amoruso Rainer Andreesen Amy Ast ley Andrew Bolton Bianca Brandolini d’Adda Charlotte Olympia Del lal Karlie Kloss Natal ie Massenet Eugene Tsai Tong Elie Top COUPLES Frédéric Fekkai and Shirin von Wul fifen Col in and Livia Fir th Lauren and Andres Santo Domingo HALLOFFAME Stacey Bendet H.R.H. Duchess of Cambridge Karl Lagerfeld ORIGINALS King of Bhutan St. Vincent Donna Tart t VF. COMEDITORS ’ PICKS Claudia Adaszewska Kyle Hotchkiss Carone Eddie REDMAYNE…

Charlotte Rampling and Kristin Scott Thomas—a generation apart and quite different actresses. Rampling arrived in the mid-60s with a smoky gaze and the slinky physique of an Egon Schiele, her beauty so silent, catlike, and clawed that her surname has practically become a verb—to rample. (“For a female to render a male helpless with a kind of coldly elusive sexuality” is how Urban Dictionary defines it.) Last winter, at age 68 no less, Rampling was named the new face of Nars cosmetics. Scott Thomas appeared in the mid-80s, more classically romantic, more gleamingly British (all those crispt’s in her name), with a Maid Marian clarity in the eyes and brow. What the two do have in common—along with great bones—is a voice. Neither Rampling nor Scott Thomas was ever the…

CRYSTAL PALACE The Fondation Louis Vuitton, which opens to the public in October, lights up the Bois de Boulogne. Your first instinct, when you see an extraordinary new building that looks like nothing you have ever seen before, is to try to understand it by connecting it to what you know. And so Frank Gehry’s new Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris, looks like sails, and it looks like a boat, and it looks like a whale, and it looks like a crystal palace that is in the middle of an explosion. Some of the innards make you think of Piranesi, and as you look up the stair tower, monuments of Russian Constructivism, such as Vladimir Tatlin’s fantastic spiral tower, might flash through your mind, just as you could stand in…

Charissa Shearer, who is 25, says she never wanted to be anything but an actress. “Since I was about four years old, I would walk around the house wearing plastic sunglasses, saying ‘Gee-whiz,’ even though I wasn’t American.” It’s hardly surprising: the Anglo-Irish beauty is the niece of Daniel Day-Lewis and the daughter of V.F. contributor Tamasin Day-Lewis and the television executive John Shearer. Her grandfather Cecil Day-Lewis was Britain’s poet laureate from 1968 until his death, in 1972. “I was brought up with a strong sense that I must always be myself. I wanted to act to find what is underneath the surface and to discover the things that we can’t talk about but that form who we are. I am fascinated by impulses, and my earliest impulse was…

As male ingénue parts go, few rank higher on the scale of infamy than the lead in The Blue Lagoon, the role that brought the lithe, beachpermed Christopher Atkins a depressing sort of immortality and, in 2012’s remake, launched the film career of 25-year-old Brenton Thwaites, an easygoing former soap actor from Australia who was last seen (as Prince Phillip) with Angelina Jolie in Disney’s $200 million Maleficent. Fairytale-prince looks and the ability to carry off a loincloth scene could be characteristics sufficient to rocket Thwaites to stardom, but the Cairns, Queensland, native has serious parts in his sights, and one under his belt: he has the lead in Phillip Noyce’s screen adaptation (out this month) of Lois Lowry’s futuristic novel The Giver. Thwaites plays Jonas, whose life of Utopian…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Family, friends, laughter, and music so loud you feel it inside. Which living person do you most admire? Any homosexual or transgender people fighting for their rights anywhere in the world. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? My personality. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Insincerity. What is your greatest extravagance? Diamonds. What is your favorite journey? Any journey that leads me home. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Patience. And silence. On what occasion do you lie? In the past, I may have lied to myself. I hope that is not true anymore. What do you dislike most about your appearance? I believe in accepting your appearance, not disliking it. Which living person do…

In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays an arrogant weatherman who fnds himself stuck in a time loop, condemned to repeat a single (and increasingly tumultuous) 24-hour period until—after doing himself harm in every imaginable manner—he fnally understands that he must change his ways or he’ll remain stuck in the loop forever. I’d never really thought of the movie as a parable of U.S. foreign policy, but waking up to fnd Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and other Bush-era neocons on TV every morning is enough to put any sentient citizen in a Groundhog Day frame of mind. The unapologetic architects of two costly and catastrophic wars, snarling bravely from their well-remunerated and safe redoubts, want America back in the intervention business. It almost doesn’t matter where—Iraq, for sure, but maybe Syria…

Whatever our politics, most of us agree that our nation's greatest ethical misjudgmcut (to put it mildly) was slavery, followed by our treatment of Native Americans. We also agree that misconduct by physicians is the worst form of malpractice. (Stockbrokers who defraud investors place a distant, though solid, second.) And that Edward Snowden did not act ethically (but barely: 54 percent). Beyond that, at least on some matters, our ethics seem to break along party lines. Significantly more Republicans than Democrats or Independents among us would turn in our neighbors if we found out they were in the country illegally. The ethics of fast-food restaurants also turn party-specific: Republicans say there's nothing worse than sei-ving unhealthy food. Democrats say that, yes. there is: underpaying the workers who serve that unhealthy…

Out to Lunch with The first thing we know about Livia Firth—though by no means the last—is that she’s married to Mr. Darcy, or to every woman’s idea of the most charming, handsome Englishman on the planet, Col in Firth. But Mrs. Firth (“Call me Livia, please”) is no Jane Austen heroine. She’s a strikingly vivacious Italian who arrived for lunch at Gobo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan looking eager and dazzling in black. Her informal eco-stylishness defnes her. Her jacket, she explained in her Anglo-Italian accent, was from a French brand, Kami Organic, and was made with recycled leather and organic wool; her T-shirt was from the U.S. brand Stewart & Brown, specialists in organic cotton; her trousers, from the London shop Joseph, weren’t “eco” or “ethical,”…

It Girls romise us we won’t look like Gossip Girls,” Noor Fares protests while preparing for her photo shoot with Eugenie Niarchos. It’s true these best friends are as privileged and beautiful as the characters in the TV series, but instead of catand boyfriend swaps, Niarchos and Fares, both 28, spent their adolescence completing complex geology courses and founding ambitious jewelry companies. Niarchos, the daughter of Greek shipping heir Philip Niarchos, was raised in Paris, and graduated with a degree in jewelry design from the Gemological Institute of America in London. Her first foray into design was a collaboration with the French jewelry house Repossi when she was 19. Fantasy and exotic creatures are the dominant influences of Venyx, the name of her brand (a hybrid of Venus and onyx).…

THE IRONMAN NIGHTLIFE DECATHLON Digital Reboot & Rally “The camera phone basically killed off the V.I.P. room as an arena where anything interesting might happen,” laments journalist-cum-late-night-liability Anthony Haden-Guest, three-time winner of Spy magazine’s infamous Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathlon. “There’s not nearly as much drunkenness as there was back then, and certainly not as much fun. I can hardly remember the last time I saw a queue of giggling girls waiting to use a restroom.” “Back then” was the late 1980s, when Spy annually dispatched reporters to chronicle Haden-Guest, Jay McInerney, Carl Bernstein, and others as they partied their way across Manhattan, awarding points for dance moves busted, free drinks downed, and bar tabs abandoned. “Of course, it’s all self-promotion now,” says Haden-Guest, a hint of regret in his…

IT’S A STREET—PERHAPS IN MANHATTAN, PERHAPS IN LONDON, PERHAPS ONLY IN THE MIND’S EYE—WHERE CLOTHES CREATE THE CLIMATE. MARIO TESTINO SNAPS 16 MEMBERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL BEST-DRESSED LIST, INCLUDING Ronan Farrow, Dasha Zhukova, Jeremy Irons, AND Betty Catroux, AS THEY STRUT THEIR STYLE Take a stroll along the Best-Dressed Boulevard. It’s an urbane avenue situated somewhere not too far from the “famous thoroughfare” of Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ On the Ritz.” A fashionable lovers’ lane recalling Marcel Proust’s Allée des Acacias, it is populated by boulevardiers who pause in their promenades to make phone calls, or who wander accompanied by young beauties. Gleaming vehicles transport veiled ladies who step out for the sole purpose of turning heads. All inhabitants understand that to get dressed is to show respect. The climate is…

These nine young American designers may not exactly be cut from the same cloth, but they have one thing in common: they are unstoppable! Pictured here alongside their muses, they are some of the most sought-after designers in the industry at the moment. Yet we can hardly call them the new kids on the block—one has dressed the First Lady for the 2009 and 2013 inaugural balls (Jason Wu, who recently added the title of creative director of Hugo Boss to his résumé); three (Nicholas Kirkwood, Christopher Kane, and Joseph Altuzarra) have deals with major fashion groups, including LVMH and Kering; Jennifer Fisher and Tabitha Simmons are the accessories darlings of the moment; Simon Spurr is breathing new life into Kent & Curwen; and Public School (Maxwell Osborne and Dao-Yi…

Anyone who has heard of Tavi Gevinson probably already knows more about her than I do. I don’t like the Internet and I don’t like computers. I realize that by maintaining this attitude I am exiling myself from the most vital cultural outlet of my own time, but I can’t help it. I have never read a blog and am not entirely sure what they are. It follows that I had never heard of Tavi—her blog, Style Rookie, or her online magazine, Rookie, which apparently reached one million views just five days after its September 2011 launch, or the tedxTeen talk she gave when she was just 15—before she auditioned for the upcoming Broadway premiere of my 1996 play, This Is Our Youth. When we cast her, I was subsequently…

From the beginning of his career, in 1992, Alexander McQueen defined himself as a designer who trafficked in raunch, filth, and perversion so heightened it was almost funny. He was an outsider, and he reveled in it, but only three years later, he was losing himself. He had just shown his autumn-winter 1995–96 collection, “Highland Rape,” and it was his breakout: his models stormed the runway with bare breasts, wearing slashed tartan and lace and punk-rock rubber pants. It made McQueen a star, and now he wanted to fit in with the fashion people he’d once ridiculed: he’d already had his teeth fixed, and would later have liposuction on his stomach and lose the wattle under his chin. He took to life at Hilles, Isabella and Detmar Blow’s country pile,…

For Mario Testino, real style is not necessarily about the red carpet or the gala party. Instead, it’s about what’s worn on the street —with family, friends, pets, and maybe even a new conquest. The idea behind this year’s Best-Dressed shoot, Testino explains, “was to show how people have a personal style on an everyday basis,” and to “catch people in real life, candid and unguarded.” V.F. fashion and style director Jessica Diehl, who collaborated with Testino, believes the portfolio achieved its aim of “authenticity.” Nicky Haslam, for example, wears a Savile Row suit from his own collection, and Helena Bonham Carter is tight-laced into a corset dress confected by a new favorite young designer, Miss Rosie Red. “Helena really loves costumes,” Diehl notes, “the more madcap and eccentric the…

From her office in New York City, Jenna Lyons, J. Crew’s 45-year-old president and executive creative director, oversees everything from designs, fabrics, store interiors, and marketing campaigns to collaborations with jewelry-makers, heritage brands, artists, and perfumers. (J. Crew will debut its first two women’s fragrances this month.) Given the green light by the company’s chairman and C.E.O., Mickey Drexler, Lyons has delivered a splash of coveted cool that complements the brand’s stable of wardrobe basics. This past year, J. Crew opened its doors in Lon don and Hong Kong, ofcially marking the glo bal i zation of the beloved American brand. —PUNCH HUTTON I love the configuration of this Massimo Vitali photograph. It’s transportive. My ideal holiday is one without Wi-Fi access. We’re working on a fine-jewelry collection with Jennifer…

It is time to roll up the red carpet, return it to the factory showroom, and let famous faces attached to famous bodies walk among us as free people, not as fashion perps and exotic pets—clickbait snack meats. “More will mean worse,” the novelist Kingsley Amis prophetically grumbled, and the red-carpet procession—once such a stately ritual—has stretched into a forced march, an endless series of campaign stops for stars striking poses and beaming smiles unnatural for any normal being, putting a strain on their intergalactic alloys. When the red-carpet ceremony was limited to gala occasions—lavish premieres, the Academy Awards (its red carpet was introduced in 1961, but it wasn’t until the Oscars were telecast in color, in 1966, that it became synonymous with that night of nights), the opening of…

If you happened to be living under a rock last summer you might have missed 23-year-old model Emily Ratajkowski’s stunning breakout as one of the nearly naked dancers in Robin Thicke’s controversial “Blurred Lines” video. More than 320 million views on YouTube later, Ratajkowski is silent) still stands behind director Diane Martel’s daring but admits, “I didn’t expect the video to become this popculture phenomenon.” Director David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network) took notice; he cast her in his next movie, Gone Girl, which is due out in October. In the film, based on Gillian Flynn’s best-selling 2012 novel, Ratajkowski plays Andie, a college student and mistress of a journalist (and possible wife murderer) played by Ben Affleck. On the subject of working with an Oscar-nominated director famous for…

VODIANOVA WEARS A COAT, SHOES, AND, OPPOSITE, GLOVES, ALL BY DIOR. 'Natalia does not tell you her story the way an American would,” says Bruce Weber, the photographer. “You don’t get any of that melodrama. With Natalia: it happened, it’s simple, and that’s the way it is. Just like the women in a Chekhov play, she has this extraordinary resilience. She doesn’t let her difficult past stop her.” In fact, the past drives her like a Ferrari on the last lap of the Formula 1 Grand Prix. Natalia, 32, is the once-you’ve-seen-her-you-never-forget-her blueeyed Russian model Natalia Vodianova, who electrifed fashion runways in London, New York, Milan, and Paris a dozen years ago, when she starred in something like 40 shows that season. Mind you, this was two weeks after she…

When Carmen Dell’Orefice posed for Salvador Dalí in his suite at the St. Regis hotel, in Manhattan, in the spring of 1946, she was 14 and already a year into a modeling career whose unique, gravity-defying trajectory continues to gather momentum today. Her evolution from shy, skinny teenager to stillsexy grande dame has been charted by the defining image-makers of successive generations, from Beaton, Avedon, and Penn to Bruce Weber, Terry Richardson, and Nick Knight. Not bad for a girl who grew up in Depression-era New York, the daughter of a Hungarian dancer and an Italian concert violinist. Beauty has been her passport, gallows humor and an old soldier’s discipline her unbreachable defenses against life’s cross-currents: there were three “successful marriages that didn’t last” (she has a daughter, Laura, 61,…

SWAN’S SONG A corridor of the Agnelli apartment at 770 Park Avenue, in New York, featuring Tamara de Lempicka’s portrait of the Marquis d’Afflitto (circa 1925). Opposite, Marella Agnelli, photographed by Horst P. Horst at Villar Perosa, outside Turin, 1967. When she married the dashing Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli, in 1953, MARELLA AGNELLI entered a very different world from the conservative, aristocratic circles of her youth, a life of streamlined yachts, fast cars, and glamorous parties. In an adaptation from her memoir, she recalls the jet-set circuit—New York, Saint-Moritz, the Riviera—her shattered friendship with Truman Capote, and the Moroccan Eden she has created since Gianni’s death How did Gianni and I meet? It feels as if I had always known him, but the truth is that we met through his…

I met Madame Claude in her Los Angeles exile in 1981. Despite the comforts and status of her A-table at the lodestar Hollywood commissary Ma Maison, despite the homesickness-curing cuisine of Wolfgang Puck, and despite having her hand kissed by the likes of Swifty Lazar and Johnny Carson, France’s—and, surely, the world’s—most exclusive madam was as depressed and displaced as Napoleon on St. Helena. She had relocated to L.A. in 1977, after French authorities had begun pursuing her for tax evasion. I was hoping to cheer her up with a pot of gold in the form of a seven-figure book advance for a tell-all we would write together. We had been introduced by a rising young filmmaker, a member of the post-Shah Persian diaspora whose family included a Claude regular…

Actor Boyd Holbrook, 32, has all the trademarks of a traditional movie star—height, good looks, brooding demeanor, and devilmay-care smile. He hails from Kentucky—the Appalachian version, not the Derby version—and has maintained a lifelong love of the arts. “I wrote a lot when I was a kid, like really bad pretentious poetry, and I drew constantly,” Holbrook admits. After high school, he worked for U.P.S. and later a department store, where he happened upon actor Michael Shannon (Man of Steel, Boardwalk Empire), a fellow Kentuckian. “I recognized him from Vanilla Sky and we just got to talking about acting and he said to get into theater.” Soon after, Holbrook started doing carpentry for a local playhouse and met a photographer who encouraged him to go into modeling. Holbrook eventually moved…