Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2018 i Vanity Fair

presents At Vanity Fair, we are fortunate enough to meet a bevy of incredibly talented, influential, and interesting people on a daily basis. This month, we’ve profiled 12 of our new friends for your reading pleasure—and we think you’ll like what they’re up to. BRIDGET HELENE BAHL NYC-based Bridget Bahl (@bridget) is the talent behind the blog And I Was Like. Bridget is now a premier destination for fashion, beauty, and travel inspiration. andiwaslike.com ERIN HIEMSTRA Erin Hiemstra created Apartment 34 to be your destination for an intentioned approach to modern living. apartment34.com LIV MICHELI Liv Micheli is the inspiration for the fashion and lifestyle blog, Liv For Luxury. Through visual stories, Liv blends her feminine style with classic staples and shares everything she “Livs” for. livforluxury.com CAITLIN LINDQUIST Dash…

I am a longtime subscriber to Vanity Fair. Most issues have made for great reading; some not so much. The April issue fits into the former category; I read it cover to cover! From James Wolcott’s plaintive essay on pining for Obama (a feeling which I completely share!) to the happier article on the Duchess of Cornwall—and, in between, the tragic story of the El Faro, the brief glances at Jane Fonda and Priyanka Chopra, and the deep dive into Eddie Lampert’s questionable handling of Sears and Kmart—it all resulted in my copy of the April issue becoming ragged at the edges and looking well-worn. CAROLINE DE SOUZA Mission Hills, California TO SIR, WITH LOVE No doubt you will receive many more letters thanking James Wolcott for his wistfully perfect portrayal…

AMERICAN WOMAN Nineties “It girl” Alicia Silverstone plays a 70s mom in this fictionalized version of the childhood of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Kyle Richards. (Paramount Network, June 7) STRANGE ANGEL The brilliant director David Lowery serves as an E.P. of this stranger-than-fiction series about a rocket scientist turned sex cultist. (CBS All Access, June 14) MAKING IT Parks and Recreation pals Nick Offerman and Amy Poehler host this crafting-competition show, for those seeking a little extra warmth in the dog days. (NBC, July 31)…

The fine art of murder has entered its gilded age. Such lavishment of resources. The true-crime genre may no longer throw the long tombstone shadow it once did in nonfiction publishing, but print’s loss has been pixels’ gain. Film, television, and streaming networks are reopening famous cases, redrawing chalk outlines, and hanging the toe tags at peak production capacity, making it hard for even the most devoted forensics freak or legal beagle to keep up with this golden-oldies medley of major homicides and courtroom theatrics. Round and round the corpses go as the carousel continues to spin. O. J. Simpson’s murder trial, the miscarriage of justice that keeps on giving, was the subject of two “event” mini-series in 2016; real-life prosecutor Marcia Clark even scored her own show on A&E,…

When Haifaa al-Mansour’s agent first brought her the offer for her latest movie, an origins tale about Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, the 43-year-old director was perplexed. “I was like, ‘What? I’m from Saudi Arabia, and this is a period movie in English and I don’t know,’” al-Mansour said. But when she read about Shelley, whose authorship of the 1818 gothic novel was questioned because of her sex, al-Mansour found parallels to her own life growing up in one of the most conservative societies in the world, where women just earned the right to vote in 2015 and the right to drive in 2018. “It reminded me of home somehow,” al-Mansour said. “Like when they expect women to be a certain way, their voices are taken for granted. I really connected…

VANESSA GRIGORIADIS Contributing Editor Vanessa Grigoriadis spoke to icons of American women’s gymnastics—including Aly Raisman, Jordyn Wieber, and Maggie Nichols—about the often insidious, insular world of their sport and the fallout from the predation of Larry Nassar. “There needs to be more positive coaching—not coaching through fear,” says Grigoriadis, whose “Spring Forward” begins on page 92. Her book, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus, comes out in paperback this September. GILLIAN LAUB “I have been following their harrowing story,” says photographer Gillian Laub of Raisman, Nichols, and Wieber (above, right), the tenacious gymnasts who, following the crimes of Larry Nassar, are working to detoxify women’s gymnastics for good (“Spring Forward,” page 92). “They were just as I expected: beautiful, strong, and brave.” Laub’s “Southern Rites” exhibition—a 12-year…

AGE: 16. PROVENANCE: Los Angeles. THE FAMILY: Eilish and her older brother, Finneas O’Connell (20), collaborated on music from the start. “We wrote, I sang, he produced—it happened gradually.” THE CATALYST: “I find a lot of inspiration through visuals. When I was 12, I saw Aurora’s “Runaway” music video. Something inside me clicked, like, that is what I want to do, no matter whether it goes anywhere or not.” It has. Her debut single, “Ocean Eyes,” catapulted Eilish to fame, and her unique sound and modern teen spirit have earned her co-signs from Lorde, Lana Del Rey, and Halsey. THE INFLUENCES: “I grew up on the Beatles; I love Linkin Park and Green Day. I heard hip-hop for the first time at 11 and realized what I was missing.” THE…

Summer: the word conjures images of sun-kissed bodies poolside, beachside, strolling down city streets with golden limbs glowing. Not to burst the bubble, but “there’s no such thing as a healthy tan,” says dermatologist and psychiatrist Dr. Amy Wechsler. The facts are sobering. According to the Skin Cancer Foundation, more people in the United States are diagnosed with skin cancer each year than all other cancers combined The sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface comprises two types of ultraviolet rays: UVA (long wave, which penetrates the skin’s thick dermis layer) and UVB (short wave, which causes superficial burns). Both affect all skin tones, and contribute to an increased risk for skin cancer, as well as wrinkles and age spots. And just because you’re not burning doesn’t mean there’s no damage.…

David Lynch’s Room to Dream (Random House) The creative force behind such cult classics as Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks adds color to cultural critic Kristine McKenna’s text with personal anecdotes (“Marriage doesn’t fit into the art life,” says Lynch, who has been married four times) that feature Hollywood titans, including Anthony Hopkins and Isabella Rossellini. Mark and Jay Duplass’s Like Brothers (Ballantine) In this hilarious joint memoir, the brothers—writers, directors, actors, and co-founders of their eponymous production company—describe their childhood and professional relationship, and the years they spent “trying to make a decent piece of art together” before finally hitting their groove. Retta’s So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y’all Don’t Even Know (St. Martin’s) The Parks and Recreation star recounts growing up the child of poor, hardworking Liberian…

The motel, reconfigured and expanded to include 48 rooms, is elegantly contextual, its road-facing side cladded in vertical slats of plain white oak that block out the modern world, while its interior side opens onto pretty views of mature floodplain forest. In a clearing stands a “chime chapel,” a huge, playable sculpture that Stirratt enticed his friends in the artists’ collective New Orleans Airlift to build. A 220-foot-long suspension footbridge leads to the Hoosic’s north bank, and to old Blackinton, whose red-brick mill once supplied woolen fabric for the Union Army’s uniforms. A deconsecrated church near the mill will become the home, this winter, of Loom, a fine-dining restaurant overseen by Burns, the group’s ringer: a James Beard Award winner, late of San Francisco’s celebrated Bar Tartine, who has gone…

THE SUNNY SIDE Warm weather on the East Coast allowed the glitterati to break out the florals—and wallets—to support three worthy causes. Planned Parenthood of New York City’s annual gala honored Laverne Cox and outgoing president Cecile Richards, who bid farewell after more than a decade at the helm. In Midtown Manhattan, The Paris Review threw its Spring Revel, toasting author Joy Williams with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement, while an exuberant David Sedaris accepted the Terry Southern Prize for Humor, telling V.F., “I never win anything!” In Brooklyn, Dustin Yellin hosted the fifth annual Village Fête, an Earth Day soirée to benefit Pioneer Works, his temple to the arts and sciences. On the West Coast, creative forces converged in San Francisco to celebrate the launch of the Santos…

EVENT Genesis at Hollywood’s Biggest Week Genesis once again partnered with Vanity Fair to celebrate Campaign Hollywood—VF’s yearly week-long series of events that has become synonymous with Oscar week, honoring the year’s best talent, artists, and stories. This year, in celebration of the success of 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight and their nominated films, Genesis and Vanity Fair hosted an exclusive toast event at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Beverly Hills. Notable guests included Best Director winner Guillermo del Toro, Best Original Music Score winner Alexandre Desplat, Abbie Cornish, Liz Hannah, Nicholas Hoult, Doug Jones, and more. SHOP Introducing Amanu, a New Type of Sandal With over 400 possibilities for customization, materials from the finest Italian factories, and master-trained makers ready to build your sandal right in front of your…

Few icons of American girlhood are as symbolically complex as elite gymnasts. They appear on the mat as tiny shining birds: gems sewn into their leotards sparkling under bright competition lights, and colorful bows plopped on their French-braided hairdos like feathered crowns. Scouts looking for young gymnasts with the potential to reach the Olympics sometimes spot girls as young as seven. Their careers usually peak before they can vote and end before they can legally order a glass of wine in a restaurant. Yet they are athletes of extraordinary accomplishment and fortitude. They’re strong women, or girls becoming women, who fly through the air seemingly by sheer force of will. As a child glued to the television during the Summer Olympics in the 1980s, I thought of them as real-life…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Cuddling in bed on a Sunday morning with the man I love. Also, applause and standing ovations. What is your greatest fear? Being homeless. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Eartha Kitt. Which living person do you most admire? Leontyne Price gives me life. She broke racial barriers with inimitable poise, grace, and excellence, as well as unbelievable focus and vision. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Thinking that I am less-than. That thinking is cunning, baffling, and insidious, and I must guard against it every hour of every day. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Mean-spiritedness and the inability to set and respect boundaries. What is your favorite journey? After having lost myself in…

‘Everything in my life is a spoiler,” Emilia Clarke tells Joanna Robinson in our summer cover story. The luminous star of Game of Thrones and the new Star Wars movie, two of the most closely guarded and avidly followed creative properties of our time, is not wrong. She who commands dragons must be constantly on her guard lest she let a plot point slip. But let me take a moment to praise the spoiler—or at least take you back to a galaxy far, far away (the Midwest, 38 years ago), when one would have been welcome. Here’s what happened: like most Americans in the summer of 1980, I went to see The Empire Strikes Back, only to walk out two hours later blinking in the harsh sunlight (it must have…

‘H e would never know her; knowledge of another person was ungraspable, a cloud,” writes Lauren Groff—author of the 2015 blockbuster Fates and Furies—in her new short-story collection, Florida (Riverhead). The collection dwells in snake-thick subtropics both literal and figurative: sisters abandoned on a remote island become feral in “Dogs Go Wolf”; couples on vacation in France develop romantic entanglements in “For the God of Love, for the Love of God.” Four stories follow a mother of two who fiercely desires to at once protect her children from the ever encroaching world and prepare them for it. In Florida there is a sense of foreboding but also of hope: “A hurricane developed over the Caribbean,” Groff writes, “but only its edges lashed the shore.” Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and V.F. contributing…

The female body has long been an unruly subject, and a favorite one for women writers seeking to throw a wrench into society’s machinery. In last year’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay calls hers “wildly undisciplined”; in Sick, out in June, Porochista Khakpour presents her relationship to her body as a lifelong battle; in Body Full of Stars: Female Rage and My Passage into Motherhood, Molly Caro May describes the painful awareness she feels toward her corporeal self during and after her pregnancy. At the heart of each is an inherent chasm between body and mind, between physical demands and societal rules. These memoirists find progenitors in the fiction of earlier writers: Charlotte Brontë, Anaïs Nin, Clarice Lispector, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Take, for example, “The Yellow Wallpaper,”…

For Reika Alexander, running a restaurant is not unlike playing a jazz riff. As a classically trained pianist from Tokyo, who studied jazz in England, “it’s the improvisation that connects the dots for me,” Alexander says. “You have to be nimble. And that’s what it’s like at a restaurant—the performance creates an experience for guests.” EN Japanese Brasserie, her hot spot in Manhattan’s West Village, recently celebrated its 13th anniversary, and now her bi-coastal clientele have something more to toast: Chateau Hanare has just opened in Los Angeles. For Alexander, this verse started softly (a call from hotelier André Balazs) before finding the key (an abandoned cottage nestled behind Balazs’s Chateau Marmont hotel, on the Sunset Strip). Next, the tempo (chef Abe Hiroki’s kaiseki menu—“think more fried chicken than sushi”),…

On the day that they entered the headquarters of a renowned technology company, members of the security unit were nondescript—quiet as a mouse. It had to be that way, naturally. For months prior, the tech behemoth’s upper management had suspected that something nefarious was going on inside their organization: files were disappearing; millions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property was being copied, they believed—personal and private information, too. Worse, the executives in the corporate suite were mystified about the culprit. But they recognized the veracity of an adage in the tech industry: There are two kinds of companies—the ones that have been hacked, and the ones that haven’t been hacked yet. As the tech company’s staff went about their usual quotidian tasks, working at their computers and carrying on with…

On a rainy April afternoon, Emilia Clarke enters the bright, airy Egyptian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art the way so many movie-lovers before her have: quoting Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally. Adopting the unsourceable accent Crystal uses opposite Meg Ryan in a famously improvised scene filmed in this very room, Clarke starts stuttering, “Pah-pah-paprikash.” Our amused if bewildered guide, too young to get the reference, adds the 1989 rom-com to her list of movie recommendations from Clarke, who has already gushed about the 2017 religious drama Novitiate. Chuckling over this unlikely double feature, Clarke assures her, “You have two incredible movies coming your way.” One reference the guide does get: Game of Thrones, the HBO juggernaut which stars Clarke as its most unstoppable heroine, Daenerys Targaryen.…