Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2022 i Vanity Fair

When the Dobbs decision came down in June, I felt the urge to speak to people who had fought so hard for abortion rights before 1973—those who first envisioned an America in which abortion access was a federal protection. As it happens, I had recently met Gloria Steinem at an event for CARE, the humanitarian organization where I serve as co–vice chair of the board, and we had talked among other things about the art and fun of magazine making. At various points in her storied career, Gloria has been an activist, organizer, writer, leader, and a founding editor of Ms. magazine, which marks its 50th anniversary this year. So I was thrilled to invite her to be a special contributing editor to this issue, in which we highlight artists…

LIKE ITS SIGNATURE dish, a twice-baked potato heaped with the good stuff, Caviar Kaspia feels at once cozy and decadent. Since 1953, sophisticates and gastronomes have been flocking to this institution’s Parisian mother ship, a clubby, wood-paneled secondstory space above the Place de la Madeleine, not far from where Russian émigré Arcady Fixon began the business in 1927. The fashion world’s high rollers have in particular embraced Caviar Kaspia. It’s the place to entertain tastefully but lavishly. (A spud runs between 98 and 1,083 euros, depending on the caviar. The rest of the menu features lots of smoked fishes, with an emphasis on salmon, and other seafood.) During couture or ready-to-wear weeks, the place heaves with the likes of Giambattista Valli, Tom Ford, Betty Catroux, Naomi Campbell, Valentino, and Carine…

“WHEN THE PANDEMIC hit,” the author and critic Darryl Pinckney tells me, “this mood came on me to remember what felt, at the time, like a golden age.” His resulting memoir, Come Back in September, out from FSG, recalls Pinckney’s education under and friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, cofounders of The New York Review of Books, from taking Hardwick’s 1973 writing class at Barnard through 1989, when he was regularly contributing to the Review. The author, drawing from his diaries, offers a tender and unvarnished glimpse of two cultural milieus: his agemates’—Lucy Sante, Sigrid Nunez—and that of Hardwick, Epstein, and Susan Sontag: “the three stars of the great table of contents that was Manhattan,” he writes. He name-dropped Hardwick to James Baldwin, was witness to her divorce from…

IN THE TITLE of her seminal 1971 essay, art historian Linda Nochlin posed a question that would challenge the art world fundamentally: “Why have there been no great women artists?” A rhetorical question, but no less profound for the way it pushed us to acknowledge the great omissions of art history. Of course there had been great women artists. Through the work of pioneering scholars, courageous curators, and brave institutions, we have benefited from a radical re-envisioning of art history that laid bare pro-found exclusions. This work of a generation has given the opportunity to celebrate those women whose presence and practice were forgotten, to honor their contributions, and to acknowledge these artists who’ve paved the way for reinvention and reimagination. Those unwavering pioneers shaped an understanding of art at its…

When and where were you happiest? Collaborating with great artists on theater, opera, and film projects. What is your greatest regret? How much time I sit in front of a computer. What or who is the greatest love of your life? Elliot Goldenthal, my partner in art and life. What is your idea of perfect happiness? A fall day on the beach with Elliot and my dog, Luna, and the sea, sand, and sky. What is your current state of mind? Vacillating between excitement about the beauty of nature, future projects, hope for positive change and utter disgust for the abuse of nature, cynicism about the reality of getting dream projects off the ground, and nagging fear that humans are bent on destruction. What do you most value in your friends?…

AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT, there are reasons to hope and reasons to fear. There is a positive and negative outcome of whatever is going on right now. For instance, a global pandemic is still with us, and no one would have wished it. Yet this pandemic has produced a shared consciousness, a concern for events and people around the world, that is a first in my long lifetime. Whether there is an outbreak in Australia or Africa, New Delhi or New York, pandemics render vulnerable anyone and everyone on Spaceship Earth. Wherever there is a cure or prevention, danger or safety, it is only a matter of time and human choices before it reaches all of us. Yet to create positive choices, there has first to be a sense of…

THE HEEL OF a patent leather stiletto pierces an apple. A model in nylons and a neat red bob, surrounded by hooks heavy with raw meat, shivers in a warehouse. Steven Klein (Phaidon), the photographer’s first monograph, drips with his signature juxtapositions: sexuality and danger amid the bourgeois and industrial. Klein is an image maker in every sense of the term, especially when the sense is celebrity: Who else could have created the instantly iconic images of Brad Pitt’s bare Fight Club–era buttocks, Lady Gaga in a red latex nun habit, Kim Kardashian wearing nothing but a Prada bag? One of Klein’s most fruitful collaborations has been with the queen of iconography herself: Madonna. “It is rare to meet another human who is tuned in to your frequency,” she tells…

WHAT TELLS TIME? On a watch too dignified to register text messages or heartbeats, two slim hands do the work, making their rounds, minute by hour. So it goes further down the wrist—only there, the increments in question are years. “The horrible, sexist phrase ‘A woman shows her age through her hands’—I mean, it’s true,” says Soft Services cofounder Annie Kreighbaum, describing the thin-skinned (and genderagnostic) zone weathered by sun and wind and soap. Theraplush, a new overnight hand mask with a 0.05 percent dose of retinol (to speed cell renewal) and colloidal oatmeal (soothing even for eczema), is a fitting addition for the year-old brand created by Glossier alums; the mission is to address hitherto unchic body concerns, such as acne and kera tosis pilaris. Here, every detail is…

ON THE AFTERNOON OF AUGUST 19, SEVERAL HUNDRED CONSERVATIVE ACTIVISTS STREAMED INTO THE BALLROOM AT THE WYNDHAM GRAND hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. The grassroots event was billed as a “Unite and Win” rally for Doug Mastriano, the Donald Trump–backed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate who was campaigning on Trump’s big lie, that Democrats stole the 2020 election. But Mastriano was only the warm-up act for the headliner, who had drawn me and members of the national press corps to Pennsylvania: Ron DeSantis. The first-term Florida governor strutted onstage in a boxy suit and red tie, flinging white “Ron DeSantis” baseball caps into the sea of unmasked faces. The sound system blasted “Sweet Florida,” a country tribute anthem the Lynyrd Skynyrd–adjacent band Van Zant wrote for him. The music wrapped and the crowd…

CAITLIN BERNARD, MD Physician, Indiana Tattooed on Caitlin Bernard’s left foot is the image of a coat hanger and the words “Trust Women.” The 38-year-old Indiana-based ob-gyn got it years ago; it was intended as a reminder of life before Roe v. Wade. Bernard has long paired her medical career with advocacy. She was a plaintiff in an unsuccessful 2019 American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit to reverse Indiana’s near-total ban on second-trimester abortions. Post-Roe, Indiana became the first state to pass an abortion ban. Now, Bernard is girding for another legal fight—this time against Republican Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita, who she says maligned her practice as Bernard became a lightning rod in one of the most publicized cases after the Dobbs decision stripped federal abortion protections and turned the…

Peter VAN AGTMAEL “THE AFTERMATH,” P. 104 “The end has returned to the beginning,” says photographer and author Van Agtmael, who chronicles post-9/11 America. “Returning to Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover was the culmination of decades of work.” Van Agtmael’s most recent book, Sorry for the War, was published in 2021. Thelma GOLDEN “FORWARD VISION,” P. 74 As director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Golden has cemented the institution as a global leader in art and innovative education. “My work is unequivocally indebted to the breakthroughs made by these incredible women,” she says of our portfolio subjects. Patti WILSON “THE LIZZO SHOW,” P. 48 “Working with Lizzo was phenomenal. She brings a real presence to the set and was eager to get into a full look…

TO HEAR GLORIA Steinem describe the Ms. magazine office during its inaugural year of 1972 calls to mind a feminist workers’ utopia. The editorial team conducted meetings in a talking circle, passing a stick to indicate who was speaking. Salaries were need-based. When not in the “tot lot,” the art director’s five-year-old delivered mail via tricycle. Fifty years later, to flip through the magazine’s first year is to fall into something of a time warp. “I didn’t anticipate, then,” says Steinem, “that I would be here at age 88 confronting not exactly the same versions of issues, but the same kinds of issues.” Childcare. Pay equality. Mass incarceration. Angela Davis on the importance of writing for, about, and by Black women. Cynthia Ozick on the absurdity of defining a person…

IN AUGUST 2021, after US forces had hastily departed Afghanistan, the leaders of the Taliban held their first press conference since completing the conquest of the country. For the first time in years, it seemed, the world’s attention was focused on the war-torn nation. In a break with the past, the Taliban spokesman vowed to honor women’s rights “within our framework of Sharia [law].” A Taliban official agreed to be interviewed by a female TV journalist. This apparently conciliatory attitude came as a surprise to many, given the lack of guarantees for women’s rights in the fine print of the peace deal that the US and the Taliban had negotiated the year before. Many hoped that the more moderate elements of the Taliban would now be dictating policy—and that the hard-fought…