Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2023 i Vanity Fair

THE ODORAMA CARD Polyester, 1981 This film, starring Divine and Tab Hunter, came with scratch ’n’ sniff cards, a gimmick borrowed from Hustler’s lilac-scented spreads. “I found out that 3M had a library of smells,” Waters says. “People paid me money to smell a fart!” THAT ROACH DRESS Hairspray, 1988 “Rats and roaches have been in all my movies,” he says, including his ode to ’60s dance shows. Ricki Lake’s Tracy Turnblad triumphs in a bugged-out gown. “You celebrate what other people think is negative, you make it your own, and you win.” THOSE KILLER HEELS Serial Mom, 1994 Kathleen Turner, who shines as a deliciously unhinged murderer, cannot abide a woman wearing white after Labor Day. “My mother taught me that,” says Waters. “It’s the only thing I’m right-wing…

ERIKA AYERS BADAN kicked off her heels and sank into the quiet of her Connecticut home. It was the run-up to the spring sprint for Barstool Sports, the company she’s run for seven years. There was the Super Bowl, March Madness. And then there was the deal with Penn Entertainment, a casino and racetrack company, to fully acquire Barstool, after buying a third of the business years earlier, with plans to take on the whole thing in 2023. She knew it was coming, but these last few weeks were filled with the minutiae of it. She paid visits to all of the cable business channels to field questions about what this would mean for the company, which, since its founding, revolutionized the way media companies build community and make actual…

AMERICAN TENNIS HISTORY is filled with the boldest of boldface names—trailblazers and superstars such as Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King, Stan Smith, and Chris Evert among many, many others who reached the heights of global fame and renown. While each generation had its own heroes, it wasn’t until the ’90s, when an explosion of talent and personality brought us Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, Jim Courier, Todd Martin, and Michael Chang, that a whole cohort of Americans dominated the global stage at the same time. Their contrasts in styles, personalities, and paths to greatness commanded unrelenting coverage and a place in popular culture until the ’00s introduced two Williams sisters from Compton, California, who first challenged, then dominated, and ultimately transformed the sport in their own image—Venus becoming the activist…

DESTIN DANIEL CRETTON was just trying to give a struggling young actor a job. How hard could it be? He and LaKeith Stanfield had worked together three years earlier, on a 22-minute short film Cretton made in 2009, called Short Term 12, which won the Grand Prix award at the Sundance Film Festival. Now Cretton was turning it into a full-length feature. As with his original short, the script was based on his two-year experience postcollege working in a juvenile care facility—the story of a shift leader at a group home, her weary young staff, and the scarred kids in their care. Stanfield had made his onscreen debut in the short, playing the critical role of the facility’s senior resident, a quiet, seething young man on the cusp of his…

Nicola FORMICHETTI “LIFE OF RILEY,” P. 66 “Riley Keough radiates beauty inside and out,” says creative director and stylist Formichetti, who spent his childhood in Japan and Italy and now splits his time between New York and LA. He has served as fashion director for Lady Gaga for the past decade and worked as creative director for Mugler and Diesel. Jason REMBERT “VANITIES,” P. 46 Rembert’s inventive and elegant work has graced red carpets and runways worldwide. The stylist and designer behind the fashion house Aliétte brought his affinity for bright colors and unexpected textures to VF’s shoot with Lewis Pullman, whom Rembert calls “a talent who brings clothing to life.” Dana SCRUGGS “THE AMERICANS,” P. 94 “I asked [the athletes] to re-create movements used during tennis, which allowed for…

“WE SMILE WHILE our faces burn, we love it so. Because we know magic is happening, just like in a fairy tale.” By the time Mirabelle Nour—the narrator of Mona Awad’s latest novel, Rouge (Marysue Rucci Books)—speaks this gauzy ode to exfoliation into the mirror, she is already in too deep. With acid-based toners, yes, but more troublingly with a rogue spa, the same one that wooed her late mother before a sudden tumble off a California cliff. Set in a modern world of skin care tutorials and microcurrent devices, the book trades in age-old symbols: poison roses, an imagined prince in the guise of Top Gun–era Tom Cruise, “fairest” defined by racialized norms. This quest for eerily preserved beauty unravels Belle’s memory and language (she swaps insanity for vanity, ridicule…

ON A FRIDAY IN JUNE 2022, A SWARM OF FEDERAL AGENTS PILED OUT OF GOVERNMENT VANS AND INTO THE ORLANDO MUSEUM OF ART, A 98-YEAR-OLD institution abutted by several lakes. The feds moved past staffers and crowds there to see “Heroes & Monsters,” an exhibition filled with what were billed as never-before-seen works by Jean-Michel Basquiat. When the show had opened several months earlier, thousands came through in its first few days. Attendance was up 500 percent during the exhibition. But questions about the authenticity of the works had dogged the show, and now the feds had arrived, warrant in hand, seemingly confirming the doubters. The day before the raid, a US magistrate judge had signed an application to secure a search warrant filed by the FBI’s Art Crime Team…

THE FIRST TIME IT HAPPENED, I was in a stall in a public bathroom just off Wall Street in Manhattan. I was about to open the door when I heard two women talking about me. “Did you see what Naomi Klein said?” I froze, flashing back to every mean girl in high school, pre-humiliated. What had I said? “Something about how the march today is a bad idea.” “Who asked her? I really don’t think she understands our demands.” Wait. I hadn’t said anything about the march—or the demands. Then it hit me: I knew who had. I casually strolled to the sink, made eye contact with one of the women in the mirror, and said words I would repeat far too many times in the months and years to…

Last fall, while filming Apple’s Lessons in Chemistry, adapted from the beloved novel by Bonnie Garmus, showrunner Lee Eisenberg made an on-the-fly change: The actor Lewis Pullman’s turn as Calvin, a progressive, introverted chemist in 1960s Los Angeles, was so winning that Eisenberg wrote him into more episodes than originally planned. Earlier this year, the Top Gun: Maverick scene-stealer wowed festival-goers at Sundance with The Starling Girl and at Tribeca with The Line. As he braces for leading man attention, Pullman reflects on life in and out of Hollywood. HIS PARENTS, ACTOR Bill Pullman and modern dancer Tamara Hurwitz Pullman, met doing theater in college. Lewis, a former drummer, is the youngest of three musically inclined siblings. “None of us can do our taxes worth shit, but we can put…

SULWHASOO The heritage Korean beauty brand believes in continual renewal for the skin and for the company’s own formulas. The latest iteration of First Care Activating Serum VI (billed as a post-cleanse step) pairs plants like white lily and lotus with fermented ginseng—a new addition that aids barrier repair. Tilda Swinton, who recently joined as an ambassador, is a fan. $110 ORVEDA Known for its biotech-oriented approach to skin care, Orveda leans into healthy cellular function with the patent-pending (and loftily titled) Omnipotent Concentrate. Antioxidant-rich schisandra berry helps to calm the inflammatory response; the formula also supports hydration and collagen production. $460 DIOR BEAUTY Le Nectar Premier is the latest serum from the house’s Prestige line to deploy the fabled rose de Granville, hybridized with a cliff-dwelling varietal local to…

“IT’S HARD TO think of yourself as someone that’s important enough to save your junk,” Oscar-winning writer and director Sofia Coppola tells Vanity Fair. But Coppola’s boxes of “junk”—on-set snaps of famous faces from Bill Murray to Paris Hilton; revised scripts; letters; and even a marked-up VF article by Nancy Jo Sales, from which Coppola adapted her 2013 The Bling Ring—are another person’s nearly 500-page treasure trove. “I’m not very organized,” she admits. “So there’s some kind of order to having it all in one place.” Compiled like a scrapbook, which she makers, Sofia Coppola Archive: 1999–2023 (MACK), spans her nearly 25-year-long feature filmography. It begins with a peek behind the scenes of her dreamy 1999 directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides, and closes with an exclusive look at her upcoming…

“AS A THEATER kid, all you ever dream about is being potentially nominated for a Tony,” says Justin David Sullivan. But this year, the star of the Broadway musical & Juliet declined to compete. Sullivan is trans nonbinary and didn’t see themself in either the actor or actress category. “It was heartbreaking to have to make that decision.” Where is someone like Sullivan supposed to go? The debate has intensified in recent months as nonbinary performers find more success and gendered acting accolades feel more archaic. Liv Hewson (Yellowjackets) sparked headlines for opting out of Emmy consideration, and Emma Corrin called for an end to gendered awards. The Film Independent Spirit Awards have dropped “actor” and “actress” in favor of neutral “performance” categories. So, as Film Independent president Josh Welsh…

GEORGE AARONS—EVERYONE CALLED the six-foot-four-inch New Englander “Slim”—had the good fortune to make pictures for magazines from the 1940s to the 1990s. His work filled the glossy showbooks of the day: Life and Holiday, Town & Country and Travel + Leisure, and, on occasion, Vanity Fair. His sunny portraits of postwar affuence captured the habits and habitats of the elite—and of the wider stylish class, whose socialites commingled with bohemians and trendsetters. Decades later, those same images from another era, through their buoyant mood and almost fetishistic attention to detail, have continued to hold sway over today’s influencers in the worlds of fashion, design, and advertising—a group of tastemakers who simply can’t get enough of Aarons’s idealized depictions of the good life. The last time I saw Slim was Memorial Day…