Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec-15 i Vanity Fair

Exclusively from the Vanity Fair Archive World renowned photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Anton Bruehl, and Edward Steichen have helped to define our culture through their celebrity photography in Vanity Fair. Collect timeless artistry with five exquisite portraits of some of the most notable talents of their times—Louis Armstrong, Louise Brooks, George Gershwin, Katharine Hepburn, and Leslie Howard— available now as a collectible set from the Vanity Fair Archive. Own the collection: Visit www.condenaststore.com E-mail commercialsales@condenast.com This special portfolio is assembled in a custom linen box that may be displayed flat on a coffee table or bookshelf, or the individual prints can be framed for wall display, as shown above. Frames not included…

BRUCE WEBER “Trying to capture somebody who is a different character every three minutes makes you really fast on your shutter speed,” Contributing Photographer Bruce Weber says of Bill Murray, whom he shot in Montauk for “Host of Christmas Present,” on page 152. Weber—pictured here with Murray and writer Mitch Glazer—says that after the shoot wrapped, the pictures kept coming: “It was probably the most selfies I’ve seen requested with the talent on a shoot.” DEREK BLASBERG Since his appointment as Our Man on the Street at Vanity Fair, man-about-town Derek Blasberg has hit the sidewalk running. This month, he profiles Business of Fashion founder Imran Amed (“Fashion Forward,” on page 94) and 17-year-old model, heartthrob, and Instagram sensation Lucky Blue Smith (“All by His Selfie,” on page 172). And…

SIGMAN WEARS A DRESS BY ALEXANDER MCQUEEN; CUSTOM HEADPIECE BY CHRISTY DORAMUS; EARRINGS BY TIFFANY & CO. AGE : 28. PROVENANCE : Ciudad Obregón, Mexico. FI E LD TRIPS: Sigman’s father is a scout for the New York Yankees. “I grew up in baseball stadiums. It was my two brothers and baseball around me all the time. I knew nothing about film or acting or theater when I was young!” BOLD MOVE: As a teenager she moved to Mexico City to pursue modeling and subsequently acting. “When you’re 16 years old, you’re not afraid of anything.” SCREEN SIREN: The actress, whose big break came in 2011’s critically lauded Miss Bala, can currently be seen as Pablo Escobar’s mistress Valeria Vélez on the Netflix series Narcos. “[Valeria] is in love with…

Fresh fish, Asian-inspired dishes, and Europe’s largest Japanese-whisky selection are only part of the decadent appeal of Richard Caring’s new restaurant, Sexy Fish, in London’s Mayfair. The infusion of jaw-dropping art and design—floating fish lamps designed by Frank Gehry, Damien Hirst cast-bronze mermaids, and hand-cut collage artwork on the ceiling from illustrator Michael Roberts—also helps to make this the most eccentric dining room in town. (sexyfish.com)…

I always joke that I learned everything about floral arranging from the University of YouTube,” says Christina Stembel, the 37-year-old founder and C.E.O. of Farmgirl Flowers. “But I didn’t like the aesthetic out there. I wanted to be able to send my mom flowers I wouldn’t be embarrassed by.” Stembel has neither a college degree nor a background in horticulture, yet she is revolutionizing the multi-billion-dollar-a-year floral e-commerce business. “Those companies are all owned by men, even though 78 percent of people who buy flowers are women,” she says. Her Eureka! moment came in 2010, when she was working in event planning at Stanford University and saw that floral centerpieces were costing up to $200 a pop. “That just didn’t make any sense to me,” she says. So, Stembel did…

REMEMBERING HIM THEIR WAY Family, friends, and colleagues celebrated the life, lessons, and stories at the memorial for beloved producer Jerry Weintraub in Los Angeles. LUMINOUS AFFAIR Britain’s entertainment community turned out at the Guildhall in London to support the British Film Institute National Archive. The Luminous gala, in partnership with IWC Schaffhausen, helped raise funds to secure the future of the U.K.’s collection of films and TV programs.…

Donald Trump’s quest to become president of the United States as a stepping-stone to emperorship and eventual godhood is clearly a new viral strain of performance art, a vanity production with innovative, popular appeal, so let’s examine its tooth marks. It feeds off too many swamp-brain paranoias and bigotries to qualify as a lightweight satirical put-on, like the 1968 candidacy of TV’s Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour cast member Pat Paulsen, whose slogan was “We Cannot Stand Pat” and whose oratory drooped with deadpan malaprops and double-talk delivered with a Bob Newhart–ish stammer. Paulsen’s joke campaign had a kind of dumb innocence to it, a benign contrast to the raw furies of 1968. But after David Letterman, Robert Altman’s Tanner ’88, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and The Onion, the…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Being in peace with the whole world, starting with my family, in which harmony represents the condition sine qua non to be happy. What is your greatest fear? Fear is just a waste of time. The best thing is to put our lives in the hands of God. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Without a doubt, pride. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Without a doubt, pride. On what occasion do you lie? A free man never has reason to lie. Which words or phrases do you most overuse? I try hard not to be repetitive. What is your greatest regret? Probably the fact that I never completed my piano studies. What or who is the…

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM @VANITYFAIR ONLINE FEATURES GOING FOR GOLD The Oscars may not be until February, but awards season has already begun. Listen to our new podcast, Little Gold Men, to keep up with the latest releases and chart the buzz to the ballot. VF.com’s Katey Rich, Mike Hogan, and Richard Lawson offer the inside scoop for Oscar season, welcome guest stars, and prep us all for the annual mad dash toward Hollywood glitz and glory. ALL THAT JAZZ Cool cats are making a comeback. As young jazz musicians trumpet the genre’s timeless tempo, head to VF.com for an extended roundup of the top talent under 33 1⁄3, from Los Angeles to Armenia. Plus: Go behind the scenes on Mark Seliger’s photo shoot. PHOTOGRAPHS A LUCKY STAR…

There’s fashion, which is how we describe the prevailing way people dress. And then there’s Fashion with a capital F, the international, multi-billion-dollar industry that dictates what and how people clothe themselves. Imran Amed founded the Web site Business of Fashion to link the two. “One of my first observations when I met people in the industry was this gulf in understanding between the creative side and the business side. It’s like they spoke a different language,” he says. “BoF translates business for fashion people.” Amed, 40—who was born in Calgary, Canada, to Indian parents who had emigrated from East Africa in the 1970s—graduated from Harvard Business School in 2002. He went to work at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in London. But by 2006, he had started a…

Ralph Fiennes must infuriate fellow actors who lack his range, which almost defies believability. Over the past 25 years, the English actor has readily conquered Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Shaw, and collaborated with Spielberg, Minghella, and Anderson. He has played sinister villains, idiosyncratic Lotharios, and earnest romantic leads. An indie darling, Fiennes also regularly titillates the masses in blockbusters such as the Harry Potter franchise and Clash of the Titans. His latest spate of projects is neither less diverse nor less envy-inspiring. This month, he appears as M in the new James Bond film, Spectre, and is co-starring in Hail, Caesar!, the latest Coen brothers farce, to be released in February. Considering his sprawling résumé, it’s hard to believe that he once doubted that he had the stuff to act in…

Four years ago, the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies honored Agnes Gund with its Leonore and Walter Annenberg Award for Diplomacy through the Arts. The award was presented to Aggie (as she is known to everyone from her driver, Robert, to her pal David Rockefeller) by Hillary Clinton, who proceeded to list all 23 charitable boards and advisory committees on which Gund served at the time. “My God,” I said to Jo Carole Lauder, fape’s chair, “when does Aggie sleep?” “At board meetings,” she replied. Hardly. Gund’s generosity of time, money, and effort knows no bounds. At 78 she is down to a mere 20 boards and committees, ranging from the New York State Council on the Arts to Socrates Sculpture Park. She was president of the Museum…

With ach passing month, the shelf life of Donald Trump’s erratic, if entertaining, presidential sideshow continues to befuddle the smart money in Washington. What the experts fail to grasp is that, crude as his jerrybuilt platform is, to many voters there is a kernel of ... “truth” is too strong a word for it—a kernel of accuracy in many of his more astringent barbs. Jeb Bush does have low energy. The poor fellow is valiantly trying to undo this image, but is there anything so sad as a low-energy person trying to act like a high-energy person? That said, Trump’s and Jeb’s Biff Tannen–George McFly act is one of the more lively matchups of the fall television season. Hillary Clinton, no matter what her supporters say, does appear shifty. Far…

Herewith, the December poll, in which we try to sort through the Whole Clinton Thing. The dynasty issue? Americans don’t feel strongly either way about whether another Bush, Clinton, or for that matter Kennedy should be in the White House: two-thirds of us give the teacher’s-pet answer—we just want “the best person.” Republicans are pretty sure that donations from foreign governments and individuals to the Clinton Foundation had some ulterior motives. Many people think they know why the couple is still together: 38 percent say it’s “good politics.” Nearly half say that it’s “none of my business.” But could the couple’s endurance have something to do with Hillary’s being a great dancer, a fact that emerged in her private-server e-mails? So, how do Americans feel about another Clinton in the…

It’s hard to improve upon perfection, but in the early 1960s George Whitman felt that something was missing. Yes, his Left Bank bookstore, Shakespeare and Company— an homage to the original bookshop owned by Lost Generation doyenne Sylvia Beach—had become a celebrated haunt for his generation’s literati, but that wasn’t quite enough. Soon Whitman identified the missing ingredients: coffee and lemon pie. Shakespeare and Company needed a literary café in the little medieval building next door. The only hitch: the building’s owner wouldn’t let him have it. Every weekend, Whitman knocked on the owner’s door and made his case, and every weekend he was refused. Whitman died in 2011, but now, more than a half-century after he first had the idea, his vision will finally be realized. His daughter, Sylvia—the…

Making Scents Ex Nihilo, the new kid on the fragrance block, arrives at Bergdorf Goodman this month. In addition to launching its eau de parfum Sweet Morphine, which is composed of citrus, vanilla, and green notes, the line will offer a unique demi-bespoke experience. Consumers can select one base scent from the available eight and then add a raw ingredient to make it their own. This takes the meaning of personal fragrance to a new level. ($225– $415; bergdorf goodman.com) —AUDREY NOBLE Crème de la Crop Fashion designers Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra—known as “the lumberjacks of fashion”—have collaborated with Kiehl’s to create charmingly eclectic custom art for the apothecary’s 7th Annual Limited Edition Creme de Corps Holiday Collection packaging. As a beautified bonus, 100 percent of net profits from…

William Eggleston, the near-mythic southern gentleman and father of color photography, who is placed in the pantheon of the greats alongside Walker Evans and Robert Frank, greeted me with a courtly little bow at his favorite hangout in New York City, El Quijote restaurant, the joint adjoining the Chelsea Hotel. It would be a liquid lunch for the 76-year-old Mr. Eggleston, who pointed out, in his wry, gracious way, that if he had felt like lunch he would have surely had one of El Quijote’s small, signature lobsters. He began with champagne mixed with vodka, in a tall glass. “You look well,” I said. “Thank you,” he said in his light southern accent. “A compliment is always nice.” He still lives in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was raised a son…

Off on the Road to Morocco Bill Murray and I ride the dark highway between Fez and Rabat. We are on Murray’s “party bus,” rented for himself and two of his sons for a sevenweek shoot in Morocco for a movie we’re working on, Rock the Kasbah. The bus’s Kool Aid–blue disco lights are dimmed, and save for us and Abdul, the driver, the 30 seats are empty. For once, James Taylor’s “Mexico” is not playing (a Murray-family favorite this summer). It’s midnight-quiet as we drive from a Fez weekend vacation to Rabat and a final five-day sprint to finish work on the film. This Moroccan summer has been a joyous, tough, and utterly magical ride. Murray has inhaled it. Squeezed every drop from this adventure. He has been on…

Tessa Thompson is more than familiar with Hollywood—she grew up in the heart of the city. “It was my backyard; we would walk on Hollywood Boulevard to do errands or whatever,” the 32-year-old actress recalls. “When I found myself on television it felt like happenstance because of my sheer proximity to it. Since childhood, acting was always something I was doing; it was the only thing I cared about being good at.” Although Thompson worked steadily in television, her big break came with a one-two punch in 2014. First was the Sundance-award-winning Dear White People, in which she played a black student at an Ivy League college, and then the Academy Award– winning Selma, in which she portrayed civil-rights activist Diane Nash. This month she stars opposite Michael B. Jordan…