Vogue December 2017

To round out Vogue’s 125th anniversary, we’ve marked transformations in culture, beauty, politics, and fashion. We’ve played a parlor game with people we love: Who were the Jay-Z and Beyoncé of 50 years ago? Who is the Nora Ephron of now? We tell the story of a woman who forever changed American political history—Katharine Graham—and the indomitable actress who is bringing her to life for a new generation. Vogue has always been about looking ahead, searching for the next, the new, the now. This issue we look back to see who we’ve been—and marvel at how far we’ve come.…

THIS DECEMBER ISSUE IS THE LAST HURRAH OF OUR 125th anniversary. We’re calling it Then & Now, a celebration of times past and present. Most of the subjects that we’ve covered over the years—from fashion to food, culture to celebrities, society and style—are here on every single page as we show how they have evolved and transformed. Yet while much of this issue was conceived in the spirit of joyful commemoration, it also wasn’t immune to quieter, wistful reflection —particularly since, as we were finishing it, we learned of the passing of Si Newhouse, Condé Nast’s Chairman Emeritus. Si’s title doesn’t even begin to do justice to what he achieved in his more than 50 years of leading Condé Nast. Many of my fellow editors at the company have written…

When we look back on the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, we’ll recall the xenophobic policies, the perpetual shuffling of White House staffers, the rise of unabashed white supremacists, the intensifying Russia investigation. We’ll think of NFL athletes taking the knee, and the misery of Puerto Ricans, only belatedly recognized by the president after Hurricane Maria. What we are unlikely to remember—what is, to me, the most disorienting feature of this year and thus the most difficult to describe—is how time itself has been altered. I cannot believe, for example, that as I write this, the violence in Charlottesville happened only six weeks ago, that Trump fired FBI Director James Comey only 137 days ago, or that 59 days ago, Trump announced, over Twitter, that he was banning transgender…

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, magazines were my holy texts. This was before the Internet, and we didn’t watch television, so magazines were the things that connected me to wanting and glamour and the sense that life was happening somewhere else, and definitely not to me. They existed in the checkout line of the grocery store—where I prayed it would take a few extra minutes to scan everything—in waiting rooms, and at the Sacramento Public Library. My mother, my very good mother, would take me every week to the downtown branch, which had multiple stories and was filled with light and comfortable chairs. Despite being the capital of California, Sacramento was and is a midsize city with a small-town heart. As with so many kids, for me the library was…

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1984 I have a rush of desire to live somewhere modern. I had always imagined myself living in a New Yorker–y brownstone walk-up, but I am over old-world touches. I want to be the opposite of who I was in London. I want to live in a glass box with white sofas that looks down on the electric throb of New York. I am so dying to get out of the Algonquin, with its sleepy switchboard and jostling lobby, that I pick the first apartment the agent sends me, a sublet in a black glass tower with curved corners at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Sixty-Sixth Street. Harry came in from London, and we met the real estate agent in the lobby on my lunch…

Like a screen star’s ever-shifting identity, the style code of the eyebrow is always in flux, perpetually pivoting toward the current state of cool. What other feature can be so easily shaped, sculpted, and masterfully redrawn to convey a chosen mood? Before makeup became an acceptable form of off-duty adornment, the Gibson-girl aesthetic of the Victorian age called for bare skin and natural arches (a mandate echoed by Gen Z). But as silent-film sirens like Anna May Wong set the course for rule-bending flappers, the twenties saw an uptick in pin-thin adaptations that swanned across the forehead. The glamorous, painted-on curves of the postwar years soon gave way to a powdered, Hepburnesque tomboy style, and when mod, graphic eye makeup swept the sixties, more change was in store: Women groomed…