Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 i Vogue

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.…

Tailored to the nines and sexy as hell.” That’s how Vogue rapturously defined Yves Saint Laurent’s 1974 collection as sported above by Charlotte Rampling in a photograph by Helmut Newton. Of course, in earlier days, women’s choosing to wear anything that was the purview of men was contentious. It’s worth noting that as the supposedly liberated sixties turned into the anything-goes seventies, many restaurants and hotels still wouldn’t admit women wearing pantsuits. And on top of the ubiquitous glass ceiling, there was also a pin-striped ceiling: Women had to contest not only for equality in the workplace but for their wardrobes within the workplace. Thankfully, the culture has moved along immensely: We’ve recently seen a demystification of masculine and feminine dressing codes, along with the sort of masterly blending of…

WHEN WOMEN’S “BATHING DRESSES” first appeared in the 1800s—as fulllength gowns, complete with stockings and sometimes garters—the skirts were weighted at the trim so that they wouldn’t float up and expose the wearer’s legs. In the intervening century, the swimsuit has both lightened and lessened: One-piece offerings, though not of the sleekly cut Eres type found today, hit the American market near the end of World War I, and the groundbreaking bikini was first shown in Paris in 1946. Both the shrinkage and the skinbearing engineering advancements of swimwear—think Ava Gardner’s hourglass-enhancing wartime twopiece or Pamela Anderson’s hip-hooking Baywatch lifeguard suit—are, of course, tied to women’s attitudes toward their bodies. It’s not necessarily a progression of things getting sexier by the summer but, rather, silhouettes and shapes reflecting the growing…

RUDOLF NUREYEV WAS BORN ON the Trans-Siberian Express and raised in remote Bashkiria by a family of Tatars. He was seventeen before he could afford to study ballet, but his ambition and soaring talent would make him one of the century’s greatest performers. In 1961, he defected from the Soviet Union and was soon thrilling audiences around the world. By the end of the decade, he danced naked for Richard Avedon, caught in what Vogue exultantly described as “an agony of action.” Nureyev “could have been the source and inspiration for many of Michelangelo’s sublime realizations of the human form.” Michelangelo would be invoked some 50 years later to describe another balletic prodigy, this time an all-American princeling. David Hallberg, wrote The New York Times’s exacting ballet critic Alastair Macaulay,…

WEDDINGS ARE ALL ABOUT LOVE—FROM THE DRESS to the ceremony to the first dance. And there at its center are the bride and groom, who only have eyes for each other— right? Wrong! Weddings, dear reader, have become the twenty-first century answer to the debutante ball. This is where society’s fashionable (and aspiringly fashionable) step out into the world, groomed to the tips of their nude-painted nails. No more sloppy speeches and drunken hugs. The modern society wedding is a feat of organization, location scouting, teams of event planners and publicists making sure nothing feels ordinary. The bride may hope for glossy-magazine coverage, but often a gazillion Instagram posts and her own hashtag will do perfectly well. Take Hannah Bronfman’s wedding in Marrakech, last spring, which inspired hundreds of #hbf4ever…

A half century ago, Vogue visited the Manhattan atelier of skin guru Miss Elisabeth Ungar to investigate two new firming machines with delightfully midcentury names: the Tonatrone, which delivered eighteen electrical surges to the face per minute, and the Galvanotron, which used galvanic currents to “force-feed a given lubricant effectively.” If more intensive work was required, Ungar was available to rake clients’ facial folds with an electric needle, resulting in a “state of puffiness” that was, presumably, a good thing. This magazine has a long history with similar youthi fiers: Dr. Walter’s Rubber Garments—heavy black straps affixed to the jaw to “quickly dissolve superfluous flesh easily”— were all the rage in 1919; a decade later, Elizabeth Arden’s Bleachine Cream promised to “remove” sunburn with—ouch— lemon juice. Those seeking more involved…

When songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul—or Pasek and Paul, as they have been known since they started collaborating in college— had their first show on Broadway, A Christmas Story, the Musical, they were all of 27 years old. But they had nothing on the composer Richard Rodgers, who was 22 when he wrote his first hit, with Lorenz Hart: “Manhattan” (as in “We’ll have Manhattan”). Rodgers, of course, went on to team up with the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and reshape the American musical. Starting with their first collaboration, Oklahoma!, in 1943, they ushered in the era of the so-called serious or integrated musical—shows that eschewed pastiche for more consequential subject matter and united script, song, and dance into a tight-knit whole (South Pacific, The King and I, The…

AT ONE POINT IN THE OPENING episode of Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s monstrously acute British TV series, an elegant woman of around 60 approaches the lectern at a feminist conference. The show’s eponymous heroine, played by Waller-Bridge herself, is in the audience with her sister, and they have already irritated the hell out of each other. “Please raise your hands,” the speaker says, “if you would trade five years of your life for the so-called perfect body.” Both sisters put their hands up, urgently and instinctively. They look around. They are alone. “We’re bad feminists,” Fleabag whispers as they sink, mortified, into their seats. For fans of Fleabag—and they are legion, on both sides of the Atlantic—this scene perfectly captures a double-edged moment in the lives of twenty-first-century women. Not wanting…

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…

DIANE AND TALITA VON FURSTENBERG Though It girls of every generation have often garnered a reputation for partying like it’s 1999, some of them were only just born then. Take eighteen-year-old Princess Talita von Furstenberg, daughter of the charismatic Alexandra (herself one of the nineties swan-sister trio known collectively as the Millers) and granddaughter of the legendary designer and philanthropist Diane: Raised in Los Angeles, this year the blue-blooded darling of the Instagram generation attended her first Met gala and matriculated into Georgetown. Talita is quick, though, to downplay her ascendant status. “With social media, every girl is an It girl!” she says cheerfully, while her ever-evolving grandmother takes stock of how the technology has fundamentally changed notions of accessibility—and responsibility. “It gives everyone a platform to express themselves, hopefully…

In the movies I watched growing up in suburban Colorado— Desperately Seeking Susan, John Waters’s Hairspray—the hair salon was always where the protagonist, with the aid of a few dozen helping hands, left behind her old, drab exterior and emerged radiant, ready to embark on her adventure. This metamorphic potential was further underlined by the megasalons of the eighties and early nineties that I read about in my mother’s dog-eared fashion magazines: bustling, white chrome palaces filled with supermodels and presided over by hair royalty—names like Vidal Sassoon, Frédéric Fekkai, and Sally Hershberger. But on a recent trip to Hairstory, the current salon atmosphere appeared decidedly different. The five-chair, privateclient cut-and-color destination in Manhattan’s Flatiron District that emerged as an offshoot of Bumble and Bumble veteran Michael Gordon’s product line…

Winter The Procedures Three vials of Juvéderm over the course of one year. New advancements, like the Vectra M3 device, allow doctors to finesse a three-dimensional facial image with virtual filler. The Details Juvéderm is made from a stabilized form of hyaluronic acid that is injected into creased or slackened skin, most commonly around the nose and mouth, along the hairline, and under the eyes. It can last for a year and run from $600 to $1,200 per 1 mL vial. One vial is recommended per session. Spring The Procedures Three rounds of the Enlighten PICO Genesis laser, which heats the dermis below the skin’s surface to boost collagen, even out imperfections, and shrink broken capillaries. Two sessions of the Vbeam Perfecta pulsed-dye laser to target discolorations like age spots,…

Brilliant, sexy, rich, they came together like two hurricanes on the Atlantic—he a self-made star from nowhere, she a former teenage idol on the verge of her best work. They set the high mark of celebrity in a fame-obsessed culture; they upgraded the meaning of “power couple”; they came to live in their own gleaming bubble, coolly using their ever-morecomplex relationship to inspire ever-more-extraordinary art. When Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (“Liz and Dick” to fans) worked together on the Cleopatra set in 1961, they launched an affair that led Ann Birstein, writing in Vogue in 1969, to call them “a pair of gods gaily dumping cornucopias on each other.” Half a century later, it is Beyoncé and Jay-Z careering into on-top love. What the two couples share—an eerily similar…

ON AN EARLY OCTOBER AFTERNOON when an unseasonable humidity lay over a torpid Brooklyn, I closed my web browser and shut my windows to block out the reggaeton bass line pounding from a pickup truck outside. As Skype’s familiar dial tone cued up, I was nervous about the intimacy I was about to engage in with a stranger. We may live in a time that celebrates oversharing anything and everything, but talking about the details of my sexual health remains a challenge for me. So when a redhead in her early 40s beamed into view on my computer screen from Southern California, I panicked and was soon rattling off a list of medical symptoms. Kimberly Johnson snapped me back into focus. “Let me just pause you for a second,” she…

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…

MUSIC CITIZEN JAIN A third-culture kid, the singer is producing music for the global stage. You could spend significantly more time deconstructing Jain’s songs than it takes to listen to them. With her delicious blend of Congolese rumbas, Arabic percussion, vibraslap funk, jazz vocals, French electro, and reggae beats, she’s M.I.A. meets Amy Winehouse, dressed like Blair Waldorf: She usually performs in a little black ensemble with a deceptively prim Peter Pan collar. Jain (real name Jeanne Galice—she took her stage name when she was fifteen from the ancient Indian religion of pacifism, in admiration of its moderation and equilibrium) is a global artist for global times: She sings in English, “the language of travel,” and says she wants to disrupt the narrow-minded populism that’s taken hold in certain parts…

On the Run THEN As legend has it, the ancient courier Pheidippides ran from a battlefield near Marathon to Athens to announce the Greeks’ victory over the Persians, but it would be another few thousand years before the recreational-running boom. Vogue encouraged its readers to give it a go in 1983. “The facts: There’s little or no scientific proof that jogging jars the uterus or harms breasts.” NOW Running is no longer a solitary pastime. Outdoor Voices and Nike+ organize group jaunts all over the country, and people run in packs on treadmills at indoor specialty gyms such as New York’s Mile High Run Club and Stride in Pasadena. Dance Dance Revolution THEN “Feel the burn!” was the battle cry of the eighties, and Jane Fonda the highly decorated commandant…

In 1975, Vogue called Francois Catroux “the crack interior designer of Paris … who moves space and volume, texture and light, objects and planes with the sense of an architect, the eye of an artist.” Through the years, the magazine has documented Catroux’s elegantly urbane work for tastemakers from Marie? Helene de Rothschild to Lauren Santo Domingo, but in 1970 Horst photographed Catroux in his own house, with his rangily elegant wife, Betty (muse and intimate of Yves Saint Laurent), lolling against the polished-steel chimney breast. Vogue dubbed the exhilarating space an “Op-art-ment … a 1970 space capsule within a historic building” that was filled with African sculpture and the designer’s “favored surfaces of stainless steel, lacquer, slicked plastics, and matte fabrics.” When it came to creating a home for…

A t a dinner I attended in Oakland—held beneath eucalyptus trees on a mountainside— a leg of lamb roasting à la ficelle was turned by whomever happened to be near the hibachi. At another get-together, at a friend’s flower farm, I shelled fava beans while other guests shucked corn or tended rib eyes on a grill. Here in Hudson, I meet friends at the farmers’ market and convene several hours later to compose meals in tandem. Would the hostesses of yesteryear recognize the dinner parties of today? Would Elsa Maxwell? Would Brooke Astor? Would Nan Kempner? Would they even call them dinner parties? As in restaurants, where beams and ducting, lightbulbs and tabletops—once concealed by ceilings and walls, light fixtures and linen—have been exposed, the cogs and gears of entertaining…

“SPEAK, MEMORY!” VLADIMIR NABOKOV IMPLORED— but could the great Russian novelist have been foreshadowing that spring day in 2004 at the Prada store when you tried on a skirt printed with vintage postcards and, for some crazy reason, decided to pass on it? More than a decade later, your memory of this doesn’t just speak: It shouts, it sobs, it swears. For generations, the splendid ensembles that you bitterly regretted not buying—the ones that got away—remained tantalizingly out of reach. But now, due to an exploding global vintage market at our fingertips, these longed-for ensembles never really disappear. More than ever before, it is possible— at least in theory—to uncover these lost ghosts of yesterday, to literally wear the “then” now. So, fancying myself a combination of Mata Hari and…

DESIGN PRIDE OF PLACE For the Chicago-based company Vintage Place Settings, Granny’s prized Blue Willow patterns do not belong in the china chest. “Our goal was to bring back these beautiful heirlooms,” says VPS’s Coreen Arnold, a crockery connoisseur whose inventory is now available to those whose inheritance lacked a set of Limoges. Pick out a pattern, set the table, return, and repeat. On offer are classic toiles from Haviland, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, and more—all of which, Arnold hopes, will summon happy ghosts of Christmases past. As Arnold preaches, “Don’t put this in a cabinet; use it!”—LILAH RAMZI MOVIES CELLULOID HEROINES Some people chase after the past; others race toward the future. One of the latter is Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie), the antiheroic heroine of Craig Gillespie’s zippy I, Tonya.…

What happens to an actress once she has played the queen? Does some magisterial DNA rub off on her? Helen Mirren, Kristin Scott Thomas, Judi Dench have all been appointed dames. Only Cate Blanchett, who so magnificently illuminated Elizabeth II’s namesake, Elizabeth I, is yet to receive a title. But since she’s an Aussie and thus, technically, a subject of Her Majesty, there’s still a chance. Besides, Blanchett exudes innate queenliness. “The role can give you quite a lot back if you let it,” says Peter Morgan, who should know, since he wrote not only The Crown (for TV) and The Audience (for the stage) but also The Queen, the 2006 movie that arguably restored the monarchy’s popularity following Princess Diana’s death. “When Helen was a guest of the Obamas…

WHAT MAKES A MUSE? Simply put, it’s the right girl with the right look in the right place at the right time, from Clara Bow in the 1920s to Edie Sedgwick and Jean Shrimpton (photographed, above, by David Bailey in 1970) in the sixties and seventies and Sofa Coppola in the nineties. In our current moment, Adwoa Aboah certainly checks all the right boxes. Her buzz cut, freckled brown skin, and mischievous smile radiate an otherworldly cool. Still, what makes the 25-year-old British model thoroughly modern is the way she is connecting with millennial women on Gurls Talk, the online platform she founded in 2015, sharing her own experiences with addiction and depression to empower others. That life-affirming grit informs Aboah’s personal style, too. She’s breaking rules on the red…

THOUGH PENELOPE TREE’S groovy, color-saturated 1968 David Bailey photo shoot for Vogue (above) limns a certain natural-mystic vibe of the swinging sixties, to fnd the roots of bohemian style you’ll have to travel back to the mid-nineteenth century, when the author George Sand boosted the term to the mainstream. Sand (the nom de plume of a woman, Aurore Dupin) spent her career fghting the expectations of what a woman’s role in society should be, thus planting the seeds of the freedom and rebellion that would later be echoed in the work of Oscar Wilde and the advent of aestheticism, onward through the beatniks of the ffties and the hippies of the sixties—even in the Olsen twins with their shawls and maxidresses during the aughts. Today sees the style rife with…

WHILE MODERN STREETWEAR ISN’T entirely derived from grunge, the movement does hold pride of place. In grunge’s early-1990s first flower, as it emerged from the Seattle music scene, Vogue described its look as “flannels, ratty tour shirts, boots, and baseball caps.” (See Greta Gerwig’s “Come As You Are,” Nostalgia, page 108.) At Perry Ellis for spring 1993, a young Marc Jacobs designed his now-famous grunge collection—and it famously got him fired. Today’s wavelength is glossier—but with no less irreverence. Outsize everything and heavy hoodies are still in the mix, but what was once a subculture has morphed into a powerhouse that’s far less gender-binary (particularly in the work created by Shayne Oliver or Rick Owens), with a previously unheard-of interplay between the streets and the runways. This is largely due…

The photograph above—shot by Irving Penn for Vogue in 1994—shows a Chanel couture corset designed by Karl Lagerfeld. (His inspiration: the Wonderbra, the push-up sensation of the nineties.) While lingerie—particularly corsetry, à la Jean Paul Gaultier in the eighties and Thierry Mugler over the following decade—has long been a part of the modern fashion complex (on the earlier side of the twentieth century, Madeleine Vionnet called the corset orthop�dique), underwear has now shifted to … not exactly outerwear, but something far more acceptable in the day-to-day than strictly for behind closed doors. Any flip through a slide show of today’s street-style darlings—Bella Hadid in a sports bra or Cara Dele vingne in boxer briefs by Supreme come to mind—confirms it. At the designer level, meanwhile, lingerie is booming: Balmain’s Olivier…

Party Panache Wild Ones Bright Young Things Animal Magnetism Travel Time The Emergency Present…

Chanel shopping bag ($3,900) and flap bag ($3,100) “There is no life without water,” says Karl Lagerfeld. Accordingly, a rainy forecast is no reason to tuck away your finery: Instead, simply make your look itself waterproof. No parapluie, no problem. For spring, Chanel’s dainty handbags were tucked like Russian nesting dolls into larger, water-resilient totes. Here, a chain bag shimmering with iridescent sequins of lavender and lemon-yellow is paired with a quilted top-handle bag with a lambskin trim—a combination that’s as right as rain itself.…