Vogue April 2018

OUR APRIL ISSUE FOCUSES ON DREAMERS—those individuals who can envisage whole worlds of their own making, worlds that are beautiful and compelling in their originality. The theme came from Fashion News Director Mark Holgate during a fashion meeting not long after we’d returned from the spring 2018 collections last October. It was inspired, in part, by the idea that sometimes fashion doesn’t have to be anything other than magical and magnificent; whether it was wearable or not didn’t factor too much into our decisions about what we wanted to shoot. Usually at Vogue I’m a great believer in addressing real needs about clothes, but let’s be honest: We all want to eat dessert sometimes. The fashion we chose came from those designers who took this approach the best, most notably…

One day my mother told me and my older sister Claire to pack a few things to go to my grandmother’s farm in Butare, a few hours south of Kigali, toward the Burundi border. Claire and I loved it there and we revered our grandmother. She lived in an adobe-style house with small windows, a thatched roof, and rows and rows of sunflowers behind it—a house out of a fairy tale. A man arrived in a van early the next morning. It was still dark. We stopped at other houses; other girls entered. We all squished together in the middle of the seats, away from the windows. We rode up and over the hills, the curved slopes soft, like a body, past the stands of trees, the rice paddies. When…

IN THE WORLD ACCORDING TO VIOLETTE, a Manhattan park is a perfectly acceptable place to film a makeup tutorial. Dressed in a Gallic striped top and flared jeans, the Parisian expat nestles into a garden chair, spreading out products on a cloth napkin like a plein air picnic. As she works her magic on a model—blending concealer, fluffing lashes, painting on cherry lipstick with a blurred-edge technique coyly supertitled “#frenchkisslook” on YouTube—the effect is persuasive: part Nouvelle Vague realism, part Sex and the City sisterhood, part QVC finesse. Last summer, when Estée Lauder tapped the self-taught makeup artist to be its global beauty director, it seemed like an unexpected move for a brand long synonymous with American pluck and polish. How did the French-born art school alum, whose painterly way…

If paradise was paved to put up a parking lot, two new California wine-country hotels—the Astro and Skyview—are doing just the opposite. Once mid-century motor lodges, both properties have transformed park-outside-your-hotel-room lots into edible-garden green spaces. And as the region recovers from last year’s wildfires and mudslides, renewal is in the air. In Sonoma’s Santa Rosa, the Astro Motel embraced its sixties origins, explains co-owner Liza Hinman. A Googie-style neon sign blinks, and doors alternate in shades of atomic orange and teal. Shinola bikes are at the ready for trips to nearby wineries, or guests can venture downtown à pied for microbreweries and garagiste winemakers. Skyview is situated in Santa Barbara’s Los Alamos, and its outdoor lounge area and restaurant’s vegetable garden suggest nothing of the hotel’s origins as a…

“I’M A BIG GEEK—I’M OBSESSED with reading, I’m obsessed with art history,” the fashion designer Matthew Adams Dolan says, looking both exhausted and really, really excited. Exhausted because in the runup to his just-staged fall show he was sewing until 4:00 a.m. every night, his Lakeland terrier, Maisie, at his side, soul music blaring. And excited because that show—with its electric-blue country club–ready cable cardigans, its button-down shirts sporting exaggerated plaid cuffs, its crisp swing-back checked coats—brought a bright burst of energy to New York Fashion Week. Dolan, 30, who is very tall and very boyish, is dressed today in one of his vastly oversize denim jackets—the silhouette that first put him on the fashion map. He lives in a huge loft in the Seaport district of Manhattan with two…

“I’m a nostalgic woman,” says Nathalie Lété, “I’ve always been drawn to the images I saw in books as a child.” The Parisbased artist and illustrator collaborated with British boutique Avenida Home to create a series of charming cutting boards adorned with (food-safe) vintage garden imagery and folklore motifs. A hedgehog plays coy in the corner of one of the boards, and here, a sprawling floral bouquet adds life to the most mundane of kitchen accoutrements.…