Vogue December 2018

IN EVERY DECEMBER ISSUE—just in time for the holidays—we like to bring you a little festive cheer in the form of some unabashed escapism. This year, Annie Leibovitz and Tabitha Simmons photographed Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the stars of Mary Poppins Returns, director Rob Marshall’s sequel to the 1964 movie that has become forever associated with Julie Andrews, the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and Dick Van Dyke’s English accent—which to this day is yet to be heard spoken by anyone else over the entire length and breadth of the British Isles. The movie’s arrival couldn’t be better timed. For all of its twenty-first-century flourishes, this Mary Poppins remains at its core a delightfully old-fashioned, feel-good movie, with just the kind of cinematic indulgence we could all use right now: a life-affirming…

When she arrived for our interview, fresh off the train from D.C., wheeled suitcase at her side, Ana Maria Archila (one of “the very rude elevator screamers,” per Donald Trump) looked anything but angry. With her wide cheekbones, warm smile, colorful scarf, and dangly earrings, the 39-year-old seemed like your kid’s favorite preschool teacher. Could this really be the ferocious activist who, along with Maria Gallagher, 23, famously buttonholed Senator Jeff Flake in the elevator in the midst of the Kavanaugh-confirmation hearings? “What you are doing is allowing someone who actually violated a woman to sit in the Supreme Court! You have children in your family! Think about them! I have two children!” With each sentence, her voice rose in fury and the senator shrank farther into the corner of…

I was a strange child. I lived with my grandmother in a place where there weren’t any other kids, and she didn’t like me wandering around the streets, so I just stayed home and drew all day—I didn’t even know how to ride a bicycle at that point. I went to movies a lot. That’s where I learned; that was my college. There was one little theater that played old movies, and they were showing [1934’s] Cleopatra, with Claudette Colbert. I saw that and I went, “Wow!” In the late ’40s, you didn’t see cleavage in Hollywood—it was against the code. Later, when I started doing costumes for Cher, I said to the producers, “There’s things in that movie that would be great on her—she could do all that stuff.”…

AT LEAST FOURTEEN TIMES a day, the Korean actress Claudia Kim applies toner to her face. One round of seven strokes in the morning; another before bed; and pretty much whenever she can steal a few minutes to swipe, pat, repeat. That’s why Kim carries a travel-size container of the soothing, oil-controlling formula from the K-beauty brand Dermatory in a black duffel bag with her wherever she goes, she explains on a rainy fall day in Manhattan’s Koreatown. The remaining contents include specialty cotton pads from Japan, sunblock from Korea, and at least two masks (a shea-butter infusion for her face and a cooling, herbal iteration for her feet). A mini blue lighter rounds out the self-proclaimed K-beauty junkie’s “essentials,” but more on this in a minute. A former model,…

“Power,” said Henry Kissinger, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” He could be describing The Favourite, the Oscars-bound film by Yorgos Lanthimos that takes the traditional costume drama and dusts its corsets with poison. It’s set during the eighteenth-century reign of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), a sickly, needy soul under the sway of her steely friend Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz). Everything changes with the arrival of Abigail (Emma Stone), a fallen aristocratic cousin whom Lady Sarah takes under her wing. What follows is a juicy, gleefully nasty fable whose comedy is black as a dungeon. If Stone as the duplicitous Abigail is the most startling revelation, the most commanding performance belongs to Colman: She makes us laugh at the queen’s addled silliness, then stuns with her vulnerability. With its savage portrait…

EVERYONE REMEMBERS THEIR FIRST Clinique experience. Mine was at my grandmother’s beach house in South Jersey, where she had a bottle of Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion—the cornerstone of the brand’s iconic three-step cleansing, exfoliating, and moisturizing system—in the guest bathroom. Save for my occasional dalliances with the nostalgic glass bottle and sage-green packaging, its contents never seemed to dwindle. Years later, I’d realize that Bubbles, as my sister and I called our father’s mother, kept the butter-yellow elixir in the medicine cabinet not so much as a skin-care aid but as a beauty status symbol with a decades-old pedigree. Since its launch in 1968, Clinique has remained fairly faithful to the fragrance-free and allergy-tested formula created by celebrated dermatologist Norman Orentreich, M.D. The company sells a box of one plumping-and-hydrating…