Vogue January 2019

AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, we’re all usually urged to look forward—to brightly face the future and give plenty of thought to the unknown. So perhaps we’re being a little counterintuitive with our first issue of 2019: We’ve chosen to focus on the happiness and contentment to be found in the familiar. This January’s Vogue is devoted to couples—to what it means to be in love and to know someone deeply. There’s something about these stories of togetherness, both real and fictional, that makes for joyful and optimistic reading, a salve for the last twelve months, when it has often felt like human interaction has been coarsened to a sad and worrying degree. That we’re focused on celebrating some of our favorite duos of the moment is entirely serendipitous. Months…

The joke about my younger son, Emmett, is that at age seven he’d still crawl back into my womb if he could. He’s more reserved than his gregarious older brother, and sticks to me in social situations that overwhelm him. He worries about things that wouldn’t even occur to another child. Recently I picked him up from a birthday party and also collected the sons of two close friends to spare them a trip. Walking across the parking lot in a foursome of first-grade boys, Emmett kept glancing at another classmate who was leaving with his mother. Later he told me he worried the boy had seen the group heading to our car and thought Emmett was having a “big fun playdate” and hadn’t invited him, and that his feelings…

ON AN ABSURDLY BEAUTIFUL autumn day, Thomasin McKenzie is contemplating the blazing trees of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, which are peacocking in bursts of reds and yellows. It was McKenzie’s own radiance—as well as her deep love of the outdoors—that helped secure her breakout role in last year’s Leave No Trace, Debra Granik’s quietly devastating film about a thirteen-year-old girl and her combat-veteran father living off the grid in the Oregon forest. Obsessed with the script, the Kiwi actress sent Granik videos of herself as well as “a little self-portrait,” as McKenzie calls it. “I got a GoPro, and I took it on a run with me through the New Zealand bush, so you see the landscape and my dog, Toto, behind me.” Blown away by the candidate, Granik cast her…

JACQUELINE RABUN THE LIVING ROOM–CUM–ATELIER of Jacqueline Rabun is a juxtaposition of contrasts: The wood-paneled, light-flooded loft in Clerkenwell in central London, designed by architect Amin Taha, resonated with her immediately. “I’m a big fan of the architect John Lautner, and when I first walked in a year ago, it really gave me that feeling of spaces in California,” says Rabun, dressed in a Comme des Garçons skirt and jacket. The room, like her jewelry, challenges and beguiles, with a mélange of Scandinavian and contemporary African influences, which include a Finn Juhl sofa, a Studiomama Pallet Project floor lamp, vintage stools picked up in Senegal, and contemporary sculpture by Nigerian artist Niyi Olagunju. “I love the way that objects sit in a space,” Rabun says, “and I am obsessed about…

If your museum is poised to reopen after years of renovations, a Nina Chanel Abney exhibition augurs a solid beginning. “She is an artist who thinks about history while looking at what’s relevant in the moment,” says Cheryl Brutvan, curator of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, which will debut a new campus this month following a three-year-long upgrade. Abney started out sketching cartoon characters and became more serious about painting in high school. After a year working on the line at a Ford Motor plant, the Illinois native headed to Parsons. For her MFA thesis show, she exhibited a large-scale painting of her white classmates, dressed in prison-garb orange and painted as black, while a version of Abney, depicted as a white armed guard, stood…

AFTER EMILY FONNESBECK HAD her first child, she was eager to get her body back. As a registered dietitian, she knew what she had to do: She started with at least an hour of cardio six days a week, and cut out processed foods. (Gluten, dairy, and sugar soon followed.) The weight slipped off. But Fonnesbeck, a 36-year-old Utah native with a creamy complexion and a chestnut bob, was plagued by fatigue and headaches. “I didn’t see that as a result of overexercise and under-eating,” she says. “I saw it as a sign of ‘inflammation’ from something I was eating. If I could just find the culprit, I would feel better.” A clean diet was the ideal, and hers would be immaculate. Fonnesbeck eliminated all animal products and nuts, then…