Vogue September 2016

This fall, two of Vogue’s longest-serving editors publish collections of their favorite work: Grace Coddington with Grace: The American Vogue Years (“Amazing Grace,” page 613) and Phyllis Posnick with Stoppers: Photographs from My Life at Vogue. When Grace and Phyllis showed me early versions of their books, I was filled with both a sense of wonder at their talents and a great deal of gratitude that these two ladies have brought their brilliant visions to this magazine for so long. This issue, we showcase their picturemaking abilities again: Grace with the joyful romanticism she does so well (“New Romantics,” page 708), Goodman, who styled cover girl Kendall Jenner (“The Real Deal,” page 672). You’ll have seen Kendall in our pages before, of course, but with this sitting, Tonne, along with…

Ten years ago, in the middle of an ugly divorce, the most banal of realizations came upon me: In order to find a path out of the mess I’d made, I needed to wrestle with the history that had shaped me. My mother, the late African-American writer, filmmaker, and activist Kathleen Collins, died of breast cancer in 1988 at age 46, when I was still a teenager, leaving me to care for my younger brother. Our parents had split when we were toddlers, and we had been raised by a single, black artist mother, vibrant yet frequently depressed, and unwavering in her commitment to her work. She had kept her illness a secret until two weeks before she died. In those first few weeks after we buried her, I filled…

I first met Isabel Johnson Hiss in 1997. I was an assistant at a literary magazine by day and a waitress by night. I had not yet begun work on my first novel, but I was well into the work of becoming a writer: reading voraciously, writing lousy stories, and scribbling notes in a composition book. The magazine was run by a famous (and famously eccentric) editor. He taught me to read carefully and ruthlessly, to edit sentences, and to revile “widows” and “orphans” in typeset print. But he also gave me advice about how to live. He recommended cheap food (various street vendors), expensive doctors (specialists on the East Side of Manhattan), cheap laundry soap (Fels-Naphtha), and expensive clothing (Filson oilcloth jackets and wool sweaters). To me, a young…

I come from a dark place. Postwar Yugoslavia, the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s. A Communist dictatorship, Marshal Tito in charge. Perpetual shortages of everything, drabness everywhere. There is something about Communism and socialism—it’s a kind of aesthetic based on pure ugliness. The Belgrade of my childhood didn’t even have the monumentalism of Red Square in Moscow. Everything was somehow secondhand, as though the leaders had looked through the lens of someone else’s Communism and built something less good and less functional and more fucked-up. Whole families lived in massive, ugly apartment blocks. Young people could never get an apartment for themselves, so every flat would contain several generations—the grandmother and grandfather, the newlywed couple, and later their children. It created unavoidable complications, all these families jammed into very small places.…

Nearly a decade ago, Kate Darling bought a small but intelligent robot dinosaur that she named Yochai, after a favorite professor. Yochai could see and hear, and over time it developed a unique personality according to how it was treated. Darling, then a law student in Basel, Switzerland, with a lifelong passion for all things robotic, liked to invite friends to interact with the dinosaur, which was equipped with a tilt sensor and would begin to squirm and cry if held upside-down by its tail. “When I saw it suffering, I’d say, ‘OK, that’s enough; put it down,’ ” she recalls. “And then I’d pet it until it stopped crying. I thought, This is weird. I’m not particularly maternal. I don’t know how to care for a plant. And yet…

Selena Gomez met Nicolas Ghesquière the new oldfashioned way—she got his email address from a mutual friend and dashed off a letter of introduction. “I was immediately intrigued by her spontaneity and curiosity,” the Louis Vuitton creative director remembers. “Actually, he loved my song ‘Good for You,’ ” Gomez says. “That was the real icebreaker.” Two years later, in addition to being a regular at Ghesquière’s shows, joining him at the Met gala this past May, and even sharing the cover of Brazilian Vogue, Gomez is now his latest campaign star. And while a celebrity endorsement might sound like par for the course at a global brand, the relationship is actually more an affirmation that, at 24, Gomez is (finally) a fullfledged fashion force. “Let’s just say I wasn’t always…