Vogue February 2019

THOUGH THIS ISSUE MARKS Reese Witherspoon’s sixth Vogue cover, the time between her last appearance, in 2014, and today feels like an eternity in terms of how much both she and Hollywood have changed. For most of her career, Reese has been portrayed as America’s Sweetheart, the sunny and upbeat blonde hailing from Nashville, Tennessee. For many, she will always be Elle Woods from Legally Blonde—the relentlessly perky, sugar pink–clad, Chihuahua-toting sorority sister who defied (male) expectations and ended up a hotshot attorney. (Incidentally, the third installment of Legally Blonde appears next year, just one of the many projects that she has in the works.) There is one aspect of Reese that can be regarded as very Elle-like: Stereotype her at your own peril. She is not only a terrific…

Our baby is two days old when our pediatrician sits us down and says, “We got an abnormal test result.” The terror I feel at these words must show because she immediately adds, “But it’s a screening, not a real test—definitely not definitive. Very high false-positive rates.” Her prefatory disclaimers don’t ease my mind; the opposite: I’m now anticipating something so awful that it requires the kind of preparation I don’t feel equipped to make. Or maybe her vagueness was intentional, to scare us so when she does blurt it out—“He failed the newborn hearing test”—we’ll sigh in relief at its relative benign-ness, at the absence of words like fatal and malignant. Her disclaimers, though, turn out to be wrong. It’s not nothing. Not a false positive. One month and…

TWO HOURS A DAY, seven days a week, with a mix of the treadmill and the Tracy Anderson Method: Victoria Beckham is serious about exercise and knows her way around a pair of trainers. So when it came time to design her own—her new collaboration with Reebok launched this month—she was characteristically precise. “I expect a lot out of my workout clothing,” Beckham says, “but I also expect it to carry me from the gym through the day” “Every time I launch something new, it’s because it’s something I want in my life,” Beckham says at the New York shoot for the campaign. “I’ve wanted to put a trainer in my collection for a long, long time, but it’s something that’s very specialized—I had to do it with a brand…

In an age when the double tap is so often the fastest path to fame, there is something appealingly old-fashioned about a literary success story. This holds especially true for the tale of Benedict Wells, the 34-year-old German wunderkind who survived a downright Dickensian childhood before emerging as a cultural sensation in his native country. Wells was only six when illness and financial troubles shattered his household, forcing his parents to send him to state-run Bavarian boarding schools. This early experience informs Wells’s überpersonal fourth novel, The End of Loneliness (Penguin Books), an international phenomenon that won the European Union Prize for Literature. The tale centers on the orphaned Jules and his two older siblings, following the trio through a series of events that are unfortunate but also joyful and…

In the world of fashion, Bill Cunningham built a sterling reputation on his extreme modesty. It was this consistent lack of ego that earned him the respect of a notoriously discerning industry and a warmly avuncular status within it, beloved by all. If broader audiences first became acquainted with fashion’s favorite blue-jacketed photographer in Richard Press’s 2011 film Bill Cunningham New York, a new documentary offers another intimate look at the notably private figure. Narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker, Mark Bozek’s The Times of Bill Cunningham unearths Bozek’s own long-forgotten 1994 interview with the icon, catching him in a rare moment of candor. Deployed to France after World War II, Cunningham spent his leave in Paris, attending New Look–laden couture shows. His expanding fascination with the world of fashion got…

WHILE PREGNANT WITH HER first daughter, seven years ago, April Gargiulo, a third-generation winemaker, began to take a hard look at what she was putting into and onto her body. Napa Valley’s farm-to-table ethos took care of her diet. But when it came to her skin, she couldn’t find a clean replacement for the chemical-heavy regimen that had effectively combated her lifelong acne. So she set out to make something for herself. Here’s where things take an unfamiliar turn from the I-made-this-in-my-kitchen indie-brand backstory: The 22 highly potent ingredients in her grapeseed oil–based Vintner’s Daughter Active Botanical Serum—antibacterial and skin-tightening cypress from Spain; tone-evening bergamot from Calabria; pore-shrinking hazelnut from Piedmont—are so effective that the product has become a skin-care phenomenon since its launch in 2014, the diminutive black glass…