Vogue March 2019

THIS MONTH WE CELEBRATE everything that defines the West Coast today, from fashion to food, beauty to art, politics to wellness, interior design to sustainability. It’s the first time that an entire issue of Vogue has been devoted to just one place, but as it’s become more and more apparent that all the world’s highways lead back to the Golden State—whether one focuses on the tech giants (Uber, Airbnb) that have sprung up in the last decade, irrevocably transforming our lives, or on Hollywood’s continuing dominance as the global entertainment hub—it feels absolutely right for the times. Of course, the current news cycle that’s spinning as I write this letter—the continuing aftermath of the horrific recent forest fires and their heartbreaking impact on towns and communities; the lightning-rod issues of…

One morning early last summer, I woke to a burnt-orange sky. The sun looked biblically dimmed. High up, a dense plume had drifted in, a billowing cloud of dark gray smoke tinged with brown at the edges. The forests, near and far, were on fire. My husband and I had made plans with some friends to visit the beach, and we clung to this arrangement, smoke or no smoke. We packed a picnic basket with blankets and wine and headed to the shore, where all afternoon we watched gangs of kids trying to shove one another off their paddle boards. Parents played lazy games of soccer, Coronas in hand. The cloud above us clotted and thickened. Dogs chased the seagulls. I lay down on my towel and slathered myself in…

FASHION “What I really like is to make things,” says Bottega Veneta’s new creative director, Daniel Lee. “From a very young age, I spent my spare time knitting and making any other kind of craft.” Lee, 33, was raised in Bradford in Yorkshire, the northern English county famed for its rolling landscape and doughty, no-nonsense citizens. By the age of eighteen, though, he was intrigued by fashion, feeding his appetite with issues of Vogue and reports on Alexander McQueen’s and John Galliano’s epic shows on fashion television—all he had access to until he moved to London later that year. “Now I try and play catch-up with culture,” he says. Lee was an academic student, and his parents (his father is a mechanic, his mother a homemaker) “were quite surprised that…

DESIGN In 2012, fed up with the frequent and unproductive tire-burning protests that blocked roads and polluted the air in the Lebanese capital, Beiruti textile house Bokja staged their own form of civil disobedience. They unleashed a load of tires, sheathed in their elaborately embroidered fabrics, throughout the streets. It was a photogenic stunt that echoed the notes of activism subtly woven throughout all of Bokja’s collections. Take a seemingly simple chair that teems with mimosas and graceful sea horses; it’s a quiet celebration of gender equality, as the sea horse is one of a few species in which the male can be impregnated. Named after the traditional Middle Eastern patchwork textiles used to wrap a bride’s dowry, Bokja (pronounced “bubjeh”) was founded almost 20 years ago by Huda Baroudi…

ACTIVISM Last May, weeks after America Ferrera’s son, Sebastian, was born, the first images emerged of children being torn from their families at the U.S.–Mexico border. “Those images are tough for anyone to see,” Ferrera says over lunch in West Hollywood, her husband, the filmmaker Ryan Piers Williams, at her side. “But looking at them as a brand-new mother who is holding her two-week-old child? It just destroyed me.” So Ferrera—arguably Hollywood’s most ardent political activist—did what she’s always done: She picked up the phone. Chances are, if you’re a politically minded young actor or artist or influencer, you’re on Ferrera’s speed dial. During the recent midterm elections, for instance, she enlisted everyone from Natalie Portman to Alicia Keys to Zoe Saldana to join her in supporting Democrats on the…

MUSIC “All of my aunts and uncles in Syria on my mom’s side are artists, singers, musicians, and puppeteers,” the singer and composer Káryyn tells me from Los Angeles, where she moved 24 years ago with her parents. It’s this heritage that most inflects her work. “I’m giving voice to my great-grandfather,” she says. This is no passive inheritance: That ancestor was beheaded during the Armenian genocide, and she thinks this violent act and her own drive to communicate are psychically related. A more recent conflict haunts Káryyn’s debut album, The QUANTA Series, out this month. Though born in Alabama and raised in Indiana, the singer-composer spent childhood summers in Syria, until war made that impossible. (ISIS took over the hotel that her family owned in the mountains outside Aleppo…