Vogue May 2019

“Our 100% giving model is among the first in the world and has allowed us to create change at a scale we never could have imagined.”John Demsey, Chairman of the MAC AIDS Fund In 1994 MAC Cosmetics had a simple yet bold idea to help fund HIV/AIDS programs around the world: Lipstick for your life. Indeed, 100 percent of sales from the very first MAC VIVA GLAM lipstick—a dark, moody, and very nineties shade—benefited AIDS charities. Over the next 25 years MAC Cosmetics would raise more than $500 million and in the process set, break, and reinvent the charity mold over and over again. But one thing remained the same: Every cent of sales from VIVA GLAM products was donated to charities—a philanthropic first. The fight is not over. It’s…

IN EVERY MAY ISSUE we have the pleasure of bringing you a preview of the new Costume Institute show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Last year’s “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” was devoted to the inspiration of faith to Church and designers alike. It was the biggest show the Met had ever staged, and it drew a record-breaking crowd—due in no small part, I’ve always thought, to the way “Heavenly Bodies” let us all walk the arcane and mysterious corridors of the Vatican, revealing a powerful and secretive institution known before to only a very few. This year’s exhibition, “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” takes quite a different approach, even if some might argue that devoting a show to Catholicism’s gloriously gilded excess was already pretty camp…

I left New York late on a frozen night and arrived to sunshine and the feathery warm air of Nairobi. Two days later, on February 6, 2019, in a remote area of Southwestern Kenya, 42 cultural leaders from the Loita Maasai tribe would come together to declare their commitment to abandon female circumcision of girls. The date was chosen since it is world zero-tolerance day for female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C), and because I am interested in matters concerning the least protected category of people in the world, adolescent girls, I accepted an invitation from my friend Nick Reding to witness the historic occasion. The Kenya Loita Maasai—a group within the estimated one million Maasai—are a deeply traditional, historically pastoral tribe of 40,000, recognizable by the red tartan blankets often draped…

On a warm June evening last year, the crowd at London’s Village Underground got an unexpected jolt when a platinumhaired Rina Sawayama joined Charli XCX onstage to put her own euphoric spin on XCX’s anthemic chart-topper “Backseat.” Since the release of her 2017 EP Rina, Sawayama has become accustomed to playing packed venues. But this was different. The concert finished at 4:00 a.m. Two hours later, the Japanese-born, London-bred model and musician was on set for Turn Up Charlie, the new Netflix comedy starring and produced by Idris Elba. Music, let alone acting (the Elba production is her first professional gig), is a fairly recent endeavor for Sawayama, who graduated from Cambridge in 2012 with a degree in politics, psychology, and sociology. Her education has left her with an expansive…

In the 1950s and ’60s, Bronxborn photographer Garry Winogrand made a name for himself as a paparazzo of everyday people, capturing his subjects in private moments in public spaces. He documented laughing fits outside Madison Avenue shop windows, weary glances directed at police officers overseeing political protests, the anticipation just before the first bite of a street-vendor pretzel—hectic compositions that channeled the electric energy of New York City in the postwar period. Though most of his images were taken in black-and-white, Winogrand amassed a considerable, if little-known, color portfolio as well. The last significant outing for his color work was an ill-fated 1967 exhibition at MoMA, where the slide projector broke and wasn’t replaced, leaving most visitors oblivious to the artist’s more vibrant compositions. This month, the Brooklyn Museum will…

At Miu Miu’s most recent runway show, fashion spilled over into the front row; more specifically, onto the body of the label’s longtime ingenue, Elle Fanning. The actress wore a prim dress, whipped up by Miuccia Prada, that featured a spray of dandelions (a recurring floral motif in the designer’s oeuvre) in a lustrous corn silk–yellow taffeta—all of it inspired by a 1903 portrait of a flaxenhaired girl in yellow painted by the little-known Oxfordborn Margaret Fletcher. (A turn-of-the century feminist, Fletcher founded a quarterly journal dedicated to women and academia and dabbled in the fine arts.) So if you were struck by how perfectly matched Fanning was with her dress, it’s worth noting: It was, literally, made for her.…