Vogue January 2020

THIS PAST SEPTEMBER, during the Paris collections, every Editor in Chief of Vogue—there are 26 in total around the world—met to discuss a topic important to all of us. We decided that it was the right moment to set out a mission statement articulating what we stand for, and strive for, in an increasingly fraught and complicated world. You can read that statement below. It’s the first time that Vogue has come together in this way, and we’re all very proud to have done so: While we might engage with our readers in many different languages, we can also speak with one voice. For over a century Vogue has empowered and embraced creativity and craftsmanship, celebrated fashion, and shined a light on the critical issues of the time. Vogue stands…

It was a Monday afternoon when day turned into night in the city of São Paulo. I was visiting an expensive nursery school for my 13-month-old daughter, trying to look remotely worthy of such a sophisticated institution. Although it was not supposed to rain that day, the sky suddenly disappeared behind a dense layer of low, heavy clouds. A two-year-old boy stepped out of his classroom, rubbed his eyes, and looked inquisitively at the principal, who said, “No, it isn’t night yet, dear, and your father’s not here to pick you up. Go back inside.” Later that day, meteorologists struggled to explain the midday darkness. They eventually blamed low-lying clouds from a cold front combined with smoke from the fires in the Amazon rain forest, thousands of miles away. Many…

TALENT Rose Williams is waiting on the steps of the Royal Academy of Arts in London—a grand 18th-century portico that could easily frame a Jane Austen heroine. It’s an appropriate backdrop, since the 25-year-old will soon star in the television adaptation of Austen’s Sanditon (Masterpiece on PBS) as the lively Charlotte Heywood. If the character’s name is unfamiliar, that’s likely because Sanditon was only partially written at the time of the author’s death in 1817. The manuscript provided British screenwriter Andrew Davies (responsible for the Pride and Prejudice adaptation that brought us Colin Firth in a wet shirt as Mr. Darcy) just enough material to carry him through three quarters of one episode. The rest springs from Davies’s vivid imagination but remains true to core components of the work: the…

Nootropics are worth a try, I think to myself while riding a subway car in the wrong direction—for the second time in a week. Long beloved by Silicon Valley biohackers, and broadly defined as substances that improve mental capacity—from caffeine to exotic herbs—the popular supplements are finding their way from Reddit threads to modern-day wellness ubiquity. Packed with memory fortifying Lion’s Mane mushroom, Moon Juice’s malty and delicious Brain Dust powder is flying off shelves at Sephora, while San Francisco–based Nue Co’s attention-enhancing Nootro-Focus capsules were on heavy rotation backstage at Ulla Johnson’s spring 2020 show. (Makeup artist Romy Soleimani enjoyed the brain boosters with a fleet of models looking to ace the catwalk.) But Karam Radwan, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago,…

In late October, Nicolas Ghesquière posted an Instagram image of Qiyana, a star of the multiplayer online battle-arena game League of Legends, in a limited edition Louis Vuitton “prestige skin.” The Vuitton artistic director of women’s collections isn’t one of the eight million people who simultaneously play the game each day—launched in 2009, it’s one of the world’s most popular esports—or one of the nearly 100 million unique viewers who watched last year’s world championship. But augmented reality—along with an abiding love of sci-fi and time travel—is absolutely a personal obsession. “It’s fascinating—the frontier where fantasy begins and reality ends,” says the designer. “Where it’s especially interesting for us is how a character that was built in the game becomes an influence on the real world, and how people will…

Fun is the operative word in Such a Fun Age (Putnam), Kiley Reid’s delectably discomfiting debut. The buzzed-about novel takes a thoroughly modern approach to the timeless upstairs-downstairs trope, centering on a black babysitter watching over a white influencer’s two-year-old. From the opening scene, in which 25-year-old Emira Tucker is apprehended by a supermarket security guard who suspects the nanny of kidnapping, the spring loaded tale charts a battle of best intentions. Told from alternating points of view, the novel loops through vibrant vignettes set in reggaeton nightclubs and Philadelphia farmers markets before landing firmly on one side of the maternal divide. A former babysitter herself, Reid fills the narrative with ripped-from-the-shift details about the slippery intimacies between family members and a $16-an-hour employee. This page-turner goes down like comfort…