Vogue November 2016

AND AT LAST—IT’S TIME TO VOTE. For all the chaos and unpredictability and the sometimes appalling spectacle of this election season, the question of which candidate actually deserves to be president has never been a difficult one. Vogue has no history of political endorsements. Editors in chief have made their opinions known from time to time, but the magazine has never spoken in an election with a single voice. Given the profound stakes of this one, and the history that stands to be made, we feel that should change. Vogue endorses Hillary Clinton for president of the United States. Perhaps that sentence won’t come as a surprise. Vogue has enthusiastically covered Hillary Clinton’s career, her rise from Yale law student to governor’s wife to First Lady to senator to Secretary…

Given that we have one of the most momentous and contentious elections in our country’s history—if not the most— looming this November, it would be impossible for us not to touch on politics in this issue. Vogue has, for the first time in its 124-year history, come out in support of one candidate, Secretary Clinton. One thing should be clear to us all these days: We live in an era where progressive values and attitudes have never been more important. That’s not just the preserve of those we vote into power but something we can all support and act on in our daily lives. This struck me when, over the summer, I and several of Vogue’s editors saw a screening of the Jeff Nichols– directed Loving, starring Ruth Negga and…

I met her on a Tuesday, at the laundromat on my block in the East Village. We were pulling clean clothes from opposite dryers, and she was wearing a fantastic amaretto suede skirt. She was tall, slender, and fresh-faced—an utter gamine—and looked like she wouldn’t take a compliment amiss, so I praised the skirt, and she grinned, thanked me, then unleashed a torrent of cheery, animated talk, telling me she had just graduated from Vassar and moved to the neighborhood. She was writing a play, assistant-directing a show at an experimental theater nearby, and was also working for a young woman playwright, whom she named. I was a writer and sometime theater critic, I explained, and had reviewed the first New York show of the playwright she was working for.…

Phyllis Posnick, Vogue’s Executive Fashion Editor for nearly three decades, has long been a photographer’s secret weapon, bringing acuity, style, and wit to her work as sittings editor for such photographic legends as the late, great Irving Penn and Helmut Newton. Her beauty images and portraits have one thing in common: Positioned between multipage fashion editorials, they must be arresting at all costs. If the reader doesn’t pause at the page, it’s over. Hence Stoppers (the word was coined by Alexander Liberman), out this month from Abrams, in which she shares some of her favorite moments with Penn, Newton, Annie Leibovitz, Steven Klein, and Anton Corbijn. You’ll never think of bee-stung lips in quite the same way again. Cate Blanchett’s film Elizabeth: The Golden Age was due to open, and…

Seven hours’ bumpy drive from Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, stands an abandoned schoolhouse that recently served as an Islamic State headquarters. By the time we reach it, traveling past open fields of burning oil rigs, the harsh Iraqi sun has dropped, the sky is softening, and it’s getting late. Inside the schoolhouse, a group of mostly teenage Yazidi women are beginning their bedtime ritual. They have survived genocide and witnessed their fathers, brothers, cousins, and loved ones being slaughtered by ISIS militants. But for now, they’re in loose pajamas and bare feet, untying chignons and brushing waist-length hair. In the morning they’ll be up at six for military drills. It’s a little like being at a boarding school, except that these women are trained fighters. “Our history…

She kneels at her dressing table with her back to us, her torso wrapped in a towel, her head turned slightly in profile, tiger cub’s nose and Cupid’s-bow pout peeking out from beneath a luxuriant blonde mane. With one manicured hand, she holds up a little mirror into which she gazes, transfixed by her own image, like Venus in an old-master painting—yet bathed in the light of modern celebrity. Vogue ran William Klein’s photograph of 24-year-old Brigitte Bardot on a full page in March 1958, alongside a brief article mentioning the French star’s “maximum of animal magnetism” and her four films playing simultaneously in “intellectual movie-art theaters” in New York. It is not a fashion photograph—its subject is shown après bain or just before the towel drops, when we might,…