Vogue October 2020

THIS IS A TIME of dramatic change—in our lives, our politics, our public health, even our sense of identity and purpose. Everywhere you look, people are resetting, rethinking, and choosing new paths—perhaps living in a new place or devoting themselves to a cause they believe in or just doing their best in a moment of tremendous economic strain. And fashion has been disrupted as never before. The question of what we choose to wear and why—the fundamental role our clothing plays in our lives—is up for debate in ways I’ve never seen. Some of that debate is practical (what do we need to wear for a Zoom call, anyway?), and a lot of it is political. Amid a national uprising around social justice, in an election season where our president…

Tracy K. Smith A day before Joe Biden confirmed Kamala Harris as his running mate, Vogue asked former poet laureate of the United States Tracy K. Smith to write about the vice-presidential pick, “whoever that might be,” she explains. Smith is speaking from Princeton, New Jersey, where she lives with her husband and “three, wild young children,” and where she’s gearing up for a virtual fall semester as Princeton’s Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts (as well as the November release of a collection of poems she co-translated from Chinese, Yi Lei’s My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree). When Biden announced Harris as his pick, Smith’s assignment took on new significance. “I could write about what I actually have been thinking and feeling,” she says, “about…

Jodie Turner-Smith’s beauty routine, as of late, has been a little unusual. After cleansing, the British actor and model uses a dash of lavender oil, red or black lipstick—“I love when my lips are very moody and dark,” she says—mascara, cheek stain, a brow pencil, and her own breast milk. “Ever since I had my baby, my current beauty secret is that I put breast milk in all of my face serums,” Turner-Smith says, laughing. “My skin is very sensitive, so I use a light cleanser, and then I put on a serum with aloe and breast milk that I literally squeeze right into my hands from my boob. I think it’s the lactic acid. I’ve just found that the milk has been revolutionary.” Only a few months after having…

In the midst of lockdown home-improvement projects, Odessa A’zion had a mishap with a hammer, and on the day that we are to speak, she has to have stitches removed. She shows me the evidence when we connect. “I had to get stitches so many times in my life—it’s like nothing,” the 20-year-old actor tells me from Los Angeles, where she grew up the middle of three sisters. (She started acting when she was 15 and had a regular role on the CBS sitcom Fam.) “I think I’m very accident-prone, and I also think I can do anything and that there will be no physical consequences.” Hyperconfidence is a quality A’zion shares with her character in Netflix’s new drama Grand Army: Joey Del Marco, an academic star reverently orbited by…

When Karen Elson sat down to write her new memoir, The Red Flame (Rizzoli), she wanted her book to be, she says, “a little bit different.” It would, of course, feature iconic images of the model-musician-activist, shot by virtually every master of late-20th-century fashion photography, but she also planned to pair these incredible pictures with an unsparingly honest text. “I wanted the narrative to give some humanity to the images,” she explains. “As a model, you’re often thought of as two-dimensional—you’re put on a pedestal. I wanted people to understand the depth of my experience—my very real experience, the hard stuff.” This hard stuff included her willingness to call out the harmful practices that have longed plagued the fashion business, as well as the need to fight for a more…

There’s a moment in Rebecca—Daphne du Maurier’s haunting 1938 novel—when, dressed for a costume ball at Manderley, her husband’s stately ancestral home, the second Mrs. de Winter peers at herself in the mirror. In both the book and Alfred Hitchcock’s noirish 1940 adaptation, her dress, copied from a painting in the house, is a white, flouncy thing finished with puffed sleeves, a sash, and a “wide floppy hat.” But in a new iteration from director Ben Wheatley (High-Rise), the look is far more sinuous—a crimson velvet column out of a John Singer Sargent portrait. Starring Lily James, Armie Hammer, and Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs. Danvers, Manderley’s redoubtable housekeeper, the film, which premieres this month on Netflix, offers a stylish update on du Maurier’s text that begins with the clothes—all…