Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2020 i Vogue

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…

Dave Asprey, founder of the supplement company Bulletproof and one of the many Silicon Valley tech titans obsessed with lengthening their life spans, famously declared he wants to live beyond 180 years. That sounds, frankly, exhausting. Yet who wouldn’t want to take a languorous sip from the gerontological cup, assuming reasonable health and fitness? Therein lies the catch: A long life is something that’s desired and dreaded in equal measure. My uncle was a rocket scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. When I visited him in his final years, I did not recognize this once dynamic, brilliant man. He was confused, frail, vague. In 2014, Ezekiel Emanuel, a noted oncologist and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania,…

It feels like a homecoming,” Diedrick Brackens says. After a successful showing last summer at the New Museum, the Texas-born, Los Angeles–based artist’s first solo New York museum exhibition, Darling Divined, comes to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin this month—opened at reduced capacity and with timed slots for patrons. “I’m excited to be able to take my family to see my work,” he continues. “I mean, I think there’s some family who still don’t quite know what I do.” In all fairness, Brackens’s work is quite complex; his graphic, handwoven textiles—the biggest, around eight by eight feet—consider folklore, mythology, Christianity, and history through the lens of his own Blackness and queerness. “Diedrick’s work is singular in its form, mindful in its every thread,…

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” The famous Lenin quote is acutely resonant in 2020, amid a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands and ongoing protests sparked by the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake. Borders are closed, millions are unemployed, and whole industries have been decimated. Meanwhile, the strangest and perhaps most consequential presidential election in American history is upon us. What does any of this have to do with fashion? Everything, it turns out. Fashion is a planet-spanning $2.5 trillion business that employed more than 1.8 million people in the United States alone before COVID-19 reached our shores. Its touch extends from the starry realm of the red carpet to sweatshops as…

Table of contents: 27: Turtleneck ($705), shirt ($600), and skirt ($2,245). Turtleneck at net-a-porter.com. Shirt and skirt at saksfifthavenue.com. 34: Top ($4,600) and skirt ($2,750); (800) 550-0005. Tailor: Cha Cha Zutic. Cover look: 34: Dress, $5,900; Valentino, NYC. Earrings, $16,995; jasonofbh.com. Chopard rings and bracelet, priced upon request; chopard.com. Tiffany & Co. rings ($17,500–$70,000) and bracelet ($350,000); tiffany.com. Shoes, $695; manoloblahnik.com. Manicurist: Eri Ishizu, using Red Carpet Manicure. Tailor: Susie’s Custom Designs. Editor’s letter: 40: On Lizzo: LaQuan Smith top ($2,275) and skirt ($3,800); laquansmith.com. Sylva & Cie earrings, $15,750; Wilkes Bashford, Palo Alto, CA. Chopard rings and bracelet, priced upon request; chopard.com. Tiffany & Co. rings ($17,500–$70,000) and bracelet ($350,000); tiffany.com. Mia Becar sandals, $695; miabecar.com. Manicurist: Eri Ishizu, using Red Carpet Manicure. Tailor: Susie’s Custom Designs. 48: Dress…

While I was immured in my downtown apartment in the unforgettable spring of 2020, my Manhattan lullaby became an eerie, atonal symphony of birdsong, ambulance sirens, and the chilling whir of low-flying surveillance helicopters. As the days and weeks melted into months, however, I came oddly to enjoy it, to find comfort in the four square blocks of empty streets and boarded-up stores. Was it my very own Stockholm syndrome? Was I the Patty Hearst of the New York lockdown? In the midst of it all I decided to embark on a closet edit—by which I mean the creation of mountainous heaps of clothing left for weeks to gather dust and creases. In the process I came across an ensemble that I had completely forgotten: a wisteria-and-chartre use steampunk biking…

In the months since the killing of George Floyd, I’ve been stirred by the many statements of determination that have arisen out of the movement for racial justice in America. One call is for institutions and communities to do more to hear and heed the perspectives of Black people and people of color in their midst. These voices and perspectives—our voices, our perspectives—are key to harvesting the many opportunities alive within American democracy. But our nation must do the work of drawing near and listening. When the news reached me that Senator Kamala Harris had been selected as Joe Biden’s running mate, it struck me that the Democratic Party was ready to listen—and to learn. Harris’s courage, brilliance, energy, and her decades of experience have long qualified her to help…

There is no small talk with Janaya Future Khan, unless you count the first thing the Canadian-born, Los Angeles–based Black Lives Matter activist says to me, which is “What a time to be alive, huh?” They are climbing down a grassy hill in L.A.’s Griffith Park, an open place we’ve chosen to meet due to COVID restrictions, and when they look back at me, their eyes blazing intently above a light-blue medical mask, I am startled into silence. Khan (who came by their nickname by always thinking about what might come) has arrived several minutes late to the Griffith Park Carousel, a place that factors heavily into my memories of being both a high school student and later a parent of small kids in L.A. I recall it with gaggles…

When the opportunity arose to see what it felt like to get pampered during this unprecedentedly grim time, it struck me as just surreal enough to be intriguing. You see, even under the most regular of conditions, I veer toward self-denial. I consider a mani-pedi at a hole-in-the-wall nail salon a relative extravagance; the last time I received a massage must have been a half-decade ago; and, though I’m nearing my mid-40s, I’ve had a facial only once, purchased as a gift from a friend. And certainly the current circumstances—even in New York City, where Governor Andrew Cuomo gave the go-ahead to commence spa operations again in early July—enhanced my usual puritanical squeamishness. Would receiving a wildly nonessential spa treatment, I asked myself, cross the fault line from self-care to…

Tory Burch boot, $528 We’re guessing with all that time spent at home lately, you just may have made a bit of room in your closet. All the better—now you’ll have the space to welcome these stylish slip-ons. Pieced together with two beautifully colored embossed crocodile leathers, this pointed-toe boot even comes with its own (removable) chain. So, really, it’s two accessories in one. How’s that for downsizing?…

Martin Amis’s sprawling new autobiography, billed somewhat mischievously as a novel, Inside Story, is a book of gloriously unchecked preoccupations: sex, Saul Bellow, literature, sex, Philip Larkin, anti-Semitism, aging, smoking, sex, Christopher Hitchens, terrorism, suicide. Did I mention sex? Inside Story is so twilit, so nostalgic, so frankly death-obsessed, that Amis’s recollections of flirting and seduction in 1970s London are like strikes of lightning, vivid glimpses of a young writer on the make. But they’re not the only pleasures here. Inside Story spans more than four decades of Amis’s life, from those swinging London days when Amis was a young editor at the New Statesman to his hospital vigil for his lifelong comrade Hitchens, who succumbed to cancer in 2011. Along the way we get…everything. His girlfriends, wives, mentors, the…

In our new world, where travel is no longer advisable and social distancing mandatory, it has been a bit hard to connect with Lizzo. She has been on vocal rest in her home in Los Angeles, while I’m mostly isolated in my house on the East Coast. When a window of time finally opens, she settles in before the Zoom camera dressed casually, her sweater falling off her shoulders. She looks even more youthful than her 32 years, with her hair in two buns, reminding me of another princess, the fictional Leia from Star Wars. Both women took on the world and won. For Lizzo, this was not necessarily in our national script; for a Black woman it is never a given. But Lizzo’s script is an updated one. As…

It’s the last day of July, and there’s a heat wave in New York City. I wake up at 7:30 a.m. to roast bell peppers and prepare my mise en place. I’m about to have a Zoom video cooking lesson with Marcus Samuelsson, chef and co-owner of Red Rooster and author of numerous cookbooks, including this month’s The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food. Marcus is an old friend, and normally we would talk over a meal at Red Rooster, but we’re doing a virtual meetup because I’m in strict quarantine, and his landmark Harlem restaurant is undergoing COVID-related renovations (as the lockdown began last spring, it began providing meals to Harlem residents in collaboration with the hunger nonprofit World Central Kitchen). I arrive to our Zoom…

Kirsten Owen’s conversion from high-fashion model to organic blueberry farmer had everything from blind luck to sheer happenstance behind it. “I had a fantasy about having a blueberry farm after I moved here, in 2002,” she says of her 56-acre patch of land in northern Vermont, from which she speaks via landline. “And then some land right next to me, which already had 250 young blueberry plants, came up for sale. I couldn’t resist.” This sylvan setup, a mere hour or so south of Canada, where she was born and raised, is a far cry from the life Owen led in her 20s and 30s, crisscrossing the Atlantic for runway shows and shoots and as a muse to Helmut Lang, Melanie Ward, and other creators of 1990s grunge looks. These…