Vogue April 2021

WHAT DOES A YEAR AT HOME teach us? I’ve been thinking about this question quite a bit this winter. I’ve thought back 12 months, to March 2020, when everything changed—so suddenly, it seemed. We all have our turning points. For me, for whatever reason, the news of Tom Hanks contracting COVID-19 in Australia was that moment, a shift in mindset. I was at home when I read the news. And home is where I’ve been—more or less—ever since. This has not been altogether a bad thing. Of course, like you, I miss so many things—travel, restaurants, seeing friends, fashion shows, being out in the world. But there is another side to this year: We’ve turned our focus to our personal spaces in all sorts of interesting ways. We’ve had time…

Isabel Okoro Now in her final semester at the University of Toronto, where she’s earning dual degrees in neuroscience and psychology, Okoro spends what little free time she has doing what many 19-year-olds do: “I really enjoy listening to podcasts,” she says. “I also play a lot of Candy Crush.” During her breaks at home in Nigeria, however, her photography practice, centered on “a personal visualization of Black utopia,” is in full swing. For this issue, she shot Faridah Folawiyo—of the luxury concept shop Alára—at her parents’ home in Lagos. (See the portfolio “No Place Like Home” on page 64.) In her subject, Okoro found something of a kindred spirit. “Faridah is an image maker herself, so we had some interesting conversations about photography,” she says. “She was very open…

The same summer of 1967 that Joan Didion went to San Francisco to report on the hippies, a term she put in quotation marks, my parents had converted an old school bus to a groovy if primitive house on wheels and caravanned from St. Louis to Eugene, Oregon, where they were starting a new life. As Didion was listening to the ramble of paranoiacs in Golden Gate Park and encountering the famous Susan, a five-year-old in white lipstick who was being regularly dosed with acid by her mother, my parents and my older brother were moving their bus between state and county parks around Eugene, in order to keep ahead of ordinances designed to discourage long-term parking. They had no money, and my father’s teaching job didn’t begin until September…

Did you know that there exists a wild yeast that spends its winters hibernating on the backs of bumblebees? Or that most ancient medicinal texts, whether Chinese, Persian, or Greek, refer to vinegar (from the French vin aigre and the Latin vinum acetum, or soured wine) as a nostrum? Or that yeast, sugar, and bacteria exist in flower nectar, so that all fruits are, from the moment of their inception, on a natural path to becoming vinegar? I learned these facts from Oregon-based vinegar maker Kirsten Shockey on Zoom while I noisily pureed Cortland apples into a slurry and stirred a jar full of old wine. I had an early copy of Shockey’s upcoming book, Homebrewed Vinegar, a fold of cheesecloth, and several jars at my side. I’d swept everything…

I like to consider myself a generally body and face-positive person: I don’t own a scale, I go makeup-free often, and I keep my self-talk fairly congenial. But I loathe my eyelids. Currently, my upper eyelids are resting uncomfortably close to my lower ones and have descended into a slow, steady sag—a common condition called acquired ptosis, or blepharoptosis, which affects an estimated 11.5 percent of adults. Sometimes it can be caused by long-term contact-lens use; but more often than not, the condition is brought on by age—and can even obstruct vision in severe cases, turning an elective eye-lift procedure into a nonelective one in insurance parlance. While I’m not quite ready to plead my case to Aetna, my pandemic-era mask-wearing has certainly made my own ptosis more noticeable, with…

For Holly Tupper, creating clean scents that riff on classic notes (honeyed orange blossom, rich tuberose) isn’t just about leaning on nontoxic formulas. “Natural ingredients just have a greater nuance and magic to them on the skin,” says the 65-year-old perfumer, who worked in finance before launching her luxury brand Cultus Artem at Bergdorf Goodman last fall. But Tupper’s commitment to fostering a greener approach to perfume goes beyond responsible sourcing and small-batch production. In 2014, after moving from Singapore to Texas to manage her family’s ranch, Tupper purchased a 13,000-square-foot former Southwestern Bell Telephone Exchange building in San Antonio and converted it into a laboratory for her in-house chemist, a salon for private appointments, a climate-controlled room for storing raw materials, and designated areas for filtering and bottling. A…