Vogue December 2021

WE’RE ALL LOOKING FOR SERENITY, aren’t we? As the news bombards us, as our channels and social feeds fill, as the pace of life ever accelerates, the need for somewhere apart, a place—mental or physical—where everything feels slow and peaceful, has become a bit of a modern necessity. I thought as much over a recent lunch with John Galliano at his home in Gerberoy, a village in Northern France, where he and his partner and collaborator, Alexis Roche, have recently put down roots. What struck me most about his life there, with his Brussels Griffon terriers and his English garden, was how at peace he seemed. John is one of fashion’s most brilliant and restlessly creative minds, and he’s updated Maison Margiela in extraordinarily dynamic ways, yet to him, right…

SJP Takes NYC For contributing fashion editor Tabitha Simmons, Sarah Jessica Parker’s sixth Vogue cover story (“Carried Away,” page 126) was an ideal assignment. “She is a woman after my own heart—a businesswoman and the head of a great shoe brand, a mother, actress, wife,” says Simmons, a shoe designer herself. “She is basically doing it all, with grace and enthusiasm.” As such, the story’s fashions mingled pie-in-the-sky extravagance with more practically minded looks suitable for a woman on the go—although once Simmons and photographer Dan Jackson moved the shoot outside, Parker quickly brought surrounding traffic to a grinding halt. “We knew the spread would not be complete without getting ‘Carrie,’ our quintessential New Yorker, on the street,” Simmons says. “What we didn’t anticipate were the throngs of adoring fans,…

I never particularly thought of myself as a gossip until I saw my first child, age one and a bit, hold a banana to her ear in the kitchen and say “whatsthegoss?” into one end. She had already ruthlessly named me “cappuccinomummy,” but this was a real moment of self-revelation; if she was going to mirror me on the phone, I had better start thinking about what I was saying, or she was going to get an addiction to chitchat and caffeine before she could stand up. In my defense, I was on maternity leave, with my second child, and it is precisely when one is most cut off from other adults that one longs for “thegoss.” A phone call with a like-minded friend could change the mood of a…

“I’M REALLY A FRUSTRATED INTERIOR designer,” Karl Lagerfeld told Vogue in 1990, “very fussy about perfection and detail.” The polyglot creator—designer, photographer, writer, wit, and passionate collector—treated his living environments with almost the same revolutionary ardor as he approached his fashion, moving deftly from giddy nostalgic romance to startling modernity as his fancy and the zeitgeist took him. “I can freak out and change overnight,” he noted. Lagerfeld’s treasures have been dispersed through the years at some notable auctions, and now Sotheby’s will offer a further thousand lots, from his signature fingerless leather gloves to the dishes in which his beloved Birman cat, Choupette, was served her food. The items will be sold across a series of eight online and live auctions (the latter in Monaco, Paris, and Cologne) from…

When the first post-vaccine holiday season began to come into focus, I found myself craving makeup of the luxurious and theatrical variety—something to steady me as I navigated the festive closeness of a room full of laughing, dancing, sweating revelers, out of practice but elated to be back. That thing, I decided, was the over-the-top eyelashes you could see from across the venue at Marc Jacobs’s New York Public Library fall show: the thicker, the darker, the longer, the better. “People want to play and have fun,” says makeup artist Diane Kendal, who was behind the “extreme” look on Jacobs’s runway, a study in oversized proportions and code-breaking dressing. “I thought, You know what? I’m going to try these lashes on everyone. Once we started doing it on two or…

THE NORTHWEST CORNER of 28th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan has hosted many ventures in its long history. Once a Gilded Age family home, it was torn down to make way for a bank featuring a separate “ladies entrance” for the discreet transactions of female clients; more recently, it’s been an office building housing everything from the International Silk Guild to the publisher of science periodicals. Soon, 250 Fifth Avenue, which has undergone a seven-year, $200 million restoration, will reopen as the brand-new 153-room Fifth Avenue Hotel. “It’s highly emotional and highly romantic,” 31-year-old owner Alex Ohebshalom says of his NoMad passion project, whose ornate interiors were updated by maximalist designer Martin Brudnizki. Suites are swathed in jewel tones and soft velvets; Murano chandeliers hang from the ceilings. A…