Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i Vogue

ANDRÉ LEON TALLEY AND I first met in 1983. Grace Mirabella, the then editor of Vogue (who we also commemorate in this issue), had just hired me as the magazine’s creative director, while André was its fashion news director. He’d arrived at Vogue having been at the Costume Institute, Interview, and the Paris bureau of WWD, where he was the toast of the town. We quickly became friends, in part because neither of us quite fit in with the no-nonsense and totally beige corporate atmosphere of the office: André had enough volubility to be onstage at the Metropolitan Opera, while I was just the weird Brit. Looking back, I really didn’t help my cause by having the eccentric Isabella Blow as my assistant, who took to cleaning her desk with…

“It’s got a little bit of the old me. You know, the dark side; there’s a spider and it’s a little bit sinister,” says Cindy Greene, examining one of her debut wallpapers for her new line, Sabel. Dubbed Absolem, the pattern swirls with serpentine critters, spindly-legged arachnids, and cobwebs where you might expect blooms. This “old me” she’s referring to alludes to the time she spent as cofounder, alongside designer Johnson Hartig, of cult fashion label Libertine, a brand that marches to the offbeat of its own drum and possesses an aesthetic that could be described as merry macabre. (A recent post-Greene collection featured pants emblazoned with crystal skeletons and trenches printed with chilly lines from Robert Burns’s “A Winter Night.”) Despite the echo from her earlier life, Greene, who…

According to Tania Sanchez, coauthor of the seminal 1992 compendium Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, the beginning of the modern era of fragrance can be marked by the 1882 release of Houbigant’s Fougère Royale. It was the first cologne to use a synthetic material, but its cultural significance runs much deeper, explains Sanchez. “The Fougère family, which would come to include such macho standbys as Brut, Drakkar Noir, and Cool Water, really established itself in that moment as the fragrance family for men anxious to prove they were ‘real men,’” Sanchez continues. By the 1930s, advertisements for Fougère Royale read, “Leave the flower perfumes to the ladies” alongside an image of tuxedoed gentlemen smoking cigars and drinking cocktails. (That flower perfume, of course, was Houbigant’s Quelques Fleurs, a lush cacophony of…

“Stand up straight.” I am 13 years old, patiently waiting for the organ to launch into “O Thou the Central Orb,” when I hear these words and feel two hands yanking back my cassocked shoulders. Towering over my peers in the choir stalls at the front of Holy Trinity Church Northwood, just outside London, my face flushes. I am tall for my age, the second tallest in my class, and already developing an apologetic stoop as a result. This makes me fair game for behavior correction from concerned parties—my grandmother, random adolescent boys, septuagenarian choristers. I think murderous thoughts. Then, I pray for poise. As a five-foot-eleven teenager, my poor posture was my shame. I shot up like a houseplant when I was nine years old, growing five inches in…

It’s the first week of January, after another holiday thrown into chaos by COVID, and the winter sun is starting to set behind a Vogue team gathered to photograph Kim Kardashian and her four children in the parklike grounds of Kim’s modernist Hidden Hills, California, estate. We’re only 20 minutes north of the thrum of Los Angeles, though you’d never know it watching the cottontail bunnies dart between hedges. Kim’s children, North, 8; Saint, 6; Chicago, 4; and Psalm, 2, whom she shares with her soon-to-be ex-husband, Kanye West, have been playing for the last hour, trailed by clicking cameras. North, dressed in a white Skims tee and an old pair of her mother’s artfully tattered Levi’s, cinched at the waist, has been practicing her free throws on the black…

“A LOT HAS CHANGED IN the last year or so, and I think that is definitely owed to the pandemic,” says the artist Grace Weaver. She is walking me through “11 Women”—her recent solo show at the James Cohan gallery in Tribeca—which marked an exciting new turn for her output, until now distinguished by oversized, highly saturated figures engaged in what she has called the “theater of public life.” Exhibited across the U.S. and Germany, Scotland, France, and Denmark, Weaver’s people primped, jogged, ate, smoked, checked their phones, and descended into the subway—sometimes in one big, twisted mass of limbs and gestures—while “kind of awkwardly performing and aware that they’re posing,” she says. The women of “11 Women” are like that, too, maneuvering streets strewn with empty bottles and traffic…

Fresh Take To accompany “About Face” (page 216), Celia Ellenberg’s story on The Outset, Scarlett Johansson’s new skin-care line, photographer Cass Bird worked with the stylist Max Ortega on a light, bright portrait befitting their effervescent subject. “I’ve been the face of several luxury brands throughout my career, and all of those experiences were really wonderful,” Johansson tells Ellenberg. Still, she longed to spearhead something of her own: “I was sort of playing a character in those campaigns, and as I evolved, I wanted to create and represent a brand that was true to me.” On set at Pier 59 Studios in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, Bird also gave Johansson free rein—with charmed results. “I asked Scarlett what type of music she liked, and her response was German punk,” Bird says.…

Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low, as the truism goes. But the pleasures of Elaine Hsieh Chou’s campus satire are in high supply. Ingrid Yang, the neurotic, antacid-popping protagonist of Disorientation (Penguin Press), is a Ph.D. student at a middling institution studying a late canonical Chinese American poet who has fallen out of fashion. The discovery of a mysterious note in the archives could liberate her from “academic purgatory,” leading her down a rabbit hole of research at its most madcap. In the tradition of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, Chou has written a delightful new chapter of dark academia. Eternal love is the mystery anchoring another debut novel, The Arc (St. Martin’s Press), Tory Henwood Hoen’s bracingly entertaining antidote…

When Beth Bugdaycay cofounded the fine jewelry company Foundrae with her husband in 2015, she knew what she didn’t want: run-of-the-mill chains and charms, drippy and dull—things you could pick up anywhere. “I wanted my work to speak directly to the people who really understand our jewelry,” she explains, and, indeed, her pieces flaunt highly individual embellishments: Some rings evoke vintage cigar bands; others can be enameled with your own secret sayings; medallions feature half-moons, arrows, abstract blossoms, and radiating hearts—meant, in Bugdaycay’s lexicon, to represent notions like wholeness and resistance, symbols that transcend mere monograms and horoscopes. Foundrae’s obsession with individualism is perhaps what has made it such a cult hit. In times like these, when the ground beneath our feet seems to shift every day, more and more…

THE LAST TIME I MET Scarlett Johansson, seven years ago, she had just given birth to her daughter, Rose, and had brought the infant on the press junket for a new luxury beauty launch. Johansson was running late, according to her publicists, who kept the details vague. She arrived within a few minutes, looking noticeably bright-eyed and fresh, especially for someone who was only a few months postpartum. “I’m so sorry, I was nursing my daughter,” she explained with a warmth and familiarity that were disarming coming from the woman who would shortly become the world’s highest-paid actress. When we meet again in late fall, this time hovered over our respective computers, I am hiding from my children in a corner of my basement turned home office, while Johansson sits…

It’s 2:45 p.m. on an unseasonably balmy Tuesday in December, and Minneapolis City Hall is eerily quiet. There’s no municipal bustle—only empty halls and the click of my boot heels on marble steps. Among the only two people I see outside, in a still-desolate, mid-pandemic stretch of downtown, is a protester wielding a drum, wearing a vest scrawled with BLM and NLM (Native Lives Matter). Just down the street is the Hennepin County Courthouse where, last April, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder for taking George Floyd’s life. I wonder if the stillness here is actually the calm after the storm. Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey breaks the silence in his corner office. “Hi, I’m Jacob,” Frey booms, as much as one can through a KN95 mask.…

Table of Contents: 62: On Ju: Jacket and hat; ilovelibertine.com for information. Dress; Chanel boutiques. Marc Jacobs shoes and socks; bergdorfgoodman.com. On Chaoyu: Jacket and dress; Chanel boutiques. Libertine hat; ilovelibertine.com for information. Marc Jacobs shoes and socks; bergdorfgoodman.com. Cover Look: 80: Dress; loewe.com. Manicurists: Diem Truong, Kim Truong. Tailor: Hasmik Kourinian. Contributors: 102: Left photo: Proenza Schouler dress; proenzaschouler.com. Manicurist: Lolly Koon. Tailor: Cha Cha Zutic. Right bottom photo: On Ju: Brandon Maxwell dress; net-a-porter.com. Harlem’s Heaven by Evetta Petty hat; harlemsheaven.com. Annie Costello Brown earrings; anniecostellobrown.com. On Chaoyu: Kiko Kostadinov gilet and cardigan; Dover Street Market New York. Sunnei ear cuff; sunnei.it. Tailor: Zoey Chen. As the World Turns: 120–121: On Akech: dress and shoes; ysl.com. Wing & Weft glove; wingweftgloves.com. Pebble London cuff; pebblelondon.com. On Ruea: dress,…

PAT CLEVELAND, model In 1969, Grace would sit at her little desk in the alcove just outside of Diana Vreeland’s office. She would welcome me when I had to be there for fittings. Grace always wore that pussycat-bow shirt under those fawny beige little sweaters. I’ll never forget her hair, that chopped mane of ash blond, and her big smile as she looked up at me from her desk. “Hello, Miss Cleveland. You can go in now.” Together we would quietly enter the sacred space of Diana Vreeland’s bright red room. There were just the three of us, with Diana choosing looks to go into the magazine. Grace would be assisting, hanging on to every word as I changed. Grace would help me dress—time was of the essence, we had…

ON TIKTOK, there’s strength in numbers: Anyone from a vintage fashion expert to a dedicated home chef can find a community of like-minded obsessives. And now, Vogue is launching a challenge to discover what strength means and looks like to TikTokers across the globe. Play along by following @voguemagazine and showing us when your body feels most powerful—whether while working out or spending time with loved ones—using the hashtag #ifeelstrong. Need a little guidance? Cut out the insert on the facing page to create a flip-book starring Mia Kang, or head over to our TikTok to see the challenge in action. VOGUE #ifeelstrong 3/18 HOW TO BUILD THIS 1 To remove all 18 flip-book cards cleanly, fold along each perforation before you tear them out. Then stack them in order,…

Though the barefoot, free-loving revelers of the Woodstock era have gotten a lot of play in fashion since they first roamed the earth, you won’t find any of those hackneyed hippie references in Taofeek Abijako’s vision of festival style. His first womenswear collection for Head of State draws inspiration from the lesser-known history of the Festival of African Culture (FESTAC) ’77, widely recognized as the largest gathering of Black arts and culture in West Africa. “I grew up hearing stories about Sun Ra, Stevie Wonder, Miriam Makeba—they all performed,” says Abijako, who was born in nearby Ajegunle, in Lagos, and now resides in Brooklyn. “My uncle attended the festival and has so much footage, which got me thinking: What would FESTAC look like if it happened today?” Homecoming, the new…

The body is back. That’s the news from the spring 2022 runways—all that skin hidden away by lockdown sweats has been reexposed, with legs stretching out beneath minis at Dior, navels winking above low-slung waistbands at Miu Miu, and miles of midriff revealed by bras, crop tops, and peekaboo cutouts spotted everywhere from Loewe to Michael Kors. Transparency is a theme; so too fabrics that cling to every curve, and tailored ensembles enunciating a robust hourglass silhouette. Designed at a moment when it seemed society might be putting COVID in the rearview mirror, these collections feel optimistic: Go out and play, they say. Show yourself. In some ways, this is a standard fashion move. The last time catwalks united in proposing what are often referred to as “bodycon” looks—short for…

I ARRIVED ON THE CAMPUS of my private Southern university at what felt like the exact moment Britney Spears began shaping the minds and bodies of an entire generation. When my friends and I got dressed to “go out,” typically to a fraternity party, we didn’t assess our closets and, after much consideration, choose to wear a slightly cropped top with a pair of low-rise jeans. These were the only clothes we owned. I don’t remember questioning why I flashed my lower abs and belly button for so many years, but I do remember feeling hyperaware of how my stomach—that anatomically amorphous word for our midsections—compared to those of the women around me. It’s no wonder few mourned the belly-baring silhouette when it eventually gave way to high-rise denim, shirts…