Vogue November 2024

IT’S EASY TO DO NOTHING. That’s the truth of a year like this, of an election season like this—when there’s so much at stake, when strong feelings are everywhere, when there are countless ways to go wrong, to offend, to displease. The best course of action can seem like the safest: Don’t stand up for anything. Don’t say anything. Avoid risk. Thankfully this is not how the Council of Fashion Designers of America operates. The CFDA has a long history of civic engagement—whether that’s funding AIDS research in 1990 with Seventh on Sale, or raising money for distressed designers during the worst of COVID with Our Common Thread. The CFDA understands that fashion can’t exist in a vacuum, that it’s woven into the very fabric of America. And so on…

Homing In Rebuilding Harlem’s National Black Theatre has been deeply personal work for CEO Sade Lythcott (second from left), so it follows that the shoot for “Staging a Comeback” (page 110)—about how Lythcott, entrepreneur and philanthropist Dasha Zhukova (second from right), and architect Frida Escobedo (far right) created a gleaming new base for the nearly 60-year-old cultural institution—hit close to home. Indeed, one of Annie Leibovitz’s portraits was set on Lythcott’s doorstep. “It was great and iconic,” Lythcott says. “Annie was at my house!” French Dispatch To quote photographer Théo de Gueltzl, “the incomparable feeling of summer in the South of France” permeates every image in “Simon Says” (page 102), Nathan Heller’s profile of designer Simon Porte Jacquemus (above). The accompanying visuals, by de Gueltzl and Matthieu Salvaing, which also…

Finneas O’Connell likes to disappear. A tendency toward self-effacement may seem like an unexpected character trait for the youngest person ever to win a Producer of the Year Grammy, a prize that has pride of place in Finneas’s living room, alongside the other nine he’s earned for his work with his sister, Billie Eilish. But seated at the dining table in his LA home, the 27-year-old musician elaborates. “When you hear a song and you’re like, ‘Wow, who made this?’ That’s what I’m trying to do when I write,” he says. “He can really tap into the other person,” says frequent collaborator Ashe, née Ashlyn Rae Willson. “He is a phenomenal listener.” But pulling a Houdini wasn’t an option for Finneas’s second solo album, For Cryin’ Out Loud! The…

The honey-colored stone cottages of the Cotswolds, the windswept beaches of Cornwall, the historical charm of East Sussex—the list of picture-postcard rural getaways in Britain is long. But there’s a new (and fast-rising) contender for the crown: North Norfolk. Just two hours north of London, but an entire world away, the region is beloved for its vast dune-like beaches, crumbling medieval abbeys, and grande dame stately homes, from the Palladian grandeur of Holkham to the wonderland of contemporary art at Houghton Hall. (Plus, of course, the Sandringham estate—open to the public seasonally—best known as the royals’ Christmas getaway and the countryside bolt-hole of the Prince and Princess of Wales.) Now, a new guard of stylish stays showcases the region’s more refined side. First, there’s The Maltings in Weybourne: Just a…

We produce exceptional things when it comes to clothes, and bags, because we have great artisans—so I thought, Why not jewelry?” Matthieu Blazy, the creative director of Bottega Veneta, is in Venice describing his unhurried approach to the house’s latest endeavor: its first fine jewelry collection. We are discussing these glittering prizes sequestered in a salon in a ridiculously elegant 15th-century Venetian palazzo; on the table between us are the 15 pieces that make up this inaugural undertaking—sleek if gargantuan teardrop earrings; chain bracelets imposing enough to ward off evil spirits; rings whose sweetness is cut with thorns. (The pieces in this initial collection are grouped into four families: Drop, Catena, Primavera, and Enlanced.) “We started with very few objects,” Blazy explains, with the quiet intensity that informs both his…

How do you capture a city as frenetic as New York? For the late artist Martha Diamond, it meant looking up. In her soulful paintings of New York City’s skyscrapers, Diamond used loose ropes of color that land somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Though sparse in detail, her buildings teem, as the city does, with life. Diamond made most of her paintings in her loft on the Bowery, where she lived from 1969 until her death last December, at age 79. Throughout her five-decade career, she didn’t so much re-create what she saw as channel its slippery essence. “I know the city has straight lines or edges,” she said in 1989, “but as I walk around, the ending or beginning of substance becomes less absolute.” Her buildings sway in the…