Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2024 i Vogue

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…

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…

It was late in the summer in Los Angeles, with all the dry heat and burnished sunlight that implies, and Billie Eilish was sitting in a dark room, busy changing her mind. The singer was halfway through editing the music video she had directed for “Birds of a Feather,” her latest astronomically successful hit song (nearly 1 billion streams) off her latest astronomically successful hit album (nearly 4 billion streams at the time), when she encountered a problem: She realized she hated it. Well, not hated. “I was like, this ain’t it,” she says. She’s telling this story, about the music video that wasn’t, a few days after she came to that particular realization. We are sitting in the cool dark of her rehearsal space, curled up on a couch…

At a friend’s birthday dinner in Paris not long ago—a long banquette in a small neighborhood restaurant—I arrived late, sat, and was questioned by my tablemates about what brought me to France, where I don’t live. With the dismissive vagueness that writers learn to cultivate for work in progress, I told them I was working on a piece about a fashion designer. “I hope it’s Jacquemus,” someone across the table cut in. “Yeah, Jacquemus,” another guest agreed. From there, to my surprise, the sentiment echoed around. The guests at this table mostly weren’t fashion people; they were movie people, business people, people with kids, lawyers. But they had views about the brand. “Jacquemus is really exciting,” someone insisted to me. “You have the sense they’re doing something new.” Strictly speaking,…

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…

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…

The world of Russian ballet is a rarefied one, and Juhea Kim’s escapist second novel, City of Night Birds (Ecco), takes you deep into the corps of the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg, onto the vast stage of the Bolshoi in Moscow, and into the ranks of the Opéra Nationale in Paris. Kim, who trained in dance at a young age, writes lush prose buttressed by vivid detail—the pain in a dancer’s foot, the smell of sweat backstage, the searing heat of blisters soaked in vodka. Our heroine, Natalia, rises from humble beginnings to become a worldrenowned prima, with a self-confidence and hauteur to match—and her story is packed with drama: love affairs (several), high-stakes rivalries, and an accident that spirals her into addiction and self-doubt. What the ever-expanding world of…

Audra McDonald is crouched over a curious white plastic box. “I swear this is a kayak,” she says as it suddenly unfolds like large-scale origami, making a satisfying crunch as it hits the pebbly shore. What will eventually be my vessel for the afternoon is now a flat piece of corrugated plastic. We are perched on the banks of the Hudson River, just outside of Croton-on-Hudson, a storybook village about an hour’s train ride north of Manhattan. McDonald has lived here ever since she left the city in the wake of September 11. She had an infant daughter at the time and wanted some distance from the place she had called home ever since enrolling at Juilliard as an undergraduate in 1988. The quiet of the riverbank is a stark…

Valentino bag There are bags designed to be discreetly tucked away, and then there are the scene-stealers, crammed full of narrative intrigue. The Valentino Garavani Nellcôte, a medley of pretty jacquard, punkish studs, and some serious suede fringe from Alessandro Michele’s first collection for the house, is one such accessory, immediately evoking the heady swirl of la vie bohème. Forget paring back and piping down—here is a piece made to sing and swing.…