MAY
on a roll
emma stone
funny, fashionable, new films
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strictly ballroom
the met celebrates the greatest american couturier
wearing hope
fashion fights aids
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ryan murphy’s
the normal heart
spring in the citY clash your prints, pop your colors!
WEARING HOPE BRAND-NEW DAY, P. 230
MAY Liya Kebede in a Prada for Born Free skirt, an Equipment blouse, and Marc Jacobs sandals. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
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Letters from readers
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TRIBUTE
L’Wren Scott was both a bold-faced perfectionist and an elegant and reserved grande dame. By Hamish Bowles CONTRIBUTORS UP FRONT
In this excerpt from her irresistible new memoir, My SalingerYear, Joanna Rakof lands a job at a New York literary agency with a certain famous client LIVES
Philanthropy guru Laura ArrillagaAndreessen is guiding the titans of Silicon Valley to new heights of charitable giving. By Jacob Weisberg NOSTALGIA
Grace Coddington remembers the late BritishVogue editor Beatrix Miller, who presided over two decades of culture and fashion with rule-breaking fair
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IN THEIR SHOES
Imogen Poots Twenty art-world heavyweights design shoes for charity CONTINUED>48
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FAS HI ON ED I TOR : P HY LLI S P OS N I CK . H A I R, JUL I E N D’YS FO R JUL I E N D’YS. D E TA I LS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
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TALKING FASHION
Street-chic sneakers, pleats (page 124), and insect-inspired designs (page 126)
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TNT
From Paris Fashion Week to a Roman holiday, Elisabeth TNT greets spring in style
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New restaurants elevate the Bowery DISPATCH
Caroline de Maigret in Thailand SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
Through her charitable clothing line, Phoebe Dahl helps send girls in Nepal to school—boosting local economies in the process
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redo in fresh-of-thecatwalk creations. Lynn Yaeger reports
THE HAMISH FILES
VIEW THE RUNWAY BRIDE
Saying “I do” gets a
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CROWN HEIGHTS
Tiaras to wear on the big day—and beyond RING CYCLE
When Chloe Malle became engaged, playing solitaire wasn’t an option
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SPANISH CLASS
Madrid-based designer Josep Font is ushering Delpozo into the global spotlight
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BOLD STROKES
Spring’s designs pay homage to Cy Twombly’s work, on view next month in Mexico City STYLE ETHICS
Karlie Kloss teams up with Warby Parker to debut a collection of sunglasses
Raúl Martinez
BEAUTY & HEALTH
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PLACES IN THE SUN
A fashionable couple sets up a cluster of tiny, rustic-chic spa hotels in Mexico BUZZWORD: CHARCOAL
The latest Itingredient, prized for its detoxifying powers, is turning up everywhere
IL MAESTRO
From his stunning Milan casa, Giampiero Bodino gives fne jewelry a new setting
THE EDITOR’S EYE
UNEVEN GROUND
Slight imbalances in our body’s alignment could be the culprit behind back pain, according to a persuasive new school of thought. Elizabeth Weil reports
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HEALING WATERS
Reviving an ancient tradition, a spa opens in Bath, England Sasha Pivovarova in a Prabal Gurung tweed top, a Ralph Lauren Blue Label shirt, Burberry Prorsum skirt, and Casadei for Prabal Gurung heels. Photographed by Mario Testino.
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CHICKEN COUP
A wave of persistent infections in women has been linked to poultry. Jancee Dunn reports POP POLISH
Rita Ora collaborates on a bold new line of nail lacquers
PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT TALENT
With breakout roles on screens large and small, Mackenzie Davis is capturing Hollywood’s attention ART
L.A.’s Blum & Poe inaugurates its frst New York gallery with a show by Mark Grotjahn MOVIES
Jon Favreau stars in the personable new comedy Chef, while Tom Hardy is at the center of Locke AUCTION
Vogue Creative Director Grace Coddington curates a selection of nudes for Paddle8 TRAVEL
A former girls’ academy in Stockholm is transformed into a sleek hotel CONTINUED>52
SPRING IN THE CITY DAY TRIPPING, P. 198
VOGUE.COM
FAS HI ON ED I TOR : TO N NE G OO D MA N . HA I R, C HR IST I A A N ; M A KEU P, VA L GA RLA ND. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
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MAY Ceramist Amanda Mofat’s latest collection of stoneware has a hint of Delft
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BOOKS
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DESIGN
PARIS MI AMORE, P. 244
250 SOLID GOLD
Is there a more elemental pleasure than the taste of fnely made butter? Just one, writes Oliver Strand. Making your own supply
Dancer Lil Buck brings jookin’ to New York City Ballet Stories have their day
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London Grammar goes from pub gigs to sold-out arenas
Designer Giambattista Valli’s charming reading room in his Parisian home. Photographed by François Halard.
TELEVISION
Costume drama meets horror movie in the new Showtime series Penny Dreadful
FASHION & FEATURES POINT OF VIEW DAY TRIPPING
Model Sasha Pivovarova and singer-songwriter James Blake roam artsy, old Barcelona—the ideal backdrop for today’s creative day clothes THE ONE AND ONLY
As a reinvigorated Costume Institute prepares to celebrate the work of Charles James, Hamish Bowles refects
on the incredible career of America’s greatest couturier
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THE DARLING
Emma Stone is fying high—major movie roles, a Spider-Man beau, fashion-world heat—but, as Jason Gay discovers, she’s just as downto-earth as ever
226 LOVE AND WAR
Ryan Murphy and his all-star cast bring Larry Kramer’s catalyzing 1985 play The Normal Heart, which captured the early days of the AIDS epidemic, to the small screen. By John Powers
COVER LOOK STONE AGE
230 BRAND-NEW DAY
In the global fght against AIDS, South Africa is making extraordinary strides in reducing mother-to-child transmission. Now a philanthropic initiative called Born Free is teaming up with the fashion industry to lend a hand. By Jonathan Van Meter
244 PARIS MI AMORE
Giambattista Valli’s apartment in the city’s Canal St.-Martin neighborhood, as Mark Holgate fnds, is as layered with history as his native Rome
Emma Stone wears a Gucci tobacco abstract leopard-print dress with leather inserts and hat. To get this look, try: PhotoReady BB Cream, PhotoReady Translucent Finisher, Highlighting Palette in Bronze Glow, Colorstay Liquid Eye Pen in Black, Lash Potion by Grow Luscious Mascara in Black, Brow Fantasy Pencil + Gel Duo in Dark Brown, ColorBurst Matte Balm in Complex, Core Nail Enamel in Seductive. All by Revlon. Hair, Jimmy Paul for Bumble and Bumble; makeup, Mark Carrasquillo. Details, see In This Issue. Photographer: Craig McDean. Fashion Editor: Tabitha Simmons.
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HATS OFF
New treatments are—fnally— making fuller, thicker, stronger, longer hair a reality
254 STEAL OF THE MONTH
Gugu Mbatha-Raw on the role of a lifetime—and the dress of the moment
256 WHAT TO WEAR WHERE
Pre-fall’s graphic grooves line up nicely—but the fun part, of course, is in the mix-and-match
INDEX
263 PAINTING
THE TOWN
This season’s fashion is more like wearable art
268 IN THIS ISSUE 270 LAST LOOK
AMAZING LACE THE ACTRESS, WEARING CHANEL HAUTE COUTURE. REECE HUDSON BAG. CHANEL BOOTS.
31 DAYS
OF HOSTESS DRESSING Spring is all about entertaining, so whether you’re organizing a baby shower or giving an impromptu brunch, here is a month’s worth of welcoming head-to-toe hostess looks.
THE MET GALA
From the moment the first celebrity walks down the red carpet until the last drop of champagne is consumed at the after-party, Vogue.com has the only cameras allowed inside the Party of the Year.
VIDEO
EMMA
EMMA STONE
In our latest Vogue.com exclusive video, watch the Amazing Spider-Man 2 star as she uses a hilarious, highly unconventional method to prepare for her latest role—as a nun. Written and directed by Ruben Fleischer.
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THE SEASON’S BEST SANDALS
A relaxed time of year calls for an equally laid-back wardrobe—but which pair of sandals, among the hundreds of options to choose from, is your best bet? Here we distill the strongest new looks for the ultimate summershoe guide.
STO NE : C RA I G M c D E A N. FAS HI ON E DI TOR : TA BI TH A S IM M ON S. H A I R, JI MMY PAUL FOR BU MB LE A N D BUM B LE ; M A KEU P, MA RK CA R RASQU I LLO. P RO DUC ED BY KYD DRA K E FO R NO RT H SI X. P RO DUCTI ON DESI GN , P I ERS HA N ME R. PA RTY G I R L: BRUCE W E BE R. SA N DA L: MA R KO M a c P HE RSO N . D E TA I LS, S EE I N T HI S ISSUE.
PARTY GIRL WHAT TO WEAR TO YOUR OWN SOIREE THIS SPRING.
ANNA WINTOUR Editor in Chief Creative Director GRACE CODDINGTON Design Director RAÚL MARTINEZ Fashion Director TONNE GOODMAN Features Director EVE MacSWEENEY Market Director, Fashion and Accessories VIRGINIA SMITH Executive Fashion Editor PHYLLIS POSNICK International Editor at Large HAMISH BOWLES Fashion News Director MARK HOLGATE Creative Digital Director SALLY SINGER
Fashion Accessories Director RICKIE DE SOLE Fashion News Editor EMILY HOLT Bookings Director HELENA SURIC Market Editors KELLY CONNOR, JESSICA SAILER, CYNTHIA SMITH Accessories Editor SELBY DRUMMOND Home Editor MIEKE TEN HAVE Associate Home Editor REBECCA STADLEN Associate Accessories Editor MAYA SASAKI Fashion Associate BEAU SAM Accessories Assistants SARA KLAUSING, ALEXANDRA MICHLER Fashion Assistants LAUREN BELLAMY, ALEXANDRA CRONAN, GRACE FULLER, GRACE GIVENS, EMMA MORRISON
Beauty Beauty Director SARAH BROWN Beauty Writer LAURA REGENSDORF Beauty Assistant ARDEN FANNING
Features Culture Editor VALERIE STEIKER Senior Editors TAYLOR ANTRIM, JOYCE RUBIN (Copy), COREY SEYMOUR, ABIGAIL WALCH Entertainment Editor JILLIAN DEMLING Social Editor CHLOE MALLE Style Editor at Large ELISABETH VON THURN UND TAXIS Food Critic JEFFREY STEINGARTEN Associate Entertainment Editor MARK GUIDUCCI Features Assistants ALLY BETKER, THOMAS GEBREMEDHIN, KATE GUADAGNINO, ELIZABETH INGLESE, GABRIELLA KAREFA-JOHNSON
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Vogue.com Site Director BEN BERENTSON Editor CAROLINE PALMER Managing Editor ALEXANDRA MACON Production Manager ANDEE OLSON Fashion News Director CHIOMA NNADI Beauty Director CATHERINE PIERCY Senior Fashion Editor JORDEN BICKHAM Market Editor CHELSEA ZALOPANY Culture Editor THESSALY LA FORCE Associate Editor PATRICIA GARCIA Social Media Manager ANNE JOHNSON Research Editor EUGENIA MIRANDA Archive Editor LAIRD BORRELLI-PERSSON
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THOMAS J. WALLACE Editorial Director
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SUSAN D. PLAGEMANN Vice President, Publisher Associate Publisher, Marketing KIMBERLY FASTING BERG Associate Publisher, Advertising DAVID STUCKEY
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Marketing
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VOGUE.COM
letter from the editor
DREAM TEAM CECIL BEATON’S ICONIC 1948 IMAGE OF MODELS IN CHARLES JAMES GOWNS HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS “FASHION’S ANSWER TO THE LAST SUPPER.”
PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE
O
n the evening of May 5, in New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will again host its annual Costume Institute gala, which this year celebrates the work of the troubled genius that was Anglo-American couturier Charles James. As you will read in Hamish Bowles’s account of his rise and fall (“The One and Only,” page 212), James’s incredible creativity was matched only by his tempestuous personality, which tried the patience of even his closest friends, not to mention his clients. (Who would ever want to hear “I couldn’t possibly make anything for a frump like you” from her favorite designer?) Still, his mercurial nature can’t detract from the brilliance of his clothes, with James
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virtually defning our notions of nighttime elegance in the twentieth century. Has there ever been any greater evocation of that than Cecil Beaton’s famous 1948 group portrait of eight models in James’s grand, sculptural dresses? So exacting was James in working out the patterns of these marvels of cut and construction that Creative Director Grace Coddington and photographer Tim Walker wittily shot some of the designer’s most iconic creations rendered in paper for the sitting that accompanies Hamish’s story. It’s particularly apt that the show devoted to James, who today is revered by the industry—he virtually defines the notion of the designer’s designer, and I don’t think I’ve met this many of them so excited about the Met show as when it was announced last year—is also the first to open in the museum’s newly renovated costume E D I T O R ’ S L E T T E R > 6 9 VOGUE.COM
letter from the editor
WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST ABOVE: LIYA KEBEDE IN CAPE TOWN ON BEHALF OF THE BORN FREE INITIATIVE. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ. BELOW AND RIGHT: ALEK WEK WEARS MARCHESA AND LILY ALDRIDGE (WITH DAUGHTER DIXIE) WEARS IVANKA TRUMP IN BORN FREE’S PRINT CAMPAIGN.
W E K A N D A L DR I DG E : PAT RI CK D E MA RCH E LI ER
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wing. It’s an opportunity for one American institution to salute another. We will, of course, be bringing you masses of coverage of the night itself on Vogue.com, but if you want to know more about the backstory of the transformed galleries, not to mention linger a little longer over who wore what, we are publishing our second Met Special Edition on May 14. James died in 1978, destitute and all but forgotten. I like to think that if he had been around today, he would have been assisted by a fashion world that rallied to help him beat his demons. That I am part of an industry quick to do something meaningful in times of crisis has always been a source of pride to me—and no era was more in need of courageous action than the very early eighties, when AIDS hit. I was reminded of those awful days when I watched Ryan Murphy’s new flm adaptation VOGUE.COM
of the groundbreaking 1985 Larry Kramer play The Normal Heart (“Love and War,” page 226). When AIDS first struck, there was such an acute sense of shame and terror associated with the disease that no one even wanted to say the word. At the time, I was working at New York magazine, where I sat next to a wonderful man E D I T O R ’ S L E T T E R >7 0 VO G U E M AY 2 0 14
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named Henry Post, who died of AIDS without letting any of us know what was actually happening. He simply started coming to the ofce less and less, every now and then asking me to fll in for him on a shoot he was meant to do, afterward politely calling to tell me how great it looked. Before long he stopped showing up at all, and the next thing we knew we were going to Henry’s memorial service. Ryan’s movie may have lessened some of the intensity of the rage that Larry Kramer’s play so brilliantly brought to the stage, but he has ensured it remains a poignant tribute to the lives that were lost, and I urge you to watch it when it is shown on HBO on May 25. The death of a talented young man like Henry, along with
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many others I knew, was in my thoughts when Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and I came together, along with the entire fashion industry, in 1990 to respond to the AIDS crisis by launching Seventh on Sale. Today, fashion is once again rising to the challenge to make a real diference in support of a new initiative—one intent on eradicating the transmission of HIV from mother to unborn child in Africa. Designers from Miuccia Prada to Tory Burch to Victoria Beckham, all of them women with children, have created a collection of special pieces under the label Born Free, and all of the proceeds will go to make the aim a reality. Victoria joined writer Jonathan Van Meter in Cape Town for his moving and illuminating story on the state of prenatal HIV prevention in South Africa (“Brand-New Day,” page 230), and I’d like to thank her for doing so; when she and I discussed the idea of her going on the trip, she didn’t hesitate to say yes. To launch the collection, there will be a special Born Free fund-raising carnival in New York on Mother’s Day, May 11, hosted by Claire Danes and Diane von Furstenberg, with plenty of fun things for kids to do. If you’re in the city, please drop by. Lastly, something about this month’s cover star, Emma Stone. I defy anyone to read Jason Gay’s charming piece on the actress (“The Darling,” page 218) and not take to her instantly. It’s undoubtedly the frst time a major star— and it’s entirely ftting to use that phrase about Emma, given her four high-profle movies in the works, including her appearance in the newest Spider-Man blockbuster—has taken a writer to a Build-a-Bear Workshop for her Vogue profle. Emma may have professed to Jason how guarded she is in her interviews, but what she ultimately reveals about herself is the very real and warm, not to mention very funny, human being behind the fame. What also struck me was how determined the young Emma was to get to Hollywood to start her career. Optimism should always win in the end.
VOGUE.COM
FAS HI ON ED I TOR : TA BI T HA S IM M ON S. H A I R, JI M MY PAU L FOR BU MBL E A N D BUM BLE; MAKEUP, MAR K CAR RASQUILLO. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
ROCK SOLID EMMA STONE WEARS A SANDRO LEATHER JACKET, A GUESS SHIRT, AND TRUE RELIGION JEANS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY CRAIG McDEAN.
talking back
letters from readers
THAT GIRL LENA DUNHAM, IN A BURBERRY PRORSUM SHIRT, PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ.
magazine continues to be right on the mark. Also, it was such fun to watch the original short starring Dunham and Hamish Bowles on Vogue.com! Moira McCulloch Toronto, Ontario, Canada
I was delighted to see Lena Dunham on the cover of the February issue. What was even better was reading Nathan Heller’s well-informed interview. I highly commend VOGUE for featuring such a driven, talented, and inspirational woman—Dunham is a true role model for people of all ages, and it was such a joy to be allowed access into her daring mind. Kari Wells Brooklyn, NY
The February interview with Lena Dunham not only showed the actress in a new light but also exposed her to a whole diferent set of readers who perhaps will tune in and glimpse her unique brand of humor and genius. Dunham is an everywoman, and with each episode of Girls illustrates the trials and tribulations that we face as women. Through her alter ego Hannah Horvath, she shows us her struggles with weight and insecurities in relationships. I applaud her for her brilliance. Debbie Chaves Raynham, MA
DIVINE COMEDY
Thank you for an amazing article on the hilarious Lena Dunham [“That Girl,” by Nathan Heller, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, February]. She’s no cookie-cutter bombshell, but someone with a fresh creative vision, an impressive work ethic, and the bravery to share her work with the world. Dunham is the height of cool. I hope VOGUE
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continues to feature inspiring and culturally relevant women like her on its cover. Anita Randrianantoanina Nashville, TN
The cover of the February issue, with its bright, beautiful portrait of the matchless Lena Dunham, is truly eye-catching. True, Dunham isn’t the typical VOGUE cover girl, but that only proves that the
I am deeply disappointed that VOGUE did not have the courage to show us the real and naturally gorgeous Lena Dunham. Dunham has displayed a candor and confdence by baring her true self inside and out on Girls. She’s been refreshing and empowering for those who do not conform to today’s unrealistic image of beauty. Before the age of Photoshop, VOGUE somehow managed to represent beauty and style through untouched editorial images. The magic came from the models, the fashion, the makeup, and the photographers’ and editors’ eyes. What a wild and freeing concept! But now, through the overuse of Photoshop, VOGUE and other publications are creating a standard of eerily similar avatars that is becoming increasingly boring to the reader. Sarah Hickson Montreal West, Quebec, Canada TA L K I N G B A C K > 8 0
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talking back letters from readers A NEW DAWN
KIMYE REDUX
AS THIS ISSUE WENT TO PRESS, OUR APRIL KANYE WEST–KIM KARDASHIAN COVER INSPIRED SPIRITED TRIBUTES ACROSS SOCIAL MEDIA. HERE ARE SOME OF OUR FAVORITES.
Ceridwen Dovey’s article on Nelson Mandela was so wonderfully written, it made me nostalgic for a childhood I didn’t have [“Healing Touch,” Nostalgia, February]. I was captivated while reading about her experiences as a young girl during a time of social upheaval—Dovey adds so much depth to the usual narrative about Mandela. We need voices like hers to remind us that the light in the darkness is sometimes our own, even if she may very well be just another “well-intentioned white woman.” Stella Miller Ann Arbor, MI
After reading Ceridwen Dovey’s “Healing Touch,” I was disheartened that she was not able to experience South Africa in transition. I can’t help thinking that had she been a part of the change, rather than being whisked away to school in “sterile Sydney,” she might not have felt “lonely and confused” upon her return to Cape Town. What South Africa needed was for all those who left in terror, imagining the worst after our frst democratic elections in 1994, to come back and make this their home, without guilt, but with pride. How ironic that her parents fought for democracy as antiapartheid activists, and yet the children weren’t able to experience and live in our beautiful Rainbow Nation, realizing the dream they had for their country. Claire McCormack Durban, South Africa
CULTURE CLASH
I was incredibly frustrated by your spread “Portrait of the Artist” [photographed by Mikael Jansson] in the February issue—there was nothing even remotely near “the craft of the Navajo” in it. None of the pieces are made by us, none are worn by us, and the profts will most certainly not beneft us. When will the fashion industry fnally understand that using our name and likeness to sell “Navajo” or “tribal” knockoffs is offensive? Certainly you can aford to put together a spread that isn’t page after page of cultural appropriation. Please leave us out of it. O. C. Gorman Nazlini, AZ
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BEAUTY AND THE BEASTS
Snail mucus? Bee venom? I was absolutely absorbed by “Wild Kingdom” [by Lynn Yaeger, Beauty & Health, February], a delightful article that revealed the new, must-have skin-care products and their creepy-crawly origins. However, I’m worried that as we become more health-conscious and desperate to scoop up all the fsh eggs and snail mucus we can fnd, we’re in fact depleting precious resources and running into even bigger problems than just the crow’s-feet around our eyes. Tempted by these luxe treatments and their natural sources, yet torn by morals, we all need to ask ourselves whether there’s a line and if it’s been crossed. Izabel Nielsen Montpelier, VT
MANE ATTRACTION
Leslie Camhi’s piece on hair color was a total treat [“Show Your Colors,” photographed by Patrick Demarchelier, February]. Of course I was expecting the standard how-tos on achieving more “shine” and “bounce,” but I was pleasantly surprised to see Camhi approach the conversation of color from a historical vantage point as well. As a lifelong brunette, I’ve toyed with the idea of going blonde but fnd that perhaps, like Camhi, I should work with what I’ve already got! Becky Lerner Indianapolis, IN
MR. AND MRS. RIGHT
It’s refreshing to read about the engagement of such a dynamic couple as Alex Wagner and Sam Kass [“The Talk of the Town,” by Jacob Weisberg, photographed by Norman Jean Roy, February]. With the frenzy of wedding season nearly upon us, it’s nice to see two people who understand the importance of balance—in life and in love. From hosting a television show to advising the president, Wagner and Kass haven’t lost sight of their ambition for all the pressure of upcoming nuptials. They’ve got it going on, and I’m sure the passion they bring to their jobs translates to their relationship. Here’s hoping for a happy and successful marriage! Loren Vail Chicago, IL TA L K I N G B A C K > 8 6
VOGUE.COM
talking back letters from readers NOT SAFE FOR WORK
After reading “Top Form,” I remain disappointed in designers’ ideas of acceptable ofcewear [What to Wear Where, photographed by Patrick Demarchelier, February]. The collection is charming— no argument there—but how can we as women compete in the boardroom when we remain looking like junior offce staf? Give me a ftted suit that isn’t boxy or a predictable cut. I want to be feminine, but also to be taken seriously. All of this, without breaking the bank! Dawn Newell Denver, CO
CALL OF THE WILD
I greatly admired Tamar Adler’s piece on bird hunting [“Duck, Duck, Goose,” photographed by Eric Boman, February]. It was beautifully written and an absolute pleasure to read. But, perhaps even more important, it was thoughtful and refective, especially considering the delicate, controversial nature of the subject matter. As Adler notes, wild meat really is “the most sustainable sort we
eat . . . and its carbon footprint is nearly invisible”—a fact that is not discussed nearly enough, drowned out amid all the noise surrounding the ethics of hunting and animal rights. But, that said, Adler does not dismiss the gravity of having taken the life of an animal—she confronts it (“I also again consider the morality of hunting . . . ”). In doing so, she has written a wonderfully complex piece about a complex sport, a piece that I intend to share again and again. Brava! Annie Dumas New York, NY
I was enjoying my morning coffee and my new issue of VOGUE when I turned the page to a photo of a dead duck hanging by a chain. Needless to say, I almost choked on my cofee. Now understand, I don’t live in a cave. I know about hunting and factory farms and all the other kinds of abuse faced by our animal friends. But do I have to see such a horribly graphic example in, of all places, a fashion magazine? Surely, in the great big, ever-changing, ever-expanding
world of fashion, you could have found something else to fll your pages. Michele Ferguson Newport, RI
MODEL BEHAVIOR
I have been reading VOGUE since the early sixties, when I served in the United States Air Force. I am 67 years old now and still enjoy your magazine, especially when you feature models on the cover. Enough with the actors and singers! They are of no interest to me. I remember excitedly picking up one of your issues whenever my favorite model-of-the-moment appeared in her rightful place. Please bring them back—they are fashion. Delilah Haun Sequim, WA VOGUE welcomes letters from its readers. Address all mail to Letters, VOGUE Magazine, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036, or via e-mail to
[email protected]. Please include your name, address, and a daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity and may be published or used in any medium. All submissions become the property of the publication and will not be returned.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST MODEL SASHA PIVOVAROVA, IN A CHLOÉ DRESS, PHOTOGRAPHED BY MIKAEL JANSSON.
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VOGUE.COM
tribute
L’WREN SCOTT 1964–2014
SPIRIT AND SOUL THE DESIGNER, PHOTOGRAPHED AT HOME IN PARIS FOR VOGUE, 2012.
S
ix feet three in her stocking feet, L’Wren Scott was every inch a great lady. Hers was a classic American success story of reinvention and achievement—of becoming the woman you wanted to be. Her unplaceable transatlantic cadences and her ironic humor (touched with just the faintest whif of Jaggerese), her insouciant style that saw her wear exquisite eighteenth-century diamonds like costume jewelry and spend nine months studying seasonal daylight patterns before selecting the nuanced pastels for her Paris aerie, led Sarah Jessica Parker to tell Vogue that L’Wren was “maybe the most glamorous person I know.” Born Laura “Luann” Bambrough, she was raised by adoptive Mormon parents in Roy, Utah—a salt-of-the-earth upbringing that ensured that many years and lives later she could hold her own equally well at a white-tie gala or on an outdoor survival mission in the Utah mesas. Throughout her career she sent thoughtful, handwritten thank-you notes and cookies to an array of friends and collaborators, from editors in chief to assistants. Already fve feet eleven at the age of twelve, she began repurposing thrift-store fnds and adapting Butterick patterns to make her own clothes. In the eighties, she was discovered by Bruce Weber, who was looking for a long-legged model for a hosiery campaign and soon advised her to bypass the modeling industry in New York and instead head directly to Paris—and with the fearlessness of youth she bought a oneway ticket to a brave new world and rechristened herself. The
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gamble paid of: Her frst assignment was to walk the Chanel couture show for Karl Lagerfeld, and she soon became something of a muse to Thierry Mugler. The complicated genius Guy Bourdin cast her in his demanding photo shoots; Jean-Paul Goude sent her to matador school so that she could convincingly twirl a toreador cape in front of the camera. All along, L’Wren was diligently taking notes, absorbing lessons of ft and image-making from the masters. Her modeling career segued neatly into a new life as a fashion stylist in Hollywood, where, with her innate understanding of a woman’s body, she dressed stars including Madonna, Julianne Moore, and Ellen Barkin, and oversaw her friend Nicole Kidman’s transformation into the pluperfect red-carpet swan. When she couldn’t fnd what she wanted, she simply had it made, and so it seemed inevitable that she would one day parlay her fashion sense into a brand of her own. In 2006 she did just that, working with what Vogue described as “remorseless, untiring diligence.” Her artfully cut little black dresses and embellished twinset– and–pencil skirt looks, the rock-star swagger of her Edwardiandandy coats, and the drama of her embroidered grand statement pieces transformed vintage tropes into wearable contemporary fashion that fattered a gamut of body types and won her adoring fans around the world, from Rachel Feinstein to Christy Turlington to Michelle Obama. Her collections would soon be shown at elegant luncheon presentations (a bento box at the spring show, chicken potpie for fall) in art galleries or historic rooms, the girls parading before banquet tables of assembled guests including such friends as Barkin, Parker, Daphne Guinness, and, of course, Mick Jagger, her romantic interest since 2002, an association that she wore lightly. “L’Wren was a total perfectionist,” says Anna Wintour, “someone who absolutely embodied everything her marvelous clothes stood for: strength of character combined with a confdent and powerful style.” As L’Wren told Vogue in 2009, “I trusted my instincts and stuck to what I believed in.”—hamish bowles VOGUE.COM
FRA N ÇO I S HA LA RD
The virtuoso of modern glamour was both a bold-faced perfectionist and an elegant and reserved grande dame.
contributors
T
o date, James Blake’s made-in-hisbedroom electronic music—perhaps best described as post-dubstep, with extra soul on the side—has earned the 25-year-old Briton a Grammy nomination, two top-ten albums on the U.K. charts, and, last year, the prestigious Mercury Prize, past nominees for which include Mumford & Sons and Adele. “But I haven’t sold any records compared with those kinds of people,” the nearly lifelong vegetarian says over falafel at London’s St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel, having just returned from a Barcelona sojourn alongside Mario Testino and Vogue’s Tonne Goodman (“Day Tripping,” page 198). “I’m not being modest, I’m just being realistic.” And while that may be true now, it likely won’t be for long, as American audiences continue to fall for the six-foot-six Margiela enthusiast, whom Kanye West once described as his favorite artist. “As a teenager, seeing music played from a laptop was quite game-changing,” Blake says. “I decided, ‘I’ll never do that.’ ” Instead, his concerts are exhibitions of technical bravura and risky methods, like looping, through which Blake builds his vocal phrases until he sounds more like a choir than one man behind a keyboard. “It never becomes second nature,” he says. “You have to get it right every night. It is dangerous, but it wouldn’t be fun otherwise, or genuine.” —mark guiducci
BLAKE, IN A DIOR HOMME SUIT, ON LOCATION IN BARCELONA
THIERSTEIN ON LOCATION, WITH MODELS (FROM LEFT) CODIE YOUNG, NASTYA STEN, ALEXANDRA KIVIMAKI, AND ALICE CORNISH
RHEA THIERSTEIN
“[Photographer] Tim Walker asked me to interpret Charles James’s designs in a delicate and surprising way, and the creative process evolved naturally. In the end, the dresses were so giant they had to be hung from the ceiling.” THE SET DESIGNER AND ART DIRECTOR ON HER PAPER RE-CREATIONS OF JAMES’S DRESSES FOR “THE ONE AND ONLY,” PAGE 212.
VOGUE.COM
BLAKE: MAR IO TESTINO. FASH ION ED ITOR : TONNE GOOD MAN. H AIR , CHRIST IAAN ; MAKEU P, VAL GARLAN D. ME N SWE AR ED ITOR : MICH AEL PH ILOUZ E. TH IERSTEIN: TIM WALKER . FASH ION EDITO R: G RACE CO D D IN GTO N . HAIR, JU LIE N D’YS FOR J ULIEN D’YS; MAKEUP, LUCIA PIERONI FOR CLÉ D E PEAU BEAUTÉ . D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .
JAMES BLAKE
up front
WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE THE AUTHOR, IN DRIES VAN NOTEN, PHOTOGRAPHED IN BOSTON.
In this excerpt from her irresistible new memoir, My Salinger Year, Joanna Rakoff lands a job at a New York literary agency with a certain famous client.
M
y frst job out of college was at a literary agency in New York famous for representing J. D. Salinger. It was 1996, but it may as well have been 1946 inside that warren of rooms, where leather armchairs, shaded lamps, and dark wood bookcases were interspersed with such technological marvels as a Dictaphone, a telex machine, and, in a vague concession to modernity, a series of electric typewriters. “So,” my boss said on my frst day, lighting a long brown cigarette, a gesture that somehow reminded me simultaneously of Don Corleone and Lauren Bacall. “We need to talk about Jerry.” I nodded. The frst Jerry that came to mind was Seinfeld, who presumably wasn’t a client, though one never knew. “You never call him. You never write to him. If he calls, you just say, ‘Yes, Jerry. I’ll let her know.’ Got it?” Before I could answer, she looked at me and emitted an odd, low laugh. “He doesn’t want to read your stories. Or hear how much you loved The Catcher in the Rye.” Oh, I thought, that Jerry. “I don’t have any stories,” I told her, half truthfully. I had stories. Just not fnished ones. “Good,” she said. “Writers always make the worst assistants.” How many times had I been told that Salinger wouldn’t call? And yet one morning, I picked up the phone and heard someone shouting. “HELLO? HELLO?” Then gibberish. Slowly, as in a dream, the gibberish resolved into language. “IT’S JERRY!” Oh, my God, I thought. It’s him. I began to
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quiver, not because I was talking to—or being shouted at by—the actual J. D. Salinger but because I feared incurring my boss’s wrath. My mind began to sift through all the Salingerrelated instructions that had been imparted to me, but they had more to do with keeping others away from him, less to do with the man himself. There was no risk of my gushing about The Catcher in the Rye. I hadn’t read it. “WHO IS THIS?” he asked. “It’s Joanna,” I told him, nine or ten times, yelling at the top of my lungs by the fnal three. “I’m the new assistant.” “Well, nice to meet you, Suzanne,” he said, fnally, in something akin to a normal voice. “I’m calling to speak to your boss.” I had assumed as much. But she was out for the day. I conveyed this to him, or hoped that I did. “I can call her at home and have her call you back today. Or she can give you a call when she gets in on Monday.” “Monday is fne,” he said, his voice ratcheted down another notch. “Well, very nice to meet you, Suzanne. I hope we meet in person someday.” “Me, too,” I said. “Have a great day.” This was not a phrase I ever used. For my boss, the agency was not just a business, it was a way of life. It had more in common with a religion, with its gods to worship, Salinger being the frst and foremost. Other clients fell lower on the hierarchy. One morning, my boss raced out of her ofce, yelling for a junior agent named Hugh. He came right out. “Judy just called,” she said. “I need you to pull all her royalty statements and books and clips and, well”—she waved her hands up and down—“just anything you can.” “Judy?” I whispered after she’d left. “Yes,” said Hugh. “Judy Blume. The children’s-book writer. Have you heard of her?” “I’ve heard of her,” I told him. “She was Claire’s client,” he said, referring to a legendary agent who’d just retired. “Now she’ll be passed on to your boss.” U P F R O N T> 9 4 VOGUE.COM
CH RI STOP H ER C HU RCHI LL . S I T TI NG S E D I TO R: MA RY FE LLOW ES. H A I R A N D M A KEUP, COURTNEY PER KINS. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
HELLO TO ALL THAT
up front
BY THE BOOK
Dutifully, I gathered copies of Blume’s classics, which I found, with some difculty, on an out-of-the-way shelf, and piled them neatly on my boss’s desk. There they sat, for several days. On Tuesday, I dropped of some correspondence and found my boss scrutinizing the cover of Deenie. On Wednesday, I caught her peeking at the frst pages of Forever . . . , as if afraid of breaking the spine. On Thursday, I arrived at work early to fnd my boss at her desk. Usually she arrived later, swathed in a whiskey mink, her eyes covered with enormous dark glasses. “Oh, good, you’re here,” she called as I took of my coat. “I’m here!” I called back with exaggerated cheer. I had been looking forward to that half hour in the ofce alone. Sometimes I worked on poems, typing them up on the Selectric. “Now,” said my boss, making her way to my desk, “how would you like to read something? A manuscript? I’d need it read very quickly. Tonight.” “I’d love to,” I said evenly, trying not to smile. I had been waiting for this moment. “You’ve heard of Judy Blume?” asked my boss. How was I having this conversation again? “Yes,” I said. “Well, this is her new novel. I don’t quite know what to make of it.” This didn’t surprise me. My boss, as far as I knew, had no children and, like a certain breed of adult, appeared to have materialized on earth fully formed, in a taupe-hued pantsuit. “Can you read it tonight?” I could. That night, I arrived home at twilight, my coat under my arm, and found a letter waiting for me atop the radiator in the hallway. My breath stopped at the sight of my college boyfriend’s small, neat hand, the blue ink from his fountain pen. Quickly, I stufed the letter in the black leather carryall I’d bought in London, where I had last seen him, right before I came to New York and fell for Don and an entirely new life. I wanted to rip it open—though I suspected it would not be the kindest of missives—but I also couldn’t bear the thought of doing so, not with Don potentially waiting for me in the apartment. It was not that I worried he’d be jealous. It was that I couldn’t risk succumbing to the wave of emotion that would surely hit the moment I read the frst line. Don and I were supposed to go to a party that night. We were always supposed to go to a party. Parties in DUMBO lofts with enormous windows looking out on the Manhattan skyline. Parties in East Village tenements, their kitchens foored in crumbling linoleum, or in the back rooms of restaurants, where the bill always came to more than anyone could aford. Inside, I found Don lying on the couch, in boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, listening to Arlo Guthrie and reading the third volume of Remembrance of Things Past. He often quoted Proust, but when I asked directly if he’d read all seven volumes—I knew no one who had—he said, “That’s a silly question.” His favorite passage had to do with the narrator’s wondering why he loves Albertine most when she’s sleeping. Tonight’s gathering was in the Financial District, the launch of a magazine. I didn’t realize how much I’d dreaded going— changing my clothes, getting back on the train—until I told him I couldn’t. “I have a manuscript I need to read tonight,” I said, and put on water for pasta, pleased by the prospect of a night at home alone in my pajamas.
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“I’ll stay home, too,” said Don, shrugging. “I need to work.” He had reached the stage of working on his novel where he appeared simply to be moving commas. “Sentences should be worked,” he sometimes said. I agreed, but I also thought, privately, that they could be overworked and perhaps—based on the one story of his I’d read—that it might be time to give his poor novel some air. “Oh, no! You should go.” I peeled off my sweater and grabbed my old pajamas, maroon sateen things from the 1960s purchased in high school at Unique, the giant clothing repository on Broadway. He shrugged again. “Can you make pasta for me, too?” Propped up in bed with a bowl of spaghetti, I took the rubber band of the manuscript and stretched my legs. Don lay down beside me and plucked the title page from my lap. “Judy Blume?” He wasn’t quite smirking. “She’s a good storyteller,” he said. “She gets kids. I loved Then Again, Maybe I Won’t.” “You did?” I was less shocked that Don had read anything so pedestrian than I was surprised that he would admit it. “Of course I did. I was just like the hero, Tony. My parents were working-class, but then we moved to a more middle-class neighborhood and I didn’t ft in. It’s really a book about class.” I nodded as he went on with his Marxist interpretation of Judy Blume’s oeuvre, but my eyes turned back to the pages at hand. For the past fve years, if not more, I’d consumed literature with a capital L, as my mother liked to say. Don was eternally amused by how little I’d read of philosophy and po-
The agency was not just a business, it was a way of life. It had more in common with a religion, with its gods to worship litical theory and works in translation. “You’re so bourgeois!” he often cried when he found me rereading Persuasion or The Age of Innocence. “You just want to read these books about rich people getting married and having afairs. There’s a whole other world out there.” He was right. I wished I’d read more, and more widely. The list went on and on, all that I hadn’t read, all that I didn’t know. My life was a project in catching up. Thus, it had been a long time since I’d read any “commercial fction.” I took the title page of the manuscript with something close to anxiety. What if I had outgrown Judy Blume? But no one, I suppose, outgrows Judy Blume. When I was a kid, her books had seemed to speak directly to my own experience, to the confusion and loneliness of being an outsider in a suburban setting. So why was I surprised to fnd her new heroine, Vix, ensconced in an ofce in midtown Manhattan, eating lunch at her desk? By the fnal pages, when Vix says that her only regret is that her oldest friend, Caitlin, couldn’t confde in her, couldn’t explain the choices she’d made, I was quietly crying. It was past midnight and Don had fallen asleep, but he woke, startled. “What’s wrong?” he asked. I couldn’t explain. “It’s not a kids’ book,” I said through tears. Don looked at me, bewildered. “I think you might need to go to sleep,” he said, then yawned widely. U P F R O N T> 9 6 VOGUE.COM
up front
BY THE BOOK
I
thought of my best friend from high school, Jenny, who worked a few blocks away from the agency, in the McGrawHill Building, editing social-studies textbooks. Like me, Jenny was a child of the 1970s—her mother an Afrosporting feminist who published poetry in Lilith—but she seemed to be morphing into a housewife from the 1950s by the day. In high school, her life began and ended with poetry. Her work was beautiful, brilliant, strange. But since meeting her fancé, she rarely talked about poetry, consumed with the prospect of her wedding at the Central Park boathouse. And she couldn’t understand the choices I had made—to leave my college boyfriend and move to Brooklyn, to take up with Don. In the old days, Jenny and I had talked about everything, a unifed front against the world. But we were no longer fully unifed, and we didn’t quite know how to be together with these points of departure between us. The next morning, I rose earlier than usual and dressed carefully in a sober brown knit shift with a matching jacket, purchased for me by my mother. The more I resembled a 1965 coed, the more seriously my boss regarded me. I found her pacing in front of my desk, cigarette in hand. “Well, what did you think?” she asked by way of greeting. “I liked it.” I pulled the manuscript out of my bag. “Really?” she asked. “But what did you make of it? It’s not a kids’ book, is it?” “It’s not a kids’ book,” I said. “It’s a novel for grown-ups. About kids. Or, teenagers. In part.” I hadn’t thought I’d be nervous. My boss tapped her fnger on my desk impatiently. “My concern is: Am I going to be able to sell this? Will adults really read a book about kids?” I started to protest, but something in her tone stopped me. She didn’t want my opinion, I realized, with a sudden jolt. Maybe someone had told her I was a good reader—a couple of agents had taken on clients based on my initial reads. But my boss didn’t want input from a 24-year-old. She wanted me to agree with her. “Lots of great novels have child protagonists,” I began instead, knowing this was absolutely the wrong tack. “Oliver Twist——” “This isn’t Oliver Twist,” she informed me. “But you would read it?” “Many people would read this book,” I said. “Would buy this book—everyone who loved her as a kid.” She looked at me uncomprehendingly, not—I realized later—because she didn’t understand the scope of Blume’s fame, but because my boss’s relationship to books, to stories, to writers themselves, was entirely diferent from mine. She’d never willed herself into Anne of Green Gables so that she might have real friends, friends who understood her thorny desires and dreams. How could she spend her days—her life— ushering books into publication but not love them in the way that I did, the way that they needed to be loved? I glanced into her cool, intelligent eyes. Was I wrong? Had she once been just like me? And time—and publishing—had changed her?
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EARLY DAYS “I just don’t know if I can sell it,” she told THE AUTHOR AT A me. And there, I suppose, was my answer. She FRIEND’S WEDDING; COMES was a businessperson. “Well, you’ve had your HER MEMOIR OUT ON JUNE 3. fun,” she said, handing me a few tapes, “but now it’s time to get to work. I’ve got a lot of dictation for you.” An hour later, as I fnished the last of my typing, a tanned, skinny woman in narrow-legged jeans and a close-fitting white T-shirt walked hesitantly toward my desk. Suddenly something caught her eye and she retreated back into the corner, crouching down in front of the obscure bookcase where I’d found Judy Blume’s books. Oh, no, I thought, as a frown arranged itself on the woman’s face. Before I could explain that we were in the process of reshelving after a renovation—which was true!—my boss cried, “Judy!” The woman rose and allowed herself to be led into my boss’s ofce. A few minutes later, they left for lunch in grim silence. I placed my typing on the corner of my boss’s desk for signature, put on my coat, and grabbed my bag. On the corner of Forty-ninth Street, I decided to splurge on a tray of gyoza at a nearby Japanese restaurant. Perched on a high stool at the bar, I remembered the letter. There it was, at the bottom of my bag, jostling with the previous week’s New Yorker. I pulled it out and, before I could think better of it, slit the envelope with my thumb. Inside lay two sheets of the thin, airmail-like paper my college boyfriend favored. “Dear Jo,” I read and, without intending to, let out a great, gulping sob, for no one in my current life called me Jo. Oh, God, I thought, what have I done. The next morning, the phone rang in my boss’s ofce just after she arrived. “Judy, hello!” I heard her cry, with manic enthusiasm. Her door closed. When it opened again, she was standing in the frame, blinking forlornly. “Hugh?” she called. He came running out of his ofce. “Well, that’s over,” she said. “Judy?” he asked. “Yep,” said my boss, with a raise of her pale brows. “She’s leaving.” “I won’t ask for whom,” said Hugh. “Doesn’t matter,” said my boss. I wondered what she had said about the new novel. But I kept my head down, my eyes focused on the contract in front of me, for my thoughts were utterly disloyal: If I were Judy, I would have left, too. @
Excerpted from My Salinger Year, by Joanna Rakof. Copyright © 2014 by Joanna Rakof. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. VOGUE.COM
MY SALINGER YEAR : COU RTESY OF RA N D OM HOUSE . RA KO FF: COU RT ESY OF J OA NNA RAKOFF.
The minute I closed my eyes, though, my thoughts began racing again. Why couldn’t Caitlin confde in Vix? Because she knew Vix would judge her. Because it was easier to pretend everything was all right.
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ne day in the summer of 2011, Brian Chesky, cofounder of the residencesharing company Airbnb, paid a visit to the Atherton, California, home of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The two sat by the pool discussing whether Andreessen’s frm should lead the start-up’s next round of funding. Chesky, who was not yet 30 and had gone from maxed-out credit cards to more money than he knew what to do with, mentioned that he was interested in philanthropy. “I’ve got someone for you to meet,” Andreessen said. “My wife, Laura.” They were introduced at the Allen & Co. mediaand-technology power retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho. “I have a bit of a reputation there for cornering people to talk with them about philanthropy,” says Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, who hit it of with Chesky right away. Afterward, she visited Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters and argued that philanthropy should be fundamental to the company’s mission. The visit struck a chord. Airbnb’s engineers developed a tool to match people who want to donate shelter with those left homeless by natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy. The company also embarked on what’s become an annual community-service project in which all Airbnb’s employees may volunteer to spend a workday cleaning up parks and schools in San Francisco. To Arrillaga-Andreessen—a Stanford lecturer who has become a philanthropy guru in Silicon Valley—it is gospel that a young, idealistic workforce wants to create social good as much as it wants perks like free meals and dry cleaning. “She’s unconstrained in her view of what’s possible in the HELPING HAND “I HAVE A BIT OF A world,” says Chesky, who intends to announce philREPUTATION FOR anthropic plans of his own later this year. “Other CORNERING PEOPLE TO TALK ABOUT people try to fnd reasons things can’t happen. Laura PHILANTHROPY,” tries to fnd ways that they can.” SAYS ARRILLAGAANDREESSEN. With gold-rush fortunes being made up and down FENDI DRESS. Silicon Valley, the face of philanthropy in America is changing. The list of top gifts compiled by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, while still crowded with bequests and old East Coast families, is now punctuated by West Coast entrepreneurs and people in their 40s or younger. ArrillagaAndreessen is the one persuading this new generation of tech tycoons to give their riches away. Look behind several of the most meaningful philanthropic gestures of recent years and you’ll fnd her pulling the strings. She has Chesky’s ear. She’s guided the giving of Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan; she’s close friends with Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, another serious player in philanthropic circles. A typical evening in the Valley fnds her and Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of the DNA-testing company 23andMe, conspiring over drinks about how to change the world—and gossiping about sitting next to Kevin Spacey at a black-tie dinner. L I V E S >1 0 4
TECH SUPPORT
Philanthropy guru Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen is guiding the titans of Silicon Valley to new heights of charitable giving. By Jacob Weisberg.
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RA LP H MEC KE . S I T TI N G S ED I TO R: K AT HRYN N E A LE . HA I R , I A N JA M ES; MA KEUP, GEOFFR EY ROD R IGUEZ . PRODUCED BY MCC PRODUCTIONS. H EAD LINE: LOS ANGELES TIMES, JA N UARY 1 , 2014. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .
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“Laura has an uncanny ability to walk alongside entrepreneurs and say, ‘OK—what’s next?’ ” Powell Jobs says. “ ‘How will you link your passion and your intellect to make an even greater impact in the world?’ She does this with charm, charisma, and just the right touch of persuasion.” Laura’s persuasive charm is on full display when I meet her for cofee in the lobby of the Rosewood hotel in Menlo Park, California. Willowy and ethereal, she is dressed in a Gucci motorcycle jacket, an Alexander McQueen dress, tiger-striped tights, and thigh-high suede Robert Clergerie boots. Around her neck are two Tifany crosses she always wears, one a gift from her husband (“my beloved”), the other a reminder of her late mother. After settling into a seat by the freplace, she tells me she is preparing to break it to Marc that she wants to cancel their vacation to Hawaii. “I haven’t told my beloved yet,” she says. “But what I really want to do is work.” Among her occupations: teaching undergraduate and business school classes, running Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and heading a philanthropic-innovation lab called the Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation. Her best-selling 2011 book, Giving 2.0, distills her research and thinking. People at all income levels derive satisfaction and meaning from donating time or money, she argues. Any expression of generosity should be accompanied by an embrace of the same risk-taking ethos and analytic rigor that drives start-up culture. “Moving from Giving 1.0 to Giving 2.0 is a transition from being reactive to being proactive, from emotionally based giving to strategically based, from isolated to collaborative,” she tells me. “So it’s not so much about what you give but about mitigating the risks of time, of money, of whatever portfolio of assets you’re choosing to invest.” Her ideas have taken on added urgency since confict between the have-littles and the have-everythings burst into the open around the Bay Area. On several occasions this winter, San Francisco activists have blocked the path of private shuttle buses that ferry tech workers to Apple and Google. The protests
“Laura has an uncanny ability to walk alongside entrepreneurs and say, ‘OK—what’s next?’ ” says Laurene Powell Jobs aimed to demonstrate that tech workers exist in a privileged bubble, untouched by the social problems of the community at large. “Some citizens of San Francisco still see Google as extracting value, and we need to change that,” says Marc Beniof, the cofounder of the software giant Salesforce.com. In 2010 he gave $100 million to build the new UCSF children’s hospital. “That’s why Laura’s work is so important. Tech companies and entrepreneurs need to be looked at as allies and not adversaries in the efort to make the world a better place.” It was Arrillaga-Andreessen who advised Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan—relatively recent converts to philanthropy—on their $100 million gift to education in the city of Newark, New Jersey, in 2010. Since then, Zuckerberg and Chan have become the country’s largest charitable donors,
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giving $1 billion to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which supports social causes in the Bay Area. “Laura helped us create a framework of how to evaluate diferent opportunities and how to choose the ones that were actually meaningful to us,” Chan says. “She taught me how to hone in and focus on certain changes in the world we wanted to see happen—and empowered me to say no to things that weren’t going to help us in our core mission.” Laura and her husband have become close friends with the Zuckerbergs, who come over for regular movie nights—usually pizza and a thriller chosen by Marc. She has also grown close to Zuckerberg’s friend and fellow Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz, who at 29 has also become serious about giving away much of his estimated $6 billion net worth. Moskovitz’s wife, Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, has taken Arrillaga-Andreessen’s Stanford course. The couple’s new foundation, Good Ventures, applies Laura’s ideas on evaluation and institutional efectiveness. Unusual in the world of philanthropy, it highlights its own mistakes.
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atching the attention of young billionaires isn’t hard. Laura has an ease and informality— and her fowing strawberry-blonde hair and gray-green eyes give her the look of a PreRaphaelite maiden. She also stands out in a place most people come to from somewhere else; she’s a true “daughter of the Valley,” as Powell Jobs puts it. Her father, John Arrillaga, Sr., is a commercial real estate developer responsible for much of Silicon Valley’s physical infrastructure. Hers was a normal, even “humble,” childhood, she says—“one pair of pajamas, one jacket from the Sears catalog, one hour of TV on weekend mornings.” The house she was raised in was a Mission-style single-story ranch—ordinary for Palo Alto. Her frst car was a $750 used Honda. She says she had no idea that her parents were wealthy until junior year of high school, when her father could no longer keep his name of the Forbes 400 list, and the story got picked up by the local paper. Philanthropy, she learned, was a family tradition. Her father, who grew up poor outside Los Angeles and attributes his success to a basketball scholarship to Stanford, began with a two-fgure contribution to the university when he graduated in 1960. In 2013, he gave $151 million. The family’s name is on six buildings around campus. Laura struggled with dyslexia as a girl and compensated by developing outsize interpersonal skills. She now calls it a gift. “I learned not to sleep much and to develop an amazing memory and absorb information in a diferent way than other people,” she says. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.” Another compensating mechanism, instilled by her father, was to be furiously detail-focused and goal-oriented. She writes two-, fve-, and ten-year strategic plans for everything. Three weeks after Laura was accepted to Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1994, her mother, Frances—never a smoker—was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was 52. Instead of starting school, Laura moved back home. “My mother was my best friend and soul mate,” she says. “We were inseparable. She and I did everything together.” Frances had committed her life to community-service organizations and founded two of them herself; when she L I V E S >1 0 6 VOGUE.COM
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died, 20 months after her diagnosis, her daughter was deeply changed. Instead of launching a start-up, Laura turned her focus to efective giving. She met Andreessen at a New Year’s Eve dinner in 2005 hosted by their mutual friend Greg Waldorf (who, appropriately enough, became CEO of the matchmaking site eHarmony soon after). “Marc and I talked to nobody else for the next six hours straight,” she says. She, of course, wanted to know about his interest in philanthropy, and the fact that he sat on the board of Stanford Hospital passed her test. Eight months later, they were married. The two have much in common, including a good deal of charming eccentricity. She takes her own coffee—Taster’s Choice hazelnut-favored instant—wherever she goes. Both have had the same favorite restaurant for years: the plasticmenu diner chain Hobee’s, where Andreessen has permanently reserved a table. They display their afection unabashedly in public. “My partner Ben [Horowitz] will tell you that I was an unhappy, grumpy, irascible character before I met Laura,” Andreessen says. “My life was pretty diferent.” Laura persuaded the six partners in the venture capital frm her husband and Horowitz founded in 2009—one of the Valley’s most successful and connected—to donate 50 percent of what they earn to charity. With early investments in companies like Instagram, Groupon, Zynga, and Pinterest, that amount is likely to fgure in the billions. “She was infuential in how we should think and talk about it, how it will add meaning to the things we’re doing,” says Horowitz. “A lot of it was about how to make Silicon Valley a better place to build a company. She was very good at expanding that idea and saying there are a lot of people here who aren’t in these tech companies—the people who are taking care of kids, who are cutting grass. What did we think of their contributions to what we did? She made it seem ridiculous that we wouldn’t have a pledge like that—to get six guys to give away half their money.”
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aura’s other great love is modern art: She was recently fagged in tabloid captions as Kim Kardashian’s “philanthropist pal” when the two had a private tour of the James Turrell exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. An art-history major at Stanford, she collects work by American artists from the ffties, sixties, and seventies: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, and Agnes Martin, six of whose poetic, monochromatic paintings she and her husband own. One of her closest friends is Pace Gallery president Marc Glimcher. The two visit museums, galleries, and art fairs together in New York and London. “She’s the kind of collector that dealers dream about,” he says. “She has real expertise, and she collects in depth. It’s not about ticking of a box. It’s about getting deep in there with what the artists are doing at the highest level. “The art world can be debilitatingly cynical these days—you can really lose hope about what you’re doing,” Glimcher continues. “I have to say, Laura has played a big part in turning that around for me, restoring the idea that what you’re doing has real meaning.”
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There are many of these “Laura changed my life” stories, not just from her husband and friends but also from former students. Several work in her office. When we arrive after breakfast, she greets everyone with a hug. “We completely blur the lines between personal and professional, and I love each one of our team members like a family member,” she says. She begins a meeting by handing out books as holiday gifts and reading a Billy Collins poem aloud. Then she serves a lunch she made herself: an avocado-and-orange salad, an organic
“She made it seem ridiculous that we wouldn’t have a pledge like that—to get six guys to give away half their money,” says venture capitalist Ben Horowitz green salad, and grilled chicken. She provides career advice for dozens of her alumni, who constitute a network of social entrepreneurs at innovative nonprofts like Kiva, Ashoka, Anjna, GuideStar, GiveWell, and Google.org, as well as the Californiabased Hewlett, Gordon and Betty Moore, and George Lucas Educational foundations. Still mostly in their 20s, her idealistic graduates are passionate about changing the world through philanthropy, and changing philanthropy through technology. Over lunch, her former students discuss the use of drones for climate-change monitoring and an open-source disaster-relief model developed by the data-visualization start-up Ushahidi. One, Alexander Berger, talks excitedly about the organization GiveDirectly’s use of mobile payments to recipients in Kenya. “What seems so powerful to me about this model is that you have the personal engagement that drives two-thirds of giving,” Laura says. Berger enthusiastically agrees and imagines the way the model might evolve. “You can double a family’s income for $200, and they can send a text thanking you. It’s like donor crack.” Afterward, Laura invites me for a walk around Stanford. It is a bright, cold day, and she looks like a rock star, or a very chic witch, in aviator sunglasses, a Rick Owens blistered-leather jacket, Givenchy motorcycle boots over suede leggings, and a Saint Laurent hat—all black. She shows me her favorite buildings, many of them erected by her father. After about an hour, we end up in front of the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, a building donated in memory of her mother. She shows me the garden in back, where she and Andreessen were married in a small ceremony. The memories of her mother are still fresh, and there’s a catch in her voice as she talks about her. “She was an extraordinary advocate for those in the community who had no voice of their own,” she says. The months she spent caring for her have remained present in her mind. “It was the greatest privilege of my life,” she says. “That was the frst time that I lived completely outside of myself, completely in service of another human being. Once I’d experienced the powerful, just overwhelming beauty of living in service, I knew that I could live no other way.” @ READ MORE ABOUT SILICON VALLEY PHILANTHROPISTS IN THE VOGUE DIGITAL EDITION. DOWNLOAD IT NOW
DYNAMIC DUO NEAR RIGHT: BEATRIX MILLER, WHO PASSED AWAY IN FEBRUARY, WITH GRACE CODDINGTON IN PARIS, C. 1971.
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frst met Beatrix Miller when I was a very young model and she was the legendary editor in chief of British Vogue, on whose pages I sometimes appeared. As time passed and it became clear that my modeling years were numbered, I decided to try my hand at fashion editing. Encouraged by a friend, Marit Allen, who was a junior fashion editor at Vogue, I plucked up the courage to call Bea and suggest meeting over lunch to discuss the idea. During the meal, she plied me with impossible literary questions that I was ill equipped to answer. I felt I had failed dismally and that would be the end of that. But to my surprise, over cofee, she exclaimed, “Wonderful, darling. You’ll start at the beginning of the year.” It was 1968. Despite her rather traditional demeanor, Bea had a very open mind, and she encouraged us to experiment. After a brief stint at American Vogue in her early years, she had come to British Vogue via Queen, the avant-garde London magazine owned by Jocelyn Stevens, where the staf was used to turning things inside out and upside down, including even the cover. (One memorable issue was printed this way on purpose.) Bea kept her eyes and ears open, and she was very smart at seeing what was going to be the next new thing. Her own life was not about breaking the rules—but she did like to break the rules in fashion. At Vogue, her career landed right in the crossover moment between the very mannered photographers like Henry Clarke and Norman Parkinson and the new guard of Bailey, Donovan, and Dufy, whose style was raw and sexy. The magazine moved from depicting women in the polished, elegant way of the ffties to gritty, black-andwhite London street scenes of the sixties that reflected the coming of the pill and the sexual revolution. Bea embraced it all. She was schoolmistressy in a way, but she could also be
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CUTTING A DASH
Grace Coddington remembers the late British Vogue editor Beatrix Miller, who presided over two decades of culture and fashion with rule-breaking flair. quite firtatious and giggly, and she enjoyed it when David Bailey and the bad boys tried to chat her up. Driving to work rather fast each morning in her company Jaguar, she had a strict routine, arriving at around quarter to ten after stopping for a daily comb-out at her hairdresser on Sloane Street and somehow managing to squeeze into the tiny parking space allotted her in the garage underneath Vogue House. She would appear perfectly coifed and neatly dressed in something simple by Jean Muir or Susan Small, with boots to her knees, sit down at her desk, prop a leg on the bottom drawer pulled out for the purpose, and light a cigarette. She would then make out a never-ending to-do list, neatly handwritten on a yellow legal pad, and proceed to work her way through it. At lunchtime, without fail, she would walk down the street to Burke’s, a restaurant owned N O S TA L G I A >1 1 0 VOGUE.COM
MI L LER A N D COD D I N GTON : JACK NI S BE RG/COU RT ESY O F G RAC E CO DD I N GTO N ; MAR KO M a c PH ERSON.
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THE NANNY DIARIES A MODEL FLOUTS CONVENTION IN YELLOW HOT PANTS FOR A STORY PHOTOGRAPHED BY PETER KNAPP, BRITISH VOGUE, 1971.
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by Doug Hayward and Michael Caine, always starting her meal with a Negroni. In those days in England everybody went out to lunch for a couple of hours. It wasn’t about eating a sandwich at your desk; you would have a three-course meal, very civilized. Bea would speed of in the Jaguar at fve-thirty and, unless she was entertaining, usually spend her evenings at home alone, quietly reading. She wasn’t passionate about fashion the way I was; her take on it was much more intellectual. She was able to embrace the wilder shores of our world, designers like Vivienne Westwood, Kansai Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, John Galliano, Body Map, whose clothes she would never be seen dead in but who amused her, and whose cultural importance she very much understood. She liked to explore ideas that went beyond trends. The stories she dreamed up were more conceptual and lifestyle-oriented than purely about fashion. At meetings in her ofce, she might say, “I had this idea in the bath this morning. . . .” In her apartment she had one of those grand bathtubs with gold taps and claw feet in the center of the room, and I pictured her soaking there having all these inspirations foating through her head for the magazine she loved. One of these brilliant ideas became one of my favorite fashion shoots. Photographed by Peter Knapp in 1971, it took the rules of British etiquette as described by Nancy Mitford in her book Noblesse Oblige and turned them on their heads. For example, Mitford claimed that “a lady never wears fake jewels, coloured underwear, diamonds before breakfast,” so we photographed a beautiful model, Cathee Dahmen, doing all three. To challenge the notion that “practical clothes, dark colours, sensible shoes, are essential for travelling,” we shot Cathee in a white Sheridan Barnett suit tearing along on the back of a Harley-Davidson. To illustrate “A lady never makes up her face in public,” Cathee is shown in a scarlet lip-print Saint Laurent dress applying lipstick at a restaurant. We had no budgets for photo shoots in those days, so everything was a favor. The motorbike came from a friend of mine who was also commandeered to whiz the model round and round The Boltons with Peter Knapp in hot pursuit. The restaurant location was my ex-husband’s place, Mr Chow—another freebie. The picture I loved best in the story made fun of the idea that it was in poor taste to dress conspicuously in a conservative crowd. Here Gala Mitchell was our model. I liked her because she had lots of red hair just like mine. I dressed her up in outrageous yellow satin hot pants designed by my friend Serena Shafer for her company Electric Fittings, in fabric printed by the future photographer Eric Boman. (There was always a personal connection to everything we did in those days, and it was perfectly fne to plug your friends.) We took her out to Hyde Park to wheel a Pedigree pram among a host of very proper uniformed nannies doing the same. She couldn’t have been more attention-seeking if she were Paris Hilton! Another of Bea’s bathtub fantasies was a story about women in their gardens, since she felt this relationship was quintessentially English. She herself was obsessed with her country house—mysteriously called “Pig”—where she gardened enthusiastically, even if she didn’t have particularly green fngers. For the story, which opened with a portrait of Princess Diana with baby Prince Harry—Bea was a devoted monarchist who lost no opportunity to use her connections to photograph the royal
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family for the magazine—we worked with the GOING GREEN LOCKWOOD beautiful model Victoria Lockwood, who later VICTORIA SHELTERS UNDER A LEAF IN AN went on to marry, and divorce, Diana’s brothENGLISH GARDEN, er. By this time, 1984, I was working almost PHOTOGRAPHED exclusively with Bruce Weber. I adored Bruce, BY BRUCE WEBER, BRITISH VOGUE, 1984. and the fact that he took fashion further than just a studio and put it in a situation appealed to Bea, too. The shoot in a Sufolk garden has a charming, Beatonesque eccentricity, with the model leaping over rosebushes adorned with branches and fowers. This being England, you’re never very far from your favorite beat-up old mackintosh, which we draped over a Chanel suit, and added sensible shoes and a big hat. We photographed Victoria in the pouring rain, sheltering under a huge leaf picked from the garden. To me it says everything about the romantic English attitude Bea and I shared. Bea was a very warm person, and she had an amazing group of friends, who were always dropping by at the ofce or visiting her tiny basement fat in Chelsea, where she would throw wonderful supper parties for 20 to 30 people, followed by a host of after-dinner guests who flled the place to capacity. You’d see Liz Taylor and Richard Burton there, Geofrey Beene, Paul and Linda McCartney, Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon, Michael York, Liza Minnelli. Bea would greet everyone in a Thea Porter caftan or a long evening gown that showed of her beautiful shoulders. She was a marvelous hostess, dispensing witty remarks, so-so food, and excessive quantities of wine served by somewhat tipsy waiters who usually disappeared before the end of the evening, leaving me and Vogue’s art director, Barney Wan, to do the washing up in the minuscule kitchen (no modern dishwasher here) while she retired to bed with a cup of cocoa. Everyone loved Bea. She was respected by all, and her down-to-earth approach to life balanced out our whimsical indulgences. She could also be very motherly. The ofces were always full of children and animals. The menswear editor, Geofrey Aquilina Ross, had a little Jack Russell that used to run free and was often found next to Bea’s desk, where she would be feeding him treats. You could go to her with any problem. If you said, “Oh, my pipes burst,” she would say, “Darling, let me give you the name of a plumber.” She saw me through all manner of personal traumas. When my second marriage broke up and I was devastated, she put me straight back to work and said, “In a couple years’ time you’ll forget all this. I know it’s dreadful now, but you’ll be with someone else.” And she was right.—as told to eve macsweeney VOGUE.COM
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mogen Poots is on a rare break in London when she’s asked how many feature flms she has under her 24-year-old belt. “I don’t know—a lot?!” she replies before erupting in laughter. (The answer, for those keeping track: nineteen.) “It’s funny—when you start out, you’re kind of happy just to have a job, and now I understand more what I want to do. That comes with growing up, I guess.” Though her career started with a small role in V for Vendetta at age ffteen, Poots quickly parlayed that into bigger, gutsier parts—recently as the manic, suicidal Jess in an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s A Long Way F L A S H >1 1 6
LIP SERVICE POOTS, IN A SAINT LAURENT BY HEDI SLIMANE DRESS, WITH A LOUIS VUITTON WATCH AND A GIVENCHY BY RICCARDO TISCI BAG.
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Down and as model Linda Keith, who plays a crucial part in the Jimi Hendrix biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side. “I was quite in awe of her strength,” she says of the latter character. “She was so young, so savvy—and, I think, very unselfsh.” In other words, exactly the kind of person Poots is turning out to be. “Sometimes you have to do the job for you,” she says, “and sometimes it’s about being part of a project that speaks to you.” Along the way, she’s also become rather savvy about the red carpet. “I used to think it was something very, very daunting, but then you start to understand that it’s a performance,” Poots says. And though her notion of fashion started out as “Audrey Hepburn eating croissants outside of Tiffany’s,” it has since expanded to include Proenza Schouler, Nina Ricci, and Miu Miu. “I’ve realized that you can choose to wear something only to have everyone hate it—but if you’re happy with it and proud of it, I think that’s terrifc,” she says, and it seems clear that what’s true of getting dressed applies to her acting as well. “I think it’s a real shame to conform to anything.” —ally betker F L A S H >1 1 8
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AT EASE THE ACTRESS, LEFT, WEARING GIVENCHY BY RICCARDO TISCI AND, RIGHT, IN THE ELDER STATESMAN FOR J.CREW SWEATER, BCBG TROUSERS, AND ALEXANDRE BIRMAN SANDALS.
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STEP UP CHARLOTTE OLYMPIA’S SIGNATURE DOLLY SHOE, CUSTOMIZED BY (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) FRANCESCO CLEMENTE, KENNY SCHARF, AND ED RUSCHA.
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hat some might call the first steps of India Wolf’s Stepping Up for Art project were more like giant leaps: When Wolf, the sixteen-year-old daughter of artist Maya Lin and art dealer Daniel Wolf, first saw pictures of Charlotte Olympia shoes painted in the manner of Pollock, Picasso, and other twentieth-century masters at Art Basel Miami Beach two years ago, she wondered if she could get a group of well-known living artists to do much the same. Less than a year later, she opened a parcel from Richard Prince containing a canvas with gold-soled high-heeled shoes strapped onto it. “It blew me away,” Wolf says. Even for a young woman who grew up among many of the art world’s leading figures, commissioning work from 20 of them—including Jeff Koons, Laurie Simmons, Ed Ruscha, George Condo, Cindy Sherman, Tom Sachs, and Francesco Clemente—to benefit Studio
in a School, a nonprofit that brings artists into New York City public school classrooms, was an ambitious task. Wolf first approached Charlotte Olympia designer Charlotte Dellal, who donated her signature Dolly shoes to be used as blank canvases. Wolf sent them out and waited, and slowly the results trickled in: from Tom Sachs, a video of a pair on fire; from Hugo Guinness, a pair tagged bang! stomp! whack! splat! “They’re all so breathtaking,” Wolf says. The collection will be on display at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue location on May 2, 3, and 5, along with pairs decorated by students from schools in each of New York City’s five boroughs. High art, meet high heels. —KATHERINE BERNARD
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THE STREET-STYLE SET TRADES TOWERING HEELS FOR COLORFUL SNEAKERS, PAIRING HIGH FASHION WITH GYM-CLASS FOOTWEAR.
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FROM PARIS FASHION WEEK TO A ROMAN HOLIDAY, ELISABETH TNT GREETS SPRING IN STYLE.
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ashion Weeks are famously busy and exhausting, but I don’t think I’m alone in calling Paris the highlight. There was the evening at the Tuileries when Gaia Repossi presented her new collection, White Noise, and stood beaming among her guests, wearing stacks of her rings on her fngers. Even fellow jewelry talent Delfina Delettrez came to admire— and then she and I dashed of to another gig at hot spot Caviar Kaspia, a celebration of a Roger Vivier collaboration with Russian powerhouse Miroslava Duma. I had the pleasure of sitting next to our host, Bruno Frisoni, and chatting to him about everything from Paris to Tangier, all while he and high-spirited cohost Inès de la Fressange were teasingly firing chunks of bread at each other across the room. Afterward, there was a great atmosphere at a party hosted by Natalie Massenet at the Hôtel Solomon de Rothschild: a packed dance foor, Christian Louboutin and Mary Katrantzou rocking, while other people lounged on a bed next to the bar. At the entrance I bumped into Prabal Gurung, and we stood amused at the foot of the impressive marble staircase, where two huge greyhounds greeted us. The best moment of my week had to be the Dries Van Noten exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Far from a navelgazing retrospective, the show was an invitation into the brain of one of fashion’s most discreet and creative talents. No wonder opening night was so jam-packed with models, socials, designers, art-world types, and fashion editors. I ran into a new fashion crush of mine, Fausto Puglisi, who had come directly from the Ungaro studio, even though fttings were in full swing, because “Dries is one of my biggest inspirations.” En route to the Dior show I went to my favorite hairdresser, David Mallett (I now share him with most of my friends). All I wanted was a braid—but I walked out with one we had spontaneously made shocking pink. I was glad to see that Raf’s girls bore lots of color on the runway, too: jet-blue eyeliner and pink coats and dresses. Then there was Nicolas Ghesquière’s frst presentation at the helm of Louis Vuitton. That morning, I was so excited I was almost trembling with nervousness. I have been F L A S H >1 2 2 VOGUE.COM
BRA I DS: COU RT ESY OF EL I SA BE T H VO N T HU RN U N D TA X I S/ I N STAG RA M. REP OSS I: NEIL RASMUS/BFANYC.COM. EXH IBIT: LUC BOEGLY/COURTESY OF MAR IE- LAUR E MOR EAU/LES ARTS D É CO RAT IFS.
IN FOCUS ARRIVING AT GAIA REPOSSI’S JEWELRY PRESENTATION AT THE JEU DE PAUME.
FLASHTNT
GIRL’S BEST FRIENDS POSING AT THE BULGARI 130THANNIVERSARY PARTY IN ROME WITH CARLA BRUNI AND CLOTILDE COURAU. ABOVE: IMAGES OF BULGARI JEWELS PROJECTED ONTO THE SPANISH STEPS.
ENVELOPE, PLEASE NICOLAS GHESQUIÈRE BACKSTAGE WITH CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG. RIGHT: THE INVITATION TO THE LOUIS VUITTON FALL/WINTER 2014 SHOW.
clothes. “At some shows you like the clothes,” I said. “At others you actually want to be that girl.” After Paris I was able to revisit one of my other favorite cities . . . Roma! Any excuse is a good excuse to hit up Rome: strolling around the alleys, past fountains, and ducking into churches, or just sitting on my brother’s terrace appreciating the light. Once you get used to the light, it’s hard to be anywhere else, Ginevra Elkann told me over cofee. A glamorous party for Bulgari’s 130-year anniversary was the bait for my trip. It began with a stunning video projection cast onto the Spanish Steps during cocktails, after which we followed a black carpet to the Palazzo Colonna, where a beautiful staircase led up to a terrace. We all mingled—including Poppy Delevingne, wearing daringly sky-high Dolce ceramic platforms, Delfna Delettrez, Clotilde Courau, and of course Bulgari’s ambassador Carla Bruni—and nibbled from tables piled high with cakes and Roman delicacies. @ F L A S H >1 2 4
BOWERY EATS
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nce upon a time, the Bowery was known more for its flophouses than for its Michelin-starred chefs. This spring, though, a full menu of new eateries settles on the East Village thoroughfare. Andrew Carmellini—along with partners Luke Ostrom and Josh Pickard, who together opened Locanda Verde, the Dutch, and Lafayette—premieres Bar Primi, a casual corner bistro devoted solely to the pasta course, or primi piatti, of traditional Italian dining, inside the old Peels space this month. Slightly farther south, Keith McNally is shuttering his Pulino’s trattoria and replacing it with a French restaurant, Cherche Midi, to be helmed by chefs Shane McBride (the current executive chef of Balthazar) and Daniel Parilla (head sous-chef of Minetta Tavern). Momofuku Ko’s new home a block north, meanwhile, will allow David Chang to add tables to his twelve-seat chef’scounter restaurant—while the teams behind Lure Fishbar and the Bowery Diner are also bringing yet unnamed projects to the street. Skid Row? More like Restaurant Row.—A.B.
USING YOUR NOODLE ARTWORK COMMISSIONED BY ANDREW CARMELLINI FOR HIS NEW RESTAURANT, BAR PRIMI.
GH ESQUIÈR E AND GAINSBOURG: KEVIN TACH MAN. INVITATION: COURTESY OF ELI SABE T H VO N T HU RN U N D TAX IS/IN STAG RAM. BULGAR I PROJ ECTIONS AND POSING: DAVID ATLAN (4). BOWERY EATS: MAISON PAPE RCU T & DAVID G E N CO FO R BAR PRIMI.
in awe of Ghesquière since I could barely aford a Balenciaga T-shirt. Of course I was not the only one excited. Sipping a coffee in the little VIP room before the show, I sat quietly watching the others with delight: Princess Charlene of Monaco, actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos, Kate Mara, Chloë Sevigny, Charlotte Gainsbourg. And the show did not disappoint! Belted highwaists, short A-line skirts, fabulous coats, easy sweaters, experimental fabrics . . . even the bags felt fun and cool, especially the miniature versions of the classic LV trunk. You can imagine the scene backstage after the show. Everyone wanted their Nicolas moment. Later, over a bite of lunch, Coco Brandolini, Dasha Zhukova, and I chatted feverishly about the collection. It wasn’t the fabulously fantastical presentation that Marc Jacobs would have dreamed up. But this was a show where we longed for the
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or years when my man and I and our seven-year-old son had a vacation, we ended up taking a very long fight to a seemingly random country with no hotel reservations whatsoever and renting a car. It’s called a road trip, and though I know it sounds crazy, it was a way—or so I thought—to preserve my independence. I wanted to see as much as I could, to stay in a location as
long as I wanted if I liked it—or leave right away if I didn’t. Well, I fnally grew up. On our most recent trip, we did take a very long fight to Thailand, but we decided to stay in the same place for ten whole days. It was amazing: to rest after a year of hard work, to take some time with my son, to look at wildlife, swim, read . . . to just enjoy. I had heard from a friend about INTO THE BLUE a very special place above Phuket BOATING ON on Koh Phra Thong island called THE ANDAMAN SEA, WHICH Golden Buddha Beach Resort, reSURROUNDS garded as Asia’s fnest eco-resort. KOH PHRA THONG ISLAND. The island boasts one of the last unspoiled coastal areas in Thailand, and we had our own private villa located right on the beach. How beautiful it was to wake up facing the horizon, to walk on the beach for more than six hours without seeing another soul, to read a book kissed by sunset. Monkeys and birds watched over our yoga classes. Of course there are all sorts of things to do there—diving, trekking, Thai-cooking lessons, for starters—things that seemed quite important to us when we booked the place, as we were scared of being bored spending so much time on a secluded island. Mostly, though, we ended up doing absolutely nothing, which turned out to be the biggest luxury of all. @ F L A S H >1 2 6
THE PLEAT GOES ON
LEIGH LEZARK IN PROENZA SCHOULER.
YASMIN SEWELL IN CÉLINE.
LUPITA NYONG’O IN GIVENCHY BY RICCARDO TISCI.
ELLE FANNING IN MIU MIU.
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D I SPATCH : © YA RO L P OU PAU D. LEZ A RK: JO E SC HI LD HO RN / BFA NYC.CO M. N YO N G’O : I N FUSN Y-24 4 / I NFP HOTO.CO M /N EWSCO M. S EW E LL: RU N WAY M A NH AT TA N / CÉ LI N E GA I LLE /N EWSCO M. FA NN I N G: KCS P RESSE /SP L ASH NEWS.
FROM FOIL-PRINTED TO GRAFFITISPLATTERED, TRADITIONAL MICROFOLDS GET TOUGHENED UP.
MIRANDA KERR, WITH SON, IN LANVIN.
FREIDA PINTO IN SANCHITA.
CREEPY OR CRAWLY, INSECTS TAKE WING ON THE RED CARPET AND BEYOND.
A BUG’S LIFE FAR FROM
BACKSTAGE AT GIVENCHY.
HELEN LASICHANH (WITH PHARRELL WILLIAMS) IN LANVIN.
A VERA WANG COLLECTION BROOCH.
KN OW LES : DAV I D TON N ESS E N/ PACI FI C COAST N EWS. KE RR: RE X USA / D. D a S I LVA /RE X . RONA N: A N T HO NY HA RV EY/ © G ET T Y I MAG ES. NEC KLACE : COU RT ESY O F DA NI ELA V I LLEGAS. P I NTO : IAN GAVAN/ © G ET T Y I M AG ES. BEYON CÉ : COU RT ESY O F BEYO NC É /I N STAG RA M . G IV EN CHY: KEV I N TACHM AN. BRO O CH: LUCAS V I SSE R. LASI C HA N H A N D W I LLI A MS: G I LB ERT CA RRASQU I LLO/ © G E TTY I MAGES.
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DANIELA VILLEGAS NECKLACE.
SOLANGE KNOWLES IN AZEDE JEANPIERRE . SAOIRSE RONAN IN VALENTINO.
BEYONCƒ SHOWS OFF HER DELFINA DELETTREZ EARRING ON INSTAGRAM.
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HELPING HAND DAHL WITH A STUDENT AT THE MAKAWANPUR SECONDARY SCHOOL IN NEPAL.
ONE FOR ONE
THROUGH HER CHARITABLE CLOTHING LINE, PHOEBE DAHL HELPS SEND GIRLS IN NEPAL TO SCHOOL—BOOSTING LOCAL ECONOMIES IN THE PROCESS.
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hoebe Dahl learned her first stitches as a wrinkled and washed and torn up. These are pieces you can child in her grandmother’s antique-fabric travel with and love forever.” store in Santa Fe, where she made hats and For every item sold, uniforms are donated (through the scarves. A few years on, after attending San Santa Monica–based nonproft GO Campaign, which helps Francisco’s Fashion Institute of Design and vulnerable children around the world) to young girls in Merchandising and the London College of Nepal—where education is often out of reach for children Fashion, she was assisting a designer in Amwhose families can’t aford requisite school attire. “If girls can’t get an education, they’re considered worthless, and their sterdam when consecutive trips to Tokyo and India rerouted parents often sell them to sex trafckers,” says Dahl. “We give her career. “I saw the most beautiful linen textile mills in Tothem two uniforms so they can go to school and choose a kyo,” Dahl, 25, says, “along with a style that I’d never seen betrade—like farming, or sewing—and at the end of the course fore: ripped Levi’s with oversize linen dresses. It was part folky we give them a microloan to start their business.” and part farm girl—just comfortable, beautiful, and elegant.” During her frst trip to Nepal in March, India struck her for completely differat a school on the border with India, Dahl ent reasons. “The poverty there was just “IF GIRLS CAN’T listened as mothers and daughters—only 50 unbelievable,” she says, and when she re- GET AN EDUCATION, turned to her home in L.A. pondering what THEY’RE CONSIDERED feet away from women toiling in the felds— spoke of how education was making small she could do to help, Faircloth—a simple changes in their culture that were rippling but directional line of organic linen—was WORTHLESS, AND into a broader impact. “It was wonderful to born. “I love the nature of the material,” THEIR PARENTS see the improvement from one generation to says Dahl of the drop-waist dresses, bloom- OFTEN SELL THEM TO the next,” she says. “Just one uniform is helpers, cropped shirts, and smocks that have SEX TRAFFICKERS.” attracted everyone from teenage girls to ing these women claim their basic human middle-aged women. “I love it when it’s right to an education.”—molly creeden
THE HAMISH FILES Undaunted, I followed the YSL trail in Morocco, hotfooting it to Au Fil d’Or to order an embroidered amethyst velvet jacket of the sort Saint Laurent sent down his seventies runways; to Mustapha Blaoui’s crowded emporium, where I discovered a cache of 1920s transfer-printed china; and CACTUS COOL A SLIVER OF JACQUES MAJORELLE’S GARDEN. LEFT: THE ARTIST’S STUDIO, WHICH SAINT LAURENT AND BERGÉ TRANSFORMED INTO A MUSEUM.
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fter three weeks on the road for the fashion collections in London, Milan, and Paris, I took a dawn flight from gray and glacial Orly to arrive at the heavenly Riad Madani in the heart of the Marrakech medina in time for a sun-kissed breakfast. Goodness—what a pick-me-up. My dear friend Gordon Watson, purveyor of twentieth-century furniture and exquisite objects to the likes of Madonna, Mick Jagger, Valentino, and Donna Karan, among others, was celebrating a Very Big Birthday with a bevy of close friends, thus justifying my moonlight fit (I was back in the City of Light the following evening). On the eve of my departure I had taken myself to the movies to catch Jalil Lespert’s Yves Saint Laurent, a biopic about the tortured design genius that
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charts his tempestuous life, friendships, and relationship with Pierre Bergé (it opens in select cinemas in the States next month). In the title role, 25-year-old Pierre Niney of the Comédie-Française gives RIVE GAUCHE a performance so keenly A YOUNG YVES SAINT observed that Bergé himself LAURENT (PIERRE found it unsettling to watch. NINEY) FITS VICTOIRE DOUTRELEAU Sadly, though, the movie’s dis- (CHARLOTTE LE BON). tinction ends there. It is entirely to the diminutive Topolina boutique lacking in style—all the more perplexing for tasseled loafers made from African as Bergé gave the project his blessing, alcottons and upholstery fabrics and delowing the designer’s original creations and drawings to be used in the movie signed by owner Isabelle Lallemang’s and opening the doors to the legendary eighteen-year-old son, Pierre-Henry Ramaget. A new Saint Laurent in the Saint Laurent–Bergé headquarters and homesteads, including two of their housmaking? The Saturday-night festivities were es in Marrakech. (A second biopic, Saint far too much fun, and on the morrow, Laurent, by director Bertrand Bonello, is not quite at my freshest, I leaped into a in the works, and one can only hope that horse-drawn carriage H A M I S H >1 3 4 the rich material is better served by it.) VOGUE.COM
V I LLA A N D GA RD E N: COU RT ESY O F HA MI S H BOW LES. YVES SAINT LAURENT: © T HI BAU LT G RA B HE RR/ TI BO & A N OUCH KA- SN D.
MARRAKECH EXPRESS
THE HAMISH FILES hightailed it to the bewitching Jardin Majorelle, the preservation and restoration of which was Bergé and Saint Laurent’s magnifcent gift to the city. (A hidden gate leads from the gardens to their legendary house, originally built for the artist Jacques Majorelle in the 1920s.) The cactus beds have been superbly restored by landscape designer Madison Cox, and Majorelle’s former studio has been converted by
architect Christophe Martin into a museum housing the Bergé–Saint Laurent collection of Berber artifacts, featuring magnifcent silver, coral, and amber wedding parures and homespun Amazigh robes and textiles displayed in galleries paneled in sweet-scented cedar. (Further treasures from the collection are included in “Berber Women of Morocco,” the current exhibition at the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent in Paris through July 20.) —hamish bowles
WIGGING OUT
GLAM ROCK NEIL PATRICK HARRIS IN ARIANNE PHILLIPS’S “WIG IN A BOX” DRESS FOR HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH’S BROADWAY DEBUT. RIGHT: PHILLIP BOUTTE, JR.’S, RENDERING OF THE “BERLIN WALL” FLIGHT SUIT.
BABY BLUES THE AUTHOR AMONG THE MAJORELLEPAINTED GARDEN PATHS.
“HE’S KIND OF LIKE AMERICA’S SWEETHEART,” says costume designer Arianne Phillips, laughing, on the heels of reimagining Neil Patrick Harris for his upcoming performance in the title role of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Like Phillips herself, the high-octane cult musical will be making its Broadway debut on April 22 (I caught it Off-Off-Broadway at the Jane Street Theatre in 1998), though Phillips—nominated for Academy Awards for Walk the Line and Madonna’s W.E.— also costumed the 2001 movie adaptation. Harris has ignited the Tony Awards four times with his nimble footwork and deft-tongued repartee—I was lucky enough to catch him as Bobby in the 2011 concert production of Sondheim’s masterly Company—and he is clearly having as much fun with the demanding role of Hedwig as Phillips is dressing him for it. “Collaboration is the beauty of this job,” Phillips told me, and she has both worked with New York’s remarkable costume shops and joined forces with designers, including Michael Schmidt, Desi Santiago, and wig-and-makeup creator Mike Potter, who emerged from the Manhattan club scene—much like the musical itself, which writer John Cameron Mitchell and songwriter Stephen Trask workshopped at the Manhattan drag showcase Squeezebox in the mid-nineties. She also collaged East German and American camouflage for a costume inspired by an early-1970s Bowie ensemble designed by Kansai Yamamoto, and grafted a raunchy denim skort ensemble with Cranach’s sixteenth-century painting Adam and Eve and Berlin Wall graffiti. In character, Harris never leaves the stage, so Phillips has drawn on her experience dressing Madonna’s tours for a roster of quick-change sleights of hand. Meanwhile, everything is Swarovski-bedazzled. As Phillips explained it: “Hedwig has to bling on Broadway!”—H.B.
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H A MI S H: COURT ESY O F GEO RGI NA G OD LEY. N EI L PAT RI C K HA RR I S: KEV I N TACH MAN. SKETCH : COSTUME D ESIGN BY AR IANNE PH ILLIPS. ILLUSTRATION BY PH ILLIP BOUTTE, J R .
with designers Solange AzaguryPartridge and Georgina Godley and
WEDDING BELLE KARMEN PEDARU IN AN IVORY SILK LACE DESIGN BY PETER COPPING FOR NINA RICCI; BARNEYS NEW YORK, NYC. PHOTOGRAPHED BY KATJA RAHLWES.
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EDITOR: MARK HOLGATE
FAS HI O N E D I TO R: V I CTORI A YOU N G. HA I R , SE BAST I E N RI C HA RD ; M A KEU P, LLOYD SI M MO NDS. P RO DUCED BY OCTOPIX. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
NEO-NUPTIALS
THE RUNWAY BRIDE Saying “I do” gets a redo in fresh-off-thecatwalk creations. Lynn Yaeger reports.
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CUTTING AWAY FROM TRADITION ABOVE: RACHEL CHANDLER IN HAIDER ACKERMANN WITH HER HUSBAND, TOM GUINNESS. BELOW: KATIE SHILLINGFORD IN DOVE-GRAY GARETH PUGH.
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CH A ND L ER A N D GUI N N ESS: KEV I N TAC HMA N . S HI LLI N G FO RD : A M Y GWAT KI N.
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hen Stella Tennant’s venerable grandmother the former Deborah “Debo” Mitford frst saw Tennant in her Helmut Lang wedding dress, she dubbed her stunning progeny “a bandaged bride.” Admittedly, the two-piece ensemble was just slightly unorthodox—it had a vestlike top of silk netting (“I was breast-feeding at the time,” Tennant says, laughing), an asymmetrical skirt, and “a bit of a train—well, a piece hung down in the back.” Though Tennant, who has been modeling for more than two decades and starred on many 2014 runways, was an early adopter of the bridal costume with personality, more and more chic brides have been tweaking the assumptions of what makes a dress “special” on this special day. In fact, many looks from the spring 2014 runways, though not intended as strictly bridal, would handsomely fulfill these fresh requirements: Tom Ford’s casually elegant trousers topped by an abbreviated white fur; Erdem’s lacy number, with the ease of a T-shirt (and with just the suggestion of a mullet hemline); Balenciaga’s tiny, structured of-the-shoulder fantasia. According to Peter Copping, Nina Ricci’s creative director, whose frothy confections have been coveted by more than one bride, many of the women he works with are abjuring the frosty formula— with his enthusiastic support. “I actually don’t think fabrics look best in white,” he says, explaining that he and his ladies prefer pale-pink, of-white, ivory, and pearl tones. The photographer Rachel Chandler had two weddings, a year apart: For the frst event, a tiny gathering of 20 or so people in Los Angeles, she donned wide, cropped Céline pants with an ultraluxe version of a tank top; for the second, far more lavish blowout in the Cotswolds, a dress made for her by Haider Ackermann. “Haider started by asking me which parts of my body I like best,” Chandler says, which is why her dress ended up having only one sleeve. She also dispensed with the veil, “didn’t wear a blue thing,” and, in a loving gesture to Mom and Dad, removed her trademark nose ring for the occasion. “My parents hate it.” The stylist Katie Shillingford, who got married in the shadow of the palace where Henry VIII grew up, did wear “a blue thing”—a bit of ribbon sewn into the headpiece Stephen Jones made for her, which she describes as something between a fencing mask and a beekeeper’s hat. It complemented her highly controversial dress choice—a slashed gray chifon-andtulle extravaganza by her friend Gareth Pugh that managed to seem both wispy and monumental. Though Shillingford says, with a rueful smile on her beautiful face, that an Internet site once included her in a roster of most horrifc brides (oh, the perils of Googling oneself!), higher authorities beg to difer: Her gauzy grandeur is now on view at the V&A Museum’s exhibition “Wedding Dresses 1775–2014.” But if gray seems a radical choice, what of British jewelry designer Hannah Martin, who walked down the aisle in full-on black Alaïa and pony-skin stilettos in emerald to match her ring? “I’ve worn it a number of times since,” she says. “Why go crazy on a dress if you are only going to wear it once? I’ve never owned a white dress in my life.” And did she have something blue for the occasion? “Yes! My three best girlfriends gave me a naughty magazine.” @ V I E W >1 4 4
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CROWN HEIGHTS Tiaras to wear on the big day—and beyond.
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n today’s image-saturated times, one’s high-definition big day requires a rigorous focus on details—including, more and more, eye-catching accents for the top of one’s head. Today’s tiara, whether donned to waltz down the aisle or worn to accept an Academy Award (as Lupita Nyong’o did), is alluring around the clock. Enter Madina Visconti di Modrone, whose debut jewelry collection is an extension of her own savvy eye and good taste. The notion of hair jewelry came to Visconti di Modrone, 23, while she was wearing a vintage feathered band to a wedding in Florence. “I became curious to see if I could replicate it in a heavier element, like bronze,” she says. Her sculptural pieces have been shaped and
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molded into fresh takes on the traditional bridal adornment, from neoclassical ivy circlets to feather quills fastened with suede ribbons. The Milan resident plucked inspiration from her lush family gardens in Grazzano, a bucolic hamlet in northern Italy where she spent the long, sweet summers of her formative years. (Growing up, she often dabbled alongside her mother, jewelry designer Osanna Visconti di Modrone, as she molded wax models.) Madina’s spirited collection, cast with a centuries-old technique at a historic Milanese foundry, also includes gold-plated pendulum-drop ivy-leaf earrings; small-leaf studs; and a ring that mimics ivy tendrils climbing the wearer’s hand and fastens with a thin band above the wrist. Darker mottled–and–hand
wrought chokers and bracelets, meanwhile, are drawn from rose thorns rendered in silver oxidized patinas, adding a twisted subcurrent to the collection. From these initial flowers of alfresco romance, it was a short jaunt to feathered pendants that double as brooches—or an elaborate and shimmering multilayered headband that Visconti di Modrone is calling “a bird’s nest.” No weddings—or Oscar nods—in your future? Simply tuck one of these creations into undone hair and wear it with jeans. While tiaras may be noble in theory, they’re wondrously democratic in practice.—kerry olsen V I E W >1 4 6 VOGUE.COM
CO HE N: ZO E G HE RT N ER. FASHI O N E D I TO R: KA R EN K A I SE R. HA I R, DE N N IS G OTS; MAKEUP, LISET GARZ A. PRODUCED BY CONNECT TH E D OTS I N C. AT ELI ER A N D V I SCO N T I D I M O D RO N E: FI LI P P O BA MB ERGH I . H A I R A N D M A KEUP, GIUSEPPE LORUSSO. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
IVY LEAGUE MODEL CARLY COHEN IN MADINA VISCONTI DI MODRONE’S IVY HEADBAND, $1,050; IKRAM, CHICAGO. RIGHT: HER MILAN ATELIER. BELOW: THE DESIGNER ON THE STEPS OUTSIDE HER HOME IN THE CITY’S CENTRO STORICO.
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RING CYCLE
When Chloe Malle became engaged, playing solitaire wasn’t an option.
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ou didn’t cry at all?” The Vogue fashion team was incredulous. It was the frst day back after the winter holiday, and word of my New Year’s Day engagement had pitter-pattered around our 8:00 a.m. Lanvin pre-fall appointment. “But what were his exact words? How did you feel?” Honestly? Equal to any joy or elation was the feeling of complete stupefaction that
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WITH THE BAND ATYPICAL ENGAGEMENT RINGS SET A NEW STANDARD OF BEAUTY. EXAMPLES FROM: 1 AIMÉE.AIMER 2 MARC ALARY 3 MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA LINE 12 FINE JEWELRY 4 JENNIFER MEYER 5 JANIS SAVITT AND 6 THE THREE GRACES.
a kind of Carrie Mathison–level covert operation had taken place behind my back. As it turned out, everyone involved in picking out the ring (my soon-to-be fancé, Graham; my mother, stepfather, stepsister, and future sister-in-law; and, of course, Vogue Accessories Director Rickie De Sole) had strong notions of what constituted a “very Chloe” engagement ring, none of which included a platinum solitaire. V I E W >1 4 8 VOGUE.COM
ZOE G HE RT NE R. FAS HI ON E DI TOR : KA REN KA I S ER . DE TA ILS, SE E I N TH IS I SSU E.
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NEO-NUPTIALS fiancés had proposed with to the two Fifth Avenue jewelers whence they came. What do they want instead? Everything from a hexagonal gray diamond on a recycled gold band from Péan to one of James de Givenchy’s lassoed cushion-cut sapphires for Tafn—or Irene Neuwirth’s squareshape lightning-ridge opal. Those looking to subvert tradition rather than remake it, meanwhile, can fnd their subtle wink in Maison Martin Margiela’s new line of wry and quirky gems: If Holly Golightly can make an engraved Cracker Jack prize elegant, Margiela’s bisected diamond or foating cushion-cut sapphire should present no problem for the creatively minded.
CHLOE GETTING MARRIED MALLE AND HER OFF-THE-BEATEN-PATH FRED LEIGHTON RING (ABOVE RIGHT) FEATURING SAPPHIRES (INCLUDING A 1920S ART DECO CUSHION-CUT CENTER STONE) FLANKED BY DIAMONDS.
But how did I feel? Thrilled to be engaged, obviously—but also overjoyed that those close to me knew that a traditional engagement ring was just not part of my proposal fantasy. The diamond solitaire wasn’t always comme il faut: Cavemen tied bands of braided grass around their mates’ wrists or ankles, ancient Egyptians wrapped a single silver or gold wire around the third fnger of their loved one’s left hand, and the Puritans exchanged more practical thimbles. Mary of Burgundy was the first known recipient of a diamond engagement ring, given to her by the Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1477, though it wasn’t until the mines of South Africa were discovered in the late nineteenth century that the stone became de rigueur. Tifany’s creation of its signature six-prong setting in the 1880s—and, decades later, De Beers’s 1940s campaign “A Diamond Is Forever”—cemented the solitaire’s status as the engagement ring go-to. Though diamonds may be forever, many women are now opting away from them—or at least from the conventional style. “I think the concept of one traditional kind of ring is changing with our generation,” says jeweler Monique Péan, whose Atelier line ofers bespoke engagement and wedding rings. Pamela Love, who collaborated with Péan on her own ring, agrees: “There are a lot of women out there who want something more unique, more personal.” Love recently had two women drop by her studio looking to design engagement rings with her after returning the solitaire platinum rings their
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“When Jason proposed, he said, ‘I refuse to pick out an engagement ring for you because I know you would get so much joy choosing one yourself,’ ” explains Fabiola Beracasa, who will wed Jason Beckman in Croatia this summer. Indeed, she delighted in designing a ring with Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia composed of two portrait-cut diamonds forming a circle on a bed of rubies in the shape of the West African symbol for unity. “At the end of the day, they’re family heirlooms,” she says, “so it’s nice when they have a story.” Sofía Sanchez Barrenechea and her fancé, Alexandre de Betak, spotted her future engagement ring in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar while on holiday. “He took a picture, and a year later I managed to get it,” she says coyly. “It’s not an obvious one—it’s half and half whether people know I’m engaged,” Barrenechea says of the nineteenth-century Ottoman ring. Another thing that isn’t obvious? The etiquette of the male engagement ring. The question of the appropriate ring for two male partners encourages a healthy dose of creative license. “There just aren’t as many rules about engagement rings for men,” says Joseph Altuzarra, who recently became engaged to Seth Weissman. “But I was obviously not going to wear a solitaire.” Weissman, upon the counsel of the couple’s close friend Vanessa Traina Snow, went to Givenchy, who created a custom three-layer ring consisting of a gray ceramic center bookended on top and bottom with bands of diamonds. The ring my fancé, Graham, ultimately decided upon— after many clandestine rendezvous with my mother at Fred Leighton—is a 1920s Art Deco cushion-cut sapphire set in a diamond surround with wedge-shaped sapphires on each side. It does not look like an engagement ring, but rather a petite blue fash of elegance. People don’t automatically know that I’m engaged—and I actually like the hesitancy and uncertainty. The simple fact of being engaged at 28 is, frankly, far more conventional than I had hoped to be. Thank God the ring isn’t. @ V I E W >1 5 0 TO S E E E V E N M O R E U N C O N V E N T I O N A L E N G A G E M E N T R I N G S , G O TO VO G U E . C O M
MA LLE : K EV I N ST U RMA N . RI N G : TI M H OU T.
“The concept of one traditional kind of ring is changing with our generation,” says jeweler Monique Péan
SPANISH CLASS
Madrid-based designer Josep Font is ushering Delpozo into the global spotlight. ROJO VIVO MODEL DRAKE BURNETTE IN A DELPOZO DRESS (DELPOZO, MIAMI) AND BIONDA CASTANA SHOES. ABOVE: CREATIVE DIRECTOR JOSEP FONT.
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osep Font is one of those overnight successes realized in the course of 20 years. The Barcelonaborn designer, 47, won his first design competition in 1984 while studying architecture and fashion in Spain and spent the next two decades working on collections under his own name in Milan, Tokyo, and Paris, where for four seasons he showed during the couture. Now, as creative director of the 40-year-old Spanish label Delpozo, Font is rightfully stepping into the global spotlight as his daring silhouettes and imaginative, striking use of color—from an embroidered brocade
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foral-print strapless dress with a neckline of budding petals to a long-sleeved, hand-crocheted number in Mandarin red—set pulses racing among the stylishly adventurous set. “Aside from being a little modern, a bit odd, and very feminine, Josep’s designs are painstakingly crafted from the fnest materials,” says Moda Operandi cofounder Lauren Santo Domingo, who carries Delpozo on her e-commerce site and wore a cream-colored coat with insect-like embellishment to Delpozo’s New York City runway show last February. Street-style stars like Nasiba Adilova and Hollywood actresses such as The Wolf of Wall Street’s V I E W >1 5 2 VOGUE.COM
CH RI ST I A N M a c D O NA L D. FAS HI ON E DI TOR : ST ELLA G RE E NS PA N . H A I R, MA R KI S H KR ELI; MAKEUP, ALICE LANE. PRODUCTION D ESIGN, J ESSE KAUFMANN FOR FRANK R EPS. FONT: © MÓ N ICA SU ÁRE Z D E TAN G IL. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .
VIEW
VIEW Into the Night
Margot Robbie also champion Font’s original eye and outsize proportions, with the latter recently hitting the red carpet in a black, white, and mustard dress with a beaded bib from spring. “I begin with the inside of the clothes and build the volume out,” Font explains just a few days before unveiling his creations for fall. Among them are long wool skirts with exaggerated hips, monastic capes with peaked shoulders, and for evening, graphic foor-length numbers in fearless color combinations like navy and tangerine, or baby blue and lime. Given Font’s talent for vivid hues,
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it’s no surprise that Delpozo chose to open its frst Stateside store in Miami (expect more to follow now that the company has hired its frst American president, Indre Rockefeller). Font ran into a number of women there wearing his clothes during Art Basel, though it’s also not uncommon for him to recognize a few of his pieces at the Teatro Real opera house in Madrid, where he lives. Not that they’re difcult to spot: In the current landscape of understated day clothes, Font’s exquisitely rendered, structural statement looks ofer an exciting counterpoint. It’s about time. —emily holt V I E W >1 5 4 VOGUE.COM
CH RI ST I A N M a c D O NA L D
BROWN SUGAR BURNETTE IN A DELPOZO DRESS ($3,850; DELPOZO, MIAMI).
VIEW MIX MASTER LEFT: BODINO’S ATELIER. RIGHT: A NECKLACE FROM HIS “CAMMEO” COLLECTION.
IL MAESTRO
From his stunning Milan casa, Giampiero Bodino gives fine jewelry a new setting.
T
hough the painter and fne jeweler Giampiero Bodino’s old-world manners and new by-appointment-only maison both reflect the kind of refned customs one can trace all the way back to Renaissance Italy, everything else about the man and his work is a refreshing break from tradition. For a start, the Turin native has left the richness of bygone eras behind for a new Milan atelier in Villa Mozart, a stunning example of 1930s rationalist architecture by Piero Portaluppi (who also designed the sublime Villa Necchi Campiglio). “Beauty is so diferent here,” Bodino says. “It’s discreet—it has to be discovered.” In the case of his shop, he means that literally: A curious passerby or client will never spot anything so obvious as a Giampiero Bodino storefront. “We’re working in such a precious feld that the approach needs to be different,” he says over tea and petits fours beneath one of his V I E W >1 5 8 VOGUE.COM
TO P : FI LI P P O BA MBE RG HI ( 2) . BO D IN O A N D N ECK LACE : L A ZI Z HA M A NI / COU RT ESY O F G I A M P I E RO BO D I N O. DE TA I LS, S EE IN T HI S I SSU E.
TOYING AROUND A “TEODORA” CUFF IS SURROUNDED BY BODINO’S COLLECTION OF CRITTERS AND ROBOTS. BELOW LEFT: THE ARTIST AT WORK.
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FINE LINES RIGHT: CY TWOMBLY’S CAMINO REAL II. THE ARTIST’S STYLE IS ECHOED AT CÉLINE (BELOW) AND CHANEL (BAG, $2,400; SELECT CHANEL BOUTIQUES).
BOLD STROKES
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STUDIO SESSIONS TWOMBLY, PHOTOGRAPHED FOR VOGUE, SEPTEMBER 1994, BY BRUCE WEBER.
hether in the form of childlike doodles or seemingly harried, large-scale loops, Cy Twombly’s work spans a vast range of expression. Such shapes and forms have been surfacing more and more in the fashion sphere as well, with designers offering motifs ranging from schoolyard scribbles to brash sprays of graffiti (see Index, page 263). For a more painterly line, though, look to Céline’s spry spring collection or Chanel’s paint-dabbed bags. (And keep an eye out for Thakoon Panichgul’s fall lineup, which is rife with bright, inexact forms: “Twombly’s work guided me in exploring a floral motif in a more abstract way,” he says.) Check out the permanent collections at New York’s MoMA or Houston’s Cy Twombly Gallery for prime examples of the artist’s work—or, better yet, jet south to his first Latin American retrospective, opening June 5 at the new David Chipperfield–designed Museo Jumex in buzzy Mexico City. —NICK REMSEN
VOGUE.COM
CA M I NO R E A L I I, 20 10: CY T WO M BLY. D E TA IL , AC RYLI C O N P LYWO OD, 9 9 3 ⁄ 8 " X 72 7 ⁄ 8 ". © CY TWOMBLY FOUNDATION; PH OTO: ROBERT M c KE EV E R/COURT ESY O F GAG OS I A N GA LL ERY. C É LI N E: C RA I G M c D EA N . C H A NE L BAG: OLIVIER SAILLANT/COURTESY OF CH ANEL.
oversize monochromatic paintings. “It’s the reason we’re sitting here and not in a boutique on Via Montenapoleone.” A willingness to remove the codes traditionally attached to fine jewelry is a bold move—though the backing by Richemont (Bodino previously served as art director of the Swiss luxury group) and its founder and chairman, Johann Rupert, helped him make the leap. Striding over to a series of vitrines, Bodino fills a black lacquered tray with a selection from his Capi d’Opera (“Masterpiece”) collection of one-of pieces—including a deceptively simple necklace of cabochon amethyst, diamonds, and citrines on mother-of-pearl, which mimics fish scales in its design and nods to the semicircular pattern of the villa’s walnut parquetry. Bodino credits his technical dexterity to an early stint in Turin sculpting cars at Italdesign before moving on to Bulgari, Cartier, Piaget, and Montblanc. More than three decades later, his jewels are united not only by their Italian inspirations but also by their three-dimensional qualities. “They are little sculptures you can wear,” says the designer, referring to a cache of cocktail rings. His maison, meanwhile, wears a meticulous collection of sculptures, from a wooden Antonio Maraini piece near a pair of 1940s Paolo Buffa chairs to a gilded white marble creation by Italian sculptor Adolfo Wildt, whose studio was a mere two blocks away. Floral-frescoed ceilings foat above early–twentieth century boiserie and a coral-colored rug by André Arbus, one of the leading European interior designers of the era. Shifting the notion of fine jewelry from a kind of haughty grandeur to something with a more human touch is a mark of the twenty-frst-century jeweler. That mark is apparent in Bodino’s Cammeo collection of carved noble profles framed by diamonds, pink tourmalines, rubellites, and Akoya cultured pearls— and more wildly evident in his Primavera ring, which features gold pistils topped with tiny diamonds and white, gray, yellow, and cognac brilliant-cut diamonds, pink sapphires, and a 2.55-carat vivid yellow diamond as the fower’s centerpiece. “It’s so very modest—one can fnd it everywhere in Italian forests,” Bodino says. In fact, one cannot—but one can hope.—kerry olsen V I E W >1 6 0
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EDITOR: TONNE GOODMAN
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ashion collaborations don’t often originate on the basketball court. But when Karlie Kloss met Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa at a charity tournament the Warby Parker cofounders were hosting, it was, as Blumenthal says, “just one of those things where everyone hits it off.” Cut to the launch next month of Karlie Kloss x Warby Parker, a capsule collection of sunglasses benefiting Edible Schoolyard NYC, an affiliate of Alice
Waters’s nonprofit. With ombré lenses and seventiesinfluenced shapes, the trio of metal frames reflects Kloss’s all-American personal style, but it was her enthusiasm as an Edible Schoolyard volunteer and her philanthropic work as creator of Karlie’s Kookies that really caught the eye of team Warby. “It’s about being aligned not just aesthetically but philosophically,” says Blumenthal. Kloss agrees: “It’s an incredible way to make a larger social impact while creating something beautiful and fun.”–EMILY HOLT
S EBAST I A N KI M . FAS HI O N E DI TO R: B EAU SA M. HA I R , R I TA M A RMO R; M A KEU P, YU MI M O RI . S ET D ESIGN, J ESSE KAUFMANN FOR FRANK R EPS. PH OTOGRAPH ED AT TH E PAR K R ESTAURANT, NYC. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .
Style Ethics
SHADES OF SUMMER KARLIE KLOSS, IN A SVILU TOP, WEARS KARLIE KLOSS X WARBY PARKER SUNGLASSES ($145; WARBYPARKER.COM).
THE EDITOR’S EYE RAÚL MARTINEZ
MARTINEZ WITH CHILDREN INEZ, NOW EIGHT, AND DIEGO, NOW ELEVEN, IN MAJORCA.
“RIGHT NOW IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SPORTS INFLUENCE, ESPECIALLY WITH THE SNEAKER FRENZY GOING ON FOR FALL.” RIGHT: RAFAEL NADAL.
Design Director Raúl Martinez came into the industry at a time when fashion was starting to enter the mainstream. “Prior to that it had been something for the very, very few, but then—along with design—it became an integral part of our world,” says the Cuban-born, New York–raised Martinez. “That’s when I really started to see the possibilities of how truly impactful it could be.” Fast-forward a decade or two, and it’s a relationship he still finds compelling. “For me, it’s all about how fashion influences the culture that we live in.” @
“FASHION IS TAKING ITS CUE FROM THE STREET, AND THAT’S WHAT I RELATE TO.” ABOVE: CUTLER & GROSS FRAMES, $495; CUTLERANDGROSS .COM. LEFT: KAROLINA KURKOVA.
CENTER RIGHT: ROLEX WATCH; ROLEX.COM. ABOVE: RAG & BONE SNEAKER, $290; RAG & BONE STORES. LEFT: MARC JACOBS TOTE, $1,470; MARCJACOBS.COM.
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“IT’S BEEN A GREAT YEAR FOR DIVERSITY IN MODELS. JOAN SMALLS’S [NEAR LEFT] STARDOM IS REALLY MEANINGFUL.” FAR LEFT: HERIETH PAUL, IN A LOOK FROM RAG & BONE’S PREFALL COLLECTION.
MA RT I NE Z A N D C HI LD RE N : COU RT ESY O F RA Ú L M A RTI N EZ . PA IN T I N G : COU RT ESY O F A L EXA N D ER SH AW. GLASSES: MAR KO M a c PH ERSON. KUR KOVA: R EX USA/R EX. SMALLS: PH IL OH . RAG & BO N E : COURT ESY O F RAG & BO NE . BAG : COURT ESY O F MA RC JACOBS. S N EA K E R: LUCAS V ISSE R . N ADAL: MATTH EW STOCKMAN/GETTY IMAGES. ROLEX: COURTESY OF ROLEX. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSU E .
“ALEXANDER SHAW IS AN INCREDIBLE PAINTER BASED IN BROOKLYN— THERE’S A NEW ENERGY THERE IN THE ART SPACE.”
BEAUTY
EDITOR: SARAH BROWN
Placesinthe Sun A FASHIONABLE COUPLE SETS UP A CLUSTER OF TINY RUSTIC-CHIC SPA HOTELS IN MEXICO.
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D ETA I LS, S EE I N TH I S I SSU E
MAYAN MAGIC AT COQUI COQUI, TULUM: FRANCESCA BONATO (IN A DONNA KARAN NEW YORK DRESS) AND NICOLAS MALLEVILLE WITH THEIR SON, LÉON. BELOW: THE SPA AT VALLADOLID. PHOTOGRAPHED BY DOMINIQUE VORILLON. SITTINGS EDITOR: SALLY LYNDLEY.
n her twenty-third birthday, back in January 2003, Francesca Bonato w a s w al k i n g al o n e down an empty beach in Tulum. It was before the streams of surf- and yoga-seeking hipsters had arrived, when this sandy stretch of Mexico’s Mayan Riviera was not much more than a sleepy hippie enclave. When Bonato passed a handwritten sign that read massage, she thought to herself, Fantastic, this is exactly what I want for my birthday, and ducked inside. Before her treatment (a scrub with earthy, orange mud from a nearby cenote), a handsome stranger brought her a cofee. “Nico,” she says, blushing. A little over ten years later, Francesca Bonato and Nicolas Malleville are the accidental, happy hoteliers behind four of the Yucatán’s chicest, most intimate spa retreats. They have a darling little boy, Léon, and recently added one more member to the family: Coco, the pet fawn their son requested for his fourth birthday. B E A U T Y >1 6 6
very definition of the trampled-todeath term eco-chic, Nicolas explains, “We had no choice!” Soon the couple were cooking for their guests, as well. “They’d say, ‘What’s for dinner?’ ” recalls Nicolas, “and it was, ‘Let me check what’s in the fridge, and I’ll tell you!’ ” When the tail of Hurricane Katrina FROM NEAR LEFT: COQUI COQUI ROSAS A LIMESTONE damaged a good part of Coqui Coqui FRESCAS BATH FOUNTAIN IN THE OIL; MOSQUITO in 2005, the couple evacuated inland to COURTYARD OF THE REPELLENT. COUPLE’S HOME Valladolid while they rebuilt. IN VALLADOLID. They bought the house where they now live and turned the top foor of their nearby Perfumeria into a suite—a hotel with just one room—and added a small spa. Two years later, they designed a fourroom jungle retreat set on a blue lagoon near the Mayan ruins in Coba. “From the top TWIN TUBS of our rooms you can see the IN L’ÉPICERIE SUITE IN MÉRIDA. pyramids. In the morning you can see crocodiles swimming,” NICOLAS, LÉON, AND says Francesca. In 2009, when Léon was (“He lives in the backyard. He’s like a FRANCESCA born in Mérida, the region’s bustling dog—it’s crazy,” says Nicolas.) IN TULUM. capital, they acquired a stately Belle A fashion model who had been livÉpoque mansion dating back to 1903— ing in New York, Nicolas—whom you their newest hotel and spa. “Whenever may recall from any number of Gucci, we travel, we end up buying a house,” Burberry, and Tod’s campaigns—came Francesca deadpans. to Mexico on vacation in 2001 and never The thirteen scents developed by left. “I wanted to settle down a bit, and Nicolas—which have blossomed into frst, I wanted to have a beach in front corresponding bath oils, linen sprays, of me,” he remembers. He bought a little and candles—are inspired by the piece of beachfront in Tulum, but in orcharacter of each place. Coco Coco der to own land as a foreigner, he had is a green coconut for Tulum; Menli, to incorporate a business. So along with a cocktail of lime and mint, and Mahis childhood friend Belen, a physioderas, a blend of tropical woods, contherapist, he started a tiny spa out of the house he’d begun to build, a limestone jure the jungle at Coba. For Valladolid, structure that glowed pink in the moonthere’s Floplum, after the frangipani tree that blooms in May and fills the light from the coral and shells embedded entire peninsula with its scent. Agave in its bricks. Nicolas, who had gone to she recalls. “We used to have a lot of fun, and Rosas Secas (which smells spot-on agricultural school in his native Argenwith no pressure,” adds Nicolas. “Just a like dried roses) represent Mérida. little house on the beach that we needed tina and trained as a landscape architect But even as Francesca and Nicoto make a business.” When Jade Jagger (designing gardens between modeling rented it for her birthday, that sealed the jobs), started making cold-pressed cocolas expand their dominion, they keep deal. Coqui Coqui, all seven rooms, was it small. Guests at Coqui Coqui— nut oils for the spa treatments. When he now a hotel, too. everyone from Jared Leto and Riccardo came across an old rum distillery in the At night they powered the lamps Tisci to Daria Werbowy—eat dinner colonial town of Valladolid, he bought with a car battery. Local artisans taught together, and read books while rockit, and soon he was a perfumer, too. Francesca the craft of weaving a very By now, Francesca had abandoned ing in a hammock or sprawled on the fne fabric from agave fbers for the hoher job as an interpreter in Paris and couch. “For us, it’s this gathering evmoved to Tulum (wouldn’t you?); during tel’s linens. (She now sells traditional erybody together, sharing a culture we low season, they’d prop a massage table rebozo shawls, woven on antique looms, have adopted. I will never have more up on the beach, with Nicolas posing as under her Hacienda Montaecristo than fourteen people in the hotel,” says a customer. “It was just me, Nico, and line.) Everything from the minimalist Nicolas. “That’s the magic.” Rooms, for days, no one. We’d say, ‘Hey! There! cement beds to the soaps was made from $230; coquicoquiperfumes.com. I think I saw someone on the beach!’ ” by hand. While that may sound the B E A U T Y >1 6 8 —sarah brown
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FOR A GUIDE TO TULUM’S BEST RESTAURANTS AND SHOPPING, DOWNLOAD VOGUE’ S DIGITAL EDITION
D O MI N IQUE VO RI LLO N ( 2 ) . O N FRA N C ESCA : D O NN A KA RA N N EW YO RK D RESS. CLAWFOOT TUBS: COURTESY OF COQUI COQUI. BATH OIL: TIM H OUT. MOSQUITO R EPELLENT: LUCAS VISS E R. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .
BEAUTY ESCAPE
BEAUTY SKIN
BIORÉ SKINCARE SELF HEATING ONE MINUTE MASK.
UNTITLED III, 2001. CHARCOAL ON CANVAS BY GARY HUME. COLORS NATURAL COLLAGEN SASAZUMI SOAP.
ORIGINS CLEAR IMPROVEMENT MASK.
SHAMANUTI ACTIVATED CHARCOAL CLEANSER.
HERBIVORE BOTANICALS ACTIVATE MASK.
C
MORIHATA BINCHOTAN FACIAL CLEANSING MASK.
SORT OF COAL KURO SHAMPOO. GLAMGLOW SUPERMUD CLEARING TREATMENT. MORIHATA KISHU BINCHOTAN CHARCOAL STICKS (FOR PURIFYING WATER AND ABSORBING ODORS).
all it black magic. Charcoal, the millennia-old wonder ingredient suddenly cropping up in everything from Danish shampoo and Japanese cleansing puffs to self-heating masks and even toothbrushes, has long been prized for its detoxifying powers. Phoenician seafarers stored drinking water in charred barrels; scientists in nineteenthcentury France proved charcoal’s efficacy as a poison antidote in daredevil demonstrations. A natural purifier, it can absorb as much as 800 times its weight in toxins and impurities. Typically made from Japanese bamboo or oak, fnely powdered charcoal “is able to draw things out of the skin, almost like a magnet,” says dermatologist Joely Kaufman, M.D. At her Miami office, she recently debuted a pore-refining laser procedure featuring an inkblack carbon lotion, which leaves skin “really smooth afterward.” Consider it a deep, dark twist on spring cleaning. —laura regensdorf F I T N E S S >1 7 2
GA RY HU M E. UN TIT LE D I II, 2001 . C HA RCOA L O N CA N VAS, 2 8" X 2 2" . T HE JUD I TH ROTH SCH ILD FOUNDATION CO NT E MP O RA RY D RAW IN G S CO LLECT IO N G IF T © T HE M US EU M O F M O D ERN A RT/L ICENSED BY SCALA/ A RT RESOU RCE , NY. BI N CH OTA N FAC IA L C LE A NS I N G MAS K, G LA MG LOW SUP E RM U D AND SMEAR , H ER BIVOR E BOTA NI CA LS ACT I VAT E A ND SM EA R , BI O RÉ SM EA R : TI M H OU T. A LL OT HE RS : M A RKO M a c PH ERSON.
BUZZWORD: CHARCOAL
BEAUTY FITNESS
OFF KILTER ONCE ASYMMETRY SETS IN, IT CAN BE HARD TO STRAIGHTEN OUT. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO FOR VOGUE, 2012.
UNEVEN GROUND
SLIGHT IMBALANCES IN OUR BODYÕS ALIGNMENT COULD BE THE CULPRIT BEHIND BACK PAIN, ACCORDING TO A PERSUASIVE NEW SCHOOL OF THOUGHT. ELIZABETH WEIL MEASURES THE EVIDENCE.
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e all need answers in this world—why we’re here, what to wear, and what to do about back pain ruining our lives. Philosophers do OK with the frst question. Designers excel at the second. But the third? It’s a melee: M.D.s, osteopaths, acupuncturists, chiropractors, massage therapists, Rolfers—all of whom will likely ask you to touch your toes or lift your left leg or lie extremely still in a deafening MRI machine. Afterward, you might receive an explanation like “It’s your bulging disc at L4” or “your dysfunctional sacroiliac joint.” I know because I saw everybody and heard everything, and then it happened: A masseur identifed the infernal butterfly that started my tsunami of discomfort. He pulled on my ankles,
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pushed up on my toes, and said, “Yup. Your right leg is shorter than your left.” Remember in the late 1990s when there was all sorts of talk about facial asymmetry and beauty, and the Harvard psychologist Nancy Etcof, author of Survival of the Prettiest, showed we fnd that people with even features are often the most attractive? The 2014 version of this is your entire body. People have structural asymmetries all over, starting with the fact that the heart tilts slightly left. According to one of the largest studies on the topic, in 32 percent of people, one leg is one-ffth- to three-ffths-ofan-inch longer than the other. Sometimes this means the actual leg bone is longer; more often joints, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and other soft tissue have stretched or contracted,
causing a functional asymmetry. Either way, it’s a problem. “Leg-length discrepancy and back pain have been linked for as long as I’ve been in the feld,” says Lisa DeStefano, D.O., chair of the Department of Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine at the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, who has been practicing for seventeen years. The fact that your left foot is a smidge bigger than your right is a shopping inconvenience. But diferences in leg length can trigger a series of unfortunate events, as body parts are linked through what movement specialists call the kinetic chain: the hip bone connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone connected to the knee bone. If that chain starts of on a base of unequal legs, it makes sense that back problems could occur. F I T N E S S >1 7 7 VOGUE.COM
FITNESS
BATH : COURT ESY O F T HE L I BRA RY O F CON G R ESS. GA I N SBOROUG H: COURTESY O F CH AMPALIMAUD D ESIGN.
Logical, but skeptics are legion. “The science really hasn’t borne it out,” says Amy Powell, M.D., a Salt Lake City–based doctor who sits on the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine board. Truth is, very little of the science of back pain has been borne out. So we’re left with hunches and hypotheses, and the theory that unequal leg length causes back pain fts nicely with the current ftness trend of seeing the body as a Jenga tower that needs careful and professional balancing (hence all the time we spend hanging in the tethers of the functionalfitness TRX). Mike Boyle, a strengthand-conditioning coach who works with Olympic athletes, agrees that a whole lot of us—most of us, probably—are asymmetrical and that the best way to address our askew frames is through core-stability work to keep the wobbling that results from unevenness at a minimum. His prescription? “The plank, the side plank, the bird dog,” an exercise you start on hands and knees, extend your right leg and left arm simultaneously, and then reverse. At home, newly aware that my life was literally of-kilter, I began noticing things. While standing at my desk—because,
yes, I stand at my desk—I realized that I was leaning into the side of my right foot. And whenever I reached up to hug my six-foot-two husband, I stood on my right toes while my left heel remained fat on the ground.
OLYMPIC COACH MIKE BOYLE THINKS THE BEST WAY TO ADDRESS OUR ASKEW FRAMES IS THROUGH CORESTABILITY WORK How did I, or any of us, get out of whack? Countless ways: sports injuries, car accidents, idiosyncratic reactions to stress. Most of the time we don’t even notice the imbalance happening. And then you fnd yourself lying fat on the foor when you’re supposed to be hosting a dinner party. If you really want to measure for an anatomical asymmetry, you need to get an X-ray. But since everybody agrees
BEAUTY that bones themselves are rarely uneven, I skipped that part and just began doing Boyle’s routine. I also returned to my massage therapist, who suggested I stand at my desk with a magazine under my right foot to correct the imbalance. After perching on top of a New Yorker for a week, I didn’t feel much better. (Perhaps I should have chosen something thicker, like Vogue’s September issue.) Some people opt for inserts in shoes. But often the body is so used to its own misalignment, righting it doesn’t help. Colin Phipps, a chiropractor in San Francisco, believes that in addition to physical therapy, chiropractic adjustments can help with joint relationships and thus decrease asymmetries. I’ll probably never know exactly what happened—or how to fix it. Perhaps my bulging disc at L4 is the underlying culprit. Or maybe my sacroiliac joint twisted at some point during the many years I practiced yoga. For now I’m going with trying to get myself in balance by working while standing atop one of those tippy discs often found in the corners of gyms. At the least, I’ll have excellent posture. And that can’t hurt. @ H E A LT H >1 8 0
Healing Waters
hese waters are hot, of a bluish colour and strong scent, and send forth their vapours,” noted a 1703 geography journal on Bath, England’s natural springs. The city’s healing powers date to 863 b.c., when the ninth king of the Britons founded Bath as thanks for curing his leprosy after a roll in its bubbling, mineralrich mud. During antiquity, the Romans renamed it Aquae Sulis, consecrating a temple there to Minerva, goddess of fountains and baths, and from the twelfth century through the Victorian era, artists and royalty flocked from across Europe seeking cures. This summer, bathing is back in style: The Gainsborough Bath Spa, which opens in July atop the remains of ancient Roman baths, grants guests direct access to the springs via its spa, where steaming water rises through limestone aquifers into a luminous neoclassical atrium. Magnesium wraps are on the menu; there’s an ice chamber and an infrared sauna; aquatic therapy, held in a 94-degree thermal pool, promises to improve balance and flexibility. Or just opt for a soak in a tub in one of the hotel’s three luxurious spa suites, where the region’s famous water flows straight from the taps. Rooms, from $480; thegainsboroughbathspa.co.uk.—JULIE BRAMOWITZ
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BATH CULTURE ABOVE: A C. 1890 VIEW OF BATH, ENGLAND, WHOSE HOT SPRINGS HAVE DRAWN SPAGOERS FOR CENTURIES. LEFT: ONE OF THREE THERMAL POOLS AT THE NEW GAINSBOROUGH BATH SPA.
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A WAVE OF PERSISTENT INFECTIONS IN WOMEN HAS BEEN LINKED TO POULTRY. JANCEE DUNN REPORTS ON THE LATEST SAFETY MEASURES.
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FOR THE BIRDS ONE RECENT ANALYSIS OF DATA FROM THE FDA SUGGESTS THAT AN OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF ANTIBIOTICS SOLD IN THE UNITED STATES ARE NOW GIVEN TO FARM ANIMALS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY IRVING PENN FOR VOGUE, 2003.
acqueline Aguirre, a writer from Long Beach, California, is not the whistle-blowing sort. A lithe 25-year-old fond of hot yoga and mindfulness meditation, she’s a moderate when it comes to health; unlike some of her West Coast counterparts, she had never driven a waiter to madness with a lengthy recitation of verboten foods. Then she found herself making regular trips to her doctor for painful urinary-tract infections. Each
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time, she was prescribed antibiotics, the usual course of action—but they never worked. “My doctor also had me cut out common irritants like cofee and alcohol,” says Aguirre. “That didn’t help, either.” Having already given up red meat, Aguirre next eliminated chicken. To her surprise, a month passed, and no infection. Then two months. “It has now been four years since I became a vegetarian,” she says, “and I haven’t had a UTI since. Not one.”
It’s a scenario that seems spun from a bad Hollywood pitch meeting but is all too real: A cluster of recent studies have found that an increasing number of UTIs are becoming resistant to antibiotics—and the problem is being traced back to chicken. UTIs, which plague an estimated half of American women at some point in their lives, are caused by bacteria, most commonly E. coli. A joint investigation by the Food and Environment Reporting Network and ABC News discovered that the E. coli circulating in women’s bodies during these infections is genetically similar to what can be found in retail meat—meaning that the bacteria is being transmitted directly to humans (by either unsafe handling or undercooking) if the chicken is contaminated. While this is believed to account for only a fraction of UTIs, that still translates into several hundred thousand women every year who do not respond to treatment. Gazala Siddiqui, M.D., a urogynecologist at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, says she has seen a major uptick in drug-resistant UTIs. “I’m a specialist, so I get a lot of referrals where the doctor says, ‘I don’t know what to do with you,’ ” she notes. Many doctors prescribe newer, more powerful antibiotics for UTIs because they assume that the usual ones will not work. But Siddiqui says that more potent drugs may increase the chance that a woman’s next bacterial infection will be drug-resistant. This past winter, the FDA made a much-awaited acknowledgment that antibiotics in meat are a threat to public health by announcing that it will ask pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily stop labeling these drugs for animal growth—eventually making it illegal for farmers to use them for that purpose. While public-health experts say it’s a step in the right direction, potential loopholes abound, says Lance B. Price, Ph.D., professor of environmental and occupational health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at H E A LT H >1 8 6 VOGUE.COM
BEAUTY HEALTH to those drugs, they’re programmed to evolve quickly and relentlessly. “If you have 50,000 birds chunked together and sharing bacteria constantly, then add a low dose of antibiotics that doesn’t quite kill the bacteria but does force them to become resistant, it’s the perfect scenario,” says Price. “I mean, I’m a microbiologist, and if I was going to design a system to create a drug-resistant superbug, I’d go no further.” The CDC
physicians all too eager to reach for their prescription pads. Public health advocates nonetheless continue to mobilize. Four bills designed to enforce stricter laws are currently wending their way through Congress, but legislative and legal battles drag on (one bill has been introduced four times). “The livestock and pharmaceutical industries wield a lot of power,” says Sasha Lyutse, a policy advocate with NRDC’s Food and Agriculture program. “They’ve been very influential in blocking movement on this issue.” For the time being, make smart food choices by seeking out organic meat, which must, by law, be free of antibiotics. And ensure that meat is thoroughly cooked to kill all bacteria. As the demand for drug-free meat grows more insistent, scientists point to the success of Sweden and Denmark, countries that have long banned antibiotics to promote growth. Instead, farmers improved living conditions; studies found that the animals’ health and growth rates have remained basically the same. “It’s not like we’re saying we have to go back to the red barn and silo,” Price says. “Denmark is one of the world’s largest pork exporters. It can be done.” @
“IF I WAS GOING TO DESIGN A SYSTEM TO CREATE A DRUG-RESISTANT SUPERBUG, I’D GO NO FURTHER” is one of several health organizations to condemn the use of antibiotics to promote growth in animals. The lack of definitive evidence— it would cross ethical lines to deliberately cause infections in people to prove a disease risk—leaves room for disagreement. A spokesperson for the National Chicken Council says the recent research is “not an accurate representation of how antibiotic resistance transfers from meat to humans.” Advocates for the livestock and drug industries argue that the fault lies not with veterinarians but with
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HOT RIGHT NOW RITA ORA, VOGUE, 2013. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: RIMMEL’S 60 SECONDS COLOUR RUSH POLISH IN DON’T BE SHY, LOSE YOUR LINGERIE, DO NOT DISTURB, AND BREAKFAST IN BED. AVAILABLE IN JULY.
wenty-three-year-old British pop phenom turned actress Rita Ora is known as much for her multiple talents as her beauty signatures: Gwen Stefani–inspired peroxide punk hair, screen siren–red lips, and mile-long nails whose street-chic designs seem to change as often as the weather. This summer, Ora is taking customization a step further, with a capsule collection for Rimmel of six quick-drying polishes in a palette of milky pastels and punchy brights. She calls an icy mint Breakfast in Bed, a rich violet Midnight Rendezvous, and an otherwise demure ballet pink Lose Your Lingerie. While creating the lineup, “I was filming Fifty Shades of Grey,” explains Ora, who will play Mia Grey in next year’s much anticipated film, “so all of the names are quite sexy.” When in doubt, she turned to style deity (and Rimmel face) Kate Moss for guidance. “Kate oozes cool—she was very helpful,” says Ora. Moss’s best advice? “Just do you.”—ARDEN FANNING
ORA: BOO GEORGE. ALL OTH ERS: MAR KO M a c PH ERSON.
George Washington University. Without detailed surveillance, Price explains, the industry may swap growth promotion for disease prevention, without actually decreasing total antibiotic use. And the ramifications could not be more serious. Antibiotic-resistant UTIs “are a completely new paradigm for food-borne infections,” says Price. “We’re used to shrugging of these infections because we’ve had good antibiotics for so long. But if the E. coli that’s causing them is resistant to antibiotics, you can progress to a potentially deadly blood infection. Thousands of people die in the United States of what started off as a UTI.” The latest studies join a number of unsavory reports on the topic. A study published in 2011 found that nearly half the chicken samples researchers gathered were contaminated with antibiotic-resistant staph. Still, chicken remains the most popular meat in the country. The average American eats an estimated 83 pounds of it annually, the vast majority of which has been treated with antibiotics— sometimes injected directly into the egg before the chick is hatched. These drugs have been added to animal feed since the forties, when farmers found that they caused animals to grow more quickly and thus become more proftable. But when bacteria are continually exposed
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TRUE BLUE THE STAR OF HALT AND CATCH FIRE IN A SACAI TOP AND SKIRT.
ABOUT NEW GIRL
TALENT
EDITOR: VALERIE STEIKER
WITH BREAKOUT ROLES ON SCREENS LARGE AND SMALL, MACKENZIE DAVIS IS CAPTURING HOLLYWOOD’S ATTENTION.
T HO MAS W HI T ES I D E. S I TT I N G S E DI TOR : DE LP H IN E DA N HI E R. H A I R, D E NN I S D EVOY; MA KEU P, YUM I M OR I. A RT: M A RK GROTJA HN . D ETA I LS, SE E I N T HI S I SSUE .
and warmth to Cameron. We didn’t want to do a male idea of what a woman programmer would be.” Davis always wanted to act but went about it sensibly. She got an English degree from McGill, paid bills by modeling—she’s fve feet ten—and eventually studied at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse. Now settled in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, she’s reveling in the chance to show
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hough she considers herself “a real Pollyanna,” Mackenzie Davis
would rather not play one: “Nice girls usually get forgotten, but bad girls always push the action forward.” These days, the polite 27-year-old Canadian is pushing her own story forward. So far in 2014 she’s been hailed for her heartfelt work as a disillusioned daughter in Breathe In and for her bantering turn as Miles Teller’s gal-pal in That Awkward Moment. (“She’s going to blow up,” Teller told me last year.) In the upcoming What If, she’s Adam Driver’s hot-to-trot girlfriend,
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her range, having just starred as a vampire who saves a small town in Sony’s upcoming horror-comedy Kitchen Sink. “My favorite ladies in the world are Laura Dern, Jessica Lange, and Charlotte Rampling,” she says. “They’re willing to play the most bizarre, complicated women and not care whether you like them.” She gives a laugh. “I want to be like that.” —john powers PATA >1 9 0
ART a funny-touching role that got her nominated for the Canadian Screen Award. The role that should truly launch her is programming whiz Cameron Howe in Halt and Catch Fire, AMC’s gripping series (premiering June 1) about the eighties computer industry that offers a dramatic counterpoint to HBO’s comical, deeply guyish Silicon Valley. Starring alongside Lee Pace and Scoot McNairy, Davis plays a genius whose punk anarchism, she acknowledges, carries a whiff of Lisbeth Salander—“but without the tattoo.” Says Halt’s cocreator Chris Rogers, “Mackenzie brings incredible intelligence
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ometimes a particular body of work allows someone to delve into a problem,” says curator Douglas Fogle, “and come out of it a different artist.” He’s speaking about the nonobjective perspective works that made the Californiabased Mark Grotjahn’s career. First displayed at L.A.’s Blum & Poe in 2002, a flock of these “butterfly” paintings—in which vibrant wing formations fan out from infinite-seeming centers—arrives this month to inaugurate the gallery’s first New York space, an intimate town house in the East Sixties.—KATE GUADAGNINO
TAKING WING A SELECTION FROM GROTJAHN’S BUTTERFLY SERIES.
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A MAN is ostensibly returning filmmaking WITH A PLAN to(thispersonal is the guy who wrote
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Swingers) after directing corporate blockbusters like Iron Man. If a tad selfindulgent, the tale has a genial spirit, rousing salsa music, and funny turns. But be prepared: You will leave the theater hungry. Things go less smoothly for the hero of Locke, Steven Knight’s propulsively stripped-down tour de force in which Tom Hardy is on-screen alone for the full 85 minutes— while driving. Speaking in a gentle Welsh lilt, Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a conscientious construction manager who goes AWOL right before a big job and begins tooling through the night on a mysterious mission. Over the course of his dark, solitary journey, he makes phone calls—to his wife (Ruth Wilson), his boss, and a woman in the hospital—that slowly threaten his whole world. The movie’s worth seeing just for the charismatic Hardy, who has both the fire and playfulness of Marlon Brando.—J.P. OUT OF THE KITCHEN IN CHEF, JON FAVREAU’S CHARACTER CHASES FOODTRUCK GLORY, WITH SON IN TOW.
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SOLD! CODDINGTON IMAGINES A SCENE OF OLDFASHIONED BIDDING.
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ogue’s creative director, Grace Coddington, looks beyond fashion for “Grace
Coddington: No Clothes,”
a sale of some three dozen paintings and photographs of nudes by such photographers as Herb Ritts, Annie Leibovitz, and Ryan McGinley that she is curating for the online auction house Paddle8. Cofounded three years ago by Phillips alumnus Alexander Gilkes, the house lists works by both blue chip and upand-coming artists, all available for under $100,000, and has revolutionized the selling of art in the age of eBay. “Grace is not only, through her work, an iconic imagemaker; she is a consummate collector of everything from photography to ceramic cat teapots to her beautifully alphabetized picture books,” says Gilkes. “I’ve long carried a torch for her—her extraordinary taste, humility, and whimsical romanticism—and wanted to celebrate her eye and motivations.”
Selected works from the final list (still in formation at press time) attest to Coddington’s predilection for a combination of outrageous beauty and subversive wit. Take Horst P. Horst’s Waxed Beauty, New York, 1938—a surreal black-and-white of a Depression-era lovely; or Steven Meisel’s Kristen at the Ritz (1993), in which Kristen McMenamy lounges on a salmon-colored sofa in her birthday suit, a couture hat, and a pair of hotel slippers. “I’ll always go for something romantic, but it’s not your usual take on that,” says Coddington, whose choices are “pictures I would hang on my walls.” Case in point: Juergen Teller’s photograph of Raquel Zimmermann, standing spotlit in the Louvre before Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. “I love the humor and great freedom of his pictures,” Coddington says of Teller. “There are no boundaries for him.” —leslie camhi PATA >1 9 2 VOGUE.COM
MOVI ES : M ER RI CK MO RTO N/O P E N ROA D FI LM S. AUCT I ON : G RACE CO D D IN GTON .
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arly in the amiably ambling new comedy Chef, a prosperous L.A. chef, Carl Casper (Jon Favreau), takes his favorite hostess (Scarlett Johansson) back to his place. She stretches herself out before him, and we’re given a swooningly sensual shot of—the pasta he’s cooking her. These days, food is the new sex. After flipping out at a food critic (Oliver Platt), Casper gets canned by his restaurant’s owner (Dustin Hoffman), who insists on a menu of popular but dated dishes. At loose ends, the once-hot chef flies off with his ex-wife, Inez (Sofía Vergara), to Miami, where he’s offered a beaten-up food truck by her first ex-husband, Marvin, a rich oddball given an amusing spin by Robert Downey, Jr. Going back to basics, Casper bonds over the stove with his eleven-yearold-son, Percy, who, in Emjay Anthony’s delightful performance, becomes the film’s emotional anchor. Although Chef’s as formulaic as any Hollywood crowd-pleaser, writer-director Favreau
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SPRING BREAK
A FORMER GIRLS’ ACADEMY IN STOCKHOLM IS TRANSFORMED INTO A SLEEK NEW HOTEL.
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aving conquered fast fashion and infectious pop songs, Sweden reinvents the boutique hotel for today’s designsavvy traveler. Opening this
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DELFT TOUCH MOFFAT OFTEN LOOKS TO OLD FABRICS AND ICONIC FORTUNY PATTERNS.
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lue and white is part of everyone’s vocabulary largely because of Delft,” observes the Brooklyn-based ceramist Amanda Moffat of her latest collection of stoneware, the result of an accidental glazing, whose launch happily coincides with the imminent reopening of The Hague’s Mauritshuis Museum. “I like to think about how the vases will be lived with,” says Moffat. “The way the flowers will gather and fall from them.” Available at John Derian.—MIEKE TEN HAVE
spring, Nobis Group’s Miss Clara in ultramodern Stockholm offers guests a fresh, centrally located alternative to the city’s luxury chains. Architect Gert Wingårdh has transformed the seven-story
Art Nouveau building, once a girls’ school whose beloved headmistress serves as namesake, into 92 bright rooms that combine Nordic naturalism (stained-oak herringbone foors, bentwood tables
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’m kind of like the ambassador of jookin’,” says dancer Charles “Lil Buck” Riley, but he’s actually being modest. Having performed the Memphis-born style of hiphop—an outgrowth of the nineties Gangsta Walk that is as intricate as it is unorthodox—alongside everyone from Madonna to Yo-Yo Ma, the 25-year-old is like the Balanchine of jookin’, too. The comparison is especially apt this month, as Lil Buck joins the New York City Ballet for a pièce d’occasion directed by French visual artist JR and set to a score by Lana Del Rey collaborator Woodkid. While Buck is too self-effacing to speculate about why the ballet world is so infatuated with his smooth moves and creative energy, he admits that the fluid choreographic vocabulary of jookin’ allows for constant innovation. “It’s like a Wonka factory in my head,” he says. So what’s it like for the street performer turned YouTube phenom to be training at Lincoln Center? “The ballerinas want to learn jookin’, but they’re scared because my specific style is crazy—and it’s their worst nightmare to roll those ankles.” But if a recent pas de deux with NYCB principal Tiler Peck is any indication, he’s fitting in just fine. “I’ve always been flexible,” Buck says. “That helps.”—MARK GUIDUCCI
and chairs) with Scandinavian functionality (retractable workspaces, modular storage). Wall-mounted task lamps and window seating, a nod to the building’s scholarly heritage, are ideal for curling up with the latest Swedish noir thriller, while the buzzing international brasserie at street level is the perfect spot for a fika, or coffee break, after wandering bohemian Södermalm across the water. Before heading home, be sure to pop into Acne Studios’ flagship on Norrmalmstorg square— site of the infamous 1973 bank robbery—for some fashion-forward souvenirs. Rates start at $250 a night; missclarahotel.com.—julie
DANCE: MATTH EW KR ISTALL. SITTI N GS E D ITO R: KE T EVAN GVARAMADZE . G RO O MIN G, LISA RAQU E L. TRAVEL: J EAN- BAPTISTE RABOUAN/ © G E T T Y IMAG ES. D ES IG N : T IM HOU T. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .
CITY ISLAND ACROSS THE NORRSTRÖM RIVER LIES THE OLD TOWN OF GAMLA STAN.
FOOTLOOSE BUCK WEARS A SAINT LAURENT BY HEDI SLIMANE JACKET AND BLK DNM JEANS.
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SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK FROM LEFT: ROTHMAN IN A.P.C., REID IN JIL SANDER, AND MAJOR IN SURFACE TO AIR.
SMALL WORLDS
MUSIC
STORIES HAVE THEIR DAY.
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talian author Francesca Marciano’s captivating story collection, The Other Language (Pantheon), features Europeans whose flirtations with the exotic prompt a sea change: An adolescent crush at the beach sets the course of a young Roman woman’s life; a Chanel dress, too gossamer to be worn, acquires a talisman-like power for a former filmmaker. With a nod to Paul Bowles, Marciano evokes the freedom found in not belonging, as the heroine of her title story explains: “She felt she had finally become . . . someone who thought, dreamed and made love in a different language. . . . ” Closer to home, Antonya Nelson’s gloriously debauched new collection, Funny Once (Bloomsbury), finds that conventions are made for flouting, from an eminent professor who sleeps with his young wife’s best friend to former college competitors who embark on a lost weekend. A wistful irony pervades Lydia Davis’s Can’t and Won’t (FSG), shorts that are like cold-pressed shots of experience pointing to the incidental magic of daily life. Adult siblings struggle their way through a toxic emotional inheritance in the standout first two stories of Deena Goldstone’s debut, Tell Me One Thing (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday). And a master storyteller comes to affably charming life in Adam Begley’s incisive biography Updike (Harper). Moving from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s early influences to the loosening social mores that provided grist for an astonishing 50-year career, Begley finds the truest reflection of the man in his work. As Updike himself put it: “Nothing in fiction rings quite as true as truth, slightly arranged.”—MEGAN O’GRADY
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efore the trio behind London Grammar came together as students at the University of Nottingham, they were kids who preferred music to toys. “My mom loved Tina Turner,” says Hannah Reid. In 2011, an agent saw her, Dan Rothman, and Dot Major perform at a local bar. “From that point on, everything changed,” says Rothman. Since the fall release of their debut album, If You Wait, which has gone platinum in the U.K., the band has drawn comparisons to indie-rock titans like the xx. On the title track (written in the school library), Reid’s silky vocals float atop Rothman’s shadowy strings and Major’s dazzling keyboard. Lyrically, the band explores what it means to be young—lovelorn,
YOUTH QUAKE
LONDON GRAMMAR GOES FROM PUB GIGS TO SOLD-OUT ARENAS. uncertain—a theme that’s resonated with listeners from Brighton to Brooklyn. After garnering a Brit Award nomination, the three 24-year-olds recently played on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (“a real honor,” says Rothman) and alongside idols Coldplay at SXSW (“terrifying,” adds Reid). Now at work on a sophomore album, they are excited to headline the muchanticipated Festival N°6 in Portmeirion, on the Welsh coast, with Beck in September. “It’s all very different,” says Major. “But I don’t know. It still just feels like you’re hanging out with your friends, like a little family.” —thomas gebremedhin
PULP FICTION
I DARK ARTS EVA GREEN PLAYS A VICTORIAN-ERA PSYCHIC.
f audiences love anything more than monsters, it’s mash-ups. You get both in Penny Dreadful, a nicely upholstered new Showtime series that feels like a Masterpiece Theatre costume drama invaded by a horror picture. Set in 1890s London, it stars Eva Green as Vanessa Ives, a psychic who, along with a renowned adventurer, Sir Malcolm (Timothy Dalton), and a carnival-circuit Western gunslinger, Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), gets mixed up with such otherworldly icons as Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), Dr. Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and his creature (Rory Kinnear), and assorted vampires. Dreamed up by John Logan, who wrote the Tony-winning play Red as well as 007’s Skyfall, the show is brooding and splendidly acted, especially by Green, whose Vanessa is at once witty, sexy, and spooky. Named after a kind of lurid nineteenth-century magazine, Penny Dreadful plunges us into a repressed Victorian society that yearns for order only to find its worst nightmares coming true.—J.P.
M US I C: KAVA GOR NA. SITTINGS ED ITOR : D ELPH INE DANH IER . H AIR , STEVEN FE RN A N D ES; MAKEUP, TRACY ALFAJ ORA. BOOKS: MAR KO M a c PH ERSON. T V: JON AT HAN H ESSION/SH OWTIME. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
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GOOD VIBRATIONS
They used to have a word for it: verve. Something beyond mere flair—a pulse of energy and dynamism; a kinetic, jaunty vibe radiated by stylish women taking honest joy in their wardrobe, dashing it together like Jackson Pollock attacking a canvas. We’re getting little jolts and shocks of this from the highly charged looks in this issue. Humming with abstract and expressive intersections of pattern and a hundred different stripes and diverse strokes of color, this is fun, creative fashion for fun, creative nonconformists. Surprise—inspiring an openmouthed “Oh!” of admiration—is what this spring is all about: nautical stripes over brocade; red sequins over morning coffee.
But there’s something more happening here. What we wear is suddenly less about showing off the body beneath. These clothes are about the clothes. The combination, or—dare we use another old word?—the ensemble. There’s also a sub rosa democratizing effect to this way of getting dressed: Whether you already move among a stylish set or consider yourself a mere Coachella kid, this is design as a medium with which to express your special . . . well, verve. Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Boring is out. 197
CAFÉ SOCIETY Sasha and James begin their rendezvous at Bar Alegria. Louis Vuitton sweater ($1,630) and dress; select Louis Vuitton stores. Proenza Schouler striped top, $280; Proenza Schouler, NYC. American Apparel beret. Oscar de la Renta belt. No. 21 sandals. Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane bucket bag (throughout). Céline sunglasses. On Blake: Dior Homme suit. Balenciaga shirt. Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane tie. George Cox shoes. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.
DAY TRIPPING
MODEL SASHA PIVOVAROVA AND SINGER-SONGWRITER JAMES BLAKE ROAM OLD BARCELONA—A CITY THAT, WITH ITS GAUDÍ ARCHITECTURE, MUSEUMS, AND ARTSY BARS, IS THE IDEAL BACKDROP FOR TODAY’S CREATIVE DAY CLOTHES. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO.
GORGEOUS MOSAIC Fanciful, fantastical . . . that’s how we might describe Casa Batlló, the crowning glory of Antoni Gaudí. It’s also how we’d describe the mismatch of patterns that’s so of the moment. Marni silk coat with glass embellishments, $3,120; Marni boutiques. Bottega Veneta laminated– silk jacquard dress, $4,200; Bottega Veneta boutiques. A.P.C. striped cotton top, $220; apc.fr.
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PARK LIFE Far from any “urban” clichés of pieces for sidewalk warriors, these are quirkily curated ensembles for individuals who prefer to stray from the prescribed path. Burberry Prorsum burgundy silk-jacquard coat, $2,995; burberry .com. Jonathan Saunders merino-wool sweater, $830; Joseph, NYC. Dries Van Noten flower-print dress, $1,998; Barneys New York, NYC. Brooks Brothers belt. On Blake: A.P.C. raincoat. Dolce & Gabbana red shirt. Details, see In This Issue.
HI, GLOSS Sequins suddenly look surprisingly polished— especially under the midday Catalan sun in the high-shine finish of Blake’s convertible. Marc Jacobs cream-and-navy striped tunic with sequined detail, $1,100; Marc Jacobs boutiques. Tees by Tina black mock neck, $58; teesbytina.com. No. 21 beaded peplum skirt, $2,425; modaoperandi .com. Marni necklace. Details, see In This Issue.
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BUSY SIGNALS This is the moment to exercise your creative muscles—to work the unexpected pairing, the eccentric flourish. It’s a moment for prints, in other words; the more ebullient, the better. Marni printed cotton top ($850) and matching skirt ($1,020); select Neiman Marcus stores. Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses. Photographed at Casa Batlló.
ALLIOLI & BLACK LACE Maximum embellishment is on the menu. Giambattista Valli macramé-trim jacquard dress, $3,283; Saks Fifth Avenue, NYC. Bottega Veneta shantung-jacquard pants, $1,550; Bottega Veneta boutiques. Banana Republic white shirt, $60; bananarepublic.com. Reed Krakoff sandals. Marni earrings, worn as shoe clips. Photographed at the home of Devin Winter and Lázaro Rosa-Violán. Details, see In This Issue.
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PLAYING YOUR CARDS RIGHT Let your artistic impulses bloom. Alexander McQueen jacquard dress with silverbrocade tulips; Alexander McQueen, NYC. Stella McCartney striped sweater, $765; Neiman Marcus, Los Angeles. Perez Sanz necklace. Photographed at Lázaro Rosa-Violán Studio. Details, see In This Issue. BEAUTY NOTE
Blur the line between luxury and low-key with a no-maintenance red lip. Maybelline’s SuperStay 14HR Lipstick in Enduring Ruby holds color all day.
P HOTO G RA P HE D AT T HE H OME OF D EV I N W I NT E R A N D L Á ZA RO ROSA-V I OL Á N ( W I T H BOSCO TH E D OG).
ARMED FORCES The stripy tops and sweaters worn under dresses throughout this portfolio underscore just how chic a coveredup look has become: Consider this the everyday-ization of the sexy little cocktail dress. Peter Pilotto beaded black wool dress, $3,209; Ikram, Chicago. Proenza Schouler striped shirt, $280; Proenza Schouler, NYC.
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SIDEWALK SHIMMER Silk satin is having its day—playing perfectly into our fascination with shine. This jacket, with its piping lapel, is part thirties boudoir, part decadent disco. Alexander McQueen jacquard jacket; Alexander McQueen, NYC. Vera Wang Collection gray taffeta sheath with rhinestone detail, $1,295; Vera Wang, NYC. Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci striped shirt, $800; givenchy.com. Perez Sanz necklace. On Blake: Dolce & Gabbana navy shirt. Details, see In This Issue.
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NEW WAVE Classic stripes— particularly with a beret— have always projected an unmistakable seaside air. Here, we’re also seeing echoes of Blondie c. Parallel Lines. A.P.C. black striped sweater, $220; apc.fr. Guess white cotton shirt, $70; guess.com. Peter Pilotto purple, black, and white beaded skirt, $1,193; Hu’s Wear, Washington, D.C. Marni necklace.
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MUCH ADO ABOUT EVERYTHING These are looks that telegraph that you’re a force to be reckoned with. Valentino butterflyembroidered dress; Valentino, NYC. Marc by Marc Jacobs striped shirt, $278; select Nordstrom stores. Carolina Herrera floral jacquard skirt, $1,190; select Carolina Herrera boutiques. Marni necklace. In this story: hair, Christiaan; makeup, Val Garland. Produced by Björn Frederic Gerling at Production Berlin. Menswear Editor, Michael Philouze. Details, see In This Issue.
P HOTO COURT ESY O F T HE C ECI L BE ATO N ST U D IO A RCH I V E AT SOTH E BY ’S.
LADY IN WAITING Cecil Beaton’s 1948 photograph of James and his fitter at work peeks from behind Grace Mahary wearing an Oscar de la Renta duchesse-silk dress and crystal brooch. Carolina Amato gloves. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Grace Coddington.
The One and Only As a reinvigorated Costume Institute prepares to celebrate the work of Charles James, Hamish Bowles reflects on the incredible career of America’s greatest couturier. Photographed by Tim Walker.
BREAKING THE MOLD When James wasn’t sculpting fabric directly on a client’s body, he fashioned his experiments on customconstructed forms.
ENSEMBLE CAST Conjuring Cecil Beaton’s iconic 1948 James tableau, a modern-day imagining suggests the hauteur of the designer’s mid-century clients, from Babe Paley to Austine Hearst. from far left: Maja Salamon, Ola Rudnicka, Codie Young, Esmeralda Seay-Reynolds, Nastya Sten, Sasha Luss, Alexandra Kivimaki, and Alice Cornish. Paper dresses and jewelry created by Rhea Thierstein. Produced by Susannah Phillips at Truro Productions. Details, see In This Issue.
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rancusi had his medium; Picasso, Faulkner, Shostakovich theirs,” declared the couturier Charles James. “Mine happens to be cloth.” An immodest genius, James was as complex as the magisterial clothes he labored over, their idiosyncratic seams, sly surrealist detailing, and artfully manipulated swathes of fabric frozen in time like the robes of Sargent’s haughty sitters or the angels in Renaissance paintings. Though he infuenced a generation of acolytes and apprentices—Halston, Scaasi, Adolfo, Miguel Ferreras, George Halley, and Homer Layne among them—James’s creations were unlike anything else seen before or since. In the decades following his death in 1978, creative forces as varied as Gianni Versace, Azzedine Alaïa, Christian Lacroix, Claude Montana, Ralph Rucci, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Zac Posen have all paid overt homage to James. “He was an artist and a technician,” Posen says. “His pieces remind me of Brancusi sculptures. They’re so sophisticated, but there is a humor there through his play with sexuality in the lines and the gestures in the cut.” Posen equates studying an original James gown with looking at a body on a dissection table; both reveal “the core structure, the muscle structure, the full anatomy of a human body,” he says. “The multiple layers of his dresses are like sculpted body casts.” Though James himself occasionally quoted from the past—incorporating the rigor of a nineteenth-century uniform jacket into his virtuosic tailoring, or the cut of an empire bodice on a Regency dress into his variant on a prototypical sports bra—he was determinedly futuristic, his innovations often prophetic. James’s body-caressing Taxi dress of 1932, for example, with its then–newly invented zipper winding around the body of the garment so that (as the designer suggested) the dress could be unzipped in the back of a taxi, prefgured the ease of the wrap dress, while his quilted satin eiderdown jacket of 1938—a piece that Dalí admired as an example of “soft sculpture”—was in turn the direct precursor of the now-ubiquitous sleeping-bag coat and pufer jacket. James also understood the power of branding and licensing long before such ideas were common currency. “What’s in a name? It’s the designer’s capital,” he said, although his querulous personality and inability to work within a conventional Seventh Avenue structure of deadlines and bottom lines ultimately defeated his eforts and drained his fnances. The designer was at once brilliant, impossible, and self-destructive— and now all but forgotten to the world at large. “Charles James: Beyond Fashion,” which runs from May 8 through August 10 in the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Gallery and Special Exhibition Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, aims to correct that. Organized by Harold Koda and Jan Glier Reeder and drawing on the Anna Wintour Costume Center’s unparalleled holdings of the designer’s work (inestimably enhanced by the recent assimilation of the Brooklyn Museum’s collection), the exhibition brings the work of this singular talent into focus every bit as sharp as his seams.
James was revered by both clients and contemporaries—“a designer’s designer,” as a Life story in 1950 put it. “All my work was inspired by women who were not merely lovely or rich but personalities,” James said, and they were the best-dressed women of his age, from Millicent Rogers to Marlene Dietrich and from Babe Paley to Gypsy Rose Lee (who ended her ecdysiast performances dressed in James’s most elaborate gowns). Chanel and Schiaparelli both ordered James’s clothes to wear themselves; Christian Dior anointed him “the greatest talent of my generation” and is said to have claimed him as the source of Dior’s own era-defning New Look; Cristóbal Balenciaga, meanwhile, described him as “not only the greatest American couturier, but the world’s best”—the only one, he said, who had elevated dressmaking to “a pure art form.” “I pass you my crown,” Paul Poiret told James in the 1930s, having seen a cape the young designer created of radiating panels made from a cache of Belle Époque Colcombet millinery ribbons discovered in a Paris flea market. “Wear it well.” In some ways, Poiret’s gift was a poison chalice. “It is the destiny of many great artists to read of their infuence on a world that has left them for dead,” James wrote of Poiret, who died in penurious obscurity, but he may well have been foreshadowing his own woeful trajectory. James was born in England in 1906 to a world of privilege, the last gasp of the opulent Edwardian era that the First World War was soon to sweep away. (Several of his designs nostalgically echo the silhouettes—the batwing coats and peg-top skirts—of his early childhood.) His pretty, doting mother—a Chicago heiress to a shipping and real estate fortune—and dashing English father, an army captain, sent their young son to Harrow, the British public school, where the puckish fgure befriended Cecil Beaton, who was to prove instrumental in James’s career. A piano prodigy, he later equated musical and design theory and set his fashion shows to music by Bach, Ravel, Debussy, and Satie. (A client from the 1930s recalled having to pick her way across his salon foor, messily strewn with 78 rpm records, “like someone obliged to ford a river” to get to the looking glass.) Following what is usually described as a “sexual escapade” at Harrow, James’s father pulled him from the school and sent him to work in Chicago for his friend Samuel Insull’s Commonwealth Edison utility company. When James was discovered brandishing some batik beach wraps of his own design around the ofce, Insull had the sense to swiftly remove him from his desk job and set him down in the architectural department. Although the opportunity was short-lived, James relished it and absorbed many of the fundamental skills that he would later apply to his structured fashion creations. Soon he left to focus on making hats. “I attempted the impossible,” he wrote, “out of a compulsion to be involved in a business of which my father disapproved.” His father, suitably enraged, cut him of, but his indulgent mother—though forbidden to wear her son’s creations—surreptitiously supported him, while her coterie of afuent society friends became his backers and clients, and in 1926 James set up shop under the label Boucheron (his father C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 6
Cristóbal Balenciaga described James as “not only the greatest American couturier, but the world’s best”— the only one who elevated dressmaking to “a pure art form”
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CUTTING ROOM Delicate folds and draped swaths of sea-foam satin form a contemporary take on Jamesian opulence. Fei Fei Sun wears an Alexander McQueen washed duchesse satin– and–tulle off-the-shoulder dress. Antique diamond necklace from S.J. Phillips Ltd. Carolina Amato gloves. In this story: hair, Julien d’Ys for Julien d’Ys; makeup, Lucia Pieroni for Clé de Peau Beauté. Production design, Rhea Thierstein. Photographed at Il Bottaccio, London. Details, see In This Issue.
SHEER BRILLIANCE Stone’s appeal lies in her ability to take her work seriously— and herself not at all. Marchesa silkorganza dress with rose embroidery. Dior Fine Jewelry necklace and bracelet. Fashion Editor: Tabitha Simmons.
THE DARLING Emma Stone is flying high— major movie roles, a Spider-Man beau, fashionworld heat—but, as Jason Gay discovers, she’s just as down-to-earth and devilish as ever. Photographed by Craig McDean.
MAKING WAVES The actress’s interest in fashion is almost journalistic. “I like to look through the glass.” Erdem suede jacket. Theory shirt. Suno wrap skirt. Rag & Bone hat. Jennifer Meyer ring. Details, see In This Issue.
BABY BLUE “What you see is what you get,” says Octavia Spencer. “It’s not pretend or a feigned humility, it really is who she is.” Dior Haute Couture embroidered silk dress. Van Cleef & Arpels necklace. Judith Leiber Couture minaudière. Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda heels. Details, see In This Issue.
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t is a quiet Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles, and Emma Stone and I are at a mall, eating hot dogs on a stick from Hot Dog on a Stick, sitting with our teddy bears from Build-a-Bear Workshop. I can explain all of this. Let me back up a bit. It’s the night before, at a restaurant called the Hungry Cat in Santa Monica. Maybe around 8:30 p.m. There have been oysters. There has been wine. Don’t get the wrong idea: not a lot of wine. One glass each. There has been polite and expected conversation about Stone’s career and Stone’s childhood and Stone’s newest movie, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which is in 3-D and comes out in early May. Stone is dressed in a plaid red-and-black A.P.C. shirt and Rag & Bone jeans, and she is being funny and gracious, even if sitting for long interviews with magazines occasionally freaks her out. It’s “a self-editing thing,” she says. Invariably, she gets home and thinks about something she said, and wonders if she could have put it diferently, and the anxiety just gets exhausting. “The permanence of it is what’s nerve-racking to me,” she says. “And the intimacy of it.” Then there’s the matter of the activity: the ruse that happens in many magazine stories, in which the writer and the subject agree to join up in a shared diversion. Sometimes the activity is a walk or a trip to the museum or an amusement-park ride. Activities can be helpful, but they’re a bit of a contrivance, a device to create motion in a story, so it’s not just chatter in hotel lobbies and forks picking at salads. Weeks before, Stone had suggested a trip to Grifth Observatory, but here at dinner, that activity starts to sound like, you know, a trip to an observatory. No disrespect to observatories, which are fantastic. It’s just that it might not be representative of who Stone is, which is a little devilish and unpredictable. Then Emma Stone has an idea: “Can we go to Build-a-Bear?” And this is how I fnd myself, the next day at 1:00 p.m., meeting one of the most successful young actresses in Hollywood on the second foor of the Westside Pavilion in Rancho Park. An eager Stone gets there before me and texts: I’m sitting outside Forever 21. They’re playing “Love Shack.” We are going to build a bear. For the uninitiated: Build-a-Bear is a store in which customers can . . . build bears. I guess the name says it all. Bears are stufed, hearts are inserted (not as creepy as it sounds), and then the fun really starts: dressing the bear. This is the sine qua non of the Build-a-Bear experience, during which Stone, star of The Help and Superbad and Easy A, is overheard saying, earnestly, “I want to give my bear skinny jeans.” There are rigorous conversations about bear accessories, and then there are bons mots from Stone like “exhi-bear-tionism” and “bear-ing all.” “This is bear-nanas,” she says. “I can’t stop making bear jokes!” To think that Stone and I could be at an observatory, pondering the essential questions of the universe. But this is the unpretentious madness that happens when you leave the activity to Emma Stone, whose movie-star life appears to be based on a likable philosophy of taking her profession seriously, and herself not at all. We will get to the 25-year-old’s rise to fame, the twists in the career of the actress whom Jonah Hill calls “probably the funniest person in the room . . . and so much more than that” and Bradley Cooper claims “has a 221
lot of magic in her” and Oscar winner Octavia Spencer says will be able to work for as long as she likes “because she has the goods.” We will get to all that. But right now, Emma Stone is going to pick out some bear sneakers, because bear sneakers rule.
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he essential (and now-legendary) moment in the Emma Stone Origin Story occurs when Stone is still Emily Stone of Scottsdale, Arizona, an anxious child who combats her anxiety by jumping headlong into theater (she makes her regional-theater debut playing Otter in The Wind in the Willows). At fifteen, she requests a home audience with her parents, where, via PowerPoint, she presents the case that she should be allowed to move to Hollywood. This sounds like a plot turn in a movie Emma Stone might have once starred in, but it actually happened. Stone says she ofered examples of successful entertainers who had started young. “Sarah Jessica Parker,” she recalls. “And I think the singer Michelle Branch.” “It is true,” Stone’s brother, Spencer, says by phone. “There was a Madonna song that played during the whole presentation. It was her basically begging my parents to be able to go to L.A.” Soon Stone was moving westward with her mom, renting a place in the Park La Brea apartments of L.A.’s Miracle Mile. An agency sent her out on auditions. Then the agency stopped calling. Stone got a job working at Three Dog Bakery—which is indeed a bakery for dogs—in the L.A. Farmer’s Market. This was around the time her mother spotted a commercial for a new Partridge Family reality-show competition. On YouTube, you can fnd a video of teenage contestant Emily Stone in a rowdy duet of Pat Benatar’s “We Belong.” “I realized why the people on The Bachelor go so crazy,” Stone says now. “You go in there rolling your eyes, thinking, This is just a reality search competition, but then you’re there for seven weeks, and you just really, really want to win.” The fever was short-lived; Stone made it onto the reality show, but the promised relaunch of the Partridge Family never reached the air. Stone found parts here and there—the voice of a dog on an episode of the kiddie series The Suite Life of Zack and Cody (“Thank you for remembering that”); an episode of Louis C.K.’s HBO sitcom Lucky Louie; a Fox series called Drive. Then came the Breakthrough: the bawdy teen comedy Superbad, in which Stone played Jules, a cool high school student obsessed over by Seth (Jonah Hill), her hapless home-economics partner. Produced by Judd Apatow, Superbad was an unlikely hit, grossing more than $121 million, and will live forever as the flm that gave Earth the word McLovin. “It was weird!” says Spencer Stone. “I was in high school when that came out, and all my friends loved that movie . . . everyone on the football team knew my sister was in it.” Superbad would provide a launchpad for a string of flms including (not necessarily in order) Zombieland (with Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray), Crazy, Stupid, Love (with Ryan Gosling), and, of course, Easy A, a wry Scarlet Letter update in which Stone played a high school student who declined to
refute (untrue) rumors of her sexual escapades. Smart and packed with throwback, rat-a-tat dialogue, Easy A announced Stone as a confdent leading actress of the moment. She loved making the flm but, curiously, has never watched it. “It’s just too much of me,” she says. Not even the premiere? “Went across the street, had home fries.” Stone’s not being falsely modest. She is the rare person in public life who will straight up tell you that yes, she has Googled herself. “I don’t usually like what I fnd,” she says. “But some of it is really funny.” Stone mentions Internet comments that referred to her as a “Bland Basic Bitch,” which was probably meant as a dig, but she found it hilarious, to the point that at dinner she now begins to refer to herself as “That Bland Basic Bitch.” Friends claim she isn’t swept up by fame. “She is just a breath of fresh air, she really is,” says Octavia Spencer, who recalls meeting Stone before making The Help and thinking she was a precocious fourteen-year old. (“The coolest little fourteen-year-old I ever met,” she jokes.) Spencer and Stone remain close; she has Thanksgiving with Stone’s family. “What you see is what you get,” Spencer says. “It’s not pretend or a feigned humility, it really is who she is.” Now comes The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the sequel to the phenomenally successful franchise reboot, which I guess makes this a seq-boot, and I’m sure Sony Pictures doesn’t mind what anyone calls it if it rakes in close to its predecessor’s worldwide $750 million haul. What’s always striking about these superhero epics is the scale of them, all that technological imagination and elaborate global rollout; as pieces of entertainment, they resemble aircraft carriers. “Nothing matters unless you care about the characters at the heart of the story,” says Spider-Man director Marc Webb, and this is where Stone comes in, playing Gwen Stacy, early love interest to Andrew Garfeld’s Peter Parker. Stone says she wasn’t sure if she wanted to join the adventure until she auditioned. “I remember I came home after the screen test and was upset about the idea of not being able to do the movie. I knew I wanted to be a part of it.” Between the two flms, Stone estimates, she has spent about a year of her acting life playing Gwen Stacy. The project changed her in other ways: She and Garfield have been a couple since 2011. And while the pair have made it something of a joint policy to keep their relationship private, they can’t disguise their chemistry on-screen. There’s a scene in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in which Peter and Gwen meet up in Manhattan’s Union Square, and there’s a cute tête-à-tête— Parker tweaking Gwen about her laugh; Gwen noting Parker’s brown eyes—that’s impossible to watch without being struck by the undercurrent of affection. “You can’t fake it,” says Webb. “There are so many tiny nonverbal cues that they are issuing each other and picking up on.” “I think I’ve learned a lot by being around him,” Stone says of Garfeld. “And, you know, he is an incredibly important person to me.” The feeling is clearly mutual. Garfeld sounds grateful that Stone has been at his side during the far-fung Spider-Man journey. “I thank my lucky stars that we’ve been able to be on this ride together,” he says in an e-mail. “We all need companions in the mystery to get you C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 6
“I want to try different things.” Like what? Maybe some “truly bizarre characters,” she says. “I would like to see what I can do”
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ALL BUTTONED UP Stone admits to Googling herself. “I don’t usually like what I find,” she says. “But some of it is really funny.” Band of Outsiders cropped-sleeve shirt. Isabel Marant pants. Chanel hat. Details, see In This Issue.
REBEL SPIRIT Stone is eager to shake things up and has attracted the eye of directors like Cameron Crowe and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Chanel cotton tweed jacket. Maxstudio.com striped top. Rag & Bone/Jean skinny jeans. Chanel hat. Tabitha Simmons ankle boots.
SWEPT AWAY “He’s an incredibly important person to me,” Stone says about her Spider-Man costar and boyfriend of nearly three years, Andrew Garfield. Valentino dress with butterfly embroidery. Bulgari earrings and necklace. Hair, Jimmy Paul for Bumble and Bumble; makeup, Mark Carrasquillo. Produced by Kyd Drake for North Six. Production design, Piers Hanmer. Photographed at Cadillac Jacks. Details, see In This Issue.
PRODUCED BY 3STAR PRODUCTIONS. SET D ESIGN, LISA BAZ AD ONA.
THE TIME WAS NOW The Normal Heart airs on HBO this month. from far left: Taylor Kitsch in a Maison Martin Margiela suit, Jim Parsons in a Malo sweater and Tom Ford jeans, Mark Ruffalo in an Hermès T-shirt, Ryan Murphy in a Band of Outsiders suit, and Matt Bomer in Hermès. Grooming, David Cox for Kevin Murphy. Photographed on the backlot at Warner Bros. Studios. Details, see In This Issue. Sittings Editor: Bill Mullen.
Love and War
Ryan Murphy and his all-star cast bring Larry Kramer’s catalyzing 1985 play The Normal Heart, which captured the early days of the AIDS epidemic, to the small screen. By John Powers. Photographed by Norman Jean Roy.
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hould you ever fnd yourself having to choose the most galvanizing play of the last 30 years, you wouldn’t be wrong to name The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s scalding 1985 drama about the HIV/AIDS epidemic then decimating the gay community in America. Written at a time of appalling ofcial apathy, it tells the story of Kramer’s fctional alter ego, Ned Weeks, as he tries to rouse a hostile political and medical establishment to take action against AIDS while desperately urging his fellow gay men to come out of the closet and fght for their lives. At once a manifesto, an indictment, and a cri de coeur, the play has gone from being a searing call for action to a cultural landmark. “This play is comparable to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” says playwright Tony Kushner, the author of another groundbreaking play about AIDS, Angels in America. “It’s one of the rare works of American art that had a direct political impact. And it’s still relevant today for many, many reasons, including the silence still surrounding the world pandemic of AIDS.” The Normal Heart is so undeniably important—36 million people have died of HIV so far—that it seems incredible nobody ever managed to film it. One who was incredulous is Ryan Murphy, the writer-director-producer best known for creating Nip/Tuck, Glee, and American Horror Story. “I grew up loving the play,” he says, “and I remember thinking, Why has this movie not been made?” And so he made it. On May 25, nearly three decades after The Normal Heart premiered at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in a production directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, HBO will air Murphy’s screen adaptation, which stars Mark Ruffalo, Jim Parsons, Taylor Kitsch, Matt Bomer, and Julia Roberts. Scripted by Kramer, the story carries us from the sun-drenched pleasures of gay parties on Fire Island in the early eighties into the
pitch-black of the nascent AIDS epidemic, with its young bodies being devoured by lesions from a virus made all the more terrifying because nobody could explain it. As our heroes—and Roberts’s feisty doctor—try to halt its spread, the flm bristles with still-fascinating arguments about how to change the world: Is it more efective to work within the system or confront authority? And it captures the irony in the idea that just at the moment when gay men felt liberated to have sex as they chose, they were being asked to curtail it—or die. In a choice that may well be controversial, Kramer’s play has been substantially retooled, and softened, for a presentday America, where ideas that once made Kramer seem like a revolutionary firebrand have become so mainstream that according to a recent survey, the majority of Americans now support gay marriage. If the flm lacks the original’s provocative incandescence, its nuanced performances bring to life the personal dimension of a trailblazing political movement. “It’s no longer as angry,” says Murphy of this gentler new version, which harks back to the terror and sadness of an era when gay life often looked like a death sentence. “It’s not agitprop. It’s stories about diferent kinds of love.” Some of that love is on display in a private dining room at Warner Bros., where I have lunch with Murphy and the male leads from the cast. The room brims with a genuine warmth and enthusiasm, and it’s clear that the actors feel bound by having played a diverse group of gay men who work, fght, love, and grieve in the face of the greatest crisis of their lives. “I would never seriously compare acting to going to war,” says Jim Parsons in the distinctive tones made famous by his role as Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory, “but we do feel like we went to battle together.” Leading the charge was Mark Rufalo, an actor brilliant enough to have made the Incredible Hulk into an interestingly nuanced character. Himself a political activist on
“I would never seriously compare acting to going to war,” says Jim Parsons, “but we do feel like we went to battle together”
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environmental issues, Rufalo feels a clear afnity with Ned, a well-known writer who helps found a gay health group to deal with the AIDS epidemic, only to have his cofounders accuse him of being too aggressively outspoken in public. “Every movement has that guy,” says Rufalo, “and they need him.” Yet as Rufalo plays him, Ned’s fabled stridency is less striking than the sensitivity he shows as he feeds, comforts, and even bathes his dying lover, Felix Turner (Matt Bomer). “You realize what it cost gay people to love at that time,” Ruffalo says. “There were already so many things going against them—and then you add the disease.” The story really hit home for Bomer, the startlingly handsome star of TV’s White Collar, who plays Felix, a genteel, sweet-smiled New York Times reporter whom we (and Ned) watch waste painfully away. One of the movie’s best surprises, Bomer frst read the play as a gay teen in Texas—“I knew it was part of my story,” he says simply—and knocked himself out to land the part of Felix, even charting for Murphy the way AIDS would make Felix’s muscle mass decompose. “It’s the frst great role I’ve had the opportunity to do,” he tells me, adding that the experience was profoundly emotional. After shooting their climactic hospital scene, he and Rufalo hugged and sobbed for so many minutes that everyone left them to be alone on the set. If Felix casts Bomer in a rich new light, the movie marks a happy return to character work for the charismatic Kitsch, whose knack for exploring the wayward corners of troubled masculinity (obvious on Friday Night Lights) got lost in misbegotten blockbusters like John Carter and Battleship. Here he plays Ned’s friend Bruce Niles, a corporate type whose poise and martial good looks should make him the perfect front man for a gay organization—except he’s professionally closeted and believes it’s safer for gay people not to come out. “I’m kind of the villain,” Kitsch says with a wry little smile. “But I found Bruce incredibly relatable. He’s scared and doesn’t know the truth about why people are dying, and he thinks he’s doing the right thing.” So does the movie’s most practical and even-keeled character, Tommy Boatwright (Parsons), who foats above all
SAFE HARBOR Mark Ruffalo (right) plays Ned Weeks, a character based on Larry Kramer. In this scene, Ned has just proposed that his boyfriend, Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), move in with him.
the furious arguments about tactics, closeting, and sexual liberation that divide the other activists. Parsons, who played the same role in the 2011 Broadway revival, says that what really connects him to Tommy is less their sexual orientation than their common personality traits: “I do tend to take a somewhat analytical view of things,” he says, “so I like that Tommy’s a peacekeeper who can get along with everyone.” Oddly enough for a flm whose actors are so emotionally naked, nobody exposed himself more on The Normal Heart than the man behind the camera, Murphy. “Ryan can be so clever, so jaded, even world-weary,” says Rufalo, “that it can keep him from being vulnerable. But with us he created the atmosphere of vulnerability we needed.” Murphy says that tackling Kramer’s play was daunting, and not simply because it is a modern classic. “The project scared me because it meant so much to me. I came of sexual age in 1982, so that feeling of ‘I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die’ has never left me. I now realize that there was a lot of stuf I didn’t deal with as a young man. Making it was a very cathartic experience, and I hope it is for people watching it.” For Murphy, the movie is both about the past—it allows those who lived through that time to finally see their story being told—and about today, when countries like Russia and Uganda target gayness and many governments prefer to think that the HIV/AIDS crisis is over even though, on average, 6,300 men and women a day still contract HIV. At the same time, as an openly gay man, he thinks the struggle against the virus depicted in The Normal Heart ofers reason for hope. “Larry and the other organizers were true heroes,” he says. “I have a wonderful life. I’m married, I have a kid, I have freedoms that as a child I never thought I would have. And I don’t think I would have those freedoms without those guys. So I was interested in paying them tribute.” He gives them a little nod: “Thank you for my life.” @ 229
COME ALONG Liya Kebede, a designer for the Born Free Collection, with children from Ntwasahlobo Primary School in Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township. Fabric design for all Born Free clothing based on the work of Wangechi Mutu. On Kebede: Lemlem for Born Free dress. Joie jacket. Jutta Neumann belt. Marc Jacobs sandals. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Phyllis Posnick.
BRAND-NEW DAY
In the global fight against AIDS, South Africa is making extraordinary strides in reducing mother-to-child transmission. Now a philanthropic initiative called Born Free is teaming up with the fashion industry to lend a hand. By Jonathan Van Meter. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
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os Angeles has its sprawl, Paris its lights, Beijing its smog. Cape Town, especially in the summer, is windy. On a perfectly beautiful, blue-sky day—one like today, as it happens—a wind can kick up out of nowhere and blow so strongly and constantly that you have to all but give up on trying to talk to the person right next to you. This happens with such regularity during the week I spend here in late February, the height of the South African summer, that I grow accustomed to the small army that emerges from my colonial-era hotel to tie down all of the lawn furniture lest it end up in the pool. These persistent winds are called “the Cape Doctor” because, for so many years, they were thought to be powerful enough to blow away all the pestilence. If only it were that simple. On this particular hot, windy afternoon, I fnd myself riding in the passenger seat of a black Toyota belonging to Dr. Michael Phillips. We are driving out of Cape Town through the eastern suburbs of Kraaifontein, on our way to the Bloekombos community, a former shantytown of poverty-stricken squatters—an “informal settlement,” in the technocratic lingo. Since the late nineties, the South African government has put a lot of efort and money into pulling this place onto the grid, building housing, schools, and one crucial clinic. Phillips, a genial, soft-spoken 41-year-old black South African, grew up on the edges of the gang life that dominated his northern Cape Town suburb, went to medical school, and found work in an HIV clinic. Five years ago, he became a district manager for Kheth’Impilo, an ambitious publichealth NGO that supports more than 300 facilities in the poorest—and hardest hit by HIV—districts in South Africa. As the landscape shifts to arid empty lots followed by mile after mile of shantytowns, Phillips recalls for me how South Africa became virtually synonymous with the AIDS crisis in the developing world. “South Africans endured a lot of bureaucracy around the availability of antiretroviral treatment with the previous ministers of health,” he tells me, referring to the administration of Thabo Mbeki, one of current president Jacob Zuma’s predecessors and an AIDS denier whose health policies, according to a 2008 Harvard study, led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. But things have turned around dramatically since President Zuma was elected, partly because he had the sense to install an actual doctor as the minister of health. “Now,” says Phillips, “we have one of the biggest antiretroviral programs in the world, if not the biggest.” Spending time with people like Phillips, you can’t help feeling the newfound sense of hope and optimism in South Africa when it comes to HIV/AIDS. I quickly learn that nowhere is this more evident than in the excitement around the issue of ending mother-to-child transmission. It’s been only a couple of years that a pregnant woman with HIV could take one pill—a combination therapy of three antiretroviral medications— every day of her pregnancy and practically ensure that her baby would be born free of the virus. “It’s one of the greatest inroads we have made in fghting this,” Phillips says. “Because you’re talking of a new generation. Parents are positive or mother is positive, but the child is born negative. A brand-new start.” 232
We pull into the Bloekombos community just after 2:00 p.m., as hundreds of kids in maroon school uniforms are just beginning to fan out across the windswept, rubble-strewn roads toward their homes, many of which are single-parent households. We pass one little girl with a backpack slung over her shoulder, walking very slowly: She is intently studying a piece of sheet music, singing to herself. Though there is now formal government housing in Bloekombos, with piped-in water and fushable toilets, a good many of the 30,000 residents still live in tin shacks, and one-third of them are unemployed. The prevalence of HIV hovers around 11 percent. Today Phillips wants me to see the Bloekombos Clinic, which treats 300 people a day on average. Inside, he and a pharmacist named Lizette Monteith proudly show me around the facility: It is plain, well organized, and spotlessly clean. Cartoon posters on the wall—say “no” to teenage pregnancy and diarrhea (runny tummy) can kill babies and young children—lend it the air of a grade school, but one with lessons that have life-and-death consequences. We walk into a lab where Monteith takes out a white plastic bottle with an orange-and-black label with the word tribuss on it and sets it down in the middle of a big metal table. It’s almost impossible to believe that this bottle of pills is the main cause of so much momentum in bringing the rate of motherto-child transmission of HIV down to zero in Africa. First developed in the late eighties, antiretrovirals didn’t become truly efective until used in combination in the mid-nineties. But even then the regimen was brutal, often requiring up to 20 pills a day with debilitating side efects. “Now, when an infected mother comes in,” says Monteith, “you just have to give her one bottle of pills, not this huge bag flled with drugs.” After we leave the clinic, Phillips takes me to the home of Barbara Matisane, a 30-year-old with HIV and a mother of two—a three-month old and a nine-year-old—both born negative thanks to Matisane’s determination to continue her treatment throughout her pregnancies and breast-feeding so that she did not pass the disease along to her children. Phillips calls her “the special one,” as she is now part of the Kheth’Impilo network, a social-auxiliary worker who helps other women to get tested, join support groups, and take their medication. Matisane represents a growing cadre of young mothers who, by taking charge of their children’s fates and becoming mentors to other aficted young women, have turned a potential death sentence into a cause for hope. The infuence of these “mentor mothers,” who may not have more than a secondor third-grade education, is confirmed when I speak with Robin Smalley, a former Hollywood producer who cofounded mothers2mothers in Cape Town in 2001, a grassroots organization that has reached more than 1.2 million people through programs in nine countries throughout sub-Saharan Africa. “These mentor mothers have really become a professionalized tier to support the rest of the medical team,” says Smalley. “And then, when they go back into their communities, they are fghting stigma in the townships, just by their example.” Though Matisane’s house has running water and electricity, it is clearly not part of the so-called formal governmenthousing initiative that has transformed this “settlement” into a “community.” Indeed, her house is pieced together out of particleboard and corrugated aluminum, with a tangle of wires crisscrossing her ceiling and newspapers stufed in the cracks between the roof and the walls. Matisane is pie-faced and ebullient in her red scoopneck T-shirt, blue
jeans, and red tasseled loafers. Though the predominant language in this community is Xhosa, Matisane speaks pretty decent English, sometimes to unintended comic effect. She was diagnosed HIV positive in 1998, when she was fourteen. “I was still young, and then HIV was like a bad disease. Let me put it that way: It was a baaad disease. I stole my medical fle, I put it in my bed, because I didn’t know how to tell my parents.” Eventually she told them, insisting that the doctor said they must all go together to the clinic as a family. “I was not happy. Maybe if I cook, my mother would take the food and throw it out.” Before long, she joined a treatment action group. “I asked my family also to join the group and then they see that, OK, we can live with a positive person in the house.” Suddenly, Matisane’s sister appears with three-month-old Neo in her arms—a plump, gorgeous baby boy with big brown eyes. I ask Matisane if it’s possible for her to describe the feeling of fnding out that Neo was born without HIV, and she jumps out of her chair. “AAAAH! Yes! It’s so happy! I don’t know what! I feel like screaming!” She talks about the stress and fear of sitting in a corner waiting for the results. “The nurse ask me, ‘Why are you sitting there?’ I said, ‘I’m scared.’ And she said to me, ‘Come.’ When I come in, she said, ‘Wow, your child is negative. All because of you.’ I said, ‘He is?’ I’m proud of myself because I don’t forget to take my treatment every day, every night. I wish some of the other mothers could be as brave as I am. They can take that treatment every day, every time. And they must go to the antenatal clinic as soon as possible when they realize that they are pregnant.” She goes on, “While I’m sitting here, I’m on maternity leave, but my phone keeps on ringing day and night, day and night because of my patients. The thing is, I have the passion; the work that I do is always here in my heart. I’m proud of myself. I love what I am doing. I’m not doing it for me, I’m doing it for my children and my community.” As Dr. Ashraf Grimwood, the CEO of Kheth’Impilo, later tells me, “Barbara’s journey is an example of moving from patient to health-care provider, from victim to hero.”
normal, destigmatized condition, like any other. We don’t stop diabetics from getting pregnant. We don’t stop heart cases. So it needed that paradigm shift.” I tell her about going to another clinic earlier that day in Hout Bay and meeting a woman with HIV named Thabisa, who has given birth to not one but six HIV-negative children. “And that is why there is so much hope: For the frst time, we actually have things we can do that we know will work,” says Bekker. “And the big issue now is, How do you apply them? How do you scale it up to the degree that you actually can talk about an AIDS-free generation?” Since 2003, countries coping with an AIDS crisis have been able to rely on PEPFAR—the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Launched under President George W. Bush, it has since given $52 billion dollars to the cause. South Africa, which was long considered ground zero for the epidemic, was one of its frst benefciaries. As of 2013, 2.5 million people in South Africa were on antiretroviral treatment—the most in any single country on Earth. As Barks-Ruggles tells me, “This is one of those mystical, magical issues where we continue to have bipartisan support in Washington, not because people are unrealistic but because people are very brass-tacks realistic about it.” So far, in South Africa alone, the chance of mother-child transmission of the virus has gone from 30 percent to less than 3 percent. “That’s a huge number of lives,” she says. But the next phase for PEPFAR has begun: handing off the baton. “We use the term country ownership,” says Deborah von Zinkernagel, the acting U.S. global AIDS coordinator who runs PEPFAR. “Because in every country, we’re there to help, but the local governments are increasingly running the show, which is how it should be.” As the South African government has stepped up its involvement, for instance, it has built 3,000 new clinics. Though fears about cuts to PEPFAR this year went unfounded (its funding has remained essentially fat for the past fve years), this kind of commitment and fnancial aid from the U.S. won’t last forever, which is why it is more important than ever to fnd new ways to give African governments the support they need. One way to do that, of course, is to marshal resources from the private sector. (As Michel Sidibé, the executive director of UNAIDS, said to me, “Eighteen pills a day is now one pill a day—that’s the private sector.”) Enter the American philanthropist John Megrue, the chairman of the private-equity frm Apax Partners U.S. Megrue has a long history of trying to solve the problems of extreme poverty and related issues in Africa. Once the Global Plan to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV by December 31, 2015 was announced by UNAIDS, Megrue was approached by Eric Goosby, then the U.S. global AIDS coordinator; Sidibé; and Ray Chambers, a longtime philanthropist and special envoy to the United Nations, to be the privatesector voice at the table as the group came together to try and fgure out, once and for all, how to reach this goal. Megrue founded Born Free, a foundation dedicated to the single task of pushing the not-inconsiderable success with reducing motherto-child transmission in Africa over the fnish line. One of the ways Born Free is doing that, says its president, Anna Squires
“For the first time, we have things we can do that we know will work. The issue is, How do you scale it up so that you can talk about an AIDS-free generation?”
One surprisingly unwindy afternoon outside Cape Town, I have lunch with Dr. Linda-Gail Bekker, deputy director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre, and Erica Barks-Ruggles, consul general for the United States in Cape Town. We meet in Woodstock, a recently gentrifed suburb on the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak that seems to be trying to live up to its name, with locavore cafés where modern-day hippies (and hipsters) hang out. An intense, wiry platinum blonde with a pixie haircut, Bekker, who grew up in Zimbabwe, is one of the foremost experts on HIV in South Africa. She has been agitating for access to antiretroviral treatment and destigmatization since the late nineties. “Initially, with our patients, there was an overwhelming sense of ‘Well, that’s it: Your sexual lives are over, as is the likelihood of your having a child,’ ” she says. “And what changed—this was around 2004—is that there was a soap opera on our national television, and one of the characters had the virus and got pregnant. Suddenly it kind of hit us between the eyes that women had a right to be pregnant, and that it was all about living a normal life with this disease. For the six million South Africans who have it, let’s make it a
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ON THE ROAD Victoria Beckham, in her own clothing, with children from the Imizamo Yethu township in Hout Bay, beside a Tutu Tester mobile HIV clinic. She is one of 23 designers— all mothers— collaborating on the Born Free Collection.
TOGETHER NOW Kebede, next to Imizamo Yethu resident Yolanda Baliso and her family. On Kebede: Isabel Marant for Born Free blouse. Vera Wang for Born Free longsleeved top. Nili Lotan pants. Details, see In This Issue.
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Levine, is by “amplifying the effects of all the other people working on this topic already”—people like Robin Smalley at mothers2mothers and Michael Phillips of Kheth’Impilo. The trick now is to capture the American imagination. “We know there are huge movements in the U.S. that catch fre and make real change, and this is not one of them,” observes Levine. “If it could be, it would be huge.” To that end, Born Free joined forces with Vogue to ask 23 designers who are mothers, including Diane von Furstenberg, Tory Burch, Sarah Burton, Donna Karan, Jenna Lyons, Donatella Versace, Carolina Herrera, Vera Wang, Liya Kebede, and Victoria Beckham, to create a Born Free Collection of women’s and children’s clothing and accessories based on the work of the Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu, to be sold on Shopbop.com, an Amazon Fashion site. The limited-edition collection, which ranges from Alexander McQueen baby blankets to matching mother-and-child pleated skirts by Prada, will go on sale on April 23, with all of the proceeds going toward helping Born Free. (The MAC AIDS Fund recently announced it would match dollar for dollar all proceeds up to $500,000.) “The question was, How do you get the message out?” Megrue says. “You either go to Hollywood, sports, or the fashion industry, because all three have these huge megaphones.” He chose the fashion industry largely because of its history of facing down its own HIV/AIDS crisis in New York in the early nineties by raising millions and changing minds. Until about a year ago, Megrue had been entirely focused on policy issues and implementation—and not thinking much about public awareness, particularly in America, where coverage of the success of mother-to-child transmission rates in Africa has been all but nil. As Smalley puts it, “I fnd my most educated, brilliant friends don’t know about it. Because we don’t see babies born with HIV in the U.S. very often anymore, we sort of assume it’s not happening anywhere. It makes headlines, it’s so rare.”
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t is another incredibly windy afternoon, and Victoria Beckham, who is in talks to become an ambassador for UNAIDS, is standing in a parking lot in Hout Bay in front of the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation’s mobile HIV clinic (also known as a Tutu Tester), holding a little girl in an apricot dress. Annie Leibovitz is behind the camera, here to capture the Born Free initiative on the ground. Behind her there are three men hanging on with all their might to the lighting equipment, lest the wind rip it from their hands and launch it into the sky. Hout Bay is a coastal suburb, about ten miles west of the center of the city. It is about as beautiful a place as I have ever seen. In one direction there is the harbor and the fshing village that surrounds it. Beyond that there are neighborhoods with names like Hillcrest and Beach Estate. This is a surfer’s paradise: The annual Red Bull Big Wave Africa competition is held here. But up the hill behind us, there is the Imizamo Yethu (in Xhosa, literally “our struggle”) community, which is also known as Mandela Park. It is a shantytown that climbs up the steep slope right behind where Beckham, Leibovitz, and her crew are trying their best to get the right shot. Imizamo Yethu is home to 15,000 people, yet has an extremely limited sewage system. Many of the residents use the Hout Bay Main Road Clinic, supported by the TB/HIV Care Association, when they need medical attention—which, as you can imagine, is frequently.
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As I did a few days earlier, Beckham will tour a facility and meet the doctors and mentors and nurses—all women—who are, among other things, striving to keep the unborn from contracting the virus. She has been supporting various charities for years now, but she had long wanted to do something more. “It’s taken a long time to fnd a charity that I really feel a connection with,” Beckham will tell me later, “and it’s kind of changed how I feel about everything, really. I have met a lot of HIV-positive women who told me their stories. My eyes were opened. I had no idea that this pill existed, and because of these pills, we are now at a statistic of 97 percent of babies born free of HIV. The statistics are nothing short of mind-boggling. Obviously I am a woman and I am a mother, and this touched me. I really feel like I can do something to make a diference.” The Ethiopian model Liya Kebede, who already has a foundation dedicated to maternal health in her native country, “was surprised by how little I knew about this maternal-transmission issue, and how within reach it is.” All of the designers seem genuinely invested in the cause. “This kind of thing I am happily roped into,” says Stella McCartney, whose contributions include onesies, T-shirts, and dresses for children. “It’s a great way to balance fashion with something incredibly vital. I love the idea of pulling out working mothers in the industry and giving us something important to tackle for a change. I mean, you know, I love shoes, but there are more important things in life, like survival, and creating the next generation of healthy humans on this planet. That’s what’s so startling about this particular cause, seeing that kids, just because of where they’re born, are not given the same set of chances.” When I ask her about what she designed, she says, “They’re approachable pieces. I already do childrenswear, so it seemed like a good idea to bring that into this project because it’s about seeing the connection between mother and child.” Of Mutu’s artwork she says, “It’s quite ornate; there’s a lot of emotion and storytelling within it. As someone who normally creates her own prints, I found it was sort of a new way of approaching design.” Mutu, who lives in Brooklyn and just had a big show at the Brooklyn Museum, was born and raised in Nairobi, went to high school in the U.K., and then to art school in New York, where she has now lived and worked for more than 20 years. A collage artist, she cuts up magazines and blends them with ink and paint. Intriguingly enough, she mostly uses images from fashion magazines. (She chose two pieces for the designers to work with: one from 2003, from her Alien series, and the other “a kind of a sweet fgure seeded with big red ponytails.”) “It’s funny how it comes all the way around,” she says of the fact that her work, based on things torn out of fashion magazines, will now be made into fashion that will be featured in fashion magazines. “But I sort of believe that’s how it all works anyway. Everything is connected. So there’s an interesting relationship between how this project is transforming people’s lives and bodies, and allowing mothers to raise healthy kids. It’s just phenomenal. It’s a miracle project. It’s the kind of thing I’ve dreamed could be done—a project where art and fashion are used to empower, to educate, to give someone who might not be as fortunate as those who are making art or fashion an opportunity to enjoy their lives, and even enjoy their clothing, perhaps. That is what is shockingly amazing: It’s pointing out what is possible.” One Saturday night in Cape Town, I meet John Megrue and the CEO of Born Free, Jennifer McCrea, a senior research fellow at the Hauser Institute for Civil Society at Harvard
on their grandfather’s towering legacy while trying to tackle University, at a dinner for the initiative for about 40 people some of the continent’s biggest problems, including HIV. at a Vegas-like resort on the waterfront called One&Only. “Obviously our granddad was extremely passionate about As I watch the guests arrive, including UNAIDS’s Michel HIV, and our family was also personally affected by it,” Sidibé and Caroline Rupert, the daughter of a South AfriKweku tells me. “So I think for me and Ndaba it’s actually can business dynasty that owns Cartier, among other things, a personal thing more than anything else.” They have lent it strikes me that country ownership of the fight against their full support to Born Free. “I think it’s vitally important AIDS can’t happen without the rich and powerful of Africa that, if we are going to stop the next generation from being really getting behind the cause, people like Megrue’s South infected by this epidemic, it really starts with newborns,” says African cohost tonight. A woman named Dr. Precious Kweku. “It’s the frst step.” Moloi-Motsepe, she is the kind of person who could only But Kweku and Ndaba are also, as one person put it to me, exist in Africa: a doctor by training who is married to one of “using the media to change people’s perceptions of Africa, South Africa’s frst black billionaires and also runs Fashion particularly young people.” They themselves may not be Week in Cape Town. She travels with her stylist in tow, an “born-frees,” this new demographic who are of great interest exceptionally pale white man wrapped in layers of fabric to South African politicians, who towers above everyone. but that is where their focus lies Wearing a slinky black Azzeas well. “Now it’s got to fall on dine Alaïa dress, she reminds this generation; that’s the excitme of some otherworldly coming part,” says Kweku. “We’re bination of Naomi Campbell at the point where we can actuand Diahann Carroll, with all the charm, glamour, and imally fnally see the end of it.” But as Linda-Gail Bekker reperiousness that that suggests. minded me, it’s important that It turns out that Rupert we not get ahead of ourselves works closely on flm projects with all this hopeful born-free with her good friend Kweku talk. “Now, for the first time, Mandela, whom I also meet we really need the resources. at the reception. He is Nelson This is where we say, ‘Don’t Mandela’s 29-year-old granddisengage, because we’re on the son, who lives in Johannesburg cusp of getting it right.’ ” but spends a lot of time in Los Wangechi Mutu agrees. “A Angeles, where he has prolot of the issues in my country, duced and directed both feaand in Africa in general, are ture flms and documentaries, solvable. And what bothers including Mandela, about his me—and this is part of why grandfather, and The Power I am doing this—is it’s really of Words, a project made for just about doing that one thing the Tribeca Film Institute last that gets everything going in year. Wearing jeans, a gray the right direction so we can T-shirt, and a dark denim actually do something about jacket, Mandela seems to have it. The fact that one drug can picked up the L.A. custom of allow the baby to survive, dressing down for semiformal which happens in the U.S. all events. When I ask how he got SING OUT The Sizophila Choir, run by the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre, helps the time. . . . It’s a no-brainer. into show business, he tells me support mothers and children with HIV. But it’s so great that someone a story about watching Dick has figured out a way to make these beautiful products, Tracy, starring Warren Beatty and Madonna, with his these pieces of clothing for sale, into messengers—disciples grandfather when he was a kid. When the credits rolled, he of this message about prevention of this transference of asked, “What are those?” and his grandfather said, “Jobs.” disease. Go for it.” The next morning, an op-ed piece runs in the Sunday Times Her words bring me back to sitting in Barbara Matisane’s under the headline born-frees set to make their mark. It is living room as she was lamenting the fact that her ninenot about HIV/AIDS but about the 600,000 or so eighteenyear-old daughter, Uthandile, whom she has already eduand nineteen-year-olds—new voters—who were born right after apartheid ended and are now old enough to cast a ballot cated on the reality of HIV/AIDS, was late coming home in the presidential election this month. I am reminded of somefrom school. She wanted me to see and hear for myself just how healthy and wise her little girl has become. Suddenly thing that Kweku said to me about why he chose the Power & Uthandile burst into the tiny room in her school uniform the Glory café as the location for his Vogue shoot with Rupert and, speaking to her mother in Xhosa, asked if she could and another Mandela grandson, Ndaba, who was recently apgo outside and play. Yes, said Barbara. Her daughter pulled pointed deputy president of the Pan African Youth Council: a box from underneath the bed in the corner, grabbed some “Twenty years ago a place like this wouldn’t have existed, and sneakers and shorts and a T-shirt, changed behind a bedthe three of us wouldn’t have been able to be here together.” In 2009, Kweku and Ndaba founded the organization sheet hung as a curtain, and then ran out the door, like any Africa Rising, which is committed to honoring and carrying other kid in the world. @ S E E V I C TO R I A B EC K H A M A N D L I YA K E B E D E ’ S P E R S O N A L P H OTO G R A P H S F R O M T H E I R T R I P TO S O U T H A F R I C A , O N LY O N VO G U E . C O M
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TABLE TALK “Obviously I am a woman and a mother, and this issue touched me,” says Beckham, photographed with (from left) Caroline Rupert and Ndaba and Kweku Mandela, at the Power & the Glory café, in Cape Town.
MATERNAL INSTINCTS Kebede, photographed with five mothers with HIV and their HIV-negative children in a local home in Khayelitsha. On Kebede: Marni for Born Free dress. Donna Karan New York belt. In this story: hair, Julien d’Ys for Julien d’Ys; Beckham’s makeup, Sally Branka. Produced by Gavin Schneider Productions with support from mothers2mothers, Lalela Project, and the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation. Details, see In This Issue.
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PARIS MI AM
P I CASSO : © 2014 ESTAT E O F PA BLO P I CASSO/ A RT I STS RI G H TS SO CI ET Y ( A RS) , NEW YOR K.
A ROMAN’S EMPIRE A late–seventeenth century Italian daybed dominates the living room filled with pieces from the designer’s collection of art, including two Picasso embroideries found in an antiques store in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Sittings Editor: Hamish Bowles.
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Giambattista Valli’s apartment in the city’s achingly cool Canal St.-Martin neighborhood is as layered with history as his native Rome. Photographed by François Halard.
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isit chez Giambattista Valli, the Roman designer’s chic and labyrinthian Troisème République apartment in the Tenth Arrondissement of Paris, and you might pause for a second. Something, it seems, is missing, and just then it occurs to you: There are no sofas. It’s not as if there aren’t any number of places to sit. Two daybeds—an ivory-upholstered wooden Charlotte Perriand and an ebony-cushioned metal Jean Prouvé—are between them a master class in modernist design. And there are conversation-piece chairs, from Marc Newson’s Felt models to a sizable 1986 black leather–and–steel hammock-like piece by Christina och Lars Andersson. There are two monumental wooden beds—a seventeenth-century Italian example from the Clignancourt marché aux puces in the living room and a nineteenth-century Chinese one, a gift from the jeweler and designer Luigi Scialanga, a close friend and collaborator of Valli’s, in the gorgeously appointed reading room directly beside it. But still: seriously, Giambattista, no sofas? “I think it comes from my nomadic spirit,” he says, laughing. “I’m always in movement, and everything else in this space is foating and airy—putting a sofa here would be like putting a heavy rock over my brain.” To a sociable and relentlessly kinetic fgure like Valli, 47, his choice of seating arrangements suggests the airy ebb and fow of a party, a circulation of chatter and laughter around those interlocking rooms. It’s an appropriate environment for a designer who has dressed the likes of Charlotte Dellal, Bianca Brandolini d’Adda, and Matilde Borromeo for just about every engagement under the moon. Of course, appearances can be deceptive, and there are two sides to every story. When Valli moved in, he zoned the apartment into two very distinct worlds: The public salles designed for entertaining, and a private set of rooms—bed, bath, study—that is intended, he says, “to be a bit like a suite in a hotel; I love the sense of privacy it gives. Even when I have guests, I have this island in the middle of the house that’s mine.” Valli first saw the apartment in the increasingly branché Canal St.-Martin neighborhood—which, with its waterways spanned with bridges, evokes Amsterdam at its most bucolic, while the surfeit of edgy bars and restaurants summons hipster Williamsburg—in 2010. On his initial visit, the place, which had been all but abandoned, possessed a spooky tumbledown quality (only recently, for example, has the black leaded stove in the kitchen, adorned with Neapolitan Pulcinella fgurines and Vietri ceramics from Positano, been restored to its original glory). In the end, though, his decision to take it had little to do with what he saw and everything to do with what he felt. “When I stepped inside, there was this beautiful energy. I said to myself, This is the one.” Scialanga partnered with him on planning the renovations and created some pieces for Valli, including exquisitely witty bronze consoles with painted representations of fowers, opium, and incense depicting the pleasures of the court. Given Valli’s barely contained energy, it’s easy to presume that he must have been utterly impatient (read: impossible) during the eight-month transformation, though he laughs away the notion. He actually liked the feeling that the place was in fux—in fact, he still does. “I love very much the idea of an unfnished house,” he says. 246
DESIGNER IN RESIDENCE Valli prizes the space as much for its atmosphere as for its aesthetics.
LIGHT SHOW A vintage Serge Mouille floor lamp in the living room. ITALIAN STUDIES A 1953 Giò Ponti desk was brought from Valli’s house in Rome.
PRAYER MEETING A side panel from a fifteenth-century Flemish altar backstops an opaline glass lamp.
WITHIN GRASP A Jean Marais vase.
HOTHOUSE One of two custombuilt conservatories.
BU RRI : © 2014 A RT I STS RI G HTS SO CI E T Y ( A RS ) , N EW YO RK/SI A E ROM E . BOU RG EO I S : © TH E EASTON FOUNDATION/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YOR K, NY. WAR H OL: © 20 14 TH E ANDY WA R HO L FOU N DAT I ON FOR T HE V I SUA L A RTS, I N C. /A RT I STS RI G HTS SO C IE T Y ( A RS ) , N EW YO R K. SCH IFANO: © 20 14 ARTISTS R IGH TS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YOR K/SIAE, ROME.
BODY OF WORK Valli’s extensive collection of drawings includes a number of figure studies.
EASTERN ACCENTS An antique Asian wedding bed in the reading room.
HOME ON THE RANGE Valli restored the kitchen’s original nineteenthcentury stove.
INSTANT EASEL Treasures atop and below a Paolo Buffa armoire.
THE REAL THING Mario Schifano’s Pop canvas dates from 1979.
SWEEP OF HISTORY A typically dramatic trailing evening dress by Giambattista Valli, worn by Daria Werbowy. Photographed by David Sims for Vogue, 2009.
What has resulted is a respectful treatment of the past that nevertheless manages to make Valli’s own declarative and original mark on it apparent. Thick black lines painted on the moulure beneath the eleven-foot-high ceilings create both a starkly chic framing device and a singular visual motif that unites the rooms. At Scialanga’s suggestion, Valli installed a foot-high platform “stage” across half of the marble bathroom, imbuing it with a surreal and delightfully off-kilter theatricality—a feeling only amplifed by a narrow ceilingto-foor glass conservatory that encloses the window, so that when Valli showers in the morning, the sunlight floods in through a wild array of plants (he wanted to re-create the sense of being on summer vacation in his beloved Positano). Another conservatory has been installed in the entranceway, adding a fecund hothouse twist to its otherwise sober elegance. As to the decor, think eclectic in spirit and autobiographical in approach. Being a Roman living in Paris (for almost two decades) certainly has much to do with it: “I always work in opposites,” he says. “As a Roman there is austerity, and as a Parisian, opulence. Being a Roman has also infuenced the way my mind works—it’s about making conficts function together in harmony. You can see that all over Rome: Ancient ruins coexist with Baroque churches, modern architecture with sphinxes and Egyptian obelisks—sometimes in the same square.” And so it is here, with masterly examples of postwar Italian design, including a Giò Ponti desk and a Paolo Bufa cabinet, contrasted with delicate eighteenth-century Meissen salts and Serge Mouille lamps from David Gill in London. Just don’t call Valli a collector; he can’t stand the term. “You cannot go out looking for things,” he says. “They have to come to you.” He’d rather be thought of as an accumulator—and when it comes to his art, he has done so at an impressive clip. There are intriguing examples of Italy’s Arte Povera; erotica (in the living room hangs an Andy Warhol silk-screen sextet—appropriately enough—of anatomical studies that would have made Marilyn Monroe blush); contemporary photography (Nan Goldin, primarily); and a very fne collection of sketches, from an example of Louise Bourgeois’s college-era work to Brancusi to Gauguin and Dalí. For someone who spends his professional life sketching (often at home on the Italian bed, with music—Vivaldi, Bach, Dolly Parton—cranked up and his Cire Trudon Rose Poivrée candles fickering in the air), the seemingly tentative drawn line constantly holds sway over his imagination. “It’s very nice to have the beginning—or the end—of stories.” Come to think of it, there’s an echo of this in the black beams on the walls, which mimic the assertive dash of graphite on vellum. Like everything else Valli has accumulated in his home, the art always tells a story. The Nan Goldins, for instance—a Déjeuner sur l’Herbe–like grouping laughing to the camera and a drag queen beaming from the back of a motorbike, among others—were bought when he found that Goldin was having an early show at a garage next door to his apartment in Rome. When his good friend Lee Radziwill frst saw them, she mentioned to Valli how incredible it was that he seemed instinctually drawn to the happy moments in Goldin’s oeuvre, which otherwise seems to draw from a rather opposite mood. “I guess I always try to fnd the happy moments, even if her work is usually dramatic,” says Valli. “I am dramatic, too—maybe that’s why there aren’t big couches. I love the idea that I could just pack everything up and move in a second.”—mark holgate SEE MORE PHOTOS FROM GIAMBATTISTA VALLI’S APARTMENT IN THE VOGUE DIGITAL EDITION. DOWNLOAD IT NOW
NOW AND THEN The designer’s apartment constantly evokes visually stunning plays between the centuries—such as this Marc Newson Felt chair beside a Troisème République mantel.
SolidGold
Is there a more elemental pleasure than the taste of finely made butter? Just one,writes Oliver Strand. Making your own supply. Photographed by Eric Boman.
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sually, I breeze through an airport security check. I fy often and I know the drill, so it was a surprise to fnd myself locked in a tense argument with a security guard at Charles de Gaulle after she opened my shoulder bag and confscated four small blocks of butter from Beillevaire and Bordier, two of my favorite butter-makers in France. The seizure had nothing to do with customs regulations— it’s perfectly legal to bring butter into the United States. The butter, according to the guard, was a liquid, and over the limit for a carry-on. The butter, according to me and to elementary science, was a solid. It was wrapped in waxed paper, not sloshing around in a tub. “It melts,” she said. “So does chocolate,” I said. “And plastic.” She wasn’t buying it, and she was the one with the uniform, the badge, the backup. Most important, she had the butter. I was given a choice: Continue the conversation in a windowless room with one of her colleagues, or give up and board my fight. I decided to go back to New York that day. “I hope you enjoy it,” I said. “I will,” she replied, placing the butter under her desk. On the plane, I was angry with myself for caving. Beillevaire and Bordier taste like clover, sun, and sea salt; they’re worth fighting for. At a time when much of the culinary world is dominated by chefs who fetishize the esoteric (overwintered root vegetables, unpronounceable herbs), a supply of good butter is something of a calling card for those who don’t chase trends, who know when not to mess with simple perfection. Butter is elemental, just churned cream, but the very best ones hold favors so sophisticated and elusive that they dazzle your palate while comforting you like a child. Many chefs use two kinds, a neutral butter for cooking and a distinctive artisanal butter for the table. In the United States, those artisanal butters can be tricky to fnd. (If a chef discovers one he loves, the restaurant will buy out a dairy’s supply.) It’s diferent in Paris, which is one of the world’s great butter cities. Chalk it up to French cows, French technique, or the lingering belief that the French are simply better at certain tasks (tying scarves, sautéing fsh), but the French can get their hands on a lofty caliber of butter that in other countries never makes it to the open market. Bordier—which the chef David Chang told The New York Times he wanted “for my last meal”—is on the table at Restaurant Arpège, le Chateaubriand, Septime, and just about every other gastronomic heavyweight in Paris. A number of good cheese shops carry it, and it’s always available 250
at Breizh Café, a crêperie in the fashionable northern corner of the Marais, where a 250-gram block costs a little more than €4. At about $6 for a half-pound, it’s a gastronomic steal. When I went to Paris last December, a friend told me to try Le Ponclet, a butter from Brittany so creamy and beautiful you’ll want to eat it straight. It is found only at fromagerie Laurent Dubois, a cheese store with three locations and a cocky staf. I went to the one on the Place Maubert, where I found the butter displayed in a glass cloche next to the register. It’s sold in sets of four cubes, each imprinted with an interlocking L and P. After you pay (€6), you are given a fact sheet (I learned that the cows were about to change to their winter diet of foin, orge, et betterave—hay, barley, and beet), then you are handed a small plastic box, as if the butter were a rare orchid. This time the butters went in my checked suitcase for the fight home. Perhaps the most riveting butter I have ever tasted was at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that has redefined fine dining. The basic composition of the dish was simple—new potatoes served with melted butter—but it was animated by a few fourishes. The potatoes carried the slight favor of charred wood, and you ate them with a sharpened twig topped by a bouquet of salad greens you dredged through the butter. This was cultured butter, made with cream that was allowed to ferment and sour slightly so that it had the delicate acidity of fresh yogurt. (Uncultured butter is called sweet butter— almost all of the supermarket butter in the United States is uncultured, as is most of the expensive butter sold in specialty shops. The United States is a sweet country, while France and Scandinavia are more cultured.) Every dish at Noma has a good story. I was told that the butter I all but wanted melted and served in a glass was made by a couple who go by the nom de beurre the Butter Vikings. The Butter Vikings are Zandra Bring and Patrik Johansson. They have been producing butter on Sweden’s west coast for only six years, although Johansson was taught how to make butter by his grandmother, who started selling it in the 1940s. They make “batch churn” butter, turning cream in a small metal drum until the buttermilk separates from the butterfat. The process takes anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes, depending on the cream. Large companies make “continuous churn” butter with powerful machines that agitate the cream, mechanically extract the liquids, and vacuum out the oxygen to give the butter a longer shelf life. Industrial butter can be produced at the rate of 500 pounds a minute. Bring and Johansson’s repertoire includes “virgin butter” (never touched by human hands), “bog butter” (aged in a bog), and “king’s butter,” C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 7 FOR A HOMEMADE BUTTER RECIPE, DOWNLOAD THE VOGUE DIGITAL EDITION
AT EVERY CHURN Le Beurre Bordier, an artisanal French butter served at some of the best restaurants in Paris, tastes like nothing you can buy in the United States.
HATS
OFF I NEW TREATMENTS ARE MAKING FULLER, THICKER, LONGER, STRONGER HAIR A REALITY. BY SANDRA BALLENTINE. PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID SIMS.
n the animal kingdom, a good coat can attract the right mate. Things aren’t so diferent in our world. Let’s face it: We tend to judge each other by our hair. It can be a symbol of good health and of youth, and a defning signature that makes us feel sexy. A lot of things, including genetic destiny, can stand between you and an amazing head of hair. While thinning hair has become socially acceptable (even attractive sometimes) in men, for women it is most often devastating. Stress, illness, pregnancy, thyroid conditions, hormonal issues, anemia, and autoimmune disorders like lupus can all lead to hair loss, both temporary and long-term, as can poor diet and ordinary aging. It’s a follicular minefeld out there. Looking back at my own history, I regret that I didn’t take my hair more seriously. When I started losing it, I did what a lot of otherwise smart, well-informed women in complete denial do: I ignored it, hoping it would go away. And a lot of it did. The tricky part, then as now, was getting it back. I remember having dubious (and expensive) vitamin shots in my scalp in the late nineties, and recoiling in horror when a famous dermatologist suggested Rogaine a few years later. I didn’t want to be seen purchasing a product for bald men at my local Duane Reade, nor did I care to foam up my $90 blow-dry. The sparser things got, the more potentially damaging hair dryers and fatirons I required in order to keep up appearances. When I came across a frightening recent photo of myself at a fashionable London restaurant—the overhead lighting revealing a glaring bare spot near my part—I realized I had to take action, immediately. My first call was to dermatologist (and hair authority) Fredric Brandt, M.D. Minoxidil—the active ingredient in both Rogaine and Pantene’s new Hair Regrowth Treatment for Women—“is still the only FDA-approved topical for women, and it does work,” he said. But I was still leery of a 252
commitment to Rogaine. Minoxidil is a strong chemical, a drug, and once you stop using it, any freshly grown hair— which is mostly baby-fne, with the consistency of a dusting of ground cover—can fall out. I wanted other options. When I heard that New York dermatologist David Colbert, M.D., was injecting platelet-rich plasma (PRP) into the scalp, I made an appointment right away. Originally used on athletes to treat joint infammation and in surgery to facilitate wound healing, PRP has lately made the jump to cosmetic injectable. Unlike dermal fllers such as Restylane, PRP foods a targeted area with growth factor drawn from your own blood, which is said to encourage cells to make more collagen and elastin, naturally plumping the skin. If your hair follicle is the seed that grows a plant, think of PRP as the fertilizer, said Colbert. He has been injecting it into people’s scalps for a little over a year and plans to begin combining it with other treatments like LED laser light—which he hopes will energize the follicles, making them more receptive to the nutrient-rich broth. Thus far, he’s seen “a reasonable amount of hair regrowth” in patients, which he estimates to be about a 10 percent improvement. “It’s a start,” he said. “The future of PRP is what’s really exciting.” After an assistant expertly drew a tube of my blood and refned it via centrifuge to isolate the growth factors, the doctor injected the clear plasma into the thinning area above my forehead. For someone who is used to Botox needles, it barely hurt. Fifteen minutes later, and with my Orlo Salon blow-dry intact, he was fnished. To see results I would have to repeat the $2,500 process once a month for three months. In Sarasota, Florida, Joseph Greco, Ph.D., the groundbreaking hair-restoration doctor who started using PRP on both transplant and nonsurgical patients back in 2007, has something even more potent up his sleeve: PRP combined with cytokine-rich plasma (CRP), a more purifed version developed by the biotech company he cofounded. While PRP alone “has more of a delayed-action release over time,” CRP, stripped of red and white blood cells and platelets, “provides an immediate burst of growth factors. It’s basically liquid gold,” he says of the $1,700 treatment. The founder of the popular Web site Women’s Hair Loss Project, who goes by the initial Y online, fies in from Los Angeles every four to six months for it. “I saw reduced shedding after one appointment, and now, after nine sessions, I fnd I’m keeping more hair, and it’s of much better quality, ” says the pretty 36-year-old. For the frst time in years, there is much to look forward to on the hair-growth horizon. In one closely watched trial, researchers tested the key ingredient in Latisse—that wonder product that causes longer, lusher eyelashes to miraculously sprout—on the scalp. Angela Christiano, Ph.D., a professor of dermatology and genetics at Columbia University, made headlines last year when she spearheaded a study in which dermal papillae (cells that play a critical role in hair formation and growth) were used to grow human hairs on human skin, albeit skin that was grafted onto mice. The technique—in which hairs harvested from a small strip of skin behind the ear are used to grow hair-follicle stem-cell cultures—could have important implications for women with difuse hair loss. “In the future, these could provide a permanent supply of your own stem cells that can be grown at any time to regenerate new hairs,” explains Christiano. While I wait for my next PRP appointment, Colbert has some simple advice: Take care of the hair you have. “Keep blow-drying to a minimum,” C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 8
HEAD CASE Model Manon Leloup in a Lanvin mohair coat and hat. Hair, Paul Hanlon; makeup, Linda Cantello for Giorgio Armani Cosmetics. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Phyllis Posnick.
Unknown Legend Gugu Mbatha-Raw on the role of a lifetime—and the dress of the moment. Photographed by Sebastian Kim.
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he tale of Dido Elizabeth Belle, daughter of Admiral John Lindsay and an enslaved African woman named Maria, is an extraordinary—if little known—chapter in British history. She was raised at Kenwood House in London under the guardianship of her great-uncle, Lord Chief Justice Mansfeld, who was instrumental in the abolition of the slave trade in the U.K. “Dido was such an important fgure in our heritage, but so few people know about her,” says British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who stars in Belle, a new movie based on the life of the eighteenth-century aristo. “I used to carry a dog-eared postcard of her portrait with me, in the hopes that this flm would be made.” At the heart of the movie is the tender story of friendship between Belle and the young abolitionist John Davinier, played by Australian actor Sam Reid (near right), which slowly blossoms into love. “My favorite scene is when Dido steals away from the ball and fnds herself in his embrace,” Mbatha-Raw says. “Although wearing those corsets will bring on a hot fash no matter what!” She prefers the more modern allure of a foral day dress—like this one by Tory Burch—as a complement to her wardrobe of tailored basics from Vince, particularly when it comes to the timeless conundrum of dressing for a romantic lunch date. “The pressure of a first date isn’t the same in London,” says the actress, who was born in Oxfordshire but now spends part of the year in Los Angeles, “because you usually don’t know you’re on one!” Date or no date, a look cut with this kind of casual sophistication is easy to fall for.—chioma nnadi 254
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STEAL OF THE MONTH
BLOOMING BEAUTY Mbatha-Raw wears a Tory Burch dress ($395) and loafers ($285); toryburch.com. On table, Diane von Furstenberg bag, $395; dvf.com. On Reid: H&M blazer ($149) and trousers ($60); hm.com. Rag & Bone shirt, $255; Barneys New York, NYC. Hair, Lesly McMenamin; makeup, Darlene Jacobs. Photographed at the Ace Hotel Downtown L.A. Produced by Heather Burgoyne for Lalaland Artists. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Sara Moonves.
DOWN THE LINES This Givenchy top and skirt are a fitting set and match for the French Open at Roland Garros. Caroline Trentini wears a Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci top ($1,390) and skirt ($1,550); saks.com. Roger Vivier cuff. from far left: Carole Tanenbaum Vintage Collection Lucite and red resin rings. Alexis Bittar white resin ring. Falke socks. Manolo Blahnik flats. Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.
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AN GLE S PR GR E-FALL NIC OOV ’S GR PAR ELY— ES LIN APHIC IN T T, OF BUT T E UP PHOHE M COU HE FU CR TOG IX-AN RSE, N AIG RA D-M IS Mc PHE ATC DEA D B H. N. Y
GALLERY GIRL A Lurex crop over a fine-knit vest? Why not? Demo your newfound eclecticism at the Whitney Art Party at Highline Stages. Dior check-print top ($1,450), baby-blue wool-knit top ($1,950), and dress ($4,500); Dior boutiques. Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci cuff. Kara Ross rock-crystal ring, on index finger. Coach bag. Manolo Blahnik shoes. Details, see In This Issue.
OFF THE GRID Phoebe Philo breathes lightness into the season’s linearity with charming latticework and sumptuous banded fur. Throw it together for the Pratt Institute Fashion Show at NYC’s Center548. Céline mink capelet and dress with pleated skirt ($4,100); Céline, NYC. Tabitha Simmons flats.
COMPARE AND CONTRAST Graphic interplays add a bit of structural-like sharpness appropriate for the debut of the Shangri-La Hotel at London’s Shard skyscraper. Proenza Schouler velvetjacquard top ($1,150) and bucket bag; Proenza Schouler, NYC. Calvin Klein Collection pants, $1,995; Calvin Klein Collection, NYC. Prada scarf. Maison Martin Margiela oval cuff. Details, see In This Issue.
P RO DUC ED BY P RO DN AT A RT + CO MM ERC E
EARNING YOUR STRIPES Soften contours with a coat in alternating bands of color. It’s a bold silhouette well-suited for the premiere of Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie as the villain from Sleeping Beauty. Fendi shearlingand-leather coat; Fendi, NYC. Ralph Lauren Black Label pants, $725; select Ralph Lauren stores. Prada scarves. far right: Kara Ross quartz ring. J.W. Anderson platform brogues.
FRAMING DEVICE J.W. Anderson’s striated wool knit ($1,530; saks.com) accompanies a vermilion topcoat and racing-striped pants in a bold statement perfect for Art Basel Hong Kong, now in its second year. Michael Kors wool coat, $2,695; select Michael Kors stores. DKNY trousers, $335; DKNY stores. J.W. Anderson circle cuff. Proenza Schouler sandals. In this story: hair, Orlando Pita for Orlo Salon; makeup, Aaron de Mey. Set design, Piers Hanmer. Details, see In This Issue.
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MODERN CRAFT STYLEBOP.COM’S FASHION DIRECTOR LEILA YAVARI WEARS A CÉDRIC CHARLIER NEOPRENE JACKET ($1,405), MINISKIRT ($490), AND BLOUSE ($795); THE WEBSTER, MIAMI BEACH. MANSUR GAVRIEL WALLET, $285; MODAOPERANDI.COM.
EDITOR: JESSICA SAILER
Painting theTown
Balenciaga earrings, $365; Balenciaga, NYC.
With free-form brushstrokes and graffiti-sprayed lines, this season’s fashion is more like wearable art.
S EA N T H OM AS. FASH I ON ED I TOR: JESSI CA SA IL ER . HA I R, T I M RO G E RS FO R L I V I NG P ROO F; MAKEUP, J UNKO KIOKA FOR CH ANEL BEAUTÉ. BOND NO. 9 AND CA RV E N : M A RKO M a c P HE RSON . EA R RI N G S: G O RM A N ST U D IO. CA R: COU RT ESY O F VO LVO A RT SESSION. ALL OTH ERS: TIM H OUT. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
Mulberry envelope clutch. $1,200; Mulberry, NYC.
Bond No. 9 HTTP://WWW.BOND09.COM Eau de Parfum, $250; bondno9.com. Opening Ceremony top, $175; Opening Ceremony, NYC.
VOGUE.COM
Opening Ceremony skirt, $425; Opening Ceremony, NYC.
Carven dress, $870; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC.
Performance piece by Blanda for the Volvo Art Session 2013. This year’s version runs from May 15–18 in Zurich.
Vince flats, $325; nordstrom.com.
INDEX Jimmy Choo bag, $745; jimmychoo.com.
Proenza Schouler dress; Proenza Schouler, NYC.
Nicholas Kirkwood sandals, $495; Nicholas Kirkwood, NYC.
Marc Jacobs Beauty nail lacquer in 114 Snap!, $19; Sephora stores.
ART POP “FROM THE ARTE POVERA PRINTS AT JIL SANDER TO CÉLINE’S BRASSAÏINSPIRED GRAFFITI, THE SPRING COLLECTIONS ARE RICH WITH ARTISTIC REFERENCES,” SAYS YAVARI. ZARA TUNIC, $60; ZARA STORES. VINCE SKIRT, $320; VINCE.COM. EXPRESS STRIPED CLUTCH, $35; EXPRESS STORES. PROENZA SCHOULER SANDALS, $975; PROENZASCHOULER.COM.
Fausto Puglisi top ($470), skirt ($890), and belt ($900); clothing at Bergdorf Goodman, NYC; belt at Forty Five Ten, Dallas.
Charles and Ray Eames fiberglass-shell chair by Krink for Modernica, $950; krink.com.
Longchamp flats, $330; Longchamp boutiques. C H EC K O U T M O S T WA N T E D AT VO G U E . C O M FO R MORE INSPIRED ITEMS
S EA N T H OM AS. FAUSTO PUG LI SI , P RO EN Z A SC HOU LE R, M A RC JACOBS NA I L P OL IS H: MA R KO M a c P HE RSON . E A MES : COU RT ESY O F MO D E RNI CA . A LL OTH ERS: T I M HOU T. D ETA I LS, SE E I N T HI S I SSUE .
Repossi cuff; repossi.com.
THE ONE AND ONLY
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having forbidden the association of the family name with such a trade). As a milliner, James fashioned extraordinary, unforgiving hats shaped like stingrays or winged helmets modeled directly on his clients’ heads. He soon graduated to clothing, fitting between Chicago, New York, London, and Paris’s Hotel Lancaster, where clients might discover him wafting around in swimming shorts, brandishing dressmaking shears. In London he created a wardrobe for the aristocratic British aesthete Stephen Tennant and dressed the gratin of fashionable British society. Bloomsbury mavens, fashionplate actresses, and Bright Young Things all focked to his salons, though James was exceedingly particular about just whom he would lavish his skills upon. Oliver Messel’s enchanting sister Anne Armstrong-Jones (later the Countess of Rosse) was James’s beloved client of the period—one indulgent enough to be amused when she arrived for her fittings to find the designer wearing the clothes intended for her. Mindful of his ever-precarious financial situation, Armstrong-Jones once brought a deeppocketed American acquaintance of hers to his salon. After a quick appraisal of the woman, James told her crisply, “I couldn’t possibly make anything for a frump like you—why, you can’t even walk properly.” (Armstrong-Jones also recalled an episode when James, fleeing the credit bailiffs as usual, appeared unannounced at her house accompanied by a feet of taxis stufed with armfuls of his creations—“specialties for special people; all masterpieces”—which he then scattered across the foor of her dining room just before a lunch party.) “Charlie escaped from the chores of life by episodes that were like the acts of trapezists in the circus,” noted his friend the British Surrealist Sir Francis Rose. The designer romped through a life out of Evelyn Waugh, living generally beyond his means in swank hotels and funding his haute couture fantasias with money extracted from doting family, society friends, clients, and occasionally lovers. Having settled in New York in the early 1940s to establish his couture salon there, James and his talent soon blossomed. Clients clamored for his grand statement ball gowns, such as those immortalized in the iconic Cecil Beaton tableau shot for Vogue in 1948 (see page 64). Dorry Adkins, the statuesque beauty on the far right of the image (which she described as “Fashion’s answer to The Last Supper”), recalled that her dress was “so beautifully made it could stand alone, independent of one. The folds of heavy French silk would do a design as you moved; it almost had a mind of its own.”
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But though he was among the most expensive dressmakers of his day—a James ball gown could set a customer back $1,500 in 1950, a giddying sum—his perfectionism meant that his pieces were exorbitantly expensive to produce. James was always destroying fnished garments on the eve of delivery and sending them back to be reworked. (He also spent two years and an alleged $20,000 developing the perfect sleeve.) As Harold Koda notes in the handsome book accompanying the exhibition, “James considered even the most resolved idea to be poised in a penultimate state.” Clients, though, were frequently exasperated by his posturing and his tantrums, his idiosyncratic billing methods (he was known to sell the same dress to more than one person), and his inability ever to deliver a garment on time. Gloria Vanderbilt, who asked James to make her a simple tweed suit, recalls endless fttings in his suite at the Sherry-Netherland hotel. “He did all the fttings himself—nobody ever put hands on the garment except him,” Vanderbilt says. “He was such a perfectionist that he never felt he got it right—it literally took hours. [Later] he would call and say, ‘I just need you one more time,’ and the whole thing would be ripped apart and put back together. It was a simple suit, not an extravaganza. He never fnished it.” Austine Hearst, a client of exceptional beauty with a pocketbook as plump as she was slender, ordered James’s Four Leaf Clover dress—the piece he considered his masterwork, or thesis—for the Eisenhower inaugural gala in 1953. When it did not arrive in time for the inaugural, she decided to wear it several weeks later to a March of Dimes beneft, for which James also improvised a bolero jacket smothered in fresh gardenias. James then lent Hearst’s gown to Gloria Vanderbilt to wear to another beneft. Although it weighed ten pounds, with the skirt’s hem seven feet in diameter, “it was not a bit difcult to wear,” Vanderbilt remembers. “The dress was so well balanced it became part of the wearer. He really was an absolute genius.” He also pushed both his employees— Bill Cunningham, a friend, has noted that James thought nothing of locking them in the studio overnight to complete an order for the morning—and himself harder than anyone. Patron M. E. Hecht recalled that “excoriation would barely cover the language he used” to staf who had failed his exacting standards. John de Menil and his wife, Dominique, asked James to decorate the modernist house in Houston they had commissioned from Philip Johnson. “Charlie was impossible,” noted Dominique. “But all that mattered was that he was a genius.” She cherished her James wardrobe just as she did her
Dalí, Magrittes, and Mirós (a jewel-box exhibition of her James-designed clothing and furniture—“A Thin Wall of Air: Charles James”—will run from May 31 through September 7 at the Menil Collection in Houston as a complement to the Met’s extravaganza). James’s romantic life was as shambolic as his working conditions—he attempted suicide on more than one occasion, apparently as a result of amorous disappointments. (Jean Cocteau, staying in a Paris hotel room opposite James, once discovered him trying to hang himself, and cut him down.) “All my designing represented a vicarious love afair with women whose beauty I took delight in enhancing,” James said toward the end of his life. In 1954, though, he surprised his intimates by marrying Nancy Lee Gregory, the former wife of one of his lovers and an heiress who helped fnance and organize a roster of new business ventures. James insisted that he married for love, and the couple had a son, Charles, and a daughter, Louise, which soon led to their father designing children’s clothes—Princess Grace included some in her daughter Caroline’s layette. But Nancy left him in 1961, and his ambitious schemes soon floundered. In 1964 he moved into Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, where he survived on the generosity of the manager, Stanley Bard; handouts from friends and erstwhile patrons; and the occasional paying student. Surrounded by the detritus of his life’s designs in an atmosphere of Grey Gardens squalor, he would regale those who came to pay homage (including William Ivey Long, who moved to the Chelsea to be near him, and the occasional client, such as Elsa Peretti) with his fashion philosophies. Meanwhile, the brilliant fashion artist Antonio Lopez began both to document his work and to introduce the young Warholian circle to it; soon, James was lending his precious originals for madcap nights on the town. Karl Lagerfeld remembered the potent impact of seeing Pat Cleveland in James’s 1938 down jacket (though he was less impressed with James himself: “He was a tiny little midget with dyed hair—the most unpleasant man I ever met. I think he was his own worst enemy”). In the fall of 1978 James fell ill with bronchial pneumonia. True to form, he kept the ambulance men waiting as he finished primping his face and tenue (James regularly touched up his graying hair with what was supposedly shoe polish). “It may not mean anything to you,” James told them as they waited to take him to the hospital, where he would die later that night, “but I am what is popularly regarded as the greatest couturier in the Western world.” @ VOGUE.COM
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out of your head and into your heart, to moan to and to take the piss out of it all with.” I ask Stone about filming scenes with Garfeld. Is that stuf easy? Harder? “It’s not harder,” she says. “It’s fun. It’s been fun working with him just because of who he is as an actor and person. I think it would be fun no matter what.” She smiles. Talking about Garfeld is a rare moment when Stone shows signs of putting up her guard. As celebrity couples go, they are not terribly public. The wildest paparazzi moment of the two I can fnd is a recent surfng excursion in Hawaii (this is what counts as an Emma Stone headline on TMZ: emma stone wipes out surfing in hawaii). Stone keeps a low profle in general; the past year has been all about work. She considers New York “the closest thing to home,” but at the moment, she is in L.A., living in a hotel (“L.A.-oise,” she says drily). Stone has had a commercial relationship with Revlon since 2011, and she isn’t a stranger to fashion shows. She’s been spotted at Paris and New York Fashion Weeks. She considers her curiosity about the spectacle almost journalistic. “I like to look through the glass,” she says. “As I’ve been more exposed to it, I fnd it interesting. I see what’s beautiful about clothes.” She is close with Alber Elbaz of Lanvin, who made her custom red fowered dress for the 2012 Costume Institute gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and was her date. “I feel about Emma that she’s a close cousin rather than a celebrity I have to dress,” says Elbaz, calling Stone “a great date . . . my mother would have been proud.” “It’s fun to get to borrow a dress for a night and dress up for something,” Stone says. But she’s not attached to it. She doesn’t consider herself a style infuencer; when the idea is raised to her, she finds it funny and waves it of. “No, I’ve never thought about that,” she says. She nods to her yellow shoes. “Though it would be supercool if everyone started wearing yellow leather shoes.” Besides Amazing Spider-Man 2, Stone has wrapped a furry of intriguing projects, all of which she is permitted to discuss only in fragmentary detail: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, which revolves around a play staged by an actor (Michael Keaton) who initially found fame as a superhero (Stone plays Keaton’s daughter); an untitled Cameron Crowe project with Bradley Cooper and Bill Murray, flmed in Hawaii, so closely guarded it is currently referred to as Untitled Cameron Crowe Project; and Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight, which Stone can divulge was “filmed in France and takes place in the twenties.” Stone is eager to shake things up. Jonah
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Hill, who has gone on from Superbad to be nominated for Oscars for his performances in Moneyball and The Wolf of Wall Street, says that he’s talked to her about making a similar kind of career transition. (Hill took Stone to see the Who at the Hollywood Bowl for her eighteenth birthday; the two remain close friends.) Hill says he told Stone, “You don’t have to worry about anything. You’ll do anything and everything.” That includes stage. Stone was ready to make her Broadway debut as Sally in Cabaret—she got the part after auditioning for Sam Mendes in London—but ran into scheduling difficulties with her Spider-Man obligations. She believes she’ll eventually get a chance to play Sally. “Someday,” she pledges. She talks about other theatrical parts, about taking more chances in flm. “The thing I gravitate toward naturally is comedy,” Stone says. “But I want to do diferent things.” Like what? Maybe some “truly bizarre characters,” she says. Maybe she’ll produce. “I would like to see what I can do.” Here are some other things I learn about Emma Stone: She is not known as a partier, especially by L.A. standards, but when she was seventeen, she went out for a bunch of nights over a two-week period with a friend, drank loads of Red Bull, and somehow ended up at Paris Hilton’s house, twice. She does not have great eyesight: Stone wears contact lenses, but I tried on her prescription glasses. They were so intense, I nearly had to lie down afterward. When she was making Untitled Cameron Crowe Project, Bill Murray made a habit of bringing Stone small gifts: an umbrella hat, slippers, coffee, potato chips, a pie. (“He wants to take care of people. I just love him.”) She ofers rides home, which is how I discovered that she drives an environmentally efcient car with large water bottles clinking below the passenger seat. She currently is reading Lolita for the frst time, but don’t read too much into that. She would love to star in the second season of HBO’s True Detective. (“That would be amazing. I would do True Detective with Kristen Wiig in a heartbeat.”) Lately she has been listening to Cat Stevens. And Sufjan Stevens. (“A lot of Stevens,” she says.) “I had a nude selfie come out,” Stone says. “Did you see that one?” Wasn’t her, she says. She says her publicist emailed her: I just want to let you know . . . I want to be able to say that this isn’t you, but. . . . Stone reassured her: not her. A modern rite of passage, it seems. “That stuf rolls right of of me,” she says. Back at the mall, Stone has moved the conversation from Build-a-Bear to the food court and Hot Dog on a Stick. Two HDOS are ordered, as are fries and a pair of frozen lemonade slushies big enough
to house tropical fsh. The recently built bears sit on the table in tall boxes, bound by yellow ribbons. In a few weeks, people in this mall will be on their way to the movies, many of them, presumably, to see The Amazing SpiderMan 2. Stone says she does not obsess over public reaction, about opening weekends, about box ofce. “That is so outside of my control,” she says. Soon there will be an international tour to promote the movie, taking Stone to Australia, China, Japan, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome. She is a human component at the center of a franchise, glamorous if needed but beloved for her talent to be relatable on-screen. “People do not feel she’s on a pedestal,” says Webb, the director. “You do not feel like you’re walking around with a movie star.” Stone takes a sip of her frozen lemonade slushie. “Is there anything I can say more eloquently?” she asks. “Are there any opinions I can state that are cool and groundbreaking?” She laughs. Emma Stone may in fact be a movie star, but right now she’s just another girl at the mall. With a bear wearing sneakers. @
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which Johansson told me is “the only butter our king likes.” I asked for details. “Last summer the Swedish king was visiting the nearby city of Gothenburg,” Johansson told me. When he and Bring learned that Carl XVI Gustaf didn’t particularly like butter, they decided to create a special one for a dinner in the king’s honor. They took a cultured butter and salted it “until it sings in your mouth,” then they gently heated sweet butter until it just melted. “With the tip of a knife we carefully add drops of melted butter to the cold surface of the salted sour cream, wait until it solidifies, and carefully fold it down into the cream,” Johansson told me. “Then we repeat this 30 to 40 times until the cream is full of pearls.” The king, according to Johansson, helped himself to fve servings. Johansson rarely produces the king’s butter—it takes too much time—but he sent me a link to a photograph of it on his blog, and suggested that I try to make it myself. It turns out it’s not hard to make butter. You just agitate cream until the buttermilk and the butterfat separate. That’s it. You can go into the kitchen right now, pour heavy cream into a Mason jar, screw on the lid, and shake it as if you’re making a cocktail on the most languorous afternoon of the year, and after 20 minutes, or maybe 40, you will have fresh butter. If you don’t want to risk tennis elbow, you can use a KitchenAid stand mixer set on the lowest or next-lowest setting, checking in every ten C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 8
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minutes until you hear the paddle splashing through the buttermilk. And yet it’s a difcult craft to master. Daniel Patterson of Coi, the San Francisco restaurant with two Michelin stars, first shared a simple recipe for butter in 2007; last year, he published a lengthy, lyrical revision in Coi: Stories and Recipes. “The frst time I made it, I thought, Oh, my God, all I have to do is overwhip cream,” Patterson told me. “Now I see it’s one of those simple things that’s a lifelong craft. Every year we get it a little better.” Some rules: One, temperature affects texture—you need to temper your cream, then let it rest and cool, and warm it slightly before churning. Two, the slower the churn, the better the mouthfeel. Three, culturing cream is a dark art—some inoculate cream with yogurt (others consider that blasphemy); some simply pour cream into a container, cover, and let it sit out overnight (for a quick culture), or in the refrigerator for three days or longer (for a slow culture), until the cream thickens and starts to foam. The Butter Vikings use a secret cocktail of dairy cultures and went silent when I asked them to tell me more. The most important thing is to use good ingredients. “It has a lot to do with the raw materials—what’s in there?” asked Elaine Khosrova, the founding editor of Culture, a magazine about cheese. Khosrova is writing a book on butter to be published next year. “The beauty of dairy products is that you can’t control them 100 percent. There is some serendipity, and a lot of it is how you treat the animals.” “It comes down to the quality of the cream,” agrees Patterson. Professionals have access to cream you can’t fnd in the retail market. The problem, according to Patterson, is “you’re funneled to common sources.” I did the best I could with what I could find at gourmet stores and farmer’s
markets. I found that health-food stores carry the best selection of dairy, and settled on a cream from Battenkill Valley Creamery in upstate New York. After weeks of tinkering, I had a refrigerator full of butter. I needed to clear space, so I invited some friends to meet me at Third Rail, an excellent cofee shop in lower Manhattan with a view of St. Mark’s Church. I found some truly delicious American cultured butters—from Evans’ Farmhouse Creamery in New York and McClelland’s Dairy in California— and brought them in as ringers, but most of the butters on the table were mine. You’d be surprised how many people will show up on an unseasonably cold morning for a butter party. As a lark, I brought a Mason jar flled almost to the top with cream and told everybody to take turns shaking it. The jar made its way around the room, conversation-hopping until it found its way into my hands, just as the buttermilk and butterfat started to separate. I shook it the rest of the way, dumped the contents into a cheesecloth-lined strainer, and sprinkled it with sea salt. It was a runny mess, and somehow mesmerizing. Even though everybody there was primed on the basics of butter-making, when I put the butter on the table, the room of grown adults approached it with innocent wonder. Was it the fnest butter, with the most delicate taste and prettiest texture? No, but it was the most popular. The puppy in the dog park always draws a crowd. @
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he said firmly. “Your hair is a fiber. Would you throw your eight-ply cashmere sweater in the dryer?” (Probably, knowing me.) So, as part of my new proactive approach, I’ve been sampling the
latest high-tech shampoos, conditioners, and leave-in serums, which Colbert says should act synergistically with the PRP, amplifying its effects. Renokin (a line from Korea recommended by Brandt) and Renessence (the new range from Gregory Brown, M.D., of RéVive–skin care fame) both contain growth-factor peptides, which help stimulate dormant follicles. “Up until now, it’s been either minoxidil or snake oil,” says Brown. “This isn’t going to help a person who is bald, but we’ve seen a 10 percent increase in hair density after three to four months using the products.” Revita shampoo, from DS Laboratories—bolstered by thirteen active ingredients—promises thicker, more fabulous hair in as little as a month. Mine looked more luxurious after just three applications. I’ve even been trying the iGrow, a space-age-y, helmetlike device that uses LLLT—low-level laser therapy. Pending FDA approval for use by women (it’s already approved for men), it has been shown—when worn for 25 minutes every other day for four to six months—to promote hair growth by stimulating unhealthy cells within the follicle into an active growth stage. Chia Chi Kao, M.D., a Santa Monica plastic surgeon, ordered six of the $695 devices for his office. When I opened the door wearing mine on a recent afternoon, the UPS guy couldn’t keep a straight face. And that’s just it: When you have a hair issue, you’ll do almost anything to solve it. You throw everything you possibly can at it and hope something sticks. It’s too early to tell if the zany helmet, the PRP, or the supercharged shampoos lining my shower shelves are making a quantifable diference, but for the frst time in years, my hair feels more luxurious, and I could swear it’s thicker on top. The people who know my hair best—my stylist and my colorist— concur. What’s better than that? @
IN THIS ISSUE Table of contents 38: Skirt, $245; shopbop.com. Blouse, $198; equipmentfr.com. Sandals, price upon request; Marc Jacobs stores. 48: On Pivovarova: Tweed one-shoulder top with maroon-colored sleeve, price upon request; by special order at Barneys New York, NYC. Shirt, $165; select Ralph Lauren stores. Skirt, $995; burberry.com. Marni necklace, $500; Marni boutiques. Brooks Brothers belt, $98; brooksbrothers .com. Heels, $1,050; Barneys New York, NYC. Additional production support, Jorge Bernos. Cover look 52: Dress ($3,200) and hat ($695); select Gucci boutiques. Manicure, April Foreman. Vogue.com 56: Guipure-flower tweed top and corseted skirt with sequins, priced upon request; 011-331-44-50-7000 for
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information. Bag, $1,595; kirnazabete.com. Knit-andcalfskin boots, $1,095; select Chanel boutiques. Editor’s letter 70: Jacket, $860; sandro-paris.com. Shirt, $80; guess.com. Serena jeans, $178; True Religion stores. Manicure, April Foreman. Contributors 90: On Blake: Suit, $3,500; Dior Homme boutiques. Balenciaga shirt, $355; Balenciaga, NYC. Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane tie, $245; Saint Laurent, NYC. Cos socks, $7; cosstores.com. Up front 92: Coat, $1,995; By George, Austin, TX. Lives 98: Dress, price upon request; Fendi, NYC, for similar styles. On her right hand: Cartier 18K white gold–and–black lacquer Paris Nouvelle Vague ring with diamonds, price upon request; select Cartier boutiques. Christian Louboutin
pumps, $625; Christian Louboutin, Beverly Hills. Flash 112: Georgette dress, $3,490; Saint Laurent, NYC. Watch, $6,400; select Louis Vuitton boutiques. Sequined bag, $1,450; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. 116: Right: Albertus Swanepoel hat. Manicure, Emi Kudo. 126: Necklace with diamonds, sapphires, amethysts, tanzanite, and opal, $13,750; net-a-porter.com. Beetle brooch, $395; Vera Wang, NYC. View 141: Silk-lace dress, $7,790. Dolce & Gabbana headband with silk almond blossoms ($1,465) and earrings with ceramic fowers ($1,830); select Dolce & Gabbana boutiques. Manicure, Philippe Ovak. 144: On Modrone: Madina Visconti di Modrone feather headband (price upon request) and feather cufs ($539 each); headband at
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A WO R D A BO UT DISCO UNT E RS W HI LE VO GU E TH OROUG HLY RES EA RC HES TH E COMPANIES MENTIONED IN ITS PAGES, WE CANNOT GUARANTEE TH E AUTH ENTICITY OF MERCH A N D IS E SO LD BY D ISCOU N T E RS. AS I S A LWAYS T HE CAS E I N PURCHASI N G A N I T E M FRO M A NYW H E RE OTH ER TH A N TH E AUTH OR IZ ED STOR E, TH E BUYER TAKES A R ISK AND SH OULD USE CAUTION WH EN D OING SO.
yoox.com and cuffs at osannavisconti.it for information. Prop stylist, Sissi Valerian. Manicure, Lisa Jachno. 146: Ring with cultured pearls, $790; aimee-aimer.com. Ring with diamonds, $2,390; Jeffrey, NYC. Sapphire ring with diamonds, $4,300; Maison Martin Margiela, NYC. Pavé diamond ring, $3,225; barneys.com. Ring with diamonds, $3,160; bergdorfgoodman.com. Victorian enamel–and– diamond buckle ring, $2,250; georgianjewelry.com. 150: Dress, $5,350. Shoes, $738; biondacastana.com. 154: Giampiero Bodino necklace and cuff, priced upon request; giampierobodino.com. Style ethics 160: Clara sunglasses; at warbyparker.com beginning June 10. Organic cotton sweater, $350; Baby & Company, Seattle. Carrie Hofman Jewelry 18K-gold wide-band ring, $3,650; carriehoffmanjewelry.com. Monique Péan ring with pavé diamonds, $8,525; Barneys New York, NYC. Maiyet bangle, $550; maiyet.com. Editor’s eye 162: Oyster Perpetual Milgauss watch, $7,650; rolex.com for information. Beauty 164: On Bonato: Silk wrap dress, $2,995; Donna Karan New York boutiques. On Malleville: Maison Martin Margiela sweater and Hermès trousers. 166: On Bonato: Dress, $2,295; Donna Karan New York boutiques. On Malleville: The Elder Statesman sweater. PATA 189: Top ($1,030) and skirt ($1,200); top at Maxfeld, L.A., and skirt at Riccardi, Boston. Art: © Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Red Butterfly III Yellow Mark Grotjahn P-08 flled in M 3 753), 2008. Oil on linen, 73" x 54". Untitled (Yellow Butterfy II 782), 2008. Oil on linen, 48" x 38". Untitled (Blue Butterfy Light to Dark VI 656), 2006. Oil on linen, 86" x 47", Douglas M. Parker Studio. Untitled (White Butterfly Blue MG), 2001. Oil on linen, 72" x 26". Courtesy of Mark Grotjahn; Ovitz Family Collection, Los Angeles. 192: Jacket, $3,500; Saint Laurent, NYC. Jeans, $215; BLK DNM, NYC. Nike sneakers, $85; nike.com. 194: On Rothman: Bomber jacket ($495) and shirt ($225); apc.fr. On Reid: Top and skirt, $1,040 each; jilsander .com. Alexander Wang heels, $495; alexanderwang .com. On Major: Shirt, $180; Surface to Air, NYC.
DAY TRIPPING 198: Suit, $3,500; Dior Homme stores. Balenciaga shirt, $355; Balenciaga, NYC. Tie, $245; Saint Laurent, NYC. Cos socks, $7; cosstores.com for information. Shoes, $325; Trash and Vaudeville, NYC. 199: Dress, $6,800. Beret, $24; americanapparel .com. Belt, $950; oscardelarenta.com. Sandals, $825; modaoperandi.com. Bucket bag, $1,290; Saint Laurent, NYC. Sunglasses, $350; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. 200: Marni necklace, $750; select Neiman Marcus stores. Céline sunglasses, $350; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. 201: Dress belt, $98; brooksbrothers.com. On Blake: Raincoat, $515; apc.fr. Shirt, $425; barneys .com. 203: Necklace, $750; select Neiman Marcus stores. 204: Sunglasses, $260; sunglasshut.com. 205: Perez Sanz hand-carved resin-and-silver necklace, $4,000; Perez Sanz, NYC. Sandals, $750; reedkrakof .com. Marni earrings, worn as shoe clips, $330; Marni boutiques. On Blake: Balenciaga tie, $195; Balenciaga, NYC. Falke socks, $36; the Sock Hop, NYC. 207: Dress, $9,130. Necklace, $2,251; Perez Sanz, NYC.
208: Marni earrings, worn as shoe clips, $330; Marni boutiques. 209: Jacket, $12,380. Hand-carved resin, mother-of-pearl, and silver necklace, $4,048; Perez Sanz, NYC. On Blake: Shirt, $375; select Dolce & Gabbana stores. 211: Dress, $17,000. Necklace, $670; select Neiman Marcus stores. Additional production support, Jorge Bernos.
THE ONE AND ONLY 212: Dress ($8,490) and brooch ($495); oscardelarenta .com. Gloves from the Carolina Amato archive, by special order at
[email protected]. 214–215: From far left: On Rudnicka: Fratelli Orsini gloves, $238; leatherglovesonline.com. On Young: Carolina Amato satin gloves, $70; carolinaamato.com. On SeayReynolds: Gaspar Gloves kid-leather gloves, $380; gaspargloves.com. On Luss: Agnelle gloves, $110; agnelle.com for information. On Cornish: Sermoneta kid-leather gloves, $280; Sermoneta, NYC. 217: Custom-made dress; Alexander McQueen, NYC, for information. Necklace, price upon request; S.J. Phillips Ltd., London. Gloves from the Carolina Amato archive, by special order at
[email protected].
THE DARLING 218: Dress, $15,950; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. Necklace and bracelet with diamonds, priced upon request; select Dior boutiques. 219: Jacket, $3,760; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. Wrap skirt, $575; sunony .com. Hat, $175; similar styles at Rag & Bone stores. 18K gold–and–onyx ring, $1,750; Barneys New York, Beverly Hills. 220–221: Dress, price upon request; Dior boutiques. 18K–white gold Thenaria necklace with aquamarines, diamonds, and pink spinels. Minaudière with amethyst, crystal, and seed pearls, $4,995; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. Heels, price upon request; 011-39-02-778-88-929. 223: Shirt, $245; Saks Fifth Avenue, NYC. Pants, $685; Isabel Marant, L.A. and NYC. Hat, $1,275; select Chanel boutiques. 224: Jacket, $8,350; select Chanel boutiques. Striped top, $78; maxstudio.com. Jeans, $176; Rag & Bone stores. Hat, $1,275; select Chanel boutiques. Ankle boots, $1,195; net-a-porter.com. 225: Dress, $6,950; Valentino, NYC. Bulgari 18K-gold earrings with diamonds, sapphires, and amethysts, $27,200. Bulgari’s High Jewelry Collection necklace with tourmalines, amethysts, emeralds, turquoises, and diamonds, price upon request. Both at Bulgari boutiques. In this story: Manicure, April Foreman.
LOVE AND WAR 226–227: On Kitsch: Jacket ($1,495) and pants ($630); Maison Martin Margiela boutiques. Jil Sander shirt, $330; Jil Sander boutiques. John Varvatos tie, $135; John Varvatos, Boston and NYC. Bottega Veneta shoes, $970; Bottega Veneta boutiques. On Parsons: Sweater, $1,015; Malo, Beverly Hills. Boglioli shirt, $295; boglioli.it for information. Jeans, $830; select Tom Ford boutiques. Billy Reid shoes, $395; billyreid.com. On Ruffalo: Hermès T-shirt ($1,225) and shoes ($1,325); Hermès boutiques. On Murphy: Blazer ($1,950) and pants ($650); Barneys New York, Beverly Hills and NYC. Dior Homme
shirt ($540) and shoes ($710); Dior Homme boutiques. Worth & Worth by Orlando Palacios hat, $165; Worth & Worth, NYC. On Bomer: Shirt ($480) and pants ($880); Hermès boutiques. John Lobb oxfords, $1,695; John Lobb, NYC.
BRAND-NEW DAY 230–231: Dress, $98; shopbop.com. Linen jacket, $248; Joie, NYC. Cowhide belt, $150; Jutta Neumann New York, NYC. Bracelets, from top: Dezso by Sara Beltrán 18K gold–and–leather Barbatia shell bracelet ($562) and Anadara shell bracelet ($242); twistonline .com. Center: Jill Platner sterling silver–and–leather bracelet, $640; Jill Platner, NYC. Sandals, price upon request; Marc Jacobs stores. 236–237: Blouse ($190) and tunic worn as a top ($95); shopbop.com. Cotton pants, $330; nililotan.com. Isabel Marant necklace, $220; Isabel Marant, L.A. and NYC. Sartore boots. 242–243: Dress, $245; shopbop.com. Bracelets, from top: Isabel Marant necklace (worn as a bracelet), $220; Isabel Marant, L.A. and NYC. Jill Platner sterling silver–and–leather bracelet, $640; Jill Platner, NYC. Dezso by Sara Beltrán 18K gold–and–leather Andara carved bracelet ($255) and Barbatia shell bracelet ($562); twistonline.com. Leather wrap belt, $595; Donna Karan New York stores.
HATS OFF 253: Mohair coat ($2,995), wool-and-grosgrain hat ($595); Lanvin, NYC. Manicure, Trish Lomax.
STEAL OF THE MONTH 254–255: Manicure, Karen Gutierrez.
WHAT TO WEAR WHERE 256: Cuff, $1,675; Roger Vivier, NYC. Lucite ring ($800) and red resin ring ($275); caroletanenbaum .com for information. White resin ring, $195; alexisbittar.com. Socks, $12; falke.com. Flats, $745; by special order at Manolo Blahnik, NYC. 257: Velvet cuf, $635; Barneys New York, NYC. 18K white gold–and–crystal ring with diamonds, $6,200; Kara Ross, NYC. Bag, $398; coach.com. Shoes, $735; neimanmarcus.com. 258: Capelet, $21,200. Flats, $645; Saks Fifth Avenue, NYC. 259: Bucket bag, $1,425. Scarf, $285; select Prada boutiques. Cuff, $795; Maison Martin Margiela boutiques. 260: Coat, price upon request; Fendi, NYC, for similar styles. Scarves, $285 each; select Prada boutiques. On index fnger: smoky-quartz ring, $2,400; Kara Ross, NYC. Brogues, $975; saks.com. 261: Cuf, $650; saks.com. Sandals, price upon request; Proenza Schouler, NYC, for similar styles. In this story: Manicure, Megumi Yamamoto. Index 263: Earrings, similar styles at Balenciaga, NYC. Volvo Art Car by Blanda; volvoartsession.com for information. 264: Printed dress, $2,150. Pink-gold cuf, price upon request. Chair, krink.com for similar styles. Also at modernica.net. Last look 270: Necklace, 011-39-02-778-88-929 for information. ALL PRICES APPROXIMATE.
VOGUE IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2014 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VOLUME 204, NO. 5. VOGUE (ISSN 0042-8000) is published monthly by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: The Condé Nast Building, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036. S. I. Newhouse, Jr., Chairman; Charles H. Townsend, Chief Executive Ofcer; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President; John W. Bellando, Chief Operating Ofcer & Chief Financial Ofcer; Jill Bright, Chief Administrative Ofcer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing ofces. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001. Canada Post: Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to P.O. Box 874, Station Main, Markham, ON L3P 8L4. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see DMM 707.4.12.5); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address corrections to VOGUE, P.O. Box 37720, Boone, IA 500370720. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK-ISSUE INQUIRIES: Please write to VOGUE, P.O. Box 37720, Boone, IA 50037-0720, call 800-234-2347, or e-mail
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LAST LOOK
EDITOR: VIRGINIA SMITH
L
ike Cagnacci’s lilies or Renoir’s gladiolus, Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda’s gemstone flowers blend the beauty of the organic with the elegance of the creative mind. “It’s something unique, one of a thousand shades,” says Stefano Gabbana of this ebullient necklace, which boasts a dazzling thicket of tourmalines, sapphires, beryls, and more, accompanied by a sizable South Sea pearl. With diamonds forming its ostensible vine and enameled sprigs lending it a handmade resonance, the piece gives thrilling new meaning to the term garden variety. @
PHOTOGRAPHED BY GRANT CORNETT
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V O G U E M AY 2 0 14
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S I TT I N G S ED I TO R: J ORD E N B IC KH A M. P RO P ST YLI ST, W HI T N EY H E LLESE N. D ETA I LS, SE E I N TH IS ISSUE.
Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda
