Vogue USA - October 2023

OCT
THE SHOCK
AND CHIC
OF FALL
FASHION
LAID BARE
LESS-IS-MORE
SKINCARE
KATE WINSLET
ON FEARLESSNESS, MOTHERHOOD,
MARRIAGE, AND THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME
FENDI BOUTIQUES 888 291 0163 FEN D I .CO M
BANANAREPUBLIC.COM
DAV I DY U R M A N .C O M
October 2023
MAXIMUM EFFECT
P RO DUC ED BY B EN M I LLE R BI B ESCO, E X ECU T I V E P RODUC E R: ZO E TOM LI N SO N . D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

RAQUEL ZIMMERMANN KEEPS IT CLEAN IN A LOEWE DRESS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARK BORTHWICK.
42 83 102 132 146 154

Editor’s Letter Fine Lines Flights of Fiction The Hot Seat Sensitivity Facing the World
Lynn Yaeger on Fall books that Karine Jean- Training The eight finalists
56 the louche range from past Pierre’s historic Gentle skin care is of our first global
Contributors glamour of Drake to present turn as White the regime du jour. open-casting
FASH I ON ED I TO R: A L EX HA RR I NGTO N . HA I R , JI M MY PAUL; MA K EU P, D I CK PAG E.

Carr’s artwork House press Lauren Mechling initiative
62 108 secretary. By investigates
Up Front 86 The Art of Mattie Kahn 160
Martha McPhee’s The Italian Job Being Lee Miller 148 The Get
coming-of-age in Ginori issues a Lee Miller was a 136 Happy Feet Wardrobe ideas
1970s New Jersey line of home photographer, war Good Press The season’s for spooky season
furnishings and correspondent, Gutenberg! The most covetable
70 fabrics fashion model, Musical! might accessories? 168
Eternal art world muse, just be the most Glorious boots Last Look
Moments 90 and an adventurer delightful thing
A new exhibit plots Lost and par excellence. to hit Broadway
Cover Look Frame of Reference
out the Bloomsbury Found For Kate Winslet, in years. By
Kate Winslet wears a Prada dress and shoes. Van
group’s influence Chloe Schama she’s the role Marley Marius
Cleef & Arpels bracelet. To get this look, try: True Match
on fashion searches high of a lifetime. By Super-Blendable Foundation, Infallible Up to 24H Fresh
and low for a Wendell 138 Wear Soft Matte Bronzer in Fair, True Match Super-
72 beloved Chanel Steavenson Alaïa Anew Blendable Blush in Tender Rose, Colour Riche La
In Her Shoes lipstick shade Following Palette Nude, Telescopic Lift Mascara in Black, Infallible
Chloë Sevigny tries 120 Azzedine Alaïa Voluminous 24-Hour Wear Brow Mascara in Light
out the surprising 98 Basic Instincts seemed all but Brunette, Infallible Matte Resistance Liquid Lipstick in
collaboration Balearic Boom Elegantly unfussy impossible. Then Le Rouge Paris. All by L’Oréal Paris. Hair, Ivana Primorac;
between Miu Miu Mallorca levels shapes come with Pieter Mulier makeup, Lisa Eldridge. Details, see In This Issue.
and Church’s. up its hotel a playful sense of came along. By Photographer: Annie Leibovitz.
By Liam Hess offerings possibility this fall Nathan Heller Fashion Editor: Tabitha Simmons.
28 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

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KATE, LEE, ANNIE
LEFT: KATE WINSLET WEARS EMILIA WICKSTEAD.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ.
ABOVE: LEE MILLER, C. 1930. BELOW: LEIBOVITZ
AND WINSLET ON SET AT FARLEYS IN SUSSEX.
Three Women
and had collaborated with Miller’s son and biographer,
Antony Penrose, to do so properly. Vogue wanted to help
her too. This was a passion project for Winslet, clearly
personal, a chance to celebrate a woman who seemed to
T RUST / A RT I STS RI G HTS SOC I E TY ( A RS) , NY / A DAG P, PA RI S 2023, IM AG E : T E LI MAG E, PAR IS. BOTTOM: ANTONY PENROSE. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
try everything and fear nothing. A woman who bore not
THE ASSIGNMENT CLEARLY STRUCK a chord. For a little similarity to Winslet herself.
TO P LE FT: FAS HI O N E D ITO R: TA BI T HA SI MMO N S. P RO DUC ED BY A L ST U DI O. SE T D ESI GN: MARY H OWAR D STUD IO. TOP R IGH T: © MAN RAY 20 15
years Annie Leibovitz and I have exchanged ideas for Vogue, Winslet, as captured in Annie’s dramatic and beautiful
and these are some of my favorite conversations. She photographs, and in the accompanying profile by
always has such a clear vision of how to shoot a subject, or Wendell Steavenson (herself a war reporter who idolizes
there’s a fantasy fashion portfolio already forming in her Miller), is as funny and driven as you’d expect. She strikes
mind. And the idea I raised, of Kate Winslet on our cover you as someone who cannot be deterred or denied, who
as the legendary midcentury photographer Lee Miller, will do things her own way, set the terms of her career, and
who Winslet was finally portraying in a film she’d been apologize to no one for it. “She may share some of Lee’s
working on for years, clearly electrified Annie. As it had me. grit, it seems to me,” Steavenson writes of Winslet, “a certain
I’d been in touch with Winslet about Lee for a long bloody-mindedness and persistence.” Lee, filmed in
time. Lee Miller famously became a war correspondent Hungary and Croatia, with at times uncertain financing—
for Vogue during WWII, and so her history—one of a beautiful film, and a moving one—owes its existence
adventure, restless creativity, and courage—was intertwined to Winslet. “I truly drove it up a mountain,” she said.
with ours. Winslet wanted to tell Miller’s story in a film, A coproducer on Lee, which will play the film festival
circuit this fall, describes Winslet as indefatigable, a
perfect characterization and a word I would also apply to
Annie. Watching Annie plan for her shoot, the intensity
she brought to bear, the way she went about re-creating
famous moments from Miller’s life—the time Miller made
Hitler’s bathtub her own, for instance—was profound.
Here was a project Annie was absolutely determined to
do justice to. One in which, perhaps, she saw something
of herself. Annie’s brilliance and iconoclasm have given
her a career as history-making and inspiring as Miller’s.
In our cover I see a kind of prism, three formidable
women—Kate Winslet, Annie Leibovitz, Lee Miller—
each reflected in the other, each as talented and daring
and fearless as I can imagine.

swarovski.com
Contributors
TO P LE FT: P H OTO G RA P HE D BY M I C HA EL P HI LOUZE . TO P RI G HT: P HOTO G RA P HE D BY ALEX WEBB OF MAGNUM PH OTOS. FASH ION ED ITOR : MAX ORTEGA. PRODUCED BY BOOM PRODUCT IO N S.
Holding the Line
Late last year, contributing fashion
editor Max Ortega started to notice
something funny on Instagram.
“On Tuesdays, I’d wake up to groups
S ET D ES IG N : MI LA TAYLO R-YOU N G. BOTTO M: P HOTO GRA P H E D BY N O RMA N JE A N ROY. SITTINGS ED ITOR : SOLANGE FRANKLIN. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
of friends in LA posting videos of
themselves line-dancing at a club,”
he says. They’d been turned on
The Real Deal to Stud Country, a weekly queer
For “Good Press” (page 136), a preview of the Broadway-bound Gutenberg! country-dancing party in Los
The Musical!, menswear editor Michael Philouze and photographer Angeles and San Francisco. That
Stefan Ruiz found the perfect place to capture stars Andrew Rannells visual, coupled with the glitzy boots
and Josh Gad. Their show—opening this month at the James Earl that went stomping down the fall
Jones Theatre—is about two friends, Bud and Doug, who have written runways, resulted in “Happy Feet”
a musical about Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the movable-type (page 148), a portfolio styled by
printing press, “without knowing much about him,” Philouze explains. Ortega and photographed by Alex
So, he thought, why not find the actors an actual press? Cut to the Webb. (Above, model Amber
South Street Seaport Museum, where printing paraphernalia from the Valletta makes her move with singer
19th and early 20th centuries is still in operation—and where Rannells Lizzie No and Phillip Spaulding,
and Gad had no trouble making a joyful scene. both Stud Country fans.)
A Sense of Occasion
“My hope in styling a very visible public servant is to
shift the lens a bit, with dignity and depth.” So says
Solange Franklin, the sittings editor for “The Hot Seat”
(page 132), Mattie Kahn’s profile of White House
press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre—the first Black person
and first openly gay person to hold that position. In July,
Franklin traveled with photographer Norman Jean Roy
to the White House, where, after an all-staff meeting,
they captured Jean-Pierre in a Gabriela Hearst suit, a
striped sheath from Victor Glemaud (who shares the
press secretary’s Haitian heritage), and a claret-colored
maxidress from Tove (pictured at left). “Steps from
the Oval, Karine rushed to lock her office door for fear
of someone busting in—even on a Saturday,” Franklin
recalls. “Norman and I then shot her in studious repose
between two handwritten notes: one from her nine-
year-old daughter, the other from President Obama.”

YOU ARRIVED A BUD
ARRIVAL
©2023 The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C.

YOU DEPARTED A BLOOM
DEPARTURE
Up Front
Of the Farm
In the 1970s, Martha McPhee lived on a rambling property with
siblings, half-siblings, and her frequently naked parents.
The farm was named after a utopia—but for a sensitive young
girl coming of age, life was far from it.
mega Farm sits on top of a hill, the highest northeast. Even so, the only thing that arrives from that
O
point in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, wider, crowded world is the wind falling into the trees.
with sweeping views over fields and farms, My stepfather, Dan Sullivan, bought the place in 1970,
the Sourland Mountains unfurling in the from a woman who had recently lost her husband. She
distance to meet a big and open sky. When told Dan she couldn’t care for the place the way it needed
you sit on the deck the sun rises on your to be cared for without her husband. She told Dan the
right, just beyond a barn and another field and chicken run, place needed to be loved.
a rooster crowing. The sun sets in spectacular fashion I was one of nine children who lived there, plus the baby
across the valley. The midday heat, which comes on hard my stepfather and mother had together—and as our
and thick in July, is cut in half by a canopy of enormous blended family settled in, lofts rose through the ceilings, a
oaks and ash. So complete is the canopy that a satellite wing extended from one end of the house, transforming
image on Google shows only trees—no house. There are a garage into bedrooms. A dining room got pushed out
neighbors. There is mail and package delivery, the mailbox from the kitchen, the walls replaced by plate-glass windows
P HOTOG RA P H BY P RYD E B ROW N .
at the bottom of a long gravel driveway, but somehow the and sliding glass doors so that sitting down for a meal
idea of affixing an “address” to this place seems particularly felt like you were hanging above the yard in the trees.
misplaced. The house, near the village of Ringoes—just At the far end of the new wing, Dan added an indoor
70 miles from New York City, 50 miles from Philadelphia, swimming pool that he kept heated to 105 degrees >66
10 miles from Princeton, five miles from Lambertville
PIED PIPER
in the too easily maligned, benighted state of New Jersey— THE AUTHOR (PULLING THE WAGON) WITH FRIENDS AND
is located in the most densely populated part of the SIBLINGS ON OMEGA FARM, MEMORIAL DAY, 1974.

JOHNHARDY.COM
Up Front Family Ties
with a furnace all its own. Sliding Japanese doors with tempered by the common straw of everyday life—
their smoked panes sealed in a steam so thick you couldn’t suggested the old joke about utopias: that the only thing
see your hand. Dan practiced as a Gestalt therapist, wrong with them was that they included other people.
though he wasn’t legally licensed, and often, naked, he’d
see his patients, also naked, in the pool. efore we moved to the farm, my mother,
B
The place was stuffed with stuff. Dan’s first wife, Sally, sisters, and I lived just down the road on the
was a newspaper heiress. Her father had owned The Times outskirts of Princeton in a big white colonial
of Trenton and oil interests in Texas. She inherited in the woods on Drakes Corner Road. Long
18th-century cupboards and cabinets, side tables, Louis after we left Drakes Corner Road for the
Comfort Tiffany objets, Vuitton steamer trunks, a pair farm, I would still consider it my real house.
of swords that dated to the French Revolution, sterling In it were my bedroom and my dolls and my things and
silver, cranberry crystal, Rosenthal china, Bohemian my family, all ordered and tidy, and built by my mother
glass. The house was a kaleidoscopic mix of African and and father early in their marriage. My parents split up in
Haitian art, and traditional furniture, dinnerware, and the spring of 1969, and, as I remember it, my mother went
specialized silver dining implements and doodads—grape to her bed and stayed there for what seemed a long time.
shears, a potato fork, a cake breaker, a butter pick—that At the suggestion of a friend, she started seeing
had no practical contemporary exigence. Plants and books Dan, who ran his Gestalt therapy practice in Princeton.
were everywhere. A swinging couch. Persian rugs. An He lived there, too, with Sally and their children, and
orange laminate kitchen straight out of an electric he had a reputation in town as a feminist, a supporter of
Kool-Aid acid test. In photographs of the time, usually women, even organized sit-ins in pubs that excluded
for holidays and other occasions, women. Although he was unlicensed,
Dan could be seen sporting an ascot, My stepfather was he advertised the therapy practice
jaunty suspenders. On his finger sat and worked with groups on realizing
an enormous turquoise ring. He convinced he was helping sexual equality. His thesis was
was a would-be philosopher and a women realize their full essentially sound: The dehumanizing
dandy trapped in the body of a role we ascribe to women was good
Texas showman who loved opera potential. If he sometimes for neither sex. Only if men and
and enjoyed wrong-footing slept with those same women could be equal could true
dinner guests and disarming the
locals with a glad hand and a wink. women—well, it was the romantic love be achieved. But he
was also something of a con man, a
If you believed this Texas ’70s, after all serial philanderer. He was, as people
storyteller, who drove into our lives sometimes like to say, a complicated
in a turquoise Cadillac belonging to his father-in-law, figure, a man who was convinced he was helping women
the whole place was history. According to Dan, the realize their full potential. If he sometimes slept with those
house sat on the site of a sacred Lenape burial ground. same women—well, it was the ’70s, after all.
He told us that if we looked hard enough, we could find As it happened, Dan’s Princeton clinic was located in
Lenape coins and arrowheads. He told us that George a dilapidated farmhouse just a short distance through
Washington had camped at the foot of our driveway near the woods from our house. Mom got herself out of her
the Alexauken Creek on his way to defeat the British bed and made her way to one of his sessions, and soon
troops at what is now known as Washington Crossing. she fell in love.
He told us a lot of things when we were kids. John
Ringo, founder of our town, had buried a bunch of gold THE NINE OF US—the Sullivans and the McPhees—
up here. In the evenings sometimes, Dan would have were divided into the “big kids” and the “little kids.” I was
all us kids climb a ladder so we could sit on the roof of one a little kid, and in that summer of 1970 on a family trip
of the barns. He’d light a joint, which he liked to do, and out West, to California and Oregon, I watched as the big
take a deep long puff, then pass it around. From up there, kids got to accompany Mom and Dan to a production
he told us, you could see New York City. This was as of Hair in San Francisco, regaling the rest of us with
untrue then as it is now. You can look as hard as you want stories of the cast naked onstage. Naked was a theme,
from that roof, but you will never see New York City. a prolonged ’70s-era meme. In Big Sur, we stayed at
But that was Dan—and all of us kids looked hard just the Esalen Institute, where the adults wandered around
the same: for the arrowheads, for the Lenape coins, unclothed, to the mortification of us kids, while Dan
for the hidden chest of John Ringo’s gold. Dan infused held his group therapy sessions.
everything with a certain kind of magic and lore. The Back home at Omega Farm, the dinner table was
name Omega Farm, for instance, was a nod to his favorite always crowded and often argumentative, the tectonic
philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote pressures, resentments, shifting allegiances, and
about a future time when everything in the universe betrayals of two very different families suddenly
spirals into one unified point—the Omega Point. erupting, say, over the issue of abortion. Roe v. Wade
So, Omega Farm—with its tone of utopian aspiration was in the news. As a Catholic, Dan was stridently > 6 8

Up Front Family Ties
against abortion, even though swirling among the one another, went on adventures, prattled in the wee
children, whispers passed from ear to ear, was the secret hours about nothing, but mostly—and this was because
that my mother had been pregnant twice before giving of the older kids, who could sniff out a fraud when
birth to Joan. I didn’t understand exactly what this they saw it—mocked and ironized to a fare-thee-well the
meant as a child, but I absorbed it enough to know my way Omega Farm was neither one thing nor the other,
mother was going through something big and scary neither farm nor utopia, but mostly, really, a big, sprawling,
that she was trying to fix. chaotic mess with Neil Young playing from speakers
Dan and his kids would fight about abortion using nailed to the trees.
terms I didn’t understand, words like quickening and
sentient flying across the table, the tide of rage rising. MOST OF MY LIFE, it seems to me, I’ve been trying
When it wasn’t abortion, it was the PLO and Israel. to put my family back together, to understand it, gain
Always the same fights, which went so late into the night mastery over it, fix it. I was four when my parents
that Mom would disappear into Dan’s bedroom, separated. Across my childhood I looked for signs that
lulled to sleep by the rhythms of Dan’s mildly subversive my mother and father were still in love, that they’d
waterbed, a word that, by itself, conjures an entire gaudy reunite. It didn’t seem impossible. On what would have
family, long extinct, of 1970s enthusiasms that been their 20th wedding anniversary, both remarried to
populated the house—fondue pots, egg-shaped cocoon others, my father gave my mother a book of wine routes
chairs suspended from the high branches of an oak, in France. One they had traveled when we were babies,
swinging in the air—while my sisters had been highlighted by Dad in
and I found a place to sleep on the yellow. We’d heard the story of that
floor in the living room, curling into trip so many times, how they dined
each other, wondering how we’d get in Michelin-starred restaurants,
to school in the morning. leaving my sisters and me asleep in
the car. In my kitchen in New York,
THE BACK AND FORTH between I had a menu from one of these
Princeton and Ringoes, between my culinary excursions framed and
old home and what was becoming hanging on the wall. Asterisks drawn
my new home at the farm, ended in by Dad indicated what dishes they
the spring of 1973. My parents were had eaten, what wine they had drunk.
finally divorced, and my mother was Sometimes I imagined who I’d
very pregnant with Joan. Was this to have been had they not divorced, had
be the Omega Point? The only point my mom not met Dan and moved us
that Omega Farm represented to to Omega Farm. I’d have been an
me then was the upheaval and disorder entitled girl from Princeton, growing
of a momentary whim that had gone up in a big white house in the woods
off the rails. In the mornings, we at the edge of town, confident in
were always late to school, piled into herself and her beauty. Sometimes
the Cadillac. Many times, I went to I could see her, that other me—
school wearing two different shoes. TRUE STORY almost unrecognizable, living the life
Afternoons, one of the friends of my McPHEE’S NEW MEMOIR, FROM WHICH that could have been mine. My
THIS ESSAY IS ADAPTED, IS OUT NOW.
older stepbrother, long hair flying, a mother told me to keep a journal.
cigarette in one hand, a beer between “Take notes,” she said. “You have an
his legs, would pull into the school parking lot like an interesting family.” So I did what my mother told me to:
extra from Easy Rider and rev the car engine so that I wrote things down. “Observe,” she’d say to me. “Details.”
everyone in the straitlaced, buttoned-down world of She had wanted to be a writer, had started a children’s
Princeton could watch me climb into the back of book, had won an award from the state of New Jersey for
the turquoise Cadillac and thereby become properly, the work, but life got in the way.
righteously, discomfited. And she wanted me to love Dan. It was around this
My mom had become a photographer by this time, and time that they got into one of their worst fights. He found
when she’d return late to the farm from work with carousels of slides from Mom and Dad’s life together with
the camera bags hanging off her shoulders, Dan would my sisters and me, our life as a family, Dad’s love letters
sometimes be glowering with rage. I thought it best to to Mom. In his rage—his feminist passions forgotten—
COU RT ESY O F SCR I BN ER .
stay quiet and not draw attention to myself, but I watched he dumped them in a heap in the driveway, squirted
and here is what I saw: adults stoned or drunk or gasoline on the heap, and lit a match. I remember Mom
exhausted or all three; children filled with turbulence and standing over the fire, the slides melting, staring with
rage—pushed together and told to get along—stealing a big, blank expression, numb with the horror she must
one another’s clothes and small possessions; children who have felt. For me, the fire, the burning of our past,
played mean tricks on one another, laughed, forgave defined Dan’s jealousy—and that jealousy gave me hope. @

SKETCHES OF THE PAST
far left: Virginia Woolf, c. 1911.
above: Charleston, Vanessa Bell and
Duncan Grant’s home in East
Eternal Sussex, England. left: A painting

by Bell. below: A fan by Grant.
Moments
PA I N T I NG : © TH E BLOO MS BU RY WO RKS HO P, LON D ON / © ESTATE OF VA N ESSA BE LL. © 2023 ARS, NEW YOR K / DACS, LOND ON / BR ID GEMAN IMAGES.
Chanel or playing tennis, and
TO P LE ET: H A RVA R D T HE AT RE CO LLECTI O N , HOUG HTO N LI BRA RY, HA RVA RD U N I V ERSITY. TOP R IGH T: CAROLYN CLAR KE / ALAMY STOCK PH OTO.
A new exhibition and book I wanted to really look at what
was actually happening at that
plot out the Bloomsbury
FA N : COU RT ESY O F T HE CHA R LESTO N T RUST. © ESTAT E O F DU N CA N G RA N T. A LL RI G H TS R ESERVED, DACS, LOND ON / ARS, NEW YOR K.
time. The Bloomsbury group
group’s influence on fashion. felt like the perfect people to
study that through.” On view are
shell necklaces worn by Woolf
n letters inviting friends to her Sussex and Bell, original sketches by
I home, Virginia Woolf would often sign

off with a simple directive: “Bring no
clothes.” Not that she was expecting
them to arrive naked—although, given the famously tan-
gled love lives of the Bloomsbury group, her aristocratic
Grant, and a silk Mariano For-
tuny dress that once belonged
to the patroness Lady Ottoline
Morrell. Meanwhile, the captivating vintage photographs
and conversational tone of Porter’s book—at turns schol-
band of early-20th-century British creatives, that wouldn’t arly, slyly amusing, and touchingly personal, as when he
be entirely outside the realm of possibility. She merely describes taking inspiration from Bell to make his own
meant that visitors should come as they were. clothes after the death of his artist mother—give those
Woolf ’s words, writer and curator Charlie Porter unable to travel to the south of England their own chance
argues in the exhibition “Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury to appreciate the group’s disruptive sense of style.
and Fashion” and its lively accompanying book, reflected While the exhibition explores how the Bloomsbury set’s
a broader shift—from the stuffy corsets of Victorian sartorial mores underlined their radical understandings
England to the free-spirited bohemianism embodied of feminism and sexuality, equally fascinating for Porter
by Bloomsbury. (The trust that oversees Charleston, was how the likes of Erdem, S.S. Daley, and Kim Jones
the former home of Woolf ’s sister Vanessa have mined the group’s philosophies. Case in
Bell and her partner, painter Duncan point? Five striking ensembles by Rei
Grant, is behind the show, which Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons
runs from September 13 to Janu- from 2019, all inspired by the
ary 7 at a new space in the East “emotion” of Woolf ’s Orlando.
Sussex town of Lewes.) The show, notes Nathaniel
“In fashion histor y, Hepburn, director and
that per iod is of ten CEO of the Charles-
skirted over,” says Por- ton Trust, “is about
ter. “It just goes from ideas as much as it
cinched control to is about garments.”
images of women in — 

L’ H E U R E D U D I A M A N T
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NEW YORK 730 Fifth Avenue – MIAMI Bal Harbour Shops – COSTA MESA South Coast Plaza
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In Her
Shoes
The always-original
Chloë Sevigny tries
out the surprising new
collaboration between
Miu Miu and Church’s.
By Liam Hess.
t’s a baking hot summer evening in Connecticut, and quirkier details—molded rubber soles and an embossed
I Chloë Sevigny is preparing to try on a shoe. She’s

spending the week with her mother and her three-
year-old son while her husband, gallerist Siniša
Mačković, travels to an art fair. “I thought it would be
more fun than single-parenting in the city for a week,”
logo on the side, for example—that speak to Miu Miu’s
involvement and make them feel, well, Sevigny. “Classic
with a twist,” she says, as she turns her ankles from side to
side to appraise how they look. “I want to run down the
street and jump!”
Sevigny says with a wink from her brother’s bedroom, For Sevigny, the appeal of Miu Miu’s fall collection also
where she’s illuminated only by the glow of her iPhone runs a little deeper. As the latest chapter in the brand’s
screen over FaceTime. renewed hot streak over the past few seasons, Miuccia Pra-
From a powder pink box, with all the ceremony of a da’s whimsical vision of a “frazzled Englishwoman”—from FASH I ON ED I TO R: M A X O RT EGA . H A I R, J O EY G EO RGE ; MA KEU P, G ITA BASS.
white-gloved art handler appraising a masterpiece, Sevi- frizzy fringes and sheer polka dots to tweeds and cordu-
gny lifts a pair of brogues in lacquered tobacco leather. roy and (perhaps most shocking of all) athleisure-adjacent
The piece is the product of a new collaboration between gray marl hoodies and leggings—has already become a viral
Miu Miu and British shoe manufacturer Church’s: sensation. “To me, it was all classic Miu Miu,” Sevigny says.
S ET D ES IG N : NO ST UD I O. D E TA I LS, S EE IN TH IS I SSU E.
Available as either a lace-up or a monk strap, in black “She’s always done the underwear-showing, all the way
or tobacco-glossed brushed leather, the shoes were first back to when I walked for her—it’s actually very timeless.”
spotted on the runway of Miu Miu’s fall 2023 collection. Sevigny would know: Her first runway show with the
(The very eagle-eyed among us might also have sighted brand was in New York in 1995, just two years after the
them being worn by Miuccia Prada herself while taking label had launched and soon after the release of Harmony
a bow at the end of the Prada menswear show in June.) Korine’s Kids, which catapulted Sevigny to a certain kind
“They feel light as air,” she says, slipping her foot into of underground fame. “Miuccia has always embraced and
the shoe with the assistance of a shoehorn. “Whenever I championed young actresses, especially those of us >7 5
find other brogue enthusiasts, they’re always talking about
Church’s, so this is an exciting day for me.” The Brit- BUCKLE UP
ish craftsmanship of Church’s prized by Sevigny’s fellow Chloë Sevigny, in Miu Miu, sports the double-monk-strap shoe from
enthusiasts is present and correct, of course, but it’s the Church’s X Miu Miu. Photographed by Stefan Ruiz.

EAU DE PARFUM
CHANEL .COM
Liana Satenstein, shoppers waited for up to four hours in
lines snaking around the block to get their hands on Sevig-
ny’s pieces, many of which dated back to the ’90s, when she
was first enshrined as “the coolest girl in the world” by Jay
McInerney. Most curious of all was its cross-generational
appeal, with Gen Z vastly outnumbering those who were
actually around for the first phase of Sevigny’s career.
(Olivia Rodrigo picked up a plaid Versace dress that she
proudly showed off in a video for Vogue: “A girlfriend gave
that to me for my 40th birthday!” Sevigny says, beaming.)
As for why this younger contingent has developed such
a fervent interest in her looks from decades past, Sevigny
has a few theories. “I like to think that my choices as an
actress when I was younger really helped generate that kind
of interest,” she says. “Making films that were challenging
and exciting, like Gummo and Party Monster and Boys Don’t
Cry—films that are really staples of alternative youth culture
now—I think helped propel people’s interest in my fashion.”
Was the sale emotional, given Sevigny’s deep attachment
to the clothes she wears? “Weirdly…no?” she says, after a
pause. “When you’re ready to let go of it, you’re just ready.”
Over the past few years, one gets the sense that Sevigny
has mellowed a little. Chalk that up
to marriage, or motherhood, per-
NINETIES TO NOW haps, but it also has something to
above: Sevigny as the face of Miu Miu do with the new phase she’s entered
in 1996, photographed by Juergen Teller.
rhght: Miuccia Prada wearing the in her acting career along with
collaboration at her and Raf Simons’s her increasing focus on directing:
recent men’s show. With four shorts under her belt,
she’s currently shopping around a
making more controversial choices,” feature-length project. Next on the
she says. “I don’t want to say it vali- slate, however, is the new Gus Van
dates you, but it’s nice to have some- Sant–directed season of Ryan Mur-
one in fashion not just dressing you, phy’s Feud, which charts the fallout
but really celebrating you.” The feel- between Truman Capote and his
ing is clearly mutual. Not only has high society “swans.” Sevigny will
Sevigny starred in campaigns for be playing the socialite and style
the label many times since, but she icon C. Z. Guest—meaning plenty
also returned to walk for Miu Miu in of fabulous outfits. “The clothes
2018; the year before, she directed a are great, but the shoes are terrible,”
short film that premiered as part of she says with a laugh of the “dowdy”
the brand’s Women’s Tales program. ’70s pumps. (Thankfully, she man-
Her latest Miu Miu moment also aged to sneak one pair of Chanel
arrives at a time of feverish interest heels into the mix.)
in Sevigny’s style. A quick skim through her hashtag on Still, despite playing dress-up as a high-glamour prin-
TikTok reveals an endless stream of throwback Sevigny cess for months of filming, Sevigny insists that the Upper
looks—though it’s easy to argue that this interest has East Side approach to dressing hasn’t rubbed off on her,
never really gone away. There have been recent runway even as she says it’s “something to aspire to as I’m getting
turns for Simone Rocha and Proenza Schouler, as well older—more of an elegance.” But Sevigny has her own
TO P : COU RT ESY O F MI U M I U. BOT TO M: G ET T Y I MAG ES.
as an appearance in a fairy-tale-themed book for the cult kind of aspirational elegance: It’s the kind that can take a
London brand Chopova Lowena. There was her subver- humble Oxford shoe and elevate it to something that feels
sive take on bridal for her 2022 wedding, which featured daring, unexpected, or subversive. There’s a reason, after
daring looks from the likes of Glenn Martens for Jean all, that a youth-focused brand like Miu Miu has returned
Paul Gaultier Couture, Loewe, and Mugler, the latter fea- to Sevigny again and again over the decades.
turing a waist-snatching bustier and eye-popping sheer “Have I outgrown Miu Miu?” Sevigny muses, then lets
lace panels. And then, of course, there was that closet sale. out a peal of laughter. “I hope I never do. There’s a sophis-
“It was insane,” she says, laughing, of the spectacle in tication to Prada, and I don’t know if I’m quite there yet.
Manhattan this spring that dominated Instagram feeds I still like the fun of Miu Miu. It feels a little less…I don’t
around the world for the day—and came about simply know—you’re a writer, you should be helping me here!
because Sevigny felt her wardrobe needed a clear-out. Just a little more playful. Is that the right word?” I couldn’t
Titled “Sale of the Century” and organized by Vogue writer have put it better myself. @
VOGUE.COM O CTO B E R 202 3 75

Limited to eligible items. Authenticity Guarantee is independent from, and not associated with,
any brands on eBay. Terms and conditions apply. Visit ebay.com for terms.
Christy Turlington Burns
photographed by
Wayne Maser for
Vogue, 1986.
Wisdom recreates Christy’s look 37
years later: wearing a Cartier Pasha
watch, Van Cleef & Arpels bracelet,
and small hoop earrings from
Chopard (top earrings), backed by
Wisdom Kaye eBay Authenticity Guarantee. “When
photographed for you know what you’re wearing is the
eBay, 2023. real deal, you feel more in tune,”
Wisdom says. “It’s about wearing
what feels like you.”
Twiggy, Rita, and Wisdom
always keep it real. At Vogue
World in London, they wore
their eBay authenticated
accessories, matching the
looks in the photographs to
create a full-circle fashion
moment in real life, too.
Their items were then
auctioned on eBay, with
profits supporting a
more circular
fashion world.
Wisdom wears a Cartier Pasha watch, Van Cleef & Arpels bracelet,
small hoop earrings from Chopard (top earrings), and a Bottega
Veneta Cassette bag, backed by eBay Authenticity Guarantee.
Find more luxury accessories, like these featured throughout the
decades of Vogue, at eBay.com/DecadesOfAuthenticity.
Fine Lines
Drake Carr’s provocative artwork
imbues fashion illustration with
a louche glamour. By Lynn Yaeger.
Carr, who is 30, lanky, and all-

American handsome, arrived in
New York City in 2015. (Green
says their friendship was inevitable:
“We are both gay boys from churchy
homes in Michigan.”) He worked
at restaurants to keep afloat, at one
point buying himself an airbrush
machine for $200 just to explore its
possibilities. His first gallery was
the walls of Happyfun Hideaway, a
“queer tiki disco dive bar” in Bush-
wick, Brooklyn, where he still works
one day a week—which is maybe
surprising for a guy whose work
graced the Summer 2023 cover of
Art in America. But maybe not.
In his soft voice, Carr confesses
that there is so much he wants to
love fashion, and I love drawing clothing,” says the do—fashion, of course, but also a continuation of his
I rising art star Drake Carr. In early 2023, members of

Carr’s extended family—everyone from stylist Dara
Allen to downtown artist Rose Mori to club lumi-
nary “Connie Girl” Fleming to the models Karlie Kloss
and Pat Cleveland—showed up in all their rarefied glory
series depicting the louche characters he has encoun-
tered since he arrived in New York. His work, first
widely seen through his Instagram posts, has since been
in one-person shows at The Hole gallery on the Bow-
ery and in Los Angeles. In October, at Vogue’s Forces of
to have their portraits drawn by Carr during his ad hoc Fashion, he will set up shop, sketching a handful of the
residency at the studio of his friend, the photographer conference’s illustrious attendees.
RI G HT: COU RT ESY OF D RA KE CA RR.
Ethan James Green. While Carr’s first fashion drawings were informed by
Carr’s drawings, paintings, and installations, at once his childhood infatuation with superheroes, his grown-up
unblinking and delicate, have an uncanny ability to distill works have their roots in the now vanished world of
the essence of his subjects. In an age of AI, where we are fashion illustration—he particularly reveres the > 8 6
increasingly victims of bland manufactured content, the
defiantly handmade quality of Carr’s work is subtly rebel- TAKE A BOW
lious. As his friend Green puts it: “He manages to capture top left: Drake Carr in New York. Photographed by Ethan James
people in a way a lot of photographers can’t.” Green. top right: Carr’s portrait of writer Lynn Yaeger.
VOGUE.COM O CTO B E R 202 3 83

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late Antonio Lopez, but “instead of
starting with the garment and doing
a little gesture of the face, I do the
face and a silhouette of the garment,”
he explains. “Just getting the feel of
the fashion.”
For his residency at Green’s Chi-
natown atelier, some of his subjects
brought bags of their own clothes—
Carr describes one ensemble as
“pink boxer shorts, patent leather
boots, and an expensive scarf.” The
project resulted in a monograph,
Walk-Ins, with Carr’s boyfriend, a
graphic designer, making the beau-
tiful book. (They live near Prospect COLOR STORIES
Park in Brooklyn and met while above: Carr’s Rose, 2023.
rhght: Julian and Kenta, 2023.
Carr was having his mom’s old busi-
ness card—the business was Nails
by Wendy—tattooed on his arm.) Carr’s fashion work,
though, has stretched far beyond pastel undershorts: For
Christopher John Rogers’s fall 2019 show—the designer Quietly ebullient as he may be, Carr is a bit awestruck
is another member of his Brooklyn posse—Carr painted by his recent rise. “There are moments when I feel like
bodices and created a print of faces that turned up on a a country mouse in the city,” he confesses. But like so
shirt. “He has a real appreciation of glamour, which is not many intensely creative people who leave behind far-
always so popular right now,” Rogers says, adding that his flung addresses and head for the nearest metropolis, he
friend is “kind of soft-spoken, but when you get to know has found a home in the wilds of Brooklyn. “I don’t ever
him, the ebullience of his personality comes through.” feel like I shouldn’t be here.” @
The Italian Job

Ginori issues a line of home
furnishings and fabrics.
W
hen Italian designer Medici, and now with Domus,
Luca Nichetto attend- a line of lamps, furnishings,
ed Catholic Com- and fabrics (items range from
munion celebrations $280 to $11,000 and are avail-
as a boy, he noticed that the little able at Ginori 1735 locations).
dishes and such that were given out While many luxury brands
as keepsakes always bore a certain carving a lane for themselves
TO P : COU RT ESY O F D RA K E CA RR . BOT TO M: COURT ESY O F G I N O RI 1735.
imprint: Ginori, the storied Floren- in interior design hand over
tine porcelain firm founded in 1735. a brief to a separate manu-
“If you are an Italian designer,” says facturer, Nichetto wanted to
the Stockholm-based Nichetto (who, cultivate a closer collabora-
regardless, considers himself “100 tion. So he reached out to Venetian considered an emblem of good for-
percent Italian”), “Ginori is for sure glass authority Barovier & Toso and tune in many cultures. The two more
one of your references.” It was that the fabric company Rubelli—both abstract patterns—Sagitta, which cites
deep-seated affiliation that spurred of which, like Ginori, possess an Brunelleschi and Escher, and Saia, a
Nichetto to work with the company expertise born of centuries of crafts- series of geometric swatches—offer
on some of its earliest forays beyond manship. The Domus fabrics, in a covert callback to the DNA of the
porcelain—first with a home f ra- particular, carry a story within the company. Saia, for instance, takes its
grance inspired by Catherine de’ jacquard: There is Oriente Italiano, motif from the way colored decals are
a riff on the Asian-inspired pattern applied to porcelain to test the hue.
A VINE TIME designed by legendary Ginori artis- Some things change, the shifting pat-
Patterns from Ginori’s new Domus line, tic director Gio Ponti, and Ondori, tern says, and some things stay the
created with the fabric company Rubelli. a reinterpretation of the red rooster, same.— 

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Lost and Found
Recalling a beloved Chanel lipstick,
Chloe Schama searches color
databases, high-tech matching tools,
and the complexities of memory.
While the intersection of scent

and taste with memory has prompted
scientific examinations and literary
ruminations (Proust with his made-
leines, etc.), the connection between
color perception and memory seems
a more elusive target for inquiry, per-
haps because it is so subjective. “I am
only too aware—having faced custom-
ers across the shop counter for many
years—that we tend to see color in
different ways,” writes The Anatomy of
Colour author Patrick Baty in an email
P RO DUC ED BY B EN M I LLE R BI B ESCO. E X ECU T I V E P RODUC E R: ZO E TOM LI N SO N . D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

to me from London, where he is also
the proprietor of the masterfully
encyclopedic paint shop Papers and
Paints and a kind of visual detective–
cum–mad scientist when it comes
W
e’ve all had the expe- and a brick path after it’s rained; put- to pairing shades from the past with
rience: A lifetime of ting it on was like becoming another modern-day materials. (He recently,
FASH I ON ED I TO R: A L EX HA RR I NGTO N . HA I R , JI M MY PAUL; MA K EU P, D I CK PAG E.

trial and error finally person, a woman with something for example, restored the drawing
leads you to the perfect crisp to say, even when her lips weren’t rooms at Stowe House in Buck-
shade, and then the lipstick is discon- moving. It was an old-timey wedding, inghamshire to their precise 18th-
tinued (lost to time) or goes missing with pin curls, tea-length dresses, and century glory.) Originally taught by
(lost in the handbag). For me, it was a Paper Moon–style photo setup. We his father to color-match by eye, Baty
an almost-maroon Chanel that I rode a rattling antique car to the cer- now uses a machine called a spec-
plucked from the beauty closet at the emony site, and I felt, in my sepia trophotometer to build up a giant
office and then wore to my sister-in- shade, like I had been lifted from a database of color profiles—perhaps
law’s wedding at an outdoor railway silent film. The color was perfect, and the largest in existence. But all the
museum in Monticello, Illinois. The so were the pictures. This was lucky science in the world doesn’t make
color was somewhere between plum from one vantage point (the color was the way we experience color less per-
immortalized by professional pho- sonal, he concedes. “So often, people’s
tography), unfortunate from another responses are based on emotion or
FORGET ME NOT (the photos taunted me: Would I ever even on some of the ridiculous names
Memories of colors are elusive. When find it again?). The tube was not even given to them by paint companies.
a favorite hue is gone, how do we one-quarter used when it vanished. Some names discourage, while oth-
recapture it? Model Raquel Zimmermann
wears a Bottega Veneta parka. As Elizabeth Bishop put it, “The art ers encourage selection (e.g., ‘Senior
Photographed by Mark Borthwick. of losing isn’t hard to master.” Citizen’ or ‘Elephant’s Breath’).” > 9 2

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However individual our relation- salesperson would bat her lashes. I I get to work with the Chanel tool,
ship with color might be, it has an might as well have been spouting pouting for the camera on my laptop
undeniable power to affect the way algebra theorems. while swiping through various shade
our neurons fire. Autistic patients But who needs language when options, jotting down names as I go.
read 35 percent faster, according to you have technology? When I finally A few days later they arrive. Rouge
one study, when a colored overlay is email Chanel with a similarly abstruse Allure Caractère is more brown than
put on the text. Some warmer col- description, I am kindly referred to red, as if I’ve forgotten to lick my lips
ors (yellows, reds, and oranges) have their virtual try-on tool, a targeted while drinking syrupy hot chocolate;
been found to increase attention more filter that lets you “test” the colors Rouge Allure Sensation is a dark
effectively than cooler tones—not by staring into your laptop screen, blackberry color, more like something
hard to clock if one has ever walked no in-store stick sharing required— that belongs on Wednesday Addams.
through a food court with screaming, a practice that now seems a relic of a I boldly line my lips, and then rub
flame-colored signage. We remem- pre-pandemic era, when we had less them clean in shock when I catch a
ber vibrant images better than black- familiarity with germ theory. A quick glimpse of myself in the bathroom
and-white ones. And then there is the mirror an hour later. Not for me!
infamous “drunk tank pink” theory, Rouge Coco Baume in Fall For Me
popularized by social psychologist The lipstick was not is a much more enjoyable wear but
Adam Alter’s 2013 book of the same even one-quarter used a different consistency than what I’d
name: the idea that a bubble-gum hue recalled. As the name implies, it’s
could pacify inebriated aggressors (or when it vanished. As somewhere between balm and lip-
an opposing team—some college Elizabeth Bishop put it, stick and goes on smooth and slick.
football coaches took to painting the Somewhere along the line, I realize
visiting athletes’ locker rooms this
“The art of losing that Chanel actually offers a way to
Barbie-adjacent shade). The mul- isn’t hard to master” reverse-engineer a solution with its
timedia artist Madeline Hollander, Lipscanner app, which allows you to
whose serpentine dance Hydro Parade take a photo and then match the color
recently wound its way through The to its offerings. It’s like some kind of
Metropolitan Museum, has a kind digital-age fairy tale: The answer
of synesthesia in which she experi- was in the picture all along. I take
ences all language (and some sounds) myself to Saks and purchase a stick of
in color—for example, L is blue, H Rouge Coco in Suzanne—there it is!
is white; do is yellow, re, maroon— A somewhat anticlimactic conclusion
and it’s been this way since she can to my half-decade-long quest.
remember. “Having synesthesia,” she Science, it seems, has its limits
tells me, “is like having a window when entangled with sentiment. Per-
into the metaprocessing that goes on haps what I wanted was not so much
in the brain as it translates symbols, the shade, but the shadow of a for-
ideas, language into thought.” mer self, or to return to a moment
In the years that followed my sister- in time already washed in the warm
in-law ’s wedding, I did my own tones of nostalgia. There’s another
processing of what this color might photo from that wedding weekend
mean and how to find it, wandering that remains foremost in my memory.
department store aisles, painting the It’s an image of the nape of my then
back of my hand a slice of the spec- nine-month-old’s neck as I gave him
CELEBRATION DAY
trum ranging from crimson to ochre. a bath in the hotel sink, a perfect curl
The author at her sister-in-law’s
I dipped my toes into the Pinterest wedding, wearing the lipstick she nestled in the crevice at the bottom of
color-matching world, a mood board coveted—once she lost it. his skull, anatomy that was changing
gone off its hinges. I found myself almost the instant I took the picture.
on homely websites where you could trip through the internet reveals that He would never be so small again.
order a (new) bespoke product based Maybelline has a similar tool, and My sister-in-law would never again
on a color-matched sample of an so does Revlon, L’Oréal, and many smile like it was the first day of the
earlier offering. But all those services other companies. This summer, rest of her life. In the meantime,
and social media subcultures were Fenty launched a shade-matching Chanel’s Fall For Me, that lighter
predicated on the idea that you knew filter for its foundation on TikTok, shade with the slicker texture, has
exactly which (mostly discontin- which, when you turn it on, suspends nestled itself comfortably in the bot-
ued) shade you were looking for. In your face in a skin-colored cloud, tom of my purse. I find myself reach-
E LI ZA B ET H GUZA L DO
Sephora, I would attempt to describe Casper the Ghost–like. It might not ing for it on the subway, at the office,
the hue: “dark red, almost bordering be a spectrophotometer, but it’s leaps as I drop that now seven-year-old
on brown, a color that belonged on beyond my mumblings at the store— off for his first day of second grade.
Claire Danes’s quavering lips in My Proustian remembrance replaced by It’s not a color from my past, but one
So-Called Life…” and the Gen Z the power of pixels. for the present. @

#FloraFantasy
The New Eau de Parfum
#FloraFantasy
ISLAND LIFE
A room at Hotel Corazón
(left); the exterior of
Grand Hotel Son Net (below).
poolside as another honey-colored

sunset dips behind the mountains.
Half an hour down the road,
you’ll find a more contemporary
take on the traditional Spanish
farm stay, Son Bunyola (rates start
at $650 a night). The hotel is the
project of Richard Branson, who
was among the first to recognize the island’s potential as
Balearic Boom a five-star destination back in 1987, when he launched a
(then rare) venue in the idyllic village of Deià. The entre-
A new guard of hotels is quietly preneur’s approach rests firmly on the local, with an addi-
tional sprinkling of adventure. Hikes, bikes, tennis, yoga,
leveling up Mallorca’s offerings. and paddleboarding are all likely to feature on the itiner-
ary here: all the better to explore the surrounding region’s
or European travelers, Mallorca is hardly an under- natural wonders.
F the-radar destination. Every year, sunseekers from

the continent’s northern reaches migrate to the
Balearic island like wildebeest across the Serengeti:
whether flocking to the all-inclusive resorts that dot the
coastline near the capital of Palma or gravitating toward
Finally, if it’s something more offbeat you’re looking
for, head to Hotel Corazón (rates start at $600 a night).
With just 15 individually designed rooms and run by part-
ners and longtime island residents Kate Bellm and Edgar
Lopez, it’s a property by artists, for artists. (The paintings
the charming hilltop villages and rocky swimming coves and sculptures that line its limewash walls have all been
of the UNESCO-protected Serra de Tramuntana moun- made by the couple’s friends, while a rotating lineup of
TO P : COU RT ESY O F HOT E L CO RA ZÓ N / A N N A M A LMB ERG. BOTTO M : COU RT ESY OF G RAND H OTEL SON NET.
tain range. But this year, the island is beckoning a new, artists in residence ensures that every guest will have an
design-minded visitor to its shores. opportunity to flex their creative muscles.) Bursting with
First, there’s Grand Hotel Son Net (starting at $660 a charm and playful design, it’s the spirit of new Mallorcan
night), the second property from the team behind Finca hospitality in a nutshell.— 
Cortesin, the beloved Andalusian hideaway that
has developed a feverish cult following. A pala-
tial 17th-century villa painted a pleasing shade
of terra-cotta and set high in the mountains, Son
Net is surrounded by fragrant citrus orchards
and olive groves straight out of a Mediterranean
picture postcard. Yet while it may appear classic
on the surface, step inside and something more
unexpected unfolds amid the riotously patterned
interiors that reflect the island’s history as a cul-
tural melting pot, from tiles that speak to the
region’s Arabic design influences to beds draped
in Spanish linen. It’s the world-class service here,
though, that sets a new standard for the island,
whether you want to learn more about the wine
cultivated within the hotel’s own vineyards or be
whisked away for an afternoon on a boat explor-
ing the secluded beaches nearby. And you haven’t
experienced true Iberian hospitality until a gin
and mandarin cocktail has been ferried to you

PRODUCED BY VOGUE FOR GOLDMAN SACHS
Ciara Asks:
Why Not Us?
How the platinum-selling
global superstar has
raised over $10 million for
pediatric cancer research
We all know Ciara from her platinum-selling oeuvre, but there’s $10 million for pediatric cancer research and opened a tuition-free
another side to her. These days, what really drives her is her work with charter school, the Why Not You Academy in Des Moines,
the Why Not You Foundation, which she runs with her husband, Washington*.
Denver Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson. Sure, she has a new
As Ciara has built both her foundation and musical empire, she’s
record coming out (on her own label, no less), but it’s the
leaned on the advice of other ambitious, mission-oriented
philanthropic achievements she focuses her gratitude on.
entrepreneurs like herself. Goldman Sachs Private Wealth
“Where you come from in life does not determine how far you’ll go,” Management has been actively involved in seeking out opportunities
she says, emphasizing how she pushes herself to dream big. “Every to help Ciara maximize her impact. “Our team at Goldman Sachs will
day I ask myself, why not us?” pick up the phone to call whoever we need in their network, to make
sure we can maximize every opportunity,” she says.
That mantra—why not us?—is the catalyst for Ciara’s work with the
foundation. Since Why Not You launched in 2014, it has raised over
Ciara is a current client of Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management (PWM). The opinions expressed are solely those of the client. Compensation
in the amount of $7,500 was paid to the client to facilitate logistical services related to her participation in this advertisement and for her statements
relating to Goldman Sachs PWM. This testimonial is representative only of the client and her experience with Goldman Sachs PWM, and your
experience may differ. Goldman Sachs PWM does not request or advertise testimonials from all clients. Brokerage and investment advisory services
offered by Goldman Sachs PWM are provided by Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, which is an SEC registered broker-dealer and investment adviser,
member FINRA/SIPC.
* Foundation facts provided by Ciara & Why Not You Foundation.
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and plenty of cloak-and-dagger maneu-
Flights vering, but what elevates it is Herron’s
clear-eyed portrait of state power, in
of Fiction which lowly civil servants joust with
formidable MI5 leaders who may, in
turn, be toppled by spies who have long
New books range from ago come in from the cold. Amid his
past to present. careful plotting Herron manages to
be acidly funny too, a quality fans of
his best-selling Slough House novels
humpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories (adapted by Apple TV+ as the terrific
J (Knopf) is a delectable, sun-washed

treat: a series of tales set in and
around the Italian cap-
ital, told f rom the perspective
of natives, expats, migrants, and
series Slow Horses) know well.
The unsettling Vengeance Is Mine
(Knopf) from Marie NDiaye, winner
of France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt,
has the magnetism of a thriller and the mysteri-
other transplants. When a city ousness of an existential riddle. Maître Susane,
invites you in—with all its alluring a lawyer of middling success in Bordeaux, is
splendor—who ultimately gets asked by the husband of an imprisoned woman
to lay claim to it? Lahiri wears to defend her. What has she done? Murdered
that geopolitical question lightly, her three children—an unimaginable crime that
enveloping the reader in birthday NDiaye allows to sit in the background of her sto-
parties and summer heat waves; rytelling like an ominous dream. What concerns
the adrenaline of teenage delin- NDiaye’s heroine is a flickering memory from her
ROM A N STO RI ES: COU RT ESY O F A LFRE D A . K NO P F. TH E VASTER W I L DS: COU RTESY O F R IVER H EAD BOOKS. THE SECRE T HOURS: COVER D ESIGN BY DAVID LITMAN,
quents and the anxieties of nonnas childhood that involves the defendant’s husband,
keeping a watchful eye; flings that a passive-aggressive relation-
are mere flights of imagination ship with her Mauritian house-
and real, life-transforming affairs. keeper, a sense of rejection by
Like Lahiri’s two most recent her parents, and her too-modest
books, this collection was written in Italian and trans- car. This is a novel of unraveling
lated for an English audience, and the stories have the certainties and of a middle-class
beating heart of the city itself, a place of magnificent life encroached upon by night-
COU RT ESY O F SO HO P RESS. VENG EA NC E IS M IN E: COU RT ESY O F A LFR E D A . KN OP F. LE T US DESCE N D: COURTESY OF SCR IBNER .
decay and vibrant, varied life. mares. You may not fully unlock
Lauren Groff has long been fascinated by stories its mysteries—it’s slim, a good
of female survival, and in her new novel, The Vaster length for a reread—but you
Wilds (Riverhead), she places her protagonist in won’t be able to put it down.
extreme circumstances: an early period of the James- — 
town colony, when famine Let Us Descend (Scribner),
d e cimat e d al most th e the latest novel f rom Jesmyn
entirety of that settlement. Ward—the virtuosic author of
Our heroine flees to the 2011’s Salvage the Bones and
surrounding wilderness, 2017’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, both winners of the National
where, by wits and tenac- Book Award for Fiction—takes its title from a passage in
ity, she manages to main- Dante’s Inferno, verses of which Ward’s protagonist, an
tain a tenuous purchase on enslaved teenager named Annis, can hear through the door
life. The Vaster Wilds is a as her white half-sisters sit for their lessons. It resonates:
page-turner with a built-in Working in her sire’s house feels distinctly like hell—dark,
engine: What will she have endless, full of dangers—the only
to do to survive? Inspired grace, Annis’s fierce bond with her
by the language of Eliza- mother, Sasha. Yet after Sasha is
bethan English, the book sold, and Annis herself is sent on a
takes a minute to metabo- harrowing walk from the Carolinas
lize. But once you slip into to Louisiana, she descends to yet
its rich rhythms, it’s an engrossing and rewarding another circle, enduring the searing
journey.—  loneliness and fresh terrors of life
Spy novelists are often hailed as successors to the on a sugar plantation. The novel
late John le Carré. Mick Herron with The Secret is not for the faint of heart, but
Hours (Soho Crime), his teemingly complex story Annis’s story, told in Ward’s musi-
of the British Secret Service, rife with post-Brexit cal prose, is nothing short of epic,
infighting and festering Cold War secrets, earns magical, and intensely moving.
the comparison. The novel has exciting set pieces — 

IS
IT.
INTRODUCING THE
MOST ULTRA-LUXURY
EXPERIENTIAL RESORT
IN THE WORLD
www.atlantistheroyal.com @atlantistheroyal
Lee Miller was a photographer, war
correspondent, fashion model,
art world muse, and an adventurer
The
par excellence. For Kate Winslet,
she’s the role of a lifetime. By
Wendell Steavenson. Photographed
by Annie Leibovitz.
Art of Being
Lee Miller
WITNESS TO WAR
Winslet, photographed
at Farleys, the historic
home of Lee Miller
and Roland Penrose
in Sussex, stars in
the film Lee, expected
later this year. Winslet
wears a Stella
McCartney vest and
pants. Paige shirt.
Fashion Editor:
Tabitha Simmons.
ondon, one Friday in the day—Jane Campion, Todd Field, “I was consistently told I was the
L
late June, the scene is a Ang Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Danny wrong shape,” Winslet told me. “I was
dark, windowless edit- Boyle—and starring opposite the consistently told I would have to settle
ing suite. Kate Winslet best actors of her generation: Leon- for less.”
is recording dialogue for ardo DiCaprio, Harvey Keitel, Susan “Why didn’t you?” I asked her.
Lee, a film she produced Sarandon, Johnny Depp, Jim Carrey, “Cause I wasn’t going to take that
and stars in, about the life and work Jodie Foster, Saoirse Ronan. She has shit from anyone.” Winslet laughed.
of Lee Miller, the Vogue model turned been nominated for seven Oscars, win- Time and again, Winslet has been
photographer turned war correspon- ning in 2009 for The Reader, in which drawn to independent productions
dent who documented the horrors of she played a former concentration and auteur directors, playing com-
the concentration camps in the Sec- camp guard who embarks on a postwar plex characters that challenge her. It’s
ond World War and was famously affair with a teenage boy, and has won an instinct that has served her well as
photographed in Hitler’s bathtub. five BAF TA s, five Golden Globes, she’s navigated a notoriously fickle and
This kind of carefully synced au- four SAG awards, and two Emmys. sexist industry, as well as the media
dio work requires precision intrusions that accompa-
and practiced technique. nied her early success and
“It’s like solving a Rubik’s the personal upheavals of
Cube within a time limit,” motherhood, marriage, and
explains Winslet, who is divorce. Winslet has three
fond of a metaphor. “It’s like children—Mia, 22, with her
finding that piece of cloud first husband, Jim Threaple-
with the birds for the last ton; Joe, 19, with director
corner of the jigsaw puzzle. Sam Mendes; and Bear,
That kind of satisfaction.” aged 9, with her husband
Winslet is dressed down Ned Abel Smith, whom she
in a pair of tight jeans and met days before a terrifying
a T-shirt over which tum- house fire on businessman
ble several fine gold chain Richard Branson’s Necker
necklaces; her hair is tied Island in 2011.
back in a workaday pony- It all seems to have pre-
tail. When I arrive it is mid- pared Winslet for making
morning and she has been at Lee—which represents her
it since 8 a.m. and will con- first time as a deeply hands-
tinue, without a lunch break, on producer, responsible for
until past three in the after- everything from finances to
noon. She crouches over script to casting to camera
the microphone, waggles angles—and for being able
her hands, focusing on the to understand and commu-
minute adjustments of tone, nicate Miller’s extraordinary
inflection, volume, stress, personality. “Frankly,” she
and pitch, fine-tuning indi- told me, “I’ve been through
vidual words to make sure a lot, so there are corridors
PA B LO P I CASSO / A RTI STS RI G HTS SOC I E TY ( A RS) , NEW YO RK, B RI D G EM A N I MAGES.

she nails Miller’s midcen- of emotions I can access
tury American accent. “I CLOSE-UP that I simply didn’t have
didn’t have enough r on the never. Miller’s friendship with when I was younger.” P HOTO © D ER EK BAY ES. A LL RI G HTS RES E RV ED 2023 / © 2023 ESTAT E O F
Let’s do it again, please,” she asks the Pablo Picasso yielded several portraits Miller’s life spanned the 20th cen-
sound technician. “Just one more, a of her, including this one from 1937. tury. In 1930s Paris, she was lover
little bit more downplayed…. Can and collaborator to the photographer
you bring up the level of the fuck?” It’s a long way from where Winslet Man Ray and part of a Surrealist
“Kate is the fastest audio in the started out—“The fat kid at the back band of artists and poets (among
West,” says Kate Solomon, her copro- with the wrong fucking shoes on,” as them Jean Cocteau, who cast her in
ducer on Lee. she told me. She likes to say she owes his film The Blood of a Poet), as well
“After 30 years of doing this, I her career to the luck of being cast as friend and subject of Pablo Picasso
should be,” says Winslet laughing, at age 17 by Peter Jackson in Heav- (who painted her portrait with her
deflecting the compliment. enly Creatures, an intimate and darkly head bright yellow to illustrate the
brilliant film based on the true story brilliance of her personality). Her
Kate Winslet is an actor at the top of two girls who killed a woman in work as a correspondent for Vogue in
of her game. She has honed her craft 1950s New Zealand, and then again Europe during WW II brought an
through 37 feature films and several in the megahit Titanic when she was important female perspective to the
highly regarded miniseries, working 20. But in fact Winslet has always news, even as the horrors that she
with many of the great directors of worked hard to make her own luck. witnessed opened her own chasms of
110
EN PLEIN AIR
Recreated in Lee is Miller’s famous
photograph from 1937 of
friends—Paul and Nusch Élouard,
Roland Penrose, Man Ray, and
Ady Fidelin—in the South of France.
trauma. “Lee was a woman who lived

her life on her terms and she paid a
horrific emotional price for all of it,”
Winslet told me. “I wanted to tell the
story of a flawed middle-aged woman
who went to war and documented it.”
Miller was intrepid and brave, and
fought in her work against the chau-
vinist strictures of the times, but she
also grappled with childhood trauma,
periods of depression, and a depen-
dency on alcohol and pills (that she
finally overcame). Antony Penrose,
her son and biographer who is played
by the actor Josh O’Connor in Lee and
whose 1985 book, The Lives of Lee
Miller, forms the basis for the movie,
told me Winslet was his dream actor
to play the part. “When I saw Kate
all those years ago in Titanic, what I
loved was that she wasn’t afraid to get
wet, to get dirty, to fall in the water, to
get roughed up. I thought she would
make a fantastic Lee Miller.”
am a war repor ter ; L ee
I
Miller has long been a hero
of mine. I’ve spent much of Miller’s life spanned the 20th century. In 1930s
the last year and a half in Paris, she was lover and collaborator to Man Ray and
Ukraine, and I told Winslet
that I understood the mix part of a Surrealist band of artists and poets
of adventure and professional pride
that compelled Miller to drive down
dangerous roads toward unknown milieu that she moved in. When I met lovers. Overall, Winslet was deter-
destinations. “I suspect,” I said, “this Antony Penrose at Farleys, his parents’ mined to foster a happy, creatively
kind of journey is very much like home in East Sussex, now preserved as rewarding set, gathering together
© LE E MI L LER A RC HI V ES, EN G LA N D 2023. A L L R I G HTS RESE RVE D. LE E MI LLE R.CO.U K.
filmmaking.” a museum to their Surrealist life and many crew members whom she had
“Exactly!” said Winslet. “For me art (Lee Miller was married to Roland worked with before. She had known
that’s the joy of it. You can do all the Penrose, an artist and leading figure of the cinematographer Ellen Kuras
preparation under the sun, but you the Surrealist moment), he told me since they met making Eternal Sun-
genuinely do not know how the day he had been disappointed over the shine of the Spotless Mind and invited
is going to go.” years with screenplays that tended to her to direct Lee—Kuras’s first feature
She may share some of Miller’s grit, be “formulaic and traded too much on film directing credit. And Winslet
it seems to me—a certain bloody- Lee’s beauty and being a model. They worked closely on casting, personally
mindedness and persistence. It took didn’t explore her intellectual capacity calling many of her costars. “I couldn’t
eight years of patient dedication to or her skill as a photographer.” say no to acting opposite Kate Wins-
realize Lee (which as of this writing Winslet was involved with every let,” said SNL alum Andy Samberg,
is headed out on the festival circuit aspect of the movie. The script had who plays Life photographer David
to seek distribution). “The process of gone through several iterations, and Scherman, Miller’s close friend and
getting it off the ground was the most Winslet, adamant that a female voice companion in war. It’s Samberg’s first
phenomenal fight,” Winslet said. “I was needed, brought Marion Hume dramatic role, and he told me Winslet
truly drove it up a mountain.” and Liz Hannah aboard to avoid the was enormously helpful and encour-
She was intent on focusing the story clichés and trite tropes that tend to aging: “She’s incredible. I knew this
around Miller’s work rather than her be attached to women—especially [movie] would be of a certain quality,
lovers and the sexy artistic celebrity those like Lee Miller, who had many no matter what, because of her.” She
111
Weathering the business
as a young actress
“absolutely toughened
me up,” Winslet said.
“It gave me a profound
understanding of
what it means to play
Lee Miller”
even helped coordinate Samberg’s

flights to set in order to minimize his
time away from his young children in
LA. “She said: ‘We’re going to make
it happen for you, don’t worry.’ She
was just thorough—somehow able to
sway the creative flow of things in
a positive way.”
“She’s also indefatigable,” said Sol-
omon, her coproducer. On the first
day of filming, while rehearsing the
sequence when Miller is running
down the street in the French city of
Saint-Malo, under bombardment in
1944, Winslet slipped and injured her
back. “I had three massive hematomas
on my spine, huge,” Winslet told me.
“I could barely stand up.” Determined
there would be no delays, she pushed
on with the schedule despite the pain.
That meant getting up before 4 a.m.,
hair and makeup at 5, and on set before
7. It also meant slipping between act-
ing and producing, taking calls with
potential investors (financing was
precarious; at one point, in preproduc-
tion, Winslet told me, she personally
covered two weeks of wages to keep
things going), chasing down new loca-
tions, and then in the evening going
over her lines with her dialogue coach.
“Kate held the film in her,” Solo-
mon said. “If you spoke to her about
any aspect of it, she knew what her
opinion was. And when you have that,
you can galvanize everyone behind that
person. It looks effortless, but having
lived with her, you can say: My God,
it is a lot of work to get to that point.”
WINSLET’S EYES ARE large and

aqueous, her face seemingly lit from
within. Every nuance of feeling is
registered there, in the fine lines
between brow furrow and half smile.
She’s a master of dialect (f rom
working-class Dorset in Ammonite
112
HER OWN PATH
“Kate held the film
in her,” Winslet’s
coproducer Kate
Solomon said.
Winslet wears an
Emilia Wickstead
coat. Prada shoes.
PAST AND PRESENT
Winslet at Farleys with
Antony Penrose, Miller’s
son and biographer, with
whom she collaborated on
Lee. Winslet wears a John
Smedley cardigan. Erdem
pants. Church’s shoes.
115
to blowsy Brooklyn in Woody Allen’s
Wonder Wheel; from suburban Phila-
delphia in Mare of Easttown to cold,
clipped German in The Reader), and
she inhabits every character she plays,
totally, physically, vocally, emotionally.
Watching her in close-up, between
the lines of dialogue, you can see
multiple feelings cross her face—
sometimes each individual thought.
“It’s really her authenticity and the
way she puts everything she has in
a part,” said Marion Cotillard, who
plays Solange d’Ayen, a friend of Lee
Miller’s who survived the Nazi occu-
pation of France. “I look at her work
and I never see her actually playing a
role. I always see her being a person.”
Such was Winslet’s commitment
to accuracy and verisimilitude for Lee
that she spent hours in the archives
at Farleys, poring over Miller’s dia-
ries and letters and going through
her contact sheets. She made sure her
costumes replicated what Miller wore
as a war correspondent. She learned
how to operate the hand-cranked
Rolleiflex camera that Miller used,
and several of the stills that appear
in the film are, in fact, photographs
Winslet took on set.
Many scenes were deliberately
staged to replicate Miller’s historic
images. The sequence that recreated
DAV I D E. SCHE RM A N © COURT ESY LE E M I LL ER A RC HI V ES, E NG L A ND 2023. A LL RI GH TS R ESERVED. LEEMILLER .CO.UK.

the Dachau concentration camp,
where Miller and Scherman were
present at the liberation, was so care-
fully rendered that everyone on set
was profoundly affected. “I knew it
was going to be emotional and intense
and it was,” Samberg told me. “I lost a
lot of family in the Holocaust. It was
definitely something that shook me.”
American Vogue ran Miller’s photo-
graphs of piles of emaciated corpses
from the camps under the headline:
“Believe It.” But, in a decision that
angered and frustrated her, British
Vogue only published one of Mill-
er’s pictures from the camps in the
context of a larger feature on victory
over Germany.
Such questions, over how much
reality to show, continue to this day.
HISTORY IN IMAGES
left: Miller’s searing report in American
Vogue, June 1945, documenting
the liberation of Buchenwald and the
end of the war. top right: Winslet
recreating the famous photo of Miller
in Hitler’s bathtub from 1945.
116
Penrose told me that after years of The truth is often hard to bear. This has taken some time. “I know
having to study Miller’s terrible, indel- Winslet described the day she and better than to waste precious energy on
ible photographs from the camps, he Andrea Riseborough, who plays the criticizing my physical self,” she said.
and other researchers suffered what British Vogue editor Audrey Withers, “I think any woman is better off just
he called a kind of “battle fatigue. filmed a crucial scene in Lee of rage saying: I believe in myself. It doesn’t
We couldn’t stop seeing the images and expiation: “It was horrendous. matter what other people think; this is
day and night.” We both agreed that that was abso- who I am—let’s get on with it.”
I told him that I recently had a con- lutely by far the hardest day of work There’s a famous photograph Miller
versation with a friend of mine, a pho- on a film set that either of us have took of a group of friends picnicking
tographer, who had returned from a ever done. The reality is,” she went topless, déjeuner sur l’herbe, in France
field hospital on the f ront line in on, “that there are times when we before the war that includes her future
Ukraine, and who was, his voice shaky play characters where we truly hurt husband Roland Penrose (played by
on the phone, still trying to process ourselves inside. And it does come Alexander Skarsgård in Lee), Man
what he had seen and worried about at a cost, my God—” Tears filled her Ray, the poet Paul Éluard, his wife
how much of the gore he should hold eyes. “It’s just ridiculous.” She started Nusch, and the model Ady Fidelin.
back and self-censor. “It’s a question to apologize, and I stopped her and Winslet, now aged 47, recreated the
we have to keep interrogating,” said assured her that feeling deeply, that scene for Lee, despite the fact that with
Penrose, who sees a link between his caring, wasn’t ridiculous at all. her back injury, she had been unable to
mother’s work documenting the mur- exercise. “You know I had to be really
derous horror of Nazi Germany and Winslet radiates energy, swears eas- fucking brave about letting my body
the nationalist invective being invoked ily, laughs easily, likes to tell a good be its softest version of itself and not
by populist political leaders today. “We story and will jump up from her seat hiding from that,” she said. In another
are never going to get anywhere in to mime out the particulars: “I always scene she wears a bikini top. “And
stopping these things from happening have to act everything out!” Self- believe me,” Winslet said, rolling her
if we lie about them,” he said. “What I deprecating as she is, she’s also famous eyes, “people amongst our own team
wanted in the film really was to show for scrubbing her face of makeup and would say, ‘You might just want to sit
Lee’s commitment to the truth.” not shying away from nudity onscreen. up a bit.’ And I’d go, ‘Why? [Because
117
of ] the bit of flesh you can see? No,
that’s the way it’s going to be!’”
It’s not easy to maintain self-worth
in the face of stereotypes of beauty,
and Winslet has learned to ignore the
white noise of media opprobrium. “I
think it probably stems from having
been subjected to the most awful
scrutiny and judgment, and, actually,
I would go so far as to say bullying,
from mainstream media when I was
in my 20s,” Winslet told me.
This is perhaps why she hasn’t read
a review since she was 21. Nor is she
on social media—and she’s kept her
children away from it too. Winslet’s
son Bear knows he’s not allowed an
iPhone. “But I’m not in any way smug
about it,” she said. “I do see how it’s a
very difficult negotiation for parents.”
This is a subject she tackled in I
Am Ruth, a British TV production
f rom last year that she starred in
with her daughter, Mia Threapleton,
and her son, known professionally
as Joe Anders. It’s a devastatingly
realistic drama—most of the dia-
logue improvised—about a daughter
spiraling into shame and self-harm
as a result of online trolling. When
Winslet accepted her BAFTA for best
actress, she used the occasion to make
an impassioned speech reaching out
to “families who feel that they are held
hostage by the perils of the online
world.” Several times during our
conversations, Winslet, frustrated by
issues of unfairness, raised her voice
or put her fists on the table.
From W inslet ’s crisp English
accent people might think she’s posh
or a classically trained drama school
actor, but in fact she grew up one of
four children “in a very warm, lov-
ing home that was utterly chaos, not
enough space for anyone. We were
always forgetting to feed the rabbit.”
Her father was an actor who took
odd jobs to make ends meet. Wins-
let and her siblings were eligible for
free school meals (she well remembers
the snide remarks in the lunch queue),
and she left school at 16 and worked
in a café, barely able to afford train
fare into London for auditions.
When she reads personal stories
of economic struggles, she told me,
she often sends money. “Anything
that smacks of social injustice, a per-
son not being able to do something
just because C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 6 2
118
SE T D ESI G N : M A RY H OWA RD ST U DI O.
TAKING R&R
Winslet wears a
PRO DUC E D BY A L ST U D IO.
Loro Piana shirt.

Louis Vuitton
pants. In this story:
hair and wigs,
Ivana Primorac;
makeup, Lisa
Eldridge. Details,
see In This Issue.
Basic Instincts
COAT CHECK
Options, options:
As she unfurls
a handsome wool
toggle coat from
Prada (prada.com)—
the picture of prim
practicality—model
Raquel Zimmermann
tries an equally
fetching Balenciaga
trench (balenciaga
.com) on for size.
Shoes from Church’s.
Fashion Editor:
Alex Harrington.
Minimalists, rejoice!
Elegantly unfussy shapes
come with a playful
sense of possibility this
fall. Photographed
by Mark Borthwick.
TWO OF A KIND
A silhouette like this
one—at once perfectly
rigorous and subtly
sinuous—is worth
investing in several
times over. Stella
McCartney bustier
dress; stellamccartney
.com. The Row bag.
On the mannequin:
Alexander McQueen
dress; alexander
mcqueen.com.
RED NOTICE
A scarlet
Ferragamo coat
(ferragamo.com)
and dual-toned,
midlength Loewe
dress (loewe
.com) offer two
bright ideas.
123
SIMPLE PLEASURES
It’s all right here in
black and white:
The very simplest
color palette doesn’t
remotely lack for
magic. Zimmermann—
pictured with her
stylish young friend
On Nakamura-
Dangerfield—wears a
boxy wool coat and
fleece pants from
The Row; therow.com.
On the mannequin:
a Gucci bustier
dress; gucci.com.
125
CLOSE
ENCOUNTERS
Zimmermann
wears a sculptural
strapless dress from
Loewe; loewe.com.
SHEER
NECESSITIES
at front: A black
plissé Hermès dress
(Hermès boutiques)
and trompe l’oeil
stocking boots from
Balenciaga delight
in ideas of transparency
and opacity. at rear:
A Dolce & Gabbana
coat (select Dolce &
Gabbana boutiques)
and bag from The Row
opt for a stealthier chic.
127
MIX AND MATCH
A joyful jumbling of
colors and lengths adds
up to one exuberantly
expressive Victoria
Beckham dress; victoria
beckham.com.
128
CRÈME DE LA CRÈME
Zimmermann goes for
the straight, narrow,
and utterly undeniable
in a white crepe Khaite
dress; khaite.com.
FEELING IT
Minimalist restraint
meets a casual
extravagance in
Zimmermann’s
textured Jil Sander
by Lucie and
Luke Meier top
(jilsander.com)
and frayed knit skirt
from Elena Velez
(elenavelez.com).
E XECU T I V E P RO DUC E R: ZO E TO MLI N SO N .
P RO DUCE D BY BE N MI LLE R BI BESCO.
BUNDLE OF JOY
Nakamura-Dangerfield
wears a Makié dress;
makieclothier.com. In this
story: hair, Jimmy Paul;
makeup, Dick Page.
Details, see In This Issue.
131
Karine Jean-Pierre
has made history
as President Biden’s
White House press
secretary. She’s
The
also made waves.
Mattie Kahn reports.
Photographed by
Norman Jean Roy.
Hot Seat
TRUE GRIT
“She’s prepared
her entire career for
the moment she’s
in right now,” says
Valerie Jarrett
of Jean-Pierre, in
Gabriela Hearst,
photographed
at the White House.
Sittings Editor:
Solange Franklin.
n June 2019, Karine Jean- (some $25,000, despite a partial
I
Pierre was moderating a scholarship)—kept her feelings in
forum for presidential candi- check. “Will Marjorie Taylor Greene,
dates when a protester rushed who had $183,000 of her own busi-
the stage. It’s a famous video: ness loans forgiven, vote to deny debt
Finding herself seated be- relief to the 92,000 student bor-
tween the oncoming protester and rowers she represents?” Jean-Pierre
then senator Kamala Harris, Jean- wondered aloud. “Will Representa-
Pierre leapt to her feet, raised a hand, tive Vern Buchanan, who had over
and turned her body to face him—a $2.3 million of business loans for-
five-foot-two one-woman blockade given, vote to deny student debt relief
to the future vice president of the for 95,000 of his own constituents?”
United States. On Morning Joe later President Biden has emphasized
that week, cohost Willie Geist mar- to Jean-Pierre that when she speaks,
veled at her courage: “I know who I her audience is as much the American
want moderating my next panel.” people as it is the press corps, and so
At the time, Jean-Pierre, who had that afternoon she went on: “To the
worked in the Obama administration, more than 40 million eligible student
was the chief public affairs officer for borrowers who are eagerly waiting
MoveOn.org and a political pundit.
Her next moves would be swift: In
2020 she joined the Biden campaign A quality of
as a senior adviser and later became
Harris’s chief of staff. About a year directness—blunt,
and a half into the Biden presidency, with a touch
she was introduced as the White
House press secretary—the first Black of compassion—
person and first openly gay person to is Jean-Pierre’s
hold the position.
Jean-Pierre is a realist. For all the currency at the
history she’s made in her career, she briefing podium
expects she will best be remembered
for her fracas with the protester that
went viral. “It’s going to be on my to learn about the fate of their debt LINES DRAWN
tombstone,” she says, with cheery res- relief, I urge you to tune in to today’s Letting her own opinions slip
ignation. The day after the onstage vote to watch which Republican law- into the record, says Jean-
Pierre, pictured here in her
clash, Harris called Jean-Pierre to see makers shamelessly vote against debt office in a Victor Glemaud
how she was holding up. “How I was relief for you—after having their own dress, “is not what I signed
doing!” Jean-Pierre remembers. “I said, loans forgiven.” up for.” In this story: hair,
Dior Sovoa; makeup, Kym Lee.
‘Please get security.’ She was like, ‘I’m Details, see In This Issue.
calling to check in on you!’” But Jean- Jean-Pierre never planned to work
Pierre repeated herself. Get security. in politics. Born in Martinique to
That quality of directness—blunt, Haitian parents, she moved with her
with a touch of compassion—is mother and father to Paris as a baby,
Jean-Pierre’s currency at the briefing and then to New York, where relatives how to read and write, but “how to
podium. She meets the White House had settled in Queens Village. Later, articulate emotions, how to speak.”
press corps almost daily—favoring they landed in Long Island. Her sis- When her sister took dance classes,
bright colors and bold eye shadow ter, Edrine, was born when she was Jean-Pierre handled drop-off and
when she does—and, while she’s seven. Her brother, Chris, arrived not pickup. It was about this time that her
more reserved than some of her pre- long after. (Her parents also had a parents started handing her bills to
decessors and less likely to respond to son named Donald, who died before decipher. “I was like the third parent,”
provocation with a social media–ready Jean-Pierre was born.) Jean-Pierre she says. “I had big responsibilities.”
retort, she has sharpened her own couldn’t read until the third grade. But fulfilling those obligations
technique: disarm with a smile, then Her parents—consumed with mul- meant learning to compartmental-
lay out the facts at hand. tiple jobs—had assumed she would ize. In her memoir, Moving Forward:
In one example, when House learn in school. She did not. A Story of Hope, Hard Work, and the
Republicans earlier this year pre- Determined to help her siblings Promise of America, Jean-Pierre
pared to block the president’s plan avoid the same fate, Jean-Pierre set writes of silence as a tool of survival.
on student-debt relief, Jean-Pierre, up a classroom in the basement when She records instances of childhood
49—who has been open about the she was in middle school. Her brother sexual abuse at the hands of a cousin.
debt she accrued in graduate school remembers her teaching him not just She didn’t tell her parents. (A relative
134
noticed how she flinched when the Track proved the perfect sport for But her MCAT scores were terrible
cousin walked in the room, and put someone looking to outrun her real- and it was clear that medical school
a stop to it.) She describes a suicide ity. In high school, Jean-Pierre joined was not in her future. She was still liv-
attempt in college: Her sister found the team. She became a standout ing with her parents, with no idea of
her in her car with the exhaust on and cross-country runner, too, breaking what she would do next. Washington
shook her awake. Jean-Pierre threw records on Long Island. Her vegetari- brims with driven, sometimes Machi-
her urine-soaked khakis in the trash anism baffled her meat-eating parents avellian strivers. Jean-Pierre spent the
and never discussed the incident— and she briefly considered becoming first half of her 20s taking temp jobs.
or what drove her to it—with her a nun, the better to evade any ques- She worked for a spell at Estée Lauder.
parents. She had known she was tion of romantic attraction. After She took a gig in conservation, pro-
gay since childhood, but the book graduation, she enrolled in the New tecting the nests of piping plovers.
recounts only one agonizing attempt York Institute of Technology—a pri- In 2001 she enrolled at the School
at coming out to her mother. (“I vate university on Long Island—and of International and Public Affairs
could see the revulsion on her face,” loaded up with pre-med classes. She at Columbia University, thinking she
Jean-Pierre writes.) Decades would trained as a volunteer firefighter, an might pursue environmental studies.
pass before she and Jean-Pierre dis- experience that would prove useful in The week she began classes, the Twin
cussed it again. her eventual career in rapid response. Towers fell. C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 6 2
135
n a warm Wednesday
O
morning in Man-
hattan’s South Street
Seaport, as a throng
of little gir ls and
their mothers swells
outside a Barbie-themed restaurant
pop-up serving rainbow-sprinkle
pancakes, another group has gathered
in the service of very different IP.
Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells are
inspecting the letterpress at Bowne
& Co. Stationers, inside the South
Street Seaport Museum, where res-
ident printers still operate machines
from the 19th and early 20th centu-
ries. (Bowne & Co. itself dates back
to 1775.) This month, more than a
decade after starring in The Book of
Mormon, the Tony-nominated actors
return to Broadway in Gutenberg! The
Musical!, written by Scott Brown and
Anthony King. The show centers on
Bud (Gad) and Doug (Rannells), two
friends staging a frantic run-through
of their musical about—you guessed
it!—Johannes Gutenberg, inventor
of the movable-type printing press.
A special kind of comic chaos ensues.
“Why don’t we do the show here?”
Gad asks, poking around Bowne &
Co.’s charming storef ront, where
paper gifts and tote bags live along-
side ancient printing paraphernalia.
“We’d sell 10 tickets,” Rannells quips
in response. “We’d be sold out!”
Banter like this—and the odd belted
lyric from Sweeney Todd—continues
throughout the morning, as the two
gamely change setups and juggle the
props that will be used for their Vogue
portrait. They have, it’s clear, not one
clue what to do with a tray of metal
letters or a large wooden mallet (at
one point, Gad swings at Rannells’s
knee like a doctor with a plexor), but
that’s kind of the idea: In the show,
Bud and Doug don’t have a cast, set,
costumes, or a lot of historical con-
text to work with, much less an actual TWO BY TWO
printing press. It’s just the two of from near rhght:
them—plus their pianist, Charles— Andrew Rannells
wears Ami Paris and
doing their level best with some Bode. Josh Gad
empty boxes, a stack of trucker hats wears Todd Snyder.
(each one duly labeled “Gutenberg,” Grooming for Rannells,
“ Woman,” “Drunk #1,” “Another Melissa DeZarate;
grooming for Gad,
Woman,” etc.), and their own star- Jessica Ortiz. Details,
tling commitment to the work. Those see In This Issue.
who know The Book of Mormon, or Fashion Editor:
even just Rannells’s spirited perfor- Michael Philouze.
mance at the C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 6 4
136
GOOD PRESS
Gutenberg!—a musical
about the inventor
of the printing press—
might just be the
unlikeliest thing to
hit Broadway in
years, and also the
most delightful.
Marley Marius meets
its champions.
Photographed by
Stefan Ruiz.
RAISING
HIS PROFILE
Since taking the
reins two years
ago, Pieter Mulier
has been putting
his own mark on
the house of Alaïa.
ALAÏA ANEW
FOLLOWING THE LEGENDARY
AZZEDINE ALAÏA SEEMED ALL BUT
IMPOSSIBLE. THEN PIETER MULIER CAME
ALONG. NATHAN HELLER MEETS A
DESIGNER WITH AN EYE FOR THE PAST—
AND A VISION FOR THE FUTURE.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANTON CORBIJN.
IN THE MOMENTS before the start of view but by his skill in managing
of Alaïa’s ready-to-wear show in large teams. When he was picked to
Paris this past summer, the house’s succeed the Tunisian-born designer
creative director since 2021, Pieter Azzedine Alaïa, who died in 2017
Mulier, stood out among the team after reimagining the language of
for his qualities of ease and calm. He body-conscious tailoring, many won-
spent some minutes chatting with dered whether Mulier could finesse
his backstage visitors. He wandered the transition, teasing forth the
over to the makeup room, found he brand’s fragile magic while pushing
wasn’t needed, and sat on a curb with his own fresher vision through. “Alaïa
the model Julia Nobis to smoke Marl- felt so specific to Azzedine and to that
boro Golds and talk. Shows weren’t time that it seemed it was going to be
always so comfortable—his last one, impossible for it to happen again,” says
held within his own apartment, in Julianne Moore, who found herself
Antwerp, had driven him into a rejoining the collection waiting lists
nervous state—but this one took its after Mulier’s debut in the summer of
rhythm from the summer evening and 2021. “Pieter managed to do it.”
announced Mulier’s advancement to In person, Mulier is tall and skinny,
a master’s station. The runway would with a boyish whoosh of hair just
be the Passerelle Léopold-Sédar- graying and a teenager’s spidery way
Senghor, spanning the Seine between of dangling his forearms from cocked
the Tuileries and the Musée d’Orsay. elbows. He dresses most days in
This bridge was one of the city’s quiet white or black sweatshirts and jeans
marvels of engineering, and, as the (no logos) and leads his house in the
sun aligned with a western breeze, spirit of a team captain, calling plays
it exemplified the warm and precise from the field and cheering colleagues
refinement that has given Mulier’s on. At a fitting two days earlier, he
work at Alaïa its magnetic appeal. “I kept the show music cranked up and
try to keep a little bit of the family struck prattling conversations with the
aspect of Alaïa in the studio,” Mulier models as they entered. “When you’re
BOURSE DU T RAVA IL C L A RA ZE T K I N , BO B IG N Y.
says. “Everything is on a human scale.” waiting for your fitting, all you hear is
At 44, Mulier is at once a new ‘Wow!’ and clapping,” says the model
arrival in the firmament of creative Élise Crombez, who grew up half an
directors—Alaïa is the first house hour from Mulier. “It was as if every
he has led—and one of fashion’s girl was specifically chosen for her
ensconced steady hands. For 16 years outfit—you felt like a person, not just
he served as Raf Simons’s deputy and a number walking down the runway.”
sounding board, moving along with Mulier himself wears the same
his mentor’s career as it rose toward white atelier coat as his staffers
ever-larger labels and distinguishing backstage, an egalitarian gesture that
himself not only by his creative point matches his straightforward manner:
139
He is Flemish, and can seem as buoy-
ant and pellucid as a glass of summer
ale. His approach to the craft, though,
is rarely so simple. Even beyond his
workday, Mulier haunts galleries and
artists’ studios, compiles scrapbooks
and archives, and picks apart garments
like old radios to understand the way
they work. Where some designers
operate as inward-turned iconoclasts,
he sees his fashion as one offering in
the long, shared practice of forming
a point of view about ambitious art.
“I still think fashion should propose
something, say something—because
it’s part of culture,” Mulier says.
The theme of the bridge show,
inspired by Mulier’s fascination with
the clock of the Musée d’Orsay, is
time. (To start a collection, he likes to
say, he needs only a shoe and a venue.)
He saw reclaiming time as urgent
in an increasingly ’grammed-and-
forgotten fashion world. Unlike most
houses, Alaïa still shows only twice
a year; in the ’90s, Mulier observes,
Azzedine was known to cancel shows
at the last minute if he deemed the
work unready. If taking time was
Alaïa’s superpower, Mulier thought,
why not celebrate that on the runway?
When he thought about clocks,
he envisioned buttons. “I quite like
the idea that you need time to get
dressed—and you need time to get
undressed,” he says. If the moment
of doing up buttons was one of self-
making, empowerment, their undoing
measured out erotic time. This focus
on the physicality of clothing and
the body was itself very Alaïa, Mulier
thought. His invitation package to the
show had been unconventional—a
three-legged folding chair that guests
were told to bring with them. Now
the grandees of the fashion world are
arrayed along the bridge in their make-
shift seating, which seems a statement
about transience and environmen-
tal use, but also an impish gesture
of democratization. “I love the idea
of the fashion crowd walking with a
camping chair through the most bour-
geois area of Paris,” Mulier says.
A breeze comes up; the garments
dance. There are autumn coats and
hoods and hats paired with sheer
vinyl skirts and dresses. There are
translucent plissé pieces in black and
beautifully tailored white. There are
haunting yellowy pinks and blues and
140
PASSE R E LL E L ÉO PO LD S ÉDA RD SE N G HO R, PA R IS 7 E R.
GRAPHIC,
NOVEL
from far left:
Model Awar Odhiang
wears an Alaïa
dress and belt.
Model Victoria Fawole
wears an Alaïa dress
and cuffs. All at
maison-alaia.com.
Fashion Editor:
Alex Harrington.
RAF SIMONS CAME UP AFTER THE EXAM
TO OFFER MULIER HIS CARD. “HE SAID,
‘I DON’T THINK YOU’RE AN ARCHITECT;
I THINK YOU’RE A FASHION DESIGNER’ ”
earth tones, blouses with high collars a tight, close-fitted four-person on their chairs but for the Parisians
and sharp cutouts, corsets, leggings, design team and four small specialty and the tourists who pause—who
trousers cut in the Alaïa silhouette, ateliers—tailoring, draping, knitwear, take the time—to watch before, just
wrapped boots, leather suspend- and leather. like the models, heading on their way.
ers, and an exquisite amber-colored At last Crombez appears, against a
vinyl overcoat. Alaïa makes a point of stirring ostinato in low clarinets by the A couple of days later, Mulier is
melding ready-to-wear and couture composer Gustave Rudman, to close back in Antwerp, where he’s lived, FRA N ÇO I S HA L A RD, TH E WOR L D OF I NT ER I ORS, SE PT E MBE R 2023.
into a single retail collection, and its the show. The choice is one of inti- with interruptions, for two decades,
garments are famous for their unusual macy: She and Mulier are nearly the feeling upbeat. “It’s fantastic!” he
construction: They are designed not same age and grew up speaking the exclaims as he heads to lunch. “This
on pattern tables and mannequins but same Flemish dialect. She’s dressed in guy put his restaurant in the ugliest
directly on the human body, built like an exquisite black high-neck translu- surroundings.”
houses from the inside out with pro- cent dress with a band of low, lean The restaurant, Veranda, faces a
prietary dynamic-tailoring techniques. ruffles at the hips, black heels with concrete train overpass. The founder is
Many wearers suggest they’d know an A-shaped cutout at the toe, and his friend the chef Davy Schellemans,
the feel of an Alaïa dress with their a belt of polished gold. Passersby on whom Mulier has repeatedly enlisted
eyes closed. “They hug you,” Crombez the Quai Voltaire have gathered to to cook for Alaïa’s most honored
explains. “It grabs you,” Mulier agrees. watch, hanging entranced over the guests. Mulier loves amazing things
“They don’t just hang. In French we river’s high embankment. The fash- nested just slightly off the beaten
say tenu—you’re held together.” ion show has bled into an easy Sunday path, greatness that doesn’t advertise
He takes this also as a mission state- evening in Paris, building up a specta- itself but attracts a devout community
ment for the house, which employs cle not just for the fashion observers of people who bother to take the time
142
DESIGN FOR LIVING was a tailor,” Mulier says, the key, he woman, he thought; he brought them
opposite page: Steven Shearer’s Dogpile, thinks, to the work’s blend of femi- out. Jackets had a way of ending up
2019 (left), and Poems, 2005 (right), ninity and strength. “He brought ease more sculptural than comfortable, so
in Mulier’s Antwerp home. above: A tailor’s
dummy in his studio. right: A Georges to sex appeal—which is unbelievable.” he opened up and modernized their
Jouve vase, Castiglioni lamp, Tim Breuer This sex was never compromising; lines. He added product categories
painting, and Gaetano Pesce chair. it was French. at lower price points—swimwear,
Photographed by François Halard.
By the end of Azzedine’s life, eyewear, underwear—to welcome
Mulier thinks, the nectar had soured. younger consumers. And he tried to
to look. A waiter—Mulier knows the “Alaïa became a little bit the vesti- bring the sexy back.
staff by name—brings tiny mugs of aire of the bourgeoisie,” he says. “I After pecking at a strawberr y
cool broth flavored with summer remember going to art fairs and every sorbet—“Fan-tastic!”—Mulier heads
tomato, handmade cauliflower ravi- gallerist was dressed in Alaïa—the outside to light a cigarette, then climbs
oli served with pink and gray Belgian same dress with the same shoe. It’s into the back of a black minivan that
shrimp, and morsels of local chicken never good if you become the syn- ferries him around. (He recently
dressed with chickpea cream and fer- onym of ‘good taste.’ ” The brand had acquired a 1978 Porsche 911, but the
mented honey sauce. lost the young and restless. “Kids van life gives him opportunities to
In Mulier’s view, he explains while didn’t know what Alaïa was,” Mulier work through his perpetually over-
devouring his chicken, Alaïa’s golden says. “The mother was wearing it; the flowing WhatsApp queue: Every-
age was the period extending from daughter was not.” body seems to have his number.)
the ’80s to the ’90s—the period when It became clear to Mulier that his Mulier usually comes to Paris for the
Azzedine created a new language that mandate was to wave away the brand’s workweek and returns to Antwerp for
both revealed and mystified a wom- accrued perfume of stodgy money and the weekend, by train or by car.
an’s curves. Azzedine blended light, correctness and get back the young, Whenever the van was on hire for
classically feminine materials with daring spirit that had made Azzedine an Alaïa job, the driver placed a huge
tougher ones, like leather. There was a revolutionary and sensation. Seeing ashtray in the back seat.
knitwear tailored like a jacket, at once the house’s strengths, he began to On his way home, Mulier stops off
tidy, professional, and sensual: a reve- try to isolate and correct for its tics. at the extensively renovated Royal
lation at the time, and one of the most Shoulders and arms were cut much Museum of Fine Arts to marvel, as he
lasting profiles of the ’80s. “Azzedine too tightly for the contemporary sometimes does, at Flemish painting.
143
double take. “It was a completely dif-
“ALAÏA FELT SO SPECIFIC TO AZZEDINE THAT ferent way of thinking,” he says.
IT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE FOR IT TO HAPPEN As Mulier remembers it, Simons
AGAIN,” SAYS JULIANNE MOORE. “PIETER came up after the exam to offer Mulier
his card. “He said, ‘I don’t think you’re
MANAGED TO DO IT” an architect; I think you’re a fashion
designer,’ ” Mulier recalls. “I said, ‘No,
I don’t think so.’ He said, ‘I think you
“My favorite one is that one,” he during the week, he learned Latin and are.’” Simons proposed that Mulier
says, pausing before Rubens’s trip- Greek and the basics of art appreci- visit his atelier in Antwerp—an invita-
tych Epitaph of Nicolaas Rockox and ation; he made friends with whom tion that Mulier recalls answering with
His Wife Adriana Perez. Why? “It’s he remains close. Mulier describes polite indifference. “Then my girl-
small,” he says. “I quite like Rubens himself, during these years, as “very friend said, ‘Oh, yes, you’re going,’” he
when it’s small.” classic”: a happy, straight-edged pro- explains. Three months later, knowing
Not far away is a gallery filled with vincial Northern European schoolboy almost nothing about fashion, Mulier
the vivid, dreamlike expressionist can- with a happy, straight-edged future. showed up in Antwerp to begin the
vases of James Ensor. “He’s one of my He was in the Boy Scouts until the age internship that changed his life.
favorite painters,” Mulier offers, slow- of 19, at which point, at the sugges-
ing before The Skeleton Painter, which tion of his parents, he went to law col- The city of Antwerp is at once human-
shows a deathly skeleton behaving as lege in Leuven, rooming with boarding scaled and expansive, encompassing
an artist. He adds, offhandedly, “He school chums who’d done the same. the second-largest harbor in Europe.
was actually born where I am from.” Yet the study of law failed to excite Its old center extends from squares
Mulier grew up in Ostend, a seaside him, while architecture did (he liked of gorgeous Flemish town houses;
resort town in west Belgium that he the minimalists: Álvaro Siza, Peter its more recently rebuilt regions have
describes as “surreal.” “They always Zumthor, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas), an industrial air, traced with green. In
say that people in Ostend are very so after two years he switched to 2014, Mulier bought the penthouse of
creative—and a bit crazy,” he says. His architecture school, at the Institut the Riverside Tower, a concrete mod-
extended family was from Bruges; his Saint-Luc, in Brussels. It proved a ernist icon designed by Léon Stynen
father was a doctor, and Ostend, with revelation. Brussels was the largest and Paul De Meyer and completed
its wealth of health spas and casinos, city in which Mulier had ever lived, in 1972, on the city’s “left bank”—
needed personnel. Mulier has an older and the edgier creative people he met a parky residential flatland that Le
brother and a sister, and describes him- there thrilled him. Corbusier once tried to lay out as an
self as a “very social, very easy” child, “It was the beginning of my world ideal neighborhood. Mulier spent two
albeit one without broad skills. “My becoming bigger,” he says. Muli- years renovating the apartment, which
brother was a big football player, tennis er’s urbane girlfriend at the time, at had been De Meyer’s own home, with
player, rugby player—every ball he got pains to broaden his taste, led him the help of the architect Glenn Ses-
in his hand,” Mulier says. “My father through a world of art. “She took tig and the landscaper Martin Wirtz,
was frustrated that I didn’t have that.” me to every gallery, all the museums, who designed him a distinctive roof-
Instead, he gravitated toward crafts, and fashion stores.” The only living top garden based on ivy, irises, grasses,
P RO DUC ED BY PA RA M OU R P RO DUCT I ON . PASSE REL LE LÉO P OLD SÉ DA RD S EN G H OR , PAR IS 7ER .

drawing, piano lessons, drama class. designer Mulier had ever heard of and trees. And he filled it with new
He revered his mother’s father, a shirt- then was Dries Van Noten, but his art: Tim Breuer, Bendt Eyckermans,
maker on commission to the Belgian girlfriend had pictures of the newest Steven Shearer, and much more. (“I
monarchy, who managed three hun- Raf Simons collections on her walls. think I prefer artists to fashion peo-
dred seamstresses. “I always thought They were students together. ple: There’s something more direct
that he was an artist more than a One design course required a final in what they do,” he says.) A favor-
businessman,” Mulier says. “He spoke project on the theme of “survival.” ite word of Mulier’s is extreme, and
seven languages. He lived in modern- Simons had agreed to sit on the exam the penthouse, which looks out both
ist houses.” To the young Mulier, this jury. “You had a lot of the people in on downtown Antwerp and on the
urbane shirtmaker seemed the height school making, I don’t know, jewelry waterfront, is proudly that. Every
of worldliness, a figure steeped in art rings so that if they got attacked in species of plant in the garden, Mulier
and bigger dreams. “What I learned the street they could knock a person says, was chosen because it had sur-
from him was that you can do what- down, stuff like that,” Simons recalls. vived the explosion at Hiroshima.
ever you want in life,” he says. Yet it Mulier interpreted the prompt quite When he held an Alaïa show here,
never occurred to him to follow his differently and showed up wearing on a chilly day last January, models
grandfather into the garment trade. a bodysuit that would supposedly paraded through his library, his office,
At 11, Mulier went off to the ensure survival of any job interview: and his bedroom.
Abdijschool van Zevenkerken, a Strapped into a one-piece garment, “It’s like an island, because we’re so
Benedictine institution outside with no shirts to come untucked or high,” Mulier says, glancing now in
Bruges—his uncle was a Catholic flies to come undone, the idea went, a satisfaction at the river and the city
bishop—that he describes as being job candidate was freed from unwit- spread below. “It’s a little world outside
“like Harry Potter.” Boarding there ting self-sabotage. Simons did a the world.” C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 6 5
144
CLOSE COVER
Model Jeanne Cadieu
wears an Alaïa coat, jacket,
skirt, and earrings. In this
story: hair, Shingo Shibata;
makeup, Kanako Takase
for Addiction Tokyo.
Details, see In This Issue.
KEEP IT CLEAN
Paloma Elsesser
wears Tory Burch.
Hair, Sondrea “Dre”
Demry-Sanders;
makeup, Yumi
Lee. Details, see
In This Issue.
Fashion Editor:
Max Ortega.
Sensitivity
t is a woman’s duty to use all Zendaya, Sofia Richie, and Euphoria “I specialize in problematic skin,” she
I
the means in her power to star Sydney Sweeney are all sensitive- advises. “I talk to my clients about
beautify and preserve her identifying, while Marisa Tomei one- their diet and lifestyle, and we’ll work
complexion,” wrote the Irish upped the lot when she told Vogue she on a home routine.” I start using her
dancer Lola Montez in her has a “sensitive system.” We are all, it products—a gel face wash that takes
delightful 1858 guidebook, appears, snowflakes, each special in its time to form suds, and a light
The Arts of Beauty. How closely, but our own way. exfoliant serum—and they have a
misguidedly, have I followed this Our skin can become sensitive due gateway effect.
advice! From the time I’ve been able to an array of triggers—cosmetic Over the coming days, I set off on
to roam the drugstore unsupervised, ingredients, pollution, extreme UVs, a tender bender. Ren Clean Skin-
I have been engaged in a battle for or TikTok-inspired DIY bathroom- care’s Evercalm Overnight Recovery
beauty. In my youthful zeal for perfect sink chemical peels. The damage is Balm melts on my fingers. I dig into
skin, I leaned upon scrubs and heavy- to the skin barrier; when defenseless, the tinted balms that anchor Bobbi
duty toners, most of which chafed our outermost layer stands no chance Brown’s “clean no-makeup” line
and stung—to my great satisfaction. against irritants. “Imagine a sheet Jones Road. I slather on French phar-
When acne came for me in college, I with a high thread count versus a macist Natacha Bonjout’s Le Balm,
armed myself with prescription-grade lower thread count, or a canvas bag a solution that smells faintly of roses
gels and capsules that blitzed my spots versus a plastic CVS bag,” says Man- and comes in an ivory tin that looks
and made my skin flake. A fair price hattan plastic surgeon Lara Devgan, like a chubby macaron. Every time
to pay, I reasoned. Recent decades MD, giving me a crash course on the I apply a dollop of Biography ’s
featured laser treatments and power- states of skin barriers, and the myriad Long June, a silky chamomile- and
house potions I one-click purchased ways we can wreak havoc on them. camellia-seed-packed oil formu-
as I brewed my morning coffee. Welsh-born aesthetician Sofie lation, my face feels as though it’s
But amid the ambient noise about Pavitt, a former designer for Tory sipping a mug of herbal tea. I put
skin sensitivity, I began to won- Burch, once took regular trips to in a preorder for Lesse’s moisturizer,
der: Might it be time to start eas- Korea and learned everything she whose key ingredient is Kakadu plum
ing up? Not long ago, an obsession could about 10-step cleansing rou- extract, known to be a potent yet
with so-called clean beauty had us tines. It was all so elaborate and gentle source of vitamin C.
all fretting about how our potions thrilling! But now, Pavitt says, “I take It all feels divine, and smugly
might be polluting our insides. Now a more minimalist approach,” borne salubrious—but am I going over-
skin sensitivity—the new gluten out in her newly launched skin care board? The dermatologist Shereene
intolerance!—has us setting our sights line—a supertight edit of a mere Idriss, MD, tells me that not every-
on the surface. A new crop of ultra- three products. Pavitt’s Manhattan one needs so radical a refresh. “I just
gentle, if not ultra-simple, products atelier resembles a therapy office. feel like it’s overkill to limit yourself
caters to those prone to itching, sting- from products that might bring you
ing, and inflammation—or who, like better results overall,” she warns.
me, just want something soothing Gentle skin care is the A dose of wisdom comes f rom
after a lifetime of chasing the burn. celebrity makeup artist Gucci West-
Skin sensitivity isn’t an official regime du jour. man, who recently posted a picture of
medical diagnosis, though anywhere Does that mean less is herself that revealed thumbprint-size
from 60 to 70 percent of women say red splotches. “I think it started from
that they suffer from it, and women more? Or creams using overly aggressive active prod-
are stepping forward in droves to and serums galore? ucts,” the 53-year-old tells me. Her
claim the delicate mantle of the cult line, Westman Atelier, is geared
moment. Lila Moss’s sensitive skin Lauren Mechling for the needs of people with skin
played into makeup artist Fara Homi- investigates. sensitivities; its latest Skin Activa-
di’s inspiration for the model’s walk tor serum has 12 ingredients said to
down the runway in barely-there
Photographed by strengthen the moisture barrier. I
makeup for Chloé’s fall 2023 show. Stefan Ruiz. confide that after a lifetime of prod-
uct promiscuity, it’s doubtful I could
ever land on a one-serum solution.
The profusion of gentle giants on my
bathroom counter has been way too
Training
S ET D ES IG N : NO ST UD I O.
tempting, and I’ve been pouncing on

every vial and tube in sight. “It’s okay
to be curious,” Westman tells me, say-
ing she too can weaken in the face of
possibility. “There is a chance that I
might launch something else.” @
147
KICK OFF
Model Irina Shayk (fear
right) wears Giuseppe
Zanotti boots; giuseppe
zanotti.com. Louis
Vuitton pullover. Belt
from The Row. Model
Amber Valletta wears
Alexander McQueen
boots; alexander
mcqueen.com. Victoria
Beckham jacket. at rear,
from left: Eliza Jouin
and Ethan Skaates of the
line dancing group Stud
Country have a stretch.
Fashion Editor:
Max Ortega.
Happy
Feet
The season’s most covetable accessories don’t hang on the
arm, dangle from the ear, or clasp about the neck.
They’re boots—shiny, sparkly, and even plumed, but still
perfectly walkable. Photographed by Alex Webb.
ON THE LEVEL
Short and stompy,
Shayk’s boots
from Jimmy Choo
(jimmychoo.com)
make quick work of
grounding a very lively
Tory Burch dress—
while Valletta’s Maison
Margiela (maison
margiela.com) boots
are a complement
and counterpoint to
her Givenchy dress.
NEUTRAL
TERRITORY
These sculptural,
almost witchy
boots from Dior
(Dior boutiques)
are layered with
a quintessential
trench and
streamlined skirt,
both from The Row.
151
As a flock of
TUFT STUFF
Country scoots
flight in feathery
boots; Valentino
her, Shayk takes
dancers from Stud
and stomps behind
boutiques. Miu Miu

Valentino Garavani
tops, skirt, and tights.

PRO DUC E D BY BOO M PRODUCT I ON S. SE T D ES I G N: M IL A TAYLO R-YOU N G.
MOV E M EN T D IR ECTO RS: SE A N MO N AG H AN A ND BA I LEY SA LI SBURY O F ST UD COU N T RY.
PHOTOG RA PH E D BY A L E X W EB B O F M AG N UM P HOTOS. LOCAT I ON : I NDUST RY C I T Y, B RO OK LY N .
SILVER BELLES
Shayk wears a pair of
boots, dress, bra,
top, and skirt, all from
Bottega Veneta;
bottegaveneta.com.
Valletta wears Givenchy
boots; givenchy.com.
Loewe dress. In this
story: hair, Tamara
McNaughton; makeup,
Dick Page. Details,
see In This Issue.
153
Facing
PHOTO FINISH
Vogue’s Open Casting
class of 2023. top
row, from left: Mars,
Colette Kanza, and
Abrar. middle row:
Mengyao Wang, Cynthia
Machava, and Rayan
El-Mahmoud. bottom
row: Dulmi and
Rania Benchegra.
Fashion Editor:
Poppy Kain.
the World Vogue’s first-ever
global open-casting
initiative gathered
60,000 submissions,
from everywhere
on Earth. Here are
our eight finalists.
Photographed by
Charlotte Wales.
ew things remain as
F
alluring as the stories
of how our most well-
known models were
d i s c o vered : S h al om
Harlow, then 17, was
attending a concert by the Cure in
Toronto; Naomi Campbell, then
15, was window-shopping in Cov-
ent Garden when a modeling scout
approached her; Linda Evangelista,
16, had just lost the Miss Teen Niag-
ara pageant when she was “discov-
ered” by an agent for Elite. Perhaps
most famously, Kate Moss was wait-
ing to board a plane headed back to
her London home after a holiday in
the Bahamas when she caught the
eye of the founder of a new model-
ing agency, Storm. A year later, the
photographer Corinne Day found
her photo in a drawer at the agency
and saw in her a reflection of where
culture was headed—away from the
glamazon women that dominated the
late 1980s and into a beauty that was
more natural, more real—and Moss
became a global icon.
155
The possibility that stardom could values and what’s happening in the Moro and Samuel Ellis Scheinman,
be lurking just around the corner has world are equally important. This past the founders of DM Casting.
fed fashion fantasies for decades. May, Vogue launched Open Casting, a The eight finalists you will meet
These days, discoveries are more global modeling initiative on an enor- on these pages come f rom Accra
likely to take place on social media mous scale aimed at discovering new and Marrakech, Tokyo and Paris,
than in the street (in 2015, legend- archetypes and new personalities that Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Henan
ary makeup artist Pat McGrath cast reflect the world we live in. Prospec- province, and London. “We’ve done
a then unknown Paloma Elsesser tive models—with or without agency modeling competitions in the past,
after coming across her Instagram representation—were encouraged and the results have been lovely,”
account)—a thrilling evolution that to send in their photos, and within Scheinman says, “but having both this
has nonetheless disrupted an entire three weeks we received more than massive scale and the specific creative
industry, particularly as definitions of 60,000 submissions. identity that Vogue brings to projects
beauty and the very notion of what The arduous but enviable task of thrilled us.”
a model can or should look like have going through every photo and video On a warm Wednesday in July, Big
exploded in recent years. was undertaken by our judging com- Sky Studios in North London was
Today, physical beauty is only part mittee, which included Vogue editors filled with an electric energy. “Having
of what it takes to be a successful f rom around the world; industry all of us together—it felt like a close-
model—a strong sense of self, an professionals including Instagram’s knit community of dream-chasers,”
ability to multitask, and a willingness director of fashion partnerships, Eva says Rayan El-Mahmoud, a model
to speak up and speak out about one’s Chen; Elsesser; and Piergiorgio del f rom Accra, Ghana. “We laughed
156
TURNING POINT
Machava wears an
intricately articulated
Versace minidress;
versace.com.
WINNING
ATTITUDE
Mars wears a Marc
Jacobs dress;
bergdorfgoodman
.com. In this story:
hair, Shingo Shibata;
makeup, Kanako
Takase for Addiction
Tokyo. Details,
see In This Issue.
“Having all of us together—it felt like a close-knit community
of dream-chasers,” says Rayan El-Mahmoud
and supported each other.” For turns in front of the camera. “The hopes to become a counselor or ther-
Abrar, a Londoner who graduated music—even all the songs I’d never apist, the lessons learned on set were
P RO DUC ED BY M IN I -T I T LE . SE T D ES I G N: A LI C E KI RK PAT RI C K.
from King’s College with a degree heard before—brought such a cheer- truly priceless. “My favorite part was
in classical studies a week after the ful atmosphere to the shoot,” says when we were all shooting together,”
shoot wrapped, any anxious feelings Mengyao, who arrived from Zhoukou they say. “It reminded me that model-
dissipated as soon as she arrived on City in China’s Henan province. For ing is a skill—and it took a lot of work!”
MOVE ME N T D IR ECTO R: E RI C CH RI ST I SO N .
set. “The main thing that was going Johannesburg’s Cynthia Machava, the It ’s also worth noting that, for
through my mind was whether I was adventure began as soon as her flight some, this work and these skills serve
good enough,” she confesses, “but was booked: She had never been on a a higher purpose. “This wasn’t just
the warmth and kindness radiated by plane before. “When I found out I’d about fulfilling a dream,” says Rania,
everyone gave me a newfound sense made the cut,” she says, “I thought I who grew up in Marrakech, Morocco,
of belief in myself.” was daydreaming.” and flew in from New York. “It was
Music—everything from Afrobeat For Mars, a Los Angeles native a fierce determination to shatter ste-
to R&B and, yes, even Madonna’s who just finished a double major in reotypes and empower us to embrace
“Vogue”—filled the studio and set psychology and women, feminist, and our identities unapologetically.”
the mood for the finalists to take their queer studies from Vassar, and who — -
159
The Get
1
Treats
As spooky season
for crafting a

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161
THE ART OF BEING I’ve done it!” Winslet said. “I’ve actually Jean-Pierre came to see politics as a
LEE MILLER made the film!” remedy. After graduation, she worked
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 118 Now it’s time to take a break. Wins- for New York City Council members.
their parents don’t have the cash in the let typically tries to space out projects In 2007 she headed for North Carolina
bank, drives me crazy.” She pulled back in order to have time at home with her to work for presidential candidate John
from her outrage with a laugh. “I’m sure family, but Lee backed up against film- Edwards and met Jen O’Malley Dillon,
if I wasn’t an actor I would have ended ing The Regime, a satirical political series his deputy campaign manager. When
up being a lawyer.” for HBO in which she stars as the dic- Edwards’s run imploded, O’Malley Dil-
Increasingly, Winslet said, she wants tator of a fictional European country. lon moved to Barack Obama’s staff and
to tell stories that “not just stick in peo- “I’ve just missed Bear’s sports day,” she offered Jean-Pierre a job.
ple’s minds but sometimes even ignite confessed, “and that’s the first of any of “Karine and I grew up together in the
debate and make a difference.” She is my children’s sports days I’ve missed. business,” says O’Malley Dillon, now
a brand ambassador for L’Oréal, this But his dad was there.” She credits Abel President Biden’s deputy chief of staff.
year wiping off her makeup in L’Oréal’s Smith for his constancy and support. “It makes me sound like the oldest lady in
Lessons of Worth campaign and adju- They don’t, she said, have any child care. the world, but when we were first starting
dicating the brand’s third annual Lights “Ned is my absolute partner. He’s out, there weren’t as many women lead-
on Women Award that honors female a huge part of how I can do all this.” ers and there certainly weren’t women of
short-film directors. When we met, she When she travels for shoots, “Ned, Bear, color at the level that Karine is at now.”
had just returned from filming a com- and I move as a little unit.” Almost on Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s
mercial for the beauty house in Paris; she cue, her husband called to ask if she was longtime adviser and now CEO of his
told me she was proud to have convinced going to be able to do the school pickup foundation, has known Jean-Pierre
them to commission a former recipient later that afternoon. “That’s Ned,” said nearly as long. “I think she’s prepared
of the award to direct it. Winslet, “and he’ll still be smiling when her entire career for the moment she’s
Winslet said that attitudes to women I come through the door at the end of in right now,” she says.
in the film industry are changing, but the day having literally just dragged
it is an ongoing fight. Fists firmly on myself through a trench.” These days, Jean-Pierre wakes up
the table again, she railed at how she Winslet’s been learning that maybe, around 5 a.m. Her emails to me have
had been patronized by male executives just maybe, it’s okay to let go of the pre-sunrise timestamps. “I’m not disci-
when trying to raise money for Lee. idea of having to achieve everything. plined at all,” Jean-Pierre says. About
“The men who think you want and need She admitted she rather rejoiced in balance, she means. She’s quite dis-
their help are unbelievably outraging,” the fact that when she was injured she ciplined about work, from which she
she told me. “I’ve even had a director say couldn’t exercise, “that the Peloton ride allows few distractions.
to me: ‘Listen, you do my film and I’ll and 10 minutes of fucking abs” would Jean-Pierre does not watch television.
get your little Lee funded…’ Little! Or have to stop. “In a way it was weirdly When she reads books, it’s bedtime
we’d have potential male investors saying good for me, to go fuck it: I’ve got to go stories. ( Jean-Pierre shares her daugh-
things like: Tell me, why am I supposed easy on myself.” ter, Soleil, with former CNN national
to like this woman?” Too often recently, Winslet said, she correspondent Suzanne Malveaux. It
Winslet acknowledged that the had missed the everyday, ordinary things was Malveaux who initiated the adop-
#MeToo movement had empowered in life. tion process, not long after she and
actresses. She roared her enthusiasm. “Doing the school drop-off and Jean-Pierre started dating. Now Soleil
“Oh, my God! This is the best part. pickup. Going to Waitrose, absolutely is nine, and Jean-Pierre’s mother has
Young actresses now—fuck me—they my favorite thing. Cooking.” She and become a doting, obsessive grandpar-
are unafraid. It makes me so proud. Abel Smith live outside of London in ent.) Jean-Pierre does like musicals, and
And I think, Yes, all the shit flinging, all the South of England. She loves cold- she and Soleil have taken in The Lion
the struggle, all the using my voice for water swimming, “possibly a bit of King, Wicked, and Once Upon a One More
years, often being finger-pointed at and windsurfing,” long walks with her two Time. She still runs when she can, and
laughed at—I don’t give a shit! It was all dogs. “Just being able to watch the telly,” after three miles, her mind starts to clear.
bloody worth it. Because the culture is she said wistfully, “lovely, with a packet Acknowledging that a nanny helps
changing in the way that I couldn’t in my of crisps. Fucking brilliant.” make her schedule possible, Jean-Pierre
wildest dreams have imagined in my 20s.” “What flavor?” I asked her. tells me she pulls into the White House
She told me that weathering the business Winslet grinned. “Salt and vinegar in time for her 8:15 a.m. meeting, which
as a young actress “absolutely toughened every time.” @ Jeff Zients, White House chief of staff,
me up, but the one thing it gave me, hosts in his office. Jean-Pierre sits to one
more than anything else, was a profound The interviews and photography in this side. And when she speaks, he swivels.
understanding of what it means to play a story predated the SAG-AFTRA strike. “While she’s humble, she’s got confi-
character like Lee Miller.” dence in views that might sometimes
W hen I told Winslet the effect THE HOT SEAT run against where the team is heading,”
her performance had on Miller’s son, CONTINUED FROM PAGE 135 he says. “I always pause because she’s
Penrose (“I thought, That’s Lee! It’s Jean-Pierre studied under the urban probably onto something.”
real,” he’d told me. “That’s Mum, it’s policy expert Ester Fuchs, PhD, whose A little after 9 a.m., Jean-Pierre set-
really her”), her voice grew heavy with class told a narrative of American prog- tles behind her semicircular desk in the
compassion. The two became close ress. “The view essentially was, ‘Okay, West Wing. Soleil is responsible for
during the making of Lee. He had been our institutions work,’” Fuchs says. Jean- much of her office decor: a framed letter
her guide and touchstone and, also, she Pierre—one of two Black women in the (“You are the best mom in the world”),
told me, the spur to get Miller right, to course—wasn’t so sure. “She asked the a pink wood-block animal figurine (of
honor her story and her work. “So many hard questions,” Fuchs says. “Her con- indeterminate genus), and a doodle near
tears. It’s huge for him. He’s got clo- cern was always for what we call the two framed photos—one of Jean-Pierre
sure.” The pride is professional. “Even promise of America. She believed in it, with President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden,
as I’m watching Lee, I’m thinking, Oh, but she saw where it wasn’t working.” and one of her with President Obama.

From her perch, Jean-Pierre can see promoting a lie that enslaved people questioned Jean-Pierre’s ability to do her
four TV screens broadcasting news actually benefited from slavery. It’s inac- job. “Are you upset that you came out
networks. More shelves hold stacks curate, insulting. It’s hurtful and prevents to this podium…with incomplete and
of books, from bestsellers like Angela an honest account of our nation’s history.” inaccurate information?” Keith asked.
Duckworth’s Grit and Adam Grant’s ABC News picks up her statement— “And are you concerned that it affects
Originals to Horse Barbie, Geena 600 retweets, 2,500 likes, a quarter of a your credibility up here?”
Rocero’s memoir of growing up as a million views. One media reporter who has covered
trans pageant queen in the Philippines. Jean-Pierre’s tenure tells me that Dem-
Rocero inscribed it to Jean-Pierre Before her current job, Jean-Pierre had ocratic officials have been critical too.
during a visit to the White House. been principal deputy to Jen Psaki— The public needs to understand what
There are memes about eldest sisters, Biden’s first White House press secre- the administration has accomplished, the
and then there are the women who live tary. The two were so close that Psaki reporter points out, “and if you don’t have
them. Jean-Pierre is so organized her got them matching leather briefing someone who’s really able to sell your
pens have their own coral pouch. A thin books, which Jean-Pierre christened message, that hurts the White House.”
film keeps her Dell monitor pristine. “Ebony” and “Ivory.” Several times, The alternate view is that Jean-Pierre
Visible disorder in her office is limited Jean-Pierre filled in for Psaki at the can only say as much as the White
to drooping flowers on a side table. podium or on overseas trips. “I gaggled House counsel allows her to. “I take
Today, she’s wearing a vibrant orange more than Jen did,” Jean-Pierre says, none of it personally,” is all Jean-Pierre
sleeveless shift, with a rose gold Garmin referring to the informal, off-camera will tell me, when I ask her about the
watch strapped to her wrist. When I briefings the White House often holds attacks on her credibility. “I’m repre-
arrive, staffers have already started to fil- on the road. senting the president, so petty is just not
ter in and out of her office in an exercise Still, there was no actual interview on the menu.” She adds (and reporters
her team calls “prep,” but which is better process in the lead-up to her promo- I speak to confirm) that she has devel-
characterized as a mix of college office tion. News had already leaked that Psaki oped good personal relationships with
hours and Talmudic exegesis. would leave for an anchor position at many correspondents—even those
Together with aides, Jean-Pierre takes MSNBC, prompting speculation about with whom she has “intense back-and-
stock of the latest economic signals, the a successor; Jean-Pierre was the obvious forths,” as she puts it.
status of the Presidential Commission front-runner, and after a month, Biden Fuchs—still a mentor—has noticed
on the Supreme Court, and reports of called her into the Oval Office. improvements in the year she’s been
extreme heat across the country—all “It happened fast,” Jean-Pierre says. doing the job. “Her press conferences
with an eye toward fielding questions “The president and I had 20 seconds now are very different than they were
later that day. Some in the press corps together.” “I remember she described when she started,” Fuchs says. “She’s
have complained that Jean-Pierre reads her feeling as shell-shocked,” Psaki says. figured out how to carry herself.”
too much from her binder—that she “It’s a little bit of an out-of-body expe-
sounds rehearsed. That is because she rience when the president of the United Best of luck to would-be blackmailers:
rehearses. In prep, she chooses adjectives States asks you to do something.” Jean-Pierre doesn’t drink coffee or alco-
and verbs with fastidious care. Is defend “You’re kind of like, ‘Were there sup- hol. Psaki calls her viceless. Her snack
the right word to describe Florida gover- posed to be fireworks happening? Mood is roasted seaweed or a morning banana
nor Ron DeSantis’s stance on education music?’ ” Jean-Pierre says now. “There smoothie made al-desko with a gadget
standards that seem to celebrate the skills was none of that.” The press release called the BlendJet.
that enslaved people learned in bondage? came out a few minutes later. Before the briefing starts, she allows
Or perhaps it’s more accurate—and more When Psaki eventually relinquished herself a matcha bubble tea and then rus-
pointed—to put it like this: It demon- her office to Jean-Pierre, she left a note tles up a faded Beautyblender to touch
strates a lack of leadership. It’s an insult. quoting a bit of advice she’d gotten from up her makeup. When she hears a two-
The team has drafted a statement on her own mother: “Keep your feet planted minute warning, she pops a mint, takes
the issue, if Jean-Pierre is open to it. Like on the ground and your spine stiff.” She her watch off, and puts her heels on.
all updates to her binder, it is printed and meant that this is not a job for anyone Briefings last about 45 minutes. This
hole-punched. (She dreams of a briefing made of squishy stuff. “There’s a reason one includes queries about protests in
iPad.) No office in America relies on hole that press secretaries over the years have Israel and a few about GOP maneuvers
punchers like this one does. In the event handed down a physical flak jacket,” says at the border. Afterward, Jean-Pierre
of a national confetti shortage, White Ben LaBolt, White House communica- and her staff have a 10-minute post-
House hole punchers can be requisi- tions director. “You tend to get a lot more mortem. Today, an aide reminds her to
tioned to release strategic reserves. criticism than you do praise.” be firm on questions that deal with pro-
C a n J e a n - P i e r re c om m e n t on Jean-Pierre did get a lot of criti- spective interest rate hikes. She wants
Governor DeSantis from the podium? cism, especially in the beginning. There the team to feel comfortable critiquing
He is a candidate for president, so she were reportedly complaints from the her. “But also, I know if I’ve screwed up,”
has to be careful. A few months ago, press corps, who sniped about Jean- she says. “No one has to tell me.”
Jean-Pierre was slapped with a Hatch Pierre’s recitation of talking points and In fact, when she feels she has truly
Act violation for comments she made expressed genuine exasperation about slipped, she is in the habit of process-
about “MAGA Republicans,” which the her perceived stonewalling on basic ing aloud. Zients has come to expect a
Office of Special Counsel, a govern- questions. Things became particularly pop-in. “She’ll show up to share good
ment watchdog agency, said ran afoul testy in early 2023 when Jean-Pierre was news, which is fun, but also when things
of the federal ban on executive branch pressed on a cache of classified docu- don’t feel quite right,” he says. “She’s
employees participating in campaign ments found at Biden’s Delaware home. open to new ideas, to feedback. You’ll
activity. So, she’s wary. But DeSantis is She seemed to share incomplete infor- see a bunch of people here who think,
also an elected official. mation f rom the podium—so much ‘You know what? I’m under such tre-
In the end, Jean-Pierre criticizes so that NPR reporter Tamara Keith, mendous pressure. I’m working so hard.
“extreme officials in Florida and across who was then president of the White Why don’t you go try to do that?’ If she
the countr y ” who are “shamefully House Correspondents’ Association, has that instinct, it never comes out.”
163
Jean-Pierre endures ruthless, some- The week I visit, Fox News is obses- and NBC. For now, the West Wing still
times frightening treatment on social sively covering a change in Jean-Pierre’s sparkles. Jean-Pierre stays.
media—the part of the job that Psaki word choice regarding whether or not Last year, Jean-Pierre took her
tells me “crosses the line.” Still, Jean- President Biden was involved with his mother to a state dinner. “When my
Pierre says she has never had a “nasty” son Hunter’s business dealings. Where mom met President Biden, she cried,”
encounter in public. “People who love once the line was that Biden had Jean-Pierre says. “She cried, and he
me are concerned,” she admits. “But I do “never spoken” about foreign deals with opened up his arms, and she put her
not walk around fearful for my life or my Hunter, Jean-Pierre now tells reporters head on his chest.”
security. That is not something I worry Hunter and his father were never “in Later, she called her daughter—the
about. I worry more for my daughter.” business” together. Other reporters (like girl who never became a doctor, who
The afternoon that I visit, Jean-Pierre The New York Times’ Peter Baker) note embarked on a life of her own choosing,
leaves work earlier than usual to take the shift as well. expectations be damned. Jean-Pierre
Soleil to a local pool. It’s clear that this is Jean-Pierre reminds me that she’s smiles at the memory: “She said to me,
all a juggle, and it has gotten more chal- not speaking for herself at the podium. ‘That was the happiest day of my life.’” @
lenging lately. Jean-Pierre and Malveaux That’s as true when questions about
have separated. “I’m a single mom who Hunter arise as it is when she has to GOOD PRESS
is co-parenting this amazing kid,” Jean- respond to geopolitical human rights CONTINUED FROM PAGE 136
Pierre says. “Our number-one priority is issues that target LGBTQ+ communities. 2011 Tony Awards, will know what I
her privacy and to make sure we create She cites Haiti’s descent into political mean when I say that Gutenberg! has
an environment that’s nurturing.” chaos as an example of where she must big “I Believe” energy. “It allows us to be
She and I drive through leafy suburbs hold her feelings back. It’s “one of the our truest idiots,” Gad says. “And I say
and arrive in the still humid evening, as issues that’s toughest for me,” she says. that in the most genuine way possible.”
Jean-Pierre continues the conversa- She knows that what she represents
tion poolside. She nods toward Soleil, is part of why Biden chose her for this It all began as a joke. In 1999, when
who is splashing in a sequined bathing role. But letting her own opinions slip Brown and King were in their 20s and
suit. “We talk about her feelings all the into the record “is not what I signed up sharing an apartment in Bay Ridge,
time,” she says. “I ask her all the time, for,” she says. “I signed up to speak on Brooklyn, King worked at the Manhat-
‘Are you happy? How’s it going?’ And behalf of this president. That’s why he tan Theatre Club, where he was charged
she’ll tell me.” Open communication is selected me.” with going through unsolicited demo
something Jean-Pierre is committed to. First lady Jill Biden can attest to that. recordings and attending readings of new
“That’s the nice part—being the parent “From our first meeting with Karine, musicals. It was utterly illuminating, not
that you wish you had,” she says. “My we knew we wanted her on the team,” only to see the kinds of (strange, bad)
parents were amazing, but they were she says in a statement. “As a pioneer- things that writers and composers hoped
trying to survive.” ing White House press secretary, she would someday be produced but also to
She never expected to be in this brings grace, integrity, and insight to hear the deadly serious passion behind
situation—mothering. Having a child the podium. With her calm, quiet con- each fledgling show. “I got obsessed with
was “a thousand percent” not on her fidence, Karine inspires us all.” the idea of people creating musicals in a
to-do list. She spent so much of her The film director Gina Prince- vacuum somewhere else, with the dreams
own childhood helping to raise her sib- Bythewood, who met Jean-Pierre at of coming to Broadway,” King says. “And
lings. Her work was a bid for freedom. an event honoring Black women across because they had to perform these songs,
“I think that’s one of the reasons I left industries earlier this year, says she too they would be full-out—like, with so
to do campaigns,” Jean-Pierre says. is struck by Jean-Pierre’s grace: “When much enthusiasm, so much energy.”
“Because it took me away f rom the you’re the first, you need to do well for To be sure, King and Brown (who had
responsibilities of home.” yourself, but you also have to do well for recently started at Entertainment Weekly)
But it turns out being a parent has only all those who want to come up after you. were hardly establishment figures them-
made her more motivated. “Everything If you mess up, people judge a whole selves; in fact, they had a lot more in com-
that we do, being led by the president, community based on your actions.” mon with the faceless slush pile people
is going to matter, not just today, but Jean-Pierre gets at the same idea, than not. “We were listening to these,
tomorrow and for the rest of our lives,” obliquely. We’re talking about the criti- like, desperate dreamers on tapes,” Brown
she says. “What we do is certainly going cism that has dogged Harris—whispers says, “but we were also two mildly crazy
to change the trajectory of her life.” about staff turnover, a bedeviling policy people living in a very hot apartment in
portfolio. “It’s hard to be the first,” she an outer borough.”
Recently, a cabinet member texted says of her former boss. “There is always One day, they decided they’d give
Jean-Pierre. (She declines to say which.) going to be criticism. You’re always the process a go themselves, and “write
This official had been getting pilloried going to be under a bigger microscope.” three songs for a bad idea for a musical
in the press, and Jean-Pierre had offered “Men can get away with all kinds of and submit it under fake names,” King
a strong defense f rom the podium. personalities doing this job,” Fuchs tells recalls. That bad idea was to build a show
“They reached out to me and thanked me. “Most of them are crude and rude. around the 15th-century invention of
me,” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s nice. Karine had to develop something dif- the printing press. “It’s just so fun to cre-
You’re welcome.’” ferent. And she did. She developed this ate anything, even something terrible,”
Who does that for her? Her team, steely personality with a big smile, and says Brown. “Once it starts to take on its
she says. She has champions outside that’s her armor.” own life, you kind of can’t stop it.”
the White House too. When a group Jean-Pierre will not do this job for- By 2003, Brown and King had
of Black women came to see Harris not ever. “Someone once told me, ‘If you stretched and shaped that unlikely con-
long ago, one of them sought out Jean- walk into the White House campus, and cept into a 45-minute one-act, perform-
Pierre to say that “there are millions of it doesn’t move you anymore, then you ing it at the former Upright Citizens
us who want you to succeed.” shouldn’t be here,’” she says. Perhaps she Brigade Theatre in Chelsea and the New
There are of course also millions who will return to cable news, having already York Musical Theatre Festival. It wasn’t
do not. served as a commentator on MSNBC a straight historical piece, but more like

Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, dramatizing the fun of Mormon was that when we in a high school classroom), Timbers has
the very act of putting on the show. (The were onstage together, we just tried to conspired to make it feel as cozy as pos-
format of a reading or a backer’s audition make each other laugh,” Gad says. “We sible, removing several first-row seats
seemed especially fertile, funny ground: genuinely have this admiration and joy and bringing the proscenium slightly
“It’s so bizarre, because you are asking for breaking the other.” forward. The effect, he says, is that “our
the audience to just imagine what [the Keeping things under control for stage pushes past the fourth wall. All of
production] could be,” King says.) A Gutenberg! is “going to be really diffi- that stuff accumulates to create some-
two-act version of Gutenberg! premiered cult,” says Rannells. thing that feels really intimate, like you
at London’s 70-seat Jermyn Street The- “Audiences should be aware,” adds and Josh and Andrew are all sitting in
atre in 2006 (“Is there a producer in the Gad, an impish glint in his eye. the living room together.”
house?” read one review that lauded King It wasn’t actually Gad’s plan to take “I get teary-eyed at the end,” says Gad
and Brown as “the real thing”), moving a decade-long break between Broadway of the show. “I think we’ve all become
off-Broadway, to Midtown’s 59 E 59 roles; in the interim, as Rannells led pro- super skeptical of reality and the hard-
Theaters, that November. ductions of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, ships of life, of industry, of all of it.” The
Alex Timbers, who directs the Broad- Falsettos, and The Boys in the Band and SAG-AF TRA strike is underway, and
way production, also helmed Gutenberg! Gad worked mostly in film and televi- before they begin rehearsals for Guten-
at 59E59. “My background’s in improv sion, they’d been carrying on separate berg!, both Gad and Rannells plan to
and sketch comedy,” he tells me. “And so conversations with Timbers, while also join a picket line. “It’s nice to have two
I always love material that sits between looking for something to do together. characters who so fully believe in pos-
true comedy and a play or a musical.” Finally, Timbers approached them both sibility,” Gad continues. “I think that is
When he was introduced to Brown and about Gutenberg!, which had been rat- the profound beauty of the show, despite
King, the connection was instant. “We tling around in his head for years. The the insanity of the comedy. It’s got this
had a lot of shared interests and sensibil- group gathered for a reading in Los beating heart that I think is really beauti-
ities, and that same kind of playful atti- Angeles, the quick takeaway being that ful, and I hope audiences leave uplifted.”
tude,” says Brown. One touch point was Gad and Rannells simply had to do it. “That’s a good way to say it,” Rannells
the 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer: There was a lot to love—ridiculous lyrics remarks.
Watching it, King says, all three realized, like “When I got out of bed today, his- “…like they do from Cabaret,” Gad
“Oh, you can play it completely straight, tory was a lot more boring / But then I deadpans.
but also have this sense of absurdity.” thought in a different way, now the bird Rannells laughs. “ ‘Just like Cabaret.’
Timbers’s production of Gutenberg! was of inspiration’s soaring”—but what per- Throw that on the poster.” @
hailed a “smashing success” by The New haps appealed most was the rendering
York Times that season, earning best- of Bud and Doug. “They really are fans ALAÏA ANEW
musical nods at both the Lucille Lortel of each other, and there’s not any sort of CONTINUED FROM PAGE 144
and Outer Critics Circle Awards. snark to it,” Rannells reflects. “It’s rare, When Mulier is in residence, he
From there, the show traveled across because—I sound like an old man saying wakes at a quarter to seven—his win-
the country and around the world— this, a lot of humor these days…” dows, which are huge and trapezoidal,
cropping up at regional theaters from “…is cynical,” Gad offers. have no blinds—makes himself break-
Boston to Seattle, as well as in Sydney, “Yeah, it’s very cynical,” Rannells says. fast, and returns to wake his dog, John
Paris, and, just earlier this year, Madrid. “I am snarky as fuck, so I get it. But it’s John, who sleeps with him in bed. They
(From a purely economic standpoint, it’s nice to get to play two people who are walk together for an hour in the nearby
difficult to imagine a fleeter, leaner musi- really, truly joyful about what they’re woods. At home, he showers and starts
cal to mount.) And it inspired another doing.” They may know virtually noth- sending emails. If it’s a workday, he’s at it
collaboration: Broadway’s Beetlejuice, for ing about the real Gutenberg—after from 9 a.m. to somewhere between 7 and
which Timbers served as director, and all, they give him a romantic interest 9 at night; then he and John John walk
Brown and King wrote the book. (Eddie named Helvetica—but Bud and Doug again, and he meets friends for dinner,
Perfect handled the music and lyrics.) obviously adore the theater. “As you’re or cooks—one of his favorite things. By
Given all of that, I ask Brown and King, watching the show, you know what 11 or 12, he’s back in bed. “It is actually
did they ever wonder if Gutenberg! might musicals they’ve seen,” says Timbers. quite classic, my day,” he says, as if the
someday see the Great White Way? “They love Les Mis, they love My Fair thought were just occurring to him. (In
“No,” King replies with a laugh. “This Lady, they love Oklahoma!” Mulier-ese, what’s “classic” is what’s not
is completely insane.” So, Gutenberg! had its stars. “It was extreme.) Zoom was, for him, the best
immediate, I think, to both of us that thing to come from the pandemic: He
When Gad, Rannells, and I reconvene this was the thing,” Gad says. Then has not set foot in New York since 2019,
at Il Brigante, a quaint Italian restaurant comes the perfect punch line—and the when he and Simons and his former
not far from the South Street Seaport awful truth: “That was March of 2020.” partner of 16 years, the designer Mat-
Museum, they’re still cracking each Suffice it to say that three years later, thieu Blazy, all living there, left Calvin
other up, several hours later. Timbers Gad and Rannells are entering a some- Klein. “I was so happy in New York,” he
likens their joyful dynamic to that of the what wobbly theater landscape. Yet nei- says. “It would break my heart to go back.”
great comedic duos of the last century: ther one seems overly concerned about On free weekends, he tools around
“You think about Abbott and Costello, how Gutenberg! will fare this fall, even the apartment and the galleries, goes
Laurel and Hardy, Nathan Lane and as it goes head-to-head with flashy new to the gym, cooks for friends at home,
Matthew Broderick, Mike Nichols and revivals of Merrily We Roll Along and and, on Sundays, visits his brother and
Elaine May—it’s not the lengthiest list.” Purlie Victorious. To them, Gutenberg! ’s his sister and their families around
For the actors, their chemistry is small scale is an asset: While Broadway’s Ostend. (“I love kids,” he says. “I always
practically compulsive, and it’s been James Earl Jones Theatre, which nor- wanted kids, because it brings balance
that way since Mormon, when they mally seats about 1,100, is surely one to a life—reality when you are in an
starred as hapless missionaries-slash- of the biggest venues that the show has industry like this. But I would never do
partners-in-crime. (Both departed the ever played to (on YouTube, I found a it alone.”) He adores Antwerp, but has
show after a year, in 2012.) “A part of full-length production ostensibly staged always, he says, experienced it from a
165
slight social distance: a lesson he feels changes everything.” By the time Simons house, and it was where Mulier learned
he learned from Simons, who taught commuted to Milan to work at Jil Sander, the power of a recognizable silhouette:
him to approach the city through its Mulier, who did the brand’s shoes and the box (Chanel), the hourglass (Dior),
artistic underground over his first year accessories, was known as his right hand. the long hourglass he would one day
at the label—a period when Mulier “It was a very interesting combination,” master at Alaïa.
learned basic skills like patternmaking says Blazy, who is now creative director As Mulier tells it, though, Dior was
and contract management and felt, he at Bottega Veneta, “because Raf would most of all where he learned how to
maintains, “completely lost creatively.” think in terms of concept, where Pieter sell a dream. “It was about curves,” he
“I’d gone f rom a law school to an would think immediately as an archi- says. “It was about attitude.” The les-
architect school to—a company in Ant- tect: in volumes, colors, product.” When son lodged in his imagination even as,
werp that dresses skinny boys? The first designing, Mulier drew in profile—“You in 2016, he and Blazy joined Simons
show I saw from Raf, I was like, What could see the volume of the clothes,” says in New York to lead design at Calvin
is this? My father saw a picture and said, Blazy, who internalized this sidelong Klein—a résumé bump for Mulier,
‘That’s what you do?’” method—and created his shoes bottom- who was listed (and paid) as the brand’s
And yet, at Simons’s label, Mulier up, as if designing a building. creative director, and a crucial window
underwent a kind of bloom. He lived for All the while, Mulier dreamed of into the inner workings of both global
a year in the office, sleeping on a mat- designing womenswear. W hen he commerce and, he notes in earnest,
tress underneath the archive. Simons realized, deep into his 30s, that the underwear. The Antwerp trio was alive
brought on Blaz y, another young closest he had gotten was making wom- with an ambitious dream: They were
designer, and in time, as Mulier came en’s shoes, he had a kind of crisis and going to take sublime, smart, daring,
to acknowledge his sexuality, the two of decided to launch his own womenswear first-rate fashion and make it globally
them started to date. They found joy in line. It was 2010 and, as he was ramping available. But for Mulier, the experience
being part of a scrappy team of kids who up the collection, his father became ter- had the radiance of a candle burning at
spent hours in the studio, living inside minally ill. Mulier paused the work. “I both ends, filled with almost nonstop
art and design and, from a quiet Bel- took care of him for six, seven months travel among Europe, the US, and Asia.
gian city, making work that enthralled until he passed away,” he says. By then, “You’d arrive in Amsterdam in the
the entire fashion world. Simons was moving to Dior and invited morning and have 50 people in front of
“Raf used to bring us all to the Frieze Mulier to join—this time, he’d work on you with 24 hours to work with them—
art fair, to Art Basel, and have us look womenswear, including couture, an offer and you’d have to give them energy,” he
at things that, honestly, I’d never seen he could not bear to refuse. “I knew after explains. “You’d clean it up, leave, and
before, and explain why they were a week at Dior,” Mulier recalls, “that this come back every three weeks to do it
important,” he recalls. “I believe that is what I wanted to do.” again.” By the time the project ended, “I
everybody in life has one person who It was at Dior that Mulier’s quiet genius was just burned up.”
does that for you: a professor in school, for color, volume, and construction—the For a year, he turned down job offers
or a parent, or an uncle. But I didn’t have material personality of a garment—came that came his way. Getting restless
that at home or in school. I had it when to the fore. “He was interested and chal- during the pandemic, he considered
I met Raf—that person who pushes you lenged by the technicality,” Simons says. becoming creative director of a Swiss
so far out of your comfort zone that it Dior—like Alaïa—was a tailoring-based furniture company. “I thought, Oh,
In This Issue Industry City, Brooklyn.

Movement Directors,
Sean Monaghan and
Bailey Salisbury of Stud
Cardigan; johnsmedley
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footwear.com. 118–119:
Bag; therow.com.
Church’s shoes;
church-footwear.com.
On mannequin: Hat
Table of Contents: 28: Bottom left photo: Country. Manicurist: Shirt; loropiana.com. from The Row; therow
On Zimmermann: Bag Emilia Wickstead coat; Yuko Tsuchihashi. Tailor: Pants; select Louis .com. 123: Church’s
by The Row; therow emiliawickstead.com. Olga Dudnik. Bottom Vuitton boutiques. shoes; church-footwear
.com. Church’s shoes; Contributors: 56: Top photo: Tove dress; Tailors: Carson Darling- .com. 124–125: On
church-footwear left photo: Hats tove-studio. com. Khiry Blair, Jane Law. Zimmermann: Church’s
.com. On mannequin: customized by Works in earring; khiry.com. Hair, Artworks depicted in shoes; church-footwear
Archival Maison Progress NYC. On Gad: Dior Sovoa; makeup, this story ©Lee Miller .com. On Nakamura-
Margiela dress. Tailor: Todd Snyder jacket; Kym Lee. Tailor: Archives, England Dangerfield: Makié
Egle Paulauskaite. toddsnyder.com. Billy Fleurisse Dany. In Her 2020. All rights reserved. dress; makieclothier
Cover Look: 28: Dress Reid shirt; billyreid.com. Shoes: 72: Cardigan, leemiller.co.uk. .com. 126: On
and shoes; prada.com. On Rannells: Todd top, skirt, and shoes; ©Roland Penrose Zimmermann: Church’s
Bracelet; vancleefarpels Snyder polo sweater; miumiu.com. Tailor: Cha Estate, England 2020. shoes; church-footwear
.com. Tailors: Carson toddsnyder. com. Bode Cha Zutic. Lost and The Penrose Collection. .com. On mannequin:
Darling-Blair, Jane Law. pants; bode.com. Found: 90: Parka; All rights reserved. Archival Maison
For artworks on the Grooming for Andrew bottegaveneta David E. Scherman Margiela dress. 127: On
cover, see The Art of Rannells, Melissa .com. Tailor: Egle ©Courtesy Lee Miller Zimmermann: Boots;
Being Lee Miller credits. DeZarate; Grooming for Paulauskaite. Archives, England 2020. balenciaga.com. On
Editor’s Letter: 42: Top Josh Gad, Jessica All rights reserved. mannequin: Bag;
left photo: Jacket and Ortiz. Tailor: Lucy Payne. THE ART OF BEING ©Antony Penrose therow.com. 129: On
skirt; emiliawickstead Top right photo: On LEE MILLER Estate, England 2020. Zimmermann: Port
.com. John Smedley Valletta: coat and pants 108–109: Vest and Tanger sunglasses.
cardigan; johnsmedley from The Row; therow pants; stellamccartney BASIC INSTINCTS 130: On Zimmermann:
.com. Hair and wigs, .com. Dior boots; Dior .com. Shirt; paige.com. 120–121: On Church’s shoes;
Ivana Primorac; boutiques. Hair, Tamara 113: Coat; emilia Zimmermann: Shoes; church-footwear.com.
makeup, Lisa Eldridge. McNaughton; makeup, wickstead.com. Shoes; church-footwear.com. Tailor: Egle
Tailor: Jane Law. Dick Page; Location: prada.com. 114–115: 122: On Zimmermann: Paulauskaite.

furniture, it’s so calm!” It was at this Mulier takes a round table and orders a lot of everything around you,” Mulier
point that Alaïa came into view. gray-shrimp croquettes, mussels, and a says. He chose Alaïa, Blazy chose
“I had this idea that Pieter should bolleke, or goblet bowl, of local beer. He Bottega Veneta, and the rest was sealed.
go to Alaïa,” Clémande Burgevin knows the server by name here as well. Today, the two of them are still among
Blachman, who had known Mulier at “My dog is obsessed with her,” he says. the most enthusiastic fans at each other’s
Raf Simons and Calvin Klein, recalls. Since he and Blazy broke up, they’ve shows. “What I like about Pieter’s way
Her mother had been a close f riend split custody of John John, who travels of working is that he goes against the
of Azzedine; she thought she saw, in back and forth among Paris, Milan, and stream, takes risks, but he’s not someone
Mulier, a designer who could bring the Antwerp, sleeping in the back seat of who wants to shock—he’s just going for
house to life again with the old energy. the car along the route. When he’s away, what he believes in most,” Blazy says.
“I knew he had this way of looking at Mulier misses him acutely. “My day is But they remain apart. “It didn’t work
the feminine body—maybe it’s because based on him,” he says. “He’s at Alaïa anymore, based only on that—only on
of his background as an architect—and constantly: He’s in the ateliers. He’s the jobs,” Mulier says.
this cultural and art knowledge,” she downstairs. He’s in the studio. An ani- A loss, though, has been balanced by
says. “I convinced him he should find mal brings something calm to the teams.” wild success. At Alaïa, the vision that
a way to apply.” John John lives with him more than Mulier most believes in has the public
The application process lasted a full Blazy, and he frets about the fairness of heart. His first collection alone turned
year. “We were dating,” Mulier says that, but he finds himself counting the the fortunes of the house around. A set
wryly. “I told them, I’m not going to days until the dog’s return. “I went to of hoods that he updated from an early
cheat on you—I’m going to wait.” What Milan just to see him,” Mulier says. Alaïa model worn by Grace Jones sold
he recognized in Alaïa, long before a lot “We’re on that level now.” and sold and sold—a fashion icon right
of other people did, was a house that Mulier and Blazy had the fortune and out of the gate. “It represents Alaïa in
joined the intimacy and particularity the misfortune of each seeing their luck- a very simple way, and every big house
of Raf Simons, the refined ateliers and iest breaks—a once-in-a-lifetime chance copied it,” Mulier notes. “It’s one of
dream-making of Dior, and the demotic to lead, at last, the world-class fashion those pieces that made other brands
openness of Calvin Klein. He became house that each believed in—appear at look at Alaïa again.”
convinced it was the lead job he was almost exactly the same time. For years, They are still looking and, more than
made for. Over 12 months, he ordered they had been partners in deputy-ship, two years later, the hoods continue to
vintage Alaïa garments and studied their the two base corners of a triangle. Then, sell dazzlingly well. Success is generally
construction as an architect might study overnight, each had become the sover- worth waiting for, at least in Mulier’s
French cathedrals, learning Azzedine’s eign of his own imaginative world. view. “We’re a small company. It takes
language in cloth. The weight of two such new mantles, a lot of time,” he says. He smiles, then
based in two cities, with two chief calen- shrugs: After two decades of biding
When Mulier and Blazy were together dars and desperate drives to squeeze the his own time for the right big break,
in Antwerp, they often ended their most from a rare opportunity, was more he was used to taking opportunities in
days at De Zeester, a family-filled than one relationship could bear. “Once pace. Now he had all the past to work
tavern-style restaurant a moment ’s you obtain that job, you have to make with, and the future. “I’m very patient,”
walk f rom the apartment. Tonight some choices in your life, because it eats Mulier explains. @
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New York, NY 10007. For reprints, please email [email protected] or call Wright’s Media 877-652-5295. For reuse permissions, please email [email protected] or call 800-897-8666. Visit us
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VOGUE IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED ART WORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED
TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ART WORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR
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167
P RO DUC ED BY A NT HE M. S ET D ES I G N: ST U DI O V EG E TE .
Louis Vuitton bracelet

Inspired by shifting tectonic plates, this Louis Vuitton haute jewelry bracelet—there’s also a
coordinating necklace—consists of a string of diamonds and oval cabochon-cut opals, a yellow
gold chain link, and a riviera of brilliant-cut zircons. Sparkling throughout are 320 custom-cut
diamonds—and, with a bit of unfastening, the opal section detaches (hence the piece’s
name: Rupture), creating a second bracelet to dazzle your wrist. We call that groundbreaking.
P H OTO G RA P H E D BY JACQU ES B RU N

Vogue USA - October 2023

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OCT

P RO DUC ED BY B EN M I LLE R BI B ESCO, E X ECU T I V E P RODUC E R: ZO E TOM LI N SO N . D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

42 83 102 132 146 154

FASH I ON ED I TO R: A L EX HA RR I NGTO N . HA I R , JI M MY PAUL; MA K EU P, D I CK PAG E.

28 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

SCAN AND Explore the Paradoxe

HOSTED BY CHIOMA NNADI

42 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

56 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

©2023 The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C.

62 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

66 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

68 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

Eternal Sussex, England. left: A painting

I home, Virginia Woolf would often sign

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I Chloë Sevigny is preparing to try on a shoe. She’s

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VOGUE.COM O CTO B E R 202 3 75

Carr, who is 30, lanky, and all-

I rising art star Drake Carr. In early 2023, members of

VOGUE.COM O CTO B E R 202 3 83

Quality Leathergoods Since 1975

The Italian Job

86 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

Available at select Neiman Marcus stores.

While the intersection of scent

P RO DUC ED BY B EN M I LLE R BI B ESCO. E X ECU T I V E P RODUC E R: ZO E TOM LI N SO N . D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

FASH I ON ED I TO R: A L EX HA RR I NGTO N . HA I R , JI M MY PAUL; MA K EU P, D I CK PAG E.

90 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

Made with ≥95%

92 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

poolside as another honey-colored

F the-radar destination. Every year, sunseekers from

98 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

IMPROVE SKIN TEXTURE

DAY + NIGHT USE

Scan to discover this smoothing, lightweight collection

* In vivo study results after 12 weeks

J (Knopf) is a delectable, sun-washed

102 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

PA B LO P I CASSO / A RTI STS RI G HTS SOC I E TY ( A RS) , NEW YO RK, B RI D G EM A N I MAGES.

trauma. “Lee was a woman who lived

am a war repor ter ; L ee

even helped coordinate Samberg’s

WINSLET’S EYES ARE large and

DAV I D E. SCHE RM A N © COURT ESY LE E M I LL ER A RC HI V ES, E NG L A ND 2023. A LL RI GH TS R ESERVED. LEEMILLER .CO.UK.

Loro Piana shirt.

P RO DUC ED BY PA RA M OU R P RO DUCT I ON . PASSE REL LE LÉO P OLD SÉ DA RD S EN G H OR , PAR IS 7ER .

tempting, and I’ve been pouncing on

and stomps behind

boutiques. Miu Miu

tops, skirt, and tights.

160 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

1. ALEXANDER MCQUEEN CARDIGAN, $2,090;

GLOVES, $1,050; VERSACE.COM FOR SIMILAR

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164 O CTO B E R 202 3 VO GU E .CO M

In This Issue Industry City, Brooklyn.

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133: Jacket and pants;

Dress; shopbop.com. Proenza Schouler belt; hoops (net-a-porter

SENSITIVITY proenzaschouler.com. .com) and pearl

Tailor: Fleurisse Dany.