Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2017 i ELLE

FEBRUARY 10 Dua Lipa, whose 2015 synthpoppy single, “Be the One,” has 85 million– plus views on YouTube, puts out her long-awaited self-titled debut album. FEBRUARY 5 Uniting her fandom of Little Monsters with the equally otherworldly creatures known as football players, Lady Gaga takes the stage during halftime at Super Bowl LI. FEBRUARY 7 ELLE.com contributor Alana Massey publishes All the Lives I Want, a collection of essays about the sex industry, mental illness, and the influence of pop-culture icons from ScarJo to Lil’ Kim. FEBRUARY 8 The work of artist Raymond Pettibon, who arose out of the ’80s punk scene (he designed the band Black Flag’s iconic logo), goes on view at New York City’s New Museum. FEBRUARY 10 Just in time for V-Day, the endless foreplay (interspersed,…

ELLE.com’s pop news guru R. Eric Thomas introduces himself “We may be twominutes from doomsday,” R. Eric Thomas wrote in a Facebook post this past June, “but thank the Lordt we still live in a universe where three world leaders can strut into a room like they’re the new interracial male cast of Sex and the City.” Those leaders-President Barack Obama, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto-were shown striding across a red carpet “looking like Tom Ford presents The Avengers.” The post captured a moment- and the attention of some 75,000 people, including ELLE.com Editorial Director Leah Chernikoff. A few weeks later, our regular “Eric Reads the News” column was born. Here, Eric captions his own history. “I’m never not making a cake or thinking…

Last October, Allison Williams joined (RED) on a four-day trip to Nairobi, Kenya, and Kigali, Rwanda, to meet with local health workers and peer educators who are working to eradicate HIV and AIDS in their communities. Williams’s activist streak began during her undergrad years at Yale, where she took classes focused on the HIV/AIDS epidemic and spent a summer in Ghana working with Theatre for a Change, a performance troupe dedicated to raising awareness about HIV. (Indeed, the fight is far from over. One staggering stat: In sub-Saharan Africa, adolescent girls account for nearly 80 percent of all HIV infections—giving this demographic the power to stop the disease’s transmission to the next generation.) “If women and young people are protected and informed, it’s not going to keep spreading,” says Williams,…

First up: Isabel Marant’s date-night outfit: Nailed it! GUNS N' ROSES The season’s rose-tattoo f lorals are a long way from naïve Liberty prints TRY IT WITH STYLIST’S TIP Lace trim adds a girly touch to tomboy board shorts. SMALL WONDERS Who wears short shorts? With the help of tailored separates to dial down the big reveal, you do! STYLIST’S TIP The secret to pulling off supershort: Keep things supercovered on top. TRY IT WITH CRAZY IN LOVE Leather adds racy sophistication to a debutante-beloved silhouette TRY IT WITH STYLIST’S TIP Forget strappy sandals: Coolgirl boots are the strapless’s new best friend. PEEKABOO STREET The most romantic of fabrics gets a street-smart edge STYLIST’S TIP An opaque bandeau puts a sporty spin on sheer lace. TRY IT WITH…

WESTWORLD TAP INTO YOUR FRONTIERSWOMAN AVATAR IN WESTERN RUFFLES AND LACE GAME OF THRONES SLARY DRAGONS (AND ADMIRERS IN MEDIEVAL SILHOUETTES AND ARMOR-LIKE JEWELLARY  MR. ROBOT STICK IT TO THE MAN WITH GEEK-CHIC STYLING AND MACBOOK: SHINY SILVER  STRANGER THINGS JUMP INTO AN’80S PARALLEL UNIVERSE IN CRAYOLA BRIGHTS AND GOONIES-ESQUE OUTERWEAR…

Some aspects of Ali Wentworth’s new comedy series may seem a little familiar: It chronicles the behindthe-scenes antics of a late-night talk show in which Wentworth, 52, stars as talent booker Staci Cole. And yet Nightcap, which premiered this fall on the Pop TV network and has already been picked up for a second season, comes off as wholly fresh, and even a little radical. For one thing, it sticks it to the lie that shows about—and made by—women of a certain age can’t find an audience. And then there’s the comedy: It’s incredibly bawdy, and, to borrow a phrase, fucking hilarious. Each episode is peppered with cameos by the actress-comedian’s real-life friends, such as Kelly Ripa, Whoopi Goldberg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Sarah Jessica Parker, who serve up knowing caricatures…

She’s the writer, director, cocreator, and occasional cast member who turned her cult-hit Web series, High Maintenance—which follows a nameless NYC weed-delivery guy (Ben Sinclair) as he’s welcomed into the houses, homes, and disparate inner lives of his clients—into a halfhour HBO darling. On what it means to hit the big time: “My role on the show [as Becky] is so supporting—maybe that’s how I am in life. I’ve always been the person to push other people forward. And I’ve had so much support around me between our executive producer [Russell Gregory], who’s my best friend, and my creative partner, Ben, who’s also my life partner. The key to our relationship is having truth on every level and respect for each other artistically. It’s our secret sauce. Ben and I…

She’s played a teenager moonlighting as a scrappy private investigator (Veronica Mars), a mentally unstable mutant (Heroes), a smart, crafty management consultant (House of Lies), and, now, a morally questionable saleswoman who, after getting hit by a truck, is just trying to do right in the afterlife (The Good Place). Oh yeah: She was also the voice of Gossip Girl and has rocked in smash-hit films like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Frozen, and Bad Moms. In other words, there’s not much Bell can’t do. On her (cast of) characters: ”On social media, I’m still referred to as Veronica Mars, but Eleanor [her The Good Place role] is creeping in. For a while, it was Sarah Marshall. I try to start every character with an authentic part of me. I have a…

It is the frigid winter of 1862. The Civil War has cracked the country in two, and the 53-year-old president Abraham Lincoln, struggling with decisions that are costing thousands of lives, finds himself numb with grief over the swift decline and crushing loss of his cherished, chubbycheeked 11-year-old son, Willie, to typhoid fever. Willie is interred in a crypt in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers at the time report that the president, on more than one occasion, returns—alone and at night— to the crypt, and opens Willie’s casket and cradles his son’s body. Out of this gemlike, poignant, unsettling historical moment, George Saunders has risen an unsentimental novel of Shakespearean proportions, gorgeously stuffed with tragic characters, bawdy humor, terrifying visions, throat-catching tenderness, and a galloping narrative, all twined around the luminous…

Before Vernon François was sculpting and smoothing a certain Oscar-winning actress’s hair into dazzling configurations for the red carpet (see above), he practiced on a much less demanding client: “As a child, I taught myself how to braid with the fringes of a rug,” says the British stylist and colorist. François assisted at a London salon when he was 14 years old, “washing hair…washing windows,” and worked his way up, ultimately winning industry awards, earning a reputation as a master of natural textures, and amassing a serious crew of leading ladies that includes the impervious-to-bad-hairdays Kerry Washington and Tracee Ellis Ross. Now, with his most recent endeavor, an ultraluxe hair-care line with product names like Pure~ Fro Conditioner, he’s revolutionizing the market and making curly hair great— that is, silky,…

JEWEL BOX To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Shiseido Rainbow Face Powder, the company introduces an updated take on the original color corrector with 7 Colors Powder Revival Centennial Edition (from top, in lavender, yellow, and beige). BLUE LAGOON Thanks in part to the ultramoisturizing succulent kalanchoe pinnata, Clarins Hydra-Essentiel Cooling Gel helps to counteract the 17 temperature and hydration fluctuations the company found that skin experiences on average in one day. GET LIT John Hardy and fragrance studio Joya teamed up to create the Sedap Malam scented candle, inspired by the flowers of Bali and housed in a hand-tooled pot of recycled black porcelain adorned with 22-karat liquid gold. YOUNG LOVE Decadent Givenchy L’Intemporel Youth Preparing Exquisite Lotion acts as a moisturizing toner, employing hyaluronic acid and vitamin E…

It’s 10 days after the presidential election, and Martha Raddatz, back in her booklined Washington, DC, office after a photo shoot, quickly de-pancakes her makeup and slips into slim pants, a puffy down jacket, and flats, all black. Then she curls up in a chair, a Pakistani rug woven with images of Kalashnikov rifles, tanks, and grenades at her feet, to talk about her work as a TV reporter in some of the most dangerous, machismoloaded situations in the world. “I was in Ramadi, and there was an older marine who said, ‘Are you one of the good ones or one of the bad ones?’ ” she recalls. “And I just looked him in the eye and said, ‘I don’t know, Marine, are you one of the good ones or…

Take two megawatt executive producers, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. Add a pair of Hollywood’s most zeitgeisty twentysomethings, Shailene Woodley and Zoë Kravitz. Throw in a blockbuster novel about a group of upper-middle-class mothers of kindergartners roiled by sexual violence, class issues, ageism, and... murder! (That’d be Liane Moriarty’s 2014 Big Little Lies.) The result is an HBO miniseries that, even in this big-budget, high-minded small-screen era, we’ve never seen before: a seven-part thriller that looks like a movie, feels like a movie—and packs enough woman power to populate the Oscars’ front row—but grips like only episodic TV can. Here, the insightful foursome sound off, as do 15 other electric women from all corners of the TV landscape—all of them looking as powerfully chic as the scene stealers they are.…

Woodley, 25, (slightly belatedly) joins us from Standing Rock Reservation, where she’s been protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline—the construction of which, at press time, had been officially halted by the Army Corps of Engineers, a major victory for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the thousands who protested the drilling. While Woodley’s Jane is the youngest, humblest, and most recent inductee to Big Little Lies’ mom squad, one thing’s clear about this girl: She has a past. SHAILENE WOODLEY: I’m here! The crazy girl who can’t work her phone. I’m so sorry! ELLE: No worries! You’re still in North Dakota, right? SW: I am. Let me know if at any point you can’t hear me. I’ve been here for a few days. It’s the first time I’ve been back since…

As much as we love Kit Harington with a man bun, we’ve got only two more seasons to lust after the romance novel–long mane and the character to whom it belongs: brooding bastard Jon Snow of Game of Thrones—currently filming its seventh season (to premiere this summer) in Belfast. Plot spoilers for the HBO epic are notoriously hard to come by, but this one tidbit recently slipped out: Harington and four other principal castmates banded together to negotiate a $1.1-million-per-episode salary for each. It seems Harington—the London-born son of a businessman and a former playwright—skipped the starving-artist phase of his career. After graduating from London’s prestigious Central School of Speech and Drama in 2008, he landed, first, the lead role in War Horse on the West End, then starred in…

In the fifth century b.c., Herodotus, the gossipy Athenian historian, wrote about a legendary Ethiopian spring that could reverse aging. Around the twelfth century a.d., Europeans believed that the mythic King Prester John ruled over a mystic land with a river of gold and an age-defying fountain. Legend has it that more than 300 years later, Ponce de León was looking for the so-called Fountain of Youth when he stumbled upon Florida. The idea of a magical elixir that lets us escape growing old has long captured the human imagination, but in the end, it was University of California, Berkeley, associate professor Elizabeth Blackburn who found it back in 1984. Kind of. What Blackburn, who holds a PhD in molecular biology, actually found, with the help of one of her…

JAN 20–FEB 18 Everything is illuminated for Aquarians as the radiant Sun beams in your sign until the 18th. Fete your birthday season by expanding your own horizons: Travel to a far-flung locale, or sojourn symbolically by signing up for a game-changing educational program. With Jupiter beginning retrograde on the 5th, you could revisit a seminal location or continue a course of study you’d previously abandoned. On the 10th, important relationships get pushed into the spotlight thanks to a Leo lunar eclipse, the first in a series that, over the next two years, will help you finesse the balance between “me” and “we.” PISCES (FEB 19–MAR 20) In early February, clear away clutter and distractions. That way, you can manifest with intent when the Sun blazes into your sign on…

Even if the name Nirav Modi doesn’t ring a bell, chances are you know the designer’s handiwork: say, the diamond cascades that dangled from Kate Winslet’s lobes at last year’s Oscars, or the equally showstopping drops Kate McKinnon wore on the cover of ELLE’s own debut Women in Comedy Issue. Impressive headway, so to speak, for someone who started his business on a lark less than a decade ago. The 45-year-old Indiaborn, Antwerp-raised jeweler founded his namesake house in Mumbai in 2010 after creating a pair of bespoke earrings for a friend—it didn’t hurt that he came from a family of established diamond suppliers—and opened his first U.S. store on Madison Avenue in 2015. Today he reportedly boasts a $2 billion jewelry empire and is known as the “Diamond King”…

 THE AMERICANS FX, EPISODE 209, “MARTIAL EAGLE” • DRAMA File under: Sexy Russian Spies Covert Russian operatives learn their teen daughter is a covert Christian. Talk about work-life balance!  VEEP HBO, EPISODE 405, “CONVENTION” • COMEDY File under: How Power Really Works As POTUS (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) weighs the VP pick, her chief of staff [Anna Chlumsky] spews a careermaking monologue.  WEST WING NBC, EPISODE 222, “TWO CATHEDRALS” • DRAMA File under: How Power Ideally Works President Bartlet mourns a mentor and manages his health crisis...without a single Twitter rant. Hail to the chief! THIS IS US NBC, EPISODE 101, PILOT • DRAMA File under: Waterworks Go deep on Pearson family drama just before they hit you with a twist. Sappy, yes, but artfully constructed.  CASUAL HULU, EPISODE 207, “THREESOMES” •…

When actress Kathryn Hahn says, “I’ve been pretending to be normal for so much of my life,” one can’t help but think, What a waste! Over the past five years, Hahn has become a sort of stealth TV icon, the kind of woman you’re thrilled to see pop up in whatever amazing show you happen to be watching—Girls, Transparent, Parks and Recreation— because you know you’re in for something wildly hilarious, totally lacking in vanity, deeply human, and occasionally weird. (She’s worked that skill set to strong effect on the big screen, too, most recently in last year’s Bad Moms, in which she matter-of-factly demonstrated how to handle an uncircumcised penis—using a hoodie-wearing Kristen Bell as her facsimile.) We meet at a café near the L.A. lot where she’s filming…

Among the important issues that Alexandra Wolfe explores in her voyeuristic cultural history, Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story (Simon & Schuster), is the paradox of America’s premier tech hub being both a hotbed of visionary progress—leading twenty-first-century humankind to a new plateau of enlightenment— and a seemingly predatory totalitarian fiefdom with a penchant for sky’s-the-limit avarice. Writes Wolfe, a Wall Street Journal reporter, “In Silicon Valley, gone are the straitjacketed paths of the East Coast elite; in their place are a series of open-ended questions about what industries will be disrupted next, and which cultural configurations will supplant Old Society. Even more than a testing ground for start-ups, the Valley… is a larger laboratory of cultural experimentation, where the only thing that’s impossible is to predict.” Racy…

With equal parts admiration and exhaustion, chef Julia Sullivan surveys the scene unfolding at the intimate preview of Henrietta Red, her restaurant and oyster bar debuting this month just down the road in Nashville’s trendy Germantown neighborhood. Under strands of twinkling lights, friends and family are piling their plates with raw and roasted oysters before settling in at long communal tables—all on full display for neighbors out for an evening stroll. “An event like this is a great representation of what I want Henrietta Red to feel like: communal, convivial, a place where people can come in and relax,” Sullivan says of the Low Country supper, which tonight is being staged in the front yard of the 12th Table, a local event company. More than two years in the making,…

Reese Witherspoon, 40, disappears into the role of Madeline Mackenzie, Big Little Lies’ fast-talking, gossip-collecting queen bee of insular Monterey, California. Zoë Kravitz, 28, plays free-spirited, yoga-obsessed beauty Bonnie Carlson, who also happens to be married to Madeline’s ex. Let the games begin! ELLE: Reese, how did you fall in love with Big Little Lies? REESE WITHERSPOON: I read Liane Moriarty’s book The Husband’s Secret two years ago, and she wrote so accurately about the interior lives of contemporary women. And then I was on a movie set and the female producer handed me a book; she said, “My company’s not going to buy this, but maybe you and [producing partner Bruna Papandrea] should buy Big Little Lies.” We read it overnight and were both just like, “Oh my God!”…

Sometime in the fall of 2008, as the Disney TV trilogy High School Musical was finishing its run, in the culture and in my house (and launching Zac Efron as a pec-flexing movie star), I received a screener for a new Fox show that also was set in a high school and featured cheerleaders/jocks/nerds/stoners/divas/desperates, and one pregnant girl, all bursting into song at appropriate, and really inappropriate, emotional crossroads. The Glee screener was passed around among ELLE’s editors like a bong in the basement of the kid whose parents were never home. Cocreator Ryan Murphy’s show was funny and piercing and cynical and utterly humane—all at the same time— and it blew up every high school trope: letting the Mean Girls be really mean—and get away with it; letting the…

PHOTOGRAPHER THIS MONTH: “THIS. IS. BIG.” (PAGE 159) Binge-watching: Years of Living Dangerously Listening to: ’90s R&B on Spotify Bucket list: “To go back to the Sahara Desert with my kids once they are a little bit older.” First job: “Shooting a surf-shop campaign. I was working at a pub on the beach next door and was paid in board shorts.” Valentine’s Day: “I’m a nonbeliever in Valentine’s Day. I celebrate our ‘Monthiversary’ with a poem, a rose, and a pearl.” Peter Stevenson WRITER; THIS MONTH: “A BOOK OF THE DEAD” (PAGE 118) “If you would like to know about my messy suburban life, it’s currently being broadcast on my wife Sarah Dunn’s new ABC sitcom, American Housewife. The actor who plays me is taller, slimmer, and funnier than I…

This past July, Leslie Jones was preparing to make the leap from Saturday Night Live cast member to legit movie actress, costarring alongside comedy’s biggest names in the hotly anticipated Ghostbusters. Jones should have been elated. Instead, she was stressed out. Not only was she under a daily siege of highly publicized, baldly racist attacks by social media trolls, but about two weeks before the movie’s premiere—the single most photographed night of her career—she had nothing to wear, and no prospects in sight. In desperation and disgust, Jones took to Twitter, calling out designers for not offering to help. Surfing above the hate mail came a reply: two “waving hand” emojis from Christian Siriano—his way of saying, “Come over here, girl. I’d love to dress you.” (Her response: “yaaaaaassssss.”) At…

WENDELBORN by Kate Wendelborn AGE: 36 PROVENANCE: Milwaukee CV: Still dreaming of the cloudlike cable-knit sweaters that this University of Wisconsin and FIT grad created as the designer of Protagonist, the in-house label of The Line? You’re in luck. After departing the industry-favorite shop, last fall Wendelborn launched her own collection of luxe knit underpinnings— and now there’s more. Come for the cashmere tees; stay for the silk jumpsuits, slipdresses, and track shorts. BEAUFILLE by Chloé and Parris Gordon AGES: 29 and 26 PROVENANCE: Toronto CV: Walking the line between masculine and feminine, hard and soft, the Gordon sisters’ appropriately named line (French for “handsome girl”) was a breath of fresh air at New York Fashion Week. Clean-lined silhouettes topped off with dramatic, flamencoesque flourishes managed to avoid feeling costume-y,…

This force of nature stars in both ABC’s American Crime and HBO’s The Leftovers, has taken home two Emmys (for American Crime), and is shaking up the small screen as a director, to boot. ELLE: What have you learned by directing episodes of shows like Pitch, Scandal, and The Catch? The psychology of dealing with people. You’re not part of [an established show] from its conception, so you come in like the new kid at school. You could have an actor who likes to get a note, one who needs an “Attaboy!” at the end of every take, and another who couldn’t care less. As the director, you have to take time for those little moments, even when you’re moving fast. ELLE: With more women of color in lead TV…

She created a hit YouTube show (Twenties), was a producer of a critically acclaimed movie (Dear White People), and now brings her savvy as the dryly hilarious, straighttalking Denise in Netflix’s Master of None, which follows an actor (cocreator Aziz Ansari) trying to make his way in New York. On why art has to be more ardent than ever: “I’ve very recently been reminded of the role artists play, particularly black artists—and then I’m also a black queer artist. If you’re in this business, a lot of people don’t look like you—executives, producers—and sometimes that makes you think, I’m not going to be too combative. But now I’m saying I need to stand up, to be heard. I don’t agree that all black characters need to be good. We deserve…

RUTINA WESLEY (now starring in Queen Sugar) on TRUE BLOOD costar ANNA CAMP “She’s hilarious, and this woman that she created [True Blood’s Sarah Newlin] is just insane. I remember being on set like, ‘Is she always this funny?’ We always talked about how we couldn’t wait to work together again someday.” ANNA CAMP (now starring on Good Girls Revolt) on UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT costar ELLIE KEMPER “Ellie and I would run lines in the hair and makeup trailer, so when we got to set we’d be on point and could explore and have more fun. She’s just a ray of light, genuinely sunshine on set.” ELLIE KEMPER on THE OFFICE costar MELORA HARDIN “My sister Carrie was actually a writer on The Office, and she wrote an episode that…

If you’re a fan of Katie Kitamura’s lauded previous novels (Gone to the Forest and The Longshot ), you’ll adore A Separation (Riverhead Books). A couple breaks up; he goes missing in Greece; she goes looking for him. Kitamura’s prose gallops, combining Elena Ferrante– style intricacies with the tensions of a top-notch whodunit. If you’re ready to reexamine some cherished tenets of so-called second-wave (1960s–’70s) feminism, you’ll embrace Why I Am Not a Feminist (Melville House), by Bookslut founder and editor Jessa Crispin. She argues against the current brand of feminism that equates progress with buying into the status quo, and calls for a reinvestment in radical, even revolutionary thinking about what feminism can mean, and do: “Moving beyond [the patriarchal] structure means forgoing the rewards that structure doles…

Honey, that sticky, delicious goodness produced by bees, has been used by humans for thousands of years—and not just to satisfy a sweet tooth. It appears in wound-healing recipes recorded on clay tablets that date back to 2000 b.c.; the ancient Roman scientist Pliny the Elder wrote of its efficacy in treating pneumonia, pleurisy, and snakebites; and in both traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, it’s been used for everything from fighting infections to quelling nausea to silencing coughs. Modern science has confirmed many of its purported powers: We now know that honey has antioxidant and prebiotic properties when ingested, and antimicrobial activity when applied topically. But there’s a big difference between the stuff that comes in that cute, squeezable bear and manuka, the pricey, potent honey that has now begun…

On the morning after the election, as news that Hillary Clinton, winner of the popular vote and my own, nonetheless lost to Donald J. Trump, I felt a deep disconnect looking over the batch of new books on my desk (all out this month and next) celebrating the Danish art of hygge, or creating a cozy, convivial atmosphere for the sake of well-being, as the word (pronounced hoo-gah) roughly translates. Nervously leafing through these pretty lifestyle guides while I gathered enough steel to read, I landed on a photo in The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Contentment, Comfort, and Connection (Plume), by half-Danish, half-English journalist Louisa Thomsen Brits, showing a small, rustic basket filled with perfectly round stones. Worried that the bigotry, misogyny, and climate-change denial stirred up…

Start Fresh Only buy oysters with uncracked, closed shells and a “fresh, ocean smell,” Santiago says. “If it’s open, this is an indication that it’s old or dead. You can try tapping the oyster to see if it closes up, in which case it’s fine.” Gear Up “You need to get yourself a good oyster knife,” Bloomfield says. “I prefer one with a short blade and an upwardcurled tip; this gives you leverage when opening up the oyster.” Shuck It Using a kitchen towel to protect your hand from any slips, hold the oyster level on a table with the rounded side down. Work the tip of your knife into the nook near the hinge, then twist to pop open.…

Kidman plays wealthy, gorgeous Celeste— mother of twin boys; wife of a hot younger man (Alexander Skarsgård); harborer of very dark secrets. Originally, ELLE invited friends and costars Kidman and Shailene Woodley to interview each other by phone. But when Woodley, who was in North Dakota protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, ran into some technical difficulties, Kidman, 49, didn’t miss a beat. ELLE: While we wait for Shailene, let me just say the series is so fun and so juicy. NK: I’m so glad you loved it! I hope that it gets out there in terms of people watching it together at viewing parties, because there’s something to be had in watching this with a group— everyone just laughing and gasping and going, “What?!” ELLE: Shai’s team just e-mailed me…

EVAN RACHEL WOOD & THANDIE NEWTON WESTWORLD “This is a woman—a power—I recognize,” says Thandie Newton of her character, Maeve, an android (or “host”) prostitute in the Wild West who, like many of her fellow robots in HBO’s Westworld—a theme park where wealthy patrons pay to play out their darkest fantasies—gains sentience and begins to revolt against her overlords. “A lot of people in this world are sleepwalking,” she continues, “having our souls beaten out of us. Maeve, in a way, is doing what so many of us wish we could do. And she’s fucking naked!” Like Game of Thrones before it, Westworld runs high in sex and violence, and examines why we as humans (and viewers) respond so viscerally to the basest of impulses. It’s a series in which…

COVERS Reese Witherspoon wears: Lace and sequin dress by Lanvin, $4,880, at Lanvin (NYC), visit lanvin.com. Stretch lace bra by Morgan Lane, $188, visit morgan-lane.com, collection at Jill Stuart (NYC). Diamond and platinum ring by David Yurman, price on request, at David Yurman (NYC), visit davidyurman.com. Gold, green sapphire, orange sapphire ring, $2,500, gold and diamond ring, $1,800, by Marc Alary, visit marcalary.com. Reese Witherspoon wears: Bead embroidered jacket (worn as dress) by Giorgio Armani, price on request, at Giorgio Armani (NYC), visit giorgioarmani.com. Stretch lace bra by Morgan Lane, $188, visit morgan-lane.com, collection at Jill Stuart (NYC). Rhinestone and stud embellished belt by Shyanne, $25, exclusively at Boot Barn stores nationwide, visit bootbarn.com. Zoë Kravitz wears: Wool-blend knit dress, $23,000, stretch-viscose knit bra, $900, by Dior, at Dior boutiques…