Vogue March 2017

Franca Sozzani 1950 – 2016 As we all know, women do not always beat the odds. But in planning our March issue, we decided to take a moment to celebrate the strong, original female designers who have shaped our industry and who never stop inspiring and provoking us. Just like the incredible models on this month’s cover, these bold and unconventional women show us new ways to think and engage with the life that is changing so fast around us. Sadly, as we were preparing to go to press, my dear friend (and counterpart at Italian Vogue) Franca Sozzani lost her battle with cancer. I can think of no one more creative, bold, or inspiring. I dedicate this issue to her. Franca and I both became editors in chief in…

This is a landscape an art-therapy patient might paint to represent depression: gray sky and a sweep of featureless peat rising out of the sea. The water is the same color as the clouds; it is !ecked by white-capped waves, spikes of black rock, and, intermittently, the silvery spines of dolphins. I pace from room to room in the empty house, testing out the silence with occasional noises: “Hi! Ha! Who! How!” My "ngers are sti# with cold. When I open my notebook, I fumble with the pages; I struggle to grip the pen. I write the title of a journal entry: “Bleaker Island, Day One.” Beneath it, an attempt at a beginning: “I am living alone on an island.” What I’ve written sounds like a metaphor, so I clarify:…

In a small conference room at Google’s New York City headquarters, Yasmin Green is about to get some bad news. Green, 35, is the head of research and development at Jigsaw—the tech giant’s in-house think tank—and the trouble at hand has to do with trolls, those who foment anger and disrupt discourse online. People tend to think of trolls in terms of random harassment, teenagers with too much time on their hands, but these in particular are globally scattered and state-sponsored, targeting journalists and activists, an independent press, or outspoken citizens. Trolls are big, for instance, in Iran, where Green was born (her family !ed to London in 1984). “Iran is really kind of trailblazing in terms of developing digital repression,” she likes to tell people. Jigsaw is a little…

Olivier Rousteing “When I was growing up in Bordeaux in the nineties, Paris and its fashion world seemed a whole lot farther away than just a six-hour car ride,” says the Balmain creative director. “I was a good student, but I would often find myself lost in daydreams—almost always triggered by the amazing images of that era’s fashion. I was enthralled, watching as fashion transformed itself and the world around it—in particular the music that my friends and I listened to. Runway shows of that time were like nothing that had come before—I loved the liberating and invigorating energy that was on display, especially from someone like Gianni Versace, who always reminds me of how intoxicated I was by fashion.” VOGUE, 1995. PHOTOGRAPHED BY STEVEN MEISEL. Georgina Chapman “When I…

I was the worst kind of student poet, nearly illiterate in contemporary poetry and writing to resolve a feeling of drift that had overtaken me the year before as a junior at Bennington College. And I wasn’t a student. My restlessness had led me to drop out of college—schoolwork, even at Bennington, which gave no grades, felt like too much pressure—and move to Cambridge, taking a room in a communal apartment at $27 a month (heat not included) and a secretarial job at Harvard, working in the college registrar’s o!ce in the Holyoke Center, just one "oor below the conference room where I was now sitting. Getting a position in one of Harvard’s many administrative o!ces, I’d heard, was an easy matter if you could pass the typing test. That…

When we come to look back at the surreal, strife-torn, and turbulent times we’re living in, what will we see reflected back at us in the mirror of fashion? Of all the improbable things, I’m banking on the emotional solace of the million and more spangles the designers have liberally sprinkled all over the shows, from New York to London and Milan and back. I’m holding a tiny, glinting blue object in the palm of my hand as I think this over, and it’s making me smile. It’s been shed from a T-shirt made by Michael Halpern, a young American designer from upstate New York. Halpern, a 2016 graduate of Central Saint Martins, is at what you might call the chrysalis stage— a new butterfly with glitter wings flying on…