Vogue October 2017

LIKE MANY PEOPLE ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 9 last year, I was to be found watching television, transfixed by Hillary Clinton as she gave her gracious and eloquent concession speech. Secretary Clinton writes about that moment honestly in her memoir What Happened, published on September 12. It’s a candid account of the events leading up to the 2016 election, as well as the personal and emotional footpaths of her life that led her to run for the presidency. Our excerpt from this book recounts that very day—when, she says, “my job was to smile, be strong for everyone, and show America that life went on and our republic would endure. . . . I wear my composure like a suit of armor, for better or worse.” After addressing the…

When I was growing up, my family moved across cities and continents: By the time I was twelve, I’d had eight different homes in three countries and had attended five different schools. In each new situation, I aimed to keep my head down, learn the ropes, and fit in as best I could, though my cheeks still grow hot at the recollection of awkward interactions now 35 years behind me. My daughter Livia’s childhood, by contrast, has been pretty stable: We’ve lived within the same five-mile radius of Cambridge, Massachusetts, since she was two, and she attended a single school for most of her childhood. Her classmates became like extended family: She had her close gang, but she knew and got along with everyone. They all bumbled through childhood side…

I was confident that Bill would be great at parenting. His father died before Bill was born; he knew how lucky he was to have this chance that his own father never had. Still, a lot of men are thrilled to be dads but not so thrilled about all the work that a child requires. The writer Katha Pollitt has observed how even the most egalitarian relationships can contort under the strain of child rearing, and all of a sudden the mom is expected to do everything, while the dad pitches in here and there. She calls it becoming “gender Republicans”—a nifty phrase, if perhaps a little unfair to all the feminist Republicans out there, who really do exist. I knew that I had enough energy and devotion for two,…

FROM THE TIME HE WAS SIX YEARS OLD, my father wore his difference like his missing eye. His older cousin had shot him with a BB gun, and for years my father sported a patch before he was fitted for a false eye in his teens. Something about the experience enabled in my father a different kind of vision. He began to draw. He drew through his childhood, through his adolescent years. Fantasy creatures and animals and portraits of his mother. He taught himself to pay attention to proportion and placement, to imbue lines with life. Sometimes I think about how my father sat in his room in his mother’s house, stared up at the thin ceiling while bundled against the Bay Area chill, and felt the creative impulse in…

ALEXIS LOWRY: Dia Art Foundation Alexis Lowry was still in elementary school when her father, Glenn, became the director of the Museum of Modern Art. Ironic, then, that her formative art experiences took place south of Fourteenth Street. “My dad and I would walk around the SoHo galleries, and nothing was censored for me,” she explains, looking bemused through Warby Parker horn-rimmed glasses. “I was taken to see a wide range of probably inappropriate art for a ten-year-old, but it gave me a keen sense of looking.” Now 32, Lowry lives in a “tiny garage apartment, quiet and woodsy,” within shouting distance of Dia’s Beacon outpost, where she is an associate curator and working on Particulates, a newly commissioned light sculpture by Rita McBride opening at Dia Chelsea this month.…

Though you’ve likely never heard of Bienen-Davis bags, they have a storied past. Since the label’s founding in the 1930s, they’ve appeared in Vogue, on the New York nightlife scene (the bags were inspired by the likes of disco-era Anjelica Huston, Margaux Hemingway, and Jerry Hall), and reside on permanent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now fourth-generation family member Richard Bienen, together with Marc Jacobs alum Meredith German and her husband, W. Ross, is bringing new life to the line for fall. The clutches, wristlets, and convertible shoulder bags—made in Italy in the same factories that produced the originals—are rendered in teal, apricot, and bois de rose satin and velvet and feature delicate, lingerie-like linings. The P.M., shown here, is named after both the initials of Bienen’s late…