Vogue November 2017

EXPLORATIONS OF TASTE GET LITERAL THIS MONTH WITH THE publication of Vogue’s first large-format culinary collection, along with a sumptuous volume of gardens and interiors. “It’s amazing how big and rich a book came out of just ten years’ of house stories,” says editor Chloe Malle, whose Vogue Living: Country, City, Coast (Knopf) picks up where 2007’s Vogue Living: Houses, Garden, People left off. Food in Vogue (Abrams) features subjects as disparate as hot dogs and caviar, as well as urban farmers, rising chefs, and restaurant trends. “Since we’ve never done a book quite like this before, we were inventing it from scratch,” says editor Taylor Antrim. “It was a reminder of just how startling and unusual our food images are.” Showcasing in particular the playful erudition of Jeffrey Steingarten…

In what has been a tumultuous (and, for many of us, anxiety-inducing) year, there is something I think we can all agree on, wherever one stands on the political spectrum: As a country, we haven’t been this occupied with—or this vocal about—those who govern, and how they wield power, in decades. Given that we are twelve months away from the 2018 elections, it seemed timely to profile a politician who looks set to rise to national prominence. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who has served New York since 2009, tells writer Jonathan Van Meter that she has been recognized more in the last six months than at any other time in her near-decade in office. That’s for good reason: She has what Jonathan calls, in a neat turn of phrase, a certain…

I WAS SEVENTEEN WHEN HURRICANE ANDREW ROLLED through South Florida, taking down block after block of houses. I lived in Hialeah, a city of immigrants in Miami- Dade County, with my mother, stepfather, and grandparents. We could not have evacuated even if we’d wanted to. My stepfather was a manager at a utility company that needed him back on the job immediately. Hotel rooms weren’t cheap, and neither was gas. We slapped plywood on the windows and huddled together in the hallway. We were spared the worst. Just 20 miles south, children my age were homeless. These days, such events have come to seem less like aberrations. Maps prognosticating future sea-level rise show an obliterated Florida, a future Atlantis. In 2015 the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact compiled data…

TWO THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN A PART OF WHO I AM for as long as I can remember are a love of dogs and a tendency to depression, the first of which can sometimes serve to take the sting out of the second. But around the time I turned 30, I went through a period of depression so profound that I could barely function. Spiraling toward oblivion, I made the painful decision to check myself into a psychiatric hospital and to give away my dog, Lou. Though I eventually climbed my way back to health, I remained shaken by the encounter with my own fragility and ashamed that I had fallen to the point where I was unable to take care of not just myself but a dog who depended…

BY 21, I’D GIVEN UP ON BECOMING A NOVELIST. It was too impossible, too grand, too unattainably elbow-patched-Waspy for a cash-strapped, state school–educated, suburban Jewish boy. I’d moved on to my backup plan. I’d become a fashion photographer in New York. I understand now that it’s like giving up professional poker to fall back on shooting craps. Still, it made sense to me. Photography is a real job. There’s lots of equipment to operate. You press a button and get results. If you work in a studio, you can play loud music and be around other people— most of them models. And everyone takes you seriously. Set up a light in Central Park, have an assistant hold a reflector, and the tourists will circle around, taking pictures of you taking…

EDITORS: MARK HOLGATE & MARK GUIDUCCI Halpern LONDON IN 2017 MAY SEEM LIKE THE LEAST LIKELY place to find an unabashed young ambassador for bedazzled New York glamorama, but here’s Michael Halpern, and he’s exactly that. “I love disco, and the glamour of the seventies, and hearing stories from my mom about Studio 54,” he says, laughing and running his hand through a rail of iridescent sequined tunics and superflares. “But to me, disco is so much more than the images. It’s a state of mind. The late seventies were so beautiful—the freeness, openness, and acceptance. And I think that’s really missing now.” Working out of his small studio in London’s East End, Halpern is among the latest in the long stream of alumni to have shot out of Central…