Vogue December 2019

IF TRUTH BE TOLD, our December cover, starring the brilliant Phoebe Waller-Bridge, started with Sienna Miller. A few years ago I asked Sienna if she had any idea who could host the Evening Standard Theatre Awards in London. It’s an event I am deeply passionate about, not just because I love the theater but, more important, because my father edited the newspaper while I was growing up. We’d had a terrific run of male comedians—James Corden, Steve Coogan—taking the honor, but it felt like it was the right time to hand things over to a woman. Sienna suggested I ask Phoebe; I did, and she did an incredible job. (This year it will be Cush Jumbo taking up the mantle.) Phoebe, of course, has gone on to make Emmy-winning, Amazon-dealmaking,…

Nobody expected Lucy McBath to win. “When I told people I wanted to run for Congress, they’d laugh or pat me on the arm and say, ‘Oh, isn’t that nice?’” she says, leaning over and touching my arm with her perfectly manicured nails to make her point. To be fair, they had reason to be skeptical. McBath, 59, was a black woman running in a majority white suburb outside Atlanta—a Democrat trying to win a seat that Newt Gingrich had held for 20 years. She’d spent her professional life as a flight attendant and had never once campaigned for anything. But in a country where gun violence claims nearly 40,000 lives a year, voters—especially mothers—found themselves listening to her. “I just told them my story, and that was enough,” she…

TALENT Moments before I am due to meet Josh O’Connor, the skies over North London open with such vengeance that we have no choice but to begin our interview sheltering in his car. If the 29-year-old actor finds this awkward, he doesn’t show it. “Let’s sit here until it calms down,” he suggests cheerfully as he tries (and for several minutes fails) to parallel park, then roots around for a spare umbrella to lend me. During a break in the rain, we make a dash for the nearest pub. O’Connor is dressed for the weather in a green Loewe parka (his slightly gawky, oversize good looks have made him the face of the brand’s menswear line), which he’s paired with department-store pants borrowed from his grandma. The untraditional wardrobe choice…

LIVES “Get yourself a cup of tea, sit down, put your feet up, and let me take you on a magical journey,” urges Angela Kelly in The Other Side of the Coin: The Queen, the Dresser and the Wardrobe (Harper), a delightfully engaging book from Queen Elizabeth II’s personal assistant and senior dresser that reveals the meticulous planning that goes into producing and coordinating Her Majesty’s iconic looks. Kelly and her royal mistress appear to enjoy a respectful complicity. Initially self-conscious about her broad Liverpudlian accent, Kelly decided that she needed elocution lessons, and who better than Her Majesty to provide instruction? The queen suggested furious as the first experiment. “Fee-or-ree-ous,’’ enunciated Her Majesty. “Fyer-ri-ous,” countered Kelly, at which point they both decided to leave well enough alone. Kelly has…

SKIN CARE It came out of nowhere. As I paced with pre-presentation jitters at a Nolita boutique, where I had come to speak on relationships after parenthood (an unlikely specialty of mine following a book on the subject), my face blazed like a space heater. Just a few days earlier, a livid red rash had spread across my cheeks and chin. I’m firmly 53 and well past those years of skin unpredictability, so the inflammation took me by surprise. Now, broken capillaries had surfaced on my cheeks, too—and no amount of Armani foundation could disguise them. I was going for “coolly composed self-assurance,” but my complexion betrayed me. “It’s rosacea,” Joshua Zeichner, M.D., director of cosmetic and clinical research in dermatology at Mount Sinai, confirmed when I showed up at…

FASHION Stylist Stella Greenspan is a magpie for vintage fashion—though her stringbean proportions (she stands six-foot-one) make fitting anything that’s more than a decade old virtually impossible. What she lacks in Edwardian tea dresses, however, she makes up for in vintage handbags. Sourced in thrift stores from Paris and Los Angeles to Zurich, where she grew up, Greenspan’s impressive trove of one-of-kind purses inspired her to design her own. “I love a little bag with a big personality,” she says, “though often my best vintage pieces either proved to be too tiny or started falling apart.” Her just-launched, eponymous label (sold at matchesfashion.com and, later this month, at stellagreenspanshop.com) reconfigures the eccentric bag for a new generation of cool girls. The two debut styles feature a discreet, midcentury silhouette, though…