Vogue October 2016

This October issue is really about fearlessness. As you’ve no doubt guessed, our cover star, Lupita Nyong’o, is very much part of that, but it’s someone who isn’t used to being in front of a camera that I want to talk about first. Franca Sozzani, the editor of Italian Vogue, is the subject of a new documentary, Franca: Chaos and Creation, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Franca is someone I’ve been so lucky to call a good friend for 30 years now, with both of us becoming editors around the same time, so watching her story unfold on-screen was particularly moving for me. Truth be told, I’ve always been rather in awe of her. She is a risk-taking visionary—and the hardest-working person I know. (The two qualities…

NOVEMBER 13, 10:37 p.m. Melvil fell asleep without a murmur, as he usually does when his mama isn’t there. He knows that with Papa, the lullabies are not as soft and the hugs not as warm, so he doesn’t expect too much. To keep myself awake until she gets home, I read. It’s the story of a novelist turned detective who discovers that a novelist turned murderer did not actually write the novel that made him want to become a novelist. My phone, lying on my bedside table, buzzes. I read the text from a friend: “Hey, everything OK? Are you at home?” I hate those text messages that don’t really say anything. I don’t reply. “Everything OK?” “ . . . ” “Are you safe?” What’s that supposed to…

I lost my mother when I was sixteen. She always made clear to my sister and me that we were winners, that nothing could stand in our way—not opposition, not sexism, nothing. We were strong Irishwomen, and Irishwomen push through. Her conviction propelled me into politics, into the speaker’s chair of the New York City Council for eight years, and, in 2013, into the mayoral race. And it seemed for some time that my mother had been prescient. The poll numbers, public opinion, and conventional wisdom all told a consistent story: I would win the race and make history as the first female, and first openly gay, mayor of New York City. And so I ran out of the gate, through the five boroughs, full of joy and momentum. I…

When my mother was pulled into a pool in the midst of a raucous party, it was by my father, who was in the process of divorcing her. It was 2002, at a farm in Virginia. The dancing at the party was frenetic, and the two of them, Henry and Lindy, were at the center of it. Even as they were coming undone, they couldn’t stop dancing with each other. At some point someone pushed a guest, fully clothed, into the pool, setting off a cheerful melee of tumbling waterborne partygoers. My mother playfully shoved her soon-to-be ex-husband, and as he fell, he grabbed her arm and she tumbled in on top of him. They were underwater unraveling limb from limb, and when my father emerged to the surface he…

Who’s going to play me?” Franca Sozzani asked when her son, Francesco Carrozzini, informed her that he was planning to make a film about her life. “You are playing Franca,” he replied. And who better to bring to life the spectacular career of this editor in chief, for 28 years at the helm of Italian Vogue, than the woman herself? Carrozzini’s new biopic, Franca: Chaos and Creation, took six years to complete. Though he began by immersing himself in other biographical films—Anderson Cooper’s documentary with his own mother; Martin Scorsese’s Italianamerican; My Architect, by Nathaniel Kahn, about his father, Louis Kahn; and Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell among them—some of the subjects of those films were deceased. But even when they were alive, were they as seemingly impenetrable as the…

Just to be clear: While social media didn’t start the fire that is street-fashion illustration, they certainly fanned its flames. Unlike in the seventies and eighties, though—the last time illustration was this huge—the hottest illustrators posting today are predominantly female, and in their new relationships with designers and brands they’re having some fun with fashion. The London-based painter Helen Downie began quietly putting her work on Instagram three years ago; 220,000 followers later, her illustrations are collected by Alessandro Michele, the Gucci creative director—and, in their touched-by-the-hand quality and their link to an earlier tradition, are even seen as a kind of encapsulation of the Gucci moment. “I love Helen’s work,” Michele says. “Her illustrations immediately get me in touch with my inner child—the dreamlike, fairy-tale part of me.” And…