Vogue June/July 2020

BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE, I want to say that I hope you are all well and dealing with this deeply challenging moment as best you can. Like you, no doubt, I’ve been left reeling by the dramatic changes we’ve experienced in the space of a few short weeks and the constant emotional challenges of striving to look after our families, friends, colleagues—and ourselves. It’s not as if we haven’t gone through tough times in the past, but this one feels different: The crisis is global in scale, and none of us have been left untouched. We’ve all witnessed terrible scenes and felt acutely how the coronavirus has affected our lives, and we are incredibly grateful for those who have selflessly stepped forward to keep our communities safe. We owe a huge…

Karen Elson, Nashville “We’re all just trying to adjust to the new normal.” says the model and musician. “We have some good days; then we have other days where it’s more challenging. To keep calm, I’ve been making music—picking up my guitar and learning a song I like. That’s been really cathartic. It’s an antidote for a lot of this.” Florence Pugh, Los Angeles “For the first few days I felt low. Then my dad reminded me that I needed to dance and I needed to cook and I needed to do all of the things that make me happy. I instantly started shimmying and boogeying in the morning, and I felt so much happier and just … bubbly all day. I’ve also turned toward chopping and cooking and flavors.…

The world as we knew it is over,” says Donatella Versace, and she’s right. Across every spectrum of society in virtually every nation, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended our outlook. As for the future? In a script that’s being rewritten each day, there are a few constants: We’ll need to look forward, to adapt, and to take nothing for granted. Fashion has long been a community driven by passion, artistry, joy, and invention, though, of course, around it has evolved an industry of perpetual motion, always moving, faster, faster, faster… until everything stopped. Thrown from our carousel, sheltering in place, coming to grips with our ever-shifting new reality, we’ve all had the opportunity to reflect—and then to react. It took only a few days to realize that the fashion community…

Until the day before yesterday, the art world was a buzzing hive of global activity, with ever-increasing pressure on artists to produce for an insatiable market. Artists (the worker bees)—along with curators, dealers, and collectors—flew from art fair to art fair, to biennials and gallery and museum openings, yet somehow managed to put in the necessary hours in the studio. Then COVID-19 shut everything down. The future of art and art-making is always hard to predict, but we all sense that, post-corona, it will not be what it has been. We also know that great art has come out of societal catastrophes. Titian’s magnificent Pietà was one of the last paintings he made before he died of a fever during Venice’s plague in 1576. Edvard Munch, who survived the 1918…

On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 11, I went to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre to catch the last few minutes of my play The Inheritance. It was a matinee day, which meant a marathon—part one in the afternoon, part two in the evening. We did three of these each week, a grueling schedule for the actors (the play runs six and a half hours in total), but they loved being able to tell the entire story in one go, for an audience that had committed to being at the theater all day. The ending of part one, in which we honor those whose lives came abruptly to an end during the AIDS epidemic, has always elicited a strong emotional reaction. On this day, it was noticeably heightened. Someone upstairs was…

On the last day of March, Symone Sanders and her boyfriend, Shawn Townsend, are embarking on a third week of self-isolation. For Sanders that means working from her brightly lit condo in Washington, D.C., around the corner from the Wharf and, most important, a seven-minute drive from Reagan National Airport. Typically, the senior adviser to Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign travels more or less nonstop, most recently decamping for a month to South Carolina before Biden won that delegate-rich primary, dramatically reshaping the presidential race in the process. But stay-at-home orders mean the 30-year-old strategist is moored in D.C., for by far the longest stretch since she first moved into this apartment in December. Sleek and modern, her condo is accented in greige hues and gleaming sharp-cornered surfaces, the walls…