Vogue October 2022

“I KNEW FULL WELL THAT the response would be powerful,” said Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska. “I never regretted it. It was an important step for me. I accepted it. It was another chance to focus the attention of millions of people around the world on the developments in Ukraine.” She was talking about the reaction to Annie Leibovitz’s images of her and her husband (see “Portrait of Bravery,” page 108) for Vogue. We published these photographs online in July, along with Rachel Donadio’s well-reported profile of Zelenska. Some voices on social media, including a Republican politician or two, tweeted that they were inappropriate, or a poor use of a wartime leader’s schedule, or…something. To be honest, it was hard to make sense of the social media complainers. As Donadio…

Difficult People Ahead of the New York premiere of Straight Line Crazy—David Hare’s new play about urban planner Robert Moses—star Ralph Fiennes spoke to Sarah Crompton for “King of the City” (page 118), and sat for a portrait by photographer Paul Wetherell in London. (The show marks Fiennes’s first appearance on the New York stage since 2006.) “David writes dubious men very, very well,” Fiennes told her, reflecting on his 20-plus-year history with Hare’s work—and on Moses’s divisive legacy. “He’s famously written great parts for women with a clear moral sense of direction. And men who are a bit lost, who had a moral direction, but somehow they’ve lost it.” Let’s Do the Time Warp Styled by contributing editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson and photographed by Nadine Ijewere, “Nowstalgia” (page 96) declares…

Eric Boman, who died in August at the age of 76, was always the youngest person I knew. I met him in 1987, when Anna Wintour, then the editor in chief of House & Garden, asked me to write about the quirky New York loft in the Flatiron district that he and his partner, the artist Peter Schlesinger, had created. Eric was known for making women look fabulous in photographs, and I somehow found myself sitting for him. He redrew my eyebrows, which were “too pale and not the right shape” for my face, had me put my right hand on my waist, elbow out, and then started clicking away. “You’re so vain,” he said. “You’re the vainest person I’ve ever come across. It’s really quite shocking.” He kept me…

It wasn’t until my 33rd birthday that I really understood Marilyn Monroe, in all her beautiful and pained glory. It wasn’t, as these things go, a very happy birthday. The year 2018 had already yielded three humiliations: a stint in rehab, the loss of my fertility, and a breakup that everyone expected (hard to know if that’s the better or worse kind). Unlike the reticent Marilyn—whose early 30s produced her own 50-car pileup of public humiliation, but who rarely spoke about any of it—I never shut up and I certainly didn’t put red lipstick on to cover the sad truth. My resistance to celebrating was so great that my friends decided to throw me an arts-and-crafts party, as if I were an obstinate 11-year-old whose class needed to be bribed…

When Gigi Hadid moved to New York from Los Angeles almost a decade ago, it was on the brink of a particularly bitter East Coast winter. Needless to say, the bone-chilling weather was a shock to the system. “I’m always the person who’s cold even when other people feel hot,” says Hadid, with a sigh. Thankfully, her parents had planned ahead: They’d sent their then teenage daughter off to college at the New School with the cashmere sweaters she’d swiped from their wardrobe on cooler days in California. Her favorites were all stealthy chic: a gray turtleneck that fastened with leather straps (her mother’s) and an allengulfing button-up cable-knit cardigan from her father. With her life in a moment of transition—one both wildly exhilarating and bewildering—the cozy knits offered the…

Throughout the tweeze-happy ’90s, I enthusiastically pruned away at my eyebrows. Inspired by Kate Moss’s delicate arches, I obliterated my own—chestnut colored, with a totally acceptable, softly angled natural shape—until they were as slight as my slip dresses. When the Clinton administration ended, so, too, did my follicular assault, but not without lasting damage. It took years for some semblance of regrowth to materialize, thus closing a traumatic chapter in the beauty history of an entire generation. That is, until it was pried open again by TikTok, where a popular thin-eyebrow filter that renders full-to-feral shapes into reedy wisps sent a shiver across my forehead when I first came upon it in early spring. How did we get here, I brooded to myself, as I flipped through images from fall…