Vogue December 2022

IT’S A THRILL TO HAVE Jennifer Lopez on the cover this month. Here is someone who has been in our lives for years, whose career and life and marriages and romantic alliances we have followed—breathlessly at times—and who has now achieved, at the age of 53, a kind of self-possession that feels like peace. “I’m very much in control of my own life and destiny and feel empowered as a woman and as a person,” she told contributing editor Rob Haskell in the course of their time together in Los Angeles, where Lopez and her husband, Ben Affleck, live as a blended family of seven. “There is something innately, magically kind and good and full of love at the heart of who Jennifer is,” says Affleck. And also “quite a…

Teenage Dreams To mark the Broadway opening of Kimberly Akimbo—David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s affecting musical about a rapidly aging suburban teen—Adam Green spoke to the show’s stars and creative team for “The Awkward Age” (page 136), as photographer Mayan Toledano and fashion editor Max Ortega captured the cast in action. Working on a set custom-made for the occasion, the shoot plunged headfirst into 1990s high school nostalgia, with the fashion to match. “There were actually a lot of clothes that felt grungy and ’90s in the collections,” Ortega says. (Above, for instance, leads Victoria Clark and Justin Cooley have a laugh in vintage-inspired Molly Goddard and Polo Ralph Lauren, respectively.) “I was like, Wow, this is actually perfect. It was really fun building out each character based on the…

Everything that I’ve learned about covering politics, I’ve learned from covering losing candidates. When I was a tabloid reporter for the New York Daily News, there was Christine Quinn, the redheaded, Irish American, lesbian Speaker of the New York City Council, with a booming voice and a hearty laugh, who at one point was widely assumed to be the mayor-in-waiting of New York. (She wasn’t.) I had recently turned 30 and the assignment made me feel like I was at the center of the universe. After 12 years, Mike Bloomberg was leaving office and the entire city was gripped by the question of what would come next. Right after graduating from a small liberal arts college outside Philadelphia, I’d moved to a New York so defined by the billionaire mayor, and…

Guido Palau is beholden to the scroll. “I follow a lot of colorists from Japan, China, and Korea,” the legendary hairstylist says, noting a recent affinity for a specific hair dye technique that has long been popular in Asia and that is beginning to proliferate in the U.S. “It’s a kind of color conceptualizing that feels computerized almost,” says Palau, who has built a beauty hypothesis around the pervasive influence of technology. After years of clinging to the idea of “realness”—no-makeup makeup, come-as-you-are hair—we are now verging on the “hyperreal,” he says, the result of our collective consumption of archivable inspo photos and avatar construction through the glitchy pixels of our smartphones. “There is a sci-fi anime feeling to it for sure,” Lena Ott says of the specific quality Palau…

It’s September in New York, just after Labor Day, and Nicolas Di Felice, artistic director of Courrèges, is putting the finishing touches to the French house’s new store in the city. (This is the second; the first shuttered 38 years ago.) It’s in SoHo, and it’s all space-age white, of course, inspired by Courrèges’s original rue François 1er boutique in Paris, which Di Felice recently had renovated. After launching his couture maison in 1961, André Courrèges virtually invented the futuristic grooviness of the’60s with his gleaming vinyl jackets and we-have-liftoff go-go boots. Yet as Di Felice, 39—an animated and garrulous figure, quick to laugh and refreshingly devoid of pretension—has reimagined the Courrèges legacy since joining the house in 2020, there’s been plenty of himself in the mix too. Those spacious,…

It might be assumed that a model’s runway makeup prep begins with some concealer or foundation—maybe a fluff of the powder brush. Not so: “Skin today has to be flawless,” makeup artist Michaela Bosch proclaimed backstage at Christopher John Rogers’s resort show, where staggered swipes of statement lipstick in hot pink, deep aubergine, and a bright cerise punctuated exaggerated silhouettes. Bosch was busy giving Nepalese model Varsha Thapa a facial massage with MAC’s Hyper Real Serumizer, a new multitasking fluid that officially launches in January. While no one would confuse the behind-the-scenes chaos at Fashion Week for a spa, the comparison was there for the making: Among even the most color-forward makeup brands, there’s a new emphasis that it’s what’s underneath that counts. After lockdown caused a spike in skin…