Vogue March 2023

I’M WRITING THIS IN JANUARY, well into resolution season. And yet I don’t know many people who actually made resolutions this year. Is the practice a little passé? So much has been said about the relentlessness of our age, and that very modern yearning for perfection—for so-called optimization (an awful word). But perhaps we’ve had enough? Perhaps something is shifting? Fashion certainly thinks so. To see the spring collections last fall was to see designers celebrating imperfection, the handmade, that place where authenticity and creativity meet. Marni, led by the designer Francesco Risso, is a prime example of this, and Vogue contributing editor Maya Singer writes in this issue about the “purposeful imperfection” of Risso’s latest collection—the dangling threads and the seemingly offhand combinations of textures. A similar spirit was…

Killing It “The concept for all my shoots right now is beauty,” says photographer Norman Jean Roy. “I’m only interested in making everyone I photograph look beautiful, relaxed, happy.” Roy made good on that ideal two times over in this issue, with both “Sister Act,” Tamar Adler’s profile of the inventive Gohar sisters (page 196), and “Trial by Fire,” Adam Green’s interview with actor Jodie Comer (page 180). Of the latter—seen above, surrounded by hairstylist Joey George, contributing fashion editor Max Ortega, and Roy himself—the photographer reports, “Jodie is such a lovely person with natural beauty, inside and out. We chatted a lot before and during the shoot, which always helps add shape and tone to a photograph.” Island Time Late last August, photographer Ngoc Minh Ngo headed out to…

We are 11 or 12 years old, but most of us look younger; we have been chosen, in part, because we are small for our age. Our smiles are tense, our necks stretched, our backs erect. Perhaps we are pretending, as we’ve been taught, that a puppeteer is pulling up our heads by a string. We have been told that our ballet school is the best in the world; we have been told that we are lucky. There are 20 of us in the photo, and we all want the same thing: to dance with the New York City Ballet. My cheek is tilted toward the light, but my eyes are pointed down. This year, my body has begun to defy me: The curve of my hip is peeking out…

Though Emily Adams Bode Aujla, founder of Bode, has now designed her very first line of clothing for women, it’s not the first time she has designed women’s clothes. Students of Bode’s short but wildly successful history will note that while at school—simultaneously studying fashion at Parsons School of Design and philosophy at Eugene Lang College—Emily and her roommate routinely crafted their own clothes for the weekend ahead. “On Fridays, we would stay up late and make a skirt out of crushed velvet or something,” Emily remembers. Making women’s clothes, it seems, wasn’t so much a challenge as a natural occurrence. “It just came so naturally to me that I wasn’t as inspired by it.” Other factors steered her early direction too: At Parsons, after one design assignment (“Astronauts, maybe?”),…

I have a colleague who travels the world to report on hotels and parties. Her Instagram is a pastiche of how the other half lives—and by the other half I mean those without kids. But the post of hers that really made my heart race had little to do with far-flung social engagements or uninterrupted adult conversation: It showed her reclining in a tub, lauding the elegant setup at the new Fouquet’s hotel in New York. A bathing experience minus the squeak of rubber duckies—a truly tantalizing prospect. In the immortal words of comedian Ali Wong, I no longer want to lean in, I want to lie down. All this concurrent career-building and child-rearing is really quite a lot—and is there anything more simultaneously indulgent and simple than a bath…

I have been bleaching my hair a solid, uninterrupted blond—not brassy, not gray, but a shade of pure peroxide, like Barbie or Pamela Anderson—since 2002, when I persuaded a friend to lovingly paint my entire head with a packet of drug-store powder bleach and let it cook. My scalp burned and itched. Inches of my hair snapped off, but the result was glorious. It was unnatural, and unkempt, and radical—a kind of imperfect perfection that rebelled against the glossy-lipped, high-definition, pseudo-real pop world that MTV was peddling at the time. I didn’t want to slip into a pair of leather chaps like Christina Aguilera; I wanted the ’70s grit of Debbie Harry. Despite my decades-long desire for non-conformity, I always feel a bit of anxiety when I see that reverse…