Vogue Summer 2023

THIS WILL BE THE SUMMER of Barbie—that’s been clear at least since set photographs of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling dressed in rather startling neon skates caused a frenzy online. It’s good and wise to be wary of hype, but the excitement around Barbie, which opens in July, is hard not to be caught up in. Here is a doll that has meant so much to so many, a cultural icon that has grown up alongside us and reflected the times she found herself in. Barbie’s a mirror. She tells us who we are and who we’ve been. Her history is our history. And so much pink! Not since Elsa Schiaparelli has a color had such cultural currency. Robbie looks incredible in pink, of course, and I am thrilled to…

RUPERT EVERETT I first came across Michael waiting in line to get into London’s Embassy Club in 1978. I was a startled faun of 18 and he was the fashion editor of The Sunday Times. I cowered in the shadows as he wafted past the queue in a flotilla of fabulous fashion freaks towards the coat check, exuding a strange international glamour, dressed in a blazer, a button-down collar, and a tightly knotted tie. Suddenly we were introduced and Michael looked me up and down. (I was smaller in those days.) “Did anyone tell you that you look like Snow White?” “No.” “With a touch of Anne Frank. Very peculiar.” Before I could answer he had swept on. Despite this inauspicious beginning, we soon became great friends. When Michael started…

Afriend of mine, a jewelry historian, is often called upon to give talks or chair panels. When a gig comes up at the last minute and she has, like most of us, nothing to wear, she hustles down to a certain shop on Bleecker Street and picks up what she calls “an Ulla.” She is not alone in her reliance on a dress from Ulla Johnson, whose designs—at once vaguely frilly but not ridiculous, pretty but not sticky, bohemian but never unkempt—more and more reflect how women want to look today. No longer bound by the arcane rules of appropriateness (nor forced to troop around in “basics”), they—okay, we—are free to don a puff sleeve and, nevertheless, be taken seriously. Johnson, 49, is among a cadre of female designers who…

When Kyiv awoke to the Russian invasion last February, Natasha Kamenska and Maria Gavryliuk, founders of the Ukrainian-based fashion and homeware label Gunia Project, were among the many who temporarily relocated to safer regions (Berlin in their case). Reflecting on the harrowing early months of war, they remembered a growing sense of responsibility—not only to their country, but to the Ukraine-based ceramic, metalwork, glass, and textile artisans under their employ. As the two friends brought their business back to life, they thought of their wider community too. A nation’s morale was at stake. “A lot of friends and clients talked about the stuff they packed that first day,” says Kamenska. “Almost all of them took something of ours—an accessory, or a scarf, or a little small bag. To them, it…

The basement smelled like old paint and metal; glue, newsprint, vanilla, sea-kissed sweat. A sign propped up on a table upstairs had drawn me down there, looking for spoils: “Books, $1 Each.” I was in Cape Cod for the summer and 10. After some dignified begging, I was granted an advance on allowance. I selected 20 books. It took me months to work through the haul, which included a battered-up Roald Dahl box set and an illustrated version of The Secret Garden. Each time I opened one, I was back in the basement, treasure hunting. I started to prefer old books to new, not just for the inscriptions to strangers, but for that smell. Old books turned stories into portals; until then, I hadn’t known reading could feel like time…

In Jenny Xie’s Holding Pattern (Riverhead Books), Kathleen Cheng has moved back home to Oakland, reeling from a devastating breakup and having dropped out of a graduate program. There she finds her Chinese immigrant mother somehow newly engaged to a tech entrepreneur. Signing up to be a cuddle therapist at a curious start-up moves Cheng to reconsider the relationships in her life. Driven by Xie’s irresistible voice, this is a warm and funny debut about longing and belonging, the motherdaughter bond, and finding intimacy in an increasingly alienated world.—LISA WONG MACABASCO Tom Rachman’s bustling, globe-trotting new novel manages to be about a writer’s life ending, quietly, lonesomely—even as it bursts with characters, plots, and humor. The writer is Dora Frenhofer, a prickly Dutch novelist in her 70s, living by herself…