Vogue September 2023

I CAN’T REMEMBER THE LAST time I went to a shoot. It must have been 30 years ago? More? But this wasn’t an ordinary day on set. This was history being made: Cindy, Naomi, Christy, and Linda together again, conjuring fashion magic as only they can. British Vogue’s Edward Enninful was the consummate editor, mixing a throwback spirit with the energy and relevance of now, and his collaborator, the brilliant young photographer Rafael Pavarotti, was in his element too, at the center of so much celestial star power. The scene had wattage, pure and simple. But there was uncommon warmth too. These four Supers, indomitable women each of them, know one another so well, and they know Vogue so well that the proceedings had the air of a family reunion.…

Fantasy Land “Arriving at Glyn Cywarch on a sunny afternoon is like walking into some kind of foxglove fairy tale.” So says photographer Sean Thomas, who in June traveled to the wildly romantic Welsh manor house where the Harlech family has lived for hundreds of years. In “Pure Imagination” (page 306), Amanda Harlech (pictured at left in 1992, riding her horse Joyita across Glyn Cywarch’s lush grounds) describes the estate’s evolution over the last half century—and, with help from her daughter, Tallulah, styles some of fall’s most frolicsome looks on a gaggle of their friends. “I remember looking at the two of them when they were unpacking the boxes of clothes with all of that Vogue wrapping tape,” Thomas says. “I thought to myself how wonderful it must feel to…

Not long after my last breakup, at lunch with friends, talk turned to my love life. One pal suggested I try “dating an American.” (My ex is English.) Another retorted, “or maybe a European.” We laughed. Conversation shifted. Later, as I waited for the subway, an ad for a European dating site appeared in my Instagram feed. I had, I think, the reaction typical of these digital times: a frisson of disquiet—they’re listening—followed by a shrug of bemused resignation. What can you do? My train arrived; I got on with my day. The ad began to follow me around. The more it appeared, the more it struck me as fishy—too soft-focus; too sincere. What was the scam? One night, curiosity got the better of me: I entered some basic information—email…

One night a few months ago, I was scouring my usual list of secondhand websites—The RealReal, eBay, Grailed—when I spotted it: a vintage Jean Paul Gaultier top plastered with imagery of cowboys and Native Americans. Sigh. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve seen my Indigenous culture reduced to a kind of gimmick. Growing up Ojibwe on the Nipissing First Nation reservation in northern Ontario, only rarely did I see the beauty of our people and their designs authentically reflected in the fashion world; all too often, we were reduced to caricatures instead. But I bought that shirt, which now rests in my growing collection of fashion pieces that feature various elements of cultural appropriation. Of course, this isn’t a new concept: Appropriation—in this case, using style cues and motifs…

Shara Hughes, whose invented landscapes have intoxicated me since I saw one nearly 10 years ago, is at a turning point. At 42, she’s getting married to her longtime partner and fellow artist, Austin Eddy. She is making work for her Los Angeles debut, in September, at the David Kordansky Gallery, and she is on the verge of signing with a another, top-tier gallery. Hughes and Eddy recently bought half a town house, with a garden, in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. They’re getting a Boston terrier puppy, tentatively named Puppet, to replace Hughes’s much-loved Chicken Nugget. And she’s thinking hard about saying goodbye to landscape as her main subject. “There’s a big transition coming,” Hughes tells me. It’s mid-May and we’re in her Brooklyn studio, which is a seven-minute…

Like so many things in life, it boils down to a commitment issue. Are you ready to go under the knife—or should we say scissors—daring your hairdresser to chop a fringe high above your eyebrows, quelling the words strangling your throat, the voice that says, It’ll take years to grow these things out! Or do you grit your teeth, shut your eyes, and dream that when you open them you will swing around in the barber’s chair looking like Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina? Fraught and terrifying as the prospect of cutting shorties might be, the micromini bang is undeniably having a moment. Sometimes they skew edgy and subversive, like Bella Hadid’s spiky and gelled wisps for Marc Jacobs’s latest eyewear campaign, or more classic, like Emily Ratajkowski’s and Olivia Rodrigo’s…