Vogue November 2023

ONE HEARS THE PHRASE passion project much too much—and yet I can’t think of a better way to describe Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s magnificent and meticulous new movie that depicts the life, and the very complex marriage, of the American composer Leonard Bernstein. His wife was the actor Felicia Montealegre, and she’s played by our cover star this month, Carey Mulligan—and more on Carey in a moment. If you’re lucky enough to be friends with Bradley, you know how hard he works. He is—and I say this with admiration—a bit obsessive, and never more so than he was with Maestro. The level of care and attention he devoted to every frame, every shot, every set and costume, even to the projecting equipment in Venice, where the film had its triumphant festival…

Dog Days “Barn This Way” (page 98) sent contributing editor Chloe Malle and photographer Norman Jean Roy out to Litchfield County, Connecticut, where Sylvana Durrett, cofounder and CEO of Maisonette (and Vogue’s intrepid former director of special projects), shares a sprawling property with her husband, their three young children (that’s six-year-old Millie, at top right), two Labrador retrievers, and a rotating cast of friends and extended family. Roy, who arrived on that humid summer’s day bearing baked goods for the Durrett clan, was amused more than miffed when—as Malle recalls it in her story—Blue, one of the Labs, lunged for a bite of his freshly baked bread. “Clearly, the dog has good taste!” Roy jokes. Girls on Fire Norman Jean Roy was also behind the camera for “Big Lights” (page…

At the beginning of a crisis it’s the adrenaline that gets you through. When Ukrainians woke up on the morning of February 24, 2022, they were jolted into a world of urgency and alarm. Explosions, jets screaming overhead, tanks on their highways. I remember reading headlines in the sleepy village on the coast of Brittany where I live, when an email from an editor popped into my inbox: Do you want to go to Ukraine for us? Once upon a time I had been a war correspondent in Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt during the Arab Spring, but over the past few years I had started writing about food as a way to illustrate larger issues: ecology, economics, identity. I briefly weighed the article about onions I was working on against…

Some designers cling strictly to the calendar, releasing their collections in rigid sequence, but others have imaginations that cannot be tied down to a particular season. For Nadège Vanhée, the artistic director of women’s ready-to-wear at Hermès, this desire to break free, to throw out the old rules, has resulted in an exquisite, extremely limited edition (a mere 16 looks!) that she refers to as sleeping beauties—their formal name is Collection Hors-Série, Women’s 2023 Savoir-Faire Collection. Each of these creations, from the embroidered ivory swing coat to the silk jacquard Spencer jacket to the micromini woven with ribbons, is made from fabrics left over from previous collections. You might call it deadstock, but of course the end of a bolt of Hermès cashmere is not exactly a prosaic remnant; a…

Oh the joys of the compact essay! Set against concerns over the fragmentation of media—and the fetishization of “long-form”—it’s a tonic to recall just how potent a short read can be. Hilary Mantel, the beloved author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, was for decades before her death last year a journalist as well as a novelist. The works collected in A Memoir of My Former Self (Holt) are sharp and shapely, models of economy and density of thought. They also cover an expansive terrain. Here is the story of her time in Saudi Arabia, and her struggles with a culture she deemed both rich and claustrophobic; her lifelong compulsion to write; her endometriosis—which becomes a moving meditation on women’s pain. If you are a Mantel completist or if you have…

When it opened in 2018 amid 400 acres of dense and leafy woodland, Heckfield Place raised the bar for a British countryside escape. Now, with the opening of its expansive wellness space, The Bothy by Wildsmith, it is just showing off—albeit with a charming lack of pretense. When I arrived at the stately Georgian home this summer, I was promptly instructed to swap my flats for a pair of Wellies and escorted through the Narnia-esque walled garden, beyond which lies The Bothy. The small stone building hides what lies beneath: an impressive 17,000 square feet of dedicated wellness space, accessed via a vast spiral staircase. Nature permeates even underground; walls are decked with dried wildflowers, and recorded birdsong—captured during lockdown—provides a soothing soundtrack. The Bothy is only open to hotel…