Vogue May 2024

INSPIRATION CAN COME FROM ANYWHERE—a painting, a piece of music, overheard conversation, an ephemeral moment in our lives. It’s a precious thing, but not the only thing. Creativity requires so much more: follow-through, investment and risk, mettle, heart, courage. I’ve been thinking about all of this in the wake of a fascinating season of fashion shows here and abroad—so many risk-taking collections by so many brilliant designers—and as I have watched the curator Andrew Bolton and his collaborators and colleagues at The Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute prepare the exhibition “Sleeping Beauties.” Their work has reached a fever pitch ahead of the May opening. Andrew has one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever encountered. And he’s always, always challenging himself. I watched him come up with the idea for “Sleeping…

The Bees’ Knees In late January, “The Big Short” (page 166) sent photographer Colin Dodgson, contributing fashion editor Max Ortega, model Kendall Jenner, and some of the season’s shortest and sweetest looks to Los Angeles’s Kenneth Hahn park, up in the Baldwin Hills. There, in zippy separates from the likes of Max Mara, Hermès, and Chanel, Jenner frolicked in the grass, hugged a few trees, and played with a dog named Chico (belonging to producer Zachary Higginbottom). Also in on the fun were Ortega’s assistants, Minty Mellon and Conor Manning—both pictured above, with Dodgson at center—who dressed up as beekeepers. Their (very real!) gear? Courtesy of the Department of Agriculture. Making Magic To Hamish Bowles, John Galliano’s spring 2024 haute couture collection for Maison Margiela—shown beneath the Pont Alexandre III…

“A piece of clothing isn’t something to just hang on a hanger or put on a mannequin,” says the photographer Nick Knight, who collaborated with Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, on this groundbreaking new exhibition. “We have dreams in it and live our lives through it.” “Sleeping Beauties” uses next-gen technology to reawaken and animate masterpieces from the museum’s permanent collection—many of them very rarely seen before. In the pages that follow, a few friends pay tribute to their own icons.…

My love affair with preppy style began with a sweater—a pistachio green, cable-knit, three-ply cashmere Ralph Lauren crewneck, to be exact. It had exquisite proportions—a skinny, slightly cropped cut, tiny armholes, and narrow sleeves that made your arms look like they went on forever—and the wool was so soft that it felt like a baby’s hair when you touched it (which I did a lot, obviously). In my New York of the late ’90s, it became part of my work uniform: I would wear it to the Vogue office on Madison Avenue with a pair of pale pink silk Dolce & Gabbana flared trousers, my granny’s pearls, and Manolo Blahnik kitten heel sandals in pale suede. On my shoulder: a huge leopard-print Fendi sack that André Leon Talley had given…

As a very young South Korean-born girl growing up in Utah, Anna Park fell deeply and permanently in love with drawing. “I just found it very seductive,” she tells me. “It made me feel good.” She still feels that way. Her fluent, immersive, black-and-white images, often 10 feet long, have put her in the forefront of a cohort of Asian artists who are attracting attention from curators and collectors. Her drawings have the power and presence of oil paintings but are made from charcoal or India ink. Many of them feature the smiling, perfect young women in mid-century ads, comics, or movies, but they’re clearly not as dopey as they seem. The result is a whirlwind of abstract and figurative elements that evoke the anxieties and absurdities of popular culture…

I didn’t know it was going to be quite so…wet,” says the playwright Amy Herzog as she arrives at a Brooklyn café, shaking a slushy mix of rain and snow out of her hat. Herzog, 45, has delicate but pointed features and a kind of immediate intensity and focus that she’ll need to draw upon in the weeks ahead. This is the month her adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People opens, directed by her husband, Sam Gold, and starring her old college friend Jeremy Strong. And at nearly the same time, in a quick shift in tone and material, rehearsals begin on a Broadway revival of her play Mary Jane, with Rachel McAdams in the titular role. I was pregnant when I first saw Mary Jane in…