Vogue September 2024

MY LETTER THIS MONTH MUST take the form of a thank-you. Our escapist, glamorous, inimitably cinematic September cover shoot is all down to the genius of its director, Baz Luhrmann. Baz and his brilliant wife and creative collaborator, Catherine Martin, known to all as CM, are the kind of friends who will do anything for you. In fact they take favor-granting to the next level. Ask them to help you host a dinner party and suddenly you’re organizing an opera. So it was no small thing to ask him to mastermind our September cover. But instantly his mind started whirring. It would have to star Blake Lively and…Hugh Jackman! It would need a title—“The Heist of the Heart”—and scenes that would conjure Old Hollywood, Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in…

Cap It Off “Does anyone still wear a hat?” That was a question posed in the Sondheim musical Company way back in 1970—but, as Vogue contributing fashion editor Max Ortega observed at the fall shows, the answer in 2024 is a resounding yes. “Hats had recently fallen off, but for fall there were so many exciting new ways to see them,” he says. In his story “Hat Tricks” (page 322), shot by Sean Thomas, the cast of mad hatters included models Abby Champion, Alton Mason, and Ugbad Abdi (above), as well as actors Sarah Pidgeon and Juliana Canfield, whose 1970s-set play Stereophonic fit the theme. As Ortega notes, “The show is about something nostalgic, but staged in a modern way.” Adventure Time This month’s transporting cover story, “The Heist of…

In 2006, I started taking Xanax and continued, more rather than less, for the next 17 years. The drug was first prescribed to me after I experienced a panic attack. I had thought that I was dying. My children were two and six years old. We were at home—my husband had gone for the day and the babysitter was late. I started sweating and had this urge to run, to get outside. I didn’t know what was wrong, but my heart felt weird and I didn’t want to die in front of my kids. So I stuffed them in a stroller and went down to the street—West 106th in Manhattan—hoping to intercept the sitter. There she was in the lobby. She took the children. I didn’t explain. On the street,…

I was 22 when I first went to India. In the late ’90s, the hippie trail from Agra to Jaipur to Rishikesh was still full of backpackers. Germans, Israelis, and Australians traversed the country in elephant-printed harem pants and Buddhist prayer beads, indulging in banana-pancake breakfasts and cannabis-laced bhang lassis. My boyfriend—a serious student of the subcontinent, equipped with maps, train tables, and a prestigious fellowship—planned to do India differently. We would dress respectfully, live on a local budget—less than $5 a day—and see places other backpackers missed. When we bought cannabis, it was from a farmer in a Himalayan village where they grew the world-famous Malana cream. We were two recent Harvard graduates in India, and we were all about doing our homework. Young people may be known for…

It was the summer of 1984. Republican Ronald Reagan was running for reelection against Democrat Walter Mondale, who had picked a woman, Geraldine Ferraro, for his running mate. I was watching the political conventions on my little pink TV—no cable—in my apartment on East Ninth Street that cost $177 a month, wearing a silky flapper frock bought from a vintage store on St. Marks Place. Let the rest of the world flounce to the ballot box in neon colors, miniskirts, big-shoulder overcoats, and Jane Fonda workout clothes: I was dressed for the occasion as if it were 1924, not 1984, with prohibition in full swing and Republican Calvin Coolidge winning the White House. (The waggish journalist and cultural critic H. L. Mencken once observed that electing Coolidge was like a…

Without naming the most grotesque examples of tree mutilation in England, it is clear that much beauty is lost in our gardens by the stupid and ignorant practice of cutting trees into unnatural shapes,” wrote the Victorian-era gardener William Robinson in Gravetye Manor: Or Twenty Years’ Work round an Old Manor House (1911). Robinson’s fighting words were laid out in the preface to his book, an account of the decades he spent creating his gardenat the Elizabethan house of Gravetye Manor in Sussex, England, and recently reproduced in facsimile by Rizzoli alongside stunning contemporary photographs. Born in Ireland in 1838, Robinson was just nine when the Great Famine descended, and he began working as a garden boy before he was a teenager. Over the following decades, he would labor in…