Vogue September 2025

ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS about editing Vogue is returning to those who have been in our pages before (sometimes many times before) and charting the course of their careers. It’s a way of thinking about history, the arc of a life, and the durability of that ineffable thing we call personality. Revisiting friends—and there are a lot of them in this issue—seems especially timely given fashion’s fixation on personality. The spring runways were obsessed with fashion as the anti-uniform, with looks that rejoice in the adventurous act of being yourself. We hope to see much more of this at the upcoming shows as the fashion world continues to reshuffle its deck, and we have portfolios this month from Drew Vickers and Carlijn Jacobs that revel in risk-taking, self-expression, and…

Window Dressing What happens when a playful photographer, an Oscar-winning actor, the artistic director of women’s collections at Louis Vuitton, and a legendary fashion editor all walk into a 14th-century palais in Avignon? Why, this month’s cover story, of course(see JasonGay’s “Lucky Star,” page 254), for which Jamie Hawkesworth shot Emma Stone in looks that Nicolas Ghesquière made just for her, with styling by Grace Coddington. (That’s Coddington, above, going medieval in 1964.) In summary? “The whole thing was really a joy to be part of,” Coddington says. Southern Hospitality The profile “Horse Race” (page 298) sent photographer Norman Jean Roy (above, in navy), sittings editor Alexandra Michler Kopelman, and Vogue’s deputy editor, Taylor Antrim, down to Frankfort, Kentucky, to meet the state’s popular Democratic governor, Andy Beshear. Roy, whose…

My father’s most famous story was published in The New Yorker on July 18, 1964. Its hero, a Waspy, aging, and boyish suburban businessman named Neddy Merrill, is hanging out at a neighbor’s pool on a Sunday morning when he decides to swim home across the county from swimming pool to swimming pool. It’s a lovely, languorous, rich-boy idea. Neddy begins the story and his afternoon adventure as the quintessential Cheever hero: the best of the patriarchy, the loving, prosperous father of beautiful tennis-playing daughters and the husband of a lovely wife, Lucinda. But in art as in life, this surface is nothing but surface. The brilliant alchemy of narrative threads from myth, literature, and local gossip enabled my father to hit a watery nerve with the splash of an…

Somewhere inside Manhattan’s Morgan Library & Museum is an illuminated manuscript from the 15th century called The Black Hours. It is one of many such books that were prevalent in Christian households in the Middle Ages, noting which prayers to recite throughout the day. But what makes The Black Hours so special—its vellum pages darkened with carbon, giving the silver and gold text and the ornately drawn religious scenes a striking luster—is also what makes it so fragile. “It’s like a ghost story,” says the artist Lily Stockman, whose abstract paintings give off their own kind of glow. She’s never seen The Black Hours in person (few have—it was last on view in 1997), but years ago she heard the tale of this 500-year-old book tucked inside an acid-free box.…

Early fall may be the time to start thinking about putting the garden to bed, but in the world of book publishing it sees a profusion of verdant volumes. From Rizzoli there is Bird Haven Farm: The Story of an Original American Garden, a record of how the 100-acre New Jersey estate was cultivated into a variety of spaces—a pond dyed a nontoxic black to better reflect the sky, an orchard that produces hundreds of pounds of apples a year, a grove filled with early blooms like hellebore and dogwood. Once owned by the publisher of the Nancy Drew series, the farm, now tended by the jewelry designer Janet Mavec, who has lived on the property for almost 30 years, tells myriad stories in its own right. Also from Rizzoli…

In the summer of 2024, the British-born, American-based shoe designer Paul Andrew became the creative director of Sergio Rossi. The Italian shoe label was founded in 1951 by its namesake, and its trademark sculptural sexiness gained even greater prominence with the minimal yet sensual look so prevalent in the ’90s. “I’ve known and loved its aesthetic my whole career,” Andrew says. “[Rossi] was such a genius—he did so much for modern shoemaking, things that people don’t really talk about today: the lightness of the shoe, the inclination of the arch, the padding of the instep, the way the shoe is stitched…. It’s so fine.” Andrew is, he’ll admit with his wry humor, both a shoe nerd—his personal archive, housed in a vast temperature-controlled storage space in Connecticut, runs to the…