Vogue August 2018

THIS AUGUST WE BRING an (almost) entirely new roster of photographers, writers, and people to the pages of Vogue. I say “almost” because Irish actress Saoirse Ronan has been in the magazine several times before, as has Jamie Hawkesworth, the young Englishman who photographed her back home in Dublin, though this marks the first time either of them has had a Vogue cover. In the case of Saoirse, it seemed right and fitting that she should take the lead in an issue that celebrates new visions and voices. Usually the typical route for a talent of her age and background—someone who has prioritized smart, interesting roles in smart, interesting movies—is to be drawn into the Hollywood machine, making glossy, expensive multiplex productions; to become, and to conform to, what we…

New York in the 1970s was a wild, sleazy city, and as a teenager, I found myself exploring its leather bars, amusement arcades, and discos with an intensity that didn’t leave much room for school. On my report cards, the number of days absent was higher than most of my grades. One night in eleventh grade, my best friend and I took our schoolbags to Studio 54, stowed them under a seat in the upstairs gallery, and went straight to our Upper East Side girls’ school the next morning, bleary but triumphant. Hadn’t our parents noticed we didn’t come home the night before? my children asked many years later when they heard this story. Parents didn’t notice much in that unsurveilled era, I said. Teachers noticed, though. When it came…

When one thinks of sensible, eminently practical things to comfort, protect, and soothe during air travel, a quilted black polyamide toile one-piece from Chanel’s forthcoming Coco Neige collection may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But such is my discovery, which requires no thought on the part of the bleary-eyed during an early-hour dash to the airport: a nipped-waist, two-legged sleeping bag, fully insulated against temperature changes and suspect surface materials. Michelin Man I am not, thanks to world-class tailoring—though my boyfriend notes that I have been transformed into the largest travel pillow he could have snuck past security. I discover this life hack while exploring how, exactly, one might wear a piece from Chanel’s first-ever stand-alone ski and snow-sport collection. While Karl Lagerfeld’s seasonal runways have…

His Favorites Following the accidental death of a friend, fifteen-year-old Jo Hadley shows up mid-semester at a posh boarding school in Kate Walbert’s stunningly hazy novel His Favorites (Scribner). The new coed captures the attention of Master, a 34-year-old classics teacher whose boyish charm quickly turns predatory. Master’s legacy becomes “a shadow across my life—a solid bar, a locked turnstile that brings me up short, trapped on the other side of where I thought I was going.” Invoking the work of Wallace Stevens, Master’s favorite poet, and the bard of lost innocence, His Favorites becomes a layered, time-bending book that depicts the lingering effects of abuse. In 2004, when Walbert was among five female novelists nominated for the National Book Award, critics caviled that the academy was lowering its standards…

“THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS that separate me from Awkwafina,” says Nora Lum of her stage persona, a YouTube rapper alter ego she first created in high school. “Like the neurosis, the anxiety, and the overthinking.” None of that is apparent when I speak to Lum, however. Instead she’s a fast-talker with a stream of one-liners—a lot like the Queens-resident crook she plays in Ocean’s 8 (Lum is herself from Queens) and the silk pajama–wearing best friend in this month’s Crazy Rich Asians. “My grandma saw the trailer and she said, ‘It wasn’t even like you were acting,’” says Lum. While Lum is as confident and electric in person as she is on-screen, she grew up with something of a fractured identity. Born to an immigrant South Korean mother who died…

DISCREETLY CLOISTERED IN a nineteenth-century hôtel particulier on Paris’s Champs-Élysées, the Biologique Recherche store displays its creams under bell jars like rare specimens in a laboratory. Which is fitting, since the skincare company’s white-coated scientists have been pushing the boundaries in the superhot field of epigenetics. The epigenome is the control panel for our genes, determining which of them are turned on or off at any given time, and recent studies have indicated a promising ability to affect (via the epigenome) DNA related to the aging of the skin. In 2016, at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in La Jolla, California, scientists manipulated epigenetic markers in live mice with progeria, a disease of premature aging, to restore adult cells to a younger-seeming state. Mice we are not, but skin-care…