Vogue April 2019

Karl Lagerfeld was a standard unto himself. He defined what it means to be a twenty-first-century designer, and he did it with humor and joy. It’s doubly painful to have lost him because he never fell out of love with his work or with the world, and his death marks the end of the era of craftspeople who could do it all. Karl was the living soul of fashion: restless, forward-looking, and voraciously attentive to our changing culture. He recognized earlier than most that ready-to-wear wasn’t just couture-lite but the vibrant center of the new, accomplished woman’s lifestyle. And at a time when his peers were seeking shelter in fashion houses, he branched out alone as perhaps the world’s most dazzling freelancer, designing multiple labels with electric energy. I’ve joked…

WHILE WE WERE FINISHING this issue, there was still talk in Congress and from the White House of building a wall along our southern border—a contentious (and, quite frankly, offensive) cause that’s already prompted so much suffering and hardship thanks to the longest government shutdown in American history. Even beyond the political implications of such a thing, though, is the cultural impact: Why should we only gaze inward, when to look outward is always so much more exciting and enriching? Walls—or, more precisely, the absence of them—are what inspired April’s Vogue. At a time when our leaders seem to be trying to close us off from everyone and everything else, we wanted to celebrate globalism through the prisms of fashion and culture. Quite recently our latest digital platform, VogueWorld, did…

It was a modern non–love story, the only kind I’d ever really known. But this was my first time at the rodeo in my 30s, a decade so far remarkable for my first gray hair, my first time showing up for jury duty, and my first real heartbreak, stemming from the public dissolution of a six-year relationship I had believed to be permanent. Jeremy (his name has been changed) “slid into my DMs” after I posted a thirst-trap picture in some plus-size panties (fire emoji eggplant emoji water droplet emoji yasss). I was lonely as hell—maybe lonelier, because at least those baddies are all down there together—and I had been programmed by my near miss of a marriage to see off into forever. This seemed like a good way to…

For the past two decades, fashion director Tonne Goodman has traveled the world for Vogue—from the Great Wall of China to Lima, Peru, to Madrid and (her personal highlight) Kenya’s Lake Victoria with Lupita Nyong’o. Wherever she goes, she comes armed only with her singular eye for elegance, a Dries van Noten coat over her arm, and a carry-on wheelie carefully packed with three pairs of white Levi’s 511s, black and navy Organic by John Patrick sweaters, Brooks Brothers pajamas, Louboutin’s Chelsea boots, black suede Belgian loafers, her father’s leather belts, and a handful of Charvet foulard scarves, which recall the print of her favorite smocked dress that she wore as a little girl growing up on the Upper East Side. Many of these odysseys are revealed in Point of…

“Yesterday’s pondwater / braided still wet in my hair.” These lines from a poem by Jane Hirshfield made me cry when I heard them years ago. In just eight words, she had summed up the happiest times of my childhood—once I had discovered, as I put it in a story I would write decades later, “that water was going to be my place on earth.” There was a single pond in the Chicago suburb where my family moved in 1963 when I was eleven. When I swam there that first year, a song ran constantly in my head, so it was not silence or mindlessness that I was after. The song was “Hello Stranger,” a summer hit by Barbara Lewis. When Lewis sang the line, “Seems like a mighty long…

If there’s no new step under the sun, then Bob Fosse might just be the sun. With a reach that extended from Broadway to Hollywood and back again, Fosse (1927–1987) was a soft-shoed dancer with megawatt talent. In his films (Cabaret; Sweet Charity), as in his stage productions (Pippin; Chicago), the director-choreographer married tap’s fancy footwork with the hipswaying sensuality of back-alley vaudeville. Fosse’s style was hot and cool; polished, but a little bit dirty; and the signs of its continued influence are everywhere. This month, Fosse gets the FX treatment with a new show, Fosse/Verdon, starring Sam Rockwell (as the director-choreographer) and Michelle Williams (as wife and collaborator Gwen Verdon), and executive-produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton director Thomas Kail. Here, we trace just a few of the connective…