Vogue February 2021

OUR FEBRUARY ISSUE is born out of national pride—pride in American creativity, in the never-ending supply of fresh ideas that exist from coast to coast, and in the belief that this is a nation to celebrate and explore and discover again and again. Such pride should not seem radical, but as I write this, in the last days of 2020, it does a little. That’s because we’ve been through four long years in which division and grievance have too often fueled our politics. And we’re reeling from a pandemic that has cost us so much and cruelly affected the neediest most of all. The vaccines are so important, and they can’t be distributed quickly enough. There is light ahead, and hope, but it’s been a dark time and a complicated…

Louise Erdrich “I’m a writer. I could work in pajamas. But I prefer to cheer myself up,” says Erdrich, a National Book Award–winning author whose novels and short stories have memorably chronicled Native American and Midwestern life. “I like to prop my feet up when thinking and look at this pair of intricately hand-beaded tennis shoes a friend made for me.” Her personal essay for Vogue, “Heritage Designs” (page 38), is not the first time Erdrich, based in Minnesota and North Dakota, has written about fashion—and she’s currently under way on a novel that contains ghost stories about her Borsalino hat. “In the Ojibwe language, certain items of clothing are, in some dialects, animate,” she explains. “The sense that some apparel has life and some does not is very consistent…

When people think of Miami, it’s hard not to think of its longtime status as the playground for foreign diplomats and socialites, not to mention many of the South’s greatest rappers and athletes, all modern demigods partying away in Art Deco Mount Olympus. But chip away at the bleached-pastel veneer, and you’ll find its more intriguing, Stygian side. This is the Miami I know best: a sinister place where murders of crows stalk green parrots in palm trees, feral cats rove North Beach, and a midday monsoon can flood your neighborhood for days. Florida in the late ’90s produced ghastly rock acts like Marilyn Manson and Jack Off Jill—and, eventually, sullen teenagers like me. I raided my Gen X parents’ stash of alt-rock cassette tapes and Anne Rice novels in…

I am a mixed-blood member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, a tribal nation centered high in North Dakota, 10 miles from the Canadian border. My mother, Rita Gourneau Erdrich, sewed my clothes. Fashion starts in childhood. We instinctively love what is right for us. A dress of dark turquoise patterned with black flowers. A sparkling white pinafore with sunflower buttons. A pair of beaded moccasins made of tanned fawn skin, trimmed with red ribbon work. These were precious to me. Like my background, my message has always been mixed. I went to college on a Native American Program scholarship wearing a denim miniskirt, brown tights, red cowboy boots, and my father’s knit oxblood teacher’s vest. In the ’70s, out of college, joining American Indian activists, I asked my…

At 14, all I wanted in the world was to be 40. What could have been more embarrassing and terrible than being a teenager? Adults were in charge, it seemed to me then, and adult life appeared to be governed by reason and rationality. I trusted adults. I had faith in adults. Every Sunday when I was growing up, my parents would drive 20 minutes from my suburb on the east side of Akron to our Unitarian Universalist church on the west side. It was a great church. The congregants were freethinking, open-minded adults who worked to create an enormously accepting community, one that felt to me very far away from the slings and arrows of adolescence. The sermons that hit me the hardest were about how big the stakes…

Why do you have so many little floral prints that you never wear?” demands my daughter, rifling through a rarely visited corner of my closets. Upstairs in our family house in Turin, Italy, she is as usual ransacking my wardrobe for vintage clothes—an Alaïa leather skirt, a Tom Ford for Gucci velvet jacket—that she will cajole from me for extended loans. “Stuff like this doesn’t look good on you,” she adds with daughterly bluntness, holding up a blouse from the Italian company Frau Lau, with a minuscule Liberty design of pale-blue blossoms. “Not your style at all.” It is true, I admit, that it is not my style, which is monotone, severe, yet occasionally reckless, ideally with an edge of kink. Yet it is also true that, over the years,…