Innehållsförteckning för September 2021 från Vogue

Three years ago, on an early summer’s afternoon in leafy Bloomsbury, London, a 27-year-old Sally Rooney and I were sitting in the grand offices of her British publisher, Faber, discussing her upcoming second novel. Her debut, Conversations With Friends—the story of two best friends and one’s adulterous relationship with an older married man—had been out for a year, and already Rooney was haloed by a cult status: a literary novelist who had broken the mainstream. “Salinger for the Snapchat generation” is how she was introduced to the world (“I remember thinking at the time,” Rooney guiltily recalls, “What is Snapchat?”), and anticipation for her follow-up was reaching fever pitch. Fast-forward to 2021, and that second novel, Normal People, a will-they-won’t-they? tale for the millennial era about two students, Marianne and…

NINE YEARS AGO, A TEENAGE Kristine Froseth went to a casting call at an Oslo mall with two friends, “for the heck of it,” and was signed by a local talent agent on the spot; a few months later, she found herself in a Prada campaign shot by Steven Meisel. Her acting career manifested through similar happenstance. “It was pretty much just another lucky moment,” insists the New Jersey–born, Norway-raised model, now 24, who stars in Amazon’s fall ballet drama Birds of Paradise. “Physically it was pretty challenging,” Froseth says of the grueling workout schedule (barre, Pilates, gyrotonics, cardio) required to accurately portray a young dancer vying for a spot in the elite Opéra National de Paris. Joining the body-positive set of Sharp Stick, Lena Dunham’s secretive feature-length directorial effort,…

LAMINE BADIAN KOUYATÉ IS BETTER KNOWN for his love of color—and his use of wax prints and stretch fabrics—than for his long-standing commitment to what he calls “making great things with less.” For 30 years, though, this pioneer of sustainable fashion has been doing just that under the label Xuly.Bët (a Wolof expression meaning “Keep your eyes open”). Now, with buyers, editors, and customers increasingly on the lookout for both joyous and conscious clothing, it seems that the world is finally paying attention to Kouyaté’s work. (Xuly.Bët is available at xulybet.com.) That’s a welcome development for the 58-year-old designer, who spends seven days a week in his studio in a Brutalist concrete building in Ivry-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris, making dynamic dresses and bodysuits with stretch tulle or an…

In 1966, before she moved to Paris and became a muse to Karl Lagerfeld and Anthony Lopez, the model Pat Cleveland received a letter at her family’s Harlem apartment from Eunice W. Johnson. The cofounder of the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company—which produced the influential magazines Ebony and Jet—was officially inviting a then 16-year-old Cleveland to join the “traveling troupe” participating in that year’s Fashion Fair. A kind of mobile runway show, Ebony’s annual trademark event brought highlights from the Paris collections to cities and towns across America via Greyhound bus. With as many as 187 shows during a 12-week run twice a year, Johnson engaged the fashion-mad yet largely overlooked Black middle class, giving them access to Yves Saint Laurent and Valentino Couture that was impossible otherwise—and she ran a…

MIUCCIA PRADA DOES NOT like collaborations. “I’ve been asked to do a collaboration since ages!” she exclaims in heavily accented English. “They always seemed to be just about selling more—about clichés, banality, and not about ideas. I was never interested.” She is sitting in her Milan office alongside her new counterpart, Prada co–creative director Raf Simons, as I count contradictions. Even without the presence of Simons here in the nerve center of Prada HQ, it is clear to any devotee that what’s happened to the label is most definitely a collaboration: Since February 2020, when the partnership was first announced—prompting great surprise and intrigue—the fingerprints of both designers have been stamped all over the Prada collections, as plain to see as the omnipresent triangular logo. The pair have so far…

FOUR DAYS BEFORE HE BEGAN his glorious, drama-filled run to the finals at Roland Garros, Stefanos Tsitsipas took the court at a suburban Paris country club and started circling his arms, reaching so far that he looked less like a 22-year-old tennis star and more like a Ferris wheel that had just been turned on and was gently picking up speed. Today was shoe-test day. Tsitsipas was wearing a new pair of black sneakers from Adidas, his sponsor; black shorts; and a white T-shirt that read terre battue (“clay court,” more or less, and a French Open slogan). His shoulder-length, sun-streaked curls were getting in his face, so he called for a headband. While he waited, he took out a pouch and ate some kind of goo. Soon Tsitsipas’s coach—his…

Once upon a time, whenever I had seats for a Broadway show, my pretheater ritual involved one of two activities. I would either meet a friend at Sardi’s for a quick martini and a ramekin of orange cheese or else find myself sprinting out of the Times Square subway station at 7:59 to make an 8:00 curtain. But on a sunny, not-quite-warm Saturday in early April, I found myself in a fluorescent-lit exam room at an urgent-care clinic in Hell’s Kitchen, on the receiving end of a rapid-antigen COVID test. A negative result would let me join a lucky few at the St. James Theatre for an iteration of NY PopsUP, the citywide initiative to start bringing back theater, music, and dance to its culture-starved citizens. It would be the…

Table of contents: 69: Dress, $15,000; tomokoizumi.com. Headband ($220) and earrings ($58); joomilim.com. Necklace ($2,290) and rings ($990 for set). Necklace at givenchy.com. Ring set; similar styles at givenchy.com. Maria Tash septum ring, $280; mariatash.com. Vex gloves, $70; vexclothing.com. Manicurist, Gina Edwards. Tailor, Cha Cha Zutic. 93: Balenciaga Couture clothing and accessories; balenciaga.com. Manicurist, Marie Rosa. Cover Look: 93: On Gerber: Dress, $5,750; tomford.com. On Yai: Dress, $2,990; ralphlauren.com. On Lee: Dress $1,490; carolinaherrera.com. On Hadid: Dress, $4,725; bergdorfgoodman.com. On Shi: Blazer ($1,990) and pants ($1,090); proenzaschouler.com. On Nicholson: Sweater ($650) and skirt ($4,750); shopmcmullen.com. On Nu: Dress, $450; marahoffman.com. On Leon: Dress, $4,670; michaelkors.com. Tailors, Zunyda, Lucy Falck. Behind-the-scene shots, photographed by Hunter Abrams. Editor’s Letter: 118: On Hodge: Waistcoat and pants, $2,745 for suit; dolcegabbana.com. Shirt, $735; tomford.com.…

Marni bag Bits and bobs and odds and ends add a dash of charm to this top-handle, brushed-calf-leather bag. There’s a tiny mushroom for a psychedelic, down-Alice’s-rabbit-hole flair—along with some cutlery and a set of keys, because why not? Hermès watch Where modern timepieces are concerned, few are as immediately recognizable as Hermès’s Heure H—though this variation on the theme, with an alligator strap to match its malachite dial and a rose-gold case set with diamonds, is worth going green with envy over. Chloé bag Creative director Gabriela Hearst has brought back the maison’s Edith bag—which also happens to be the first luxury handbag she ever carried—but this time it’s cut in buffalo leather and features fringe made of recycled cashmere. While it speaks volumes about Hearst’s dedication to sustainability…

On paper, Catherine Dior is an unlikely heroine. Born into the prosperous Dior family in 1917, the youngest of five children, she seemed destined for a decorative existence. But when the family’s fortune suddenly vanished due to failed real estate ventures, a life of leisure seemed far less inevitable. In 1935, the teenage Catherine moved from the family’s stately home in Granville, Villa Les Rhumbs, to a dilapidated farmhouse in Provence. She soon escaped to live with her older brother Christian in Paris, selling accessories for a fashion house while he peddled his sketches. When World War II broke out, the siblings returned to the South of France and grew vegetables that they sold in nearby Cannes. It was there, after Christian had returned to the capital in search again…

In the early aughts, then–fashion designer Mina Stone struck up a side gig as a chef to support her eponymous clothing line. A few events later, she found herself with an invitation to cook a 40-person dinner at Gavin Brown’s downtown Manhattan gallery. “I had no idea about the art world,” Stone says—nor had she ever made dinner for so many people. “I looked up recipes online and multiplied them by 10.” The party served as a seductive introduction to a new scene: “I remember Blondie was there, and I was like, Where. Am. I?” She started preparing all of Brown’s gallery dinners, and her elegant, unfussy approach caught the attention of the Swiss artist Urs Fischer, who invited Stone to cook daily staff lunches at his Red Hook, Brooklyn,…

For Demna Gvasalia, Balenciaga’s artistic director, the haute couture—reintroduced to the storied brand on July 7 (for the first time since its founder retired in 1968) with a powerful, elegant presentation, shown in silence and fragranced with incense, that managed to be both reverential and iconoclastic—is “almost like a holy grail, like an altar in a church.” When he joined Balenciaga in 2015, Gvasalia was well aware of the house’s history and its roots in impeccably conceived, handcrafted couture under the direction of Cristóbal Balenciaga, a humbly born Spaniard whom Christian Dior hailed as “the master of us all.” Balenciaga shaped fashion from 1937—after he fled the Spanish Civil War to establish his already two-decade-old brand in Paris—until he shuttered his house in 1968 (complaining bitterly that his career in…

Meet the emerging brands and designers giving new life to the season’s wardrobe staples. CAROLINA SANTO DOMINGO utilizes Italian craftsmanship to create her striking geometric bags. Known for its bamboo “Ark” bag, CULT GAIA delivers equally sculptural ready-to-wear, inspired by nature. Chicago-based AZEEZA is a go-to for voluminous dresses in bold shades. And if you’re looking for an eco-conscious option, try STELLA PARDO’s Parisian-style knitwear, handmade in Peru with natural materials.…

THE PHRASE “LEAP OF FAITH” must be indelibly imprinted on the mind of just about every young designer who has decided to go it alone with their own label today. Let us count the minefields you need to navigate to let your own particular fashion flag fly: You can experience the sheer joy of making exactly what you want—but you’ll need to work day and night to ensure it’s being made in ways that are accountable and respectful. Your clothes can say something about the world—or about your world—yet there’s also that little voice in your head asking if you should be making anything at all, given the environmental predicament we find ourselves in. But here’s the thing with this new generation of independenttalents: They don’t shy away from creativity…

How many of us are holding on to a pile of cosmetics empties, simply waiting to “do the right thing” when disposing of them? I’ve heard rumors of beauty editors’ storing suitcases full of moisturizer tubs and lip-gloss tubes in their New York apartments, too informed to throw it all away but too busy to figure out how to ethically disappear the waste. Months of living in isolation in my Chicago town house brought me to the brink, with containers squirreled into every crevice—a microcosm of a much bigger problem: In 2018, an estimated 120 billion units of cosmetics packaging were produced globally, only a fraction of which made it to a recycling facility. After a year of self-soothing via online shopping, one can only imagine 2021’s damage. “Think of…

WHEN IT COMES TO PREPERFORMANCE RITUALS, the show literally cannot go on until Rihanna has applied her perfume. And the Fenty Beauty founder doesn’t just wear fragrance. “My mom actually worked in the beauty-and-fragrance industry, so she’d always get a lot of samples and introduce me to the scents when she came home,” Rihanna explains of her long-standing habit of layering different bottles to create a bespoke blend. So when she decided to launch a signature Fenty scent, out this month, her goal wasn’t just to add another category to her ever-expanding empire; it was to upend the traditional world of high-end perfumery. “I didn’t just tell them, ‘Make a fragrance that’s floral or spicy or makes me feel like I’m on the beach,’” the hitmaker jokes of what turned…

SPEAKING WITH THE New York–based, São Paulo–born jeweler Ana Khouri, you’ll quickly notice her choice of words: she makes pieces, not rings; retailers are exhibitors; shoppers are collectors. Khouri is, in fact, an artist—she studied sculpture in Brazil and at Manhattan’s Parsons School, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris shows her newest pieces each year. Designing with ethically sourced materials has always been a focus; her next pieces, crafted from vintage rosewood furniture, include rings shaped like Froot Loops and encrusted with colored stones, along with a pavé-diamond-laden version of Khouri’s cult Mirian ring—a wraparound piece that doesn’t reach all the way around and that is named after her mother. There are also semi-enclosed chokers with diamonds, similar to the Ana Khouri pieces worn by Vice President Kamala…