Vogue October 2021

HOW SHOULD WE FEEL, at this moment, about the great outdoors? The climate news is frightening (and demands a courageous response from our political leaders), as is the extreme weather around the world—the tragic fires and floods and storms and drought that we are seeing far too much of. And yet there’s a poignance to this uneasy-making time: Our attachment to nature has only grown through COVID. We are more protective than ever of our fragile planet, and (hopefully) more respectful of it too. Fashion certainly has the outdoors on its mind. The collections were full of parkas, puffers, sturdy knits, boots, and other technically minded looks that suggested we throw open the doors and spend a season in the trees, in the snow, under the sun, and by the…

On Location: Iceland Inspired by both the technical gear that turned up in the fall collections (think heavy boots, anoraks, puffer coats galore) and the far-flung places where designers presented them (think Miu Miu in the Dolomites), “Wild Style” (page 88), photographed by Annie Leibovitz and styled by fashion editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, required one seriously good backdrop. “We wanted to go somewhere that had an expansive enough visual vocabulary to the landscape—everything from a volcano to the seaside, to glaciers, to icebergs,” Karefa-Johnson says. With dramatic terrain comes logistical challenges—especially where a full-blown fashion shoot is involved. “At one point we were on a glacier, which was kind of a sight to be seen,” Karefa-Johnson laughs. “People go there to see once-in-a-lifetime views, and we showed up with girls in…

The day after I gave birth to twins, a lactation consultant came to my hospital room to see how the babies were feeding. My mother was holding one baby, while I breastfed the other. The consultant tried to teach me how to feed both of them at the same time. Then she looked at me curiously. “Your eye looks droopy,” she said. Taken aback, I tried a joke, “Yes, my eyes are a little droopy,” I acknowledged. “I’m Irish.” “That’s not what I mean,” she said, kind but firm. “Go look in the mirror.” The left half of my face had fallen down. Eyebrow, fallen; eyelid, fallen; lip fallen, frozen, immovable. A stroke? I was astonished—my face hadn’t felt any different before I looked in the mirror. I tried to…

After a year of living on vid-eo calls, Eli Russell Linnetz hasn’t given up dressing for an occasion—even if he appears onscreen from his sun-lit California studio in an outfit he instantly regrets. “I forgot I was sup-posed to be wearing my American flag shirt—dammit!” he says, shaking his head and laughing. “That ruined the whole interview.” The allover flag-print tee isn’t some hokey bit he’s trying to pull off to tie in to the Costume Institute’s two-part exhibition In America: A Lexicon of Fashion (part one opens on September18)—itwasthestarof Lin-netz’s recent ERL menswear collection, set alongside techno silver trousers and kitschy tuxedos. And while his debut women’s collection doesn’t feature the old stars and stripes, it’s infused with an all-American spirit. For the past two years, Linnetz has been…

JONATHAN FRANZEN’S PLEASURE BOMB of a novel Crossroads (FSG) takes place in New Prospect, an Illinois suburb that could be a Norman Rockwell backdrop were it not for the rumblings of the women’s liberation movement and the war in Vietnam. It’s 1971 and the Hildebrandt family lives in a drafty house that the local church provided to patriarch Russ, a God-fearing and self-loathing associate minister who has not only fallen for a pixie-like widow but blames his desires on his wife, Marion. They have four children: young Judson; Becky, the golden-girl cheerleader who isn’t half as boring as she might seem; college-age Clem, tormented by guilt over the inequitable draft and his lust for a worldly older student; and Perry, whose extraordinary mental wiring leads to the manic episode that…

Is there any makeup more ephemeral than blush, or whose promise, through the ages, has proved more alluring? “They wish to find the springtime of their earliest years hiding in a pot of rouge,” an 18th-century social critic observed of the ladies at the court of Versailles, whose vermilion cheeks, floridly blooming in artificially snow-white complexions, signaled their allegiance to the aristocracy. These days, after years of heavy-handed “shake and bake” contouring, fashion is embracing the freshness of blush anew. But this is not your grandmother’s rouge. On the Chanel cruise runway, makeup artist Lucia Pica draped intense pink tints from models’ cheekbones all the way up across their temples. The look was “punky, almost rebellious,” Pica tells me, “tough and soft at the same time,” and a tribute to…