Vogue April 2022

READING THIS MONTH’S cover story, on Bella Hadid, reminded me all over again how unfathomably difficult it must be to be young today. “For three years while I was working, I would wake up every morning hysterical, in tears, alone,” Bella says in her interview with the writer Rob Haskell. Those are difficult words to read from someone as outwardly glamorous—and as steely and professional on a runway—as Bella. Her demeanor, she says, is simply her “armor,” and she talks in remarkably personal terms about what it hides. I applaud her for doing so. We all need to reckon with the gap between our inner lives and the selves we share with the world—especially through those platforms we’re all addicted to. It takes a reserve of strength and self-confidence to…

The Group In “Random Family” (page 46), Dodie Kazanjian describes the utopian studio arrangement of five female artists—Ruby Neri, Lily Stockman, Megan Reed, Hilary Pecis, and Austyn Weiner (seen here with their dogs, Dolly, Jake, Mango, and Pablo)—in Los Angeles. “I needed a place that was ground-level, with a roll-up door, so I could have my gas kiln outside,” explains Neri (far left), a sculptor. The building she found, in low-key Frogtown, “was a little bit beyond my price range, but I signed the lease in January, two months before COVID shut things down, and put out a call to other people.” Now, Pecis (second from right), a painter, likens the space to Seinfeld: It’s “a real open-door kind of situation,” she says. “Everyone here has a good work ethic,…

“I remember the moment very clearly,” Dries Van Noten tells me over Zoom from his Antwerp office, painting a vivid picture of his garden just outside the city a few summers ago. A designer beloved for fashion that marries romance with a certain Northern rigor—beauty and brains—Van Noten was leading a group of 10 hand-picked perfumers on a tour of his 55-acre grounds, and they had stopped to examine a peculiar scene: Next to what Van Noten considers to be “one of the most beautiful roses”—the velvety, dark burgundy Munstead Wood from David Austin—was a nearly neon pink varietal that he gleefully describes as “not really very tasteful.” The perfumers were struck by the juxtaposition. “They asked me why my rose garden didn’t look like any other rose garden,” he says,…

It began as so many successful relationships do: A deeply distinctive personality finds its soul mate, and a glorious creative encounter follows. In this case, Chitose Abe, Sacai’s innovative founder and creative director, met up with Cartier CEO and president Cyrille Vigneron, and the result is nothing less than a reimagining of the maison’s iconic Trinity jewelry. This might have seemed like a startling proposition: Sacai’s Abe was the woman who reinvented camo jackets with graceful patchwork; who enhanced austere cardigans with explosive eyelet flourishes—and the iconic three-band design of Trinity has been around for almost a century. But three years ago, when Abe visited the Cartier design team to talk about a one-off Trinity ring just for herself, her dream began to take shape, and sketches and prototypes were…

What are the chances that five women artists, with studios in the same Los Angeles complex, would all be rooting for one another? Just such an unlikely arrangement exists right now in Frogtown, a sleepy, mostly residential neighborhood on the Los Angeles River, minutes from downtown. Ruby Neri, a sculptor of bright, bumptious, large-scale female clay nudes, had her eye on the magic warehouse for some time before she officially obtained it in 2020. “It was a little bit beyond my price range, but I signed the lease two months before COVID shut things down.” Lily Stockman, an abstract painter, heard about it from a friend, and got in touch with Neri. “It was truly right in my backyard,” she says. Neri then called Hilary Pecis, a realist painter of…

It was one of the great fashion moments of the internet era: For the 2015 Met gala, marking the museum’s “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibition, Rihanna electrified the red carpet in a fur-trimmed, canary yellow cape with a traffic-stopping 16-foot train. As the fashion world descended in a joyous frenzy, the designer Guo Pei found, rather instantly, a rapt Western audience. “I did not expect such a strong reaction,” Pei says now. In hindsight, she attributes it in part to “people’s perception that China did not have fashion or design. Many people used to think of it as a developing country.” Later that year, she was invited to join the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture and show on the couture week calendar in Paris. Though you can draw…