Vogue May 2022

THE ROAD TO A RIHANNA cover is never especially direct, but getting to our destination this month—an astonishing Annie Leibovitz portfolio of the superstar enceinte, in Paris, at the Ritz, during a late Fashion Week night in March 2022—took more than a little ingenuity and nerve. “Rihanna has never been much for scheduling,” writes Vogue’s Chioma Nnadi in her accompanying profile, deploying what might be the understatement of 2022. Actually, none of us have been perfect with scheduling lately. A global health crisis has made quick work of best-laid plans. Just ask Vogue’s fashion department, where editors first pulled clothes from the spring collections for a Rihanna shoot then imagined in Los Angeles. When that shoot was moved to Barbados and set for December 2021, the team assembled a completely…

Family Ties For the portfolio “Meet the Parents” (page 162), Vassi Chamberlain, Mark Holgate, Ellie Pithers, and Emma Specter spoke to six thoroughly modern families, each with a distinctive (and inspiring) origin story—from finding their egg donor over FaceTime during the pandemic to co-parenting as best friends. Contributing fashion editor Tabitha Simmons worked with Annie Leibovitz to capture them all, a project that sent the photographer from downtown Manhattan to rural Connecticut and back. (Two more portraits, in British Columbia and Paris, were executed remotely.) The story had a certain resonance for Leibovitz, who has a singular family of her own—she’s pictured here with daughters Sarah, Susan, and Samuelle in 2015. Fancy That Eveningwear’s wild new frontier is the focus of “Come As You Are” (page 136), in which inventive…

In an age that favors—often demands—the constant reinvention of its pop stars, there is a reassuring familiarity to Florence Welch, front woman of Florence + the Machine. Here she is, a Saturday lunchtime in February, nearly 15 years after she crash-landed onto the music scene, still looking as though she has walked out of a Renaissance painting: flowing Titian locks, untamed and tumbling around her sculpted, makeup-free porcelain features, a long, floral Vampire’s Wife dress picking out the gray-blue of her eyes. Which isn’t to say there hasn’t been an evolution, both artistically and personally. Perhaps it is owing to the raw emotion her work deals in, or her unabashed adoration of theatrics and drama, but I hadn’t realized just how funny the now 35-year-old is. I didn’t, for example,…

A kind man with white hair who resembled a doctor in a children’s book came into the room with a folder and sat down across from my parents and me. The scans, he said, showed many tumors, in both lungs and all through the body. The kind of cancer was “squamous cell lung cancer.” The doctor said, “We can’t cure this cancer, but we have treatments.” The doctor said we only had to make one decision that day, “the first decision of a hundred more,” and that was what treatment plan to start with. He said the options were: chemotherapy, immunotherapy, both, or neither. We all sat there, stunned. “What’s your reaction when I mention chemotherapy?” the doctor asked. “I’m a writer,” my father said. “I’m still employed. I want…

“All off?” a doubtful Italian coiffeur asks a long-haired, 24-year-old Audrey Hepburn in her first starring role as a princess-on-the-lam in Roman Holiday. “All off,” the soon-to-be-gamine commands him. This most famous onscreen haircut in movie history gave rise, in the decades that followed, to a host of imitators—and a single label. No one knows who was the first to call it a “pixie” cut, or even where the word pixie itself comes from. The dictionary says a pixie is “a cheerful, mischievous sprite” or “a usually petite, vivacious woman.” But my best guess is that the term was part of a broader social effort to tame with cuteness and adorability a gesture that, in the right hands, might smack of radical feminine reinvention and empowerment. No one called Joan…

To understand the philosophy behind La Palma, a new 50-room hotel opening this summer around the corner from the famous Piazza Umberto I in Capri, it’s helpful to familiarize yourself with the plot of the 1961 film Come September: A wealthy American (Rock Hudson) owns a villa on the Italian coast, which he visits each September with his mistress (Gina Lollobrigida). One year, he makes an impromptu visit in July—only to discover that his majordomo has turned his gilded palazzo into a hotel. That, explains La Palma interior designer Francis Sultana, is the vibe he’s going for: “I want guests to feel surrounded by glamour. It’s about romance, it’s about fun.” Sultana is far from the only one with Old Hollywood visions of European summers. For much of the past…