Vogue September 2022

SERENA WILLIAMS WAS ONLY 16 when Annie Leibovitz first photographed her and her sister Venus for Vogue. There’s been quite a bit of history since—obviously on the court, where her triumphs need no summary from me, but in this magazine too. Serena has traveled between the worlds of sport and fashion as naturally as anyone I can think of—and her brilliance has always been tied to her fearlessness, in the evident joy she takes in pushing boundaries and trying something new. She recently lamented not wearing a design by the late Virgil Abloh onto the red clay of Roland-Garros. She described a long skirt and cape with “a crazy train” he wanted to make for her. “I should have done it,” she exclaimed. “I should have worn it!” I can’t…

Printed Matter As in previous September issues, Vogue’s “Last Look” this month (page 358) doubles as a wide-ranging creative showcase, focused now on women artists around the globe who work in photography, painting, and collage. Sydney-based Emily Galicek is part of that group, tasked with creating a border to match the kaleidoscopic, handcraft-inspired geometries of an Hermès scarf. The assignment fit right in with her existing work. “I have always loved working with patterns, and have often used vintage Hermès prints and imagery of quilts in past paintings,” she explains. In her hands, the scarf’s motif devolves into rippling abstractions, even straying into optical illusion. “The more you look at this painting, the more you begin to see the areas where the patterns are repeated, or where they have been…

Maria Ressa hasn’t eaten all day—but she hardly seems to need to, tiny as she is, smiling, full of talk, driven by some internal flywheel of restless, merry-warrior energy that never lets up. None of what she’s telling me is good news, of course. When we meet in New York City in May—she is here on a visit from the Philippines, where she leads the digital-news organization Rappler—she’s ruminating about tipping points, the worst of human nature, the end of democracy. “I don’t want to depress you,” she says cheerfully, nibbling on a granite slab of a Starbucks crispy rice treat and calling it delicious. Ressa couldn’t depress you if she tried. The 58-year-old journalist is a beloved figure on the world stage, unsparing about the road we’re on—and the…

When Ester Manas and Balthazar Delepierre met at Belgium’s La Cambre university, neither intended to get into fashion. Manas, now 29, had been studying graphic design while Delepierre, also 29, had chosen type design. “After a year, we started to help each other with our projects,” Delepierre says, with Manas quickly picking up the thread: “I mean, we are a couple, in work and in life—we can’t help doing everything together!” So when Manas switched majors to try her hand at fashion design, Delepierre joined her. Their final year of studies, in 2017, proved to be a formative one. With Delepierre’s help, Manas had designed a plus-size graduate collection, and her boundary-breaking and curve-accentuating pieces were starting to get noticed by the industry at large—by 2018, the collection was a…

HAS EVERYONE STOPPED drinking? It certainly feels that way. Over the last year, dozens of my former cocktailers-in-arms have leaped onto the wagon for insufferably sensible aims like preserving their marriages or their health—or at least for an extended annual reset in Dry January or Sober October. Chefs like David McMillan and Sean Brock, formerly of Joe Beef and Husk, respectively, and once known for their debauchery, have repudiated booze. Models and actors like Bella Hadid and Kate Moss and Katy Perry and Naomi Campbell and Brad Pitt have all thrown in the bar towel. And the nondrinkers aren’t sitting at home moping. There are suddenly chic little alcohol-free bars to go to, like Getaway in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; Gem Bar in Pitman, New Jersey; Sans Bar in Austin, Texas; the…

In the summer of 2016, photographer Jamie Beck was flying home to New York after an assignment in Sweden when she hit some turbulence. Feeling certain the plane was about to crash, a single thought nagged away at her: “Great, now I’ll never know what it’s like to live in France,” Beck remembers. “So I made a promise to myself that if the plane landed, I was going to move there.” The plane did indeed land, and Beck actually made good on that promise—even if it meant partly giving up her fast-paced life as a photographer in New York City, working for clients including Chanel, Chopard, and Armani. “In New York, I was working all the time, and I just kept wondering, Is this it?” Beck says. One month and…