Vogue April 2023

TO EVERY SEASON, ITS MOOD. Ours this month is serious—with stories on substance abuse and mental health, intolerance and antisemitism, and the terrible specter of sexual exploitation of minors. Taken together it can seem like a lot for a single issue, but we believe in using our platform to spark discussion and draw attention to subjects that need our thought and focus. Cara Delevingne is a model of openness—that’s why she wanted to speak about how she finds herself, at 30, in a moment of intense self-reflection. Cara has always been such a light in the fashion industry and in the culture at large, someone whose charisma is unmistakable and who has been candid about her struggles with mental health. To Vogue’s Chioma Nnadi, who spoke with her several times…

New Directions For “Frida’s World” (page 92), Vogue contributing editor Dodie Kazanjian spoke to Frida Escobedo, the Mexico City–born architect reimagining the modern and contemporary galleries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Contributing fashion editor Max Ortega—a proud Mexican compatriot—and photographer Clément Pascal created the portraits that accompany the story, embracing views of the museum hidden from the casual visitor. They got the shot above, for instance, “in the structure above the European paintings galleries’ glass ceiling, under the skylights,” Pascal says. “It’s always one of my favorite parts of the job, having access to all those restricted places and being able to create something beautiful there.” So, too, did the shoot let Escobedo play with the way that she was seen. “She usually dresses all in black,” Ortega says,…

When, one night in Manhattan, 1964, Truman Capote accepted a ride in Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s limousine after the theater, the author wasn’t prepared to find himself at the center of a mob scene. “Damp, ghostly faces were flattened against the car’s windows,” he wrote. “The whole scene was like a stilled avalanche nothing could budge.” The crowds would gather the following evening, and the one after that, too; Burton, fresh from starring alongside Taylor in Cleopatra, had signed on to play Hamlet for 17 weeks on Broadway, and pandemonium raged outside the Midtown theater. It’s this fraught Shakespeare production—led by Burton, directed by West End titan John Gielgud, and underwritten by Taylor’s tangential involvement—that has inspired director Sam Mendes’s The Motive and the Cue, opening at the Lyttelton…

Soon after I had my second child and the tight, brioche-bun sheen of pregnancy skin had faded to a postpartum gefilte-fish gray, I saw a meme on the Instagram Stories of a younger friend’s younger sister: “If The O.C. was your favorite show in 2004, it’s time to add retinol to your skin care routine,” it read in sans serif letters over a cast photo of the beloved earl-yaughts high school dramedy. Already in college when it aired, I was a little too old to be gripped by Mischa Barton’s teenage shenanigans, but the reference immediately aged me. A month later, a male friend caught me similarly off guard. “Do you use retinol? Should I use retinol?” he asked earnestly. There is apparently a special French formula that isn’t even…

The idea of a day dress doesn’t—and has never—existed in my wardrobe. Oh, but they’re so easy, everyone says: Slip it on, and off you go! But what shoes? Tights, or bare-legged? What underwear—and then what on earth goes over the top? A cardigan seems trite. A jacket? Sure, but what kind of jacket? Once you’ve overcome those challenges, you have to adhere to some basic behavioral codes, like how to sit upright, with legs crossed. (You certainly can’t sit slouched in a chair or with your legs remotely apart.) Frankly, it’s a minefield—and one that, yes, even as a Vogue editor, I’ve never had the patience nor the desire to navigate. Tailoring, on the other hand, makes a whole lot of sense: A two-piece solution that works for anything,…

Jenny Jackson’s novel Pineapple Street (Pamela Dorman Books) is a delicious modern-day Gilded Age drama set in the leafy enclaves of Brooklyn Heights. It follows three women in the Stockton family, a clan that made their money in real estate and left subsequent generations to alternately indulge in and wring their hands over the inherited fortune. Family members make their way from their nonprofit jobs and school fundraisers to tennis clubs and private planes. It’s a lighthearted book that captures New York society, a guilty pleasure that also feels like a sociological text, punctuated with very particular references to touchstones of urban life in 2023 among the 1 percent. Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X (Macmillan) is a complicated book tackling a simple question: How well can you ever know another…