Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2023 från Vogue

THIS WILL BE THE SUMMER of Barbie—that’s been clear at least since set photographs of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling dressed in rather startling neon skates caused a frenzy online. It’s good and wise to be wary of hype, but the excitement around Barbie, which opens in July, is hard not to be caught up in. Here is a doll that has meant so much to so many, a cultural icon that has grown up alongside us and reflected the times she found herself in. Barbie’s a mirror. She tells us who we are and who we’ve been. Her history is our history. And so much pink! Not since Elsa Schiaparelli has a color had such cultural currency. Robbie looks incredible in pink, of course, and I am thrilled to…

When Kyiv awoke to the Russian invasion last February, Natasha Kamenska and Maria Gavryliuk, founders of the Ukrainian-based fashion and homeware label Gunia Project, were among the many who temporarily relocated to safer regions (Berlin in their case). Reflecting on the harrowing early months of war, they remembered a growing sense of responsibility—not only to their country, but to the Ukraine-based ceramic, metalwork, glass, and textile artisans under their employ. As the two friends brought their business back to life, they thought of their wider community too. A nation’s morale was at stake. “A lot of friends and clients talked about the stuff they packed that first day,” says Kamenska. “Almost all of them took something of ours—an accessory, or a scarf, or a little small bag. To them, it…

I know what you’re thinking. A ponytail? What am I, 12? But we’re not talking about tying your hair up for HIIT class or staggering through your skin care routine. These are ponytails with purpose: high-swinging, high-gloss arrangements with their roots in high fashion. (Less Disney Channel, more Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour.) Ponytails have topped off all sorts of glamorous folks lately, from runway stars like Irina Shayk at Mugler’s fall show to Jill Kortleve at Alexander McQueen—who also sported a spine-tracing hip-length style on her April British Vogue cover. Add in red carpet looks by Florence Pugh and Rihanna, a dash of street style omnipresence (looking at you, Bella Hadid), and you’ve got a recipe for a bona fide moment for the topped-off mane. I can vouch. At the…

RUPERT EVERETT I first came across Michael waiting in line to get into London’s Embassy Club in 1978. I was a startled faun of 18 and he was the fashion editor of The Sunday Times. I cowered in the shadows as he wafted past the queue in a flotilla of fabulous fashion freaks towards the coat check, exuding a strange international glamour, dressed in a blazer, a button-down collar, and a tightly knotted tie. Suddenly we were introduced and Michael looked me up and down. (I was smaller in those days.) “Did anyone tell you that you look like Snow White?” “No.” “With a touch of Anne Frank. Very peculiar.” Before I could answer he had swept on. Despite this inauspicious beginning, we soon became great friends. When Michael started…

On the Saturday before the Oscars, celebrity stylist Kate Young made a difficult decision. It wasn’t about the silk tulle cape that her client Michelle Williams would wear. It was about her Oura Ring, a biohacking tool that measures everything from steps to body temperature to, most popularly, sleep. She decided to take it off. The reason? During the busy lead-up to the ceremony, her sleep scores had been appallingly low. “My HRV [Heart Rate Variability] basically said I should go to the hospital,” she says. She’d compared scores with a Chanel publicist at the brand’s annual pre-Oscar dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge, and decided to go without for the rest of Hollywood’s big weekend. The anxiety was too much. “I was like, This isn’t helpful right…

GETTING OUTSIDE BY BELINDA HUIJUAN TANG In the spring of 2018, after two years living in Beijing as a graduate student, I began to experience a crisis of self. I’d suffered an ignoble breakup delivered via Instagram DM and planned soon to leave China, the place I’d been happiest, to pursue a writing career in America. I could find no solace in a city of 21 million, bumping up at every turn against another hurried body. On the subway or biking through the sprawling city traffic, I felt jostled like a pinball. Even when I retreated to a park, I was soon interrupted by pop music blaring from speakers for a congregation of dancing retirees, or a shopkeeper arguing with a customer. I sought shelter in the countryside, in Anhui,…

“I was blown away by the love put into the look,” McCartney says. “The intricate stitchwork, the detail” When Shanghai-and-Chengdu-based womenswear designer Shie Lyu received an email inviting her to take part in a Vogue-initiated collaborative project with Stella McCartney, her astonishment bordered on disbelief. “I thought the message was spam!” exclaims Lyu, who founded her label in 2020. A short while later, in London, McCartney’s team opened the first mystery box shipped from Lyu’s Chengdu studio—which contained a fall 2022 floral-quilted cropped jacket and coordinating miniskirt, an abstract print top, gauzy black stockings, and chokers strung with romantic pearls and steel hardware. “There was a moment of pause where you think, Gosh, this has happened in such a different part of the world,” says McCartney. “I could see similarities…

Afriend of mine, a jewelry historian, is often called upon to give talks or chair panels. When a gig comes up at the last minute and she has, like most of us, nothing to wear, she hustles down to a certain shop on Bleecker Street and picks up what she calls “an Ulla.” She is not alone in her reliance on a dress from Ulla Johnson, whose designs—at once vaguely frilly but not ridiculous, pretty but not sticky, bohemian but never unkempt—more and more reflect how women want to look today. No longer bound by the arcane rules of appropriateness (nor forced to troop around in “basics”), they—okay, we—are free to don a puff sleeve and, nevertheless, be taken seriously. Johnson, 49, is among a cadre of female designers who…

In Jenny Xie’s Holding Pattern (Riverhead Books), Kathleen Cheng has moved back home to Oakland, reeling from a devastating breakup and having dropped out of a graduate program. There she finds her Chinese immigrant mother somehow newly engaged to a tech entrepreneur. Signing up to be a cuddle therapist at a curious start-up moves Cheng to reconsider the relationships in her life. Driven by Xie’s irresistible voice, this is a warm and funny debut about longing and belonging, the motherdaughter bond, and finding intimacy in an increasingly alienated world.—LISA WONG MACABASCO Tom Rachman’s bustling, globe-trotting new novel manages to be about a writer’s life ending, quietly, lonesomely—even as it bursts with characters, plots, and humor. The writer is Dora Frenhofer, a prickly Dutch novelist in her 70s, living by herself…

FRIENDS AND FAMILY BY CHIARA BARZINI My mother has Sicilian origins. In our family, “the beach” always meant the South, and the South always meant rural islands with impervious access to water. When I look back on childhood pictures, I see rocks (not sand) and very naked people of all ages and body types. My parents claimed that vacationing anywhere that wasn’t a sun-blasted lava rock in the middle of the sea—with no electricity or running water or roads—was a sin. “You don’t want to be like those people that go on holiday in the North,” they said to my brother and me. But of course: We did. We wanted nothing more than to be those people. In the summertime, my friends went dancing in nightclubs by the beach and…