Vogue December 2023

YOU CAN SCARCELY BELIEVE IT’S HER. A young woman sits in a coffee shop in 1973, hiding behind her Nikon. The snapshot at the top of this page is of Annie Leibovitz. She’d begun working for Rolling Stone at that time and she’d already had a couple of assignments from Vogue. So much was still to come: A remarkable half century of image-making. When I think of all the fashion images, portraiture, and photojournalism Annie has created for Vogue, a body of work of incredible breadth—pictures of actors, models, designers, heads of state, and everything in between—I confess I’m a little astonished. Line these images up and they are the collection of one of our greatest living artists. How lucky Vogue is to have published so many. How lucky I’ve…

Na Kim Artist Na Kim’s usual subject is a female nude, head and shoulders only, so it was a bit of a departure for her to be asked to respond directly to a fashion house, in this case Bode, for “When Art Met Fashion” (page 156). But, as she points out, “fashion has been used throughout art history as a tool to convey mood, time, and place, especially within portraits to tell the story about who the subject is.” Kim, who is also the art director for The Paris Review and Farrar, Straus and Giroux books, is currently having her debut solo show at White Columns gallery in Manhattan.—DODIE KAZANJIAN Elizabeth Colomba For Elizabeth Colomba, the French painter of Martinican heritage, “a serendipitous pairing with Christopher John Rogers felt destined.”…

GR ACE CODDINGTON I first visited Vogue House in 1959, when I was a finalist for that year’s model contest. My prize was to be photographed by some of British Vogue’s top photographers—Norman Parkinson, Don Honeyman, and Eugène Vernier. I met them all at a rather daunting tea party hosted by Audrey Withers, the then editor in chief, at the photography studios on the sixth floor (the Vogue offices were one floor below). In the same studios, by the early ’60s you might see David Bailey, Saul Leiter, Frank Horvat, and Helmut Newton, while in the café opposite Vogue House, Bailey was often joined by his mates, the photographers Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy—“The Terrible Three,” as they were known—who watched the wannabe models carrying large portfolios and dragging heavy…

On a cool, early fall day in Los Angeles, the actor Sarah Paulson, a person of palpable charm and sincerity, pauses over lunch to consider how she came to embody a series of unlikable, and occasionally truly awful, women. (Her CV includes roles like 12 Years a Slave’s harrowing Mistress Epps, Linda Tripp, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Nurse Ratched.) “I try not to judge them,” she says finally. “I try not to think about how they’re going to be perceived, because I don’t think many people are thinking about how they’re coming across in any given moment. People are, myself included, reactive and reacting to the environment around them.” If this sounds pretty elementary, you are probably not a Hollywood star, with all of the correlating concerns…

If you were forced to dream up a list of the world’s most legendary spa destinations, it’s unlikely that Transylvania would be on it. But for those able to look beyond the regional stereotypes of vampires and werewolves, this blissfully bucolic corner of central Romania has served as a low profile destination for intrepid wellness pilgrims. And as of this November, those trekking through its picturesque mountains or soaking in its mineral-rich springs might spot a new—and thoughtfully designed—haven nestled in the peaks of the Carpathian Mountains: Matca, an independent spa hotel with a twist. The tasteful taupes and creams of its artfully rustic suites and villas are where the similarities to other wellness sanctuaries end. Here, you can immerse yourself in the local landscapes with more than just a…

Georgia O’Keeffe, who loved clothes—she owned some 100 dresses, by her caretaker’s estimate, “all alike, except that some are black instead of white”—once likened painting to “a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one’s life.” It’s an elegant quote, though nearly as tricky to interpret as O’Keeffe’s heady florals and sweeping desertscapes. Was she positing art as the sinew of…ideas? As an undergirding for the stuff of life? Or did she have a different kind of thread work in mind? O’Keeffe owned several pairs of low suede heels from Saks Fifth Avenue, rigorously simple but for the raised seams running down their centers and branching off the sides like the boughs of a tree. If art can do that to the fabric…