238642938642893568

JUN
Elle
Fannıng
A Star
in Bloom
No Small
Thing
Arundhati
Roy’s
Return to
Fiction
Summer
of the
Rose
Swooningly
Romantıc
Dresses
The Return
of the
Red Lip
Vogue’s Very
Own Flower!

June
Island
Getaway
JAM ROCK SWEETNESS, P. 150
MODEL IMAAN HAMMAM WEARS
A LOEWE DRESS AND HAT.
OLIVER HADLEE PEARCH. FASHION EDITOR: SARA MOONVES. HAIR, JAWARA; MAKEUP, EMI KANEKO. PRODUCED BY WALTERS PRODUCTIONS. SPECIAL THANKS TO KANOPI HOUSE.
30, 36
MASTHEAD
38
EDITOR’S LETTER
42
UP FRONT
Rebecca Johnson’s
cancer was caught
early but left her with a
reconstructed breast
50
NOSTALGIA
Her mother’s job as a
curator at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art gave Lucy
Ives a glimpse into a
mysterious, adult world
Talking
Fashion
58
ALL EYES ON
Zoë Kravitz and
Karl Glusman
62
LE CLICK!
Paris’s Le Bon Marché
goes digital
62
BAND OF BERETS
Military millinery
gets a downtown
refresh for summer
64
KEEP THE FAITH
How did Faith Connexion
become the toast of Paris?
Lynn Yaeger finds out
68
TNT
High-society dames
and bucking broncos
leave Elisabeth TNT with
Lone Stars in her eyes
Beauty
& Health
72
CERTAIN WOMEN
Wıth a new scent
franchise and a fresh new
face, Chanel is redefining
femininity in fragrance
74
BIG SPLASH
Watermelon is a summerbeauty
cure-all
76
MATERIAL CULTURE
Jessica Kerwin Jenkins
checks in on the craftcosmetics
movement
78
OIL BOOM
Essential oils are spilling
over into the mainstream
78
OUTSIDE INTERESTS
Ditch the studio and try
one of these workouts
under the sun
People Are
Talkıng About
81
TV
Stefanie Martini stars in the
reboot of Prime Suspect
82
DESIGN
Cabana magazine’s highly
anticipated home-goods
collection arrives
82
ART
From Brooklyn to
Manhattan, the best
outdoor art
82
BOOKS
This season’s mustreads
explore fresh starts
and new beginnings
CONTINUED>28
VOGUE.COM VOGUE JUNE 2017
23

June
84
TRAVEL
Journey to two ecoluxury
lodges in Africa
84
MOVIES
Funny girls command
summer blockbusters
Fashion
& Features
87
SWEPT AWAY
From child actress to
sparkling ingenue,
Elle Fanning is becoming
one of Hollywood’s most
uncanny and fascinating
stars. By Nathan Heller
102
MOONLIGHT & ROSES
The fall collections
blossomed with
otherworldly beauty.
Photographed by
Mikael Jansson
112
FIRST BLUSH
Nathan Heller follows
the fragrant trail of the
newly fashioned Vogue
Anniversary Rose
114
IN FULL BLOOM
Meet the young roses:
the brightest lights of
philanthropy and society
120
GOLD STANDARD
From 1984 to Harry
Potter and the Cursed
Child, Sonia Friedman
is considered the Midas
of theater producers.
By Hadley Freeman
126
CENTER STAGE
A diverse generation
of young women is
remaking the theater
world. By Adam Green
130
INDIAN SUMMER
Arundhati Roy delivers
the follow-up to The God
of Small Things 20 years
later. By Daphne Beal
134
FINGERS ON THE PRINTS
A new designer takes on
Marni. By Luke Leitch
140
MASTER OF
CEREMONIES
Questlove is changing
America’s culinary
culture one food
salon at a time.
Tamar Adler reports
144
IN CONTROL
Defying categorization,
SZA is the most exciting
artist of the year.
By Rob Haskell
146
LOUD MOUTH
Red lipstick returns
to the spotlight. Lena
Dunham reports
148
BETWEEN THE LINES
Stripes are the stars
of the season
ACT II
FINGERS ON THE PRINTS, P. 134
MODELS (FROM LEFT)
FARETTA, ANSLEY GULIELMI,
ELLEN ROSA, SAMILE
BERMANNELLI, AND WALLETTE
WATSON, ALL IN MARNI.
150
JAM ROCK SWEETNESS
Imaan Hammam lights up
the paradise of Jamaica
Index
156
POOL PARTY
Light, bright swim style
is making a big splash!
Serve—and savor—the
tones of your favorite gelato
161
IN THIS ISSUE
162
LAST LOOK
Cover Look
ELEGANT
ELLE
Elle Fanning wears a
Valentino Haute Couture
dress. To get this look,
try: Infallible Total Cover
Foundation in Classic Ivory,
True Match Super Blendable
Blush in Baby Blossom,
Colour Riche Eyeshadow
in Little Beige Dress,
Infallible Silkissime Eyeliner
in Highlighter, Voluminous
Feline Mascara, Brow
Stylist Kabuki Blender in
Blonde, and Infallible Paints
Lipcolor in Spicy Blush.
All by L’Oréal Paris. Hair,
Julien d’Ys for Julien d’Ys;
makeup, Lauren Parsons.
Details, see In This Issue.
Photographer:
Annie Leibovitz.
Fashion Editor:
Grace Coddington.
28
VOGUE JUNE 2017
VOGUE.COM

ANNA WINTOUR
Editor in Chief
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Fashion Director TONNE GOODMAN
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FASHION/ACCESSORIES
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BEAUTY
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FEATURES
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ART
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European Editor FIONA DARIN European Fashion Associates CAMILA HENNESSY, ANTHONY KLEIN
West Coast Director LISA LOVE West Coast Special Projects Editor CAMERON BIRD
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CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
MIRANDA BROOKS, SARAH BROWN, SYLVANA WARD DURRETT, ADAM GREEN, ROB HASKELL, NATHAN HELLER, LAWREN HOWELL,
CAROLINA IRVING, REBECCA JOHNSON, DODIE KAZANJIAN, CHLOE MALLE, SARA MOONVES, SARAH MOWER,
MEGAN O’GRADY, JOHN POWERS, MARINA RUST, LAUREN SANTO DOMINGO, TABITHA SIMMONS, JEFFREY STEINGARTEN, ROBERT SULLIVAN,
PLUM SYKES, ANDRÉ LEON TALLEY, JONATHAN VAN METER, SHELLEY WANGER, JANE WITHERS, LYNN YAEGER
30
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Letter from theEditor
FLOWERS OF THE FLOCK
FROM FAR LEFT: TOM STURRIDGE, OLIVIA
WILDE, AND REED BIRNEY STAR IN SONIA
FRIEDMAN’S 1984. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANTON
CORBIJN. BELOW: VOGUE ANNIVERSARY
ROSES. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ERIC BOMAN.
From Strong Roots
THIS JUNE BRINGS TOGETHER TWO OF MY FAVORITE
things in one issue—gardens and the theater. When we began
discussing last year some new and original ways we
could celebrate our 125th anniversary, Features Director
Eve MacSweeney had the rather brilliant idea of creating a
Vogue rose. As you will read in Nathan Heller’s ode to our
very own flower (“First Blush,” page 112), it was handy that
we like to plan well in advance at this magazine: Our creation
took months and months to blossom, quite literally, and
involved crisscrossing the country several times to work with
farmers, breeders, and gardeners to develop it. (I spent many
a features meeting inquiring about its condition and when it
would finally be able to be photographed. Major Hollywood
stars need less cultivation.)
All of the discussion around the rose led us to think more
tangentially about the subject. We photographed some young
roses of a different kind—a new generation of smart, capable
women who are out and about and engaged with the world
in a way that does without the dreaded need to add the suffix
“ite” to social (“In Full Bloom,” page 114). And it led us to
shoot our cover star, Elle Fanning, in some of spring’s most
gorgeous bloomed-and-sprigged dresses in spooky-pretty
New Orleans (“Swept Away,” page 87). Elle was photographed
by Annie Leibovitz and styled by Grace Coddington—because
when one needs a romantic eye on fashion, it is always
Grace that one turns to. Nathan Heller, who has been kept
extraordinarily busy this month, traveled southward to meet
this remarkable nineteen-year-old actress, and he returned as
impressed with her as we are; it is admirable to see Elle at her
relatively tender age defy categorization and classification as
an actor, choosing instead to stretch herself with cutting-edge
directors such as Mike Mills and Sofia Coppola.
Lastly, we have another way of celebrating our 125th birthday
in a year in which we’re profiling women who define our
era in every issue. This month it is the turn of those who live
and breathe theater—timing that is entirely deliberate, given
that the Tony Awards take place in New York on June 11 (and
as an enthusiastic member of the audience, I’m delighted
at the unexpected choice of Kevin Spacey as host; perhaps
he’ll go for the political jugular). The writer Hadley Freeman
profiles the London-based producer Sonia Friedman
(“Gold Standard,” page 120), who has enviable instincts as
to what makes a play a cultural phenomenon; her 1984 opens
on Broadway in June, just one of the fifteen shows she now
has in production on both sides of the Atlantic. Meanwhile,
Adam Green introduces some of the newest actors, directors,
and playwrights (“Center Stage,” page 126) who are, as he
puts it, storming the fortress of the boys’ club. Adam’s piece
heralds the arrival of their impressive and compelling voices,
to be sure—yet it also welcomes the triumph of diversity in
today’s theatrical landscape.
38
VOGUE JUNE 2017
VOGUE.COM

Up Front
A STRANGER in My House
Rebecca Johnson feels lucky. Her cancer was caught early. What she didn’t know,
however, was how hard it would be to get comfortable with her reconstructed breast.
Last year, a man in Australia came across a
round, rubbery object on the beach, about
the size of a small tortilla. In a panic, he
scooped it up into a plastic bag and hurried
to the local police station, convinced a woman
had been mutilated by a maniac who had
prized her breast implant out of her body.
The police had a good laugh when they saw the object. It was
a jelly fish. That’s what I have implanted on the right side of
my body—a silicone disc that’s a dead ringer for a jellyfish.
I discovered I had breast cancer the way a lot of women
do—a routine mammogram revealed a lump in the right
breast. One out of every eight women in America will develop
breast cancer at one point in her life, but for some reason,
when the nurse came into to the waiting room to call “Ms.
Johnson” back for a consultation, I just assumed it was someone
else. In my defense, Johnson is a common name.
The radiologist described the suspicious mass as pea-size
and recommended a biopsy. I asked if I could see it. She
turned the computer screen my way and there it was, a distinct
circle suspended in a ghostly web of white, like the egg sac in
a spiderweb. “Is it cancer?” I asked. The doctor turned the
screen back to herself. I have noticed this about doctors—
none of them wants to be the bearer of bad news. If they can
pass the buck, they will, and really, who can blame them?
What kind of life is it, telling people they’re UP FRONT>46
SHAPE-SHIFTER
FOCUSED ON THEIR PATIENTS’ SURVIVAL, DOCTORS RARELY PREPARE
THEM FOR THE JARRING SENSATION OF LIVING WITH A PROSTHETIC
BODY PART. BLUE NUDE, 2000, BY TOM WESSELMANN.
TOM WESSELMANN. BLUE NUDE, 2000. SILK SCREEN ON 100 PERCENT COTTON RAG, 17˝ X 19˝. ART © ESTATE OF TOM WESSELMANN/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK.
42
VOGUE JUNE 2017
VOGUE.COM

Up Front
Fierce Attachment
going to die sooner than they think? “We’ll need to do more
testing,” she answered impassively.
And that is what we did. More testing. The mammogram
gave way to the sonogram, which gave way to the biopsy,
which gave way to the MRI. It was like hitting the plus sign
on Google Maps over and over, getting closer and closer to
the target. Soon we would be able to read the writing on the
garbage cans next to the back door. Initially, my surgeon had
assured me I could get a lumpectomy and keep the breast,
but as the results of the testing got grimmer, the prognosis
changed. My tumors may have been tiny—more lentil than
pea—but they were numerous. Four, to be exact. In the end,
it was an Alice in Wonderland moment: “Off with her breast!”
The night before my mastectomy, I stood naked
in front of the bathroom mirror and held my
right breast in my hand, like an old friend in
need of comfort. Goodbye, I told it, thanking
it for its years of service. Like every sentient
woman in the First World, I have spent stupid hours bemoaning
my physical flaws, but in all that
time I could never think of anything bad
to say about my breasts. Not too big, not
too small. Not too droopy. During sex,
they were a pleasant erogenous zone,
and when it came time to breastfeed,
they performed yeoman’s duty. I’d always
thought men were a bit silly in their
worship of breasts, but actually they are
right. Breasts are wonderfully springy,
joyful things. I had so much to be grateful
for, but, of course, I only realized all that on
the cusp of its loss.
The problem with breast reconstruction
after cancer is that you have to make
your decision in the midst of all these other traumatic life
and death decisions. Only after discussing the possibilities
of chemotherapy, radiation, mastectomy, and statistical
outcomes for survival are you asked to consider reconstruction,
at which point you’re thinking, Who cares? What’s a
breast compared with a life? On the other hand (assuming
treatment is successful), you will have the rest of your life to
live with that void on your chest, so you really do have to pay
attention. Plus, reconstruction is the one area where you actually
get to make your own choice, as opposed to treatment,
where only a fool would decline to follow standard protocol
(don’t get me started on alternative medicine).
My options for reconstruction were (1) do nothing; (2) get
an implant; (3) undergo a six-hour DIEP-flap (deep inferior
epigastric perforator) surgery, in which a plastic surgeon removes
flesh from the abdomen, assuming you have sufficient
excess (not a problem!), and then painstakingly reconnects
the blood vessels from your abdomen to the blood vessels in
your chest, trying as best as possible to match the shape of
the remaining breast.
I considered declining reconstruction—I like the idea of
being that indifferent to convention. On the Internet, you
can see lots of pictures of women who made this decision.
I looked down at
my handsome
doctor’s polished
Italian loafers and
panicked. A man
I did not know
was going to choose
my new breast?
They look proud, defiant, and like they could run an Ironman.
That’s not me. I hate being the center of attention. If
I had only one breast, anytime I wore anything formfitting,
people would notice the lopsidedness. I was lucky not to
need chemo, not just because I wasn’t going to have toxic
chemicals dripped through my veins but also because I
would not have to endure the sad face of strangers contemplating
my bald head and its attendant message: “This
person may be dead soon.” I know because I can’t help
making the same sad face when I share an elevator with
those bald people at Memorial Sloan Kettering, the hospital
where I was treated.
I was tempted by the idea of reconstructing the breast
with my existing flesh by doing the DIEP-flap operation.
The result would be soft and warm, like my own body, but,
as with all the options, it would still initially be numb, like
a lobotomized cousin who comes for dinner every night.
Once the nerve endings are cut during the mastectomy, full,
normal sensation never comes back. Shaving under your
arm will forever after be a guessing game—you know a
blade is scraping your flesh, but you can’t
feel a thing. After DIEP surgery, you also
need to spend three or four days in the
hospital, the cost of which can run into
the hundreds of thousands of dollars
(although insurance pays for it, thanks to
the Women’s Health and Cancer Rights
Act of 1998). In a world where people
are dying for lack of basic medical care, I
could not fathom so much trouble just so
I could have a soft breast. So, the silicone
implant. But only one. There is a growing
trend for women with low-risk cancer
(Stage 1 and under) in a single breast to
opt for a double mastectomy with reconstruction.
In 2002, 4 percent of diagnosed women chose
this option; in 2012, 13 percent of women did. The thinking
is, they’ll never have to worry about cancer again and will
get a great rack to boot. In reality, the risk of developing
cancer in the healthy breast remains the same as if you have
never had cancer. And as for the myth of the “great rack,”
read on. If I had been tempted, a conversation with a friend
of a friend put an end to that. “I can’t tell you how much I
regret giving up that healthy breast,” she confided. “It was
probably the biggest mistake of my life.”
Each option, it turned out, was its own political minefield.
Not long after I made my plan, I ran into an acquaintance
who’d had a mastectomy but decided not to reconstruct her
A-cup breast. After hearing about her diagnosis, I had lent her
all the breast cancer books in my library, but when I told her
I’d been diagnosed and opted for the implant she said, “Really?
I didn’t think you were the type.” Meow! “Unlike you,”
I answered, “I actually have breasts.” Not my finest moment.
When I met with my plastic surgeon to discuss the operation,
he explained there were two shapes of implants to
choose from—round or teardrop. “I want the teardrop,” I
told him confidently, imagining the fake-looking hockeypuck
boobs on strippers’ chests. I looked at UP FRONT>48
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Up Front
Fierce Attachment
my husband for confirmation, but he only nodded, a ghastly
expression on his face for which I couldn’t really fault him.
“We’ll see,” the doctor answered. Apparently, some decisions
get made on the operating table when the surgeon can
finally see how the scar healed. Unfortunately, the person who
will have to live with what is implanted in her body for the rest
of her life is unconscious at that moment. I looked down at
my handsome doctor’s perfectly polished Italian loafers and
panicked. A man I did not know at all was going to choose
my new breast?
Suddenly, I regretted my impulse to always dress up for my
appointments, something I did because my doctor’s office was
right across the street from Barneys and sometimes I would
wander in there to cheer myself up. But the Mikimoto pearls,
the Marni jacket, the Robert Clergerie shoes, maybe they were
sending the wrong message? The bulk of my days were spent
in UGGs and yoga pants at a computer.
“Listen,” I told him, “if I were a pair of
shoes, I’d be Birkenstocks.”
“So,” he answered, “comfort above
all?”
“Absolutely.”
When I woke from surgery in the Evelyn
H. Lauder Breast Center on Manhattan’s
Upper East Side, I released all
my years of bitterness at paying $30 for
a tube of lipstick. My room had marble
floors, a killer view of Manhattan, and
a private nurse who told me people beg
to stay a few days longer.
It took me weeks to look at my new breast. When I finally
worked up the courage to give it a good, hard stare, I
felt shock at all the angry red scars, followed by relief. The
surgeon had gone with the round implant and done a lift on
the other so the two would match. In a million years I never
would have gotten a breast lift, but the look of it wasn’t bad
(assuming you saw past the scars, which would eventually
fade). The feel of it was the problem. In the doctor’s office, the
implant had felt squishy and almost playful—like something
you’d give a three-year-old to get her interested in science.
But once it was placed under the muscles of my chest wall, it
felt hard and strange and just wrong, worthy of a Germanic
portmanteau word—Brustschmerzangst. Whenever I hugged
my then ten-year-old son, the top of his head would hit it and
I would wince, not from pain exactly, but from the physical
dissonance of knowing something alien was in my body.
On the websites devoted to breast cancer, I read
other women’s complaints about tightness and
discomfort. One mentioned how weird it felt to
go swimming in cold water, when the rest of
your body stays at 98.6 degrees but the silicone
hardens into an immovable lump. I am a tennis player. The
moment during the serve when the racket makes contact with
the ball while the arm is fully extended overhead is when I
feel the implant the most. It’s like the plucking of a giant
harp string. I never cease to wonder if everything is going to
unravel at the point of impact, causing the unloved blob of
When it came to
sex, I was impossible.
If my husband
didn’t touch it,
I accused him of being
grossed out; if he did,
I was grossed out
gel to slip its bonds and travel through my body, ending up
somewhere around my ankles.
Whenever I went to visit my oncologist for checkups,
she would ask how things were going, and I would bite my
tongue about the odious implant. She spent her days with
people dying of cancer, and I had gotten off pretty easy in
the cancer game. No chemo. No radiation. Just the mastectomy
and the drug tamoxifen for the next ten years. To
complain about an implant seemed churlish and ungrateful.
“Fine,” I always lied.
We don’t do a great job of preparing women for life without
a breast. If a soldier loses her leg in combat, the whole
world can see. If a woman loses her breast, she carries her
scar in secret and rarely talks about it out loud. Angelina
Jolie quite bravely told the world she was having a prophylactic
double mastectomy and oophorectomy in order to
avoid the cancer that killed her mother,
grandmother, and aunt, but after that
we heard little until the bombshell news
of her divorce. While the tabloids were
scratching away for clues to the marriage’s
dissolution, I couldn’t help feeling
that I understood better than most.
Life after reconstruction isn’t just hard
on the woman, it’s hard on the man who
is with the woman. We’re weepy, we’re
sad. We miss our breasts. I never felt like
“less of a woman,” a stupid phrase if
ever there was one, but I felt like less of
a human because I had lost something
I cared deeply about. When it came to sex, I was impossible.
If my husband didn’t touch it, I accused him of being
grossed out by it; if he did touch it, I was grossed out by the
sensation of being touched but unable to feel. Aging brings
its own depredations to the human body; this just felt like
one more insult to deal with. The first time I undressed in
the gym, I carefully covered the fake breast with a towel so
no one could see, but now, almost two years after the surgery,
I have come to a reluctant truce with my new breast.
Our bodies are maps of our lives—I have a scar on my
thigh from the time a thug pushed me off my bike on the
Brooklyn Bridge, a chip on my front tooth from when I
slipped on the wet tile of the YWCA pool, a long scar across
my abdomen from the C-sections that yielded the greatest
joys of my life (Hi, Simon! Hi, Toby!), and now I have these
scars on my chest that bear witness to that brush with death.
I’ve never liked the cancer-survivor metaphor and its implicit
message that anyone who dies isn’t a warrior, as if cancer
were simply a matter of will. I did not “battle” cancer; I
meekly (sometimes snivelingly) followed every single thing
the doctor said to do so that I could squeeze out as many
years as possible on this planet.
When I was told my remaining breast was cancer-free
at my one-year-anniversary scan, I felt enormously lucky
and grateful to every scientist and doctor who has worked
to make breast cancer less of a death sentence. If the towel
slips and someone sees the scar that tells that story, it’s not
the end of the world. □
48
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Nostalgia
HerBrilliant
CAREER
Her mother’s job as a curator at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art
gave Lucy Ives a glimpse into
a mysterious, adult world.
SCULPTURAL STYLE
MODEL INGRID BOULTING IN GRÈS, PHOTOGRAPHED
BY RICHARD AVEDON FOR VOGUE, 1970.
I RECALL, AS A GIRL OF EIGHT OR NINE,
discovering a photograph of my mother taken a few
years before I was born. In the image, my mother stands
in a white room. She is laughing as I had never seen her
laugh in life, completely taken by elation. Surrounding
her are large-format photographs, presumably waiting
to be hung on the walls. Some are still wrapped in paper,
but two—showing beautiful women—are visible.
One of the women is also laughing, almost as much
as my mother. I later learned that this long-haired,
gently disheveled, smoking and ring-wearing figure
was the singer Janis Joplin—though for now she was just
an anonymous subject who reminded me a little of myself.
When I brought the picture to my mom, she told me that the
photographs were by a man named Richard Avedon. In 1978
Avedon, a.k.a.“Dick,” had a retrospective at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, where my mother worked as a curator.
This was a standard mother-daughter conversation. There
were many unusual objects in our Upper East Side apartment,
and I was a wily sleuth. I was even beginning to believe—
knowing nothing of the cost of child care—that my mother’s
reason for sometimes bringing me with her to her office after
school was that she wanted my assistance. We traveled, hand in
hand, from the neighborhood’s upper reaches to Fifth Avenue
and the Met’s imposing neoclassical façade. As we ascended
the steps together, I believed that the building belonged to us.
Only we knew about the unfinished blocks at the tops of the
grand columns—meant to become figures personifying the
four great periods of art, from Ancient to Modern, but never
carved. This was the power of the museum: It could hide a
flaw in plain sight and look magnificent while doing so.
My mother and I proudly entered, making our way to my
mother’s department. She was a specialist in European drawings
and prints, and her office was accessible via a secret door
in the wall of one of the galleries, which she opened using a
key, often in full sight of gawking tourists. We’d pass through a
study room, into the haven of my mother’s private work space.
The smell was of ancient papers, leather, inks, and resins.
I did homework or looked through my mother’s collection
of antique doorknobs, keys, and keyhole covers. She liked to
purchase these odds and ends at European flea markets. I had
no idea what they meant to her.
Later, museum closed and workday done, we exited the
departmental warren and descended through the empty,
darkened building. We passed shadowy busts and portraits,
obscure arms and armor, sacred objects visible only in outline.
These walks, sometimes up or down staircases inaccessible
to the public, would reappear in my dreams. Sometimes it
would be impossible to find my way out of the museum; or a
work of art might come, disconcertingly and messily, to life.
In reality, we always reached an exit without incident. In one
subterranean storage hall, passing a giant two-dimensional
reproduction of a blue hippopotamus sculpture from ancient
Egypt nicknamed “William” by the staff, we’d even salute. My
mother’s heels clicked reassuringly. This was her place.
These are my most vivid childhood memories. Of course,
there were privileges: an early viewing of the immense Christmas
tree along with the intricate, miniature crèche, put out
every year without fail in the medieval hall; my mother’s ability
to give the occasional tour to my grade-school class, an
event that filled me with pride. However, it was the incidental
things I cherished: eating lunch in the staff cafeteria, looking
through my mother’s suitcase after she’d come home from a
business trip. These moments impressed upon me the dignity
and solace of work. The institution encompassed my mother;
it seemed to support her at every turn.
Dinner conversation with my father revealed a different
side of the job: other people. There was the macho curator
who always had to get his way, flaunting NOSTALGIA>56
INGRID BOULTING, DRESS BY GRÈS, PARIS, JANUARY 26, 1970 © THE RICHARD AVEDON FOUNDATION
50
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Nostalgia
Nights at the Museum
the economic superiority of his specialty and mocking my
mother’s lowly prints and illustrated books. There were also
regular updates on Brooke Astor, the late heiress, with whom
my mother lunched from time to time—and here the tone of
the report shifted. Mrs. Astor was extraordinary; the chauvinist
was forgotten amid reflections about Mrs. Astor’s palatial
apartment, the pleasantness of her conversation. Sometimes
celebrities appeared, requesting tours. There was the week of
Brad Pitt. Despite repeated entreaties, all my mother would
say was that he seemed “attentive.”
I knew from the Avedon installation picture that my mother’s
life at the museum had been different before my time,
maybe more surprising. It was, after all, her first big job. She’d
fled a difficult family situation in San Diego and taken a
master’s in art history at Columbia. Here she’d met my father,
who was studying law and had previously worked
construction on the side. They’d made a go of it.
My mother changed her first name as well as her
last in marriage, and my father left behind Yonkers
and his working-class roots. My mother had the
physical gifts that permit self-transformation: She
was slender, with sweet, symmetrical features and
beguiling brown eyes. She made powerful friends,
including the philanthropist Lincoln Kir stein,
and rose quickly through the ranks at the Met,
becoming the director of her department. She
met Andy Warhol.
“But what was Andy like?” I demanded to
know. I was a teenager now, and the 1990s had
brought renewed hunger for Warhol’s commodified
irony. Even Kurt Cobain seemed to be modeling
himself on the Factory magus.
“Weird,” my mother said. “Quiet.”
transformed, at nightfall. I continued to grow away from
her, at first physically, then creatively. I became obsessed with
drawing, a pursuit my mother discouraged vehemently when
a high school teacher suggested I apply to art school. I would
go often to the museum on Friday afternoons to work on my
sketches. I no longer bothered to venture up to my mother’s
office; I came alone and sat alone and left without her.
After I was accepted at Harvard, the polar opposite of art
school, my mother began taking me with her on research trips,
perhaps because I was a good sounding board or perhaps to
keep an eye on me. We went to London, Paris, Australia, and
French Polynesia. Our last trip, an inquiry into Paul Gauguin’s
final days on the remote island of Hiva Oa, was challenging. I
was tailed by wild dogs when I foolishly attempted to visit the
artist’s grave alone, and my mother came close to drowning.
By this time, my mother and I disagreed
on many topics. Not least among these
was my appearance. All my clothing
was deemed too tight. My eye makeup
was eternally inappropriate, what my
mother termed “your Cleopatra eyes,” a mild dig
I tried to take as a compliment, given the Met’s spectacular
Egyptian collection. Meanwhile, I was athletic, verging on
Amazonian, or so I felt. By age twelve, I was already passing
my mother in height. I played three sports. My face came from
my father. His Assyrian-Iranian and Polish features—dark
hair, broad face, pronounced nose—had won out over Mom’s
German-WASP blend. In spite of my apparently British last
name—in fact an Ellis Island corruption of my paternal
grandfather’s Ivas—everyone assumed I was of Eastern European
descent and Jewish. Among friends’ families I usually
smoothed over any confusion by preemptively proclaiming
that I had no religious education at all, which was true.
Only later did I understand how fully one can reinvent
oneself in New York City, particularly with a good partner in
metamorphosis, as it were. In my mother’s case, I was never
entirely sure if that partner was my father or the museum
itself, which during certain periods seemed to consume her
whole each morning, spitting her out again, mysteriously
BALANCING ACT
THE AUTHOR’S MOTHER, COLTA IVES (SECOND FROM LEFT),
INSTALLING AVEDON PORTRAITS AT THE MET, 1978.
This episode took place on a volcanic beach, where we were
walking. I don’t know why my mother decided to swim, but
swim she did, and was caught in a rip current. Our host, Monsieur
Gaby, and I stood on the shore, watching with mounting
horror. “Swim to the side!” Gaby yelled, probably in French.
Eventually all was well, but in that petrifying moment I saw
clearly and for the first time the distance between my mother
and me. It wasn’t just the fast-moving ocean.
Later, after my mother had staggered back to land, we all
stood staring at one another. I felt as if I was meeting her
for the first time. Gaby, meanwhile, seemed ready to depart.
We piled into his SUV. As the vehicle bounded up the lush
mountainside, I reflected on what an odd couple we must appear:
the brooding daughter wandering off into an overgrown
cemetery; the sociable mother nearly swept out to sea. Or
perhaps we were not so much “odd” as inverses, I thought,
mirror images.
But what a strange and difficult mirror it was. □
COURTESY OF COLTA IVES
56
VOGUE JUNE 2017 VOGUE.COM

Talking Fashion
EDITORS: MARK HOLGATE & MARK GUIDUCCI
KRAVITZ
IN CÉLINE AND
GLUSMAN
IN A LANVIN
OVERCOAT.
ALL EYES ON
Zoë Kravitz and
Karl Glusman
CERTAIN HOLLYWOOD COUPLES
debut their romance with a tabloid
shot heard round the world—and then
there are those who casually slink onto
the scene and into each other’s arms.
Consider Zoë Kravitz and Karl Glusman,
poster children for the latter. Last
fall, the pair were spotted hand in hand
at a private Kings of Leon concert
(Cara Delevingne, Lily Aldridge, and
Dakota Johnson also attended), and
soon after came a stream of couples
Instagrams. In October, the Nocturnal
Animals star quite literally cemented
his relationship status with Kravitz by
posting a photo of her standing beside
fresh pavement with her name scrawled
on it. Together, Glusman, ethereal with
wide-set eyes, and Kravitz, a downtown
goddess, make for a duo with serious
fashion chops. At Saint Laurent’s last
show, they appeared to have stepped
off the catwalk and into their front-row
seats. Earlier that week, Kravitz looked
the antithesis of her crunchy Big Little
Lies character at the Vanity Fair Oscar
party, every bit the twenty-first-century
vamp in Armani Privé with a Pepto
pink–tressed Glusman on her arm.
Despite their relationship’s fledgling
status, the two seem to fit each other
like a perfect pair of vintage blue jeans.
—LILAH RAMZI
TALKING FASHION>62
ALO CEBALLOS/GETTY IMAGES
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Talking Fashion
RITA
ORA IN
VINTAGE
KANGOL.
AUDREY
GELMAN IN
VINTAGE.
Military millinery
gets a downtown
refresh for summer.
Band of
Le Click!
Le Bon Marché, with its iconic orange bags, has been
unleashing shopping endorphins since it opened its Rive
Gauche doors in 1852, and this month the department
store, armed with the luxury might of the entire LVMH
group, which owns it, launches a global shopping site
called 24 Sèvres to build on its legacy. In addition to Bon
Marché’s famed curation, 24 Sèvres will be stocking both
Louis Vuitton and Dior—two titans that have until now
been largely absent from the e-commerce space.
The site (and a corresponding app) offers everything from
a Laura Mercier compact ($75) to an Yves Salomon mink
bomber ($13,000) with a singular focus. “We wanted to make
this visually based,” says Ian Rogers, LVMH’s chief digital
officer, “with an elevated social-media presence.” (There’s
also a team of Parisian fashion experts available via video
chat: Imagine those decisive and believable ouis and nons.)
A 75-piece capsule collection—which combines the
talents of 68 stocked maisons (including Chloé, Proenza
Schouler, Givenchy, and Prada) and contemporary Parisian
creatives—debuts just in time to celebrate the launch. Note
the art de vivre of Loewe’s hammock bag emblazoned with
an illustration by Jonathan Anderson’s collaborators at
the creative agency M/M—or the Courrèges motocross
jacket adorned with a print by artist Chloe Wise.
Rogers has given the nascent site an early test-drive,
sending a PARISIENNE sweatshirt by Maison Kitsuné to his
daughter in California. With such petits trésors now just a click
away, now we will truly always have Paris.—EMMA ELWICK-BATES
24/7 HERO
MIU LADY BAG BY MIU MIU, REIMAGINED IN ROYAL BLUE, IS
A 24 SÈVRES EXCLUSIVE. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.
RIHANNA
IN DIOR.
BEYONCÉ IN
GUCCI.
Berets
TALI LENNOX
IN VINTAGE.
STILL LIFE: COURTESY OF MIU MIU. GELMAN: BENJAMIN LOZOVSKY/BFA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK. ORA: MARK MILAN/GETTY IMAGES.
RIHANNA: CHRISTIAN VIERIG/GETTY IMAGES. BEYONCÉ: AKM-GSI. LENNOX: DAVID X PRUTTING/BFA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK.
62
VOGUE JUNE 2017
TALKING FASHION>64

Talking Fashion
PANTS ON FIRE
MODEL GRACE
ELIZABETH WEARS
A FAITH CONNEXION
CARDIGAN ($2,190),
T-SHIRT ($150), AND
PANTS ($1,240);
FAITHCONNEXION
.COM. PUMA
SNEAKERS.
Keep
the
FA ITH
How did the amorphous—
and anonymous—fashion
collective Faith Connexion
become the toast of Paris?
Lynn Yaeger finds out.
Everyone but Thomas Monet
has gone to Tahiti or the Caribbean
or some other sunny
clime. It is the day after the
Faith Connexion fall 2017
show in Paris, and the rest
of the design collective responsible
for putting vast bejeweled cardigans,
minuscule punk-lace frocks, and Easter
chick–yellow faux-fur coats on the runway
have flown the coop for parts unknown.
Which is why the bearded Monet, who
is leaving for Bali next week, is the sole
representative available to describe this dynamic,
street-infused line. But he makes it
clear he is speaking for the entire gang—a
young, multinational crew who specialize
in such arcane tasks as deconstructing
tailored pieces and piling
froufrou upon once-simple knitwear.
We are seated at a small table next
to the incredibly busy showroom,
where buyers are clamoring for
brocade tuxedo coats, leather drainpipe
trousers, and sweatshirts with
sleeves reading TALKING FASHION>66
TOM JOHNSON. SITTINGS EDITOR: KAREN KAISER. HAIR, TAMAS TUZES; MAKEUP, JEN MYLES. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.
64
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Talking Fashion
WITH THE BAND
MODELS
BACKSTAGE
AT FAITH
CONNEXION’S
FIRST RUNWAY
SHOW IN PARIS
IN MARCH.
that London or Paris or Los Angeles “is my hometown.”
Monet himself is a walking billboard for the company’s
sensibility. Clad in a repurposed vintage pajama top, a
beat-up Perfecto, and his trademark self-customized jeans,
he stands in contrast to the opulence of the surroundings.
Faith Connexion’s atelier is currently based in the elegant
Hôtel de Pourtalès, in view of the Madeleine. (It is a location
that has gained notoriety as the site of the harrowing Kim
Kardashian robbery.)
“We are doing something together,” Monet says. “We are
bringing energies together!” Not just energies but actual
personnel: Faith Connexion heartily rejects the model of
most high-end brands, which employ a single star designer,
in favor of a loosely organized collective—a conceit that
might be described, to paraphrase that hoary fashion icon
Karl Marx, as “from each according to his—or her—ability.”
In this case, the ability refers to the lightning skill at
which a tagger signs a pair of jeans or an embellisher creates
a giant, glittery Byzantine cross.
The invisible hand pulling at least some of the literal
strings at Faith Connexion is Christophe Decarnin, formerly
the designer for Balmain, and the guy responsible for the
revolutionary reinvention of that house in 2006. After five
whirlwind years of feathered minidresses, ersatz-military
overcoats, and a vast array of artfully wrecked denim, Decarnin
left Balmain in 2011. Though the collective is reluctant
to discuss his exact role, he remains a backstage presence at
Faith Connexion, a ghost in the machine, hovering over
the line’s distinctive urban-couture sensibility. It is an aesthetic
that fully embraces the notion of gender-nonspecific
clothing and that flaunts a fierce commitment
to artisanal detail, even if this means not Lesage
embroideries but T-shirts hand-painted with
slogans like protect earth.
The company’s owner, the loquacious Alexandre
Allard, says he thinks the idea of a single
designer is not just passé but also slightly depressing.
“I always had a problem with the idea that
there would be only one amazing designer—I
think this is a concept that is going to disappear!”
he declares. “We need to give a chance to more
creative people.” Allard likens Decarnin to a
composer allowing people in the Faith Connexion
“orchestra” to create their own masterpieces.
This orchestra will soon be playing in New
York, when a flagship in SoHo opens this summer.
Of course, it won’t be a conventional boutique:
A juice machine from Jean-Georges is
on order; neighborhood seamstresses may be
recruited to create individualized embroidered
flourishes; a rotating cast of artists will be on hand
to decorate your jeans or your tee while you wait.
“This is a new magic!” Allard says. And in
these fraught times, when the earth seems to be shifting
under our feet, when all of our assumptions are suddenly
up in the air, who doesn’t want a magical one-of-a-kind
fringed jacket, joyously tagged and glittering with crazy
paste jewels, to at least give the illusion of keeping you
happy and safe? □
TALKING FASHION>68
COREY TENOLD
VOGUE.COM

Talking Fashion
High-society dames and bucking broncos leave
Elisabeth TNT with Lone Stars in her eyes.
TEXAS STOLE MY HEART, OR MAYBE I JUST DROPPED
it somewhere whizzing along those arrow-straight roads, wind
in my hair, that extraordinary light bathing everything in a
golden hue. I took the plunge with Lacey Dorn, a seventhgeneration
Texan whom I had met at my cousin’s art opening
in London, and our first stop was her uncle’s ranch near El
Paso. There were red mountains on the horizon, a few wonky
signposts . . . and nothing else. The emptiness made me gasp.
A proud West Texan, her uncle gave us the grand tour.
From his jeep we spotted coyotes, longhorn sheep, and
quail before stopping for a delicious mountaintop picnic.
Then he let us try out his elegant white-gripped revolver,
which, he told us, “won the West.” Turns out we have quite
the shooting skills, Lacey and I, even though I hadn’t held
a gun since I was a child.
A few nights later we were in Marfa, the famous little desert
town technically off the beaten track but very much on track
with anyone in the know. Taking in a sunset at Donald Judd’s
Chinati Foundation has made it hard to imagine looking at a
regular white-cube gallery the same way again. There was so
much great art to see, not to mention a few drinks to be had
with a gaggle of New York and European friends—Lauren
Santo Domingo, Poppy Delevingne, Coco Brandolini.
Next we jetted off to Houston, where we were joined by
born-and-bred Houstonian Allison Sarofim. She gave us
a tour of the stunning Menil Collection and an invitation
for tea and ginger biscuits at the home of the grande dame
of Texas socialites, Lynn Wyatt. Flawlessly turned out as all
Texan women are, with a fresh lick of red lips and perfect
platinum hair, Wyatt chatted to us about our trip while her
two large Warhol portraits gazed back at me.
And then we were off to the races—well, the rodeo—and
arrived just in time to meet one of the sport’s biggest stars,
multiple world champion Kelly Timberman, a blue-eyed
COUNTRY STRONG
TOP: FRIEND AND GUIDE LACEY DORN TOOK ME FOR A RIDE BEYOND
CIRCLE RANCH. ABOVE: THE RODEO BLEW MY BAVARIAN MIND.
hunk from Wyoming, who told us he’s one of the oldest riders
in the business—and by old he meant 41. Signing autographs
were riders from all disciplines: bullfighting, bareback, tiedown
roping, steer wrestling. One young steer wrestler smiled
at me and said he could not imagine doing anything else.
The rodeo girls were a sight, too, with their tucked shirts and
rhinestone-studded bell-bottom jeans, their long hair spilling
out from under cowboy hats.
There was one last essential stop on my Texan tour:
Rocky Carroll, boot-maker to eight U.S. presidents. Even
Elizabeth Taylor had her boots made by Rocky, hers involving
nine-carat diamonds, of course. No surprise the man
was not fazed by measuring the feet of a real princess—but
he did enjoy addressing me as such. (How he knew I have no
idea.) “Princess, I’m gonna make you the perfect boot.” The
longer I talked to Rocky, the more excited I got to stomp
around a few castles in my new pair. I may even let them
walk me back to Texas! Let’s go, boots! □
FROM TOP: COURTESY OF TNT; SCOTT DALTON
68
VOGUE JUNE 2017 VOGUE.COM

Beauty
EDITOR: CELIA ELLENBERG
CERTAIN WOMEN
Wıth a new scent franchise and a fresh new face, Chanel is redefining femininity in fragrance.
PERFUME GENIUS
IN HER FIRST FRAGRANCE CAMPAIGN FOR THE FRENCH
HOUSE, ACTRESS KRISTEN STEWART CHANNELS THE
REBELLIOUS SPIRIT OF GABRIELLE CHANEL BEFORE SHE
WAS COCO. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO.
When Kristen Stewart shaved off her
choppy, chin-grazing strands in early
March, leaving behind a prickly
fuzz tinted a shade of icy corn silk,
there seemed to be a brief moment
when the world—as far as it exists on
celebrity-news feeds—stopped spinning. “Circumstances really
just worked out, because I had been wanting to do it forever,”
the 27-year-old actress reveals a few weeks post–buzz cut from
the New Orleans set of her new film, Underwater. A close shave
made logistical sense for the big-budget, action-packed drama,
which requires Stewart to be in mechanical-engineer BEAUTY>74

Beauty
Fragrance
garb—with helmet—for much of its running
time. Plus, the streamlined style has been
essential to conveying a certain “strength”
on-camera, she reveals—the kind needed
by an unlikely heroine who must overcome
a cataclysmic chain of events. But
Stewart wants to make one thing clear: It
is by no means intended to read as masculine.
“Immediately after I did it, I felt
undeniably feminine,” she explains. The
decolletage-exposing look has also made her
feel longer and leaner, subsequently opening
her up to wearing brighter colors, new necklines,
and a surprising fragrance that refuses
to be pigeonholed as just another floral.
“It smells really good—particularly on
me,” Stewart says with a laugh while discussing
Gabrielle, Chanel’s first blockbuster scent franchise
in fifteen years. As someone whose own olfactory history has
precarious roots—“To be quite honest, I love Old Spice”—the
Twilight star turned Cannes darling wasn’t necessarily the
woman perfumer Olivier Polge had in mind when he started
work on the jasmine, orange-flower, and ylang-ylang blend
that includes an exclusive strain of creamy tuberose distilled
from Chanel’s private gardens in Grasse. But Gabrielle, the
fragrance, much like its namesake, Gabrielle Chanel—before
she was Coco—is hard to pin down.
In our increasingly gender-agnostic society, where fragrances
are skewing increasingly unisex, billing something as deliberately
feminine, as Polge has with his latest creation, is almost
FLOWER POWER
THE NEW SCENT FEATURES A GOLDEN
BEVELED BOTTLE AND A STANDOUT
TUBEROSE NOTE DISTILLED
FROM CHANEL’S PRIVATE GARDENS
IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE.
novel. But perhaps it’s time to reassess how
we apply this term in a beauty context. “It’s
not girlie or frilly in any way,” insists Stewart,
who will star as the face of the perfume,
out in September. Instead, the golden beveled
bottle conjures what she describes as
Chanel’s “basic essence”—what the French
call insoumission, a word that falls somewhere
between rebelliousness and disobedience
in English, although Stewart’s own
definition, having an “unshakable”quality,
more accurately describes it.
In her role as a Chanel ambassador,
Stewart has been indoctrinated into the
lore surrounding the French house’s founder:
She has toured Mademoiselle’s Paris
apartment, and she has been brought up
to speed on the trysts and turns that helped take her from an
orphaned cabaret singer to a milliner, couturier, perfumer,
brand builder, and an all-around expectations-defier whose
legend continues to resonate with women globally 107 years
after she opened her first store on the Rue Cambon. But
the way Stewart connects to Chanel’s nonconformity feels
refreshingly unsponsored. “It’s hard to speak about yourself
in that way, but I like to imagine that I act on my own accord,
and there’s nothing really exterior that would derail the deepest
things that keep me going,” she acknowledges of her own
driving force. “I feel kind of worthy of it at this point in my
life,” Stewart says of Gabrielle’s unapologetic scent profile.
“Which is a great feeling.”—CELIA ELLENBERG BEAUTY>76
Ingredient
Big SPLASH
However you slice it, watermelon is nearly
synonymous with warm-weather picnics and
afternoons on the beach. But the electric-pink
après-barbecue treat also happens to be packed
with vitamins and lycopene—a potent antioxidant that helps
counteract UV damage—which has made it a buzzy new
addition to everything from the sweet jerky in Sakara Life’s
cultish organic-meal-delivery service to a Beyoncé-backed
cold-pressed-juice brand, and now skin care. “It’s Korea’s
favorite fruit,” says Sarah Lee, cofounder of Glow Recipe,
the online destination for natural K-beauty products. Lee’s
mother used to grate refrigerated watermelon rind to
soothe sunburns and acne irritation, which helped inspire
the Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask in the brand’s debut
product range. The cooling, clear gel treatment—with
visible chunks of locally sourced Korean watermelon rind—
delivers a burst of plumping hydration and can be rinsed off
for a quick dose of moisture, or worn overnight following a
long day spent in the summer sun.—ZOE RUFFNER
JUICY FRUIT
ULTRA-HYDRATING AND LOADED WITH ANTIOXIDANTS,
WATERMELON IS A SUMMER BEAUTY CURE-ALL. THE COMFORT
OF WATERMELON, BY ANA MERCEDES HOYOS, 1993.
FRAGRANCE: COURTESY OF CHANEL. INGREDIENT: ANA MERCEDES HOYOS. THE COMFORT OF WATERMELON, 1993.
OIL ON CANVAS. PRIVATE COLLECTION. PHOTO: © CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES.

Beauty
Makeup
Material Culture
As the definition of makeup grows to include everything from felt and string to sequins
and stamps, Jessica Kerwin Jenkins checks in on the craft-cosmetics movement.
STATE OF THE ART
MODEL JULIA BERGSHOEFF IN THREAD AND FLOCK LIDS
AND BROWS BY MAKEUP ARTIST PAT MCGRATH. PHOTOGRAPHED
BY CHARLOTTE WALES. BACKGROUND: FELT SWATCHES.
My two daughters, now seven and a half and
almost ten, are heartbeats away from outgrowing
those peak crafting years when
we would while away the hours at the
dining-room table, snipping and gluing
delicate tulles and feathers, and trimming
doll clothes with my collection of antique ribbons. Truthfully,
I’m a little wistful about what will become of these glittering
mementos, all crammed into an overstuffed closet at our home
in Maine, though if the latest runways are any indication, they
may find a second life in an unlikely place: my makeup bag.
The very concept of cosmetics has been stretched in recent
seasons by artists like Pat McGrath, who wound a length of
colorful string from brow to nose bridge at Maison Margiela’s
spring couture show. Since the early nineties, McGrath’s
nontraditional makeup kit has included strips of chain mail
(a gift from Donatella Versace), faux fur, and anything else
she might find in designers’ ateliers. “When you have the
freedom to create a look from experimental materials, a realm
of limitless possibility opens,” says McGrath. There is also a
practicality in choosing colorful cat-eye paper cuttings over
more traditional pencils and gel pots, she admits. “Drawing
on eyeliner is labor intensive!”
Thanks to platforms like Instagram, a new generation of
fans and followers—more than a million of them—have been
emboldened by McGrath’s techniques, making things like the
Swarovski-studded mouth she debuted for John Galliano
fifteen years ago (and later reprised for Raf Simons), “a
basic,” she says, bemused. This willingness to supplement
lipsticks and eye-shadow palettes with items gleaned from
the world of high fashion—or online, which is where Erin
Parsons picked up the flocking powder she used for the
Muppet-like red lids and lips at LRS’s fall show—is a confirmation
that “the fear of makeup is totally gone,” says Peter
Philips. The creative and image director of Dior Makeup,
who brought an elfin twinkle to the house’s spring couture
runway with strategically placed star-shaped sequins, also
credits social media for the cosmetics coup. YouTube daredevils
have taken cues from the pros, proliferating the trend
by gluing on everything from wildflower lashes to crystal tears
(see also: Alessandro Michele’s fall Gucci show).
Our collective audacity has rarely been so evident, yet why
now? Does decorating the face deliver that crafty catharsis
people seek when taking up knitting? Or do homespun materials
lend comfort in a climate of polarized politics? McGrath
recalls another era when beauty turned wild: London’s punk
scene, with its visceral expression of social unrest. “You don’t
put safety pins through your face as a reaction to feeling
safe and sound,” she says. Even so, this latest incarnation of
extreme beauty has a uniquely folksy vibe, offering what we
desire most in uncertain times: joy.
Uplifting creativity is what women crave right now,
according to Georgie Greville, a cofounder of Milk
Makeup, which debuted a series of Tattoo Stamp styluses
made of face-safe ink in peace symbols, hearts, stars, and
smiley faces earlier this year. As Greville, a busy working
mother who often wears a small stamped heart on her
cheek like a New Wave beauty mark, explains, “That’s what
makes us feel alive.” □
BEAUTY>78
SITTINGS EDITOR: EMILIE KAREH. HAIR, TOMO JIDAI; MAKEUP, PAT MCGRATH.
BACKGROUND: STEVE GORTON/GETTY IMAGES. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.
76
VOGUE JUNE 2017

Beauty
Health
OIL Boom
Once the domain of health-food stores and hippie aunts, essential oils are spilling over into the
mainstream, with dedicated workshops being held everywhere from Los Angeles to New York. At
a dinner party I recently attended, the chic woman sitting next to me whipped out a tiny rollerball
and twirled it on her temples. “Cannabis oil, mixed with peppermint and sage,” she explained. “It
makes me less tense around the jaw.” When applied topically to the pulse points, inhaled, or even
ingested, these superpotent plant extracts pack a one-two punch: The scent affects mood, while the
plant medicines can have an impact on physiology. An increasing number of peer-reviewed medical
studies have shown that certain oils—cinnamon, eucalyptus, and rosemary, for example—have an
antibacterial effect, and a study published earlier this year showed that geranium and rose oils may
raise estrogen levels in perimenopausal women. Desperate for a solution to my tension headaches, I
visited the SoHo studio of Oceana Baity, a yoga instructor and acupuncturist who has started leading
essential-oil classes. For 45 heady minutes, Baity diffused a springy grapefruit and bergamot oil into
the air, then pressed something zingy and herbaceous into the tips of my ears. I felt a little silly but
also, I had to admit, relaxed. The best part? One week later, I’m still headache-free.—JULIE BUNTIN
Fitness
SCENIC ROUTES
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: SAN
FRANCISCO’S GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE;
LOVE YOGA INSTRUCTORS; SANTA
MONICA BEACH; PHOTOGRAPH BY
JORG BADURA FOR VOGUE, 2004.
OUTSIDE
INTERESTS
It used to be that an outdoor workout
meant going for a jog or rustling up a
tennis partner. Thanks to an array of
inventive new offerings on the fitness
scene, you can finally get your grade-A
instruction along with some vitamin D.
Manhattan stalwarts Sky Ting Yoga and New
York Pilates are pairing up to stage Abs Arms
Ass and Grass classes in Nolita’s Elizabeth
Street Garden. Across town, on the West
Village’s Charles Street Pier, Bandier’s editorpacked
Studio B offers cardio and sculpting
classes. All about props? Look no further
than San Francisco’s Kokoda, a mobile boot
camp whose trainers set up rowing machines
and squat racks in Crissy Field and Oakland’s
Lake Merritt, rain or shine. In Los Angeles,
head to VeniceBeach, where cult studio Love
Yoga’s instructors Kyle Miller and Sian
Gordon lead classes to the sounds of the
Pacific Ocean. You can also climb Runyon
Canyon with the Wildfire Initiative, whose
weekly Walk & Talk offering blends breath
work, meditation, and qigong with vigorous
hiking. The air just got a little fresher.—Z.R.
HEALTH: VOISIN/PHANIE/GETTY IMAGES; BEAUTY: CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: MARCEL
MALHERBE/IAIF/REDUX; MIKI ASH/LOVE YOGA; STEVE PROEHL/GETTY IMAGES
VOGUE.COM

PeopleAre Talking About
EDITOR: VALERIE STEIKER
MACIEK POŻOGA. SITTINGS EDITOR: ANNA SCHIFFEL. HAIR, ALEXANDER SOLTERMANN; MAKEUP, JO FROST. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.
Television
KillerInstinct
In a 1970s-set reboot of Prime Suspect, Stefanie Martini
brings Jane Tennison’s early years to life.
i
’m a country girl, from North Somerset,” admits
Stefanie Martini. “When I was seventeen, I went
to the National Youth Theatre in London and it
was like in The Hobbit—the first time I’d been out
of the shire. I realized there was this whole other
world I could be a part of.”
So she jumped in: Two years ago she was an unknown
drama student at RADA; a year later, she was starring as the
immaculately virtuous heroine of Julian Fellowes’s Doctor
Thorne (“She was too nice and had no flaws; I struggled with
that”). From there, she went on to play the vengeful Lady Ev
in Emerald City. Now the 26-year-old is enjoying her highestprofile
role yet as the lead in Prime Suspect: Tennison (PBS’s
Masterpiece), the prequel to the landmark 1990s show about
Jane Tennison, a flinty London police inspector played by
Helen Mirren who battled crooks, sexist colleagues, and her
own demons. In this new series, set in 1973, Martini is an
THE ACTRESS IN AN EMILIO PUCCI TRENCH COAT AND A SEE BY CHLOÉ TOP.
eager uniformed rookie cop from a well-to-do family who
starts off wide-eyed but, while investigating murder, discovers
her own inner steel. “It was scary,” she says of filling
Dame Helen’s shoes, “but I wasn’t really playing the same
character. The point of the show is how my Tennison gets
to where Helen Mirren’s is.”
A North Londoner these days, Martini spends her offhours
doing “lots of yoga” and hitting coffeehouses with
her friends. She recently finished shooting a fifties-style
Agatha Christie mystery alongside Glenn Close and
Christina Hendricks—“I had to keep from fan-girling
too hard”—and, she tells me, looks forward to playing
characters with some dark edges. This would come as no
surprise to Prime Suspect: Tennison’s director, David Caffrey.
“Stefanie has that level of innocence and that level of
ambition,” he says. “She looks delicate, but she’s as tough
as a pair of old boots.”—JOHN POWERS
PATA>82
VOGUE.COM VOGUE JUNE 2017
81

People
Are Talking
About
Design
ON the Table
The highly anticipated debut
collection of home goods by cultish
design magazine Cabana is finally
upon us. Our favorite: this carafeand-tumbler
set, hand-blown in
Murano, featuring Tyrolean motifs
inspired by eighteenth-century
bottles that Cabana founder Martina
Mondadori Sartogo spotted in an
Austrian antiques store. “I think this
is so genius for a bedside table,”
she says. Consider this glassware
for the bedroom.—SAMANTHA REES
CABANA’S HANDMADE BEDSIDE-
TABLE CARAFE-AND-TUMBLER SET.
Art
Sculpture
GARDENING
Just after the Public Art Fund brought Anish Kapoor’s spellbinding
work Descension, an endless spiral of dark water that leads to nowhere,
to Brooklyn Bridge Park comes their artful intervention at City Hall
Park. This month, Estonian artist Katja Novitskova installs seven
otherworldly sculptures in the downtown green space. Embossed on sheets
of aluminum, each work depicts celestial and terrestrial imagery that
plays into our collective picture and technology obsessions. Meanwhile
in midtown, Josiah McElheny creates a haven for spontaneous expression
in Madison Square Park with three pieces in painted wood and prismatic
glass: a curvilinear wall to enhance music, a reflective floor for dance, and
pavilions for poetry—public art for public consumption.—LILAH RAMZI
KATJA NOVITSKOVA’S RENDERING FOR EARTH POTENTIAL, 2017.
Books
Starting OVER
“I’d run out of options. That’s how these things usually
happen,” explains Mary, the heroine of Catherine Lacey’s
tartly feminist second novel, The Answers (FSG),
who pays for her New Age therapy by taking part in a
narcissistic actor’s “Girlfriend Experiment,” with chilling
results. The Northern Irish sisters in Nick Laird’s Modern
Gods (Viking) find their attempts at fresh starts—via a
BBC show on religion and a second wedding—doomed
by legacies of fanaticism. A Delhi family gets schooled in
upward mobility in Diksha Basu’s ultra-charming debut,
The Windfall (Crown), while a marital reboot becomes
a zip line to disaster in Maile Meloy’s holiday cruise–set
thriller Do Not Become Alarmed (Riverhead), in which
the children’s moral complexity outstrips that of their
parents. And generational rebellion is in the air in Estep
Nagy’s 1960s Maine–set ode to a disintegrating WASP
order, We Shall Not All Sleep (Bloomsbury), written for
a new era of uncertainty, in which there’s much to believe
in and little to depend on.—MEGAN O’GRADY
PATA>84
ART: KATJA NOVITSKOVA. RENDERING FOR EARTH POTENTIAL, 2017. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST; KRAUPA-TUSKANY ZEIDLER, BERLIN; AND GREENE NAFTALI,
NEW YORK IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND PUBLIC ART FUND, NY. DESIGN: COURTESY OF CABANA. BOOKS: COURTESY OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE.

People
Are Talking
About
Travel
Into the WILD
The ethically and environmentally focused travel group Time + Tide welcomes two properties—both plunged deep
into local African ecosystems—to their portfolio of luxury lodgings. King Lewanika Lodge, the first permanent
campsite in Zambia’s Liuwa Plain National Park, a mecca for rare birds, features six luxury villas designed with a nod
to 1920s safaris (old-school sink basins, steamer trunks, khaki linens). Off the Madagascan coast, meanwhile, is
the private island resort of Miavana. While guests’ first impressions are formed from above (the island is accessible
solely via helicopter), on the ground the ocean gives way to fourteen beachfront villas constructed with local
honey-pink limestone. Explore the area on a marine-based Blue Safari before heading to the beach piazza, where
things get lively on the breezy rooftop dance floor and culminate with a midnight dip in the infinity pool.—L.R.
A CHEETAH STANDS GUARD AT TIME + TIDE’S NEW PROPERTY IN ZAMBIA.
Movies GOING Rogue
Movies are suddenly in love with women who
make trouble. In the uproarious Rough Night,
a gender-flipping riff on guy pictures like The
Hangover, Scarlett Johansson plays a politician
whose Miami bachelorette party gets way out
of hand. While Lucia Aniello’s feature directorial
debut doesn’t quite scale the heights of
Bridesmaids, it’s carried by Kate McKinnon’s
off-kilter Aussie and Jillian Bell’s hardcore girl
crush. You’ll be squirming during Miguel Arteta’s
Beatriz at Dinner, a Trump-era comedy starring
Salma Hayek as a holistic healer who gets
roped into a 1 percenters’ dinner for an Earthdespoiling
real estate tycoon (John Lithgow),
then can’t hide her righteous detestation of
him. A sly film that questions how to battle a
monster without becoming one yourself.—J.P.
HAYEK (THIRD FROM LEFT) AND THE
FEMALE CAST OF BEATRIZ AT DINNER.
TRAVEL: COURTESY OF TIME + TIDE. MOVIES: LACEY TERRELL/ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS.
84
VOGUE JUNE 2017
VOGUE.COM

June 2017
A w ay
We’ve watched her transform from child actress to sparkling ingenue, but with a
series of mature roles Elle Fanning is becoming something else—one of
Hollywood’s most uncanny and fascinating stars. Nathan Heller visits her in
New Orleans, the setting for her gothic new film, Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled.
Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
PRETTY IN PINK
Fanning, who has been acting since she was two, regards moviemaking as the easy part of growing up. It’s
real life that can feel tricky. Loewe jacket and skirt. Manolo Blahnik boots (worn throughout).
Fashion Editor: Grace Coddington.
87

BRANCHING
OUT
In Sofia Coppola’s
The Beguiled, Fanning
plays an aspiring
temptress at a Civil
War–era boarding
school. “Sofia was so
excited about making
me the bad girl!” she
says. Gucci dress.

ou can tell the story of Elle Fanning through the
things she does, but also through the things she does not do.
Fanning would rather not sit still, for instance. She does not
tweet. She does not learn her lines until the night before she
shoots them (then she memorizes them in the bath) and does
not watch her own talk-show appearances (“It’s like hearing
your voice on an answering machine”). She does not appreciate
it when the paparazzi trail her to the gym, because
she thinks she’s not famous enough to merit the commotion.
(“The rest of the world is like, ‘Who is that person?’ I’m like,
‘I’m sorry!’ ”) When people now stop Fanning on the street
(“Are you——”), she tries not to reply, “Dakota Fanning’s
sister!” Fanning, then, would not be the first
person—and might actually be the last—to
realize what a rare and even spooky star Fanning,
at nineteen, has become.
It’s not only the regal beauty—arching
eyebrows, snub nose, and a sylphic whoosh
of hair—or the growing catalog of impressive
work. When I meet Fanning one evening
at Tableau, a high-ceilinged restaurant
in New Orleans’s French Quarter, what is
striking is the outward flexure of her confidence,
the way she knows just who she is and
wants to pass along such certainty to you.
“Hi!” she says, and throws her arms
around me in a big squelch of a hug. She’s
dressed in an elegant red Céline turtleneck
top, black Balenciaga rockabilly denim, and
Maison Margiela sneakers with sparkling
buckles. She doffs her tiny Gucci purse and slides into a chair
by French doors that open out onto the street. Fanning lived
in New Orleans for weeks while shooting Sofia Coppola’s
new movie, The Beguiled, with Kirsten Dunst, Colin Farrell,
and Nicole Kidman. It was seven years after she had filmed
Somewhere for Coppola and the first time she’d flown off
alone to shoot without a family member on hand.
We’ve met for drinks (a lemonade, a Diet Coke—“a lot
of ice,” she says) before embarking on a haunted tour of the
French Quarter, something Fanning has always wanted to
“I am a
person of huge
contradictions,
apparently,”
says Fanning,
who recently
had her star chart
read. “Opposite,
opposite,
opposite”
do. As an errand, it’s appropriately eerie. Coppola’s adaptation
of The Beguiled (originally a 1966 novel by Thomas P.
Cullinan and, later, a 1971 film starring Clint Eastwood), is
the Civil War–era story of a wounded Union soldier (Farrell)
taken in by a girls’ boarding school in Virginia and subjected
to a gantlet of hospitality, temptation, and horror. Fanning
plays Alicia, an aspiring seductress; early in the film, she
steals into the soldier’s chamber and, as he sleeps, plants on
him a bold To Catch a Thief–style kiss.
“Elle is so sweet, and a kid, and to have her play this role
where she’s kind of like the slutty, mischievous one, very vain
and kind of a bad girl—that’s the opposite of her personality,”
Coppola says. “I thought that was really fun.”
“Sofia was so excited about making me the bad girl!”
Fanning says. But the idea had appeal for her, too. After
she finished 20th Century Women, Mike Mills’s tribute to
women of three generations finding their way through
the drifting, abeyant seventies, she had her star chart read
for the first time (Mills’s wrap gift to her). “I am a person
of huge contradictions, apparently,” she says. “Opposite,
opposite, opposite.” On the one hand, there’s her Pisces
side: “very girly,” otherworldly, uncanny in talent. “I’m not
sure I’ve ever worked with an actress who seems to operate
from such a place of deep instinct as Elle,” Colin Farrell
says. Nicole Kidman speaks of her ease and grace: “Her
work feels effortless.” Many young people know Fanning
best as Sleeping Beauty in Maleficent, a role she adored.
And although she was born in Decatur, Georgia, and
spent her first couple of years in nearby Conyers, she is, to
fans, the ultimate L.A. child: effortlessly stylish, enamelcheeked,
a Hollywood princess. She has acted since she
was two, and has lived her life both on and for the screen.
Fanning had her very first kiss on-camera, in Ginger &
Rosa—and they used that take.
Yet there’s another side to Fanning (her
Aries side, according to the star chart) that
few people see, although she wishes more
would. She has a huge temper. “My mom
and my sister are always like, ‘That’s not
something you brag about,’ ” she says with
a laugh. “But I tell strangers—I’m also very
trusting of people—like, ‘I get so mad!’ ”
This is the Elle Fanning who takes no guff,
who knows what she wants, who has started
boxing to stay fit at the LA Fitness near her
parents’ house, where she still lives, and has
developed a brutal left hook. It’s the Elle Fanning
who criticizes her own table manners (“I
eat like a dude”) and who marches to her own
beat with a gawky, Diane Keaton–like stride.
Often she introduces her ideas archly—“I
must say”—or tacks an incredulous “—yeah!” on the end of
a sentence, meaning, Gosh, what a world. “Elle has this funny
way of speaking, these old-lady phrases,” says Kirsten Dunst,
with whom she developed a close friendship while shooting
The Beguiled. In the years when both Fanning sisters were
working as minors, Elle’s grandmother was her usual companion
on set; Elle sometimes has the waggish voice and
vantage of another time.
That Fanning has a taste for professional adventurousness.
She stunned some people last year, when, newly eighteen,
90

she starred in Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon: a
dark parable of sex and death and stardom whose surreal
dreamscape culminated—rather divisively—in a spectacle
of horror-film gore. (Dakota Fanning says she was so rattled
watching her sister seem to suffer torment at the movie’s
climax that she almost fled the theater. When the lights came
up, she was amazed: “I was so moved by her as an actor.”) In
The Beguiled, Fanning has another outré role—at least by the
measure of Civil War mores. “It’s seductive in that I show my
collarbone,” she says. “Like, Oh! Her ankle is out.”
Such roles have brought on lots of long-faced-press questions
about growing within her craft, maturing as an actress,
and the artist she aspires to be. She finds this
line of inquiry bizarre.
“Obviously, people watch you grow up onscreen,”
she says, taking a sip of Diet Coke.
To her, moviemaking is the easy part: the
constant and familiar churn. She doesn’t understand
why people ask so little about what
is truly strange and new about getting older.
Parties, for example. Graduation. Figuring
out what kind of woman you are going to be.
“You have responsibilities at eighteen
that you didn’t have before, but you still
feel like a little kid,” she says. Until Dakota
went off to NYU, the sisters, their parents,
and their grandmother all lived together in
L.A., and the Fannings have an extended
family of, as Elle puts it, “girls, girls, girls!” She thinks a lot
about the women around her and the standards that they’ve
set. Around the time of her high school graduation, she
realized that she shouldn’t coast mindlessly into an acting
career and weighed other options, including college. But the
choice, she says, was easy in the end: “It’s scary to think of
not being able to do movies still.”
Fanning has a vivid, cinematic inner life: One of her favorite
pastimes, she tells me, is sitting on her bed and letting her
imagination run. When she goes to sleep, she has clear, lucid
dreams that dredge up buried memories and sometimes, she
thinks, let her see the future. There was the time in fourth
grade when she and three of her friends made plans to see
Twilight at the Grove, in L.A. She could scarcely wait. She
had a crush on a particular boy at school (a fifth-grader—
you know how it is), and when she went to bed the night
before the movie, she dreamed about rounding a corner in
the Grove and seeing him there. “I woke up that day and told
my friends, ‘We’re going to see him! I just know we’re going
to see him.’ They’re like, ‘He doesn’t even live close by.’ ” But
in fact her crush did appear at the Grove that day—right in
the spot where Fanning had dreamed he would be. “I’m like
a witch!” she exclaims delightedly.
This all seems a swell prelude to our haunted tour. I’m even
a little spooked, and probably look it. “If I dream about you
tonight,” Fanning says with a reassuring laugh, “I’ll let you
know tomorrow.”
On the north corner of Jackson Square, we meet Michael
Bill, a “paranormal investigator” sent by Ghost City Tours.
En route to the Quarter, I had realized that I had no mental
image of what a ghost-tour guide looks like, but when we
spot him, it is clear that Bill could not be anything else.
“I’m
superromantic,”
she says—
and then, as if
worried I didn’t
hear, throws
out her arms and
shouts it:
“Superromantic!”
Gray-bearded and tanned, he wears white jeans with kneehigh
lace-up boots, a button-down shirt printed with Star
Wars logos, and two huge silver crosses around his neck.
Strapped to one thigh he has a pack in which he keeps
some spirit sensors, and on his back he wears a bulky
JanSport filled with other vitals of the trade.
“We’ll use the Ovilus, and I have a couple of spirit boxes,
and we’ll see what happens,” he explains. His voice is like
a plucked banjo; his chestnut hair is parted on one side.
We wander to a nearby corner and a stately old French
Quarter eatery.
“This is Muriel’s,” Bill explains. “It’s a good restaurant. It’s
also haunted.” The ghost is Pierre Jourdan,
who, in the late eighteenth century, lost the
deed in a heated poker game and hanged
himself. Up a winding staircase to the second
floor, a plush room has been lit in soft red
light. We sit, and Bill takes out his Ovilus, a
device that turns spiritual energy into En glish
words. It looks like a baby monitor. “Is it true
that this place is haunted?” he asks.
Fanning is scrutinizing the screen of the
device when it delivers its reply. “Definitely,”
she says.
On Royal Street a female reveler, probably
possessed by spirits of another kind, shouts
to Fanning from a car: “Dear, I like your
top!” The Céline top is, in fact, great. With
a high neck and an opening around the navel, it’s a kind of
grown-up evening version of the midriff-baring shirts that
Fanning wore as a child. But as the car zooms on, Fanning
doesn’t hear “Dear, I like your top”; she hears “Dear God,
you’re tall!” She has been self-conscious about her height—a
very reasonable five feet nine—ever since she shot up seven
inches one year and gained two shoe sizes while shooting
Somewhere. And yet her elegant, long form makes it easy
to find clothes she loves: Rodarte (fashion’s own California
sisters) and Miu Miu (quirky and fun). “Rodarte and Miu
Miu are like characters in a film,” she explains. Last spring,
at Cannes, she got to wear a sumptuous Valentino dress, and
that was heaven. She loved to spread the skirt for cameras. “I
was basically just walking around with it flared.”
It’s dark now, and the tight French Quarter streets are
filled with nighttime wanderers. Bill leads us to a building
that was formerly a brothel; he says that it was called the
House of the Rising Sun. If a john treated the women badly
there, the madam would exact revenge. She’d offer the man
a laced drink, served by two ladies. Then two more women
would come, and then more. “The rube would realize he was
surrounded by six very pissed-off prostitutes!” he exclaims.
“They would beat him down, slit his throat, take out his
wallet, roll him into a pre-dug grave, take out the cash—and
the coup de grâce would come when they would throw the
empty bottle on top of him and cover him up!” Today, he
says, the building is a hotel.
Fanning smiles sweetly. “So bring, like, a bad boyfriend or
something,” she says.
The Fannings were supposed to be a family of athletes,
not actors. Dakota and Elle’s father had been in the minor
leagues, their mother played tennis professionally, and an

EYE OF THE
STORM
For all of her
outward
confidence,
Fanning’s
weakness is
auditions—she
hates them so
much she fainted
at one from
sheer terror.
Dior dress.

FAMILY TREE
Elle’s big sister,
Dakota, blazed a
trail to Hollywood.
“You think, Gosh, if
I didn’t have a sister
who started acting,
would I be acting?”
Louis Vuitton dress.

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aunt was a sideline reporter in football. Although Elle has
always had physical interests—she did ballet for a while, before
subjecting herself to a brief but intense preoccupation
with hot yoga—the sisters’ interests quickly turned in other
directions. When Dakota was five, she went to a local theater
camp and was spotted by a scout. “It was a play called Blue
Fish. She was the blue fish!” Elle explains. “They’re like, You
need to go to L.A. or New York with her, because she was
amazing at being the blue fish.” In an act of parental heroism,
their mother put her life in Georgia on hold and relocated
to California with Dakota for commercials and pilot season;
Elle and her father followed when Dakota booked a lead in
the Sean Penn drama I Am Sam. Elle was called on set to
play that character’s younger self. By the time she was six,
they were giving interviews together.
Today, Elle talks about Dakota with open awe and
something more. “You think, Gosh, if I didn’t have a sister
who started acting, would I be acting?” she says. A peek at
home videos of the toddler Elle reveals a natural performer.
(“Here’s . . . Elle Fanning!” she cries into the camera, spreading
her arms wide.) But her path was cleared by Dakota,
and a mutual loyalty has lingered as their work has diverged.
“People sometimes want us to feel weird jealousy or competition,”
Dakota says. “It will never happen. There’s no one I
want to see succeed or soar more.”
Elle loathes auditions—she once fainted in one from
sheer terror—but she loves to meet with directors and talk
a project over. When Coppola cast Somewhere, the two
immediately hit it off. “She just had a really fun, sparkling
personality,” Coppola says. “It’s that rare combination of
being sophisticated but a kid at the same time—she’s not a
mini-adult like a lot of kid actors.” Because the character in
Somewhere skates, Coppola offered Fanning an ice-skating
double, but Fanning knew the skating scene was key, so for
weeks she took early-morning and after-school lessons.
Somewhere showed the world she was more than just Dakota
Fanning’s sister. But that was already quite long ago.
“All of a sudden, she’s much taller than me,” Coppola says.
“But the same person, with the same sparkly essence.”
Marilyn Monroe has been Fanning’s hero for about fifteen
years—most of her life. She studies Marilyn’s interviews the
way some study paintings by Cézanne. “You could always see
the emotions that she was feeling . . . in her eyes,” she says.
“She didn’t know how great she was.”
She often wonders how Marilyn would have managed
social media. For years, Fanning resisted what she calls (in
excellent old-lady fashion) “the Facebook and the Twitter.”
But as time went on she worried she was too much in her
shell. “I need to evolve with the times!” she says. She’s a visual
person, so Instagram beckoned. As of this writing, her account
has upward of 900,000 followers. “Before you share,
you get nervous: You can’t help but have those flashes,” she
says. “My sister has a million followers—which is nothing
compared with Selena Gomez, who has the world.”
Yet Fanning’s embrace of technology is still vexed at best.
She got Netflix for the first time this past winter. She does
not have any of the new emojis on her iPhone, because she
has not managed to update it in a while. As a result, much
of what her friends text her shows up as question marks and
gibberish. She’s too chagrined to tell them, so she acts as if
she understands. CONTINUED ON PAGE 158

HOT
BLOODED
For all of her
effervescence and
wit, Fanning also
has a temper, which
she boasts about
to strangers. “My
mom and sister
are like, ‘That’s
not something
you brag about.’”
Valentino Haute
Couture dress.

SLEEPING
BEAUTY
Fanning says one
of her favorite
pastimes is
sitting on her
bed and letting
her imagination
run. Alexander
McQueen dress.

PRODUCTION DESIGN: MARY HOWARD. FURNITURE COURTESY OF ROYAL
ANTIQUES LTD, NEW ORLEANS. LOCAL PRODUCTION BY BATOU CHANDLER.
PRACTICAL
MAGIC
“I’m not sure I’ve
ever worked with an
actress who seems
to operate from
such a place of deep
instinct as Elle,”
says her Beguiled
costar Colin Farrell.
Givenchy Haute
Couture by Riccardo
Tisci dress. In this
story: hair, Julien
d’Ys for Julien d’Ys;
makeup, Lauren
Parsons. Details,
see In This Issue.

SOMETHING
IN THE AIR
THE DETAILING ON
THIS EMBROIDERED
COAT IS STITCHED TO
POSY PERFECTION.
MODEL GRACE
HARTZEL WEARS A
DOLCE & GABBANA
COAT; SELECT
DOLCE & GABBANA
BOUTIQUES. VOGUE
ANNIVERSARY ROSE
(ON JACKET).
FASHION EDITOR:
TONNE GOODMAN.

BLOOMS
WITH A VIEW
THE SKY’S THE
LIMIT WHEN
IT COMES TO
INTERPRETATIONS
OF THE PRICKLY
PERENNIAL. KARL
LAGERFELD PARIS
FOR LORD & TAYLOR
X VOGUE 125
DRESS, $198; LORD
& TAYLOR STORES.
VOGUE RECEIVES
A PORTION
OF THE PROFITS
FROM THE SALE OF
THIS DRESS.
MOONLIGHT
&ROSES
FROM THE
DELICATELY
APPLIQUÉD
TO THE
INTRICATELY
EMBROIDERED,
THE FALL
COLLECTIONS
BLOSSOMED
WITH
OTHERWORLDLY
BEAUTY.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY
MIKAEL JANSSON.

STOMPING
GROUNDS
KICK UP SOME
DUST IN A BLOWN-
OUT FLORAL
GOWN. DOLCE &
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DRESS; SELECT
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105

PETALS WITH
METTLE
ADAM SELMAN’S
RAMPANT-FLORA
FINALE GOES TOTALLY
IMMERSIVE AMID
PHILLIP K. SMITH
III’S INSTALLATION
THE CIRCLE OF LAND
AND SKY, AT “DESERT
X,” AN EXHIBITION
OF LARGE-SCALE
WORKS NEAR PALM
SPRINGS, CALIFORNIA,
CURATED BY NEVILLE
WAKEFIELD. ADAM
SELMAN TULLE
DRESS, $1,750; THE
GROCERY STORE,
SAN FRANCISCO.

BELLE FLEUR
A BUDDING ROMANCE
CALLS FOR A SLINKY,
FLORAL-STREWN FROCK.
JUNKO SHIMADA
SILK DRESS, $1,596;
JUNKOSHIMADA.COM.
BEAUTY NOTE
OFFSET FEMININE
FLORALS WITH TEXTURED
HAIR. PHILIP KINGSLEY’S
INSTANT BEACH ADDS
PIECEYNESS WITH A
SOFT, TOUCHABLE HOLD.

THE
WORLD’S
HIS
STAGE
It takes a rare breed of actor
able to cross-pollinate
acting chops and cultural
appeal to find success in
both Hollywood and
Bollywood. Ali Fazal’s big break
came in 2013 with the hit Hindi
comedy Fukrey, a film (a sequel is
in the works) about four friends
who concoct a harebrained getrich-quick
scheme that goes
awry. Since then the Indian-born
Fazal, 30, has been a regular on
the Bollywood circuit—but
the actor, whose floppy-haired
charm apparently translates internationally,
has set his sights
beyond his home country.
Shooting for Vogue near
Joshua Tree National Park gave
him his taste of California—he’ll
soon be back on the West Coast
to promote his next project, Victoria
and Abdul, the true story of
Queen Victoria’s (Judi Dench) unexpected
friendship with a young
Indian clerk played by Fazal. Like
the actor, the film—shot in India,
Scotland, and a handful of small
towns around the United Kingdom—melds
the English- and
Hindi-speaking worlds.
Despite both his full-blown
Hollywood-star potential and his
weighty Bollywood presence—
he cites Indian designers Manish
Malhotra and Shantanu & Nikhil
as his red-carpet go-tos—Fazal
radiates a humbling lack of pretension.
(“I have a weird job for a
grown man,” reads his Instagram
bio.) But while the actor might
not take himself too seriously, the
same can’t be said of his craft.
With a steady stream of projects
in the pipeline and his forthcoming
directorial debut, Fazal is a
multinational force whose Stateside
arrival comes at just the right
moment. “It’s a strange time,”
says the actor, “but we are seeing
a sudden burst of people from
everywhere, and I want to be part
of it.”—LILAH RAMZI
A MAN FOR
ALL SEASONS
FAZAL WEARS
A SALVATORE
FERRAGAMO SUIT,
AN A.P.C. SHIRT,
AND A J.CREW TIE.

LEAD GREENHOUSE IN HERE
AMA EFFECT SO SDGNIA
POREM A LITTLE DU FLOWER SADDOS
EIUSAM POWER, RERCIAS IN THE END,
IN GOES COMNIENTIUS
A LONG WAY.
ENIMOLRUM MICHAEL KORS INISIN
RIDAND COLLECTION GENIMUS DRESS,
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MICHAEL EST LA GUAEST, KORS NET
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SET VOLORIB DESIGN, ERIATEM MARY
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SEE MAGNIM IN THIS SANDAES ISSUE.
110

PRODUCED BY CAROLINE STRIDFELDT FOR LOLA PRODUCTION

ƒırst
SPRING IN THE ARIZONA DESERT BRINGS A SENSE OF
expectation and the stirrings of new life. “You see the first
flush and the first bloom,” Tyler Francis, a farmer, tells me
one morning as we tear around the fields of Francis Roses, the
world’s second-largest grower, in his white Ford pickup. The
young bushes crop up at this time of year, but the real thrill
arrives in November, when they are fully mature. Francis’s
farm grows more than 1,000 varieties, making the fields at
harvest luscious and ambrosial. He tells me, “There are very
few things that bring that much passion and joy.”
We are here to see the first days of an infant flower: lush,
fragrant, and destined for gardens nationwide. It is a floribunda,
bright and bushy in the ground, with a deep, dawny
peach color, more than 50 petals to each flower. It has the
fragrance of soft summer mornings on the coast—citrus,
licorice, a tincture of vanilla—and an eagerness to bloom.
And it’s new. In a world of roses colored by a traditional
lineup of reds, whites, yellows, pinks, and oranges, this bloom
represents not only a new breed but a new way of thinking
about the nation’s favorite flower.
In the postwar years, Francis explains, roses were bred to
fit into a landscape of female domestic chores: You dusted
and vacuumed your house; you sprayed and pruned your
rosebushes. Women today, thankfully, have broader opportunities.
“You get people like my wife, who have two kids, who
work,” Francis says, bringing the truck to a stop. “They’re
not going to go out into the garden and start deadheading.”
Gardening fathers are similarly beset. Fortunately, advances
in rose breeding are making better, less finicky flowers—everblooming,
self-cleaning (i.e., they don’t require deadheading),
fragrant, and resistant to disease. The peach-colored buds we
have come to see emerged from decades of cultivation, and
when Francis first saw the flower, he had a eureka feeling.
Meet the Vogue Anniversary Rose.
A while back, the editors of this magazine confronted a new
version of a familiar challenge: How to celebrate the passage
of time without raking tediously over the past? Vogue turns
125 this year, an impressive age for any publication. But dragging
out last year’s (or century’s) stuff isn’t what the magazine
has ever been about. Was there a way to celebrate the past
with something brand-new—an icon of fashion that grows
toward the future? How about a rose?
The idea seemed predestined. The fall runways in New
York were so dense with rose prints this February (recall
Prabal Gurung, Brock Collection, and Tanya Taylor, to say
nothing of Adam Selman’s sending out a model covered in
actual stemmed roses) that the Los Angeles Times called a
B L U S H
trend: “Everything’s coming up roses.” And when Beyoncé
heralded her pregnancy in a styled Instagram photo? Those
weren’t geraniums behind her.
But if plucking the idea out of the air was easy, anointing a
new flower was a thornier proposition. The naming of roses
has become one of the dimly lit, mysterious back corridors
of celebrity culture, lodged somewhere between wax museums
and franchise emoji. There is a Christian Dior rose (red),
a John F. Kennedy rose (white), and a Miranda Lambert rose
(rousing hot pink). There’s a Catherine Deneuve (elegant
coral, in the French style), a Marilyn Monroe (pale blonde
and said to smell like peaches), and a Rosie O’Donnell (loony
red tips, possibly shippable to the White House). If there was
to be a Vogue rose, it would have to be—well, what? A list of
ideal qualities emerged.
First, the Vogue rose should be elegant and of its moment—because
standard-setting is important. It should be
exquisitely fragrant because, to quote Coco Chanel (who
borrowed in turn from the poet Paul Valéry), “a woman who
doesn’t wear perfume has no future.” It should be an English
rose (the layered, heavily petaled variety favored in gardens,
rather than the quick-to-wilt things sold in grocery stores), but
with New World roots. Instead of the dusty, dark foliage that
often droops below vivacious blooms, it should have leaves
as bright and glossy as this magazine. And because fashion is
adaptable, fast-traveling, and global, it should be able to thrive
anywhere: planted in a Los Angeles garden, potted on a New
York City patio, or set along a boulevard in Paris or Milan.
Stephen Scanniello, best known as the former longtime
curator of the Cranford Rose Garden in Brooklyn, put
Vogue in touch with rose breeders, including Brad Jalbert
of Select Roses, a star hybridizer near Vancouver who was
raising some of the most interesting new flowers around.
Breeding roses is like breeding animals: You take the pollen
from one variety (the “father”) and apply it to another (the
“mother”); a few months later, seeds are gathered from the
mother’s rosehips and planted. Cross two varieties repeatedly,
and you’ll get different offspring every time. Most breeders
get one promising rose from as many as 10,000 new seeds
they create; Jalbert can work that to one in 1,000.
Finding that one, however, requires eight years of scrutiny.
Does the plant look healthy? Can it survive winter or
shade? Are the flowers interesting and new? (Rose growers
disparage what they shorthand J.A.P.—“just another
pink.”) Many beautiful roses smell bad—I encountered
one redolent of fried food—and more have no fragrance
at all. Year after year, breeds get cut from the running.
“It’s the only thing in the world I CONTINUED ON PAGE 158
What does it take to create your very own bloom? Nathan Heller
follows the fragrant trail of the newly fashioned Vogue Anniversary Rose.
Photographed by Eric Boman.

JUST
PEACHY
With notes of
citrus, licorice, and
vanilla, Vogue's
namesake rose
will start blooming
in gardens this
summer.
Vogue receives a
portion of the
profits from the
sale of this rose.

Cécile
Winckler
On the terrace
of her Manhattan
apartment,
Winckler stands in
a cutout peplum
sheath dress by Ryan
Roche, $1,933;
ryan-roche.com.
Fashion Editor:
Phyllis Posnick.
Photographed by Anton Corbijn

Amy Sall
The New School
lecturer at work, where
Kara Walker’s mural
Event Horizon (2005)
commands the eye.
The Row coat ($4,890),
belt, and boots.
Coat at Neiman Marcus
stores. Céline earrings.
Hair, Shon; makeup,
Jen Myles.
ART: KARA WALKER, EVENT HORIZON, 2004. © KARA WALKER, COURTESY OF SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORK. THIS SPREAD: PRODUCED BY IAN KAPLAN FOR THE CUSTOM FAMILY.
I N F U L L
B L O O M
From Jayne Wrightsman to Lauren Santo Domingo, Vogue has always
celebrated the brightest lights of philanthropy and society. The new generation,
however, is not just ineffably stylish but self-aware, socially conscious—and
sometimes even self-made. Meet the young roses.

CÉCILE WINCKLER
“Artists have to remain open and independent,” explains
Winckler, 31, a New Yorker by way of Paris and her native
Belgium. “When artists are tied down to a job, they lose
their vision.” It’s a sentiment that led Winckler, whose circle
encompasses everyone from actor and artist India Salvor
Menuez to Charlotte Casiraghi, to cofound Unemployed,
a large-format magazine that she coedits with her partner,
Sophie Tabet. Unemployed publishes the work that her artist
and fashion-photographer friends are most passionate
about but which is—so far, at least—of little commercial
value. Think of it as a nonprofit gallery without the gallery,
and Winckler a kind of postmodern patron of the arts.
“It’s a bridge between art and fashion,” she says. “We create
something you could put on your wall.” In most cases,
Winckler’s support is what allows the photographers to realize
their projects at all. Recently she has taken Pierre-Ange
Carlotti to the beaches of Marseilles, Harley Weir to Beirut,
and Oliver Hadlee Pearch to Savannah, Georgia. And last
fall, François Pragnère shot a photo essay at the Burgundy
château that belongs to Winckler’s family. “We produce everything
together—it’s a whole community, an ecosystem,”
she says. So much for not having a job.—MARK GUIDUCCI
AMY SALL
Sall, a striking 27-year-old Senegalese-American academic—she’s
currently a Eugene Lang College lecturer
at Manhattan’s New School—has recently lent her face
to Kenzo x H&M and J.Crew campaigns. Though her
growing exposure in the social and fashion worlds would
seem to prove otherwise, her primary focus these days is
SUNU Journal, a print and online outlet centered on ideas
of African cultural expression.
Ahead of its launch, Sall, a former U.N. intern with
a master’s in human-rights studies from Columbia, has
already enticed more than 52,000 would-be readers with
SUNU’s social-media feed full of references to classic
African cinema and rare portraiture from the continent.
“I want to create a space where young people—emerging
thinkers, voices, artists—can disseminate their work,” she
says.—MARJON CARLOS
NIEVES ZUBERBÜHLER
During one week in March, Zuberbühler, 29, flew back
and forth from New York to southern Florida twice: first
for the Okeechobee Music & Arts Festival, organized
by her husband, Julio Santo Domingo, and then again
to a retirement community in nearby Delray Beach to
interview the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor for her
job as a 60 Minutes associate producer. On both trips, the
Emmy Award–winning Argentine’s wardrobe was surprisingly
similar: Frame jeans and Converse sneakers (which
at Okeechobee were paired with a favorite vintage Rolling
Stones tee and feather earrings trawled from a street fair
in Punta del Este).
The attire for Zuberbühler’s fantastical Halloween wedding,
however, was decidedly less casual. For that occasion—with
900 guests in attendance—she called on friend
Brandon Maxwell to create a Pre-Raphaelite–inspired
satin-faced chiffon confection with a ten-foot train that the
designer sheared off after the church ceremony, and then
cut shorter still for the early-morning after-party. In lieu of
a registry, she and her husband asked for donations to two
South American charities, the ALAS foundation and the
Argentinean school Las Lomas Oral. But Zuberbühler’s
philanthropic inclinations extend far beyond the placement
at her gala table: During 60 Minutes’ summer hiatus, she
plans to volunteer with the International Rescue Committee
in a U.S. refugee-resettlement center and also one in
either the Middle East or East Africa. “I’ve been trying to
contribute in any way I can,” she says. “I just really feel like
I need to do this.”—CHLOE MALLE
CLEO WADE
Though she didn’t debut at the Crillon, let it not be said that
the magnetic Wade, with her halo of curls and fantastical
Valentino dresses, doesn’t make a grand entrance. With more
than 200,000 Instagram followers, Wade, 28, has become
the face of a new creative guard determined to use fashion
to altruistic ends. She stands for specific causes—drawing
attention to criminal-justice reform and putting an end to
mass incarceration in the United States, for starters—as well
as a broader agenda to promote change through positivity
(Heart Talk, her debut self-help book, will be published in
early 2018). “The people always have more power than the
people in power,” says Wade, her tone at once personal and
political. “I want to represent the people who feel they don’t
have a voice. Activism is organized storytelling.” Glistening
as she does in a Valentino dress (and on the arm of Senator
Cory Booker), Wade has set herself up to be one very inspiring
narrator.—EMMA ELWICK-BATES
NELL DIAMOND
“And tresses all disordered. . . . ”
Twenty-eight-year-old Diamond is fond of quoting
Milton, about whom she wrote her undergraduate thesis
at Princeton, but there is nothing disordered about this
laser-focused entrepreneur with auburn hair and a Sargent
complexion. The daughter of former Barclays CEO Bob
Diamond, Nell took to the trading floors of Wall Street
before starting her linens company, Hill House Home, last
year while still in business school at Yale. In addition to
debunking marketing myths about thread counts and Egyptian
cottons—and with an expansion into tabletop linens up
next—she aims to make Hill House a lifestyle destination for
her contemporaries.
Diamond also exemplifies the millennial philanthropist
looking for more meaningful ways to give back. “There’s
a disconnect between a champagne-fueled party and the
cause it supports,” she says. “I don’t think there’s an appetite
there anymore.” Instead, she is a founding member of
UNICEF’s Next Generation, with which she has raised funds
to distribute Plumpy’Nut—a life-saving peanut paste that has
done wonders to combat child malnutrition—in Guatemala;
she has also helped establish sanitation in parts of Vietnam.
The group’s New York City–based successes include instigating
a pop-up speaker series and hosting the Snowflake Ball
with UNICEF ambassador Katy Perry. Diamond also supports
the Guggenheim Museum and is passionately hands-on
with God’s Love We Deliver. “The more we engage,” she says,
“the more people will listen.”—E.E.-B.

Nieves
Zuberbühler
The news
producer epitomizes
the glamour of a
lady in red.
Brock Collection
dress, $4,490;
matchesfashion.com.
Oscar de la Renta
earrings. Rings by
Retrouvaí and Pascale
Monvoisin. Hair,
Garren for Garren New
York at R+Co.
Fashion Editor:
Tonne Goodman.
Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier

Cleo
Wade
Head to toe
in the brand, Wade
appears a Gucci
heroine. Gucci
coat, earrings, and
rings; select
Gucci boutiques.

Nell
Diamond
At her West
Village town house,
currently under
construction, Diamond
is seen in profile
in a Monique Lhuillier
dress; Monique Lhuillier
boutiques. Cathy
Waterman earrings.
Hair, Jerrod Roberts;
makeup, Dick Page
for Shiseido. Details,
see In This Issue.
THIS SPREAD: PRODUCED BY ROGER DONG FOR GE PROJECTS

Standard
From 1984 to Harry Potter and the
Cursed Child, Sonia Friedman has fourteen shows
(and counting) on the go between London and
New York. No wonder she’s considered the
Midas of theater producers. By Hadley Freeman.
Photographed by Anton Corbijn.
It’s a warm spring evening in London’s West
End. Dodging tourists and excited theatergoers,
Sonia Friedman is attempting to visit
the casts of at least some of the plays she is
producing before curtains rise in 90 minutes.
“Wait, I need a cigarette—who’s got a
light? Have you got a light?” she asks looking
around. Happily, a nearby Spanish-speaking
tourist does, and, cigarette lit and held between
clenched teeth, we’re off again.
Even though she flew in this morning on a
red-eye from New York, Friedman is lively and
bright-eyed, energized by doing what she loves
most. She has been making preparations for the
Broadway transfer in 2018 of the mammoth twopart
show, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, about (and I’m tiptoeing
around spoilers here) the adult Harry struggling with fatherhood.
She’s also been supervising the rehearsals of her dazzlingly clever production
of 1984, an adaptation of George Orwell’s all-too-relevant
novel that opens on Broadway this month, starring Reed Birney,
Tom Sturridge, and Olivia Wilde. (You don’t become one of the
biggest producers in the world by failing to recognize the Zeitgeist.)
“Bit of a nightmare, really, as Tom’s visa didn’t turn up. We
ended up getting him a duplicate passport—all very Mission:
Impossible!” she says, chuckling. I tell her she does rather look like
PET PROJECTS
Friedman, with bichon frises Teddy and Buddy, outside London’s Palace
Theatre. The Row coat, shirt, and pants. Hair, Shon; makeup, Hiromi Ueda.
Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick.

a spy in her Topshop black-and-white striped trousers, black
top, and Gucci leather jacket. “Ha! Is Gucci a good thing?
Make sure you put that in, then,” she says.
First on our list for this evening is Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?, starring Imelda Staunton and Imogen Poots. We
slip through the stage door, and Friedman walks down the
stairs and through the dark, winding corridors with the confidence
of someone who could do this blindfolded. Staunton,
who has been suffering from a throat infection, is onstage in
rehearsal and hugs Friedman warmly.
“If you need anything, anybody, anytime,
call me. I’m always five seconds away,” Friedman
tells her.
“Ooh, I’ll start making a list,” says
Staunton, smiling.
Next stop is The Book of Mormon, which
Friedman brought over from New York; then
Travesties, written by her friend Tom Stoppard.
In the theater, Sam Mendes FaceTimes
her. “I’ll call you back—I’m backstage!” she
shouts at her phone. She rolls her eyes at me
and laughs: “Always the wrong time, eh?”
We have just enough time to make it to
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (which
she is coproducing with Colin Callender).
She greets all the backstage crew by name,
and they wave at her—“Welcome back, Sonia!
Thank you for the lovely email!”—as we hurry toward
the cast, waiting for her on the Hogwarts set. Shoe bags of
wands hang in the wings, as well as cards from fans, including
Tom Cruise (“Thank you all for a fantastic performance
on Sunday”).
“I’ve just been in New York and missed you all,” she says.
“Do you feel promiscuous, like you’ve been with the New
York Harry Potter and now you’re back here with us?” asks
the actor Jamie Parker, who plays Harry. Friedman loves
the question.
“I do!” she says, laughing.
A bell rings, meaning the audience is arriving. Friedman
grabs my hand.
“Come on! If we’re quick we might make The Glass
Menagerie!”
Friedman is widely hailed as the most powerful
person in British theater. She put Madonna
on the London stage (in 2002’s Up
for Grabs) and introduced Mark Rylance
to Broadway (in plays including Jez Butterworth’s
Jerusalem, as well as Twelfth Night
and Richard III. She will bring his latest,
Farinelli and the King, to New York later
this year). Mainly known for dramas, she also produces the
classics, farce, musicals, and even TV (the BBC’s Wolf Hall
and an upcoming production of King Lear, starring Anthony
Hopkins). The common denominator of them all is caliber:
The credit “Sonia Friedman Productions” is a guarantee
of quality. This year her plays were nominated for a recordbreaking
31 Oliviers (the British equivalent of the Tonys),
and she ended up winning eleven. Nine went to Harry Potter—another
record, since no new play has previously won
more than seven. In January, she picked up an Order of the
Wıth her
tousled
dark-blonde hair,
crooked mouth,
and husky
smoker’s laugh,
she could
be J. K. Rowling’s
naughty twin
British Empire from the queen for services to the theater.
“She is, to use that dreadful phrase, the go-to theater producer,”
says Stoppard. “Every generation has one whom
everyone wants to work with, and now it’s Sonia. She’s probably
the busiest person I know; she crosses the Atlantic like
other people cross the street.” Butterworth—whose new play,
The Ferryman, opens in the West End this month, directed by
Sam Mendes—describes her attentiveness. “I know she has
a million things going on, but when I’m working with her I
always feel like she’s just doing my shows,” he
says. “She makes you feel special.”
To find Friedman in her office above a
West End theater, you follow photos of her
past productions and their stars up the stairway:
Ralph Fiennes! Kristin Scott Thomas!
Simon Russell Beale! Benedict Cumberbatch,
as Hamlet, up in a corner! At the top, one of
her 40-odd mostly female staff ushers me
into a side room. Eventually her two bichon
frises, Teddy and Buddy, trot in, like knights
announcing the arrival of a queen. And what
a regal entrance she makes, talking 20 miles to
the minute before she even sits down, a vision
of London chic in a Biba–style white fake
fur coat, dark velour Donna Karan trousers
tucked into chunky high heeled boots, and a
silky black chemise top that shows an impressive
amount of skin for the English weather.
“Sonia,” Stoppard tells me later with some understatement,
“does not look like a typical theater producer. She is
much cooler than that.” In fact, with her tousled dark-blonde
hair, crooked mouth, and husky smoker’s laugh, she could
be Joanne—better known as J. K.—Rowling’s naughty twin.
“Jo and I look very, very similar, and we’re the same age,”
says Friedman, who is 52 and first visited Rowling in the
author’s hometown of Edinburgh in 2013. But physical resemblances
were only the start of how Friedman got Rowling
to agree to a Harry Potter play, succeeding where so many
before her had failed.
For a while—a lifetime, really—Friedman had been stewing
over a question: Do great men make good fathers? And
Harry, she realized, was the perfect vehicle through which to
explore it. Rowling loved the idea. “We immediately connected
over being daughters of difficult dads,” Friedman says.
Rowling has spoken out about her estrangement from her
father, and Friedman’s relationship with hers was even more
fraught. A celebrated violinist, Leonard Friedman left his
wife the year Sonia, their fourth child, was born, and barely
looked back. “I’d see him once a year, maybe—he certainly
never knew my birthday or said he loved me. He would shake
my hand; it was that kind of relationship. Things like that
form you. So I was always fascinated with how so-called
Great Men cope with being fathers,” she says.
As for the play, Broadway regulars may suspect they’re too
jaded by years of jazzy onstage pyrotechnics to be excited by
magic wands. Well, they’re in for a big surprise. When I saw
the production in London, I gasped aloud watching papers
tidy themselves on desks and human figures disappear inside
telephones. And don’t get me started on the time travel.
“It is quite clever, isn’t it?” says the director, John Tiffany.
“But we didn’t use a huge amount of technology, because
122

we knew there was no way we could compete with the movies.
So we used the fantasy to go further into the human
experience, which is when fantasy works best.” And, like
the books, the play triumphs at taking big themes—death,
family, love, isolation—and turning them into deeply
personal stories.
After her father left, Friedman’s childhood in North London
was pretty rackety. Her mother was often absent, working
multiple jobs to earn enough to feed her children. “I don’t
have any of the normal memories: being put to bed, doing
homework. But I do remember the four of us kids putting
on plays together and having a laugh. It was an idyllic
childhood, really. None of us went off the rails, although
we’re all terrible with authority, and I’m especially awful with
male authority. It doesn’t take an analyst to figure out why I
ended up being my own boss,” she says.
Friedman’s sister Maria, an actor and theater director
five years her senior, says that their homegrown projects
gave Sonia a particular insight. “Other producers are like,
‘Just write something; just say your lines.’ But because we
grew up making plays, puppet shows, and operas, Sonia
knows creativity doesn’t come out of a toothpaste tube,”
she says, “and that has given her a genuine love for it.”
Aside from Sonia and Maria, their brother Richard is a
successful musician, and sister Sarah is an academic. Their
half-brother, Ben, is a producer and director (his credits
include The Great British Bake Off).
“One of the great things about having a childhood like
ours is that you don’t know you’re breaking rules, because
you have no idea what they are,” Maria adds. “The ropes and
barriers are invisible, and Sonia has always exemplified that.
If someone tells her no, she just keeps going.”
When Friedman was fourteen and had recently been
expelled from school for truancy, she went to the West End
to see Maria rehearsing as an understudy
in Oklahoma! “I co–brought up Sonia
because our mother was so busy. I loved
her, this ringleted, sunny, stubborn, funny
creature, so she came with me everywhere.
I remember her little face as she watched
what was happening backstage. It was like
she was intoxicated,” recalls Maria. Says
Friedman, “I turned my stool around because
the scene changes seemed so much
more interesting than whatever was happening
onstage.”
As it happens, the scene of that epiphany
was the Palace Theatre in London, where
Harry Potter is now playing. “Life is weird,
isn’t it?” Friedman reflects. “I wanted it so
badly then, and now here I am.”
As soon as she was old enough, Friedman enrolled in
night school to learn stage management. She went on to
drama school and afterward was interviewed by Laurence
Olivier in his kitchen over a lunch of chicken and salad for
her first stage-management job. She got it. Later she worked
at London’s National Theatre as an assistant stage manager.
“I’d be sitting in rehearsals, and Harold Pinter, who was
directing his own plays then, would lean over and say, ‘I
think there needs to be a pause there. Can you write pause
in the script?’ That was when I fell in love with new writing,
“She’s probably
the busiest
person I know,”
says Tom Stoppard.
“She crosses
the Atlantic like
other people cross
the street”
because I watched plays being written in front of me,”
Friedman says. The then head of the National Theatre,
Richard Eyre, told her one day, “You seem to be very
good at getting people to do what you want. You should
be a producer.” She took his advice, launching her current
company in 2002.
Often, a commercial-theater producer
is little more than a bean counter, but
those who work with Friedman laugh
at the idea of that being the limit of
her role. For one, she is known for
being on the side of writers, which
has won her the loyalty of many of
the biggest names in theater today.
“I’ve known Sonia since 1985, when she was a skinny stage
manager” at the Oxford Stage Company, says Rylance. “She’s
always had an amazing vision about what theater should
be. Working with her is like working for a superb artistic
director.” Remembering a production of his own play Nice
Fish, he adds, “She would come in with specific ideas about
what needed to be cut, how a scene could evolve, how to shift
the audience’s perspective. She could be tough, but she was
always right.”
“I can get as paranoid as the next precious twat, but I feel
very looked after by her,” says Butterworth. “I have a tendency
to disappear, especially if I’m struggling with writing.
Halfway through The River I just couldn’t finish it, but Sonia
has a very careful way of flushing me out and not making me
feel like I’m in trouble. She gave me the keys to the country
house, which for The Ferryman was hugely valuable.”
Whether she’s considering taking an already established
play to the West End or helping to plan a new work, Friedman,
who says she currently has eleven shows in production,
has only one criterion: “It needs to feel
relevant. I don’t mean that cliché about
putting a mirror up to society—it needs
to go deeper, scratch below the surface to
answer questions politicians are not asking
for us, and provoke debate. I need that in
my life. But a fusty old revival with a TV
star? I mean, why?”
Plenty of people in creative industries
begin their careers wanting to push boundaries,
but as they get older moneymaking
instincts almost invariably take over. Friedman,
unusually, has never succumbed to
that trajectory, and she remains as excited
about esoteric fare like Rylance’s Nice Fish
as she is about Harry Potter. As John Tiffany
points out, “When Sonia walks into
the room you never feel, ‘Oh God, the producer’s here.’
That’s because most commercial producers want to cut
corners to make a profit, but Sonia’s focus is how to make
the work as good as possible. Also, she’s a woman, which
shouldn’t be unusual but is.”
I ask Friedman why she thinks there are so few female
producers in the theater. “The hours,” she says immediately.
“I’m never home before eleven at night, and if I had a child,
I couldn’t do it.” She says she did not explicitly decide not to
become a mother. “It was subconscious,” she says. “I have to
123

124
PRODUCED BY PAULA NAVRATIL FOR PRODN.

e philosophical about it. I’ve always made things happen for
myself if I wanted them, and I didn’t with this. But I’m very
maternal within my work. I send people presents and emoji
texts and love hearts. It’s all personal to me.”
As Rylance puts it, “Her plays are like her children, and
the way she runs her office—she has a bunch of youngsters
in there. For a long time Sonia was a little lonely. She was so
busy, and things didn’t work out with the people she knew.
But now she has the most wonderful partner in Joe.”
So tell me about Joe, I say to her. A blush creeps up from
her chest to her cheeks.
“Oh! Well, it’s an unusual relationship in lots of ways. He’s
younger than me.”
That’s not a big deal, I say.
“Whatever age gap you’re thinking, double it.”
Ten years?
“Double it again.”
Twenty?
“And more,” she says.
We both pause.
Well, get you! I say.
“Quite!” she hoots.
Poet and writer Joe Murphy is, it eventually emerges, 25
years younger than Friedman. They met in 2012 through the
director Stephen Daldry, when Daldry was staying at Friedman’s
house, a converted pub in East London, while supervising
the 2012 Olympics ceremonies nearby. “And Joe started
hanging around and, well, bit by bit, you know . . . It’s been
three years, which is not bad for me. I find it hard to make it
beyond five years in a relationship, so we’ll see,” she says.
When I meet Friedman at the after-party for the first night
of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Imelda Staunton is there
calmly greeting guests, but Friedman is visibly quivering with
nerves about the newspaper reviews, which will be online
shortly. “But it was amazing,” she says, allowing herself a
moment of satisfaction over a job well done. She is looking
pretty amazing herself, in a 1970s-style Sonia Rykiel velvet
jumpsuit that plunges almost to her belly button. Modesty
is retained with a black Armani tuxedo jacket.
I can’t believe this is just one of your eleven shows, I say.
“No, no—fourteen,” she corrects me. “We took on three
more today—ha-ha-ha! Go talk to Joe!” she orders as she
heads off to mingle, and I am introduced to Friedman’s boyfriend,
who is talking with some of the play’s investors. With
his feathered brown hair and Bambi-size eyes, he is boy-band
cute, with an earnest manner and a soft voice that makes you
lean in close. I can see all too well how things began, bit by
bit. “She’s a genius, she really is,” he says, his eyes instinctively
scanning the bar for her.
Friedman has no time to talk, because the reviews are just
coming in: five stars from the broadsheets! She punches the
air and treats herself to a drink. As I leave, I see her talking
earnestly to another investor, eating canapés and drinking
champagne. She seems happy enough. But she looked like
she was having a lot more fun backstage at the theaters. □
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU
The cast of George Orwell’s 1984, on Broadway this month.
FROM FAR LEFT: Tom Sturridge, Olivia Wilde, and
Reed Birney. Hair, Shon; makeup, Yumi Lee. Menswear Editor:
Michael Philouze. Details, see In This Issue.
Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick.
125

C E N T E R S T A G E
In time for the first Tony Awards of the pink-pussy-hat era, we’re celebrating an electrifying
new generation of women storming the fortress of American theater: four ethnically
diverse young actresses redefining what it means to be a musical-comedy ingenue and
four restlessly inventive writers and directors shaping the dramatic landscape.
By Adam Green. Photographed by Nigel Shafran.

BENTON: HAIR, CARRIE ROHM. NOBLEZADA: HAIR, ALYSSA BATTERSBY. DOSS: HAIR, SUSAN CORRADO.
DRESS
REHEARSAL
FROM LEFT: Denée
Benton (costume
by Paloma Young),
Eva Noblezada
(costume by
Andreane Neofitou),
Barrett Doss
(costume by Rob
Howell), and Laura
Dreyfuss (costume
by Emily Rebholz).
Sittings Editor:
Phyllis Posnick.

PREVIOUS SPREAD
DENÉE BENTON, 25, plays a lovelorn Russian aristocrat in the
War and Peace–inspired musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great
Comet of 1812. The show’s color-blind casting is fast becoming
a hallmark of the Hamilton age. “It’s telling a universal story of
love and loss and war and regret,” Benton says, “and I think
because of that you can put any person of any shade in it.”
EVA NOBLEZADA is only 21, yet she has already played
Eponine in Les Misérables in London and now brings her
clarion singing voice to the Broadway Theatre’s Miss Saigon.
“I’ve learned how necessary it is to have someone like
Denée expose the hidden talents of minority performers,” says
Noblezada, who is of Filipino and Mexican descent. “We work
our asses off to be seen on the same level as everyone else.”
BARRETT DOSS was all set to become a San Francisco
cheese monger six years ago, after a series of fruitless auditions.
Then Thomas Bradshaw—in whose 2007 one-act
Cleansed she had played a fourteen-year-old biracial skinhead—cast
her in his play Burning. Now, at 28, she is making
her Broadway-musical debut as Rita (played onscreen by Andie
MacDowell) in the stage adaptation of Groundhog Day.
LAURA DREYFUSS With heartbreaking tenderness, Dreyfuss,
28, plays a soulful high school student struggling in a
relationship with the anxiety-ridden class geek (Ben Platt) in
the musical Dear Evan Hansen. She has appeared on Broadway
in Hair and Once and is best known as Madison Mc-
Carthy on Glee. “Glee and Evan Hansen are fundamentally
the same idea: ‘Where do I belong?’ ” she says.
THIS SPREAD
CLARE BARRON’s plays burn with an almost feral urgency—coupled
with an off-kilter humor—as they explore
the joys and terrors of faith, family, and the female body. Her
latest, Dance Nation, concerns a preteen dance troupe, played
by a cast ranging in age from twelve to 75. Barron, 31, depicts
the pagan ferocity beneath the girls’ skin. “I think we tend to
simplify what it was like to be that age,” she says.
LILEANA BLAIN-CRUZ, 33, mounted Suzan-Lori Parks’s The
Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World at
the Signature last fall. This month she returns with Dominique
Morisseau’s Pipeline, about the plight of an African-
American teacher and her son, at Lincoln Center Theater.
“Making theater right now—especially when it seems to be
speaking to the times—feels like a refuge,” she says.
LILA NEUGEBAUER, 31, directed four acclaimed plays in the
past few months—Miles for Mary, by her theater company,
the Mad Ones; Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s
Everybody; and, most recently, Annie Baker’s
The Antipodes—with several more slated for next season. “I
hope I’m inviting people to investigate ideas that they might
normally take for granted about the way they live,” she says.
YOUNG JEAN LEE, 42, has for nearly fifteen years been
writing and staging genre-bending works that also manage
to be deliriously entertaining. Next season she’s making her
Broadway debut as a playwright—the first Asian-American
woman to do so—with the funny and mournful Straight
White Men. Her next play will be, she says, about “everything
that’s going on in the country right now.” □

PRODUCED BY MATHILDE CARLOTTI AT ROSCO PRODUCTION
CURTAIN CALL
FROM LEFT: Clare
Barron, Lileana
Blain-Cruz, Lila
Neugebauer, and
Young Jean Lee.
All in clothes of
their own. In this
story: hair and
hair color, Joe
Martino; makeup,
Alice Lane. Set
design, Bette
Adams for Mary
Howard Studio.

I N D I A N
S U M M E R
Her first novel, The God of Small Things, was
an instant best seller. Twenty years later, Delhi-based
author and firebrand Arundhati Roy delivers the
follow-up we’ve been longing for. By Daphne Beal.
Photographed by Rena Effendi.
n the top floor of a
small building on a quiet lane in central Delhi, the writer Arundhati
Roy greets me at the door of her apartment, accompanied
by two eagerly barking dogs, whose names, she tells me, translate
as Mrs. Filthy Darling and Beloved of the Earth. “Filth and Dirt,”
Roy says cheerfully as she welcomes me into her large, sunny
kitchen and starts making coffee in an Italian moka pot—“It’ll be
weak, South Indian–style, OK?” she says with a laugh.
With its high ceilings, bookcase-lined walls, and political posters
(one shows a bobby with a beat stick: sedition protects democracy),
her apartment has the airy yet lived-in feel of an artist’s
loft. I take a seat at a farmhouse table, near a vase of exceedingly
tall, bright-orange lilies. Roy is wearing a crisp, cream-colored
salwar kameez with matching dupatta. When I comment on her
stylishness she says, “I run away from tradition, I run away from
modernity, and then—you find your own space.”
IN THE PINK
Arundhati Roy, photographed in a quiet corner of
Delhi, to which she retreated often while writing her new novel,
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

It’s been fifteen years since we first met—I came to Delhi
in 2002 to write about Roy’s fearless political activism for
this magazine—and at 57, she seems virtually unchanged.
Her curly hair may be grayer (“Gray pride,” she likes to
joke), but her wide eyes, lined lightly in kohl, remain merry,
and her easy laugh is the same. She’s in a fine mood, having
been up much of the night overseeing “the comma wars”
between her American and British copy editors at Knopf
and Penguin UK over the proofs of her second novel, The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her first since 1997, when
The God of Small Things was published.
To say Roy’s latest venture into fiction has been long awaited
is an understatement. An instant best seller, The God of
Small Things—which Junot Díaz calls “one of the single
most important novels written in English”—won the Man
Booker Prize and quickly went on to become a global literary
phenomenon. After working on the new novel for ten years,
last August Roy texted her British agent, David Godwin,
with one word: “Done.” Godwin got on the first plane to
Delhi. He was nervous when she handed him the manuscript.
“But then I read the opening,” he says, “and thought, Yeah,
we’re back.” When The Ministry of Utmost Happiness comes
out this month, it will be published in 30 countries.
From the novel’s beginning—“She lived in the graveyard
like a tree”—one is swept up in the story. “She” is Anjum,
born a hermaphrodite in Old Delhi, who, after being raised
as a boy named Aftab, goes to live as a woman in a nearby
home for hijras (the South Asian term for transgender
women). Headstrong and magnetic, she becomes the spokesperson
for the hijra community. But after barely surviving a
Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, Anjum renounces everything
to set up a solitary new life in a cemetery, where she builds a
guesthouse among the gravestones that gradually becomes
home to a colorful cast of characters.
More than 400 pages long, The Ministry is a densely
populated contemporary novel in the tradition of Dickens,
Tolstoy, and García Márquez. If The God of Small Things
was a lushly imagined, intimate family novel slashed
through with politics, The Ministry of
Utmost Happiness, though primarily
set in Delhi, encompasses wildly different
economic, religious, and cultural
realms across the Indian subcontinent
and as far away as Iraq and California.
Animating it is a kaleidoscopic variety
of bohemians, army majors, protesters,
police chiefs, revolutionaries, and lovers.
“She has the instinct of sympathy for the
underdog,” says Roy’s friend the writer
Pankaj Mishra. “It’s a rare gift. She’s always
with the people who are powerless.”
With her exquisite and dynamic storytelling, Roy balances
scenes of suffering and corruption with flashes of humor,
giddiness, and even transcendence. In one poetic passage a
baby is found “on the concrete pavement, in a crib of litter:
silver cigarette foil, a few plastic bags and empty packets
of Uncle Chipps. She lay in a pool of light, under a column
of swarming neon-lit mosquitoes, naked. Her skin was blueblack,
sleek as a baby seal’s.” To read the book is to hear
Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and all kinds of English, and to be
flooded with impressions of India right now. As Díaz says,
When the
German chancellor,
Angela Merkel,
paid a state visit to
Delhi, she requested a
meeting with Roy
“If you really want to know the world beyond our corporatesponsored
dreamscapes, you read writers like Roy. She shows
you what’s really going on.”
At 1:00, Roy’s neighbor, the literary editor in chief of
Penguin India, Meru Gokhale, knocks on the door with
homemade ravioli and tomato soup for lunch, and cover
proofs. Spreading them out on the table, they decide on
matte rather than glossy for the off-white cover, inspired by
a Muslim marble grave. “Everyone is fucked over in the story,
so it’s OK if the book gets fucked up,” says Roy, who curses
frequently, the words in striking contrast to her musical voice.
She seems to have taken the same sly delight in peppering the
new novel with a spectacular array of obscenities—“I swear
by your mother’s cock” is one—that punctuates her flowing
prose with adrenaline jolts.
On either side of the apartment is a terrace full of potted
plants, an oasis. Roy seems to appreciate her aerie and be
aware of the need to leave it. “You can get insulated,” she
says. “I made sure that didn’t happen.”
wenty years ago, in the wake of
T
her best-selling debut, many assumed
that Roy would get right
back to fiction. But while she
enjoyed being feted for GOST
and still lives off the royalties, she
was uncomfortable with the ways
that India was shifting politically.
Although technically the world’s
largest democracy, India has witnessed the rise of an all-toofamiliar
strain of nationalism, religious extremism, and censorship
that threatens freedom and minorities. “I found it hard
to see what you see around you,” she says, “and just splash
about enjoying your own good fortune.” Then, in 1998, India
conducted nuclear tests in the desert bordering Pakistan; its
neighbor responded in kind. “Unexpected people were celebrating
it,” she says. “I knew if I didn’t say something, it would
be assumed that I was part of the celebration.” The result was
“The End of Imagination,” a searing essay
about the high-stakes risks of nuclear
saber-rattling that was published in India’s
Outlook and Frontline magazines. The
piece “immediately got me kicked off the
pedestal of the fame goddess,” Roy says.
“And I began a journey into worlds that
I’ve spent the last 20 years writing about,”
referring to her many political essays, subsequently
collected in more than a dozen
nonfiction books.
When I met Roy in 2002, the country
was in a renewed standoff with Pakistan,
and she had taken on the role of political critic. Through
provocative articles and lectures around the world, she responded
to the rise of Hindu nationalism, the ongoing war
in the Kashmir Valley, the oppression of Dalits (formerly
Untouchables), environmental degradation related to mining
and dam-building, and the perils of economic globalization.
“With each piece, I’d think I didn’t want to do it, because
I’d get into trouble again,” she says. “But you can’t help it.”
As she turned into an unapologetic public intellectual in the
vein of Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky, some dismissed

COURTESY OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
her as a polemicist who should get back to novel-writing.
Others held her up as a much-needed agent of change. I asked
Roy then if she thought she would write more fiction, and
she said, “I hope so. It’s difficult living in a time like this. . . .
Whatever I write next, all that will go into it.”
Her platform continued to broaden. She was invited to sit
on a war-crimes tribunal in Istanbul in 2005 after the U.S.
invasion of Iraq, and when the German chancellor, Angela
Merkel, paid a state visit to India in 2015, she requested a
meeting with Roy. “Sister Roy really is an internationalist
connecting what’s going on in one corner of the globe with
what’s going on in another,” says the philosopher and activist
Cornel West. “She is bearing intense moral witness.”
It comes at a cost. Roy has been brought before the Supreme
Court of India on charges of criminal
contempt of court (for the second time)
for protesting a friend’s brutal arrest. And
while people regularly stop to take selfies
with her, she has also been burned in effigy.
Another friend, the Pulitzer Prize–winning
author Siddhartha Mukherjee, compares
her to George Orwell. “Goons have
smashed chairs on the stage where she is
speaking,” he says, “and spies stand at the
edges of the room taking notes on what
she says.” But Roy has no desire to leave
India. “As a writer,” she says, “I’m just in
the paws of this place, and this place is in
the paws of me.”
It’s hard to imagine Roy’s new novel existing
without her nonfiction. “I’m pretty
sure that I’m fundamentally a fiction writer.
Nonfiction is the fretwork,” she says. “Politically,
whatever positions I’ve taken, I’ve
taken. That was a march. This is something
else. This is a dance.”
Roy’s social world in Delhi is interwoven
with friendships from the 30-plus years she
has lived in the city since she arrived here to
study architecture. Her writing has brought
her into contact with authors far and wide,
including John Berger, with whom she was
very close before he died; Naomi Klein; Eve
Ensler; and Wallace Shawn. One night as we part she tells me
she is headed out with a group of friends from her days teaching
aerobics in her early 20s. “I never let go of anyone,” she
says. “We can speak in shorthand, a kind of code, in movie
dialogue.” She is strongly connected to those who share her
sense of mission. “I’m a person who’s been very much a part
of concentric rings of solidarity.”
Despite her numerous circles, Roy sees herself as a creature
of solitude. “The most un-Indian thing about me is
how alone I am,” she says. She keeps a place to write in
the winding alleys of Old Delhi, about a half-hour’s drive
from her apartment. “Don’t call it a writing studio,” she
says as we head there one afternoon. “That sounds so
New York. Call it a refuge.” Leaving the car at Turkman
Gate, one of the original portals to the old city, she pulls
me deftly through an oncoming barrage of auto-rickshaws,
motorbikes, and cars. “These streets are in me, and these
Though her
life there comes
at a cost, Roy
has no desire to
leave India. “I’m in
the paws of this
place,”she says,
“and this place is in
the paws of me”
goats,” she says, as we pass one dressed in a burlap sack
eating from the gutter.
Walking under a tangled web of electrical lines, we pass
storefronts straight out of her novel, selling saris, jewelry, cell
phones, glasses, hardware, and legumes. At dusk, we climb
the stairs to her landlady’s apartment and flat roof, where
we are served butter cookies and tea from white china cups
as the landlady’s family gathers around. Clearly at ease, Roy
says, “You don’t find this in the First World—where you walk
through shit and into love.”
Across the way, Roy’s “refuge” is a clean and simple room
of plain white walls with blue trim around the windows, a
desk, and a single bed with a dark-red coverlet. The kitchen
is a floor above, along with a wall-to-wall bookshelf crammed
with everything from The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire to Alice Munro.
On our way down, Roy walks out onto
the narrow balcony overlooking the busy alleyways
and rests her forearms on the wooden
railing. This, she tells me, is where she
dreamed up the novel. “I was disciplined,
writing during the weeks at home, and coming
here only on the weekends,” to think and
plan. I ask, “So no country house for you?”
She laughs. “People offer me all sorts of nice
places to work, but pristine places scare me.”
As we leave, weaving through the noisy
traffic, she asks, “Isn’t it a good sound track
to write a novel to?”
“Why?” I ask. “Because it drowns out all
the doubting voices?”
She looks back, surprised. “No, because
it reminds you that no matter how much
you think things should be put in order, all
is actually chaos.”
She may have an affinity for chaos, but Roy
nonetheless finds ways to step back from it.
A few days later she takes me to the birthplace
of the thirteenth-century Sufi saint
Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, which adjoins
a Muslim cemetery. It’s not the invented
graveyard of the novel, she says, but a peaceful
place she returned to over and over in the
course of writing. From there we go to the nearby Old Delhi
neighborhood where she lived in her 20s while working at
the National Institute of Urban Affairs. “Each day, I would
rent a bicycle for a rupee and cycle to work,” she recalls. “At
the end of the day I would cycle home, and all the beggars
sitting out in the street would greet me: ‘So you survived
another day, too?’ ”
It was at this job that she met Pradip Krishen, a film
director who cast her as a tribal girl in his film Massey
Sahib, and with whom she would go on to collaborate on
two movies. One, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, is a
cult classic about “stoned architecture students” that she
wrote and he directed. They eventually married. When a
third film project fell through, Roy, who had started writing
GOST, turned to the novel full-time.
These days Krishen and Roy are friendly. (Though not
officially divorced, they keep CONTINUED ON PAGE 159
133

CLASH MOB
FROM NEAR RIGHT:
Faretta, Ansley
Gulielmi, Ellen Rosa,
Samile Bermannelli,
and Wallette Watson.
All clothing and
accessories by Marni.
Fashion Editor:
Tonne Goodman.

Fıngers
On the
Prınts
A new
designer—the largely
unknown
Francesco Risso—
makes his
mark at Marni.
By Luke Leitch.
Photographed by Craig McDean.

Marni’s expansive, columned show space on Viale Umbria in
Milan was dense with expectation on the morning of February
26: After 22 years, Consuelo Castiglioni had retired from
the house she’d founded and nurtured, one with an almost
cultishly devoted fan base, and her assembled fans and the attendant
press were gathered to see how Francesco Risso—a
34-year-old designer barely known outside Milanese fashion
circles and the newly appointed creative director of Marni—
would add to her legacy.
Castiglioni made Marni by translating her own instinctively
hewn, unconventional femininity into modernist,
faintly bohemian, and utterly anti-bourgeois furs, florals,
extravagantly casual silhouettes, and accessories that subverted
the gaze of the male eye. These were pieces for women
who didn’t look to define themselves by sex appeal—who
were sophisticated enough to play with both feminine and
feminist stereotypes. How would this man handpicked by
Marni owner Renzo Rosso to succeed Castiglioni articulate
his own voice within this heady framework?
The collection started in ebb, eventually flowed, and then,
near the finale, flourished before Risso emerged to take his
post-show bow wearing an artfully frayed 1940s cowboy
shirt, baggy straight-leg pants, and the Jack Purcells he
lives in. Afterward, with no shortage of opinions from the
gathered crowd, perhaps only one thing was certain: At first
glance, Risso’s Marni seemed a different beast entirely from
Castiglioni’s.
A few weeks earlier, Risso is seated at a table in his favorite
pasticceria, Cucchi, on Milan’s Corso Genova, alongside a
vitrine displaying a pair of high heels and a handbag made
of chocolate. We are around the corner from the apartment
he has shared with Lawrence Steele, a Virginia-born designer,
since they got together in 2008: a 1930s penthouse with a
sprawling terrace furnished with exotic plants and trees—a
“beautiful jungle,” as Risso puts it, twisting the ringlets of his
copper-hued hair, before launching into his almost cinematically
baroque backstory.
Risso was born in Alghero, Sardinia, in 1982, and until
he was four lived and meandered across the Mediterranean
with his mother and father on their sailboat, the Tartar. “I
was a baby on a boat—my crib was tied between two masts,”
Risso says. A love of adventure—or a kind of free-spirited
wanderlust—seems to run in the family: Later, Risso shows
me a blurred photo of his father, also named Francesco,
galloping down a beach on horseback, dragging a boy
(Risso is not sure who) on water skis behind him, while
Risso’s grandmother on his father’s side was found—only
after her death—to have owned a secret house in Jamaica
where she’d run off to every August, telling anybody who
asked that she’d been in Europe with a friend. Eventually
the family settled on dry land in Genoa, where they lived a
big, rumbustious life.
Risso was enthralled by fashion early: When he was
eight, he began cutting up his parents’ clothes to see how
they were made, and at the age of sixteen he left home to
study fashion—first in Florence at Polimoda, then at FIT
in New York, and finally to London and Central Saint
Martins for his masters.
Once graduated, he worked for Anna Molinari at Blumarine
in Carpi for two years before joining Alessandro
Dell’Acqua in Milan. In 2008—four years after he arrived
in the city—Risso transferred to Prada, working first as
a knitwear designer before being promoted to a kind of
senior lieutenant of womenswear. His eyes widening, Risso
describes working with Miuccia Prada for nearly a decade as
“surfing for the mind”—which is why taking the decision to
accept an offer from Renzo Rosso to replace Castiglioni was,
he says, so profoundly jarring: “It was very deep, and very
emotional—especially when it came to telling Mrs. Prada.
I burst into tears! Working there was the most stimulating,
intense, creative adventure.”
When Castiglioni told Rosso that she wanted to step away
from Marni, Rosso began a broad search for her replacement.
“I was looking at some very important names in the
fashion industry,” Rosso says, “but the more I looked, the
more I knew I had to find someone really young and modern.
Francesco and I started to talk—for a long time—about a vision
for Marni: line by line, including shoes, accessories, bags,
ready-to-wear, the stores, the advertising. And we started to
feel together—we were in love with what we wanted to do for
the future of Marni.”
Risso brings to his own adventure at the house an energy
and an eccentric spirit that jibe nicely with its history. “I was
always a passionate client—I love the sense of playfulness
and dynamism in the colors, the prints, and the decorations,”
he says. “To me, Marni is a temple of playfulness—and I love
that it is intelligent and against stereotypes. I want to fight to
keep that—it is so important.”
136

NACHO ALEGRE. GROOMING, FRANCESCA ANGELONE. PRODUCED BY MAI.LONDON.
COMING UP RISSO
Marni’s new creative director aims to infuse a kind of youth and vigor to the storied house known for its abundant flora.
“Marni is a temple of playfulness—I love that it is intelligent and against
stereotypes,” Risso says. “I want to fight to keep that”
Fast-forward a month to the morning before Risso’s runway
debut. Head tilted, ringlets askew, the creative director
appears at home pacing the runway while listening to the proposed
sound track for the show created by Frédéric Sanchez.
A disembodied echo of Erykah Badu’s “On & On” pulses
across an abstract synth backing track. “Obsessed!” Risso
mutters exaltedly to himself, lost in his work. “Obsessed!”
He claps his hands. “Genius!”
I stand nearby with Steele, whom Risso has just appointed
associate creative director of Marni; henceforth, they will
work together as well as live together. I ask Steele about his
first meeting with Risso.
“That depends on which first time you are asking about,”
he replies. “Francesco tends to change, physically, a lot—the
first time I met him, he was blond with very long hair. The
second time”—a year or so later—“he had very short hair,
almost no hair at all really. In fact, I didn’t remember having
met him before.” Which is not to say, Steele is quick to note,
that their first meeting wasn’t revelatory. “Oh, it was—a real
sparkle-in-the-eye, connection-made moment. It’s just we
had that moment once, and then time passed, and then it
happened again.”
I ask Steele if he has concerns about becoming a work
partner with his life partner of the last ten years. “Oh, no,” he
137

eplies almost instantly. “Working together is easy, effortless.
We know each other’s minds instinctively.”
It’s a knowledge honed by a decade together exploring the
city both designers chose to adopt as their own. Although
Risso says his first impression of Milan was sorely lacking—
“It felt gray and cold and hard to live in”—he has learned
to understand it and love it. “Blood is pumping through its
veins again,” he says. One might even say that the city’s jarring
admixture of arte povera grayness and unabashed luxury
informs both Marni and Risso.
He and Steele spend spare moments trawling the artists’
editions in Libreria Bocca and agonizing over purchases
from the impeccably curated furniture in Nilufar, owned
by his friend Nina Yashar. Milan is also close enough to
Genoa for jaunts down the autostrada—Risso is soon to
take delivery of his “dream car,” a spectacularly beautiful
old peacock-blue Citroën DS—to his favorite store in the
world, Pescetto. “It is one of my highest obsessions, where
I buy half of my vintage clothes,” Risso says. “It was very
popular in the sixties, and on the top floor they still sell
treasures from that time—they used to make editions of
clothes in Harris Tweed or, with Hermès, amazing sweaters
in cashmere or alpaca.” The designer’s mania for collecting
extends down to his socks: Risso lifts the hem of his pants
to show me today’s Pescetto-bought pair in 1960s Filo di
Scozia. “The fine-gauge cotton from that period is very,
very good,” he says, “but expensive!” More expensive than
partly inspired by Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures. “Marni
has always been about making sculptural pieces,” he tells
me after the show. Next, a twisted and layered heaping of
ikat and floral on fitted dresses sometimes punctuated with
external bralets (something that clearly builds on his time
at Prada) and two pieces in a subtly crackled, high-shine
black finish—a strapless, balloon-skirted dress and an overcoat—with
their strictness subverted by asymmetrical panels
of teddy-bear fluff. At the climax, a series of drawstringcinched
dresses in a spongy synthetic are peppered with
beads, stones, studs, and shards of recycled CDs.
As for traditional Marni tropes, there is a lot of floral, for
sure (but none from the archive), as well as a carefully irreverent
use of fur both faux and real on wide-brimmed hats,
in off-kilter stoles, or in Muppet-hued coats. One of these
coats—also incorporating tiger stripe—is, Risso reluctantly
concedes, one of his favorites, something he calls “the wild
personality.” The look reminds him of Edie Sedgwick and
sixties experimentalism, which he says is “something that I
love and which is close to the generation Consuelo is part
of—but seen through the eyes of my generation.”
Reviews from the press were mixed, though Ken Downing,
senior vice president and fashion director of Neiman
Marcus, was bullish. “The quirky, existential, individualistic
spirit of Consuelo was there, along with the interesting technological
fabrics, the color mixes, the unique silhouette, the
juxtaposing volume over volume,” he says. “But anybody
“I’m learning a lot, and that is part of the process,” Risso says.
“You make mistakes; you learn”
the shoes, I ask? Risso laughs and—only momentarily—
stops twisting his ringlets.
Paola Bay, a designer and brand consultant, first met
Risso through Lawrence when the couple got together.
“He’s much more than an amazing fashion designer,” she
says. “His creativity extends 360 degrees—whether it’s an art
gallery or a flea market, wherever we go out together he can
find and appreciate beauty. I think he has the outlook of a
Renaissance man, one who’s open to experimentation with
everything. In a way, he is exactly Marni.”
Back at Viale Umbria on the eve of the show, Risso is
staring up at a complicated rig of lanterns tethered by a mile
of cable and 81 switches that looms above us. He is unhappy
at precisely how these lanterns are casting light on a model
wearing a tuftily tactile aquamarine sweater in nylon, a flocked
woolen pink skirt, and a pair of neutral not-quite-to-the-knee
leather boots topped with tufted fronds of feathery mohair. “It
is not beautiful to see that girl so completely lit,” he says. “They
have to come from darkness into light—because this is the
other world. Let’s go back to work!” Risso calls out, fiddling
with the resin beads on his wide-linked golden chain necklace.
The next day dawns. By mid-morning, the Bubble Wrap–
upholstered plywood benches that border Risso’s meandering
runway are packed to capacity with editors, buyers, and
friends sitting in dimness before Risso’s lanterns flicker
slowly to life. The collection reveals itself in stages. First
come a series of oversize padded outfits in gray and taupe
followed by a cocooning bright blue coat, all of which are
that knows Francesco’s lineage and his work at Prada recognized
the seventies sensibility and the pattern play. I think he
was very respectful to Consuelo and to the house, but as with
any first collection, everyone’s lens was laser-focused. Every
nod forward is a new chapter.”
Two mornings after the show, I meet Risso back at Cucchi.
Coffee is ordered, ringlets are twisted, and I ask him about
first impressions. “Certainly people still need to know me,”
he says. “There was—there is—such a crowd that is so much
in love with Consuelo, and that is normal—I understand
that. She decided to go, and this is hard for people to digest.”
I ask Risso if he’s been in touch with Castiglioni, who is
now 58. Did he meet her? Ask for advice? “I met her, and we
write each other letters,” he says, though he’s unwilling to
discuss the content of those letters. “We are in touch—she
is an extremely lovely person. I have a very high respect for
all she has done. I’m learning a lot, and that is part of the
process. You make mistakes; you learn.”
But learning, Risso clarifies, does not mean changing
course in the face of criticism. “It’s not about making adjustments,”
he says. “It’s about a process: the expression of
visions, myriad stimulations. That’s what I would love to
achieve.” For Marni’s resort collection, that vision, those
stimulations, translate into “a lot of prints and clashes of
prints, and the idea of having a romantic edge applied to very
formal wear,” Risso says. “Mainly, though, it is about making
beautiful objects. Eclecticism and surprise are the core of this
brand—and I feel that in myself, too.” □
138

PRODUCED BY LUIGI FILOTICO FOR MAI. PHOTOGRAPHED AT HEADQUARTERS 5VIE. SET DESIGN, CHARLOTTE MELLO TEGGIA.
TWO FOR
THE SHOW
Faretta (FAR
LEFT) and Ellen
Rosa model
Risso’s debut
fall collection.
All clothing and
accessories
by Marni. In
this story: hair,
Duffy; makeup,
Erin Parsons.
Details, see In
This Issue.

MASTER
OF
CEREMONIES
LEGENDARY ROOTS DRUMMER,TONIGHT
SHOW MUSICAL DIRECTOR, AND . . . DINNER-PARTY
HOST? TAMAR ADLER MEETS
QUESTLOVE, THE MAN CHANGING CULINARY
CULTURE ONE FOOD SALON AT A TIME.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY STEVEN KLEIN
he plush rec room in Questlove’s
T
Manhattan apartment tower is full
to brimming. Over by the open
kitchen is Olivia Wilde in a Stella
McCartney bomber jacket, chatting
with Chris Rock. By the swimming
pool are Rosario Dawson and Jimmy
Fallon. There at a cocktail table
is Matt Lauer. And Pharrell. Chefs—Kwame Onwuachi of
the late Shaw Bijou in D.C., Amanda Cohen of Dirt Candy
on the Lower East Side, and Bryce Shuman of New York’s
recently departed Betony—compose bites of crab with uni,
carrot sliders, and tête de cochon. Misty Copeland stands
by the window in a canary-yellow dress and four-inch heels
like a mystical bird guarding downtown Manhattan at dusk.
Towering above everyone is Questlove, né Ahmir Thompson,
ever recognizable in the extravagant Afro he’s had since
he was a child. He’s dressed in his uniform: a black hoodie,
custom-made black jeans, Nike high-tops, and a Dee and
Ricky Lego brooch. Questlove is, of course, cofounder and
drummer of the Roots; musical director of The Tonight Show
Starring Jimmy Fallon; Hamilton Mixtape producer; and DJ
for everyone from the San Francisco 49ers to Balenciaga to the
Clinton Global Initiative to the Golden Globes. His position
in the food world is more nebulous—he’s part impresario, part
creativity evangelist, part entrepreneur. Whatever he is finds its
expression in these high-wattage culinary jam sessions.
He calls them salons, a quaint, Enlightenment-era term
that he deploys with some irony. You might call them dinner
parties, but that misses their accessibility and unaffected exuberance.
His ascension to a place where chefs such as Daniel
Humm, David Chang, and Dominique Ansel value his culinary
opinion—and moreover consider him one of them—is,
for lack of a better term, a little weird. He doesn’t cook. “No,
no, I’m a very good eater,” he explains when I make my way
to him through the crowd. “Except, actually, for carrots and
beets,” he adds, as we taste Amanda Cohen’s carrot sliders.
“Which I didn’t like until tonight. But now I’m converted.”
Nor is Questlove a restaurateur, though he briefly owned
a very good fried-chicken stand at the Chelsea Market with
Philadelphia restaurant scion Stephen Starr. And he isn’t a
food journalist, though last year he wrote a cerebral romp
through culinary creativity called Something to Food About
(Clarkson Potter), and he’s developing a documentary on
black chefs with filmmaker Lyric Cabral.
What Questlove is, in a traditionally parochial, rule-bound,
white field (has there been #gastronomysowhite yet?), is a
glimmer of a better future. Around Questlove, hierarchies
dissolve. The salons are notable for their mix of colors, ages,
occupations, and there is an almost palpable absence of ego.
That’s part of the point. “Nobody here has status above
another person,” he says. To be sure, his guests are mostly celebrities
(not all; there is a token segment of civilians, like me),
but they’re the celebrities one tends to fantasize less about
being than having as friends. Questlove strikes me as that rare
breed in preadolescence—the cool kid who makes schoolyard
life harmonious. Fallon agrees with me. “Questlove has this
childlike innocence. When we booked Phil Collins, he sent me
a text, freaking out. It’s that level of excitement.”
It helps that Questlove has star power enough on his own—
and is such a serious artist—that chefs know their fame isn’t
what attracts him. “Questlove isn’t trying to join a club,” says
Wylie Dufresne. “He’s genuinely excited about what we’re
serving—but he also contributes. He adds to the conversation.”
Part of that contribution is bringing exposure to chefs
who don’t look like Jacques Pépin and Alain Ducasse. “I
don’t think he’s playing with favoritism in terms of color,” says
Onwuachi. “But he is aware. He makes it easier for me to get
on the radar. He’s saying: ‘Where are the African-American
chefs out there?’ He can identify with me, and that helps.”
When I meet Questlove a few weeks after the salon, backstage
at The Tonight Show, he’s with his friend Lin-Manuel
Miranda, here from SNL. They talk in the half sentences of
a married couple. “You know,” Lin says to him as Questlove
mulls something over, “you look just like Stephen Sondheim
when you scratch your chin.” Questlove lets out a characteristic
half-snort, half-chortle, and the two huddle over
rare R&B 45s that Questlove’s buyer has found at a dealer
in Pennsylvania. Eventually Questlove’s assistant tears him
away. We have a reservation at Sushi Seki on First Avenue.
Fallon told me that Questlove is the most fun person in
the world to eat with. But I find myself nervous. Questlove
SET DESIGN, ANDREA STANLEY FOR STREETERS. PRODUCED BY LOLA PRODUCTION.
140

WITH
THE BAND
Questlove turned
to food when his
love of music
started to dim.
“Food is the thing
that inspires my
utter elation,”
he says. Hair,
Maisha Stephens-
Teacher; makeup,
Maria C. Scali.
Sittings Editor:
Phyllis Posnick.

was inspired to write Something to Food About after a visit
to Jiro Ono’s famous sushi counter in Tokyo, and a number
of his press photos show him with chopsticks and nigiri in
hand. I needn’t have worried. He has an immediate, unforced
way of putting one at ease. It starts when we both order an
elaborately described rice beer called Koshihikari Echigo,
which we taste. “Really?” Questlove asks, raising his eyebrows
conspiratorially above his thick-rimmed glasses—of
which, by the way, he has 600 pairs. I offer that Koshihikari
Echigo tastes like Bud Light. “Oh!” he exclaims. “Is this what
Bud Light tastes like?”
Questlove wants chutoro (medium fatty tuna). I hazard
a preference for otoro (the fattiest and by most standards,
the best). “You know, let’s settle this,” he says. He suggests
an A-B comparison, which lasts five or six rounds—I lose
count—and quickly devolves into the kind of digressive conversation
one has with an old friend. Which is the best brand
of earplugs? Is Pluto a planet? How many episodes of Soul
Train has he yet to watch? He draws comparisons between
chefs and underground rappers. “Dominique Crenn,” he says
(of Atelier Crenn and Petit Crenn in San Francisco). “Dominique
is like, ‘How can I provoke? How can I move you?’ ” We
talk about Cronuts—he’s a fan—and
the fact that he first tasted wine at 23.
We consume great quantities of very
expensive, delicious tuna. For the record,
Questlove is right about chutoro.
Born to musician parents in Philadelphia,
Questlove was drumming at two.
He played Radio City Music Hall with
his parents’ band, Lee Andrews and
the Hearts, at eleven. He and his high
school friend—kind of friend, kind of
frenemy—Black Thought (a.k.a. Tariq
Trotter) formed the Roots in 1987, at
the Fame-like Philadelphia High School
for Creative and Performing Arts in
South Philly. (A bit of hip-hop trivia: The band’s early name
was the Square Roots, which is charmingly nineties nerdy.)
Questlove has a collection of 80,000 records whose tracks
he can recite at will.
When did he turn his attention to food? It happened when
his love of music dimmed. “I had a good fifteen-year period
with hip-hop, when it was upping the ante all the time,” he
says. But at some point, “I traded in the romance of music
for the technicality of music.” He references John Coltrane to
explain: “A lot of people hear A Love Supreme and they have
an epiphany. But I hear it now and I wonder what the mic
setup was. It’s become technical for me.” His tone is slightly
forlorn. “I’m the only person I know who likes the engine
better than the car. But now, food is the thing that inspires
my utter elation. You ever see the baby elephant discover the
ocean?” (I have, on YouTube, as has much of the rest of the
world. Several times.) “That’s me with food.”
It’s not as if he didn’t love eating before. When he was
growing up, preparations for a Sunday meal at his grandmother’s
house—“the most exquisite soul-food dinner
ever”—were a four-day affair, beginning on Thursday
mornings. “They would make this cake soaked in brandy,
which took a few days. Saturday afternoon they soaked
THE SALONS
ARE NOTABLE FOR
THEIR MIX
OF COLORS, AGES,
OCCUPATIONS. THAT’S
PART OF THE POINT.
“NOBODY HERE
HAS STATUS ABOVE
ANOTHER PERSON,”
HE SAYS
black-eyed peas. By the end of Saturday night they’d finally
finished.” Monday was earmarked for dishwashing.
“It was also probably food that helped the Roots cross
over,” Questlove says. Twenty years ago, when the Roots were
still Philadelphia-based, their manager, Richard Nichols,
decided the band needed to cultivate a tribe of like-minded
collaborators and fans—today we have Swifties and the
Beyhive, but these were A Tribe Called Quest days, and one’s
tribe made music as well as listened to it. Nichols persuaded
Geffen Rec ords to add a personal chef to the band’s budget.
That chef, pilfered from a posh Philadelphia jazz club,
cooked—sometimes for hours—while the Roots hosted fiveand
ten-hour jam sessions, originally at Questlove’s Philadelphia
house. These evolved into the famous Black Lily jam
sessions, where Macy Gray, Erykah Badu, Alicia Keys, and
many more went to practice and collaborate, eventually leading
to at least ten record deals. “There had been nowhere for
the neo-soul–hip-hop movement to get together,” Questlove
tells me. “Jill Scott, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Musiq Soulchild,
Freeway . . . they were all there.” His food salons, he says, “are
what those jam sessions were in 1997.”
We have a second dinner reservation—at Carbone, Rich
Torrisi and Mario Carbone’s temple to
veal Parmesan—but we feel lazy and
disinclined to head all the way downtown.
We decide instead to relocate to
Cipriani, a celebrity clubhouse a few
blocks away not known for its food.
“Their rigatoni is good, ” Questlove assures
me. “We’re fine with that or the
ravioli.” We enter, some time around
9:30, to a chorus of “Questlove!” Spike
Lee’s wife, Tonya, is finishing dinner
with a retinue of powerful women in
suits. After much hugging and kissing,
we sit, and Questlove jokes he’s surprised
we’re let in without a booking. “I
mean, the Clooneys really like it here,”
he says. “I’m just the most celebrated second banana. I’m
Tariq’s partner. I’m Jimmy’s second banana. I hide behind a
drum set. I hide behind a DJ booth.” The truth is Questlove
has any ear he wants. Our conversation turns to the astrological
possibility of a thirteenth zodiac sign (Ophiuchus the serpent).
“I have to ask Neil deGrasse Tyson about that,” he says.
For help scrambling an egg? “Chang or Ansel,” he says. When
he is in Minnesota, he goes cereal shopping at the General
Mills factory. His favorite sneakers are a pair of Yeezys sent
to him by Kanye with a note: from k west 2 q uest.
The only subjects we don’t broach during our night on the
town are race and politics. I know how politically active he
is—he worked on both of President Obama’s election campaigns
and makes pointed comments on social media about
racial profiling, President Trump, and LGBTQ rights. As
a food writer whose work rarely covers any more sensitive
topics than whether shrimp should be peeled, then cooked,
or cooked, then peeled, I don’t know quite how to steer the
conversation in that direction.
But when we meet a few days later at his apartment, where
his personal chef makes me a salad of Bushwick-grown arugula
with Shishito peppers, grilled pears, and citrus dressing,
142

I do my best. I’ve read that Questlove has been pulled over at
least 20 times for Driving While Black—including the night
before he won a Grammy. He got a car and driver because
so many cabs were turning him down. Once, he had to fit his
six-foot-four-inch frame into a pedicab to get from a Roots rehearsal
to The Tonight Show because no cab would take him.
I ask if he sees himself as an instrument of change.
“Dude,” he answers, “I don’t even believe I have impact in
my own field.” At the same time, he’s actively working for
greater equality in food access. He recounts having learned,
years ago, from Magic Johnson that when Johnson opened
a TGI Fridays in Harlem, it was the only place that you
could get a fresh salad within a fifteen-block radius. To that
end, he joined the advisory board of the Edible Schoolyard
NYC, whose goal is food education in inner-city schools.
Kate Brashares, executive director of Edible Schoolyard,
tells me, “He’s the real deal. He really understands the importance
of getting healthy, delicious food to everyone.” She
adds, “He’s opened doors to us we never could have opened
without him.” Some of that may be the color of his skin.
Some is Questlove’s talent for collecting ideas and people to
the mutual benefit of both. He tells me he loves that Daniel
Fuel, shares billing with Hugh Acheson’s lamb with fava
beans and Tom Colicchio’s smoked monkfish. On a cocktail
table near a bar serving cognac and gin concoctions by
Nitecap’s Natasha David, guests write anti-hunger slogans
on paper plates (food is fuel for my family; food is fuel
for my mind) and photograph them. Minton’s Joseph “JJ”
Johnson—whose upgrading of the junk-food classic Frito
pie is a masterwork of rice and cassava chips, peanut sauce,
braised goat, and edamame beans in a bespoke Mylar
bag— is here for his culinary cachet and his food-justice
work. JJ is an adviser to the Food Bank for New York City.
Once a week, the Minton’s staff feeds the 89 tenants of a
nonprofit that houses the homeless in the building above
the Harlem restaurant.
And yet: The night isn’t heavy with the cause. Champagne
and Rémy Martin flow. Guests gather around the chefs and
cluck and ooh. “You, the chef, are really the star of this show,”
Johnson tells me in a kind of daze. “It’s this no-judge zone,
too, where everyone really cares about food in a cool way. Plus,
Tom Colicchio helped me plate.”
As we stand by the open kitchen, surveying the chefs and
guests—an astoundingly beautiful crowd, in every hue, of
MOVEABLE FEAST
Questlove uses a dedicated Instagram account to post shots of dishes that inspire him.
CENTER LEFT: AMY LOMBARD. CENTER RIGHT: @WILLAJEANNEWORLEANS/
© INSTAGRAM. ALL OTHERS: @QUESTLOVESFOOD/ © INSTAGRAM.
Patterson and Roy Choi opened LocoL in the middle of
Watts. It’s a direction he can see himself taking, though he
can’t say how yet. He can say, with characteristic humility,
that he’s starting small. “I’m going to do the documentary
about black chefs and hopefully expose some people and
start some scholarship programs to culinary schools.” His
approach is shaped by a lesson he learned from President
Obama: “You’ve got to believe in small. No pebble splash
starts with the outer ripple.” When he teaches classes about
Prince at NYU—he’s also a professor—he likes to limit the
number of students to nineteen so that he can connect with
each. “I mean, right now,” he says, “before I go in the grave,
I feel like if I can really affect the course of 20 people’s lives
. . . maybe 50, then I’ve succeeded.”
Questlove’s food salons play a growing role in his activism.
He’s planning one in Washington, D.C., in honor of
Earth Day, which will be, rather pointedly, at the home of
George Washington University’s president, across the street
from the White House. The one I most recently attend here
in New York has a social-justice theme. The Food Policy
Action Education Fund’s anti-hunger campaign, Food Is
every age, all talking about food—Questlove tells me his new
obsession is Impossible burgers, which are faithful simulacra
of meat made from plants. I tell him I haven’t tasted them
yet, and he shakes his head and grips my arm. “Dude, you’re
going to freak out. You will not be able to tell the difference
between it and a burger!” He tells me about “the blood element”—which
makes the wheat protein, coconut oil–and–
soy based burger juicy, like . . . meat. He’s investigated the
soy content. “It’s low,” he tells me. “Because I worry about
soy.” Questlove tells me that Impossible meat is going to be
a big deal. “It literally addresses all the problems we have.”
The environmental cost of animal farming, endemic health
problems, hunger.
He has to move on, give bear hugs, taste Aquavit’s Emma
Bengtsson’s banana split, talk to CNN’s political gadfly
W. Kamau Bell. About . . . comedy? Politics? Food justice?
The banana split? Or maybe more about the future—a subject
Questlove manages to keep lightly on his mind.
“I fear for the Impossible guys the way I fear for the makers
of the electric car from the gas companies,” he tells me as
he breaks away. “That’s how on the cusp they are.” □
143

A FEW MONTHS AGO, SOLANA ROWE WAS
meandering through Hollywood in search of vintage clothing
and a chunk of the iridescent mineral called labradorite.
She stepped into a crystal shop on Melrose and was pleased
to hear one of her favorite songs by Little Dragon, the Swedish
electro band, piping through a small speaker. Perhaps
that’s why she let the shopkeeper sell her something called
an energy reading.
“I always run into some wild-ass psychic shit in L.A.,”
says Rowe, who performs under the name SZA (pronounced
like the cutting implement). The energy reader told her that
her purpose on the planet was to empower women, to be a
force for their good. This came as both a relief and a bit of
a burden. “I’m like, OK. That’s not something I signed up
for, but I definitely get that vibe from my life, and now that
someone’s confirming this, I’m like—I have a responsibility.”
We’re sitting at the Cactus Taqueria in Sherman Oaks as
a hot spring wind whips through the San Fernando Valley.
Diminutive and big-haired, SZA initially brings to mind
the ebullient Chaka Khan of the mid-1970s (with baggy
sweats in place of the bell-bottom jumpsuit). She moved to
Los Angeles a few weeks earlier, and so far there are only
three landmarks she knows: Runyon Canyon Park, which
she hikes with her French bulldog, Piglet; Cactus Taqueria,
a battlefield. “After 9/11, it went from, Oh, there’s this girl
who wears a hijab sometimes, but she’s cool and normal,
to, Oh, you worship the devil,” SZA recalls. “They would
snatch my hijab off and follow me home. My dad would
be outside waiting for me.” She detached socially, finding
a place for herself among the bad kids who drank Bacardi
Gold and saved their money for tattoos. “My parents are
both from the ’hood, and they got out of their situations
by minding their business and being excellent. That’s what
they wanted for me.”
But instead, Rowe had some vague ideas about a career in
fashion and settled in New York, working as a bartender at a
strip club. She attended three colleges and never managed to
graduate. And then her older brother, Daniel, a rapper, asked
her to sing hooks on a few of his songs. Rowe had no musical
aspirations. “I hated how nasal I sounded,” she recalls. “I had
no experience at all. I wasn’t one of those girls who sang at
church. But it lit a little fire.”
She started writing her own melodies and lyrics, stole
prefab beats off the internet, and occasionally rented studio
time when she saved enough money making cocktails with
names like Bubblegum Surprise. “I thought that everybody
just did it all themselves,” she recalls, pulling down her hoodie
and shaking out sheaves of long braids. “Do you know how
In Control
Cutting-edge neo-soul meets raw vulnerability in the sensational, hard-to-categorize
music of SZA. Rob Haskell meets the most exciting new artist of the year.
Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier.
a Mexican chain where she favors the California Burrito,
distinguished by the French fries within; and Sky Zone, a
trampoline park where she has lately been revisiting the aerial
moves of her high school gymnastics career. In fact, we are
heading to Sky Zone in a few minutes, which calls into question
our choice to have lunch first. “I make bad decisions
frequently,” SZA says. “They’re fun.”
It would be wrong to call her music career a bad decision,
considering that SZA’s first full-length major-label release,
out this month, may be the most breathlessly anticipated
neo-soul album of the year—though to call her neo-soul is
to ignore myriad counterstrains in her work: synthpop, trap,
chillwave, indie rock. Like other millennial artists (Jhené
Aiko, Tinashe, and Sky Ferreira come to mind), SZA defies
easy categorization. Kendrick Lamar—also a confrere at her
label, the L.A.-based Top Dawg Entertainment—calls her a
visionary. “She’s the only person who inspires me in music
today,” he goes so far as to say. “She’s a true storyteller.”
And yet her career began by accident just a few years
ago. Rowe, now 26, was born in St. Louis but grew up in
suburban New Jersey, where her mother and father worked
as executives for AT&T and CNN respectively. Music played
little part in her childhood, though in the mornings her father
would turn on the house speakers and play a record by
John Coltrane or Miles Davis while he made his daughter
oatmeal. She was raised Muslim, which turned school into
mad I was when I found out that people were getting songs
written for them?” She branded herself SZA—an acronym
built from the Supreme Alphabet of the Nation of Gods and
Earths, a derivative of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam.
(S is for savior, Z is for the zigzag toward self-knowledge, and
A is for Allah.) Then she recorded some songs that grabbed
the attention of Top Dawg.
Her first full-length album, called CTRL, debuts this
month, and it is anchored by the single “Drew Barrymore.”
On the face of it an oblique homage to one of her favorite
actresses, the song upends R&B balladeering by the plaintive,
exposed-nerve, and frankly neurotic content of its lyrics.
“Why is it so hard to accept the party is over?” she asks as
the song opens, over a languorous, grimy rhythm. “You came
in with your new friends/And her mom jeans and her new
Vans/And she’s perfect and I hate it, oh so glad you made it.”
There is nothing particularly catchy or easy about this or any
of SZA’s songs. They invite you to yield to them over time,
and they reward repeated visits. She is an exciting singer, not
a blandly gorgeous one, bending and perverting notes, permitting
her voice to get as tense as an overfilled balloon. Her
off-kilter melismas suggest an ear for jazz as much as for soul.
Pharrell Williams, a longtime idol (one of SZA’s first
jobs before college was as an intern at his clothing label,
Billionaire Boys Club), produced a track on the new album.
“She’s one of the most talented CONTINUED ON PAGE 159

PRODUCED BY ROGER DONG FOR GE PROJECTS
PITCH
PERFECT
SZA counts
Pharrell Williams
and Kendrick
Lamar as
collaborators
and fans. “She’s
the only person
who inspires me
in music today,”
Lamar says. Gucci
jacket, shirt, and
skirt. Hair, Garren
at Garren New
York for R+Co.;
makeup, Emi
Kaneko. Details,
see In This Issue.
Fashion Editor:
Sara Moonves.

APPLY
YOURSELF
Model Sarah Fraser
channels screen-star
glamour and the spirit
of resilience in a Polo
Ralph Lauren robe
and scarlet Dolce
& Gabbana lipstick.
Hair, Julien d’Ys for
Julien d’Ys; makeup,
Diane Kendal.
Fashion Editor:
Phyllis Posnick.

LOUD
Mouth
For generations
of polished,
confident women,
red lipstick
has been a fashion
statement—but
also a call to action.
Lena Dunham
reports on
the color’s return to
the spotlight.
Photographed by
Patrick Demarchelier.
My first memories of
my mother are redlipstick
memories: her
smearing it on as we
headed out the door
on a Saturday night to an art opening,
the color so bold against her slate-gray
Yohji Yamamoto pantsuit; her cleaning
out the cupboard under our sink
where she kept her lipsticks (all varying
Chanel and Revlon reds) and nail
polishes (same); and the time she let me
draw it on my face in concentric circles
like a Yayoi Kusama installation gone
deeply wrong.
My mother’s style wasn’t overtly
feminine. She was one of a group
of women (Cindy Sherman, Sarah
Charlesworth, and Marilyn Minter,
to name a few) whose emerging presence
in the male-dominated art world
in the late seventies and early eighties
signaled a tidal shift. Being a woman
wasn’t an easy space to occupy then—
it required strength, precision, and
fearlessness. Maybe that’s why, growing
up, I remember a lot of menswear:
crisp white shirts, J.Crew khakis, desert
boots, shoulder pads. But always red
lipstick, reminding the powers-thatbe
that their femininity was an asset
rather than an albatross.
Nearly 40 years later, we find ourselves
asking similar questions about
our rights that we never thought we’d
have to revisit. This has galvanized a
new generation of women, women who
never considered themselves political,
to engage in a dialogue about what we
want, what we deserve, and what it will
take to get it. The exciting news? The
second-wave sense that taking up this
call to action means denying your femininity
(see: images of oversize T-shirts,
corduroy pants, and unmascara’d lashes
at the protests of the seventies) has
been replaced with an anything-goes,
all-encompassing idea of what womanhood
can be, reappropriating makeup
as a simple pleasure that allows a moment
of private joy for even the most
public activist.
The revolution will wear red lipstick.
We saw it on the fall 2017 runways,
from Topshop to Prada, Jason Wu to
Preen: lips in every shade of vermilion,
from just-sucked-lollipop to vampire
assassin. As the world reeled following
the surreal circus of the U.S. election
season, it was hard not to see the
connection CONTINUED ON PAGE 160
147

MOMENT OF THE MONTH
PRODUCTION BY LEONE IOANNOU AT PONY PROJECTS. PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE
JOHN MCCRACKEN EXHIBITION AT DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK. ART: © THE ESTATE
OF JOHN MCCRACKEN. COURTESY OF DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK/LONDON.

Between
the
Lines
Oh, stripes. Considered
“demeaning, pejorative,
or clearly diabolic” in the
Middle Ages and restricted
to prisoners’ garb in the
nineteenth century, they
needed some combination
of Breton sailors and
Coco Chanel (an early
adopter) to resuscitate their
respectability. And judging
from the winning streaks
that surfaced on the fall
runways—from Phoebe
Philo at Céline and Jonathan
Anderson at Loewe to Alberta
Ferretti—stripes in bright,
bold, and wildly optimistic Pop
Art palettes are clearly the
stars of the season. “Stripes
are a powerful flag of female
confidence and power,” says
designer Duro Olowu, who
took his unwavering love of
lines to the trench coat. “In
these trying times, that’s
quite the statement.”
THE DETAILS
FROM FAR LEFT: On Mayowa
Nicholas: Céline dress ($855)
and sandals; Céline, NYC.
Alberta Ferretti pants, $1,030;
Barneys New York, NYC. On
Lineisy Montero: Loewe top
($1,290) and skirt ($1,290);
Loewe, Miami. Proenza
Schouler sandals. On Katie
Moore: Duro Olowu coat,
$3,950; matchesfashion.com.
Nehera dress, $610; Opening
Ceremony, NYC. Proenza
Schouler sandals. Bracelets by
Proenza Schouler and Jochen
Holz for Peter Pilotto. Hair,
Tamas Tuzes; makeup, Jen
Myles. Details, see In This Issue.
Photographed by Tom Johnson.
Fashion Editor: Alex Harrington.

CAPHED HERE
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y pxqm cyllqd "Piqd
Bqyuty"-Gqryrd
Mynlqy Hxpkins's
qxultynt cqlqbrytixn
xh yll things spxttqd,
hlqckqd, mxttlqd,
ynd dxttqd. Hxw
dihhqrqnt my lihq
wxuld hyvq bqqn ih
I'd cxmq ycrxss thq
pxqm in my tqqns! I
wys in hull hrqcklq

JAM
ROCK
SWEET
NESS
Summer’s got a
brand-new vibe: Imaan
Hammam lights up
the paradise around
Port Antonio, Jamaica,
in the season’s best
skimpy separates,
seductive prints, and
sheer sheath dresses.
Photographed by
Oliver Hadlee Pearch.
LITTLE SISTERS
A PLAYFUL POLKA-DOT BIKINI TOP
BECOMES AN ITTY-BITTY STATEMENT.
MODEL IMAAN HAMMAM (WITH,
FROM FAR LEFT, HARMONY, KHALIA,
KAEJAH, AND KAMOI) WEARS A MARNI
BRA, $650; MODAOPERANDI.COM.
OSCAR DE LA RENTA SKIRT,
$3,390; OSCARDELARENTA.COM.
TOME HAT. HERMÈS BAG.
FASHION EDITOR: SARA MOONVES.

LIVE AND
PROSPER
HIT THE RIGHT NOTE
WITH GRAPHIC
PRINTS AND BOLD
BIJOUX. LEFT:
PROENZA SCHOULER
DRESS; PROENZA
SCHOULER, NYC;
STUART WEITZMAN
SANDALS. CÉLINE
BAG. BOTTOM RIGHT:
FENDI BIKINI, $570;
NET-A-PORTER
.COM; MERCEDES
SALAZAR EARRINGS.
BOTTOM LEFT: ETRO
BIKINI ($390) AND
BAG; BIKINI AT ETRO
.COM. PRADA HAT,
NECKLACE, SOCKS,
AND SHOES.
CAPHED HERE
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text ygx, dummy
text I cymq ycrxss
y pxqm cyllqd "Piqd
Bqyuty"-Gqryrd
Mynlqy Hxpkins's
qxultynt cqlqbrytixn
xh yll things spxttqd,
hlqckqd, mxttlqd,
ynd dxttqd. Hxw
dihhqrqnt my lihq
wxuld hyvq bqqn ih
I'd cxmq ycrxss thq
pxqm in my tqqns! I
wys in hull hrqcklq

FULLJOY
YOURSELF
A CROCHETED BIKINI
AND A WHERE-THE-
WILD-THINGS-ARE
NECKLACE GET THE
PARTY STARTED.
STELLA MCCARTNEY
SWIMWEAR BIKINI,
$350; STELLA
MCCARTNEY, LOS
ANGELES. NECKLACES
BY GRACE GIVENS FOR
BEADS OF PARADISE
AND PRADA. JIMMY
CHOO ESPADRILLES.
BEAUTY NOTE
BOOST YOUR SUMMER
GLOW WITH A DOSE OF
MOISTURE. GUERLAIN’S
TERRACOTTA HUILE
SOUS LE VENT
NOURISHING DRY
OIL IMPARTS A
NATURAL SHEEN.

BASHY VIBES
TO ADD TO AN
EVER-EXPANDING
COLLECTION OF
BAUBLES: STRANDS
OF SEASHELLS
THAT WASHED
UP IN VARIOUS
PERMUTATIONS ALL
ACROSS THE FALL
RUNWAYS. MAX
MARA TOP, $495; MAX
MARA, TROY, MI. TED
MUEHLING EARRINGS.
NECKLACES BY BEADS
OF PARADISE AND
DRIES VAN NOTEN.
154

PRODUCED BY WALTERS PRODUCTIONS. SPECIAL THANKS TO KANOPI HOUSE.
EVERYTHING
NICE
GET UP, STAND OUT
IN BRIGHT, LIGHT
IVORY. A COAT OVER
TROUSERS HAS THE
UNSTRUCTURED EASE
OF A ROBE OR WRAP
DRESS. THE ROW COAT
($1,990) AND PANTS
($590); THE ROW, NYC.
SAMUJI HAT. BROTHER
VELLIES SHOES. IN
THIS STORY: HAIR,
JAWARA; MAKEUP,
EMI KANEKO. DETAILS,
SEE IN THIS ISSUE.

Index
EDITOR: EMMA ELWICK-BATES
17
Pool
PARTY
Light, bright swim style is making a big splash!
Serve—and savor—the tones of your favorite gelato.
156 VOGUE JUNE 2017 1
2
3
16
15

4
6
1: COURTESY OF MODA OPERANDI. 2: COURTESY OF SANTO. 3: COURTESY OF JOHN DERIAN COMPANY. 5: COURTESY OF SHISEIDO. 7: STUART TYSON. 8: COURTESY
OF REBECCA DE RAVENEL. 9: COURTESY OF MATCHESFASHION.COM. 10: COURTESY OF HERMÈS. 11: COURTESY OF PRESSED JUICERY. 12: COURTESY OF TACORI.
13: COURTESY OF MIU MIU. 14: COURTESY OF LISA MARIE FERNANDEZ. 15: LIAM GOODMAN. 16: COURTESY OF ONE KINGS LANE. 17: COURTESY OF RAY-BAN.
5
9
7
10
8
13
12
11
14
1. KHAITE DRESS, $1,050; MODAOPERANDI.COM. 2. SANTO
NECKLACE; SANTOBYZANI.COM. 3. ASTIER DE VILLATTE X JOHN
DERIAN SAUCER, $130; JOHNDERIAN.COM. 4. MODEL CAROLINE
TRENTINI, VOGUE, 2017. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO.
5. SHISEIDO SUN PROTECTION LIP TREATMENT, $22; SHISEIDO.COM.
6. PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREA GENTL (GENTL AND HYERS). 7. KARL
LAGERFELD PARIS FOR LORD & TAYLOR X VOGUE 125 DRESS, $198;
LORD & TAYLOR STORES. (VOGUE RECEIVES A PORTION OF THE
PROFITS FROM THE SALE OF THIS DRESS.) 8. REBECCA DE RAVENEL
EARRINGS, $345; REBECCADERAVENEL.COM. 9. MAISON MICHEL
HAT, $588; MATCHESFASHION.COM. 10. HERMÈS BEACH TOWEL,
$630; HERMES.COM. 11. PRESSED JUICERY VOGUE LIMITED-
EDITION LEMONADE; PRESSEDJUICERY.COM. (VOGUE RECEIVES
A PORTION OF THE PROFITS FROM THE SALE OF THIS LEMONADE.)
12. TACORI RING, $790; TACORI.COM. 13. MIU MIU SLIDE, $890;
SELECT MIU MIU BOUTIQUES. 14. LISA MARIE FERNANDEZ SWIMSUIT,
$445; LISAMARIEFERNANDEZ.COM. 15. SALVATORE FERRAGAMO
BAG, $1,150; SELECT SALVATORE FERRAGAMO BOUTIQUES.
16. WAYUU HAMMOCKS HAMMOCK, $299; ONEKINGSLANE.COM.
17. RAY-BAN SUNGLASSES, $165; RAY-BAN.COM.

SWEPT AWAY
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 95
We are sitting under the awning
of Café du Monde, eating local delicacies:
a café au lait (me), chocolate
milk (her), and beignets—doughnutlike
fried dough piled high with powdered
sugar. As I gingerly lift one to
my mouth, trying to avoid getting the
sugar everywhere, she tells me not
to overthink it, then adds, deadpan:
“Just don’t breathe.”
Fanning is funny. On the set of The
Beguiled, she and Dunst dreamed
of starring together in a comedy.
(“She’s hilarious,” Dunst says. “I’d
like to see Elle host SNL.”) The girls’
school exterior was shot at the Louisiana
plantation that Beyoncé used in
Lemonade, but interior scenes were
filmed in the exquisite, rambling New
Orleans home of the comic actress
Jennifer Coolidge, whom Fanning
knew best as Paulette from the legendary
bend-and-snap scene in Legally
Blonde. (“We didn’t ask. We were too
scared.”) Coolidge has a famous Halloween
party every year, and Fanning
and Dunst went as, respectively, a
fairy and a nurse. They felt as if they’d
missed a memo. “Everyone was in
Marie Antoinette Gothic garb,” Fanning
says. “We really stuck out.”
She didn’t care, though. Since a period
of early-adolescent effort to blend
in (skinny jeans, neutral tops), she has
tried to embrace doing things her own
way, with proud Elle-ness, even if it
strikes others as strange. For instance,
senior prom. Fanning and her best
friend, Cassio, had planned for weeks
to be each other’s dates. Then Fanning
learned she had to go to Cannes and
wouldn’t be able to make the dance.
She had a crazy notion: What if they
both went to France and made it their
own version of prom? They did, and
Elle wore her prom dress to the red carpet,
and Cassio wore his prom tux, and
it was a great time—actually, the greatest
time—a time so good they do not
like to talk about it, because they think
they’ll never have so much fun again.
A number of Fanning’s friends are
of a different generation, encountered
through work. Aside from her
close bond with Dunst, she often gets
dinner with Mike Mills; she spends
a really surprising amount of her
life chatting on the phone with the
80-year-old Bruce Dern. She also
leans on her school friends—many
of them have parents in the movie
business, so they understand her long
absences to shoot—and, now that
some have left for college, worries
about her social world thinning. She’s
single at the moment, although she
daydreams of being swept off her feet.
“I’m superromantic,” she says—and
then, as if worried I didn’t hear, throws
out her arms and shouts it on the Café
du Monde patio: “Superromantic!”
Still, she doesn’t really know how you
meet people, at least the right people,
outside school.
“Will I be in Café du Monde? Will
there be a spotlight on someone? I
don’t know where to find these people.
But I also don’t want to screw with the
magic of organically finding someone.”
She wants to have a family, but
to be eighteen, nineteen, is not to be
there yet. “We’re just going with the
flow. We haven’t learned, you know,
the hard ways of the world.” She considers
for a moment, and adds, “We’re
not humans yet.”
Well, one of us, anyway. Having just
gobbled up two plates of beignets with
Fanning, I am feeling all too human,
and we walk off the pastries around
the Quarter. It’s a warm, clear day, and
Fanning is dressed for spring: a lovely,
full, white shoulderless dress by The
Row, sandals by Chanel, a big white
Rochas bag. As we step into the sunlight,
she pulls a blue-and-pink Chanel
sweater over her shoulders. (Another
thing that Elle Fanning does not do:
tan.) We stop by the costume-wig store
where she found the perfect hair for
her fairy costume, and then a vintage
shop. In The Beguiled, the women wear
period attire, but without the usual
hoop cages. “The silhouette looks like
something you could wear now or in
the seventies,” says Coppola. “These
long floral dresses. . . . It’s this kind of
dusty-pastel world.”
Fanning has made her last three
movies for female directors. Following
The Beguiled, with Coppola, she
went to Savannah, Georgia, to film the
crime thriller Galveston, directed by
Mélanie Laurent. And she’s just about
to fly to upstate New York to shoot a
new Reed Morano film, I Think We’re
Alone Now. (“Basically, it’s just me and
Peter Dinklage,” she says. “He’s the last
man on Earth—and then I show up.”)
She has been receiving vocal coaching
in preparation for Teen Spirit, a
movie about an American Idol–like
competition, made by the same team
that produced La La Land. “That
will be challenging, for sure,” she says.
The really big challenge that Fanning
dreams of is directing. “I definitely, definitely
want to do that,” she says. “As an
actor, you’re exploring someone else’s
vision. I’d like to be able to create that
vision instead.” Refn, the director of
The Neon Demon, strongly supports
the idea, she reports. And as she talks,
I realize that there’s little in the world I
want to see more than an Elle Fanning–
directed film. She’s in Aries mode now:
focused, businesslike, confident, full of
urgent vision. “I know it’s hard—so
many people asking you questions all
the time,” she says. “It’s a huge challenge.
But I want that.” □
FIRST BLUSH
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 112
have patience for,” Jalbert says. “Except
dogs.”
It was almost a decade ago that Jalbert
crossed the apricot-colored Loretta
Lynn Van Lear (his own creation) with
Julia Child (a popular, fragrant yellow
rose). “I remember when that rose was
born,” he says; the young plant caught
his eye—and nose—and held it. The
breed, which he labeled Jal-011-2-10,
was an English-style rose with leaves
of an unusual, glossy bright green. It
seemed to resist most diseases, such as
black spot. It bloomed, and bloomed
again, and then again, from spring to
fall. It could thrive as an “own root”
rose (not a graft onto another root system),
which meant that it could freeze
to its base in winter and reemerge, in
spring, as itself. And it “trimmed” its
own flowers, growing into a lush, leafy
bush of knee height.
A breeder normally hopes to find the
rare rose that brings together two or
more desirable qualities: color, blooming
habit, fragrance, resistance, shape,
maintenance. A breed that combines
all is a moon shot. By some cosmic turn
of destiny, Jal-011-2-10 was reaching its
debutante age just as Vogue was scouring
the country for its perfect rose. Jalbert
sent the magazine several of his
new breeds, but there was never any
competition. This was a match made
not in heaven but deep in the earth:
Jal-011-2-10 was the long-sought-after
Vogue rose.
By late afternoon, Francis and I are
careering toward the Phoenix airport,
on our way to the next outpost
on the path of rose production. He’s
on speakerphone, making an adjustment
to his flight. When a customerservice
rep breaks through the hold
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music—“Hel-lo!”—he asks her, as he
often does, what she knows about roses.
“A lot!” the woman exclaims. She
has kept Mister Lincoln, Cécile Brünner,
Veterans’ Honor. “I like Queen
Elizabeth, Sterling Silver, Apricot
Nectar——”
“Yup!” Francis says, and smiles. (Later,
he tells me he can guess at her age
from this list.) “Do you know there’s
going to be a Vogue Anniversary Rose?”
“Oh!” the customer-service woman
exclaims with delight. “For heaven’s
sake!”
After landing in Dallas, we drive to
Tyler, Texas, the self-proclaimed rose
capital of America. Today it’s home
to Certified Roses, which packages the
Vogue Anniversary Rose in containers
for sale. (It will be available through
Jackson & Perkins on its release this
month.) Certified is also the final
proving ground for roses approaching
market. The East Texas climate is
harsh—it can be 100 degrees in summer,
sometimes with up to 100 percent
humidity—and only the best plants
escape blight. This is the final edit, and
a crucial one: Even after years of winnowing,
a new breed will be abandoned
if it doesn’t perform.
I drive out to the greenhouses with
Francis and the head of Certified,
Lawrence Valdez, who stroll between
small potted rosebushes, snapping
off blooms, ruffling the petals, huffing
the perfume, and crumbling the
flowers in their hands. At this stage,
they are studying fragrance, “inner
nodes” (the gaps between leaf clusters,
which should be minimal to avoid a
tall, scrawny plant), and “habit” (does
the bush grow in a pleasant, symmetrical
way, or does it shoot off in bizarre
directions?). As with the length of a
dress or the height of a heel, it’s a call
of experience and eye.
“So you see all of this weirdness,”
Francis says, tossing an unsatisfactory
flower aside. “Then you come to the
Vogue Anniversary Rose, and you’re
like, Oh, yeah.”
We have reached four sawed-off barrels
where the new bushes have been
planted. The foliage is tight and orderly.
There are buds everywhere. The plant
is thriving more than 2,000 miles from
home—and that is just the start of its
new life. □
INDIAN SUMMER
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 133
separate homes and lives.) Roy is funny
about her love life, telling me she has
many sweethearts, including the one responsible
for the tall orange lilies on her
kitchen table. “My harem,” she jokes,
saying mysteriously, “They are all in The
Ministry’s acknowledgments.” When
she was at architecture school, she says,
“my name on the roster was S. A. Roy,
so a lot of people called me that.” (Her
given name is Suzanna.) “My sweethearts
call me Roy. Almost no one calls
me Arundhati.” She laughs her easy
laugh once more and adds, “None of
the simple things in my life are simple.”
That includes her relationship with
her mother, Mary Roy. A Syrian Christian
from Kerala, Mary scandalized
her conservative community not only
by marrying outside the faith but then
by leaving her Hindu husband and returning
home with two small children
in tow. Atypically for her generation,
she raised Roy and her older brother,
Lalith, on her own. Roy tries to return
to Kerala (where The God of Small
Things is set) every couple of months
to see her family. She says she feels “delicious
vengeful feelings toward that
parochial community that excommunicates
you before you’re three years
old because you don’t have the right
pedigree. . . . And yet the minute I see
the rivers and the coconut trees, I know
that this is my landscape, my geography.
It’s a very strange contradiction.”
A lot has changed since Roy was a
child, but the old houses and the Meenachil
River—where she would catch fish
for lunch with a bamboo pole—remain
much the same. Roy clearly developed
a strong sense of self-reliance from her
mother, who, 50 years ago, founded a
school in two rooms rented from the local
Rotary Club with just five students—
two of them her own children.
After flying down to Kochi and
driving two hours south to the town of
Kottayam, I find Mary Roy in a sunny
office at the heart of the verdant hillside
Pallikoodam campus. With extensive
grounds—including a swimming pool,
playing fields, and gardens—Mary’s
school now serves some 470 students,
from nursery to twelfth grade, some of
whom have matriculated to Harvard or
Johns Hopkins.
With short salt-and-pepper hair,
Mary, at 83, is physically frail, yet regal
in a charcoal salwar kameez and three
strands of silver pearls. “I didn’t want
to start a school. The inspiration was
my children,” she tells me. Advised by
two nuns, Mary decided her students
wouldn’t be burdened by excessive
sports, and would learn about “nuclear
weapons and the pyramids,” she says.
Teaching social awareness was a priority,
and she herself took on the Supreme
Court of India in the 1980s to successfully
overturn an inheritance law that
discriminated against women.
Armed with this unconventional education
and example, Arundhati and her
brother left when they were nine and ten
to attend Lawrence, a prestigious private
boarding school in Chennai, where
Lalith says “Suzie” excelled as student,
orator, and athlete. At Lawrence, “you
had to fight for yourself,” says Lalith,
who works in seafood export (Roy calls
him a “prawn broker”). “She was very
independent. My mum had groomed
her to be tough.” It was a challenging
relationship, and not long after arriving
in Delhi, Roy had a falling out with her
mother and cut off all contact for the
next four years.
“My mother’s such a fabulous influence
in my life, not motherly and nurturing
in that way,” says Roy. “She’s the
calcium in my bones, the steel in my
spine, from warring with her.” Mother
and daughter eventually reconciled.
“But there was no Bollywood moment,”
Roy says. “I was a writer when I
was three years old. Even when she was
raging at me I could see she was in pain.
As a child, to be able to understand an
adult is a terrible thing.”
On my last visit to Roy, I find her at
home in a meeting with a young leader
in the Dalit-rights movement. The
Supreme Court has met to say it will
discuss Roy’s case in a month’s time but
later postpones it. (“The process is the
punishment,” she says wryly.) And she
is about to go to the London Book Fair
to give a reading from The Ministry to
1,000 Penguin UK employees at the
Barbican Centre, to deliver 26 carefully
marked proofs of the book cover to her
publishers with all her notations, and
to meet with her many translators to
discuss the nuances of the prose. “You
end up thinking in so many languages
and dialects,” she says. “We are living in
Babel now.” □
IN CONTROL
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 144
singer-songwriters at the moment,” he
says, “a master of relatable simplicity.”
And yet SZA tends toward the cryptic
when she discusses her music. She
cites no particular influences, though
the shadows of Billie Holiday, Björk,
Lauryn Hill, Amy Winehouse, and
amounts of homework, would play Rihanna pass CONTINUED ON PAGE 160
VOGUE.COM VOGUE JUNE 2017
159

over these songs. At home, she says,
she listens to nothing at all.
“I just think I have too much anxiety
to listen to music,” she explains. “Sometimes
it feels like noise, and sometimes
it’s so affecting that I can’t recover from
it.” CTRL, she adds, “is the product of
the realization that I have none.” In fact
SZA’s life has felt decidedly out of control
of late, and her eyes fill with tears
as she lists off the people she has had
to bury in the last year: three friends,
the mother of her longtime boyfriend,
her own grandmother. The album is
informed by these hard lessons but is
also, she says, an exploration of feeling
at all times out of place, permitting others
to make decisions for her. She digs
out her phone and plays me a snippet
from an unfinished collaboration with
the hip-hop artist Travis Scott, which
addresses the theme of dependency
with bone-dry humor: “Give me paper
towel/Give me another Valium/Give
me another hour or two with you.”
In interviews, SZA has hinted that
this new album may be her last. Today
she hedges a bit. “I’m always hedging,”
she explains. She can imagine setting
music aside for film. She’d like to take
a whack at environmental science and
maybe get lost in the Brazilian jungle.
But she also confesses to wanting to
win a Grammy. If SZA’s music finds
a mainstream audience, it will be on
account of its refusal to posture and
its invitation into the fraught inner
world of its author. One of the most
trenchant pop lyrics of 2016, emerging
out of that ambivalence, can be found
in a song that SZA co-wrote for and
recorded with Rihanna, called “Consideration”:
“Let me cover your shit in
glitter/I can make it gold.”
What most pop princesses might
wish to dress up, SZA prefers to lay
bare. “I learned everything the hard
way—like, literally everything.” she
says. “I know that God does that to
people that he has lessons for. I just
wish that I had learned less extreme
lessons. I wish God would chill the
fuck out.” □
LOUD MOUTH
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 147
between the complete Pantone palette
of carmines and scarlets and the
sense that many dissatisfied women
were collectively demanding more.
Maria Cornejo, long admired for her
collections of strong, inventive womenswear,
collaborated with the makeup
artist Dick Page to send models down
her fall runway with clean skin and a
warm, glossy brick lip. It was as much
a colorful complement to her velvet
dresses in chocolate and crimson as
it was a purposeful statement. “If
you’re just wearing red lipstick, you’re
usually not wearing much else, and I
think that shows confidence,” says the
Chilean designer, long a devotee of
Shiseido’s matte bullets. “You can still
be a feminist if you wear lipstick and
look pretty.”
These days, feminists are recognized
as coming in all shapes, sizes, and
shades, and there is no fashion prerequisite
for membership—or at least
that seems to be the message echoing
from voices like Sarah Sophie Flicker’s.
The performance artist, activist, and
a leading organizer of the Women’s
March is rarely seen without her go-to
bow of MAC’s Ruby Woo, the classic
orangey-matte pigment that she and
In This Issue
Table of contents
23: Dress ($1,290)
and hat ($650);
Loewe, Miami. Cover
look 28: Dress, price
upon request; select
Valentino boutiques.
Talking fashion 62:
Bag, $2,180; Le Bon
Marché Rive Gauche,
Paris. 64: Sneakers,
$65; puma.com. Beauty
76: Manicure, Yukie
Miyakawa. PATA 81:
Trench coat, $2,861;
Emilio Pucci boutiques.
Top, $475; shopbop.com.
82: Casa Cabana carafe
set, $447; 1stdibs.com.
SWEPT AWAY
87: Jacket and skirt;
loewe.com. Boots,
$1,495; manoloblahnik
.com. 88–89: Dress,
price upon request;
gucci.com. 92–93: Dress,
$43,000; select Dior
boutiques. 94–95: Dress,
price upon request; select
Louis Vuitton boutiques.
96–97: Valentino
dress, $23,500; select
Valentino boutiques.
98–99: Dress, price
upon request; Alexander
McQueen, NYC.
100–101: Dress, price
upon request; givenchy
.com. Special thanks to
Friends of City Park and
Jennifer Coolidge House.
MOONLIGHT
& ROSES
102: Coat, $9,495. Rose
at jacksonandperkins
.com. 104: Dress,
$5,395. On Fazal: The
Frye Company boots,
$298; thefryecompany
.com. 109: Suit jacket
($1,350) and trousers
($470); select Salvatore
Ferragamo boutiques.
Shirt, $165; A.P.C., NYC.
Tie, $60; jcrew.com.
IN FULL BLOOM
115: Belt ($790) and
boots ($1,390). Belt at
Barneys New York, NYC.
Boots at Neiman Marcus
stores. Earrings, $530;
Céline, NYC. 117: Earrings,
$425; oscardelarenta
.com. Retrouvaí signet
ring, $1,025; Broken
English, Newport Beach,
CA. Pascale Monvoisin
rings, $825–$880;
net-a-porter.com. 118:
Coat ($9,000), earrings
($975), and rings
($350–$450). 119:
Dress, $6,995 . Earrings,
price upon request,
Twist, Portland, OR.
GOLD STANDARD
120–121: Coat ($5,990
for similar styles), shirt
($990), and pants
($990); The Row, NYC.
Tabitha Simmons shoes,
$895; tabithasimmons
.com. 124–125: On
Sturridge: Burberry shirt,
$295; burberry.com. On
Birney: J. Mueser suit,
$1,950; J. Mueser, NYC.
Boss shirt, $175; Hugo
Boss stores. Silver Lining
Opticians glasses, $245;
silverliningopticians.com.
FINGERS ON
THE PRINTS
134–135: On Faretta:
Dress ($3,920), earrings
($1,300), and boots
($1,390). Dress and
earrings at select Marni
boutiques. Boots at
modaoperandi.com. On
Gulielmi: Dress ($4,200),
earring ($440 for pair),
socks ($120), and shoes
($980). Dress at select
Marni boutiques. Earrings
at Neiman Marcus stores.
Socks at modaoperandi.
com. Shoes at Hampden,
Charleston, SC. On Rosa:
Dress ($2,460), earrings
($470), socks ($120),
and shoes ($890). Dress,
socks, and shoes at select
Marni boutiques. Earrings
at Saks Fifth Avenue,
NYC. On Bermannelli:
Jacket ($5,660), top
($860), scarf ($320),
skirt ($1,440), earrings
($1,210), socks, ($100),
and shoes ($980).
Jacket, scarf, earrings,
and socks at select
Marni boutiques. Top
and skirt at Tender,
Birmingham, MI. Shoes
at Hampden, Charleston,
SC. On Watson: Dress
($4,050), top ($860),
earrings ($660), and
boots ($1,390). Dress,
top, and earrings at select
Marni boutiques. Boots
at modaoperandi.com.
139: On Faretta: Dress
($1,870), hat ($2,820),
and shoes ($1,420).
Dress at Bergdorf
Goodman, NYC. Hat
and shoes at select
Marni boutiques. On
Rosa: Dress ($2,250),
hat ($710), and stole
160
VOGUE JUNE 2017
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her fellow march organizers, Tabitha
St. Bernard and Janaye Ingram, wore
like war paint in Washington, D.C., in
January as they helped wrangle and
energize the millions gathered at the
National Mall. “But there’s room for
everyone who shows up,” Flicker explains,
“red lips, hijabs, long hair, no
hair, natural hair, dressed up, and pared
down”—binaries and boundaries that
were once upheld largely to “police,
contain, and shame women,” according
to trans activist Janet Mock, who
wears red lipstick to amplify her words
during speeches.
Culturally, a well-lined cherry pout
has always sent a certain message: seductress,
femme fatale, devilish lover
sure to leave a mark. Watch Ryan Murphy’s
Feud for a full catalog of red lips
and the women who made them legendary,
then move on to Sid and Nancy.
But they’re not just the man teasers
Marilyn Monroe believed them to be.
Symone Sanders, the former national
press secretary for Bernie Sanders, sees
hers as an essential part of a duty to
highlight diversity. “I don’t think there
are a lot of bald black girls on the
political scene, at least that the American
people get to see every day, so I
want to represent for brown girls, all
shades of brown,” explains the CNN
talking head, who has no qualms about
showing up on air with a pop of MAC’s
Carnivorous, a blood-wine that is not
trying for subtlety. And that’s its charm.
Sanders is quick to pay homage to
Huma Abedin—“She is always rocking
that lip”—Hillary Clinton’s chief
adviser, who has (to government knowledge)
never been seen red lip–less. “Anytime
is red-lipstick time,” says Abedin,
who depoliticizes her early love of
Clinique’s Vintage Wine, which was inspired
by pictures of Audrey Hepburn
and Grace Kelly, and glossy tear sheets
from Vogue. “Red always feels confident,
fresh, bold, and simple to me,”
she continues, explaining that while
she never “properly” learned how to
apply makeup, a quick slick of Yves
Saint Laurent’s matte red 201 or Huda
Beauty’s Heartbreaker allows her to
explore a love of color while boosting
her confidence, something her job demands.
“Red goes with everything, and
it just feels right whenever you wear it.”
I ask my mother about the dawn
of her own red-lip allegiance, and we
remember my grandmother, whose
diminutive stature belied the steely will
of a woman who raised three Jewish
girls in the shadow of the Holocaust,
keenly aware of the radical act of
purely existing even as she attempted
to melt face first into suburbia. “My
mother absolutely would not leave the
house without it,” she says of what
for her has become at once a cosmetic
enhancer as well as a disguise, an art
project, a photo op, a suit of armor, an
invitation, and a do not disturb sign.
I have one more red-lipstick memory
of my mother: a photograph of
hers that hung in our downtown loft
of a small doll in a housedress pushing
a lipstick as big as she is across an ideal
1950s home. That perfect tube, bright
and angry, possessed me. “In hindsight,”
she says, unpacking the piece,
“I think I was saying my femininity is
as big as me. I’d gotten the feeling that
historically women needed to imitate
men or renounce their femaleness to be
‘real’ artists. I wasn’t buying it.”
And neither am I. □
A WORD ABOUT DISCOUNTERS WHILE VOGUE THOROUGHLY RESEARCHES THE COMPANIES
MENTIONED IN ITS PAGES, WE CANNOT GUARANTEE THE AUTHENTICITY OF MERCHANDISE SOLD
BY DISCOUNTERS. AS IS ALWAYS THE CASE IN PURCHASING AN ITEM FROM ANYWHERE OTHER
THAN THE AUTHORIZED STORE, THE BUYER TAKES A RISK AND SHOULD USE CAUTION WHEN DOING SO.
($3,450); select Marni
boutiques.
IN CONTROL
145: Jacket ($4,980),
shirt ($2,200), and skirt
($2,900); select Gucci
boutiques. In this story:
Tailor, Leah Huntsinger
for Christy Rilling Studio.
Manicure, Kana Kishita.
MOMENT OF
THE MONTH
148–149: On Nicholas:
Sandals, $780. Proenza
Schouler white cuff,
$260; Proenza Schouler,
NYC. Jochen Holz for
Peter Pilotto glass bangle,
price upon request;
peterpilotto.com. On
Montero: Sandals ($910)
and black cuff ($260);
Proenza Schouler, NYC.
Jochen Holz for Peter
Pilotto glass bangle,
price upon request;
peterpilotto.com. On
Anaïs: Wolf & Rita dress,
$83; wolfandrita.com.
Happy Socks; happysocks
.com. Stella McCartney
Kids espadrilles, $166;
stellamccartney.com. On
Moore: Sandals, $910;
Proenza Schouler, NYC.
Jochen Holz for Peter
Pilotto glass bangle,
price upon request;
peterpilotto.com. In this
story: Manicure,
Eri Handa.
JAM ROCK
SWEETNESS
150–151: Hat, price upon
request; tomenyc.com.
Bag, $10,900; hermes
.com. 153: Dress, price
upon request. Sandals,
$398; stuartweitzman
.com. Bag, $3,900;
Céline, NYC. Earrings,
$173; Bergdorf
Goodman, NYC. Bag,
$2,025; Etro, NYC. Hat
(price upon request),
necklace (price upon
request), socks ($640),
and shoes (price upon
request); select Prada
boutiques. 153: Grace
Givens for Beads of
Paradise necklace,
price upon request;
similar styles at Beads
of Paradise, NYC. Prada
necklace, price upon
request; select Prada
boutiques. Espadrilles,
$475; jimmychoo
.com. 154: Earrings,
$1,200; Ted Muehling,
NYC. Beads of Paradise
choker, $22; Beads of
Paradise, NYC. Dries Van
Noten necklace, price
upon request; Barneys
New York, NYC. 155:
Hat, $330; samuji.com.
Shoes, $380; Nordstrom
stores.
INDEX
156–157: 2. Necklace,
$3,500.
LAST LOOK
162: Slides; select
Dolce & Gabbana
boutiques.
ALL PRICES
APPROXIMATE.
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161

Last Look
EDITOR: VIRGINIA SMITH
Dolce & Gabbana slides, $995
Crafting a sandal that manages to be both highly casual and indulgently opulent is no mean feat. For their
Tropico Italiano collection, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana blended la dolce vita values with a millennial ease
and irreverence—think terry-cloth hotel slippers with gilt-thread embroidery. The pale-pink rubber sole is offset
by a jacquard strap festooned with a wreath of plastic roses on a bed of raffia with periwinkle-and-champagne crystals.
Somewhere along the way, the whole enterprise hits that delicate sweet spot between kitsch and chic—
kind of like summer itself, now that we think about it. □
PHOTOGRAPHED BY ERIC BOMAN
DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.
162
VOGUE JUNE 2017