Vogue March 2020

a world of change

THIS MONTH, we bring you three covers, each shot by a different photographer—along with many more images and works of art inside—of our March cover star, Billie Eilish, the young pop singer who has become rather a cultural provocateur in the last year or so. Not that she’d ever define herself that way: Billie told writer Rob Haskell as much when they met at her home in California—her parents’ home, in fact, where she still lives, as Billie only turned 18 at the end of last year—that she bristles against the very idea of being considered a rule-breaker. It’s very rare that we would choose to give the accolade of a cover so soon in anyone’s career, but there is something about Billie that is completely compelling, as you will discover…

love lines

In the fall of my senior year in college, a guy from my 17th century–literature class asked me out. We saw a movie about the Vietnam War and went back to his rented house for a beer. He was quirky and cute, but we were stiff and unnatural together, and I remember thinking, as I sat on his couch, that we probably shouldn’t go out again. Then his roommate, Henry*, came home from his date. It was the ’80s in North Carolina, and everyone had a date on Saturday night. Henry behaved like he’d just gotten out of jail. He came into the living room and acted out the goodbye at his date’s sorority house, how he’d put the screen door between them before he’d have to kiss her. He stood…

force of nature

Jane Fonda is the most intimidating person I’ve ever met. It was nearly 20 years ago, a week before George W. Bush’s inauguration, when I arrived at the door of her hotel suite in Santa Monica to interview her for Vogue. I remember an outstretched arm—Hi, I’m Jane Fonda—a rigid handshake, and a once-over. No phony smile or how nice to seeeee you. As we sat down, I asked how much time I had. “Let’s start with an hour,” she said, curtly. No amount of friendly chit-chat—how about this rain?—changed the dynamic. Indeed, I had to fight the urge to flee. Only once I started asking direct, pointed questions (and stopped wasting her time) did things turn around and she talked animatedly, sometimes wildly gesticulating, for well over an hour.…

naturel instincts

Click. Click. Click. That’s the sound of millions of American women tapping on web links with headlines that read, the french girl’s guide to x, where X is whatever mystical Gallic property you prefer. Frenchwomen don’t get fat! They wake up with impeccable bedhead! They meet their lovers in insouciant-yet-polished ensembles like the ones in Hedi Slimane’s Celine spring 2020 show, that paean to the discreet charm of the ’70s-era French bourgeoisie. We, les américaines, can’t get enough. What’s their secret? we wonder—and on we click. Since the dawn of the Republic, American women have looked to the City of Light for beauty, fashion, and lifestyle cues. The Belle Époque aesthetic that Nicolas Ghesquière referenced at his Louis Vuitton show this season is the same one that dazzled Gilded Age heiresses…

read the room

For 14 months, Athena Calderone ping-ponged between the East and West Coast and farther off to Copenhagen and Lyon for her latest book, Live Beautiful (Abrams), produced with photographer Nicole Franzen. By the end, she was left with a collection of design magazine–worthy photographs, but also a number of shots that captured her from a less glamorous vantage. “I was looking at the behind-the-scenes photos, and there were all of these images of me in somebody’s shower,” she recalls with amusement. After studying interior design at Parsons, Calderone launched her website, EyeSwoon, in 2011 to disseminate original photography of her unpretentious but elegant at-home life. Her rise coincided with that of Brooklyn as an aesthetic, not just an alternative borough, and she has hordes of disciples who home-make à la Athena,…

desert dreamer

When Agnes Pelton’s airy, luminous abstractions arrive at the Whitney Museum in New York this month for Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, it will be something of a homecoming for the artist, who spent much of her childhood in Brooklyn and developed her enigmatic style while living in an abandoned Long Island windmill in the 1920s. You could be forgiven, however, for not discerning these roots. At 50, Pelton, a devotee of theosophy and Agni yoga, permanently decamped to Cathedral City, California, a dusty town outside Palm Springs, and her work took on the expansive feel of the desert. Curator Gilbert Vicario, who organized the Phoenix Art Museum’s traveling survey, calls her paintings “metaphysical landscapes,” and the Whitney curator Barbara Haskell says the canvases were “vehicles for Pelton’s own insight into…