Sommaire pour January 2021 de Vogue

The first step was to empty my wallet, with its graveyard of receipts that had last seen the light of day in pre-pandemic times, loyalty cards from abandoned coffee shops, 17 NYC MetroCards carrying unknown currency. Cash!? I hadn’t handed over a fistful of filthy bills since you could still call a certain Mexican beer by its proper name without a second thought. And the salt in the wound: a reloadable Fun Card from Deno’s Wonder Wheel. Where is Deno’s Wonder Wheel? (Coney Island, it turns out. See you in the summer of 2022.) For years I have been a large-bag person—not only to accommodate this brick of a wallet but to make sure I could handle all manner of mishaps: laptops that had lost their charge, episodes of low…

I used to be so embarrassed to say it,” Naomi Osaka recalls. We’ve been pondering the strange power of Come on!—which, sometime around when Osaka was born, 23 years ago, emerged as tennis’s prevailing battle cry, an autocatalytic fist pump in a pair of words. Though its origins are murky, many historians of the sport believe it was Lleyton Hewitt, the retired Australian two-time Grand Slam singles champion, who inoculated the tennis world with this efficient exhortation. Roger Federer says it. So does Serena Williams. Some prefer to use their native tongue: Vamos! Allez! When Osaka was a 10-year-old learning the game, her father would pay her a quarter every time she shouted the words. “I hated it. I thought, If I’m so loud, then I’ll draw attention to myself,”…

I am not allowed to tell you where this took place. She made this clear at the outset. I can tell you that it was an unincorporated township known for its natural beauty. Approached from the east, ridges of towering redwoods give way to a tidal estuary favored by great blue herons and snowy egrets. Beyond the lagoon lies the secret place—a small peninsula on which a loose patchwork of idyllic farms, rustic homes, and piney-smelling eucalyptus groves stretches into the Pacific. This Shangri-la is less secret in the era of geo-tagging, but locals do what they can to maintain its seclusion (e.g., remove road signs to divert visitors). Fittingly, the secret place is separated from the North American continent by an active fault. It is literally on a different…

To put a newfound spin on our favorite looks from the spring season—see the buoyant stripes-filled portfolio “A Fresh Start” (page 58)—we called upon eight photographers, most of whom were entirely new to our pages. As we were closing this issue, we asked each of them to tell us a bit about their time on set. Of his photo of model Mayowa Nicholas, Philip-Daniel Ducasse, 32, who grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, said, “I wanted this image to take us back to where we both came from. As Africans and Afro Caribs, we love color—it lifts our moods and complements our skin.” Jody Rogac, 39, from Vancouver, Canada, also wanted the essence of her subject (model Grace Elizabeth) to shine through: “I didn’t want her to transform into anything other…

Visual excess is nothing new to the Spanish pop star Rosalía, whose videos and performances are so saturated with flaring colors and baroque imagery that they could have floated off the pages of art-history books. Yet in mid-October, as I follow her into a massive, three-floor costume emporium called Abracadabra in New York City’s Flatiron District, she’s momentarily overwhelmed, like a character in a kitschy, haunted Wonderland. Nearby, a gaggle of animatronic clowns smile maniacally while holding chain saws; lush feather boas cascade down shelves like ivy; and the aisles twinkle with constellations of accessories covered in rhinestones and glitter. Rosalía wanders deeper into the shop, collecting its camp and horror like a human satellite. She’s wearing white Prada sneakers and Burberry trousers and, beneath a pink-lined Burberry trench coat,…

Five minutes before NBC called the 2020 election for Joe Biden, Kristen Welker was sprinting. After rising at 4 a.m. and coanchoring Weekend Today in New York, the White House correspondent darted into a car and began racing back to her post at Biden campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware. Welker knew Pennsylvania would be called imminently, and she risked missing her historic live shot if she was stuck at a gas station in New Jersey when the race was decided. “It was out of a movie,” Welker, 44, said of arriving at Wilmington’s Chase Center at the final hour. (Her producer later scored a TikTok video of her dashing onto the set to the Rocky theme.) “I made it in time to get a sip of water, hear the special…

On paper, the idea of fashion insiders hitting up the local pumpkin patch seems utterly absurd, but on a chilly weekend in October, Paloma Elsesser and her friends find themselves amid an expanse of Dutchess County farmland nestled deep in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York, the stuff of grade school field trips and pastoral postcards. The birthday celebrations for Elsesser’s friend Camille Okhio, a Nigerian American writer and fine- and decorative-arts historian, are in full swing. For many in the group—which also includes designer Emily Adams Bode and mixed-media artist Theresa Chromati—this is a welcome opportunity for some fresh air while discussing anything that is not work. Talk centers on the upcoming election, the prospect of apple-cider doughnuts, and the task at hand. Weeks after the farm’s first…