Vogue September 2021

I would like to speak up for office life. And I mean life in an actual office—not the kitchen table or your daughter’s room or (God forbid) your bed. I know we’ve all found incredible new ways to collaborate through COVID, and Zoom is an amazing tool—we’ll never give it up—but as the Vogue staff has cautiously come back together at One World Trade Center in recent weeks, I have felt an altogether uncautious feeling of joy. I’m not a social scientist. I don’t study productivity and cannot speak confidently about whether we can accomplish more in person or remotely (or via some hybrid of the two). What I can tell you is that the sense of community that comes with passing one another in the hallway, visiting at our desks,…

Annie Leibovitz, Grace Coddington, and Natalia Vodianova For Vogue’s September issue, the photographer, contributing editor, and model all paid tribute to Beatrix Farrand, an intrepid American landscape designer active between 1895 and the 1950s (“Earthly Delights,” page 310). Informed by the great gardens of Europe and northern Africa, Farrand’s work fascinated Leibovitz, who spent her teenage years not far from Dumbarton Oaks, Farrand’s crowning achievement in Georgetown (and a key location for the Vogue story). Returning home to New York after the shoot, she says, “I looked at my house and said, ‘I have to do some landscaping.’” Coddington—herself prone to puttering in her Wainscott, New York, garden—was also bewitched by the estate. “It was very beautiful,” she says, noting that a swarm of cicadas seemed to agree. “They were all…

Meet the emerging brands and designers giving new life to the season’s wardrobe staples. CAROLINA SANTO DOMINGO utilizes Italian craftsmanship to create her striking geometric bags. Known for its bamboo “Ark” bag, CULT GAIA delivers equally sculptural ready-to-wear, inspired by nature. Chicago-based AZEEZA is a go-to for voluminous dresses in bold shades. And if you’re looking for an eco-conscious option, try STELLA PARDO’s Parisian-style knitwear, handmade in Peru with natural materials.…

Three years ago, on an early summer’s afternoon in leafy Bloomsbury, London, a 27-year-old Sally Rooney and I were sitting in the grand offices of her British publisher, Faber, discussing her upcoming second novel. Her debut, Conversations With Friends—the story of two best friends and one’s adulterous relationship with an older married man—had been out for a year, and already Rooney was haloed by a cult status: a literary novelist who had broken the mainstream. “Salinger for the Snapchat generation” is how she was introduced to the world (“I remember thinking at the time,” Rooney guiltily recalls, “What is Snapchat?”), and anticipation for her follow-up was reaching fever pitch. Fast-forward to 2021, and that second novel, Normal People, a will-they-won’t-they? tale for the millennial era about two students, Marianne and Connell,…

The most ambitious exhibition to date from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute kick-starts with a question: who gets to be american? A red, white, and blue silk sash from the grand finale of Prabal Gurung’s 2020 10th-anniversary collection bears the phrase, and it greets visitors from the threshold of the Anna Wintour Costume Center. It’s a query every immigrant must consider—but shrouded in golden light at the outset of a fashion retrospective, it takes on a new verve. “It was important to open with that,” says Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s Wendy Yu Curator in Charge. “It tackles this notion of acceptance and belonging, which recent events have brought to the fore. Of course, these are questions that have always been present—but there are moments in history when…

When Mickalene Thomas was growing up in New Jersey, she kept telling her family that she was going to move to Europe. “Here she’s talking about Europe again,” she remembers her cousins teasing her, saying, “Girl, you don’t know about no Europe.” She’s been there more times than she can count since then. This fall, 31 monumental new works—including collage-like paintings of magisterial Black women and social-political “Resist” pictures—are appearing in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong as part of an exhibition collectively titled “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” At the age of 50, Thomas is one of the most dominant and fearless artists of her generation. The New York Times’ critic Roberta Smith, looking back on Thomas’s 2012 mid-career survey at the Brooklyn Museum, wrote, “No Manhattan museum had…