Sommaire pour December 2019 de Vogue

IF TRUTH BE TOLD, our December cover, starring the brilliant Phoebe Waller-Bridge, started with Sienna Miller. A few years ago I asked Sienna if she had any idea who could host the Evening Standard Theatre Awards in London. It’s an event I am deeply passionate about, not just because I love the theater but, more important, because my father edited the newspaper while I was growing up. We’d had a terrific run of male comedians—James Corden, Steve Coogan—taking the honor, but it felt like it was the right time to hand things over to a woman. Sienna suggested I ask Phoebe; I did, and she did an incredible job. (This year it will be Cush Jumbo taking up the mantle.) Phoebe, of course, has gone on to make Emmy-winning, Amazon-dealmaking,…

BEAUTY The visual language of beauty marketing is ingrained by now: extreme close-ups of precision-painted lips; alluring portraits of familiar spokespeople; well-lit selfies regrammed on companies’ social channels. Coy seduction, the story goes, is the surest way to move makeup. But Hiroshi Imamura isn’t buying it—and he doesn’t think a new generation of consumers is, either. “The role of cosmetics has become clearer for us: They can provide emotional value and make everyday life richer than ever,” says Imamura, the cofounder of UZ (pronounced oo-zoo), a forward-thinking beauty concept out of Japan that has positioned itself as a refreshing outlier. For its Stateside debut this past March, the brand released 13 rainbow-bright shades of liquid eyeliner, with an artisan-made brush tip from a centuries-old factory in the Kumano region of…

When Monsieur Dior put on his first London fashion show in 1950, the British press headlined it dior “circus” comes to town. With a wink, current Dior artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri recently played ringmaster to a circus of her own to showcase a couture collection, heady with harlequin prints, inside a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey–esque tent replete with acrobats. The look that actress Lucy Boynton chose to wear, according to Chiuri, is “the result of a sleight of hand that has made it possible to create pleats that turn into swirls.” It’s high-wire-act trickery that’s most definitely a crowd-pleaser…

GIFTS No one is sure who said it, but it’s true: “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” There’s something captivating about a home with a well-stocked library, an intangible quality that even the most impeccably designed bookless interior can’t replicate. Perhaps it’s the revealing hint of the dweller’s personality, whether that means a prized collection of first-edition George Eliot novels or glossy volumes of Robert Frank images. Even an antiseptic hotel suite suddenly becomes yours when there’s reading on the bedside table; suddenly, there’s something to do. A library’s appeal isn’t just intellectual; books add warmth and color to any space. A quick scan of #bookstagram calls up monochromatic groupings, book-printed trompe l’oeil wallpaper, gravity-defying shelving. And, of course, many of the books themselves are…

THEATER It’s the first cool day of autumn, and I’m in a rehearsal space high above 42nd Street in Manhattan, watching the cast and crew of the Broadway musical Jagged Little Pill run through a harrowing scene. Kathryn Gallagher (recently seen in a supporting role on the TV show You), playing a distraught high schooler named Bella, is curled in the corner of a sofa as she recounts a sexual assault to two classmates, Frankie (Celia Rose Gooding) and Jo (Lauren Patten). Bella has to go to the police, they insist. She scoffs. “They never believe anyone anyway.” Behind me, Sean Allan Krill, who plays Frankie’s father, inhales sharply. “This part just kills me,” he mutters. Later, Gallagher apologizes to me that it was such a disturbing rehearsal. Then again,…

On the penthouse floor of a downtown hotel, often used for actual bat mitzvahs, I recently participated in a performative version of the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony. As a klezmer band fought to be heard over the crowd’s excited chatter, my friend the designer Susan Korn showed her spring Susan Alexandra collection amid hundreds of pink and white balloons and sparkly fuchsia streamers. Korn had asked me to model—along with other comedians, writers, and artists she cast on Instagram—and so I found myself mingling with the show’s attendees in a rust-colored bouffant wig, a boldly-hued outfit, and bright-green eye shadow that a makeup artist had slathered all the way up to my eyebrows, a peak example of what countless fashion-blog explainers and Instagram Stories might now refer to as “Euphoria makeup.”…

DISCOVER JIMMY CHOO FEVER EAU DE PARFUM An addictive and seductive gourmand fragrance inspired by glamorous nights of dancing til dawn. This luxurious fragrance is mysterious and hypnotic with top notes of black plum. Fever is the epitome of the free-spirited Jimmy Choo woman and perfect for evenings out on the town or for anytime you want to be noticed. Discover Jimmy Choo Fever Eau de Parfum available at Macys.com CELEBRATE THE MOMENT WITH FERRERO ROCHER® This holiday, celebrate special moments with those closest to you with something equally special. Ferrero Rocher® chocolates are a tempting combination of luscious, creamy, chocolaty filling surrounding a whole hazelnut, within a delicate crisp wafer – all enveloped in milk chocolate and finely chopped hazelnuts, wrapped in glittery gold foil, then placed in beautiful…

TALENT Deep in the San Fernando Valley, Mette Towley is sitting barefoot on a red velvet couch in a shed turned music studio; an oversize silk shirt hangs loosely from her curvy frame, and a single diamond earring dangles from her ear. A producer who goes only by “Jimmy” has just stepped out of the early-evening session, in which he and Towley have been working on songs for her first-ever EP, due this spring. Since 2018, Towley has been spending more time in London, where she filmed Cats—the musical motion picture directed by Tom Hooper, out this month. But when she is in Los Angeles, she can typically be found in a studio like this one—often after a morning workout at Modo Yoga or Bünda (“Home of the better butt,”…

WHEN WEST SIDE STORY opened on Broadway more than 60 years ago, it shocked critics with its savage depiction of racially motivated teenage gang violence on the streets of New York City—even as Leonard Bernstein’s ravishing jazz-and Latin-inflected symphonic score, Stephen Sondheim’s virtuosic lyrics, and Jerome Robbins’s hormonally kinetic dances beguiled audiences, who fell in love with librettist Arthur Laurents’s retelling of Romeo and Juliet. In the intervening decades, this once-groundbreaking musical has been enshrined as a classic, its gritty surface burnished to a nostalgic glow. As a result, West Side Story can seem to contemporary audiences, in many ways, as much of an artifact of a vanished era as, say, The Music Man, the show that beat it out for best musical at the 1958 Tony Awards. Enter Ivo…

FASHION Stylist Stella Greenspan is a magpie for vintage fashion—though her stringbean proportions (she stands six-foot-one) make fitting anything that’s more than a decade old virtually impossible. What she lacks in Edwardian tea dresses, however, she makes up for in vintage handbags. Sourced in thrift stores from Paris and Los Angeles to Zurich, where she grew up, Greenspan’s impressive trove of one-of-kind purses inspired her to design her own. “I love a little bag with a big personality,” she says, “though often my best vintage pieces either proved to be too tiny or started falling apart.” Her just-launched, eponymous label (sold at matchesfashion.com and, later this month, at stellagreenspanshop.com) reconfigures the eccentric bag for a new generation of cool girls. The two debut styles feature a discreet, midcentury silhouette, though…

FASHION “I think this is a really commercial piece,” says Beckett Fogg, one half of the team behind Area, holding up a stiff metal cage wrought of rainbow-hued crystal. To which I respond, with astonishment, “Commercial?” But Fogg insists. “It’s really commercial because of the many ways you can wear it! Look—you can just put it over a white button-down shirt. You just have to have that emotional connection. Our embellishments, our crystals, our trims really draw you into the fantasy.” Though Area’s gender-nonspecific extravaganzas may be a truly postmodern fantasy, Piotrek Panszczyk, Fogg’s codesigner of the New York–based line, says the creations have deep roots. “We love classic things, but we want to recontextualize them,” he explains. “Glamour can be rhinestones, but it can also be an Hermès double-face…

BEAUTY You won’t see it on any Oscar ballots, but powder—that longtime makeup essential—has played a crucial supporting role in many a Hollywood movie. In The Women (1939), glamour-puss Paulette Goddard pulls out a giant shiny compact on the remote Reno ranch where she’s waiting on a quickie divorce. In The Apartment (1960), a vulnerable Shirley MacLaine powders at the table while trying to fend off the attentions of a married lover who is an executive at the company where she works as an elevator operator. More recently, streaming direct to your living room on Amazon Prime Video, Rachel Brosnahan’s marvelous Mrs. Maisel powders up in a 1950s New York City coffee shop in the wee morning hours, having spent the night in jail on obscenity charges. Though the judge…

BOOKS Much like his beloved bedtime companion Harry Potter, the main character of Ann Napolitano’s Dear Edward (The Dial Press) finds himself orphaned and with a jagged scar ranging the length of his left shin. The sole survivor of a cross-country plane crash that took the lives of 191 people, including his parents and older brother, 12-year-old Edward Adler is a sudden folk hero, left to make sense of a trove of letters from strangers affected by the tragedy and contend with his own coming of age. In this life-affirming tale, the downright unbearable blossoms into a testament to the power of love and grace. Another story of remarkable grit unfolds in Jeanine Cummins’s heart-aching and heart-in-throat-thrilling American Dirt (Flatiron Books), which follows a mother and her son as they…

Table of contents: 48: Printed raffia dress, $5,490; modaoperandi.com. Long-sleeved T-shirt, $80; goldietees.com. Slides, $390; Marni stores. Tailor: Nafisa Tosh. Cover look: 56: Dress, price upon request; Saint Laurent, NYC. Ring, $390; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. Cuff bracelet, $11,640; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. Manicurist: Jin Soon. Tailor: Christy Rilling Studio. V Life: 88: Sweater, $345; margarethowell.co.uk. Jeans, $220; albam clothing. Tailor, Della George. 110: On Sun: Coat ($4,850) and hat ($790); select Tom Ford stores. On Nicholas: Jacket ($2,950), pants ($1,990), and hat ($790); select Tom Ford stores. Manicurist: Megumi Yamamoto. Tailor: Christy Rilling Studio. 132: Dress, price upon request; similar styles at matchesfashion.com. Manicurist, Emi Kudo. SAY ANYTHING 137: Jacket and pants, priced upon request; Alexander McQueen, NYC. Ring, $24,000; alvr.com. 138–139: Jacket ($1,995) and dress ($1,995); christopherkane.com. Bracelet, $45,000; alvr.com.…