Vogue

now and forever

WHAT AN INCREDIBLY SAD LOSS. The global fashion community, which Virgil Abloh forever changed with his brilliance and fearlessness, seemed to pause, stunned at the news of his death from cancer in November. I couldn’t believe it—none of us could. As Luke Leitch captures in his moving remembrance this month (see page 70), Abloh, the founder of Off-White and the artistic director of menswear for Louis Vuitton, seemed to light the path fashion was taking. He was a boundary-breaker, a gate-crasher to a world that needed one, a visionary, and a kind of caretaker to those following in his wake. It’s his generosity I will think of most: his instinct to support a diverse, forward-looking new generation of talents. I’ll never forget when he designed the uniforms for the Paris-based…

contributors

“My whole thing is, like, I just wanna have fun with it,” says hairstylist Evanie Frausto (pictured above, at right, with the singer Rina Sawayama) in “Hair Apparent,” page 100. Common Ground When the photographer Tess Ayano and stylist Jasmine Hassett assembled in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to shoot the talents behind On Sugarland (see Adam Green’s “Fresh Air,” page 86), much of the play’s ensemble cast was meeting for the very first time. (Above is Ayano, in purple, with actors Charisma Glasper, Kai Heath, Mister Fitzgerald, and Xavier Scott Evans.) The purity of their enthusiasm, coupled with visual references from the Harlem Renaissance, proved deeply inspiring. “It was beautiful to watch the actors bond over the course of the day, knowing they’d be spending countless hours rehearsing and performing together,” Ayano says. Brief Encounter For…

love and duty

In the history of workweeks that start badly, few can compete with the one Representative Jamie Raskin began on January 6, 2021, his first full morning back in the Capitol since discovering the corpse of his son six days before. Raskin, a Democrat who represents Maryland’s Eighth District, was entering his fifth year in Congress, having first been elected on the same night as Donald Trump. The previous Thursday, after preparing a breakfast smoothie, he had gone to the room where his 25-year-old son, Tommy, was staying while remotely attending Harvard Law School and had found him dead, a victim of suicide. For Raskin and his wife and their two other children, this was the start of a nightmare. “After searching frantically for my phone—which I had thrown high in…

the one and only

Like so many of the details that have been mythologized around Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s life, the camellia—one of Chanel’s most recognizable motifs—has its own piece of lore. Chanel’s lover Arthur “Boy” Capel allegedly gave her a bouquet of these flowers in the early days of their courtship, thus immortalizing both the bloom and its bearer into the French house’s design vernacular. To date, Boy has been canonized as a best-selling handbag, a lipstick shade, and a fragrance, while the camellia has been embroidered into evening gowns, encrusted in diamonds, and, most recently, reimagined as the key ingredient in Chanel’s most ambitious beauty launch in decades. No. 1 de Chanel, a nine-piece line that encompasses skin care, makeup, and fragrance, has been shrouded in secrecy for more than 10 years. It even…

fun and games

While 2020’s Summer Games were a year late, the 2022 Winter Games are right on schedule. But not missing a beat means surprises—especially for the athletes. (Surprise number one: Their events are already complicated by politics, with the U.S. staging a diplomatic boycott—athletes will still attend; dignitaries will not—in protest of China’s human rights record.) Ski slopes that are being groomed at this moment on Xiaohaituo Mountain, in Yanqing National Park, about 60 miles north of Beijing, were originally scheduled to host a 2021 trial run. That was canceled, due to the pandemic. This month, skiers will be meeting the mountain for the first time. “None of us know it,” says Mikaela Shiffrin, 26, the alpine ski racer who has won two Olympic golds, “but what I’ve seen from the videos,…

you be you!

Some outfits carry with them such a momentous gravitational pull, you can feel them brushing past you with the force of a thousand suns. I felt myself entering a new orbit outside the Collina Strada spring 2022 show in Brooklyn: A guest whooshed past me in an orange mesh top, cascades of lilac ruffles, and platform teal sneakers, frills fanning out in the breeze. On the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm, where designer Hillary Taymour had constructed a runway between the kale and basil harvests, another was wearing a vintage Versace blouse with translucent white pants and a coral necklace the size of the Great Barrier Reef. Two boys in multicolored nail polish gossiped in the front row while their female companion pulled her furry bucket hat over her ears. Without fanfare,…