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OCT

THE REAL REESE THE GIRL NEXT DOOR FINDS HER EDGE

GEORGE CLOONEY’S RAVISHING BRIDE

SHE’S THE ONE

INTO THE WOODS

A DIE-HARD NEW YORKER TRIES THE RURAL LIFE WHY RABBIT IS THE NEXT ETHICAL MEAT

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH APPLE’S DESIGN GENIUS

CORE VALUES

HIP HOP

JOHN KERRY’S HIGH-STAKES YEAR

STATE OF PLAY

PERFECT PARKAS, PAINTERLY PRINTS, AND THE WHITE-HOT BAG PLUS, MEET THE FASHION SUPERSTARS OF TOMORROW

COUNTRY CHIC, CITY COOL

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MATCH

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EDITOR’S LETTER TALKING BACK Letters from readers

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CONTRIBUTORS UP FRONT What happens when a die-hard New Yorker doesn’t take Manhattan? After 26 years in the city, Jonathan Van Meter embraces the country life

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ISSUES Annie E. Clark and Andrea Pino are changing how colleges deal with sexual assault—and shaping a national debate. Rebecca Johnson reports

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LIVES When Ivana Lowell sold her house in Sag Harbor, she decided to take the ashes of her mother, Caroline Blackwood, back to Ireland

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NOSTALGIA Superstar actor Neil Patrick Harris traces the roots of his fascination with performance to the magicians he admired in his youth CONTINUED>66 ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK MODEL VANESSA AXENTE (IN MARNI) AND ACTOR MICHIEL HUISMAN (IN A HAIDER ACKERMANN BLAZER AND A CALVIN KLEIN UNDERWEAR T-SHIRT). PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO.

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FAS HI O N E D ITO R: TO NN E G O OD M A N . H A I R, C HRI ST I A A N ; M A KEUP, LUCI A P ICA . MENSWEAR ED ITOR : MICH AEL PH ILOUZ E. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

october flash 195 IT GIRL Sophia Amoruso

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SOUL RECYCLE Patagonia plants a foot firmly in fashion with a brilliantly green capsule collection

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WINNING METAL Charlotte Dauphin de La Rochefoucauld shares the inspiration behind her first fine-jewelry collection

for you? Robert Sullivan on the art of fragrance matchmaking

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TNT Elisabeth TNT discovers that the perfect place for an artists’ retreat is under the Tuscan sun

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THEY MEAN BUSINESS Behind every great designer these days, there’s a woman in charge

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CONTINENTAL PROVIDE Monique Péan reveals the origin story of her jewelry collaboration with model Liya Kebede

ARTISTIC LICENSE Creative types are putting their stamp on beauty with products that look like they’ve come straight out of an art studio

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THE TRIP TO ITALY From a Tuscan villa to the Amalfi coast, two la dolce vita weddings were a study in contrasts

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ART Christie’s Xin Li and Victoria Siddall of Frieze Masters are building bridges—between East and West, new and old— in their respective corners of the art world

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UP

220 225

THE HAMISH FILES

view FAR AFIELD With a new creative director, famed Welliesmaker Hunter shoots for something more urbane

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BROCK STEADY Partners in both love and labor, Laura and Kris Brock founded the New York– based womenswear label Brock Collection

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GETTING DOWN How to wear the puffer jacket without looking, well . . . puffy

DOUBLE TAKE SASHA PIVOVAROVA IN A PROENZA SCHOULER DRESS, FLATS, AND CHAIN BAG. CARTIER BRACELET. PHOTOGRAPHED BY PATRICK DEMARCHELIER.

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FAS HI O N E D ITO R: TA BI T H A S IM M ON S. H A I R, JI M MY PAU L FOR BU MBL E A N D BUM BLE; MAKEUP, D ICK PAGE FOR SH ISEID O. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

TALKING FASHION Fall’s moody florals; ruffles take to the red carpet and beyond (page 218)

NOMADS AT REST Victoire de Taillac-Touhami’s Popbright Paris penthouse is the ideal perch for a family on the go

beauty & health 249 PERFUME MANIA Which fall scent is the one

HAZARDOUS HERBS With adulteration commonplace and regulation minimal, how can we be sure herbal supplements really are what they say on the jar? Liz Welch investigates C O N T I N U E D >7 8

step

october GREAT outdoors THE FALL CLASSIC, P. 284

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BREAKING UP WITH SHAMPOO There’s a (simple) secret behind fall’s cool, lived-in hair. Kayleen Schaefer on the trend that has everyone in a lather

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ART As the Musée Picasso reopens in Paris, the Spanish master has his moment

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MUSIC Kelela reinvents the club track with sultry vocals and layered beats

FRONT ROW NATALIA VODIANOVA IN A MR&MRS FURS PARKA. THE ROW RIBBED SWEATER AND WOOL DRESS. CÉLINE BOOTS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ.

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people are talkıng about 268 UP NEXT In Lone Scherfig’s latest, Max Irons plays a university student swept up in a secret society

TELEVISION A hit British mystery series gets remade for American audiences

THEATER Glenn Close returns to Broadway as a matriarch at loose ends in A Delicate Balance

made for bundling up in that most cozy of October-weekend favorites: a casual, embracing, chase-the-wind parka

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TRAVEL With its relaxed vibe, and natural beauty to spare, Sonoma County is the ideal fall getaway

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BOOKS Essays by Lena Dunham and Lynn Barber, and a biography of Tennessee Williams, examine the idiosyncratic roots of art and ambition

PERFORMANCE PIECES Today’s most compelling day looks are fearlessly creative—a mix of separates in eclectic prints and patterns, with collaged shapes and the occasional experimental textile REESE REINVENTED With a raw and riveting performance in Wild and a production company dedicated to strong female roles, Reese Witherspoon is taking risks like never before. By Tom Shone CONTINUED>82

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MOVIES Jason Schwartzman’s Philip is a possible genius and definite narcissist

OBJECT Casamidy finds its sporty side with a smart backgammon set

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POINT OF VIEW

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THE FALL CLASSIC Glorious autumn days are

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D E TA I LS, S E E I N T HI S I SSUE

DESIGN Timorous Beasties debuts a vibrant collection of tiles

TALENT Up-and-coming director Damien Chazelle doesn’t miss a step

fashion & features

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october Potluck index 350 WAY OUT WEST Screenwriter, director, and newly decanted vintner Gia Coppola shares where to go—and what to pack—for an autumn weekend in California HOP TO IT, P. 332

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IN THIS ISSUE LAST LOOK

cover look GOLDEN GIRL

RIGHT THIS WAY MOST RECIPES CALL FOR RABBIT TO BE COOKED SLOWLY, IN A STEW OR RAGÙ. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ERIC BOMAN.

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JOHN KERRY’S SECOND ACT Through one international crisis after another, America’s Secretary of State is waging a marathon campaign of high-stakes diplomacy. By Suzy Hansen HEARTS AND MINDS Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ewan McGregor make their Broadway debuts in a revival of Tom Stoppard’s mesmerizing The Real Thing. By Adam Green

Jonathan Ive, has found the way to our hearts. By Robert Sullivan

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PRINCESS BRIDE For human-rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin’s fairy-tale wedding to George Clooney, only a dream dress would do. Enter Oscar de la Renta. By Chloe Malle

STEAL OF THE MONTH With three films in three months, Charlotte Le Bon’s acting career is positively bursting

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ALL ABOUT IVE How Apple’s under-theradar design genius,

HOP TO IT Rabbits are delicious to eat, humane to raise, gentle on the environment, and famously reproductive. Tamar Adler gets cozy with the ultimate guilt-free meat

YOUNG GUNS A rising generation of anti-diva design stars has emerged from an uncertain landscape with a sensibility that’s pragmatic, personal— and transformative. By Sarah Mower

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BLANC SLATE Ivory. Arctic. Cloud: Alabaster accessories are the clear choice of this season—from bucket bags to clutches

Reese Witherspoon wears a Dolce & Gabbana laser-cut silk dress. Cartier necklace with onyx-anddiamond pendant. To get this look, try: Instant Light Radiance Boosting Complexion Base in Champagne, Bronzing Duo SPF 15 Mineral Powder Compact in Light, Kit Sourcils Pro Perfect Eyes & Brows Palette, 3-Dot Liner in Brown, Be Long Mascara in Intense Black, Rouge Eclat Lipstick in Woodrose. All by Clarins. Hair, Garren for Garren New York Salon for R+Co.; makeup, Mark Carrasquillo. Details, see In This Issue. Photographer: Mikael Jansson. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.

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video

Questions with Reese Witherspoon For the October installment of our video series, the actress takes us on a tour of her L.A. home, and reveals what she wishes she’d known in high school and where she thinks Tracy Flick might be now.

W I T HE RSP O O N: MI KA E L JA NSSO N. FAS HI ON E DI TOR : TO N NE G OO D MA N . HA IR , GAR R EN FOR GAR R EN NEW YOR K SALON FOR R + CO; MAKEUP, M A RK CA RRASQU I LLO. P RO DUC ED BY RI CA RD O D. M A RT I N S FOR NO RT H SI X. P RODUCTION D ESIGN, NICH OLAS D ES JAR D INS FOR MARY H OWAR D ST U D I O. L A N E: DA N I EL A RN OL D. FASHI O N E D I TO R, JO RD EN BI CKHA M . HA I R, IL KER AKYOL; MAKEUP, SUSIE SOBOL. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

SOUTHERN CHARM WITHERSPOON ON SET IN AN OSCAR DE LA RENTA DRESS AND A CARTIER NECKLACE.

Coats

Famed street photographer Daniel Arnold captured makeup artist Alice Lane and other stylish women in New York City wearing outerwear from the fall 2014 collections that is rife with personality.

ONE FINE DAY ALICE LANE (IN A PRADA COAT, A MOTHER OF PEARL BLOUSE, AND A ROCHAS SKIRT) WITH HER SON WALT (IN A TRICO FIELD VEST) AND HIS FRIEND GRIFFIN (IN A STELLA MCCARTNEY KIDS JACKET).

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SIMPLY RED KARLIE KLOSS IN BURBERRY PRORSUM AND A DRIES VAN NOTEN BELT. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO.

Fall Beauty Guide S ME A R: TI M HOU T. LI PST I C K: COURT ESY O F L’O RÉA L PA RI S. V I D EO: D I RECT ED BY STEV E N BRAH MS. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

The

From the season’s best new fragrances and skin-care breakthroughs to the stealthiest pro shortcut for getting the perfect smoky eye, Vogue.com brings you our definitive guide to fall beauty—just in time for dipping temperatures. This is everything you need to see, try, and do this season. We’ll also be celebrating a foolproof blowout, loving brunette hair color again, and offering our take on the best lipstick-and-sweater pairings.

video

Dutch model Imaan Hammam wouldn’t think of going out without her headphones. In this video for Vogue.com, see her dance through the streets of the Big Apple.

AND THE BEAT GOES ON SWEET TREAT HAMMAM IN AN EDITH A. MILLER T-SHIRT AND BEATS BY DR. DRE HEADPHONES.

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ANNA WINTOUR Editor in Chief Creative Director GRACE CODDINGTON Design Director RAÚL MARTINEZ Fashion Director TONNE GOODMAN Features Director EVE MacSWEENEY Market Director, Fashion and Accessories VIRGINIA SMITH Executive Fashion Editor PHYLLIS POSNICK International Editor at Large HAMISH BOWLES Fashion News Director MARK HOLGATE Creative Digital Director SALLY SINGER

Fashion Accessories Director RICKIE DE SOLE Bookings Director HELENA SURIC Market Editors KELLY CONNOR, SELBY DRUMMOND, CYNTHIA SMITH Fashion Writer NICK REMSEN Home Editor MIEKE TEN HAVE Menswear Editor MICHAEL PHILOUZE Fashion Credits Editor MELISSA RODRIGUEZ Associate Accessories Editors GRACE FULLER, MAYA SASAKI Associate Market Editors GRACE GIVENS, EMMA MORRISON Associate Home Editor REBECCA STADLEN Fashion Associate BEAU SAM Accessories Associate ALEXANDRA MICHLER Bookings Associate ANDY MacDONALD Fashion Market Coordinator TAYLOR ANGINO Accessories Assistant SARA KLAUSING Fashion Assistants LAUREN BELLAMY, ALEXANDRA CRONAN

Beauty Beauty Director SARAH BROWN Beauty Writer LAURA REGENSDORF Beauty Assistant ARDEN FANNING

Features Culture Editor VALERIE STEIKER Senior Editors TAYLOR ANTRIM, JOYCE RUBIN (Copy), COREY SEYMOUR Entertainment Editor JILLIAN DEMLING Social Editor CHLOE MALLE Style Editor at Large ELISABETH VON THURN UND TAXIS Food Critic JEFFREY STEINGARTEN Arts Reporter MARK GUIDUCCI Features Associates ALLY BETKER, KATE GUADAGNINO Features Assistants ELIZABETH INGLESE, GABRIELLA KAREFA-JOHNSON

Art Art Director ALBERTO ORTA Deputy Art Director MARTIN HOOPS Senior Designer GABRIELLE MIRKIN Design Associate JENNIFER DONNELLY Photography Director IVAN SHAW Senior Producer ALLISON BROWN Photo Editor, Research MAUREEN SONGCO Photo Researcher TIM HERZOG Production Assistant ADELE KANE

Vogue.com Site Director BEN BERENTSON Senior Director of Product Management NEHA SINGH Managing Editor ALEXANDRA MACON Production Manager ANDEE OLSON Senior Producer CHRISTINA LIAO Fashion News Director CHIOMA NNADI Fashion News Editor ALESSANDRA CODINHA Contributing Style Editor EDWARD BARSAMIAN Fashion News Writer LIANA SATENSTEIN Beauty Director CATHERINE PIERCY Beauty Editor MACKENZIE WAGONER Photography Director ANDREW GOLD Photo Editor SUZANNE SHAHEEN Assistant Photo Editor SAM ADLER Art Director FERNANDO DIAS DE SOUZA Senior Digital Designer BRENDAN DUNNE Senior Fashion Editor JORDEN BICKHAM Market Editor CHELSEA ZALOPANY Culture Editor ABBY AGUIRRE Deputy Culture Editor ALEX FRANK Associate Culture Editor PATRICIA GARCIA Social Media Manager ANNE JOHNSON Archive Editor LAIRD BORRELLI-PERSSON

Production/Copy/Research Production Director DAVID BYARS Digital Production Manager JASON ROE Deputy Copy Chief CAROLINE KIRK Senior Copy Editor LESLIE LIPTON Copy Editor DIEGO HADIS Research Director JULIE BRAMOWITZ Research Editors JENNIFER CONRAD, HEATHER RABKIN

Special Projects/Editorial Development/Public Relations Director of Special Projects SYLVANA WARD DURRETT Special Events Associate EADDY KIERNAN Editorial Business Manager MIRA ILIE Manager, Editorial Operations XAVIER GONZALEZ Director of Communications HILDY KURYK Director of Brand Marketing NEGAR MOHAMMADI Communications and Marketing Manager ELIZABETH FISCH Executive Assistant to the Editor in Chief LILI GÖKSENIN Assistants to the Editor in Chief LILY GILDOR, REY-HANNA VAKILI European Editor FIONA DaRIN Fashion Associates CAMILA HENNESSY, ANTHONY KLEIN West Coast Director LISA LOVE West Coast Associates CARA SANDERS, WENDELL WINTON Managing Editor JON GLUCK Executive Director, Editorial and Special Projects CHRISTIANE MACK Contributing Editors ROSAMOND BERNIER, MIRANDA BROOKS, ADAM GREEN, NATHAN HELLER, LAWREN HOWELL, REBECCA JOHNSON, DODIE KAZANJIAN, SHIRLEY LORD, CATIE MARRON, SARA MOONVES, SARAH MOWER, KATHRYN NEALE, CAMILLA NICKERSON, MEGAN O’GRADY, JOHN POWERS, MARINA RUST, LAUREN SANTO DOMINGO, TABITHA SIMMONS, ROBERT SULLIVAN, PLUM SYKES, SUSAN TRAIN, JONATHAN VAN METER, SHELLEY WANGER, VICKI WOODS, LYNN YAEGER

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SUSAN D. PLAGEMANN Vice President, Publisher Associate Publisher, Marketing KIMBERLY FASTING BERG Associate Publisher, Advertising DAVID STUCKEY

Advertising Advertising Director BETH McCLAIN Advertising Manager BORA PARK Executive Director, International Fashion and Business Development SUSAN CAPPA Executive Retail Director GERALDINE RIZZO Executive Beauty Director LAUREN HULKOWER-BELNICK Beauty Director AMY KATZ American Fashion Director JAMIE TILSON ROSS Luxury Director ROY KIM Account Director MARIE LA FRANCE Account Managers LENA JENSEN, MEREDITH RATH Assistant to the Publisher JESSICA BAUKOL Advertising Coordinator NINA CAPACCHIONE International Fashion Coordinator STEPHANIE ROSEN Retail Coordinator ALEXANDRA LANCI Advertising Assistants ISABELLE EDDY, SAMANTHA ANTOPOL, JILL BREITNER, LILY MUMMERT Advertising Tel: 212 286 2860 Advertising Fax: 212 286 6921 Director of Finance and Business Operations JOSIE MCGEHEE Senior Business Director LESLIE A. ROHR Associate Business Director MICHAEL NIES Advertising Services Managers WENDY HERRERA, CHRISTINE GUERCIO

Business

Creative Services Integrated Marketing Executive Director, Creative Services BONNIE ABRAMS Director, Creative Development RACHAEL KLEIN Director, Special Events and Partnerships BRIGID WALSH Integrated Marketing Directors MARK HARTNETT, SARAH RYAN Associate Director, Special Events CARA CROWLEY Associate Director, Integrated Marketing KATHERINE GALEOTTI Senior Integrated Marketing Managers JILLIAN GLENN, EUNICE KIM, JAMIE KNOWLES Integrated Marketing Manager JILLIAN ZURCHER Integrated Marketing Coordinator BRITTANY PEOPLES Integrated Marketing Assistant MEGAN KEANE Vogue Studio Creative Director DELPHINE GESQUIERE Director of Vogue Studio Services SCOTT ASHWELL Senior Art Directors SARAH RUBY, AMELIA TUBB Senior Designer NANCY ROSENBERG Copy Director DEENIE HARTZOG Junior Designer KELSEY REIFLER

Marketing Executive Director of Marketing MELISSA HALVERSON Associate Director of Marketing KATHRYN SHAW Senior Marketing Manager YI-MEI TRUXES Marketing Managers MEREDITH McCUE, ALEXANDRIA GURULE Associate Marketing Manager ANNA NATALI SWANSON-DORNEMANN Marketing Assistant LINDSAY KASS Senior Director, Digital Marketing and Innovation JULIA STEDMAN Digital Marketing Manager REBECCA ISQUITH Associate Digital Marketing Manager KATHRYN NELSON

Digital Marketing and Innovation

Branch Offices San Francisco CATHY MURRAY BANNON and SUSAN KETTLER, Directors, 50 Francisco St., San Francisco CA 94133 Tel: 415 955 8210 Fax: 415 982 5539 Midwest WENDY LEVY, Director, 875 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60611 Tel: 312 649 3522 Fax: 312 799 2703 Detroit STEPHANIE SCHULTZ, Director, 2600 West Big Beaver Rd., Troy MI 48084 Tel: 248 458 7953 Fax: 248 637 2406 Los Angeles CAROLINE BALES, Director, 6300 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90048 Tel: 323 965 3598 Fax: 323 965 4982 New England STEPHANIE COUGHLAN, RESPONSIBLE MEDIA 277 Linden St., Suite 205, Wellesley MA 02482 Tel: 781 235 2429 Fax: 781 237 5798 Southeast PETER ZUCKERMAN, Z. MEDIA 1666 Kennedy Causeway, Suite 602, Miami Beach FL 33141 Tel: 305 532 5566 Fax: 305 532 5223 Europe FLORENCE MOUVIER, Director, Europe 4 Place du Palais Bourbon, 75343 Paris Cedex 07 Tel: 331 4411 7846 Fax: 331 4705 4228 ALESSANDRO and RINALDO MODENESE, Managers, Italy Via M. Malpighi 4, 20129 Milan Tel: 39 02 2951 3521 Fax: 39 02 204 9209

Published by Condé Nast Chairman S. I. NEWHOUSE, JR. Chief Executive Officer CHARLES H. TOWNSEND President ROBERT A. SAUERBERG, JR. Chief Financial Officer DAVID E. GEITHNER President–Condé Nast Media Group & Chief Revenue Officer LOUIS CONA Chief Administrative Officer JILL BRIGHT Chief Technology Officer JOE SIMON Senior Vice President–Operations & Strategic Sourcing DAVID ORLIN Managing Director–Real Estate ROBERT BENNIS Senior Vice President–Corporate Controller DAVID B. CHEMIDLIN Senior Vice President–Market Research SCOTT McDONALD Senior Vice President–Finance JENNIFER GRAHAM Senior Vice President–Business Development JULIE MICHALOWSKI Senior Vice President–Editorial Operations RICK LEVINE Senior Vice President–Human Resources JOANN MURRAY Senior Vice President–Digital Technology NICK ROCKWELL Senior Vice President–Corporate Communications PATRICIA RÖCKENWAGNER Senior Vice President–Editorial Assets & Rights EDWARD KLARIS Vice President–CN Licensing JOHN KULHAWIK Vice President–Manufacturing GENA KELLY Vice President–Strategic Sourcing TONY TURNER Vice President–Planning & Strategy SHEN-HSIN HUNG Vice President–Digital Product Development CHRIS JONES Vice President–Human Resources NICOLE ZUSSMAN Vice President–Special Projects PATTY NEWBURGER Vice President–Digital Operations & Monetization CHRISTOPHER GUENTHER Vice President–Corporate Communications JOSEPH LIBONATI Vice President–Corporate Partnerships JOSH STINCHCOMB Vice President–Insights and Brand Strategy DANIELLA WELLS Vice President–Marketing Solutions PADRAIG CONNOLLY Vice President–Finance JUDY SAFIR Executive Vice President MONICA RAY Vice President–Consumer Marketing GARY FOODIM Vice President–Planning & Operations MATTHEW HOFFMEYER Vice President–Consumer Marketing Promotion GINA SIMMONS Vice President–Marketing Analytics CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS Condé Nast Entertainment President DAWN OSTROFF Executive Vice President–Chief Operating Officer SAHAR ELHABASHI Executive Vice President–Motion Pictures JEREMY STECKLER Executive Vice President–Programming and Content Strategy, Digital Channels MICHAEL KLEIN Executive Vice President–Chief Digital Officer FRED SANTARPIA Executive Vice President–Alternative TV JOE LABRACIO Chief Revenue Officer LISA VALENTINO Senior Vice President–Business Development & Strategy WHITNEY HOWARD Vice President–Digital Video Operations LARRY BAACH Vice President–Technology MARVIN LI Vice President–Revenue Operations JASON BAIRD Vice President–Marketing MEI LEE Vice President–Production JED WEINTROB Vice President–Scripted TV GINA MARCHESCHI Vice President–Branded Content & Sales Marketing ANISSA E. FREY Published at 4 Times Square, New York NY 10036 SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES: subscriptions@vogue.com or www.vogue.com/services or call (800) 234-2347. For Permissions and Reprint requests: (212) 630-5656; fax: (212) 630-5883. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to Vogue Magazine, 4 Times Square, New York NY 10036.

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letter from the editor

MISS SCARLET HAVING A BALL IN NINA RICCI. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO, 2008.

AGE OF EXPERIENCE WITHERSPOON TODAY, WEARING NINA RICCI. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MIKAEL JANSSON. AG E O F E X P ER I EN CE : FASH IO N E D I TO R: TON N E G O OD M A N . H A I R, GA RRE N FOR GAR R EN NEW YOR K SALON FOR R + CO. ; MAKEUP, MAR K CAR RASQUILLO. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSU E .

LADY AND THE TRUNK WITHERSPOON, PHOTOGRAPHED BY PETER LINDBERGH, 2011.

LEADING ROLE THE ACTRESS’S FIRST VOGUE COVER, PHOTOGRAPHED BY STEVEN KLEIN, 2003.

THEN NOW and

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ne of the pleasures of editing Vogue is checking in from time to time with the people who fascinate us, letting them bring us up to date with their stories. That’s the case this month with Reese Witherspoon, who makes her fifth appearance on our cover. However, it’s actually her sixth time in the magazine: Back in 1994 the eighteen-year-old Reese, wearing an absolutely tiny Prada slip, was photographed by Steven Meisel just as she was about to feature in a movie called S.F.W. That film proved to be as big as Reese’s dress, but this exceptional actress’s career has since been marked by all sorts of monumental performances, including the (Type-) A Student from Hell Tracy Flick (Election, 1999), E D I T O R ’ S L E T T E R >1 0 7 VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

FIRST MOVES HER INITIAL APPEARANCE IN VOGUE. PHOTOGRAPHED BY STEVEN MEISEL, 1994.

PARIS BY DAY WITH DESIGNER OLIVIER THEYSKENS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO, 2008.

DARLIN’ COMPANION IN EDITO R CHARACTER ’ S L E T T E RWITH >000 JOAQUIN PHOENIX, AS JUNE CARTER AND JOHNNY CASH. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, 2005.

letter from the editor

PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD THE WINDSURFING SENATOR WITH WHITE HOUSE AMBITIONS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, 2003.

GLOBAL DOMAIN SECRETARY OF STATE KERRY IN WASHINGTON, D.C. PHOTOGRAPHED BY RALPH MECKE.

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the Perky Sorority Queen Elle Woods (Legally Blonde, 2001), and an Oscar-winning turn as the Nashville Icon June Carter (Walk the Line, 2005). It’s quite staggering to realize that Reese, though only 38, is already in the midst of a three-decade-long career, one that has been conducted in the full glare of the celebrity spotlight. She has discovered that it is a light that never goes out, having shone just as strongly on her personal life as on her

movie career, tracking her as she grew up through marriage, kids, divorce, remarriage, and another child with her second husband, Jim Toth. We profile a lot of Hollywood actresses in Vogue, yet I can think of few who have laid bare, as Reese did in 2011, how one’s personal highs and lows don’t go undocumented; how fame can mean an absolute loss of privacy. “Sometimes I mourn it,” she said back then. “Sometimes I will sit in the car and cry. Because I can’t get out.” I am pleased to say that the Reese whom writer Tom Shone encountered in his profile “Reese Reinvented” (page 308) is in a very good place. She plays the lead role of Cheryl Strayed in Wild, a movie that led her into new terrain as a recovering heroin addict undertaking a 1,100-mile hike, with her performance already being talked about as an Academy Award contender, while her production company is behind director David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Both movies indicate the kind of brave and interesting choices Reese is willing to make with her career. Experience has led her to a point where she understands that taking risks can bring all sorts of new rewards into one’s life. I look forward to writing about her next chapter in the years to come. As we were working on this issue, it became apparent that “then and now” had unwittingly become something of a theme for October. Istanbul-based writer Suzy Hansen endeavored to keep up with the whirlwind travel schedule of Secretary of State John Kerry, E D I T O R ’ S L E T T E R >1 0 8 VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

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CLASS OF 2014 EIGHT DESIGNERS, SEVEN LABELS: ONE NEW GENERATION OF FASHION STARS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY JAMIE HAWKESWORTH. VERY GOOD YEARS TWO DIFFERENT VINTAGES OF DESIGNERS, MANY OF WHOM WENT ON TO GREATNESS. LEFT, PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, 2010. BELOW, PHOTOGRAPHED BY STEVEN MEISEL, 2000.

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trailing him through Poland, France, Britain, and Lebanon before— finally—sitting down with him in Washington, D.C. We first profiled Senator Kerry in March 2003, when he was hoping to be the Democratic nominee ahead of the 2004 election. History, as we all know, clearly had another path for him, and as you will read in “John Kerry’s Second Act” (page 320), he is intent on making his life and career play out in ways that will be both meaningful and beneficial. Given the sheer number of conflict zones around the world right now, that’s no small challenge. I certainly applaud his fearlessness. Lastly, we bring you a group of the young (and youngish) designers who we believe are destined to be stars in “Young Guns” (page 336). It’s not the first time we’ve done a survey of who’s next in the fashion world: One such group in 2000 included the likes of Nicolas Ghesquière, Olivier Theyskens, and Hedi Slimane, while another in 2010 featured Raf Simons, Riccardo Tisci, and Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler. That’s illustrious company to be joining—but something tells me that the talents we brought together to photograph in a field in New Jersey on a hot afternoon in late July are more than able to stand with them.

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talking back

Letters from Readers GRACE NOTES LUPITA NYONG’O, IN A PRADA DRESS, PHOTOGRAPHED BY MIKAEL JANSSON.

Nyong’o. Her performance in 12 Years a Slave was well-deserving of an Oscar, and her intellect and beauty make her an exciting new star to watch. I am definitely looking forward to seeing her in future films.

Nicole Amiridis Los Angeles, CA

I picked up the VOGUE July issue, delighted to see Lupita Nyong’o on the cover. However, what a disappointment it was to read her comment when she compared the red carpet experience to being in a “war zone.” It was truly insensitive.

Lily Clark London, UK

BREAKTHROUGH BEAUTY After a short hiatus from my VOGUE subscription, I picked up the July issue and was thrilled to see Lupita Nyong’o on the cover [“Grace Notes,” by Hamish Bowles, photographed by Mikael Jansson]. Ms. Nyong’o is smart, sophisticated, and sartorially perfect. My faith—and my subscription—have been renewed.

Margaret Siple Seattle, WA

Lupita Nyong’o has wrapped the red carpet around her finger, navigated mind-numbing interviews with effortless élan, and earned cinema’s highest honor on her first impassioned try. What’s next for her?

Brad Barnes Santa Ana, CA

Though it was refreshing to see Lupita Nyong’o on the cover, the feature leaned too heavily on representing her as exotic. Yes, it’s wonderful and significant that the newest It girl represents diversity rarely seen in Hollywood, but Lupita’s appeal as an actor and role model comes from much more than the fact that she’s African. The piece, and especially the photographs, focused a bit too much on the novelty of Lupita’s look; the well-deserved adoration has very little to do with what makes her different and everything to do with her poise, her intelligence, her dedication to her craft, and the fact that, for any skin tone or hair texture, she is just uncommonly stunning.

Rena Thérèse Cambridge, MA

Any magazine that tirelessly promotes incredible artists is a great one in my book, but I was especially pleased to read your recent article on Lupita

I just got my copy in the mail, and I’m overjoyed to see Lupita Nyong’o on the cover. The first thing I did was flip to the story. The photographs were magnificent. TA L K I N G B A C K >1 2 4 VOGUE.COM

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talking back Letters from Readers

MOD GODDESS CARA DELEVINGNE, IN A BURBERRY TRENCH COAT, JOSH NICKERSON (FAR LEFT) IN SAINT LAURENT BY HEDI SLIMANE, AND MATTHEW WHITEHOUSE (RIGHT), IN A BURBERRY LONDON SUIT, PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO.

This gorgeous and talented woman is a perfect fit with the ideals that VOGUE embodies—elegance, sophistication, and ambition. I hope to see more of her in future issues!

Karen Martin-Faulkner Edmond, OK

I returned from vacation in Brazil to find that, sometimes, we miss the mark in the U.S. by being too singular in our presentation of beauty as Caucasian and fair-skinned. This is why, when I saw Lupita Nyong’o on your July cover, tears of joy came to my eyes. This is the most breathtaking cover I have seen in a long time.

Yvonne Okoh Onyike Arlington, VA

issue [“Mod Goddess,” by Plum Sykes, photographed by Mario Testino]. The article, however, left me disappointed and feeling like all I’d learned about Cara was that she’s sleep-deprived. I wanted some kind of insight into what it’s like to be her, something I can’t get from her Instagram. I understand that Cara’s naps shortened the interview, but I still wish Sykes could have discovered something new and noteworthy.

Janie Provoncha Woodbridge, VA

in demand. Yes, she has a distinguished career. Yes, she has a hectic schedule, but her tardiness is off-putting.

Adriana Padilla Austin, TX

WAKING LIFE I was ecstatic to see a mention of Cara Delevingne on the cover of the July

As a young woman with a successful career in modeling and fashion, Cara Delevingne, I would think, would want to exhibit professionalism in this industry. The excuse of “jet lag” leading to her behavior is foolish. When asked about her late nights out partying, she again referred to jet lag, which causes her to stay out late. Yes, she is a model

I was a bit turned-off by Cara Delevingne’s work ethic. She may be the hottest model, but an interview with Plum Sykes for VOGUE should be important to her. Cara should have made this interview a priority. After all, VOGUE, along with other fashion magazines, helped her rise to the top. She does take fabulous editorial photos, though.

William Bulaclac Arleta, CA

LABOR OF LOVE While Lupita Nyong’o is obviously beautiful, talented, and inspiring, it was “About Time,” by Mira Jacob [Up Front, July] TA L K I N G B A C K >1 2 8 VOGUE.COM

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talking back Letters from Readers that stole my heart. Thank you for sharing a unique and optimistic outlook on marriage decades after “I do”!

Alison Masters Greensboro, NC

[“Living History,” by Megan O’Grady, photographed by Annemarieke van Drimmelen, July]. Hats off to her phenomenal success!

Judith Stanton Pittsboro, NC

Thank you for including the essay by Mira Jacob in the July issue. “About Time” described such an affecting process of falling in love—or learning how to fall in love. Arranged marriage is a taboo topic in this country and I’m pleased that VOGUE presented it in such an educational, warm, and human way.

Katharine Greiner Bryan, TX

THE NEW GIRL Lizzy Caplan is a modern-day role model for today’s actresses [“Cool Factor,” by John Powers, photographed by Angelo Pennetta, July]. She’s masterfully sexy, has her own style, is smart as hell, and most important, fearless and just downright funny. I’m glad to see that she has found a role that she can really make her own.

Ryan Milles New York, NY

under our eyes [by Vicki Woods, photographed by Inez and Vinoodh]. Wrinkled faces are very pretty and expressive. It’s such a shame we fill up with Botox and other products to hide the fact that we have lived for so long. It sure would be nice to read something positive about being alive, healthy, and able to hold our heads high with our old, beautiful, smiling faces.

Cathy Manning Reno, NV

BRAVE HEARTS Words like courageous, fearless, and bulletproof come to mind whenever I hear or read about the young Russian human-rights activists Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alekhina of Pussy Riot [“Enemies of the State,” by Sara Corbett, photographed by Taryn Simon, July]. Public ridicule, imprisonment, TA L K I N G B A C K >1 3 2

HISTORY BUFF As a former academic who is now happily writing historical fiction, I applaud Katy Simpson Smith’s decision to leave the Ph.D. track and write

AU NATUREL I read the article “Seeing Double” in the July issue on wrinkles and bags

LIVING HISTORY KATY SIMPSON SMITH, IN THAKOON, PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANNEMARIEKE VAN DRIMMELEN.

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and even the threat of death are daily realities for these outspoken women and their loved ones. After their 21-month stint in the brutal Russian prison system, I was so pleased to read this update and learn more about their undeterred efforts for reform.

Christine Joy Washington, D.C.

ENEMIES OF THE STATE MASHA ALEKHINA (LEFT), IN MICHAEL KORS, AND NADYA TOLOKONNIKOVA, IN VALENTINO, PHOTOGRAPHED BY TARYN SIMON.

I applaud Masha and Nadya for staying the course and not abandoning their fight for a movie deal, tour offer, and the like. These women continue to raise awareness of issues that matter, both globally and within Russia’s borders. My main criticism is not of Masha and Nadya, but of those who have wined and dined them, taking such an interest in their actions. For years in the U.S., people have spoken about prison conditions and few, if any, have made a splash like Masha

and Nadya. What makes the statements of some more believable and worthy of support than others? It appears that Masha and Nadya have good heads on their shoulders and I hope they continue to be activists for voices that have not received worldwide support, but carry equally important messages.

Cheyenne Moore Denver, CO VOGUE welcomes letters from its readers. Address all mail to Letters, VOGUE Magazine, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036, or via email to Talkingback@vogue.com. Please include your name, address, and a daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity and may be published or used in any medium. All submissions become the property of the publication and will not be returned.

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contributors Natalia VODIANOVA “I discovered a rural, wild part of Connecticut. To capture the right mood, an artificial cloud followed us everywhere. It was especially popular with my children and passersby.”

VODIANOVA WITH CHILDREN (FROM LEFT) VIKTOR, NEVA, AND LUCAS IN FENWICK, CT

THE ACTOR, WEARING A JOHN SMEDLEY SWEATER

Michiel HUISMAN

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f you spend any time watching television, you will almost certainly know Michiel Huisman even if you don’t know his name. Since making his American debut as a busker on Treme, the striking Dutch actor has exploded with a series of splashy roles. He’s Emilia Clarke’s warrior/lover Daario Naharis on Game of Thrones, sexy music producer Liam McGuinnis on Nashville, and Cal Morrison, the dubious father of Sarah’s daughter on Orphan Black. “It’s kind of crazy,” he says happily. “Last year I was suddenly on TV three nights a week on three great shows. And people were like, ‘Who’s this guy on my TV every night?’ ” Huisman, 33, is possessed of a handsomeness charged with ambiguity, which means he can play heroic, sinister, ardent, anything. Small wonder he’s already got three new movies in the can: Wild with Reese Witherspoon (“Reese Reinvented,” page 308), The Age of Adaline, in which Blake Lively plays a woman who never ages and falls in love with Huisman’s character, and The Invitation, a nasty thriller about a dinner party, in which he may be a villain. Still, he can’t stop talking about Game of Thrones. “I just love it,” he tells me by phone from the Dutch countryside. “I’m playing somebody who’s flashy, superconfident, and cool. I walk on set and I get my sword and there are 500 soldiers waiting.” He laughs. “I feel like a kid in a C O N T R I B U T O R S >1 4 0 candy store.”—JOHN POWERS VOGUE.COM

VOD I A N OVA : A NN I E LE I BOV IT Z . FAS HI O N ED I TO R: CA M I LLA N I CK ERSO N . HA I R , R ECINE; MAKEUP, D IANE KENDAL. PRODUCTION D ESIGN, MARY H OWAR D. H UISMAN: MAR IO TESTI N O. FAS HI O N ED I TOR : TON N E G OO D MA N . HA I R, CHRI ST IA A N ; MA K EU P, LUCI A P I CA . M ENSWEAR ED ITOR , MICH AEL PH ILOUZ E. PRODUCED BY INGR ID D EUSS PRODUCTION. D ETAILS, SE E IN T HIS ISSU E .

THE MODEL ON “THE FALL CLASSIC,” PAGE 284.

contributors Neil Patrick HARRIS

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THE ACTOR (RIGHT) WITH PARTNER DAVID BURTKA

Charlotte LE BON “As a child, I wanted to be a trainer for dolphins and a singer and I wanted to be a pilot. Plan B is not so bad.”

THE STEAL OF THE MONTH SUBJECT ON HER CAREER AS AN ACTRESS C O N T R I B U T O R S >1 4 6

LE BON, IN AN ERIN ERIN FETHERSTON DRESS

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H A RRI S A N D BU RTK A : © 2014 PAT RI C K M C MULLAN COMPANY, INC. LE BON: BOO GEORGE. HAIR, ESTHER LANGHAM; MAKEUP, CHRISTIAN M C CULLOCH FOR D OLCE & GA BBA N A . P RO DUCE D BY FI LL IN T HE B LA NK P RO DUCT IO N . SH OT ON LO CATI ON AT Z EZ É FLOWERS, NYC. PROP STYLIST, ER IN LAR K GRAY. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

eil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography (Crown Archetype) may be the first celebrity memoir to include instructions for “good, sexy card tricks.” “Those two words don’t often come together,” says the actor, who expands on his lifelong hobby and the larger history of magic in this issue’s Nostalgia (“The Art of Magic,” page 188). Then, of course, there’s the magic of the theater, “the idea that you can see Shakespeare performed with benches and candles, and then two months later in the same space, it’s an entirely different world.” For now, the stage at Broadway’s Belasco Theatre still belongs to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, though Harris ended his Tony-winning turn as its strutting glam-rocker in August. “I’ve never felt more proud of anything I’ve done,” he says of the deeply demanding role, rehearsals for which began just as How I Met Your Mother was wrapping back in L.A. “It’s felt like living in a snow globe, and everything’s finally starting to settle.” But while Harris is looking forward to lying low and maybe granting a few of his kids’ constant pleas to make things disappear, fans can catch him as the foil to Ben Affleck’s Nick Dunne in this month’s Gone Girl.—KATE GUADAGNINO

contributors THE PHOTOGRAPHER, SHOT BY ADAM MURRAY

Jamie HAWKESWORTH ELWICK-BATES AT GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL

t age 20, Jamie Hawkesworth (“Young Guns,” page 336) picked up a camera, photographing a mock crime scene as part of his course work as a forensicscience student. Within two years he’d forsaken criminology, moved to London, and aced his first professional gig, printing his images by hand. A Young Gun in his own right, the 27-year-old feels the weight of early success and the expectations that come with it. “It’s worrying, stressful,” says the Brit, “but in a healthful way.” For his shoot with Contributing Editor Camilla Nickerson, he wanted to “capture an environment I could understand” and, also, make Jonathan Anderson smile.—ELIZABETH INGLESE

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Emma ELWICK-BATES E LW I CK- BAT ES: COU RTESY OF A LI STA I R GUY

“When I was growing up, my mother kept stacks of American and British Vogue in the library—perfect for flicking through on a rainy Welsh afternoon with my sisters. I can still recall the cover of Princess Diana in a black jumper.”

VOGUE’S NEW FASHION NEWS EDITOR (“FAR AFIELD,” VIEW, PAGE 225) ON HER EARLY JOB TRAINING

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up front ROOM TO THINK THE AUTHOR, IN A BURBERRY LONDON SUIT AND A BUDD SHIRT, ON HIS PROPERTY IN UPSTATE NEW YORK. PHOTOGRAPHED BY JASON SCHMIDT. FASHION EDITOR: TONNE GOODMAN.

t the risk of sounding appallingly pretentious, it was Cate Blanchett who made me realize it was time to leave New York City. It was a year ago, last October, and we had just finished a leisurely interview over a late dinner in a London restaurant when we found ourselves standing on a rainy street corner, not quite ready to say good night. She asked what I was doing the next day, and I said I had no plans because I have no friends who live in central London anymore. Like my friends in Manhattan, most of them have moved somewhere less ruinous. Blanchett, who’d left London herself a few years earlier, looked a little wistful and said, “It’s a different place.” Having recently turned 50, I muttered something about being older—maybe that’s what had changed. “No,” she said firmly. “The world’s changed. It’s very difficult to know where to be.” Then she compared giving up one’s chosen city to a drunk going dry. “Because sometimes life is so fast and so absolute that the only way you can change things is by actually shifting your life utterly and totally to a different hemisphere. You can’t partially change. There’s no semi-revolution.”

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Into The WOODS What happens when a die-hard New Yorker doesn’t take Manhattan? After 26 years, JONATHAN VAN METER says goodbye to the city and embraces the country life.

That was the moment, right there, the speech delivered toward the end of the story by the passing character in the protagonist’s life that turns on the light and shifts everything. As I said goodbye and walked away, my heart pounding, I was filled with a rush of certainty about something I had been puzzling over for years: Where should I be? I hopped in a cab and called my boyfriend, Andy, back in New York: Quit your job, and let’s move upstate. Leaving the life I knew was a terrifying thought, but then again, I’d done it before. When I was 24 and living in Atlantic City, my parents helped me pack up what little stuff I owned into the back of their pickup truck U P F R O N T>1 5 0 VOGUE.COM D E TA I LS, S E E I N T HI S I SSUE

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up front Hello to All This and dropped me off on the corner of One-hundred-second Street and Broadway, where I had found a sublet for $575 a month in the classifieds of The New York Times. I wanted to be a writer, and New York was calling. Never mind that I knew exactly one person in the city, a waitress/actress named Cristine, and she was barely speaking to me. Twenty-six years, eight apartments, one book, and dozens of magazine cover stories later, Manhattan had become not just the place I’d lived my whole adult life but my identity. My career, my social life, my love life had all taken place within four square miles. And for the better part of two decades, that was good enough for me. But sometime in the last few years I began to hear a faint hissing—the sound of air leaking out of the dream. What had changed? New York, for one. Far too much has been written about this already, but suffice it to say that the street I lived on for many years—once a sublime combination of urban lumberyard, artists’ studios, and a fifties diner—is now a high-end shopping mecca with four-star pizzerias and a Kobe-beef emporium selling Wagyu for $130 a pound. It’s the story of so much of Manhattan, but when it happens to your street, it’s heartbreaking. My friend Ellen is still the co-op–board president of the loft building Andy and I called home. She emailed me the other day to say that the ground-floor commercial space, once home to a kooky antiques shop run by an eccentric pain in the ass, has been rented out to Phillip Lim, who is opening a new store during Fashion Week with a big party at which Banks will perform. Nothing against Lim or Banks, but who other than a groupie wants to live above that? We sold our loft in that building a few years ago and, in a final attempt to find a place to be in the city, bought another loft in Alphabet City, where I had lived in the late eighties. But I could not shake the feeling that I had become a ghost, wandering around the streets of my salad days, stalking my younger self. When I told a friend, a grande dame in her 80s, that Andy and I were thinking of leaving Manhattan, she implored me not to tell anyone. They will think you are out of the game, she said. But that’s the other thing that’s changed: There is no game. The New York media complex has atomized and scattered to the winds. If Glenn Greenwald, the guy who broke the Edward Snowden story, can shake the U.S. security apparatus to its very foundation from the top of a mountain in Rio, it’s clear that you can change the conversation from pretty much anywhere. It was time to shove on, and, luckily, we already had a place to go. bout five years earlier, during a rare but keenly felt rough patch in Andy’s and my relationship, we made the fairly rash decision to buy a house in Woodstock, one of the most well-known small towns in the world, where the 1969 music festival famously didn’t take place. It was rash not just because we had visited Woodstock only once before, in the middle of February, but because we also already owned a country house, a twelve-acre farm in a small town in New Jersey called Woodbine, not far from the horse farm where I grew up. Long story how it came to be ours, but bottom line, it was both a wreck and cheaper than a Porsche Carrera, the monthly mortgage payment not much more than our parking space in Manhattan. I have a lot of family in South Jersey, and our little farm very quickly became the Van Meter compound. It wasn’t until that rough patch that Andy finally told me he wasn’t thrilled to be spending his weekends witness to, but never truly a part of, all the highs and lows of a family dynamic that had been playing out for decades before he arrived on the scene. I finally addressed what had, until that moment, been swept under the rug: We needed a place of our own, away from my history and out of the city, with its co-op and condo boards, where ownership still feels like sharing,

Manhattan had become my identity. My career, my social life, my love life had all taken place within four square miles where nothing is ever truly yours. We needed a place where we could be alone, together, where every decision (and all of its ramifications) would be ours and ours alone. It was right around this time that our friend Abbe, who lived in our building in Manhattan with her husband and eight-year-old son, and who spent her summers in Woodstock, decided that there would be no semi-revolution for her, either. She left her husband for a woman and then pulled up stakes and left New York entirely: Just like that, she was gone. It was jarring, to say the least. I had always thought of Abbe as being more like me than not: hopelessly urban. We were both given to quoting lines from Sandra Bernhard’s Without You I’m Nothing: “New York, New York . . . if you can make it here, you will fail. every. where. else!” I needed to investigate what was going on in this little town that had so ensorcelled my friend, so that February, with three feet of snow on the ground, Andy and I drove up to Woodstock to spend the weekend with Abbe, a weekend during which she threw a fortieth-birthday party for herself and nearly 100 people showed up, many of them expats from the city, including a couple dozen happy gay men, and we all danced in her living room until 4:00 a.m. It was the best party I had been to in years. Andy and I both felt something click that weekend, and so we went back and looked at real estate and promptly fell in love with the second house we walked into: a 100-year-old shingle-style cottage on five acres, a half mile up the mountain, just outside town. The house had only two previous owners. The first was an army nurse who built the original structure herself out of wood from decommissioned barracks in New Jersey that she had shipped up the Hudson River. The second was a woman named Johanna Vos, who bought the place in 1963 with her husband, Aart, and over the years expanded it into a rambling, sneaky-big warren of wonderfully odd proportions; there are four bedrooms, four bathrooms, five porches, an oversize Federal-style fireplace, and three sets of French doors that open out onto a huge, private oasis of a backyard. The writer John Bowe declared the house to be “nook-tastic” when he came to visit one day that first summer. U P F R O N T>1 5 2 VOGUE.COM

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up front Hello to All This Johanna Vos had worked as a journalist in Paris in the thirties. Living in Holland during World War II, she and Aart rescued 36 Jews, hiding them in their home and in a tunnel that Aart built under their backyard. After the war they moved to Woodstock and started a summer camp for the children of U.N. employees. Aart died in 1990, but Johanna lived until 2007. There was a strange office cubicle in one corner of the living room— presumably where she wrote her book, The End of the Tunnel. We learned some of this history at the closing from Johanna’s daughter and her husband—and some from her lengthy obituary in The New York Times. When Johanna’s son-inlaw handed over the keys in the parking lot of the bank, he said, “Make sure you walk far enough into the woods and find the waterfalls.” The minute Andy and I got settled into the house, FALLING SLOWLY A WATERFALL NEAR THE I set about building a trail that begins at the back HOUSE BROUGHT BACK of our yard and goes deep into the woods, all BOYHOOD MEMORIES. the way to the big stream that runs down Mead Mountain. The trail ends at three preposterously beautiful We quickly discovered that renovating to create the waterfalls that have, through centuries of constant splashillusion that everything has always been there requires a thesis-like amount of research. One day, while interviewdown, carved out lovely little swimming holes, just big enough for two people to float around in, which is exactly what Andy ing someone at the Rose Bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel and I did every chance we got that first summer. When I built in the city, I inquired about the beautiful wood covering the trail, I did it with such a freaky intensity, such monomathe walls and discovered that it came from the Hudson niacal focus, that Andy had no choice but to mock me by Company, a reclaimed-lumber mill not far from our house naming the path Jonny’s Way. I did not stop to think much upstate. If it’s good enough for Ian Schrager . . . , I thought. about why I became so obsessed, what sort of primeval urge A small fortune later, we have new-old floors and new-old was in play, as I raked and mowed and cleared rocks and beams in the ceiling that look like they’ve been in place for fallen trees and lopped off branches and plowed through the 100 years. When we finally found a source for handmade woods until I made it to the stream. It wasn’t until a year later, encaustic cement tile for the kitchen and dining room and feeling lonely and bored one day after a relentless 48-hour then fell in love with a pattern that was already in stock August rain, when I walked the trail back to the waterfalls (cheaper), we hesitated a moment too long and Zac Posen and sat on a big rock and stared into the churn, that I stopped bought out the entire lot. We eventually swallowed hard to think about it: I was re-creating—reclaiming—my most and custom-designed our own batch—and then had to fundamental, and in some ways most complicated, boywait three months for it to arrive on a ship all the way from Morocco. When the interior was finally finished, hood memories, those middle years between seven and ten we painted the exterior, trim and all, a spooky gray-green when I spent a lot of time by myself in the woods, building color that looks almost black, called New York Café Noir a fort, catching frogs and turtles—lonely and yet somehow (very Woodstock), which, ironically enough, we found at exhilarated by a newfound sense of freedom. As I sat there, I Walmart (not very Woodstock). Our contractor refuses to realized I had finally found what I had hoped to find on the shop there, so he had it mixed somewhere less offensive to farm in Woodbine: a place to be. the local anti-corporate sensibility. Oh, the hippies. It permeates everything here: the endne day the Woodstock building inspector said to us, “Mrs. Vos was very frugal.” Is that why less yoga options, the crystals and healers, the tie-dye the house wasn’t insulated? Was warmth seen shops, the Buddhist monastery on our road at the top of as too indulgent? She lived in a cold house the mountain, the place to get your teeth cleaned called for more than 40 years! How could we have Transcend Dental. It’s ripe for mocking, but it’s also kind known that a year-round home within 30 miles of three ski of great. Nobody’s trying too hard. It’s uncool here, and resorts would have no insulation? For the next five years, we that’s not a complaint. People are nice. At four-way stop meticulously renovated every square inch: replaced every signs, no one wants to appear pushy by going first. (As window (but in the exact six-over-six, mullioned style of opposed to New York, where everyone has to be first.) I the originals), took down and put back up every single wall once honked my horn at the proud gray-haired hippie lady (replastered just as they were before). For some reason, we in the Subaru station wagon ahead of me at the stop sign felt it was important to hew as closely as possible to her in front of the village green. She probably lives in a purple vision—but warmer. house. I felt guilty for weeks. U P F R O N T>1 5 4

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up front Hello to All This Visitors from the city often ask if we “have any friends” upstate, which makes us laugh out loud. We’ve never had more friends! We turn down dinner-party invitations every weekend because we’re always booked. Even though most of our friends in the city had moved to big town houses in the New Brooklyn Suburbia—where they no longer had the excuse of a toosmall apartment—they still weren’t exactly fighting over us as guests to all the dinner parties they hoped to have because they’re too exhausted from demanding jobs and chasing after fiveyear-olds. I never thought I’d say this, but we were bored in Manhattan. e’re continually amazed by the oddball menagerie we’ve accumulated, the unlikely social orbit we’ve been pulled into. There’s Karen, the tennis pro at the Woodstock Tennis Club whom we play with regularly. We call her Vegetable Princess of Ulster County—for 80 years her family owned Gill Farms, a 1,200-acre produce farm that they just sold to Warren Buffett’s son’s foundation for $13 million. There’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge Pierre Leval and his wife, Susana, who was nominated by President Obama to be on the National Museum and Library Services Board. They live nearby on an old bluestone quarry, where they have the best pool parties in town. At one of our earliest gatherings, new friends Stéphane and Alison, an NYU professor and a family mediator, brought along Alison’s mother, the photographer Gay Block, who published a book and had a show at MoMA called “Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust.” Sometime in the eighties, Gay had photographed Johanna and Aart’s portrait in what is now our living room, and she wanted us to see it. Minus all the macramé and spider plants, it looks pretty much the same now as it did then. We moved into our not-quitetotally-renovated house on April 1, and the digging of the pool began on April 2. The noise and the dust and the carpenters and the painters and the landscapers are all gone now, the house finished, the pool a marvel. Andy does laps in his Speedo every morning. I walk into the woods and out to the waterfalls when I am feeling stuck or bored or anxious. It beats wandering around the East Village, feels easier to hit the reset button, refresh the page. I am not a fool, however. I know that our existential worries follow us wherever we go, though some of them take on a slightly different cast. What was once OMG, what if a bomb explodes on the subway when Andy is coming home from work in Times Square? is now Please let Andy not hit a deer on 375 when he’s driving home from getting the groceries. And, sure, there are things I will always miss about living in Manhattan: barbershops on every other block; Asian delivery that arrives in seven minutes; walking home tipsy through the West Village at midnight after a particularly raucous dinner party; my shrink’s couch. But so far, I am mostly getting what I need up here in the Catskills, including, for lack of a

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The trail ends at three preposterously beautiful waterfalls, just big enough for two people to float around under better phrase, the occasional sense of well-being that, for whatever reason, seemed to escape me in the city. It’s that anxious, bored, alone, but happy thing I felt when I was a kid, on my own, in the woods. My friend Diane recently said to me during one of her weekend visits upstate, “You are your best self here.” Isn’t that what everyone wants? I can’t explain exactly why I am paying $20 a month to Verizon to hang on to the 212 phone number I had in the city for more than 20 years. Every once in a while, I dial it, just to make sure it’s still mine. I find it perversely amusing that it rings forever, into nowhere. A Manhattan friend recently called to chat and as the conversation was winding down asked, “How’s life in the country?” Well . . . , I said. It’s summer. “You’ll be back,” she said, laughing, and then hung up.

TO SEE PERSONAL SNAPSHOTS OF VAN METER’S MOVE, DOWNLOAD THE VOGUE DIGITAL EDITION

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issues How were two 20-somethings with no legal background, no money, and no formal organization going to take on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the country’s top educational institutions, on such a difficult topic? And why Title IX? Wasn’t that the law created to ensure that women’s sports on campus got as much money as men’s sports? Call us when you have something, the news people essentially told them. In March 2013, only a few weeks after sending in their complaint, they had something. “To be honest,” Clark, now 25, says about the letter she received from the U.S. Department of Education informing her that an investigation was about to be opened, “I was so surprised I almost fell down.” Clark and Pino, who is 22, weren’t the first to file such a complaint, though usually the petitioners went by the name of Jane Doe. Victims willing to use their real names attached to real stories? Suddenly, the newspapers were calling them. Soon, they were on the front page of The New York Times, avatars of an entirely new way of viewing sexual assault on campus. A year after they filed their complaint, the White House announced a task force to address the problem. This past summer, when New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Missouri senator Claire McCaskill announced a bipartisan bill to reform and strengthen many of the laws regarding the issue, Clark and Pino were on the dais with them. When the two women first showed up earlier in the year, unannounced, in Gillibrand’s Capitol Hill office and said, “Let’s talk about ending sexual assault on campus,” the staff was unsure what to make of them. Didn’t they know you needed an appointment? Once they heard their stories, though, they knew their boss had to meet with them. The whole scenario reminded Gillibrand of her own battles with the military over sexual assault. “This is how our system works,” the senator says. “We need citizen activists to bring attention to these situations.” Rape on campus is not new, of course. In fact, it’s disturbingly common. One out of every five young women who attend college will, at some point, be sexually assaulted. For a long time, the problem was rationalized, if not, in a sense, accepted. Alcohol is flowing. Hormones are raging. Things happen. Sometimes, those things are bad. “You just learned to live with it, like living with the risk I S S U E S >1 5 8 CHARTING THE TERRITORY PINO (BELOW, FAR LEFT) AND CLARK IN LOS ANGELES, IN FRONT OF THE MAP THEY USE TO KEEP TRACK OF THEIR WORK. ABOVE: JUST ONE OF THE MANY HEADLINES THE TWO HAVE GENERATED. VOGUE.COM

Annie E. Clark and Andrea Pino are changing how colleges deal with sexual assault—and shaping a national debate. REBECCA JOHNSON reports.

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arly last year, when Annie E. Clark and Andrea Pino decided to file a complaint against their alma mater for sexual harassment using an unorthodox framing of the federal law known as Title IX, they called up some local news outlets in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The university, they said, was doing a terrible job both preventing and handling sexual assault, and they intended to do something about it. “Basically,” Clark says of her conversations, “they laughed at us.”

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J EFF LI PS KY. SI T T I NG S E D I TO R: SA LLY LYND L EY. HA I R, CH A RLES M C N A I R FO R L’OR ÉAL PROFESSIONNEL HA I RCA RE ; M A KEU P, NATAS HA S EV E RI N O FO R YSL B EAU T É. D ETA I LS, S EE I N T HI S ISSUE.

FIGHTING

issues Crisis on Campus of earthquakes,” says Michele Dauber, a law professor at Stanford who consulted with Clark and Pino and whose own work at her university has been a model for reform. “Students were told, ‘You should protect yourself,’ but there wasn’t much effort to change the culture.” Such change took shape quietly and came from an unlikely place. Shortly after his first election, President Obama made good on his campaign promise to strengthen enforcement of civil rights laws by hiring Russlynn Ali, a former teacher turned lawyer, at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Under the Bush Administration, the office had been a sleepy backwater, but in 2011, Ali sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to every university in America reminding them that sexual violence is not only a crime but also a form of discrimination— thus making it a violation of Title IX, which guarantees equal access in education. Some conservatives cried foul, labeling campus sexual assault “an imaginary emergency.” At first, it was a bombshell that nobody paid much attention to. “For the average person it didn’t compute,” says Dauber. “They understood that a professor putting his hand on your knee and promising a good grade for sex is harassment, but if every day in class you have to sit next to the boy who raped you, that’s harassment too. The letter made students aware of a right they didn’t know they had.” The ultimate penalty for violating Title IX is withdrawal of all federal funding to an institution, but since that has literally never happened, most universities felt free to leave the letter at the bottom of the in-box. What they did not count on were students like Clark and Pino stumbling onto its existence. hip-smart and passionate about their cause, both women were among the first in their families to attend college. Pino, a second-generation CubanAmerican from Miami, talks case law with a methodical attention to detail. Clark is the more emotional one, with hair streaked blonde, thick mascara, a Southern accent, and a Phi Beta Kappa key around her neck. When Clark goes afield, Pino reins her in. “You’re skipping ahead,” Pino chastises her. “I know,” Clark answers. “It’s how my brain works.” Both women’s lives were forever altered by sexual assaults that occurred during their undergraduate years, though Clark is more hesitant to discuss hers in detail. “It’s a very personal issue,” she says. “I was assaulted pretty violently by a stranger—most people are assaulted by someone they know—and it’s still hard to talk about. After it happened and I fought him off I ran into a bathroom, where I tried to get myself together. I remember putting my hands down on the white ceramic sink and staring at myself in this dirty mirror in a state of shock, not knowing how to process what had just happened to my body. I made the decision to go public seven years after it happened because I saw so many friends and students going through the same thing, and I was in a position to speak out.” First, though, she had to tell her parents. “I not only had to tell my mom that I had been raped, but that my story was about to be in the local paper,” Clark says. “It’s not a phone call any daughter wants to make—or any mother wants to take.” Pino was attacked as a sophomore in 2012 when she went to a party off-campus one night with some friends. She didn’t typically go to parties but, ironically, she was concerned about a friend and accompanied her. Once there, Pino—who wasn’t drinking—began to dance with a student, a white male with blue eyes and brown hair wearing Levi’s. She’d never seen him before—nor has she since—and never learned his name. To this day, Pino cannot say exactly what happened that night. She remembers being dragged into a bathroom, where she was slammed so hard against the wall that she blacked out from a concussion. When she came to, she saw her own blood on the white tile floor and shakily returned

In their wildest dreams, Clark and Pino couldn’t have predicted the firestorm they were able to unleash to the party, hoping to find some answers, but her friends were nowhere to be found. She walked back to her dorm room alone that night, her body aching, her mind confused. It was spring in North Carolina. The azaleas were blooming—that much she remembers. The next morning she woke up battered and bruised in her dorm room in a pool of blood. “At first I didn’t think I was raped,” she says. “I thought I just had my period—but when I tried to use a tampon, it was too painful.” Later that morning she saw the friend who had been with her at the party. “I don’t know what happened last night,” Pino confessed. “Maybe you just had a bad hookup,” the friend offered. At the time, going to the police didn’t seem like a viable option— “I couldn’t handle it,” she says. “I couldn’t even use the word assault. I didn’t want to think that I could be raped at Chapel Hill—a place that was called ‘the Southern part of heaven.’ ” Pino initially tried to bury the incident, but she began to suffer from anxiety and depression—both classic signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Clark also struggled in the aftermath of her attack. One day she decided to seek help from the university. The woman she met with advised her that rape was like a football game, and that the next day was like being a Monday-morning quarterback where you look back and think, What would I have done differently? (Clark has repeated the line so many times that it showed up in a Law & Order: SVU episode dealing with rape on campus.) The insensitivity of the woman’s response galvanized Clark. She persuaded UNC to install boxes around campus where students who had been assaulted could anonymously deposit accounts of their attacks. As both she and Pino would later learn, however, anonymity would get them nowhere. When Pino first got to know Clark during a gathering for student activists on campus, they bonded immediately. “We’re like sisters now,” Clark says. After Clark graduated from UNC in 2011, the two kept in constant contact, sharing information and outrage at what they discovered. Even violent rapes at UNC were investigated by so-called honor courts, where other students would question both victim and assailant in the same room—and at university after university across the country the same thing seemed to I S S U E S >1 6 0 VOGUE.COM

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issues Crisis on Campus be happening, with the same poor results. “These student panels were set up to handle plagiarism,” Dauber explains. “In that situation, a professor is bringing a charge against a student, so we give the accused a lot of rights—the right against self-incrimination, the right to consult an attorney, and the provision of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But now you have a woman who is claiming to be sexually assaulted going up against a student. And he has all the rights. Often he has hired a lawyer, and now it’s the lawyer going up against a sobbing girl.” On the rare occasion when students are found guilty, the punishment is often laughably hollow— an apology letter, maybe, or a book report. (Turning to the police has its own drawbacks: Prosecutors are notoriously hesitant to take on what are often classified as date-rape cases, and the succesful prosecution rate for all rape cases is shockingly low—one report has the figure at just 18 percent.) Though most schools do not make the result of these honor courts public, Dauber thinks transparency of data is crucial. One of the first steps she took before reforming Stanford’s process was to publicize the school’s record, which she calls typical for most universities—over thirteen years, 175 assaults were reported, four hearings took place, and two students were found guilty. “It was very hard to look at that data and say, ‘We’re doing a good job,’ ” she says. their organization, End Rape on Campus, helping other women file complaints and providing survivor support. They have had their share of successes: EROC put Anna, the subject of a lengthy front-page article in The New York Times, in touch with the reporter who wrote the piece; a group of women they worked with at the University of Connecticut received a $1.3 million settlement from the university; and UNC, their own alma mater, has instituted a host of significant reforms. More broadly, the fire they lit has fostered a kind of national conversation taking place everywhere from op-ed pages to informal gatherings across the country, and the White House task force created to address the issue has released a list of 55 colleges and universities under investigation by the Department of Education for their handling of sexual assaults. Of course, being a successful activist does not necessarily translate into material success. When I caught up with Pino and Clark at the beginning of this summer, they had just traveled cross-country by car, speaking with victims along the way, and were looking for a place to live in Los Angeles. “We’re basically homeless,” Pino admitted cheerfully, while Clark lamented the impecunious life of an activist. “We’ll be interviewed on Good Morning America and have meetings at the White House, and the whole time we’re wearing clothes from Goodwill.” There are other tolls. Having to repeat the story of an assault over and over, sometimes under the glare of television lights, can be traumatic. To protect herself, Pino relates the incident matter-of-factly, almost as if it happened to someone else—a defense mechanism that can frustrate journalists looking for the sensational. “Aren’t you going to cry?” a TV producer once asked. “Did the blood spatter or pour?” another queried as Pino described her attack. She wants to go to law school, but after her tumultuous undergraduate career, her GPA isn’t what it should be. Clark, for her part, has always wanted to run for public office but wonders how her advocacy

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nce Clark and Pino decided to file a Title IX complaint, everybody they spoke with told them to hire a lawyer. But where would they get that kind of money? Clark was working as a low-level administrator at the University of Oregon; Pino was a scholarship student barely scraping by. Instead they threw themselves into research mode, spending all their free time at the library or on the Internet, listening to podcasts of Supreme Court arguments, constantly texting each other back and forth. Once they came across the Title IX strategy—a gambit originally proposed in the 1970s by feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon, then a brilliant law student at Yale, which essentially uses the threat of withholding of federal funds as a lever to force universities to make fast systemic changes—they reimagined the law to focus it on advocacy rather than basic compliance. The complaint they wrote, which combined powerful narratives with legal arguments, was 32 pages long and detailed their own experiences, along with those of three other women. “It was strictly DIY,” Clark says. To celebrate the filing, they both got dime-size ix tattoos on their ankles. In their wildest dreams, Clark and Pino couldn’t have predicted the firestorm they were able to unleash—but they’ve also been the target of some ugly backlash. Both say they received death threats on Twitter, along with threatening phone calls. Somebody broke into Pino’s dorm on campus, leaving behind a fake bloody knife just outside her room. (“I didn’t feel safe anymore,” she says.) But they also received phone calls from law professors asking them about Title IX, along with hundreds of calls and emails from people who wanted solace, advice, and justice. In the semester that followed the filing, Pino made 35 trips to other campuses around the country to talk to students. Clark soon resigned from her university job, and both now work full-time on VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

“The work they have done will change the world,” Senator Gillibrand says. “What is more important than that?” work will play. “I don’t want to be ‘the rape girl’ my whole life,” she says. “I have a college degree and a teachers’ license, but when you Google my name, that’s all that comes up.” “I think these women are amazing,” Professor Dauber says. “But it makes me angry that they are having to put their lives on hold to fix this problem.” Gillibrand takes the long view. “They are extraordinary activists who truly created a movement,” she says. “The work they have done will change the world. What is more important than that?” The work has also helped Clark and Pino find meaning at a point in their lives when it would have been easy to feel overcome by events. “We get messages every day from people saying, ‘I never told anyone, I thought about killing myself, but then I saw you on TV and I knew I wasn’t alone,’ ” Clark says. “It keeps you going. It makes you think, OK—this is what I should be doing.”

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lives

When IVANA LOWELL sold her house, she decided to take the ashes of her mother, Caroline Blackwood, back to Ireland.

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ast winter I sold my house in Sag Harbor. I had inherited it from my mother, and I couldn’t help feeling its sale was in some way a betrayal of her. She had died eighteen years ago, and in that time it had become a true home for my daughter, Daisy, and me. My mother had loved the house. It was a place she could write, and there was space enough for her restless mind and body to wander. I felt she was as contented there as she could have been anywhere. As I sorted through the rooms and packed up, every piece of furniture, photograph, and object brought back memories of a lost time or person. There was something that I knew I had to take with me, but it was the one thing I had been dreading having to face: my mother’s ashes. My mother was the Anglo-Irish novelist Caroline Blackwood, and we had been incredibly close. Even though as a child I had suffered from her carelessness, her flaws, and her consistently pessimistic view of the world, I had adored her and spent some of the funniest and most memorable times of my life with her. She was 64 when she died, but she seemed to have lived, seen, and experienced far more than her age belied. She had written ten books, had three husbands—the painter Lucian Freud, the composer Israel Citkowitz, and the poet Robert Lowell—as well as several tumultuous love affairs. She had married (or eloped) at eighteen to flee what she felt was a stiflingly aristocratic and pointless upbringing; she had seemed to spend the rest of her life searching for ways to escape it, always attracted to an artistic and bohemian kind of life. She was brave, fearless, and talented. My mother had had three other children: my sister Natalya, who died, Evgenia, and Sheridan. Though I don’t think any of us experienced a great sense of stability or family life, we all loved her. We moved around a lot, lived in many different houses in England and America, attended various schools in different cities, and had a succession of nannies to take care of us. As I grew older she came to be a great friend. She would sit up late into the night, fueled by a steady stream of vodka, dispensing advice and darts of lucid criticism to my friends and me. After she was diagnosed with cancer, our roles were reversed. I felt the need to look after her in the way I wished she had looked after us.

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AGE OF INNOCENCE LUCIAN FREUD’S GIRL IN BED, 1952.

She died on a cold, sunny Valentine’s Day in New York City, and after she was cremated, my sister and her husband, my brother, and I took her back to the house. The garden looked beautiful and serene under a blanket of snow in the white light of winter. We found a spot under a tree at the far end of the garden, dug a hole as deep as the frozen ground would allow, said some simple words, and then placed her to rest. Now that I was moving, I knew I couldn’t possibly leave her behind to be bulldozed over or landscaped into a swimming pool. I thought she probably wouldn’t mind much, but I would. I decided it was time for her to go home. L I V E S >1 7 2 VOGUE.COM

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LUC I A N FR EUD, GIRL IN BED, 1 9 5 2 . O I L O N CA NVAS. P R I VAT E COL LECT I ON / © TH E LUC I A N F REU D A RC HI V E /BRI DG E MA N I MAGES.

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rowing up in Ireland, my mother had particularly loved being at Luggala, her cousin’s house in County Wicklow. She had felt at home there and was always moved by the magical beauty of its setting. Originally built as a hunting lodge, the house is a white castellated Gothic folly nestled deep in a valley, at the edge of a lake and surrounded by mountains and leprechaun forests. I phoned cousin Garech in Ireland. “Oh, hello, naughty little one,” he began, “I was wondering when you were going to call.” His voice danced with amusement. I could picture him dressed in one of his tweed three-piece suits, customary glass of champagne in hand, in the round hallway. Garech had inherited the house from his mother, Oonagh, who alongside my grandmother Maureen and their sister Aileen had roared through society in the twenties and thirties. Gossip columns had nicknamed the three brewery heiresses the “Golden Guinness Girls,” celebrated for their beauty, marriages, colorful humor, and lavish lifestyles.

Arriving in Ireland, I started to dread what was now being referred to as the scattering. I realized I had no idea, really, of what to expect. Garech had made all of the arrangements, and I could tell he was taking it very seriously. He had placed announcements in the Irish and British newspapers and asked the canon from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin to perform the service. Daisy and I stayed the night before the big day with my cousins Desmond and Penny Guinness at their home, Leixlip Castle, in County Kildare. I had spent a lot of time there as a child, since Robert and Caroline had lived nearby in a house called Castletown. That evening we talked about my mother and about how much we missed her. The gate of the driveway to Luggala is at the top of one of the highest points in the Wicklow Mountains, and once you pass through it feels as though you are entering another world, some fictitious realm created by Tolkien. In Gaelic the name Luggala means “hollow of the hill,” and the location of the house lives up to its name. It was a warm, sunny day in June as we wound our way down the road, past moss-covered rocks, gnarly trees, rabbits, and spotted fawns on one side, a deep black lake and mountains on the other. As we rounded a sharp corner, the small neoclassical temple next to the beach came into view, and then the white castellations of the house. A poet once described Luggala as resembling a Gothic wedding cake, and that description seemed apt. Garech was waiting in the drawing room, wearing black tails, black-and-cream leather side-button shoes, and a sealskin top hat. His white hair was tied in a ponytail with a black velvet ribbon, his white beard reached L I V E S >1 8 6

In her aunt Oonagh my mother had found a kindred spirit. While my grandmother liked to mix with British aristocracy and royalty, Oonagh preferred to surround herself with writers, artists, and musicians. Her house-party weekends at Luggala were infamous for the eclectic assortment of guests and abundance of drink. My mother and Garech were always close, leading lives that were a mixture of privilege and tragedy, and they shared the same dark sense of ironic humor. The last few times they had seen each other, they had agreed that one day she would return to the place she referred to as her spiritual home. Garech gave me a date in June. A few days later I implored two brave male friends to discreetly retrieve her from the garden, and we left the house for the last time. Arrangements for the trip were more complicated than I had expected. I had thought I would just pack up her ashes in my suitcase and be on my way. But that was before I received stern warnings from friends. “It’s completely illegal to travel abroad with human remains without official documentation, and this might look like suspicious white powder. They could fling you into prison for a very long time. Haven’t you seen Midnight Express?” I had not really given much thought to any of that. I just wanted to take my mother home. The idea of Daisy and me languishing in an Irish prison wasn’t very appealing, so I set about getting the necessary paperwork. It required many phone calls and a trip down to a department named Burial, fittingly situated in the bowels of the Municipal building, to pick up her certificate of cremation. A man at Frank E. Campbell’s funeral home, where she had been cremated, confirmed that her ashes were now legal to travel, and he handed them back to me in an elegant maroon carry-on bag.

LADIES OF LETTERS IVANA WITH HER MOTHER AT A BOOK PARTY FOR HUGO VICKERS, 1985.

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COURTESY OF IVANA LOWELL

She would sit up late into the night, fueled by a steady stream of vodka, dispensing advice and darts of lucid criticism to my friends and me

lives Home Again his waist, and he clutched a black-and-silver-tipped cane. It felt as though we had just stepped into another century. Champagne had been flowing all morning, and there was already an assortment of people milling around; some were introduced and explained to me, others not. Acting like an eighteenth-century master of ceremonies, Garech held court. I was relieved that he was in charge. Canon Reed arrived looking resplendent in red, white, and gold flowing robes, and Garech ushered us into the pantry to go over the service. I protested that my mother hadn’t been at all religious and that I felt a simple short service would be lovely, but I knew he was going to ignore me. Garech had asked his friend Paddy Moloney, of the Irish band the Chieftains, to play the uilleann pipes. I asked if he knew the song “Carrickfergus,” as my mother had always loved it, and he said, “Sure, I used to play it at Clandeboye, where your mother grew up.” Guests started to assemble outside as the vintage 1950s Rolls-Royce pulled around to the front of the house. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed by an intense combination of nerves and sadness. I wanted to shout, “It’s all off!” like some bride with last-minute reservations. My daughter held my hand in a tight grip and assured me I could get through it. Daisy and I got into the Rolls-Royce, which smelled musty but had a spacious bar in the back, and I thought Mum would appreciate that. We drove slowly down to the temple, a folly on consecrated ground where members of the family are put to rest. I remembered visiting the temple with my mother. She had pointed out the two stones placed for cousins she had grown up with, Tessa and Tara Browne. They both had died young, Tessa at fourteen from a bad reaction to a vaccination and Tara at 21 in a car crash immortalized by the lyrics “I read the news today, oh boy,” in the Beatles song “A Day in the Life.”

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ow I stood surrounded by friends and family, by the temple facing the lake. The water, usually black and ominous-looking, had a silver tone, and the mountains beyond reflected the shifting light. Paddy Moloney and his harpist started playing hauntingly mournful Irish music as Canon Reed began his long version of the “Ashes to ashes” service. I was feeling all right at first, holding Daisy’s hand and taking in the beauty of our surroundings, but then I glanced at Garech, who was tearing up. Just in time, Canon Reed beckoned me up to read the poem I had chosen, “Mermaid,” by my stepfather Robert Lowell; it was one he had written about my mother. As I read the lines from the last stanza—“I’ve searched the rough black ocean for you. . . . ”—the words came out of my mouth sounding more like a sob. Paddy Moloney was now playing “Carrickfergus,” a song about loss and yearning. I was handed the bag of ashes. Suddenly it seemed bigger and heavier than before. The crowd facing me was waiting in patient silence as I grappled with the bag. In my desire to get it over with as quickly as possible, I grabbed the biggest handful I could and with a dramatic gesture threw it up into the sky toward the lake. I heard someone exclaim, “No—go low!” It was too late— a couple of people ducked or tried to shy away, but it came right back down and we were all covered. I was mortified to

IRISH FOLLY FROM TOP: A SIDE VIEW OF LUGGALA, AN 18TH-CENTURY FORMER HUNTING LODGE. CANON REED, LEFT, AND THE AUTHOR’S COUSIN THE HONORABLE GARECH BROWNE JUST BEFORE THE CEREMONY.

see people hastily wiping off their jackets and dresses, and my cousin seemed to have got a nasty piece of grit in his eye. Daisy ran up. “I’ll finish it, Mum.” She took the bag down to the edge of the lake, where she gently began tossing the rest of the ashes into the water. In her pink dress with her thick red hair flowing behind her, she seemed an Irish nymph sprinkling fairy dust. Then it was over. It’s strange, but in the time since I had sold the house and had taken my mother to Ireland, it had seemed like she was back with us, but now she was gone again. I knew that what I was leaving behind was far more than the bag of dust. It was my childhood and in many ways my identity. As long as I had the house, I had an excuse to remain entwined in my relationship with my mother and limited in my ability to move on. As I walked away from the lake I tried not to look back. I felt sad, lonely, and unprotected. But I also felt lighter, as though I had just put down some incredibly heavy object. I knew it was right to have done this. And of course I still have the maroon bag.

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just love the early–twentieth century magic men like Howard Thurston and Dante. They had so much style—dapper and glamorous in their tuxes and top hats, waistcoats and pocket watches. The grandest of them traveled in their own train cars, publicized with giant posters that would be pasted up all over town a week before the performer arrived. They would do Houdini-type stunts— a straitjacket escape in the town square, perhaps—then open up the doors to the theater, and everyone would file in to experience the ingenuity and stagecraft of their acts. Guy Jarrett, for example, was an illusion builder who created a pedestal table that the magician would stand on and from which he could produce assistant after assistant. He’d hold up a cloth and—whoosh—there would be a girl on the table standing next to him. And she would jump down and— whoosh, boom!—another girl. He could conjure fifteen girls, one right after the other. That’s a fantastic trick even today, but back then it must have been just earth-shattering. Magic was taken more seriously in those glory years. We’re a jaded society now: For as many magic shows as we see, there are programs on the Science Channel explaining how green-screen effects or CGI work, and people now assume that magic is fake. But there are still tricks that only a handful of practitioners know the secrets to—and mysteries that were taken to the grave. This portrait of Hughie Fitz by Norman Parkinson for Vogue in 1949 holds a lot of intrigue. The picture has a sinister side—the magician with his face unrecognizably darkened, making an ominous gesture under the gaze of a crowd of stone-faced girls (they are the junior committee, conscientiously auditioning acts for the annual charity Christmas Circus Party in the ballroom at the Plaza hotel, no less—I love it!). Not to mention that you have to wonder what the clown is doing in the background, or how they got that dog to walk the baby. Like all my favorite art, the more you look at this photograph, the more it reveals. N O S TA L G I A >1 9 2 VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

SPELLBOUND MAGICIAN HUGHIE FITZ PERFORMS A TRICK FOR A GROUP OF NEW YORK SOCIETY GIRLS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY NORMAN PARKINSON FOR VOGUE, 1949.

Superstar actor NEIL PATRICK HARRIS traces the roots of his fascination with performance to the magicians he admired in his youth.

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The Art of MAGIC

nostalgia Tricks of the Trade I’ve always been one to seek out secrets. I love to look Later I began directing magic shows. One was called at the architectural plans of Disney theme-park rides, for Nothing to Hide, with Derek DelGaudio and Helder instance, to see how the Pirates of the Caribbean boat gets Guimarães—two of the best cardsmiths in magic right to do so much in such a small space. I also like to explore now. It was jaw-dropping. (Stephen Sondheim saw it several backstage—to find out where the barricade goes at the end times.) I directed another with the British magician Guy Holof Les Misérables. I like to know how it all works. Magic lingworth. For some reason, American magicians often have is perfect for that because when you’re a kid you can meet the bad reputation for windblown, big-collared Las Vegas the magician behind the counter of the magic shop. He can cheesiness, but the Brits bring a level of class and sophistishow you some sleight-of-hand tricks and you can choose cation to their acts. Now Vegas is making magic cool, and your favorite, plop down change, and then you get a packet there’s a new enthusiasm for seeing it performed, perhaps that includes props and a secret. You sneak off into a corbecause of the “old is new again,” Mad Men thing—like the world that Parkinson’s phoner, or under the covers with a tograph evokes. The Academy flashlight, to read how it’s done, of Magical Arts in Los Angeles, and then practice and perform it. a private club for magicians that When I was a child I saw David I served as president of for three Copperfield onstage in Albuqueryears, has a dress code for the que, New Mexico, which was a shows it presents at the Magic couple of hours from where we Castle: jackets and ties for men, lived. I was completely overand dresses for women. It brings whelmed. This was during his back that golden age. heyday, when he had just “vanAlthough I have lots of magiished” the Statue of Liberty—he was the biggest thing on television cian posters from the glory days for magic. I was superimpressed of the traveling performers, it’s because it wasn’t just a TV show David Copperfield who buys that I was watching from my living almost everything to do with room; he sawed a woman in half magic history. He has a massive vertically, right in front of me! My warehouse in Las Vegas where, own adventures in magic started to the benefit of magic, everysoon after, at the age of eight at thing is on display, documented, a magic store called Fool’s Paraand archived. So it’s all going to dise in a mall in Albuquerque. To be protected for generations to this day I appreciate the neighborcome. All of us other magic colhood kids and my family for their lectors grit our teeth, waiting for patience and their ability to put a the moment when we can get at false smile on their faces for the least a little something out of the duration of my shows. hands of Boss Copperfield! I usuENCHANTED I began performing as a young FAMED AMERICAN ILLUSIONIST DAVID COPPERFIELD ally have to wait until someone HIS THEN GIRLFRIEND, MODEL CLAUDIA SCHIFFER. magician at children’s birthday WITH finds himself hard up and is like, PHOTOGRAPHED BY STEVEN MEISEL FOR VOGUE, 1994. parties, multiplying sponge balls “I never wanted to get rid of this and doing the hippity hop–rabbits trick, where the rabbit great old piece—but for you I just might . . . if the price is goes from one case to another and then disappears altoright.” And then I thank How I Met Your Mother, and acquire a new part of the puzzle. gether. I also did a finger-chopping routine with a small The most difficult trick that I’ve ever pulled off was at last guillotine that terrified the girls. They ended up crying, much year’s Tony Awards during the opening number, which was to my chagrin. I don’t believe I got a healthy wage at the end called “Bigger.” Pippin was one of the shows that was up for of that, with an angry mother wondering what I had done. awards, and so, since magic is an element of that show, I got What started as a rather solitary hobby—there’s an unto do a trick. I entered a big box that Ed Alonzo supplied spoken magician’s oath that you don’t share secrets with for me. You climb a flight of stairs inside the box and close your siblings or friends—changed as I got a little older the door; the box moves center stage and rotates so you can and found mentors I could talk to and learn from. When I see all sides of it. Then the assistant pulls the cord, all four moved to L.A. in my teens to make Doogie Howser, M.D., I sides drop—and I’m gone! Meanwhile the camera, without met a comedy magician named Ed Alonzo—a very Harold cutting, spins around and I am coming down the aisle with Lloyd–type character with big, round-rimmed black glasses a bunch of cast members from Newsies from the back of and hair standing on end that almost looks as though Radio City Music Hall. Same shot. That was pretty hard to he has electrocuted himself. He swiftly became my best pull off—especially live—because there were lots of things friend—and still is today. He shared a warehouse with the that could have gone wrong. People still ask me how that prop comic Gallagher, so I got to play with all the contrapwas done. And like a true magician would, I refuse to tell. tions and figure out how they worked, and my infatuation —AS TOLD TO HAMISH BOWLES with magic grew.

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IT GIRL G REG O RY HA R RI S. SI T T IN G S E DI TOR , SA RA M OO N V ES. HA I R, TA MA RA M C N AUG H TON; MAKEUP, MAKI RYOKE. P RO DUCT I O N D ES I G N, HO LL I FE AT HE RSTON E FOR MA RY HOWA RD ST UD I O. D ETA I LS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

Sophia

Amoruso

DIGITAL DIVA THE CEO WEARS RALPH LAUREN COLLECTION AT THE BOWERY HOTEL IN NEW YORK.

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t was easy, not so long ago, to think that Nasty Gal was everywhere. In fact, it wasn’t really anywhere at all—it existed only on your browser—but the company’s great secret is to imagine their customer as real. “There’s both a living, breathing girl and an ethos behind Nasty Gal—that’s my proudest accomplishment,” says Sophia Amoruso, the ecommerce juggernaut’s 30-year-old founder and CEO and the poster girl of the moment for melding a youthful, Internetsavvy fashion sense with the kind of business acumen that has Silicon Valley investors lining up at her F L A S H >1 9 8

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It’s the next step in Amoruso’s plan to take what she learned while transforming an in-the-vintage-trenches aesthetic into a sure-thing brand for the young woman who’s moving her fashion forward one minidress at a time. As is Amoruso’s M.O., her plan is based on her own meticulous analysis of what’s already out there. Her feeling is that shopping, something she thinks can’t ever be truly replaced by online purchases, can be a chore. “You walk into most stores—and it doesn’t matter how expensive it is—and you say, ‘OK, I want to try some stuff on,’ ” she says. “There’s no one to be found. Then you find someone, but you have to wait until they’re finished ringing someone up. . . . ” She could go on. “We’re not opening with ‘Oh, my God, we’ve reinvented retail,’ but long-term I want to get rid of that friction. What those retailers are telling you is that you should feel lucky to have these things—that you’d better stand in line and get sneered at.”

For Amoruso, the Great Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s resembled a kind of extreme version of business school—“It was about taking your life for yourself,” she says—and when she got around to reviewing the portfolios of venture capitalists looking to invest with her, it was she who interviewed them. “It’s the same as walking into a retail store,” Amoruso says. “If they have a home-run shoe department but are selling garbage everywhere else, I wouldn’t trust their point of view.” In 2012, Danny Rimer, who’d previously backed Skype, Etsy, and Net-a-Porter, invested $49 million. Amoruso is also that rare social-media virtuoso who’s a fan of handwritten notes and insists on both politeness and a kind of democratic hospitality among everyone she works with. “Fashion’s been very exclusive,” she says, “and while it was never my intention to change that, it’s all I know: that you can be cool and inclusive. I think that’s a new thing— everyone’s invited.” —ROBERT SULLIVAN F L A S H >2 0 2 VOGUE.COM

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door. We’re in her spacious corner office in Los Angeles, a bulletin board on one end prominently displaying the jacket of her bestselling book, #GirlBoss. Next month, she’s doing something that Nasty Gal hasn’t done before: introducing its living, breathing customers to living, breathing stores. One of the fastest-growing retailers in the country is going brick-and-mortar, with one location debuting on Melrose, across from Fred Segal, and another, larger outpost in Santa Monica. “We’re going to have a pretty massive shoe salon,” Amoruso says of the latter store, “and a really beautiful dressing room that’s going to have a very personal feeling—kind of a new luxury vibe.” Also new: a partnership with MAC, in part to fulfill a long-mentioned wish of the Nasty Gal customer. “They’ve always asked on social media—what color is that lipstick?” Amoruso says. “They’re excited about the complete look.”

fore concept boards alongside her chief product officer and president, Sheree Waterson (late of Lululemon), and senior vice president of creative, Lina Kutsovskaya (late of Sephora), the conversation ranges from clothing racks, mirrors, product, and the ever-important detail of how a sales associate might stand or sit. Eight years after Nasty Gal’s founding, with its half a million customers and more than $100 million in sales, Amoruso has been riding a publicity wave. Most of those reports, though, emphasize her years spent as an itinerant West Coast anarchist and freegan and discount her relentless work ethic. “She hired people who felt passionate about the brand and just put her head down,” says Natalie Massenet, founder of Net-a-Porter. “She didn’t put PR and marketing first—she put the business and her customers first.”

FL ASH ITALIAN JOB VILLA LENA, AN ARTISTS’ RESIDENCY IN TUSCANY, SITS SHROUDED BEHIND THE PROPERTY’S TREES AND WILD GARDENS.

TNT ELISABETH TNT DISCOVERS THAT THE PERFECT PLACE FOR AN ARTISTS’ RETREAT IS UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN.

DUMMY HEDER MENDA SIT RONIS DOLOR REPLKEN BUSTEM PORIBUST GATEM BUSDAM DEBTIS AT REXUM NECESITATIBUS DUMMY CAPTION

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he thing that popped into my head when I entered Villa Lena, a nineteenth-century manor and artists’ residency cofounded by Lena Evstafieva and her husband, Jérôme, in the Tuscan countryside, was that Wes Anderson would really get a kick out of the place. It’s an imposing estate—green shutters, balconies and archways, a terra-cotta fountain overgrown with flowers, a pine forest stretching as far as the eye can see. Inside, a marble staircase leads upstairs, where you bump into all sorts of characters: painters, musicians, writers, speaking languages from every corner of the world. Behind one door Jasmin Blasco, an old friend from my student days in Paris, sits in front of his computer, which is plugged into a cockpit-like machine of keyboards, wheels, and buttons. Back in L.A. he’s been working with two pals from CalArts under the name the Noise Index, composing music, developing software, and building extraordinary sound sculptures. (I can’t resist mentioning that Jasmin happens to be a grandson of an artist whose name may ring a bell. Pablo Picasso, anyone?) Upstairs, a sweet scent of flowery cologne leads me through another door, where colorful dresses, beads, crèmes, and oils, as well as finished and unfinished canvases, pile on top of one another. A radiant Lola Schnabel stands in the middle of it all, trying to pack her suitcases. She will dearly miss the joy of waking up to a view of pine trees. “I come back to these wonderful trees, their shape, their movement, the way they pierce the sky

THE DRAWING ROOM FROM TOP: SITTING IN FRONT OF MY FAVORITE SPOT ON THE PROPERTY, AN OVERGROWN TERRA-COTTA FOUNTAIN; EXPLORING LOLA SCHNABEL’S PAINTING STUDIO.

in all my recent paintings,” she tells me. Later we walk outside and down a path to the studios. Lola’s is particularly bright and spacious. The walls are hung with portraits and landscapes in strong blues and greens. The creative energy is contagious. Lena, a native Russian who grew up in London, is dressed with an airy elegance. She shows me the villa’s vegetable garden. “Saint Laurent,” she confides when I ask about her black jumpsuit, before quickly correcting herself: “Yves Saint Laurent.” She and Jérôme produce their own olive oil (I tried some fresh from the press, and it was deliciously nutty) and keep pigs and rabbits. Jérôme explains that some of their artists-in-residence are hugely successful (they get a stream of DJs, and RZA from Wu-Tang Clan left a few days before), while others are still emerging. The key is a like-minded spirit. On my second night the residents organized an impromptu dinner party. An Italian filmmaker cooked up a feast of spaghetti and fish. I contributed a salad I’d picked fresh from the garden. When I finally headed to bed, I felt like I was bidding goodbye to old friends. Me and communal living? Welcome to Villa Lena. F L A S H >2 0 4 VOGUE.COM

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FL ASH The TRIP to ITALY FROM A TUSCAN VILLA TO THE AMALFI COAST, TWO LA DOLCE VITA WEDDINGS WERE A STUDY IN CONTRASTS. TREE OF LIFE THE BRIDE AND GROOM EXCHANGED VOWS AT SUNSET IN FRONT OF 400 GUESTS.

DESIGN TEAM “PETER [DUNDAS, FAR LEFT] MANAGED TO MAKE ME REALLY CALM ABOUT THE ONE THING I FOUND TO BE VERY DIFFICULT,” SAYS BRAWN OF HER EMILIO PUCCI DRESS.

WHO: ALESSANDRA BRAWN AND JON NEIDICH WHERE: PISA, TUSCANY WORE: EMILIO PUCCI SOMETHING NEW: THE EVENT CAME TO BE KNOWN AS THE WILD-BOAR WEDDING, WITH A PIG-ROAST DINNER THE EVE OF THE CEREMONY AND THEMED SWEATSHIRTS FOR GUESTS THAT READ “GET BOARED.”

y 10:00 a.m. on Sunday, June 22, the last of the late-night revelers were piling into cabs and speeding back toward hotels in Lucca and Forte dei Marmi—the final capstone to the three-night extravaganza that was Alessandra Brawn and Jon Neidich’s wedding in Pisa, Italy. Given that the couple met at the Standard High Line hotel (at the time, Brawn worked at the Standard Grill, and Neidich was the managing director of Le Bain and the Boom Boom Room), it’s no surprise that the reception reached bacchanalian proportions. “Throwing a party is totally in Jon’s DNA,” Brawn says. “He loves to host, so he took charge of a lot of the entertaining.” The 9:00 p.m. ceremony unfolded beneath a TRAIN giant stone pine tree on the grounds of a famSPOTTERS ily friend’s villa. Aby Rosen and Samantha THE VEIL WAS HAND-SEWN Boardman’s children, Baker and Vivian, walked WITH FLOWERS down the aisle ahead of the bride, taking their duCUT FROM THE SAME ties as ring-bearer and flower girl seriously. “I’m LACE USED ON a professional,” eight-year-old Baker assured the THE DRESS. bride, who wore custom Emilio Pucci. “I don’t consider myself to be an extremely traditional person,” Brawn says, “but the one thing I really wanted was this traditional weddingdress silhouette, with sleeves and a F L A S H > 2 0 6 VOGUE.COM

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Brides

train. [Emilio Pucci creative director] Peter Dundas managed to be totally timeless and romantic but also kind of sexy, which is, I think, what he does best.” A long veil dotted with lace flowers, pearl-and-diamond drop earrings from her motherin-law, Brooke Garber Neidich’s, jewelry company Sidney Garber, and Gianvito Rossi sandals finished Brawn’s first look (she later changed into a short, shimmering Emilio Pucci dress and Converse high-tops). The couple’s 400 guests, each of them dressed in la dolce vita attire, sat underneath hundreds of string lights at two long dinner tables before fireworks got the crowd on its feet to be led by a local band to the dance floor, where the newlyweds swayed to James Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves.” Around 2:30 a.m., merrymakers were led to a IL PARADISO THE CEREMONY TOOK PLACE UNDER A GIANT STONE PINE ON A FAMILY FRIEND’S PROPERTY. SHE’S GOT MOVES ABOVE: LAUREN SANTO DOMINGO, WEARING DOLCE & GABBANA. RIGHT: BRAWN CHANGED INTO AN EMILIO PUCCI MINIDRESS AND CONVERSE HIGH-TOPS FOR DANCING.

SWEET TALK THE WEDDING CAKE, A TWELVE-LAYER ITALIAN PAN DI SPAGNA, WITH FRESH RASPBERRY FILLING AND WHIPPED CREAM FROM L’ANGOLO DOLCE.

second site, where event planner Bronson van Wyck and his team helped coordinate a spectacle replete with fire twirlers, contortionists, and a mermaid. As the sun came up, the truly tireless received sunglasses and sweatshirts. “I jumped in the pool around 8:00 a.m.,” Brawn remembers. “At that point I sort of said, ‘OK, now I’m freezing.’ ” Four hundred miles south, Chiara Clemente and Tyler Thompson exchanged vows in Amalfi. “It was where I spent every summer since I was born,” Clemente says. While her dream was always to be married in her family’s home there, “the only way to reach it is up 189 steps, and to carry anything you pretty much need a donkey.” Instead, the filmmaker settled on Hotel Santa Caterina for her July wedding, where a glass elevator took guests from the clifftop F L A S H > 2 1 0

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garden where the ceremony was held to dinner overlooking the sea. “The food, as you can imagine in this part of the world, is actually—for once—more important than the drinking!” says Clemente, who selected local seasonal produce for the menu and classic Italian dishes like pezzogna (a type of fish) and frittelline di alghe (seaweed fritters) followed, naturally, by the torta nuziale (wedding cake). It was very much a family affair. “There was no event ARMED AND planner—just my mom and me,” Clemente says. “You realize READY CLEMENTE, later on that an extra person could have been helpful!” Her IN ALBERTA FERRETTI, mother, Alba, designed the table settings, with paper boats, WAS starfish, coral-reef candles, and locally made ceramic fish— ESCORTED DOWN THE seaside-inspired decor that also played off the brightly colored AISLE BY flowers on Clemente’s Alberta Ferretti dress. “I stuck to the HER FATHER, FRANCESCO. tradition of not having Tyler see my dress ahead of time,” she recalls. “But when we went to look for a suit together, he picked this emerald-green Prada number and a vintage floral tie. I couldn’t give it away at the time, but it was so in sync with my dress. I thought it was such a visual symbol of us.” One hundred guests gathered as members of the wedding party (including Clemente and Thompson’s infant daughter, Alice Rose, who was carried by her godfather) walked down the aisle to the accompaniment of local mandolin players performing “Ceremony,” by New Order—though the bride confesses that “I was very emotional, so I have no memory of the music. Luckily, someone recorded it WHO: CHIARA on their phone.” Later, the couple’s first dance played CLEMENTE AND TYLER THOMPSON out to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good,” and while CleWHERE: AMALFI, mente was happy enough just to celebrate her growing SALERNO family, she also rejoiced at finally bringing her friends WORE: ALBERTA FERRETTI to Amalfi. “Everyone wants to come back next sumSOMETHING NEW: mer to visit us,” she says, “which was, of course, A BOUQUET OF CHILI our plan all along.”—ALLY BETKER F L A S H > 2 1 2 PEPPERS, IN HONOR OF THE LOCAL SPECIALTY AND THE GROOM’S LOVE OF SPICY FOOD.

CROWNING GLORIES FLOWER GIRLS THREW PETALS IN THE SAME COLOR PALETTE AS CLEMENTE’S DRESS.

ROMANCE LANGUAGE ABOVE: CLEMENTE’S CHARLOTTE OLYMPIA SHOES AND HER DAUGHTER, ALICE’S, HANDMADE SLIPPERS FROM CIR CORREDI IN ROME. RIGHT: THE COUPLE EXCHANGED CUSTOM-MADE RINGS.

RED HOT THE CHILI-PEPPER, OR PEPERONCINO, BOUQUET, DESIGNED BY THE BRIDE’S MOTHER, ALBA.

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EMMA WATSON IN DIOR.

POPPY DELEVINGNE IN VIVIENNE WESTWOOD.

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ROMANCE WHO SAYS FLOWERS BLOOM ONLY IN SPRING? MOODY FLORALS TAKE ROOT FOR FALL, ADDING GOTHIC UNDERTONES TO FEMININE SILHOUETTES. NICOLE RICHIE IN ERDEM.

EMMA STONE IN DOLCE & GABBANA.

MILEY CYRUS IN GIAMBATTISTA VALLI HAUTE COUTURE.

MARGARET QUALLEY IN ROCHAS.

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Talking Fashion

FL ASH

BUSINESS SUITED XIN LI, IN ALTUZARRA AND GIANVITO ROSSI HEELS, AT CHRISTIE’S IN PARIS.

COLLECTORS’ ITEMS TWO WORKS OF ART AUCTIONED AT CHRISTIE’S IN MAY: UNTITLED, BY MARK ROTHKO (ABOVE), AND POISSON VOLANT, BY ALEXANDER CALDER (BELOW).

CHRISTIE’S XIN LI AND VICTORIA SIDDALL OF FRIEZE MASTERS ARE BUILDING BRIDGES—BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, NEW AND OLD—IN THEIR RESPECTIVE CORNERS OF THE ART WORLD.

Art & Commerce years poring over catalogs of past sales. “Basketball taught me discipline and that you have to train; nothing comes easy,” Li, now in her mid-30s, says. “I also have a photographic memory,” she adds without a hint of hubris. Today Li is the auction house’s primary liaison between Chinese collectors and Western specialists, her knowledge base having developed considerably—along with that of her clientele. (She also shares a budding art collection with her sister, who works for Gagosian in Beijing.) Li’s longtime friend Wendi Murdoch has witnessed the progression. “Xin’s combination of talents would be rare anyway,” Murdoch says, “but knowing both the Chinese and Western ways of thinking makes her unique.” Now she travels more than ever. In July alone, she’s seen her New York apartment twice, been to Europe thrice, visited Hong Kong, and conducted our interview while sailing the Ionian. And though her career in fashion seems to be over, she still has excellent sartorial advice: “If you travel often, you must have a few McQueen knit dresses,” she says. “They never wrinkle on the plane.” F L A S H >2 1 8 VOGUE.COM

Xin Li, Deputy Chairman of Christie’s Asia

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uring a recent postwar sale at Christie’s, Xin Li, the auction house’s disarming deputy chairman of Asia, spent most of the evening on no fewer than three phones, deftly proffering eight-figure bids on behalf of the anonymous Asian clients who eventually won five of the auction’s top ten lots. It seems almost impossible to think that just six years ago, Li knew little more about art than any other New Yorker who enjoys the occasional stroll through a few Chelsea galleries. “I always wanted to travel,” Li says of growing up in the Jilin province, on China’s North Korean border. And travel she did: By age fifteen, the nearly six-foot-tall Li was playing pro basketball, and by 1996 she had moved to Paris (though she spoke neither French nor English) to model. She found success as one of the first Asian girls to break out in Europe but by 2008 was looking for a third act. An entry-level position at Sotheby’s led the way to Christie’s, where she spent VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

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FL ASH Victoria Siddall, Director of Frieze Masters

Pursuits

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n the two years since the inauguration of the Frieze Masters art fair, it seems that founding director Victoria Siddall has briskly earned the admiration of every oldschool gallerist (2014 will see 127 booths in all) who each October transforms Regent’s Park into an art-world mecca. As a sister operation of Frieze, Masters presents work made from antiquity until 2000 (i.e., anything but contemporary pieces) and is now considered a fundamental complement to the annual extravaganza. With two successful outings under her belt and eight years at Frieze’s primary operation prior, Siddall, 36, sees her role as ensuring that Frieze Masters offers something entirely unique. “There was no need to create a fair that felt like all the others,” she says. “There are enough art fairs in this world.” Siddall curates booth locations as one might seat a dinner party: with the aim of sparking conversation. Expect to see, for instance, Native American tribal work adjacent to a suite of Jackson Pollock drawings inspired by Navajo culture. “Victoria is extraordinary,” says architect Annabelle Selldorf, who is responsible for the design of the airy space and gray-scale color palette of Frieze Masters. “She had a clear vision from the outset of the dialogue that could come from juxtaposing art from diverse periods, and has never wavered from that.”

FRIEZE FRAME SIDDALL WEARS A JIL SANDER SHIRT AND HERMÈS TROUSERS IN THE LIFE DRAWING ROOM AT LONDON’S ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS.

Siddall’s private life is as varied as her professional one. She lives in Bethnal Green, near many of the young galleries in East London, and cochairs the board of Studio Voltaire, which fosters the work of unrepresented artists—the type whose work she likes to collect. At the same time, “I find myself extremely attracted to medieval sculpture.” Embracing the unexpected? It’s clearly become something of a habit.—MARK GUIDUCCI

DIANE KRUGER IN GIAMBATTISTA VALLI HAUTE COUTURE.

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CATE BLANCHETT IN CHLOÉ.

ZOE SALDANA IN VALENTINO.

FROM PLAYFUL FRILLS TO LAYERS OF ELEGANT FOLDS, RUFFLES TAKE TO THE RED CARPET AND BEYOND.

MIRANDA KERR IN A GIVENCHY SKIRT.

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FLOUNCE

the hamish files BELLE OF THE BALL NATALIA VODIANOVA IN THE WHITE GARDEN AT VALENTINO’S CHÂTEAU DE WIDEVILLE, 2013.

TABLE MANNERS ABOVE: ALL SET FOR TEA IN THE GARDEN. LEFT: YOURS TRULY, DELIGHTED BY THE BLOOMING DELPHINIUMS, 2013.

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STYLE ast summer—before one of the glittering blacktie dinners that he holds during the couture in a ravishing moated castle where Louis XIV installed his mistress Louise de la Vallière—I lost myself in the gardens of Valentino’s Château de Wideville. I had taken a left turn after the second magnificent rose garden, wandered through a woodland glade and the potager, and found myself in the White Garden, which was embowered by an arched pergola tunnel of elaborately espaliered pear. I had thought I was alone until I turned to see Natalia Vodianova, looking like an ambulant Botticelli in her fragile gown by the designer’s brilliant protégés Maria Grazia Chiuri VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

and Pierpaolo Piccioli—the perfect girl in the perfect dress in the perfect setting. Fortunately, you need not wait with breath bated for your own invitation, embossed with the castle’s image in woodland green, to Wideville—or to Valentino’s Fifth Avenue aerie, his wood-paneled chalet in Gstaad, his handsome white stucco London villa, or the T.M. Blue One, his sleek floating mansion—because Valentino: At the Emperor’s Table (out next month from Assouline) brings his Viscontian world to your coffee table. Encouraged by his partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino shares his tableaux—and his chef’s recipes—in a tome that can fairly be said to break the mold for vegetarian cookbooks. (The design legend’s menus these H A M I S H > 2 2 2 VOGUE.COM

TABLE SETTING: OBERTO GILI/ASSOULINE.COM. ALL OTHERS: COURTESY OF HAMISH BOWLES.

House of

the hamish files days are meat-free and generally light on dairy—there is a reason he’s so trim.) There is a goat-cheese flan for Gstaad (topped with the very Valentino flourish of a dahlia formed from tomato “petals”), a cacciucco fish stew for the boat, and an avocado-and-crab roll for Wideville, among many others. And whether he is entertaining for hundreds or dining alone, Valentino’s settings—the fruits of a lifetime of sleuthing for treasures—are as elaborately conceived as the dresses that delighted his legions of fans for nearly half a century. Eighteenth-century Meissen porcelain swans are set adrift on a tablescape that might include monogrammed linens from Cesari, Georgian silver, imperial Russian porcelain, crystal goblets from NasonMoretti (their rims and bases touched with an edge of color), Buccellati silver cabbages, and a Qianlong boar’s-head tureen. “I always had in my mind the idea of a life of beauty,” Valentino tells André Leon Talley in the book’s foreword, where he also hilariously recalls scoring incompetent own goals when he played soccer as a child while daydreaming about the glamorously dressed screen sirens in his older sister’s movie magazines. Goodness knows he is living that life now.—HAMISH BOWLES STORYBOOK SETTINGS THE MEDIEVAL TOWN OF CAVTAT AND ITS PICTURESQUE COASTLINE.

IN GOOD HANDS DIRECTOR BAZ LUHRMANN AND KARLIE KLOSS AT WIDEVILLE, 2013.

CHURCH AND STAKE LEFT: THE AUTHOR OUTSIDE AN 18TH-CENTURY CHURCH IN MILNA. BELOW: A STILTED PERFORMANCE AT FABIOLA BERACASA AND JASON BECKMAN’S DUBROVNIK WEDDING.

MY INTRODUCTION TO CROATIA as a guest and chronicler of the lavish and poetic nuptial festivities of Fabiola Beracasa and Jason Beckman in Dubrovnik (see September Vogue’s Flash pages) could hardly have been more auspicious. Fabiola, of course, told me that I simply had to come back to further explore the country she had fallen in love with, and her positive thinking must have paid off—less than a month later, I found myself discovering more of this fascinating place by boat, with its beautiful ancient cities, miraculously undeveloped coastline, miles of rolling hills fragranced with umbrella pines and cypress, and archipelagos of lunar-landscaped islets. In addition to the storied cities of Hvar, Split, Trogir, et al, there are abundant smaller gems to discover, such as the island of Lopud, where tastemakers including art maven (and former New Romantic poster girl) Francesca von Habsburg; the interior designer Lucien Rees Roberts and his partner, architect Steven Harris; and Toto Bergamo Rossi—the international-relations adviser for Venetian Heritage—have all brought ruinous structures back to stylish glory. Venetian Heritage, incidentally, has helped to restore many of the area’s churches and cathedrals, along with their treasures, which, after centuries of benign neglect and the destructiveness of the 1990s hostilities, are now emerging in full-phoenix splendor—jewels in the country’s rich historical treasury.—H.B.

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IN GOOD HANDS: KEVIN TACHMAN. STORYBOOK SETTINGS: HAMISH BOWLES. CHURCH: GEORGINA GODLEY. PERFORMANCE: ROBERT FAIRER.

Adriatic ADVENTURES

CITY SLICKERS ALASDHAIR WILLIS WITH MODEL KINGA RAJZAK IN LONDON. RAJZAK WEARS A HUNTER ORIGINAL TRENCH ($695), SWEATER ($160), AND BOOTS ($240); USA.HUNTER-BOOT.COM.

EDITOR: MARK HOLGATE

Elemental Forces LON N Y SP E N CE . SI T T I NG S E D I TO R: SA M RA N G ER. HA I R, PAUL D ON OVA N ; MA KEU P, LUCY BR ID GE. PRODUCED BY MINT PRODUCTIONS, LOND ON.

WITH A NEW CREATIVE DIRECTOR, FAMED WELLIESMAKER HUNTER SHOOTS FOR SOMETHING MORE URBANE.

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iven England’s famously dour weather, making a splash outside London Fashion Week is to be expected. But inside? Hunter Original’s slick runway debut in February saw 35 beautiful waders splishing and sploshing down a watery allée of silver birches before disappearing beneath the hand of a magician. Yet this glamorous display was much more than just Wellies. Under the stylish direction of Alasdhair Willis, the British heritage brand is enjoying a new dawn. “I was

thinking about extreme expeditions—not just here, but also deep sea and outer space,” says the North Yorkshire–born Willis. He’s the rangy entrepreneur with an easy smile who has made rebranding his métier: In 2005, he pioneered Established & Sons, a furniture manufacturer and gallery, and his agency has consulted for both Dunhill and David Beckham’s underwear line. His new vision: a performance wardrobe with a high-fashion spin. Think rubber trenches with a Belle de Jour come-hither, patch-pocket poacher jackets, and matching waxed miniskirts. V I E W >2 3 0 VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

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Elemental Forces Both tradition and provocation are in the air at Willis’s office off Hyde Park in London, and his designs promise to combine the brand’s almost 160 years of reliability with a slickness as much city-bound as festival-ready. “Hunter has an emotional connection to its customers,” says Willis, and it’s clear this is something he wishes to maintain, helped by his modest design team of six, even amid the innovation. “Waxed jackets, that kind of thing—that’s already been done, and very well.” Fair enough. But does his Hunter Original line really pass muster on social terrain? I try the cozy bicolored fisherman’s sweater (“My wife’s favorite piece,” says Willis—his wife being Stella McCartney) with cropped cigarette pants and suede Manolo Blahniks for dinner at 34, and discover that it fares equally well on the Mayfair dining circuit as it does tramping on grouse moors (though no one recognizes the signature “mustache” motif cleverly worked into the ribbing—a nod to Willis’s playful polish). This past summer’s flash floods, though, prove the real road test. Forced to abandon my car en route to London, wading to the nearest rural station, I remember the kale-colored waterproof poncho and olive heeled Wellingtons are in the trunk. one hundred percent polyurethane vinyl may not sound enticing—but it works. Reaching my destination, I shake down the hood (blow-dry: intact!) and disrobe (J.W. Anderson shirtdress: dry!). My apprehension about heeled Wellies has been proven to be unfounded. I am steady on my feet, and can now happily see myself in the black heeled version with a quilted Miu Miu miniskirt come fall. “I knew a heel would immediately modernize the traditional boot,” Willis says. “It was the first thing I wanted to crack.” A week later, traipsing through the glutinous mud at Glastonbury, I spot Willis in Hunter ankle boots wending his way with Stella and friends to see the Black Keys. “Perhaps I am the only one here that’s happy it’s raining,” he says with a chortle. There is indeed a gale force of Hunter-branded boots and coats; I already see the rubber satchel from the fall collection. Alexa Chung is cemented to her Hunter Chelsea boots. With extreme weather becoming a global norm, luxurious outward-bound clothes and accessories will surely become even more entrenched in our closets. No worries: Willis has it covered.—EMMA ELWICK-BATES

brock STEADY

IT’S ONE OF THOSE STARS-ALIGNED, madein-Manhattan stories: Laura and Kris Brock first met as students at Parsons when Kris asked Laura to be a fit model for a wedding dress he’d designed. Fast-forward three and a half years, and, as fate would have it, they’re married, with Laura walking down the aisle this past summer in a gown of her own creation. (“I told Kris I bought it!” she says with an ear-to-ear grin.) Partners in both love and labor, the couple also founded Brock Collection, a New York–based womenswear label that premiered earlier this year on Moda Operandi. Kris trained as a tailor, Laura at Theory—yet their debut extends well past what one typically associates with “young” design: Plush, anti-minimal, and swaddled in luxurious fabrics (think über–wide leg trousers in baroque jacquards and weighty circle skirts in plaid wools), Brock Collection is as much Oscar (de la Renta) as it is Olivier (Theyskens). That sentiment is particularly evinced by their outerwear—for fall, see an alizarin floral-motif shirtdress or a blue-gray mohair aviator with a hidden iPhone pocket on its sleeve. Additionally, a slouchy shearling bomber was their runaway hit on Moda, oversize as if WARMUP ROUND to suggest “a girl nicking LAURA WEARS BROCK COLLECTION’S FLORAL it from her boyfriend on SHIRTDRESS ($1,190) a chilly morning after a AND PLAID CIRCLE sleepover,” says Laura. “In SKIRT ($1,990); MODAOPERANDI.COM. college, she’d steal mine all TOD’S LOAFERS. KRIS the time,” says Kris, smiling. WEARS A BURBERRY LONDON SWEATER. V I E W >2 3 2 —NICK REMSEN

VOGUE.COM

C HRI ST I A N M A C DO N A LD. S IT T I N G S ED I TO R: J ESSI CA D OS REM ED I OS. HA I R, MA R KI SH KR ELI FOR LEONOR GR EYL; MAKEUP, FARA H OMID I. SET D ESIGN, DANIEL GRAFF FOR MARY HOWARD ST U D IO. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .

QUILT COMPLEX PETER PILOTTO’S EYE-CATCHING TAKE ON THE PUFFER JACKET ($1,886; BERGDORF GOODMAN, NYC).

Elemental Forces

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Getting

HOW TO WEAR THE PUFFER JACKET WITHOUT LOOKING, WELL . . . PUFFY. ust forget it’s a sporty jacket—use technology to make it chic like an evening coat!” Giambattista Valli, creative director of Moncler Gamme Rouge, is explaining the sort of alchemical magic involved in transforming that most plebeian of garments, the Michelin Man–contoured downfilled jacket, into something fit for an opening night. Puffers—and doesn’t their very name indicate the problem?—are abundant this fall. At Chanel, quilting has been dramatically rethought in silver; at Dries Van Noten, the stitching has an Art Deco air; Peter Pilotto’s zip-up is dramatically hued. Even non-outerwear is jumping in: Miu Miu offers a quilted mod shift; Dior employs matelassé fabric to shape a spectacular, fiery-red number. The puffer paradox can be read as just another component of the activewear revolution, joining other styles once left behind in the gym locker—hooded zip tops, pull-on drawstringed trousers (now boardroom-appropriate in fine flannel or cocktail-ready in cashmere). And let us not forget for a moment that down coats are light. They are warm. They make us feel cozy and comfortable. Who wouldn’t want to replicate that feeling, even in an evening frock? Still, however you might heap the laurels upon them, isn’t this business of gussying up a feather-filled behemoth a blaring sartorial example of putting lipstick on a puffy pig? “Absolutely not!” says Thakoon Panichgul, whose own vivid floral creations are far from porcine. The designer spent a couple of months choosing just the right colorful thread to work over traditional quilting lines— “embroidering on top of it to make it more fashion.” But asked if these garments can ever be, well, slender, he admits, “It’s a bit hopeless! You have to embrace the volume—a belt defeats the purpose! For me it’s all about performance and a sportif color.” How did he solve the silhouette problem for himself? “I bought a boy’s North Face jacket,” he says, laughing. He loves its shrunken look—but, he confesses, “the sleeves are a bit short.”—LYNN YAEGER V I E W >2 3 4

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Soul RECYCLE

STEP OUTSIDE MALAIKA FIRTH WEARS A PATAGONIA RECLAIMED WOOL– AND–ORGANIC COTTON PARKA, $299; PATAGONIA .COM. HILFIGER COLLECTION SKIRT. MULBERRY BOOTS.

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he world in which we dress is an ecosystem where certain brands move in and out of season. In that sense, Patagonia has long been fashionable: With the arrival of every autumn comes a flurry of down-nestled stylists shopping at their local farmers’ markets. Now, though, the brand’s influence has expanded to include the runways, with Joseph Altuzarra’s nod to the company’s iconic fleeces in his shearling jackets and coats for fall just one example. The label’s own designers, of course, don’t approach this new terrain in the same way. “All of our best designs are coming from a functional need,” says the veteran Patagonia designer John Rapp. But there’s also a sense that we’re VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

witnessing the collision of two style worlds—that even those of us who do our camping exclusively in boutique hotels will be noticing Patagonia’s new capsule collection this fall. Yes, the four-decade-old Ventura, California–based company now has a foot in two streams: one in the channel of traditional outdoor apparel and another in the quicksilver rapids of fashion. It’s a first ascent guided in part by Alabama Chanin, the collective-oriented design stronghold just outside of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and helped along by Calamai, a family-owned company in Prato, Italy, that has been recycling wool for three generations without the aid of chemicals or plastics. Take Patagonia’s new reclaimed-wool parka: “They keep saying, ‘It’s just simple!’ ” says Jill Dumain, Patagonia’s director of environmental V I E W > 2 3 6 VOGUE.COM

B EN TOM S. FAS HI O N E DI TO R: K AT I E S HI LL I NG FOR D. H A I R, N AO KI KO MI YA ; MA KEUP, GEMMA SMITH -ED H OUSE. PRODUCED BY SYLVIA FARAGO. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

PATAGONIA PLANTS A FOOT FIRMLY IN FASHION WITH A BRILLIANTLY GREEN CAPSULE COLLECTION.

Elemental Forces strategy, of Calamai. (The cotton canvas on the shoulders and arms, as well as the stand-up collar and pocket flaps, is all organic, while the polyester lining designed to block wind is recycled.) Another high note from what Patagonia is calling its Truth to Materials collection: quilted scarves made from soul-tired down sweaters under the auspices of Natalie Chanin, founder and creative director of the craft-centric Alabama Chanin. In Alabama, I chatted with the company’s Diane Hall, who, while working on scarves, told me about the quilts she is sewing at home for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and I met Olivia Sherif, the artist and Alabama Chanin design director who helped solve Patagonia’s decades-long problem of how to recycle down by taking a walk. “There was a pillow factory across the river,” Sherif said. “I figured they’d probably know what to do.” I also visited Patagonia HQ in Ventura, where highlights included a stop in a fabric-testing lab built to foster innovation such as new rainwater barriers that mimic Mother Nature (“Nature has more time for R & D,” a technician said). I spent some time in the so-called Forge, where designers work to create outdoor garments that nobody has thought of yet, like an inflatable vest that can keep a wave-dashed surfer from drowning—and where I watched Patagonia designer Kourtney Morgan turn an ugly blanket into a beautiful poncho. “We’re trying to close the loop,” Rapp told me—the loop being the environmental impact. But back to Alabama, where Sherif showed me the incoming boxes of old down garments—duct-taped, accidentally bleached, a few salted with spare change. We spent some time marveling at their former lives—now transformed into scarf-size patchworks of old trips or adventures or walks around the block. Chanin summed it up. “They’ve been loved hard,” she said.—ROBERT SULLIVAN

POWER LUNCH FROM LEFT: DEVON PIKE IN A GIVENCHY BLOUSE ($1,850; THE WEBSTER, BAL HARBOUR, FL); KARIS DURMER IN AN ALTUZARRA DRESS ($1,995; CAPITOL, CHARLOTTE, NC); AND INDRE ROCKEFELLER IN A DELPOZO BLOUSE AND PANTS ($650–$2,050; DELPOZO, MIAMI).

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or a very long time, Karis Durmer wanted to be a U.S. senator representing New Hampshire, her home state. She studied government at Georgetown and interned for Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic National Committee, and Al Gore’s PAC, but something just didn’t feel quite right:

She liked to read fashion magazines, not just Roll Call, and scouted clothing racks like battleground precincts pitting Democrats against Republicans. But after moving to New York, working in finance at Bear Stearns and magazine publishing at Martha Stewart and Condé Nast, and earning a business degree from V I E W > 2 3 9 VOGUE.COM

S EBAST I A N KI M. SI T T I NG S ED I TO R: FE LI CI A GA RCI A- RI V ERA . HA I R , D E NN I S D EVOY; MAKEUP, MAKI H . SET D ESIGN, LAUR EN BAH R FOR A KS/A N N E KO CH ST U D I O. P HOTOG RA P H ED ON LO CATI ON AT HOT EL HUGO’S I L P R INCIPE, NYC. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

Leading Ladies

IBERIAN INFLUENCE MODEL DRAKE BURNETTE WEARS A DELPOZO BUTTERFLYPRINT DRESS, $2,550; DELPOZO, MIAMI. PHOTOGRAPHED BY CHRISTIAN MACDONALD.

WEARING IT WELL RIGHT: KATE MOSS IN AN ALTUZARRA BODYSUIT AND SKIRT, VOGUE, 2013. ABOVE: KARLIE KLOSS IN GIVENCHY (WITH EDDIE REDMAYNE), VOGUE, 2011. BOTH PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO.

Columbia, she found herself chief executive of the great state of Altuzarra. “I was spending my weekends walking the stores, looking at things and feeling things,” recalls Durmer, now 35. “And when I put it all together, I said, ‘You need to be in luxury retailing!’ ” Durmer’s ascension is just the latest example of the many women in their 30s who are being appointed fashion CEOs. As she sees it, it’s been happening slowly but steadily, with the fashion industry itself helping to move things along with mentors and other support. “Having worked in finance and media, I’ve found this industry to be more open and collaborative than the other two,” Durmer says. She names role models including Shirley Cook, CEO of Proenza Schouler, one of the first of her generation to run a fashion company. It’s an achievement Cook, 35, downplays. “If I’m not mistaken, 52 percent of the workforce is now women,” she says, “so women are bound to rise to the top.” And by the way: No offense to guys in suits. “I work with FO R DA I LY FA S H I O N N E W S A N D F E AT U R E S , G O TO VO G U E . C O M

guys in suits, and they’re great,” says Cook. “But it’s interesting to have a CEO with a personal feeling for the product, so it goes beyond numbers and strategy.” Indre Rockefeller, 34, was appointed U.S. head of Delpozo last winter, after cutting her teeth in fashion e-tail (Moda Operandi), business school (Stanford), fashion publishing (Vogue), art-history studies (Princeton), and a five-year career in ballet before that. “I mostly played supernatural creatures—characters that require imagination,” she says. But it fostered her interests in costume and artisanship, key ingredients in any fashion enterprise. Her eventual shift to business was simply what dancers call a changement—that elemental jump in which the feet change positions in the air. Now she is orchestrating the American growth of a promising Spanish house—establishing a New York office and overseeing retail expansion. “I need an eye for the creative but a head for the business,” Rockefeller says. Devon Pike had a similarly abrupt

career shift. While in college (Brown), she ruminated about writing philosophical novels, but then took a summer job at Filene’s. It was a decision that changed everything. “I had such an amazing experience,” she says. After six years there as a buyer, she went to business school (Harvard), where she studied under Clayton Christensen, a theorist who has helped CEOs go after new markets and calculate methods to innovate—ideas that are now dear to Pike, 43, as she sets out to boost Givenchy’s presence on American shores. “We have an incredible couture house, and we’re taking it to the next level,” she says. As Givenchy prepares to open some new U.S. stores (in Miami this winter, in New York next spring), Pike is thinking as much about a general future as a particular one. Instead of writing novels, she mostly reads books—Goodnight Moon, for example—to her two-year-old daughter, who, if things keep going the way they are, will grow up in a world where there is no need to note that a large number of women have been appointed fashion presidents and CEOs. “That’s who I think about,” Pike says, “when I think about what I’m doing.”—R.S. V I E W >24 0 VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

BU RN ET T E : FAS HI O N E DI TO R: STE LL A G RE EN S PA N . HA I R, MA RK I SH KRE LI ; M A KEUP, ALICE LANE. P RO DUCT IO N D ES IG N , JESSE KAUFM A N N FO R FRA N K REPS. D ETA I LS, S EE I N T HI S ISSUE.

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PILING ON DE TAILLACTOUHAMI WITH HUSBAND RAMDANE TOUHAMI AND THEIR CHILDREN, ADAM, NOOR, AND SCHERAZADE, IN THE MASTER BEDROOM.

VICTOIRE DE TAILLAC-TOUHAMI’S POPBRIGHT PARIS PENTHOUSE IS THE IDEAL PERCH FOR A FAMILY ON THE GO. n American friend told us we have good real estate karma,” says Victoire de Taillac-Touhami, laughing. In the past half-dozen years, she and her husband— entrepreneur, art director, designer, and man of a thousand trades Ramdane Touhami—and their three children (Scherazade, eleven; Adam, nine; and Noor, six) have moved from Paris to Tangier to New York and back to Paris, landing each time in a still-more-spectacular location. Their current abode, a modernist duplex penthouse on the Rue du Bac, perched atop an eighteenth-century hôtel particulier built for the daughter of Louis XIV’s finance minister, THE NEW RUSTIC THE DINING ROOM (LEFT) benefits from sweeping views of FEATURES A TABLE SO the Eiffel Tower and Les Invalides BIG IT HAD TO GO IN THROUGH THE WINDOWS. and “very un-Parisian propor“IT WAS WORSE THAN tions,” de Taillac-Touhami says, A PIANO,” RAMDANE SAYS. ABOVE LEFT: AN meaning luminous, wide, expanECLECTIC MIX OF ART IN sive spaces. The look V I E W > 2 4 2 THE COUPLE’S BEDROOM. VOGUE.COM

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Nomads at Rest

Hip House

UNITED COLORS FROM COMMONWEALTH CUES TO ARABIC CALLIGRAPHY, THE DINING ROOM IS A CASE STUDY IN JUBILANT JUXTAPOSITION.

inside, though, is anything but streamlined. Instead, it is a happy jumble, bearing witness to a life of multiple passions crisscrossing wide worlds of art, design, and fashion. Headquarters for the couple’s latest project—Buly 1803, their relaunch of a celebrated nineteenth-century parfumerie, with whimsically packaged, luxuriously handmade soaps, water-based perfumes, and all-natural beauty products sourced from remote corners of the globe—is just a few blocks away on the Rue Bonaparte. Ramdane (who helped usher Cire Trudon, the seventeenth-century French candlemaker, into the twenty-first century) designed the shop’s engagingly retrograde decor, which melds warm wood paneling and a turquoise tiled floor. Victoire, a willowy aristocrat turned shopkeeper, may be found in the boutique most days, suggesting herbal concoctions to soothe complexions or explaining the usefulness of Brazilian tucumaseed oil. (Later that afternoon, sitting in her kitchen, she applies it to her sunburned legs, souvenir of a recent family

LINED UP MID-CENTURY-MODERN FURNITURE MEETS AN AD HOC PORTRAIT GALLERY IN THE MASTER BEDROOM. ABOVE: EYEWEAR AND VINTAGE EGYPTIAN FILM POSTERS IN A BATHROOM.

vacation on a Spanish island.) She also edits Corpus, a biannual beauty magazine she and Ramdane launched last year. But if the Seventh Arrondissement (where Victoire grew up near the Eiffel Tower, and where her mother still lives) is once again home, the couple’s peripatetic philosophy of life hasn’t changed. “We are gypsies,” Ramdane explains over tea in their cheerfully chaotic salon. “We want to stay free. If tomorrow we decide to live in Hong Kong, Tokyo, or New York, we collect our stuff, and off we go.” The couple met in the late nineties, when Victoire was handling publicity for the then-fledgling boutique V I E W > 2 4 4 TO SHOP ITEMS INSPIRED BY DE TAILLAC-TOUHAMI’S PARIS PENTHOUSE, DOWNLOAD THE VOGUE DIGITAL EDITION

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Hip House Colette; Ramdane had cofounded L’Epicerie, a concept store in the Marais, and was commuting to Tokyo, where he had a hand in refashioning the brand And A. She is a descendant of a royal guardsman who was one of the inspirations for the Three Musketeers, and her family has a château in FOWL PLAY RIGHT: A TREEGascony; he is the relentlessly inTRUNK TABLE IN ventive son of a French-Moroccan THE BEDROOM. BELOW: POSTCARDS apple picker from outside TouAND TOY BIRDS louse. Together they have moved SHARE SPACE IN VICTOIRE’S OFFICE. eight times, taking their history (radical posters from the 1960s, an armchair that belonged to an aristocratic ancestor) along with them to each successive location. The ornate nineteenth-century baldachin bed in the couple’s master bedroom, for example, fit for a princess and wide enough for the whole family to tumble into, is a legacy of their first house in Tangier, which had belonged for decades to expatriate English decorator David Herbert. The enormous wooden farm table, long enough for fifteen or 20 people to gather around in their dining room (an “Ali Baba’s cave,” Ramdane says, with walls painted dark eggplant and partly covered in metallic wallpaper), was acquired for their first house in Brooklyn, where the couple moved four years ago while Victoire was overseeing the construction of her sister jeweler Marie-Hélène de Taillac’s Manhattan boutique, a mini-Versailles, at Sixty-ninth and Madison. The “ancestral” Hello Kitty portraits in their son’s bedroom were created by Ramdane for an exhibition in Tokyo celebrating the brand’s thirtieth anniversary, while throughout the apartment works by the couple’s artist friends—Philippe Parreno, José Parlá, Anri Sala, and others—jostle with objects of beauty like the Dieter Rams for Braun turntables that Ramdane collects and flea-market finds he has picked up around the world. Yet the life these cosmopolitan nomads lead is homebound and family-centered. “We cook a lot, always from scratch,” Ramdane says. “We don’t keep bees or chickens on our terrace, but even when I’m alone here, I cook for myself.” The family’s frequent moves, he says, are in the service of creating citizens of the world. “I want our children to experience something other than the daily grind of Parisian life—so we will be in Paris for a few years, and then we’ll see. I think, having done Africa, America, and Europe, there is only Asia left.”—LESLIE CAMHI V I E W >24 6

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NO ADULTS ALLOWED ABOVE: SCHERAZADE, NOOR, AND ADAM ON THE BALCONY WITH THEIR JACK RUSSELL TERRIER, HOLY. BELOW: ADAM’S BEDROOM.

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GILDED CAGE THE DESIGNER, AT HÔTEL PARTICULIER MONTMARTRE IN PARIS, WEARS HER ROSE-GOLD CUFF WITH WHITE DIAMONDS. BELOW: DAUPHIN RING; BOTH AT BERGDORF GOODMAN, NYC.

he only jewelry that designer Charlotte Dauphin de La Rochefoucauld wore while growing up in Paris was a gold band and a classic Rolex belonging to her late father, Laurent Dauphin, son of a French advertising pioneer. As heirlooms, they held sentimental value, of course, but their commanding beauty and weight also captivated her. “I’ve always liked very strong pieces,” she says. “Those delicate things your mother or grandmother gives you were never my cup of tea.” That appreciation for bold form and refined materials is central to her first collection of fine jewelry, called Dauphin. Launched earlier this year, the cuffs, choker, rings, and earrings come in just two motifs—a cage or overlapping squares—and are handcrafted exclusively in gold and diamonds. “I’m interested in silhouette and volume,” says de La Rochefoucauld, who studied art history at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art and also is a sculptor. “I’m not choosing big stones.” De La Rochefoucauld is as focused in her designs as she is about where the collection is sold. For now, Dauphin is carried at Colette, Le Bon Marché, Bergdorf Goodman, and her ateliers in Paris and London, where she lives with her husband, Comte Charles-Henri de La Rochefoucauld, a second cousin of Annette de la Renta. Influential lineage and familial ties to fashion aside, de La Rochefoucauld’s singular vision and impeccable taste place her squarely in the spotlight as one of fine jewelry’s rising talents. It really is as simple as that. —EMILY HOLT

Continental PROVIDE “WE WERE SHOOTING IN REYKJAVÍK TOGETHER, and between takes we’d buckle down with tea and just start drawing.” Monique Péan is telling the origin story of her new jewelry collaboration with model Liya Kebede—a project conceived to support the latter’s foundation dedicated to improving maternal-health services in Ethiopia (Kebede is from Addis Ababa). Five months later, their capsule boasts a scrimshaw dial depicting the African continent etched in concentric lines—recalling the terraced croplands outside Addis—along with a similarly topographic 18K-gold ring. “Jewelry design was uncharted territory for me,” says Kebede, whose organization will receive 100 percent of the partnership’s proceeds. “In the end, though, Monique’s sketchbook had what seemed like a million ideas—and we picked the perfect one.”—N.R.

TREASURE MAP PÉAN AND KEBEDE’S SCRIMSHAW– AND–18K GOLD NECKLACE, $3,480; BARNEYS NEW YORK, NYC.

VOGUE.COM

PASCA L CH EVA LLI E R. SI T T I NG S ED I TO R: CH A RLOT TE COL LE T. HA I R , ALEXANDRY COSTA; MAKEUP, LILI CHOI. RING: JOHN MANNO. MAP OF AFRICA, E NG RAV E D BY TH OM AS STI RLI N G, PU BLI S HE D BY EDWA RD BU LL, 1 830 / © BRIDGEMAN IMAGES. NECKLACE: MONIQUE PÉAN. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.

STORIES OF EAU XIAO WEN JU IN PRADA. PHOTOGRAPHED BY PATRICK DEMARCHELIER. FASHION EDITOR: TABITHA SIMMONS.

Beauty FROM TOP: TOM FORD VELVET ORCHID, ARQUISTE FOR J.CREW NO. 31, B. BALENCIAGA.

EDITOR: SARAH BROWN

HA I R, T E D DY C HA R LES ; MA KEUP, LI SA HOUG H TO N . P E RFU M E: T I M HOU T ( 3 ) . D E TAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

MANIA A WHICH FALL SCENT IS THE ONE FOR YOU? ROBERT SULLIVAN ON THE ART OF FRAGRANCE MATCHMAKING. VOGUE.COM

Perfume

s you read this fragrance report, fragrances are falling from the fragrance houses like autumn leaves, and, once again, you are faced with an impossible question: How to decide which of the new fall perfumes is the one for you? Do you make your choice by choosing the designer behind the scent? Do you judge by a particular note? Or do you go by the design of the bottle? As in life, nothing in fragrance is sure, except that fragrance is strong stuff—mind-bending, world-creating, sometimes heavenly, other times not, depending on your taste—and yet we press ahead, looking for clues that will lead us to the fragrance that is (in the olfactory sense, at least) our soul mate, our number one. B E AU T Y>2 5 0 VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

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Scent of Narciso Rodriguez. For his new scent, Narciso, he worked on the bottle for weeks, eventually painting the interior of the weighty glass cube a creamy off-white, for a milky, suspendedin-air look. It’s the exact shade of a stone he found a few years ago by the storied birthplace of Aphrodite, a sea stack in Paphos on the coast of Cyprus. (“There’s your proof,” he says, picking up the stone from his desk.) This Rodriguez-visiting fragrance correspondent was also struck by the similarities between the bottle and an ivory wool dress in his fall collection. Is it a coincidence that his clothes look like his scents? He answers in a blink: “They should—they were both designed by me!” As for the powerful scent contained within the discreet bottle, Rodriguez mentions the strong Cuban women in his life, like his mother and his aunt, the latter being a person who decorated with gardenias, a note, yes, in Narciso. Speaking of strong women, Giorgio Armani is betting that the smart and elegant among them will see Cate Blanchett in this fall’s Sì campaign and think that cassis and freesia and May rose and vanilla make it a scent match made in heaven. “I do like the smell of excitement,” Blanchett said at an event for the designer in New York this past spring. Alicia Keys recently said yes to Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci’s invitation to embody the house’s new Dahlia Divin—an earthy amber with a jasmine overlay—after he

If it is possible to establish a direct relationship between the bottle and the so-called juice, then Tom Ford’s Velvet Orchid may be close. The bottle, which shows off its translucent violetness when you hold it up to the sun, hinting at the intensity of what’s inside (Brazilian Cattleya leopoldii orchid, honey), looks, yes, just a little like a flask—there’s rum in it, too. Calvin Klein’s Reveal—plush sandalwood at its core—is translated as a modernist glass pillow. Another exercise in scent metonymy, My Burberry is the teamwork of designer Christopher Bailey and perfumer Francis Kurkdjian. “Fragrance is a lot like acting,” Kurkdjian says of his career as a nose-for-hire. “You play someone’s scent.” My Burberry is an example of Method acting: a case not just of the fragrance matching the fashion in spirit, but the fragrance matching an actual fashion object. Did you notice the gabardine ribbon tied around the bottle’s neck, the precise cloth used to make the iconic Burberry trench? Have you seen the bottle’s cap, which looks just like the horn used for the buttons? When you pop off that button-cap, you smell (or are supposed to smell) what Bailey refers to as “disheveled elegance.” That’s how he describes the ultimate Burberry girl—a cool, young, Londonliving woman, maybe a little late for drinks, refreshingly unpressed—personified in the campaign by Kate Moss and

FROM LEFT: MY BURBERRY, GIORGIO ARMANI SÌ, GIVENCHY DAHLIA DIVIN, CALVIN KLEIN REVEAL, NARCISO RODRIGUEZ NARCISO.

Cara Delevingne. And here’s where Kurkdjian’s acting abilities come in: To translate that feeling into a scent, he twisted the classic English rose, adding a hint of geranium for “zing,” and a splash of patchouli, to convey a sense of wetness—like a London garden just after the rain. Does Kurkdjian own a Burberry trench?: “Yes, of course I do!” Kurkdjian is an old hand, but in the first-time-fragrance category comes Alexander Wang with his debut for Balenciaga. A first fragrance is more than a fragrance moment. After all, those who may not find themselves cocooned in one of Wang’s cool felted-wool coats this fall may still partake in a taste of Balenciaga via his perfume, B. Balenciaga. Think of it as the high-fashion equivalent to baking a pie to make your home smell inviting, or of hors d’oeuvres. Wang’s welcoming scents: lily of the valley, violet leaves, and a green edamame accord. Yes, edamame. It’s clean and crisp, with a warm cashmere wood anchor, a fine and refined place, like its architectural vessel: Euclidean lines in cracked glass, a reference to the marble tiling of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s first Paris salon. In an effort to explore the questions raised by the fragrancefashion connection, I dropped by the Gramercy design studio

whipped up a look in 2012 for her to wear to the Met gala. Tisci immediately grasped her precise brand of feminine swagger: “It was 100 percent my style—a tuxedo jumpsuit. That’s me!” says Keys. Tisci’s designs, she says, are for women who are “tough but gentle. Same with the fragrance.” In discussing fragrance match-making and the risks and rewards therein, it’s difficult not to mention Girl, the whimsical and streetwise eau de toilette from Comme des Garçons and Pharrell Williams, named for Williams’s latest album. How do you bottle a scent (a breezy, effervescent blend of neroli, lavender, white pepper, vetiver, cedar) that has been produced by the man who gave you “Happy”? Williams turned to Brian Donnelly, the artist known as KAWS, whose work he collects. When it was time to tell Donnelly what to do, Williams didn’t, and he is in love with the result: a bottle wrapped in one of KAWS’s signature cartoon characters that looks less like a perfume and more like art for the boudoir. “It was nothing short of alchemical,” Pharrell says. Donnelly is happy, too, though his very favorite scent is not Girl but a girl—specifically, his seven-month-old daughter. “The best smell ever,” he says. B E AU T Y>2 5 2 VOGUE.COM

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FROM TOP: NYX COSMETICS LIPSTICKS IN BLUE VELVET, PISTACHIO, AND CITRON.

KARLIE KLOSS, WITH A PAINTERLY TWIST ON EYE MAKEUP BY JULIEN D’YS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY PATRICK DEMARCHELIER, VOGUE, 2010.

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Artistic

& OTHER STORIES HAND CREAM IN SHINJUKU BLOOM.

SHU UEMURA BRAVE BEAUTY EYE PALETTE. LONGCHAMP LE PLIAGE ECLIPSE BAG, AVAILABLE IN NOVEMBER.

THYMES HAND CREAM IN JADE MATCHA.

RÉGIME DES FLEURS FRAGRANCES NITESURF (ABOVE) AND TURQUOISE.

LONGCH AMP: J OH N MANNO. A LL OTH ERS: TIM H OUT.

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reative types are putting their stamp on beauty this fall with products that look like they’ve come straight out of an art studio. Thick brushstrokes dress up Thymes hand cream and new eye palettes from Shu Uemura; the culty Swedish fashion brand & Other Stories, which launched in London last year (and quickly became a destination for Europebound editors), arrives Stateside this month along with its beauty range, which includes purse-size skin care resembling tubes of acrylic. An artistic experiment between perfumeobsessed friends Alia Raza and Ezra Woods, L.A.’s Régime des Fleurs fragrances come in custom-painted flacons. The scents have art-world cred, too: Nitesurf, with a “phosphorescent petal accord,” made its debut earlier this year in an installation at Santa Monica’s Gallery 169. How to carry it all home? In an artist-designed tote: British-born Sarah Morris, known for her soaring geometric paintings, has lent her keen eye for pattern and color to a collection of Le Pliage bags for Longchamp.—LAURA REGENSDORF H E A LT H > 2 5 4

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Health ANYTHING GOES? HERBAL REMEDIES CAN BE CONTAMINATED WITH HEAVY METALS SUCH AS LEAD OR MERCURY. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ERIC BOMAN.

WITH ADULTERATION COMMONPLACE AND REGULATION MINIMAL, HOW CAN WE BE SURE HERBAL SUPPLEMENTS REALLY ARE WHAT THEY SAY ON THE JAR? LIZ WELCH INVESTIGATES.

HERBS a cold or a case of poison ivy,” says Whittel, now 40. “I grew up believing in the healing power of plants.” Still, no amount of comfrey or calendula could relieve the eczema that plagued Whittel throughout her childhood and into her 20s, when the outbreaks became so severe her skin would crack and bleed. “It got so bad I didn’t want to leave the house,” she says.

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hen she was a teenager, Naomi Whittel spent her summers harvesting herbs on her Swiss-German grandmother’s farm in Vermont. “The kitchen was lined with dried bouquets of echinacea, elderflower, and chamomile, which my grandmother turned into tinctures for any ailment, whether VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

Prescription drugs helped but came with side effects. Finally, at 23, Whittel found an acupuncturist who prescribed a series of needle sessions combined with an intense program of Chinese herbal medicine. Given a long list of botanical supplements that included gardenia, mulberry leaf, and chrysanthemum, she duly swallowed them, steeped them in her bath, and sipped them as tea. “It took about eighteen months, but my skin eventually cleared up,” she says. Soon afterward, she was engaged to her lawyer boyfriend, and ready to start a family. “I went to my doctor for a routine blood test,” she recalls. “That’s how I discovered that my metal counts were so high that getting pregnant would be risky.” Stunned, Whittel racked her brain trying to identify the culprit. Suddenly it dawned on her: It must have been the herbs. Botanicals have been used as natural medicine for thousands of years—and many have more recently been studied by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Ginger, for example, is thought to alleviate pregnancy-related nausea, and cranberry may prevent urinarytract infections. These are just two of thousands of herbal remedies sold in a $5 billion industry (a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that one in five Americans uses an herbal supplement). So when a Canadian study published last fall found that one third of the herbal supplements tested did not contain any of the main herbal ingredient listed on the label, and a third included additional ingredients that were not listed, shock waves went through the herbal industry and beyond. People who believe in natural cures felt duped, and those who were skeptics had proof. While many unlisted ingredients were benign, like rice powder, which is often used as a binder, the study found that one ginkgo biloba supplement contained black walnut, potentially fatal for people with nut allergies, while an echinacea sample contained a bitterweed called Parthenium hysterophorus, which can cause rashes and nausea. The alarming conclusion—that 59 percent of the tested remedies were adulterated—has since been called into question, as it H E A LT H > 2 5 6 VOGUE.COM

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Health Chinese plant, none of which has been associated with reducing hot flashes. Since most herbal supplements are relatively safe and alarming side effects are unusual, these bait-andswitches are rarely discovered—it’s like taking a sugar pill. But in rare instances, herbs can have serious health consequences: Six cases of severe liver toxicity thought to have been associated with black cohosh were reported in Canada between 2005 and 2009. Another case in Australia was so serious it required a liver transplant. Following Whittel’s heavy-metal diagnosis, she went on a fourteenday juice detox prescribed by a nahave anti-aging properties. “I found a seventh-generation organic vineyard in France and tested the soil and the seeds before we signed any agreement,” Whittel says. “That’s still where I get most of my grapes, vines, seeds, and stems.” Reserveage has since grown to include supplements that use more than 80 botanicals, all of which Whittel strives to ensure are both authentic and uncontaminated. This mission has taken her to Ecuador, where she sources cacao beans for nutritional supplements, and this past summer to Switzerland, where she spent time with a grower of biodynamic chamomile. “Whenever possible, I visit the farms,” she explains. When she cannot personally test the purity of every herb used in her products, she relies on a company that can. Naturex is a global company based in France that specializes in botanical extracts, the key ingredient in all herbal supplements. Curious to learn how an echinacea plant is turned into a capsule I might take to combat a cold, I requested a tour of the company’s U.S. headquarters in South Hackensack, New Jersey. There, David Yvergniaux,the U.S. sales director of Nutrition and Health, walked me through the extraction process, starting in the receiving warehouse, which was filled with raw herbs. Burlap bags of black cohosh root and green coffee beans were stacked alongside buckets of orange blossom and boxes of ginseng, each labeled by its provenance. Later, in the lab, a staff botanist inspects each shipment for authenticity (checking that it really is black cohosh and not an imposter plant) and purity. Next, the herb is ground and placed in percolators to be brewed into a liquid the consistency of molasses. That liquid is then spray-dried into the fine powdered extract found in capsules. But first, this powder is examined using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), a technique that can identify the plant’s various compounds and potencies in a crucial process known as standardization. “Standardization is one important thing when looking for products,” says Gene Bruno. “It’s a strong indication that you are getting an effective herb.” Finally, the powder is tested for heavy metals, pesticides, and mold in a process H E A LT H > 2 5 8 VOGUE.COM

was based on a relatively new DNA bar code–testing technique. But even the most die-hard herbal enthusiasts agree that the findings highlighted the Achilles’ heel of the supplement world. “The quality and the identity of herbal materials is one of the biggest issues in the industry today,” says Mark Blumenthal, founder and executive director of the American Botanical Council, a Texas-based nonprofit research-and-education organization. “People should be able to look at the label on a product and have a high degree of confidence that the product reflects what’s on the label.” They should also feel confident that it is pure. Whittel believes the herbs she took to cure her eczema were contaminated. “Even if the supplier claimed the seeds were organic, who knows what pesticides neighboring farmers were using, or what other toxins had leached into the soil?” In the world of supplements, adulteration is the ultimate dirty word. “There are two types: accidental and intentional,” Blumenthal says. “Both are a global problem.” Whittel suspects she experienced accidental adulteration—no one realized the herbs she took might have been laced with heavy metals until the blood test revealed that she had high levels of mercury and lead. Intentional adulteration is more sinister. “That’s when companies switch or dilute their product with an undisclosed cheaper product for profit,” Blumenthal explains. “You’re selling A but you’re providing B.”

A STUDY FOUND ONE THIRD OF ALL HERBAL REMEDIES TESTED DID NOT CONTAIN ANY OF THE MAIN HERBAL INGREDIENT ON THE LABEL turopathic doctor, and spent the next six months on a diet that eliminated any foods her doctor thought could contribute to the metal buildup in her body, including certain fish and any green vegetables that were not organic. Once the metal levels in her blood dropped, she quickly became pregnant and gave birth to a healthy daughter in 2002. But her bittersweet experience with botanicals continued to trouble her. “My eczema never returned, so I still felt strongly about the power of herbs, but I also realized how important it is to know that they’re 100 percent pure before I put them into my body,” she explains. For Whittel, that meant going directly to the source—just as she had as a teenager in her grandmother’s garden. The idea of full transparency—from soil to seed to supplement—became the cornerstone of Reserveage Nutrition, the company Whittel launched in 2009 with a product called Resveratrol, a supplement containing a polyphenol found in red grapes that has been thought to

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he situation becomes murkier still when a company sells, for instance, black cohosh, and states that on the label, but does not include the type of black cohosh that has been linked with helping to relieve menopause symptoms. “Only North American black cohosh root and rhizome extracts have been thought to reduce hot flashes,” explains Gene Bruno, the dean of academics at Huntington College of Health Sciences and the director of Category Management at Twinlab, a major U.S. supplement manufacturer. So if the label says “black cohosh,” it might be the leaf or stem of the North American plant, or a similar VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

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Health which supplements are worth taking. They choose supplements to test according to popularity—ginkgo biloba was the very first test in 1999, green coffee-bean extract a more recent one. Third-party labs test dozens of products for purity, authenticity, and efficacy. “Twenty to 25 percent of the products we select fail our test for one reason or another,” Cooperman says. “Either the main ingredient isn’t all there, or there’s a contaminant like a heavy metal, or way too much of one ingredient than is claimed on the label.” While you can pay for an annual subscription that gives access to all ConsumerLab findings, there are other ways to find out if your supplement is safe. The first rule is to go with a trusted brand that has a good track record. Also look for products that offer a Certificate of Analysis, says Michael Smith, M.D., who practices natural medicine and is the author of a book on supplements. “That means a third-party lab has tested [the product] for purity and potency,” Smith explains. Companies may also include a Current Good Manufacturing Practices certification on a supplement’s label—otherwise it should be readily available on the company’s Web site or by calling the manufacturer. Another tip is to look for standardized herbs, indicated on the label by a ratio or percentage. This means that a particular compound has been measured to match the specific amount found to be effective in trials. So instead of just listing “black cohosh” as an ingredient, it would specify “black cohosh extract (root and rhizome) standardized to 2.5% triterpene glycosides.” Whittel’s herbalist grandmother would laugh at such scientific tongue twisters—she still makes her tinctures the old-fashioned way, from whole herbs. “She taught me how to respect plants,” says Whittel, who recently returned from the organic farm in the Alps where she sources her chamomile. “I’m working on a new product for stress reduction and will use their plants,” she says. “They’re the purest I’ve found. And my grandmother grew up not far from there, so that was another sign, since she planted the seed in me to do this work.” B E AU T Y>2 6 4 VOGUE.COM

called ICP-MS. “If the ginkgo leaves were grown along a highway, we might find heavy-metal traces here that were not identified in the first check,” Yvergniaux explains. “If that happens, the entire shipment is rejected.” ll supplement manufacturers are required by law to establish the safety of their products and ensure any claims made on their labels are not false or misleading, according to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) passed in 1994. “People often say the industry is unregulated, but that’s incorrect,” says Tod Cooperman, M.D., founder of ConsumerLab.com, a company that does independent testing on dietary supplements. “The FDA has regulations; they’re just easy to get around.” This is because companies making dietary supplements, the category herbs fall into, do not need FDA approval before launching a product. As a result, the only way to find out if an herbal supplement is unsafe is when a consumer complaint leads to an investigation, or if the FDA does a spot-check. The FDA carries out routine inspections to make sure companies are following Current Good Manufacturing Practices, regulations introduced in 2007 that require all supplement-makers to adhere to a set of laboratory-testing and qualitycontrol procedures—one of which stipulates that products must be free of contaminants. The results are unsettling: Between 2011 and 2013, the agency found violations in more than half of the 900-plus firms inspected. In short, if a company wants to profit from an herbal trend, it can put rice husks in gel capsules, create a weightmanagement formula label, and claim the pills will help you lose five pounds. They can sell out of a short run before the FDA finds them. If no one reports adverse effects, the company may even get away with it. Bad players like these have given the industry its murky, Wild West reputation, and are one of the reasons Cooperman started ConsumerLab. The goal of this subscription-based company is to help consumers decide

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FRESH TAKE NATALIE WESTLING IN A VALENTINO DRESS, PHOTOGRAPHED BY GREGORY HARRIS. FASHION EDITOR: SARA MOONVES.

Breaking Up with

SHAMPOO THERE’S A (SIMPLE) SECRET BEHIND FALL ’S COOL, LIVED-IN HAIR. KAYLEEN SCHAEFER ON THE TREND THAT HAS EVERYONE IN A LATHER. “I always love when a girl hasn’t washed her hair for a day or so,” says Paul Hanlon, the British hairstylist who galvanized the look of fashionably laissez-faire hair over several seasons at Proenza Schouler and, before Louis Vuitton’s fall show in Paris earlier this year, went as far as to request that the models arrive with their hair unwashed. The look he’s after is “weighted down a bit so it’s not floaty—not that clean sort of bouncy, soft hair,” he explains. “I want to keep the edge but make it languid, sexy.” B E AU T Y>2 6 6 VOGUE.COM

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he new hair to have isn’t short or long, flatironed into glassy sheets or falling in big, bouncy curls. It’s the sort of coolly lived-in hair Frenchwomen and chicly aloof models have: It bends in just the right places; it smacks of low-maintenance, effortless ease. It looks like they-just-woke-up-like-this because, in many cases, they did. The secret: Women all over the world are quietly breaking up with shampoo.

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HA I R, TA M A RA M C N AUG HTON ; MA KEU P, M A RL A B ELT. A LL OTH ERS: MA R KO M A C P HERSON. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

CLEAN SWEEP CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: WEN CLEANSING CONDITIONER IN BAMBOO GREEN TEA; PURELY PERFECT CLEANSING CREME; L’ORÉAL PARIS EVERCRÈME CLEANSING CONDITIONER.

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Hair made the mistake of shampooing my hair a few weeks ago, and I kid you not—it was brittle for days!” Salons have taken it up, too. At his Hollywood atelier, Chaz Dean washes clients’ hair with his line of Wen cleansing conditioners, made with mint and lavender. Whittemore House in Manhattan and the Karcher in Brooklyn are using a co-wash by Purely Perfect, the new range by Michael Gordon, the founder of Bumble and Bumble. “I started with the idea of not having a traditional shampoo,” says Gordon. “This is something that cleanses the hair and leaves it feeling fantastic.” Anessa Daviero, owner of Headdress, the five-chair East Village salon where Karolina Kurkova, Jessica Stam, and Taylor Schilling come for their color, says she gets mixed reactions when she tells clients their hair is being washed with conditioner. “Some people are skeptical, but those who don’t shampoo their hair a lot are like, ‘Amazing,’ ” she says. The trend couldn’t come at a better moment, says John Barrett. Barrett is a staunch advocate of cleansing with conditioner from time to time and using less shampoo in general, calling American women’s propensity to overwash their hair a national epidemic. “The more you strip your hair, the more you’ll find you have flyaways. The less you strip your hair, the more naturally smooth and nice it will be. The follicle won’t be screaming out to be left alone,” he declared when I visited him one morning in his salon atop Bergdorf Goodman in New York. Still, co-washing is not for everyone. “It’s really case-by-case,” admits the editorial hairstylist Duffy. For women with fine hair, who need all the lift and bounce they can get, “it’s not a great idea because it can leave hair heavy and lank.” To keep hair from getting too flat, he suggests using a cleansing conditioner just one day a week, and rinsing thoroughly. And shampoo is far from dead. Just ask veteran hair wizard Garren, whose new line, R+Co, features five separate shampoos with names like Moon (for shine), Atlantis (moisturizing), and Dallas (thickening). “We were talking about doing a cleansing conditioner,” he says, “but I’m kind of old-world. I think you have to shampoo. Yes, less is more, and you don’t have to do it every day, but there comes a point where you do have to shampoo.” When I visit Valery Joseph for a trim at his salon in Barneys and mention that I’ve been washing my hair with conditioner, he tilts his head to the side as if he’s waiting for me to tell him I’m joking. “I think you should shampoo,” he says finally. (Joseph lathers his own glossy chin-length locks daily with his new Long shampoo.) “It’s true that some people believe you’re not supposed to wash your hair at all, but I think we live in a modern age where we have very good shampoos.” He pauses for a moment before gently adding, “Plus, you do have a little buildup on top.”

FO R DA I LY B E AU T Y N E W S A N D F E AT U R E S , G O TO VO G U E . C O M

THE HAIR TO HAVE BELOW: LILY ALDRIDGE, PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANGELO PENNETTA. RIGHT: KARLIE KLOSS (IN STELLA MCCARTNEY), PHOTOGRAPHED BY SEBASTIAN KIM.

CLEANSING CONDITIONERS HELP ME SKIP THE OVERLY FLUFFY HAIR DAY I’D USUALLY HAVE POST-SHAMPOO AND GO STRAIGHT TO SMOOTHER TERRITORY EverCrème help me skip the frizzed-out, overly fluffy hair day I’d usually have post-shampoo and go straight to tamer, smoother territory. The practice is called co-washing, short for conditioner washing. It was first embraced by African-American and curly-haired women as a way to calm thick, textured hair. Since it keeps the hair moisturized, it also helps color last longer. (I started my own conditioner-heavy routine when Reyad Fritas, top colorist at the Frédéric Fekkai salon on Fifth Avenue, suggested it as a way to prevent my chestnut shade from quickly turning brassy.) Hannah Bronfman, downtown DJ and cofounder of the Beautified beauty service–booking app, is an avid co-washer. “Since my hair is textured, it dries out supereasily,” she says. “Co-washing moisturizes without stripping natural oils. I

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A L DR I DG E : FASHI O N E D I TO R: TA BI T HA S I MM O N S. HA I R, EST HE R L A N GH A M; M A KEUP, LISA H OUGH TON. KLOSS: FASH ION ED ITOR : BEAU SAM. H AIR , R ITA MAR MOR ; MAKEUP, YUMI MO RI. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .

I’ve had a nearly full bottle of my favorite shampoo in my shower for six months, and it will probably be there for another six because I, too, want my hair to look piece-y and carefree, as if I never brush it or bother with it much at all. That’s not to say my hair is dirty. I’m still washing it, but I’m doing it with specialized new products made specifically for the shampoo-averse. They’re called cleansing conditioners, and they work similarly to non-foaming facial washes: They don’t lather much—they’re detergentfree—but they do lift out impurities with gentle ingredients like essential oils or aloe vera. My hair is thick, semi-wavy, and tends to be dry more often than not. Cleansing conditioners from brands like Ojon and L’Oréal

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OXFORD Revisited In Lone Scherfig’s latest, Max Irons plays a university student swept up in a secret society.

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design

Best known for its wall coverings with a modern take on classical motifs like toile de Jouy, the Glasgow-based design company Timorous Beasties is debuting a collection of lithographed tiles. Hand-drawn, digitized, and then printed on limestone, the Rorschach line features an almost psychedelic damask pattern of abstract florals in fuchsia and electric orange. It’s a pleasing tension between two traditions—one storied and opulent, the other accidental and psychologically revealing. As co-owner and designer Paul Simmons says, “We hope to turn aesthetic assumptions about pattern upside down.”—MIEKE TEN HAVE

Off theWALL

FAR OUT FROM LEFT: OMNI SPLATT DAMASK AND SPLITTER SPLATTER DAMASK; CLETILE.COM. VOGUE.COM

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U P N E XT: SA RA H P IA NTA D OS I. SI T T IN G S ED I TO R: HA N N A K ELI FA . G RO OM I NG, NAOKI KOMIYA AND LUCY BURT. D ESIGN: COURTESY OF TIMOROUS BEASTIES. D ETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSU E .

percent proud,” Irons says. “But at first, stupidly, I did not want to do it. I didn’t want to glamorize it.” It’s easy to guess why Irons might have resisted playing a dynastically entitled scion. He’s the 29-yearold offspring of Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack, and thus, unavoidably, carries the thespian genes of a great English/Irish family tree. Irons protests it is not a case of natural typecasting, though. He may have grown up in Oxfordshire and attended the Bryanston School (from which he was expelled for being caught in flagrante with a female student), but, he says, “I’m not really a man’s man. I’m not good at banter. It’s always sort of been my nightmare.” Does the man have a diffident English charm? Oh, of course not. After Bryanston, where Irons struggled with dyslexia and discovered “acting was most fun,” he enrolled at the Guildhall School to study the family trade, ignoring his parents’ warnings. “The emotional part, the financial part, the jealousy, the being away from loved ones—they explained it all,” he says. So far so good, though: A steady stream of film and TV parts (Red Riding Hood, The Host, The White Queen) has kept his career on the upswing. What ultimately attracted him to The Riot Club is the fact that it’s the opposite of a dreaming-spires-ofOxford romance. Adapted by Laura Wade from her 2010 play, Posh, the plot fictionalizes the exploits of the real, secretive Oxford University Bullingdon Club, whose former members include British prime minister David Cameron and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London. The cast did its research, Irons says. STAND BY ME “We interviewed members of the Bullingdon Club. THE ACTOR, IN What you read about is true, and happens.” As Miles, A BURBERRY PRORSUM a gorgeous first-year who wins a sparky workingCOAT AND class girlfriend (Holliday Grainger), he—like the PANTS AND A RAG & BONE viewer—is lured into an initially entertaining and T-SHIRT. then fully shocking display of violent British class hatred. As Irons says, “He’s taken in by the glamour and then he Riot Club involves ten good-looking, urbane fails to act.” More recently the actor, who lives in New York British boys (Douglas Booth, Sam Claflin, Freddie Fox, with his fashion-editor girlfriend, Sophie Pera, just finished among them) dressed up in tails for a story about a despifilming for Simon Curtis’s Woman in Gold, with Helen Mirren cably behaved Oxford University dining club. Directed by and Charles Dance. A future member of the great and the An Education’s Lone Scherfig, it almost didn’t have Max good of British drama? Maybe.—SARAH MOWER PATA > 2 7 0 Irons in the lead role. “It is the only thing of which I’m 100

people are talking about movies

THE EYES HAVE IT THE COVER IMAGE FROM PICASSO’S ANIMALS (PRESTEL).

ENOUGH

a

Jason Schwartzman’s Philip is a possible genius and definite narcissist.

About Me

lex Ross Perry’s novelistic indie Listen Up Philip is the mordant tale of an up-and-coming Brooklyn writer who refuses to be redeemed. In a startling change of pace, Jason Schwartzman plays Philip Friedman, a prickly latterday Philip Roth burning for literary stardom. Under the tutelage of a famous novelist (a superb Jonathan Pryce), Philip wanders through life abusing his publishers, insulting his writing students, and behaving badly toward his girlfriend, Ashley Kane, a highly regarded photographer whose appalled fascination with his impenetrable narcissism is beautifully caught by Elisabeth Moss. Like Lena Dunham’s Girls and Adelle Waldman’s fine novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Perry’s funny, surprising film offers an observant portrait of a cultural moment when young artists (especially in Brooklyn) are so busy wanting to be heard by the world, they can’t be bothered to hear those around them. —JOHN POWERS

art

It’s an apt moment for the artist who said, “Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.” After a painstaking renovation that’s doubled its exhibition space, the Musée Picasso reopens the doors of its hôtel particulier in the Third Arrondissement, not far from the drafty Montmartre studio where Gertrude Stein once sat for the Spanish master. Art historian Sir John Richardson, who’s curated another jewel-like show for the Gagosian, “Picasso and the Camera,” will be feeding the frenzy here in New York, and he’s not the only one. Last year, Leonard Lauder promised his world-class collection of Cubist works to the Met. Now, for the first time, these 79 pieces by Picasso and his perspective-bending contemporaries Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger will be put on public view in “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection.” And Pablo admirers of all ages will enjoy the forthcoming Picasso’s Animals, featuring line drawings of the animals that most inspired him, including birds, bulls, and his pet dachshund, Lump.—KATE GUADAGNINO

PICASSO Mania

television

HOPELESSLY DEVOTED ELISABETH MOSS (VOGUE, 2009) PLAYS THE PROTAGONIST’S GIRLFRIEND.

If television has an ironclad rule, it’s that any show worth making is worth remaking. Gracepoint is a new ten-episode Fox mystery series based so closely on the gripping British original, Broadchurch, that it even boasts the same star, Scottish actor David (Doctor Who) Tennant. Set in a small town on the California coast, it begins with a young boy’s body being found on the beach. Investigating are Detective Ellie Miller (Breaking Bad’s Anna Gunn), whose son was the victim’s friend, and her new boss from out of town, Detective Emmett Carver (Tennant), whose outlook is as bleak as Ellie’s is hopeful. As the two start fishing for clues—and filleting red herrings—we discover that this nice little town is full of people with secrets, from the boy’s father (Michael Peña) to the amiable minister (Kevin Rankin) to the gruff kayak shop manager (Nick Nolte). Although Fox promises a new ending, Gracepoint otherwise follows the original, and why not? The show became a hit in the U.K. by keeping viewers guessing whodunit.—J.P. PATA > 2 7 2

M OV I ES: KEV I N ST UR MA N . A RT: COURTESY O F P REST EL .

Clued IN

people are talking about FIELD OF DREAMS THE RUSSIAN RIVER VALLEY MAY BE AT ITS MOST PICTURESQUE IN FALL.

travel

Wine COUNTRY

f

With a relaxed vibe and natural beauty to spare, Sonoma County is the perfect fall getaway.

or scenic views and award-winning food and wine, travelers are heading to laid-back, sustainably minded Sonoma, in many ways a West Coast version of Long Island’s North Fork. October, when the leaves turn and crush season hits its stride, is an ideal time to visit—don’t miss Farmhouse Inn, just down the Old Redwood Highway from trendy

talent

object

ROLL with it The design team Anne-Marie Midy and Jorge Almada, otherwise known as Casamidy, gets in the game with this colorful backgammon set (available at casamidy.com). Woven at their atelier in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, the graphic red-andblack wool saddle blanket comes with leather playing pieces and a waxed-cotton carrying case—making it just the thing for a fall picnic. For more pointers from the stylish duo, check out The Artisanal Home: Interiors and Furniture of Casamidy, out from Rizzoli this month.—M.T.H.

“I tend to latch on to things and not let go,” admits Damien Chazelle, the 29-year-old director of Whiplash, a blistering portrait of the battle between life and art that wowed at Sundance and established him as a filmmaker who, like Benh Zeitlin, eludes the usual categories. Miles Teller stars as an aspiring drummer under the sway of his music school’s jazz-band conductor (J. K. Simmons, bound for an Oscar nod), whose bullying perfectionism borders on MEASURE FOR the psychotic. What starts as a story MEASURE about music takes on the life-andTHE DIRECTOR, IN A GUCCI BLAZER death intensity of a war movie. AND A MARC The son of professors, Chazelle grew JACOBS SHIRT. up in Princeton—“It was total ivory tower,” he says with a hangdog shrug—and went on to Harvard. It was there that he fell in love with the work of Jacques Demy, whose Umbrellas of Cherbourg inspired Chazelle’s 2009 debut, the delightful low-budget musical Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, and eventually led him to Hollywood. “Damien may have been lacking a little self-confidence at first,” says the avuncular Simmons, “but he has everything a director needs.” Or, as Teller puts it to me from the Baton Rouge set of The Fantastic Four, “Man, is he good.” In February, Chazelle will start shooting his “multicolored love letter to L.A.,” La La Land, an old-school musical about an actress and a musician (rumored to be played by Teller and Emma Watson). “What’s great about musicals is their energy and go-for-brokeness—stopping the story to sing and dance,” he says with a smile. “How can you not love that?”—J.P. PATA > 2 74

SIGHT and SOUND

TA LE NT: JE FF LI PSKY. S I TT I N G S ED I TO R: SA LLY LYN D LEY. G RO O MI N G, C HE RI KEAT I NG. P H OTOGRAPH ED AT ACE H OTEL, D OWNTOWN LOS ANGELES. TRAVEL: J ER RY D OD R ILL/ © GETTY IMAGES. O BJECT: COU RT ESY O F CASAMIDY. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .

Healdsburg, on a quiet stretch of the Russian River Valley. Brother-sister team Joe and Catherine Bartolomei, who as children spent weekends running around their grandparents’ nearby ranch, bought the charming bedand-breakfast thirteen years ago and have been adding luxurious touches ever since. Most recently, they completed a major renovation that added an in-ground spa and nine new rooms, with bright linens (“That fresh-off-the-line feel is important to me,” says Catherine), homespun throws from Alicia Adams Alpaca, and stone fireplaces. Guests can attend nearby vintage tastings, go canoeing, bike or hike nature trails, and explore the area’s farmers’ markets and antiques stores. For the ultimate farm-to-table dinner, reserve a spot at the inn’s Michelin-starred restaurant, whose wine list includes a strong local showing from the likes of Kistler Vineyard and Porter Creek. As Catherine says, “So many people here are spinning off from the big wineries and saying, ‘I want to do my own thing.’ ” farmhouseinn.com; rates from $595.—K.G.

people are talking about BRIGHT NOTE KELELA WEARS A MARC BY MARC JACOBS DRESS.

music

t

Kelela reinvents the club track with sultry vocals and layered beats. her that she and her daughter had been listening to Kelela’s mixtape nonstop. Beyoncé attended a concert of hers in February. “When you can include

Dancing QUEEN

he Ethiopian-American singersongwriter Kelela Mizanekristos was at a Williamsburg, Brooklyn, café recently when she ran into Björk, who told

Björk and Beyoncé in your audience, you can just quit,” jokes the 31-yearold L.A.-based artist. It felt like fate, especially because, as a friend of hers observed, Kelela’s genre-jarring brand of experimental R & B sits at the stylistic intersection of the two. Before she was meeting icons, Kelela was channeling them, standing on her kitchen table in Maryland and belting Whitney Houston solos for her parents. Later, she would summon the courage to leave American University, where she was studying international relations, to pursue a music career out West. A telemarketing gig paid the bills as she honed her craft; she eventually attracted the attention of the influential electronic-music collective Fade to Mind. In 2013, Kelela became the first singer to sign with the underground label, carving a niche for her intricate, vocally charged dance tracks, which marry the lyrical traditions of rhythm and blues with otherworldly beats. Following the success of her thirteentrack mixtape Cut 4 Me, she’s completing her debut studio album and working on a handful of singles featuring such collaborators as Tink and Le1f. This month brings the release of her newest track, “Ex-Girlfriend,” produced by Arca (Kanye West, FKA Twigs). With her crown of dreadlocks, the almond-eyed artist also appears in Calvin Klein’s new CK One campaign. “I feel really good about putting it out there in the world,” she says of making music. “It feels quite natural but also magical. Like, ‘Whoa, this is so not normal life for me.’ ”—GABRIELLA KAREFA-JOHNSON PATA > 2 7 6

theater

Glenn Close can barely set foot on a Broadway stage without winning a Tony. This month she returns as Agnes, the sharp-tongued doyenne of a perfectly appointed WASP household in a new production of A Delicate Balance, Edward Albee’s barbed 1966 Pulitzer-winning drawing-room comedy about upper-middle-class family dysfunction and existential terror. Throw in John Lithgow as her passive-aggressive husband, Martha Plimpton as their spoiled 36-year-old daughter, and Lindsay Duncan as Agnes’s alcoholic younger sister, with Pam MacKinnon directing (she was also behind 2012’s knockout revival of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and you’ve got one of the most eagerly awaited productions of the season. The play offers a harrowingly funny portrait of people desperately seeking succor in an uncertain world. “Agnes is in a very delicate place herself when the play opens,” says Close, who is no stranger to a privileged milieu or the chasm yawning beneath its surface—she grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and her parents joined a cult when she was seven. “She’s a mother trying to hold her family together, but what she’s really trying to hold together is herself. And there’s something kind of noble in that.”—ADAM GREEN

FAMILY Matters

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CLOSE-UP THE ACTRESS, PHOTOGRAPHED BY BRIGITTE LACOMBE FOR VOGUE, 1989.

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LONNY SPENCE. SITTINGS ED ITOR : EMMA WYMAN. H AIR , CYND IA H ARVEY; MAKEUP, LOTTEN H OLMQVIST. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .

books

people are talking about

SPOT ON DUNHAM, PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ FOR VOGUE, 2014.

t

hat Lena Dunham’s eagerly anticipated essay collection, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” (Random House), reads a lot like Hannah Horvath’s diary shouldn’t come as a surprise. Hilariously self-involved, with a genius for putting words to the anxieties of our time, Hannah was our entrée into Girls, and into a generation of young women slouching toward adulthood amid an obliterating sea of possibility. While Hannah threw the doors open on a cultural moment, Dunham’s focus here is on herself and the ways her writerly curiosity has gotten her into trouble. She’s great, as ever, on sex: “Between porn and Angelina Jolie films, we get the message loud and clear that we are doing it all wrong.” It’s fitting that Not That Kind of Girl gives nods to Helen Gurley Brown and Dunham’s mother, the photographer Laurie Simmons, whose unfiltered 1970s self-portraits helped pave the way for Dunham’s wartsand-all self-exposure—though it’s Nora Ephron whose influence is most apparent here. But while Ephron invited us to see our experiences in hers, Dunham, with her tales of

Essays by Lena Dunham and Lynn Barber examine the idiosyncratic roots of art and ambition.

About a GIRL

PLAY-by-PLAY

AMERICAN CLASSIC WILLIAMS, PHOTOGRAPHED BY IRVING PENN FOR VOGUE, 1951.

eighth-grade field trips and bad college boyfriends, takes us on a very personal tour of her creative origins, in tales that gain complexity when they resist irony’s solace. In the strongest essay, “Barry,” she explains how a sexual experience proved too dark and unwieldy for the Girls writers’ room. It’s this kind of honesty, odd-cornered and ambivalent, that feels the most transgressive of all. There’s nothing safe or easy about coming of age female and ambitious, as the English journalist Lynn Barber knows. Her now-classic 2009 memoir, An Education (which inspired the film starring Carey Mulligan), told the story of her love affair, at sixteen, with a debonair con man—which taught her that people are not what they seem, and planted the seed for her future as a fearless celebrity interviewer. Her latest, A Curious Career (Bloomsbury), collects priceless outtakes from some of her wide-ranging subjects: Salvador Dalí and his ocelot When The Glass Menagerie debuted on Broadway in at the Meurice; Rafael Nadal, in 1945, it was a smash success, and after 24 curtain his Armani underwear, in an incalls, its then-unknown author, 34-year-old Tennessee terview that prompts a brilliant Williams, took to the stage to greet his audience. Until his death in 1983, he never really left. Twelve years indictment of sports management. in the writing, former New Yorker drama critic John What Barber doesn’t get credit for Lahr’s magisterial biography Tennessee Williams: is her tremendous empathy, most Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (Norton) illuminates apparent in an unsentimental our most autobiographical of playwrights, whose yet tender talk with Christopher works, as Elia Kazan once wrote, were “as naked as Hitchens. The secret to a great inthe best confessions.” From the purgatorial ferocity of terview, as she told Vogue in 2010, Williams’s writing—an act of “outer oblivion and inner is to “be genuinely curious, to be violence”—to his relationships with lovers, with his interested”—but in the age of PR, tormented sister, and with Kazan, his great collaborator, it’s Barber’s ability to make our Lahr renders his subject with compassion and insight, icons human that sets her apart. echoing Williams’s own dramatic goal: “to redeem life, through beauty, from the humiliation of grief.”—M. O. —MEGAN O’GRADY VOGUE.COM

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point of view

The

EDGE

Who ever would have dreamed that Reese Witherspoon, America’s favorite pert Southern girl, would RISE TO NEW HEIGHTS playing a heroin addict? As it happens, the fashion in this issue has something in common with Reese’s career path: It’s also about ESCAPING COMFORT ZONES. Today we are inclined to be more experimental with our clothes, to push into more CREATIVE TERRITORY. We seek the edge.

This isn’t about silly look-at-me trends but about COZY AND OFTEN FAMILIAR autumn pieces that have had any lingering trace of

the boring removed by the application of REAL IMAGINATION. A traditional satchel or bucket bag has an unexpected urgency when redone in stark, AVANT-GARDIST WHITE. A practical loden parka is repositioned with a swanky, outsize swath of fur on the collar. Probably, though, it’s the season’s citified day pieces—collaged and woven and snipped and printed with a really ARTFUL ARRAY of (often clashing) patterns—that best capture this spirit of determined artistic iconoclasm.

Also central to this conversation, of course, are the NEXT-GENERATION DESIGNERS in “Young Guns” (page 336 ).

With determination and energy, they are SHARPENING OUR FOCUS — and defining our right-now fashion moment.

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FALL CLASSIC The Glorious autumn days are made for bundling up in that most cozy of October-weekend favorites: a casual, embracing, chase-the-wind parka. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

PLEIN AIR The great outdoors has been on designers’ minds more than usual this season, with interesting coats drawing much of the attention. Natalia Vodianova wears a Hilfiger Collection shearling-lined army-green parka, $890; Tommy Hilfiger, NYC. Edun ribbed-wool turtleneck ($455) and skirt ($345); Barneys New York, NYC. Falke socks. CÊline boots. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.

PULLING RANK Many modern parkas and trenches have their roots in army tradition—and this double-breasted mac in faded olive has an elegance and utility along with its military spiffiness. Belstaff bonded cotton gabardine overcoat, $1,295; Belstaff, NYC. Alberta Ferretti mohair sweater, $885; Alberta Ferretti, L.A. J.W.Anderson moss-andwhite-striped silk wrap skirt, $1,290; theline.com. Details, see In This Issue.

CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY Many of the details—waxed cotton to repel rain showers, wool to keep out the cold, colors that mirror the autumn harvest—come from generations of rural life. Balmain cotton jacket, $2,472; select Neiman Marcus stores. Céline ribbed sweater ($3,350) and doubleface felt skirt ($2,050); Céline, NYC. Zadig & Voltaire fur collar. Photographed at Montgomery Place Historic Site, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Details, see In This Issue.

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COLD COMFORT FARM What was once mainly a man’s coat still delivers that borrowed-from-the-boyfriend snugness. Hermès hooded deerskin coat with woolflannel lining and wool knit pencil skirt ($890); Hermès boutiques. Hilfiger Collection striped cable-knit wool sweater; Tommy Hilfiger, NYC. Details, see In This Issue.

P HOTO G RA P HE D AT M ON TGO M ERY P LACE H I STO RI C S I T E, A N N A NDA LE- O N -HU DSON, NY

CABBAGES AND KINGS There’s a piquant high/ low contrast to a parka with a lush fur hood, especially one paired a bit whimsically with a delicate dress. Mr&Mrs Furs canvas jacket with murmansky trim, $1,115; mrmrsfurs.com. The Row ivory sweater with ribbed trim ($850) and wool mohair dress ($1,450); Barneys New York, NYC. CÊline boots. Photographed at Mead Orchards, Tivoli, NY. Details, see In This Issue.

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ONE IF BY LAND What signal does this parka send? It’s British Quadrophenia mod crossed with a supremely American sense of relaxed luxury. Yves Salomon cotton parka with coyote-andrabbit trim, $1,932; select Saks Fifth Avenue stores. Isabel Marant open-weave sweater, $725; Isabel Marant, L.A. Calvin Klein Collection mohair tweed skirt, $1,150; Calvin Klein Collection, NYC. In this story: hair, Recine; makeup, Diane Kendal. Production design, Mary Howard. Details, see In This Issue.

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PIECES

PERFORMANCE

PAINTER’S PALETTE Model Vanessa Axente and Game of Thrones actor Michiel Huisman (OPPOSITE) meet for a drink at Korsakov in Antwerp—the Belgian capital of off-kilter cool. Céline wool coat; Céline, NYC. A.L.C. navy-andred knit top, $245; select Barneys New York stores. Nicole Miller Artelier black-and-white jacquard dress, $295; Nicole Miller boutiques. Stella McCartney bandeau top (worn at waist), $315; stellamccartney .com. Maison Boinet belt. Marni bag and peep-toe heels. Falke nude socks. On Huisman: Polo Ralph Lauren blazer. Paul Stuart polo. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.

TODAY’S MOST COMPELLING DAY LOOKS ARE FEARLESSLY CREATIVE—A MIX OF SEPARATES IN ECLECTIC PRINTS AND PATTERNS, WITH COLLAGED SHAPES AND THE OCCASIONAL EXPERIMENTAL TEXTILE. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARIO TESTINO.

HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR Who said all-black was still the urban uniform? This carefully curated outfit includes python, Lurex, wood, and vinyl. Gucci yellow python-and-leather jacket; select Gucci boutiques. Derek Lam maroon Lurex short-sleeve top and woodbuckle leather belt; top at Derek Lam, NYC. Roksanda printed PVC-coated skirt, $918; Opening Ceremony, NYC. Marni bag and peeptoe heels. Shot on location at 298 the Sprookjes Showroom.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST Belgium’s ateliers have always nurtured iconoclasts, from Magritte to Margiela. Let that unfettered spirit be your guide. Louis Vuitton jersey dress ($2,950) and green lace top ($1,260; worn underneath); select Louis Vuitton stores. Venyx star earrings and ring. Dior minaudière with twill-scarf strap. Shot on location at the studio of Gert Voorjans. Details, see In This Issue.

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FRINGE FESTIVAL Earth-brown paired with champagne-pink? Elastic and suede and flapper fringe? It takes a certain nonconformist moxie to compose your own mix of opposites. Derek Lam suede jacket; Derek Lam, NYC. A.L.C. striped sweater, $335; select Barneys New York stores. Burberry Prorsum hand-painted fringe skirt, $3,295; burberry.com. Christy Rilling Studio elastic belt.

SHOT ON LOCATION AT THE SPROOKJES SHOWROOM

SIDEWALKING Boldly embracing such formerly unchic elements as maroon leather and sheer tan ankle socks summons a jolie laide quality. Prada leather coat, cashmere gilet ($830), brown cotton blouse ($890), and plaid wool skirt ($4,220); select Prada boutiques. 3.1 Phillip Lim by Linda Farrow Gallery sunglasses. On Huisman: Ermenegildo Zegna jacket. Agnès B. shirt. Levi’s jeans. John Lobb boots. Details, see In This Issue.

S HOT ON LO CAT I ON I N T HE C IT Y OF A N T W ERP

STROKES OF GENIUS Pattern and print are splashed all over. Céline goatskin coat; Céline, NYC. A.L.C. sleeveless mock-neck sweater, $245; select Barneys New York stores. Etro graphic-print trousers, $664; Etro, Beverly Hills. Michael Kors belt. Dior minaudière with twillscarf strap. Marni peep-toe heels. On Huisman: Maison Martin Margiela shirt. Shot on location at the residence of Leo and Susan Coolen. Details, see In This Issue.

BEAUTY NOTE

Vivid lips are the ultimate creative expression. Chanel’s Rouge Allure lipstick in Incandescente is a standout orange-red.

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RARE BREED In autumn fashion, tactile materials often come into play, with woolens to be expected. But this is an exotic pedigree: lush velvet paired with a perforated flannel-and-Lurex appliquĂŠ. Isa Arfen maroon velvet oversize cardigan, $767; departementfeminin .com. Marco de Vincenzo flannel-andLurex pleated skirt, $1,870; select Saks Fifth Avenue stores. Marni cotton belt.

S HOT ON LO CAT I ON I N T HE C IT Y OF A N T W ERP

THE EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE Another dress, another arty, avant-garde fabric—one that’s first woven of plastic fibers, then embellished with silver beads. Alexander McQueen red-and-black silk jacquard coat. Roksanda strapless shift, $4,505; Opening Ceremony, NYC. Details, see In This Issue.

S HOT ON LO CAT I ON AT T HE HO ME O F GE RT VO O RJA NS

DE STIJL Bands of black or white outline the forms of several of these pieces, much like the banded colors seen in the Neoplastic paintings of Mondrian. ChloĂŠ patchwork-leather top, $4,650; select Neiman Marcus stores. Edun ribbed skirt with stripes, $395; select Barneys New York stores. Maison Boinet belt.

S HOT ON LO CAT I ON AT T HE RESI D E NC E O F LEO A N D SUSA N CO OLE N

THE NEXT WAVE Of course, Belgian designers—including some of the original, groundbreaking Antwerp Six—are all over this movement, too. Case in point: Dries Van Noten wool coat with painted flowers ($2,710) and wave-striped trousers ($1,130); coat at barneys .com and pants at select Nordstrom stores. Marni multicolored blouse, $1,410; Marni stores. On Huisman: Brooks Brothers blazer. Agnès B. shirt. In this story: hair, Christiaan; makeup, Lucia Pica. Menswear Editor: Michael Philouze. Produced by Ingrid Deuss Production. Details, see In This Issue.

S HOT ON LO CAT I ON I N T HE C IT Y OF A N T W ERP

EYE ON THE PRIZE “When people underestimate me,” Witherspoon says, “it’s actually a comfortable place for me.” Dolce & Gabbana printed-silk dress and matching corset. Cartier necklace with onyx pendant. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.

With a raw and riveting performance in Wild and a production company dedicated to strong female roles, Reese Witherspoon, former blockbuster sweetheart, is taking risks like never before. By Tom Shone. Photographed by Mikael Jansson.

REINVENTED

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ook at this,” says Reese Witherspoon. Perched on a canvas stool in a large air-conditioned hangar just outside New Orleans, she is wearing a short, bright-red dress, a silver-studded belt, and brown fringed cowboy boots. the same joke,” says Witherspoon as Fletcher calls for shooting to resume over on the other side of the hangar. “It’s only funny and fresh, what—two, three times? It’s much better if you can fast-track it and just say, ‘Sofía and I want to do it, and this is when we’re available. . . .’ ” Witherspoon is tired but hiding it beautifully. Last night she was up until 4:00 a.m., being shaken around by a bus mounted on air-controlled pistons in the middle of the hangar. As shooting begins, Witherspoon juggles acting in the scenes; entertaining her young nieces Abby James and Draper, who are visiting the set; arranging for soup to be sent to Vergara, who has a cold; and discussing schedules with Papandrea. One can’t but notice a certain neatness to the way Witherspoon crosses the t’s and dots the i’s of her fame—she carries herself with the same spirit in which someone might complete a set of thank-you notes. Only later, returning to her trailer for a lunch of watermelon salad, does she admit, “My nerves are shot. I’m a morning person.” Her trailer is piled high with books: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler; Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, by Diane Keaton; The Vacationers, by Emma Straub; The Light Between Oceans, by M. L. Stedman. She is constantly on the lookout for new material; she has just optioned Liane Moriarty’s New York Times best seller Big Little Lies. But Pacific Standard is no vanity exercise. Two years ago, Witherspoon snapped up the rights to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, initially thinking of herself for the lead, but after she found out that director David Fincher wanted someone “cool and unapproachable” for the part—it eventually went to Brit Rosamund Pike—she was happy to step aside. “Whatever I am, I’m not that,” she says with a cackle. It was a different matter with Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of love and death and hiking. Witherspoon read galleys of the book, which Strayed had sent her through her agent, on a return flight from L.A. to New York. By the time she landed, Witherspoon was in tears. She knew she wanted to play Strayed and called her the next day. “Reese really understands that when you’re passionate about something, you have to just jump on,” says Papandrea. “The only other person I know who reads the way she does is Nicole Kidman.”

On a small monitor in front of her is playing a scene from the comedy she is shooting with Sofía Vergara, as the wife of a Mexican drug kingpin; Witherspoon is the by-the-book cop Vergara spends most of the movie handcuffed to. It’s basically Midnight Run in high heels; and in the scene we are watching, both women are escaping through the tiny window of a bathroom stall. For the sirenish Vergara, it’s quite a squeeze. She tumbles through, stands up, dusts herself off, and quickly checks her teeth with her finger. Witherspoon hoots. “Isn’t that brilliant?” she says. “Because her character’s Colombian, and her teeth are expensive. She’s like Sophia Loren. The studios should be falling over themselves to make movies for this woman.” With her electric-blue eyes, dazzling smile, and determined chin, Witherspoon’s face is only ever a heartbeat away from the expression worn by the winners of beauty pageants. At five feet two, she is petite—Vergara’s nickname for her is My Little Pony. But she is both more easygoing and shrewder than the uptight perfectionistas she plays on-screen, with a no-nonsense, room-temperature affect that sets you quickly at ease. “She makes you feel like you’re speaking to someone you’ve known for a very long time,” says Jeff Nichols, who directed her in 2013’s critical darling Mud, “not by having some sorority-sister Southern charm where she brings you cookies and makes you tea. But by saying that really smart thing at just the right time.” This film, with its touches of rhinestone and slapstick, may resemble the bubble gum–hued comedies with which Witherspoon cemented her stardom in the 2000s, but it’s no studio picture. Helmed by 27 Dresses director Anne Fletcher, it was developed independently by Witherspoon and her producing partner Bruna Papandrea, one of the flagships for their new production company, Pacific Standard, devoted to making movies for, about, and starring women. Witherspoon decided she wanted to make a comedy with Vergara and presented her with several ideas. After the Modern Family star chose this one, they commissioned a script, came up with a budget and a schedule, and then took it to the studios, who immediately started bidding. “I discovered from years of developing comedies with the studios, you end up chasing copious amounts of notes about

STREET OF DREAMS “She understands that when you’re passionate about something, you have to just jump on,” says her producing partner. Peter Pilotto embroidered-silk dress. Jennifer Meyer bangle with diamonds. Photographed at Nashville’s Ernest Tubb Record Shop. Details, see In This Issue.

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BACKSTAGE PASS “She has everything,” says director Jean-Marc Vallée, “and yet she’s still compelled to go outside of her comfort zone.” Carolina Herrera silk-faille strapless dress with floral appliqués. Jimmy Choo heels. Photographed at the Station Inn. Details, see In This Issue.

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Even Strayed was taken aback by the speed with which the adaptation came together. “Boy, this is happening so fast,” she remembers emailing Nick Hornby after he was assigned the task of adapting the book. “Don’t worry,” he replied. “You know there’s like a 10 percent chance of this happening.” He finished his first draft of the screenplay in three months. Papandrea calls it “one of the best I’ve ever read.” Grudgingly, Hornby recalculated the odds. “OK, there’s a 17 percent chance this movie is happening.” Then, in August, Dallas Buyers Club’s Jean-Marc Vallée came onboard as director. “OK,” Hornby emailed Strayed, “25 percent.” A week before the movie was due to go into production, costarring Laura Dern and Game of Thrones’s Michiel Huisman (page 296), Strayed checked in with him. “OK. I can’t believe this, but 85 percent.” “I don’t know, Nick; I think we’re going to make the movie,” said Strayed. Hornby had reckoned without the speed that comes when a big star like Witherspoon decides to go the indie route. Call it the reeducation of Tracy Flick. The Oscar-winning actress who commanded as much as $20 million a film in the 2000s has downsized, conquering the indie-film world with the surety with which she once carried off pillbox hats. In Mud she was the sullen trailer-trash ex-flame of Matthew McConaughey’s wild-eyed drifter—a small, hard gem of a performance hinting at unseen facets in the actress. In Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s forthcoming adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern, shaggy-dog detective novel, she plays an assistant district attorney and the main squeeze of Joaquin Phoenix’s pot-addled detective. “She’s out in search of some hippie love thrills, basically,” says Anderson. “Buttoned up during the day, out watusi-ing at night.” It’s the first time the two actors have been reunited since their explosive pairing in Walk the Line. Witherspoon seems to work best opposite unruly men, suggesting that she is one of those actresses who outsource their chaos to their partner, the better to hold strong at center. “Why the two of them work together so well, I don’t know,” says Anderson. “It’s like watching a professional athlete dominate their sport. After only four days of shooting, I really didn’t want to let her go. I started to think of other scenes we could create so she wouldn’t leave. Ultimately, she knew these ideas were bad and said, ‘Adios, fellas.’ ” he day after my set visit, I meet Witherspoon for lunch at La Petite Grocery in the Uptown District of New Orleans. It’s 90 degrees outside, but she looks crisp and cool in a Stella McCartney dress and Valentino sandals, with a pretty Mannin monogrammed necklace and cuff. Her eldest kids—Ava, fifteen, and Deacon, ten, from her marriage to Ryan Phillippe—are at camp right now. Her youngest, two-year-old Tennessee, with husband Jim Toth, is asleep. Yesterday they took him to get his hair cut, bribing him with ice cream to stay still. “He’s like a blond

“I just didn’t want to hear, ‘Oh, we don’t want to see Reese have sex. . . . Oh, can we not have any profanity?’ ” says Witherspoon. “I wanted it to be truthful. I wanted it to be real”

version of my husband. He’s so pretty. The older he gets, the more and more he looks like him. So cute.” Toth is an executive at CAA, where Witherspoon is a client. He represents Vergara and also McConaughey, and seems to have been something of a behind-the-scenes facilitator for Witherspoon’s recent career recalibration. “It’s an agency thing,” says Nichols. “They’re like, ‘What do you think about Reese?’ They want to take everybody’s temperature. ‘Wow, do you think she would do that?’ ‘I don’t know . . . would you want her to do that?’ ” The studios had been trying to get her and McConaughey in a film together for a long time, and Witherspoon was initially worried her presence would “unbalance” Nichols’s film, a drama about love and myth on the Mississippi riverbank as beautifully shaped as a piece of driftwood. “Look, you’re going to make this ratcheted-down, realistic film,” she told him. “Before you know it, you’re going to see a trailer with me and Matthew cut into every shot.” Witherspoon is acutely aware of the baggage that comes with her screen persona—upbeat, a little uptight, the most likely of all her contemporaries to let fly with a “shoot” or “dagnabbit.” After a string of films—Water for Elephants, This Means War, How Do You Know—did badly at the box office, she picked up an issue of The New Yorker one day and was appalled to find herself listed among a number of actors, Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson included, whose days as box-office titans were behind them. “And there I was thinking I was reading about Ben Stiller!” she says with mock indignation from which not all traces of real indignation have been removed. “Thank God their articles are so long. I was on page six. Nobody can have got that far.” But the challenges she faced in finding a new direction for herself were real enough. “It’s not that the roles dried up,” she says. “They just weren’t as dynamic or as interesting as anything I felt I could do.” Partly this had to do with a film industry more attuned to fashioning entertainment for teenage boys than roles for 30-something actresses, even Oscar-winning ones, and partly it had to do with her. One A-list director she won’t name refused to see her for a part because he said she was too “ ‘Southern and sweet and huge.’ I was like, ‘All right, back to the drawing board.’ ” If the roles she wanted were not coming to her, she would create them for herself. “When people underestimate me, it’s actually a comfortable place for me,” she says. “ ‘Oh, that’s what you think I am; well, no, I’m not.’ I’m a complex human being. I have many different shades.” Certainly Reese Witherspoon and wild have not, until a couple of years ago, been a combination that would turn up much in a Google search. It’s not too hard to see what a star seeking to shed her studio gleam might find in Strayed’s memoir, a raw, soulful portrait of a woman cut off from the human pack, a “stray,” stripped to the core after the death of her mother and the collapse of her marriage. As she sets about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she finds herself dismantling and rebuilding her very identity as a woman, “the one I’d fostered all through my young

INNER DRIVE Witherspoon has been acting since the age of fourteen. Oscar de la Renta printedcotton dress. Tod’s handbag. Burberry sunglasses. Details, see In This Issue.

adult years while trying on different costumes,” Strayed writes in the book, “earth girl, punk girl, cowgirl, riot girl, ballsy girl. The one for whom behind every hot pair of boots or sexy little skirt or flourish of the hair there was a trapdoor that led to the least true version of me.” Honeycombed with flashbacks capturing Strayed’s passionate relationship with her mother—a luminous Dern— and the reeling impact of her death, Wild was shot using the same method Vallée worked out for Dallas Buyers Club: a minimal crew, using hand-held cameras and natural light whenever possible. “If the actors got it right with all the movement on rehearsal one, well, that becomes take one,” Vallée says. Lugging a backpack affectionately nicknamed Monster that weighed up to 60 pounds, Witherspoon had to repeatedly haul herself up and down the same stretch of snowy mountain slope or plunge into a freezing river. “It was brutal,” says Dern. The scenes on the trail in particular felt, says Witherspoon, “more like a documentary than a feature film,” and the result has a remarkable candor: What stays with you is Witherspoon’s face, plain and unadorned by makeup, slack yet resolute, unillumined by the effort of

charming or entertaining people. One of cinema’s great crowd-pleasers, alone. “There are sentences that I wrote that I can see written on her face,” says Strayed, who met with the actress a few weeks before production started, at the author’s house in Portland. They walked all over the neighborhood, talking for hours about “everything from our childhood to our parents and what we were like in high school to our sex lives and our love lives and our romantic histories,” says Strayed. They touched, too, on the incident earlier in the year in Atlanta, where Witherspoon was shooting The Good Lie, a Blind Side–ish heartwarmer about Sudanese refugees, when she and her husband were stopped by police; Toth was charged with a DUI, while police footage of Witherspoon remonstrating with the officer was splashed all over TMZ. “She said to me, ‘When those things happen, it just proves what I’ve always been telling people, and that is I’m not perfect,’ ” Strayed tells me. “There’s nothing artificial about her. I think that’s what makes her such a spectacular actress and such a relatable movie star, too. Reese is one of us. She’s real people.”

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I wonder if part of the appeal of Wild for Witherspoon isn’t this: that an actress who has been balancing her checkbook since the age of fourteen, and who cannot make a misstep without its being pounced on by the tabloids, gets to play a woman who has made some of the biggest mistakes you can make and then owned them. The film is unflinching in its portrayal of the bottom Strayed hit after the death of her mother, dabbling with heroin and embarking on a string of one-night stands as if trying to awaken her grief-numbed senses. Witherspoon knew no studio would let her go there. “I just didn’t want to hear, ‘Oh, we don’t want to see Reese have sex. . . . Oh, can we not have any profanity?’ ” says Witherspoon. “I wanted it to be truthful, I wanted it to be raw, I wanted it to be real.” art of the authenticity of Strayed’s memoir stemmed from its being no publishing stunt, written to order. She embarked on the hike when she was 26; it took her more than a decade to get it down on paper; the results have the burnish and weight of rings in a tree trunk. Did Witherspoon have to weather a few storms of her own before being able to play the part? She thinks awhile before answering. “Nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors, but I think there’s a general sense now that I’ve lived a pretty”—she searches for the right word—“textured life. So many of the things that Cheryl goes through in the book I’ve been through, you know? I’ve been married, I’ve been divorced. I haven’t lost my mother, but my mother’s mother died in a very similar way, of an aneurysm very suddenly. . . . Cheryl has this idea that the things that have happened to you are part of you. There’s something really beautiful about that idea.” Does she believe that herself? She sounds a little wistful, as if describing a fairy tale, something beautiful but untrue. “I’m not sure I agree with her about everything. Someone might say, ‘I was raped. Is that a part of me? Am I supposed to accept that?’ That’s her perspective.” One senses in this something of Witherspoon’s conflict between her instincts as an actress, which she must follow into whatever dark corner they lead her, and her responsibilities as a star and role model for young girls. Her Episcopalianism runs deep. She’s known to take her children to church, and to put parental blocks on their computers. Witherspoon found the drug scenes in Wild hard to film—on set Strayed had to show Witherspoon how to shoot heroin; “I was like ‘Come on, people, haven’t you guys ever done this?’ ” recalls the author—but even more difficult were the sex scenes, which Witherspoon so dreaded that she employed a hypnotist to help quell her nerves. “She’d never done a scene like this before,” says Vallée, who remembers her wondering, “Am I doing the right thing?” right up until he called action. “She’s in the place in her life where she has everything. She doesn’t have to do this. She has a husband, a great house, a great career, money, children. She has everything. And yet she’s still compelled to do something great, go outside of her comfort zone, show something new. It’s not about her showing off and trying to do the ultimate performance. It’s just her. ‘I’m almost naked here, and I’m a 37-year-old, and I’m not perfect, but it’s all right, all right, let’s do it.’ ” 317

MIRROR IMAGE “There are sentences that I wrote that I can see written on her face,” says Wild author Cheryl Strayed. Carolina Herrera daisy-print silk dress. Catbird star ring. Details, see In This Issue.

WOMAN IN WHITE The actress in Nashville, where she has a house with her husband, Jim Toth, and three children. Versace ivory mattesatin floor-length dress. In this story, hair, Garren for Garren New York Salon for R+Co.; makeup, Mark Carrasquillo. Photographed at the Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art. Produced by Ricardo D. Martins for North Six. Production design, Nicholas Des Jardins for Mary Howard Studio. Details, see In This Issue.

SECOND Through one international crisis after another, America’s Secretary of State is waging a marathon campaign of highstakes diplomacy. Suzy Hansen reports. Photographed by Ralph Mecke.

JOHN KERRY’S

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AT HOME IN THE WORLD “I don’t think about a legacy. I think about getting the job done as well as I can, and history and other people will take care of the rest of it,” says Kerry, photographed at the State Department in Washington, D.C. Grooming, Courtney Perkins.

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ack in June, Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to the tiny French village of Saint-Briac-sur-Mer to do something he never could have done while running for president—celebrate his European roots. Kerry’s mother, a descendant of the Forbes shipping family, grew up here on an estate called Les Essarts, which was destroyed by the Nazis and then rebuilt as an enormous blue-shuttered château the family still owns today. “Johnnie,” as one of his cousins, the town’s former mayor, calls him, spent his boyhood summers in this idyllic, immaculate place: all stone buildings, cobbled streets, épiceries with bright awnings, and women in Jean Seberg striped jerseys outside the Bar Tabac de la Poste. Having come from the seventieth-anniversary commemorations of the Normandy invasion, Kerry, 70 himself and slender as the Tin Man, is dressed in a midnight-blue suit and a pinkorange tie, his dense, graying hair as immovable as ever. He glances toward the windswept Brittany coastline and then at the crowds trailing his convoy, eager to see an eminent American so intimately connected with their village give a speech about the war. I have been traveling with Kerry for several days—from Warsaw to Beirut to France—and though I have caught glimpses of his playful side, the Secretary of State has largely lived up to his reputation for reserve. In the backseat of his SUV, we discuss the elaborate Normandy festivities at Omaha Beach, where President Obama, German chancellor Angela Merkel, and Russian president Vladimir Putin gathered to remember the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers—and Kerry is pensive. He speaks of how terrifying the invasion must have been for the soldiers. I ask if he, as a former officer, could put himself in their shoes. He shakes his head. “There was the possibility that we would be killed,” he says, referring to his tours of duty in Vietnam, “but it was more remote in that you didn’t know when you were going to be ambushed. You didn’t know when something was going to happen. In that situation”—D-day—“you know. You are watching boats blown up around you. It’s hell.” I compare the America of 70 years ago, the America that liberated France and won the admiration of the world, to the America of today, which seems more embattled and wary. It’s a moment, I suggest, “where there are accusations that America is ‘pulling back’——” “No, no! We’re not, we’re not pulling back,” he says. Kerry leans forward in his seat. “That kicks me into gear and makes me want to go out and explain more. We have to make it clearer to people. I intend to, and the president intends to. That’s what he did at West Point.” He is referring to President Obama’s much-discussed speech in May at the military college, in which he laid out a vision of American foreign policy that emphasized diplomatic engagement over the reflexive use of military force. “We have to build on that,” he continues. “And that’s what I am going to do.” But Kerry will barely get the chance. The summer will bring a cascading and surreal series of international crises, which keeps him constantly on the move. Rarely a day goes by without shocking and terrifying news: a fierce election dispute in Afghanistan that threatens to bring the country to civil war; the downing of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner in Ukraine; a deadly conflict between Israel and Hamas; the 321

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advance across Iraq of the jihadist group ISIS, on whom President Obama authorizes air strikes in mid-August. During this jolting period Kerry will seem to be everywhere at once, engaging in negotiations, jousting with his foreign counterparts, and struggling to pull off small victories before jumping back on his plane. “I don’t think there has ever been a Secretary of State who has thrown himself into the job with as much verve and conviction as this guy has,” says Strobe Talbott, a deputy Secretary of State under President Clinton and now the president of the Washington think tank the Brookings Institution as well as a Kerry adviser. “If he can’t get a workable and acceptable compromise on a dispute, it’s very hard to imagine anybody who can.” erry practices just the sort of vigorous diplomacy President Obama spoke about at West Point—but his relentlessness, especially on issues as seemingly intractable as Israeli-Palestinian peace, has been bruising at times. Does America wield the influence in the world that it once did? Critics say that Kerry’s go-for-broke diplomatic style raises just this question—and that he has wasted time on problems that the U.S. cannot solve; supporters say that if Kerry achieves a breakthrough in even one of his major endeavors—say, a nuclear deal with Iran—he could be one of the most important Secretaries of State in recent history. “There’s a lot going on,” Kerry acknowledges when I meet with him over the summer in his office at the State Department. “But when you have four or five flare-ups at the same time, you’ve still got to talk to people; you’ve got to sit down with them face-to-face, look in their eyes, grab the problem, and work through it. So we’re managing. We can multitask.” It’s a tremendous amount of pressure for someone who already suffered a large-scale defeat in his political career, but Kerry seems at ease. “I feel comfortable, and I feel free,” he says of the work he’s doing now. “I feel completely liberated. But, you know . . . I was a lot better senator after I ran for president because I had done it. I had run. I came within 59,000 votes in one state”—Ohio—“so for three hours I was president.” He smiles to make sure I get what I am not completely sure is a joke. “I feel like I made a few mistakes, but I didn’t blow it,” he continues and shrugs. “The one thing I kick myself about back then is not listening to myself a few times . . . not letting it all out.” Democrats could be forgiven for feeling less sanguine about 2004. Many still consider Kerry’s loss to President George W. Bush an almost unfathomable debacle. The war in Iraq was proving disastrous at the time, and Kerry had the perfect presidential résumé: a Kennedy-like background, a record of courage in Vietnam, 20 years in the Senate. But some voters found him hard to connect to and perceived an aristocratic air that the Right mercilessly exploited. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smeared Kerry’s military record, Republicans branded him a flip-flopper on Iraq (a war he had voted for in 2002), and, in the end, Kerry lost the popular vote by 3 million.

“You know, obviously, losing the presidency is not the option of first choice,” Kerry says and laughs, as if awed by the memory. “But you can’t get lost in it”

“I don’t think there’s anything harder in this life,” apart from matters of life and death, “than losing a presidential election,” says his friend former Yale classmate and State Department adviser David Thorne. “It requires determination and toughness to get back up on the horse.” After the election, Kerry largely faded from view as he returned to the Senate, chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, and recovered from his loss. “I would say he became more confident,” says his longtime chief of staff, David Wade. “That experience of running a campaign like that . . . and then losing in a pretty heartbreaking way. He came out of that experience with a great deal of conviction about how he wanted to spend his 60s and his 70s. “I also think it left him with a little sense of ‘I just don’t really give a shit,’ ” Wade adds. “People are going to make judgments, but you play a long game.” That long game has brought a kind of vindication. Today President Obama’s foreign policy happens to look much like Kerry proposed America’s should during the campaign in 2004: more modest, more interested in multilateral diplomacy and fighting terrorism on a case-by-case basis. Kerry praises what he calls President Obama’s “very careful, hard-nosed approach” to decision-making. “I am impressed by the questions he asks . . . and how he wants to know the strategy and the facts that support that choice before he makes it—not afterward.” The world is also more turbulent, multipolar, and crisisprone than it was a decade ago. When Kerry succeeded Hillary Clinton as secretary in 2013, after President Obama’s presumed choice, Susan Rice, withdrew her name following the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, he faced a dizzying list of problems. The U.S. was in the midst of messy withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process was dead. The Arab Spring had upended American policy in the Middle East. Syria had become a humanitarian catastrophe, and Iran still posed a nuclear threat. Kerry began addressing each with gusto. “The way he views it is that Secretary Clinton was secretary at a time when we had to repair our relationship with the world,” says State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki. “He’s building on a lot of the work she has done.” (“I telephone Hillary here and there and ask her for her thoughts about things,” Kerry says. “I have a lot of admiration and friendship for her.”) At press time, Kerry had traveled some 543,687 miles, visited 55 countries, and spent almost 1,200 hours in the air. “He has chosen to tackle head-on some difficult strategic issues,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. nationalsecurity adviser, “and these issues would probably deteriorate into more dangerous prospects without some serious signs of U.S. interest.” “He listens well,” says Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq, of Kerry’s diplomatic style. “He will listen to his interlocutors, understand their viewpoint, and make his points within the context of where they stand. That kind of empathy goes a long way to creating a climate in which compromise and agreement become possible. And he also

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POWER PLAYER “He listens well,” says Ryan Crocker, the former ambassador to Iraq, of Kerry, shown in his D.C. office with his yellow Lab, Ben. “He never misleads, and he’s known for it.”

has a reputation for absolute honesty and integrity. He never misleads, and he’s known for it.” There are those who call Kerry naive or arrogant for believing that he can somehow solve problems that no one else can. “I think he vastly overstates his personal ability to persuade people to do what the U.S. wants,” says Stephen Walt, an expert on foreign policy and a professor of international affairs at Harvard. “Kerry is like Madeleine Albright, who said that the U.S. is ‘the indispensable nation.’ So if a problem happens in the South China Sea or Nigeria or Ukraine, Kerry thinks there’s a solution in Washington. And he hops on a plane to try and provide it. I think that view is occasionally correct, but usually not.” Kerry’s response is that he would “rather get caught trying than never try at all” (this, incidentally, was also a favorite phrase of President Clinton’s). He acknowledges that President Obama has given him “enormous latitude. I actually thanked him a couple of months ago,” he tells me. “I said, ‘You know, Mr. President, I want to thank you for giving me the breadth to take the ball and roll with it.’ ” It’s obvious that Kerry is more suited to the diplomatic life than he ever would have been to the modern presidency. He is far less extroverted and eager to please than most politicians—and he can’t fake a folksy, telegenic style. He has a solemn air of politeness, which seems to come from a sense of duty. At a press conference in Beirut, for example, I watch a Lebanese journalist yell angrily at him because she believes Kerry’s staff has cut the time short. Kerry, halfway off the dais, stops mid-stride, eyebrows raised, and returns to the microphone. “I’m very happy to take your question,” he says with gentle amusement. On his plane, he briskly walks the

aisles to say hello to members of the press, flashing a T-shirt given to him by a Lebanese security detail, posing obligingly for photos. The routine lasts for only a minute or two before he passes his huddled staff and the hulking bodyguards stowing their weapons, and returns to his cabin—back to work. Work is a constant. Only rarely do photographers catch him relaxing or kiteboarding on Nantucket, and his reading tends toward serious history and biography (though he recently made time for The Art of Fielding). For a man in his eighth decade, Kerry takes remarkably little time off—but he seems to be having a good time on the road, too. One night in Paris, I run into him outside the gilded Westin hotel near the Tuileries Garden, returning from dinner at Chez L’Ami Louis with David Thorne, his stepson André Heinz, and both men’s partners. He stands on the sidewalk extolling the virtues of the wine he’d had that evening, then poses for selfies with some eagle-eyed Boston natives. It is midnight when he disappears into the hotel bar, his staffers trailing behind him, struggling to keep up. “I really do think some of it comes out of Vietnam,” says Wade about Kerry’s drive. “He came out of Vietnam with a pretty fundamental conviction that for whatever reasons a lot of his closest friends never came home, and he did. He has this conviction of not wasting time.” Peals of laughter can be heard from his plane cabin when Kerry FaceTimes with his daughter Vanessa, a critical-care physician in Boston, and his two-and-a-halfyear-old grandson, Alexander. Kerry’s other daughter, Alexandra, a film director, recently had a baby girl. “He’s been awesome, actually,” Vanessa says of Kerry as grandfather. “I have left him alone to babysit Alexander, which makes me feel really guilty. I C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 6 2 323

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f you were an English playwright of dazzling wit and intellect who had repeatedly (and unjustly) been accused by critics of being all head and no heart, what would you do? If you were Tom Stoppard, you would put the issue to rest by writing a heartfelt play about the mysterious and messy nature of love—one with a protagonist who is an English playwright of dazzling wit and intellect. That play turned out to be The Real Thing, a deliriously cerebral, profoundly moving meditation on the human heart by the 77-year-old author of such latterday classics as Jumpers, Arcadia, and The Coast of Utopia. It caused a sensation when Mike Nichols directed Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close in its 1984 Broadway premiere, and again when David Leveaux brought his London revival, starring Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle, to town in 2000. Now The Real Thing returns to the New York stage under the direction of the tireless and talented Sam Gold, with Ewan McGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal making their Broadway debuts. The play opens with a man confronting his wife about her infidelity—a showdown that turns out to be a scene from a comedy written by the brilliant Henry (McGregor) and performed by his wife, an actress named Charlotte (Cynthia Nixon), and another actor, Max (Josh Hamilton), whose real-life wife, Annie (Gyllenhaal), is having an affair with Henry. Henry and Annie leave their spouses to be together, and the rest of the play looks at how a man who leads with his head learns through suffering how to live and write with his heart. That pain comes courtesy of the sensual, impulsive Annie, who takes up the cause of a politically persecuted soldier turned playwright and takes off her knickers for a younger actor, while Henry holds forth on the connection between well-chosen words and cricket bats and the emotional power of pop songs. But he’s most eloquent when words fall short, responding to Annie’s affair with an anguished “Oh, please, please, please, please don’t.” The 36-year-old Gold, whose recent credits include the acclaimed Public Theater musical Fun Home and Annie Baker’s Pulitzer-winning The Flick, says that his Real Thing will be “a very simple, actor-driven production—more personal and emotional than rhetorical and intellectual.” “I totally fell in love with the play—what amazing insights into who we are, what brilliant language,” McGregor says. “I get to be incredibly clever every night.” The actor, whose oldest daughter is eighteen, cites Henry’s lyrical parting words to his seventeen-year-old daughter before she hits the road with her boyfriend. “He tells her about what it is we give to each other as lovers, and it’s the most extraordinary, tender, beautiful moment between a father and a daughter,” he says. “I wish I had given my daughter that speech—and that I could say it like Stoppard.” Gyllenhaal found a similarly personal connection. “I felt like there was something about me and my life and my heart that I could express through, and learn from, Annie,” she says. “I’m interested in love and sex and marriage and fidelity—that’s what’s on your mind when you’re in your 30s—and what that really means. I’m working on those things in my own life, and it definitely takes a lot of work.” Both McGregor and Gyllenhaal are looking forward to digging into their characters. “People in love go through such an extreme range of emotions,” McGregor says, “and they feel everything—the joy and pain—so intensely. As an actor, that’s where the action is.”

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PLAYING WITH FIRE Gyllenhaal (in a Derek Rose robe) and McGregor (in a Brooks Brothers sport jacket, a Steven Alan shirt, and Paul Stuart trousers). Menswear Editor: Michael Philouze. Hair, Jimmy Paul for Bumble and Bumble; makeup, Alice Lane. Produced by Wanted Media. Production design, Colin Donahue. Details, see In This Issue. Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick.

Hearts andMinds MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL AND EWAN MCGREGOR MAKE THEIR BROADWAY DEBUTS IN A NEW REVIVAL OF TOM STOPPARD’S MESMERIZING THE REAL THING. BY ADAM GREEN. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANTON CORBIJN.

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HOW APPLE’S UNDER-THE-RADAR DESIGN GENIUS, JONATHAN IVE, HAS FOUND THE WAY TO OUR HEARTS. BY ROBERT SULLIVAN. PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID SIMS. first catch sight of Jony Ive across the Apple campus, in a plain Dodger-blue T-shirt and white painter’s pants, in conversation, nodding. The head Apple designer, who brought you the iMac and the iPad and now, the Apple Watch, has a nearly shaved head and a tightly trimmed beard. He’s not tall, not small, and looks as if he might be a formidable rugby opponent—though even from a distance he comes across as open and amenable, less likely to tackle you than to do what he is doing with a colleague at this very moment, which is listening. Ive has a calming presence, like the Apple campus itself, whose very address, Infinite Loop, lulls you into a sense of Zen-ness. In the courtyard, trays of beautiful food— grass-fed steaks and fresh-made curries and California-born hot sauces—lead Apple employees out toward the open-air seating, away from the white cafeteria that might be described as a luxurious spa for the terminally nerdy. White is the color of choice at Apple HQ as in the Apple product line. It is through this white, with its clarity, its dust-hiding lack of distraction, that you have already met Jonathan Ive. To the south of the cafeteria is a tiny amphitheater, an emotional site in Apple’s history: At the company’s 2011 memorial for Steve Jobs, Coldplay took the stage, as did Jony Ive. Ive is notoriously reluctant to give interviews, not to mention speak in public. But on that day he spoke for the man whom he called his dearest friend. For his part, Jobs, when he was alive, referred to Ive as his “spiritual partner.” “I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful,” Ive told the assembled mourners, “they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts.” Another thing Jobs understood way back in 1997, the year he returned to the company that had kicked him out a decade earlier, was that Ive—then still in his 20s—was a designer with the background and the psychological tools not just to create the latest, hottest devices but also to orchestrate a team. Like cutting-edge steel, Ive is strong and persistent but flexible, and most crucial (most Jobs-ian, in fact), he is passionate about things, as in things, literally. “So much of my background is about making, physically doing it myself,” he says. In other words, the secret weapon of the most sought-after personal-electronics company in the world is a very nice guy

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from Northeast London who has a soft spot for woodworking and the sense that designers ought to keep their design talents backstage where they can do the most good. “There’s an odd irony here,” he observes. “I think our goal is that you would have a sense that it wasn’t design.” When you sit down with Ive, he is eager to chat—too eager, maybe, for the Apple time-minders who are always looking around for him—and will take a while to respond to a question, smiling as he says, “This is going to be a kind of oblique answer. . . .” We are talking in a white room, distracted only by a black non-Apple television—itself a signpost to the question, When will Apple make TVs or whatever will replace them? Noticeably, his phone neither rings nor vibrates; he has designed the moment for concentration. He nurses a white mug of tea, and the only thing in the room besides an iPhone is the pair of reading glasses designed by his friend Marc Newson and tucked into the front of his T-shirt: simple, delicate, but clear and strong. “I wish I could articulate this more effectively,” he continues, addressing his ambitions as a designer. “But it is to have that sense that you know there couldn’t possibly be a sane or rational alternative.” Ive is obsessed over in design blogs, the sites that cover Apple as if it were the Vatican, following leaks and rumors and passing along hijacked photos of components or screens—pitching best guesses as to what Apple is working on next. One blog imagines what it would be like if Jony Ive designed—well, everything: “Jony Ive redesigns . . . freeway signage . . . Coke . . . the solar system.” You might spot the occasional photo of him out in the world—at the White House for a design award; in London being knighted, as he was two years ago, by Princess Anne; at a pizza dinner in San Francisco, sitting with Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and various Silicon Valley execs. But one of the very natural settings for the real Jony Ive is a workshop at Apple HQ. It may be easier to sneak into a North Korean cabinet meeting than into the Apple design studio, the place where a small group of people have all the tools and materials and machinery necessary to develop things that are not yet things. Reportedly Ive’s wife, Heather Pegg, has never been—he doesn’t even tell her what he’s working on—and his twin sons, like all but a few Apple employees, are not allowed in either. Work is conducted behind tinted windows, serenaded by the team’s beloved techno music, a must for the boss. “I find that when I write I need things to be quiet, but when I design, I can’t bear it if it’s quiet,” he says. Indeed, the design team is said to have followed an unwritten rule to move away from their work whenever the famously brusque Jobs entered the studio and turn up the volume so as to make his criticisms less audible, less likely to throw them off course. In 1985, the year Jobs was forced out of Apple, Jony Ive was in design school in England, struggling with computers, blaming himself. “Isn’t that curious?” he says now. “Because if you tasted some food that you didn’t think tasted right, you would assume that the food was wrong. But for some reason, it’s part of the human condition that if we struggle to use something, we assume that the problem resides with us.” Despite that initial obstacle, Ive seems to have been born to understand industrial design. He grew up in Chingford, on the outskirts of London near Epping Forest, a good place for a city kid who liked to play in the trees. His father, Michael Ive, is a silversmith, and his grandfather was an engineer. When Ive was a boy, his father worked with the British

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TAKING TIME Ive, whose latest design is the new Apple Watch (Last Look, page 366), photographed at the company headquarters in Cupertino, California. Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick.

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government to develop and set the standards for design education. When he made things with his son—a toboggan, say—he would demand that Jony sketch his design before commencing construction. As for the tree house Ive designed back then, guess what? Today he is critical. “I’d do it differently.” His eyes light up as he says it, and you fully believe, in that moment, that he would happily drop everything to walk outside and work on it now. In high school, Ive studied sculpture and chemistry, and in 1985 he enrolled in the design program at Newcastle Polytechnic, where he became known as passionately detail-oriented, creating dozens of models of a hearing aid to be used by deaf children and their teachers. By the time he was out of school and working for a small design consultancy (called, coincidentally, Tangerine), a project he took on for Apple impressed the Cupertino company. They recruited him in 1992. Five years later, a disenchanted Ive was about to leave when Jobs returned to reboot the then-floundering Apple, which happened, by most analyses, when Jobs enabled Ive. By Ive’s account, the two hit it off immediately. “It was literally the meeting showing him what we’d worked on,” Ive says, “and we just clicked.” Ive talks about feeling a little apart, like Jobs. “When you feel that the way you interpret the world is fairly idiosyncratic, you can feel somewhat ostracized and lonely”—big laugh here—“and I think that we both perceived the world in the same way.” esign critics now look back at the birth of the Jobs-Ive partnership as the dawn of a golden age in product design, when manufacturers began to understand that consumers would pay more for craftsmanship. Together Jobs and Ive centered their work on the notion that computers did not have to look as if they belonged in a room at NASA. The candy-colored iMac—their first smash hit—felt to consumers like a charming friend, revolutionary but approachable, and appealed to both men and women. “I think what we sincerely try to do is create objects and products and ideas that are new and innovative,” says Ive, “but at the same time there is a slightly peculiar familiarity to them.” The iMac was followed by laptops in cool brushed titanium, then white laptops. Apple was treating computers and media devices as tools, as more than just wires and RAM shoved in a box; they were not so much minimal devices as devices that coordinate functions. And then came the iPod and the iPhone, an invention like a divining rod, tapping into invisible streams of information. Throughout, Ive has refined Apple’s design process, which, he argues, is almost abstract in its devotion to pure idea: Good design creates the market; ideas are king. And here’s the next irony that defines Ive’s career: In the clutter of contemporary culture, where hits and likes threaten to overtake content in value, the purity of an idea takes on increasing currency. “I think now more than ever it’s important to be clear, to be singular,” he says, “and to have a perspective, one you didn’t generate as the result of doing a lot of focus groups.” Developing concepts and creating prototypes leads to “fascinating conversations” with his team, says Ive. “It’s a process I’ve been practicing for decades, but I still have the same wonder.” For someone whose influence on our lives is so huge, responsible not just for shifting whole economies but for changing the way we interact, Ive is extraordinarily 328

low-profile. “He’s a virtually unknown British character who became a central person in the explosion of the Internet,” says his friend the Hong Kong–born businessman David Tang. “It’s amazing that he’s not more widely talked about.” On the Silicon Valley social circuit, he’s an anomaly. “The technology industry tends to feature people with big personalities who like to talk about their achievements,” says Trevor Traina, a fifth-generation San Franciscan entrepreneur who is a friend and neighbor of the Ives. “Jony is humble and private, and he doesn’t wear his achievements on his sleeve.” Ive lives in the Pacific Heights neighborhood with his wife and sons. “Heather is a writer,” he says. “She’s a creative too. We met at high school. I got married when I was 21, and I’m 47. Married a long time. Isn’t it cool?” Their house, bought two years ago for $17 million, is by the storied architectural firm Polk & Co.—Willis Polk oversaw the design of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, which opened in 1915. Like his own father, Ive seems adamant about intention at home. “My boys are ten, and I like spending time with them doing stuff that I did, which is drawing and making things—real things, not virtual things,” he says. Easygoing Ive morphs into Serious Ive on this point: He sees design schools failing their students by moving away from a foundation in traditional skills. “I think it’s important that we learn how to draw and to make something and to do it directly,” he says, “to understand the properties you’re working with by manipulating them and transforming them yourself.” Perhaps it is this drive to understand design with his own hands that keeps Ive grounded. “He’s not distracted by any veneer of glamour,” says Tang, who remarks on his friend’s thoughtfulness. On a recent birthday, Tang received two finely crafted wooden boxes containing large, engraved, Ivedesigned ashtrays—Tang loves cigars—constructed from the next-generation iPhone material. “It was like getting the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Tang says. Ive likes nothing better than to come up with mischievously inventive ways to use the technology at his fingertips. When a presenter from Blue Peter—Britain’s longest-running children’s TV show, known for encouraging kids to craft utilitarian designs from household objects—came to present him with its highest honor, a gold Blue Peter badge depicting a ship in full sail, Ive was delighted. In repayment, he fired up a Mikron HSM 600U, a computer-controlled machine that can cut up a chunk of aluminum like an origami flower, and in a mere ten hours created a Blue Peter badge that looked a lot like a not-so-distant cousin of the MacBook Air. His attention to detail is famous among his friends. Traina likes to joke with him that he couldn’t imagine being Ive’s contractor, since nothing would escape his notice. “One time I showed him a 1920s Cartier crystal, platinum, and diamond pocket watch that had been my father’s,” Traina recalls. “He took a quick look and later referred to the way the crystal was beveled, something I didn’t even remember.” Ive’s personal design tastes include the Castiglionis’ Snoopy lamp and “another Castiglioni that’s a parabolic glass that sits quite low.” He likes his suits custom-made by British tailor Thomas Mahon, and might show up in one on the charity circuit—at the Mid-Winter Gala, for instance, at a table with Marissa Mayer and Alexis and Trevor Traina; the Ives also cochaired the benefit for Tipping Point Community, an anti-poverty group in San Francisco. Ive commutes what used to be 45 minutes and can now be an hour and a half, no

matter whether he is driving an Aston Martin or a Bentley or a Land Rover, a fleet of cars that the British press watches like Apple’s stock price. He takes a vacation once in a while, often in London, setting up in a suite at Claridge’s while his family visits with the family of Marc Newson, the Australian designer who has remade everything from cars to furniture to restaurants to first-class lounges for Qantas. When he and Newson relax, they do so by attempting to switch work off—tough to do when you design the world— though designers out for a drink will inevitably allow the poorly designed world to seep in. “Shit we hate,” says Newson, includes American cars. “It’s as if a giant stuck his straw in the exhaust pipe and inflated them,” he adds, “when you look at the beautiful proportions in other cars that have been lost.” The two also relax working, as they did recently on behalf of their mutual friend Bono, whose recent auction of Ive- and Newson-curated goods raised $13 million for (Red),

“EVERYTHING WE’VE BEEN TRYING TO DO,” SAYS IVE, “IT’S THAT PURSUIT OF THE VERY PURE AND VERY SIMPLE” Bono’s charity to stop AIDS. The list included Ettore Sottsass’s Olivetti typewriter; a Dieter Rams hi-fi (Rams himself showed up at New York’s Sotheby’s that Saturday night last fall); an Airstream trailer; and a Leica that Newson and Ive lovingly tweaked together. “We didn’t even have to vocalize our pet hates, we were so in tune,” Newson says. “We only have to look at the object and look at each other and our eyes roll.” It’s a collaboration that is now a lock, apparently, since Apple recently announced that Newson would join Ive’s design team to work on special projects. “They’re a bit like non-identical twins separated at birth,” jokes Bono. They finish each other’s sentences. “They finish each other’s food,” adds Bono. “The kind of emotional and physical attraction people develop with Apple products shouldn’t really be possible, but take a look around you.” Friends marvel as Ive shifts from the guy cracking jokes to the solemn Sir Jonathan Ive. “Jony is deadly serious,” says Bono, who first met Ive when Jobs dispatched him to an Irish pub to salvage a U2–Apple iPod promotion. “He is also serious fun to be around. When you go out for a pint with Jony, it’s kind of like going for a pint with the future, which is cool except you know he’s not telling you what they’ve really got planned.”

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eels nice, doesn’t it?” On my second visit to Cupertino, Ive has finally handed it over: the new Apple Watch. It is more watch than the computer geeks would ever have imagined, has more embedded software than in a Rolex wearer’s wildest dreams. When Ive shows it to me—weeks before the product’s exhaustive launch, hosted by new CEO Tim Cook—in a situation room that has us surrounded by guards, it feels like a matter of national security. Yet despite all the pressure, he really just wants you to touch it, to feel it, to experience it as a thing. And if you comment on, say, the weight of it, he nods. “Because it’s real materials,” he says proudly. Then he wants you to feel the connections, the magnets in the strap, the buckle, to witness the soft but solid snap, which he just

loves as an interaction with design, a pure, tactile idea. “Isn’t that fantastic?” At the beginning of our sitdown, he is slightly flustered at the attempt to condense all that went into the device into a single conversation. “It’s strange when you’ve been working on something for three years . . .” he says, shaking his head. He describes the trajectory of clocks to watches: from a public clock in a Bavarian square to timepieces owned by royalty, to military chronometers, to the watch’s arrival, only at the beginning of the twentieth century, on the wrist. “It’s fascinating how people struggled with wearing this incredibly powerful technology personally.” The cell phone, of course, killed the watch to some extent. Now he wants to reset the balance. The Apple Watch is designed in three collections, with myriad variations, from elegantly luxurious to a brightly colored sporty version. On the back, LEDs emit light through sapphire-crystal windows, and photodiodes convert that light into a signal that algorithms use to calculate your heart rate. Got that? All of this syncs with your iPhone, making the watch the wrist-bound control tower of your life in tech. Monitor your heart rate or your movement in general. Tap to have Siri take a message, or send a voice reply. Pay for drinks with your wrist (Apple Pay will be, yes, Apple Watch–compatible). With this product, Apple is moving from your desk and your pocket onto your person, your pulse point. The watch underscores the fact that Ive is first and foremost a masterly product designer; technology almost comes second. It’s a beautiful object, a device you might like even if you don’t like devices. “Everything we’ve been trying to do,” he says, “it’s that pursuit of the very pure and very simple.” Aside from all the ways the watch connects to your phone, Ive is very interested in how the watch can connect to another human. “You know how very often technology tends to inhibit rather than enable more nuanced, subtle communication?” he asks. This is the question that haunts the son of a craftsman: Is he making tools that improve the world or shut people down? “We spent a lot of time working on this special mechanism inside, combined with the built-in speaker” —he demonstrates on his wrist. You can select a chosen person, also wearing the watch, and transmit your pulse to them. “You feel this very gentle tap,” he says, “and you can feel my heartbeat. This is a very big deal, I think. It’s being able to communicate in a very gentle way.” Whether it is ultimately judged to be a big deal or another distraction remains to be seen. Either way, Ive eventually leaves the guarded room with his secrets intact for a few more weeks, passing through the bright white corridors decorated with long views of the Santa Cruz Mountains and a posterlike portrait of Steve Jobs holding up a Mac during one of his famous hard sells—the trademark bold product introduction, the late CEO’s big loud pitch. As you watch Ive walk off, politely thanking people, you recall that he closed up his private presentation by asking you to listen closely to a watchband as it is pulled off and then reconnected. “You just press this button and it slides off, and that is just gorgeous,” he was saying. He encouraged you to pause. “But listen as it closes,” he said. “It makes this fantastic k-chit.” He was nearly whispering. And when he said the word fantastic, he said it softly and slowly—“fan-tas-tic!”—as if he never wanted it to end. This is perhaps Ive’s greatest achievement: not that we can get our email more readily, but that we can stop to notice a small, quiet connection.

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PRINCESS BRIDE

For human-rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin’s fairy-tale wedding to George Clooney, only a dream dress would do. Enter Oscar de la Renta. By Chloe Malle. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

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NICE THREADS Alamuddin at a final fitting, with Oscar de la Renta (RIGHT) and head tailor Raffaele Ilardo, in the designer’s New York studio. Oscar de la Renta ivory beaded-tulle dress with Chantilly-lace appliqué. Hair, Orlando Pita for Orlo Salon; makeup, Alice Lane. Set design, Mary Howard. Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick.

e is the man every woman wants to hug!” Amal Alamuddin says happily. Surprisingly, the British-Lebanese human-rights barrister is not referring to George Clooney, her groom come September, but rather to the equally debonair Oscar de la Renta, who is designing her wedding dress. “George and I wanted a wedding that was romantic and elegant, and I can’t imagine anyone more able than Oscar to capture this mood in a dress,” she says. “Meeting him made the design process all the more magical, as he is so warm and such a gentleman.” Indeed, on a warm Wednesday in late July, 36-year-old Alamuddin gambols blithely into de la Renta’s Bryant Park offices on towering wedge sandals, eager to greet the designer with a double kiss. She wears a floral-printed day dress, also by de la Renta. A sand suede Balenciaga motorcycle bag dangles from her forearm. Her long jet-black hair is blown out with just enough volume around the temples to softly frame her minimally made-up face. Following her into the showroom are her mother, Baria, who lives in London, and sister, Tala, who has come all the way from Singapore for the fitting. Soon after the trio arrives, Alamuddin is whisked away into a changing room to be outfitted in the almighty dress for her final appointment with de la Renta and head tailor Raffaele Ilardo, armed with a pincushion and a tape measure draped around his neck. Several minutes later, she emerges with a swishing sound. The dress is an exquisite mille-feuille of ivory tulle appliquéd with fourteen yards of Chantilly lace, its bodice hand embroidered with beading and crystals. “Be careful, guys,” de la Renta calls to Ilardo and his team. “Don’t let the dress touch the floor!” Like a conductor Ilardo raises and then dips one hand, and in unison he and two helpers bend and pick up the skirt of the dress in one coordinated swoop. As Alamuddin arrives in front of her audience, Tala’s eyes well up immediately. Her mother’s eventually do as well, though she is temporarily distracted by the desire to add additional layers of tulle to the skirt. This is voted against by committee, one reason being that the role of train shepherd is C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 6 2 331

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Rabbits are delicious to eat, humane to raise, gentle on the environment, and famously reproductive. Tamar Adler gets cozy with the ultimate guilt-free meat. Photographed by Eric Boman. and Agriculture Organization, and Heifer International have, since 2010, funded tiny rabbitries in Haiti as a way of alleviating the many burdens of poverty. The Haitian Rabbit Project’s 1,250 farms provide dependable income and create more food than its rabbit keepers’ families can typically eat. The only true problem with rabbit eating is rabbit cooking. Rabbit is so lean that if done incorrectly it can get . . . woolly. There’s not a rabbit tract I’ve read, from an 1898 reference book by James Edmund Harting called The Rabbit to Auguste Escoffier’s 1911 rabbit column in The Statesman Review to the Italian 1950 culinary bible, The Silver Spoon, that doesn’t qualify its instructions with something like: This is going to go badly if you don’t do it well. After serving me an exemplary, shatteringly crisp fried rabbit at his restaurant in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle, Jean-Georges Vongerichten summed it up: “There’s not enough fat on a rabbit to cook it without protecting it the whole time.” A similar sentiment came from founding chef Sara Kramer of Brooklyn’s Glasserie, which has had rabbit on the menu since opening last year: “It’s a shame because it’s such a good, sustainable meat, but in restaurants rabbit is so often dry.” Better rabbit cookery can be found in Spain, where the European rabbit, from which all other domesticated rabbits descend, is thought to have been discovered. The European rabbit was called the Oryctolagus cuniculus, after the Latin word for tunnel—cuniculum—which rabbits in the wild dig into elaborate mazes. (You still hear the tunnel in the British coney, and in Italian and Spanish—coniglio and conejo, respectively.) The rabbit is so very Spanish that some etymologists think the word Hispania is from the Punic word tsepan, for “rabbit.” I’m already in Spain, on a long, lovely vacation, so the most sensible thing seems to visit Mugaritz, where Andoni Aduriz, who trained at the legendary El Bulli beside Ferran Adrià, has promised to show me how he cooks rabbit. A freckled waiter rescues me from the restaurant’s vegetable garden. He leads me to a slim, unmarked door, and just inside is Andoni, in a white chef’s coat and a long, dark apron. He is tall, his brown hair peppered with gray, with curious upturned eyebrows and delicate skin. His affect strikes me as Zen. We’ve never met, but he greets me joyously, quickly pulls me an espresso, presses it in my hand, asks “Sugar?,” then follows it up with: “Why do you write? I used to think life was a line, but now I know it is a circle.” Our conversation spirals into what one hears in silence and the origins of pain. Finally, Andoni raises his hands and says we might as well get down to business. C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 6 3 TO SEE A RECIPE FOR RABBIT RAGÙ, DOWNLOAD THE VOGUE DIGITAL EDITION

HOP IT TO

n a misty, curving road in Basque Country, beside which saturnine sheep nose into tall wet grass, stands Mugaritz, one of the world’s best and most compelling restaurants, an eggshell-white building with dark wooden stairs and a terra-cotta roof. I’m here to cook with the chef, Andoni Luis Aduriz. Though to be accurate, I’m not here yet. I had to stop for fuel on the way from San Sebastián, I neglected to search for the restaurant on a digital map, and I forgot to buy the good old Michelin kind. The front door was locked. On the side of the restaurant, though, is a long garden, fragrant and damp, full of chervil and nasturtiums, cardoons and myrtles, which is where I currently am, sweater snagged on a thistle, searching fruitlessly for a way in, mumbling about being very late. This, I think crossly, is sens dessus dessous: We’re planning to cook a rabbit, and I, not it, am running behind. Here, sensitive souls who consider it monstrous to eat rabbits should stop reading. (If you were raised European, or married one, this is not you.) I didn’t grow up thinking of rabbits as food. My first experience with them was when, with other children, I was brought to a dull little farm with cages containing cotton-balls of fluff that we held in our laps, aggressively smoothing their flimsy ears. It didn’t occur to me to eat one until, in my 20s on a trip to Florence with my mother, I found myself in a rustic osteria where whole golden rabbits turned on iron spits, row above row. I know now that my mother was as disturbed by rotisserie du Thumper as I was. But as mothers and daughters will, each wanting to seem the more knowing, we nodded coolly when our waiter suggested we share a roast bunny, and it was the rare occasion when dumb pride yields rewards. We ate ours with increasing gusto, on polenta with a liter of good plain wine. The meat was at once delicate and earthy, mild and robust, sweet with fervent rosemary. And I have never spent long without finding a rabbit for a good dinner since. Meals that are at once ecologically and gastronomically intelligent are much on my mind, and rabbit is the ne plus ultra on this front. Rabbits require neither grain nor land to thrive, subsisting happily on clover, wildflowers, twigs, bark, garden scraps. They don’t produce enough waste to poison the air or water (see cows and methane, pigs and lagoons—best to read up on this on your own). Rabbits are so inexpensive to raise that organizations such as USAID, the UN’s Food 332

RIGHT THIS WAY Rabbit is such a lean and delicate meat that most recipes call for it to be cooked slowly, in a stew or rag첫.

With three new films in three months, Charlotte Le Bon’s acting career is positively bursting. Photographed by Boo George.

Full Flower

I

f there were a manga rendering of a Manet portrait, it would bear an uncanny resemblance to Charlotte Le Bon. With her eyes the size of billiard balls and facial features delicate yet defined enough to seem almost elfin, it’s no wonder the 28-year-old actress photographs so easily. But don’t be fooled by the grace with which she models this moodyhued Rebecca Minkoff silk frock: The Montreal native hated the eight years she spent modeling before finally turning to acting—a sentiment that affected her portrayal of Yves Saint Laurent model-muse Victoire Doutreleau in a recent biopic about the designer. “I always felt I wasn’t fitting in,” she says of the modeling industry, “so it was a little weird to embody a muse.” She did so, however, with the poise and precision that characterize all of her performances, which recently have been rife, with Yves Saint Laurent out in June, Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo in July, and Lasse Hallström’s The Hundred-Foot Journey—her American film debut—in August (producer Steven Spielberg hand-picked her for the role). She ended the summer filming The Walk, Robert Zemeckis’s highly anticipated feature film of Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. And though Le Bon’s style tends more toward the irreverent-tomboy variety—she showed up for our chat in high-waisted black denim and an American Apparel jean jacket with a crochet heart appliquéd on the back— fall’s dark florals seem more than appropriate for the ingénue. After all, she’s in full bloom.—CHLOE MALLE 334

PETAL TO THE METTLE Le Bon wears a Rebecca Minkoff dress, $498; rebeccaminkoff .com. Julie Vos cuff, $165; julievos.com. CH Carolina Herrera shoulder bag, $385; CH Carolina Herrera, Beverly Hills. Kate Spade New York heels, $398; katespade.com. Hair, Esther Langham; makeup, Christian McCulloch for Dolce & Gabbana Make Up. Details, see In This Issue.

P RO DUC ED BY F IL L I N T HE B LA N K P RO DUCT I ON . SH OT ON LO CATI ON AT ZE ZÉ FLOW E RS, N YC. P ROP ST YLI ST, ER I N LA R K G RAY.

STEAL OF THE MONTH

OUTSTANDING IN THEIR FIELD FROM LEFT: Jonathan Anderson, Peter Pilotto, Christopher De Vos, Danielle Sherman, Marco de Vincenzo, Joseph Altuzarra, Simone Rocha, and Anthony Vaccarello. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.

YOUNG

A NEW GENERATION OF ANTI-DIVA DESIGN STARS HAS EMERGED FROM AN UNCERTAIN LANDSCAPE WITH A SENSIBILITY THAT’S PRAGMATIC, PERSONAL—AND TRANSFORMATIVE. BY SARAH MOWER. PHOTOGRAPHED BY JAMIE HAWKESWORTH.

GUNS

T

he fresh green shoots of fashion are gathering in a baking New Jersey cornfield for their generational portrait. Joseph Altuzarra and Danielle Sherman, creative director at Edun, have driven out from their studios in New York City. From London, Simone Rocha, Peter Pilotto, and his design partner, Christopher De Vos, are blinking in the blinding sun. Their London compatriot Jonathan Anderson of J.W. Anderson is looking dazed after landing from Tokyo, direct from the opening of a new outpost of Loewe (his new gig). Anthony Vaccarello has arrived from Paris, Marco de Vincenzo from Rome. Though it’s up in the 90s out here on the farm, there’s no sign of anyone wilting or complaining. Hanging in the shade of the location truck, they’re behaving true to peer-group form—being sociable, joking, keeping one another going. They’re happy to be here, this hardy crop. They’re the antidivas, the grounded ones. The children of the crash. Their background stories could make an economist’s mind boggle. All eight began slap-bang in the carnage of the global financial crisis, sending out their delicious micro-varieties of clothes—colorful, individualistic, well made, and expertly targeted things—into a fashion world that had turned dull and conservative. “What happened with our generation?” Altuzarra is trying to explain how things went right. “We really had to sell those clothes. Because we’ve built these brands during a recession, there is a pragmatic approach to clothing. You have to be unique—be your own brand.” It’s been less a style movement than a careful infiltration by fresh, creative, business-sensible minds coming from behind the scenes and out of cupboard-size studios in New York, London, Paris, and Rome. Altuzzara vividly remembers starting up in his Manhattan apartment in 2008. “I was at Givenchy, and I thought that if I wasn’t going to do it then, well, when? We opened selling the day after the market crash. Which”—he laughs—“was awesome.” A fearlessness came into it. Vaccarello says he didn’t feel a moment’s angst when he left Fendi and gambled his livelihood on a tiny collection of five jackets and five swimsuits in Paris in 2009. “It was the perfect time!” he insists. “I’d saved up—I never wanted to borrow from a bank like designers did before—and I knew my customers were waiting.” What counted vitally was a laser-like instinct for knowing whom you’re speaking to—whether that means Vaccarello and his talent for sexily sliced tailoring or someone like Sherman, his polar opposite, who started her career with Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen as the perfectionist designer of Tshirts at The Row. “Everything I do has to be quite functional and have an integrity and honesty,” she says. A fabric geek, Sherman took a route behind the scenes, where she learned to work closely with local factories, and then to Asia with Alexander Wang. (“I was his twelfth employee!” she boasts.) She’s now quickly upgrading Edun to a polished designer level for New York Fashion Week while building the collection’s ethical production to 85 percent–made in Africa status. Now aged between 28 (Rocha) and 37 (Pilotto), these crash babies have become adult professionals attracting all kinds of fashion attention amid an upsurge of sponsorship, mentorship, and prizes that arrived to support young designers in the mid-2000s. Altuzarra benefited from winning the CFDA/ Vogue Fashion Fund in New York; Peter Pilotto, Anderson, 338

and Rocha from London’s NEWGEN sponsorship; Peter Pilotto, meanwhile, also won the BFC/Vogue Fashion Fund in London. In France, Vaccarello took both the Hyères prize and the Paris ANDAM prize, and in Italy, de Vincenzo emerged through Italian Vogue’s Who Is On Next? competition. It’s made them all much more open to building relationships than the designers who went before. As independents, they’ve been meshed into the culture of publicity-generating collaborations—most recently, Anthony Vaccarello x Versus Versace; J Brand x Simone Rocha; Altuzarra for Target. With Instagram and Web video, they’ve moved even faster. Rocha, with her sweet-but-tomboyish dresses and Luciteheeled brogues, and Peter Pilotto, with its mesmerically textural colors, have quietly gathered customers from across the globe—a far cry from the fate of London’s lone-wolf indie designers in the nineties. They get out and travel, learning to calibrate their collections for different climates and cultures—and they’ll never boast about just how successful they have been. Pilotto practically has to have his arm twisted before he admits, “Well, we sell to 200 stores on six continents. There’s only one we don’t sell to—Antarctica!” This serious, savvy generation has even transformed the attitudes of major luxury-fashion conglomerates, which are suddenly in a flurry of competition to sign them up. Altuzarra is in expansion mode, designing in a renovated office after negotiating a minority investment from France’s Kering group. “Having a partner like Kering, who are able to fold you into their manufacturing capabilities, is something that makes a huge difference,” he says. Anderson, with a new minority investment from LVMH, has moved out of the unheated basement in Shacklewell Lane where he and his stylist Benjamin Bruno froze in the winters; now he’s in a three-story building with an e-commerce studio. In Rome, de Vincenzo is turning out his beautifully elaborate, streamlined clothes with a different kind of LVMH backing: He’d worked as a highly rated Fendi bag designer for ten years before telling the company he was desperate to start his own collection of clothes. “Silvia Fendi was brilliant,” de Vincenzo says. “She said I could stay and have my own studio. I think it is a unique arrangement.” LVMH, Fendi’s parent company, smartly got to keep its star bag designer—and to bet on his future in ready-to-wear on the Milan runway. Now their talent and knowledge are beginning to be almost as highly valued by the fashion establishment as Premier League footballers are in sport. The analogy works for the 30-year-old Anderson: As he shoulders the dual responsibilities of managing his own brand and being creative director of Loewe, he talks about it in sporting terms. “My dad was an Irish national rugby player. He’s always drilling it into me: ‘It’s all about your team!’ ” What’s really different about this generation, though, are the family, friends, and loyal stylists around them. “I like growing with the people who know me and support me,” says Vaccarello. Rocha’s mother, Odette, is her business partner. Anderson’s brother, Thomas, is his HR director. Altuzarra’s mother, Karen, is chairman of the board, and Altuzarra’s words stand for the whole group: “I believe in creating this like a family—one that has worked together from the beginning. To me, that’s a beautiful thing.” If there is a common denominator among all these disparate talents, the thing that has taken them all past survival to the point of flourishing, it is their normality, their loyalty. They’re rooted.

LOOKING THE PART The new designers have had to be hyperfocused on what kind of woman they’re designing for. On Malaika Firth: Anthony Vaccarello black bustier dress, $3,150; the Webster, Miami Beach. On Imaan Hammam: Altuzarra dress, $1,795; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. On Anna Ewers: Marco de Vincenzo circle-print velvet dress, $2,005; select Saks Fifth Avenue stores. Details, see In This Issue.

DONE AND DUSTED It’s a moment for reinvention, not retrenching—from tomboyfriendly cuts to ethical sourcing. On Vanessa Axente: Simone Rocha gold floral check dress, $3,190; Dover Street Market New York. On Lexi Boling: Edun turtleneck tunic ($455) and laser-cut wool skirt ($345); Barneys New York, NYC.

P RO DUCT IO N D ES IG N , ST EFA N BEC KM A N FO R EX P OSU RE NY

BUSY BODIES Bold strokes of color, pattern, silhouette, and material are more the rule than the exception. On Fei Fei Sun: Peter Pilotto burgundy wool coat, turtleneck ($1,066), and skirt ($1,420); coat at modaoperandi.com. On Rianne van Rompaey: J.W. Anderson leather-mix bomber ($1,380) and wool-and-cotton trousers ($805); select Nordstrom stores. On Ewers: Marco de Vincenzo knit top ($1,290) and wave-tape skirt ($2,670); select Saks Fifth Avenue stores. In this story: hair, Recine; makeup, Hannah Murray. Produced by Kate Collings-Post for North Six. Details, see In This Issue.

THE NIGHT IS YOUNG If the clock (or the chronograph) strikes midnight, fret not— that just means you’re having a good time. Kick off (or finish up) your evening at Dirty French, the new bistro tucked inside Manhattan’s Ludlow hotel. Sasha Pivovarova wears an Omega mother-of-pearl watch; Omega boutiques. Tod’s leather bag, $1,845; Tod’s boutiques. Miu Miu dress. Fashion Editor: Tabitha Simmons.

SHADES OF COOL Don’t miss Lana Del Rey’s concert in Austin, Texas, this month—and take along a Lanvin clutch as a go-to plus-one. Lanvin bag ($1,490) and trousers; bag at select Barneys New York stores. Van Cleef & Arpels 18K-white-gold watch; vancleefarpels.com. Tabitha Simmons pointed lace-ups, $695; tabithasimmons.com. 3.1 Phillip Lim eyelet top. Details, see In This Issue.

Blanc Slate IVORY. ARCTIC. CLOUD: ALABASTER ACCESSORIES ARE THE CLEAR CHOICE OF THIS SEASON— FROM BUCKET BAGS TO CLUTCHES. PHOTOGRAPHED BY PATRICK DEMARCHELIER.

What to Wear Where

PALE FIRE Fendi nods to its roots with the new By the Way bag. At once classic and versatile, it’s also compact enough to be lap-friendly at the latest unveiling of Aida at the Metropolitan Opera, which marks another return to heritage: Verdi’s spectacle was first performed there in 1886. Fendi bag ($1,650), belt ($500), sandals, and clothing; Fendi, NYC.

PAINTING THE TOWN Nicolas Ghesquière’s bucket bag for Louis Vuitton is a fittingly eyecatching piece to tote along to this month’s Artwalk NY benefit, which supports the city’s Coalition for the Homeless. Louis Vuitton bag ($4,050), belt ($1,440), ring ($570), and coatdress; select Louis Vuitton stores. Details, see In This Issue.

BACK TO THE FUTURE Mulberry’s simple clutch is the ideal carrier for a wallet and an iPhone. Just be sure to silence the latter when David Fincher’s adaptation of Gone Girl opens on October 3. Mulberry goatskin bag, $1,170; mulberry.com. Derek Lam calfskin belt ($690) and dress; belt at Derek Lam, NYC. Tod’s knit turtleneck.

BEAUTY NOTE

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Amplify classic looks with a Bardot-inspired blowout. John Frieda’s Luxurious Volume Building Mousse lifts hair into soft styles that last all day.

MODERN ENGLISH Envision summer’s last rays (or your upcoming holiday’s soleil-drenched afternoons) with this sunny outfit while strolling London’s Frieze Art Fair. And should any works catch your eye, slip a gallery card into this shapely Gucci purse. Gucci leather shoulder bag ($2,350), moccasins ($575), and clothing; select Gucci stores. Details, see In This Issue.

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TOTAL TOMBOY It’s a good time to look to the men’s collections for wardrobe inspiration—or even wearable options. These chic casual pieces are pitch-perfect for root-root-rooting as Major League Baseball’s World Series steps up to the plate at the end of the month. Prada bicolor leather clutch, belt ($380), sandals, and clothing; select Prada boutiques.

ARTFUL ENSEMBLE Clean lines—framed here by Céline’s trapeze bag— add a kind of yin to the yang of dazzling, bold earrings. Try this low key–meets– high wattage look as the Berliner Philharmoniker takes up a brief residency at Carnegie Hall. Céline earrings ($2,450), calfskin bag ($2,950), and sleeveless coat; earrings and bag at Céline, NYC. In this story: hair: Jimmy Paul for Bumble and Bumble; makeup: Dick Page for Shiseido. Details, see In This Issue.

Index EDITOR: RICKIE DE SOLE

COUNTRY Guess slip dress, $118; guess.com.

COOL

AERIN backgammon set; aerin.com.

AT EASE “I LIKE TO RELAX BY THE LAKE AND READ,” SAYS COPPOLA OF HER TRIPS TO NORTHERN CALIFORNIA. CHRISTOPHER KANE DRESS. JIMMY CHOO KITTEN HEELS, $625; JIMMYCHOO.COM.

Olivina olive bath soap, $9; olivina.com.

WAY

Tumi duffel, $695; tumi .com.

Out West

SCREENWRITER, DIRECTOR, AND NEWLY DECANTED VINTNER GIA COPPOLA SHARES WHERE TO GO—AND WHAT TO PACK—FOR AN AUTUMN WEEKEND IN THE GOLDEN STATE.

Gia by Gia Coppola Pinot Grigio, from Sonoma, $17; francisfordcoppolawinery.com.

CO P P O LA : HUG H LI P P E . SI T T I NG S E D I TO R: ST E LLA G REE NS PA N . HA I R, LEO N A RD O M A NE TTI ; MAKEUP, EMI KANEKO. PH OTOGRAPH ED ON LOCATION AT TH E MAR LTON H OTEL, NYC. EAR R INGS : M A RKO M A C P HERSO N . SOA P : J OHN MA N NO. DUF FE L: COU RT ESY O F TU MI . W I NE : COU RT ESY OF FRANCIS FOR D COPPOLA WINERY. ALL OTH ERS: TIM H OUT. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

Cathy Waterman earrings; Ylang 23, Dallas.

PLAN C I CCI O : SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE/ JOHN STOREY. TOTE: COURTESY OF DOONEY & BOURKE. BLOSSOMS: COURTESY OF JACQUI GETTY. WINERY: COURTESY OF FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA WIN E RY. T E LESCO PE : COU RT ESY O F RESTORATION HARDWARE. SWEATER: TIM HOUT. PILLOW: COURTESY OF ESQUE STUDIO. BOOK: COURTESY OF AMAZON. JEANS: COURTESY OF GENETIC LOS ANGELES. ALL OTH ERS: MAR KO M A C PHE RSO N . D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .

COUNTRY ESCAPE

COOL

Index

Cherry blossoms in Napa.

SPEND A WEEKEND LIVING LIKE A LOCAL IN THE CALIFORNIA WINE REGION.

Ciccio restaurant, in Yountville.

Dooney & Bourke tote, $295; dooney .com.

Vogel Bindery handbound journals, $850 each; Assouline at the Plaza hotel, NYC.

Francis Ford Coppola Winery.

“I usually stay at home when I’m in Napa,” says Coppola, who makes the trip upstate to relax, read (her favorite book is Victory, by Joseph Conrad), and play cards with her grandparents Francis Ford and Eleanor Coppola. When she does manage to pull herself away from her home, she visits St. Helena, “the closest town, with a sweet little movie theater called the Cameo Cinema.” Of course, no trip would be complete without dropping by her favorite restaurants (which, thankfully, were spared major damage, along with much of the area, in the August quake): Ciccio, in Yountville; Giugni’s Deli, in St. Helena (try the roast-beef sandwiches); or Rustic, at her family’s Sonoma winery. “It has all my grandpa’s favorite recipes,” she says, “dishes I love because I grew up eating them.”

Genetic Los Angeles jeans, $228; modaoperandi .com.

Brunello Cucinelli sweater; Brunello Cucinelli, NYC.

Restoration Hardware brass telescope; restorationhardware .com. Joie boots, $320; piperlime .com.

Plover Organic euro sham, $45; ploverorganic .com. Victory, by Joseph Conrad, $16; bn.com.

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Index CITY CHIC L.A.’s Griffith Observatory at dusk.

SITTING PRETTY “MY FAVORITE PLACE TO SHOP IN L.A. IS TENOVERSIX,” SAYS COPPOLA. “MY COUSIN IS ONE OF THE OWNERS, AND THEY CARRY THE BEST SIMPLE T-SHIRTS BY THE LABEL CALDER.” KENZO TOP AND SKIRT; OPENINGCEREMONY.US.

Jennifer Meyer earrings, $550; Ylang23.com.

Hasselblad specialedition Stellar camera; Samy’s Camera, L.A.

Calder T-shirt, $84; TenOverSix, L.A.

Clare V. duffel, $378; clarev.com.

Massimo Dutti raincoat, $250; Massimo Dutti, NYC. Vespa Sprint 150 ABS; vespausa.com.

Nicholas Kirkwood loafers, $395; Nicholas Kirkwood, NYC.

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VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

Hermès watch; Hermès boutiques.

COLOR FIVE EASY PIECES AND PLACES FROM THE LEFT COAST CREATIVE SET. Rodarte jacket; modaoperandi .com.

LOCAL

COPPOLA: HUGH LIPPE. GRIFFITH OBSERVATORY: COURTESY OF WES TENNYSON. WATCH: MARKO M AC PHERSON. MILLY: COURTESY OF MILLY. RODARTE: COURTESY OF MODA OPERANDI. EARRINGS: COURTESY OF BARNEYS NEW YORK. TRENCH: TIM HOUT. ARTWORK: JIM HODGES. AND STILL THIS (DETAIL). 2005–2008. 23.5K- AND 24K-GOLD WITH BEVA ADHESIVE ON GESSOED LINEN. OVERALL: 89" X 200" X 185". THE RACHOFSKY COLLECTION AND THE DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART THROUGH THE DMA/AMFAR BENEFIT AUCTION FUND. © JIM HODGES. COOLADE SET: COURTESY OF ESQUE STUDIO. THE MUSSO & FRANK GRILL: © DAISY CHURCH/DAISYCHURCH.COM. VESPA: COURTESY OF VESPA. BAG: COURTESY OF CLARE V. SHOE: COURTESY OF NICHOLAS KIRKWOOD. JUICE: COURTESY OF JUICE SERVED HERE. BLANKET: COURTESY OF MR PORTER. ALL OTHERS: JOHN MANNO. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.

Carven dress, $980; Carven, NYC.

Milly clutch, $295; millyny .com.

Andi Kovel for Esque Studio mid-centurystyle coolade set, $420; twentieth.net. A detail of and still this, by Jim Hodges. The Musso & Frank Grill, Gia’s favorite restaurant in Hollywood.

WHAT’S Now in its twelfth year, the Hammer Museum’s Gala in the Garden honors artist Mark Bradford and musician Joni Mitchell on October 11. Find yourself without a ticket? Celebrate two other luminaries at the museum this month with the opening of “Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take” and “Robert Heinecken: Object Matter.”

ON

Juice Served Here Green Milk, $75 for a carton of 8; juiceservedhere.com.

FO R M O R E I N S P I R E D I T E M S , C H EC K O U T M O S T WA N T E D, U P DAT E D E V E R Y T H U R S DAY O N VO G U E . C O M

The Elder Statesman blanket; mrporter.com.

JOHN KERRY’S SECOND ACT CONTINUED FROM PAGE 323

remember asking him, ‘What are you going to do if the prime minister of Israel calls?’ And he said, ‘I’ll figure it out.’ ” “We have many late-night and earlymorning phone calls, and John takes every opportunity to get home,” reports his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, whom he married in 1995 and who quickly became known for her outspokenness and humor on the campaign trail. Now 75, she suffered a seizure last summer while vacationing on Nantucket, and has been keeping out of the public eye through her recovery. “I have learned so much about the brain and the time it takes to recover from a seizure such as mine,” she adds. “I feel blessed to have the support of my husband—who quite literally lay beside me in my hospital bed last year.” Kerry’s first wife was Vanessa and Alexandra’s mother, Julia Thorne, who died of cancer in 2006. (She and Kerry divorced in 1988.) Since her death, Kerry has become assertive with parental advice. Vanessa remembers when she was getting married in 2009—Kerry was senator then—her father handed her a sketch of what resembled a wedding dress. “I don’t know what he was going for—I think it was sort of a strapless gown that was formfitting up top and flowing on the bottom. He drew on a sticky note, like, ‘This is what I think the dress should look like.’ He genuinely had been thinking about it. It’s been really sweet to see him cross some of the normal territory because we don’t have our mom.” “Most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence; they worry about what would happen in our absence,” Kerry told the graduating class at Yale this May, sounding like the idealistic young man who signed up to serve in Vietnam. In other ways, though, he remains the heartbroken veteran who turned against the war, too. “I think the president and I share a tremendous sense of the damage that was done by the prior administration’s approach—particularly to Iraq, and its inattention to Afghanistan,” he says to me during our interview at the State Department. America’s “wars of choice . . . never should have become what they were, and never should have taken place.” His office suite, decorated with traditional Washington Federal-style furniture and Oriental rugs in patterns of scarlet and blue, overlooks the Lincoln

and Jefferson memorials. It’s a handsome but not particularly personal space, and I imagine Kerry prefers his plane or Boston, where he works out of an office in his Beacon Hill town house. I ask about the fears of American decline expressed so often on the political Right. “Well, first of all, there’s no empire; there’s no desire for empire. The age of empire is over,” he tells me. “What we’re looking at now is an age of alliances and partnerships.” He adds that “democracy is not on the wane. People want democracy.” What we have to be mindful of is “young people around the world being co-opted by the demagoguery of individual leaders. If we don’t find a global approach to them, we’re all going to feel the heat.” This brings terrorism into our conversation; he calls it “the instrument of choice that fills the vacuum left by inadequate governance.” His assessment of the terrorist group ISIS and their murderous tactics is unsparing: “They’re ugly. They’re really horrible—as bad as anything I’ve seen in public life. They’re willing to kill indiscriminately.” He adds that “they have proclaimed definitively that they intend to attack the West” and that countries across the Middle East—from Israel to Iran to Syria to Jordan—oppose the group: “All of us are unwilling to tolerate the rise of a jihadist ISIS.” I ask him if it’s painful to see the sectarian deterioration in Iraq. “Well, it makes me angry,” he says. “Painful is not the word I’d choose. We never should have turned it upside down. Having done so, they”—the Bush administration—“never put a political process together.” We will speak about Iraq again after the country’s embattled leader, Nouri al-Maliki, resigns, and shortly before the execution by ISIS of American journalist James Foley. Over the phone, Kerry will express some cautious optimism: “It’s moving in the right direction with Maliki stepping down peacefully.” A legitimate government, he says, “was the prerequisite for President Obama, from day one, to say now we can do something about ISIL”—an alternative name for ISIS. “The U.S. is not going to get involved in any on-the-ground combat troops . . . but we’re not going to shy away from equipping and assisting.” The fighting that broke out between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip captured Kerry’s focus like no other development this summer. In July, Fox News caught him on a live microphone speaking to his Deputy Chief of Staff

Jonathan Finer and seeming to complain about the scope of Israel’s incursion into Gaza (“It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation,” he’ll tell Finer sarcastically). Back on air, he will quickly champion Israel’s right to defend itself, as he will even after being criticized by Israeli leaders who publicly dismiss Kerry’s efforts to broker peace. With me he defends his attempt to get a cease-fire. “The level of collateral damage that was taking place inevitably was going to turn against Israel and be harmful to the overall effort and harden people against cutting some kind of long-term agreement. So that’s why we were pushing. We continue to work at this and we’re going to, despite frustrations in one camp or another—because the stakes are very, very high.” At the end of the summer, Kerry traveled to Australia and Myanmar and declared, upon his return, that he would be turning his attention to “long-term opportunities” in that region of the world. It was a reminder that Kerry has another two years to serve as the president’s chief diplomat, and much ground still to cover. If you ask him about the legacy he hopes to leave, however, he practically snaps. “I don’t think about a legacy. I think about getting the job done as well as I can, and you and history and other people will take care of the rest of it.” But he does reflect on the past. “You know, obviously, losing the presidency is not the option of first choice,” he says and laughs, as if awed by the memory. “But you can’t get lost in it. I said, ‘I am not going to make this the defining moment of a life of involvement in public service and caring about things.’ I was a senator and had a lot I was interested in; I have a great family, a great life, and I have nothing to complain about. So I went right back in and started kicking. . . . “I love it, I really enjoy this job, it’s a great job,” he continues. “And I am excited. Look, we got the deal on chemical weapons [in Syria]; we’ve got Iran talking. We’ve got the Middle East people talking—we’ve made a lot of progress there, and I believe we’ll get back to talking.” He cocks his head pointedly, with a faint smile. “I am not finished.”

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already deemed too much for Tala’s twelve-year-old daughter, Mia, who is Alamuddin’s only flower girl. “That won’t be enough,” says de la Renta confidently. “You will need a grown-up to

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help as well—your sister.” He nods to Tala, who is happy to take on the task. Alamuddin twirls slowly toward the designer, careful not to upset the lower layers of the skirt. She, too, wipes the corner of her espresso-brown eyes as she stands resplendent in her dress. It is agreed by all that de la Renta was right about everything: the cut, the volume, the minimal beading, the subtle ivory hue. He smiles, satisfied. “Look at the color of the paper on the floor; that color is true white, so you can see the dress is cream.” Indeed, the floor has been carefully covered with crisp white butcher paper to protect the pristine hem. “It’s the most important dress in the life of a woman,” de la Renta says. “Any girl from any walk of life dreams of that special dress, and I try to make that dream a reality for her. Amal and I looked at a lot of evening dresses and wedding dresses together, and we discussed what she liked. That gave me the idea of what she wanted.” The Oxford and New York University law school graduate’s daunting legal résumé—she has represented WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in his fight against extradition, as well as Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and acts as counsel to the United Nations’ inquiry into drone strikes—does not preclude her from having strong opinions on fashion and the minute details of her wedding day. As Ilardo pins a fold of lace at the small of her back, she asks de la Renta whether he thinks it is necessary to have a second, shorter veil for the wedding dinner. “No, I think after the wedding you take off the veil altogether; you don’t need it anymore,” he replies. “Once you are married, you are married.” Alamuddin smiles. Like the dress, the cathedral veil is adorned with Chantilly lace and bead-and-crystal embroidery; it descends all the way down the back of the dress almost to the floor. The topic of hairstyle is broached, and it is agreed that hair down but tucked behind the shoulders is the best solution so as not to compete with the neckline of the dress and the embellishment on the veil. The hair and makeup by Orlando Pita and Alice Lane for Alamuddin’s Vogue photo shoot will act as a wedding-day trial run. The most envied bride-to-be since Catherine Middleton became the Duchess of Cambridge, Alamuddin runs her fingers across the dress’s bateau neckline, exposing the seven-carat, ethically mined emerald-cut diamond that hovers like a Chiclet-size spaceship over

the fourth finger of her left hand. She asks Ilardo about the neckline, cut off the shoulder to highlight Alamuddin’s Parmagianino neck and poitrine, and wonders if it will remain unfinished. He nods vigorously in agreement. “Oui, madame, it will be a raw edge. Un peu impur.” She discusses the details of the tailoring with Ilardo in French before replying to her mother’s questions in Arabic and proceeding to implore de la Renta, in English, to join their wedding festivities in order to see the dresses in action. Dresses, plural, includes the festive, Gatsby-style party frock that de la Renta is supplying as the second act of the evening. This she slips into after the wedding dress has been carefully removed. Her entrance is preceded by a soft clicking sound, like the chicest swarm of cicadas, the all-over silver and pearl beading and beaded fringe hem snapping together with each step. The dress is from de la Renta’s fall 2014 collection, and Alamuddin’s reedlike frame fits effortlessly into the runway sample. It has been shortened from ankle to mid-thigh, the better to show off her endless legs and to make it a true dancing dress. De la Renta studies the outfit and then issues a soft command to one of his deputies. Suddenly a pair of handembroidered beaded silver pumps emerges from a hidden closet. These Baroque marvels are the runway shoes for de la Renta’s upcoming spring 2015 show. The ensemble is complete. De la Renta looks on proudly, the elegant Dominican fairy godfather. “You look hot!” he declares. The room erupts into giggles.

HOP TO IT CONTINUED FROM PAGE 332

In a little kitchen upstairs, our rabbit has been readied, surrounded by glass bowls: a light cream, garlic paste, fresh thyme, what looks like pork crackling. A broth simmers on a stove. “This rabbit,” Andoni declares. “This will be the first rabbit ever served in Mugaritz, in our sixteen years of life. Isn’t that wonderful?” I begin to apologize, but he explains how Mugaritz this is. “Each meal here is different,” he says, “as though we go to a new market for each table.” He shows me the day’s inventory. There are wild mushrooms, diver scallops, cod neck, flower petals, duck skin, but only a tiny collection of each. Tonight maybe four diners will have morels, three the scallops, two Mugaritz’s first-ever rabbit. “Now,” Andoni says, as we turn to

the rabbit, “what is the most delicious way to cook meat?” he asks. Then answers, “It’s asado,” roasted on wood charcoal. “The meat gets crisp, roasted skin, rich melted fat, everything else stays tender. But how can you have great rabbit asado? There’s no skin to crisp.” A rabbit’s skin comes off with its soft coat when it’s butchered, in two tugs. (“First you pull off his sweater,” a Sicilian rabbit-hunter once explained to me. “Then his bottoms.”) “There’s no fat to melt. If you roast it whole, one part usually dries out before the next.” This is why rabbit is generally cut into pieces. And why most often you see rabbit in a stew or a ragù. Sometimes, as at Jean-Georges, rabbit is fried—this is glorious—or poached into a galantine, where its leanness is balanced by copious amounts of pork fat. It’s surprising that it was whole roast rabbit that inspired my conversion in Florence, since that’s probably the least gastronomically promising way to cook one. Andoni looks at me with the amused intensity that is his resting expression. “I want our rabbit to have skin and fat, to leave some impression of the traditional asado.” We won’t actually use charcoal. We will cook the thin rabbit belly slowly and put it in a warm oven until it both looks and tastes like pork crackling, wonderfully crisp and a little fatty. We will then render the thimbleful of fat on the animal, combining it with the teacupful of rabbit stock on the stove, a spoonful of tahini, a dab of garlic paste, and powdered lecithin, to make the sauce into a rich emulsion that is light on the tongue. I taste it later, in Mugaritz’s dining room, where a single soft spotlight shines down on each white tablecloth. The rabbit arrives glossy and gussied up: a portion of tiny loin, serene and tender, topped with darkly roasted shoulder and leg meat, shards of crackling, as crisp and brittle as dried twigs, all dressed with rich sauce and pale violet thyme blossoms. The meat is delectable, with the ethereal subtlety of Dover sole. It’s served on a wedge of rustic, garlicky potato, which even in this sleek dining room recalls sitting somewhere simple by a fire. If I’d never tasted rabbit in a bustling osteria, but only read of people eating it, it is this rabbit, with its crisp skin, its sweet fat, I would have hoped, someday, to meet. I’ve conspicuously avoided personal experience of eating a rabbit after looking into its blinking pink eyes. When C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 6 4

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Northern Californian friends came to New York to give conscientious diners a hands-on lesson in rabbit killing, I demurred, joining only for the ensuing rabbit meal. But now I find the phone number of John Fazio, from whom they bought their rabbits, and arrange a tour of his rabbit farm, an hour and a half from Manhattan. Farmer Fazio is a burly man with as strong a New York accent as I’ve heard and a tattoo on his left bicep of a rabbit smoking a hash pipe, from which billows a hallucinatory cloud. In it one makes out the face and claws of a growling panther and the words Più intelligente del nemico (“Smarter than the enemy”). He offers me a rabbit taco when I arrive. “This is the next fish taco,” he tells me. Then he shows me the large drum smoker where he smokes whole rabbits over apple wood before shredding the meat, putting it in a flour tortilla, and frying the thing. I say I’d like to see the rabbits I’m currently eating, but John tells me to ask my questions first. I wonder if his rabbits are raised outside, in the meadow. “There’s no such thing as a free-range rabbit,” he says. Even in the wild, rabbits find dark, contained places to huddle—e.g., tunnels. They obviously hop about on their furry legs, but not to graze or sun, only to get from one small shaded place to another. Put directly: Chickens suffer from being in little cages, as would cows and pigs. Put a rabbit on a field and he will naturally find himself a dark, cramped place. I also ask whether rabbits actually breed at the legendary pace from which the idiom is derived. John: “The doe

drops her egg after the buck has—pardon my language—done his business.” There’s no timing to it, like there is with most other mammals. “Their gestation is 30 days, and every litter has one to twelve babies. I don’t let them, but does can get pregnant quite soon after giving birth.” In short: yes. What about rabbits and carrots? “Well, they’ll eat any vegetable or vegetable scrap, or grass, or pellets of grass,” a key reason for the success of the Haitian Rabbit Project. John and I have been talking in the farm’s store for an hour, and I have a meeting back in Manhattan worrisomely soon, so I tell John, who’s been transparently trying to sidetrack me each time I’ve suggested we actually visit the rabbits, that it’s now or never. He looks at me plaintively and explains that my visit has been infelicitously timed and one has to walk through his small slaughterhouse to get to the hutches. His staff has been at work, and he has been trying to “protect [me] from the bloodbath.” “But I came to see the bloodbath,” I say (words I never expect to utter again). So we get into his truck and drive 100 meters to where a taciturn young man in a T-shirt is washing and sharpening a knife outside a long building. I hurry into a clean little room, recently hosed down but for its white tile walls, which are still Jackson Pollock–splattered with bright red blood. Soft rabbit hides peek over the top of a full bin. I can’t deny that there’s something deeply poignant and visceral about being this close to the moment: For one instant I am speechless and unsettled. But then I

right myself and mostly the experience begins to feel helpfully diagrammatic, like when in elementary school science class one got to see a butterfly devolve into a chrysalis into a caterpillar. Further inside are the hutches, cleansmelling and stretching in long rows to the building’s back. After I inspect the white, tranquil bunnies, John hands me my cull, which I will cook for my supper. A Spanish chef gave me a delightful recipe for rabbit in olive oil, wine and bay leaves, with vinegar and garlic added at the last second. It’s a recipe sent down through the ages—an ancient Roman coin on Hispania showed a woman, a rabbit at her feet, holding an olive branch in one hand and laurel in the other. But if I’m going to do anything Spanish it will come from Andoni. I decide to try putting my rabbit directly on a fire, even though I know it won’t have Andoni’s lovely skin and fat. It will, at least, echo his imaginings. It spends one night with garlic, bay leaves, olive oil, and the end of a bottle of red wine. Then onto coals, burning barely iridescent gray, and I remove smoky, tender pieces of rabbit, one by one, as they are done. My friends and I eat it with our hands, on my roof. I repeat the only other advice I followed, on eating rabbit from Roger Vergé in a 1976 book by food writer Roy Andries de Groot: “I suggest you eat it at a small wooden table in a garden under the shadow of an olive tree on a hot and sparkling day, accompanied by a bottle of rosé and a mixed Salade Mesclün.” I have the wooden table, the wine, and the bright sun. My tree is fig but it will do.

in this issue Table of contents 52: On Axente: Jacket ($1,630), top ($330), and skirt ($1,130); Marni boutiques. Venyx earrings and ring, both priced upon request; venyxworld.com. On Huisman: Blazer, $1,475; barneys.com. T-shirt, $38 for three; calvinklein.com. Manicure, Sabine Peeters. 66: Dress; Proenza Schouler, NYC for similar styles. Bag ($1,575) and flats ($995); Proenza Schouler, NYC. Platinum bracelet with pearls, tourmaline, onyx, and diamonds, price upon request; select Cartier boutiques. Manicure, Reiko Okusa. 78: Falke socks. Manicure, Megumi Yamamoto. Cover look 82: Dress, $7,445; select Dolce & Gabbana boutiques. Necklace, $2,030; Cartier boutiques. Vogue.com 84: On Lane: Coat, $8,450; select Prada boutiques. Blouse, $690; shopbop .com. Skirt, price upon request; rochas.com for

information. Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane shoes, $895; Saint Laurent, NYC. On Walt: Denim Dungaree/Trico Field reversible vest, $186; tricofield.net. On Griffin: Rain jacket, $265; Stella McCartney, NYC. 90: Striped T-shirt, $85; shopbop.com for similar styles. Headphones, $380; Apple stores. Editor’s letter 102: Lilac embroidered-sequin dress, $5,500; by special order at Ikram, Chicago. Contributors 136: On Huisman: Merino-wool sweater, $230; johnsmedley.com/us. 140: On Le Bon: Dress, $355; select Neiman Marcus stores. Up front 148: Suit, $1,195; burberry .com. Shirt, $209; buddshirts.co/uk. Issues 156: On Pino: Michael Kors blouse, $795; select Michael Kors stores. On Clark: Ann Taylor sweater, $89; anntaylor.com. Flash 195: Silk-chiffon dress, $2,795; select Ralph Lauren

stores. Manicure, Rieko Okusa. 216: Altuzarra jacket ($2,895) and matching skirt ($1,795); jacket at altuzarra.com for more information and skirt at net-a-porter.com for similar styles. Suede heels, $620; net-a-porter.com. Repossi pink-gold ring, price upon request; repossi .com. 218: Shirt, $1,410; select Neiman Marcus stores. Men’s trousers, $1,625; Hermès boutiques. View 230: On Laura: Loafers, $795; Tod’s stores. On Kris: Sweater, $550; burberry.com. Jeans, his own. Church’s shoes, $780; Church’s English Shoes, NYC. 234: Parka; available in different colorways at patagonia.com. Hilfiger Collection turtleneck jacket ($390) and skirt ($430); Tommy Hilfiger, NYC. Aurélie Bidermann gold, braided-cotton, and leather bangles, $170– $330 each; aureliebidermann.com. Rubber

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A WORD ABOUT DISCOUNTERS W HI LE VO G UE T HO ROUG HLY R ES EA RC HES TH E COMPANIES MENTIONED IN ITS PAGES, WE CANNOT GUARANTEE TH E AUTH ENTICITY OF MERCH A N D IS E SO LD BY D ISCOUN T E RS. AS IS A LWAYS T HE CAS E I N PURCHASI N G A N I T EM FRO M A NYW H ER E OT HE R T HA N TH E AUTH OR IZ ED STOR E, TH E BUYER TAKES A R ISK AND SH OULD USE CAUTION WH EN D OING SO.

boots, $330; mulberry.com. 236: On Durmer: Saskia Diez 18K-gold necklace with freshwater pearls, $382; saskia-diez.com. 239: On Burnette: Geminola floral-printed slip dress (worn underneath Delpozo dress), $325; Geminola, NYC. 240: On de Taillac-Touhami: Dries Van Noten embroidered sweater, $415; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC for similar styles. On Adam: Vince striped top, $198; vince.com. Levi’s gray jeans; amazon.com. On Noor: Anaïs & I cotton cardigan, $92; anaisandi .com. Marie-Chantal floral-printed top, $90; mariechantal.com. Crewcuts pink jeans, $68; jcrew.com/crewcuts. On Scherazade: Soeur sleeveless shirt ($99) and flower-printed overalls ($130); Posh, Brooklyn, NY. 244: On Scherazade: Soeur dress, $196; Poppy Store, Santa Monica, CA. Repetto ballet flats. On Noor: Baby Dior jacket, $593; (800) 929-DIOR. Zara girls’ flats. On Adam: Du Pareil au Même shirt, from $17; dpam.com. Levi’s jeans; amazon .com. Crewcuts lace-up shoes. 246: On Dauphin de La Rochefoucauld: Christophe Lemaire top, $450; select Saks Fifth Avenue stores. Hermès cargo pants, $1,775; Hermès boutiques. Cuff ($51,610) and ring ($10,450). Beauty 249: Dress ($2,790), sweater ($980), and scarf ($285); select Prada boutiques. Prop stylist, Todd Wiggins for Mary Howard Studio. Manicure, Tatyana Molot. 252: Sarah Morris for Longchamp bag, $160; Longchamp stores. 264: Dress, $16,900; Valentino, NYC. 266: On Kloss: Sweater, $850; Stella McCartney, NYC. Warby Parker X Karlie Kloss sunglasses, $145; warbyparker.com. Satya Jewelry gold-plated necklace, $119; satyajewelry .com. Maiyet bangle, $795; maiyet.com. PATA 268: On Irons: Coat ($2,995) and pants ($795); burberry.com. T-shirt, $95; Rag & Bone stores. Tiles, $80 per square foot. 272: Backgammon set, $325; casamidy.com. On Chazelle: Blazer, $2,350 (sold with matching pants); Gucci boutiques. Shirt, $595; marcjacobs.com. A.P.C. chinos, $250; A.P.C., NYC. J. Lindeberg belt, $125; jlindebergusa.com. 274: Printed dress, $698; Marc by Marc Jacobs boutiques.

PERFORMANCE PIECES

296 –297: On Axente: Belt, $348; Le Bon Marché, Paris. Bag, $1,660; Parashu, L.A. Heels, $940; Marni boutiques. Socks, $28; hisroom.com. On Huisman: Blazer, $895; select Ralph Lauren stores. Polo, $328; Paul Stuart stores, Chicago. 298: On Axente: Jacket, $11,000. Top and belt, priced upon request. Bag ($1,840) and heels ($940); Marni boutiques. On Huisman: Agnès B. shirt, $245; Agnès B. stores, NYC. 299: Earrings and ring, priced upon request; venyxworld.com. Minaudière, $5,500; Dior boutiques. 300: Jacket, price upon request. 301: On Axente: Coat, $9,810. Sunglasses, $270; lindafarrow.com. On Huisman: Jacket, $2,495; Ermenegildo Zegna stores. Agnès B. shirt, $245; Agnès B. stores, NYC. Jeans, $68; levi.com. Boots, $1,695; John Lobb, NYC. 302–303: On Axente: Coat, $11,300. Belt, $295; michaelkors.com. Minaudière, $5,500; Dior boutiques. Heels, $940; Marni boutiques. On Huisman: Shirt, $325; Maison Martin Margiela stores. 304: Isa Arfen knit bra top, $365; Opening Ceremony; L.A. Belt, $340; net-a-porter .com. 305: Coat, made to order; 011-44-207318-2222 for information. Heels, $940; Marni boutiques. 307: On Huisman: Blazer, $498; brooksbrothers.com. Shirt, $245; Agnès B. stores, NYC. In this story: for information on Sprookjes Showroom; sprookjes.eu. Manicure, Sabine Peeters.

STEAL OF THE MONTH

334–335: Lulu Frost chain necklaces (worn as belts), $295 each; lulufrost.com. Manicure, Rieko Okusa.

YOUNG GUNS

337: On Rocha: Simone Rocha brushedwool skirt ($2 ,4 4 0) and jelly sandals ($1,380); Dover Street Market New York. 340: On Axente: Simone Rocha gold-leather brogues, $1,160; net-a-porter.com. On Boling: Adidas Originals leather sneakers, $75; adidas.com/stansmith. 341: On Sun: Coat, $5,671; similar styles at modaoperandi.com. Turtleneck; peterpilotto.com for information. Skirt; similar styles at the Webster, Miami Beach. Nicholas Kirkwood for Peter Pilotto sandals, $1,190; net-a-porter.com. On van Rompaey: J.W.Anderson wrap shoe, $865; Dover Street Market New York. On Ewers: Marco de Vincenzo snakeskin boots. Manicure, Megumi Yamamoto. 342: Watch, $7,600. Dress, $2,435; select Miu Miu stores. 343: Trousers, $990; select Neiman Marcus stores. Watch, $54,000; also at (877) VAN-CLEEF. Top, $395; 31philliplim .com. 344: Sandals (price upon request), blouse ($1,400), and culottes ($1,250). 345: Coat dress, $3,990. 346: Dress, $2,990; Bergdorf Goodman, NYC. Turtleneck, $745; Tod’s stores. 347: Coat ($3,700), high-neck top ($1,350), and pants ($895). 348: Bag and sandals (both priced upon request), leather jacket ($4,380), sweater ($1,430), blouse ($890), and denim trousers ($1,310). 349: Sleeveless coat, $4,750; select Barneys New York stores. Manicure, Reiko Okusa. Index 350: On Coppola: Dress; 011-44207-241-7695 for information. Backgammon set, $2,400. 22K-gold earrings with ethically sourced diamonds and emeralds, $11,430. 359: Cashmere sweater, $2,495. Telescope, $2,995. 360: On Coppola: Top and skirt, both priced upon request. Vespa, $5,099; vespausa.com for information. Special-edition camera, $3,595. 361: Watch, $4,150. Clutch; similar styles at millyny .com. Plaid-wool jacket; by special order at modaoperandi.com. Handspun cashmere blanket, $5,900. Last look 366: Styles from $349. ALL PRICES APPROXIMATE.

WHAT TO WEAR WHERE

REESE REINVENTED

THE FALL CLASSIC

285: Falke boot socks, $44; Harry’s Shoes, NYC. Boots, $1,250; Céline, NYC. 286: Vintage boots. 288–289: Fur collar, price upon request; zadig-et-voltaire.com. 290–291: Coat, $10,700. Sweater, Tommy Hilfiger, NYC for similar styles. 292–293: Falke boot socks, $44; Harry’s Shoes, NYC. Boots, $1,250; Céline, NYC. Manicure, Megumi Yamamoto.

308–309: Dress ($7,995) and corset ($1,395); select Dolce & Gabbana boutiques. 18K–rose gold necklace with diamond-and-onyx pendant, $2,030; Cartier boutiques. 311: Dress, $2,435; select Neiman Marcus stores. 18Kgold bangle, $10,500; select Barneys New York stores. 312–313: Dress, $7,790; Carolina Herrera, NYC. Heels, $750; select Jimmy Choo boutiques. 315: Dress, price upon request; Oscar de la Renta, NYC. Handbag, $1,765; Tod’s boutiques. Sunglasses, $230; burberry.com. 316–317: Dress, $3,690; Carolina Herrera, Dallas and L.A. Dark & Stormy ring, $122; catbirdnyc.com. 318–319: Dress, $5,025; select Versace boutiques. In this story: manicure, Deborah Lippmann.

HEARTS AND MINDS

324–325: On Gyllenhaal: Men’s silk robe, $675; derek-rose.com/us. On McGregor: Houndstooth sport jacket, $448; brooksbrothers .com. Shirt, $168; stevenalan.com. Wool trousers, $344; Paul Stuart, NYC.

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VO GU E O CTO B E R 20 14

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last look EDITOR: VIRGINIA SMITH

round 1350, in Padua, Giovanni de’ Dondi built an astrarium that described the celestial movements of the sun, the moon, and the five known planets. It was, in addition to being a perpetual calendar, a clock. “So great is the marvel,” wrote a witness, “that great astronomers come from distant places to admire his work.” Versions of the astrarium moved from the castle to the square and then, after World War I, to the wrists of everybody. Most recently, the cell phone seemed to make horological armwear moot, but now Apple Watch, seen here with a leather strap and stainless-steel casing, and available early 2015, can do all de’ Dondi’s clock did. Plus it monitors your pulse and, if you like, shares it with Apple Watch–wearing friends. A tiny marvel.— ROBERT SULLIVAN

PHOTOGRAPHED BY ERIC BOMAN

Apple Watch

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VOGUE OCTOBER 2014

D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E

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