Gonzalez leslie publication design 2016 sp by Randy Dunbar

SUMMER 2016

INSIDE LOOK:

SCHULMAN’S SENSE OF SPACE

ENTER THE WORLD: Umami Burger Disneyland Resort FIDM’s 5th Floor

MUST HAVES FOR SUMMER

RIHANNA

UNCENSORED

1 $ 7. 50

VIIBE FASHION·MUSIC·ADVENTURES / SUMMER 2016

verve:food·TRAVEL·5THFLOOR

TWELVE MUST HAVES

RIHANNA EXPOSED

SCHULMAN’S A SENSE OF SPACE

ANGELINA JOLIE

Table of Contents

Letter from the Editor

7 5

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WHERE FASHION MEETS MUSIC

PUBLISHED BY LESLIE GONZALEZ EDITED AND PRODUCED BY SPIRAL CREATIONS SPIRAL CREATIONS INC. CCAB 24 2300 AVIATOR LOS ANGELES, CA SPIRALCREATION.COM CREATIVE DIRECTOR LESLIE GONZALEZ EDITOR NOE CHAVEZ ART DIRECTOR ALEXIS RUIZ ASSISTANT DIRECTOR JASMINE RANGEL

ViiBE

is the fashion source for

women everywhere. The publication focuses on fashion, style, culture for women, through artices based on beauty, music, travel, sex, trends, the latest movies, books, and technology are also featured.

ASSISTANT EDITOR DANIEL VASQUEZ EDITORS AT LARGE ROXANNA PEREZ MARIO PEREZ DESIGNER ALEJANDRA SOTO PHOTO EDITOR SHANDELL ESPINOZA PRODUCTION DIRECTOR ALESSANDRIA CHAVEZ PRODUCTION COORDINATOR MATTHEW CHAVEZ

Viibe

FASHION. MUSIC. ADVENTURES.

www.viibemagazine.com

PROJECT DIRECTOR LUKE CHAVEZ PROJECT MANAGER JANE GONZALEZ

VIIBE FASHION·MUSIC·ADVENTURES / SUMMER 2016

Letter from the Editor VIIBE magazine is no ordinary magazine. This magazine is designed to enhance the reader to step into the world of fashion, travel, and music all in one. This magazine features covers stories and what products are in use for this upcoming season. There is a story this month that I particulary like because it combines a great read with interesting photograpghs. The very talented Rihanna, singer and writer, is featured in a personal narravtive that includes the many strengths and doubts of her success throughout the years. August is time for making decisions before fall comes around, and our fashion team has selected the best bags, accessories, perfumes, and cosemetics of the season, creating the perfect shopping wish list.

Leslie Gonzalez

LESLIE GONZALEZ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

VIIBE FASHIONÂˇMUSICÂˇADVENTURES / SUMMER 2016

VIIBE FASHION·MUSIC·ADVENTURES / SUMMER 2016

Verve

FOOD • TRAVEL • 5TH FLOOR

NINJA bURGER ? MORE LIKE UMAMI bURGER Umami Burger is an American restaurant chain that specializes in serving hamburgers. Umami refers to savory flavor, which is outside of the traditionally accepted flavors of salty, sweet, bitter, and sour.

When our founder Adam Fleischman was working on the very first Umami Burger he strived to create the ultimate umami flavored experience. He focused on ingredients where Umami is found naturally like cheese, tomatoes and mushrooms and amplifying those flavors. For the toppings, Adam decided to play on the idea of umamifying the classic burger. Parmesan cheese is a natural umami rich ingredient but doesn’t necessarily melt well, which is where the parmesan frico came about. Using oven-roasted tomatoes is a play on a more traditional topping but when you roast a tomato it concentrates on bringing out their umami flavor. Sautéed shiitake mushrooms and caramelized onions are also added to the burger. Adam also needed to create some of his own condiments. He created an Umami Master Sauce to coat the patty, which contains hoison, kombu and soy sauce. Umami Dust is made from mostly dehydrated mushrooms. Umami Spray is made with seaweeds, kelp and bonito flakes. And what’s a burger without ketchup? Umami ketchup, contains our Umami Master Sauce and a hint of truffle. All of these are naturally high in umami and help to create a savory taste.

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Verve

FOOD • TRAVEL • 5TH FLOOR

SUNDAY FUNDAY AT DISNEYLAND RESORT Sunday Funday is a way to extended weekend festivities just a little longer before hanging up your party pants. What better way to celebrate than at Disneyland.

BY LESLIE GONZALEZ PHOTOGRAPHY BY LESLIE GONZALEZ Disneyland Park, originally Disneyland, is the first of two theme parks built at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, opened on July 17, 1955. It is the only theme park designed and built under the direct supervision of Walt Disney. It was originally the only attraction on the property; its name was changed to Disneyland Park to distinguish it from the expanding complex in the 1990s. Since its opening, Disneyland has undergone a number of expansions and major renovations, including the addition of New Orleans Square in 1966, Bear Country (now Critter Country) in 1972, Mickey’s Toontown in 1993, and the forthcoming Star Wars Land. Opened in 2001, Disney California Adventure Park was built on the site of Disneyland’s original parking lot. Disneyland is known as The Happiest Place on Earth and the place where yourinner child comesout. So, why do people love Disneyland so much? Disneyland is a Story World. Disneyland is an ode to Walt Disney’s love for storytelling, world-building, and lovable characters. Such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse. A typical Disneyland experience begins with a map with eight “lands” that are located inside the park, each revolving around a given slice of Disneyland. Tomorrowland is a voyage into the future; New Orleans Square mimics the look and feel of the French Quarter. Fantasyland is about fairy tales; whereas a visit to Toon Town is like stepping into one of Walt Disney’s cartoons. Each of these lands are like their own theme park that are part of something bigger and are arranged around Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. Within each of these eight lands are many individual Story Worlds. In Fantasyland, you can encounter the infamous Yeti on Matterhorn Bobsleds or take a trip into Snow White’s Scary Adventures. In Tomorrowland, you can invade Hyperspace Mountain along with Star Wars, or fire lasers alongside Buzz Lightyear. New Orleans square hides the most elaborate Haunted Mansion ever built and the buried treasure of the Pirates of Caribbean. In Critter Country, Splash Mountain is the funniest, memorable family portrait. Each of these rides has a distinct storyline, gorgeous animatronics, and highly memorable characters. Disneyland is truly, The Happiest Place on Earth.

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Verve

FOOD • TRAVEL• 5TH FLOOR

ART THAT COMES TO LIFE FIDM VCCOM Students create window displays that are different from one another and draw the viewers eye from different angles.

BY JAMES PEACOCK PHOTOGRAPHY BY CARMEN LAI DISPLAYS BY FIDM VVCOM STUDENTS Have you ever walked by a window display that physically stopped you in your tracks? Wether it’s the holiday season at Macy’s or the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, a well designed window display can create emotional impact for the viewer and hopefully influence their actions or decisions in some way. So who are the master minds behind creating such visually inspiring environments? Visual Communication pros are experts at designing the perfect window display or pulling together the perfect outfit—and making it look like a work of art. At FIDM, the Visual Communications Program offers students At FIDM, the Visual Communications Program offers students a diversified, creative business background in visual presentation, exhibit/trade show design, retail and event marketing and store planning, with an emphasis on the fashion and entertainment industries. In the classroom, students collaborate on real-world projects with companies like Saks Fifth Avenue and Disney Stores North America. Additionally, students collaborate to design the window displays around FIDM’s campus.

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Must Haves 2 1 4 3

1. Beats by Dr. Dre Pill 2.0 ( Portable Speaker - Bluetooth - Red) $120.00 2. Cobble Hill Adrien (Small) $328.00 3. Fujifilm Instax™ Mini 8 Camera (Radiant Orchid) $83.99 4. Jimmy Choo Black Patent Leather Pointy Toe Pumps (ANOUK) $595.00 5. Chanel Coco Noir eau de parfu spray (3.4 FL.OZ.) $130.00

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SUMMER ISSUE

6 7

9 11

8 10 12

6. Benefit Cosmetics They’re Real! Push-Up Liner $12.00 7. Travalo Refillable Perfume Spray ( Classic HD- Hot Pink) $19.99 8. Michael Kors Logo Pave Round Stud Earrings (Gold-Tone) $75.00 9. Michael Kors Women’s Watch (Packer- Rose Gold) $250.00 10. Ray-Ban Erika (Black- Gray Gradient) $130.00 11. Tartelette in bloom clay palette $45.00 12. GHD platinum™ styler $249.00 VIIBE FASHION·MUSIC·ADVENTURES / SUMMER 2016

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RIHANNA EXPOSED Rihanna is firmly in control of her life and career—but not of her image,which has veered between club-hopping temptress and poster child for victims of domestic abuse. BY LISA ROBINSON PHOTOGRAPHER: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

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ihanna sits across the table from me in the private room at Giorgio Baldi, her favorite restaurant in L.A. Her hair is reddish, wavy; her face seems free of makeup. She’s even more beautiful in person than she is in her photos. She’s wearing a white crop top, denim cutoff shorts, Puma sneakers, and a flowing Chinesepatterned robe. When she orders three half-portions of pasta dishes spaghetti pomodoro with basil, gnocchi, and ravioli), I ask how she maintains her curvy but slim figure. She says, “Legit, I have been in the gym every day this week because I am not willing to give up my food. But I will sacrifice an hour for the gym.” The 27-year-old woman in front of me is not the provocative, wild hip-hop prom queen, the sexy girl allegedly at the center of a jealous, bottle-throwing brawl in a nightclub, nor the habitué of L.A. and New York hot spots 1Oak and Up & Down. Nor is she the woman who has been described as badass, shocking, naughty, tough—pictured in tabloids and online with various rumored rap-

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per/actor/athlete boyfriends. She is elegant, funny, straightforward, and downright horrified (and laughs hysterically) at all of the rumors I toss at her. And while people may assume that her life is just one big, long, sexy night out on the town, she insists it’s not true. I ask about her bad-girl reputation. “Honestly, I’ve been thinking lately about how boring I am,” she says. “When I do get time to myself, I watch TV.” Now we’re off and running, both of us mourning the end of Breaking Bad. She loves Bates Motel and foren sics shows. What about NCIS and CSI? “I used to watch them,” she says, “until I found The First 48 [homicide detectives, cold-blooded murders at convenience stores] and Snapped [true stories of women who lost control and committed murder]. Those are things that actually happened in real life,” she says. “I’m stuck on the fact that these things actually happened. All those other things are just made-up stories.” When it comes to made-up stories, Rihanna knows whereof she speaks. Despite all those rumors of sexual liaisons, Rihanna says her last real, official boyfriend was Chris Brown—when

they briefly got back together three years after his arrest for assaulting her in 2009 (more about that later)—and, prior to that, then Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp, who she says she was just getting to know when the paparazzi got a picture of them together. “We were still dating … we were just three months in and I liked his vibe, he was a good guy, and then paparazzi got us on vacation in Mexico. He handled it well; I didn’t. I got so uncomfortable because now what? He’s not even able to be seen with [another] girl, because I’m dragged back into headlines that say he’s cheating on me, and I don’t even [really] know this guy. Some guys … I don’t even have their number. You would not even believe it,” she says with a laugh. “I’m serious, hand to God.” Given that she’s supposed to be so freewheeling, can’t she just have sex for fun? “If I wanted to I would completely do that,” she says. “I am going to do what makes me feel happy, what I feel like doing. But that would be empty for me; that to me is a hollow move. I would wake up the next day feeling like shit. “When you love somebody, that’s different,” she continues. “Even if you don’t love them per se, when you care enough about somebody and you know that they care about you, then you know they don’t disrespect you. And it’s about my own respect for myself. A hundred percent. Sometimes it’s the first time I’m meeting this person—and then all of a sudden I’m ‘with them.’ It freaks me out. This industry creates stories and environments that can make you uncomfortable even being friends with someone. If you see me sitting next to someone, or standing next to someone, what, I’m not allowed to do that? I’m like, are you serious? Do you think

it’s going to stop me from having a friend?” But, she adds, “I’m the worst. I see a rumor and I’m not calling [them] back. I’ve had to be so conscious about people—what they say and why people want to be with me, why people want to sleep with me…. It makes me very guarded and protective. I learned the hard way.“I always see the best in people,” she says. “I hope for the best, and I always look for that little bit of good, that potential, and I wait for it to blossom. You want them to feel good being a man, but now men are afraid to be men. They think being a real man is actually being a pussy, that if you take a chair out for a lady, or you’re nice or even affectionate to your girl in front of your boys, you’re less of a man. It’s so sick. They won’t be a gentleman because that makes them appear soft. That’s what we’re dealing with now, a hundred percent, and girls are settling for that, but I won’t. I will wait forever if I have to … but that’s O.K. You have to be screwed over enough times to know, but now I’m hoping for more than these guys can actually give. “That’s why I haven’t been having sex or even

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People have this image of how wild and crazy I am, and I’m not everything they think of me. The reality is that the fame, the rumors —this picture means this,another picture means that—it really freaks me out. It made me back away from even wanting to attempt to date. I’m always concerned about whether people have good or bad intentions.

—Rihanna

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really seeing anybody,” she says, “because I don’t want to wake up the next day feeling guilty. I mean I get horny, I’m human, I’m a woman, I want to have sex. But what am I going to do— just find the first random cute dude that I think is going to be a great ride for the night and then tomorrow I wake up feeling empty and hollow? He has a great story and I’m like … what am I doing? I can’t do it to myself. I cannot. It has a little bit to do with fame and a lot to do with the woman that I am. And that saves me.” Is she lonely? “It is lonely,” she says, “but I have so much work to do that I get distracted. I don’t have time to be lonely. And I get fearful of relationships because I feel guilty about wanting someone to be completely faithful and loyal, when I can’t even give them 10 percent of the attention that they need. It’s just the reality of my time, my life, my schedule.” Rihanna, born Robyn Rihanna Fenty 27 years ago in Bridgetown, Barbados, grew up in a family so close-knit that her report card had to be taken around to every aunt and uncle, and if she didn’t take it to them, they came over to her house to see it. She says that everybody knew what everyone else did and how well every child did in school—you couldn’t hide your failures; you had to face them. She memorized textbooks (her mother was very strict about grades) and played sports with her two younger brothers, Rorrey and Rajad. But from an early age she was obsessed with music: first reggae artists Barrington Levy and Beres Hammond, then Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, and Whitney Houston. Rihanna’s career began in 2004 when two American record producers, Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken—both of whom were married to Bajan women and vacationed in Barbados— heard her sing at a local audition, made demos with her, and eventually brought her to the U.S., where she lived in Stamford, Connecticut, with Rogers and his family. They made more demos and tried to get her a record deal. In 2005, at age 16, she auditioned for Def Jam Records’ then group chairman, L. A. Reid, president and C.E.O. Jay Z, and executives Jay Brown and Tyran “Ty Ty” Smith. Jay Brown, now part of the Roc Nation team that manages her, remembers her wearing all white, with her hair pulled back off her face. Rihanna says she wore white jeans,

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white boots, and a turquoise tube top from Forever 21. She remembers that her hair was wavy, parted to one side, and “I had just gotten my first weave.” She recalls wsitting in the hallway when she saw Jay Z walk by, and she was so freaked out she made sure he didn’t see her. According to Ty Ty, “When she walked in the room and started singing, what got my attention was how she looked at you and the tone of her voice. She was very serious.” Jay Z recalls, “You see someone who comes in and you know if they have that look about them, that star quality—you can’t deny it.” Jay Brown says she had a fire in her eyes. But Rihanna says she had no idea she had any fire in her eyes: “These are people who worked with the most talented people in the music industry, and I’m a little seed, from an island far away; to even have the opportunity to audition for them seemed so out of reach. I was terrified; my knees were shaking.” She’d already been turned down by another label, but Def Jam wanted her, and she—along with her lawyer—stayed in the building for 12 hours, until three A.M., when she signed what she still refers to as a “great deal.” (Jay Brown laughs and says Ty Ty jokingly told the lawyer that the only way they were getting out of the building without signing was through the window.) Rihanna’s rise happened fast. “Pon de Replay,” an island-inspired dancehall tune, became a hit, followed by “SOS,” “Umbrella,” “Rude Boy,” “Only Girl (in the World),” “We Found Love,” “Diamonds,” and many others. She worked non-

stop, releasing seven albums in eight years, and today, 10 years after her debut, she’s accumulated 54 million album sales, 13 No. 1 singles, and 210 million downloaded tracks. She’s toured and performed live concerts for millions of people around the world. She’s got 7 billion video views on YouTube, 50.7 million followers on Twitter, 25.4 million on Instagram, and 81.7 million Facebook fans. Even before her acting stint in the 2012 action movie Battleship, her fans called themselves

her “navy.” She’s a singer, songwriter, producer, actress (most recently she voiced a character in the animated movie Home), a mentor on this season of The Voice, fashion designer, the creative director for the Stance sock company). foundation helps build cancer-treatment centers in Barbados, among other charitable activities), and eight-time Grammy winner. But on February 7, 2009—the night before the Grammys—following Clive Davis’s party, an episode occurred that would change her life VIIBE FASHION·MUSIC·ADVENTURES / SUMMER 2016

A Sense of Space

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Photographer Julius Schulman’s photography spread California Mid-century modern around the world. Carefully composed and artfully lighted, his images promoted not only new approaches to home design but also the ideal of idyllic California living — a sunny, suburban lifestyle played out in sleek, spacious, low-slung homes featuring ample glass, pools and patios.

By Peter Gossell Photographs by Julius Schulman

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“The subject is the power of photography,” Shulman explains. “I have thousands of slides, and Juergen and I have assembled them into almost 20 different lectures. And not just about architecture—I have pictures of cats and dogs, fashion pictures, flower photographs. I use them to do a lot of preaching to the students, to give them something to do with their lives, and keep them from dropping out of school.” It all adds up to a very full schedule, which Shulman handles largely by himself—“My daughter comes once a week from Santa Barbara and takes care of my business affairs, and does my shopping”—and with remarkable ease for a near-centenarian. Picking up the oversized calendar on which he records his appointments, Shulman walks me through a typical seven days: “Thom Mayne—we had lunch with him. Long Beach, AIA meeting. People were here for a meeting about my photography at the Getty [which houses his archive]. High school students, a lecture. Silver Lake, the Neutra house, they’re opening part of the lake frontage, I’m going to see that. USC, a lecture. Then an assignment, the Griffith Observatory—we’ve already

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started that one.” Yet rather than seeming overtaxed, Shulman fairly exudes well-being. Like many elderly people with nothing left to prove, and who remain in demand both for their talents and as figures of veneration (think of George Burns), Shulman takes things very easy: He knows what his employers and admirers want, is happy to provide it, and accepts the resulting reaffirmation of his legend with a mix of playfully rampant immodesty and heartfelt gratitude. As the man himself puts it, “The world’s my onion.” Shulman is equally proud of his own lighting abilities. “I’ll show you something fascinating,” he says, holding up two exteriors of a new modernist home, designed for a family named Abidi, by architect James Tyler. In the first, the inside of the house is dark, resulting in a handsome, somewhat lifeless image. In the second, it’s been lit in a way that seems a natural balance of indoor and outdoor illumination, yet expresses the structure’s relationship to its site and showcases the architecture’s transparency. “The house is transfigured,” Shulman explains.

“I have four Ts. Transcend is, I go beyond what the architect himself has seen. Transfigure—glamorize, dramatize with lighting, time of day. Translate—there are times, when you’re working with a man like Neutra, who wanted everything the way he wanted it—‘Put the camera here.’ And after he left, I’d put it back where I wanted it, and he wouldn’t know the difference—I translated. And fourth, I transform the composition with furniture movement.” To illustrate the latter, Shulman shows me an interior of the Abidi house that looks out from the living room, through a long glass wall, to the grounds. “Almost every one of my photographs has a diagonal leading you into the picture,” he says. Taking a notecard and pen, he draws a line from the lower left corner to the upper right, then a second perpendicular line from the lower right corner to the first line. Circling the intersection, he explains, “That’s the point of what we call ‘dynamic symmetry.’” When he holds up the photo again, I see that the line formed by the bottom of the glass wall—dividing inside from outside—roughly mirrors the diagonal he’s drawn. Shulman then indicates the second, perpendicular line created by the furniture arrangement. “My assistants moved [the coffee table] there, to complete the line. When the owner saw the Polaroid, she said to her husband, ‘Why don’t we do that all the time?’” Shulman’s remark references one of his signature gambits: what he calls “dressing the set,” not only by moving furniture but by adding everyday objects and accessories. “I think he was trying to portray the lifestyle people might have had if they’d lived in those houses,” suggests the Los Angeles–based architectural photographer Tim Street-Porter. “He was doing—with a totally positive use of the words—advertising or propagandist photographs for the cause.” This impulse culminated in Shulman’s introduction of people into his pictures—commonplace today, but virtually unique 50 years ago. “Those photographs—with young, attractive people having breakfast in glass rooms beside carports with two-tone cars—were remarkable in the history of architectural photography,” Street-Porter says. “He took that to a wonderfully high level.” “I tell people in my lectures, ‘If I were modest, I wouldn’t talk about how great I am.’” Yet when I ask how he developed his eye, Shulman’s expression turns philosophical. “Sometimes Juergen walks ahead of me, and he’ll look for a composition. And invariably, he doesn’t see what I see. Architects don’t see what I see. It’s God-given,” he says, using the Yiddish word for an VIIBE FASHION·MUSIC·ADVENTURES / SUMMER 2016

“American photographer Julius Shulman’s images of Californian architecture have burned themselves into the retina of the 21th century. ” 28

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act of kindness—“a mitzvah.” “Most people whose houses I photographed didn’t use their sliding doors,” Shulman says, crossing the living room toward his own glass sliders. “Because flies and lizards would come in; there were strong winds. So I told Soriano I wanted a transition—a screenedin enclosure in front of the living room, kitchen, and bedroom to make an indoor/outdoor room.” Shulman opens the door leading to an exterior dining area. A bird trills loudly. “That’s a wren,” he says, and steps out. “My wife and I had most of our meals out here,” he recalls. “Beautiful.” When I ask Shulman what Neutra saw in his images, he answers with a seemingly unrelated story. “I was born in Brooklyn in 1910,” says this child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. “When I was three, my father went to the town of Central Village in Connecticut, and was shown this farmhouse—primitive, but [on] a big piece of land. After we moved in, he planted corn and potatoes, my mother milked the cows, and we had a farm life. “And for seven years, I was imbued with the pleasure of living close to nature. In 1920, when we came here to Los Angeles, I joined the Boy Scouts, and enjoyed the outdoor-living aspect, hiking and camping. My father opened a clothing store in Boyle Heights, and my four brothers and sisters and my mother worked in the store. They were businesspeople.” He flashes a slightly cocky smile. “I was with the Boy Scouts.” I ask Shulman if he’s surprised at how well his life has turned out. “I tell students, ‘Don’t take life too seriously—don’t plan nothing nohow,’” he replies. “But I have always observed and respected my destiny. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was meant to be.” “And it was a destiny that suited you?” At this, everything rises at once—his eyebrows, his outstretched arms, and his peaceful, satisfied smile. “Well,” says Shulman, “here I am.”

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FAMOUS QUOTES • The camera is the least important element in

• I’m not modest about myself. I know for a fact

photography.

that I am good. But good in the sense that I can put

• What good is a dream house if you haven’t got a

things together. I expound vociferously to stu-

dream?

dents of architecture and photography, the signif-

• I sell architecture better and more directly

icance of design. A photograph is a design in which

and more vividly than the architect does... The

you assemble thoughts in your mind.

average architect is stupid. He doesn’t know how

• And I was very successful at baby photography...

to sell. He’s not a merchandiser. He doesn’t know

Strange isn’t it? Because some of my portraits

how to express his own image. He doesn’t know

of babies were - I used dramatic lighting, shadow

how to create a design of his image... And I do it.

lighting, and I didn’t use flash. We didn’t have

I’ve done it all my career over half a century, and

flash in those days, we just had floodlights, and I

it gets better.

was photographing babies as I would an object - an VIIBE FASHION·MUSIC·ADVENTURES / SUMMER 2016

Angelina Jolie Angelina Jolie Pitt is calling the shots as actress, mother, philanthropist, and auteur. Next month, she and her husband, Brad Pitt, will appear as a married couple in By the Sea, which she wrote and directed and is their first on-screen outing since Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

BY ERIKA BILES PHOTOGRAPHER: AARON LIVES

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“The director was very focused. The actress was unstable. And the writer was deeply confused,” says Angelina Jolie Pitt. Then she laughs. She’s talking about what it was like to direct herself and her husband as a married couple in her own script for By the Sea, an elegiac exploration of grief and love. Ten years after her last collaboration with Brad Pitt, Mr. & Mrs. Smith—the movie that sparked their relationship—it’s about as far from that marriage-as-war-of-assassins comedy as you can get. “This is the only film I’ve done that is completely based on my own crazy mind,” she says, speaking with humor and intensity, bringing to life a soulless room at the Sunset Tower Hotel. Outside is glittering, heat-wave sun, umbrellas packing the Los Angeles beaches. Inside, Ange-

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lina’s in black—skinny pants, short-sleeved silk blouse—which makes her printer paper–white skin even whiter. She wears no makeup. Why bother? Her beauty has only deepened with time. For years, she says, she and Brad called the script for By the Sea “the crazy one. We even called it ‘the worst idea.’ ” She laughs again, and covers her face with her hands. “As artists we wanted something that took us out of our comfort zones,” she explains. “Just being raw actors. It’s not the safest idea. But life is short.” Angelina, of course, has never played it safe. And at this point in her mythic life, perhaps the only risk left is to pare down the myth, expose her self. And so, after getting married the summer of last year at her house in France, she moved with her tribe (Brad, six children now aged seven to fourteen, and assorted staff) to the Maltese island of Gozo, a stand-in for the southern French coast with its dazzling Mediterranean light, and shot the film. “It was our honeymoon,” she says, with a wide-open smile that expresses all that’s left unsaid about the highly privileged carnival that is her life. “They travel like gypsies,” observes Angelina’s friend, the screenwriter Eric Roth, describing the family’s peripatetic lifestyle. A band of galactically famous multimillionaire gypsies. The kids are homeschooled by teachers from different backgrounds and religions, speaking different languages. “We travel often to Asia, Africa, Europe, where they were born,” says Angelina. “The boys know they’re from Southeast Asia, and they have their food and their music and their friends, and they have a pride particular to them. But I want them to be just as interested in the history of their sisters’ countries and Mommy’s country so we don’t start dividing. Instead of taking Z on a special trip”— ten-year-old Zahara was adopted from Ethiopia in 2005—“we all go to Africa and we have a great time.” When we meet, Jolie Pitt has just returned from Cambodia, the location for her next film, and Myanmar. She took along Pax, her elevenyear-old Vietnamese-born son, who wanted to work on the film and meet Aung San Suu Kyi. Pax had read about the liberated Burmese opposition leader and Nobel laureate and was curious. “Seeing Pax get extra-nervous about which shirt he is going to wear when he meets Aung San Suu Kyi, I get very moved,” she says. “He rightfully doesn’t get nervous going to a movie premiere; he gets nervous going to meet her.” Since Jolie Pitt got back to their home in Santa Barbara—almost like any mother—she has had to attend to doctors’ appointments, vaccines for the kids, play dates, and meetings, before the whole troupe decamps again to their house in London. For now, it will make the best base for their projects. Angelina can travel to the Middle

East on UN trips and to Cambodia to prep her film, and be back for the kids, and Brad can fly to and from Abu Dhabi to shoot David Michôd’s War Machine, adapted from journalist Michael Hastings’s account of America’s recent conflict in Afghanistan. If her daily life is a large, sociable whirl, Angelina’s new film is an intimate, claustrophobic tale. She wrote By the Sea after her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of cancer eight years ago, and never thought it would see the light of day. She wanted to explore bereavement—how different people respond to it. She set the action in the seventies, when her mother was in her vibrant 20s, and began simply with a husband and wife. She gave them a history of grief, put them in a car, and drove them to a seaside hotel to see how the pair—Roland, a novelist with a red typewriter; Vanessa, a former dancer with boxes of clothes and hats—attend to their pain. Vanessa is frail, tortured, hemmed in. She feeds her mourning a diet of pills and suicidal fantasies. Roland is defeated by the seclusion of her anguish, and drinks. And so it goes on until innocent newlyweds move in next door. “It’s not autobiographical,” says Angelina, smiling. She shrugs off the fact that celebrity-watchers will have a field day trying to read into this movie. “Brad and I have our issues,” she offers, “but if the characters’ were even remotely close to our problems we couldn’t have made the film.” Yet the film is a deeply personal project, drawn loosely from her mother’s life. Jolie Pitt often talks about the sacrifice her mother made in giving up acting to raise her and her brother, James, after their father, Jon Voight, left. Later Bertrand’s work was cut short as a producer and activist for Native Americans and for the Give Love Give Life cancer organization she founded with her partner, John Trudell. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at 49; she died seven years later. “My mother was an Earth Mother and the nicest person in the world,” says Jolie Pitt (pointing out that Vanessa in the movie is not). “But the specific grief came from the woman I was closest to, seeing her art slip away, her body fail her.” She and Brad may have chosen to shoot this movie to challenge themselves, but it was during the editing that Angelina got the real scare. Her doctor called, saying she had elevated inflammatory markers. She consulted Eastern and Western physicians, including her mother’s former doctor. She had her ovaries and Fallopian tubes removed. She detailed her experience in a New York Times Op-Ed, fulfilling a promise to keep readers informed after relating two years earlier her decision—having learned she had the BRCA1 gene—to have a preventative double mastectomy. “It really connected me to other women,” she says of her decision to go public. “I wish my mom had been able to make those choices.” The procedures themselves were, she says, “brutal. It’s hard. They are not easy surgeries. The ovaries are an easy surgery, but the hormone changes”—she laughs, nods her VIIBE FASHION·MUSIC·ADVENTURES / SUMMER 2016

❝ I don’t see myself as beautiful, because I can see a lot of flaws. People have really odd opinions. They tell me I’m skinny, as if that’s supposed to make me happy.

-Angeline Jolie

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❞

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head—“interesting. We did joke that I had my Monday edit. Tuesday surgery. Wednesday go into menopause. Thursday come back to edit, a little funky with my steps.” Jolie Pitt has famously said that she has a ticking clock in her head, and that she is surprised to still be here; that she lives every day like it might be her last. Now, having gone through menopause, she says, “I feel grounded as a woman. I know others do too. Both of the women in my family, my mother and my grandmother”—who also succumbed to ovarian cancer—“started dying in their 40s. I’m 40. I can’t wait to hit 50 and know I made it.” All through our conversation on this cloudless L.A. afternoon, I’m aware of the vast landscape inside the easygoing person who sits before me, her tattoos visible, her jewelry minimal, with her aviator sunglasses, her pen and folder on the couch. Besides the actress, director, and outspoken cancer warrior, there are the other Angelinas—the most glamorous woman in the world who has to meet in an anonymous hotel room because she can’t go anywhere in public without being mobbed. “You cannot take AJ undercover,” laughs Zainab Bangura, a Sierra Leonean political activist and former government minister

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who is now the UN secretary-general’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. “She says, ‘When can we travel together? Anything more I can do?’ I can run around in Somalia undercover, but you cannot hide AJ.” There’s Florence Nightingale Angelina, Special Envoy of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who travels constantly to countries in crisis, supports, negotiates, and interacts one-on-one. “The hug,” says Bangura, “is powerful for people in pain. They know she’s genuine.” She can use her star power to make demands—to see a president, speaker of Parliament, and defense secretary, as she did recently in Myanmar to convince them to let her travel by helicopter to visit the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group facing ethnic cleansing. (A cyclone hit, and her trip was canceled; but she will go back.) And there’s the CEO Angelina, a Hollywood powerhouse who, like a martial artist, tries to wield the system to her advantage: outwits the gossip magazines by selling the first pictures of baby Shiloh in 2006 for a reported $7.5 million, and of her twins, Knox and Vivienne, born in 2008, for double that, donating the money to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation; earns a fortune playing assassins and superheroes, then making more

mission-driven films, like A Mighty Heart, Beyond Borders, and In the Land of Blood and Honey; satisfies her fans with her poise and beauty while acting out her ambitions for a committed life on a global stage. I’m also thinking of the other Angelina, the younger one, the awkward kid who wore glasses and boxed, the dark, wild punk who used to say anything, talked openly about cutting herself, collected weapons, flipped a butterfly knife on Conan O’Brien after she made Gia, sported a vial of her second husband, Billy Bob Thornton’s, blood. That power of the raw was the first thing director James Mangold saw before her audition for Girl, Interrupted, her 1999 breakout movie, after Gia. “I met her at the Sofitel, where she was staying. I remember the first thing she said: ‘This place is so dumb and French country, and I hate French country.’ ” Mangold is still in awe of that audition. “I felt like I was looking at a ravishing female Jack Nicholson.” What really set her apart? “Attitude. As directors we are starved for it in men and women,” he says. “We’ve all gotten so correct and polite and understanding of one another and the multiple points of view. And that is a good thing, but on another level it’s just a little harder to elbow your way out in front. It takes aggression, and attitude.” Clint Eastwood had it, he says. John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck. And Angelina. “I needed someone who questions the rules,” he says of Girl, Interrupted, “who fucks who she wants to, pushes aside who she wishes to, and speaks the truth as she sees it . . . to be such an outlier they are deemed sociopathic but to us,

the audience, they are brilliant.” That was Angelina’s character. And, as Jolie Pitt has said, it was also a part of her. “She was trying at that time to navigate, with far greater success than the character, what is unique about her,” says Mangold, “while finding a way to integrate herself with all the pedestrian things we live with—like French country.” Jolie Pitt used to have a window: a tiny box, tattooed on her lower back. As a kid, she says, and even on movie shoots or with her former husbands (Jonny Lee Miller and Thornton), she used to stare out windows, longing for a life elsewhere, thinking, There has to be something else. That turbulent and restless 25-year-old was the one who traveled to Cambodia to make Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the video-game heroine saving the world’s light from the forces of darkness, and had her eyes opened by the devastation wrought by the Khmer Rouge. She was confronted by genocide, refugees, people with prosthetic limbs, land mines still ripping apart children at play, the whole constellation of war’s consequences and injustices. Cambodia reshaped the contours of Jolie Pitt’s life. As she’s said, if someone had dropped her at fourteen in the middle of Asia or Africa she’d have realized how self-centered she was, that there was real pain, real death, real things to fight for. She came home, made phone calls, read everything she could get her hands on, and began traveling with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on her own dime to figure out how she could be of use, bringing along her notebook and a willingness to sleep anywhere and take physical risks.

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NEXT MONTH SEPTEMBER 2016 - ISSUE 10

Next issue's going to be a big one. In addition to an exclusive cover story on a hug new title, we'll bring you the first looks of the VMA's nominations,including predictions on who is going to win Video of the Year and new must haves for the upcoming season.

VIIBE FASHION·MUSIC·ADVENTURES / SUMMER 2016