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PURE FLUFF MODEL ANOK YAI WEARS A TOMO KOIZUMI DRESS. JOOMI LIM HEADBAND AND EARRINGS. GIVENCHY NECKLACE AND RINGS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY GORDON VON STEINER.

112 Editor’s Letter 126 Contributors 142 Into the Woods

Sally Rooney’s latest novel reckons with the thornier aspects of fame.

By Olivia Marks

152 Looking at Us

Janelle Okwodu on the Costume Institute’s new American-fashion exhibition

162 The Body Shop

Artist Mickalene Thomas embraces the high and the low.

By Dodie Kazanjian

170 Bright Future FAS HIO N E DITOR: J ORDE N BICK HAM. HAIR, MUSTAFA YAN AZ; MAKEUP, JE N MY LES. PRO DUC ED BY KE LLY MCG E E; S ET DESIG N, KYLE H AGE ME IE R AT MHS ARTISTS. SPEC IAL THAN KS TO PL EAS E SPACE .

Lipstick is back—and actor Kristine Froseth is ready to mouth off

172 Sister Act

A new biography of the quietly influential Catherine Dior

174 Flying Solo

A global generation of designers is letting their creativity soar

178 Go Time

Facialist Joanna Czech debuts her first product line

182 Lights, Camera, Exhibition

Inside Los Angeles’s Academy Museum

184 Circular Motion

Beauty’s next frontier demands minimal environmental impact CONTINUED>93

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IN GOOD SHAPE FROM LEFT: MODELS LEYLA GREISS, JANET JUMBO, AND CELESTE ROMERO ALL WEAR BALENCIAGA COUTURE WITH HATS BY PHILIP TREACY. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANTON CORBIJN.

186 The X Factor

FAS HIO N E DITOR: TAB ITHA S IMMO NS. HAIR, EUGE NE SOU LE IMAN; MAKEUP, MARIO N ROBIN E. DE TAILS, SE E IN TH IS ISSU E .

Fashion is finally catching up with Xuly.Bët. By Laird Borrelli-Persson

190 Family Stone

Chef Mina Stone turns to her lineage for inspiration

190 Bottle Drop

Rihanna brings Fenty into the world of fragrance

192 Fair Game

Fashion Fair Cosmetics is back.

By Marley Marius

196 Copper Tops

An unlikely hair color

is everywhere. There’s a good reason why.

204 Close to Home

Jeweler Ana Khouri is focused on her native Brazil

246 9/11/21

Memory, history, and one beautiful view

248 All in a Day’s Werk

Maya Singer reports on the talented array of models changing an industry

266 More Is More!

14 models and 35 looks converge in an epic, global collaboration

292 Speaking the Same Language

310 Earthly Delights

Afua Hirsch on Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’s new creative partnership

Natalia Vodianova captures the spirit of landscape architect Beatrix Farrand.

By Chloe Malle

302 Meet the Press

326 Curtain Up

Lizzie Widdicombe interviews White House press secretary Jen Psaki

304 Take Two

Hamish Bowles learns how designers Tomo Koizumi and John Galliano transformed each other’s work

308 Mr. Personality

Lauren Collins profiles tennis star Stefanos Tsitsipas

Adam Green looks at where New York theater is going

Cover Look Group Dynamics from left: Model Kaia Gerber wears Tom Ford. Model Anok Yai wears Ralph Lauren Collection. Model Precious Lee wears Carolina Herrera. Model Bella Hadid wears Christopher John Rogers. Model Sherry Shi wears Proenza Schouler. Model Ariel Nicholson wears Christopher John Rogers. Model Yumi Nu wears Mara Hoffman. Model Lola Leon wears Michael Kors Collection. Hair, Lucas Wilson; makeup, Jen Myles. Details, see In This Issue.

Photographer: Ethan James Green.

Fashion Editors: Tonne Goodman and Gabriella Karefa-Johnson.

332 Turn Up the Volume Demna Gvasalia’s haute couture debut for Balenciaga.

By Hamish Bowles

336 Index

Breaking out our weekday best

348 Last Look VOGUE.COM

SEPTEMBER 2021

93

ANNA WINTOUR

Global Editorial Director Deputy Editor TAYLOR ANTRIM Fashion Director VIRGINIA SMITH Creative Editorial Director MARK GUIDUCCI International Editor at Large HAMISH BOWLES Editor, Vogue.com CHIOMA NNADI Global Director, Vogue Runway NICOLE PHELPS Executive Fashion Director, Vogue.com RICKIE DE SOLE Fashion News Director MARK HOLGATE FA S H I O N Sustainability Editor TONNE GOODMAN Director, Fashion Initiatives ALEXANDRA MICHLER Senior Director, Talent Casting HELENA SURIC Accessories Director WILLOW LINDLEY Jewelry Director DAISY SHAW-ELLIS Senior Fashion News Editor STEFF YOTKA Senior Fashion and Culture Editor JANELLE OKWODU Fashion News Editor SARAH SPELLINGS Archive Editor LAIRD BORRELLI-PERSSON Senior Fashion News Writers EMILY FARRA, LIANA SATENSTEIN Fashion and Style Writer CHRISTIAN ALLAIRE Editor NAOMI ELIZEE Menswear Editor MICHAEL PHILOUZE Market Editors RACHEL BESSER, MADELINE HARPER FASS Associate Fashion Editors CHARLOTTE DIAMOND, CIARRA LORREN ZATORSKI, MAI MORSCH Assistant Fashion Editors LUCAS O’BRIEN, KATHLEEN THOMAS Bookings Manager MORGAN SENESI Contributing Editors JORDEN BICKHAM, GRACE CODDINGTON, ALEX HARRINGTON, GABRIELLA KAREFA-JOHNSON, SARAH MOWER CARLOS NAZARIO, CAMILLA NICKERSON, PHYLLIS POSNICK, LAUREN SANTO DOMINGO, TABITHA SIMMONS F E AT U R E S Senior Editors CHLOE SCHAMA, COREY SEYMOUR Entertainment Director SERGIO KLETNOY Associate Features Editor MARLEY MARIUS Culture Writer EMMA SPECTER Entertainment Associate KEATON BELL Contributing Editors TAMAR ADLER, ABBY AGUIRRE, MIRANDA BROOKS, LAIA GARCIA-FURTADO, ADAM GREEN, ROB HASKELL NATHAN HELLER, DODIE KAZANJIAN, CHLOE MALLE, LAUREN MECHLING, ALEXIS OKEOWO, MICHELLE RUIZ MAYA SINGER, RAVEN SMITH, PLUM SYKES, JONATHAN VAN METER, SHELLEY WANGER, LYNN YAEGER B E A U T Y/ L I V I N G Beauty and Wellness Director CELIA ELLENBERG Senior Beauty Editor LAUREN VALENTI Senior Living and Beauty Editor ELLA RILEY-ADAMS Beauty Assistant AKILI KING Senior Living Writer ELISE TAYLOR Contributing Editor ALEXANDRA MACON C R E AT I V E Design Director AURELIE PELLISSIER ROMAN Art Director PARKER HUBBARD Visual Director NIC BURDEKIN Visual Director, Research ROBYN LANGE Senior Visual Editor, Research TIM HERZOG Senior Designer DAVID VO Visual Editors OLIVIA HORNER, THOMAS WOLFE Associate Visual Editor FABBIOLA ROMAIN C O N T E N T S T R AT E G Y/ O P E R AT I O N S Executive Director, Content Strategy ANNA-LISA YABSLEY Executive Editor JESSIE HEYMAN Innovation Director FERNANDO DIAS DE SOUZA Director of Business Operations MIRA ILIE Associate Director of Logistics MIMOZA NELA Director, Audience Development and Analytics ABBY SJOBERG Senior Manager, Analytics CHANDNI VYAS Senior Commerce Editor JULIE TONG Commerce Editor LILAH RAMZI Commerce Writer ALEXIS BENNETT Commerce Producer CLARISSA SCHMIDT Associate Producer CASSANDRA PINTRO Executive Assistant to the Editor in Chief SACHE TAYLOR Assistant to the Editor in Chief CAROLINA GONZALEZ External Policy Advisor HILDY KURYK SOCIAL Director, Social Media LUCIE ZHANG Senior Manager, Social Media PUJA PRAKASH Director, Creative Development and Programming, Social Media SAM SUSSMAN Manager, Social Media ATALIE GIMMEL V I D E O/ M U LT I M E D I A Vice President, Head of Video ROBERT SEMMER Director, Creative Development ANNA PAGE NADIN Manager, Creative Development ALEXANDRA GURVITCH P R O D U C T I O N / C O P Y/ R E S E A R C H Production Director CRISTINA MARTINEZ Copy Director JOYCE RUBIN Research Director KRISTIN AUBLE Senior Production Manager JOHN MOK Production Manager HOLLIS YUNGBLIUT Production Designer COR HAZELAAR Copy Manager ADRIANA BÜRGI Research Managers ALISON FORBES, TANISHA SYKES Fashion Credits Editor IVETTE MANNERS Copy Manager, Senior Digital Line Editor JANE CHUN Research Manager, Senior Digital Line Editor LISA MACABASCO EVENTS/EXPERIENCES Director of Special Events JESSICA NICHOLS Associate Director of Special Events JENAE HOLLOWAY Experiences Director LAURA PATERSON Experiences Editor JASMINE CONTOMICHALOS Experiences Manager IAN MALONE Experiences Production and Marketing Manager ELISEÉ BROWCHUK Experiences Associate VIVIENNE LETALON European Editor FIONA DaRIN European Fashion Associate VIOLA MARELLA BISIACH Contributing Editor LISA LOVE C O M M U N I C AT I O N S Vice President, Communications JILL WEISKOPF Associate Manager, Communications REMI BERGER Associate, Communications OLIVE LEATHERWOOD

Global Creative Director JUAN COSTA PAZ

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NEW EPISODES STARTING W E D N E S D AY S E PT E MBE R 8

Letter From the Editor

Office Hours

I

would like to speak up for office life. And I mean life in an actual office—not the kitchen table or your daughter’s room or (God forbid) your bed. I know we’ve all found incredible new ways to collaborate through COVID, and Zoom is an amazing tool—we’ll never give it up—but as the Vogue staff has cautiously come back together at One World Trade Center in recent weeks, I have felt an altogether uncautious feeling of joy.

I’m not a social scientist. I don’t study productivity and cannot speak confidently about whether we can accomplish more in person or remotely (or via some hybrid of the two). What I can tell you is that the sense of community that comes with passing one another in the hallway, visiting at our desks, problem-solving and trading creative ideas face-to-face, is real and sustaining and not replaceable through our screens.

And fashion? It’s true that I’ve been dazzled by the ingenuity of designers who have shown their collections in new, entirely

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digital ways. The pandemic has not dampened creativity—far from it. But the charge of color and texture, the excitement of fashion in front of your eyes, the delight of proximity, of the physical world up close—it’s all part of what makes this work worthwhile and fun. And that has not faded.

And so: Vogue’s September issue. A milestone in our year and an opportunity to declare what we’re excited about, and what matters most to us. This year it’s New Beginnings—a theme that is expressed on all covers of Vogue around the world. New Beginnings is both a global statement of optimism and an acknowledgment that so much has changed through this terrible pandemic— especially in fashion, which is adapting and disrupting old ways of operating, and delighting and challenging us all the while. >1 1 8 BACK TO WORK THE EDITOR, IN HER ONE WORLD TRADE CENTER OFFICE. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ.

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It is American fashion that feels especially vital right now, with New York Fashion Week in full resurgence and a glorious two-part exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute set to open this month, which will offer the best and most inclusive vision of American fashion ever mounted. The first installment, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” (part two, “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” will follow in May), gives important space to engaged, politically mindful voices. “American designers are at the forefront of conversations around diversity, inclusivity, sustainability, gender fluidity, and body positivity,” the Costume Institute’s curator, Andrew Bolton, tells Vogue’s Janelle Okwodu in the pages that follow, “and the framework of the show enables us to focus on the younger designers who are engaging thoughtfully and deeply with those ideas.”

Community is the watchword among this new American generation—among designers such as Brandon Maxwell and Kerby Jean-Raymond and Christopher John Rogers, all of whom you can see in our back-to-work themed shoot by Ethan James Green. I love Ethan’s pictures, which were taken in the Vogue offices on two busy spring days as New York was opening up after so many months of pandemic restrictions, and which feature a bevy of real Vogue staffers and a cast of American models who define the moment. Community, of course, matters to models too, and the current generation seen in these pictures is at the forefront of a thrilling change in our thinking about beauty, bodies, and what it means to have influence and visibility in the fashion world. As writer Maya Singer puts it in her report on the shifting landscape of modeling, these young women have “forced an industry-wide reckoning with an essential question: Who gets to be a model?”

I love questions like that, questions that cause us to turn around and reevaluate everything we think we know—questions that prompt positive change. I also know that change is not always about simply dispensing with the past. My renewed love for 118

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POINTS OF VIEW FROM FAR LEFT: ACTOR ALDIS HODGE (IN DOLCE & GABBANA AND TOM FORD), MODEL KAREN ELSON (IN CELINE

BY HEDI SLIMANE), AND MODEL NATALIA VODIANOVA (IN MARNI).

PHOTOGRAPHED

BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ.

office life is, after all, something I’ve carried with me for many years.

And community and collaboration are not new concepts either. In fact, one of the most longstanding communities at Vogue is one that animates the breathtaking pictures in “Earthly Delights”—a collaboration between Annie Leibovitz, Grace Coddington, and the model Natalia Vodianova.

It is fair to say that Vogue brought Annie to fashion—for proof, see her gorgeous anthology of fashion images, Wonderland, out from Phaidon in November.

Annie is nothing less than America’s greatest living photographic portraitist, and after more than two decades of working with her I can say without overstatement that she has changed fashion photography forever. Her extraordinary gift is that of the storyteller.

She situates fashion in narratives and fantasias that are as deeply researched as they are wildly creative. In this she is often aided by the incomparable Grace Coddington. What more can be said about Grace’s gifts as a fashion editor? Perhaps only this: that she knows how to match clothes to a natural landscape as well as anyone (Grace loves her gardens). And so when I suggested that she and Annie consider a shoot inspired by the pioneering early-20th-century American garden designer Beatrix Farrand, the pair of them absolutely ran with the idea. In “Earthly Delights,” Natalia (whom Annie and Grace have famously cast before, as Alice in Wonderland and as Edith Wharton, in just two of their best-known shoots for Vogue) plays Farrand, “Trix” to her friends, who created gardens for some of the most illustrious families of her day (the Morgans, the Rockefellers, et al.). Farrand was a singular talent, driven, independent, and a bit indomitable—not unlike the three women behind this amazing shoot, which also includes Karen Elson as Farrand’s friend Mildred Bliss and the actor Aldis Hodge as one of her contemporaries in landscape design, David Williston.

I’m so proud to have it in this issue—something lasting and classic amid the new beginnings.

FAS HIO N E DITOR: GRACE CODDIN GTO N . ME N SWE AR E DI TO R: MIC HAE L PH ILOUZ E. HAIR, J ULIE N D’YS ; MAKEUP, FRAN CEL LE DALY. S ET DES IG N, MARY HOWARD STUD IO. S PEC IAL TH ANKS TO IN SIG N IA F ILMS/BE ATRIX FARRAND’S AM ERI CAN LAN DSCAPES. DE TAILS, S EE IN THI S I SSUE .

Letter From the Editor

Contributors Annie Leibovitz, Grace Coddington, and Natalia Vodianova

Miranda Barnes It seems fitting that for “Curtain Up” (page 326)—Adam Green’s preview of Broadway’s long-awaited reopening this fall—the person behind the camera was also a native New Yorker. Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Barnes shot Camille A. Brown—who will both direct and choreograph Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf this winter— and the ensemble from Keenan Scott II’s Thoughts of a Colored Man, opening in October, for this issue. She had a few creative references for the latter picture— set en plein air in Central Park—including a 1964 image by Garry Winogrand and a book of Saul Leiter’s color photography; but there was a deeply personal undercurrent to the shoot, as well. “My first Broadway show was The Lion King with my nana,” Barnes reveals, “and those memories are still with me today.”

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Maya Singer Between her various reported stories for Vogue—on the commodification of psychedelic drugs, for the March issue; the perks of “slow living,” for June/July; and on eight of fashion’s most exciting models for this month’s cover story, “All in a Day’s Werk” (page 248)—Singer has had all kinds of plates spinning this year. “Hilariously, a short film that I made debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival literally the night before my deadline for the September story,” the writer says. (That short, Mother, belonged to an anthology drama called With/In; and next up for Singer are two new television series.) Yet the madness hasn’t been without its pleasures, like chatting with September cover stars Ariel Nicholson and Kaia Gerber about their interest in acting. “They were talking to each other as friends who were still figuring something out,” Singer recalls, “and it always feels really alive when somebody is doing that.”

Rafael Pavarotti Pavarotti, a Brazilian-born photographer based in London, had none other than Edward Enninful as his fashion editor for “Speaking the Same Language” (page 292), Afua Hirsch’s story on Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’s new creative partnership (and a special collaboration between Vogues U.S. and U.K.). The color-saturated portfolio that resulted features four actors rapidly on the rise, all dressed in Miuccia and Raf’s striking new vision for Prada.

“The concept was inspired by Miuccia Prada’s universe,” Pavarotti explains. “You can feel the symbiotic values behind everything she creates. I admire her intrinsic storytelling, the strong connection with art, cinema, literature, architecture, and music.”

And how was it, uniting with British Vogue’s editor in chief ? “Working with Edward was a great pleasure,” Pavarotti says. “We empowered each other and created this magical universe that I’m so in love with!”

LE IBOVITZ , CO DDIN GTON, AN D VODIANOVA: KATHRY N MAC LEO D. MIRAN DA BARNES : COLE TT E A BOUSSOUAN .

MAYA S ING E R: CAN DACE L AKE. RAFAE L PAVAROTTI: COURTESY OF SUBJECT.

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

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Into the Woods

With their seductive depiction of 20-something life, Sally Rooney’s novels catapulted her to literary superstardom. Her latest book reckons with the thornier aspects of fame. By Olivia Marks.

T

hree years ago, on an early summer’s afternoon in leafy Bloomsbury, London, a 27-year-old Sally Rooney and I were sitting in the grand offices of her British publisher, Faber, discussing her upcoming second novel. Her debut, Conversations With Friends—the story of two best friends and one’s adulterous relationship with an older married man—had been out for a year, and already Rooney was haloed by a cult status: a literary novelist who had broken the mainstream. “Salinger for the Snapchat generation” is how she was introduced to the world (“I remember thinking at the time,” Rooney guiltily recalls, “What is Snapchat?”), and anticipation for her follow-up was reaching fever pitch.

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Fast-forward to 2021, and that second novel, Normal People, a will-they-won’t-they? tale for the millennial era about two students, Marianne and Connell, has to date sold more than three million copies worldwide, been praised by everyone from Barack Obama to Taylor Swift, and been translated into 46 languages. The subsequent BBC and Hulu TV adaptation has been streamed more than 62 million times on BBC iPlayer alone and made >1 4 6 HAND IN HAND ROONEY’S NEW NOVEL, BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU, IS ABOUT THE NEXT PHASE OF LIFE, SHE SAYS, “WHEN YOU REALIZE SOME OF THE DOORS HAVE CLOSED BEHIND YOU.” PHOTOGRAPHED BY PERRY OGDEN.

PRO DUCTIO N BY AN L ÁR FILMS ; S HOT ON LO CAT ION AT B E LLE E K WO O DS.

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Lives Sally Rooney overnight household names of its two newcomer stars, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal, who naturally adore her. “I want to consume everything Sally Rooney forever!” says Edgar-Jones from the set of her latest film, in New Orleans. “She is so lovely and so incredibly intelligent.” Joe Alwyn, the British actor set to star in the upcoming adaptation of Conversations, is similarly smitten.

“Sally’s mind is just so brilliant,” he says, “testing the boundaries of how we love, how we are able to love, how we are able—or not— to function within structures that we have been taught. And her refusal to tie things up neatly or offer definite solutions. I love that.”

Suffice it to say, if people were excited for Normal People, they are positively frothing at the mouth for Rooney’s latest, Beautiful World, Where Are You, published this September. But on that afternoon three years ago, none the wiser about what lay ahead, Rooney felt “uncertain.” In fact, she thought maybe she didn’t have another book in her. “Did I say that?” she exclaims today, her lively County Mayo accent rising an octave. How long, in reality, did the uncertainty last? “About three months,” she says, laughing.

It is another warm afternoon in early summer, but this time there are hundreds of miles between us. She is in her new home in rural west Ireland, near to where she grew up in Castlebar—a quiet market town on the edge of the peaceful flat expanse of Lough Lannagh—while I am in East London, both grounded by the pandemic. Rooney has returned to the setting of her childhood from a stint in New York, and before that, 10 years in Dublin. Now afforded considerable status as the favored chronicler of her often city-dwelling generation, she nevertheless finds that living in the luscious Irish countryside, with rabbits and birds outside her window, suits her. “It’s nice to be surrounded by nature and to feel a little bit enclosed by that,” she says. “It gives me mental space to do what I like to do.”

Rooney is, unsurprisingly, a first-rate conversationalist (in 2013, while studying English literature at Trinity College Dublin, she won the European Universities Debating Championships—and it shows). She is open and charming, a master of self-deprecation, but most comfortable talking in the theoretical—while she can draw you in, she can also create distance at will. One senses this is part self-preservation in the face of a spiraling public persona, part an inability to believe her mundane day-to-day life in and around Castlebar could be of fascination to anyone. “You might imagine— I’m sure you don’t imagine, but one could imagine—that I was attending glamorous parties in London,” she says. “I have not left the country or seen anyone at all for over a year.” For Rooney, an ideal week is filled with “flowers and trees and working,” while weekends are for seeing “friends for walks and coffee.”

I search her study for visual markers of the stratospheric success she has enjoyed in the intervening years, but given she is a selfidentified Marxist, that isn’t exactly Rooney’s style—dressed in a taupe crewneck sweater, she is nearly camouflaged against the bare, beige walls of her home. Occasionally, though, there is a flash of a slim gold band on her ring finger, a marker from an intimate lockdown wedding last year to her longterm partner, John Prasifka, a math teacher whom she met at university a decade ago. There have been other changes, too. She recently turned 30, and her once-bobbed hair now sweeps her shoulders (in fact, she bears an

uncanny resemblance to Edgar-Jones with her eyebrow-grazing chestnut fringe and the same doleful eyes). And she has become really rather famous.

The F word, as her new novel will attest, is much on her mind.

It does not sit easily. “There’s a level at which I’m using the book in some way to explore emotions that I may not even be aware that I’m going through,” says Rooney, later alluding to “a kind of psychological toll” her success has taken. Rooney is a writer who “can only” draw on her own life and milieu for material (“imaginatively limited” is how she describes herself, archly) and is well aware comparisons are going to be made between her and Alice, one of her protagonists, a wunderkind novelist in her late 20s who has moved from New York to a quiet Irish coastal town, where she is wrestling with her new status as a celebrity author.

“There is a sense of having lived a lot of life very quickly, in quite a compressed sort of time frame,” says Rooney of the past few years. “I think the book dramatizes some of those challenges.”

The story centers on Alice and her best friend, Eileen, a longtime staffer at a Dublin literary magazine, and their respective on-off love interests (this is, after all, a Rooney novel), Simon, a parliamentary adviser, and Felix, a warehouse worker. But as ever with Rooney, plot is almost beside the point. The meat of the matter is the chapters given over to the best friends’ lengthy philosophical email exchanges, in which they thrash out their thoughts on the big issues of their age and generation: ambition, relationships, identity politics, sex, motherhood, friendship, the impending destruction of the Earth. “Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?” writes Alice to Eileen.

What is it about Rooney’s novels that get under the skin? “When I look at my own reading life, the books that I’ve felt completely swept away by are set among the landed gentry in 19th-century Britain, which I really don’t identify with at all,” says Rooney, considering why her work resonates, its ability to traverse age and nationality. “But I care about [those people] very much if they’re in a Jane Austen novel or a George Eliot. I guess what a novel can do is take you to a particular social world and particular relationship dynamics that play out in a way that makes you feel like you’re standing in the doorway, looking in and observing exactly what’s happening.”

If her first two novels were about the transition from adolescence to adulthood, Beautiful World is about the next phase, “when you realize some of the doors have closed behind you.” Much of the novel is concerned with what makes for a successful, meaningful life—whom does the culture value and whom does it dismiss?— questions newly pertinent in the age of coronavirus and its essential workers. And it asks how any of us are able to live, have children, or be happy when faced with potential political and environmental Armageddon. Is Rooney, like so many, preoccupied with doom?

“Of course, very much so,” she says. “Me, my friends, my family all feel enormously anxious and afraid....Would I have bothered putting in all these long, thoughtful emails expressing feelings about various issues if I thought that everything they were saying was really stupid and pointless? Probably not.” At points in Beautiful World, Rooney’s characters question, she says, “whether novels themselves are worthwhile in this moment.” Rooney >1 4 8

“There’s a level at which I’m using the book in some way to explore emotions that I may not even be aware that I’m going through”

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Lives Sally Rooney novels has been money. “That is something that I did not have before that I now have, and that has made my life easier in every imaginable way, as of course having money does.” Rooney’s Marxist politics have long featured in her fiction and on her Twitter account before she deactivated it (“When I first started going around talking about Marxism,” says Eileen in Beautiful World, “people laughed at me. Now it’s everyone’s thing”). As a teenager and young woman, she felt Ireland’s major political parties had nniscrone was unseasonably quiet for the last day of May. nothing to say to her, though now—after the legalization of The small seaside town on the west coast of Ireland is same-sex marriage in 2015 and the 2018 referendum that legalized usually abuzz with holidaymakers, but tourists had yet abortion in Ireland—she’s feeling more optimistic. “There’s a to descend for bracing dips in the North Atlantic and afternoons in the amusement arcade. Aside from a group of lot more real debate and disputation going on in a way that feels locals litter-picking on the beach, few would have seen Rooney substantial and challenging and exciting,” she says. as she walked through the long grass in the dunes, preparing Her country is famously going through a particularly fertile to have her portrait taken for Vogue. Which is, of course, just literary period, with many new young women writers—Naoise the way she would have liked it. “I’m just so Dolan, Megan Nolan, Niamh Campbell, awkward at things like that,” she says of being among others—being inevitably touted as the photographed. “It’s very much like”—she “new Sally Rooney” for their 21st-century laughs in exasperation—“I don’t know what to coming-of-age tales of sex, love, and work. do with my hands.”

Next April Rooney’s sister-in-law, Catherine As a child, Rooney would spend summers Prasifka, will publish her debut novel, None here with her family—it’s “one of a very small of This Is Serious. “When you look at how number of towns that I amalgamated for literature has developed in a broader historical way, there are [always] groups of writers the fictional setting of the book. I love it there.”

She grew up a 40-minute drive away, with who are in conversation with each other,” says Rooney. Of course they will cover similar her two siblings and parents. Her mother ran ground. “Exchanging letters…going to the the local arts center, while her father was a same cafés…reading each other’s work.” technician for Ireland’s state-owned telecom company. Theirs was a bookish family; her That’s certainly how Flattery and Rooney got parents were voracious readers but had no to know each other. After being introduced literary connections. “Neither of them were by the editor of The Stinging Fly, a prestigious remotely success-orientated,” Rooney told Dublin literary magazine Rooney would edit for two issues in 2018, the pair would meet me when we first spoke. “They were just happy for coffee and exchange work. “I definitely for their kids to be happy, and if one of us think one of the reasons Ireland does so well is wanted to be a literary novelist or whatever, it we have a scene that encourages and supports was like, ‘Well, whatever makes you happy, THE GREAT DEBATE writers,” says Flattery. “And it’s not closed off. darling. Pursue your dream.’”

THE CHARACTERS IN ROONEY’S NEW I never feel intimidated.”

“I think that Sally’s someone who has written BOOK EXAMINE WHAT FICTION IS FOR. For years, Rooney was a fixture on its all her life, regardless of whether it is published nonstop schedule of book launches and poetry or not,” her friend and fellow Irish author nights. When she went to New York as a Cullman Center Fellow Nicole Flattery tells me. “I imagine not writing would be strange at the New York Public Library in 2019, it was “the first time I’d to her.” It’s true Rooney completed her first (unpublished) novel ever been outside Ireland for more than a month or so,” she says. at 15 and joined a creative-writing group, but school was never “I was homesick, which surprised me actually. When I was a her thing: Adolescence, a dislike of authority, and homework put teenager, I thought, you know, I can’t wait to go live in New York,” paid to that. It wasn’t until her early 20s that she started writing she whines in her best precocious-teen voice. “Well, it turns out properly, so to speak, and with gusto. While completing her master’s I could wait, and did wait a long time. And then when I got there, thesis in American literature, she composed 100,000 words of I wanted to come home. Even though it’s a beautiful city.”

Conversations in three months. Although she didn’t foresee a life As borders started closing in spring of last year, Rooney and as a novelist: “I just lived every day, getting up in the morning, John made the decision to return home. “We’re both very close stumbling my way through writing my book, and trusting that everything would be fine,” she told me in 2018. “I had no plans for to our families,” she said. “It felt important to be here.” Lockdown having a career.” When literary agent Tracy Bohan of the Wylie has inevitably narrowed life, but Rooney’s day-to-day hasn’t Agency read an essay Rooney published in 2015 about being on a changed all that much. Every morning, after her husband goes to debate team, she asked if she had a manuscript. The following teach at a nearby secondary school, she makes herself a coffee year, Conversations sold in a seven-way auction. and breakfast before doing a sudoku puzzle or going online to play It would be easy to assume that Rooney, like her Normal People chess—then retires to the couch to write. (“I do have a kind heroine Marianne, comes from a wealthy background, which is of study studio space where I can sit upright and not ruin my posture,” she says, “but I like to lie on the C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 4 0 not the case. The single biggest change to her life since writing her doesn’t have an answer, only her “attempt at a realistic portrait of how people who are deeply concerned still manage to eke out some kind of existence. And at the end of the day, [the book] is still very much about sex and friendship and family life,” she says, “and the everyday mundane questions that are, also, the origin and the propagation of human life.”

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© 2021 MAC MILLAN

E

TELLING TALES This trio of looks in the Installation Studio is centered on patchworking and quilting techniques. from far left: Adrian, 1947; La Réunion, 2021; Ralph Lauren, 1982.

Photographed by Stefan Ruiz.

Sittings Editor: Alexandra Gurvitch.

Looking at Us

The new two-part exhibition on American fashion at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute does more than tell us what we wore: It reveals who we are. By Janelle Okwodu.

T

he most ambitious exhibition to date from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute kick-starts with a question: who gets to be american? A red, white, and blue silk sash from the grand finale of Prabal Gurung’s

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2020 10th-anniversary collection bears the phrase, and it greets visitors from the threshold of the Anna Wintour Costume Center. It’s a query every immigrant must consider—but shrouded in golden light at the outset of a fashion retrospective, it

takes on a new verve. “It was important to open with that,” says Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s Wendy Yu Curator in Charge. “It tackles this notion of acceptance and belonging, which recent events have brought to the fore. Of >1 5 4

course, these are questions that have always been present—but there are moments in history when they’re more resonant and resounding.”

“In America,” the museum’s two-part exploration of all things made in the U.S.A., is a yearlong celebration spanning three centuries of fashion. The first part, which includes pieces from such American standard-bearers as Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, and Calvin Klein alongside the current vanguard of millennial talent, opens on September 18, with part two opening on May 5, 2022. (While the pandemic forced the cancellation of last year’s Met ball, “In America” will debut with 154

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AMERICAN PERENNIAL Florals can be sweetly pastoral—or slyly, subversively romantic. Two perfect examples on the Great Hall Balcony: left, Adolfo, 1973–74; right, Marc Jacobs, spring 2020.

a splash on Monday, September 13, closing out New York Fashion Week with a gala cochaired by Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Amanda Gorman, and Naomi Osaka— with Tom Ford, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri, and Anna Wintour honorary chairs.)

“In America” echoes the work Bolton has done expanding the Met’s archives to include more contributions from designers of

color and marginalized groups— and though it serves as a retrospective, the show’s observations about national identity are rooted in current concerns. “It was almost impossible to do this show without looking at it through the lens of politics,” says Bolton. “There’s no art form that addresses the politics of identity more than fashion.”

Language is the core theme of the exhibition’s first installment, “A Lexicon of Fashion.”

Bolton credits 2020’s socialjustice movements with prompting him to reexamine the topic of terminology—particularly when tackling such important issues— since, in the 20 years since the museum’s last overview of American fashion, discussions around style have changed. “American designers are at the forefront of conversations around diversity, inclusivity, sustainability, gender fluidity, and body positivity,” Bolton says, “and the framework of the show enables us to focus on the younger designers who are engaging thoughtfully and deeply with those ideas.”

Recent Central Saint Martins graduate and LVMH Prize finalist Conner Ives was a toddler in Bedford, New York, the last time the Costume Institute explored Americana, a theme that animates his work. (Ives’s graduation project, The American Dream, deals with feminine archetypes culled from pop culture in the states.) When he saw the announcement of the Costume Institute’s new exhibition, “I was giddy,” he says. “My collection was built around the concept of forgotten American designers—people that had such a rich, influential history, but when you mention them to a fashion student nowadays, they ask who you’re talking about. You have to stop and think, Oh, my God—there were scores of people that came before me.” Ives’s modernized debutante dress—employing deadstock, vintage fabric, and recycled-plastic floral paillettes—now illustrates the beauty of hopefulness in “Lexicon.”

After months spent indoors during the pandemic, Bolton toyed with organizing the exhibition as a kind of high-tech house inspired by Witold Rybczynski’s Home: A Short History of an Idea—but >1 5 6

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“We approach exhibition space in the same way we approach cinematic space,” says Valentino. As with an actual quilt, the right textiles made all the difference. “We’re trying to create a patchwork mentality,” Valentino explains, “but keeping it modern.” He and Crowley worked primarily with materials associated with filmmaking. “Scrim, silks, duvetyne, and velour were our archi-

READING THE PAST “The beauty of American fashion is its heterogeneity,” says the Costume Institute’s Curator in Charge, Andrew Bolton.

tectural base,” says Valentino, who employed a few Hollywood tricks to fool viewers’ eyes.

“One of the big metaphors that go through both parts of ‘In America’ is perception— changing how we look at things. We’re rethinking American designers and identity in the United States, and visually we’re trying to incorporate other ways of seeing.”

Crowley and Valentino have also added a sensory component with embroidered details that pop up throughout the exhibition.

“Embroidery has this tactile quality—there’s a three-dimensionality to it,” says Valentino.

“The way we understand language is often through a sentence or a phrase, and the

show speaks in the same way, allowing the viewer to make associations.”

The exhibition also shines a light on American talent during a moment when such support is necessary. The economic fallout of the pandemic hit the fashion community hard, particularly independent creators. “We all share the tribulation of having to create a collection while constantly checking your bank account to make sure you can pay your staff,” says Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada, whose vibrant work is also featured in the show.

“Creativity can counter some of the negativity—and as artists, we’re supposed to be contributing to our culture. This show takes people out of their heads for a second.”

That transportive sensibility is something Christopher John Rogers is hoping to experience when he sees the exhibition’s quilted set pieces in person—including a voluminous magenta plaid-silk taffeta look from his fall 2020 collection chosen by Bolton to reflect American exuberance—a quality Rogers associates with the work being produced by many of his peers. “We’re seeing people from all across the country make evocative and emotional work that isn’t predicated on traditional ideas about what American clothes should look like,” he says. With its mile-wide skirt and multicolored hues, his ball gown is an appropriately delightful example of the dynamic, independent fashion the exhibition is meant to highlight.

That “common thread” that Reverend Jackson referred to in 1984—unifying issues such as health care, education reform, and housing—remains relevant today, as does the idea that pluralism is the root of American society. For Bolton, the statement captured what he was trying to achieve. “I grew up [learning about] the concept of the American melting pot, which implies that we are all blended together and assimilated,” he says, “but what Jackson suggests is that our identities and experiences are woven together into this multifaceted whole that preserves the uniqueness of our respective heritages and voices. The beauty of American fashion is its heterogeneity.” @ Part One, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Anna Wintour Costume Center from September 18, 2021, to September 5, 2022.

BL AIN E DAVIS.

shoehorning designers into categories tied to places such as the kitchen or office proved limiting. Finally, inspiration came from an unexpected source: Reverend Jesse Jackson’s speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. “America is not like a blanket, one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size,” he told the audience at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

“America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.”

“The act of making a quilt celebrates the notion of community that is so strong in America,” says Bolton, who adds that quilts also connect ideas about family and about repurposing and recycling.

“Each square is a different designer, who represents a specific quality of American fashion.”

Approximately 100 pieces from 80 or so labels and designers range from joyful 1994 Anna Sui dresses to Christian Francis Roth’s 1990 “Rothola” dress. Naturally, the show features quilting and handcraft prominently: Hollywood costumer turned designer Adrian’s 1947 dress, for example, references the floral designs found on traditional hand-sewn American quilts. Placed with the upcycled patchwork pieces from Nigerian-American textile artist Sarah Nsikak’s brand, La Réunion, and a custom piece from Emily Adams Bode made from a vintage quilt, Adrian’s look feels newly relevant. Floral styles also get the full-circle treatment. Adolfo’s silk eveningwear, a staple of nights out in the early ’70s, fits right in with the sumptuous closing number from Marc Jacobs’s spring 2020 collection, a play on the botanical theme taken to its extreme with giant watercolor petals.

Tying everything together meant constructing a space that immerses viewers in history—a task that fell to production designers Shane Valentino and Nathan Crowley of LAMB Design Studio. Having dreamed up a neo-noir Texas for Tom Ford in his 2016 film Nocturnal Animals and blown up a Boeing 747 for Christopher Nolan’s more recent sci-fi thriller Tenet, the two are also adept at pushing the design envelope for the Met—from 2008’s “Superheroes” show to 2015’s “China: Through the Looking Glass.”

Join us this fall, when The New Yorker Festival returns with both live and virtual events—an eclectic mix of conversations, performances, and experiences, featuring the biggest names in politics, literature, film, music, art, and pop culture.

newyorker.com/festival @ NewYorkerFest #NewYorkerFest

Mickalene Thomas—whose new work will be exhibited in five galleries simultaneously this fall—is a remix artist who embraces the high and the low. By Dodie Kazanjian.

W

hen Mickalene Thomas was growing up in New Jersey, she kept telling her family that she was going to move to Europe. “Here she’s talking about Europe again,” she remembers her cousins teasing her, saying, “Girl, you don’t know about no Europe.” She’s been there more times than she can count since then. This fall, 31 monumental new works—including collage-like paintings of magisterial Black women and social-political “Resist” pictures—are appearing in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong as part of an exhibition collectively titled “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.”

At the age of 50, Thomas is one of the most dominant and fearless artists of her generation. The New York Times’ critic Roberta Smith, looking back on Thomas’s 2012 mid-career survey at the Brooklyn Museum, wrote, “No Manhattan museum had the nerve to do a show that questioned so many different norms.”

The four locations where Thomas will show this fall are all part of the Lévy Gorvy gallery empire. (She’s also showing 10 new works at Nathalie Obadia, her longtime Paris gallery.) She left her previous dealer Lehmann Maupin three years ago, and

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although she will show at Lévy Gorvy, the gallery does not actually represent her—nor does anyone else. “The idea of representation is old,” she tells me. “I think it comes with the notion of ownership, and I will not be owned.” Thomas is defiantly independent and unflinchingly herself. For the last decade she has lived in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill, walking distance from her 5,500-square-foot studio in the rapidly developing Navy Yard area. “Most artists who’ve come to Clinton Hill have gone,” she says, “but I’ve stuck it out. I’m really hoping to create a community around here for artists.” She has two miniature labradoodles (Puma and Toast) and co-parents a young daughter from an earlier relationship. The curator Racquel Chevremont, her life partner and muse, has two children of her own.

The work Thomas is making for the New York and London shows is a series she calls “Jet Blue,” based on the pinup calendars that Jet magazine published from 1971 (the INSIDE STORY Thomas’s work intimately depicts domestic interiors and corporeal figures. left: Interior: Yellow, Green and Blue Couch (2018). right: August 1977 (2019).

year she was born) to 1977. “The Jet Calendar was advertised as the first ‘Black Is Beautiful’ calendar, shifting the magazine away from Eurocentric beauty standards,” she says. “So what I’m doing is reimagining Jet’s representation of African American women as objects of desire by composing the figures within ornamental tableaux to exhibit Black female empowerment.” Her reimaginings take the form of very large paintings, in which images from Jet’s archives of nude or skimpily clothed Black women interact with an array of other forms and materials—including oil and acrylic paint and rhinestones. She started putting rhinestones in her paintings when she was at Yale’s M.F.A. program, with the idea of combining Seurat’s pointillist dots and vernacular bling. Embracing both the high and the low, she’s a DJ remix artist who’s looked closely at the work of the great collagist Romare Bearden, who had looked closely at Matisse and Manet.

“Mickalene is more than an artist,” says Christopher Bedford, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, where Thomas has transformed the museum’s neoclassical east lobby into what she calls “Baltimore’s living room”—based on the kind of >1 6 4

INT ERIO R: Y E LLOW, GRE EN AN D BLUE COUC H, 2018. RHIN ESTO NE , ACRYLI C, O IL AN D GLITTE R ON CANVAS MOU N TE D ON WO O D PAN E L, 8 4 X 96 I N .; AUGUST 1977 . 20 19. R HI N ESTON ES, AC RYL IC AN D O IL PAINT O N CANVAS MOU N TED ON WOOD PANE L WITH N AT URAL OAK F RA ME, 86 X 72 X 3 IN . COU RT ESY O F T HE ART IST/© 2021 A RTI STS R I GH TS SO CI E TY (A RS), N EW YO RK.

The Body Shop

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films, videos, installations, murals, and performance works. Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman, her short film about her mother, premiered two months before Mama Bush’s early death in 2012.

“I love everything about the Black female body,” Thomas tells me. “There’s always more to discover and explore.” There’s a wood-paneled corner in her studio where she sets up a domestic interior in boldly clashing patterns and colors, a different one for each sitting—1970s decor on steroids. She often uses the same models, and they all look you straight in the eye and exude confidence and

FACE OF CHANGE Thomas’s Hong Kong show will include several new iterations on this 2017 work, Resist.

self-awareness. They own the space; they’re not odalisques subject to the male gaze. The titles of Thomas’s works are just as brazen: Do Ya Think I’m Sexy and Hot, Wild, Unrestricted. Thomas has said her muses have “beauty, a little uncertainty, perseverance, and a sort of hunger. All of the stronger qualities I feel I possess. I guess I look for myself in these women.” In a conversation with Carrie Mae Weems in 2015 she said, “I have a deep desire and sensuality for women that’s inescapable. So perhaps I’m just as guilty as a man for my reasons for wanting to look at, photograph, and paint women.”

Thomas has also mined art history for subject matter, from Matisse and Manet to Hockney and Bearden. In her version of Courbet’s Origin of the World, the nude female genitalia are her own. When the Museum of Modern Art asked her a decade ago to make a painting for its 53rd Street restaurant windows,

Thomas responded with a monumental reversal of Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, the painting that shocked the 1863 Paris Salon.

Instead of two clothed gentlemen picnicking in the woods with a naked woman, Thomas offers three of her chic Black models in the same pose, clad in rhinestone-studded sundresses and looking us straight in the eye. As she has said, “I love the fact that now when you google Matisse or Manet or Courbet, I’m right up there with them.”

She has excluded men from her picnic, and from much of her practice, but not from her thinking. Four years ago, she began working on a series that she calls “Resist,” which deals with the brutalization and dehumanizing of Black and brown people from the 1960s to the present. Painting on top of silk-screened collages of archival images from the Civil Rights era to the Black Lives Matter movement, she builds multilayered visions that she doesn’t hesitate to tell you were inspired by the work of Robert Rauschenberg.

“This is my first social-political body of work,” she says. The first Resist appeared in a 2018 three-artist show at the Seattle Art Museum, alongside Robert Colescott and Kerry James Marshall. “I was so honored to be chosen for that show,” she tells me. “These artists created a platform for artists like me to freely make whatever the fuck I want to make.”

The Baltimore Museum of Art commissioned Resist #2, and she is working on five new ones for her show in Hong Kong this fall. “Mickalene has made some beautifully designed, well constructed, highly decorative, just fabulous pieces,” Marshall tells me.

“Some of those paintings are as beautiful as paintings can possibly be.”

But Black women remain at the core of Thomas’s work. “Mickalene took the ‘luxe, calme, et volupté’ of Matisse and crossed it with the glue-gun aesthetic of queer life, and married that pairing to the 1970s Black domestic interior, all the while centering Black women,” says the curator and writer Helen Molesworth. “The results have been ravishing.”

Does Thomas think she’s achieved anything on the level of what Mirror, Mirror did for her? “No,” she says. “The effort is there.

The courage is there. And the skill is there. My hope is that my work has the same impact.

That’s why I keep making art.”@

RESIST, 2017. RHIN ESTONES, AC RY LIC, G O LD LE AF, AND O IL STIC K ON CAN VAS MOUNT ED ON WOO D PAN EL, 84 X 108 IN .; COURTESY OF TH E ARTIST/ © 202 1 ARTISTS RIG HTS SO CIE TY (ARS ) , N EW YOR K.

row-house interior she grew up with in the ’70s. “She’s an activist, a commercial photographer, a designer, an agitator, an organizer, a curator, a public figure, and a writer.... In her conception, being an artist today is not one thing but all of those things.”

The idea of being an artist didn’t really kick in until she was in her early 20s. “I learned at a young age, watching my grandmother and the women in my family, how to persevere,” she says. “They had resilience, just in the daily grind of being Black people in America.” As a teenager, she quit high school and moved to Portland, Oregon, with her girlfriend to avoid telling her mother she was queer.

(Her father, she says, was not part of her life.) In a visit to the Portland Art Museum, she came upon an early work

by Carrie Mae Weems, called Mirror, Mirror: a photograph of a Black woman holding a mirror up to her face and confronting a fairy godmother. The caption underneath reads: “Looking into the mirror, the Black woman asked, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the finest of them all?’

The mirror says, ‘Snow White you Black Bitch, and don’t you forget it!!!’”

“It spoke to me,” Thomas says. “It’s so familiar to what I know of my life and my family.

I’m that person. I know that person. It was saying, ‘This is your life.’ That reflection was so profound that it woke me up. I thought, This is what I want to create. Whatever this artist is doing, I want to do that. I’ve always, in my work, been chasing that one moment.”

Thomas finished high school in Portland, then went to Pratt Institute in New York City.

She spent time as an exchange student at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia. Pratt led to the Yale School of Art, where she got her graduate degree in 2002.

Her work at Pratt had been abstract, but at Yale she took a photography class with David Hilliard, and that changed everything. He suggested she photograph her mother.

Thomas’s relationship with Sandra Bush, known as Mama Bush, had been extremely close but often troubled. Mama Bush had struggled with drug abuse; she went into rehab and became a practicing Buddhist.

Thomas’s photographs of Mama Bush, her first muse, introduced the Black female body as her primary subject in many mediums and forms—photographs, collages, paintings,

Bright Future

TANGERINE DREAM Froseth wears neon-orange lipstick by makeup artist Dick Page.

Givenchy dress.

Hair, Ilker Akyol.

Photographed by Cruz Valdez.

Fashion Editor: Max Ortega.

NINE YEARS AGO, A TEENAGE Kristine Froseth went to a casting call at an Oslo mall with two friends, “for the heck of it,” and was signed by a local talent agent on the spot; a few months later, she found herself in a Prada campaign shot by Steven Meisel.

Her acting career manifested through similar happenstance. “It was pretty much just another lucky moment,” insists the New Jersey–born, Norway-raised model, now 24, who stars in Amazon’s fall ballet drama Birds of Paradise.

“Physically it was pretty challenging,” Froseth says of the grueling workout schedule (barre, Pilates, gyrotonics, cardio) required to accurately portray a young dancer vying for a spot in the elite Opéra National de Paris. Joining the body-positive set of Sharp Stick, Lena Dunham’s secretive featurelength directorial effort, which filmed during the pandemic, offered a completely different experience, Froseth says—as did embracing “a lot of curls, a lot of hats, and really tight skirts” to play a young Betty Ford in Showtime’s highly anticipated The First Lady, out next spring. The constant shape-shifting is slightly foreign to Froseth, who spent most of lockdown barefaced in sweats with her family in Norway. “I’m very much trying to figure out what my identity is when it comes to makeup,” she admits, revealing that she’s hoping to “amp things up” with bolder looks, such as this masks-off pop of tangerine lipstick, as the world begins to reopen. “It’s just good to see people smiling again.”—zoe ruffner 170

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Sister Act A new biography takes a look at the heroic, patriotic, and quietly influential Catherine Dior.

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n paper, Catherine Dior is an unlikely heroine. Born into the prosperous Dior family in 1917, the youngest of five children, she seemed destined for a decorative existence. But when the family’s fortune suddenly vanished due to failed real estate ventures, a life of leisure seemed far less inevitable. In 1935, the teenage Catherine moved from the family’s stately home in Granville, Villa Les Rhumbs, to a dilapidated farmhouse in Provence. She soon escaped to live with her older brother Christian in Paris, selling accessories for a fashion house while he peddled his sketches.

When World War II broke out, the siblings returned to the South of France and grew vegetables that they sold in nearby Cannes. It was there, after Christian had returned to the capital in search again of the “atmosphere of chiffon,” that Catherine would meet and fall in love with Hervé des Charbonneries, a married father of three and

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member of the Resistance. As Justine Picardie relates in the new biography Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Catherine’s life then took another unexpected turn: By 1941, she had joined the Resistance, using the code name Caro. A recent novel by Christine Wells, Sisters of the Resistance (William Morrow), imagines the lively underground circuit that surrounded Catherine in Paris at this time.

Caro was arrested in 1944 and, after being repeatedly tortured by the Gestapo (she never betrayed her comrades), was sent to a French prison that had been commandeered by the Germans. A frantic Christian appealed to the Swedish diplomat Raoul Nordling, who attempted without success to have Catherine released into his care.

Instead, that August, she was delivered to the women’s concentration camp, Ravensbrück, only to be transferred to further abysmal camps: Torgau, Abteroda, and finally, in 1945, to Markkleeberg.

As the Allies approached, the detainees were sent on a death march, from which Catherine managed to escape. Apart from testimony she delivered against her torturers, she almost never spoke of her trials.

When Dior debuted his history-making New Look collection on a cold winter day in February 1947, it was in a room scented with Miss Dior—a perfume, as he imagined, that “smells of love.” As lore has it, the fragrance obtained its name when, in the middle of a meeting between Dior and his muse and colleague Mizza Bricard, Catherine walked into the room. “Ah, here!” Bricard exclaimed, “Miss Dior!” The same name would be given to a strapless “mille fleurs” evening dress, first shown in 1949. Meanwhile the real Miss Dior built a quiet life away from the world of fashion, living on her farm in Provence and selling flowers—alongside des Charbonneries—at Paris’s historic flower market, described by a giddy American reporter in 1954 as “an enchanted garden under the vast glass domes of Les Halles.” To this journalist, the market was a colorful, sunlit bubble, but the Dior siblings knew that the reality was messier, that it’s no easy feat to conjure life from soil—or cloth. For all the soft romanticism of the New Look, it was achieved with a rigid inner architecture. When her brother died in 1957, Catherine was named the “moral heir,” responsible for safeguarding his artistic legacy—a task she approached with great meticulousness, preserving the contents of his home down to his pack of playing cards.

Despite shunning the spotlight during her life, Catherine is now being ushered into it—not just with these new books but in a florainspired spring 2020 collection from Dior’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri that was dedicated to Catherine and a 2021 bag deemed “the Caro.” Picardie’s book is of the moment, too, celebrating an unsung hero at a time when female influences are earning new acclaim. Nonetheless the elusive sister may remain largely unknowable. Unlike her brother, Catherine never wrote her memoirs, preferring to let her actions speak for themselves. When she was asked by a young veteran about her wartime experiences, her mantra was simple: “Love life.”—laird borrelli-persson

COVE R: © 202 1 MACMILLAN . NEW LOO K: © ASSOC IATIO N WIL LY MAY WALD/ADAGP, PAR IS 2021. ALL OTHE RS : COLL ECTION C HRISTIAN DIO R PARFU MS, PARIS.

NEW SILHOUETTES clockwise from far left: Catherine Dior during World War II; the New Look, photographed in 1947; Catherine and Hervé des Charbonneries after the war.

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