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 December 2022

48
Editor’s Letter
50
Contributors
52
Up Front
Over more than a
decade of covering
politics, Annie
Karni has learned
that campaign
losses come with
valuable lessons

PH OTO GRAPH ED BY DAN MARTE N SE N . FASH ION E DITO R: TABITHA S IMMON S. HAIR, CIM MAH ONY; MAKEUP, LISA HOUG HTON . PRODUC E D BY VE RS. D ETA I LS, SE E I N TH I S I SSUE .
68
Graphic Detail
As pink goes
mainstream and
blue becomes a
regular runway
fixture, the future of
hair color is here

70
Making Space
Nicolas Di Felice’s
Courrèges moves
to the beat of
the global street.
By Mark Holgate

76
Getting Real
MAC is banking
on the idea of
building makeup
from the skin up

78
Signs and
Symbols
New books ask how
artists, designers,
and writers make
their mark

84
Blanket Coverage
The humble (or
not!) blanket has
become fashion’s
newest canvas.
By Emma
Elwick-Bates
CONTINUED>44

LET IT RIDE
MODEL ABBY CHAMPION
WEARS A CHLOÉ
DRESS AND BOOTS.
ACTOR PATRICK
SCHWARZENEGGER
WEARS A LOUIS VUITTON
MEN’S JACKET AND
PANTS. PHOTOGRAPHED
BY DAN MARTENSEN.

34 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM

AVA I L A B L E AT D I O R . C O M
SAKS
 LIFT TO DISCOVER

J’ADORE PARFUM D’EAU

THE NEW FRAGRANCE

LIFT TO DISCOVER

J’ADORE EAU DE PARFUM

The most riveting stories in fashion, culture,
and politics from around the globe.

HOSTED BY CHIOMA NNADI AND CHLOE MALLE.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE TO THE RUN-THROUGH WHEREVER
YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS.

THURSDAYS, PREMIERING NOVEMBER 10

Naomi Ackie by Juergen Teller
79 Greene Street, New York loewe.com
 December 2022

FAS HIO N E DITOR: TAB ITHA S IMMO NS. PRODUC ED BY DMB R E PRES E NTS; PH OTOG RAPHE D BY MARTIN PAR R OF MAGN U M P HOTOS.
GET CARRIED AWAY
A BOTTEGA VENETA BAG WAITS TO BE DISCOVERED AT THE SHEPTON MALLET ANTIQUES
FAIR IN SOMERSET, ENGLAND. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARTIN PARR.

86 92 something possibilities for flag for the 142

From the Hollywood hard-won: true female portraiture. wonderfully weird Finders
Ground Up and Vine happiness. By Dodie Kazanjian on Broadway. Keepers
Wildflower Farms, The curious case By Rob Haskell By Adam Green This season, the
a new resort in of Brad Pitt, 132 search is on
upstate New Château Miraval, 112 The Emergency 138 for the shiniest,
York, brings you and a new luxury Coming Clean What seemed a Lost and Found sparkliest
to nature and beauty line. At Lanserhof’s slight tremor in her Natalia Vodianova accessories
nature to you By Kathleen medispa in seven-year-old and her youngest
Baird-Murray Germany’s daughter’s hand sister, Jenna, 150
88 remote Frisian rapidly became a were separated The Get
Back in Bloom 94 Islands, Vassi sign of something by adoption. There’s no
Bruno Frisoni, Free Form Chamberlain and much more serious. Two decades place like
a master of SFMoMA honors her (reluctant) Novelist Allegra later, DNA testing home for the
unabashedly Joan Brown husband detox Goodman recalls brought about holidays
joyous shoes, together the night that an unexpected
relaunches 100 changed her life reunion. By 158
his label A Love Story 128 Hamish Bowles Last Look
Jennifer Lopez The Female 136
90 has always led Gaze The Awkward
Collective with her heart. When Jenna Age Cover Look Flying Start
Soul Now, newly wed Gribbon met With its offbeat Jennifer Lopez wears a Valentino Haute Couture
In four of the and about to Mackenzie Scott, premise and dress. Hair, Chris Appleton for Color Wow;
season’s best new release a highly it changed the way superlative cast, makeup, Mary Phillips. Details, see In This Issue.
films, we’re all personal album, she thought about Kimberly Akimbo Photographer: Annie Leibovitz.
stronger together she has achieved painting—and the is planting a Fashion Editor: Alex Harrington.

44 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM

Letter From the Editor
Love All
IT’S A THRILL TO HAVE Jennifer Lopez on the cover
this month. Here is someone who has been in our lives
for years, whose career and life and marriages and romantic
alliances we have followed—breathlessly at times—
and who has now achieved, at the age of 53, a kind of
self-possession that feels like peace. “I’m very much in
control of my own life and destiny and feel empowered
as a woman and as a person,” she told contributing
editor Rob Haskell in the course of their time together in
Los Angeles, where Lopez and her husband, Ben Affleck,
live as a blended family of seven.
“There is something innately, magically kind and good
and full of love at the heart of who Jennifer is,” says
Affleck. And also “quite a few things that the press gets
wrong,” he adds. The terrific recent documentary about
Lopez, Halftime, showed us how driven she can be,
whether that’s in her music or live performances or in
her acting (she stars in two new films next year and is
shooting another as I write). It’s her honesty that struck
me in our cover profile, and her touching willingness to
be open. “I’ve always felt like an outsider,” she says, “in the
fashion world, the music world, the movie world. I feel
like everybody knows each other and all the artists talk,
and you go to the Met ball and all the girls are hanging
48 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM
TOGETHER AGAIN
LEFT: JENNIFER LOPEZ WEARS A BALENCIAGA COUTURE
DRESS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ. ABOVE: IN
RALPH LAUREN AT HER AUGUST WEDDING TO BEN AFFLECK.
out together, and I’m not in that group. Maybe
that’s just insecurity.” To hear a superstar
voice such feelings—which are as human as any
you can imagine—is moving and, frankly,
inspiring in an age of careful image management.
Jennifer looks extraordinarily beautiful in
Annie Leibovitz’s photos.
And her love story—the wedding to Affleck that
the entire world wanted to know everything about
this summer—fits beautifully in an issue we’ve devoted
to togetherness. We have stories of love and romance and
family and attachment in these pages. Abby Champion
LE FT: FAS HION E DITOR: ALE X HARRIN GTO N. H AIR, C HR IS AP PLE TO N FOR COLOR WOW; MAKEUP, MARY PH ILL IPS.
and her boyfriend, Patrick Schwarzenegger, steal away
to a chic new spa in Germany in “Coming Clean,”
photographed by Dan Martensen. Natalia Vodianova
S ET DES IG N, MARY HOWARD STUD IO. RIGH T: ON THE JLO/J OH N RUSSO. DE TAILS, SE E IN THIS ISSUE .
reunites with her half sister Jenna—separated by adoption
two decades ago—in an emotional family story by
Hamish Bowles and photographed by Leibovitz. And the
novelist Allegra Goodman writes a gripping and extremely
moving account of a medical emergency endured by
her seven-year-old daughter, Miranda—one that results
in an even deeper bond between mother and child.
It’s an issue in which love conquers all sorts of things—
distance, doubt, fate, circumstance—and offers a few
fairy-tale gifts along the way.
One final note to readers: We are busy preparing
a special combined Winter 2023 issue, which will take
the place of our usual January and February issues.
We are so excited for you to see it.
FENDI BOUTIQUES 646 520 2830 FEN D I .CO M
 Teenage Dreams
To mark the Broadway opening of Kimberly
Akimbo—David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine
Tesori’s affecting musical about a rapidly
aging suburban teen—Adam Green spoke to
the show’s stars and creative team for “The
Awkward Age” (page 136), as photographer
Mayan Toledano and fashion editor Max
Ortega captured the cast in action. Working
on a set custom-made for the occasion,
the shoot plunged headfirst into 1990s high
school nostalgia, with the fashion to match.
“There were actually a lot of clothes that felt
grungy and ’90s in the collections,” Ortega
says. (Above, for instance, leads Victoria Clark
and Justin Cooley have a laugh in vintage-
inspired Molly Goddard and Polo Ralph
Lauren, respectively.) “I was like, Wow, this
is actually perfect. It was really fun building
out each character based on the script.”
50 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM
Heart to Heart
HAIR, TSUKI; MAKEUP, KUMA. PRODUCED BY 2DM PRODUCTION. VODIANOVA AND FAMILY: COURTESY OF NATALIA VODIANOVA. DETAILS, SEE IN THIS ISSUE.
CLARK AND COOLEY: PHOTOGRAPHED BY MAYAN TOLEDANO. FASHION EDITOR: MAX ORTEGA. HAIR, CHARLIE LE MINDU; MAKEUP, KABUKI. PRODUCED BY
FAMILY PROJECTS; PROP STYLIST, HANNE BJELLAND. GRIBBON AND SCOTT: PHOTOGRAPHED BY CLÉMENT PASCAL. FASHION EDITOR: JORDEN BICKHAM.
Shot by Clément Pascal and styled by contributing editor Jorden
Bickham, “The Female Gaze” (page 128) takes as its focus figurative
painter Jenna Gribbon (above right, in Alberta Ferretti) and her
fiancée and muse, Mackenzie Scott, the indie-rock singer and
composer known as Torres (above left, in Gucci). Visiting Gribbon’s
pretty Brooklyn studio, Dodie Kazanjian learned that the tides
of inspiration flow both ways: Not only is Scott Gribbon’s go-to
subject (along with her son, Silas), but Gribbon’s work has a way
of informing Scott’s, too. “Jenna’s paintings somehow always feed
into the songs that I’m making…. Like, the color palette that
she’s choosing for a series will influence the way that I think,”
Scott says. “It is reciprocal and cyclical and very symbiotic.”
A Happy Surprise
In “Lost and Found” (page 138), Hamish Bowles unravels
the extraordinary story of how Russian-born model
and philanthropist Natalia Vodianova (known once upon
a time as “Supernova”) reunited with her youngest half
sister, Jennifer Burns, two decades after Burns was adopted.
Annie Leibovitz and Vogue’s Tonne Goodman were
on hand as Burns, who was raised in North Carolina and
studied mechanical engineering at Clemson University,
gathered with Vodianova and Kristina Kusakina, another
half sister, in coastal Connecticut this summer, a year
after the siblings first made contact. (All three are pictured
at left with their birth mother, Larisa Kusakina, in Paris
in 2021.) Given Vodianova’s legendary rise from selling
fruit in Nizhniy Novgorod to walking fashion’s biggest
runways, Bowles’s reporting reads like a new chapter in
a real-life fairy tale. “Thank God for technology because
we would never have found each other,” she says of Burns.
“What are the odds?”
Up Front
The Finish Line
Over more than a decade of covering politics, Annie Karni has
seen the human side of campaigns—and learned that losses teach us as
much about ourselves, and our candidates, as victories do.
verything that I’ve learned about
covering politics, I’ve learned from covering
losing candidates.
When I was a tabloid reporter for the
New York Daily News, there was Christine
Quinn, the redheaded, Irish American,
lesbian Speaker of the New York City Council, with a
booming voice and a hearty laugh, who at one point
was widely assumed to be the mayor-in-waiting of New
York. (She wasn’t.)
I had recently turned 30 and the assignment made me
feel like I was at the center of the universe. After 12 years,
Mike Bloomberg was leaving office and the entire city
was gripped by the question of what would come next.
Right after graduating from a small liberal arts college
outside Philadelphia, I’d moved to a New York so defined
by the billionaire mayor, and taken a reporting job I found
on Craigslist that involved reverse commuting to Long
Island, where I covered challah shortages and spelling
bees for a weekly Jewish newspaper that catered to
Orthodox communities. My college friends had cool-
sounding jobs at The Paris Review and Paper magazine.
I wasn’t sure exactly what memo I had missed about
how to get one of those, but I knew I was miserable.
52 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM
The weekly paper’s editor in chief ’s reportorial
instincts were actually quite good, but he seemed more
interested in converting me into Orthodox Judaism
than in teaching me about journalism, occasionally
sending me to synagogues on Friday nights for nebulous
assignments. I lived with two friends in a tiny box on
Avenue B. I was newly single and not eager to spend my
Friday nights at synagogues.
But finally, by my third decade, I had worked my way to
the Daily News and into the mainstream. Local papers
matter for local elections, and I finally felt like I was at the
right place for the right race. And Quinn was dominating
in the polls—until she wasn’t. By primary day in 2013, her
campaign had become a long-shot lost cause, and I was the
lucky reporter who spent the entire day with a downbeat
candidate who still had to go through the motions.
That September primary day was a hot one. Quinn,
along with a pack of staff and press (including me),
was standing on an Upper West Side corner when a girl
on her way home from school, dressed in a neon >62
AMY C HOZIC K
LEAVING IT ALL ON THE FLOOR
KARNI, ON DEADLINE IN SOUTH CAROLINA, DURING
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2016.
 EVERY YOUNG WOMAN DESERVES
THE OPPORTUNITY TO WRITE HER FUTURE
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Lancôme will provide mentorship, workshops, and scholarships to young women of color that are
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*UNESCO
A SEASON OF DARING
Up Front Election Season

green Coney Island tank top, caught a chance sighting at the Javits Center on election night in 2016. By then
of the would-be first female mayor of New York. The a reporter for Politico, I watched men and women
girl made her way over to Quinn, and before the candidate sobbing when it became clear that Donald Trump would
could say anything, the girl broke down in tears. prevail over Hillary Clinton. I sat in a taxi crossing
It was an unusual moment. Quinn wasn’t a global the Brooklyn Bridge home as Trump gave his victory
feminist icon like Hillary Clinton. In fact, she was later speech. The driver and I listened in silence.
criticized for downplaying gender in her race, refusing Many New Yorkers were still crying on the subway
to talk about what it would mean to have the first woman, the following morning. My own feelings were mostly
and the first openly gay elected official, running City of disorientation. (Clinton maybe felt some of that too;
Hall. Despite all that, something registered, and this girl she spent the next few months walking in the woods
was, out of nowhere, sobbing uncontrollably. Quinn with her dogs, where she was sometimes spotted by
put her arm around her shoulders. She quietly told her, hikers.) The 2016 campaign had been exhilarating and
“You made my day,” and gave the girl a hug. eye-opening, and had appealed to my natural proclivity
That evening, Quinn, whose close ties to Bloomberg to be part of events while also standing slightly outside
were both an asset and her undoing, came in a distant of them. The pace of campaigning drew me in—the
third to Bill de Blasio. I watched her end her campaign, excitement, that mix of collegiality and confrontation
and her political career, as Katy Perry’s “Roar” blared with the candidate—but also the feeling that what I was
across her somber election-night gathering at the Dream writing was important even when it was banal, and the
hotel in Chelsea. Conceding, Quinn said she was realization that what I wrote played a big role in what
disappointed but still believed in New York City’s future. happened. Or so I thought.
She promised her supporters that she was “optimistic.” The time spent building relationships with Clinton’s
Was I? Professional lives have inner circle? That now felt
natural chapters: the end of a big
case, the end of the school year.
After the 2016 campaign, wasted (even though it was not).
The candidate whose biography
Moving on from a family whose many of my colleagues I had studied and whose stump
child you cared for. There’s a sense speech I could recite by heart?
of finality, but also, hopefully, of
expressed the same feelings: Suddenly just a private citizen.
a new adventure. But at the end a futility of purpose. Did it The group of reporters forged
of an election, all the energy
and excitement culminates in an
matter what we wrote about into friendship by a shared
mission? Disbanded. After the
unsettled feeling. What now? the candidates at all? 2016 campaign, many of my
Where do we go from here? The colleagues expressed the same
public may be grappling with what the election means feelings: a futility of purpose. Did it even matter what
for existential issues like climate change, abortion rights, we wrote about the candidates at all?
and education. As a reporter you’re also wondering, But what was coming was even stranger—a losing
pettily and yet humanly, what am I going to do next—as candidate who refused to lose, a campaign that had no
in, tomorrow? What does it mean for me? end point. In fact, the Trump presidency changed
In my case, it meant covering Joe Lhota, the Republican everything—not least my professional path. My husband
nominee who would run against de Blasio in the general and I moved to Washington, DC, a city I had to grow
election that November. He’d served as deputy mayor on to like, and where I soon became a White House
September 11, 2001, helping to bring the city back from correspondent for The New York Times. I covered Trump’s
the brink. He never stood a chance of winning. reelection campaign in the age of the coronavirus, which
Standing with him at the Staten Island Ferry terminal, was an exercise in working from the bedroom, a prisoner
where he was supposed to be greeting conservative-leaning of our toddler who had co-opted our downstairs. There
commuters, I saw why. The fact was he hated campaigning, was little travel. There was a lot of death and fear.
much preferred gossiping with reporters, and spent most No news organization called the race on election night
of the hour letting streams of potential supporters glide 2020, and wouldn’t do so for days. Trump appeared at
by as he kibitzed with us. (He liked me because he got a the White House after 2 a.m., falsely declaring, “Frankly,
kick out of the fact that my then boyfriend, now husband, we did win this election,” and noting that despite
was also a journalist and had covered him as chairman millions of mail-in ballots left to count in closely contested
of the MTA. Years later, my husband took Lhota as his states, “we want all voting to stop.”
date to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.) We know what happened next: A violent mob
Was my fate in life to be assigned campaigns like these? attacked the Capitol. For 77 long days between the election
By the time the Daily News put me on the incredibly and the inauguration, Trump attempted to undermine
long-shot bid of one Zephyr Teachout, a lefty academic the result with a lie about fraud. In his bizarre exit from
who was making a quixotic bid to unseat Andrew Cuomo Washington, Trump had this to say from the tarmac
as governor of New York, I was beginning to wonder. at Joint Base Andrews: “Goodbye. We love you. We will
The feeling would only increase when I was stationed be back in some form.” C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 5 2

62 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM

*
 Graphic Detail
As cotton-candy pink goes mainstream and blue becomes

FAS HIO N E DITOR: PATRIC K MAC KIE . HAIR, GUIDO PA LAU; MAKEUP, DIAN E KE N DAL . D ETAILS, S EE IN THIS ISSU E .
a regular runway fixture, the future of hair color is here.

G
uido Palau is behold-
en to the scroll. “I fol-
low a lot of colorists
f rom Japan, China,
and Korea,” the legendary hairstyl-
ist says, noting a recent affinity for
a specific hair dye technique that
has long been popular in Asia and
that is beginning to proliferate in
the U.S. “It’s a kind of color con-
ceptualizing that feels computer-
ized almost,” says Palau, who has
built a beauty hypothesis around the
pervasive influence of technology.
After years of clinging to the idea
of “realness”—no-makeup make-
up, come-as-you-are hair—we are
now verging on the “hyperreal,” he
says, the result of our collective con-
sumption of archivable inspo photos
and avatar construction through the
glitchy pixels of our smartphones.
“There is a sci-fi anime feeling to it
for sure,” Lena Ott says of the specific
quality Palau has latched onto. Ott, the
New York–based colorist and frequent
Palau collaborator who is responsible
for his vivid emerald vision above, has
brought bright green bobs to Dolce
& Gabbana’s Alta Moda show; a blue
streak to Coach’s fall offering; and pink-,
aqua-, and lime-spiked tips to Thom
Browne’s spring fairy tale. As if on cue,
clients at Ott’s popular Suite Caroline
studio in SoHo are starting to ask for
brightness that’s “a little less smoky,” she
reports, and that leans toward applica-
tions that are “tacky, but rich.”
GOING META
Model Jay Pak wears a chromatic
cut designed by Guido Palau
and colorist Lena Ott. Photographed
by Richard Burbridge.
And what happens in the salon
often spills onto the red carpet. Jodie
Turner-Smith recently debuted a
saturated fuchsia, buzz-cut fade at
the New York Film Festival, and one
can’t help but recall images of Tilda
Swinton’s shade-shifting this summer
in Venice. The Oscar-winning actor
regularly treats her floppy-topped
quiff to off-kilter colors. But for The
Eternal Daughter premiere, she chose
a striking shade of Big Bird yellow.
(What the near-neon dye job lacked
in subtlety, it made up for in social
media impressions.)
You don’t have to go full Swinton
to engage in the fantasy, though, says
Palau. “Just take a wig to your col-
orist and dye it however you want,”
he advises. “It’s another fun acces-
sory for beauty experimentation.”
—celia ellenberg

68 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM

BEFORE AFTER
 Making Space
Nicolas Di Felice has taken

I
BON COURRÈGES!
clockwise from left: Bella Hadid on
Courrèges’s spring 2023 runway;

the fall 2022 menswear collection.

ABOVE RIG HT: S PYROS REN NT, COURTESY OF COURRÈG ES. H ADI D: G O RU N WAY.
ed. After launching his couture maison
in 1961, André Courrèges virtually
invented the futuristic grooviness of
the ’60s with his gleaming vinyl jackets
ABOVE L EFT: TOM DE PEY RET, COURTESY OF COU RRÈG ES.

was those fitting rooms, but also benches

where anyone dropping by the store could

Louis Vuitton—beckoned. >7 2

70 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM

M Y L A G O S M Y W AY

C AV I A R C O L L E C T I O N S
LAGOS.COM
 it with jeans as much as with leather head-to-toe. I’m
obsessed with workwear as much as couture,” he continues.
“It’s another kind of perfection: Everything has to be done
in the right materials, and with the right details.”
Proving his point, hanging alongside those instantly
recognizable Reedition jackets and miniskirts in the
house-classic vinyl (though today it’s a fabric made in a
far more environmentally minded manner, with 70 per-
cent of the urethane derived from vegetables) are flared
carpenter pants in crisp Japanese polyester and graphic rib
knits. Something else Di Felice has been obsessed with:
the fact that much of what André Courrèges created for
women happened in an era when emancipation was being
eagerly sought and fought for. “That’s a real subject with
his work, it’s important,” Di Felice says. “He really created
to let women feel more free.”
A few weeks later, in Paris, it’s clear that Di Felice still has
that uppermost in his mind for his spring 2023 collection,
which fuses the house signatures with scuba, surf—and the
BACK TO THE FUTURE
street: There’s a short dress that looks as if it’s been made
above: A double-breasted tweed coat by Courrèges, photographed
out of coral (actually, soft-to-the-touch silicon), jackets by Bert Stern, Vogue, 1969. below: A white whipcord trouser
in durable cotton drill worn as oversized shirts, crystal- suit from the house, photographed by William Klein, Vogue, 1964.
embroidered faded denim, and a series of sin-
uous tops and dresses based on a 1974 design
Di Felice found in the archives, swapping the
original’s spiraling zippers in favor of buttons.
The construction is so ingenious that what
looks three-dimensional and rounded on the
body is, when he lays one of the tops on the
floor of the studio, revealed to be a flat plane of
fabric, cleverly cut. “It’s been erased a bit—how
body-conscious his work was,” Di Felice says.
It’s something he has readily embraced, striking
a generational chord with so many young women
today, who feel empowered to present their
physicality in just the way they see fit. (It seems,
though, that the appeal is also cross-generational:
“In Paris—and maybe we’re going to see it here in
New York too,” says Di Felice, “we have mothers
and daughters shopping together.”)
The designer took on Courrèges after a very contented Now he calls the French capital home, and lives with
decade-plus spent working for Ghesquière. He arrived at his boyfriend near Buttes-Chaumont park in an apartment
Balenciaga as an intern in 2008 and quickly fell into step with 360-degree views of the city, biking nearby during his
with the vibe of the studio and its fierce work ethic, making downtime and going out clubbing at night. (He has cer-
his mark in more ways than one: The vintage biker jacket tainly made sure that Courrèges feels like a social, inclusive
Di Felice wore every day ended up in a Balenciaga collec- house, with parties and gatherings galore; a dinner he threw
ABOVE : PHOTO GRAPHE D BY B ERT STE RN . VOGUE , MARC H 15, 1969.

tion, and after finishing his two-month internship, he was the night of his show at an indoor multistory car park near
BE LOW: PHOTO GRAPHE D BY W ILLIAM K LE IN /TRUN K ARC HIVE .

called to come back after being home for only a few days.
(He hadn’t even unpacked.)
The pace suited him. “I first arrived there from my little
Brussels; I had not been sleeping for four years, because I
was a really active student, and was making music on the
side,” he recalls, laughing. Paris was still a bit of a shock,
though. Di Felice hails from a southern Belgian city called
Charleroi, and is the grandson of Italians who’d moved
there to work in its mines. “It’s called the Black Land,” says
Di Felice, a reference to the 19th-century coal industry
centered around the town. “There are these mountains of
charcoal, and with the wind, it would blow on all the houses,
making them just as black. It’s been called an ugly city, but
I think it’s really beautiful, really powerful.”
République was laid-back and enormous fun.)
Leaving Ghesquière and the team—people he viewed
as family—was a big step, one that made him question
what exactly he wanted out of both his career and his life.
Rather than send a bunch of sketches when he applied for
his new role, he sent a letter about his background, where
he came from—who he is. “It went on for three pages,”
he says, “and I think only one paragraph was about Cour-
règes.” He knew that going to the house could only be on
his own distinctly personal terms.
“The thing is, I had a good life, I had my friends. I didn’t
necessarily want to be an artistic director—it wasn’t my
main dream,” Di Felice says. He breaks into a smile. “My
main dream was—and it still is—to be happy.” @

72 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM

MACY’S
CHANEL .COM
 VOGUE.COM/SHOPPING
PLUS, SIGN UP FOR THE GET AND RECEIVE OUR TOP SHOPPING PICKS
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 Get Real
As the complexion care market
booms, MAC—the backstage beauty
authority—is banking on the idea
of building makeup from the skin up.
I
t might be assumed that a model’s runway makeup prep
begins with some concealer or foundation—maybe a
fluff of the powder brush. Not so: “Skin today has to
be flawless,” makeup artist Michaela Bosch proclaimed
backstage at Christopher John Rogers’s resort show, where
staggered swipes of statement lipstick in hot pink, deep
aubergine, and a bright cerise punctuated exaggerated sil-
houettes. Bosch was busy giving Nepalese mod-
el Varsha Thapa a facial massage with MAC’s
Hyper Real Serumizer, a new multitasking fluid
that officially launches in January. While no one
would confuse the behind-the-scenes chaos at
Fashion Week for a spa, the comparison was
there for the making: Among even the most
color-forward makeup brands, there’s a new
emphasis that it’s what’s underneath that counts.
After lockdown caused a spike in skin main-
tenance, makeup upstarts ( Jones Road, Merit,
Kosas), fashion-empire builders ( Jenni Kayne),
and even Dollar General have entered the surg-
ing market, which is expected to be worth nearly
76 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM
$187 billion by 2026. But of all the complexion care hope-
fuls, MAC has a legitimate claim to the category. “We have
to have skin care that works with makeup,” insists global
creative director Drew Elliott. “Performance-based skin
care just completes the kit.”
MAC has dabbled in a skin care–first approach to makeup
before. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a makeup artist’s bag
without the brand’s illuminating Strobe Cream or Prep +
Prime Fix+ setting spray.) But the Serumizer is a gel-like
hybrid treatment meant to benefit skin with or without
makeup: It hydrates with hyaluronic acid, refines pores with
ABOVE : PHOTO GRAPH BY IRVIN G PE N N, PEO NY ‘TE MPEST’, NEW YOR K, 1968 | © CON DÉ NAST.
niacinamide, strengthens the skin’s moisture barrier with
ceramides, and boosts radiance with a proprietary Japanese
peony extract. “The combination offers a powerhouse that
addresses multiple skin issues at the same time,” New York–
based dermatologist Joshua Zeichner, MD, confirms of the
first drop from the Hyper Real line, which will also include
a cleansing oil and moisturizing balm. That is likely wel-
come news to Thapa. As Rogers’s show
wound down and attendees filtered into
the balmy summer evening, the model
was spotted heading to a dinner with
her full makeup look still intact—and
still impressively dewy—the highest
form of praise.—lauren valenti
DEW DROP
above: The new Serumizer features
radiance-boosting Japanese peony
extract. left: Models Varsha Thapa’s
and Steph Shiu’s radiant skin
backstage at Christopher John Rogers.
Photographed by Hunter Abrams.
 the artist’s correspondence in facsimile, the better to appre-
ciate his doodles and drawings. Beginning in his childhood
Signs and and focusing on his early career, Love Lucian is a portrait in
sumptuous, illustrated collage of the artist’s development.

Symbols A domestic accident in which he cut his

hand meant that the naturally left-handed
boy had to begin writing with his right
New books ask how hand, but the gracefully colored-in loops
of young Freud’s cursive are a work of art
artists, designers, and writers in their own right.
make their mark. Is there something a little subversive
in the left-handed person’s perspective,
asks Judith Thurman in A Left-Handed

A
handful of delightfully, lav- Woman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Such
ishly assembled books offer orientation was once considered a “malign
options for thoughtful gifts aberration,” she points out, and schoolchil-
this holiday season, starting dren were routinely “switched” to facilitate
with art historian Matthew Wilson’s a more conventional grip. When
The Hidden Language of Symbols Thurman was a child, she was
(Thames & Hudson), an illustrated leg- warned not to refer to herself as a
end to the emblems within great works “leftie” lest she set off McCarthy-
of art throughout the centuries. That era alarm bells. Precision with
eagle almost blending into the chande- language has been a guiding
lier in Johannes Vermeer’s The Art of Painting principle for Thurman, whose
(1666–1668)? It’s an indication of the Dutch exacting profiles of mostly female
artist’s deep-seated Cathol- subjects ranging f rom Rachel
icism. That bull in Picasso’s Cusk to Marina Abramović to
Guernica? Its significance Charlotte Rampling are collected
stems from ancient Egypt here—they’re not all lefties, but
and Mesopotamia. The signs each has their own slant. For
are everywhere with this those who have followed the New
book as a guide. Yorker journalist’s writing, the col-
Why do we associate Jap- lection is a welcome review; for
anese design simultaneously the uninitiated it’s an intoxicat-
with stark minimalism and ing entry, tied together by a touching introduction
blinged-out, neon maximal- in which she admits that writing about others has

FRO M TO P: LOV E LUCIAN : COU RTESY O F THAMES & HU DSON. JAPANES E IN TERIORS: COURT ESY OF PH AIDO N.
ism? The answer, Mihoko offered her greater insight into herself.

Iida, an editor at Vogue Japan,
and Danielle Demetriou
suggest in Japanese Inte-
riors (Phaidon), has to do
with the island nation’s nat-
ural disaster–prone position
at the intersection of several
tectonic plates and its rank as one of the world’s
top consumers. A communal spirit also affects
interior design: A bookshelf, for example, would
not be placed in a multigenerational living area
without considering that it might topple over
if an earthquake struck. No matter how dom-
inant the pared-back concrete aesthetic (given
the prominence of certain starchitects) and a
possession-limited ethos (given the prominence
of certain organizational gurus) might be, this
book illustrates a truly stunning and full array.
The writing of an artist can reveal the theory
that underlies their work or musings on what
they’ve eaten for breakfast—a charming mix of high and
low. Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939–1954
(Thames & Hudson), edited by David Dawson and Martin
Gayford, presents one such agreeable assortment, offering
D IAG HILEV ’S EM PIRE: COU RTESY OF FARRAR, STRAUS AN D G IROUX. SURREND E R: COURTESY O F K NOP F.
For an even more eclectic assortment of holiday
reading, two major new ballet
books offer an on-point option
for dancers and their fans: Jen-
nifer Homans’s biography of
George Balanchine, Mr. B (Ran-
dom House), and Rupert Chris-
tiansen’s Diaghilev’s Empire: How
the Ballets Russes Enthralled
the World (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux). Other admirers of events
onstage will lose themselves in
D.T. Max’s collection of late-in-
life conversations with Stephen
Sondheim, collected in Finale
(Harper), or take a trip to Dublin
through Bono’s life-spanning new
memoir, Surrender (Knopf). Nino
Strachey’s Young Bloomsbury:
The Generation That Redefined
Love, Freedom, and Self-Expression in 1920s England
(Atria) explores a different artist era, while Hermès “nose”
Jean-Claude Ellena’s Atlas of Perfumed Botany (MIT Press)
dissects the natural artistry of scent.—chloe schama

78 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM

 Blanket Coverage
newest canvas. By Emma Elwick-Bates.
O
nce, not so many luxury
moons ago, reassuringly
hefty blankets in a subtle
Nancy Meyers palette of
cream, ecru, slate, or even espresso
sat neatly atop our crisp white bed-
sheets (or were artfully thrown over
the latest arrival from the 1stDibs
seating department). But aren’t we
all looking for something a bit more
substantial lately—something laden
with feeling, or meaning, whether
in our lives or our fashion and decor
choices? Colorful, well-designed
blankets may be an investment that
lasts, but recently they’ve been prov-
ing to be both a fascinating vehicle
for cross-cultural collaborations and
a cozy comfort that can add to the
social fabric of our homes.
84 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM
“A blanket’s just a rectangle, right?
So how do you create something
special with a rectangle?” asks Greg
Chait, who crafts hand-spun Techni-
color blankets for his label, The Elder
Statesman. “For me, it was about cash-
mere all the way—but finding a really
unique way of doing the yarn.”
It was one particularly amazing
blanket that inspired Chait—the win-
ner of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund
a decade ago—to launch his label in
2007. Soon, he was selling out at
LA’s Maxfield. “They asked if I could
THROWING SHAPES
Blankets by (clockwise, from bottom
left) Erdem, JW Anderson, Loewe,
The Elder Statesman, and Begg x Co.
Details, see In This Issue.
make more, so I made more,” Chait
says, with the easy West Coast charm
imbued in his creations. It’s such stuff
that fashion dreams are spun on.
I’m a proud member of the blan-
BL AN KE TS, C LO CKWIS E FRO M BOTTOM L EFT: COURTESY E RDE M;
ket brigade: A generous toffee-and-
E LDE R ESTATES MAN; COU RTESY BEGG & CO. IMAAN HAMMAM:
white floral merino wool Erdem,
PH OTO GRAPH ED BY JAMIE H AWK ESWORTH, VO GU E, 2018.
draped over an arm on the runway, is
COURTESY J WA; COURTESY LOEW E; COU RTESY TH E
now layered over a Paustian sheep-
skin chair in my reading nook. It’s
a showpiece—every bit as much as
my Juniper volumes. Another house
prize: a rainbow cashmere Loewe
blanket gifted at birth to my son by
his godfather (and the house’s cre-
ative director) Jonathan Anderson.
Its brightening presence combats
both shivers and snotty noses and
makes a chirrupy cover on the grayest
of winter days. >86
 Anderson offers what he calls “flat
art” at both Loewe and his own JW
Anderson label, where he’s been col-
laborating with Dame Magdalene
Odundo DBE and New York–born
ceramist and performance artist Sha-
wanda Corbett. Whatever you call it,
the blanket you’re seeking should be
at once cocoon and butterf ly. The
fashion choices abound: Erdem’s
whipstitched throws reimagine
his Ottoline Chine f loral print in
bordeaux, green, camel, and gray;
understated neutrals add a further
cloak of great taste at both The
Row and Khaite; Gabriela Hearst,
a willowy fan of the wearable blan-
ket, creates her multicolored fringed
cashmere with Manos del Uruguay,
a nonprofit organization that helps
women in rural villages earn a living
through traditional craftsmanship.
Begg x Co, in Ayr, on the west coast
of Scotland, has been combining arti-
san technique with disruptive design.
“Textiles make us feel human,” says
Florence Lafarge, creative director of
home textiles for Hermès. Since its
launch in 1988, their hero blanket has
been the H-emblazoned Avalon, just
a small neigh from the house’s eques-
trian roots. (The blanket is named after
the island of Arthurian legend, which
was ruled by the enchantress Morgan
le Fay and her eight sisters, all of
them skilled in the healing arts.) Her-
mès produces a limited number each
year, and their value—financial and
otherwise—has increased over time.
Forever pioneering, Hermès con-
tinues to explore blanket possibil-
ities, recently launching its biggest
artisan throw to date: the Surface, a
seven-by-eight-foot patchwork affair
of quilted cashmere hexagons. (Less
hefty, but a brilliant gift, is Mètier
London’s patterned cashmere throw
made from a sustainable yarn in the
hills of Tuscany, which works equally
as well as an in-flight stole or draped
somewhere at home.)
The captivating stripes of Jona-
than Saunders’s geometric throws,
meanwhile—made in Los Angeles
from hand-dyed mohair cashmere and
recycled wool yarns—have shown the
Scot’s softer side at Saunders Studio,
where he has been exploring bold,
clean lines in his furniture work. “By
design, blankets are flexible, movable,
versatile. I find the contrast exciting,
as I did designing clothes—like a
hypermodern skirt in technical shine
with an organic-feeling knit,” Saun-
ders says. “It’s just a reflection of how
we live. Who matches these days?” @

From the
Ground Up
A new resort in New York state brings
you to nature and nature to you.

I
’ve never thought of myself as much of a carrot farmer.
(As a committed city dweller, I never much considered
the vegetable’s provenance.) Yet, on a late September
afternoon, I found myself with hands submerged in
crumbly dirt as a farmer named Jax examined my grip.
“Now gently pull,” he counseled. A quick tug revealed a
stubby orange Atlas.
I was foraging at Wildflower Farms, a new Auberge
resort nestled at the foothills of the Catskill Mountains,
where you can also rock-climb on nearby boulders, bake
with pansy petals and other edible botanicals, release your
children to fend for themselves in the nature playground
while you meander the miles of hiking trails that snake
along the Hudson River, or partake in seasonally themed
treatments at the sleek spa. “The core concept that we
kept coming back to was giving people meaningful experi- FIELD DAY City–based team Ward
ences with the natural world,” says Phillip Rapoport, who The meadowed grounds at the and Gray. “We took that
co-owns the resort alongside his wife, Kristen, and their new Wildflower Farms. palette and brought it
business partner Zachary Kleinhandler. inside,” Kristen says. There
COURTESY OF ELIS E TAYLOR.

That ethos extends beyond activities. The hotel’s “lobby”
is an open-air space with blazing firepits and couches
swathed in velvet; cabins feature floor-to-ceiling windows
that frame meadows dotted with goldenrods, cornflow-
ers, and Indian paintbrush. An updated Americana aes-
thetic—inspired by the fiery colors of a tree in autumnal
transition—defines the interiors designed by New York
are patchwork quilts, electric log ovens, and bobbin chairs
sourced from a local antiques store and reupholstered in
a Pierre Frey fabric. At the end of the day, with the dirt
scrubbed from underneath my nails, I sat on a porch in one
of these old-meets-new rockers and sipped an apple cider
while gazing at the Shawangunk Ridge, not quite a farmer,
but not quite so far from one.—elise taylor

86 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM

 a moment in time
a lifetime of memories
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memories. Magical experiences colored by the bluest waters, verdant landscapes, and golden
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 HAPPY FEET
Bruno Frisoni is putting the petal to the mettle with the relaunch
of his signature line, including these My Tulip heels.

as a “startup,” as he calls it. “It was something I couldn’t

not do,” an ebullient Frisoni says over Zoom from his
home in Paris’s Le Marais.
Free to design as he pleased, Frisoni found himself
“revisiting some of my obsessions,” including riot-
ous f lorals and ribbons. And while his silhouettes
tend to be classic, they’re never expected and never
boring—much like the women Frisoni caters to.
“The women who wear my shoes have a very
strong character,” he says. “They love fantasy,
and they love something that is different.”
Once again he used salvaged jean
jackets as source material for
some of the pieces—“using
existing materials immedi-
ately delivers a
cool factor,”
Frisoni says.
One mule
came to life
after he draped

Back
a piece of leather a certain way and found that it resem-
bled a sculpture by John Chamberlain, perhaps best known
for his use of scrap metal from old automobiles.

in Bloom
His return is well-timed: After a recent evolution
toward sneakers, lower heels, and ugly-chic shoes, putting
on something so playful, so colorful, and so pretty feels
like an act of joyous defiance—and this, Frisoni says, is
Bruno Frisoni, a master only a hint of what’s to come. “Expect more daring, more
of unabashedly joyous shoes, uniqueness—whether in material, shape, or volume.”
The refinement, he assures me, will
relaunches his label. remain at its current high level.

T
“I believe sexy and sophis-
hree years after Bruno Frisoni launched his epon- ticated shoes needed an
ymous shoe label in 1999—a pump composed of update.”—sarah
denim scraps sourced from a vintage jacket was spellings
an early creation—he was asked to revive Roger
Vivier, the storied French house that remains indeli-
ble thanks to a square-buckled cameo on Catherine
Deneuve in Belle de Jour. By the time Frisoni showed
his final Vivier collection in 2018—he’d shuttered
his own line in 2011—he had cemented his rep-
utation as a fantastical designer adept at using
everything from feathers, jewels, and embroidery
with a reckless, dreamy abandon.
Not long after departing Vivier, though,
Frisoni found that he simply couldn’t resist
sketching once again. That turned into manip-
ulating fabrics to see how
they would look on a shoe,
COURTESY OF BRUN O F RISO NI

which led to making some

samples, which led to his
relaunching Bruno Frisoni

88 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM

©2022 Walmart Inc.
 Collective Soul
In the season’s best new documentaries and dramatic
films, we’re all stronger together.
F
amilies—of choice, fate, or circumstance—are
sources of power in a suite of fascinating year-end
films. Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, a strikingly
faithful adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel
about consumerism, post-industrial paranoia, and fear of
death, is the biggest and highest-minded swing of the
season. Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a professor at
a fictional liberal arts college, and he’s a marvel of comic
energy, as personable as he is hilariously puffed-up. Gre-
ta Gerwig is his genial wife, Babette, with a perm and
a secret pill habit, and their four kids form a chorus of
pop-cultural erudition. When a chemical spill unleashes
an Airborne Toxic Event on their small college town, the
family and seemingly everyone around them piles into
their station wagons to escape it. A boisterous vision of
modern anxieties run amok.
The 1980s also fuel the triumphant documentary All the
Beauty and the Bloodshed, a collaboration between the
director Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) and artist Nan Goldin,
whose life and activism against the Sackler family, the own-
ers of Purdue Pharma, are the film’s absorbing subjects. It
opens with the series of actions Goldin organized at prom-
inent New York museums, strewing prescription slips and
empty pill bottles—symbols of Purdue’s deadly opioids—to
shine a hard light on the millions donated by the Sacklers.
Rousing as these scenes are, it is the way Poitras burrows
deeper into Goldin’s background and art that make the film
PERSONAL STAKES
Nan Goldin’s Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston, 1973. Goldin is the
subject of Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.
90 DECEMBER 2023 VOGUE.COM
so profound—charting a narrative of trauma and neglect
(and drug abuse), and showing how Goldin found a com-
munity in an underground 1980s Manhattan scene that she
NAN G OL DIN , PIC NIC ON THE ES PLANADE , BOSTO N (1973). COURTESY OF THE ARTI ST AN D MARIAN GO O D MA N GALL E RY.
went on to document in unforgettably gritty photographs.
A poised and meticulous film that brims with humanity.
Another intensely human story, Broker, is the first film
by the great Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplift-
ers) set in Korea, and its unlikely hero is a mother, So-young
(Lee Ji-eun), who abandons her infant at a care center in
Busan. Two men, Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) and Dong-
soo (Gang Dong-won), collect the baby and seek to profit
from its sale. Nothing about that setup suggests the ami-
able warmth that takes hold as these three band together
to find the baby new parents, even as police investigating a
murder track their movements and an orphan looking for
a new home joins their group. Heartbreaking in its empa-
thy, Broker is a drama of intense, gracious feeling.
From light to dark: Sarah Polley’s arresting ensemble
Women Talking is an adaptation of Miriam Toews’s 2018
novel, and it plays as an extended debate by a collection of
women in a deeply religious community in which sexual
violence by men is the shattering norm. After one of these
nighttime attacks is publicly revealed, the women gather
to decide how to respond: forgive the men, fight them, or
flee? Every great female actor of our moment seems to be
in this movie, including Frances McDormand (command-
ing), Claire Foy (ferocious), Jessie Buckley (equally so), and
Rooney Mara (strong and delicate at once). A thoughtful
exploration of solidarity—what it means, how hard it’s
won—Women Talking is a conversation piece, and one of
the year’s must-see films.—taylor antrim
ADVER TISEMENT
 Hollywood and Vine
The curious case of Brad Pitt, Château Miraval, and a compelling
new luxury beauty line. By Kathleen Baird-Murray.
B
rad Pitt has not read the beauty
tutorial memo. We’re 25 min-
utes into my interview with
the newly minted skin care
brand founder at Château Miraval,
the sprawling property and vineyard in
the South of France that Pitt bought
with Angelina Jolie in 2008, and after
a few quick-fire exchanges we arrive at
the inevitable question: “What’s your
regimen?” I ask, with a certain amount
of trepidation. “Can we have a product
demonstration?”
Pitt balks, smiling. “I’m not doing
that! ”
“Maybe just talk about how your
routine has evolved, then? Just don’t
make it too QVC,” I suggest to the
Academy Award–winning actor and
producer, hoping he might warm to
the idea of applying face creams while
being filmed.
“I wouldn’t know how to do that,
unless it was a comedy,” Pitt laughs,
crediting his relationship with Gwyn-
eth Paltrow for initially turning him
on to the benefits of proper skin
92 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM
cleansing after an early fealty to Dial
soap. “Actually, Sandy [Sandra Bull-
ock] and I did once try to develop a
whole idea of a husband-and-wife
team who were QVC’s most success-
ful salespeople, but we’re getting a
divorce, we hate each other, and we’re
taking it out on-air as we sell things.
That’s as far as we got.”
The world never got the Pitt-
Bullock rom-com we deserve, but the
59-year-old is giving us Le Domaine,
a science-meets-nature line of gen-
derless skin care essentials that he
developed in partnership with the
Perrin family, the renowned Château
de Beaucastel vintners who are also
Pitt’s partners in Miraval’s popular
rosé. “Landing here opened up a lot
of ideas that I wouldn’t have normally
considered,” Pitt says of the fertile
Provençal estate. “The health prop-
erties of grape skins is something we
wanted to investigate, but the initial
idea [for a skin care line], right from
the beginning, comes back to this
place. It’s just steeped in creativity.”
While Pitt made a conscious deci-
sion not to front the brand as the
“face” of Le Domaine—there will be
no campaign portraits, no Brad on
TikTok, and very few interviews after
this one—he has been hands-on with
its concept, which revolves around the
familiar story of grape-based antiox-
idants that has long been mined by
more established brands. But Le
Domaine approached the idea in
its own way, appointing one of the
world’s leading wine and human
health specialists, University of Bor-
deaux professor of enology Pierre-
Louis Teissedre, to determine which
of the 13 grape varieties grown on the
Perrin family’s estates had the most
relevant antioxidant properties. That
research began over 10 years ago, and
may have resulted in the next big
thing in skin care: GSM10, an exclu-
S ERG E C HAPUIS, 2013.
sive molecule in Le Domaine’s > 9 4
A CERTAIN VINTAGE
Pitt with vintner and Miraval winemaker
Marc Perrin at the Provençal château.
no digital
distortion
 Serum, Cream, Fluid Cream, and
Cleansing Emulsion that combines
potent properties f rom the seeds
and skins of Grenache, Syrah, and
Mourvèdre grapes. Combined with
grapevine-derived resveratrol that
aims to keep skin cells healthier lon-
ger, it serves as a powerful antidote to
oxidative stress, which can break down
collagen and contribute to the myriad
physical signs of aging.
Finally, there’s the magical nature
of Miraval’s soil itself—the terroir, as
it’s called by enologists—in this case
terrace upon terrace of olive trees,
miles and miles of otherworldly
lichen-encrusted woodland, and air so
thick with lavender that at one point
I seriously wonder if it’s being arti-
ficially pumped in. No pesticides are
used on the property, where all farm-
ing is done biodynamically; the clay-
and limestone-rich soil is plowed to
encourage the root vines to reach deep
down into the ground for moisture.
The deeper the roots grow, the better
their interaction with the soil, which
creates that much-sought-after com-
plexity in Miraval’s grapes as well as
in its olive oil, another central ingre-
dient in the sustainable line. Refillable
bottles feature wooden caps recycled
from old wine casks.
Later, while I was stuck at the
easyJet terminal in Marseille with
Teissedre, the professor tells me that
the research into this project has
been supremely exacting—even by
his standards—which reminds me of
something Pitt had told me as we sat
in his well-appointed outdoor living
area. “I know there are new products
nearly every day that people are try-
ing to launch,” he said, overlooking
the soccer pitch he added to Miraval’s
property for his kids. “But if I hadn’t
seen a real difference visually in my
skin, we wouldn’t have bothered.” As I
sat just a few feet away from his clear,
sun-dappled complexion, it was hard
to argue with that logic. @
BOTTLED UP
Le Domaine’s
four-piece range
features potent
antioxidants from a
blend of grape skins
and seeds combined
with grapevine-
derived resveratrol.

PORTRAIT OF
A LADY
from far left:
Brown’s The Night
before the Alcatraz
Swim, 1975; a
1970 photograph
of the artist by

HIG HLAN D PARK , ILLINO IS. COU RTESY O F THE SAN F RAN C ISCO MUS EUM O F MO DE RN ART. PHOTO GRAP H BY GL EN C H ERITON, 1970.
ABOVE : NICOLAS FAC EN DA. THE N IG HT BE FO RE THE ALCATRAZ SWIM , 1975, O IL EN AME L ON CANVAS, 8 4 X 72 I N. GUC COL LECT IO N,
Glen Cheriton.

COURTESY OF TH E ESTATE O F J OAN B ROWN /IMPART P HOTOG RAP HY FOR THE SAN F RANC ISCO MUSEUM O F MO DE R N ART.
retrospective at
the San Francisco
Museum of Mod-
ern Art this winter.
Brown was freshly out of art school when she first found
a following in the early 1960s, creating heavily impas-
toed canvases that blurred the line between abstraction
and figuration. Discomfited by the demands of the art
market, however, she soon changed course, pivoting to a
flat, almost cartoonish style that favored portraiture and
unselfconscious sentimentality. (Personal hobbies, includ-
ing swimming and baking cookies, had a way of showing
up in the work.) “She really had so much to lose at that

Free Form time, in switching gears and being true to herself instead
of delivering on expectations,” says Janet Bishop, a curator
at SFMoMA. Still, Brown was irrepressible: “She really
A hero of San Francisco’s art scene painted whatever she wanted to paint.” That fact is clear
in the exhibition, which spans some 80 artworks executed
gets another look. over 35 years—but her greatest achievement isn’t hanging

L
ong before Big Tech moved in, San Francisco was an
artistic haven; a place where Frida Kahlo and Diego
Rivera settled down not once, but twice; and where
a small group of painters established their own
fledgling aesthetic movement in the 1950s, now known as
Bay Area Figuration. From that fertile ground sprang Joan
Brown (1938–1990), the bewitching subject of a major
on a wall. A devoted instructor at Berkeley, Mills College,
and other local institutions, Brown was most fulfilled in
the classroom, sharing her democratizing approach to
art-making with students. “In the last decade of her life,”
notes Nancy Lim, SFMoMA’s associate curator of painting
and sculpture, “she wrote a number of times in her journal
that she had come to believe that teaching was her highest
service in this life.”—marley marius

94 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM

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 SWEPT AWAY
“I’m not one of these
tortured artists,”
Lopez says. “When I
make my best music
or my best art is
when I’m happy and
full and feel lots of
love.” Gucci gown.
Fashion Editor:
Alex Harrington.

Jennifer Lopez has always led with

her heart. Now, newly wed and about
to release a highly personal album,
she has achieved something hard-won:
true happiness. By Rob Haskell.
Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
 n a disquietingly hot We are sitting between takes in not traditional. It doesn’t have any
and windy Octo- her tent on the soundstage, where romance to it. It feels like it’s a power
ber day at the outer great efforts have been made to cre- move, you know what I mean? I’m
edges of the S an ate an oasis on a hectic, buzzing set. very much in control of my own life
Fern a n d o Va l l e y, Her favorite candle flickers on a and destiny and feel empowered as a
Jennifer Lopez—who cream-colored faux-shagreen desk, woman and as a person. I can under-
has never been accused of lacking and a black Hermès blanket is draped stand that people have their feelings
ambition—is saving the world. Not over the massage table. In the little about it, and that’s okay, too. But if
this world, though it surely also needs living room, a marble chess set rests you want to know how I feel about
saving, but an imagined dystopia on a marble coffee table, and above it it, I just feel like it’s romantic. It still
some century ahead in which robots, hangs a green neon sign whose soft carries tradition and romance to me,
according to their frustrating cus- cursive reads “Mrs. Affleck.” It was a and maybe I’m just that kind of girl.”
tom, threaten the human race. gift from the crew. That Lopez has pursued love
“To me, it’s a love story,” says Lopez, Lopez, her hair matted, her neck across four marriages, two broken
and she laughs. and temple caked with fake blood, engagements, and assorted misbe-
She laughs because of course she is surprised to learn that a few days gotten alliances over 25 years should
would see it thus, because love is her after her marriage this July, The New be news to almost no one. Neither
big project in this world, her messy, York Times published an opinion is the fact that her great romantic
public, decades-long, experiment has coin-
sometimes glamorous, cided with a relentless
sometimes treacherous,
often thwarted project, “I just feel like professional momentum,
an enormously produc-
the lens that when it tive and still expand-
comes down over her eyes
can’t help but turn every-
it’s romantic,” she says ing career (more than
30 movies, eight studio
thing as pink as the six-
carat diamond with which
about adopting albums, a dizzying array
of branding endeavors),
Ben Affleck proposed to
her the first time, in 2002.
But Atlas—the movie she
her husband’s surname. and now, at the age of 53,
an untouchable aura that
somehow contains glam-
is shooting today, part
of a new deal between
“It still carries tradition our, grit, and goodness all
at once. While it some-
her film company, Nuy-
orican Productions, and and romance to me, times seems as if Beyoncé
might live on a small,
Netflix—isn’t most peo- satin-upholstered space
ple’s idea of a love story.
In fact, it’s a straight-up
and maybe I’m just that station, Lopez, despite her
aura, has remained acces-
sci-fi action thriller, in
which Lopez plays a mil-
kind of girl” sible, real, gears exposed,
Jenny f rom the block
itary intelligence analyst and all that. Though she
assigned to reconfigure a potentially piece expressing disappointment possesses an unusually deft touch
lethal form of artificial intelligence. that at a moment when feminist with the press, dusting the trail with
Though the costumery is more Mad ideals felt imperiled in America, crumbs and remaining an object of
Max than Wedding Planner, scholars Lopez had taken her husband’s name. extreme media fascination for a quar-
of the Jennifer Lopez catalog will (She shared this news, along with ter century, Lopez has also built more
find in Atlas’s protagonist a familiar a few photos of the family jaunt to walls around her over the years.
character: the headstrong careerist Vegas, in her free, subscription-based “In the beginning I was of the mind
with little time for life’s mushier feel- “On the JLo” newsletter, where her that I could say or do anything,” she
ings until the right man (or droid) biggest fans get a not overly filtered recalls. “I was from the Bronx, and
comes along. but nevertheless highly curated who didn’t say what they thought
“Closed off. Totally obsessed with monthly update about her life.) there?” Her early relationship with
her work. Dealing with a lot of pain “What? Really?” she asks. “Peo- Affleck offered a cruel lesson, as the
and sadness f rom her childhood,” ple are still going to call me Jennifer tabloid press denigrated her with
Lopez continues, making an explicit Lopez. But my legal name will be racist and classist dog whistles; South
allusion to the porousness that Mrs. Affleck because we’re joined Park parodied her viciously, and
has characterized the relationship together. We’re husband and wife. Conan O’Brien told his audience that
between her life and her art over the I’m proud of that. I don’t think that’s the show’s “cleaning lady” would be
last three decades. “She has to learn a problem.” You mean there’s no playing Lopez in a sketch. “We were
how to let him in so that they can be part of you that might want Ben to so young and so in love at that time,
stronger together.” be Mr. Lopez? She laughs. “No! It’s really very carefree, with no kids, no

102
NATURAL WONDER
The new album is on its
way and Lopez has a pair
of films coming out next
year—Shotgun Wedding
and The Mother. Saint
Laurent by Anthony
Vaccarello jacket, blouse,
skirt, and brooch.
 AIRTIME
“The two of us, we
lost each other and
found each other,”
Lopez says of Ben
Affleck, whom she
wed this summer.
Dior jacket, bra, and
skirt. Alaïa boot.

attachments. And we were just living

our lives, being happy and out there.
It didn’t feel like we needed to hide
from anybody or be real discreet. We
were just living out loud, and it turned
out to really bite us. There was a lot
underneath the surface there, people
not wanting us to be together, people
thinking I wasn’t the right person for
him.” Over the ensuing years Lopez
has seemed to gather a force field
around her, as if weaponized against
derisive scrutiny. “I became very
guarded because I realized that they
will fillet you. I really wish I could say
more. I used to be like that. I am like
that. But I’ve also learned.”
Lopez would like especially to
say more about the journey back to
Ben Affleck, which, really, has been a
journey of self-discovery that began
around 12 years ago, when she was
newly separated from the singer-actor
Marc Anthony and suddenly a single
mother of twin babies. It was the pro-
fessional and emotional low point of
her career: A couple of albums had
sputtered, and she no longer seemed
to be getting the movie offers that had
flowed in in previous years. Finan-
cially strained and somewhat aimless,
in 2011 she accepted a job as a judge
on American Idol, which, to her great
surprise, reinvigorated her career. It
turned out that the human touch was
what her audience, and the industry,
needed from her.
“It was like, Oh! That’s all I had
to do this whole time was be myself?
Although it was a competition, it was
a reality show,” she explains, “and I
had never done one. Up until then we
only had what the media was telling
you about me. I loved meeting the
kids because I so identified with their
dreams—I just loved it. There were a
lot of things that people saw through

104
 that show, but more than anything I
think they saw my heart, that I was a
cool, funny person, that I was a nice
person. No matter how many awards
shows you do or late-night talk show
couches you sit on, people feel like
you’re putting something on. With
a reality show, you can’t hide behind
a script or a four-minute interview.
You’re out there.”
At the same time, Lopez was pri-
vately beginning a process of self-
reflection and self-improvement that
emanated f rom the experience of
motherhood. Motifs had emerged in
her unsuccessful romantic relation-
ships, which she felt ready to disrupt.
“I just didn’t understand what it was
to care for myself, to not put some-
body else’s feelings and needs—and
your need for them to love you—in
front of taking care of yourself,” she
says. “You turn yourself into a pret-
zel for people and think that that’s a
noble thing, to put yourself second.
And it’s not. Those patterns become
deep patterns that you carry with you,
and then at a certain point you go,
Wait, this doesn’t feel good. Why am
I never happy? I really felt that way
for a long time. And finally I was just
like, Ugh! It’s time to figure me out
because I need to be good for these
babies. And even from there, with all
the willingness I had, it took years and
years to really put the pieces together,
like, Oh, this thing I do because of
this, that thing I do because that hap-
pened to me at this age.”
L opez grew up in the Castle
Hill neighborhood of the Bronx,
in what she describes as a typical
working-class Puerto Rican house-
hold. Though her background has
been overmined for clues to future
greatness—the strict upbringing,
church every Sunday, early exposure
by her mother to musicals, an impres-
sive high school athletic career—two
details stand out. Guadalupe Rodrí-
guez was a young mother, fun and
performative but tough as nails and
sometimes overwhelmed with her
three daughters, not above resorting
to corporal punishment with them,
which Jennifer has tried to under-
stand as the custom of the time and
place. “We respected her, but we also
feared her,” she recalls. “She did what
she needed to keep us in line.” And
106
David Lopez, her father, worked
nights and wasn’t always available to
his family. When they divorced, after
33 years of marriage, Jennifer recalls,
it came as a shock, though perhaps it
shouldn’t have.
Over the course of our discussions,
Lopez alludes to encounters with
self-help texts, meditation, psycho-
therapy, psychiatry, and life coach-
ing. She appears to have attacked
the project of working through her
childhood trauma, and its present-
day reverberations in the form of
unhealthy attachments, with the
same intensity she has brought to her
career pursuits. “My parents taught
me the value of hard work and the
importance of being a good person,”
she explains. “But the combination of
them was what I’ve had to figure out.
It shaped what I liked as far as my
personal life was concerned. With-
out infringing on their privacy, that
was it: Who your mom is and who
your dad is and how they love you and
teach you to love become the positive
and negative patterns that you have to
overcome in life.”
opez and I meet for
breakfast at the Polo
Lounge at the Beverly
Hills Hotel, at a table in
the very back of the gar-
den, in front of which a
large potted privet creates the safety
of vagueness. The restaurant is a sort
of default meeting place for the res-
idents of high-hedged neighboring
enclaves such as Bel Air and Holmby
Hills, and she arrives without secu-
rity. Privacy is important to her, but
it’s also important that people under-
stand that she is not asking for any-
one’s sympathy for the tariffs of fame.
“The other day,” she recalls, “one of
my kids said, ‘I want to go to the flea
market.’ I was like, ‘Oh, you want me
and Ben to come?’ They said, ‘You
know, it’s such a thing when you go,
Mom.’ It hurt my feelings. I get it.
They want time with their friends
when they aren’t being watched and
followed and photographed. It’s a
thing. Nobody’s complaining, but
it’s a thing.”
She eats a bowl of oatmeal with
cinnamon and sugar, a popular Puerto
Rican breakfast, as her mother made
it, and drinks a decaf cappuccino (she
gave up caffeine years ago). She wears
a black denim jacket with the collar
turned up, her hair is pulled into a
tight bun, her skin is preternaturally
youthful—perhaps the twin effect of
DNA and the olive oil–rich tinctures
in her JLo Beauty line. (To answer a
question that many people asked me
after we met, yes. She is absolutely as
beautiful in person.)
“I’m not one of these tortured art-
ists,” Lopez says. “Yes, I’ve lived with
tremendous sadness, like anybody
else, many, many times in my life, and
pain. But when I make my best music
or my best art is when I’m happy and
full and feel lots of love.” Such was
the mood that surrounded the writ-
ing and recording of her forthcoming
album, which will be her first in nearly
a decade. I’m not allowed to reveal the
title, but suffice it to say that it serves
as a kind of bookend to This Is Me…
Then, the album she released 20 years
ago in the heady early days of her rela-
tionship with Affleck.
Lopez’s longtime manager, Benny
Medina, told me that Lopez has a
way of falling in love with whatever
she is immersed in at the moment.
While she has several films out in the
coming months, including the rom-
com-with-a-twist Shotgun Wedding
this winter and The Mother, in which
she stars as an ex-assassin, in the
middle of next year, it is this album
that pulls Lopez’s enthusiasm at the
moment. She says that it will be the
most honest work she has ever done,
“kind of a culmination of who I am as
a person and an artist. People think
they know things about what hap-
pened to me along the way, the men
I was with—but they really have no
idea, and a lot of times they get it so
wrong. There’s a part of me that was
hiding a side of myself from everyone.
And I feel like I’m at a place in my life,
finally, where I have something to say
about it.” She lends me her AirPods
so that I can listen to a few rough cuts
from the record. There are plaintive,
confessional songs, reflections on the
trials of her past, upbeat jams cele-
brating love and sex. As I’m listening,
I notice that she has closed her eyes,
and she is dancing in her chair and
singing along to her own voice. For
a moment it occurs to me that she
might be treating me to a little per- your neighbor, all the things that peo- wanted her to know that he had pro-
formance, but no, she is just so into it. ple say they stand for but then they vided a rave. They kept talking. They
You might say that Lopez has been don’t practice because somebody’s started visiting each other at home.
in a kind zone since 2019–2020, the not the same as them or somebody “Obviously we weren’t trying to go
period that she regards as her career’s has a different sexual orientation or out in public,” she explains. “But I
peak so far. She delivered a critically gender identity or a different race. It’s never shied away from the fact that
heralded performance in Hustlers, like, Really? You can’t just do you? You for me, I always felt like there was a
her most successful movie to date; can’t just be you and be happy and let real love there, a true love there. Peo-
she completed a 38-show, interna- somebody else be happy too?” ple in my life know that he was a very,
tional concert tour, also her most She says the Affleck-Lopez home very special person in my life. When
successful to date; she walked the in Los Angeles is a place where this we reconnected, those feelings for me
runway for Versace in a reincarna- newly blended family (her 14-year- were still very real.”
tion of her iconic green jungle-print old twins, his three children from his She says that she and Affleck are as
Grammys dress on the occasion of its marriage to Jennifer Garner, ranging stunned as anyone else to have man-
20th anniversary (and held her own, in age from 10 to 17) is passionate aged to recapture an early, important
she thought, in a sea of 19-year-old and vocal about a range of political love, and the fairy-tale ending-ness of
models); she co-headlined the Super and social issues. “This generation is it all continues to amuse them. (This
Bowl halftime show; and she turned beautifully aware and involved and is not to say that she is rolling her eyes.
50. “It was like, fashion! Lopez believes in the fairy
movies! music! It was tale. A plaque displayed
all coming together,”
she recalls. She also felt “You turn yourself at their wedding, held at
Affleck’s home in Savan-
emboldened to take a nah, Georgia, this August,
public political stand,
adding a segment to
into a pretzel for people a month after they were
legally married, read, Love
her Super Bowl set in
which Latinx children,
and think that that’s always hopes and always
perseveres.) “I don’t know
among them her own
child, Emme, sang her a noble thing, to put that I recommend this
for everybody,” she says.
hit “Let ’s Get Loud” “Sometimes you outgrow
f rom inside cages—a
rebuke against the
yourself second. each other, or you just
grow differently. The two
Trump administration’s
injustices at the border. And it’s not…at a certain of us, we lost each other
and found each other.
According to Lopez, the
NFL initially wanted to
cut the act from her pro-
point you go, Wait, Not to discredit anything
in between that happened,
because all those things
gram, but she held firm.
“Early in my career
this doesn’t feel good” were real too. All we’ve
ever wanted was to kind of
people would ask about come to a place of peace in
politics, but I always felt like people brave,” she says, “and they will call our lives where we really felt that type
didn’t really want to hear from an bullshit on stuff really quick. I want of love that you feel when you’re very
actor or somebody who sang pop my kids to stand up for themselves young and wonder if you can have
songs,” she remembers. “Like a shut- and the things they care about. I want that again. Does it exist? Is it real? All
up-and-dance kind of situation. I all the little girls in the world to get those questions that I think everyone
didn’t have the confidence, and I loud. Get loud! Say it when it’s wrong. has. You go through all these relation-
didn’t want to make a mistake. But Don’t be afraid. I was afraid for a long ships, and you’re searching and you’re
you get to a point in your life where time: afraid to not get the job, to piss connecting and you’re disconnecting
you realize, if something’s wrong, you people off, afraid that people wouldn’t with people, and you’re like, God, is
say it. If you’re not doing something like me. No.” this just what life is? Like a carousel,
about it then you’re kind of complicit. Lopez’s intimates know that she roller coaster, carnival ride? And then
Whether it was kids in cages, or kids has always held a candle for Affleck. it settles. But the journey to that is the
getting shot in the street by police— Shortly after she and the retired base- mystery for everybody.”
all these things where it was just like, ball great Alex Rodriguez called off Though she did not use this word,
What the hell is going on around their engagement in early 2021, she my sense is that Lopez and Affleck
here? When did we lose our way? got an email from the actor-director, are both in a kind of recovery, in their
There were so many awful, ugly atti- who had just come out of a relation- separate ways. Affleck has struggled
tudes coming to light. It was really sad ship with the actress Ana de Armas. with alcoholism for more than 20
because it didn’t need to be political. It A magazine had asked Affleck for years and more recently worked hard
was about being a good person, loving a comment about Lopez, and he toward building a lasting sobriety. If

107
 HEAD TURNER
“I’ve always felt like an
outsider,” Lopez says,
“in the fashion world,
the music world, the
movie world.” Maison
Margiela dress.
109
 Lopez has had a parallel compulsion,
it is in the domain of love, and she has
done her work, too. “I have to forgive
myself for the things that I did that
I’m not proud of, the choices that I
made that worked against me,” she
explains. “Self-love is really about
boundaries. Learning what you’re
comfortable with and putting up the
boundaries, not being afraid of the
consequences. Knowing that in taking
care of yourself, everything will turn
out okay, that people will treat you the
way you want to be treated and your
life will feel good to you. For a long
time, I was just like, Yes, do whatever
you want! I can take it,
I’ll be here, because I’m
really strong, and I’ll be
fine. Little by little it
chips away at your self-
Her first record in
worth, your self-esteem,
your soul.”
nearly a decade will be
The couple has
brought a lot of thought the most honest work
to the project of inte-
grating their households,
and they are learning
she has ever done, “kind
about parenting f rom
each other. Affleck’s
of a culmination of
ex-wife is, Lopez says,
“an amazing co-parent,
and they work really well
who I am as a person
together.” Lopez does
not have the benefit of
and an artist”
such a relationship with
her ex-husband, who lives on the
East Coast. “The transition is a pro-
cess that needs to be handled with so
much care,” she says. “They have so
many feelings. They’re teens. But it’s
going really well so far. What I hope
to cultivate with our family is that his
kids have a new ally in me and my
kids have a new ally in him, someone
who really loves and cares about them
but can have a different perspective
and help me see things that I can’t see
with my kids because I’m so emotion-
ally tied up.”
Of course, Lopez is raising chil-
dren with a great deal more privilege
than she enjoyed at their age, and she
hopes that her own model for hard
work goes some way toward keeping
them grounded. “It’s hard, in its own
way, when you don’t have to fight for
things, because then you don’t learn
how to be a fighter,” she says, boxing
at the air with her fists. “I had to learn
110
how to be a fighter. I wanted to give
them a life that I didn’t have, but they
don’t get to have the experience of
something that is also helpful, which
is developing that survivalist men-
tality.” She has made a point of step-
ping out of her mother’s shadow as a
parent, trying not to raise her voice,
keeping her temper, not matching her
children when they rev up. “I really
wanted to find a better way than
having to put the fear in them. It’s
like, I can hold a boundary with you
but also be your ally. That’s the bal-
ance, where they respect you enough
because you act in a way that they can
look up to. It’s what I feel like I want
to do because when I was young that
wasn’t what it was.”
And yet Guadalupe Rodríguez
worked hard to teach her daughters to
be good as well as great. It’s a lesson
Lopez is keen to pass on. “I’ll stress
to them, like, I want you to do well
in school,” she adds (her twins started
high school this fall), “and then my
son always finishes the sentence. He
goes, ‘But you care more that we’re
good people.’ I say, ‘That’s right. I do.’
The beauty of being a parent is that
you think you’re going to teach them
all these things, and you do. You pass
on all the things that you know, all the
knowledge you have. But at the end of
the day they wind up teaching you so
much and reminding you of the things
you need to know about life and how
to love somebody and how to care for
people, that in your 20s and 30s, as
you’re doing your own thing, you can
lose sight of. We get so self-centered
at certain points in our lives when we
have our goals and our things.”
Affleck, for his part, is glad that
his wife tolerates his singing in the
shower. To him, the big draw all these
years later was not the ways Lopez
has changed but the ways she has
not. “There is something innately,
magically kind and good and full of
love at the heart of who Jennifer is,”
he explains. “That’s exactly the per-
son I remember from 20 years ago.
Maybe she sees all the changes she’s
made, whereas when I see her, mostly
I just see someone who has retained,
against the odds, the
thing about her that
always made her the
most incredible to me: a
heart that seems bound-
less with love. She is my
idea of the kind of per-
son I want to be.”
Lopez has grand,
multimedia plans for her
current musical project.
She wants to create a
musical odyssey in the
manner of Pink Floyd’s
The Wall, she says—but
with a message about
hope and love. Per-
haps the most poignant
moment in Halftime, the
documentary about her
Super Bowl year released on Netflix
last June, occurs when Lopez is read-
ing out loud from an article about
herself in Glamour. “It’s thrilling to see
a criminally underrated performer”—
here she pauses, and tears well in her
eyes—“get her due from prestige film
outlets.” In fact Lopez did not quite
get her due, having been denied an
Academy Award nomination, which
some in the industry viewed as a
snub. A Grammy continues to elude
her, too. Despite her stardom, she has
spent years fighting for credibility, and
for all her artistic accomplishment, to
some people she is, simply, Jennifer
S ET DES IG N, MARY HOWARD STUD IO.
Lopez for a living. This hurts less than
it once did.
“I’ve always felt like an outsider, in
the fashion world, the music world,
the movie world,” she explains. “I
feel like everybody knows each other
and all the artists talk, and you go to
the Met ball C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 5 2
 LIFE IN FULL
“I want my kids to stand
up for themselves,” she
says. “I want all the little
girls in the world to get
loud. Get loud!” Marc
Jacobs jacket, bustier,
and skirt. In this story:
hair, Chris Appleton
for Color Wow; makeup,
Mary Phillips. Details,
see In This Issue.
LAND ROVER
Model Abby Champion
takes in the air on the
island of Sylt—where
the legendary medispa
Lanserhof opened a
lavish new resort earlier
this year—dressed
in a Maison Margiela
jacket, skirt, and belt;
maisonmargiela.com.
Fashion Editor:
Tabitha Simmons.
 Model Abby Champion and her boyfriend, actor
Patrick Schwarzenegger, head to Germany’s remote Frisian
Islands to experience Lanserhof ’s brand of ascetic
wellness. Vassi Chamberlain and her (reluctant) husband
follow their lead. Photographed by Dan Martensen.
 FACE FIRST
While the spa’s nourishing
skin treatments work
their careful magic,
Champion gets another
kind of glow-up in a
silver-spangled Burberry
top; us.burberry.com.
 ALONG FOR THE RIDE
Hopping aboard an
electric bike to cruise the
dunes, Champion looks
ethereal in a little white
Chloé dress—and a sturdy
pair of boots to balance it
out; Chloé Madison.

115
 o paraphrase Jane Austen, one the greatest
observers of the British male, it is a truth
universally acknowledged that the species
would rather subsist on their own entrails
before tending to matters of self-care. I
should know; I have been married to one
such shining example for more than 25 years. The man-
child I live with in otherwise conjugal bliss has never, to my
knowledge, set foot in a gym or made a doctor’s appoint-
ment unbidden; we haven’t eaten the same food for years
because gastronomy to him equals something lavishly fried
and intensely caloric. In fact, the only thing he is rigor-
ously fastidious about is stockpiling (in case of possible
Armageddon) his beloved Kronenbourg beers and pea-
nut M&M’s, both of which he consumes daily. So when
I breezily suggest we visit the newly opened Lanserhof in
Sylt, an island off the northern coast of Germany, for a
little “couples overhaul,” I get a comically withering look.
Lanserhof isn’t some kind of gratuitously strict and
old-fashioned spa for indulgent narcissists, I assure him,
going into sales overdrive. Its newest destination, I con-
tinue, adheres to the concept that originated more than

NATURE IS HEALING
clockwise from top left: Balmain shirt and miniskirt;
balmain.com; bell heather grows in Sylt’s damp dune valleys,
blooming in summer; a twisting path to the Wadden Sea.
RUNNING WILD
Champion gets
joyfully lost in a
barely-there
Jacquemus dress;
jacquemus.com.
Chanel boots.
 CLOSE CALL
Champion’s boyfriend, actor
Patrick Schwarzenegger,
wears a Palace Skateboards
T-shirt; palaceskateboards
.com. Champion wears a
Loro Piana turtleneck
sweater; loropiana.com.
 THERE’S A TWIST
Designed by German
architect Christoph
Ingenhoven, the resort is
a wonder of sustainable
materials, including stone,
concrete, and untreated
wood. Champion finds her
angle in a suitably
dramatic Saint Laurent
by Anthony Vaccarello
coat and dress; ysl.com.

119
CHANNEL ORANGE
Though accessible by
train, plane, ferry, and car,
parts of Sylt still feel
glamorously far-flung, with
no shortage of sweeping
vistas—or powerful winds,
hence Champion’s
2 Moncler 1952 jacket;
moncler.com.
 With the wind in my
hair amid the dunes, I feel
transcendent, like
throwing away a long-held
emotional weight

three decades ago at Lans, the Tyrolean alpine resort in

Austria (an avid skier, he is noticeably intrigued): that the
gut, once cleansed and detoxified, has an astounding ability
to kick-start the body’s path back to health and vitality.
(I’ve lost him.)
The idea has long fascinated me: Paired with state-of-
the-art diagnostic analyses and extensive physical and
psychological assessments, Lanserhof ’s gut-focused treat-
ments inform individualized protocols that can include
naturopathy and chronomedicine (the mapping of future
illnesses), as well as overall regeneration. There are now
two German outposts, one in Tegernsee and another in
Hamburg, as well as more streamlined programming
offered in London’s Arts Club, which despite being a mere
20-minute drive from our South Kensington apartment,
is a bridge too far for my husband; Sylt, with its minimum
seven-night stay and remote location might as well be in
another universe. Like Austen, I also know British men
don’t like to be badgered. So I needle him endlessly and
relentlessly, until, of course, I win.
A few weeks and 12 hours of transit later, we disem-
bark at Westerland train station, on the northernmost
tip of Germany, inches from the Danish border. “At least
you are close to your beloved Vikings,” I tell the grump
beside me, as our taxi glides along a thin, windswept road
flanked on both sides by the moonlit Wadden Sea, edged
in undulating sand dunes. It is nearly midnight when we
pull up to the property’s main building, but the low, three-
pronged structure with satellite-like curves and an impres-
sive thatched roof—the largest in Europe, apparently—is
just visible. Designed by award-winning German architect
Christoph Ingenhoven, the entire property features sus-
tainable materials, including stone, concrete, and unfin-
ished and untreated wood, that do not release significant
pollutants into indoor environments. We are greeted by
the night manager who, with minimal fanfare, leads us up
to our pared-back two-story suite, its sloping architec-
tural contours comfortingly enveloping. Three tiny pots of
colorful vegetable dips with paper-thin spelt crackers are
delivered in lieu of dinner, and we are told to report to the
medical department at 7 a.m. I haven’t gotten up that early
since breastfeeding our daughter in 2001.
But I am long overdue for a wake-up call. Following
a squamous cell carcinoma cancer diagnosis 11 years ago
and multiple surgeries, I underwent two years of chemo-
therapy and radiation that resulted in facial palsy as well as
anaphylaxis during my last infusion. Getting the all-clear
in 2021 was a relief; but a perforated intestine resulted
in yet another surgery and endless rounds of intravenous

121
 antibiotics. Recent bouts of hypothyroidism, followed by
Epstein-Barr, chronic fatigue syndrome, as well as IBS,
have left me more than a little due for some regeneration.
Losing a couple of pounds wouldn’t go amiss either. But
more than anything, I just wanted to feel “better” again,
and the opportunity to do so—alongside my recalcitrant
but uxorious husband—after the loneliness of time spent
in hospitals is a bonus.
So at 7 a.m. I stagger down to the medical area in my
dressing gown and complimentary teal-colored Birken-
stocks, where I undergo a “biometrical impedance analysis”
designed to measure my weight, body fat, and muscle and
water percentages; kidney, liver, and heart functions; as well
as my glucose levels and blood pressure. The nurse asks
me if I have adhered to the two-week pre-arrival recom-
mendations of abstaining from caffeine, alcohol, sugar, and
cigarettes, as well as reducing meal sizes. “Sort of,” I say,
stretching the truth. She smiles knowingly; it’s clearly not
the first time she has heard this.
Afterward, I join my husband in the vast airy din-
ing room for breakfast where we have been assigned a
table for the duration of our stay (anyone flying solo can
join a round “sharing table”). C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 5 2

SOFT FOCUS
clockwise from top left: Schwarzenegger in a Maison
Margiela trench coat; maisonmargiela.com; a few of the 600-odd
sheep in List, Lanserhof Sylt’s tiny town; an alluring dead end.

122
ABOVE AND BEYOND
Champion gets a good
view of the place in a
printed Balenciaga
dress; balenciaga.com.
Ever the gentleman,
Schwarzenegger props
her up in a Maison
Margiela cardigan;
maisonmargiela.com.
 WELL CONNECTED
Lanserhof takes wellness
seriously, greeting
guests with a battery
of diagnostics and
treatment methods
targeting both the body
and the mind. Champion
straps in for an
electrocardiogram
in a Fendi shirt and
skirt; fendi.com.

124
SKY HIGH
Champion shows her
layers in a Louis Vuitton
jacket and dress; select
Louis Vuitton stores.
 TABLE FOR TWO
The meal program at
Lanserhof—overseen
by chef Dietmar
Priewe—is built on
seasonal, sun-
ripened produce and
biophotonic meats.
Schwarzenegger
digs in wearing a
Dunhill shirt; dunhill
.com. Champion
wears a Chanel
jacket and swimsuit;
Chanel boutiques.
 SPLENDOR IN
THE GRASS
On Schwarzenegger:
Maison Margiela trench
coat; maisonmargiela
.com. Polo Ralph Lauren
sweatpants; ralphlauren
P RODUCED BY V ERS

.com. On Champion:
Prada knit top and skirt;
prada.com. In this story:
hair, Cim Mahony;
makeup, Lisa Houghton.
Details, see In This Issue.
127
 When Jenna Gribbon met musician
Mackenzie Scott, it changed the
way she thought about painting—
and the possibilities for female
portraiture. By Dodie Kazanjian.
Photographed by Clément Pascal.

enna Gribbon’s life as a figurative painter made

a sharp turn in 2017, when she was 38. “It took
me so long to understand myself and my sexu-
ality,” she tells me, “and that could be attributed
in large part to the lack of images of women
in relationships with each other. There’s a bit
more history of gay men depicting and depicted in roman-
tic situations, but I’d seen so few examples when I was
growing up of queer identity among women. I wanted to
make work that was impactful, but also more direct and
more pleasurable,” she says.
Jenna had been married to and divorced from a man,
Matthew Gribbon, and she was then living with her part-
ner, the novelist Julian Tepper, and their son, Silas. ( Jenna
and Julian were not married and had an open relationship.)
It was at this moment that she met Mackenzie Scott, the
indie-rock singer and composer known as Torres. Scott,
who is 12 years younger, became her lover and main subject.
When I visit Gribbon in late August, she leads me
to her Brooklyn studio through a magical secret garden

WATCHING YOU WATCHING ME

Jenna Gribbon (far right) in Prada, pictured with
her muse and fiancée, Mackenzie Scott, in Michael Kors
Collection, in front of Gribbon’s Here for you.
Hair, Tsuki; makeup, Kuma. Details, see In This Issue.
Fashion Editor: Jorden Bickham.

128
 with tall trees, low stone walls, and gravel paths.
We head down a flight of steps into a smallish,
double-height room with a skylight.
It may be New York’s most charming studio:
Paintings for “Mirages,” her show at the Col-
lezione Maramotti in Northern Italy (her first
solo show in a European museum, which opened
in October), hang on the whitewashed brick
walls, and nine of the show’s 10 paintings are
of Mackenzie. The eye-catcher is Here for you,
a 13-foot-long stunner of Scott lying supine on a
slab, under five floodlights, against a greenscreen
background, naked except for short-shorts and
cowboy boots. Scott’s long ash-blond hair cas-
cades over the slab’s edge. Her extra-pink nipples
stand out as though she’s put lipstick on them.
Her head is turned, looking at me as I look at her,
a somewhat troubled expression on her beautiful
face. The patient in Thomas Eakins’s The Gross
Clinic or the half-dead giant in Dana Schutz’s
Presentation come to mind. But this one is some-
thing else: Scott’s pose may echo female odal-
isques throughout art history, but we’re a long
way from the male gaze. “People have become
so accustomed to looking at unclothed bodies
in art,” Gribbon explains. “Those are nudes, and
they’re considered tasteful. But I want people
to understand that it’s not a passive act to con-
sume the image of another person’s unclothed
body, which is why I like to make them feel
more naked. Like, ‘Oh, maybe I’m not supposed
to be looking at this.’ It’s a way to make the
THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
nude body less benign and more true to what it really is,
“I wanted my work to be visibly pleasurable,
which is extreme vulnerability on the part of the subject.” to reflect the pleasure I feel in what I’m making,” says
There are two more extra-large greenscreen paintings Gribbon. Acid rococo tenderscape, 2021.
in the show—one of Scott literally (and somewhat hilar-
iously) on fire; the other, a close-up of her face, one eye
peeking out from under a blindfold. (Both paintings had romantic relationships with women before, and they talked
to be removed to give Gribbon enough room to paint Here and talked, about their backgrounds and their work and
for you.) The other pictures in the show are smaller and everything else. “I’m from Tennessee and I went to college
much less fierce. Most of them are scenes from Gribbon in Georgia, and she’s from Georgia and went to college in

COURTESY OF MASSIMO DECARLO. P REV IOUS S PRE AD: P RO DUCE D BY 2 DM PRODUCTION .

and Scott’s domestic life together—Scott, blindfolded and Tennessee,” Gribbon says. Scott kept ordering more neat
naked, reaching out to touch her reflection in a mirror; vodkas, and Gribbon poured half of them under the table.

ARTWORK: O IL ON LIN EN , 80 × 64 INC H ES, TO DD-W H IT E ART PHOTO GRAPHY/

Scott, clothed, turning to look at Gribbon (and us) as she
unloads the dishwasher. Gribbon thinks of the smallest
ones as “documentary” paintings, but the sensuous, virtu-
oso paint handling and the sunlight falling on that ash-
blond hair make them delicious to look at, no matter what
size they are. The pleasures that oil painting can give, and
so rarely do these days, are here in full. “I wanted my work
to be visibly pleasurable, to reflect the pleasure I feel in
what I’m making,” she tells me. “I had just started to go
in that direction, and then I met Mackenzie.”
A week before they met, in August 2017, Scott had
a dream. “It was a sad one, about a woman leaving me,”
she recalls. “She was holding my face, saying that she
loved me but had to leave. About a year later, Jenna did
leave me—but she came back.” They had met by chance
at St. Dymphna’s, an Irish bar in the East Village, two
very tall young women with long hair, dark in Gribbon’s
case, inescapably blond in Scott’s. Both of them had had
“There was definitely a lot of chemistry, and before the end
of the night, we were physically entwined at the bar,” Grib-
bon tells me. A few months later, she made a painting of
Scott, the first of many. Scott became her muse—Gribbon
paints her almost exclusively these days (paintings of her
son, Silas, now 11, are the exception).
The muse-dom is a two-way street. “Her paintings
somehow always feed into the songs I’m making,” says
Scott, on whose right arm Gribbon has legibly tattooed the
words “Jenna and Silas.” “There are so many songs about
and for Jenna—‘Silver Tongue,’ ‘Gracious Day,’ ” Scott says.
The lyrics on a recent song, “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in
My Head,” are all about Gribbon:
If we’re calling off the funeral
Then I’m calling for a hitching
Just when I thought that it was over
It was only just beginning

130
 orn in a suburb of Knoxville, Tennessee,
Jenna Brown spent much of her childhood
reading and drawing on her own. Her par-
ents divorced when she was two. When she
was five, she moved with her mother and
her older brother to an area outside Savan-
nah, Georgia, where her mother supported the family with
a variety of jobs and was also a foster mother to several
children. (Her mother, remarried, eventually adopted four
of them.) “I don’t know where that need to draw came
from,” Gribbon remembers. “I don’t think anyone in the
family was aware of contemporary art. But when I said I
was going to be an artist, even though I didn’t know what
that meant, nobody argued with me.” Her first-grade
teacher complained to Jenna’s mother that Jenna was
always drawing in the margins of her papers. “My mother
asked if I was getting my work done, and the teacher said,
‘Yes.’ ‘Then you’re not allowed to tell her that she can’t
draw,’ mother said. ‘My daughter is an artist.’ ” In college,
all Jenna wanted to do was hang out in the art department
and make paintings.
She spent four very happy years at the University of Geor-
gia, in Athens, which had a very good art department. In
addition to painting, she got interested in filmmaking—
especially the works of Jean Cocteau, Jacques Rivette, Agnès
Varda, and other French cinéastes. (Last year Gribbon had
a show at Sim Smith gallery in London, in which stills and
film clips from Varda’s work were juxtaposed with Grib-
bon paintings that mixed both documentary and invented
moments of intimate daily life.) Gribbon made a lot of
“I want people to understand that it’s not a passive act
to consume the image of another person’s unclothed body,
which is why I like to make them feel more naked”
experimental Super 8 films of her own at college, and she
continues to be interested in this kind of work. (She made a
music video, “Too Big for the Glory Hole,” for Scott, in sum-
mer 2020.) In college, Jenna met Matthew Gribbon, another
art student, and they were married in her senior year. The
marriage didn’t last long, but the two remain close friends.
When Gribbon moved to New York in 2003, figuration
was still taboo, and she couldn’t get a gallery to look at her
work. She did all the young artist things: lived in Wil-
liamsburg, above the Legion of Doom biker headquarters
with four roommates (one was Matthew); worked as one
of Jeff Koons’s many assistants (she quit after a year so she
could do her own work); got connected with Sofia Coppola
through a friend of a friend and painted copies of the his-
toric portraits in Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette, which in
2006 led to her first solo show, at Sarah Bowen Gallery in
Williamsburg. There were two more solo shows a couple
of years later—one in Los Angeles, another in Chelsea.
“But young artists doing figuration were not establishing
themselves at that time,” Gribbon says. “I had many people
tell me that I was fighting an uphill battle, that I needed
to de-skill. But I’m very stubborn. I ignored everyone and
just kept doing my paintings. It took about 15 years before
I had any luck at all.”
Silas was born in December 2010. A year later, Gribbon
and Julian Tepper, Silas’s father, started the Oracle Club in
Long Island City. It was a workspace for artists and writers
and a hangout for members who would gather there to talk,
attend poetry readings, and listen to music on a piano and
a record player, while Silas slept upstairs with a baby mon-
itor turned on. (Gribbon and Tepper and Silas lived on the
floor above.) At this point, Gribbon was making life-size,
full-body portraits of people she knew, talking and gestur-
ing. She hung the paintings at the Oracle, and it looked as
though they were talking to one another. “I loved it all, but
I also found it really frustrating and distracting,” she says.
Having a child was not the problem. “People just thought
of me differently. I’d go into galleries with Silas and people
would say, ‘Oh, are you still painting?’ This kind of thing
was said to me all the time, and it was so enraging. If a man
brings his child to an opening, people think it’s charming.
If a woman does, they think you’re done.” When the rent on
Oracle went way up in 2016, they closed the club, and Grib-
bon, feeling stuck, decided to go to graduate art school. She
applied to Hunter and got in. While there, things started to
happen for her. “I don’t think it was about grad school,” she
says. “I think it was the resurgence of interest in figuration
and the way people were using social media to find new art.”
Gribbon was in a four-person group show at the New
York gallery Fredericks & Freiser in Chelsea, and every one
of her five paintings sold. The following year, soon after
she graduated, she had her first solo show there, and again
everything sold. “Ever since that ‘4 Artists’ show, she’s had
a waiting list,” Andrew Freiser tells me. “When I Looked
at You the Light Changed,” the solo show, featured nude
or seminude women wrestling with other women—an
ironic take on an art trope with a long, all-male history.
She had invited friends to a wrestling party in her living
room and taken photographs that served as raw material
for the paintings. (Gribbon doesn’t paint from life.) “Jenna
is hands down an alla prima master,” the curator and writer
Alison Gingeras tells me. “I see her as a direct heir to the
legacy of artists like Cassatt and Morisot, pushing the gen-
dered spaces that they explored to a new level of intimacy,
of the female gaze, and of desire that is captured with paint
in a way that no camera could render.”
In “Uscapes,” Gribbon’s last show at Fredericks & Frei-
ser, six of the 20 paintings were very large, nearly seven
feet tall by five and a half feet wide. All six show Gribbon
and Scott larger than life, their naked, intertwined bodies
in cropped close-ups, too big to fit in the rectangle. We see
Scott through Gribbon’s long, parted legs, just as Grib-
bon sees her. Breasts, thighs, pubic hair, fluorescent pink
nipples—everything is right before our eyes. Gribbon had
told me that she greatly admires Courbet’s 1866 The Origin
of the World, which still startles viewers with its unrelenting
focus on a woman’s genitalia. “I can’t think of any other
canonized painting that continues C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 5 3
131
 The Emergency
What seemed a slight tremor in her
seven-year-old daughter’s hand rapidly
became a sign of something much
more serious. Novelist Allegra Goodman
recalls the night that changed her life.
y mother, Mad-
eleine, was a sci-
entist, but she
was also supersti-
tious. Never open
an umbr ella in
the house! Never put shoes on the table.
She believed in luck—especially bad
luck. She was sweet but tough. Poli-
tic, but scarily direct. Madeleine was
a feminist and a dancer and such a
good baker that people used to cry
when they tasted her Sacher torte and
mandelbrot. She was a virtuoso knit-
ter; my sister and father still treasure
the exquisite fisherman’s sweaters she
made them. She was tall and elegant,
and always wore high heels. She was
also a fighter, the director of women’s
studies at the University of Hawaii,
where her program was constantly on
the block for budget cuts. My mother
became the vice president of academic
affairs before Vanderbilt hired her
away as its first woman dean of arts
and sciences. She did a lot before a
brain tumor took her life at 51. I often
wish I could be more like her. I cannot
bake as well as she did, nor can I dance.
I never learned to knit, although my
mother tried to teach me. I am a nov-
elist, no administrator. But I have a
daughter named Miranda, and while
Madeleine never had a chance to meet
her, I see my mother in her.
My youngest, feistiest, most opin-
ionated child, Miranda left her mark
f rom the time she could hold a
Sharpie. She scribbled on the walls.
She drew on her bare legs. She chose
her own clothes as soon as she could
walk and wore striped tights, tie-
dyed dresses, and a lavender satin
cape that streamed behind her as she
pedaled her tricycle. In kindergarten,
132
she cut her own hair. “I’m sorry!” her
teacher said. “She took the scissors
from the art table.” Miranda taught
herself finger knitting and cartwheel-
ing. At seven, she was a dancer, and
a tumbler. She was a baker skilled at
lattice piecrusts, and an engineer who
took apart toys and electronics. She
was an organizer and a leader. The
first day of school, she forged ahead,
grabbing a shy boy by the hand when
he was afraid to leave his mother.
Miranda took after Madeleine in
wonderful ways. How cruel that she
got sick like her.
It was September. Second grade
had just begun when Miranda said
to me at breakfast, “Look, my hand
is shaking.”
“Are you cold?” I was rushing and
distracted, and it seemed like she was
shivering.
At school, Miranda held out her
right hand to show her teacher. The
shaking was subtle, but her teacher
called me. “Maybe you should take
her to the doctor?”
I was nervous, making the appoint-
ment, but Miranda had no other symp-
toms. She seemed happy and healthy,
full of energy. My husband was in Cal-
ifornia to speak at a memorial service,
and Miranda’s older brothers were busy
with homework and Ultimate practice
when I took her to the pediatrician. I
was hoping the doctor would look at
Miranda’s tremor and say, Oh, this is
something we often see.
Instead, Dr. G. looked at Miranda’s
shaking hand and said, “She needs to
go to Children’s. I’m calling this in
now. If you can’t get into neurology,
take her to the ER.”
Miranda and I drove across the
river f rom Cambridge to Boston.
 HIDE AND SEEK
“Miranda was lucky
and unlucky all at
once,” Goodman
writes. Agata Storer,
Leaves, 2022
(depicting the
photographer’s
daughter).
 We threaded the congested streets “We’ll test her.” The nurse checked “We won’t know until we operate.”
of the Longwood Medical cam- the mermaid for metal. “All good,” We were admitted. Nurses pushed
pus. I remember writing down the she said. Miranda in a wheelchair through
address and number of my parking Then Miranda lay on her back white halls and up huge elevators to
space because I did not think I would with the mermaid on her chest. The Intensive Care.
remember it later. nurse strapped her in and immobi- “We’re going to sleep over,” I told
My little girl was still cheerful and lized her head in a cage. “I don’t like my daughter.
energetic as the neurologist tested this,” Miranda said, uneasy for the “Okay, but I still want to go to
her speech and vision. He had her first time. Eden’s birthday party,” she said. “Can
walk in a straight line and hop and “I’m right here,” I said, as the nurse I still go?”
jump. Miranda could do everything slid Miranda into the machine. Only “I don’t know,” I told her.
he wished, but when she held out her her feet stuck out; she was such a The nurse on duty told me that
hands, she could not control her right small girl. Miranda was in danger of having a sei-
hand’s tremor. I sat in a rocking chair with a zure. That’s why she was in the ICU.
“She needs an MRI,”the doctor said. heated blanket on my lap. I rocked The pair of fellows came and said,
“When?” I asked. and tried to breathe the way they “ Tomorrow is Saturday, but the
“Now.” teach you in birthing classes. Then I attending doesn’t want to wait.”
“Okay,” I said. I could not bring stood and paced as the MRI clanged Saturday? I thought. I’d already lost
myself to ask why. I made the appoint- and banged. Over a speaker from the track of days.
ment for that evening, and called my next room, the nurses told Miranda, “This is why we need to operate.”
husband to tell him to fly home. “Hold as still as you can.” But the scan The fellows were explaining the sit-
Before I left neurology, uation to me. I stared into
the nurse took me aside, their young eager faces. They
advising softly. “Prepare to I could not bring myself to prepare. looked like teenagers.
be admitted.” It seemed bad luck to pack clothes Meanwhile, Miranda tried
But I could not bring to sleep, but every 15 min-
myself to prepare. It seemed for the hospital. Miranda was utes, the night nurse woke
bad luck to pack clothes for healthy. She skipped through white her and asked her name and
the hospital. Miranda was how old she was. Sleepier
healthy. She skipped through
halls out to the parking garage and sleepier, Miranda didn’t
white halls out to the park- want to answer.
ing garage. went on and on. “I’m sorry. They want “I know you’re tired, sweetie,” the
At home I told her brothers where more pictures,” the nurses said. “Don’t nurse said. “But the docs need you to
we were going that evening. Her move, sweetie.” tell me.”
oldest brother, Ezra, was 17. I said, I stood and held on to Miranda’s “You can do it,” I told Miranda.
“You’re in charge of dinner.” feet. I told myself, she is still here. I stood with the very young fel-
“But she’s fine, right?” he said. W hen at last the nurses slid lows and signed page after page of
I could not answer. Miranda out and freed her, she was paperwork. It was the middle of the
Ezra began baking. He baked a pale and hungry. The nurses looked night. They were explaining all kinds
double batch of chocolate chip cook- exhausted too. They took Miranda of things to me. One spoke earnestly
ies, while I took Miranda to Porter into another room and said, “Would about surgery at seven in the morning.
Square to buy a toy for the hospital. you like to do some coloring?” It “What’s your name again?” I asked.
She picked a small plush mermaid wasn’t a question. “You are in shock,” the nurse told
with a detachable tail. Then we Miranda went into one room and I me after the fellows left.
swung by the house and Ezra ran went into another, a small white space Then why am I so calm? I won-
out with a container of fresh-baked where I had to face the doctor and dered. I remembered how my mother
cookies—and that was all we brought the nurse, the same one from earlier got sick. Blurred vision and slurred
to the hospital. that day. I heard my husband’s voice speech. She had lost her sense of
Once again in Longwood, I wrote through a telephone mounted on the balance. Miranda had none of that.
down where I parked the car. Once wall. I saw that a tiny blood vessel had How could this be happening? I held
again, Miranda skipped through the broken in the nurse’s eye. “Your daugh- on to one fact: Miranda got to have
halls of Children’s. Cheerfully, she ter has a large mass on the left frontal surgery. My mother’s tumor had been
changed her clothes when we got to lobe of her brain,” the nurse said. inoperable.
radiology. “Here are the scans,” said the doctor. My husband was on a plane flying
“You’re going to lie on your back,” I looked at the scans, and I could home, but I didn’t know if he would
the nurse said as we approached the see the large white mass. I looked at arrive before Miranda’s surgery. I
metal behemoth that was the MRI the door and I saw two young men called my in-laws and asked them
machine. “And then we can see standing at the little square window. to pick up the boys and take them
inside you.” They were surgical fellows. “Do you home. I called my sister, Paula, an
“Can I take my mermaid?” Miranda know what kind of tumor it is?” I oncologist, and said, “Could you drive
asked. asked when they walked in. here? I signed all this paperwork. The

134
fellows look like they’re 16, and I for sure until we have the pathology examined her, Miranda asked her
don’t know what I’m doing.” report, but I believe I got it all.” dad to play Aqua’s “Dr. Jones” on his
I told Miranda she had a tumor Miranda was lucky and unlucky phone. Then she danced for everyone
squishing her brain and the doctors all at once. Her tumor was atypical. in the examining room.
were going to put her to sleep and Aggressive. Because of this, the doc- Dr. Jones said, “Best appointment
take it out. tors were not sure what Miranda’s ever!”
She said, “But I’m hungry.” prognosis would be. They said, “It’s so In third grade, Miranda was still a
Paula arrived in her white coat and rare. We just don’t see this. We have small girl wearing tie-dye skirts and
spoke to the fellows. “Could I see the to follow her.” glitter tees, but she no longer drew
surgeon?” This meant many scans, and many on the walls. At night I found her sit-
They said, “He is not here yet.” tears. Miranda was no longer the girl ting up in bed with a math workbook.
Paula was scarily direct. “I can’t let who skipped down the hall. She was “What are you doing?” I asked.
my niece go under the knife without afraid to change into a hospital gown, “I have to learn percents,” she said.
speaking to the attending!” afraid to be admitted, frightened— “Because I never learned them last
The surgeon appeared. He was the as anyone would be—that her tumor year.”
only neurosurgeon in the hospital would return. After all, this was what My rambunctious daughter started
that day because all the others were at the doctors feared. Underneath her focusing in school. She argued with
the annual pediatric brain tumor con- long brown hair, she would forever her teacher that she belonged in the
ference. Dr. W. was calm and steady. bear a scar like a question mark, curl- more advanced math group, and
He said, “I am going to do what I can ing from the top of her head down after a trial period, she proved herself
do safely. If Miranda starts to bleed and around her ear. there. She taught herself to knit with
too much or if there’s danger real needles and successfully
to her brain, I’m going to stop.” auditioned for a hip-hop class
He held a doctor’s bag in his My husband arrived, out of with older girls. She grew taller
hand. Did it contain his own breath, distraught. I was numb, and stronger, and at the hospi-
set of knives? His notebook? tal, she graduated to the clinic
Lunch? He was as resolute as but he was panicked. for survivors.
an astronaut. I’d been lucky because I’d been Some patients at the clinic
The anesthesiologist arrived, can’t walk. Some are blind. In
and she spoke with a foreign
with Miranda the whole time the waiting room, I feel a cer-
accent. French? Bulgarian? tain guilt. Not only did Miranda
Miranda lay on a gurney and my sister Long after her stitches were gone, survive, but she got away without radi-
and I stood next to her. “You are the Miranda feared doctors and hospi- ation and chemo and disability. How
parents?” the anesthesiologist asked. tals. She was distracted in school and did she get so lucky? She can dance.
At last, just as the nurses wheeled found it difficult to concentrate. She She can skate. She can go to college.
Miranda away, my husband arrived, had nightmares. In the days leading No one can see her scar. And yet,
out of breath, distraught. I was numb, up to scans, she didn’t sleep much— Miranda is tenacious. She is fierce. Is
but he was panicked. I’d been lucky and neither did I. The doctors offered that how her experience marked her?
because I’d been with Miranda the her sedation, but she refused to let Or did sickness and surgery reveal
whole time. He had endured the flight them put her under. what was already there?
cross-country without her. “She’s changed since the surgery,” My daughter is now a computer
My sister, my husband, my father- my sister observed sadly. It was true. science major, a dancer, and an aspir-
in-law, and I sat together in an empty Miranda grew quiet, serious—and ing designer. While at college, she is
waiting room because only emergency something else—determined. She pursuing an independent project—
surgeries happened on Saturdays. We began looking online for ideas about studying patient experience in MRIs—
ate Ezra’s chocolate chip cookies and how to stop worrying. One night trying to find a way to lower stress for
watched infomercials flashing on the before a scan, she looked up from the millions undergoing the proce-
wall-mounted television. We waited her computer and said, “Could you dure each year. She loves math and
and waited. We were waiting to find take me to the pool? It says here that she loves fashion. She is an organizer,
out what would happen to us all. swimming is good for stress.” I drove whether she is planning an event or
After four hours a nurse emerged her to the MIT pool, and we swam building software.
to say, “We had to give your daugh- together past her bedtime. Her brothers give her mock inter-
ter a blood transfusion, but it’s going With each clean scan, Miranda’s views to prepare for job applications.
well.” An hour later, another came out future brightened, but she dreaded “Are you a team player?” Ezra asks.
to say, “They’re closing her up now. clinics. She began preparing for Miranda thinks for a second and
We should be done in two hours.” them, bringing evidence that she then says cheerfully, “Well—every
Paula and I were alone when was healthy. A few months after team needs a leader.” I see my mother
Miranda’s surgeon appeared. Uncon- surgery, she brought her finger knit- in her. @
sciously, we stood to meet him. “That ting to show the squad of doctors
went about as well as I could have how well she could use her hands. Allegra Goodman's novel Sam (Dial
hoped,” he said. “We won’t know When a neurologist named Dr. Jones Press) is out in January.

135
 The Awkward
Age
f you were spitballing ideas
for a show that would make
you the toast of Broadway,
the story of a fat, Black,
queer musical theater writer
struggling to write a musical
about a fat, Black, queer musical the-
ater writer struggling to, etc., might
not be at the top of your list. But
when Michael R. Jackson’s dazzling
A Strange Loop won best musical at
the Tony Awards last June, it con-
firmed that there is a place—an appe-
tite, even—for offbeat, challenging
work on Broadway. Now, in the foot-
steps of A Strange Loop and such other
less-than-obvious Tony winners as
Fun Home and The Band’s Visit, comes
a new contender, fresh from a sold-
out off-Broadway run at the Atlan-
tic Theater: Kimberly Akimbo. David
Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s
gorgeous, tragicomic chamber musi-
cal stars Victoria Clark as a suburban
teen with a medical condition similar
to progeria that drastically acceler-
ates her aging process and shortens
her life. Clark classifies the show,
which opened at the Booth Theatre
on November 10, as “weird art.” “It’s
not trying to be anything other than
what it wants to be,” she says. “That is
exactly how Kimberly ends up living
her life—and it’s kind of a lesson for
all of us, to get to the core of who we
are and display those colors proudly.”
As the idiosyncratic playwright of
Fuddy Meers and the Pulitzer Prize–
winning Rabbit Hole, Lindsay-Abaire
BEST IN CLASS
from left: Justin Cooley wears Molly
Goddard. Bonnie Milligan wears Skims.
Victoria Clark wears R13. Steven Boyer
wears Gap. Alli Mauzey wears Brunello
Cucinelli. In this story: hair, Charlie Le Mindu;
makeup, Kabuki. Details, see In This Issue.
Fashion Editor: Max Ortega.
136
With its offbeat
premise, stirring score,
and superlative cast,
Kimberly Akimbo
is planting a flag for the
wonderfully weird
on Broadway. By Adam
Green. Photographed
by Mayan Toledano.
has made a career exploring the inter-
section of laughter and heartbreak,
anchoring surreal flights of fancy in
emotional truth and a keen aware-
ness of mortality. “Funny is a place
to start, but it’s got to be grounded in
something or it’s going to float away
onstage,” he tells me. “More often than
not, what I ground it in is a place of
pain, and I should probably talk to my
therapist about that.”
In a season of new musicals, most
of which are either of the jukebox
variety (A Beautiful Noise; & Juliet)
or based on a movie (Almost Famous;
Some Like It Hot), Kimberly Akimbo
is the rare example adapted from a
play, in this case Lindsay-Abaire’s
own 2003 drama of the same name.
He got the idea after asking a friend
how his newborn niece was doing.
“He said, ‘Oh, she’s amazing—she’s
like this little old woman trapped in a
baby’s body,’” Lindsay-Abaire recalls.
“I thought, Wow, that’s a very theatri-
cal idea. And then, of course, I went to
a very literal place with it. I loved the
tension between a teenager having to
deal with being a teenager and all that
entails and, at the same time, having to
deal with her own sped-up mortality.
What is it like to have all the stressors
of a young person combined with all
the stressors of an old person?”
That young person is Kimberly
Levaco, a New Jersey high school
student born C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 5 4
P RODUCED BY FAMI LY P ROJECTS.
P ROP STYLIST: H ANNE BJE LLAND.
 Lost and Found
During a tumultuous childhood in Russia, Natalia Vodianova and her
youngest sister, Jenna, were separated by adoption. Two decades
later, DNA testing brought about a grateful, unexpected reunion.
By Hamish Bowles. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
 TWO OF HEARTS
Half sisters by
birth and recently
reunited: model
Natalia Vodianova
(near left) and her
youngest sibling
Jennifer Burns.
Khaite sweaters.
Fashion Editor:
Tonne Goodman.
 ne evening in July 2021, 22-year-old Jen-
nifer Burns—“Jenna” to her friends and
family—was sitting in a Walmart parking
lot in Clemson, South Carolina, when a
flurry of email notifications appeared on
her phone. Jenna, a mechanical engineer-
ing undergraduate at the city’s university who’d been shop-
ping for a simple dinner with her roommate, remembers
thinking the timing was “weird”—it was after work hours
after all. Then she noticed the source: a DNA site she’d
subscribed to several years earlier. “A new DNA relative
has sent you a message,” one notification read. “At that
point I’m kind of freaking out,” she remembers. It could
only mean one thing.
Jenna was born Maria Mashinka in the grim Russian
industrial city of Nizhniy Novgorod and given up for
adoption as an infant. When Jenna’s American adoptive
mother Marybeth was young, she had always prayed for
the children behind the Iron Curtain, and the impact of
those prayers resonated. In 2000, she and her husband,
Chris, were approved to adopt two Russian babies, and
though they planned on bringing only one home, a boy
they called Ethan, at the last moment they added Jenna.
Jenna and Ethan were raised practically as twins in rural
North Carolina, a childhood that, by Jenna’s account, was
a typical all-American small-town idyll.
“I was the only girl in my neighborhood,” Jenna remem-
bers, “so I grew up playing a lot of sports with boys, because
that’s what I had to do if I wanted any friends at all. And
we were a very outdoorsy family—a lot of camping and
hiking and fishing and canoeing and kayaking. We were
outside every weekend. It was very happy.”
All the while Jenna was idly curious about her Russian
birth parents—enough so that as a teenager she registered
with an online DNA service—but she was never especially
interested in Russian culture and history. “I never thought
it would be a possibility to meet my biological family,
so I kind of thought, Why bother? In a way that was me
protecting myself. There were some insecurities, which is
quite common with adopted kids.”
Russian adoption law, meanwhile, made it more or less
impossible for any Russian relatives to track Jenna down.
And yet, in 2019, Jenna was notified of a match via the
DNA service she’d subscribed to, and after some internet
sleuthing she discovered that she had a half sister with a
very public profile. She sent a message through the site,
mentioning her birthplace and name. “Basically I just said,
‘I’m doing well. I hope you’re doing well too.’” Jenna recalls.
“You don’t even have to reply to this message. I just wanted
to let you know that I’m fine, if you’ve been wondering, and
I hope you are too.”
When there was no reply, Jenna assumed that that was
the end of it.
Natalia Vodianova—“Supernova” as she was dubbed at
the height of her runway and print celebrity—began her
modeling career in Nizhniy at 16, soon after a boyfriend
introduced her to a local modeling academy. Scouts told
her she could go to Paris but would need to learn English
in three months. Revealing the steely drive that would steer
her through life, Natalia did exactly that. Anything would
140
be better than toiling away at her mother’s
fruit and vegetable stand. “I had nothing
to lose,” she told Vogue’s Sarah Mower in
2003. “Only something better could hap-
pen to me.”
In Paris, she was borne by her Cinderella
story and the celestial beauty that would see
her cast as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Annie
Leibovitz’s legendary December 2003
Vogue portfolio. Her preternatural elegance
and composure veiled any thought of a
complicated history.
Motherhood and a first marriage to the
artist Justin Portman, scion of the aristo-
cratic British dynasty, which owns swaths
of prime central London real estate, was
to follow. At 19, Natalia was pregnant
with Lucas (now 20 and studying mod-
ern culture and media at Brown), and the
following year, 2002, Portman and Vodia-
nova wed “in a three-day extravaganza,”
wrote Vogue, in St. Petersburg. Natalia
was dressed by Tom Ford, whose stellar
Yves Saint Laurent fall 2002 show she
had opened and closed. Soon after—her
modeling star in ascendancy—Natalia
(whose family with Portman would come
to include daughter Neva, now 16, and
second son Viktor, 15) signed a contract
with Calvin Klein, providing a new level
of financial security that allowed her to
arrange nursing care and housing for her
severely autistic younger sister Oksana
and her mother, Larisa. “She’s my baby,”
said Natalia of her mother, then only 39.
“I want to spoil her now, make sure she’s
happy. She’s had such a hard-core life.”
“Natalia Vodianova’s story is so roman-
tic,” wrote Vogue in 2003, “she’s already a
girl on the brink of legend…the heroine
of a magical Russian rags-to-riches fairy
tale.” Natalia had revealed just enough of
her hardscrabble life to fuel the myth: At the age of 11, she
recalled, “I used to carry tens and tens of [fruit] boxes, each
of which weighed 30 kilos, without even thinking it was
heavy!” She was known for her hard-bargaining techniques:
To avoid being cheated by suppliers she would bring her
own scales to establish the correct weights.
In 2004, Natalia applied her influence and determi-
nation toward the launch of a charity, the Naked Heart
Foundation, a response to her country’s entrenched
attitudes toward people like her sister Oksana with dis-
abilities. “The Soviet Union wanted to present itself as a
nation of healthy individuals,” the charity’s website notes,
“and those with disabilities were hidden away behind
closed doors and high fences. The Naked Heart Foun-
dation aims to reverse this horrible legacy.” The organi-
zation supports families that choose to look after their
disabled children at home, and builds playgrounds across
Russia and former Soviet countries, in areas that need
them, beginning in Nizhniy itself.
 “I felt Jenna has always been
part of my life,” says Vodianova,
“even if I didn’t know her”

Portman and Vodianova divorced
in 2011, and in 2020 Natalia mar-
ried businessman Antoine Arnault,
the elegantly willowy son of Bernard
Arnault with whom she has sons
Maxim, eight, and Roman, six. On
MAKEUP, F RAN C ELL E DALY US ING LOV E +CRAFT+B EAUT Y.
FAMILY TIES Larisa’s life, according to Natalia—
Burns (left), raised in rural North Carolina, that produced a second daughter,
has led an entirely separate life Oksana, born with severe devel-
from Vodianova (right). Dresses by
Nili Lotan. In this story: hair, Sally opmental issues. Soon Larisa and
Hershberger. Details, see In This Issue. daughters found themselves, as
Natalia recalls, “in a little 20-meter

a balmy day in the parkland of the room with nothing.” Her mother
pretty village outside Paris where Natalia and her family acquired furniture on credit and “worked really, really hard,”
decamp for weekends, and with a bodyguard shadowing even as Natalia assumed many responsibilities at home and
us from a discreet distance, Natalia shared the compli- later on, at that market stall.
cated history that led to the adoption of her half sister As Natalia grew up there were further tumultuous
S ET DES IG N, MARY HOWARD STUD IO.

Jenna, whom she remembers only as baby Masha. relationships for Larisa—a summer fling on holiday in
“My mom had quite a series of very unhappy relation- Ukraine with a mentally abusive younger man, and, briefly,
ships, starting with my father,” she explained. They mar- a return of Oksana’s father, still Larisa’s true love, which
ried when Natalia’s mother Larisa was 19. Army service produced Natalia’s sister Kristina. Natalia was 14. “Love is a
was mandatory at the time, with few exceptions, and so crazy, crazy thing,” she says of this period. And so it proved
Natalia’s father was called up when she was a baby— when, a few years later, “Prince Charming comes along—
and the marriage didn’t last. Nor did a second romantic this perfect guy,” the brother of one of Larisa’s friends, “and
entanglement—with a man who would be the love of he sweeps her off her feet,” Natalia C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 1 5 5

141
SOME CANDY
TALKING
With its mélange of
glossy pearls and
colorful rhinestones,
an exquisitely small
Chanel bag (Chanel
boutiques) looks
good enough to eat.
 This holiday season, the search is
on for the shiniest, sparkliest, go-for-
broke-glamorous accessories—from
jubilant jewels to high-visibility heels.
PARTY ANIMAL
above: At the Shepton
Photographed by Martin Parr.
Mallet Antiques Fair
in Somerset, England,
a Givenchy necklace
(givenchy.com)
hides in plain sight.
Fashion Editor:
Tabitha Simmons.
TUFT LOVE
Even a cloud of cotton-
candy-colored feathers
can’t disguise this striking
gold Dolce & Gabbana
Alta Gioielleria necklace
heaving with morganites,
citrines, tanzanites, blue
sapphires, and diamonds;
dolcegabbana.com.

144
 TALL ORDER
Kicky, textured, and
irresistibly vivid, a pair
of Louis Vuitton boots
(select Louis Vuitton
stores) more than
stand on their own.
 BORROWED TIME
Tick…tick…boom!
A perfect Roger Vivier
mule (rogervivier
.com)—all glossy purple
satin and glittering
block heel—clocks in.
SMALL WONDER
Trust us when we say
that where a Fendi
Baguette laden with
pretty silver paillettes
goes, the spotlight is
sure to follow; fendi.com.

147
 SADDLE UP
Seeking a quick cure
for the winter doldrums?
Look no further than
one blindingly brilliant
Balenciaga shoulder bag
sheathed in rhinestones;
balenciaga.com.
148
P HOTOGRA PHE D BY M ARTIN PAR R OF M AGNUM P HOTOS.
P RODUCED BY DMB RE PR ESE NTS.

PRECIOUS METALS
Elsewhere at the fair,
a glittering purse
from Saint Laurent by
Anthony Vaccarello
(ysl.com) adorns a
wild-haired portrait.
Details, see In This Issue.
The Get
1

PRO DUCTS : COURTESY O F BRAN DS/WE BSITES.

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DAN IEL JACKSON . VOGUE , 2021 .

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VOGUE.COM DECEMBER 2022 151

 THE FINISH LINE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 62
That month I’d decided to try
my first-ever “Dry January,” a gim-
mick that had never before appealed.
But on the night of the 20th, after
Trump’s departure and Biden’s
swearing in, I decided that two thirds
of the month was enough for me. My
husband and I opened an old bottle
of Champagne we’d been holding on
to and drank the whole thing, and I
got woozy and fainted on our patio.
I came to and felt like I was coming
up from the bottom of a well. It was
oddly pleasant, a little break from
the world at a dark time when it was
unclear what lay ahead.
It’s still not clear. Trump has never
left. He’s held rallies, influenced the
midterm elections with his endorse-
ments, forced candidates to reshape
themselves in his image and accept
his lie that the presidential election
was stolen. And this is allegedly the
lull before he declares he is running
for president again. It has all been far
more disorienting than any hard stop.
In my life of covering losing candi-
dates, I’ve never experienced anything
like this—a campaign with no closure,
a story with no end.
Meanwhile, I’ve switched beats to
cover Congress, where Trump has
loomed over the entire midterm cycle,
elevating Republican candidates he
believes will support him in another
contested election. Republicans in
the House of Representatives will
likely serve as Trump’s instruments
as he launches another campaign.
The political press corps, at large, is
exhausted. Many of us feel like we’ve
barely come up for air since 2016.
One of the many Trump effects—the
loss of losing, of that necessary hard
stop—has been a deep distrust in
the election process, and in the work
we do. “Thank you for your service,”
people said to me on more than one
occasion during the Trump years—
on the street, in an airport. It always
made me a little uncomfortable. Jour-
nalists like me weren’t fighting a war,
despite being called the “enemy of
the people.” We weren’t the tip of the
Resistance spear, which is how I inter-
preted this show of gratitude. No one
has thanked me for my service since
Trump left Washington.
I recently found myself wondering
about that girl on the street corner
152 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM
of my first campaign. Why had she
burst into tears? What did she know
was coming?
I decided to call Quinn, to make
sure I wasn’t making too much of the
moment. Had she known what made
the girl so emotional? Was there some-
thing in the girl’s tears that under-
scored the consequences of elections?
“I’ve never forgotten it,” Quinn said
to me on the phone. We talked about
how distant that race felt, how the
stakes seemed lower then, how pol-
itics could feel uplifting.
“It was stunning because she was
so clearly taken, I don’t think with me
personally, but with who and what I
represented to her,” Quinn recalled.
“It was overwhelming to her.”
Quinn acknowledged how dis-
traught she was that day, while
cheerily greeting New Yorkers on the
street. It felt like a long time ago to
both of us—when there was more to
an election than the result. “It was a
bright moment, where I felt like the
campaign had an impact on this girl,”
she said. “It made all of the bullshit
worth it.” @
A LOVE STORY
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 110
and all the girls are hanging out
together, and I’m not in that group.
Maybe that’s just insecurity. It’s not
because I’m antisocial or I don’t want
to make friends. I’ve always been kind
of a march-to-the-beat-of-my-own-
drum, loner-type person. I’m like, I’ll
just stay focused on my thing. I’ve
always kind of felt like that. I still do.
But I try! It used to be about the idea
of validation in other people’s eyes. It
really used to be. Because I wanted to
be part of the club. But I don’t any-
more. There’s something bigger that
I’m after. It’s about touching people’s
lives and being touched.”
Twenty years ago, in an era that
has sometimes been referred to as
Bennifer 1.0, Affleck gave Lopez the
nickname “Little.” At six foot four,
he is nearly a foot taller. When they
reunited, he told her that he wasn’t
sure if that old moniker still applied,
that she seemed somehow too fully
realized to be called “Little” even
affectionately. But the pet name has
returned, even as Lopez has come
to seem like the dewy-skinned den
mother of us all, a force for good on
a sometimes dark planet. Growing
up, getting there, has been her life’s
work, on top of all that…work. “You
come out the other side, and you’re
better, you’re stronger, you’re good on
your own,” she says. “But there’s a lit-
tle piece of that former self that was
totally open, innocent, and unafraid,
that is gone. Sometimes I mourn that,
because I’m such a romantic.” Her
voice has softened to a whisper. “And
because I loved that person so much.
“My whole life, my whole music
career was just about love: every movie
I picked, every album I made. Even
though I’m super proud of who I am
today, and I wouldn’t change a fuck-
ing thing—and I can finally say that,
as a human being, as a woman, as a
partner, as a wife, as a coworker, as a
mother and stepmom—there’s just
that little piece where you feel like,
That old me? She was sweet.” @
COMING CLEAN
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 122
Old-school politeness prevails, and
fellow patients—a Franco-American
couple to our left (the husband is a
dead ringer for French football legend
David Ginola), and a handsome Ital-
ian influencer who resembles a young
Joaquin Phoenix to our right—nod
quiet “good mornings” as they pass.
The overall tableau, with its curved
floor-to-ceiling windows through
which tall pale-green reeds sway pret-
tily in the breeze, brings to mind an
early-20th-century Alpine institution.
A small bowl of yogurt and two
Lego-size pieces of toast are placed
in front of us, as well as a wheatgrass
shot and one of Lans Med Bitter
Drops (a natural mixture of plant
extracts that supports the detoxifica-
tion of the liver, bile, and stomach).
We are told to chew each mouthful 40
times and not to drink anything while
eating, other than the shots to aid
digestion. I can almost hear my hus-
band’s stomach growling like an angry
bear. “Be patient,” I tell him. There are
typically three menu stages, but my
program had seven: 0, 1, 2, 2.1, 2.2,
3, and lastly—the holy grail—Active.
We stare enviously at the wildly excit-
ing addition of fruit compotes and
carbs, such as quinoa and spelt, on
the plates of our neighbors, who are
evidently days ahead of us.
After breakfast, I grab an herbal tea
to quell my hunger pangs and happily
skip down the mesmerizingly wide,
funnel-like centralized staircase that
seems suspended from the ceiling
like a James Turrell installation to
meet the clinic’s medical director,
cardiologist Jan Stritzke, MD. Tall,
jovial, and dressed in a dark blue
cashmere sweater and cotton trou-
sers, Stritzke greets me like a friend
who has just arrived at a dinner
party. He goes through my medical
history and the results of my earlier
examination, which are all generally
fine but need improving. “Your cho-
lesterol is a little elevated, as is your
BMI,” he says, with a smile. “But
your visceral fat is low, your muscle-
to-fat ratio is optimum, and you have
good kidney and liver function.” He
lays out my plan, which includes
personal-training sessions; Cellgym
infusions—which are also referred
to as “intermittent hypoxic training”
and include inhaling varying altitude
levels of oxygen through a specialized
breathing mask to enhance energy;
abdominal massages to stimulate
digestion; full-body algae treatments
and reflexology for relaxation; as
well as an initial 48 hours of fasting.
Finally, a daily Epsom salts regime
is prescribed to clear out my bowel,
and for my long history with depres-
sion and recently diagnosed ADHD,
Stritzke suggests hypnotherapy.
When I return to our room, my
husband is beaming. Apparently, he
is in “excellent” health. “I’ve had the
detox algae treatment, too,” he tells
me, describing a methodical process
of being slathered in a seaweedy mud,
swaddled head to toe in a heavy sheet,
and then lowered into a warm bath
for 25 minutes. That sounds heaven,
I say. “Yes, but I started getting too
hot and itchy,” he replies a little dra-
matically. “I wish I had said yes to
the panic button!”
Lunch, we soon learn, is as sparse and
laborious as breakfast. Two thin broc-
coli stems are accompanied by three
tiny steamed potatoes and a slice of
spelt or buckwheat toast. Shocked,
my husband takes a photo and sends
it to his brothers. It turns out chew-
ing each mouthful 40 times takes an
inordinately long time. Still hungry,
he hops on one of the electric bicycles
provided to explore the surroundings
(or the closest speakeasy, no doubt),
and I head to my next appointment
with my designated personal trainer,
Kevin. I haven’t worked out since
before COVID and worry that just
explaining as much to Kevin will
leave me winded. But the 50-minute
session—seven minutes on the ellip-
tical machine to get my heart rate up,
followed by allover strength train-
ing with elastic bands—is fun and
encouraging; plus there’s the distrac-
tion of the Narnia-like heated out-
door saltwater swimming pool, its
steam rising and mingling with the
sun-soaked landscape.
“Let ’s go on a bike ride, you’ll
love it,” my husband says when we’re
reunited later. In spite of himself, he
seems to be enjoying this enforced
deprivation and, seduced by his enthu-
siasm, I agree to the trip off campus.
He suggests we visit the nearby town
of Kampen where the German jet set
summer. Referred to as “the Hamp-
tons of Germany” by locals, Kampen
has a Louis Vuitton store on the
main drag, and its real estate is the
most expensive in the country. “It’s
10 minutes each way,” he assures me,
and while it actually takes an hour in
total, the exhilarating feeling of sail-
ing along the cycle path with the wind
in my hair, amid the heather-dotted
dunes and the Hobbit-like cottages,
feels transcendent, like throwing away
a long-held emotional weight.
Dinner every night is the same: a
tiny measure—a thimbleful, really—
of vegetable soup. But a few days in,
as we gleefully sip the unctuous and
creamy Michelin-style beetroot, fen-
nel, or broccoli veloutés, something
funny happens. We realize we are no
longer actively hungry, and we are
relaxed like we haven’t been in years.
We skip back to our room and watch
endless episodes of a terrible but good
drama series about a catastrophic
bombing in Washington’s Capitol
building that kills nearly every gov-
ernment member present, cuddled
up and happy. (There might not be
caffeine, sugar, or alcohol allowed on
the premises, but the vice of television
is, thankfully, Lanserhof-approved.)
In between workouts, massages,
and reflexology sessions, our trip zips
by in a happy blur of indolent activity:
swimming in the warm outdoor pool,
lounging in the reading room with
cups of hot lavender tea, and drifting
off to sleep in front of the firepit that
overlooks the sea. When our fasting
ends, we are fed exquisitely prepared
tiny morsels of delicious food, which,
in a fun twist, we are also taught how
to prepare during evening cooking
classes led by the highly regarded
in-house chef, Dietmar Priewe, him-
self a devotee of the program, having
shed 70 pounds.
By the end of our stay, I am gen-
uinely sad to leave behind the mag-
nificent nightly thunderstorms, the
rainbows, the blue skies, the ethereal,
almost lunar-like landscape, and the
freedom from the sense of urgency
and panic that had become my norm
before we arrived. Whether or not
he’d ever admit to it, I know my hus-
band feels immeasurably healthier
and clear-minded, too, his beer belly
certainly the better for it. But it’s not
just the professional rigor and sweet-
ness of the staff, or the calming of my
stomach, or the fact I lost almost four
pounds that left a lasting impression.
My time with clinical hypnothera-
pist and meditation instructor Heide
Ziegenbein was, without hyperbole,
life changing.
After spending an hour evaluat-
ing my mental health, Ziegenbein
focused on the PTSD that lingers
for many cancer survivors, even years
after remission—in my case, of seeing
the pain and worry behind the eyes
of my then 10-year-old child. Lead-
ing me into a state of hypnosis, which
felt like an intensely relaxed therapy
session, she asked me to think of an
imaginary friend, someone I could
summon at will to lean on and give
me support in times of need. There are
two of them, I told her: Asterix and
Obelix. In those few sessions, my Gaul
warriors helped me achieve a modi-
cum of closure around an issue I have
been carrying around with me since I
first got sick—and my stay at Lanser-
hof gave me the unexpected chance to
see that there is a path forward. @
THE FEMALE GAZE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 131
to be so shocking,” she says. “I would
love that painting more if it was
painted by a woman, but the premise
that we all come from a woman’s body
is a very human one. It’s the opposite
of objectifying a woman’s anatomy—
it considers the physical and spiritual
realities of a woman’s body.” Grib-
bon made a painting in response to
Courbet’s Origin. Called A Simple
Demonstration, it shows Scott on a
153
 sofa, naked from the waist down, legs
spread open, and arms inviting us to
enjoy the view. We don’t see the head
on Courbet’s woman—she has no
personal identity. Gribbon gives us
Scott in full, in this and in all her large
“Uscapes” paintings. Her labyrinths
of female sexuality read as love songs,
embracing vulnerability and queer sex
as facts of life.
“Our art enters into almost every-
thing we do,” Gribbon says. Gribbon
and Scott love going for walks in the
neighborhood and going out to art
galleries, movies, and concerts—and
for dinner or just drinks, but inevita-
bly, they always end up talking about
their work, while Gribbon snaps
pictures for future reference. “We
saw Roxy Music and Willie Nelson
within a week of each other recently,”
Scott tells me. Scott makes a perfect
Manhattan for the evenings they stay
home and read, listen to records, play
chess or card games with Silas.
Jenna Gribbon’s star keeps rising.
This year, she was one of four artists
invited to show a work in the Frick
museum’s “Living Histories: Queer
Views and Old Masters” project,
which presented new works in con-
versation with old ones. Gribbon’s
What Am I Doing Here? I Should Ask
You the Same—Scott, in regal red
and purple velvet, draped to show
her intensely pink right nipple—sat
in for Hans Holbein’s portrait of
Thomas More and next to Holbein’s
portrait of Thomas Cromwell. (The
two paintings of male subjects are
usually hung side by side; Gribbon’s
work replaced the More while it was
out on loan.) This past summer, she
left her New York gallery, Fredericks
& Freiser, which had put her on the
map, and joined the powerhouse
uptown gallery LGDR , a merger of
Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, Ama-
lia Dayan, and Jeanne Greenberg
Rohatyn. The Massimo De Carlo
gallery in Europe had recently taken
her on, and, as of this month, she
adds the David Kordansky Gallery
in Los Angeles. “They all bring dif-
ferent strengths to the table,” Grib-
bon explains. “I also like that no one
person or gallery holds all the cards of
my career in their hands.”
Gribbon and Scott plan to get mar-
ried on November 12, in a quiet cere-
mony at a friend’s house in Montauk.
They will move into the Brooklyn
154 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM
town house that Gribbon recently
bought—she hopes that the renova-
tions will be finished by the end of the
year, the start of her 20th anniversary
in New York. Getting married will
make Scott available as a subject and
muse permanently. And vice versa.
“Painting her over and over again
means that the viewer gets to know
this recurring character and watch her
change,” Gribbon tells me. “She’s no
longer just a subject. She’s a person
you recognize, and this will become
more interesting over the years.” @
THE AWKWARD AGE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 136
with a genetic anomaly that makes
her appear to be in her 70s rather
than 16, which is both the age she’s
about to turn and the average life
expectancy of people with her condi-
tion. Unsurprisingly, Kim has trouble
fitting in at school (the musical has
beefed up the play’s cast of characters
with a quartet of romantically con-
fused teens) and things are not much
better at home, where her parents’
efforts to cope with her disorder and
their sadness about it are, at best, dys-
functional: Her father, Buddy (Steven
Boyer), drinks heavily and disappears
when he’s most needed, and her
pregnant, hypochondriac mother,
Pattie (Alli Mauzey), puts her own
(imagined) illnesses and hopes for
her unborn child center stage. Things
aren’t helped by the whirlwind reap-
pearance of Kim’s irresponsible—not
to mention larcenous—Aunt Debra,
played with comic bravura by the
smashing Bonnie Milligan, last seen
on Broadway in Head Over Heels.
(Someone, please mount a revival of
Once Upon a Mattress for this force of
nature to star in.)
Fortunately, Kim finds a kindred
spirit in the tuba-playing, Lord of
the Rings–loving, and word-games-
obsessed super-geek Seth, played by
newcomer Justin Cooley in a star-
making Broadway debut that balances
the sure-footed craft of a pro with
an unforced naturalness. It’s a mea-
sure of how completely they inhabit
their roles that, when the 19-year-old
Cooley and the 63-year-old Clark
start tentatively reaching toward each
other, you find yourself rooting for
them to find happiness together—if
not of the ever-after variety, then in
the here and now.
If you’re wondering how these ele-
ments add up to the stuff of a Broad-
way musical, enter Jeanine Tesori,
who in her 25-year career has estab-
lished herself as perhaps the most
prodigiously talented and versatile
composer writing for the stage today.
With such unconventional shows as
Violet; Caroline, or Change; and Fun
Home, she has shown an unmatched
gift for fusing far-flung musical
styles into unified scores that express
the unspoken thoughts of ordinary
people and give melody to their
hearts’ longings. “Not to be corny,
but I truly think that everybody is
‘tuned,’” Tesori says. “Everybody has
a unique way that they sound, their
own cadence. Everybody is melodic
in their own way. And honoring peo-
ple who aren’t often seen on a musi-
cal stage—whose song isn’t often
heard—is what I love to do.”
Tesori comes to Kimberly Akimbo
as an expert in collaborating with
playwrights taking their first stab as
lyricists. Before doing it with Tony
Kushner and Lisa Kron, she paired
up with Lindsay-Abaire on the
charming score for Shrek the Musical
in 2008. (“Jeanine understands how
stories are built, and how characters
work in a story in a way that not a
lot of composers do,” Lindsay-Abaire
says.) But Shrek was an arranged
marriage, and they were adapting a
well-known, hugely profitable film,
with all the kibitzing, risk-averse
Broadway producers and Hollywood
executives that tend to hover over
such enterprises.
When it came time to choose a
project of their own, Tesori suggested
adapting Kimberly Akimbo, in part
because of its raucous and tender
humanity (“When good people don’t
have the tools to handle what life
throws at them, it’s very fucking funny
and very fucking heartbreaking,” she
says), but mostly because she saw how
adding songs could serve to expand the
material. “I thought, Oh, wait, there’s
more to be explored here,” Tesori
recalls. “I really loved how David said
that, when you’re a teen, everything
feels like life and death. I remember,
in the seventh grade, someone pass-
ing a note, and I came home and I
said to my mother, ‘I want to die. I’m
not going back to school ever.’ And so
here’s this girl, for whom it doesn’t just
feel like life and death—it is life and
death. And right there—that’s where
the music can do so much work.”
The hallmarks of Tesori’s music are
stylistic eclecticism and a gift for sub-
limating her virtuosity in service of
character, story, and emotion. In Kim-
berly Akimbo, she combines bristling
pop-rock ballads and jazzy show-
stoppers with quieter, sweetly wist-
ful melodies that open up its young
heroine’s inner life, usually accompa-
nied by the plinky strum of a ukulele.
“Jeanine was able to translate the sub-
text into a musical language that feels
exactly right,” Lindsay-Abaire says.
“That uke is the spirit of Kimberly.”
In the show’s original 2003 incar-
nation, Marylouise Burke gave an
indelible performance as Kimberly,
embodying both the adolescent
mannerisms and hard-won wisdom
of a teenage girl who can honestly
declare, “I went through menopause
four years ago.” This time around,
Kimberly is being brought to life
in the beguiling person of one of
the finest musical theater perform-
ers alive. A 2005 Tony winner for
her gorgeously nuanced, revelatory
performance in The Light in the
Piazza, Clark combines a shimmer-
ing soprano voice with an almost
uncanny ability to inhabit the depths
and contours of a character. Kimberly
Akimbo’s director Jessica Stone says,
“This part fits her like a glove. And
her instrument is so open that she
can just drop into whatever the emo-
tional requirement is at the moment,
seamlessly. And then she opens her
mouth and gold comes out.”
At first, Clark was wary about
taking on the role, largely because
Tesori’s melodies seemed less suited
to her singing voice than to the girl-
ish treble of her speaking voice, with
its hint of vocal fry. But as she spent
time with her character, she recalls,
“I fell in love with her—her bravery
and her chutzpah—and I thought,
Oh, she’s here to teach me some-
thing deep about change and life and
self-awareness.” One thing that gave
Clark no trouble was accessing her
inner teen. “I remember what it was
like to be 15 or 16 in my bones,” she
says. “I was a misfit—insanely awk-
ward and homely, with a dorky haircut
and no idea how to dress. But I was
also super-brainy and kind of a cutup,
and I didn’t really care what I looked
like, though of course I sort of did.”
If the tentative, searching chem-
istry between Clark and Cooley, as
the equally out-of-place Seth, is
palpable, that’s because it’s entirely
real. “I know he’s only 19, but he’s
an old soul,” Clark says. “And he’s
super professional—so intuitive and
instinctive and beautiful. Sometimes,
during the last scene, I look over at
his face, and he doesn’t have any
lines on it, and I think, He’s at the
very beginning of his life, and I’m…
maybe not in my last chapter, but
getting toward the end of the book.
And I think maybe Kim has those
thoughts too.”
Cooley, who grew up as a studious
choir boy in Kansas City, Kansas,
discovered his love for the stage rel-
atively late, by which I mean in high
school. He got a chance to audition
for Kimberly Akimbo after the creative
team saw a tape of him performing
a number from Disney’s Anastasia
at the Jimmy Awards (the equiva-
lent of the Tonys for teenage musi-
cal theater kids across the country).
Stone decided that the openness and
feeling that he brought to the stage
were more important than his lack
of experience. “Justin has the soul of
a storyteller, and I think he’s done
something really beautiful with that
part,” she says.
For Cooley, the role felt like a nat-
ural extension of who he is. “I think
the quirkiest, purest parts of ourselves
are honestly the most magical, but
you often want to hide from them
because you want to be someone else,
especially in high school,” he says.
“As this weird, five-foot-five, skinny
Black man in theater, I spent a lot of
time trying to find parts of myself that
I could sculpt into, you know, some-
thing else. But this role really spoke to
the deepest part of me like no other
role before, and told me not to worry
about any of that.”
That is one of the messages that
emerges f rom Kimberly Akimbo,
along with a familiar injunction to
carpe diem—but in this story of a
singular young girl, it feels startlingly,
piercingly fresh. “Kim’s a young lady
who knows she has a finite amount
of time, and decides that it’s okay for
her to spend it the way she wants to
spend it,” Clark says. “Every stream
in the show leads to this major river
that ’s about, essentially, the pre-
ciousness of time, and how we can’t
take it for granted. It gives us such
a great jumping-off place to explore
questions I think we should all be
asking ourselves, especially right
now: What is it that makes life beauti-
ful? And how do we live it fully in the
time we’ve been given? ” @
LOST AND FOUND
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 141
says. “He’s a gentleman. He seems so
serious. He’s so kind to us, and after
six months they’re together.” He
asked Natalia to call him Dad. “My
mom is shining,” she remembers.
Larisa, then 36, was soon expecting
her fourth child. “I guess the lack
of sexual education in [the] Soviet
Union as well played its part,” notes
Natalia wryly.
It would, however, prove to be
another unhappy love affair, and a
financially ruinous one for Larisa,
even as she became pregnant with
her fourth child. The relationship
left her with a debt that forced her
to turn to the local mafia to borrow
money at extortionate terms. “By the
time she’s eight months pregnant,
we have to have this tough conver-
sation,” says Natalia, then a 16-year-
old having to grow up fast. “I told
her, ‘You absolutely cannot bring
another child into this situation.’ ”
And so the decision was made to
put the baby—who would be called
Masha—up for adoption, through
state channels. “I have always taken
responsibility for that decision,
maybe even more than I have admit-
ted to myself,” Natalia explains qui-
etly. However, “by the time Masha
was born, there was no question that
it was the right decision,” she adds,
recalling that the mafia’s tactics were
becoming ever more intimidating.
There was an excruciating grace
period in which Larisa could have
reversed her decision and decided to
keep her newborn. “They called us
and they were like, ‘She’s such a good
baby, she never cries, she’s so beauti-
ful, are you sure you want to go ahead
with this?’ And I remember saying to
my mom, ‘There is a queue of parents
who want this child. She’s going to
be loved, she’s going to have a much
better life than with us.’ ” Natalia
went to see her infant sister for the
first, and as she thought, the last
time. She put her hand through the
bars of the cot, “and she caught my
155
 finger and she just wouldn’t let go.
She already was such a fighter. And
in that moment, that very irrational,
emotional moment, I said to her, ‘I
promise we’ll see each other again.’ ”
Natalia arrived in Paris in November
of 1999 as Jenna’s adoption was under
way. “As soon as I was even a little suc-
cessful and felt safe,” Natalia recalls, “I
came back to look for her, but she was
gone. I even hired a private detective
to try to crack the system. Nobody
was giving us information.”
For Natalia the years that followed
were haunted by a “nightmare of
thinking, What if Masha is with the
wrong family? As things got better
for me, and loving my own children,
I just thought, What if she’s unloved?
When you have your children, you
understand how precious it is.”
It was in 2016 that Natalia first
took a DNA test. The website she
used sent her monthly updates about
potential relatives. “Everybody was
doing it and it seemed fun,” she
recalls. “I had very little hope of find-
ing anything. For a while I looked at
the monthly emails thinking, Who
knows? But then it just became too
painful.” And so she stopped looking
altogether—and fatefully missed the
emails, in 2019, from Jenna.
It was half sister Kristina who made
the connection. Kristina too had
registered with the DNA site, and
in 2021 had been notified of a half
sister match. Was this Natalia under
an assumed name and age? Kristina
contacted her to ask, but no, this was
another sibling altogether—and so
the discovery was made. Natalia and
Kristina immediately sent a flurry of
emails to Jenna. “I’ve been looking for
you forever,” read Natalia’s.
Jenna thinks back to that day in the
Walmart parking lot. “I was happy,
obviously, and I was also in shock,” she
recalls. “My mind was racing. I tried to
go grocery shopping and I forgot half
of the things I was supposed to buy, I
was so distracted.”
A correspondence began, tenta-
tively, at first, on Jenna’s side. But
with time, her confidence grew and
eventually Jenna felt ready for a video
call with Natalia. “I blew off class,”
Jenna remembers. “And I was quite
nervous…I don’t know what I had
expected her to be. I think maybe the
stereotypical ‘supermodel,’ but she
was quite natural, and easy to talk to.”
They spoke for almost three hours,
Natalia asking lots of questions
about Jenna’s childhood, and shar-
ing some details of the complicated
circumstances leading up to Jenna’s
adoption. Natalia was electrified by
Jenna’s physical resemblance to their
mother—stronger than any of the
other sisters.
Jenna told her American parents,
Marybeth and Chris—who, she says,
were shocked, amazed, but wholly
supportive—and the half sisters
continued to correspond back and
forth. Eventually, Natalia suggested
that Jenna visit her in Paris, with
her brother Ethan. It would be Jen-
na’s first trip to Europe and her first
in-person meeting with Natalia. “We
hugged for a long time in the airport,”
Jenna remembers.
“It was a lot,” she goes on, recalling
her immersion into Natalia’s family
life, including meeting Kristina, who
was there for the visit. Ethan “was
brilliant. He knew exactly when to
kind of step back and maybe let me
have a moment with my sisters. And
then he knew exactly when to step in
and be with all of us.” They all vis-
ited museums and tourist attractions
and the creme of the city’s restaurants,
and Jenna found she had a special
connection with Kristina, only two
years older. “She’s a doctor of paint-
ings,” says Natalia proudly of Kris-
tina, whom she brought to London to
be educated at the age of 11 and who
has just received her master’s in res-
toration at the University of Amster-
dam. “They’re the two nerds, and I’ve
never been to university.”
The second week of the Paris trip,
as Jenna recalls, “was a little more
serious. That’s when I met my mom
for the first time.”
Larisa speaks no English, and Jenna
didn’t speak any Russian (she is learn-
ing the language now and has just
mastered reading the Russian alpha-
bet). “I was quite an anxious mess,”

In This Issue
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34: On Champion: balenciaga.com for .com), JW Anderson Bachik. Tailor: Hailey pants, and loafers;
dress and boots; information. (jwanderson.com), Desjardins. michaelkors.com. On
Chloé Madison. On Contributors: 50: Loewe (loewe.com), Gribbon: knit and skirt;
Schwarzenegger: Top left photo: On Clark: The Elder Statesman COMING CLEAN prada.com. Tailor:
jacket and pants; cardigan, jumper, and (elder-statesman 112: NouNou bralette; Cassady Rose Bonjo.
select Louis Vuitton skirt; mollygoddard .com), and Begg x Co nounou. co.uk. 117:
stores. Calvin Klein .com. On Cooley: T-shirt; (beggxco.com). Boots; select Chanel THE AWKWARD
T-shirt; calvinklein ralphlauren.com. JW Black in Bloom: boutiques. 122: Top AGE
.com. Maison Margiela Anderson jumper; 88: Shoes; Maxfield, left photo: Calvin 136–137: On Cooley:
shoes; maison jwanderson.com. Tailor: Los Angeles. Klein T-shirt; calvin jumper; mollygoddard
margiela.com. 44: Christopher Majors klein.com. 123: On .com. R13 jeans;
Bag; bottegaveneta Ivery. Top right photo: A LOVE STORY Schwarzenegger: r13.com. Dr. Martens
.com. Cover Look: On Scott: Gucci 100–101: Gown; gucci Louis Vuitton Men’s shoes; drmartens
44: Dress; +33 (155) jacket and pants; gucci .com. 103: Jacket, T-shirt; select Louis .com. On Milligan:
351-600 for .com. On Gribbon: blouse, skirt, and Vuitton stores. 127: hoodie, pants, and
information. Tailor: Alberta Ferretti dress; brooch; ysl.com. 105: On Schwarzenegger: top; skims. com.
Hailey Desjardins. neimanmarcus Jacket, bra, and skirt; Maison Margiela Ugg shoes; ugg.com.
Editor’s Letter: 48: .com. Tailor: Cassady Dior boutiques. Boot; cardigan and shoe; On Clark: dress;

156 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM

 says Jenna, “but it went about as well five children. But I think our person- Statement Required by 39 U.S.C. 3685 showing the Ownership,

as it could go. It was a very intimate alities go very well together. She says Management and Circulation of Vogue, published Monthly, except for a
combined issue in June/July (11 issues) for October 1, 2022. Publication No.

moment, the first time we met. Natalia things and I’m like, Oh my gosh—that 489-270. Annual subscription price $22.
1. Location of known office of Publication is One World Trade Center,
and Kristina were translating between is so something I would say. It’s nice New York, NY 10007.
2. Location of the Headquarters or General Business Offices of the
the two of us. Everyone was kind of that we finally have made our connec- Publisher is One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007.
3. The names and addresses of the Publisher, Editor and Managing
in shock. She just was looking at me tion and we’ve closed that chapter of Editor are: Publisher, Elizabeth Webbe Lunny, One World Trade
Center, New York, NY 10007. Editor, Anna Wintour, One World
and holding me.” uncertainty, and we know we’re both Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Managing Editor, Cristina
Martinez, One World Trade Center, NY, NY 10007.
“I had never seen Mom more okay. It’s going to be exciting to move 4. The owner is: Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., published through
its Condé Nast division, One World Trade Center, New York, NY
peaceful,” says Natalia. Larisa had forward with it.” 10007. Stockholder: Directly or indirectly through intermediate
corporations to the ultimate corporate parent, Advance
ended up marrying the father of “For me,” says Natalia when she Publications, Inc., 950 Fingerboard Road, Staten Island, NY 10305.
5. Known bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning
Oksana and Kristina, even though it comes to join us on the porch. “I felt or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or
other securities are: None.
would prove “a very turbulent rela- she has always been part of my life, 6. Extent and nature of circulation

tionship,” Natalia says. He died in even if I didn’t know her. But it was in Average No. Copies
each issue during
Single Issue
nearest to

2021, and Larisa lost her Ukrainian- a quite painful way, always wondering a. Total No. Copies
preceding 12 months
1,260,726
filing date
1,280,239

born mother that same year. “But if she was okay. I just feel that we are b. Paid Circulation
(1) Mailed Outside-County Paid 979,061 938,363
finding Jenna brought her so much catching up very quickly. Feels like Subscriptions Stated on
PS Form 3541
peace,” Natalia says. “I couldn’t rec- family. There’s something beautiful (2) Mailed In-County Paid
Subscriptions Stated on
0 0

ognize her. She has been like a dark about genetics and our genes. Love PS Form 3541
(3) Paid Distribution Outside the 68,632 96,178
cloud for the majority of her life, and comes very naturally. And thank God Mails Including Sales Through
Dealers and Carriers, Street
now she was sunshine.” for technology because we would Vendors, Counter Sales, and
Other Paid Distribution
never have found each other. What Outside USPS®
(4) Paid Distribution by Other 0 0
Exactly a year after Jenna received are the odds?” Classes of Mail Through
the USPS
those first emails from Natalia and I admire Jenna’s remarkable c. Total Paid Distribution 1,047,693 1,034,542
d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution
Kristina, she is joining them in the grape-colored eyes. “I grew them (1) Free or Nominal Rate 108,353 102,628

rambling turn-of-the-century house myself,” she says with a laugh, and then, Outside-County Copies
included on PS Form 3541

in a seaside enclave in Connecticut, suddenly curious, turns to Natalia. (2) Free or Nominal Rate
In-County Copies
0 0

where Antoine and Natalia and their “Were his eyes green?” she asks, mean- included on PS Form 3541
(3) Free or Nominal Rate Copies 0 0
extended families spend the summer, ing her father. “They were,” Natalia Mailed at Other Classes
Through the USPS
and Annie Leibovitz has come to cap- tells her. “Isn’t it an incredible color?” (4) Free or Nominal Rate
Distribution Outside the Mail
4,315 3,818

ture the moment. Soon after the shoot, Natalia e. Total Free or Nominal Rate
Distribution
112,668 106,445

“Natalia’s just in such a different planned to head to North Carolina to f. Total Distribution 1,160,361 1,140,987
g. Copies not Distributed 100,365 139,252
phase of life than I am,” Jenna tells meet Jenna’s parents. Jenna promises h. Total 1,260,726 1,280,239
i. Percent Paid 90.29% 90.67%
me. With her mechanical engineer- to show her lots of family videos doc- j. Paid Electronic Copies 84,658 95,406
k. Total Paid Print Copies (line 15c) 1,132,351 1,129,948
ing degree, she has recently joined a umenting her childhood. + Paid Electronic Copies
l. Total Print Distribution (line 15f) 1,245,019 1,236,393
construction company in Charlotte, “You’re going to cry,” she tells her + Paid Electronic Copies
m.Percent Paid (Both Print & 90.95% 91.39%
North Carolina. “I just graduated uni- sister. Electronic Copies)

versity. I’m starting my first job. And “I’m ready,” says Natalia. “Happy 7. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and
complete. (Signed) Maria Betances, Executive Director, Consumer

she’s been working, and a mother of tears.” @ Marketing

r13.com. Dr. Martens Banana Republic LOST AND upon request. CONDÉ NAST IS
AN ITE M FRO M AN YW HE RE OTHE R THAN TH E AU THO RIZED STO RE, THE BUY ER TAKES

boots; drmartens pants; bananarepublic FOUND 3. Bracelet; price

OF MERC HAN DIS E SO LD BY DISCOU NTE RS. AS IS ALWAYS THE CAS E IN PURCH ASI NG
COMPAN IES MEN TION E D IN ITS PAG ES, WE CAN NOT GUARAN TEE T HE AUTH ENT IC ITY

COMMITTED TO GLOBAL
ENVIRONMENTAL
.com. Uncommon .com. New Balance 138–139: Sweaters; upon request. SUSTAINABILITY. SCAN
A WOR D A BOUT D I SCOUN TERS W HILE VO GUE TH OROUGH LY RESE ARC HES T HE

Matters earrings; shoes; newbalance khaite.com. 141: 6. Bike, price upon HERE FOR DETAILS.

uncommonmatters .com. On Mauzey: Dresses; nililotan.com. request. 10. Blanket,

.com. Miu Miu sweater; brunello Tailor: Deborah price upon request.
necklace; miumiu cucinelli. com. Levi’s Rogers. 11. Bag, $4,100.
.com. Mon Cher Moi jeans; levi.com. Vans
rings; monchermoi shoes; vans.com. THE GET LAST LOOK
.com. On Boyer: shirt Tailor: Christopher 150–151: 1. Family 158: Bag;
and T-shirt; gap.com. Majors Ivery. prada.com.
A RIS K AND SH OULD US E CAUTIO N W HE N DO IN G SO.

house trunk, price

VOGUE IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2022 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VOLUME 212, NO. 11. VOGUE
(ISSN 0042-8000) is published monthly (except for a combined June/July issue) by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY
10007. Roger Lynch, Chief Executive Officer; Pamela Drucker Mann, Global Chief Revenue Officer & President, U.S. Revenue & APAC; Jackie Marks, Chief Financial Officer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY,
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157
Last Look

Prada bag
When it comes to Prada’s latest accessories, gold isn’t all that glitters.
Case in point: this rectangular, top-handle bag that shimmers with
a smattering of crystal rhinestones in four sizes. Find just the right light,
and this accessory becomes the world’s most elegant mirror ball—in
other words, it’s exactly what you want to carry to your next holiday party.
P H OTO G R A P H E D BY S E BAST I A N L AG E R

158 DECEMBER 2022 VOGUE.COM

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