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Vanity Fair April 2023 (Digital)

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18 Articles

2 min.

Editor’s Letter

If you didn’t know spring was here, you would sense it from the energy of the stars in the pages of this issue. First, there’s Gisele, embarking on a new chapter, living an enviably healthy life in Costa Rica with her children and exercising healing powers on wounded birds. For our cover story, Michelle Ruiz spends some intimate time at home with the supermodel and her family, during which they ride horses, drink smoothies, and talk jujitsu and other strategies for self-care. Gisele’s beachy vibes reign supreme in Lachlan Bailey’s sun-drenched photographs—a taste of warmth and light to come. And there’s our portfolio of this season’s stellar Broadway talent: Jessica Chastain, Wendell Pierce, Lea Michele, Daniel Radcliffe, and many more great actors reveling in a neon-saturated Times Square simulacrum. It’s…

2 min.

Contributors

Lachlan BAILEY “WILD AT HEART,” P. 40 “Gisele really has no equal,” says photographer Bailey. The Melbourne, Australia, native, who shot the supermodel seaside in Florida on a sun-drenched day this winter, says, “She knows photography and light better than most. This is a rare treat these days.” Delia CAI “IT’S A BARBIE WORLD,” P. 36 “There is something so deliciously postmodern about the world’s most popular doll appropriating Instagram mannerisms and content creator–speak,” says VF staff writer Cai. “Let’s be real: Trends come and go, but Barbie’s influence very well might be forever.” Michelle RUIZ “WILD AT HEART,” P. 40 One commercial flight, one puddle jumper, and a car ride later, Ruiz—a journalist working on a novel inspired by the royal family saga—met Gisele Bündchen at her home in Costa Rica. On horseback and accompanied by Bündchen’s…

3 min.

VANITIES VANITAS VANITATUM

As a student of the catwalk, Alton Mason looked to Naomi Campbell. “I wasn’t really studying the guys, to be honest with you. I was studying the women because women carry this power that is unmatched.” His own walk became “this equilibrium of masculinity and femininity.” It’s served him well. Since his New York Fashion Week debut in 2016, the five-time consecutive Model of the Year has walked 143 runways and starred in 86 campaigns. After earning the admiration of Virgil Abloh and Karl Lagerfeld (who had, shockingly, never put a Black man on a Chanel runway before), Mason made his Hollywood debut, dazzling as Little Richard in Baz Luhrmann’s Oscar-nominated Elvis. But for a career that has, historically, felt all too finite, “you’re missing birthdays, funerals, and sacrificing so…

1 min.

Best for Last

MORE THAN CAKE Celebrated for her fine-dining pastry work and fundraiser bake sales, Natasha Pickowicz brings a community spirit to this soulfully precise book from Artisan: both festive (black sesame layer cake) and savory (kabocha galette). MAYUMU Abi Balingit’s colorful debut via Harvest has a coming-of-age arc, with classic Filipino dishes filtered through a no-rules multicultural lens. Pichi-pichi (like cassava Sno Balls) uses Mexican chamoy sauce; chewy rice cakes sneak in Oreos. SWEET ENOUGH A bid for deliciously unkempt desserts, Alison Roman’s latest with Clarkson Potter treats “salty” as a compliment (chocolate pudding, lemon shortbread). She dotes on pies but also offers a primer on judiciously seasoned fruit salad. LOVE IS A PINK CAKE Claire Ptak, the Chez Panisse alum who runs London’s Violet Cakes, divides this sumptuous book (W.W. Norton) into two. “California” is produce-forward, while…

1 min.

Circle ROUND

From Boudica to Joan of Arc, mythic memory favors bold—and armored—women. Thus, Francesca Amfitheatrof, artistic director of watches and jewelry at Louis Vuitton, took inspiration from the arrow in this standout necklace from her fourth high jewelry collection, the 125-item juggernaut she’s dubbed Spirit. Evoking the crisp lines of the Chrysler Building and the gleam of a slithering serpent, the piece blends antiquity and modernity in two loops of time, with its clockwise chevrons alternating yellow gold and diamond-studded platinum. Fly forward, fast and true. SET DESIGN: SOPHEAR. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY ANTHEM. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.…

4 min.

New York DOLL

THE PANTHEON OF It girls isn’t driven by the mere spectacle of dressing up. “They simply do because they must,” Hari Nef says on a crisp Sunday in Lower Manhattan. “Whether it’s Edie or Parker or Chloë,” meaning Sedgwick, Posey, and Sevigny, “or Dianne Brill or RuPaul.” Eternal icons all—still, word on the street is that many actors cling to a very set image: “They don’t want to wear wigs, take risks with makeup. I don’t relate to that.” Character play confers a certain freedom. “I can get naked behind that,” adds Nef. Eight years after her runway debut helped ink a headline-making IMG contract, the spring 2023 collections saw the actor back on the circuit, this time with an unmissable copper bob. She served retro kink at Batsheva (PVC dress,…

1 min.

Staying Power

“THE IDEA IS to create not just beauty, but the beauty of the 21st century,” says Nicolas Gerlier, the charismatic Frenchman behind La Bouche Rouge. The maison de haute beauté debuted its first lipsticks in 2017, pairing considered formulas with hand-stitched leather cases—instant heirlooms in pale blue and camel and namesake red, by way of a heritage tannery. The line’s waste-not ethos is rooted in desire (to covet is to cherish is to refill), so it’s apt that the newest project is fragrance, a category that rides on romance. But for these five scents, the beating heart is a palette of upcycled ingredients, comprising nearly a third of each formula. (Cedar sawdust, for instance, is steam-distilled to create essential oil; by-product rosewater, when cold-processed, yields an extract called rose damascena…

1 min.

SIX-PACK Three love stories, a Western, and two more to enjoy

LONE WOMEN Victor LaValle’s deft genre bender opens on Adelaide, a Black farmer, setting her home ablaze with the bloodied bodies of her parents inside. She flees California for Montana with a padlocked steamer trunk and secrets to spare. (One World) COMMUNITY BOARD Recently dumped Darcy returns home, where she loses and finds herself in a Nextdoor-esque website, in Tara Conklin’s droll investigation of what we owe our neighbors and ourselves. (Mariner) BIOGRAPHY OF X In Catherine Lacey’s newest, a widowed writer attempts to understand her late wife, an enigmatic artist, through a series of interviews; the resulting “biography” is prismatic and brilliant. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) CALLING UKRAINE In this biting comedy, Johannes Lichtman offers a glimpse of Ukraine (pre-2022 Russian invasion) through the blinkered eyes of a young American working abroad. (Marysue Rucci Books) THE GREAT…

1 min.

Splash!

“Forget what you know about mermaids,” commands Ren Yu, the teen narrator of Jade Song’s blood-soaked Chlorine (William Morrow), calling to mind—and dismissing—red-haired Ariel and pre-Raphaelite beauties. The directive is a fitting tagline for a crop of new novels with resonances that lean more Homeric than Disney and narratives geared toward a plugged-in audience. (Halle Bailey, star of the forthcoming live-action The Little Mermaid, has said the film, too, will be “updated with the current times.”) Chlorine sees a high school swimmer go to drastic lengths to assume what she believes is her true form; in Cassandra Khaw’s taut, bewitching The Salt Grows Heavy (Tor Nightfire), a mermaid is betrayed by her husband; their daughters devour his body and destroy his kingdom. And in Julia Langbein’s American Mermaid (Doubleday), when…

3 min.

Electric BOOGALOO

FOR YEARS, ROB HOWARD restored old cars. In his youth, he worked on a 1971 Plymouth Duster with his dad, and as an adult, he restored 1960s Mustangs and modernized a 1957 Chevy station wagon so he could drive it safely with his kids. But the cars weren’t dependable, and it was especially diffcult to tune antiquated fuel systems. “No matter what, it always smelled like gasoline,” he says. With a background in tech and engineering, Howard sought improved outcomes. His key determination: Banish petroleum. “When you think about restoring your car, electrification is so obvious,” he says. “It performs better, it’s lower maintenance, and it’s actually a roughly equivalent cost.” In 2019, two years after he’d sold his software company to Target and worked on the executive team there, he…

6 min.

Writer’s BLOCK

NICK CAVE, IN his idiosyncratic fan-correspondence newsletter, recently critiqued a “song in the style of Nick Cave” created using ChatGPT. At a glance, the lyrics evoked the dark religious overtones that run through Cave’s oeuvre. Upon closer inspection, this ersatz Cave track was a low-rent simulacrum. “I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI—that it will forever be in its infancy,” Cave wrote. “It can never be rolled back, or slowed down, as it moves us toward a utopian future, maybe, or our total destruction. Who can possibly say which? Judging by this song ‘in the style of Nick Cave’ though… The apocalypse is well on its way. This song sucks.” Cave’s ChatGPT takedown hit a nerve online, which probably says less…

9 min.

It’s a BARBIE WORLD

IT’S ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL day for content creation, at least according to the sky blue backdrop rigged outside the windows of one tasteful midcentury-modern Malibu dream home in particular, though strictly temporally speaking, we’re in El Segundo. Indoors, seated among an embarrassment of houseplants, a young woman strikes a pose with her stylish friends. There’s a month’s worth of content to shoot this week—such is the life of catering to just over 3 million Instagram and TikTok followers—so she’s assembled a team to help. From a few inches away, her stylist leans forward and adjusts the tilt of a hand while our star influencer smiles patiently, plastically, under the crush of lights. Barbie is nothing if not a professional. “The smallest little movement can make it look like a doll,” says Zlatan…

30 min.

WILD AT HEART

IF GISELE BÜNDCHEN IS A WITCH, SHE’S A GOOD WITCH. The supermodel is conjuring her mystical, much-TikTokked-about powers at 7:30 on a recent Friday morning in her “bedroom”—a minimalist casita in the shadow of her towering main house, perched high among the dense palm treetops of Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula—where she is cupping a wounded bird. Bündchen has just discovered the unmoving robin nestled on a white couch on her terrace, a serendipitous landing place with a panoramic vista of the beach below. Looking bereft, she scoops the bird up with the ease of a Disney princess, taking care with its mangled claw. “Are you okay?” Bündchen coos to the bird, her throaty voice softening to a whisper. She is stroking its tiny head with an elegant unpolished index finger—performing “a little Reiki,”…

6 min.

CURTA IN CALL

JESSICA CHASTAIN/A DOLL’S HOUSE “At Juilliard, Andrei Belgrader told me, ‘A great thing to do right before you go onstage—even if you don’t believe it—is to stick your arms out in the air and go, I’m a genius. Then walk onstage. Because it’ll create that energy within you.’ ” SOME BROADWAY STARS hype themselves up with K-pop. Some opt for jazz. Jessica Chastain prefers the sound of nothing—a void before she’s thrust into the claustro-phobic world of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. “That feels quite Nora to me,” she says, “to sit in silence.” The Oscar winner may find that quiet is hard to come by in New York these days. For the first time since COVID-19 put live theater on an indefinite pause three years ago, venues from Broadway to Brooklyn are…

31 min.

ECHOES IN THE DARK

CORNER CLUB OWNER Marc Trivelpiece was starting to hate reporters. As a rule, he condemns violence—anyone who throws punches in the Corner Club gets booted—but three weeks into the media storm surrounding the murders of four college kids in his town, Trivelpiece was beginning to think that people don’t get punched in the face enough. On November 13, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Kaylee Goncalves, and Maddie Mogen had been stabbed to death in the girls’ off-campus house in Moscow, home to the University of Idaho. Trivelpiece’s bar is where two of the victims, Goncalves and Mogen, spent their last evening on earth. When the murders made news, the media swarmed, and Trivelpiece’s business in particular came under siege. “I want the Corner Club to be famous,” he said. “But not for…

21 min.

CHAT PERSON

KARA SWISHER, rocking aviators, AirPods, and a “Lesbians Who Tech” sweatshirt, rolls into Vox Media’s DC headquarters and gets right to work. Today’s episode of On with Kara Swisher, a twice-weekly podcast that launched in September, is about the future of the Republican Party after the House Speaker free-for-all, and she’s tapped CNN’s Manu Raju and The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes to make sense of the mess. Once the guests come on camera, Swisher apologizes for wearing sunglasses, explaining that she forgot her prescription pair at home. “It’s very Dark Brandon,” says Raju. “I had it before him,” Swisher shoots back. “Let’s be clear on that situation.” Swisher, as an interviewer, shows little tolerance for bloviating; she gets to the point. About halfway through the episode, she calls for a “lightning round” of House Republicans,…

22 min.

THE KINGD OM OF PREP

WHEN YOU THINK of J.Crew, you probably picture Jenna Lyons, the larger-than-life high-fashion persona whose image became synonymous with the brand—if you are a person who has bothered to give the matter of J.Crew’s identity any thought, that is. Six years after departing the role, Lyons’s image will soon loom even larger as a member of the revamped cast of The Real Housewives of New York City. The generation currently coming of shopping age might solely associate it with its current head of women’s design, millennial social media darling Olympia Gayot. But the original human embodiment of J.Crew—though she will surely be uncomfortable to see it put in these terms—was a woman whom even constant J.Crew shoppers have never heard of. Today, she lives deep under the radar at her…

2 min.

BOB MACKIE

What is your greatest extravagance? Hand embroidery, an entire hand-beaded gown. What is your favorite journey? Rome, Venice, Paris, not necessarily in that order. What is your idea of perfect happiness? A great entrance-making outfit, where everyone oohs and aahs! What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Being overly critical. When and where were you happiest? Working in a room full of gifted and talented people. Which talent would you most like to have? I would love to be able to sing, but for me, it’s not a good idea! If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be? Their lack of curiosity and imagination. They never set foot in a theater or were ever interested. What do you consider your greatest achievement? Deciding at…

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I was a subscriber to Vanity Fair for 35 years. I remember the Graydon Carter years and the Tina Brown years, including Dominick Dunne and Christopher Hitchens. Those were the best. The magazine has thinned substantially, but since magazine subscriptions have dropped 56% in four years, this isn't surprising. The reason I canceled my subscription was the increasing slanted political coverage. It wasn't that I disagreed with the opinions. I just didn't think they should be so slanted in the reporting section and should have been saved for the editorial portions, such as the letter from the editor. Reporting should stick to objective facts and not include opinions.
I did restart my subscription several months ago, and I am hopeful for improvement. It's been a little mixed, but I'll continue for a year and then, if I can get a competitive renewal rate, I'll keep going.

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Vanity Fair April 2023 (Digital)

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