Vogue

THAT AIR OF BEING SETTLED, of seeming content, has never been Lady Gaga’s strongest impression. She is too electric and restless, too chameleonic a creature. Who can forget the way she came to the Met Gala in 2019, an arrival-as-performance-art that included four costume changes, five dancers, props, selfies, and more? Her covers are all unforgettable too—our anniversary cover in 2012 being one of my very favorites. She’s been generous to us at Vogue, gamely transforming herself time and again. But when I read Jonathan Van Meter’s new cover profile of her this month, which accompanies shape-shifting portraits by Ethan James Green, I was left with an unusual feeling. Gaga is happy. This is not for any mysterious reason. Her film career is in full flight, with a new Joker movie…

On the Flip Side “Woman to Woman” (page 148) sent Vogue senior editor Chloe Schama to Paris to meet Chemena Kamali, the recently appointed creative director of Chloé. The German-born Kamali has a long history with the French house—years before getting the top job there last October, she was hired as a senior designer under Clare Waight Keller, and years before that, she was a Chloé intern—but her relationship to Vogue goes back even further. Case in point: The snapshot above sees Kamali at 13, reading the magazine in bed while her family was living in Laguna Beach. The Time Travelers “I love working with Mikael. We really had fun, and it felt like everyone else on set did too.” So says fashion editor IB Kamara (center, in denim shorts) of teaming up…

All of a sudden, I couldn’t stop crying. For some reason, around the turn of the year, I was waking up in tears. Then, the rest of the day, any little thing would set me off: train delays; a remix of Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” playing at the gym; showering, weirdly. To say this was uncharacteristic would be an understatement. I am pathologically level—always quick to steady myself. Until now. I was a black hole, future dimming, my weeping the weeping of a collapsing star. What the hell was going on? “Maybe,” a friend offered, gently, as I wept to her over martinis, “this is perimenopause.” Well. I should have known. I mean, really, I should have: The good thing, I guess, about living in a technocapitalist surveillance society is…

You’re blushing! my sister cries with delight. We’re playing on the front steps of our London house and have just heard skateboard wheels approaching. I am 13 and in love with the skateboard’s owner, a boy who lives up the street whom I’ve never actually spoken to. He has long sandy hair and an American accent. Basically, he’s Kurt Cobain. It’s magical and mortifying and a secret—except it’s not, because it’s written all over my face. If the eyes are the window to the soul, then our cheeks are the back door. What other part of the body so readily reveals our hidden emotions? Embarrassment, exuberance, delight, desire, all instantly communicated with a rush of blood. It’s no wonder that blush has been a mainstay of makeup bags for decades: Ancient…

Anyone unfamiliar with Pharrell Williams’s background would be hard-pressed to make out his origins given his vast remit: designing Louis Vuitton’s menswear collections, overseeing a skin-care line, manning a digital auction house. Was he one of those Central Saint Martins guys? The heir to some crazy fortune, just seeing what stuck? Of course, Williams is none of the above—his roots are in music production and a disadvantaged part of Virginia Beach—but the same heedless creativity found him anyway. That’s both the subtext and the text of Piece by Piece, a new film by Morgan Neville (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, 20 Feet From Stardom): Ever since his childhood as a brainy, synesthetic little boy obsessed with music, water, and outer space, Williams has mostly done his own thing—so it follows that…

Plenty of us dream about, read about, and fantasize about fairy-tale endings. Fairy-tale beginnings, though? Not so much—unless you’re Erdem Moralioglu. After almost two decades of building his namesake label around dreamy dresses and romantic brocades fit for storybook heroines in array after array of lush botanicals, he’s only now setting about launching a bag—called, appropriately enough, the Bloom. “It felt like something I wanted to do before we turned 20,” says Moralioglu, laughing. “It started with the last collection, which really got me thinking about different iterations of accessories and the idea of crafting something. We started playing with a singular piece of leather, and it was a very organic process.” What emerged from all that was a distinctive handbag—one that emphasizes the dualities of pragmatism and poetry, masculine and…