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  • Will ‘Oppenheimer,’ ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ or ‘Barbie’ Be Crowned Best Picture?

    Will ‘Oppenheimer,’ ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ or ‘Barbie’ Be Crowned Best Picture?

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    Many industry folks, some of whom are no doubt Oscar voters, are grateful to Nolan for all that he’s done for the business: tethering auteur-ish prestige to marketability, vocally resisting the streaming incursion. That, coupled with the fact that Nolan is widely seen as overdue for his first Oscar, makes him a strong best director contender. But Oppenheimer as a whole should not be discounted. It may not be as screener-friendly as some of its competitors, but Oppenheimer has enjoyed one of the defining film narratives of 2023. A best picture win would be a fitting end to that story.

    As for the other half of the summer box office equation, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie made more money than Oppenheimer, most of it without the advantage of IMAX pricing. It’s not a weighty, masculine affair like Oppenheimer—which better fits the traditional best picture mold—but Barbie’s difference is probably its greatest asset. Gerwig’s film created a new version of branded filmmaking, swaddling its IP commercialism in sociopolitical commentary. If 2023 becomes known for one film, it will be Barbie, a movie that leaned into its cynical origins hard enough that it broke through to some other realm.

    But maybe the Academy, or at least enough of the Academy, isn’t quite ready for that seismic shift. They could, instead, turn to Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, a Leonard Bernstein biopic that is comfortably recognizable as an old-fashioned awards movie while still taking artistic swings. Cooper is mesmerizing in the lead role, as is his costar, Carey Mulligan. While reviews for the film may be somewhat muted, the stars have been almost universally praised. Which might mean that Maestro’s best chances are in the acting categories—or, the film, buoyed by its beloved performances, could snatch best picture as a popular tiered-ballot second choice.

    At this year’s Venice Film Festival, Maestro was perhaps the glitziest competition entry. But it had a bit of its thunder stolen by Yorgos Lanthimos’s sex-happy bildungsroman Poor Things, a movie originally scheduled for release in early September but that was, in a bit of strange luck, pushed to the more prestigious climes of December. Poor Things is in much better position now, with time to build on the momentum created by its top-prize victory at Venice and sustained good notices from subsequent festivals.

    All of the filmmakers I’ve thus far mentioned have directed best picture nominees in the past. So what of the new class? First-time filmmaker Celine Song had a debut for the ages in Past Lives, a Sundance breakout that was a modest summer hit for A24. A decades-spanning romantic drama, Past Lives is gauzy and gentle but far from insubstantial. It offers a bleary, soul-stirring consideration of immigration and aging, animated by lovely performances from Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro.

    Jonathan Glazer is perhaps one of the cinéaste world’s most respected filmmakers, despite having made only four films. His latest is The Zone of Interest, a Holocaust movie focused on the perpetrators rather than the victims. Glazer’s film is harrowing, operating at a clinical remove but certainly not spare in style or effect. The Zone of Interest is such a visceral statement of artistic vision that even the more art-film-averse members of the Academy might embrace it. The Zone of Interest took second place at Cannes; the Palme d’Or winner was Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, an electrifying drama starring best actress contender Sandra Hüller, who also plays a supporting role in Glazer’s film. Anatomy has played like gangbusters at subsequent film festivals—a frequent Telluride talking point, a hot-ticket sensation at Toronto—and may be the best positioned of any non-American film.

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    Richard Lawson

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  • Was This Strike-Struck Awards Season Hollywood’s Weirdest Ever?

    Was This Strike-Struck Awards Season Hollywood’s Weirdest Ever?

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    When Poor Things received an eight-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival in September, only Yorgos Lanthimos was there to bask in it. The director’s cast, of course, had joined the 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members on strike. Lanthimos later lamented that it was “a real shame” that his star Emma Stone couldn’t be by his side, and much of Hollywood likely felt his pain. But at least Lanthimos got to hear the applause. Bradley Cooper, whose Maestro premiered the next day, was unable to promote the film he cowrote, directed, and stars in. Instead, the film’s makeup artist, casting director, editor, and sound mixer, among others, stepped up to handle the press conference.

    That’s how it was for much of this awards season, after SAG-AFTRA imposed stringent rules on its members when the strike began in mid-July. No red carpets. No interviews. No promo, period. Even more than the writers strike, the 118-day actors walkout sent Hollywood’s awards machine into a tailspin, particularly as the Oscars gauntlet loomed. “It definitely threw a wrench in this season in terms of planning,” says a talent publicist. And awards movies, to put it mildly, are rarely big studio blockbusters: They’re often the kind of passion projects that need publicity most.

    Everyone in the industry is well aware of the chaos: The Governors Awards, usually held in November, were pushed into January and will take place six days before the strike-delayed Emmy Awards. The Academy Museum Gala, postponed following the beginning of the conflict in Gaza, was rescheduled for December. Until the strike was resolved on November 9, the phalanx of awards season marketing and publicity specialists were forced to embrace uncertainty. “We’re lighting the white sage,” one veteran awards strategist deadpanned about how he was handling the unusual start of the season.

    Cannes, contending with just the writers strike back in May, managed to be star-studded, with the casts of Killers of the Flower Moon and May December helping to launch both films. But the wattage was turned down considerably in Venice, Telluride, and Toronto, where festival organizers had to scramble after the actors went on strike and several movies pushed their premiere dates into next year. Another awards publicist calls the early days of the strike “uncertain and confusing,” adding, “We didn’t know if the fall festivals would march forward or fall apart.”

    The film festivals did soldier on—and a handful of stars were able to show up thanks to guild-issued interim agreements, but the celebrations were muted. In Venice, Jessica Chastain admitted to being “incredibly nervous” to be there. Adam Driver called his appearance for Ferrari’s premiere “a visual representation of a movie” made for a studio—Neon—willing to meet the union’s demands. Jury president Damien Chazelle showed up to his press conference in a “Writers Guild on Strike!” T-shirt. “To have three films in Venice and not be able to go broke my heart,” Poor Things star Willem Dafoe told Vanity Fair after he’d canceled nearly all plans to promote his upcoming work. The guild allowed him to attend Toronto in support of Patricia Arquette’s directorial feature debut, Gonzo Girl, but he was frank about the fact that he was pining for Venice: “I live in Italy and it’s exciting to see friends, it’s exciting to dress up.”

    Spotting a famous face at premieres became like a game of Where’s Waldo. Stone purchased her own pass to Telluride and rode the charter flight from Los Angeles to get to the festival, where Poor Things had its North American premiere. She later participated in a New York Film Festival panel for the Lanthimos short Bleat, which was granted an interim agreement. Cooper also popped up at the festival’s screening of Maestro, having been granted permission from his guild to simply sit in the audience.

    SAG-AFTRA’s interim agreements created vastly different experiences for movies in the race. A24 was able to move forward with promotion for contenders like Past Lives and Priscilla, and on the day the strike-ending deal was announced, stars Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White were attending the Dallas premiere of A24’s Texas-set wrestling drama The Iron Claw. Meanwhile 20th Century Studios, owned by Disney, decided to postpone Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders once it became clear that Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy, and other stars wouldn’t be able to properly promote the film ahead of its scheduled December 1 release. It joined Dune: Part Two and Challengers as awards hopefuls now waiting for next year.

    But amid all that confusion, some new awards season celebrities emerged. Sandra Hüller—the German star of two international contenders, The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall, which are exempt from SAG rules—rocketed into the best actress conversation after the latter film premiered at Telluride. “I’m very aware of the fact that it’s a special situation, and I’m not sure if I would’ve had that attention, if everybody would’ve been able to come,” she told VF after the fest. “And I hope very much that people really love the film for what it is, and not only because of our presence. That would be something that I wouldn’t enjoy so much.”

    Craftspeople invariably get less attention during Oscars season, but they also stepped into the spotlight, doing interviews and Q&As and walking red carpets. “The strike really challenged everyone to be more creative utilizing these artisans, as well as filmmakers, in new ways,” says Tom Piechura, who oversees entertainment marketing at 42West.

    Actors may have rushed back onto red carpets the minute the strike ended in November, but even a flurry of interviews won’t make up for the time lost over the summer. As the veteran awards publicist notes, the uncertainty about when the work stoppage would end caused many studios to pull back on their campaigns, and now there’s no going back: “It’s a mess.” But the second awards publicist isn’t convinced that six chaotic months of strikes will really impact the final vote: “Despite all the work and campaigning and the razzle-dazzle that comes with that, it really comes down to seeing the movie.”

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    Natalie Jarvey

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  • The Love Story of Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad

    The Love Story of Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad

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    Inside a Manhattan hospital room in February 2022, Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad obtained their marriage license. A city clerk addressed the pair over Zoom, and a nurse held the laptop upright as a surgical port was being prepped to go in Jaouad’s chest. This isn’t how they pictured it would be. They’d been a couple for eight years and, like many others, they were waiting out the pandemic: planning an exuberant celebration that could be attended by Jaouad’s relatives from overseas and Batiste’s New Orleans family, complete with second-line parade. “When I got sick, it expedited that plan,” Jaouad says.

    The wedding itself happened a day before Jaouad underwent bone marrow transplant surgery and five months after her leukemia returned. They were married in their then empty Brooklyn home, the floors swept clean of construction debris and rooms filled with flowers and candles. Batiste and Jaouad exchanged bread ties instead of rings, and he played “Unforgettable” on a rented grand piano. A tight-knit circle of COVID-tested guests were served fried chicken sandwiches and Champagne. The only thing the couple hadn’t thought of, it seemed, was finding someone to document the day. “It occurred to us that we did not have a wedding photographer on the morning of,” Jaouad remembers. “And Matt, of course, was like, ‘I’ll film the wedding.’ ”

    Jon Batiste premieres the titular work in American Symphony.COURTESY OF NETFLIX.

    That would be Matthew Heineman, who so intimately captures Batiste and Jaouad’s love story in Netflix’s American Symphony, acquired by the streamer and the Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground, after bowing at the Telluride Film Festival in August. Their makeshift nuptials are emblematic of a year in the couple’s life that was upended at every turn.

    Heineman, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind Cartel Land and A Private War, met Batiste when the singer, musician, and Late Show bandleader composed the score for his 2021 COVID documentary, The First Wave. Drawn together by mutual respect, they planned a vérité-style road-trip movie tracing the journey to Batiste’s first symphony at Carnegie Hall. Then, on November 23, 2021, Batiste was nominated for a field-leading 11 Grammys—on the very same day, Jaouad started chemo treatments for her second bout with leukemia. “Life intervened,” Heineman says. “And as I have with almost every film I ever made, I was forced to really pivot.”

    Shifting focus meant turning the lens toward Jaouad, who had already chronicled her first battle with leukemia at age 22 in her best-selling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms. “She didn’t want to be a part of it,” Heineman says plainly. “She definitely didn’t want to be the sick antidote to Jon’s success, and nor did I [want that]. I wanted to make sure that she was a fully formed artist and individual, in addition to being Jon’s partner.”

    Jaouad appreciated the opportunity to offer a more complex view of the cancer experience onscreen. “Too often we see a glossed-over version of the illness narrative that ends in a cure, a sense of triumph, where you return from that experience wiser and stronger and braver,” she says. “A relapse is every cancer patient’s worst nightmare. This time around, I knew that my prognosis was not in my favor. That felt, to me, worthy of portraying from the trenches of treatment.”

    Batiste’s foremost concern? “To protect Suleika and our family,” he says. “A lot of documentaries, especially with entertainers, there’s a lack of vulnerability. But the goal was to make something that would be very true to life. And life at that time happened to be Suleika having this seismic diagnosis and me having these seismic career milestones.” Batiste admits that agreeing to film warts-and-all was an exercise in faith: “It felt like it was much bigger than us. And even though it was more than we had bargained for going in, it felt as though this is what the spirit was leading us to do. It was a work of God that we had to complete to the end.”

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    Savannah Walsh

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  • ‘The Boy and the Heron’ Is a Perfect Feather in Hayao Miyazaki’s Cap

    ‘The Boy and the Heron’ Is a Perfect Feather in Hayao Miyazaki’s Cap

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    You never know what Hayao Miyazaki has planned. The legendary director, animator, and mangaka has been the face of Studio Ghibli since the Japanese company’s inception in 1985; in the decades since, his films have become as much of an event overseas as they are at home. In an animation landscape dominated by simplistic stories, his films always challenge preconceptions. His latest, The Boy and the Heron, is his most surprising yet.

    Miyazaki delights in things that are more than what they seem: an animal that might also be a person, a building hiding the doorway to a new world. The Boy and the Heron’s titular boy is 11-year-old Mahito, who comes of age during World War II (much like Miyazaki himself did), then stumbles into a magical, menacing fantasy land. That’s not to say it lacks Miyazaki’s trademark whimsy: The “villains” are bumbling oversized birds in uniform, albeit carnivorous ones.

    Given the director’s age—83 in January—and characteristically slow animation process, the persistent rumors that he’s about to retire may well be true this time. But what a note on which to end, daringly remixing all of his favorite things into one strange and wistful fable. Despite its fantastical setting, this is by far Miyazaki’s most serious film. A melancholy thread runs through it, inviting us to accept that though all things must end, endings can also be new beginnings. “Animators are getting too old,” Miyazaki told The New Yorker almost 20 years ago. He himself never has.

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    Emma Stefansky

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  • Celine Song’s Past, Present, and Future

    Celine Song’s Past, Present, and Future

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    When writer-director Celine Song broke down in tears one day on the set of Past Lives, the crew assumed it was because the scene, eerily close to her own childhood experience, was overwhelming her. They were in South Korea, filming the flashback moment when the 12-year-old protagonist of Past Lives, Nora, says goodbye to her childhood best friend, Hae Sung, as she and her family prepare to emigrate to Canada.

    In reality, it was the sun that got to Song. Unable to get the light she was hoping for, she was upset not about her past but about her present: the pressure she felt to get her very first movie right. “This film is unbelievably personal to me, of course, in the conception of it, but it is unbelievably personal to me because it is a discovery for me as an artist,” says Song. “This is what I’ve always been meant to do. I just feel at home here.”

    It’s fitting that Song, who previously found success as a playwright in New York, uses the word home to describe her directorial debut. Past Lives is about what home is, in so many ways. Song’s script, inspired by her own life, follows Nora, a writer living in New York whose childhood sweetheart comes to visit her, opening her up to a tense exploration of her past, her identity as an adult, and the meaning of love.

    Intimate yet sweeping, Past Lives was the breakout of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, drawing praise not just for Song’s distinctive storytelling and visuals, but for the performances from stars Greta Lee, John Magaro, and Teo Yoo. “The fact that all these audiences globally are responding to it, and it’s a personal conversation they’re having with the film, is really amazing,” says Song. “This makes me feel less lonely, and that’s what you dream of as an artist: that your work, when it’s in the hands of the world, makes yourself feel less lonely.”

    John Magaro costars as Nora’s husband.Courtesy of A24.

    Song talks about love a lot—and not just because Past Lives is a modern take on the classic love triangle. In our conversations she’s quick to use love as a metaphor for many things, including her romance of more than 10 years with the city of New York and her recent breakup with the theater world.

    Song moved to New York from Ontario to attend Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in playwriting in 2014. The daughter of artists (her mother is an illustrator and graphic designer and her father a filmmaker), she says she always knew she wanted to be a writer and remembers writing a poem about a spider eating a butterfly while she was still living in Korea—“I think it was before I emigrated, so it was before I was 12,” she says. She considered being a copywriter or something else in journalism but zeroed in on dramatic writing while in New York.

    The city plays a prevalent role in Past Lives, as Nora (Lee) takes Hae Sung (Yoo) around the city, from the Statue of Liberty to Jane’s Carousel to Madison Square Park. For Nora, Hae Sung represents a home left behind and a life (and love) that could have been, but it’s also clear that New York—and her husband (Magaro)—are now home. Song seems to feel the same about the city, despite its flaws. “There are rats in the streets and lantern flies are everywhere and it’s flooding, so it’s really hard to imagine that you can love New York that much,” she tells me, breaking into a smile. “But sometimes you just feel like New York loves you because it’s really just a feeling, just a certain sunlight going through the buildings. But you know that New York wouldn’t give a shit if you left. So it’s this amazing thing of being loved by somebody who doesn’t need you at all.”

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    Rebecca Ford

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  • Billie Eilish: What I Was Made For

    Billie Eilish: What I Was Made For

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    I don’t ever remember writing a song about how I was actually feeling in the moment, because I was bored by that. Who cares about what I feel like today? (Of course, it turns out that a lot of people care, which is really cool.) But writing “What Was I Made For?” I wasn’t thinking about myself, or my life. I was just inspired by the perspective of a character. It was only afterward that I had a realization: It actually was about me. A lot of the time it is a subconscious thing, writing about myself, but doing it in a way that feels safer. It’s kind of trippy. I was thinking about a character, but it turns out I am the character.

    The week after the song came out, I didn’t get enough sleep because I just stayed up watching videos that fans made for it. I can’t tell you how cool it was to feel like I was part of something that was bringing people together, all gender identities and generations from all over the world, and I loved that so much of it was bringing women together with all of those videos of people’s girlhoods and mom-and-daughter relationships. I have a lot of internalized misogyny—I did not ask for it and I don’t want it, but it’s there—and I’m constantly retraining myself not to think that way. “What Was I Made For?” brought women together in this beautiful but devastating way: We were all bonding about the traumas of being a woman in the world.

    As a young female in the industry, I sometimes find myself fighting real resentment, but that’s the world that we live in. My body, face, and abilities are scrutinized in a way that a man’s just aren’t. I didn’t realize how relatable “What Was I Made For?” would turn out to be. People started to point out the lyrics and say, “Oh, my God, Billie wrote this for me, because this is how I feel.” Hearing people talk about how much their experience as a woman resonated with what I wrote was so sad, but I also felt less alone.

    As a girl, I think the freedom of being a little kid is something that we don’t really ever get back, and we don’t realize it until it’s gone. You feel like a person—then suddenly you’re being looked at by grown men, you’re growing body parts you don’t recognize, and you get your period. Sometimes I see eight-year-old girls, and I think, Oh, my God, look at how free you are! You hit a certain age and it’s about to be the worst stage of your life.

    I directed the video for “What Was I Made For?” and it’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever made. The hard thing about directing, especially when you’re not super experienced, is that you have this vision, but you don’t necessarily know how to achieve it. You’re trying your best trying to convey to people how you want it to look, but how do you even know the words to describe it? I felt very confident in what I wanted, and I asked about the things I didn’t know. When you get to the place that I’m at in my life, you hear a lot of “Yes.” I might not know what the hell I’m doing, and people will be like, “Yes, cool, let’s do it!” So I really ask everybody, “If I’m doing this in a weird way, please tell me. I want to learn.”

    Score has been such a big inspiration, and it’s part of why I want to direct and edit my own videos. I think of music visually, and I think of visuals musically. If I edit something, the cuts have to be fully in sync with the music. With the “What Was I Made For?” video, I had my mom sit in a chair in the yard while I played the song and I did all the moves exactly how I wanted them to be. Somebody watching that video may not think about it much, but the camera is moving on all the correct beats, and with the lyrics and melody of the song.

    I have my little secret list of directors that I would love to shadow or make something with, but I keep it to myself. How embarrassing is it if you say it out loud and then it doesn’t happen? (Okay, I definitely dream of doing something with Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I love, love, love her.) I would love to direct something big someday, but it’s cool to be part of other artists’ stuff as well. The whole creative process surrounding “What Was I Made For?” was nothing but mutual admiration. And to be a part of something so giant, and so important to the world—this is historical shit. Funnily enough with this song, there was no pressure. Finneas and I were sitting there as if we were puppets and the song was writing us. It felt like there was no world in which that song wasn’t going to be written. We were so moved that it was unstoppable.

    As told to Joy Press.

    Hair, Benjamin Mohapi (Billie Eilish); makeup, Emily Cheng (Billie Eilish). Produced on location by Anna Sabatini. For details, go to vf.com/credits.

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    Billie Eilish

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  • Robert Downey Jr.’s Third Act: ‘Oppenheimer’ Is Just the Beginning

    Robert Downey Jr.’s Third Act: ‘Oppenheimer’ Is Just the Beginning

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    That was the appeal of making Oppenheimer with Nolan and his producing partner Emma Thomas, who, like the Downeys, are another husband-and-wife filmmaking duo prone to taking big swings. “For him, Chris and Emma have just figured that out like nobody else,” Susan says.

    Even their process for casting has a no-nonsense streamline to it. “When you’re doing a Chris Nolan thing, basically you get a phone call: ‘Chris wants you for this. Will you come read the script at his house?’ ” says Susan, who joked that her husband’s curiosity clashed with his, let’s say, more inert tendencies. “Robert’s like, ‘Wait, I have to drive that far east?… Okay.’ Once he was willing to do that, I already knew his mindset was very open.”

    The Oppenheimer team was surprised to meet a movie star who was willing to cast off his armor. “Honestly, he kind of subverted all my expectations of him,” Thomas says. “We’ve often talked about how amazing it’d be to work with him, but we work in a very specific, fairly stripped-down way. I wasn’t sure how he was going to adjust to that way of working because, when you’re a big movie star like Robert, that isn’t necessarily the way you’re used to working.”

    But his Avengers experience had also prepared him for being part of Oppenheimer’s gargantuan ensemble, one of 79 speaking roles in a cast that includes three best actor Oscar winners. Downey’s Strauss clashes repeatedly with Murphy’s Oppenheimer but also with his own aide (played by Alden Ehrenreich) and even with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti). Fueled by a potent mix of sincere conviction and petty grievance, he commands scene after scene of crowded public hearings, strategy sessions, and backroom machinations, but without the bemused pizzazz of his Marvel alter ego. Strauss may be a politically savvy survivor, but he’s also a black hole of personality who doesn’t so much fill a room as draw everyone into his own.

    As he had on his Marvel films, Downey relished the opportunity to stray from best-laid plans, carefully mapping out a scene with filmmakers and crew only to go rogue. “From a creative point of view, he came extraordinarily well prepared,” Nolan says. “It’s a very complicated part, and he had it absolutely down. And he also had a number of, I wouldn’t call them improvisations because a lot of it was very carefully planned, but he had a number of embellishments, things that he wanted to bring to the character, things that he wanted to try out.”

    Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema would follow Downey in a room as he delivered monologues that stretched multiple pages.

    “I think he loved that freedom to move around the room and present himself with whatever energy he felt like: ‘Let’s try it again! Let’s try it a different way!’ ” Nolan says. “However heavy the 70-millimeter camera was, Hoyte would never get too tired. In a way, Robert was probably waiting for him to get tired, but he didn’t. So he was able to really thrash it out, really reach for something and stretch himself.”

    Joe and Anthony Russo, who directed Downey in three Marvel movies, describe the Downey method in similar terms: “When he’ll come back to set, Robert is famous for throwing the plan out the window and climbing on top of the couch and whatever, sort of going off-book,” Joe says. “He does this because he likes to surprise himself. He likes to keep things fresh. He lights up for that.”

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    Anthony Breznican

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  • Brigette Romanek Loves Smoky Scents and Vintage Seating

    Brigette Romanek Loves Smoky Scents and Vintage Seating

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    “A day of just designing, that’s therapy for me,” says self-taught interiors expert Brigette Romanek. Although now a favorite of discerning Angelenos—her clients include Gwyneth Paltrow, Beyoncé, and Demi Moore—Romanek’s path has been a winding one. The daughter of singer Paulette McWilliams (whose collaborators included Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and Quincy Jones) initially followed in her mother’s footsteps, releasing her debut album with Virgin Records in 1994 with one to follow in 1997, but soon realized her passions lay offstage and turned to her first foray in design: handbags. While holding a sample sale in her LA home she noticed the way people responded to her space, so she started consulting on the interior design of friends’ houses and, in 2018, opened her own firm. Within a year Architectural Digest lauded her as one of the world’s top interior designers—an accolade that has followed her every year since. With a work ethic that celebrates instinct, Romanek’s interiors breathe life into the hollow halls of any home. Now, that sense of dynamic inspiration is on display in her first monograph, Liveable Luxe. Below, Romanek shares her favorite things (to own and to give) for happy living.

    Style File

    DAILY UNIFORM: Jeans and a button-down. 
    EVERYDAY ACCESSORY: A Foundrae bracelet. 
    WORK BAG: Christian Dior Book tote. It’s strong enough to hold my computer, binder, and all my tear sheets of furniture pieces. 
    FESTIVE FROCK: A dress by Emilia Wickstead. She makes elegant, understated pieces that leave something to the imagination. 
    PARTY SHOE: Christian Louboutin.

    FoundRae Personalized Medium Heart Extended Clip Chain Bracelet in 18k Yellow Gold and Diamond

    Dior Beige and Blue Macrocannage Embroidery Large Book Tote

    Emilia Wickstead Filippa dress in Red Duchess Satin

    Christian Louboutin Astrid Lace Strass heel in Black

    On Beauty

    EYELINER: Pat McGrath Labs. 
    WASH DAY: Monat. 
    NAILS: French or baby doll pink.

    Pat McGrath Labs PermaGel Ultra Glide Eye Pencil in Xtreme Black

    Monat Soothing Micellar Shampoo

    At Home

    RECENT ADDITION: De Sede vintage sofa in orange leather—perfection! 
    LINENS: Beltrami bedding is spectacular to me. 
    LIGHTING: By Gabriel Hendifar, the mastermind behind Apparatus. He’s created an entire world.
    ON THE WALL: Lorna Simpson. 
    AROMA: Maison Margiela Replica candle, By the Fireplace. 
    IN THE DRIVEWAY: A Tesla and a couple of furniture wrapping blankets—comes with the job. 
    FOR FURRY FRIENDS: Lay Lo. They make the beds stylish. I’m excited to work with them soon.

    Beltrami Essential Autentica Fibra Di Legno

    Maison Margiela Fragrances REPLICA By The Fireplace Scented Candle

    Lay Lo Red Checker Dog Bed

    For Pleasure

    HAPPIEST HOUR: Early morning, around 5 a.m., when it’s still quiet. 
    READING: The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. 
    WATCHING: Motherland, a comedy about motherhood. I cry with laughter. 
    LISTENING TO: Tyler, the Creator; SZA; James Blake; Kendrick Lamar; Post Malone; Sade; and Beabadoobee.

    Playing Robots Into Heaven Vinyl

    James Blake

    The Menu

    MORNING CUP: Coffee or a strawberry probiotic smoothie from Erewhon. 
    INDULGENT DRINK: Coca-Cola. 
    POWER SNACK: BjornQorn popcorn. 
    HOME-COOKED SPECIALTY: Pesto pasta with caprese salad. 
    TAKEOUT: Woon Kitchen. Beef noodles, scallion pancakes, or gai lan. Comfort food.

    On Holiday

    PERFECT STAY: Ritz Paris.
    TRAVEL DAY FOOTWEAR: Gucci platform sandals. 
    IN THE CARRY-ON: Cozy Earth socks, Goop Beauty lip balm, Escentric Molecules, Molecule 02 eau de toilette, Sleeper pajamas, and outfits—I love A.W.A.K.E. Mode’s blazers, skirts, and dresses. As long as I check the weather, I can curate. 
    TOILETRY BAG: Hermès.

    Gucci Women’s Platform Perforated G Sandal

    Cozy Earth The Plush Lounge Sock

    goop Beauty Clean Nourishing Lip Balm

    Escentric Molecules Molecule 02 Eau de Toilette

    Sleeper Party Pajama with Double Feathers in Lemon

    A.W.A.K.E. Mode black collarless jacket

    Gift Guide

    FOR THE KIDS: A climbing wall. 
    FOR THE AESTHETE: A trip to Rome to see, well, everything. 
    FOR THE HOST: Lady M Signature Mille Crêpes cake. 
    FOR THE ENTERTAINER: Michaël Verheyden T-Light candle holders. They are stunning and when the candle is lit, the glow is soft and pretty on a dining table. 
    FOR INTERIOR ENTHUSIASTS: My coffee-table book, Livable Luxe. 
    ON THE WISH LIST: A new album from the late singer Prince or an Honor Titus painting.

    Lady M Signature Mille Crêpes Cake

    Michaël Verheyden Tlight in alabaster

    ‘Liveable Luxe’ by Brigette Romanek (Author), Gwyneth Paltrow (Foreword)

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    Kayla Holliday

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  • Michael Cunningham Answer the Proust Questionnaire

    Michael Cunningham Answer the Proust Questionnaire

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    What is your idea of perfect happiness? The very idea of perfect happiness. Who wouldn’t be happy about the proposition that happiness can be perfect?

     What is your current state of mind? Optimism and gratitude, so mixed up with nervousness, it’s hard to tell one from the others.

    What is your greatest fear? The fact that, until recently, “the end of the world” would have seemed pretentious and evasive, and now seems like the only possible answer. 

    What do you consider the most overrated virtue? It’s a tie: subtlety and frugality. 

    On what occasion do you lie? I do that for a living. 

    What is your greatest regret? Only the things I didn’t do. There is, however, much to be said for staying alive. 

    What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? I’m chronically late. It’s magical thinking: I actually believe I can take a shower and get dressed in three minutes, that the train will be pulling into the station the moment I arrive…. 

    What do you most value in your friends? Forbearance with my chronic tardiness. 

    Which words or phrases do you most overuse? When I finish a draft of a novel, I read through it for words I’ve overused. They differ from book to book. With Day, there were startling abundances of understand, shimmer, and realize, to name three. 

    Who are your favorite writers? There are hundreds. 

    Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Dorothea Brooke. 

    What is your most treasured possession? A handwritten note by Virginia Woolf. It’s like a hybrid of object and living thing. 

    What is your greatest extravagance? A line of insanely expensive Italian sneakers may not sound all that extravagant, but then you have no idea how many pairs I’ve got. 

    Where would you like to live? I’m pleased to say that after decades of moving around, I’d most like to live where I actually live. 

    What is your motto? I wish I had a motto. I’m accepting suggestions. 

    Which talent would you most like to have? The ability to sing. I’d love to deliver a rock anthem or an aria to a live audience. Writing has considerable satisfactions, but it’s also a little like putting a message into a bottle and tossing it in the ocean. 

    What do you dislike most about your appearance? Don’t get me started. 

    How would you like to die? What, exactly, are you implying? 

    What or who is the greatest love of your life? My husband, Ken Corbett. My most significant accomplishment is achieving this much intimacy and connection with another being. The writing is a close second. 

    If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? Oh, well, it’s probably a little late for that by now.

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    Michael Cunningham

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  • High-Design Lipsticks Are the Accessory of the Season

    High-Design Lipsticks Are the Accessory of the Season

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    “It was horrendous, and it was fast. The whole thing was over before I’d actually drawn a breath,” says makeup artist Lisa Eldridge, recounting a moment of stomach-dropping triumph: winning Audrey Hepburn’s lipstick case at Christie’s in 2017. (Auction records show a healthy five-figure tag, hence the 1950s relic “lives in a very big safe,” she adds.) The Cartier tube, made of 18-karat gold with a cabochon sapphire, hails from a time of everyday pageantry, before plastic upended cosmetics packaging. Now, amid a push for more fanfare and ideally less waste, lipstick is again an object of infatuation. What’s inside still counts—Eldridge gleefully discovered the actor’s shade of salmon pink, which may yet spark ideas for her own line—but glamour demands a package deal.

    A ceramic-clad lipstick in grisaille toile de Jouy—Dior Beauty’s feat with French porcelain maison Bernardaud, called Rouge Premier—is a fitting place to start. “It’s as close as you can link it to a haute couture dress,” says Peter Philips, creative and image director of Dior Makeup. Offered in a dozen interchangeable shades, the new formula features red hibiscus extract (skin reviving) and 24-karat gold (why not). “It catches people’s attention,” he says of the design, “but in a very discreet, very elegant way.” That is, if one manages not to drop it.

    Lipstick, of course, can communicate as much in hand as on the mouth. This season for Hermès, Pierre Hardy has given his striped bullet a dip-dye effect, a moody gesture in three variations. By contrast, Chanel’s 31 Le Rouge is airy and architectural. The refillable glass case, belted in gold and built to accompany a roster of 12 shades, has an improbable Cinderella appeal: fragile yet ready for the ball. “The Japanese master glassmaker worked an absolute miracle,” says Sylvie Legastelois, Chanel’s director of packaging creation and graphic identity. “This lipstick is like a jewel.” Meanwhile, Guerlain’s holiday entry is unmistakably a bauble: a gem-studded bee perched on a Rouge G case by Turkish jewelry brand Begüm Khan. Bee-stung lips indeed.

    There’s a history of lipsticks playing outside the cylinder: Elsa Schiaparelli’s trompe l’oeil melting candle (c. 1940), Louis Nichilo’s Leaning Tower of Pisa (c. 1960), Salvador Dalí’s fluted tube with a 3D mouth (c. 1990—an inspiration for Pat McGrath Labs). But Isamaya Ffrench’s LIPS puts the innuendo front and center: Its shiny phallic case looks as if Louise Bourgeois and Jeff Koons partnered on the design. (A suite of refill shades arrives later this month, joining the existing three.) Ffrench, who collects “weird and beautiful objects,” is pleased to add to the canon. “Surprisingly, such a simple concept can be so hard to execute,” she says. “No pun intended.”

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    Laura Regensdorf

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  • After ‘Barbie,’ Greta Gerwig Has No Plans to Rest

    After ‘Barbie,’ Greta Gerwig Has No Plans to Rest

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    “That scene still really touches me. I see some of my friends’ teenage girls who don’t think they’re good enough, but they’re so beautiful and so smart and you just want them to know.”

    Gerwig was never taking requests, but now feels like a good moment to express my disappointment that another product of the ’90s, Teen Talk Barbie (played by Industry’s Marisa Abela), didn’t deliver her infamously offensive line: “Math class is tough!”

    “Oh, we did it,” she emphasizes. “It just never fit because it was such a weird long list of crap she says, like it belonged in a horror movie.”

    Gerwig pulls up the truly outrageous (shout-out to Jem) Teen Talk Barbie statements on her phone, beaming as she reads them out loud. It is, in fact, a weird long list of crap. But it would be funny even if it wasn’t all about malls and ponies and beach parties, even if it were sentences like, say: “I adore Sacramento! Truffaut was bigger for me than Godard. I love showpeople! I don’t like milk made from other things.” Even the most extraordinary women will sound silly when filtered through a doll. Gerwig’s feat was that she gave Barbie a soul while still having her speak exactly like herself.

    “She directs as she is,” Baumbach says. “It’s not a performance, she’s utterly herself. Actors feel like here’s someone who is also laying themselves bare and it gives them confidence to let go of habits that they may have formed, to be brave. She’s just there without any pretense, figuring it out alongside everyone else and it’s inspiring to people. With Barbie, I saw her direct on set more than I have before, and I felt: She’s delivering a speech today? I don’t know that I’ve ever delivered a speech. It’s intoxicating. I will be a different director having gone through this movie with her.”

    Coat by Ferragamo; dress by Max Mara; rings by Cartier.Photograph by Norman Jean Roy; styled by Natasha Royt.

    Speaking of paradigm shifts, Hollywood has gone through three distinct ones in recent years: #MeToo, COVID, and the strikes. Gerwig is a three-guild member—writer, actor, director. It’s been “a lot of upheaval and reassessment,” she says. But will any lessons last? I ask her how much of the “swirling crap” that led to #MeToo ever hit her (poor phrasing, given the morning’s events). Gerwig is relieved to be “luckier than a lot of people in terms of not having truly traumatic things happen.” Part of this is, indeed, being “one step removed from the apparatus” because she lives in New York: “I get to use the studio system but I don’t have to live in it. And I’m conscious of not wanting to be too attached to what Hollywood thinks is a good or bad idea because I don’t want to know if my idea is ridiculous. And when you live in LA, you know everybody. They all know each other’s lawyers. I often don’t know who the powerful person in the room is.”

    These days, it might be her.

    “That being said, there’s plenty of stuff that happened in my life, when I look back at it. I’m like, wait a minute. That was not okay. Just a million little things. It almost didn’t register. Which might be generational, you know? I think one substantive change is intimacy coordinators. They make perfect sense. It’s like a fight choreographer. Nobody would ever say, ‘Just take these swords and see what happens, just duel a little and see where the spirit takes you.’ That’s insane,” she says. “Aside from being a woman, the parallel world I see is getting stuck in some whirlpool of development where you never get out, you never get the thing made or find the right champions. I’ve been extremely lucky that I’ve managed to be supported by the system and not eroded by the system.”

    She has also been supported from the creative side, becoming someone who has both found the right champions and done some championing.

    “My experience with directors is totally generous. They’ll get on the phone and talk to you about how they did it. It’s not guarded at all. I mean, everybody has their own ego and their own sense of competition, but if I asked, they would spend all day showing me how they did it. I know because I asked Steven Spielberg to do it before I shot Little Women. He showed me all his research from Lincoln, he showed me everything.”

    “She’s a spectacular talent,” Anderson says. “When I showed Greta Moonrise Kingdom, she had the reaction you really hope for, it seemed to work for her in all the ways I wished for. It made me feel more than reassured, it made me think maybe I made something good.”

    “I don’t want to miss it,” Gerwig says, last Americano down and seemingly more at ease discussing the magnitude of this year. “I don’t want to not take the extraordinariness in. And I do, I feel it, it’s incredible. But the thing that makes me not feel overwhelmed is to keep doing the work. Now, get back to work. Keep going.”

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    Sloane Crosley

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  • How Cecil Beaton Helped Invent Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret

    How Cecil Beaton Helped Invent Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret

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    BETWEEN 1927 AND 1979, barely a year went by in which a member of the royal family was not the subject of Cecil Beaton’s enchanting lens. More concerned with his idea of the person than the person themself, the photographer transformed his subjects, and his romantic, reverential vision would help shape the image of the British monarchy in the mid-20th century. In the 1960s and ’70s, Beaton’s style evolved to reflect the changing mood of the time, and he adopted a more matter-of-fact and bold aesthetic. His presentation of motherhood, in particular, helped generate an emotional affinity between the royal family and the public. Yet he was still firmly associated with an opulence and artifice that spoke of an earlier era. Employed primarily at moments of celebration and ceremony, Beaton’s photographs were undoubtedly intimate, able to capture a clear sense of the individuals behind the public image, but they were rarely spontaneous. Rather, their affected poses and considered contexts acknowledge the splendor and status of the institution but with a generosity of spirit that invited the viewer to share in the fantasy.

    Queen Elizabeth II being photographed by Beaton at Buckingham Palace, November 1955. Photograph by Patrick Matthews.CECIL BEATON/VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON.

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    Claudia Acott Williams

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  • Sweets for the Sweet! 22 Colorful Gifts for Candy Lovers

    Sweets for the Sweet! 22 Colorful Gifts for Candy Lovers

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    The new Wonka—an origin story for Roald Dahl’s trickster chocolatier starring Timothée Chalamet, Olivia Colman, and Hugh Grant—is a world of scrumdiddlyumptious wonders and dream sequences to stir mirth. Take that as a sweet nougat of inspiration when selecting just the right treat for the sweetie pie in your life. Whether a cotton candy–toned teddy bear, a glass candy jar that wouldn’t look out of place atop a cake, gumdrop charms, or a bow tie of which the chocolate maker himself would surely approve, gift giving this season will feel like finding a Golden Ticket.

    All products featured on Vanity Fair are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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    Arimeta Diop

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  • 21 Perfect Gold Gifts, From Luxurious Perfume to Covetable Jewelry

    21 Perfect Gold Gifts, From Luxurious Perfume to Covetable Jewelry

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    Let the gleaming pages of Yves Saint Laurent: Gold be your guide to satisfying any would-be Midas on your Nice list. This official catalog of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris’s “Gold: Les Ors d’Yves Saint Laurent” exhibition marked 60 years since the couturier’s first eponymous collection. Museum director Elsa Janssen, alongside journalist and historian Yvane Jacob, brings Saint Laurent’s longtime love into brilliant focus: “I saw gold everywhere. It sparkled—lamé, belts, shoes—it was fabulous,” Janssen said of the concept. Below, an aureate treasure trove: a gleaming gua sha tool, illuminating powder highlight, a precious pendant, and some liquid gold in the form of a fragrance—smelling great never looked so good.

    All products featured on Vanity Fair are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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    Arimeta Diop

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  • The Untold Story of Tucker Carlson’s Ugly Exit From Fox News

    The Untold Story of Tucker Carlson’s Ugly Exit From Fox News

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    When Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott called Tucker Carlson around 11:15 a.m. on Monday, April 24, and said, “We’re taking you off the air,” she didn’t give him a reason. To Carlson, cancellation was unthinkable. He was the highest-rated host across all of cable news—and he was suddenly sentenced to execution. It was like somebody canceling Taylor Swift mid-tour or removing Stranger Things from Netflix before anyone could stream the ending. It made no sense.

    Carlson wasn’t given a path to sign off and pretend that it was on his terms, but Scott did offer him one thing—the chance to include his own comment in the press release. For a moment, he thought about saying yes; maybe he did want the breakup to sound mutually beneficial. But he quickly snapped out of that. He was being dumped, and he wanted everyone else to know it too. He tapped out a farewell email to his staff, known as the Tuckertroop, before his Fox email account was disabled. “I’ve never worked with better people in my life, and I don’t expect I ever will,” he wrote, adding: “I’m a little unclear on what’s going on right now, but at this point it looks unexpectedly bad.”

    Then the news erupted in public. “Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” the announcement said, abusing the word agreed and glaringly lacking any quote from the host. His production team was not given a heads-up, so they found out that Carlson was gone the same way as everyone else, through smartphone news alerts or texts from friends. The show’s senior executive producer Justin Wells was also sacked, but the rest of the staff was still on the clock. They were supposed to stay at their keyboards and whip up a replacement show that very night. Instead, they swapped theories about the canceling. One of his producers thought it was tied to Fox’s blockbuster $787.5 million settlement of the Dominion Voting Systems case, which was struck just a few days earlier. Another producer thought it was triggered by ex-producer Abby Grossberg’s lawsuits alleging a toxic workplace. A third wondered if it was somehow related to January 6 protester Ray Epps’s interview on 60 Minutes the night before, when Epps said Carlson was “going to any means possible to destroy my life.” Epps was believed to be preparing a lawsuit against Fox, which he would file in July.

    The reason Carlson’s team couldn’t immediately settle on one simple explanation is because there wasn’t one. Though Carlson would later suggest his ouster was a “condition” of the Dominion suit, there’s no evidence to support that theory, and both parties deny it. According to my reporting, many factors contributed to the defenestration of Carlson, which ranks among the biggest bombshells in cable news history, not only because of what his exit meant for Fox, but also what it meant for the Republican Party.

    Carlson was believed to have Trump-like hypnotic power over the GOP base. He was believed to be irreplaceable. But that impression was, in large part, a creation of Carlson’s. In truth, Carlson had alienated so many people, instigated so many internal and external scandals, fanned so many flames of ugliness, that his firing was inevitable. After all, he’d been fired from CNN and MSNBC earlier in his career. That’s why, at Fox, he puffed out his chest and pretended to be immune to attack. His long relationship with career vulnerability caused him to foster an image of untouchability. And it worked so well that even now, more than six months after his exit, people are wondering why it happened.

    The fact that Fox had no firm plan for its marquee 8 p.m. time slot—no splashy outside hire, no new graphics, no innovative new format—speaks to how suddenly and sloppily Carlson had been terminated. But some of Carlson’s staffers were not entirely shocked. They knew they pushed the envelope far past the point of a paper cut. “It was always going to end badly,” one Carlson producer said. “We knew we were burning too bright.” The royal we was something Carlson always used. He portrayed his production team—and only his team—as a force for good in the battle against the evils he presumed nightly. His entire show was about us versus them, and this approach extended to the rest of Fox, where Tucker Carlson Tonight had the appearance of a rogue unit. According to a Grossberg lawsuit, Carlson’s “bro-fest” environment was antagonistic toward other Fox shows, including Maria Bartiromo’s, where she had worked before. Grossberg said she was hauled into Wells’s office in her first week on the job and asked, “Is Maria Bartiromo fucking Kevin McCarthy?” (No, she said.)

    Through interviews for my book, Network of Lies, I found that Carlson’s producers and writers were more loyal to him than to Fox as a network. They were a saboteur squad of true believers, regarding the mother ship as almost enemy territory, since as a Fortune 500 company, Fox Corp had policies in place promoting diversity and supporting transgender employees—the very types of things Carlson railed against on air. Of course, Carlson always genuflected to Fox in public, praising the network for letting him “say what we think is true.” But his expressions of gratitude to Fox didn’t fool management because they knew how he acted in private. Six years in prime time had reshaped Carlson, darkened his heart, driven him to the edge. He berated Fox News executives in New York. He belittled people (like me) who scrutinized him. In the view of some of his own colleagues, he became unglued.

    While at Fox, Carlson always specified that he worked for the Murdochs, which was a way to elevate his standing and diminish what the org chart said: that his opinion show, like all the others, reported through executive vice president Meade Cooper to Scott, who was a rare female CEO in the male-dominated TV business. According to sources on the staff, Carlson shit-talked both women as well as his number one enemy within Fox News, the entrenched public relations boss Irena Briganti, whom he called a cunt.

    Carlson’s internal critics, of whom there were many, viewed his treatment of the female executives as part and parcel with the misogyny displayed on his show. More than a dozen current and former Fox staffers brought this problem up to me, unprompted. “Tucker is very titillated by misogyny,” a host said. Some of the staffers theorized that his mother’s mistreatment—she abandoned the family when Carlson was six—engendered a negativity toward women.

    The counterpoint I heard from a Fox lifer was that “Tucker didn’t respect anyone of any gender.” Carlson hit men with the same C-word too, so, according to Fox’s boys-will-be-boys etiquette, he was apparently an equal-opportunity basher. (Remember, this was supposed to be a defense of him.)

    Carlson told a friend that the word fuck “is so overused it’s lost all its power and meaning,” so cunt was more effective: “It’s super naughty, but it’s to the point.” His brand, weird as it was, revolved around the idea that he could call anyone the C-word, or anything else, at any time. He could say anything, do anything, and never be held accountable, so long as he commanded the attention and affection of millions. On the inside, that was partially true. Scott, for example, was personally disgusted by some of Carlson’s on-air comments and off-air conduct but felt hemmed in by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. She was in charge—except when she wasn’t.

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    Brian Stelter

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  • 6 Style-Minded Scents Usher In a New Kind of Fragrance Wardrobe

    6 Style-Minded Scents Usher In a New Kind of Fragrance Wardrobe

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    “I see fragrance as an extension of my wardrobe,” says Victoria Beckham, whose collection this fall goes beyond deconstructed trench coats and plush turtlenecks to include three debut scents. “You are tapping into all the senses when smell becomes a factor. It’s how you dress yourself.” There is merit to having a signature perfume—an aide-mémoire that lingers in your absence—but a cache of design-minded fragrances makes the case for a sartorial array. Here, six tastemakers riff on their creations, imagining which clothing item best reflects what’s worn on the wrist.

    Gabriela Hearst | Paysandú

    The Uruguay-born designer expands her brand this fall with two fragrances, created with Fueguia 1833. “Both scents, Paysandú and New York, are pieces of my childhood, my memories, and my soul, in a way,” she says. A nod to her motherland, Paysandú is a resinous blend layered with jazmín del país and the medicinal herb carqueja. She sees it with a knit wrap from her line, made by artisans from the nonprofit Manos del Uruguay.

    Frédéric Malle | Heaven Can Wait

    To Malle, Heaven Can Wait reads like “second skin—it’s a mood rather than a moment,” he says of the latest by perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena. Evoking “intimacy and warmth,” with notes of clove, carrot seed, and iris, the fragrance seems to find its textile equivalent in bed linens and little else. Malle instead suggests a worn-out sweatshirt, unfussy in its deep comfort, to accompany this “very soft yet textured perfume.”

    Tory Burch | Essence of Rose

    “I design fragrances the same way I design my collections: They are tools for self-expression,” says Burch. Her new scented oils—odes to rose, sandalwood, and vetiver, ideal for layering— stoke that creative impulse. Her favorite is a calibrated mix of Bulgarian rose and bergamot, akin to nailing the “ideal balance of silhouette, fabric, and fit in a jacket.” Fall’s two-piece ivory look with exposed boning strikes the same tone: “romantic and sensual.”

    Victoria Beckham | Portofino ’97

    “Fragrance for me is emotional and subjective,” says Beckham, who calls her trio of perfumes “extremely personal.” Suite 302 (tobacco, black cherry) conjures a night in Paris; San Ysidro Drive (saffron, incense) captures a stretch of LA life. This citrusy postcard from the Italian Riviera recalls her first trip with David Beckham—young lovers escaping the limelight. An aquamarine dress for fall, adorned with a plume, fits the occasion.

    Armando Cabral | Mahogany Kora

    The designer and model collaborated with perfume studio D.S. & Durga for this limited edition, featuring notes like papyrus, atlas cedar, and calabash nutmeg. “It takes me back to the ’60s in Mali, a time well-documented by the great Malian portraitist Seydou Keïta,” says Cabral. For him, a soft-texture white suit projects a “sense of elegance and depth, echoing the fragrance’s sophisticated nature.”

    Loveshackfancy | Forever in Love

    Once the type to faithfully wear a signature perfume, founder Rebecca Hessel Cohen came to appreciate the idea of an olfactive wardrobe. “It’s just like your actual closet in fragrance form—different scents for different seasons, moods, times of day,” she says. Of the three new scents, Forever in Love is her morning pick. “It’s gardenia and green pear—so open and optimistic.” The brand’s Ruffle miniskirt mirrors its flirtatious personality.

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    Laura Regensdorf

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  • John Roberts Wants Everyone to Think He’s in Charge of the Supreme Court. But It May Be Too Far Gone

    John Roberts Wants Everyone to Think He’s in Charge of the Supreme Court. But It May Be Too Far Gone

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    John Roberts once told the story of how one of his role models, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, succeeded in steering the Supreme Court of the United States, at the time “the most unpopular institution in the country,” through one of the gravest threats to its independence yet: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s controversial proposal to pack it with up to 15 justices.

    The reason for this clash of titans was the court’s conservatives’ refusal, often by a razor-thin majority of five, to go along with the president and Congress’s efforts to get the nation out of the Great Depression—by striking down popular policies and programs that were designed to lift people out of poverty and put them on a path to progress. In the end, Roosevelt lost the battle. But in Roberts’s telling, Hughes played a starring role, writing a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that helped bring about a détente. “It fell to Hughes to guide a very unpopular Supreme Court through that high-noon showdown against America’s most popular president since George Washington,” Roberts told an audience in 2015.

    Roberts is no Hughes. But if his actions and inactions in the past year, amid a very real crisis of confidence at the high court, are any indication, he wants the public to know that he’s in charge. Don’t believe the headlines on CNN or The New York Times or Politico proclaiming that he’s lost control of the Supreme Court. Under his watch and steady hand, things at the Supreme Court—which in his 18 years as chief justice has transformed American law beyond conservatives’ wildest dreams—are just fine.

    This desire to shift public perception of an institution on the brink, and his own, is understandable. Aside from his public humiliation in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, where Roberts stood alone and couldn’t convince the five justices to his right not to end the half-century-old constitutional right to an abortion, over the past two terms he has been unequivocally on board with the broader conservative project. In lockstep with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts remains as committed to Republican legal causes as ever—from expanding the scope of the Second Amendment to eroding the regulatory power of federal agencies to giving religion increasing primacy over other facets of American life, there’s little doubt that the Roberts court is, indeed, Roberts’s court.

    In the term that began in October, that reactionary streak will continue, as the usual mix of headline-grabbing cases are all under review—from the federal government’s power to regulate the economy and the abortion drug mifepristone to racial gerrymandering in the South to limits on the expanded scope of the Second Amendment. And with the 2024 election right around the corner, it’s only a matter of when, not whether, the Supreme Court will be asked to weigh in on the coming presidential contest—up to and including the explosive possibility that Donald Trump is disqualified from high office as a result of the January 6 insurrection.

    Since becoming Chief justice of the United States in 2005, a job for which he pledged to be a neutral umpire calling balls and strikes, Roberts has walked a fine line in determining how far to push the law in the direction of his Republican priors. A creature of the Reagan administration and the politics of that era, Roberts cut his teeth as a legal adviser on all the culture wars of the 1980s—from abortion to affirmative action to voting rights to the place of religion in the public sphere. A young Roberts was even critical of the Supreme Court’s own power, writing approvingly of how limits on its workload would prevent it “from usurping even more of the prerogatives of the other branches.”

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    Cristian Farias

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  • Operation Warp Speed: The Untold Story of the COVID-19 Vaccine

    Operation Warp Speed: The Untold Story of the COVID-19 Vaccine

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    The only vaccine candidate that wasn’t fully Slaoui’s choice was AstraZeneca’s. Oxford University, which had a crack vaccine team at its Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research, had already begun a clinical trial for a vaccine it was developing; AstraZeneca was its distribution and manufacturing partner. And the press was already calling the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine a winner. That made Azar think about Birx’s demand for a non-mRNA vaccine, so he put Kadlec and Marks in charge of negotiating a deal. On May 21, Operation Warp Speed gave AstraZeneca $1.2 billion in exchange for 300 million doses, so long as its vaccine got FDA approval. That came out to about $4 a dose. (The company insisted that it would not make a profit from the vaccine.)

    When Azar called Trump to tell him about the deal, Trump was furious. “Boris Johnson is going to kill me,” he said, according to someone who was in the room.

    A few days earlier, Moderna announced that its vaccine had generated neutralizing antibodies in eight volunteers. It was a tiny sample, and there was still plenty of skepticism. Nevertheless, Moderna’s stock, which had sold for less than $30 a share back in April, shot up to $80. That evening, the company announced another stock sale. This time, it was able to raise more than $1.3 billion to help jump-start its manufacturing capabilities. In total, Moderna received about $10 billion from the federal government.

    Each company got its own bespoke deal from Slaoui. Sanofi, which was collaborating with GSK, got $2.1 billion for 100 million doses. Johnson & Johnson got $1 billion for 100 million doses.

    As for Pfizer, with 2019 revenue of nearly $52 billion, it didn’t need or want to be part of Warp Speed. It feared that partnering with the government would slow it down. Inside Pfizer, the quest to develop a vaccine with its partner BioNTech was labeled Project Light Speed. “You can have any resources you need, but you need to succeed,” the company’s CEO, Albert Bourla, told his vaccine team. “And by the way,” he added, “my expectations on timeline are far faster than anything you think is actually possible, and you have no excuse not to deliver, because any resource you ask for, you’re going to get.”

    But there was one thing Pfizer needed that only Warp Speed could supply: a guaranteed market. Even mighty Pfizer couldn’t risk shareholders’ wrath by making a huge investment that didn’t pay off. Slaoui took care of that in July, making a deal to pay the company $1.95 billion for 100 million doses. Although Pfizer insists it was not thinking about profits when it began its vaccine work, this deal nonetheless set the price of a dose at close to $20. Moderna’s US price ended up being set around $16.

    Where was Warp Speed’s money coming from? Lacking their own congressionally mandated funds, the team had to scramble. They pulled $10 billion from the CARES Act, which was there thanks to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who had added extra money to the Strategic National Stockpile in order to create a slush fund. They also pulled money from the hospital fund established by the CARES Act. “Thank God for Steven,” Azar told a colleague.

    By late May, Slaoui held a virtual meeting with the companies to discuss the next step: the phase three clinical trials. “We are preparing to run what may turn out to be the largest and fastest field efficacy trials…in history,” Slaoui wrote in the invitation to the meeting. The trials would require finding, preparing, vaccinating, and monitoring 120,000 people over six months—or more if Novavax and Sanofi got through their phase two trials. It was important that the group be diverse, given the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on communities of color.

    In normal circumstances, phase three trials take years. Slaoui wanted them done in a matter of months. In addition to dramatically speeding up the process, Operation Warp Speed had to find and equip all the clinical trial sites with hard-to-obtain personal protective equipment so that everyone involved in the trials would be safe.

    “We basically have to go from an early adolescent company to a full adult company, skipping all of late adolescence,” Moderna’s Juan Andres later told Harvard Business School. Every minute mattered. “I think it would be very difficult to claim that the vaccines would have been developed in this time frame without not just the money but the coordinating role that Warp Speed played,” says Noubar Afeyan, the CEO of Flagship Pioneering, which helped found Moderna. “General Perna and Moncef Slaoui brought a level of expertise and experience and logistical capability and, I’d say, a soft hard touch. A velvet stick, such that people had to behave.”

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    Joe Nocera, Bethany McLean

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  • Barbra Streisand on ‘The Way We Were’ and Her Fight to Get It Right

    Barbra Streisand on ‘The Way We Were’ and Her Fight to Get It Right

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    Without those two crucial scenes, there’s nothing about her feeling that she has lost her sense of self in Hollywood…nothing about being informed on…nothing about what actually forced her decision. All of that is gone. So now you think they split up simply because he schtupped this other girl one time.

    You can hear Sydney on the documentary, describing how they previewed the picture on a Friday night in San Francisco and it was a flop. Then he says that he took out “about five scenes, and they were all politics,” and on Saturday night the picture was a hit. (By the way, my manager, Marty Erlichman, was there and he says the picture played great on both nights.)

    I agreed with Sydney on three of those scenes. They involved subsidiary characters having political discussions that went on so long even I lost interest.

    Yes, right, cut those extraneous scenes (about 15 minutes)…no great loss…but don’t cut the two scenes that were pivotal to the plot. Don’t cut the crucial three and a half minutes that the whole film revolves around.

    It was such a betrayal of Arthur’s story. It destroyed the soul of Katie’s character…and destroyed me.

    I was so upset back in 1973 that I asked if I could have the deleted scenes, and I’ve kept those trims in my vault (along with outtakes from my recordings, TV specials, and certain films). Then in 1998, when we were doing the DVD for the 25th anniversary, I asked Sydney if I could show those deleted scenes in the documentary. He could easily have said no, but instead he very generously said, “Okay,” because he understood how passionate I was about this movie. That was Sydney being a real friend.

    In the documentary, both Arthur and I talk about how those cuts eliminated vital information. Sydney admits, “I don’t say to this day that I’m right.” The fact is, Ray Stark and the studio were pushing him to take out the politics because they thought it would bore people. As Sydney explained to one journalist, “We were getting so much pressure. Columbia was going under at the time; they hadn’t had a big hit in years, and the picture was going over budget. Bob didn’t get along with Ray Stark, and neither did I. We didn’t know how to mix the politics and the love story and make it work.”

    Ray was nervous. Arthur writes in his book that Ray told Sydney to make those cuts after the first San Francisco preview. So Sydney and Margaret Booth, Ray’s favorite editor…a tough woman from another era…went up into the projection booth with a razor blade and cut the film hastily, in one chunk. And in my humble opinion, they threw out the baby with the bathwater.

    I took my pleas to Ray, which was useless.

    I felt absolutely powerless. My mind just flashed back to that moment as a young girl, standing in my mother’s bedroom doorway and being ignored. Once again, I felt unseen and unheard. I begged Sydney to put those two scenes back in. But he didn’t.

    This was the moment when I thought, That’s it. I had always had creative control of my albums, my TV specials, and my concerts. Now I realized, I have to be more in control of my films as well. I have to direct.

    Of course, it’s hard to argue with success. The movie became a huge hit…and Columbia’s second-highest-grossing film up till then (they told me the highest was Funny Girl). The Way We Were was nominated for six Academy Awards, but I thought there was something odd when I saw the list. No nomination for best picture. Sydney wasn’t nominated as best director. Arthur wasn’t nominated for his screenplay.

    Maybe the reason the movie missed out on the big awards was because people sensed something was missing and didn’t understand why Katie and Hubbell broke up. Several critics pointed out gaps in the storyline. Roger Ebert said, “Inexplicably, the movie suddenly and implausibly has them fall out of love—and they split up without resolving anything, particularly the plot.”

    I was honored to be nominated for best actress, but I was very disappointed that Bob wasn’t nominated for best actor for our movie, because he was amazing in it. (He did get nominated for The Sting.) At least “The Way We Were” was up for best original song, and the Academy asked me to sing it on the broadcast, but I was reluctant…my stage fright again. When I get nervous, my heart pounds and it affects my voice, which starts to shake and I lose control. It’s a terrible feeling and I didn’t want to go through that. So they asked Peggy Lee to do it, which was fine with me. (Besides, I wanted to be thought of as an actress first, not a singer.) But in retrospect, I wish I had been stronger and sung the song.

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    Barbra Streisand

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  • Inside Barbra Streisand’s World

    Inside Barbra Streisand’s World

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    “This is the opening of a film about Sarah Bernhardt, if I could get anyone to do it,” she says, drawing her hand through the air. “You start on a mirror, and the hand comes in the frame, and someone is trying to put on the eyeliner and it’s smudging. You have to erase it and start again. You don’t even know who it is.”

    We’ve been talking about makeup. For most of her career—from her nightclub gigs when she was 18 right through to her major films—Barbra Streisand did her own. At first because there was no one else to do it, and then because no one could do it better. In her autobiography, My Name Is Barbra, out November 7, she tells the story of her film test for Funny Girl. The makeup people came to attend to her, and she thought, “Great, they’re the experts. Let’s see what they can do.” But she didn’t love the result. “I said, ‘Thank you very much,’ ” Streisand writes, “but then I asked, ‘Would it be all right if we also did a test with just me making myself up?’ The studio said, ‘Fine.’ ”

    A previously unpublished photograph of Barbra Streisand, by Richard Avedon, photographed on April 1, 1970. Hair by Anna Gallant; styled by Polly Mellen. With special thanks to the Richard Avedon Foundation.© COPYRIGHT RICHARD AVEDON FOUNDATION.

    The cinematographer picked Streisand’s.

    Streisand is 81 now, and though her hands remain steady, she finds it harder to achieve that straight line across the eyelid. That’s the genesis of the Sarah Bernhardt idea—Bernhardt at an older age, still potent, still inimitable. “You know, she played Juliet when she was 74,” she says.

    I am at Streisand’s house in Malibu in July, two days before the Screen Actors Guild declares a strike, to talk to her about her book. I’m one of only a handful of people who’ve read it at this point.

    My Name Is Barbra is 992 pages of startling honesty and self-reflection, deadpan parenthetical asides (including a running bit about how much she loves going to the dentist), encyclopedic recall of onstage outfits, and rigorous analyses of her films, many of which she rewatched for the first time in decades. There’s the chilling story, which she’s never told before, of the origins of her legendary stage fright. There’s her hilarious opening line to James Brolin, who she’s been with for 27 years. There’s a page and a half correcting the record on the Streisand Effect, a term that refers to the way efforts to minimize a story can backfire, generating exponentially more press; it derives from legal action she took against a person who publicized the location of her home. (More on all this later.) There’s no index, so would-be browsers can’t cheat. A genius move—was it her choice? She laughs. Absolutely. If she could plug away for 10 years writing this exhaustive, exhilarating account of her life—leaving blood on the page, per her editor’s request—then we can do her the courtesy of reading it from start to finish.

    In 1984, Jackie Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday, invited Streisand to write a memoir. She turned the offer down: “Frankly, I thought at 42 I was too young, with much more work still to come.” (She wasn’t wrong, but for those keeping score, she had already won an honorary Tony, two Oscars, one Emmy, and seven Grammys.) Still, she started making notes, and in 1999 began keeping a journal, longhand. “I never learned to type,” she says, an act of defiance against her mother, who wanted her to pursue a career in school administration so that she’d have summers off. Instead, Streisand grew out her nails, precluding secretarial work, and—just to put a point on it—became a supernova.

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    Radhika Jones

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