Harper's Bazaar

ART IS OFTEN considered a form of conversation—an exchange of ideas, experiences, impulses, and actions that forges connections and allows us to arrive at a deeper kind of truth. Technology is changing that conversation. It is faster, easier, and more accessible for almost anyone to make a picture, write a novel, compose a song, take a photograph, or shoot a film today. Images appear at the speed of a prompt; music arrives algorithmically tailored to our predilections and moods; our memories are stored and sorted by our phones. As with so many aspects of life in the 21st century, friction—the messy, tough parts—has been reduced, with the aim of eliminating it altogether. But what hasn’t is the very human desire to see our thoughts and feelings reflected in the world.…

This past July, I celebrated my fifth anniversary in my role as editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar. In the first weeks of my tenure, I wrote a letter to Meghan, Duchess of Sussex to tell her how much I admired her and to invite her to collaborate with us in the future. A couple of weeks later, she called me. I answered the phone and she said, “Samira, it’s Meghan.” It took me a few seconds to realize which Meghan. I couldn’t fathom, at first, that it was the Meghan. There was no assistant asking me to stay on the line; it was just her, calling my cell. What began with a letter and a warm conversation between two women who had stepped into roles they’d never imagined for…

“There’s NEVER been a more OPEN-ENDED space for CREATIVITY than HOUSE MUSIC and DANCE in general,” says PINKPANTHERESS. “It’s the most EXPRESSIVE.” The 24-year-old U.K.-born singer, songwriter, and producer’s music is built around a central tension: The sound is designed to electrify the club, but the vocals are intimate, like she’s offering confessions for a pillow fort. “I’m not the most going-out person,” she admits, “but a lot of my favorite producers are introverts as well.” Like any good introvert, PinkPantheress found her voice on the Internet, posting snippets of songs on TikTok, where she’s gone viral multiple times—including when her single “Illegal” became a meme this past summer. Right now, she’s most inspired by house, a genre that heavily influenced her new mixtape, Fancy That. For our Art issue,…

WHY DON’T YOU…MAKE a wild statement piece the focus of your home. The great art collector and aesthete Pauline Karpidas anchored the salon of her London home with a custom wall-to-wall tiger-print carpet. While the palatial square footage of Karpidas’s showpiece is something to envy, try invoking the same energy by bringing animal-print rugs, pillows, or even a throw blanket into your home with aplomb. Start with something by Beni, whose sumptuous rugs are handmade by women artisans in Morocco. WHY DON’T YOU…UPLIFT in tandem with your passion, as Pamela J. Joyner, a.k.a. the “activist collector,” has done. Joyner and her husband, Alfred J. Giuffrida, have established a magnificent collection of previously under appreciated African American artists, as well as helped raise the next generation of Black museum trustees. The lesson? Be the…

TREAT yourself—and your WHOLE CREW—to one of MONCLER’s always cool PUFFERS in SLEEK BLACK, a DUSTY PASTEL, or a SHINY new shade of EMERALD or RUBY. It’s the perfect PICK-ME-UP during a winter wardrobe SLUMP. ROLEX adds some SEDUCTIVE bite to its SIGNATURE yellow-gold DATEJUST 31 with a CRIMSON OMBRÉ FACE and a DIAMOND BEZEL—an ALLURING PROPOSITION indeed…

ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2021, the poet, visual artist, and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths married the author Salman Rushdie. That same day, her best friend, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was set to speak at their wedding, died suddenly and unexpectedly. Within the first year of their marriage, Griffiths and Rushdie faced tragedy once again when Rushdie was nearly killed in a knife attack at a reading. In The Flower Bearers, out this January, Griffiths writes about what it takes to not only survive these compound tragedies but still feel alive and love and to still look at the world as a poet. We live in a time of incalculable losses. Most of us are trying to figure out how to live our lives while staying awake—how to reckon with…