Vogue March 2025

A WAVE OF CHANGE IS moving through fashion. It seems like every week there’s another announcement, another shift in the landscape. Change can feel like this: a grand reordering, the past reverberating powerfully into the present. It’s hard to pin down the beginning, but John Galliano’s seismic, phantasmagoric couture show for Maison Margiela last winter comes to mind. The excitement for what he accomplished on that January evening in Paris speaks to just how much pent-up desire there has been for an established designer doing exactly what he wants (and Galliano’s subsequent departure from Margiela suggests independence is still very much on his mind). Another beloved designer, Alessandro Michele, arrived as creative director at Valentino a year ago, and the anticipation around his first ready-to-wear collection was overwhelming—and he will…

High Drama For “Heat Wave” (page 214), writer Kate Lloyd met Paul Mescal in London, where Rebecca Frecknall’s searing production of A Streetcar Named Desire—starring Mescal as the brooding and brutish Stanley Kowalski—played at the Almeida and the Phoenix Theatre before landing, this February, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. For the arresting accompanying imagesof the29-year-oldIrishman(above) and his costars, Patsy Ferran and Anjana Vasan, photographer Andrew Jacobs worked with the stylist Harry Lambert. “I went into the shoot focusing on keeping him in character for the portraits,” Jacobs says of Mescal. “He came straight from rehearsal, so it was easy for him to portray the strong mood we’d hoped for.” Great Beauty “It was such an honor to shoot Alessandro’s beautiful Valentino collection—especially in the museum where…

Life was busier than ever as a parent of four small children living in Manhattan. But that was good, wasn’t it? Even the governor of Texas when I was growing up, Ann Richards, who had a quick tongue and a beehive hairdo, said so: “If we rest, we rust,” she’d famously quipped. It was advice I’d taken to heart. For the better part of a decade, I was nursing a baby, carrying one toddler, and trying to ready another for admission to a preschool that would, as it had been explained to me by other moms on the playground, determine their fate. I dragged strollers out of the backs of taxis, sat in ballet classes, and juggled nap-time schedules. I sourced Halloween costumes, elaborate Easter baskets, and thoughtful Christmas gifts.…

The 2024 fashion year was bookended by Sarah Burton’s swan song at Alexander McQueen and Louise Trotter landing the creative director job at Bottega Veneta. In between, the state of women in the fashion industry—specifically, how few of them there are in top design roles—became the talk of the internet. Burton was replaced by Seán McGirr at McQueen and Trotter followed Matthieu Blazy at Bottega—men who, a popular meme pointed out, bear a striking resemblance to each other and to at least a handful of other on-the-rise white male designers. Another guy getting another great job: The throw-up-your-hands inevitability of it all could be one of the reasons, alongside price resistance, why women with money to spend are trading high-fashion purchases for wellness experiences and exotic travel. Personally, though, I…

In July of 1984, as a tender 20-year-old correspondent for Australian Harper’s Bazaar, I was summoned to attend Yves Saint Laurent’s haute couture show. The great designer, it should be said, was rather befuddled by this time: While it wasn’t so much his age (he was only 47—younger, after all, than I am now), he simply seemed lost in his own world. However, he was still razor-sharp when it came to his work—and in any case Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s onetime romantic partner and the company’s defender of the gate, snarled at anyone who got in his way, and made sure the show ran like clockwork. The fall show had come at the end of the week dedicated to the Parisian haute couture houses—Karl Lagerfeld, then newly arrived at…

When I visited Rio de Janeiro recently, I spent an afternoon at the Botanical Garden—home to orchids and bromeliads, giant monsteras, and the grandest canopy of palms you’ll ever see. It had just rained, and everything was slick and extra green, like a magical paradise. For decades the 65-year-old Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes has maintained a studio near the gardens. With this tropical flora as her backdrop, and with Brazil’s complex past in mind, Milhazes builds up her canvases layer by layer. Embedded in her designs are flowers, fruits, and intricate patterns inspired by traditional textiles and 19th-century costumes. “I think that art, this practice—it’s always kind of a mystery,” Milhazes says. This March, 15 of her spellbinding works go on view in one of the tower galleries at the…