Vogue USA – May 2022
English | 190 pages | pdf | 116.29 MB
Unstoppable – Vogue USA Magazine Editor’s Letter
THE ROAD TO A RIHANNA cover is never especially direct, but getting to our destination this month— an astonishing Annie Leibovitz portfolio of the superstar enceinte, in Paris, at the Ritz, during a late Fashion Week night in March 2022—took more than a little ingenuity and nerve. “Rihanna has never been much for scheduling,” writes Vogue’s Chioma Nnadi in her accompanying profile, deploying what might be the understatement of 2022.
Actually, none of us have been perfect with scheduling lately. A global health crisis has made quick work of bestlaid plans. Just ask Vogue’s fashion department, where editors first pulled clothes from the spring collections for a Rihanna shoot then imagined in Los Angeles. When that shoot was moved to Barbados and set for December 2021, the team assembled a completely different wardrobe.
When that shoot was scrapped, due to COVID, the editors started again, scrambling through the holiday break, planning for an early January date. At which point a set of pictures of Rihanna and A$AP Rocky walking together on snowy streets in Harlem more or less broke the internet.
It was the bump seen round the world, and it created a whole new agenda for our fashion team. Looks would need to be made, or pulled directly from the 2022 runways, to celebrate Rihanna’s changing body, and our location would now be Paris, where she was headed for the shows, in March. Annie Leibovitz would meet her there, at the Ritz, along with fashion editor Alex Harrington, for a shoot starting in the midafternoon.
Afternoon moved to evening, and then an all-nighter commenced, through which Rihanna and Annie— two formidable women—captured something magical together: a set of pictures as glamorous as they are personal, a moment in history for a history-making star.
Flexibility, adaptability—these are words intrinsic to the creative process. We are all moving between disciplines these days, trying new media, taking risks in new fields. This describes the challenge presented to nine film directors by Andrew Bolton, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. For part two of the institute’s
comprehensive “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” opening in May, Bolton asked Sofia Coppola, Janicza Bravo, Autumn de Wilde, Radha Blank, Julie Dash, Tom Ford, Regina King, Martin Scorsese, and Chloé Zhao to put their stamp on the period rooms of the American Wing. What happens when you turn such a range of talents loose in a
museum? Controlled chaos. “It can’t be real chaos, because it’s a museum—that’s the fun of it,” says de Wilde to writer Chloe Malle in her survey of the exhibition. “In America” was also delayed by COVID and is finally coming to fruition thanks to the patience, ingenuity, and hard work of so many creative collaborators. It will be another history-making moment. I can’t wait.
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