THE PANTHEON OF It girls isn’t driven by the mere spectacle of dressing up. “They simply do because they must,” Hari Nef says on a crisp Sunday in Lower Manhattan. “Whether it’s Edie or Parker or Chloë,” meaning Sedgwick, Posey, and Sevigny, “or Dianne Brill or RuPaul.” Eternal icons all—still, word on the street is that many actors cling to a very set image: “They don’t want to wear wigs, take risks with makeup. I don’t relate to that.” Character play confers a certain freedom. “I can get naked behind that,” adds Nef.
Eight years after her runway debut helped ink a headline-making IMG contract, the spring 2023 collections saw the actor back on the circuit, this time with an unmissable copper bob. She served retro kink at Batsheva (PVC dress, aqua cat eye), outré glamour at Jason Wu (grungy hair, curve-hugging gown), courtier punk at Matty Bovan (corset, jagged black wig). “It’s this comfort in the chameleon,” Nef says of the season’s guises, beginning with Collina Strada’s Look 1 plaid pants and “Got Milkweed?” slip dress. It’s a nod to the runway location: a Brooklyn butterfly preserve, where the plant is an essential food source for monarch caterpillars. “I wanted her to open [the show] because I felt like the actress in her could really embrace the butterfly energy that we were going for,” says Collina Strada creative director Hillary Taymour. “And she really just set a tone in such a beautiful, striking way.”
This story is from the April 2023 edition of Vanity Fair US.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the April 2023 edition of Vanity Fair US.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Boys and Their Toys - Inside the hypermacho, Bible-thumping alt-tech universe trying to take on Silicon Valley-from El Segundo
For more than two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, California, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real shit—not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds. Some are making drones to try to control the weather. Others are building nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight Russia and China.
Vanities - Maisy Stella knows how to think outside the box
Maisy Stella didn’t have a TV as a kid because her musician parents didn’t want her and her older sister, Lennon, tuning in and tuning out. So the girls used their imaginations. “My sister made a cardboardbox TV that I would get in, and she had a fake cardboard remote,” Stella says. “I’d do a baking show, and then she’d be like, ‘Soap opera!’ and I’d be like, ‘You killed my husband!’ We would do that for hours. That was our entertainment.” Only later, when the girls landed roles as Connie Britton’s children on the country music drama Nashville, did their mother and father relent. “We bought a TV the day that me and my sister got on TV.”
Another Country- Searching for James Baldwin in the South of France
Since James Baldwin's death nearly 40 years ago, the literary lion's final home, in the South of France, has drawn a procession of acolytes to the Provençal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life.The 300-year-old villa in which he resided no longer exists: By 2019 developers had converted the site into a luxury apartment complex. But that hasn't deterred generations of admirers, inflamed and enlightened by Baldwin's prose, from making a pilgrimage. Including me. Seizing the occasion of the writer's centennial year, I paid a visit in April. My first stop was a table at a Baldwin hangout, the Café de la Place on Place du Général de Gaulle, for a croque monsieur and a double espresso.
A House Divided
The Mellon dynasty has long been known for its old money refinement and discretion. But when TIM MELLON became Donald Trump's biggest donor many members of the family were mystified-and not afraid to talk about it
FUNNY BUSINESS
NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE LAUNCHED A REVOLUTION THAT CHANGED COMEDY, TELEVISION, AND THE MOVIES. NOW DIRECTOR JASON REITMAN HAS RE-CREATED THE CHAOTIC HOURS BEFORE SNL'S FIRST EPISODE. LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S 1975!
BAD FAITH
From exiled actors to academics, influencers to intellectuals, VF gets under the hood of the Catholic right's celebrity conversion industrial complex
THE GE NERAL
How ELIZABETH PRELOGAR, America's low-key, high-powered solicitor general, is holding the Supreme Court's feet to the fire
THE BILLIONAIRE'S SECRET
THE GERMAN INDUSTRIALIST KLAUSMICHAEL KUEHNE, BORN IN 1937, IS ONE OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD, WITH MORE MONEY THAN KEN GRIFFIN, OR MACKENZIE SCOTT, OR FRANÇOIS PINAULT. WHERE DID HIS FAMILY FORTUNE COME FROM? THE NAZIS KNOW
GIVE AND LET GIVE
MELINDA FRENCH GATES is speaking out for the rights of women and girls, embracing her role as godmother to her fellow philanthropists, and getting political, even when it's a little uncomfortable.
Party PLANNING
Putin wants Trump to win, of course, and he's got big ideas about a new world order. Think Yalta-on Fiji
