“Sorry about all the kids!” Blake Lively shouts merrily as she staggers under the weight of one child and pulls another along by the hand; a third wanders behind. We are at a terrace restaurant near the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome, and from here we can see the entire city in the slant of evening light, the famous hills and arc of the Tiber river, the marble monuments and ruins tinted pink and blue. Blake’s children are dancing and singing around their mother; it is a scene of joy and silliness and utter chaos, and she seems to be delighting in it. I tell her I’m not going to mention her kids in this piece, and she says oh you can mention them. “Sitting around with them doing chicken dances while I have a very serious conversation with you is probably the most accurate portrait of me possible. Did you bring cookies?” she asks, noticing the bag in my hand. I’d hoped to bake with her in the kitchens of the Rome Sustainable Food Project, which had sent along a batch; Blake is known as a worldclass baker. “So sorry about that,” she says, brushing her hair out of her face. “I’d love to bake with you! But you can see my life….”
I’m not sure I can see her life, but I can sense it: in the sunny kindness in which she sends her children back to their hotel room, in the glee with which she attacks the cookies, in the almost nerdy enthusiasm she projects for Baz Luhrmann and the shoot they just finished for Vogue. Here is the wife of Ryan Reynolds, star of Gossip Girl, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, The Age of Adaline, and A Simple Favor—the sequel to which has brought her here to Rome. (She also has a new movie, It Ends With Us, out in August.) Here she is talking about Luhrmann not as a celebrity might but as the teenage girl she used to be, sitting in her bedroom in the San Fernando Valley and looking up at her signed poster from La Bohème.
This story is from the September 2024 edition of Vogue US.
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This story is from the September 2024 edition of Vogue US.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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Canvas the City - Martha Diamond captured the brisk energy of Manhattan.
How do you capture a city as frenetic as New York? For the late artist Martha Diamond, it meant looking up. In her soulful paintings of New York City’s skyscrapers, Diamond used loose ropes of color that land somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Though sparse in detail, her buildings teem, as the city does, with life. Diamond made most of her paintings in her loft on the Bowery, where she lived from 1969 until her death last December, at age 79. Throughout her five-decade career, she didn’t so much re-create what she saw as channel its slippery essence. “I know the city has straight lines or edges,” she said in 1989, “but as I walk around, the ending or beginning of substance becomes less absolute.” Her buildings sway in the wind and glisten in the light. “I think her work is still startling,” says poet Eileen Myles, who was a longtime friend of Diamond’s. “It’s there to wake people up.”
Off the Beat - Mainly known as a producer, O'Connell Finneas is releasing a new heartfelt LP.
Finneas O’Connell likes to disappear. A tendency toward self-effacement may seem like an unexpected character trait for the youngest person ever to win a Producer of the Year Grammy, a prize that has pride of place in Finneas’s living room, alongside the other nine he’s earned for his work with his sister, Billie Eilish. But seated at the dining table in his LA home, the 27-year-old musician elaborates. “When you hear a song and you’re like, ‘Wow, who made this?’ That’s what I’m trying to do when I write,” he says. “He can really tap into the other person,” says frequent collaborator Ashe, née Ashlyn Rae Willson. “He is a phenomenal listener.”
Spinning a Web - Not muscle, not bone, but fascia the network of tissue that connects it all is grabbing the therapeutic spotlight.
Are you in pain?” Cadence Dubus, a Brooklyn-based fitness instructor who has developed a program for “fascia release,” asks, sending me spiraling before our session begins. There’s that twinge in my shoulder and the carpal tunnel at night—but aren’t such annoyances simply the conditions of modern life, of getting older? “Some,” I answer, shy to cop to any of it. Dubus then has me walk back and forth, squinting at my gait.
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It was late in the summer in Los Angeles, with all the dry heat and burnished sunlight that implies, and Billie Eilish was sitting in a dark room, busy changing her mind. The singer was halfway through editing the music video she had directed for “Birds of a Feather,” her latest astronomically successful hit song (nearly 1 billion streams) off her latest astronomically successful hit album (nearly 4 billion streams at the time), when she encountered a problem: She realized she hated it. Well, not hated. “I was like, this ain’t it,” she says.
Coming Up Rosy - The new blush isn't just for the cheek. Coco Mellors feels the flush.
If the eyes are the window to the soul, then our cheeks are the back door. What other part of the body so readily reveals our hidden emotions? Embarrassment, exuberance, delight, desire, all instantly communicated with a rush of blood. It's no wonder that blush has been a mainstay of makeup bags for decades: Ancient Egyptians used ground ochre to heighten their color; Queen Elizabeth I dabbed her cheeks with red dye and mercuric sulfide (which, combined with the vinegar and lead concoction she used to achieve her ivory pallor, is believed to have given her blood poisoning); flappers applied blush in dramatic circles to achieve a doll-like complexion, even adding it to their knees to draw attention to their shorter hemlines
Different Stages
A trio of novels spirits you far away.
The Wizard
Paul Tazewell’s costumes for the film adaptation of Wicked conjure their own kind of magic.
THE SEA, THE SEA
A story of survival on a whaling ship sets sail on Broadway. Robert Sullivan meets the crew behind the rousing folk musical Swept Away.
STAGING A COMEBACK
Harlem's National Black Theatre has been a storied arts institution in need of support. A soaring new home is shaping its future.
Simon Says
Simon Porte Jacquemus, much like his label, resonates with the sunny, breezy French South-but behind the good life, as Nathan Heller discovers, is a laser focus and a shoulder-to-the-wheel work ethic.
