Vanity Fair UK – September 2019

(Kiana) #1

Editor’s Letter September 2019


On Your


Marks


radhika jones, Editor in Chief

Radhika Jones
at the Dior
Haute Couture
fall-winter
2019–2020
show,
in Paris in July.

It’s hard to square how much I look forward to summer with how much I look


forward to fall, but the September issue—arriving as it does in August, along with (if


we East Coasters are lucky) that first hint of chill in the night air—embodies the


paradox. We’re still in relax mode, but underneath the sunblock, we’re gearing up.


My son starts kindergarten and he needs a new backpack. Here come the fall books,


here come Fashion Week, U.N. week, the film festivals showing the movies we’ll be


talking about through Oscar season. And so this issue spills over with artists at the


top of their game. Kristen Stewart, that rare actor who shimmers effortlessly between


blockbuster and indie film (this fall it’s Charlie’s Angels and a Jean Seberg biopic).


Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose summer included an appearance before members of


Congress to testify in support of reparations for chattel slavery, an idea he has almost


single-handedly powered to the upper echelons of American discourse since he


first wrote about it in 2014 (this fall, he publishes his first novel, and in our pages


Jesmyn Ward—herself a two-time National Book Award winner—talks with him about


fiction and freedom). There’s Miuccia Prada, still a pioneer after four decades at


the helm of one of the world’s most powerful fashion houses and a behind-the-scenes


patron of the cinematic arts. There’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus, preparing for her next act


after seven seasons as a politician who once upon a more innocent time was the


worst imaginable inhabitant of the West Wing. There’s a whole crew of rising talent


crossing the ever more permeable boundaries between the big and small screens, from


Yara Shahidi to Zoey Deutch. And as the class of 2023 takes its place at colleges


around the country, forget not the scammers of Varsity Blues: Evgenia Peretz reports


on continuing fallout from the college admissions scandal in L.A., just in time for a


new wave of high school seniors to start their applications, hopefully sans Photoshop.


32 VANITY FAIR SEPTEMBER 2019


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