Wall Street Journal Magazine May 2020 
Wall Street Journal Magazine Saturday May 2, 2020 [CCLXXV, US ed.]

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Advertisement

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DOW JONES PLAYMAKERS | MIAMI, FL | 01.31.2020

Cathy Engelbert

Chase Carey

Justin Tuck, Simon Greenberg, Amar’e Stoudemire

Playmakers audience

Mark Del Rosso

One Thousand Museum residents, Mayi de la Vega

Erika Nardini, Kate Johnson, Thayer Lavielle, Donna-Maria Cullen, Kristina Pink

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This January, Dow Jones launched Playmakers, an exclusive half-day event featuring an all-star lineup of business

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and sports leaders, at the late Zaha Hadid’s newest luxury residence project in Miami, One Thousand Museum. Renowned speakers who redefined their playing fields led discussions centered on the business of professional sports, athlete empowerment and promoting diversity and inclusivity in the industry. A special thank-you to our sponsors: Genesis, ONE Sotheby’s International Realty and One Thousand Museum.

Note to Readers: We’re excited to reveal WSJ. Insider (formerly WSJ. Noted) as the reimagination of our marketing and promotions platform and our new identity. Follow @WSJinsider on Instagram for exclusive access and behind-the-scenes looks at the exciting things happening at WSJ!

© 2020 DOW JONES & COMPANY, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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ON THE COVER

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THE SORCERESS P. 58

On the morning of WSJ.’s May cover photo shoot, tornadoes swept through Nashville, near where cover star Nicole Kidman lives and the shoot took place. “Despite it all, Nicole’s famous work ethic was in evidence,” says WSJ. deputy editor Elisa LipskyKarasz (near left), who wrote the accompanying profile. “There was no question she was going to show up, do everything asked of her and more, all in the most gracious, easy way.” Stylist Elin Svahn (far left) adds: “She is an incredibly collaborative actor to work with and really embraced working with the whole team.” Photographer Bibi Cornejo Borthwick noted the energy on set despite the tragedy: “The city had gone through a lot, but there was a beautiful sense of community.” —Natalia Barr

WSJ. M AGA ZINE

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JENNIFER PASTORE; COURTESY OF BFA; COURTESY OF ELIN SVAHN

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POSE POEM Hair stylist Didier Malige and photographer Bibi Cornejo Borthwick on set with Nicole Kidman.

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may 2020 26 EDITOR’S LETTER

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20 ON THE COVER 28 THE ONE SHEET Nicole Kidman

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The actor reflects on the singular moments and relationships that have shaped her life and career.

30 CONTRIBUTORS

32 COLUMNISTS on Prudence

108 STILL LIFE Judy Chicago

The artist and activist shares a few of her favorite things. Photography by Chantal Anderson

What’s News. 35

Sculptor Genesis Belanger creates artworks for unsettling times; a documentary on Oliver Sacks

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A Marfa cookbook; Scandinavian rugs; Hublot’s updated Big Bang watch; Bellerby & Co Globemakers’ handcrafted objects

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Jewelry Box: Cartier’s Magnitude High Jewelry collection

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Trend Report: Bralettes

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The Mayflower Inn and Miraval focus on wellness; global tableware

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The Download: Tracee Ellis Ross; men’s summer pinks

Market report.

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45 TWO OF A KIND

A streamlined warm-weather wardrobe with crisp whites and light knits is a breath of fresh air.

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Photography by Dham Srifuengfung Styling by David Thielebeule

ON THE COVER Nicole Kidman in Jil Sander dress, Dior shoes and her own bracelet, photographed by Bibi Cornejo Borthwick and styled by Elin Svahn; hair, Didier Malige; makeup, Susie Sobol; manicure, Cenita Scott; set design, Amanda O’Connor. For details see Sources, page 106. THIS PAGE Nicole Kidman in The Row jacket, shirt and skirt, photographed by Bibi Cornejo Borthwick and styled by Elin Svahn. For details see Sources, page 106.

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FOLLOW @WSJMAG: To purchase original single issues from WSJ. Magazine’s archive, visit the WSJ Shop at wsjshop.com.

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Clockwise from far left: Valentin Humbroich and Cara Taylor in Montana, photographed by Christian MacDonald and styled by Alex White. On him: Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, shirt and pants, Stetson hat, vintage bolo tie, Pat Areias belt and The Frye Company boots. On her: Erdem dress and Church’s boots. For details see Sources, page 106. Artist Judy Chicago, photographed by Chantal Anderson. A sculpture by Genesis Belanger, photographed by Molly Matalon.

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the culture issue.

the exchange. 51 TRACKED: Ethan Brown

The Beyond Meat CEO imagines a world of plant-based eating. By Alex Bhattacharji Photography by Jesse Chehak

54 GETTING THEIR KICKS

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The founders of Stadium Goods are striving to make their company the ultimate luxury platform for mintcondition aftermarket sneakers.

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By Howie Kahn Photography by Daniel Dorsa

58 THE SORCERESS

88 SOCIAL NETWORK

Over three decades, Nicole Kidman has worked her magic on audiences and Hollywood insiders alike.

Fashion designer Gabriela Hearst and chef Daniel Humm prove the exception to the rule “no new friends.”

By Elisa Lipsky-Karasz Photography by Bibi Cornejo Borthwick Styling by Elin Svahn

By Andrew Goldman Photography by Maciek Kobielski

66 NO GRAPES, NO GLORY

In South Africa’s Stellenbosch region, women of color are rewriting its history—by founding their own labels and operating the area’s vineyards. By Madeleine Speed Photography by Robbie Lawrence

92 RAY OF LIGHT

Add a touch of glamour to daytime dressing with bright florals and forward-thinking silhouettes. Photography by Josh Olins Styling by Clare Richardson

102 A (LITERARY) STAR IS BORN

Ride off into an epic Western romance in a wardrobe of this season’s contemporary Americana.

In The Vanishing Half, her follow-up to 2016’s breakthrough novel The Mothers, Brit Bennett considers questions of race and the lasting consequences of the past.

Photography by Christian MacDonald Styling by Alex White

Interview by Kiley Reid Photography by Adrianna Glaviano

74 WILD, WILD COUNTRY

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Are we doing our best for future generations?

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Will they be prepared? How can we give them the right start?

Future generations are our legacy to the world. So we want them to be well-equipped for the challenges ahead. But in these changing times, what skills will they require? And how much will we need to set aside? Talk to your UBS Financial Advisor and, together, we can put a plan in place today for the next generation’s tomorrows. For some of life’s questions, you’re not alone. 5PHFUIFSXFDBOÎOEBOBOTXFS

5IFGFBUVSFEQFSTPOTBSFOPUJNQMZJOHTQPOTPSTIJQPSFOEPSTFNFOUPG6#4PSJUTQSPEVDUTBOETFSWJDFT*OQSPWJEJOHXFBMUINBOBHFNFOUTFSWJDFTUPDMJFOUT 6#4'JOBODJBM4FSWJDFT*ODPšFST CPUIJOWFTUNFOUBEWJTPSZBOECSPLFSBHFTFSWJDFTXIJDIBSFTFQBSBUFBOEEJTUJODUBOEEJšFSJONBUFSJBMXBZT'PSJOGPSNBUJPO JODMVEJOHUIFEJšFSFOUMBXTBOEDPOUSBDUTUIBUHPWFSO WJTJUVCT DPNXPSLJOHXJUIVT 6#4 KPJOFE GPSDFT XJUI #055-&501 UP DSFBUF 50(&5)&3#"/% UP SBJTF NPOFZ GPS TFMFDUFE DIBSJUJFT #PUUMFUPQ BOE 6#4 'JOBODJBM 4FSWJDFT *OD BSF OPU BGŖMJBUFE © UBS 2020. All rights reserved. UBS Financial Services Inc. is a subsidiary of UBS AG. Member FINRA/SIPC.

EDITOR’S LE T TER

ALONE TOGETHER

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ILLUSTRATION BY ALEJANDRO CARDENAS

DON’T FENCE ME IN Bast and Anubis, both wearing Balenciaga, take a reflective moment in the open expanses of Montana.

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AGAZINE MAKING is a team effort. Pro-

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ducing this issue—our first-ever finished entirely remotely—took that truism to the next level. Sequestered at home offices and kitchen tables, often with young children underfoot, our nimble staff of editors, designers, production people, copy editors and fact checkers developed a new, all-digital workflow, proving that even in quarantine, it takes a village. I’d like to thank my entire team for navigating these challenging times with such calm professionalism. Our cover star, Nicole Kidman, is one of the great modern collaborators of TV and film. With several new projects in the works, including the HBO series The Undoing, Kidman continues to build on a career

defined by a relentless work ethic. With her production company, Blossom Films, creating entertainment custom-made for the streaming era, Kidman is the perfect subject to help WSJ. launch a new editorial franchise. This month, we debut The One, a lively print and video Q&A in which interviewees share the singular moments and relationships that made a difference. What’s the one trait Kidman values most in a collaborator? “Talent,” she says. In South Africa’s Stellenbosch region, women of color are succeeding in an industry that once shut them out: winemaking. Still scarred by the legacy of apartheid, the country has tried, with mixed success, to remove the obstacles facing black entrepreneurs. Now visionary women like Nondumiso Pikashe,

Carmen Stevens and Ntsiki Biyela are operating the area’s vineyards—and, in the process, blazing a trail for the next generation of vintners. With more time to catch up on reading, I’ve been enjoying Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, a followup to her breakout novel, The Mothers. As you’ll learn in our interview with Bennett, it’s a story about identical twin sisters navigating the complexities of racial identity. It’s also a compelling reminder that, even in isolation, literature and storytelling remain a steady source of solace and renewal.

Kristina O’Neill [email protected] @kristina_oneill

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NICOLE KIDMAN

For a new monthly column in WSJ., the actor and executive producer of HBO’s upcoming limited series The Undoing reflects on the singular moments and relationships that have shaped her life and career. ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN MCAMIS

What’s the one trait you consider essential to your success? Resilience. What’s the one phone call that changed your life? I remember Baz Luhrmann calling me and going, "I want you to be the lead in my film playing Satine in Moulin Rouge...." That phone call can mean your whole destiny changes on a dime. What’s the one trait you most value in a business partner or collaborator? The one thing that I really value in a collaborator is talent. In an artistic collaborator, I will forgive many, many things if they're talented.

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What’s the one thing that keeps you motivated? The desire that my fire still burns within. So that motivates me—thinking I haven't done the work I want to do yet creatively.

What’s the one book or movie that changed your life? The book that changed my life in a huge way was War and Peace because I read it when I was on summer holidays when I was really young. I fell in love with the characters; I got lost in the characters.

What is the one piece of advice that most changed your life? "When you get to the top, just remember there's nothing there. The only thing that really matters is love." No matter what your accomplishments are, it's incredibly lonely if you're not surrounded by some form of love. Who’s the one person you call in a crisis? It would always be my husband.

Who is the one person, alive or dead, you’d most like to have dinner with? My dad, who’s not around anymore. He died, and I would love to have dinner with him again. What's the one thing about which you most often say, "Well, maybe one day"? Maybe one day I'll hike Machu Picchu. Maybe one day I'll sort of get to do all the adventures. Never seen the pyramids. Still have not been to Africa. Desperately want to go to Africa, so maybe one day. Where do you wish you could buy a one-way ticket to? Paradise. I wish I could buy a one-way ticket to paradise and bring a lot of people with me.

Visit wsjmagazine.com/nicole-kidman for a video featuring more of our conversation with Nicole Kidman.

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may 2020

REAL CORKERS Clockwise from far left: Harvesting for Nondumiso Pikashe’s Ses’fikile Wines; Carmen Stevens at her winery; photographer Robbie Lawrence; writer Madeleine Speed.

NO GRAPES, NO GLORY P. 66

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Photographer Robbie Lawrence and writer Madeleine Speed traveled to South Africa’s Stellenbosch region to meet with pioneering winemakers, all women of color, who are transforming the industry. “The entrepreneurs and winemakers we met were smart, resilient and great businesswomen. But crucially—a lot of fun,” Speed says of the women, whose jobs turned out to involve as much grit as grapes. “I was intrigued by the physical nature of winemaking—there is little glamour to the process,” says Lawrence, noting that he focused on the hands-on element in his photos. Speed remembers feeling relaxed on the wine farms while coming to terms with their murky past. “Stellenbosch is an old-school paradise,” she says. “But the region has a dark side.” The most difficult part of writing the story was, she says, “finding ways to reconcile the wealth and beauty of the region with the legacy of apartheid buried just beneath the surface.” —Natalia Barr

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SHAKTHI JOTHIANANDAN

DANIEL DORSA

KILEY REID

Writer

Photographer

Writer

RÉMI PUJOL Photographer

STILL LIFE P. 108

GET TING THEIR KICKS P. 54

A (LITERARY) STAR IS BORN P. 102

CREAM OF THE CROP P. 40

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ROBBIE LAWRENCE (2); MADELEINE SPEED; ROBBIE LAWRENCE; MITCH STAFFORD; DAVID GODDARD; CHRIS MAGGIO; COURTESY OF SHAKTHI JOTHIANANDAN

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CONTRIBUTORS

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SOAPBOX

THE COLUMNISTS

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WSJ. asks six luminaries to weigh in on a single topic. This month: Prudence.

HASAN MINHAJ

GIADA DE LAURENTIIS

ALEX HONNOLD

LOUISE RICHARDSON

“Prudence can hold you back. My instinct is always to do less because I don’t like big, showy performances. When I’ve had really successful pairings with directors, it’s because they recognize that. With Paul Dano [in Wildlife], I remember saying to him, ‘This feels like terrible acting,’ and he said, ‘Great; do the worst take you can.’ I am more reserved, a bit quieter, not initially very gregarious. I’ve got a generational hangover of that British reserve, stiff upper lip thing, whereas kids growing up now are more outspoken. The expectations of female representation on-screen can be quite prudish. Sometimes, some of the more challenging or trickier aspects to characters I’ve played have been edited out a little bit to make them more appealing. There’s a fear that if a woman on-screen isn’t likable, the audience won’t stick with the experience of the film. I don’t think that’s true.”

“There are jokes where you can use a lot of profanity; you can go blue; you can go dark. But some of the best jokes exhibit prudence. The best satirists are incredibly strategic with when and where they land their jabs. There’s times where you want to say, ‘This corporation’s bad. I hate them—exclamation point!’ But you have to bring the audience along on the journey, establish the story through examples. Then you can land that big uppercut. A lot of times, people think comedians are completely irreverent, that we have no sense of self-control or prudence. In fact, some of the best ones do. One of the things I’ve been prudent about is not replying to people on Twitter. Twitter as a medium is the water cooler, but the water cooler is really toxic. It is straight-up 8 Mile. If you’re not willing to go to war, don’t at-reply, don’t quote-tweet. You’re never going to beat an egg avatar.”

“How do you have fun and throw caution to the wind every once in a while, but also be cautious of the things you do, the things you say? As a woman, I have to be a little more prudent in my decisions and in my choices. Yes, it’s unfair; but as a woman, I can also bring a certain feeling to a restaurant or a certain mood that men don’t bring. Prudence at the end of the day is finding moderation in life. I’m a sugarholic. I love chocolate. Do I eat it at every meal? No. But I will have a little bit every single day in moderation. That’s what I try to teach my daughter. That’s the message I try to get across to everyone who works with me: The journey of this life is finding the balance. You can throw caution to the wind, but I wouldn’t recommend it all the time.”

“Prudence plays a key part in making climbing feel as safe as possible. There is something to be said, though, for choosing your moment and making it happen—every once in a while, just being like, This is my time; I’m going to do some thing and take a calculated risk. But if you’re taking calculated risks all the time, eventually the numbers just aren’t in your favor. If you’re climbing at a high level, you know friends who have had accidents, you know friends of friends. The constant reflection on mortality [that comes from climbing] encourages you to live your life as fully and as completely as possible. Part of being a professional climber is to know the right tool for the right situation and to minimize risk as you can.”

“I think of education as exposing yourself to different ideas, to different types of people. I see part of my role as robbing students of their certitudes. That’s not entirely prudent; it’s quite the reverse. I always encourage students to take intellectual risks when they come to university, to explore things they haven’t before. The very term university is universal; it means ‘all.’ We should be open to all perspectives. But where we see forward-lookingness is less in sociopolitical debate and more in a greater mixture of the socioeconomic backgrounds of the students we attract. Machiavelli sees prudence as a rational calculation of risk, whereas the term itself connotes caution. If you define prudence as caution, I would see it as holding one back—and I would counsel less caution.”

Mulligan is an actor. She stars in the upcoming film Promising Young Woman.

Minhaj is a comedian and the host of Netflix’s Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj.

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CAREY MULLIGAN

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De Laurentiis is a chef, restaurateur, author, TV personality and creator of the lifestyle platform Giadzy.com.

Honnold is a professional adventure rock climber, best known for his free solo ascent of El Capitan at Yosemite National Park.

Richardson is vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford.

DANIEL MALLORY ORTBERG

“My [Dear Prudence] column tends to value prudence and caution, and, because I naturally love feeling my way through something and going for it, I find it really useful to think, All right, what if I took a second? What if I encourage somebody else to take a second and really think through what’s going to work here? Prudence is negative whenever you use it to justify keeping something to yourself. I see this both in the column and in my own life. Caution can be, ‘I’ve already decided what I think this other person will say or do in response to me’ and committing to my own version of reality and not letting anyone else have the chance to meet me in the middle. Prudence is not always a quality that results in an immediate payoff. It’s often not the thing that I would like to turn to first, but it does seriously reduce the problems in my life.” Ortberg is the Dear Prudence advice columnist for Slate and the author of, most recently, Something That May Shock and Discredit You.

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M AY 2020

what’s news.

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Genesis Belanger’s latest work, created mostly in coronavirus isolation, responds to unsettling times.

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BY NATALIA RACHLIN PHOTOGRAPHY BY MOLLY MATALON

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TABLE MANNERS Abundantly Empty the Ceaseless Void, part of a solo exhibition by Genesis Belanger scheduled to open at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum this summer.

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ROOKLYN-BASED sculptor Genesis Belanger has a distinct, slightly nervous laugh that punctuates the end of her sentences, as if she’s letting you in on a somber joke. “Humor is a really amazing way to approach very complex ideas,” says Belanger, 42. “If we’re going to talk about something heavy, let’s disarm it, laugh about the absurdity and investigate it from a place where we all feel comfortable.” Belanger is known for her pastel-toned installations, eerie, vaguely familiar sets outfitted with ceramic sculptures of everyday objects—a hairbrush, a hamburger, a handbag—imbued with a pinch of absurdity. Her work might look fun, even funny from afar, but up close, it takes a darker turn. In Holding Pattern, a storefront window installation Belanger created at New York’s New Museum in early 2019, she fashioned a vacant office desk displaying phallic, oversize pens wilting in a mug and a tape dispenser that produced a strip of elongated tongue. Playing with proportion, adding the unwelcome, like a stray finger emerging from a floral bouquet, and animating the otherwise static, Belanger creates an uncanny universe where femininity, power dynamics and politics are explored through objects that are minimalist in expression yet exaggerated in form. For Belanger’s first solo museum exhibition, Through the Eye of a Needle, scheduled to open this summer at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, she has focused on notions

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FAC TS & STATS

OLIVER SACKS

Out in May, Ric Burns’s documentary Oliver Sacks: His Own Life profiles the late neurologist and author. Here, a look at the film and its fascinating subject. —Mark Yarm

1933

The year Sacks was born, in London. His mother was one of England’s first female surgeons; his father, a general practitioner. Sacks moved to New York in 1965, where he lived until his death, from cancer, in 2015.

BOOKS The classics authored by Sacks include Awakenings (1973), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), Musicophilia (2007) and the memoir On the Move (2015).

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OSCAR NOMINATIONS Recognition for the 1990 film version of Awakenings, in which Robin Williams played a doctor, based on Sacks, who reanimates a group of catatonic patients using the drug L-dopa. ASTEROID

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A two-mile-wide space rock that orbits the sun every five years, it was named Oliversacks in 2008 to mark the neurologist’s 75th birthday.

HOURS The time Burns spent interviewing Sacks, less than a year before Sacks’s death. “He is a challenging character,” Burns says. “A man of extremes.”

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INTERVIEWEES The people, apart from Sacks, featured in the new film, including the theater director Jonathan Miller, professor Temple Grandin and author Paul Theroux.

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KATHY DEWITT/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

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of loss and the gestures we use to express sympathy, support and condolences. “This turned out to be an oddly timely topic,” says Belanger, who is making most of the pieces amid the disconcerting quiet of coronavirus isolation. In a space featuring domestic touchpoints—a piano, a fireplace and a dining table— she plans to create tableaux of gift baskets, bouquets and other consolatory gifts. Belanger crafts her sculptures using patterned forms pressed from clay sheets, then models each piece by hand. She never uses glazes, instead pigmenting the clay to create a full palette. “Often when you look at ceramics, glazes are where much of the expressive quality of the work comes through,” says Cybele Maylone, executive director of the Aldrich. “One thing that’s so mind-bendingly fascinating about Genesis’s work: It remains incredibly expressive and colorful, but she’s making it in this way that is totally invented.” Born and raised in rural New England, Belanger studied fashion design at the Art Institute of Chicago, then moved to New York and spent several years doing set design and prop styling for photo shoots. Weary of set life, she entered the M.F.A. program at CUNY’s Hunter College, graduating with a degree in sculpture in 2012. At the time she was working in a variety of materials, but when she bought a kiln, she found it revelatory: “I felt like I could make anything I could possibly think of.” At another solo show slated for later this summer, at Le Consortium in Dijon, France, Belanger will con sider feminine clichés and female objectification. Works will include a “weirdly minimal picnic,” she says, and some oversize oysters: the fleshy interior replaced by a protruding tongue, the pearl replaced by a pill. “I have never seen before the forms Genesis offers,” Le Consortium’s co-director, Eric Troncy, says via email. “For me, art is about creating something new, more than anything else. So I guess Genesis is a contemporary of true creators, whatever their medium, such as Trisha Donnelly, Charline von Heyl or Tino Sehgal.” Maylone, too, prefers to contextualize Belanger’s work beyond medium or material specificity: “If we have to think about where her work lives, there really is a surrealist bent.” Belanger attributes the association with surrealism to a shared interest in the psychological. “I’m not opposed to being called a surrealist, especially now that they’re adding more women to the category. I’d definitely like to hang out with those ladies,” she says. “But if it’s just the old dudes we typically think of, I don’t know that I particularly want to be in their company.”

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CLAY TIME Genesis Belanger at her Brooklyn studio. Below: A Fortress of Generosity and Order, a new work.

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CIRCLE GAME A work in progress at Bellerby & Co Globemakers in London.

TIME MACHINES

GOLDEN GLOBES

For details see Sources, page 106.

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Peter Bellerby and his team of painters, illustrators and cartographers feel the weight of the world from their north London studio. This month, Bellerby & Co Globemakers, which makes some of the finest handcrafted globes on the planet, launches a capsule collection online with Mr Porter, featuring four styles of 8.5-inch mini desk globes, with terrestrial and celestial representations and an exclusive “parchment” colorway. “Each globe we make is one of a kind in some way, being handcrafted and hand-painted,” says Bellerby. “It’s lovely to think no two could ever be exactly the same.” $1,485–$1,919; mrporter.com —Sallie Lewis

INTERIOR ALCHEMY

Scandinavian rug company Nordic Knots has launched a line designed by Swedish architect Andreas Martin-Löf. The three Norr Mälarstrand styles (version 3 shown) were named for Martin-Löf’s Stockholm neighborhood and conceived for his apartment there. For details see Sources, page 106. 38

TEXAS TABLE A NEW COOKBOOK FROM A PIONEERING CHEF IN MARFA OFFERS PLEASURES BOTH SIMPLE AND SOPHISTICATED.

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OOKBOOKS are too often either utilitarian or aesthetic: a trusted guide you’ll turn to again and again in the kitchen or a sumptuous evocation of a place destined for the coffee table. Cooking in Marfa, out next month, strikes a refreshing balance. With warm, precise photography by Douglas Friedman, it transports readers to this remote artistic enclave 60 miles north of the Mexican border and includes recipes from The Capri, the restaurant chef Rocky Barnette runs with his wife, Virginia Lebermann, a driving force in the area’s cultural development. Barnette learned to cook at the three-Michelinstar The Inn at Little Washington in Washington, Virginia, but his heart is in Mexico and the stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert he now calls home. In Cooking in Marfa, Barnette shares straightforward pleasures like caviar with Fritos in place of blinis and a rib-eye with Korean chile flakes, as well as a host of more involved procedures you might want to try on the weekend, such as a dish of rabbit braised in a homemade prickly-pear wine. If you don’t want to go to any trouble at all—and fi nd yourself in Marfa—The Capri makes some of the best mixed drinks around. In Cooking in Marfa, those cocktail recipes are included too. —Gabe Ulla

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JADE FENSTER; COURTESY OF HUBLOT; DOUGLAS FRIEDMAN; COURTESY OF NORDIC KNOTS

STUDY IN DE SIGN

Hublot’s Big Bang watch, introduced 15 years ago, gets an update with a fused metal bracelet. The new version comes in 18-karat gold (shown), titanium or black ceramic.

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Crystal and diamond jewelry from Cartier recalls the house’s inventive 1930s glamour.

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ROCK OF AGES

During the 1930s, Louis Cartier combined diamonds and slices of carved rock crystal in a striking set of geometric cuffs that was purchased by the actress Gloria Swanson. “Cartier used crystal for the sake of volume,” explains Pierre Rainero, the house’s image, style and heritage director, who returned to the talismanic minerals for Cartier’s Magnitude High Jewelry collection. The necklace and earrings shown here fuse diamonds and rutilated quartz crystal, with its threads of gold-colored inclusions, imparting an organic sensibility to the precious jewels in a way that plays with scale, texture and light. For details see Sources, page 106. —Jill Newman PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOANNA MC CLURE FASHION EDITOR ALEXANDER FISHER PROP STYLIST GRACE HARTNETT

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The minimalist bralette gets dressed up when paired with jackets, cardigans and statement necklaces.

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SKIN IN THE GAME Top, from left: Michael Kors Collection bralette and skirt, Jacquemus jacket, Ursa Major earrings and Celine by Hedi Slimane necklace; Olivier Theyskens bralette, Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket and Ursa Major necklace. Middle, from far left: Chloé bralette, Jil Sander jacket and Nehera pants; Givenchy bralette, Lauren Manoogian sweater and Charlotte Chesnais x Byredo necklace.

STRAP HAPPY Left: Loewe bralette, Totême shirt, Mizuki earrings and Celine by Hedi Slimane necklace. Right: Dolce & Gabbana bralette, Maryam Nassir Zadeh pants, Ursa Major necklace and W. Kleinberg belt. Model, Natalie Ludwig at The Society Management; hair, Shinya Nakagawa; makeup, Ai Yokomizo; manicure, Nori. For details see Sources, page 106. PHOTOGRAPHY BY RÉMI PUJOL STYLING BY ALEXANDER FISHER

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Make Your House a Home

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BOLD COMFORT A guest room at the Mayflower Inn, the classic Washington, Connecticut, spa hotel redesigned by Celerie Kemble.

MATERIAL WORLD

INN PROGRESS

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“I’m doing everything I can to take the formality out but keep the beauty,” Kemble says. The main restaurant will reflect New England flavors and ingredients from nearby farms, and guests will be encouraged to clip herbs from the 58-acre gardens. The spa and gym have also been expanded and enhanced. For a more in-depth wellness experience, travelers can head 60 miles north to the Berkshires, where Miraval opens its fi rst East Coast location in June. New York– based design firm Clodagh has brought a minimalist but warm approach to the Massachusetts spa, incorporating pale wood, shirting plaids and ticking stripes. Along with Miraval’s signature rope challenge course and equine program, the property will have a golf course and a Life in Balance Spa, the brand’s largest. The spa will feature a dedicated indoor pool for Vasudhara, the spa’s version of water-based Thai yoga. After so much time in isolation, travelers will be eager for something they can’t get at home. —Sara Clemence

ALL SET

Home-goods retailer Tamam sets a smart table, from its new Turkish-inspired Murad line of dishware and textiles to its trove of antique Russian Kuznetsov ceramic plates (shown). For details see Sources, page 106.

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FROM TOP: MAYFLOWER INN & SPA, AUBERGE RESORTS COLLECTION; COURTESY OF TAMAM

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T MAY BE SOME time before far-flung travel becomes possible again, much less de rigueur. Happily, there are two fresh-faced New England properties to look forward to, both putting design, local connection and much-needed wellness programs front and center. The classic Mayflower Inn & Spa in Washington, Connecticut, is getting a complete overhaul, with updated interiors by New York designer Celerie Kemble. “I’m using all the same tools as a decorator that I would use in my own homes,” says Kemble, who is incorporating Swedish antiques and Schumacher fabrics, Penny Morrison ceramic lamps and paper flowers by Livia Cetti. The 35-room hideaway, now part of the Auberge Resorts Collection, had a stately look, with four-poster beds and toile window treatments. Kemble injected color and eclecticism, creating an elevated countryhouse vibe. Guest rooms got lacy ceiling molding and bright-pink wing chairs; a hand-blocked vine now climbs the wall in the lobby.

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With summer holding out the potential of a slow return to travel, two stylish properties focus on wellness and renewal.

P HONE MODEL : “ IP HONE 11 P RO M A X IN GOL D.”

FIRST BLUSH From suiting to caps to shades, men’s fashion embraces pink this summer.

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FAVORI T E SHOP P ING A P P S: “ M ATCHE S FA SHION A ND A M A ZON.”

NUMBER OF UNRE A D EM A IL S: “ RE A DY ? 8 ,00 4! ”

THE DOWNLOAD

TRACEE ELLIS ROSS

The actor and entrepreneur, who stars in the upcoming film The High Note, shares what’s on her phone.

BA L M A IN

Favorite podcasts I love This American Life, Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations, On Being with Krista Tippett.

Favorite Instagram fi lter I’m not a big filter user, but in a pinch I use Paris in Instagram Stories and Clarendon, Valencia or Nashville on the grid.

App you wish someone would invent Where you could send a battery charge to other people.

Favorite picture in your Instagram feed That’s way too hard: I have 2,412 posts up there, and I really like my posts.

Most-recent phone call I did a group FaceTime with my family. We’re a large bunch, so it didn’t last long.

Battery percentage at which you feel compelled to charge your phone At 80% I start to get nervous! I’m the type that likes 100% or as close as possible. I think my phone has only died once or twice. It was so upsetting that I’ve blocked it out.

PASTEL PALETTE Clockwise from top left: Hermès cap; Loewe bag; Dior Men sunglasses; Prada jacket. For details see Sources, page 106.

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Craziest place you’ve left your phone At a Tracy Anderson studio in the bathroom on a Sunday. I left it, and then they closed.

Favorite emoji . And I’m the type to fill up multiple rows with the same emoji. I like to make a point.

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ALESSANDRA OLANOW/ILLUSTRATION DIVISION (PHONE ILLUSTRATION); YULIA AKSA/SHUTTERSTOCK (BACKGROUND); COURTESY OF PAUL SMITH (RUNWAY); COURTESY OF BALMAIN (RUNWAY); COURTESY OF EMPORIO ARMANI (RUNWAY); F. MARTIN RAMIN, STYLING BY ANNE CARDENAS (JACKET AND ACCESSORIES)

EMP ORIO A RM A NI

Strangest autocorrect mishap I’m known for my typos. I never picked up on the whole proofreading thing in school, and it’s only gotten worse in my adult life. Times when you stay off your phone When I shower, I try to stay off the phone unless I’m filming process videos while testing new formulas for my company, Pattern Beauty.

Last app checked at night and fi rst app checked in the morning Both are the same: the Clock app. It’s a constant negotiation and fight with the alarm. Essential travel app Apple Maps.

PAUL SMI T H

Favorite fitness app Mindbody. Favorite text message of the week I got one from my brother Evan [Ross]. Some ridiculous meme. I always get funny, inappropriate texts from him. WSJ. M AGA ZINE



HANRO New York

9475 S Santa Monica Blvd •

806 Washington Street





Beverly Hills 90210

New York 10014





(213) 221-2835

(646) 810-8687

HANROUSA.COM

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M AY 2020

market report.

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SEA CHANGE Nautical touches and a subtle palette offer a light touch. On him: Hermès sweater, Ann Demeulemeester pants, Tiffany & Co. bracelet (worn throughout) and vintage Vans sneakers. On her: Alexander McQueen dress, Verdura earrings, Tiffany & Co. rings (worn throughout) and Prada sandals.

TWO OF A KIND A streamlined warm-weather wardrobe with crisp whites and light knits is a breath of fresh air. PHOTOGRAPHY BY DHAM SRIFUENGFUNG STYLING BY DAVID THIELEBEULE

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M A RK E T REP OR T

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CLEAN CUT Play peekaboo with unexpected skin. On her: Miu Miu top, Carolina Herrera pants and Hermès belt. On him: Fendi sweater, Dolce & Gabbana pants, Tiffany & Co. necklace and ring (both worn throughout) and Proenza Schouler belt.

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PAIRED DOWN Experiment with the long and the short of it. On her: Oscar de la Renta sweater, Givenchy shorts, Hat Attack hat and vintage Vans sneakers. On him: Loro Piana sweater, Jacquemus shorts, vintage socks and vintage Vans sneakers.

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THINK TANK Catch some rays in summery light stripes. On her: Chloé top, Chanel skirt, Jil Sander hat and David Webb earrings. On him: Prada tank and pants, Jil Sander hat and stylist’s own belt.

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EASY BREEZY Top off shorts with a touch of formality. On her: Valentino top, Dolce & Gabbana shorts, Mikimoto necklace and bracelet and Gabriela Hearst sandals. On him: Lanvin shirt, Brioni sweater, Bode shorts, vintage socks and vintage Vans sneakers. Models, Theo Ford at IMG Models and Katerina Tannenbaum at Heroes Model Management; hair, Braydon Nelson; makeup, Stevie Huynh; set design, Rosie Turnbull. For details see Sources, page 106.

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the exchange.

BEYOND BEETS Ethan Brown, Beyond Meat’s CEO, talks with a laboratory technician in their “color lab,” in El Segundo, California, as they test a beet extract to give their future plant-based steak product the ability to “bleed.”

TR ACKED

ETHAN BROWN

The Beyond Meat CEO imagines a world of plant-based eating. BY ALEX BHATTACHARJI PHOTOGRAPHY BY JESSE CHEHAK

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outperforming them in terms of nutrition, sustainability and climate impact. He founded Beyond Meat in 2009, after years spent working on hydrogen fuel cells for cars. In 2011, the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins enlisted Twitter co-founder Biz Stone to vet Brown and Beyond Meat. Stone not only urged Kleiner Perkins to back the company—he invested in it as well. “I really believe this company represents the future,” says Stone. “It’s a model for what capitalism has to do to survive and where it has to go.” Brown and his marketing staff are speaking with Hart about their latest “Go Beyond” campaign. The comedian-actor is just one part of Beyond Meat’s team of celebrity investor-ambassadors, which also includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Jessica Chastain, Snoop Dogg and star athletes ranging from the NBA’s Kyrie

Irving and Chris Paul to the NFL’s DeAndre Hopkins and Todd Gurley to skiing’s Lindsey Vonn. Last May, the company had its IPO. Before any Covid-19-related closures, Beyond Meat was globally available, including at certain locations of KFC, Starbucks and McDonald’s, which started testing a Beyond Meat sandwich known as the P.L.T., or plant, lettuce, tomato. Casually evoking John F. Kennedy, Brown utters phrases like “assembling the best and brightest” and “our moon shots.” Even amid the pandemic, his company is embarking on an expansion, convening a scientific and nutritional advisory board and launching new restaurant partnerships. “There’s so much white space ahead,” Brown says. “We want to be the brand that lets people separate the idea of ‘meat’ from animals.” > 51

T R ACK ED

T HE E XCH A NGE

65 countries (and counting)

10:09 a.m.

The nations where Beyond Meat products are sold.

Brown holds his weekly leadership meeting with Beyond Meat’s C-suite officers and department heads.

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hours

11:28 a.m.

9,000+ Dunkin’ Stores

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In his office, Brown chats with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, an early investor in Beyond and now a board member.

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Time it took KFC to sell out of Beyond Fried Chicken at a recent test run in Atlanta (it usually takes 168 hours for KFC to sell an equivalent amount of popcorn chicken).

1:49 p.m.

At a Beyond Meat food truck, Brown and Beth Moskowitz, head of special projects, eat lunch with NFL stars Todd Gurley (left) and DeAndre Hopkins, investor-ambassadors for the brand. Below: Hopkins and Gurley shoot hoops.

Number of outlets that began selling the Beyond Sausage Sandwich in October.

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percent

The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in making a Beyond Burger versus a quarter-pound U.S. beef burger, according to Beyond Meat.

$1.4 trillion The annual market for meat products globally.

2:41 p.m.

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Back in Brown’s office, comedian Kevin Hart joins the marketing and communications team to discuss the company’s “Go Beyond” campaign.

pets

The animals Brown rescued and lives with: three dogs, two turtles, a cat and a potbellied pig named Wilbur.

4:05 p.m.

77,000

Brown conducts a taste test of the new Beyond Meat Breakfast Sausage, in both classic and spicy flavors, which were introduced the following week.

stores and restaurants

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Locations in which Beyond Meat products were globally available at the beginning of the year.

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$3.7 billion

5:04 p.m.

Brown leaves the R&D facility for his afternoon resistance workout (he does cardio, typically on a Peleton bike, early each morning), for headclearing and creativity.

Beyond Meat’s market capitalization on the day it went public a year ago.

#1

ranking The sales of the Beyond Burger among all plant-based meat products. • WSJ. M AGA ZINE

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“Working with First Republic is just easy. Our friends are shocked that we can email, or actually call, someone at our bank.”

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K A R A G O L D I N, Founder and CEO, hint, Inc. T H E O G O L D I N, COO, hint, Inc.

(855) 886-4824 | Ŕrstrepublic.com | New York Stock Exchange symbol: FRC MEMBER FDIC AND EQUAL HOUSING LENDER

T HE E XCH A NGE

GETTING THEIR KICKS The founders of Stadium Goods are striving to make their company the ultimate luxury platform for mint-condition aftermarket sneakers.

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BY HOWIE KAHN PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL DORSA

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E’RE THE NEW LUXURY,” says Jed Stiller, the 41-year-old co-founder of Stadium Goods, an e-commerce website and New York City retail space that has risen to popular acclaim and financial strength by selling pristine aftermarket sneakers at premium prices. Stiller and his business partner, John McPheters, 40, launched their SoHo flagship and website in 2015. In early 2018, LVMH Luxury Ventures group led an $11.5 million round of investments in Stadium Goods, and a year later, in January 2019, the publicly traded digital fashion platform Farfetch acquired the company for $250 million. “We’re only four and a half years in,” Stiller says, sitting with McPheters in their Tribeca office. It’s early March, before the Covid-19 outbreak shut down the economy, and they are bullish about their young company’s next areas of growth. (Even as of early April, McPheters and Stiller say the pandemic has not significantly affected online sales, and they remain focused on Stadium Goods’ future endeavors.) For starters, the brand is launching a line of cutand-sewn streetwear pieces under its new Stadium label, set to start rolling out in May. The collection will join the brand’s Stadium Goods line of T-shirts, hoodies, caps and socks. Both lines are designed in-house by Greig Bennett, formerly of the cult streetwear brand Orchard Street. The Stadium range hopes to target fashion consumers with athletic-inspired gear and limited releases. It will be sold at Stadium Goods, on Farfetch and at a few additional boutiques. Stiller says not to count out the possibility of a Stadiumbrand sneaker in the future. This summer, depending on when coronavirus restrictions lift, the company plans to open a second retail outpost, in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood. The store is being designed by an internal team, with Stiller and McPheters taking the lead. Stiller likens the building’s facade to a glass-and-metal shoebox. Rows of shoes will span the length of the 4,000-square-foot ground floor, stretching from floor to nearly ceiling. Up a winding staircase will be a 2,000-square-foot space for curated, rotating installations and activations. For the store’s grand opening, McPheters hopes to use the second floor to highlight the Air Jordan, a shoe inextricable from the city’s identity. “It’ll be like a cultural presentation for Chicago,” he says. In order to understand Stadium Goods’ meteoric rise, and why Farfetch paid $250 million to acquire the brand, it’s important to grasp the way the brand sells premium sneakers as well as the runaway hype surrounding that product category. Stadium Goods is a reseller of unworn, mint-condition pairs. The company vets its inventory with a verification process of at least 15 steps to guard against counterfeits and blemishes. Some of the stock is rare, and all of it is priced at a market value determined in consultation with its sellers. Sneaker hype translates into lofty prices in part because supply is limited. And for sneaker lovers, possessing the rarest, most-limited releases is a daily obsession. So supply and demand help set market value, but zealotry sustains it. Brands like Nike and Adidas perpetuate these limited releases because

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SNEAKS ATTACK Jed Stiller (left) and John McPheters at the Tribeca office of their company, Stadium Goods.

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“WE CAN PLANT A BIG FLAG IN CHICAGO. CHICAGO IS KANYE. IT’S VIRGIL ABLOH. IT’S DON C. EVERYTHING THAT’S HOT IS FROM CHICAGO.” –JOHN M CPHETERS

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media presence. Their understanding of media, entertainment and the importance of storytelling has also helped expand the brand. With Stadium Goods’ entire inventory now available on Farfetch, which is visited by millions of shoppers across 190 countries, the business has been amplified. McPheters and Stiller, per their agreement with Farfetch, can’t release total stock or revenue figures. “We’d love to tell you,” Stiller says. “John and I love to flex, but we can’t.” The founders will say they are warehousing hundreds of thousands of shoes all over the world and are seeing an increase in international sales, especially in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Sixty percent of their sales are in the U.S., with the other 40 percent playing out across the globe. “We’ll probably flip that in the next two years,” says Stiller, citing Farfetch’s seamless system of crossborder logistics. Stadium Goods’ New York store closed temporarily in mid-March amid the coronavirus shutdown. The company’s shipping and warehouse teams have been working staggered shifts to limit the number of workers on the floor. Cleaning crews are taking additional sanitary measures. McPheters and Stiller remain optimistic and energized about their Chicago opening. “We can plant a big flag in Chicago,” McPheters says. “Chicago is Kanye. It’s Virgil Abloh. It’s Don C. Everything that’s hot is from Chicago.” •

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they create a frenzy. It’s a surefire way to build buzz. Ultimately, for certain consumers, price becomes beside the point. They simply have to have that shoe. A recently released pair of Air Jordan 1s, for example, was sold by Nike for $200. Pairs are currently available through Stadium Goods for as much as $1,285. Another coveted pair of Jordan 1s, a collaboration between Jordan Brand and Union in Los Angeles, sells at Stadium Goods for as much as $2,110. The Air Jordan 11s that Jordan Brand made to commemorate the Yankees’ retirement of Derek Jeter’s number in 2017—there are said to be only a handful on the planet—were listed at Stadium Goods for $50,000. The company works on consignment with sellers; Stadium Goods takes a 20 percent cut of each sale. When it comes to Stadium Goods’ core business, the company has no factories and pays no manufacturing costs. It depends instead on legacy brands like Nike, Adidas, New Balance and others for research, development, design and a steady supply chain. Where Stadium Goods has excelled is in making sneaker resale both chicer and better organized. McPheters points out the consumer has come a long way from the days of skeptically trolling online for rare finds or buying aftermarket pairs from a hookup in a parking lot. “It was a mess,” McPheters says. “We wanted to make it premium and rich.” Buyers were already paying luxury prices. A rare pair of Jordans can sell for more than a pair of new Louis Vuitton sneakers. McPheters and Stiller set out to create a streamlined physical and online experience to match. They’re not alone in this lucrative world. Flight Club, a sneaker reseller, where McPheters once served as vice president of business development and e-commerce, merged in 2018 with GOAT, an online sneaker marketplace, to connect Flight Club’s physical presence with GOAT’s online reach. The merger brought with it $60 million in new investment. StockX, a Detroit-based online sneaker reseller, announced last summer that its valuation had passed the billiondollar mark. McPheters says that what sets Stadium Goods apart is the luxury experience the company provides, from store design to its two clothing labels to its fashion-world connection through Farfetch. While McPheters and Stiller say online sales account for more than 95 percent of their business, they also say their flagship store is the backbone of their brand’s identity. With its high ceilings, white walls and precious totems enshrined in perfect rows, the Stadium Goods store feels like a temple. (The party for a book I co-wrote, Sneakers, was held there in 2017.) Serving as a location for Complex’s hit YouTube show Sneaker Shopping, which features celebrities like J Balvin, Chris Rock and Diddy dropping thousands of dollars on sneakers, has elevated Stadium Goods’ image further, imbuing it with both A-list and street cred. “The store looks huge on camera,” says McPheters. McPheters and Stiller have known each other for nearly 20 years and cut their teeth at Team Epiphany, an influential marketing and brand strategy group with a predictive knack for shaping culture. Stiller worked on talent procurement for brand activations there while McPheters helped build Nike’s social

COMFORT ZONE Clockwise from left: A hoodie and corduroy hat, both from Stadium Goods, and a rugby shirt from the new Stadium streetwear line. For details see Sources, page 106.

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New York

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Moscow

Shanghai

Hong Kong

Seoul

Taipei

Singapore

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CALM AND COLLECTED Nicole Kidman, photographed in Nashville, Tennessee, by Bibi Cornejo Borthwick and styled by Elin Svahn. Louis Vuitton dress and Kidman’s own bracelet.

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Over the past three decades, Nicole Kidman has worked her magic on audiences and Hollywood insiders alike. But she certainly didn’t have a plan.

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THE SORCERESS

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judged really harshly in a time when it wasn’t really seen for what it was.” If anything, many of her choices seem guided by one principle: “It seemed like a fun thing to do,” which is what she says of launching Blossom, decided upon after meeting her now-partner Per Saari at an L.A. dinner party in the mid-2000s, when he was working for Robert Redford’s film and television company Wildwood Enterprises. The company— which is just the two of them, a creative executive and an assistant—has found traction recently in producing several shows in the limited-series format, with six to eight episodes, which has proved to be a sweet spot in the streaming era. After beginning her career in television miniseries and films, Kidman was an early convert to the current era of prestige TV, to strong results. (The second season of Big Little Lies in 2019, for example, garnered an average of 11.8 million viewers across all platforms, according to HBO, making it one of the network’s top three shows that year.) In June 2018, Blossom signed a first-look deal with Amazon Studios, and the partnership has projects in development such as Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion, in which Kidman plays a Gloria Steinem–like figure, and the thriller Pretty Things, an adaptation of Janelle Brown’s novel in which Kidman also stars. Yet in this age of multihyphenates, Kidman is interested only in “storytelling,” as she calls it. “Yeah, I don’t have the energy to have a lifestyle brand,” she says. “I don’t think I have the right lifestyle to have a lifestyle brand because I am not sure what I’d be able to do, you know? I’m probably just a bit daydreamer-y. Keith will say, ‘What are you thinking?’ And I’ll say, ‘Oh, I just went away for an hour, I’m not sure where I went, but boy, it was a great journey.’” While Kidman tends to emphasize her intuitive, freewheeling side, those who work with her describe a left-brain/right-brain approach, the ability to be analytic as well as creative. “[She is] absolutely strategic,” says Francesca Orsi, executive vice president of programming at HBO, who has worked closely with Kidman since the development of Big Little Lies. “She is a key voice in the process in the unfolding of the decision making—she’ll come in for meetings or call me on my cellphone with an idea. She is very spontaneous.” Kidman also has the ability to throw her weight behind a project—for Big Little Lies, she helped recruit actor Alexander Skarsgård, while with The Undoing, she appealed to Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland to co-star. For The Undoing, she helped brainstorm the selection of Susanne Bier, the much-honored

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and a doctor husband who fulfills her. But when the mother of her son’s classmate is brutally murdered, and Grace’s husband disappears, she cycles through stress, bewilderment, terror and an unyielding sense of self-determination. On-screen and on the red carpet, Kidman often evokes the icy poise of an Alfred Hitchcock heroine, as if Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren and Kim Novak melded themselves into a single, contemporary iteration. But Kidman has a verve that matches her naturally wild curls—including stuffing them under a baseball cap so she could go check out the recent film Parasite with a friend at Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre. With her dancer’s frame, she’s limber, elastic, sometimes goofy. She’s funny. “Which always surprises people, for some reason,” she says. “Why?” Thirty years after she charmed everyone in Hollywood in 1990’s Days of Thunder, not only is Kidman busy, she is busier than ever. In the next year or so, coronavirus-related delays notwithstanding, she has several acting and producing projects coming up. Two are being made under her Blossom Films banner, where she has forged a strong alliance with Liane Moriarty, the Sydney-based author of the book Big Little Lies. (The projects include adaptations of Moriarty’s novels Truly Madly Guilty and Nine Perfect Strangers.) Collectively, Kidman’s films have generated nearly $5 billion at the global box office. “She’s probably working harder now than when she was trying to make it,” says Richard Plepler, the former chairman and CEO of HBO, who now runs his own company, Eden Productions. The relentless pace of Kidman’s output in recent years suggests a kind of grit and savvy that are rare even in Hollywood. “The desire to work ebbs and flows,” she says, shooing away any ideas about her ambition. She’s always been agnostic about form, jumping from big-screen hit to theater run to odd indie to musical. “My taste is really out there,” adds Kidman, whose choices over the last decade have included the schlocky 2018 DC Comics hit Aquaman, and the poignant play-turned-film Rabbit Hole, which was Blossom’s first production in 2010. “There’s no sense. I’m a complete random nonconformist,” she says. “People are like, ‘What are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ I’ll very much go on the record saying I have no idea what I’m doing.” She stands by choices such as the epic Baz Luhrmann film Australia, which received mixed reviews. (“...epic piffle,” read one.) “I wish they’d rerelease it, because I really love that film,” Kidman says. “I don’t think I’d want to make it again. But I’d want them to see it again because I think it was

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T WAS THE CALM after the storm one spring morning in Nashville, Tennessee. Overnight, a tornado had torn through the city’s east side and out through the surrounding towns. In between reports on the advance of Covid-19, still seemingly a continent away, the TV news kept flashing to an “I Believe in Nashville” mural that remained standing next to stairs now leading to nowhere. But it was sunny and bright, with a light breeze that seemed to ask, “Who, me?” Meanwhile, not too far south of the tornado’s path, Nicole Kidman had risen at her usual 6 a.m., put on a black sweater with a cameo bow at the neck, a long black skirt with high, lacy slits and dainty Mary Jane kitten heels and, after making oatmeal for her two youngest daughters, Sunday and Faith, headed to a photo shoot. Throughout her fourdecade-long career, Kidman has demonstrated an impressive array of dramatic abilities—including an Oscar-winning turn as Virginia Woolf in 2002’s The Hours and her Golden Globe–winning role on HBO’s hit series Big Little Lies as battered, conflicted wife Celeste Wright—but making a late entrance is not one of them. “I was raised with that work ethic: Be on time, show up, don’t mess up,” says Kidman, 52, curling into a sofa in her skirt as comfortably as if she were dressed in sweats. Tornadoes are part of life in Nashville, where she has been based for almost 15 years, since her 2006 marriage to country singer and guitarist Keith Urban, who grew up in her native Australia. “Keith was in one, years ago, where he had to hit the floor.” Urban, she says, is her “mellow muso,” using Australian slang for musician—the one guy she’d call in any crisis. “He’s pretty much the flip side of neurotic.” After a chance meeting at an industry event, she says she fell for him when he took her for a ride on his Harley-Davidson to Woodstock, New York, topped off with a picnic in the woods. “I was a goner—I mean, c’mon.” They married less than a year later. Their mutually supportive partnership is in many ways the opposite of volatile marriages she has participated in on-screen lately, in Big Little Lies and now HBO’s upcoming six-part series The Undoing, airing this fall. In the thriller, by screenwriter and producer David E. Kelley and based on the 2014 novel You Should Have Known, by Jean Hanff Korelitz, she morphs into Grace Fraser, a therapist with the kind of envy-inducing New York life that almost seems fantastical: opulent townhouse, private school for her son, effortlessly toned bod, center of the mommy in-crowd, work that fulfills her

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DANCING IN THE DARK Dior top and pants and Kidman’s own bracelet.

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INSIDE OUT The Row jacket, shirt and skirt. Opposite: Balenciaga dress.

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“EVERYTHING ABOUT NICOLE IS SO SECRETIVE, AS ANY TRUE ACTOR IS ABOUT SECRETS— MAINTAINING THE SECRETS WHILE YOU KEEP THE AUDIENCE CAPTIVATED. SHE IS THE ULTIMATE MASTER OF THAT.”

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off again and climb back in the window. So bad,” she says, with a grin. She was equally determined about her acting, leaving her high school in North Sydney to focus on it, then quickly winning roles in made-for-TV movies and limited series by the time she was in her late teens. But when Kidman was 17, her mother, now 80, was diagnosed with breast cancer and given a prognosis of a 40 to 50 percent chance of pulling through. Kidman, who was still living at home, put her burgeoning career on hold to help care for her mother. “It was very, very impactful on my psyche,” she says. “It was deeply upsetting to a daughter who loves her mother.” (Today, she and Urban help fundraise for the Stanford Women’s Cancer Center.) By her early 20s, Kidman was back in action, shooting several films including the 1989 thriller Dead Calm, which brought her to the attention of screenwriter Robert Towne, who in turn introduced her to Cruise for the co-starring role in his thenupcoming film Days of Thunder, which Towne wrote. Cruise and Kidman married when she was just 23. They made two more films together, including 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, director Stanley Kubrick’s last film, then divorced in 2001. Kidman credits Kubrick with changing her life. “His ability to not give you answers, yet stoke a fire, [and] open up these things—his process was so deeply unusual, so that takes the wiring of what you learned you are meant to do,” she says. “And I would say something, as though, Oh, this is truth. And he would say, Oh, no it’s not. Every single thing would be turned around. “I’m not a big believer in other people telling you artistically what’s good, what’s bad, what you should be doing, what you shouldn’t be doing. You’ve got to be accountable to yourself,” Kidman says. “My failures are going to be because I’ve made the choice.” But any stumbling blocks have only confirmed for Kidman the importance of showing up—for her family, for her work and for each other. “I had no idea, when things have gone down, the people who have shown up for me. And you are down on your knees, you are like, ‘I’m so vulnerable and so lost right now, and I’m unbelievably grateful for what you have done; you have no idea what you have just done,’” she says. “And by gosh, I’m going to do that—if it’s not for you, it’s for somebody else. Because I know what it means. “I try not to analyze things until the end,” Kidman says. “I’ll be on my deathbed going, What? Or my kids will be accountable: What were those choices your mother made?” •

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in a really deep way. There is just no getting around that, and I wish there was,” she says. “I haven’t been taught it. I have tried to learn it. I don’t have the ability. It does take a toll on my health, and it takes a toll on my spirit,” says Kidman, who copes by writing down her experiences and practicing meditation, taught to her by her psychologist father. “I’m always trying to dig in. The unfortunate part of it is that the feelings are intense. I wish I could be the kind of person that’s like, eh,” she says, shrugging. “I have an unbelievably understanding husband and children—the little ones who are going like, ‘Why are you looking like that, Mummy?’ [But] their ability to understand artistically is very deep already.” She and Urban arrange their schedules around their two daughters, who are 11 and 9 (she also has two older children from her first marriage, to Tom Cruise). “I’ll pass on films,” says Kidman, who frequently selects projects in which she has a supporting role or that shoot on the East Coast during months when her younger daughters’ school is not in session. “We have a system worked out to keep the family together,” she says. “When Keith’s not touring, it’s much easier. He’ll be on tour next year, and then I just don’t work as much. Literally—it will become imbalanced, and we will change it. We don’t have the answers, but the one thing we do know is that we will not jeopardize us.” Sometimes, this means bringing her girls to the set with her. Both had small parts in The Angry Birds Movie 2 and were extras in Big Little Lies. “They are kind of unusual in that they watch the filming, they are in the films. They have a great work ethic,” she says. The family attends church together (Kidman was raised Catholic), she and Urban take the girls to the Tennessee theme park Dollywood (Dolly Parton is a country-music-scene pal of Urban’s), and, just like so many other working parents, she’s on the clock to get home so that her husband can get to his job. She is a devotee of parenting books such as Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson’s The Whole-Brain Child and Lisa Damour’s Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood. What would she say if one of her daughters wanted to be an actor? “I’d get out of their way,” she says. Kidman herself began working professionally at 14, in regional theater and Australian films, which had the effect, she says, of making her self-sufficient since both parents were also working full time. She had a mischievous streak even then, sneaking out at night wearing punk boots and “white tutu things” from the local flea markets. “I could take the fly screen off the window and climb out and put it back on. And then I’d come home and I’d take the fly screen

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Danish film director, whom Kidman admired for her work in her native language as well as her smallscreen dramas, including 2016’s The Night Manager and Netflix’s 2018 movie Bird Box, which shattered streaming records by reaching 45 million member accounts globally in its first week of release. Kelley brought Kidman The Undoing after working with her on the first season of Big Little Lies. “I could only see her in the role. The subtext Nicole so thrives and excels at was perfect for this character,” says Kelley. (For both series, Kidman also acted as executive producer via Blossom.) Her instinctive approach to character is another hallmark of her performances. “Everything about Nicole is so secretive, as any true actor is about secrets—maintaining the secrets while you keep the audiences captivated. She is the ultimate master of that,” says Bier, The Undoing’s director. “You might want to put in a scene about saying goodbye [but] maybe this scene is really about sex. Nicole would totally communicate that while saying goodbye.” Working with Bier fit in with Kidman’s 2017 pledge to partner with female directors every 18 months, a goal Kidman has exceeded. She says it comes naturally to her, pointing out that she first met director Jane Campion when Kidman was just getting her start at 14. (The two later made the film version of The Portrait of a Lady in 1996, when Kidman was nearly 30, and the TV series Top of the Lake: China Girl in 2017.) “I know how to be with women,” Kidman says. “I was raised pretty much [by women], I had a wonderful father, but the sex in our family is female. I have a sister, I have daughters, I have a very strong mother, I have aunts.” (She and her sister, Antonia Kidman, a television journalist–turned-lawyer, share a secret language, recalls Grant, who met Kidman in the ’90s. “Acting with her was intimidating,” he says. “You never want to work with someone who is better than you.”) Kidman and Bier developed a strong rapport over the course of the four-month-long shoot, during which Bier directed all six hourlong episodes herself, an unusual practice for television. Kidman appears in nearly every scene. “Nicole doesn’t understand the word slowly,” says Bier. “When you say action, she becomes a medium. It’s almost like Nicole disappears and Grace overtakes her. And then when you say cut, Nicole comes back. It’s a completely radical transformation.” To embody her characters, Kidman says she uses various techniques, sometimes veering into Methodacting territory, as with 2018’s Destroyer, which follows an LAPD detective trying to piece her life back together. “Certain things penetrate psychologically 64

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FAR AND AWAY Bottega Veneta dress. Hair, Didier Malige; makeup, Susie Sobol; manicure, Cenita Scott; set design, Amanda O’Connor. For details see Sources, page 106.

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HARVEST TIME Freshly picked fruit tumbles from a harvester onto a trailer at Knolfontein Farm in South Africa’s Stellenbosch region. Opposite: Ntsiki Biyela, founder of Aslina Wines.

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In South Africa’s Stellenbosch region, women of color who have taken up winemaking are rewriting its history—by founding their own labels and operating their own vineyards.

BY MADELEINE SPEED PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBBIE LAWRENCE

that greater diversity of ownership will inevitably broaden the market, but this will take some time, particularly locally. “There will be a bit of resistance because they don’t have the history behind them.”  Pikashe’s wines are for the adventurous. She blends a stalwart like Chenin Blanc with the underused, but complementary varietal Roussanne. “I wanted to create something the market would be curious about,” she says. One of her red blends combines Shiraz with Cinsault, a grape most famous as a parent of Pinotage, South Africa’s signature variety. Its 2015 vintage won a bronze medal at the London Wine competition in 2018.  BEE was a policy introduced in 2003 to address inequalities stemming from apartheid’s legacy. In the Winelands, farmers launched learning initiatives and partnerships to elevate workers to management positions, allowing them to become shareholders in businesses that had once subjugated them. “We are a bruised nation, a traumatized nation,” Pikashe says gravely. “But we have arrived at a consciousness of being.” Pikashe is one of a growing number of black female entrepreneurs succeeding in an industry that was traditionally dominated by white men. “I want to create a legacy,” she says. “I want someone holding a bottle in Germany, in Poland, in the U.K. saying, ‘This wine was created by a lady from Gugulethu in Cape Town. How about that?’ That’s my dream.”

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O VISIT THE rolling hills of the Cape Winelands, a traveler heads due east from Cape Town past the Cape Flats, an immense sprawl of settlements stretching south to the Atlantic coast. Viewed from the highway, the expanse of brightly colored housing is partly obscured by concrete fences. The Flats, as the area is known, comprises several townships built during the apartheid era, when race-based legislation such as the Group Areas Act forced nonwhite people out of urban centers.  Another 20 or so miles down the road, the landscape starts to shift from parched sand to a riot of greenery, as telephone wires and corrugated roofs give way to the gleaming white gateways and neatly manicured vines of the Stellenbosch region. This is the epicenter of South Africa’s wine country, settled as early as the 1680s by Dutch farmers who were drawn to the fertile soil around the Eerste River. Vines were planted soon thereafter, and estates here still bear the names of the first farms: Rustenberg, Steenberg, Blaauwklippen. Nondumiso Pikashe, a 52-year-old black South African, grew up in Gugulethu, a township a short drive from the Winelands. “They were there, but they were foreign,” she says of the vineyards. “I was close, but they were distant.” As of 2010, Pikashe has been the sole owner and managing director of her own wine label, Ses’fikile. She’s one of a growing number of black women succeeding in an industry that had long shut them out. For her and others who grew up on the Flats during the 1970s and ’80s, Stellenbosch’s colonial Dutch manors might as well have been another country. People of color entered only as farm laborers. But in the early 1990s, as apartheid came to an end, businesses and opportunities that had been out of reach became accessible for the first time.  In Pikashe’s community, wine was associated with alcoholism and consumed by people “at the bottom of the social ladder.” But she noticed that among wealthier neighbors wine was spoken about in “a different language—the palate, the expression of the fruit, the balance,” she says.   She wanted in but encountered the barriers to entry facing anyone from her socioeconomic background. It was largely a question of capital. Nowadays, a hectare (about 2.5 acres) of land in the Stellenbosch wine region sells for up to 1 million rand, or around $60,000.  “I told myself, I’m not going to get discouraged,” said Pikashe. In 2006, after working 11 years as a high school teacher, she started Ses’fikile (a Xhosa word meaning “we have arrived”) along with three female partners as part of a Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) skills-sharing initiative with Flagstone, an established winery in Cape Town. Since 2010, she has run the label alone. Cathy Marston, a wine writer and owner of South Africa’s International Wine Education Centre, says brand owners like Pikashe are entering the industry on their own terms. “They’re not saying, ‘How can I fit into the current narrative?’ but rather, ‘How can I change that narrative so that it fits me and my community, my goals and ambitions?’” She adds

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between the ancient-looking palm trees lining the approach to Meerlust. Built in 1756, today this wine estate produces one of South Africa’s most iconic wines, Rubicon. This morning, the farm is in full harvest mode, as three tractors trundle along the vines. The clicking of secateurs fills the air as 30 or so farmworkers clip grapes into buckets and then toss the fruit onto passing trailers. Down the hill, Meerlust’s whitewashed manor and ornate gabled roof loom over a paddock where two horses graze. Seated at a scrubbed wooden table on the terrace is Hannes Myburgh, a white eighth-generation owner who has presided over the most radical period of change in the farm’s four-century history.  In 1986, the United States Congress enacted the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, prohibiting investment in and importation of many South African commodities. Divestment hit the wine industry hard, and the impact lingers. Sanctions were lifted in 1994, but Myburgh believes that South Africa’s reputation on the international stage still hasn’t recovered. “I think it will probably take a generation for people to change their minds.” Although export value has risen modestly—up 4.2 percent in 2019 to $550 million annually—wine prices remain sluggish.  When establishing a BEE initiative for Meerlust, Myburgh looked for a gap in the market and discovered that the region had a cellar capacity problem. In partnership with the Meerlust workers trust, he founded Compagniesdrift, a storage, bottling and labeling facility that today caters to 42 of the region’s top wine estates. As of 2019, Compagniesdrift is owned and operated entirely by former Meerlust employees. Ilse Ruthford, a 44-year-old black woman from the

VINTAGE POINT From top: The manor house at Meerlust farm; a worker at Meerlust pumps wine from the bottom of a tank to the top to equalize fermentation; winemaker Nondumiso Pikashe tending to vines at Knolfontein Farm, where she sources grapes.

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SELF STARTER Clockwise from far left: Carmen Stevens, who launched her own label— the first black-owned winery in South Africa— via a crowdfunding platform for independent winemakers; an oversize display towers over the entrance to Zetler Farms; workers pick grapes at Meerlust farm.

BATCH TEST Left: An ivy-covered entrance to a building at Delheim Farm. From near right: Nongcebo Langa, assistant winemaker at Delheim Farm, samples this year’s Chardonnay from the barrel; a crate of grapes at Carmen Stevens’s winery.

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GO THE DISTANCE The view over Stellenbosch, with Table Mountain rising in the background, as seen from the foothills of Simonsberg Mountain.

Stellenbosch countryside, worked as an administrator at Meerlust for six years. When Compagniesdrift was founded, she became  a spokesperson for the business and was eventually appointed managing director in 2012.  Ruthford says Compagniesdrift has given the farmworkers an opportunity to widen their career prospects, particularly the women. “There’s a stigma that if you grew up on a wine farm, you have to work in the vineyards because your mummy or daddy did. We want to change that,” she says. “We want them to feel that they are worthy.” For winemaker Carmen Stevens, 48, empowerment means ownership. Petite with cropped hair and glittering eyes, Stevens has overcome her share of obstacles to arrive where she is today: proprietor of South Africa’s first solely black-owned winery and founder-director of the Carmen Stevens Foundation, which feeds more than 10,000 children in 53 schools across the region.  Hailing from Belhar, a suburb on the Flats, Stevens recalls when she first encountered wine. As a child, she devoured her mother’s Mills & Boon romance novels and became enthralled by one particular protagonist: a young female winemaker in California.  After graduating high school in 1990, she applied to study winemaking at Elsenburg, an agricultural college outside Stellenbosch. Her first application was rejected on racial grounds; the next year, she was rejected again, this time for lacking an agricultural background. The third time she was accepted, becoming the only person of color on the course and one of only five women.  The treatment she faced at Elsenburg, which included bullying and intimidation, brought her close to nervous breakdown. “I never knew that racism could be so in your face. It was a rude awakening,” says Stevens. In her second year, she demanded that the head of the college address the matter. He offered to expel the perpetrators, but she told him, “I don’t want them expelled. I want them to treat me like a normal human being.” The situation improved, but to this day she refuses to attend class reunions.  After college, Stevens worked at various wine estates, often witnessing her white peers move up the ranks faster. But her talents were recognized at Amani Vineyards, where her Amani Cabernet Franc/ Merlot 2006 won the Decanter 2008 International Red Bordeaux Varietals Trophy. In 2011, Stevens got a call from the founder of Naked Wines, an online retailer and crowdfunding platform for independent winemakers based in the U.K. “He said, ‘How would you like to have your own label?’ I said, ‘Who put you up to this?’”, she recalls with a laugh. During the initial funding round, she broke all the platform’s records, raising $147,000 in just eight hours. Last year she was voted Naked Wines’ winemaker of the decade.  Stevens is often hailed as a trailblazer for women of color. Even so, the road ahead is not without obstacles, and BEE initiatives are not enough to smooth the way, she says. “People see black empowerment as needing to up-skill workers. Which is true to an extent,” she explains. “But you do not empower people alone by giving them a job. What is going to count the most? Ownership. Ownership of land should be priority.” 71

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Delheim farm was one of the first vineyards to spot the business opportunity in wine tourism. In 1971, alongside two other estate owners, Delheim’s late patriarch, Spatz Sperling, devised the Stellenbosch Wine Route, a tourist attraction that now boasts nearly 200 wineries. Delheim is set on the slopes of Simonsberg Mountain. The estate overlooks a picturesque garden fringed with palms, with the Cape Fold Mountains rising dramatically in the background. It was in this idyllic setting that Ntsiki Biyela first fell in love with the grape. Born a world away in the KwaZulu-Natal province, Biyela had never tasted wine when, at 19, she was awarded a scholarship to study winemaking at Stellenbosch University. Her first work placement in 2000 was at Delheim, where she pruned vines and assisted in the tasting room. Biyela shadowed Delheim’s winemaker at the time, Philip Costandius, and, inspired by his passion, was determined to become a winemaker herself. After graduating, she landed a job at Stellekaya, where over the course of two decades she rose in the ranks, eventually becoming senior winemaker.  In 2016, after deciding she was ready to break out on her own, Biyela founded Aslina (named after her grandmother), a label she produces at Delheim. When she harvested her first Chardonnay in 2017, Costandius was alongside her. In 2018, Biyela won the gold medal at the Michelangelo International Wine and Spirits Awards for her 2016 Bordeaux blend, Umsasane—Zulu for the iconic African acacia tree, also her grandmother’s nickname.  “When I started the company, it was to build a legacy,” she says. “Once you are in it, what is it that you are leaving behind?” With the next generation of black vintners in mind, Biyela became a founding board member of the Pinotage Youth Development Academy (PYDA) in Stellenbosch, established in 2012 to help disadvantaged young South Africans launch careers in the wine and fruit industries. Three academy graduates currently work at Delheim.  Down in Delheim’s cellar, the day’s haul is being processed. As a worker hoses down a grape crusher, the floor turns scarlet—it looks like a crime scene. The assistant winemaker, Nongcebo Langa, chats with colleagues as she darts around the cellar, measuring yeast for the vats and siphoning a taste of this year’s whites to check their progress.  Langa has a promising future in the wine business. After graduating near the top of her class in high school, she was awarded a scholarship to study viticulture and oenology at Stellenbosch University, becoming one of three people of color in a class of 20. She went on to do a master’s degree, researching solutions to vines damaged by smoke. Last year, she traveled abroad for the first time to experience an international harvest in Dry Creek Valley, California, an opportunity to assess the differences between the two winemaking regions. “It was quite an eyeopener,” she says. “It was beautiful.” One day, Langa says, she will make great wine, and eventually run her own farm. “Maybe 10 hectares, small cellar, do everything on-site,” she says, beaming at the thought. “I don’t want too much. Just enough. Because you can produce a lot from a little.” •

TAKE CHARGE Nondumiso Pikashe, owner and managing director of Ses’fikile Wines, grew up in Gugulethu township, a short drive—and a world apart—from the Winelands. Opposite: Rhenish Church, in Stellenbosch’s town center.

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67 blackowned farms out of 2,873 in the Western Cape province, according to industry body Wines of South Africa (WOSA). Many black label owners like Stevens and Pikashe aspire to produce on their own land, but the large majority of farms in Stellenbosch are built on public land, leased to white farmers under long-term contracts. And they don’t have the means to purchase land at current prices. Sustaining a wine farm is challenging for white and black farmers alike. According to Vinpro, a nonprofit organization representing South Africa’s wine industry, total vine acreage has shrunk by nearly six percent over the past five years as producers plant fewer vines due to financial pressures. Over the past decade, the number of grape producers has declined 34 percent. The average return on investment for South African wine farms, as reported last year by Vinpro, is two percent.  Vivian Kleynhans, owner of Seven Sisters Vineyards, learned about handling financial setbacks at a young age. Kleynhans grew up as one of eight children in a fishing village called Paternoster. When she was 16, her father was fired from the local fishery where he’d worked for 25 years. After the family was evicted from their home, Kleynhans decided to become an entrepreneur, with the hope of providing her family some financial security. 

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Kleynhans went on to run a successful human resources business. In 2003, her curiosity was piqued when the then minister for agriculture, a black woman, encouraged others like her to venture into the wine industry. She told her sisters she wanted to produce wine, and that in time she would name a varietal after each of them. “They laughed at me,” she says. “They said, ‘It’s never going to work. It’s a white man’s world.’”  In the early years of running the label, Kleynhans held down three jobs. At her first wine show, she met an American entrepreneur who fell in love with the Seven Sisters story and decided to help her export her wines to the U.S. The first case shipped out in 2007. Two years later, Seven Sisters’ Sauvignon Blanc, Vivian, became the first South African wine to be served on an American Airlines flight.  Kleynhans had been making all her wine at Swartland Winery, but in 2009, she benefited from a government program that gave land to entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector. She built her farm up from nine hectares (about 22 acres) of scrub, planting two cultivars, Chardonnay and Shiraz, from which she makes her premium range, Brutus.  Like most estate owners, Kleynhans has discovered that selling wine is not enough to keep her farm solvent. She knew that the answer was to profit from the burgeoning wine tourism in the region. So she began selling her wine exclusively on the property and offered wine tastings served with lunch. 

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WILD, WILD COUNTRY Ride off into an epic Western romance under the vast Montana sky in a wardrobe of this season’s contemporary Americana.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTIAN MACDONALD STYLING BY ALEX WHITE

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SWING STATE Pitch a tent far from the madding crowd at Wills Cattle Company (this page) or The Resort at Paws Up (opposite). On her: Louis Vuitton shirt, vest, skort, belt and brooch, Stetson hat and Church’s boots. On him: Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello jacket, Hermès shirt, Celine by Hedi Slimane pants and shoes, Stetson hat and vintage bolo tie. Opposite: Bottega Veneta shirt and jeans, Pat Areias belt and Re/Done boots.

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RANCH DRESSING Denim, eyelet and rough ’n’ ready boots are a dreamy match. On her: Dior shirt, jeans and belt, Stetson hat, Lisa Eisner bolo necklace and Re/Done boots. On him: Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, Frame shirt, Polo Ralph Lauren jeans, The Frye Company boots and stylist’s own gloves. Opposite: Ralph Lauren Collection 78 top and Chanel jeans.

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FREE RANGE Double down on denim, whether a big-skirted dress or high-waisted jeans. Ralph Lauren Collection dress, Pat Areias belt and Church’s boots. Opposite, on her: Chloé jacket and jeans, Isabel Marant top, Re/Done boots and stylist’s own gloves. On him: Billy Los Angeles coat, Frame shirt, Polo Ralph Lauren jeans, Pat Areias belt, The Frye Company boots and stylist’s own gloves.

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GOLDEN HOUR Look polished even off the grid in a jumpsuit or a sweet take on a day dress. Fendi jumpsuit, vintage jacket and belt, Lisa Eisner bracelets and Church’s boots. Opposite: Miu Miu sweater and dress, Stetson hat and Church’s boots.

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WESTERN UNION A long-skirted look with a belt and high neck is big-screen-worthy. On her: Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, shirt, skirt and belt, Stetson hat and Re/Done boots. On him: Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, shirt and jeans, Stetson hat and The Frye Company boots. Opposite: Alexander McQueen dress and belt. Models, Cara Taylor at Next Management and Valentin Humbroich at Soul Artist Management; hair, David Harborow; makeup, Francelle; set design, Mark Vale. For details see Sources, page 106.

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BUILDING BRIDGES Daniel Humm and Gabriela Hearst, both wearing Gabriela Hearst collection clothing, here and throughout, shot in Claridge’s hotel, London.

Social Network After meeting in New York, and opening nearby London locations last year, fashion designer Gabriela Hearst and chef Daniel Humm prove the exception to the rule “no new friends.” BY ANDREW GOLDMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY MACIEK KOBIELSKI

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NE SPRING MORNING in 2018, a love affair of the aesthetic kind began between the chef Daniel Humm and the fashion designer Gabriela Hearst. The pair of New York transplants happened to sit together while judging a magazine design competition; they agreed on virtually every category, and the extroverted Uruguayan-born designer’s silly jokes elicited giggles from the normally staid Swiss chef. They collided at their creative peaks: His three-Michelin-star culinary temple Eleven Madison Park has won every award imaginable, becoming only the second American restaurant to land atop the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Her eponymous clothing line, launched in 2015, has become as notable for its sustainable fabrics (much of her line’s merino wool is sourced from her family’s ranch in Uruguay) as for the feeding frenzy over her Demi bag, a favorite of Oprah Winfrey and Meghan Markle. In August of last year, Hearst, 43, opened her second store, designed by architect Norman Foster, on London’s Brook Street, across from Claridge’s hotel. Four months later, Humm, also 43, opened his first U.K. restaurant, Davies and Brook, in the storied hotel. It was a homecoming of sorts for Humm; at 16, in part to finance his first love—bicycle racing—he’d done a stint as a stagiaire at Claridge’s, chopping mirepoix vegetables and slicing crusts from cucumber sandwiches. Davies and Brook was also Humm’s first project since his abrupt professional split from his business partner, Will Guidara. By the time Humm’s restaurant opened in London, Hearst had decided that he was a perfect model for her third men’s collection. “If Daniel, as picky as he can get, is satisfied with the product, it’s a pretty good standard,” she says. “Whatever feedback he gives is always valuable.” (As of press time, both the store and the restaurant were temporarily closed due to coronavirus-related shutdowns.) Hearst and Humm also found echoes in their personal lives. In 2013, the designer married entrepreneur Austin Hearst, who as a child spent summers at his grandfather William Randolph Hearst’s spread in San Simeon, California (the pair, both divorcees, have a total of five children). Humm, a divorced father of three, has been dating philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs. Their relationship was the only off-limits topic in a rollicking conversation in early March about creativity, integrity and parents.

there a trend away from the kind of experience you would have at Eleven Madison Park? DH: One guiding principle is that quality doesn’t need to be pretentious. Eleven Madison is a response to what was going on 15 years ago in fine dining, before the [2008] financial crisis. AG: Remind me of what was going on. DH: There’d be like five plates on top of each other to give you one bite. A Burgundy glass like a flower vase. It was ridiculous. It was like, “We’re in New York, the center of the world. We get ingredients from anywhere, from Japan, the next day. We’re balling.” GH: Balling! [laughs] DH: So we were responding to that, and I think we did a really good job in responding to that. But Davies and Brook in London was a blank canvas. It was me on my own—my vision in a place that has a history to me because I worked there [nearly] 30 years ago. And Davies and Brook is very, very contemporary. The world is changing. A quote I love by Willem de Kooning says, “You have to change to stay the same.” And I feel that way. What we thought was luxury 15 years ago is not luxury anymore. Who made this rule that caviar is more luxurious than peas? This is all based on some preconceived notion. Why are we not saying that when we get peas? What is that? AG: Gabi, did you really insist that both your New York and London stores use no new materials in their construction? GH: Yes, all the wood’s reclaimed, for example. The London furniture is made from a fallen plane tree. AG: This edict sounds like a contractor’s nightmare. Did anyone ever say, “No, Gabi, you just can’t”? GH: I never hear no. AG: I’m intrigued by what I’ve read about both of your mothers. I’d love to hear about them. GH: My mom is my main source of inspiration, because I grew up in Uruguay, a very conservative country. It was a dictatorship and a patriarchy; very macho society. The first image I have of my mom is her being thrown by a horse at a rodeo, hitting the ground and just walking like nothing [happened]. I was brought up by a woman [for whom] physical strength wasn’t a male-dominated characteristic. She was tough, sensitive, cultured—and educated and rough. She was all the elements that continue to inspire me. AG: Isn’t she also into martial arts? GH: She became a taekwondo 2nd [degree black belt] in her 30s. She did 700-kilometer endurance races on a horse. If she was born in another place, she’d have been a professional athlete. Even now, she exercises two hours a day. She lives off the grid, on her ranch, the way the family always has. AG: Daniel, Gabi’s mom is a hard act to follow, but your mom was an artist who also sewed and wove. DH: My mom passed away last year, so it’s a little hard to talk about it, but she was an amazing person. My mom taught me everything. My mom was very spiritual, very creative. She painted. She wrote poems. But then, she was very active, too. She was doing yoga when no one was doing yoga, having green juice when no one was having green juice. And she really is very deeply inside of me. I have this voice that’s always there and that constant conversation with her. I had it before she passed away, and I have it

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AG: For what type of man would this be too much? GH: I would be too much for 99 percent of the male population, for sure. AG: What would most men have difficulty with? GH: I’m very picky. I’m very intense. If you can’t deal with my intensity, we’re not supposed to be friends. Daniel understands that. AG: You seem very intense too, Daniel. Do you think you and Gabi share a similar aesthetic? DH: I think so. GH: Yeah, I think we both are attracted to color and a minimal aesthetic, but without being boring. Whenever I design something, I’m always subtracting: Why is that there? Do you really need it? Our approach is really similar: Does that really need to be on the plate? Why is that raisin there? We don’t want to overdesign. DH: Yeah, I think we’re both trying to take away. Even when I was 20, I always had this idea of cooking in a minimal way, but then I spent a life trying to add things. Trying to add courses on the menu. Add ingredients. My technique wasn’t strong enough, so it was easier to add some crispy thing or another sauce or garnish that made the dish better. I thought if I would take it away no one is going to be impressed. But then at some point, I had one dish that I felt like I achieved—and it was a dish of celery root braised in pig’s bladder. It was just these two white circles on the plate—but when we did it, I knew that this was my first dish that I achieved everything. AG: Gabi, do you feel like there’s one thing that represented a similar breakthrough for you? GH: I guess my first handbag where everybody kind of went crazy. After I launched Gabriela Hearst in 2015, a friend of mine called me and said, “You cannot be walking around with your shoes and your ready-towear and someone else’s bag.” And I was like, That’s a really good point. So I made a bag for me. We made 25 of them and gave them to some special people. Some were high-profile, some were friends of mine. DH: I was wearing one [laughs]. I’m sure you had people say the bag needs to be everywhere. GH: They try. Everyone in my world, all the different retailers, wanted to carry the bag. I made the decision [not to mass-produce it] for sustainability. The only reason you would do it and have your bag in every single department store in the world would be because you want to become very famous, very quickly. And that is not something I wanted for my brand. AG: Daniel, dining at Eleven Madison Park is an extraordinary three-hour, seven-course experience, but I gather this kind of fine dining is not for everyone. Your new London restaurant, Davies and Brook, offers a much quicker four-course dinner. Is

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Andrew Goldman: Gabi, Daniel is wearing your new menswear collection in these photos. You’re both in your 40s—did you get stunt doubles to stand in for you for the backbends? Gabriela Hearst: No, we did them! Daniel doesn’t think I do a good bridge, though. He’s such a, you know— Daniel Humm: A perfectionist. I’m very particular about many things in my life, and my clothes. In my closet I have whites, I have piles of gray sweaters, blue and black, and that’s it. If you saw it you would think, Oh, he’s a psychopath. GH: I am attracted to individuals who are passionate about what they do [because] they have a strong opinion. Right? They know what they want and how they like it. Daniel’s a modern man. He has a very sensitive side that feels feminine, which I find interesting. AG: Gabi, you seem very comfortable discussing your work with Daniel. Are you as comfortable discussing it with your husband? GH: My husband is extremely supportive. After all these years he understands it—barely, but he gets it. AG: Only barely? GH: He knows it’s a lot of work and it’s a sacrifice and it’s a marriage to your profession. It takes a very specific spouse to understand that. It’s the commitment you have to your team, to your work, to your product. It’s not what defines me but I couldn’t exist without my job. My husband is a very rare man.

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AG: Daniel has had this seemingly uninterrupted march to greatness. Gabi, has your rise been similarly without failure? GH: I failed so many times. Oh, I spent 10 years of my life failing. Gabriela Hearst is like my I-don’twant-to-fail-anymore exercise. The reason I was able to push this brand as quickly as I did—in five years— is because I had [made] all the other mistakes that I learned [from] before. AG: What were the big lessons you learned from your experience with your first line, Candela? GH: You’ve got to make sure that you’re delivering on time. You’ve got to make sure that the product never disappoints. You learn how to say no. That only came with maturity. Before, I wanted to please. AG: Did you ever feel you sacrificed your vision for commerce? GH: Many times. When retailers started to design the product with you. They’d say, “Can I have this?” AG: What did they ask for? GH: A specific example would be that they would like something shorter or with different embroidery. And you change the complete aesthetic of the product that you’re trying to create. And when you’re young, you say yes. Now [I] say no. AG: Daniel, do you ever worry that your unyielding vision might lead you to create food that is not as beloved as what you’ve done thus far? DH: What I do can only be done in a restaurant that is full. Right? So in the beginning when you’re starting out, you just need to worry about how to have the restaurant full—give the people what they want. I understood from the beginning that only if you make money can there be the craft in your art. And so it’s a balance. You can only be [artistically] successful if you figure out how to be commercially successful as well. But when success happens, everyone sees it in a different way. Partners want different things. They see Daniel Humm as a brand that can open restaurants throughout the world. I can put my name on high-end resorts in places like Costa Rica that I never need to go to, and we’ll collect a check. AG: Are you talking about your former partner [Will Guidara]? DH: Yeah. It’s just, we didn’t see eye to eye anymore. It’s about keeping your name, what you stand for, doing what you want to do and not what everyone else around you wants to do. And that’s really challenging. AG: You traveled to India in 2017 after Eleven Madison Park was renovated. I gather you did a lot of meditation. DH: I went to India for two months. I only spoke for two hours a week. Every Saturday, I took two hours to speak to my kids, to speak to my team. AG: What happened when you came back? DH: I just edited. I edited things out of my life. It started on the plate, taking things away, and then it expanded to my whole life. AG: You deleted contacts out of your phone, right? DH: Yeah. I changed my number. I just started looking at everything and I was like, What do I really get out of that relationship? Or do I really need that friendship or this name or that thing? And I just really started to do a lot less but make it much more meaningful. There’s just so much noise. •

FRESH PAIR “I understood from the beginning that only if you make money can there be the craft in your art. [S]o it’s a balance. You can only be [artistically] successful if you figure out how to be commercially successful as well,” says Humm, pictured here and opposite with Hearst.

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now. She had me very young, and so I definitely grew up with her. I think also I just relate to the female energy more; in a way I can access my feminine side more easily than my masculine side. That has to do with how close I was with my mom. GH: I have the opposite. I can access my masculine side. My dad died in 2011. It doesn’t change you suddenly—it’s these slow changes, and they become part of you. My dad was very entrepreneurial. I used to ask my dad a lot of questions. Maybe you guys are going to think it’s really weird, but when I’m in a position of conflict I write down a question and then I write how he would answer. You know? AG: Daniel, your kitchen is gleaming and clean enough so that I felt like I’d probably be fine eating off of the floor. Everybody in your kitchen looked quite happy to be there, but I wondered if they might just be afraid not to be happy. DH: When I was younger, I was more intense. I was a professional cyclist, and I took the mentality from sports to the kitchen. If you don’t have this

solid team around you and you are trying to achieve great things, then you are stressed out. When you are stressed out, that shows in being a little bit overly aggressive. But I’ve left that behind. If you’re surrounded with a team that wants to play on that high level and win, then everyone is pushing for that. Everyone is making sure everything is done at the highest level. No one cuts corners. We are in the NBA and we want to be in the playoffs every season. AG: What happens when you get angry? You must occasionally see something that you don’t like. DH: I just point it out very calmly. That’s it. AG: But you weren’t always like this? You used to lose your cool? DH: I have never yelled. GH: He’s Swiss, c’mon. AG: Now, I don’t want to jump to conclusions, Gabi, but is it safe to assume you’ve yelled? GH: I think I yelled five times already today. But in South America, you’re yelling and talking. I think I’m talking and other people think I’m yelling.

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Ray of Light

Express yourself with bright florals and forward-thinking silhouettes that add a touch of glamour to daytime dressing. PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOSH OLINS STYLING BY CLARE RICHARDSON

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FLOWER GIRL A maxi dress that makes the case for cool comfort. Valentino dress.

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FREE SOLO Throw a party for one in pieces that make a statement. From left: JW Anderson dress and bralette; Bottega Veneta dress. Opposite: The Row pants.

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THINKING BIG Take retro styling to the next level. JW Anderson belt. Opposite: Louis Vuitton shirt, knit vest and skirt.

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TOP LINE Add a bit of excitement with patterns, embellishments and pleats. From left: Balenciaga top and pants; Alexander McQueen dress. Opposite: Proenza Schouler dress.

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FOR THE ROSES Elegant classics meet acid-trip prints. Balenciaga top and skirt. Opposite: Fendi dress. Model, Conie Vallese at Viva Paris. For details see Sources, page 106.

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A (Literary) Star Is Born In The Vanishing Half, her follow-up to 2016’s breakthrough novel The Mothers, Brit Bennett considers questions of race and the lasting consequences of the past. BY KILEY REID PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADRIANNA GLAVIANO

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RIT BENNETT LIKES women with an edge. “I just like

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mean women,” the 29-year-old novelist says, referring to the stern characters she meets both in person and in her own writing. “My mom was not that type of maternal figure at all, so I really have no idea where to trace that connection in my own personal life—but I just love a severe older woman.” Bennett is neither severe nor old, but she is on the edge of literary fiction, writing elegantly about sensitive topics, from unplanned pregnancy to racial passing. Raised in Oceanside, California, Bennett studied as an undergraduate at Stanford and for her M.F.A. at the University of Michigan, where she finished her 2016 debut novel, The Mothers, about a teenage girl named Nadia whose mother kills herself. Nadia later becomes pregnant after a tryst with a football-star-turned-waiter and is forced to cover it up. The Mothers proved a breakout success. A New York Times bestseller,

the novel propelled Bennett to being named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35. Her latest novel, The Vanishing Half, out June 2, grapples with the intricacies of race, though this time she’s even more ambitious—speaking to the cultural and social history of passing as white and the greater question of racial performance. The Vanishing Half opens in 1968 and follows identical twins, Stella and Desiree, who flee their small, black community in the fictional town of Mallard, Louisiana. Fourteen years later, Desiree returns without her sister by her side and is forced to navigate a town that hasn’t changed, even as she has evolved into an adult and a mother. Stella, however, has moved to Brentwood, California, where she has transferred what was once a practiced attitude of whiteness into a seemingly permanent membership among the white elite. With her new white persona and lifestyle, Stella realizes, if it were ever her word against another black woman’s, “she

VANISHING ACT Novelist Brit Bennett, whose second novel, The Vanishing Half, looks to be a spring hit, on the steps of the Brooklyn Museum, in Brooklyn, New York.

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would always be believed.” Stella’s passing performance slowly becomes much more than skin deep. Bennett’s tone and style recalls James Baldwin and Jacqueline Woodson, but it’s especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye, which follows Pecola, a young black woman in the years following the Great Depression who deeply desires blue eyes. For both Stella and Pecola, whiteness is depicted as a beautiful gateway and dire necessity. Bennett’s narration refrains from wokescolding polemics. Instead, The Vanishing Half leaves the reader with lasting questions. Over the telephone, Bennett takes her time to answer. She explains, among much else, how she attempted to rethink race and the murkiness of self-presentation.

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Kiley Reid: Let’s talk about colorism. I am not sure if I’ve read another novel that tackles the intricacy of skin tone, the attitudes of being white and the very common practice of passing like this. Brit Bennett: I think most of the groundbreaking novels about that topic were written in the 1920s and ’30s. I’ve read Nella Larsen’s Passing, but I don’t know if I’ve read anything recently. That’s also part of why I was interested in, What does passing look like in the 1980s? It really is, for a lot of people, a very permanent decision, and that’s why you read stories of people in the year 2000 of, “My relative died, and I found out that she was [black].” That’s part of why I was interested in writing it to a slightly more contemporary moment. KR: Why do you think issues of colorism in the black community are seldom covered in literary fiction when it’s such a ripe opportunity? BB: I don’t know. I’ll say one of my anxieties about writing this book [was] the idea of the book pathologizing black people in some way. I was really afraid that a reader would take away, like, How come they can’t even get along amongst themselves? I was worried about creating that type of narrative because obviously color is something that is not just particular to black American people. There are all these other communities around the world that struggle with it. KR: One thing I loved about this book is that I felt like it hit home on two very different points. The first is—I agree with Toni Morrison—race is a construct. On one end, race is nothing. At the same time, race is everything. From hair texture, to your neighborhood, to your attitude, to the way you speak. BB: I think what you’re saying, that contradiction, is exactly what I was interested in when writing the book. The idea that someone who’s passing, if they can perform race, then is race not a performance? But the idea that race is something that is so real and all-encompassing that it can even dictate which side of the cemetery you’re buried on. For me, it was that duality, or contradiction, I found so interesting and uncomfortable to fit in. KR: Many of your characters have a really distinct before and after. They either broke ties, or they became the person they wanted to be. Did the characters’ big decisions reveal themselves to you, or did you go searching for natural moments within them? BB: With Stella, I liked the idea of her passing, her flirting with it for a while and then having this one

“SOMEONE WHO’S PASSING, IF THEY CAN PERFORM RACE, THEN IS RACE NOT A PERFORMANCE? BUT RACE IS ALSO SOMETHING SO REAL IT CAN DICTATE WHICH SIDE OF THE CEMETERY YOU’RE BURIED ON.” –BRIT BENNETT

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SOPHOMORE SURGE Bennett’s second novel is “especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut, The Bluest Eye,” writes Kiley Reid. Opposite: Bennett in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park; grooming, Deborah Altizio.

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would be published someday; but I had no expectation that anyone would ever read it besides me. With this book, there were certain indications that there would be an audience. Looking to an invisible audience was something that made me feel very crippled as far as how I was thinking about creating. I was frustrated at times by that self-consciousness, but I was also trying to accept that that was just part of the process now. KR: I saw [the novelist] Ann Patchett at a book event four years ago, where she said, “All of my novels are the same. I write about one thing. I just do it differently each time. I think that we all have 52 cards to play, and that’s it.” It really gave me freedom to be like, OK, find your thing, and then do it differently. BB: That seems to be a thing that feels increasingly true the more I write. For me, it’s been sisterhood. That feels to be the thing that’s at the center so far. But who knows? I’m only two books in. KR: Your characters are often chasing jobs or trying very hard to keep the ones that they have. I’m curious what jobs you had when you were not writing full time? BB: So much of my life has been spent in school. But when I was in college, I worked at a music library. Such a chill job. It was not populated very much. I was very underqualified to work there. I didn’t know how to spell any composer’s name. I’d just read movie reviews sitting there. They didn’t really care what you were doing as long as you were responsive to people coming in. I’d go weeks, and I was the only person there. Maybe like one or two people would come in. It was a great job. KR: What are you reading right now? BB: [Colum McCann’s] Let the Great World Spin. It’s a novel told in fragments. Somebody recommended that book to me because it has linked stories—a fragmented story [told] from a lot of different perspectives. I’ve got a bunch of books that haven’t come out yet that have been sent to me to read. One is by one of my mentors, Stephanie Soileau: Last One Out Shut Off the Lights. She’s a Louisiana writer, so I’m really excited to read her book. KR: What is the most underrated novel? BB: That’s really tough. I don’t know if I would say Another Country is underrated but maybe that’s a lesser-read [James] Baldwin novel. I feel like [Baldwin’s] Giovanni’s Room and Go Tell It on the Mountain are the more frequently read. I started reading [Another Country] as an undergrad, and I was like, This is too dark. I don’t know what that says about me as I’ve gotten older, but when I returned to it, I was like, Yeah, I’m really enjoying this. KR: I was asked the other day if, as a writer, I am a plotter or a plunger. I’m curious what you consider yourself? BB: I dive in. I’m pretty good at knowing where I want to start. Usually I want to know the middle of the book. With The Vanishing Half, I had no idea of the end. I love the idea of just being like, Anything goes. There are no stakes. Just write what’s fun. I love that space of being in the sandbox and moving the toys around. • This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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moment where she starts to slide gradually. I love the idea of the performance becoming real. Initially, she’s just trying to get this job, and she’s just doing this at work; then eventually that becomes her real life, and her former life becomes a fake. There are characters who are performers for a living, and there are characters who are performing and nobody knows. KR: My favorite person who navigated the change was Reese, a transgender character in The Vanishing Half who’s seeking surgery, because I love when characters use big events, like a move, to be like, “OK, well, I’m this person here, and now I’m going to be another person here.” BB: It’s something that I’m always drawn to. I’ve moved around so many times in the past 10 years, and it’s like, “Who are you in the different places where you’ve lived?” KR: Your fiction is filled with very simple truths that are extremely wise. One of my favorite lines from The Vanishing Half is, “What was the point of sharing something with someone who couldn’t be happy for you?” I’m curious if these little tiny proverbs come naturally to you, or if there’s a science behind the simplicity? BB: Some of it comes from my mother, who has many sayings that she shares with us. Some are things that her mother said or things that didn’t make sense to me at the time, and then later I’m like, “Oh, that’s what that meant.” I try not to write any type of general wisdom, because I feel like characters are so much more interesting when you are specific. I try to keep it grounded to the character. I’m still learning things about the world and trying to figure out what any of this means. KR: From a craft perspective, what was it like to make character profiles for The Vanishing Half’s twins, Stella and Desiree? BB: I didn’t want it to be too Tia and Tamera [twin sisters from the 1990s TV show Sister, Sister], like, this one is smart, and this one is goofy. But I wanted them to be contrasting characters. I was also curious in the way that these two girls would witness the same central event and react to it in very different ways. I was really interested in how they form intimacy, whether they like attention or not. Those were the things I was thinking of more than necessarily these very cut-and-dried personality traits. KR: Do you also think of yourself as having two selves? BB: I’m sure I do. The idea of a public and a private self is something that is evolving for me. I relate a lot to Stella—this idea of being very guarded. I don’t think that publishing a book changed that at all, but I think it’s made me more aware of it and made me more aware of the ways in which these spaces I thought of before as being—if not private—just unimportant spaces to be social, suddenly have become something else. KR: How was the process of writing The Vanishing Half different from writing The Mothers? How have you grown as a writer? BB: I felt both more confident about my ability to finish a novel and improve it over time, but I also did feel self-conscious. With The Mothers, I’d been working on that book for several years, and I hoped that it

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TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE 22

The Row jacket, shirt and skirt, prices upon request, therow.com PAGE 24

Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, $2,250, shirt, $550, and pants, $770, celine.com, Stetson hat, $245, stetson .com, vintage bolo tie, $185, Space Cowboy NYC, 234 Mulberry Street, New York, Pat Areias belt, price upon request, patareias.com, The Frye Company boots, $378, thefryecompany.com; Erdem dress, $7,570, erdem .com, Church’s boots, $1,150, church-footwear.com WHAT’S NEWS PAGE 38

Hublot watch, $52,500, hublot.com. Nordic Knots Norr Mälarstrand 03 rug, $645, nordicknots.com PAGE 39

Cartier Magnitude High Jewelry necklace and earrings, prices upon request, 1-800-CARTIER

.com, Celine by Hedi Slimane necklace, $790, celine.com. Dolce & Gabbana bralette, $1,745, select DG boutiques, Maryam Nassir Zadeh pants, $736, mnzstore.com, Ursa Major necklace, $1,200, katejones.us, W. Kleinberg belt, $165, wkleinberg.com PAGE 42

Tamam plates, $200–$600, shop-tamam.com PAGE 43

Hermès cap, $390, Hermès stores nationwide, Loewe bag, $2,300, loewe.com, Dior Men sunglasses, $570, Dior Men boutiques, Prada jacket, $1,560, select Prada boutiques TWO OF A KIND PAGE 45

Hermès sweater, $1,750, Hermès stores nationwide, Ann Demeulemeester pants, $806, anndemeulemeester .com, Tiffany & Co. bracelet, $6,800, tiffany .com; Alexander McQueen dress, price upon request, Alexander McQueen Madison Avenue, New York, Verdura earrings, $7,950, verdura.com, Tiffany & Co. rings, $1,500 and $5,000, tiffany.com, Prada sandals, price upon request, prada .com PAGE 46

Miu Miu top, $1,200, miumiu .com, Carolina Herrera pants, $1,690, Carolina Herrera, 954 Madison Avenue, New York, Hermès belt, price upon request, Hermès stores nationwide, Tiffany & Co. rings, $1,500 and $5,000, tiffany.com; Fendi sweater, $1,890, fendi.com, Dolce & Gabbana pants, $975, select DG boutiques, Tiffany & Co. necklace, $2,600, bracelet, $6,800, and ring, $1,300, tiffany.com, Proenza Schouler belt, price upon request, proenzaschouler.com PAGE 47

Oscar de la Renta sweater, $1,490, Oscar de la Renta boutiques, Givenchy shorts, $795, givenchy.com, Hat Attack hat, $65, hatattack .com; Loro Piana sweater, $1,595, us.loropiana.com, Jacquemus shorts, $456, jacquemus.com, Tiffany & Co. ring, $1,300, tiffany.com

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Michael Kors Collection bralette, $490, and skirt, $1,290, select Michael Kors stores, Jacquemus jacket, $924, jacquemus .com, Ursa Major earrings, $240, katejones.us, Celine by Hedi Slimane necklace, $790, celine.com; Olivier Theyskens bralette, $490, oliviertheyskens.com, Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, $2,450, celine.com, Ursa Major necklace, $440, katejones.us. Chloé bralette, price upon request, similar styles at Chloé boutiques, Jil Sander jacket, $2,278, Moda Operandi, Nehera pants, $355, nehera.com; Givenchy bralette, price upon request, givenchy.com, Lauren Manoogian sweater, $450, net-a-porter.com, Charlotte Chesnais x Byredo necklace, $2,400, byredo.com. Loewe bralette, price upon request, similar styles at loewe .com, Totême shirt, $360, toteme-studio.com, Mizuki earrings, $1,095, net-a-porter

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Soho, New York, Chanel skirt, $3,600, select Chanel boutiques nationwide, Jil Sander hat, $330, jilsander .com, David Webb earrings, $34,500, davidwebb.com; Prada tank, $840, and pants, $840, prada.com, Jil Sander hat, $570, jilsander .com, Tiffany & Co. necklace, $2,600, tiffany.com PAGE 49

Valentino top, $2,980, Valentino boutiques, Dolce & Gabbana shorts, $925, select DG boutiques, Mikimoto necklace $3,240, and bracelet, $940, mikimoto .com, Tiffany & Co. rings, $1,500 and $5,000, tiffany .com, Gabriela Hearst sandals, $990, gabrielahearst .com; Lanvin shirt, $850, lanvin.com, Brioni sweater, $1,200, brioni.com, Bode shorts, $578, bodenewyork .com

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Bottega Veneta dress, price upon request, bottegaveneta .com

WS J. MAGA ZINE’S

SUMMER ISSUE

WILD, WILD COUNTRY PAGES 74–75

Hermès jacket, $5,800, and shirt, $680, Hermès stores nationwide, Stetson hat, $245, stetson.com; Brunello Cucinelli coat, $3,395, Brunello Cucinelli, 136 Greene Street, New York, Stetson hat, $245, stetson .com PAGE 76

Bottega Veneta shirt, $990, and jeans, $950, bottegaveneta.com, Pat Areias belt, price upon request, patareias.com, Re/Done boots, $950, shopredone.com

ON SALE JUNE 6, 2020

jeans, $395, nordstrom .com, Pat Areias belt, price upon request, patareias .com, Re/Done boots, $950, shopredone.com

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Jil Sander dress, $2,350, and over-dress, $1,180, jilsander .com, Dior shoes, price upon request, Dior boutiques nationwide

$245, stetson.com, The Frye Company boots, $378, thefryecompany.com

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COVER

PAGE 48

Chloé top, $950, Chloé

GETTING THEIR KICKS PAGE 55

Stadium Goods hat, $50, and hoodie, $79, and Stadium rugby, $170, stadiumgoods .com CALM AND COLLECTED PAGE 57

Louis Vuitton dress, price upon request, louisvuitton .com THE SORCERESS PAGE 58

Jil Sander dress, $2,350, and over-dress, $1,180, jilsander .com PAGE 59

Jil Sander dress, $2,350, and over-dress, $1,180, jilsander .com, Dior shoes, price upon request, Dior boutiques nationwide PAGE 61

Dior top, pants and shoes, prices upon request, Dior boutiques nationwide PAGE 62

The Row jacket, shirt and skirt, prices upon request, therow.com, Dior shoes, price upon request, Dior boutiques nationwide PAGE 63

Balenciaga dress, $1,950, Balenciaga New York, 620 Madison Avenue, Dior shoes, price upon request, Dior boutiques nationwide

PAGE 77

Louis Vuitton shirt, $2,210, vest, $2,760, skort, $3,450, brooch, price upon request, and belt, $750, louisvuitton .com, Stetson hat, $245, stetson.com, Church’s boots, $1,150, church-footwear.com; Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello jacket, $5,490, ysl .com, Hermès shirt, $680, Hermès stores nationwide, Celine by Hedi Slimane pants, $770, and shoes, $1,050, celine.com, Stetson hat, $245, stetson.com, vintage bolo tie, $185, Space Cowboy NYC, 234 Mulberry Street, New York PAGE 78

Dior shirt, $1,900, similar styles at Dior boutiques nationwide, jeans, $1,250, and belt, $990, Dior boutiques nationwide, Stetson hat, $245, stetson.com, Lisa Eisner bolo necklace, $2,800, lisaeisnerjewelry.com, Re/Done boots, $950, shopredone.com; Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, $1,100, celine.com, Frame shirt, $195, frame-store.com, Polo Ralph Lauren jeans, $90, ralphlauren.com, The Frye Company boots, $378, thefryecompany.com PAGE 79

Ralph Lauren Collection top, $1,690, ralphlauren.com, Chanel jeans, $1,250, select Chanel boutiques nationwide PAGE 81

Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini jacket, $1,095, and

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Chloé jacket, $1,095, and jeans, $1,095, chloe.com, Isabel Marant top, $1,055, isabelmarant.com, Re/Done boots, $950, shopredone .com; Billy Los Angeles coat, $1,125, billylosangeles.com, Frame shirt, $195, framestore.com, Polo Ralph Lauren jeans, $90, ralphlauren.com, Pat Areias belt, price upon request, patareias.com, The Frye Company boots, $378, thefryecompany.com PAGE 83

Ralph Lauren Collection dress, $3,490, ralphlauren .com, Pat Areias belt, price upon request, patareias .com, Church’s boots, $1,150, church-footwear.com PAGE 84

Fendi jumpsuit, $3,290, fendi .com, vintage jacket and belt, prices upon request, Early Halloween NYC, 130 West 25th Street, Lisa Eisner bracelets, $3,100 each, lisaeisnerjewelry.com, Church’s boots, $1,150, church-footwear.com PAGE 85

Miu Miu sweater, $990, and dress, $2,420, miumiu.com, Stetson hat, $245, stetson .com, Church’s boots, $1,150, church-footwear.com PAGE 86

Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, price upon request, shirt, $1,700, skirt, $2,100, and belt, $530, celine.com, Stetson hat, $245, stetson .com, Re/Done boots, $950, shopredone.com; Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, $1,100, shirt, $550, and jeans, $690, celine.com, Stetson hat,

PAGE 87

Alexander McQueen dress, price upon request, and belt, $1,290, Alexander McQueen Madison Avenue, New York RAY OF LIGHT PAGE 93

Valentino dress, $4,500, Valentino boutiques PAGE 94

JW Anderson dress, $895, and bralette, price upon request, jwanderson.com; Bottega Veneta dress, $1,490, bottegaveneta.com PAGE 95

The Row pants, $9,900, therow.com PAGE 96

Louis Vuitton shirt, $3,200, knit vest, $1,660, and skirt, $2,630, louisvuitton.com PAGE 97

JW Anderson belt, price upon request, jwanderson.com PAGE 98

Proenza Schouler dress, price upon request, proenzaschouler.com PAGE 99

Balenciaga top, $550, and pants, $1,050, Balenciaga Rodeo, 338 N Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills; Alexander McQueen dress, price upon request, Alexander McQueen Madison Avenue, New York PAGE 100

Balenciaga top, $1,550, and skirt, $1,750, Balenciaga Rodeo, 338 N Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills PAGE 101

Fendi dress, $4,200, fendi .com

WSJ. Issue 119, May 2020, Copyright 2020, Dow Jones and Company, Inc. All rights reserved. See the magazine online at www.wsjmagazine.com. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. WSJ. Magazine is provided as a supplement to The Wall Street Journal for subscribers who receive delivery of the Saturday Weekend Edition and on newsstands. Individual copies can be purchased at wsjshop.com. For Customer Service, please call 1-800-JOURNAL (1-800-568-7625), send email to [email protected] or write us at: 200 Burnett Road, Chicopee, MA 01020. For advertising inquiries, please email us at [email protected]. For reprints, please call 800-843-0008, email customreprints@dowjones .com or visit our reprints web address at www.djreprints.com.

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Savor the majestic vineyards and award-winning restaurants of Napa Valley and Bordeaux with WSJ. Magazine and luxury travel-planning company Indagare. Our Food & Wine Insider Journeys capture the full glow of these unique and breathtaking lands of epicurean delights. You’ll enjoy exclusive tastings at private cellars and innovative meals at Michelin-starred restaurants—all alongside internationally acclaimed winemakers, celebrated chefs and WSJ. Magazine editors.

bordeaux, france napa valley, california fall 2020

learn more: 646.780.8383 indagare.com/wsjmagazine

© 2020 dow jones & company, inc. all rights reserved. photo: matthew baum, courtesy indagare travel

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Explore The Wonders of Napa Valley and Bordeaux With WSJ. Magazine

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JUDY CHICAGO

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The artist and activist shares a few of her favorite things.

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“THE BUTTERFLY I MADE when I apprenticed myself

to china painters from 1972 to 1974. China making is practically a dying art. Next to that—the white figure—is a Zozobra model from 1985. The Burning of Zozobra is a tradition in Santa Fe that’s been going on since the 1920s. It’s begun by the burning of a 50-foot papier-mâché figure—a precursor to Burning Man. It’s where my husband, photographer Donald Woodman, and I ignited our romance. In the back is a vintage sign from 1965. I found it in an antique store in Pasadena, California, up the street from my studio. I put it on the 108

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHANTAL ANDERSON

wall, and I’ve had it in every studio I’ve had since. The cat is Tuxedo, one of my cats, and the plaque represents my longtime relationship with—and love of—cats. I’ve had 17 cats over the years, since I was 21. In front of that, the “Stranded” poster—that’s from my most recent series called The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction. The photo in the back is a D.K. Hall photo of my mentor, Anaïs Nin. Anaïs and I had many conversations about whether there was or could be a female sensibility in art. A lot of artists can be pretty obnoxious, especially male artists. Anaïs gave me a model

for another kind of person, someone with grace and generosity. In front of that are colored pencils that I’ve had my whole career. It’s been a hallmark of my work, airbrushing and colored pencils. I have a whole bunch of boxes like that, each one with a different color range. Next to that is a photo of my 25th wedding anniversary and renewal of vows in a typical New Mexico frame. All the way on the right is an airbrush from 1964, when I went to auto body school and started learning what it meant to be an artist. I was the only woman with 250 men in a class.” —As told to Shakthi Jothianandan WSJ. M AGA ZINE

©2019 KOHLER CO.

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GARDEN VARIETY SIMPLY WON’T DO. INSPIRED BY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ART, THE FLORAL MOTIF OF THE ARTIST EDITIONS® DUTCHMASTER SINK IS SOMETHING TO BEHOLD.

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