Vanity Fair

From entertainment to world affairs, business to style, design to society, Vanity Fair is a cultural catalyst, inspiring and driving the national conversation. Now the magazine has redefined storytelling for the Digital Age, bringing its high-profile interviews, stunning photography, and thought-provoking features to your device in a whole new way.

Vanity Fair

Editor’s Letter

Contributors

Behind the Issue

VANITIES VANITAS VANITATUM • ELLA EMHOFF is a model second daughter

Purls of WISDOM • Knitwear designer, model, and meme queen ELLA EMHOFF has style to spare

One in a Million • A new Aaliyah biography takes a hard look at old narratives.

Night MOVES • We’re going out again! But party girls and boys can trade “going out tops” for sky-high platforms, glitter, and chrome

Slip STREAM • Last time the ballet flat reigned, it was paired with black skinny jeans. Might we suggest a good book instead?

Warm FUZZIES

Bonjour JEUNESSE

You Go, GIRLS • The teen BFFs of PEN15 moonlight as our beauty correspondents

Universal GLAMOUR • With an exacting eye and a circle of next-gen muses, makeup artist SAM VISSER is filtering fashion nostalgia and aughts excess into a fresh slant

Made to Last • In Visser’s world, vintage photography and beauty books might inspire the makeup for a zine, Y2K-era aesthetics get a softer spin, and smart formulas enable full-face transformations

Are You ON THE LIST? • New York’s turn-of-the-century clubby restaurants changed social dining forever. The boom is back—and in hot new locales

CHEERS! • Orlando Franklin, head bartender at Brooklyn lounge-with-dancing Nightmoves, presents a ’20s take on that old ’90s standby: the cosmo

Freed Up • Julia Momosé serves luscious drinks, no booze needed.

Navel-GAZING • When baring your soul meant baring your midriff

Gawker STALKER • The kids once shooting spitballs at the media establishment have taken it over

Dear JON • Literary stardom ain’t what it used to be

Critical MOMENT • Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who cocreated critical race theory, now finds herself at the roiling center of the culture wars

The Birth of the Now • Does it count as nostalgia if it never really went away? The turn of the century may feel like ancient history—obscured by the fog of 9/11 and now the collective crisis of a pandemic—but the cast of characters is still very much with us. From red pills and blue pills to the millennial red carpet, from Fight Club to Florida, Rudy Giuliani to Donatella Versace, this special issue traces the influence of then on now, the ways in which those icons and enemies from two decades ago set the stage for the present, and maybe for the future.

With Love, Sean Combs • HE WAS THE ORIGINAL INFLUENCER. NOW THE ARTIST AND MOGUL FORMERLY KNOWN AS PUFF DADDY IS DEFINING HIS NEXT ERA. CAN LOVE CONQUER ALL?

Postcards From the Edge • THE CRUCIBLE IN WHICH OUR CORROSIVE POLITICS WAS FORGED HAS A NAME, AND IT IS FLORIDA

Wise Guy • DAVID CHASE AND THE SOPRANOS BLEW UP OUR IDEA OF TV. WITH THE NEW MOVIE PREQUEL, THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK, THE SHOWRUNNER RETURNS TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

Future Nostalgia • ELLE WOODS. NEO. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS. V.F. REIMAGINES OUR FAVORITE TURN-OF-THE-MILLENNIUM MOVIE ICONS WITH A NEW GENERATION OF STARS

Rudy Country • MAYOR RUDY GIULIANI WAS ALL BUT SAINTED FOR HIS LEADERSHIP AFTER 9/11. TWO DECADES LATER, THE SPECTERS—OF THAT EVENT AND OF THE MAN HIMSELF—HAUNT US STILL

Rule of Men • WHEN AUDIENCES FIRST SAW FIGHT CLUB, THEY HAD NO IDEA THEY WERE GAZING INTO A CRYSTAL BALL OF 21ST-CENTURY MASCULINITY

Viva Versace

The Good Wife • AFTER THE...