special culture

The Universal Lesson in Chappell Roan’s Audacious Statement

Back in the MTV era, the celebrity experience went something like this: person gets famous, person is hounded by paparazzi, photographs of said person go on sale to the highest tabloid bidder, rinse and repeat. Maybe fans would wait outside hotels and venues for autographs. And maybe there’d be a few stalkers tracking down a house phone number now and then. But mostly being a celebrity was a physical experience, one defined by running from camera flashes and trying not to advertise one’s whereabouts too much.

The ’90s and ’00s were famously not a fun time to be a celeb. But now, it seems, the boundaries between A-listers and fans have been eroded even further. We don’t need paparazzi and tabloids so much when we have our own phones—we can be the paparazzi and the tabloids. And social media means we can find out not only where a celebrity is, but where their family is, too. We can see who they’re friends with, where they’ve been going, and which burger joint they frequent at 3 p.m. when they’re hungover (even if they don’t post, you can bet that somebody near them will have done). Celebrities are under constant surveillance, and if you reach a certain level of fame, your personal life is going to be sacrificed as a result.

This is a life that 26-year-old pop star Chappell Roan isn’t willing to accept for herself. On Friday afternoon she posted on her Instagram: “For the past 10 years I’ve been going non-stop with my project, and it comes to the point that I need to draw lines and set boundaries,” she wrote. “I’ve been in too many non-consensual physical and social interactions, and I just need to lay it out and remind you, women don’t owe you shit.” She then goes on to say that when she is on stage or at a press event she is “at work,” but “[in] any other circumstance, I am not in work mode.” She continues: “Please stop touching me. Please stop being weird to my family and friends… And please: don’t call me Kayleigh.”

Chappell isn’t the first famous person to say some variation of “celebs don’t owe you everything” (in 2016, Justin Bieber stopped doing fan meet-and-greets because he said they made him feel drained and “like a zoo animal”). But she is one of the first to make such an unwavering statement so early on in her career. This time last year, not many people knew the name Chappell Roan. Now, the name’s a household one and you’d recognize her face even out of drag. So she’s nipping the situation in the bud before going any further. In the same way that you might decide, early on, to not reply to work emails out of hours, or to not follow your boss on social media, Chappell is saying that when she is not performing (read: being paid to perform or make a work-related appearance), she needn’t be switched on.

The Cool, Sexy Rabbi Is Hollywood’s New Favorite Trope—But Just How Accurate Is It?

Growing up in a Reform-meets-atheist household where my H&H bagel-slicing skills were deemed far more important than learning my Torah portion for a bat mitzvah that I didn’t want in the first place and my parents didn’t want to pay for, I gleaned most of my knowledge of Jewish faith and tradition not in temple, but in front of the television.

The first TV rabbi that I can remember seeing appeared—like so many good things—in Sex and the City; I watched, rapt, as Charlotte York attempted to convert to Judaisim out of love for her bald, bullish, very Jewish boyfriend Harry Goldenblatt, only to have her local rabbi reject her three times (which is apparently a real thing?) before grudgingly inviting her over for Shabbos dinner with his family. By Season 1 of And Just Like That… two decades later, Charlotte York-Goldenblatt had become a full-on Jewish mother with Hari Nef as her family’s rabbi. (Quite the upgrade!)

Watching Nef—a Jewish actress who first broke out playing a Weimar Germany-era trans woman on Transparent—perform a joyful, extremely chic “they mitzvah” for Charlotte’s nonbinary child Rock felt like the ultimate sign that we, as a faith, had evolved past staid, Fiddler on the Roof-coded depictions of Jewish spiritual leaders onscreen and into a more vibes-based rabbinical era.

There have, of course, been a few hotties along the way: Mandy Patinkin as a dripping wet yeshiva student in Yentl; Ben Stiller as Rabbi Jake Schram in 2000’s Keeping the Faith. But now, a few years after Kathryn Hahn played the beautiful, good-hearted, fuckboy-dating Rabbi Raquel on Transparent (inspiring me to don a modest dress and a tallit one Halloween), we have Adam Brody starring as a rabbi on the new Netflix rom-com series Nobody Wants This. Seeing The O.C.’s Seth Cohen—one of television’s first truly infatuation-worthy, non-assimilated Nice Jewish Boys—take on perhaps the most exalted role in the Jewish spiritual world makes me feel a) quite old and b) glad to see the rabbi enter cool, down-to-earth, romantic-lead territory.

With Their New Album Live Wire, Tom Rasmussen Celebrates the Quieter Moments of Queer Joy

Tom Rasmussen has always worn many hats. (Quite literally, in some cases: the musician first made themself known to the wider world as their former drag alter-ego, Crystal, a Russia-born, Lancashire-raised songstress with a penchant for fascinators.) They’ve written two books, co-composed a musical, and even served as a sex and relationships columnist for Vogue. But the hat they’ve always felt most comfortable wearing—and which they returned to in earnest a few years ago—was pop music. “I think it’s so embarrassing to be like, ‘I’m a storyteller,’ because that’s what annoying people say,” Rasmussen says, with typically self-effacing humor. “But I think that’s what I’ve done across all my work, and it really came to the forefront when I started writing my own music, for myself.”

In 2023, Rasmussen released their debut album, Body Building, on Globe Town Records: a heady, dance-pop rollercoaster of a record whose more euphoric moments were counterbalanced by remarkably vulnerable lyrics charting the peaks and troughs of coming out as nonbinary, and the double-edged sword of visibility. Now, just 18 months later, Rasmussen has returned with its follow-up, Live Wire—and is ready to wear their heart on their sleeve in a different, more hopeful way. “I’m really pro big and beautiful, vast emotions,” Rasmussen says of the more introspective tone of the new record, which delves into the smaller, quieter moments of their life—from casual hook-ups to marriage and their most intimate friendships. “I’m a funny person, but I’m also quite emotional and actually quite sincere.”

Timothée Chalamet Has Gone Blonde

I know bleached blonde-ness on men can occasionally signify inner turmoil (or, not unrelatedly, the rampant Kenergy of last summer). On Chalamet, though, this hair transformation is a relatively low-effort and painless way to shift the vibe from the surly, 1960s Dylan that he plays in A Complete Unknown, while still paying canny homage.

You’re Welcome! An Exclusive Look Inside Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” Music Video

“Please! Please! Please! Play Espresso!” Read a sign in the crowd at Sabrina Carpenter’s Coachella set earlier this year. The singer had just released the now inescapable hit the night prior. Little did we know, the sign was a sneaky little Easter egg for “Please, please, please,” the lead single for Carpenter’s recently announced album Short n’ Sweet, out August 23. Carpenter’s new era is kicking off with a music video co-starring none other than her biggest hype man, the Academy Award nominated actor Barry Keoghan.

“I’m feeling like I will never pay for another coffee again, and I’m so grateful and excited for people to hear the whole record. It’s so close to me!” wrote Carpenter over email about entering her new era post the success of “Espresso.” In the video, Carpenter wears everything from Alaïa and Dilara Findikoglu to Alexandre Vauthier couture and custom Coach (“I always like to heighten fashion and storyline in my videos, it’s playtime for me”) while fabulously and—quite seductively—pleading to her mischievous lover to not embarrass her any longer. “Heartbreak is one thing, my ego’s another/I beg you don’t embarrass me, motherfucker,” she sings. One has to wonder, who could this song be about?

In an Alexandre Vauthier Couture coat.

Photo: Sarah Carpenter

For those well-versed in the Sabrina Carpenter universe, the singer gets arrested at the end of her “Espresso” music video. “I ended the last video getting arrested, so naturally I thought it would be satisfying to start the ‘Please, please, please’ video in jail,” she wrote. “I liked the idea of falling in love with a convict and being shocked and embarrassed every time he commits crimes. I was sooo lucky to get Barry Keoghan in the video cause he is just magic on screen.” There’s no arguing with that.

To celebrate Carpenter’s new single and the announcement of her sixth album (you read that right, this didn’t happen overnight!), the video’s director and Vogue contributor, Bardia Zeinali, and Carpenter’s stylist, Ron Hartleben, joined Vogue for a short and sweet (sorry, I had to) chat about the making of “Please, please, please.”

Every Gilmore Girls Christmas Episode, Ranked

To that end, below, a power ranking of all the Gilmore Girls Christmas episodes:

I Want What They Could Have Had: Hugh Grant and Luann de Lesseps

Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples—or would-be couples—that give us hope for our own romantic futures, and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.

I try to stay reasonably up-to-date on my Hugh Grant news, which is easy enough when said news tends to be along the lines of, “Hugh Grant steps out in London wearing a sweater” (likely place for him to be and likely item for him to be wearing). Yet we Hugh-heads have been blessed with all kinds of interesting news lately. Not only was it confirmed that Grant will reprise his iconic role as Daniel Cleaver in the upcoming fourth installment of the Bridget Jones’s Diary film series, but he is also at the center of a veritable kissing imbroglio this week. On Friday, Real Housewives of New York alum Luann de Lesseps reported that she and the 64-year-old actor had engaged in a little makeout at a Hamptons restaurant on some unspecified prior date.

“A girlfriend of mine called me and was like, ‘Hugh Grant is at Pierre’s.’ I said, ‘I’ll be right over.’ I called and said, ‘Get the table right next to Hugh Grant.’ I had my family over, my brother was visiting me, and I said, ‘Let’s go,’” de Lesseps told the site TooFab. “I pushed out my chair real fast, and I bumped into him—flirting 101—I bumped into him and said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ He knows who I am because I know Andy [Cohen]. I go, ‘I’m so sorry. Can I buy you a shot? I feel terrible.’ He goes, ‘Okay, but I’ll come have a shot with you if you do one with me.’ Before you know it, we are taking shots and making out…heavily at the table! My brother was like, ‘I can’t believe you’re making out with Hugh Grant,’ and I was like, ‘Neither can I.’”

Beautifully enough, Grant actually responded to de Lesseps’s memory of their alleged kissing session on Monday, writing on X: “Steady on. I do remember meeting a charming RHNY in a restaurant, but I’d like to stress it was about 15 years ago. I don’t recall shots or kissing, but her memory might be better than mine.”

Margot Robbie Will Play Cathy to Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights

If you’ve still yet to fully recover from Saltburn’s bathtub scene, then it’s perhaps best to look away now: Oscar-winning provocateur Emerald Fennell has set her sights on her next project, and her choice is sure to be a divisive one.

On July 12, the director took to X to share an illustration of a ghostly skeleton by artist Katie Buckley. At its heart sits the title Wuthering Heights, and below it the strapline “A film by Emerald Fennell.” Above the image, it reads, “Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad,” the immortal words Heathcliff utters after the tragic death of Catherine Earnshaw.

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Given her last feature, and Promising Young Woman before it, were both about obsession—the former about one student’s infatuation with another, and the latter about a woman’s single-minded determination to avenge the death of her best friend—the decision to adapt Emily Brontë’s seminal tale of doomed love, as well as the accompanying tagline, make perfect sense.

However, it did leave us with a number of questions, too. Will this be a faithful period adaptation, or a modern-day update? How will it compare to the countless other big-screen renderings of this particular story, from Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon’s 1939 version, to the 1992 film starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 reimagining with Kaya Scodelario and James Howson?

Would it be Barry Keoghan, I wondered, who’d don a waistcoat and scraggly mane to play our brooding Byronic hero? And who could possibly take the part of Cathy? Well, at least on that front, we now have some answers: on September 23, it emerged that it was not the Irish Oscar nominee but—staggeringly—his Saltburn co-star Jacob Elordi who’d be delivering Heathcliff’s impassioned monologues, while Margot Robbie, now the world’s most ubiquitous blonde after Barbie herself, would (presumably) be going brunette to embody his tormented paramour. The latter will also be producing through her company, LuckyChap, after having backed Fennell’s last two films, too.

Timeless Wedding Movies for Every Romantic

It’s easy to forget that Steel Magnolias—one of the great dramedies of the 1980s—kicks off with the preparations for a big ol’ Southern wedding. That’s where we first meet the film’s firecracker women: There’s mother of the bride-to-be, M’Lynn (Sally Field); hair stylist Truvy (Dolly Parton); beauty assistant Annelle (Daryl Hannah); town grouch Oiser (Shirley McLaine); Oiser’s bestie, Clairee (Olympia Dukakis); and, of course, the “blush and bashful” bride herself, Shelby (Julia Roberts). But even without that all-star cast and their unforgettable one-liners, Steel Magnolias would be worth a watch for its over-the-top wedding. Think: a red velvet armadillo cake, outrageous guests, and a cotton-candy-pink color palette.

Isabella Rossellini on Conclave, Faith, and Farm Life