In this film about a mid-century fashion designer (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his muse (Vicky Krieps), a stunning mauve dress, a melancholy rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” and Day-Lewis searching a ballroom full of costumed revelers for Krieps make for a New Year’s Eve you won’t soon forget.
Stereophonic Stars Sarah Pidgeon and Juliana Canfield on Music, Friendship, and Their Twin Broadway Debuts
A strange thing happens to time during Stereophonic, playwright David Adjmi and director Daniel Aukin’s sensational play at the John Golden Theatre in New York. The show’s three hours and 10 minutes collapse a full year, from June 1976 to June 1977, that a band—made up of vocalist Diana (Sarah Pidgeon), lead guitarist Peter (Tom Pecinka), keys player Holly (Juliana Canfield), bassist Reg (Will Brill), and drummer Simon (Chris Stack)—spends recording their new album, with engineers Grover (Eli Gelb) and Charlie (Andrew R. Butler) manning the board. And, to be clear, those three hours and 10 minutes don’t fly by. This is a play that revels in silences—whether tense, shocked, or sad—as much as it does in rollicking sound. (Will Butler of Arcade Fire composed the songs, which the actors play on real instruments.) The meticulously rendered recording-studio set, by David Zinn, also never changes, so you’d be forgiven for having little sense of how much time has passed by the end of Act I (a month), or for missing that in Act IV, they’re no longer in Sausalito, but Los Angeles.
Yet the action, such as it is—rooted in the sometimes fraught, frequently tedious, occasionally revelatory process of making art—casts a heady spell. Stereophonic enjoyed a sold-out run off-Broadway last fall, at Playwrights Horizons, before transferring to Broadway this April, where it’s received still more acclaim (and four Drama League Award nominations). And both Sarah Pidgeon, 27, and Juliana Canfield, 32, invoke sweeping, unknowable forces (“the universe”; “a great deal of mysticism”) when asked to describe what first attracted them to the piece.
Before Pidgeon—best known until now for her roles in Prime Video’s The Wilds and Hulu’s Tiny Beautiful Things—auditioned for the show last May, she’d read for it in March 2020. (The pandemic scuttled plans for a spring 2021 production.) Those intervening years would prove essential to her interpretation of the searching, slightly neurotic Diana; emotional notes that she could only approximate at 23 had new resonance in her later 20s. “There were things that she was talking about that I could see in my own life more clearly,” Pidgeon reflects one Tuesday morning during previews. Not only did the fracturing love story between Diana and Peter—who talk, and then fight, about ambition and professional pressures and having children—seem a lot less abstract to her than it used to, but Pidgeon’s perspective on her own career as an artist had also evolved in important ways. Diana, who reckons more explicitly with her image as a rockstar than anyone else in the band, “doesn’t necessarily understand her agency and the power that she has [as a songwriter], because she relies so much on her boyfriend to help her make it happen,” Pidgeon explains. As an actor, she could recognize that self-consciousness. “There’s so much rejection in this industry,” she says. “I think it can open up a lot of self-doubt and second-guessing, this feeling that you can’t do this job unless multiple people say that they want to hire you and give you the opportunity.”
Timothée Chalamet’s Unhinged A Complete Unknown Press Tour Is Actually Genius
It started with an amusing cameo at his very own lookalike contest, a New York event that started a global pop culture phenomenon. The contest garnered so much attention that one Timothée hopeful ended up arrested, and the gathering was shut down by police. Chalamet’s impromptu appearance was lauded as “the funniest thing he could possibly have done,” and let’s be real: it was.
A Look Back at Some of the Best Moments From Vogue World: New York and London
See all of Vogue’s coverage from Vogue World 2024 in Paris here!
Vogue World: Paris 2024 is just around the corner, and while we eagerly look forward to seeing what the City of Lights has to offer, there is plenty of already iconic fashion history to pore over from the first two installments, in New York (2022) and London (2023). So, ahead of Sunday’s show, revisit all the best moments from Vogue Worlds past, below.
Serena Williams kicking off Vogue World: New York in custom Balenciaga
‘Liking This Woman Is a Part of My Identity Now’: Comedian Nikki Glaser on Attending 22 Taylor Swift Eras Concerts
“I can go longer! Sorry, I’m giving such long-winded answers,” Nikki Glaser tells me when we hit the 40 minutes allotted for our phone interview. The subject of our conversation? Not her twice Emmy-nominated Max special Someday You’ll Die, not the song she wrote and recorded for the special, and not the viral zingers she delivered in Netflix’s The Roast of Tom Brady, either. (The internet unanimously anointed Glaser the funniest—and most brutal—of all the roasters.) “I could talk about Taylor Swift all day,” she adds. And that’s actually the purpose of our call: to understand how, at such an intensely busy period in her career, Glaser has found the time and unwavering enthusiasm to attend 17 of Taylor Swift’s Eras concerts. By the end of the tour, the tally will hit 22.
In the end, the answer is pretty simple: “It makes me feel so good. I don’t drink anymore, and I try not to do drugs—and honestly, this is just like a really good drug,” she says. “I’m kind of addicted.” Fans have spotted her, time and time again, installed not in the celebrity-heavy VIP tents but in the ticketed seats, wearing bedazzled getups and singing her heart out like no one is watching. It’s pure passion, with a capital P.
“I get a little bit sad at the idea that it’s going to run out at some point, and I’ll probably have to replace it with something else,” she reflects at one point in the call. “But it‘s not really hurting anyone, so I just lean into it. The more I embrace it, the less I’m embarrassed by it. At this point in my life, I’m not embarrassed by it at all, or I wouldn’t be talking to you about it.”
Without further ado, Glaser on Swift:
‘I’ve Done My Research, and I’ve Made My Choice:’ Taylor Swift Publicly Endorses Kamala Harris for President
After weeks of rumors and speculation regarding when—if ever—Taylor Swift would endorse vice president and 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris for president, the singer-songwriter finally did so with a bang on Tuesday night, signaling her support for the Democratic candidate on social media shortly after Harris’s debate with former president and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Posting a photo of herself and her cat to Instagram (a pointed reference to J.D. Vance’s viral invocation of the specter of the “childless cat lady”), Swift wrote: “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”
She went on: “I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.” In addition to decrying Trump’s use of predatory AI to give the false impression that Swift had endorsed him, Swift also urged her followers to make sure they’re registered to vote in the 2024 election, linking to the Vote.gov website from her Instagram stories.
I’m not saying Taylor Swift is going to singlehandedly save democracy or anything, but…have you seen the power of the Swifties for Kamala? With her loyal fan army behind her, it seems entirely possible that Swift actually will have some effect on this election. Harris’s running mate Tim Walz, for one, certainly seems to think so, praising Swift’s message shortly after she posted it.
“I’m grateful to Taylor Swift, and I say that as a cat owner,” he told Rachel Maddow late on Tuesday. “That was eloquent and clear and that’s the type of courage we need in America.”
On Sophie’s Posthumous Album, a Final Disappearing Act
Some girls want to be known, while others prefer to remain obscure. Scottish-born singer and producer Sophie was for the girls who wanted to hide behind the mixer board while still crafting their own magic—and Sophie, her posthumous record, attempts to reconcile both of those ideals.
Known for the crunchy, glitchy production on her hard-hitting songs, Sophie cultivated an intensely private public profile, remaining all but unknown beyond her stage name before she came out as trans in 2017. She was a producer, in charge of her own image and sound, yet what she emanated more than anything was a kind of angelic alienism. Sophie only released one studio album—the highly acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides (2018)—and a mixtape during her lifetime, and both were heavily instrumental, with several songs featuring a single phrase repeated over and over, stretched almost to its linguistic limits, until robotic clamor and distortion took over. Her very earliest releases, like 2015’s “BIPP” and “Lemonade,” just floated in the ether for a while, with no one quite knowing their context or creator. (In 2021, Vince Staples recalled that some speculated Sophie was just another A.G. Cook project.) The 2017 visual for “It’s Okay to Cry”—which marked the first time most fans saw Sophie’s face—placed her before an ever-changing backdrop of clouds, rainbows, and a night sky full of stars, embracing a neither here-nor-there-ness, while the viciously playful video for “Faceshopping” from 2018 revels in wild manipulations of her visage. Harron Walker has previously written about the “dissociative” element in Sophie’s music, the way that it crystallizes being both present and absent at the same time, in the same body. Sophie channeled a more angelic plane, where bodies move in and out of visibility under the flashing club lights.
Liam Payne, Former One Direction Member, Is Dead at 31
Liam Payne, the singer and songwriter who drew international fame as a member of British boy band One Direction, died on Wednesday at the age of 31 after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The circumstances of Payne‘s fall have not yet been confirmed, but an outpouring of grief from fellow celebrities and fans alike has already met the news of his passing on social media.
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Remi Wolf Has Big Ideas
Occasionally, when Remi Wolf talks about her new album, Big Ideas, she lulls herself into autopilot, her body operating with no input from her brain. During a recent meeting, as she discusses studio logistics in her syrupy alto (“We worked at Electric Lady in New York, we worked at Conway in LA…”), she reaches across the table and snags a french fry off my plate.
“Do you want any ketchup?” I ask her.
Immediately, the spell is broken, leaving Wolf in a state of pure shock. She shrieks with laughter. “I’m sorry, I’m just, like, talking and eating your fries!” she says. “I was just…mind empty.”
There is a funny dissonance between 28-year-old Wolf’s cherubic face—with a halo of dark curls to match—and her tendency to pepper her sentences with “fucking” and “dude.” (She also has a wonderfully eclectic sense of style: for our lunch, she wears a long-sleeve tie-dyed shirt, a pearl choker with a large silver pendant, and mini platform Uggs.) It’s eminently likable: Striding into the Hollywood diner where we sat down together, she’s greeted with a wide grin and a warm “Welcome back!” from our waitress. Wolf has turned this unassuming restaurant into her office recently, taking meetings with various label executives ahead of her album’s release on July 12. “I wish she was here for this interview,” she says of one waitress who, unprompted, told Wolf—and a table full of execs—about her handmade “Lorena Bobbitt Rules!” T-shirt. “She was like, ‘Do you guys want more coffee? Also, I made this shirt. She chopped off her boyfriend’s penis.’ And we were just like, ‘Cool.’”
Big Ideas continues Wolf’s strong track record of clear-as-a-bell vocals, funky production, and vibrant lyricism. While her first LP, Juno, was produced entirely in a bedroom at the height of the COVID pademic, Wolf jumped at the chance to record Big Ideas in hallowed studios like Electric Lady, whose rich history she hoped would bleed into the music. On the new album, she paints vivid scenes of coughing up frogs and spending a loved-up Halloween in Chicago over zany guitar riffs and synths. Also present are pronounced jazz and disco influences, dialed up to match the album’s energetic spirit.
One recurring theme in Wolf’s music is her fluid sexuality. Since her first EP, You’re a Dog! (2019), she has referred to both men and women as the subjects of her desire (and, often, frustration). “When I first entered the music industry, it was a fight to be seen,” she says. In the early years of her career, she admits that she was reluctant to be branded as an LGBTQ+ artist. “I’m just trying to be myself. I’m writing a lot about my literal life experiences,” she says. She worried that a label would not only push her into a box but force her to speak for more than just herself. “I have no authority on anything, really—on gender politics, on queer politics. I don’t have anything to say other than you do you, and I’m gonna do me.” In the five years since You’re a Dog!, however, she feels that attitudes toward sexuality—and queerness in particular—have shifted “to a place where it’s like, who gives a fuck?” she says. “We don’t have to make it a big deal—which I love.”
Why It Matters That Kamala Can Cook
What would it mean to have a foodie as president? Someone who has manned the fries station at McDonald’s in her 20s; someone who proudly describes how she dry brines her Thanksgiving turkey; someone who is such a self-described foodie that she has declared that she aspires to, in addition to becoming president of the United States, write a cookbook. We could find out soon.
Of course, Kamala Harris is hardly the first politician to use food to align themselves with particular communities, values, and traditions. Virtually every campaigner on the trail has photo ops with food, with results ranging from weird (John Kerry ordering Swiss on his cheesesteak in Philly) to weirder (Elizabeth Warren awkwardly holding a corn dog at the Iowa State Fair) to weirdest (Gerald Ford infamously eating a tamale with its husk on because he didn’t know to remove it). Harris, though, is the only candidate who doesn’t just awkwardly eat; she can cook, too, and she’s not afraid to talk about it.
When Harris cooks, it doesn’t feel like a performance. She’s not swanning around in a caftan in a news station’s faux kitchen pretending to stir. She’s detailed. She’s not afraid of a little bourbon and bacon grease. And like any true chef, she’s just the tiniest bit judgmental.
Interestingly, and perhaps counterintuitively, Harris has been relatively quiet about food on the campaign trail: She has let many others, including famous chefs, do the talking for her. She’s been uninterested in dispelling the idea that fast food is “clean” (a Trumpian philosophy) or highlighting the everyday populism of an ice cream cone (Biden’s trick to remind people that he’s young at heart). But just as there’s a difference between talking about food and cooking it, there’s a difference between using food as a political prop and doing the political work to bring policy change that would improve the food system across race and gender lines. No other presidential candidate has so clearly stood as a representation of the ancient associations between women, food, and race. And no other candidate is as poised as Kamala Harris, by virtue both of her identity and her previous political history, to affect change in food.