Category Arts

“Vogue: Inventing the Runway,” an immersive new exhibition exploring the history of the modern runway show, will open this fall at Lightroom in London.

With the space’s astonishing four-story-tall walls as a backdrop, from November 13 through April 26, 2025, visitors can experience and interact with era-defining runway presentations up close, and at an unprecedented scale. The exhibition’s production will combine animation, state-of-the-art sound design, and a score of classical and pop music to evoke the many iconic shows that have helped shape the cultural landscape.

“At Vogue, we’ve been lucky enough over the decades to see many incredible runway shows, which have often told the story of fashion as much as the clothes themselves,” says Anna Wintour, chief content officer, Condé Nast, and global editorial director, Vogue. “This Lightroom experience is a wonderful opportunity for a lot more people to experience first-hand the thrill of watching the history of fashion unfold right in front of them.”

Extending from the intimate couture salons of early 20th-century Europe to the mass-media extravaganzas of today, “Inventing the Runway” connects the past to the present and future of fashion, utilizing Vogue’s extensive archive and contributor network to create an experience that unites the industry’s leading creative voices.

With a robust mix of participating fashion houses, including Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga, Chanel, Comme des Garçons, Dior, Iris Van Herpen, Marc Jacobs, Thom Browne, and Yohji Yamamoto, the exhibition will examine how fashion shows became the ultimate statement of a designer’s vision.

Tickets to “Vogue: Inventing the Runway” are available now.

Vogue Club has teamed up with Lightroom London to give you 20% savings on tickets, learn more.

When I meet Fiona via video chat, the pitbull-retriever mix is standing innocently on a painting in progress on Leslie Martinez’s Dallas studio floor. It’s startling to see, but the artist is unfazed. “She walks around on all this stuff—she lives with it,” says Martinez. “I work in a way that is very unprecious. Anybody could just walk all over the material, and that’s fine.”

Artists with dogs quickly learn the necessity of being unprecious with their artworks, according to the seven rapidly rising artists Vogue spoke with recently. But for the most part, these art dogs implicitly understand to steer clear of the works; mishaps are rare. And what they supply artists seems to equal or surpass the care or attention they demand.

When it comes to going on walks, for example, “there’s value to the interruption,” says Martinez; they are more of a generative interlude than an unwelcome disruption. “I can get inspiration from the light or little things shimmering on the ground and come back with a refreshed sense of energy.” Or as Brooklyn artist Dominique Fung puts it of her dog: “He breaks me out of my thought patterns. If I didn’t have a dog, I would just spiral.”

In fact, many say dogs bring them back to their humanity. New York artist Jean Shin calls her dog “a reminder of how we all as a species need fresh water or air or a break. We, as artists, often think of just the work, and in the flow, hours pass and we realize we haven’t moved our bodies or taken a break. Seeing him take pleasure in watching birds or chasing things or smelling—to be aware of our surroundings, to play, those are all things we all need but sacrifice for our work.” Los Angeles artist rafa esparza adds: “As artists, we can easily get absorbed into the studio. A dog that shows you unconditional love and needs that in return has been a humbling, grounding experience.”

Many artists credit their dogs for instituting a healthier work-life balance. “After hour four or so, she starts whining,” says Chicago artist Yvette Mayorga of her dog. “It’s actually helpful because I can be such a workaholic and not listen to my body. She helps set the boundaries.”

Here, in the fair Vogue studio where we lay our scene, two star-crossed lovers, Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, take a moment to answer some rapid-fire questions for the latest installment of Off the Cuff. The young actors, who make their joint Broadway debuts this fall in a new production of Romeo and Juliet directed by Sam Gold, convened a few days before opening night to talk music, accents, stand-out red carpet moments, and much, much more.

Their new show may be scored by the genius Jack Antonoff, but Connor’s favorite song at the moment is…Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Lilac Wine”? Swoon! And given the choice between Moo Deng and Pesto, Zegler, who is famously pretty online, is Team Pesto. (For his part, Connor does not appear to have heard either name in all his life.) Yet both parties are excited for Glicked next month—you know, Gladiator II and Wicked?—they agree that public restrooms are very strange places to meet fans, and they both loved Connor’s sparkly full Loewe look at Vogue World: London.

As for what Mirren told Zegler when she was cast as Juliet, or whether Connor rates Zegler or his Heartstopper co-star Joe Locke the better love interest? You’ll just have to watch the full video above to find out.

Director: Madison Coffey
Director Of Photography: Josh Herzog
Editor: Michael Suyeda

Producers: Rahel Gebreyes, Gabriela Marie Safa
Associate Producer: Lea Donenberg
Assistant Camera/Camera Operator: Jack Belisle
Assistant Camera/Gaffer: Esteban Veras
Audio: Nicole Maupin
Production Assistant: Rafael Vasquez

Set Designer: Lauren Bahr
Set Design: Assistants Tom Henry, Maggie Fitzpatrick

Production Coordinator: Ava Kashar
Production Manager: Natasha Soto-Albors
Line Producer: Romeeka Powell
Senior Director, Production Management: Jessica Schier

Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow
Post Production Coordinator: Scout Alter
Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo
Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch
Associate Director, Post Production: Nicholas Ascanio

Entertainment Editor: Keaton Bell
Director, Content Production: Rahel Gebreyes
Senior Director, Digital Video: Romy van den Broeke
Senior Director, Programming: Linda Gittleson
VP, Video Programming: Thespena Guatieri

Image Courtesy of SEA LIFE Melbourne Aquarium

How long did that take?

It’s an obvious first question when looking at the work of artist Liza Lou. She has used the same material—glass beads—for more than three decades, painstakingly applying millions of tiny dazzlers one by one to create her painterly installations.

“I have a weird relationship to time,” Lou admits. “Everything that I make, you have to accept that it’s going to take a while. It’s part of the material. It’s baked into the practice.” It’s not so much that she is patient by nature, she tells me from her studio in Joshua Tree, but rather slow and methodical.

This month, New Yorkers have two new opportunities to marvel at the results of Lou’s careful toiling. On September 5, Lehmann Maupin gallery opens “Liza Lou: Painting,” an exhibition of new abstract works that crank up the bravado of Abstract Expressionism by using her signature beads as paint. These works are some of the most potent examples yet of Lou’s ongoing interest in the intersection of fine art and craft.

The next week, on September 13, the Brooklyn Museum unveils Lou’s installation Trailer (1998–2000), which will remain on long-term view in the museum’s lobby. Trailer is the masculine counterpoint to Lou’s best-known work, Kitchen (1991–96), her paean to the hidden labor of women in the Whitney’s collection. The inside of Trailer is similarly covered in tens of millions of glass beads, but where Kitchen is a colorful confection of domesticity, Trailer is a grayscale film noir. Hanging amid the rifle, whiskey bottle, and typewriter is an air of something gone horribly wrong.

In all her art, “the through lines have been playing with heroics,” Lou says. But these two September events—one a new body work, the other a resurrected old one that has not been on public view in over a decade—have a fundamental connection. Lou is peeling back the layers of a certain kind of maleness: the lone wolf, the madman, the genius left to his own devices.

The new painting works have been in her brain for a long time. Though she has applied her beads in a painterly way before—as in her clouds series from 2018—Lou says this is a breakthrough. “It’s the culmination of 35 years of working with this material.”

If you are sensing a frisson of excitement in the Manhattan area today, that may well be because the 2024 Tony nominees were announced this morning. (Installed at Sofitel New York on West 44th Street, Renée Elise Goldsberry and Jesse Tyler Ferguson made a deeply charming double-act as they read off the categories.) In a season filled with several thrilling debuts—as well as vaunted revivals, reunions, and other happy returns—the list of nominated actors, directors, playwrights, composers, and other theater-makers this year was filled with all manner of exciting names, from rising stars to Broadway veterans.

Of the former category: Jocelyn Bioh, who made her Broadway playwriting debut with Jaja’s African Hair Braiding last fall, was thrilled at her show’s five nominations (for best new play, best scenic design of a play, best costume design of a play, best sound design of a play, and best direction of a play). “This is a dream bigger than any I could have imagined sitting in the chair of a Harlem hair braiding shop as a kid,” Bioh said. “That little girl never thought a day like today was possible, but it is one I will never, ever forget.”

Television writer Bekah Brunstetter, who penned the book for Michael Greif and Schele Williams’s inventive musical adaptation of The Notebook, also received a nod for her debut Broadway production. “I’m back home in LA, so I was jolted awake early this morning by the BEST KIND OF EARTHQUAKE,” she enthused in an email. “Working with Ingrid [Michaelson, who wrote the music] on The Notebook has been such a true collaboration in every sense of the word; we built this together over the years, so I see this nomination as something the whole creative team gets to celebrate together as a family. I’m so grateful to be included in this bananas season of talent.”

Kristoffer Diaz, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2010, made his own Broadway debut this month with Alicia Keys’s Hell’s Kitchen. Reacting to his nomination, one of that show’s 13, he said, “In the mid-’90s I saw three shows that changed my life: Rent, Crazy for You, and John Leguizamo’s Spic-O-Rama. Somewhere in there I made up my mind that this was what I was going to do with my life. Broadway was always the goal. The Tonys were always the goal. And today, I get to celebrate my show that was directed by Michael Greif (Rent) in the Shubert Theater (Crazy for You), and John Leguizamo was the first person to text me congrats. It means the world to be recognized for this show alongside this company… and the best collaborator I’ve ever worked with (Alicia Keys!) and hopefully make New York City proud.”

Nadya Tolokonnikova isn’t one to dither. Known best as a co-founder of Pussy Riot, she has—after being released from prison, where she was sentenced to two years on charges of “hooliganism” due to her part in Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” protest at a Moscow cathedral—founded a nonprofit to track human-rights abuses in Russia’s prisons; founded an independent Russian news organization, Mediazona, later demonized by Vladimir Putin’s administration as a “foreign agent”; designed an (ongoing) clothing and accessories collection; written an inspirational and righteous autobiography and guide to activism; become something of a pop star; and married a thought leader in the Web3 space.

More recently, though—betwixt and between continued political actions—Tolokonnikova has been prioritizing the art practice that’s at the root of virtually everything she’s done. “Rage,” the first museum show of her contemporary visual and performance work, opens tomorrow at OK Linz, a contemporary art space in Linz, Austria. (It’s on through October 20.)

The exhibition, curated by Michaela Seiser and Julia Staudach, unfolds over two floors and includes 11 works in Tolokonnikova’s Icons series of acrylic calligraphy on canvas; six works in her Dark Matter series, which incorporates calligraphy and symbols loosely based on the orthodox cross; her prison archive; a video archive of Pussy Riot actions including “Punk Prayer”; a very recent work involving reclaimed sex dolls; a replica of her Siberian prison cell; and five art films—including, perhaps most notably, “Putin’s Ashes,” which debuted last year at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, was just acquired for the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum, and is making its European debut at OK Linz.

The first room, “Rage Chapel,” features the works from the Icons series—among them, the triptych My Motherland Loves Me and I Love My Motherland, a reference to both Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me and Oleg Kulik’s I Bite America and America Bites Me—as well as Pussy Riot’s 2014 action at the Sochi Olympics, “Putin Will Teach You How to Love the Motherland,” which saw Tolokonnikova and her fellow performers beaten, whipped, and thrown to the ground by Cossack militia. The second room is centered around “Putin’s Ashes,” an installation based on a 2022 performance in an anonymous location which featured 12 Pussy Riot participants from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus burning a 10-foot-tall portrait of Vladimir Putin, with the ashes later bottled and labeled. Hanging above the staircase leading to the second floor is a monumental engraved knife, Damocles Sword, along with three tall velvet banners, with Tolokonnikova’s calligraphy repeating a kind of incantation: “Love is stronger than death.” (Another triptych, Love Is Stronger Than Fear, is dedicated to Tolokonnikova’s friend and colleague Alexey Navalny, who was murdered in a Russian penal colony in February.)

It’s always a pleasure to see Jay-Z—largely because it might mean Beyoncé is somewhere in the room—but his appearance at the 2024 Tony Awards was particularly exciting. Sure, he and Alicia Keys have performed “Empire State of Mind” live together before, but hearing the singers unite on the Grammy-winning song at the Tonys felt like a fitting tribute to Hell’s Kitchen, the award show’s New York City setting, and, indeed, to the New York institution that is Broadway.

The energy of the song—which followed host Ariana DeBose’s opening performance of an original song called “This Party’s for You”—was undaunted by the fact that Jay-Z technically joined the song via video feed from the David H. Koch Theater’s lobby (a fact that did not go unnoticed on social media). Nevertheless, the performance was undeniably fun and brought a welcome note of hometown pride to the proceedings, which have been challenged in past years by COVID closures on Broadway and a WGA strike that forced last year’s Tonys ceremony to go unscripted.