JESSICA REPETTO | LIVE FASHION ILLUSTRATIONS

Category: Arts, Fashion

INCREDIBLE LIVE FASHION ILLUSTRATIONS BY VOGUE ILLUSTRATOR JESSICA REPETTO VIA MIDNIGHTDREAMBOAT.

VOGUE STUDIO TOUR | NARCISO RODRIGUEZ

Category: Fashion, Spaces

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To kick off a new series where we give you an exclusive look inside designers’ studios, Vogue visited the Gramercy work space of Narciso Rodriguez, where the designer and his team were busy finalizing their resort collection, planning their second season of accessories, and sourcing fabrics for spring 2013. The studio is full of markers for milestones and memories; in the reception area, there’s the first piece of furniture Rodriguez ever bought: a cognac leather Le Corbusier chair. The walls are lined with photos of Vogue covers (Angelina Jolie, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Jennifer Aniston are featured prominently) and personal portraits that Rodriguez collects, hung from floor to ceiling as in a Parisian salon. Walking back, the designer opens a giant black cabinet to reveal rows of monochromatic looks, with touches of pale pink and pops of safety-cone orange mixed in. “The archive is the heart of the company,” Rodriguez says, pulling out a runway version of the black silk dress embroidered with red and black chiffon that Michelle Obama wore the first time she joined her husband, the president-elect, onstage in Chicago in November 2008. In the design area (“This is the creative madness!”) boards with bags in 20 color stories are lined up against the wall with bolts of fabric and dress forms with paper jewels pinned at the neck. It’s glamour in the making, but there are also personal touches, from Rodriguez’s table where he keeps his current reading materials (copies of Artforum and Vogue), a photo of his three dogs, John, Cliff, and Lucky, and a shot of the designer with Kate Moss, backstage at Calvin Klein in the 1990s, when Rodriguez was collection designer. “I’ve always wanted to document every moment,” Rodriguez says. “I look at life for inspiration.”

READ MORE AND SEE ALL THE PHOTOS FROM VOGUE.COM.

MERYL STREEP | A FORCE OF NATURE

Category: Arts, Entertainment, Fashion

“Streep has not cared about anything she has done in a long time as much as this, she says. “Because the material embedded in it is a lot of what I’ve been thinking about. The themes in the film, which I don’t feel like underlining, have interested me for a while. And you never see these subjects covered in films normally, and so that was very thrilling.” What subjects? I ask, picking up my underlining pen—women? Power? “Women and power and diminishment of power and loss of power,” she says. “And reconciliation with your life when you come to a point when you’ve lived most of it and it’s behind you. I have always liked and been intrigued by older people, and the idea that behind them lives every human trauma, drama, glory, jokes, love.” She was close to her grandmother, and remembers her saying that her husband, Streep’s grandfather, would be out playing golf when the school-board elections would come up. “My grandmother didn’t give a damn about politics, but she really cared who was going to be on the school board, and she would go out, interrupt him on the eighth hole, and give him a piece of paper with the names of the candidates on it and tell him who to vote for—but she was not allowed to vote. She was not allowed to vote for dogcatcher in her town, never mind president. Never mind imagine being president.”

She has played so many roles in the 35 years of her movie career. She never was an ingenue; when her first film came out, in 1977 (Julia, with Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave), she was 28. In the eighties, the era of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, she made huge movies in a Babel of accents and dialects: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Sophie’s Choice, Silkwood, Out of Africa, A Cry in the Dark. In 1989, she turned 40. “I remember turning to my husband and saying, ‘Well, what should we do? Because it’s over.’ ” The following year, she received three offers to play witches in different movies. She saw the subtext pretty clearly: “Once women passed childbearing age they could only be seen as grotesque on some level.” But with The Bridges of Madison County (1995) she captured “the audience that were my girls, that I knew they’d get it if we could get the movie made,” hence Dancing at Lughnasa and One True Thing, which were also about “women whose usefulness had passed.” And her last five years saw hit follow hit: The Devil Wears Prada, Mamma Mia!, Julie & Julia, It’s Complicated. That last film, she says, “in the period of Silkwood, could never have been made, with a 60-year-old actress deciding between her ex-husband and another man. With a 40-year-old actress it would never have been made.”

Now she’s 62, playing Margaret Thatcher—from 49 to 85—and the cover star ofVogue. She has such a big laugh bubbling under her serene expression that it finally bursts out as I duck around the o word: “I was joking with the ladies earlier,” she said (when they were having their picture taken). “And I told them I was probably the oldest person ever to be on the cover of Vogue.””

Read Vicki Wood’s full interview with Meryl Streep on Vogue.com and in Vogue’s January 2012 issue, coming soon.