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Photographed by Angelo Pennetta, Vogue, May 2013

Filled with family treasures and vintage finds, Florence Welch’s first home sings its own tune.

“I went from singing at the Met ball to coming home and sleeping on a mattress in my mom’s living room,” recollects Florence Welch, explaining why, at the age of 26, she has just acquired her first home, and not a moment too soon. “I really needed to move out—my clothes had taken over my bedroom and my brother’s room! My space looked like an old lady’s brain explosion.”

Welch’s new digs in South London, a mere ten-­minute walk from her mother’s residence, is a charmingly livable, small-scale Georgian house—probably originally a worker’s cottage, maybe for an employee of the gasworks that still looms at the end of the block. She chose the area not only for the proximity to Mom’s but because, she says, “the color of the gasworks is so beautiful—I wanted my living room to be that color! It’s like someone turned a smoke machine on.” Plus, she adds, in this part of the city you can round a corner and catch a glimpse of the London Eye or the flags flying high above Parliament.

Click here to shop the look of Florence Welch’s home.

The singer, who has taken a year off from touring to regroup and spend quality time in the studio, describes her new place as a sanctuary, albeit one with crooked door frames and what Welch calls “wonky” stairs. “It’s like being drunk or on a ship—I think it suits me.” To quickly make this house a home, she introduced small changes that ended up having an outsize impact: putting red-and-white bull’s-eye porcelain doorknobs on the kitchen cupboards, creating a “Renaissance corner” with prints and tapestries, and, most strikingly, devoting an entire floor to her ever-expanding clothing collection. Racks heave with vintage velvet cloaks, ermine capelets, and spangled frocks; the green paillette-embroidered Givenchy couture number with the notorious dinosaur bumps that she wore to the Grammys hangs nonchalantly on the back of a door; a dazzling Deco dressing gown becomes an impromptu curtain. (But it is not a fancy-dress party every day—there is also a cupboard full of jeans, though she draws the line at the workaday T-shirt.)

Welch collaborated with interior designer Carolyn Benson, a family friend, to re­imagine the space and source the furniture, which is mostly English and includes a vast desk in a study that is crowded with Florence ephemera: tomes on Diaghilev and Basquiat; McSweeney’s postcards; a note that reads, “You cannot burn what is already on fire”; a framed caricature of her grandfather Colin Welch, a former deputy editor at The Daily Telegraph. She is an inveterate antiquer, finding the paisley chair in the living room at a very traditional upper-crust fair in Battersea—“It was all pug dogs and tweed,” she says, laughing. (Full disclosure: After our house tour we repair to Alfies Antique Market, where Welch purchases, in less than an hour, a quartet of elaborate coats and a chiffon tea dress.)

A monumental gilt sleigh bed whose head- and footboard are covered with minuscule floral–printed fabric dominates the bedroom, where the color scheme relies heavily on a particularly British, particularly lovely shade of green halfway between celadon and eau de nil. Welch loves vinyl records, and turntables grace the surfaces of virtually every room, including what she says is her favorite refuge—the bathroom, with its old-fashioned wood-paneled tub and mirrored dressing table. Asked if a flat-screen perhaps lurks behind the custom-made scrollwork doors in the bedroom or is hiding in the living-room fireplace, she replies, “No—I don’t even have one at the moment, though I love TV! I bought a vintage seventies TV, but it overheated and blew out.”

See our slideshow of Florence Welch’s best red-carpet looks.

She may captivate audiences around the globe with her mercurial charisma and powerful phrasings, but Welch claims she can still travel pretty much unmolested through her neighborhood. She is a keen cyclist, and the British firm Bobbin made a custom model for her in black and purple: “I wanted green, but they said it would be too conspicuous.” She feels she has achieved just the right level of fame—it’s fun and flattering when fans recognize her, but she insists she can still spin around these familiar streets and shop at the local supermarket without stopping traffic.

Welch confesses that she thought she might end up spending most of her nights on Mom’s floor, and while she does try to visit every Sunday, during the rest of the week she is clearly relishing her new role as master of her own house. Looking around at all the special Florence touches—the faded Masonic print under wavy old glass found in the Dallas shop Dolly Python; the saber discovered in Scotland when she followed a sword sale sign—she sighs. “There are still some moments when I get a bit spun out—it’s my first time living away. I thought it would be kind of, Where am I? But it definitely feels like home.”

Click here to see Ferebee Taube’s APT with LSD.

Take a look at Asia Baker’s Mill Neck Estate.

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Photographed by Matthieu Salvaing, Vogue, September 2014

Lily Allen’s country house, hidden away down a deliciously long drive in the depths of the En­glish Cotswolds, is the sort of place Mrs. Tiggy-winkle might have lived. The ancient front door, reached through a charming cobbled courtyard dripping with white hydrangeas, has the date 1660 carved in stone above it. The only indication that this is home to a 29-year-old singer-songwriter rather than a fictional hedgehog is a welcome mat that reads Chanel. “I begged them for it,” says Lily, who has a long-standing relationship with the house.

Today, on a brief hiatus from promoting her third album, Sheezus, the songbird is spending a few days with her daughters, ages two and a half and eighteen months. Her look consists of a textured pale-pink hoodie from Pleats Please, a darker pink tee by Isabel Marant, skinny jeans from MiH, and a pair of golden Nike Air Max sneakers. (“Limited edition—I bought six pairs,” she says.) Her dark hair has a mélange of pink, purple, and fuchsia streaks through it, and her nails are Rihanna-long and painted in a neon ombré design.

The ombré theme extends to the children. The older girl appears, dressed in a multicolored baby-djellaba-type garment. “Shall we go and pick some flowers?” asks Lily, gathering a basket and secateurs in one hand, child in the other. She has her old friend Damien Hirst coming for dinner tomorrow night and wants to make a beautiful arrangement for the table.

On their land, Lily and husband Sam Cooper (who has a successful construction business) have created an English-cottage garden fantasy. There are meadows strewn with wildflowers, dells dotted with daisies, rose gardens, and endless picnic spots by streams or ponds, and as Lily picks armfuls of red poppies and dark pink mallow, she talks about her style. Although she will often put in a chic turn for the red carpet in Vivienne Westwood or Chanel couture, she is, at heart, “a magpie. I was always into naff logos from the eighties—very lary Moschino, leopard-print jeans. I loved a label—I didn’t care if it was real or fake. Now I find real gems—by which I mean things that are cheap—in the flea markets.”

Back inside the house, Lily gives me a tour. The rooms have been given nicknames—the best guest bedroom, with beautiful vintage curtains and a crewelwork bedspread, is Claridges; the Gellybub, Lily says, is a gentleman’s room and is stacked with guitars, comfy armchairs, and shelves full of vinyl. The walls of the Big Room—a double-height sitting room—are densely packed with photographs, drawings, a huge cutout of Lily as a Simpsons character, and various religious icons, which Lily collects. Her study, a cozy room with a tiny sofa and desk, is where she keeps her real treasures—sketches of her by Karl Lagerfeld and Celia Birtwell, and three framed gold discs.

Somehow the day has slipped away, and Lily has still not quite got around to her flower arrangement. “Come back for supper?” she says. “I’m cooking.”

When I return a couple of hours later, Lily is arranging a huge bunch of blooms in a giant cream-colored earthenware jug. Somehow she also manages to simultaneously pour champagne for her guests, roast two chickens, make delicious fresh salads, and entertain the group with her tales from the road. As we eat, the late summer sun sets through a tiny round window facing west, a rash of reds, golds, and oranges. “The light! Look at the light here!” sighs one guest rapturously. “It’s perfect.” Indeed it is perfect for Lily Allen. It’s ombré.

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On a visit to Hawaii last week, I took a break from sun worshipping to visit Doris Duke’s famed Oahu residence, Shangri La. Throughout her life, the tobacco heiress had a series of opulent homes, such as Rough Point in Newport, Rhode Island, and Falcon Lair in Beverly Hills, but the house she created in Hawaii, Shangri La, was the first and only home she built from the ground up. More importantly, perhaps, it was the only home she filled entirely from her own collections—Duke amassed antiquities and art almost as if it were a profession.

She first arrived on the island as a 22-year-old in 1935, during her globe-trotting honeymoon with husband James H. R. Cromwell (with whom she had a short-lived marriage). It was also her first time visiting North Africa, the Middle East, and India, and these travels inspired a lifelong fascination for Islamic art and its collectible treasures.

While the house is grand, its facade suggests otherwise. Quietly tucked into a residential block at Kaalawai, visitors are often surprised to find a simple, windowless white structure abutting a large white wall. It’s behind these walls where the beauty lies, as with much of the architecture she so admired.

Shangri La has a series of stunning interior touches, with splendor hidden from room to room. The dark reception room is lined in Iznik tile, their signature reds still brilliant. The courtyard is shielded by a screen that outlines only hints of the dramatic pavilion awaiting. Supported by mirrored columns and centered by a fountain, the courtyard is very much the heart of the home, and rooms for entertaining extend out from its tile-lined doorways. Other highlights include a Syrian interior from the nineteenth century that is exquisitely hand-painted and lifted from the home of an aristocratic family in Damascus; a columned playhouse that was originally built to emulate Iran’s Chehel Sotoun and was used as a guesthouse; and a marble and precious stone-inlayed bathroom and master bedroom—an homage to the Taj Mahal—that she had built in India.

She wasn’t rigorous about historical accuracy, though. She mixed work from different styles and eras. Her living room sofas, upholstered in their original Dorothy Liebes textiles,  still look thoroughly modern, while a tented blue dining room with fuchsia piping bears an extravagant eighteenth-century Baccarat crystal chandelier.

Shangri La was always evolving—”There was no such word as ‘finished,’” her friend Johnny Gomez once said of Duke’s process. But what remains of Duke’s marvel was perhaps best described by a journalist in 1938: “a perfectly cut gem with a flawless attention to detail, with a certain restraint that sparkles nonetheless.”

Visit shangrilahawaii.org for more information or to schedule a visit.

The post A Rare Look Inside Doris Duke’s Shangri La Home in Hawaii appeared first on Vogue.

When Canadian model Coco Rocha and her husband, interior designer James Conran, learned they were expecting, they knew what they didn’t want: a princess-y, pastel nursery for their Westchester home. While their stone house looks traditional from the outside, the inside is supermodern, with white walls, dark gray floors, pops of color, and lots of art.

“I never wanted a nursery to look too babyish,” the new mother of two-week-old Ioni said by phone. “A baby doesn’t know that it’s in a room just for them. I wanted it to be interesting.” But because Conran paints, even Rocha’s own mother-in-law asked when the pink mural of clouds or flowers would be going up on the wall. “I realized early on I didn’t want any of that.”

Like an increasing number of modern women (this author included), Rocha didn’t want to fill the room with furniture or art that only works in a baby’s room. “James and I are obsessed with finding great art,” said Rocha, “but Alex did a great job of putting them together like that.”

The Alex in question is Alex Reid, the One Kings Lane designer who worked with the couple to create their dream—and shoppable—nursery. After using Pinterest as a jumping-off point, Reid considers this room the super high-octane version of the rest of the house. A collection of furniture from different periods and genres gives the room character and its sense of fun, but there was one piece Rocha and Conran initially couldn’t envision: the black-and-white gingham daybed. “We thought it was too old, too grandma,” she said. “And on top of that, he had all those pillows we thought were too different.”

Now? “It’s a room everyone gravitates to, and we’re so happy we got the couch.”

Shop Vogue Editor Hamish Bowles’s curated picks on One Kings Lane.

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When Karen Elson, fashion’s favorite redhead, submitted her denim selfie, taken at home in Nashville, we oohed at her ingenious way with overalls. And then we aahed at the decor: that day bed! Those pillows! We had to see more. Thankfully, Elson’s Instagram account offered us a warm Southern welcome—and more proof (as if we needed it) that her sense of style ranges far beyond the closet.

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Photographed by Bruce Weber, these pictures originally appeared in “Versace’s Castle in the Sand,” by Charles Gandee, in the December 1994 issue of Vogue.

There will never be another Casa Casuarina—and not only because it was a one-off, custom made in the thirties in homage to Alcázar de Colón, the 1510 home built in Santo Domingo by Christopher Columbus’s son—but because the house, acquired by Gianni Versace in 1992, became the physical representation of a place and moment in time.

Gianni Versace, known for his sexy silhouettes and eye-catching prints, discovered South Beach quite by accident in 1992, the year of his infamous Miss S&M collection. Miami was a layover for the designer; he was headed to Cuba for vacation and stopped to visit his sister Donatella, who was overseeing a shoot there. The affair between Versace and South Beach was a coup de foudre, and he scrapped plans for further travel, purchasing Casa Casuarina instead. Versace spent $2.95 million for the house, which he gutted, and an additional $3.7 million on the adjacent Hotel Revere, which was razed to make room for a garden and swimming pool, among other features. Versace’s new home would be, as Charles Gandee described it in Vogue, “the most visible house on the most trafficked street in the most publicized resort in this country.”

The restoration of Casa Casuarina was a monumental personal extravagance by the head of a family-owned business, one of the few not absorbed into the newly formed luxury conglomerates (the heads of which have taken to building museums of late). It was undertaken to house Versace’s immediate and extended family, and no expense was spared, inside or out. The result was a home fit for an emperor, one that Versace described to Gandee as “Mediterranean, not Deco,” the latter being the prevailing style of the area. So taken was Versace with sunny, vibrant Miami that it inspired his designs (most obviously in 1992’s collection dedicated to South Beach), which in turn influenced the decor. Not only were Versace fabrics used throughout, but scarf prints formed the basis for the trompe-l’oeil embellishments. Instead of pastels, Versace opted for jewel tones, gilded wood, and glittering mosaics. His own designers (including Terry Scott, who refurbished the Biltmore Hotel in Palm Beach, artist Sybil de Bourbon Parme, and Wallace Tutt) were primed for the task with tours of his palazzo in Milan and of his Lake Como villa, as well as of Venice and Versailles, home of an earlier Sun King.

Vogue, wrote Hamish Bowles, the sittings editor on the Bruce Weber shoot, was the first to be allowed in to photograph the Casa Casuarina “in all its Miami Baroque glory.” “The scale and magnificence,” Bowles later reminisced, “were almost comical.” This virtual tour, courtesy of the Vogue archive, shows that they were equally as breathtaking.

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Photographed by Oberto Gili, these pictures originally appeared in “Royalist Leanings,” by Georgina Howell, in the April 1989 issue of Vogue.

Designer, photographer, polyglot, bibliophile, collector—the multitalented and indefatigable Karl Lagerfeld is anything but a dilettante. This is evident in his highly produced shows, often staged in sets that re-create, in great detail, environs like a supermarket or a café—and in his homes. Plural.

In 1989, when Vogue sent photographer Oberto Gili and editor André Leon Talley to document the gilded splendor of Lagerfeld’s Left Bank apartment, the designer was also in possession of a villa and two apartments in Monaco and a château in Brittany, as well as homes in Rome and in Melun—all of which were decorated in the eighteenth-century style, then Lagerfeld’s obsession, as Art Deco had been before, the designer’s m.o. being intense immersion and then deaccession. “I’m a fashion person,” the designer said by way of explanation in The New York Times. “I’m excited by finding things, but in the end there’s an accumulation and I want to get rid of it.” In other words, it’s the hunt that excites Lagerfeld, who, when in the throes of his rococo romance, cornered the market. As Georgina Howell put it in 1989: “When the contingent from the Louvre spot him across the salerooms of Drouot, they draw their fingers across their throats and go back home.”

As evocative of the Age of Enlightenment as Lagerfeld’s Parisian home was, there was nothing remotely cobwebby à la Miss Havisham about it: “Anything dusty, dirty, musty—forget about it here,” Karl Lagerfeld told Vogue. “I like my eighteenth century fresh.” To that end, fabrics were handwoven in Lyons, a bed duplicated from Versailles. Of the nine-room Parisian lair, Talley wrote: “The entire place (and Lagerfeld’s mental condition) might best be described as a Versailles complex.” The designer’s “cure” was an auction, held in Monaco in 2000, which put his historic treasure trove back into circulation and netted a cool $21.7 million.

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Photographed by François Halard, these pictures originally appeared in “The Room with a View,” by Hamish Bowles, in the December 2008 issue of Vogue.

Oscar de la Renta was born in the Dominican Republic, trained in Spain and France, and made his name in New York City. He acquired the moniker “Concorde Couturier” after he was appointed head of Balmain in Paris in 1993. As high-flying as his life was, de la Renta was anything but rootless, maintaining showcase-perfect homes in his native country, in Manhattan, and in Kent, Connecticut, which we’ve pulled from Vogue’s archive to feature here.

Having been introduced to the area by Condé Nast’s Editorial Director at the time, Alexander Liberman, de la Renta bought this American-style clapboard house, built by a House Beautiful editor and surrounded by many verdant acres, in 1971. “When I first saw what became my house—actually, when I first turned into the drive—I knew it was a place I wanted to be,” the designer said in a 2011 interview. “That has never changed.”

The same cannot be said of the house and grounds. De la Renta and his first wife, Françoise Langlade, gutted and altered it to fit their lifestyle. When the widowed designer remarried in 1989, the future of the main structure was perilous: “I very graciously said to Oscar, ‘This house is so hideous; tear it down!’ ” recalled its chatelaine, Annette de la Renta. The house stands, though it went through another series of transformations, inside and out. The stylish duo traded rich, deep-hued Orientalist touches for lighter, British inflections.

“Out went the boulle cabinets and the seraglio scenes,” as Hamish Bowles put it when profiling the house, “and in came gutsy (a favorite adjective) William Kent tables, Elizabethan portraits, and fading country-house chintzes.” It was also expanded to include a dacha-inspired bedroom (a room with a view) built by Ernesto Buch and connected to the main house by a light-filled orangery. “I thought if I wasn’t giving [Annette] a new house,” de la Renta said, “I should give her a new bedroom.”

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Photographed by François Halard, these pictures originally appeared in “Karan Dash,” by Hamish Bowles, in the March 2004 issue of Vogue.

Urban Zen, the name of the philanthropic foundation Donna Karan founded in 2007, also perfectly describes the aesthetic of her glamorous, art-filled Manhattan apartment profiled in Vogue in 2004.

Karan was as hands-on with its creation as she is with her designs, and as solution-focused. (In 1985 the designer famously introduced Seven Easy Pieces, an interchangeable system of dressing for women.) Working with Bonetti Kozerski Studio, she created a light-filled and luminous (the ivory walls are made of Venetian plaster) 7,000-square-foot living space from two classic sixes with views of verdant Central Park. Very Donna are the artifacts from her travels that fill the space, the yoga suite, and the high-tech filtering system to that keeps dust at bay and diffuses aromatherapy oils. “I didn’t want to be in a traditional kind of space—that’s not me,” she told Hamish Bowles. “And I didn’t want to be in a very modern building. That’s not me either.”

Here, from the Vogue Archive, the dramatic views and serene interiors of Donna Karan’s Manhattan refuge.

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Weekday mornings, for Vogue’s Virginia Smith—and working mothers everywhere—are manic (though she does have the benefit of a husband who brings her coffee in bed!). There’s breakfast and lunch to be made, the news to be scanned, emails to be checked, and the school run, not to mention seasonal showings in the four fashion capitols.

Weekends are a different story entirely, because Smith and family occupy two worlds: a hectic, head-down city one, and another that is peaceful and green, the center of which is their converted barn in Ancram, New York. “It’s a totally different pace,” Smith says of her Hudson Valley existence. “Having the very busy other side certainly makes you appreciate this.” “This” includes a beautiful piece of property, inhabited by chickens, bees, and the local deer, as well as a family of doves that has made the old white-painted silo their home. There’s a blue jewel of a pool set away from the house, and a turtle-filled pond. And it’s all surrounded by fields—plowed or planted with corn, and blanketed by the quiet, which isn’t silent, of the country.

Thanks to the rooster, there’s no need for an alarm. “At about 5:30 a.m. he starts going at it,” says Smiths. “But I love the sound—it’s incredible and it doesn’t really always wake me up. We sit out on the deck and have coffee and really just watch the whole day come to life, which is so pretty.”

For watching sunrises and sunsets, a game of badminton on the lawn, or for a peek at the coop and vegetable patch, planted with tomatoes, dill, runner beans, kale, and, unexpectedly, pumpkins (Smith suspects they are the result of seeds from last year’s compost), there is a wall of windows, put in by the couple, as well as multiple decks, on one of which Smith’s husband, designer Patrick Robinson, worked on Paskho, his just launched line, which he’s shipping from upstate, and packing in craft paper wrapped with twine and a feather from the family chickens. That way, Smith explains, “everyone gets a piece of the barn when they get Paskho. We wanted to bring something very personal to it.”

One of the bonuses of country life for the Smith-Robinson clan is the smallness of scale and the sense of community. Although Smith admits she “couldn’t wait to leave” the small town she grew up in in Arkansas, she now values the sense of community and history she’s found in the Hudson Valley, which she and Robinson first fell in love with on a weekend getaway over a decade ago. The pair, who met when they were both working at Anne Klein, rented a car to take them to Rhinebeck—“absolutely one of the cutest towns ever,” according to Smith—and wandered into a local real estate agency that had just one house available to rent. And not just any house, but a Stanford White carriage house set on a Hudson River estate. Smith and Robinson, who were married at the cottage’s sister house, called it home for eight years.

The next chapter of their Hudson Valley life began on a Labor Day weekend when their son, Wyeth, was about a year old. Smith and Robinson received a call from good friends who had, years earlier (and incredibly, on the same holiday), found a home. The message: “I know you guys want a barn, we found [one.] I think you should come look at it.” They did, fell in love, bought it, and, over time, made it theirs.

The first thing that Smith and Robinson did to their home, once a working barn, dating to 1870, was to childproof the upstairs by adding half walls. Then, says, Smith, “we really lived with the house for years without really doing little things, but nothing major. We wanted just to see how we felt in the house and how it worked for us.” Four years ago, they engaged Bonetti/Kozerski Studio, a New York City architectural firm that counts Donna Karan among its clients, to add onto the barn. “We were totally adamant that the new part looked like it was part of the house and not look like it was something that had been added on,” explains Smith. Their mandate was met.

Visitors to the dark brown home walk up a gravel path bordered by a stone wall, built in part by the multitalented Robinson using stones from the property, up a few stairs to a quietly dramatic eaved entrance. Windows border a textural, warm brown, mushroom wood door, sourced locally by Robinson.

A sense of space, created by a floor-to-ceiling open plan, and light, from the wall of windows that faces the entrance and through which the deck and fields beyond are visible. Sectional sofas topped with sheepskin throws are clustered around the fireplace. In the kitchen, leather and metal chairs in the Danish style flank a rectangular table, which, when set, boasts chalky white Astier de Villatte place settings. A linear crystal chandelier hangs above, its unexpected sparkle providing a piquant contrast to the rustic vibe, enhanced by the solid restaurant-quality stove and the wooden cabinet doors, above which Robinson’s cookbook collection nestles.

On the other side of the fireplace in the living room is a nooklike den with two chairs, eBay finds, which are dramatically upholstered in brown-and-white hides. On the sofa are pillows that add a Western touch: “We love Santa Fe,” says Smith. There’s also a pie-stand-cum-side-cabinet, atop of which stands a portrait of Wyeth as well as avian tchotchkes: “People keep giving us chicken things,” Smith explains.

Smith and Robinson are established and much respected figures in the world of fashion, but they didn’t bring their work home in terms of decoration in the sense that it feels anything but trendy. The understated style of the house is consistent and solid (and enviable), but as chic as it is, the Smith-Robinson home is intensely personal. It’s a family home. The few “fashion” touches there are: a horse portrait by Steven Klein; a shoe drawing by Manolo Blahnik; a Herb Ritts photo of Shalom Harlow in one of Robinson’s designs, a gift from Smith to her husband—and a chicken named Christy T (“for Christy Turlington, because she’s very tall and has very skinny legs)—have personal meaning. Nothing is for show. The decor is textured, coherent, and serene—and clean. “I’m not really a shabby chic type of girl,” admits Smith, who worked for Calvin Klein prior to joining Vogue.

Together, Smith and Robinson have imbued a minimal, modern look with warmth. And the house, with its view-framing windows, inviting decks, bowls full of home-grown produce or feathers, and a soundtrack provided by the coop, consciously connect the indoors and outdoors. The couple, who are hands-on in their approach to gardening, bee-keeping, and home improvement, have been influenced by Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle—about the author’s quest to eat locally—which they listened to on tape on the ride up to the barn. The book, says Smith “was probably the starting point for wanting the vegetable garden, and it really got us thinking about how we were living and how we really wanted to make some changes.”

None are needed, says this visitor, to make the house more welcoming. Though oozing with understated style, this is a house designed for living, for family life, visits from friends, family, and neighbors, and for laughing children to run in and out of. “I didn’t want it to feel like a place that was very precious, and I don’t want people to have to feel like they have to take their shoes off and be careful of things,” says Smith, who, on a sunny Saturday, looked put together, as always, in distressed boyfriend jeans, a soft, seamed gray top, and leopard-print Birkenstock-style sandals. “We’re pretty casual people.”

The post Easy Like Sunday Morning: The Minimal, Modern Barn of Vogue’s Virginia Smith appeared first on Vogue.

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Photographed by Carter Smith, Vogue, September 2015

For Cindy Crawford and family an island getaway in central Ontario is dressed-down, off-the-radar bliss.

When Cindy Crawford docks her powerboat at a lakeside convenience store in a tiny Canadian village, grabs a few homemade cinnamon doughnuts, then speeds off into a perfect July afternoon, it’s hard not to think of the iconic 1991 Pepsi commercial in which the model emerged from a red Lamborghini to quench her thirst at a gas-station vending machine.

But in this quiet summer community in central Ontario, where seven years ago she and her husband, Rande Gerber, built a house on a granite island blanketed in soft moss and studded with wild blueberry bushes, Cindy would prefer to be as underwhelming as her natural gifts allow. For about a month every summer, she wears no makeup, she makes no plans, she sits hour after uninterrupted hour on the dock or takes “granny swims,” as she calls them, with the friends she sees here but nowhere else, their husbands circling protectively on their paddleboards. “You’re the real you up here,” she explains as Rande’s Wakesetter carves through the sparkling lake. “You never have your game face on, your party face. When you’re getting dragged behind a boat on an inner tube, it’s hard to have much of a facade.”

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The wind has given her a big eighties blow-out—classic Cindy, but here the coiffure of every woman who travels by speedboat. Though time has brought a chiseled refinement to her features, her face remains one of the most familiar on the planet. Cindy is, of course, one of the few women for whom the word supermodel is not overstatement; a darling of designers and editors, she has also had tremendous versatility, offering proof, long before Gisele Bündchen, that a clever model can turn herself into a global brand. Sexy but approachable, Cindy was, and indeed is, the nice girl in the naughty body, her enormous appeal magnified by the knowledge that she was also her high school’s valedictorian. Despite a few bumps in the road—a highly publicized divorce from Richard Gere, a misbegotten entrée into Hollywood in Fair Game—she has made a graceful exit from fashion’s inner sancta. She does assorted campaigns and editorial work, she helms a successful furniture line, and she is a partner in the skin-care line Meaningful Beauty, but notwithstanding an impressive collection of old Alaïa she has set aside for her daughter, fashion has receded somewhat from view. “I have friends who know what the season’s It bag is going to be months before it comes out,” she says, “and that was just never me.”

We are in a part of Canada known as cottage country, for more than a century the weekend colony of moneyed Torontonians who built clapboard homes on the shoreline and painted them so dark they all but disappeared into the pines. It’s a place of stunning beauty and, for a certain kind of visitor, comforting remoteness; dotted among the Brahmins, a handful of Hollywood big shots have sought privacy along these shores. “That anonymity is certainly nice,” Cindy says, “though these days I’m the perfect amount of famous: enough to get a dinner reservation but not enough to get hassled.”

Cindy and Rande, a Casamigos Tequila owner, have no particular reason to be here, except that they fell for the place thirteen years ago when friends invited them for a week. Despite living in Malibu the rest of the year, they are lake people at their core: Rande spent his boyhood summers at sleepaway camp in New Hampshire, while Cindy waxes nostalgic about the cabin her family used to rent in a mosquito-plagued corner of Minnesota. Up here, residents are called cottagers. “I like to think that we’re especially hard-core,” says Cindy, “because we’re island cottagers. There’s no getting into the car and going to the movies when it rains.”

The seven-acre plot, when the Gerbers bought it, contained a dilapidated fishing cabin with linoleum floors. “The Old Guard doesn’t touch their houses,” Rande says. The Gerbers studied the local vernacular of shingled, two-story boathouses and rustic hunting lodges and settled on a discreet log cabin with dark timber interiors. Alfredo Paredes, a Ralph Lauren executive and good friend, helped with the decorating. “Every house here is a Ralph Lauren ad already,” Cindy remarks.

The couple, who have now designed seven houses together, from the Upper East Side to Cabo San Lucas, think about their living spaces differently. “Rande pictures every place filled with people socializing,” Cindy explains, “and I’m always saying, ‘But what about when no one is here? Then where are we sitting?’ ” Here they agreed on a warmly appointed chalet with brass lanterns, miniature canoes, and dream catchers made by the local Ojibwa tribe. The seat of an old leather club chair is upholstered in a Pendleton blanket, and a credenza from a bar Rande once owned in Aspen stands beside a lounger from a former house of Cindy’s in DeKalb, Illinois, the town where she grew up. Tacked onto a bulletin board is a thank-you note from friends across the lake inscribed on a curling piece of birch bark—the customary local stationery.

Months before their annual trip, really as soon as spring break begins to wind down, the family starts thinking about the wild blueberries, the doughnuts, a nutty cheese called Niagara Gold, and the poutine at a greasy spoon near the marina. Presley, sixteen, and Kaia, thirteen, fling themselves into the water the second the seaplane skids onto the surface of the lake. It’s the only time of year, Rande says, when the kids don’t turn on the television or pick up their phones.

Cindy makes her famous banana bread before the kids are up. Water sports from the expansive east-facing dock dominate the daylight hours: Presley likes to cruise the lake in his Whaler (though he just learned to drive a car, he has had his boating license since age nine); there is cliff diving nearby, bass fishing, logrolling, and wake surfing. When they’re bored with straight-up waterskiing, the kids will tow their friends on trash-can lids. At sunset, the family piles into a boat with drinks and snacks; perhaps they’ll see friends on a dock somewhere and pull up for an hour. Back at home, there is shuffleboard in the screened-in porch, and Cindy and Kaia have a puzzle going. Rande is in charge of the playlist; a near-constant mix of classic rock, from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to Pearl Jam, pipes out of invisible speakers. (Kaia: “I’ve been listening to those songs my entire life.”)

The community’s prevailing social ritual is the “docktail” party, as lakeside soirees are called. “There’s a golf club that we’re not members of,” Cindy says, “and if there are Old Guard ladies having tea somewhere, I haven’t been invited.” The uniform is invariably casual: swimsuits and cover-ups. Sometimes the kids chuckle when Cindy comes out of the house in nothing but her bikini, Muk Luks, and gardening gloves to pull thistles from the badminton lawn—a Bruce Weber shoot come to life.

Last summer, Cindy spent much of her time here writing a book, which debuts this month. Called Becoming (Rizzoli), it marries 150 of her modeling images with some 50 short essays on topics such as posing nude, grappling with the arrival of digital photography, and aging. “I’m turning 50 next year,” she says, “and at this point I feel I’ve learned a few lessons worth sharing.”

In one fascinating essay, she discusses the feeling of fraudulence that often dogged her early on. “There’s that ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ thing,” she explains. “I remember finding myself sitting next to Valentino at dinner, or spilling a glass of wine on Julian Schnabel’s white suit in Paris, and I’d think, When are they going to figure out that I’m just Cindy from DeKalb?”

And she explores the subject of her own iconicity with a sometimes poignant candor. “There are days—not up here, thankfully—when I feel I need to deliver that Cindy Crawford thing,” she says. “But I’ve gained so much confidence with age. That’s something I never felt early on, even if my generation of models was paid to radiate it—the shoulder pads, glamazon, hair out to there, boobs up to here. It would have been nice to have all that confidence in my 20-year-old body.”

If the passage of time is on her mind, at the lake, at least, it slows to a standstill. Cindy never puts her watch on, and there are no clocks anywhere in the house—something that Rande learned to insist upon when he was a nightlife impresario.

“The point here is to slow everything down,” Cindy says. “Life moves quickly, but it will wait.”

The post An Exclusive Look at Cindy Crawford’s Private Island Retreat appeared first on Vogue.

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Photo: © Todd Eberle from House of Thurn und Taxis, Rizzoli, 2015

From an early age, I knew my childhood was a little different. None of my classmates, for instance, made their way to school past tourists and a museum guide in their courtyard. When I had my tenth-birthday party, the hot topic among my friends was not how much candy we’d eaten but how many rooms the castle had (“Really? 500?”) and the racy contemporary art my mother hung everywhere. Some said they were too scared to come back for a sleepover (a painting of a decaying corpse hung on the wall of my bedroom).

But I’m not complaining—and I understand how incredibly fortunate I was. Schloss St. Emmeram was an amazing place to be a child. There was hide-and-seek in the courtyard, pinball machines tucked away in the entrance hall, and the nursery was a long corridor overflowing with toys. I loved the amazing Jeff Koons lobster painting outside, and my mother’s office had another Koons, my all-time favorite: a Popples sculpture (conveniently, neither scared my friends). One Christmas, to our greatest delight, my mum even had two little Shetland ponies awaiting us in our entrance hall, grazing on some hay underneath a Christmas tree. Oh, and parked here or there would be the odd Harley-Davidson—my mum being a big biker and friendly with the local rockers. Occasionally she even picked us up from school on a Harley, revving the engine and causing a scene in the schoolyard. I was torn between pride and mortification (but on the whole I loved it).

And I loved my mother’s guests—many of them artists like George Condo, who played ice hockey with us on the frozen pond, or Keith Haring, who became a hero of ours when he decorated our nursery door with a black felt pen and then passed the pen to us. My mother was appalled, but what could she say? Keith started it!

When I became a teenager, I found things to complain about (would I have been a teenager if I hadn’t?). Like the fact that there was a porter guarding the castle around the clock. Boyfriends and late nights had to be meticulously planned, and secret escapes required careful logistics (sometimes these involved leaping the fence that ringed the park behind the castle. Only later did I realize there were cameras watching over us there, too).

All along, I was enchanted by my parents’ parties. We’d sit down to dinners in the rococo ballroom, with enormous crystal chandeliers bathing us in a golden light. Later we would pass along a string of beautiful rooms—our favorite being the one with a golden four-poster bed with deep-green curtains and a golden swan on each side. I adored that bed even though my siblings and I told each other that an ancestor had passed away on it and that her ghost never left.

I would borrow pieces from my mother’s couture collection for these occasions and, later, for the yearly boar hunts, too. Did my sister and I fight over dresses? Of course! I always wanted to be the first to wear, say, a flower-embroidered Lacroix but never seemed to get the chance, as she had already gotten there first and danced in everything till the wee hours. Many of the best pieces were, alas, a little worse for wear. The one we both were most attached to, though, was a simple, slightly worn-out gray cardigan belonging to our late father. We took turns with it traveling between home, boarding schools, and, later, Madrid, Paris, and beyond.

My mother recently had the idea of having the castle photographed by our friend Todd Eberle, for a book (to be published by Rizzoli in October). Todd wanted portraits of my sister and me wearing gowns, jewelry, and tiaras. I was hesitant at first, but the whole thing was incredibly fun (and as for the tiaras, it was the only time in my life Mum let me wear these heirlooms, so why not?). Todd later confided that my sister was initially photographed without a tiara and, seeing my images, pleaded to be reshot. “That’s what I call a case of tiara envy,” he joked. I didn’t quite believe him, but it made for a good laugh.

The post A House Less Ordinary: Tour TNT’s Extraordinary Family Castle appeared first on Vogue.

Samu-Jussi Koski is a man of simple needs. Even though he is the designer behind a burgeoning fashion line called Samuji, and the former creative director of Marimekko, his day-to-day life orbits around the idea that less is more and functionality is on par with great style. Late last year, he introduced a small collection of beautifully handmade, as he says “necessary,” interior decor pieces, which he named Koti, the Finnish word for home. They include locally crafted wood cutting boards, blown glass vases, and watering bulbs for houseplants. In this collection, as in his chic utilitarian clothes, Koski’s love of timelessness and the organic is evident. And while his work may be where he expresses this aesthetic, it was definitely born in an entirely different place, far away from the worlds of fashion and design. “I spent my whole childhood in a small village in the middle of Finland,” Koski says. “I was always attached to nature.”

It is that same place in which Koski now resides with his husband, in a small country house in the woods of Porvoo about 30 miles outside of Helsinki. He commutes to the city each day for work, but his heart, his family, and much of his inspiration, is drawn from his traditional wooden home, originally built in 1820. “For me, it’s really important to feel the history behind a place,” Koski notes. “Taking care of this house, and constantly changing the things on the inside, is a nice idea to me.” The designer estimates that he redecorates and rearranges the interiors at least once a month, and sometimes, he says, it’s just about, “moving little things around here and there. It’s always changing and it’s a nice way to keep life sustainable.”

Almost all of the furniture in the home was found at flea markets and antique shops around Europe. Some pieces are hand-me-downs from Koski’s parents, like the shag rug in the bedroom, while others were given to him by various family and friends; the fish mobile over the window seat in the kitchen came from a close friend in Tokyo, and the portraits on the stairs were a gift from Koski’s in-laws. He keeps fresh flowers from the garden in the kitchen with a wood-burning oven (also used to heat the house during winter), and speckled through the rooms are pieces from Koti, as well as vintage chairs, textiles from Athens, and keepsakes from favorite stores like Arts & Science in Japan. Though the spaces are small, they’re filled with meaningful totems, collected over time and constantly cherished.

Outside there are two old saunas and a greenhouse, where Koski has started to grow his own produce. “I learned gardening from my mother,” Koski notes. “The fashion field is sometimes really hectic and it’s difficult to remove yourself from. It’s really soothing to go to Porvoo and just focus on the plants and the flowers.” He adds, “It’s an old Finnish tradition to plant a tree in your garden when you move in so that it may carry good fortune for you. We did, and it’s really become part of the family.”

The post Helsinki’s Coolest Fashion Designer Opens the Door to His Country Home appeared first on Vogue.

Lena Dunham generally steals the show in her Instagrams, but in one of her latest bathroom selfies, it was the charming wallpaper that stole the show. (Or at least came in a close second.) The painterly pattern of panthers on a red background comes from New York City–based artist and illustrator Caitlin McGauley and is appropriately called “Panthera.”

“I love Lena Dunham for many reasons, one is that she is an illustration aficionado and is so supportive of artists across the board,” says McGauley. “This pattern she chose is so versatile. It can be used in a powder room or small space to add color and charm or as a backdrop to a bohemian room with faded emerald velvet upholstery and striped linen drapes.”

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Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, February 2014

The post Get Lena Dunham’s Wild Bathroom Wallpaper appeared first on Vogue.

Caitlyn Jenner’s Malibu home has just undergone a dramatic makeover. Out are the heavy, earth-toned pieces viewers might recognize from I Am Cait, and in their place is a calm palette of soft, white, oversize upholstered items—including a 12-foot-long sofa—accented with natural elements and hints of pink and mauve.

“Caitlyn always lived in beautiful houses, but designing them was Kris Jenner’s domain—Caitlyn wasn’t really involved. This time, she really wanted to put her personal stamp on the house,” said New York–based designer Lori Margolis, who was behind the project, featured on Architectural Digest’s site.
 
Here, 16 items to bring the airy feel to your own space:

The post Inside Caitlyn Jenner’s Malibu Home Makeover—And How to Get the Look appeared first on Vogue.

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Photographed by Mario Testino, Vogue, October 2015

You wouldn’t necessarily think that the architect who is most famous for designing Studio 54 in the late seventies would be the go-to guy for the ideal twenty-first-century beach house on Long Island, but then again, you’re not Michael Kors. It’s the start of the Fourth of July weekend, and he and his husband, Lance Le Pere, are standing on a long, narrow pier that runs away from their house, through the dunes, all the way to the ocean. “If you want a beach-bum life,” says Kors, “you have to find beach bums. And the architect, Scott Bromley—his idea of getting dressed up is if his shorts are clean.” It’s a blustery, overcast day, and Kors himself is wearing khaki shorts with a navy-blue Penn State sweatshirt and Birkenstocks. When I first arrived in a blazer, Kors gently mocked me. “I think that’s the first blazer I’ve ever seen in this house,” he said, laughing. “You can’t have a jacket out here. It kills the Big Sur–barefoot vibe.”

As we move inside—phew, it’s hot, I say, and quickly slip out of my jacket—the first thing I notice is Joni Mitchell’s ethereal soprano wafting out of the sound system. It reminds me that when I first met Kors and Le Pere, a few weeks earlier, Le Pere asked if I was wearing patchouli, and when I said yes, Kors’s response was “Oh, we looooove patchouli!,” speaking with a level of enthusiasm one usually reserves for Britney’s halftime show at the Super Bowl. “No one believes me,” he said then, “but I am such a hippie at heart. My joke about it is that we are such a contradiction: We love caviar with potato chips while listening to Joni Mitchell in Capri in flip-flops, wearing ten-ply cashmere. Everything we love is laid-back but indulgent.”

Hippie was not the first word that sprang to mind when I thought of the designer, especially knowing that when Michael Kors Holdings went public in 2011, it was one of the most successful initial public offerings in fashion history, making him “big-time rich,” as his friend Blaine Trump puts it. The Long Island boy who landed on the World’s Billionaires list in Forbes magazine last year has finally become a character from one of his Mario Testino ad campaigns: the well-traveled rich guy, with tall, blond spouse trailing, disembarking from a private jet while discussing Ischia vs. Capri.

André Leon Talley talks to Michael Kors and Kate Hudson at the 2015 Met Gala:

Or has he? A friend of mine used to live next door to Kors at this very same beach in the late nineties—back when he was merely a successful (and not yet Project Runway–famous) designer—and Kors once told him his clothes were “too neat” and suggested that he start sleeping in them. Perhaps the 56-year-old designer hasn’t changed? Testino doesn’t think so: “I haven’t seen anything change in him since he’s made hundreds of millions. And that is why he says he’s a hippie. Because what he treasures isn’t the limousine; it’s intimacy, it’s the home.” Or, as his friend Blake Lively puts it, “When you have a conversation with him, it’s not about helicopters and yachts. He talks about real-world things like not wanting to go on vacation because he doesn’t want to leave his cats, Bunny and Viola.”

As we make our way through the house, which is a triumph in streamlined beach modern—Nakashima furniture, ropy Scandinavian chairs, with an enormous paper lantern trembling above it all—Kors suddenly looks out through one of the many vast sheets of glass that frame the ocean and says, “Oh, my. There’s a naked person walking on the beach.” Pause. Is he himself a nudist? “Oh, please. I shower in a caftan.”

Eventually we find ourselves in the master-bedroom suite—an entire floor, really—where at last I spy a few tchotchkes: a small cluster of framed photographs on a shelf next to the bed. One is of Kors with long curly hair, and his two best friends, Tim and Lauren, from his brief tenure at the Fashion Institute of Technology. It was taken in Montauk, Long Island, in 1981—the year Kors started his company. “Still my two best friends,” he says. “We think this picture looks like an album cover and I look like Peter Frampton.” There’s also a photograph, from the early sixties, of Kors, a towheaded toddler, with his mother and grandmother, taken at the Lawrence Beach Club, not far from here. A lot has been written over the years about the influence these two women have had on him, particularly his mother, Joan, who lives in Los Angeles, and is, according to Kors’s friend Bette Midler, “over-the-top, a true character. She loves clothes and she loves being beautiful—you know, the bella figura, that Italian thing of showing your best face to the world.”

Kors picks up the frame. “OK, this is full Flamingo Kid. I was an only child, so I was always the only kid at the cabana, surrounded by women. I think all they did, basically, was eat cantaloupe and play cards. Lunch was really just the discussion of where you were going to have dinner.” Clearly he’s been training to be a beach bum his whole life. (He’s preparing to be one for the rest of his life, too, having almost finished building a house on the Gulf Coast near Tampa. “Commutable barefoot luxury—that’s my idea of perfect,” he says, sounding like he’s describing his latest resort collection.)

We make our way over to the guesthouse. The bedrooms on the second floor here are subtly themed; one has a safari motif, with photographs the couple took in Africa. Another has pictures taken in the seventies at Studio 54, bought at the Steve Rubell estate sale several years ago: There’s a shot of Bianca Jagger and Halston, on the night when she infamously rode through the disco on a white horse. As luck would have it, Kors, eighteen at the time, was there, so thrilled by his luck that he stayed until 7:00 a.m. The next day, he walked into class an hour late. “I have big Porsche sunglasses on, and the teacher says, ‘Well, thank you so much for joining us.’ Of course, the arrogance of eighteen, I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I was out at Bianca’s birthday party.’ And all the kids in the class looked at me and were like, Ugh, you’re gross.” Perhaps it was at this moment that Kors, who is unpretentious to a fault, learned the valuable lesson that being a name drop–y douche bag gets you exactly nowhere in life.

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Photographed by Hannah Thomson

As we meander through the compound, I realize that I have not seen a single dollop of color. “I have this weird thing that people are the color in the room,” says Kors. “Also, if you travel the way we travel, you kind of end up buying things everywhere. So how do you make them work? We slap our hands and never buy anything colorful. It’s not that I wouldn’t love bright-green pottery from Thailand, but it would take too long to figure out where to put it.” He does the same thing with his wardrobe, sticking almost exclusively to black. “By mistake, I grabbed one of Lance’s navy T-shirts and wore it to the office, and all of the kids who work for us were like, ‘I love you in color!’ The lesson there is, If you have a system that never veers, you can knock people off their feet by turning the dial just a little.”

He actually remembers the last colorful piece of clothing he ever bought. He was on vacation in St. Barth’s. “We walked into the Hermès store, and they have this bright-mint cashmere sweater. I hold it up, I’m really tan, and I’m like, ‘I have to have it!’ And then I look over and I see a matching cashmere scarf. The next morning I try the whole rig on, and I look like a York Peppermint Pattie.” Most people think of Kors as a quiptastic one-liner machine, but he also knows how to spool out a yarn—and the punch line is almost always at his own expense.

Le Pere offers a quiet, even-keeled Midwestern ballast to what Midler calls Kors’s “tremendous presence.” As Kors says, “He calms me down; I rev him up.” In all of the time that I spend with them, there is only about five minutes when I am with Kors by himself: Le Pere is always at his side. One gets the sense that theirs is a deep and very private relationship, one that they protect by keeping their sanctuaries—this house, the trips to Greece or Big Sur—just for the two of them. “Certainly when one of us leaves the room,” Le Pere says, “I think we miss each other; we miss that energy.”

The couple, who got married four years ago, met in 1990, when Le Pere was a junior at Parsons and interned at Michael Kors. When Le Pere graduated, he went to work for the company, but it wasn’t until Kors began designing for Céline in 1997, flying back and forth to Paris several times a year with a few people from his team, that the romance really began. “Listen,” says Kors, “fashion’s not a nine-to-five job. We work around the clock, and you get close to the people you work with.” In Paris, says Le Pere, “I think our guard came down, and we were like, Wait a minute: There’s more to this than just working together.”

Their differences were apparent when Kors first met Le Pere’s parents. “I walk into the Parsons graduation ceremony in black Harley motorcycle boots, fully shredded jeans, a white football jersey, with a black sequined blazer. Full South Beach insanity.”

“But that was the era,” Le Pere says and then starts to say, “My parents were like——” when Kors suddenly cuts him off and shrieks, “You thought I was EXOTIC!

“Actually,” Kors continues, “I thought Lance’s being from the Midwest was exotic. I hate to generalize, but with Midwesterners, there’s a sense of politeness and decorum. When we spend time with his family, they all get along really well. I grew up with women who would argue over the color of a shoe: ‘It is not taupe! It’s mushroom!’ ”

“And now,” Le Pere says, “that’s what you do for a living.”

In some ways, Michael Kors’s entire design philosophy might be described as a blend of preppy Midwestern refinement with a dash of gutsy New York glamour. It’s an aesthetic that appeals to everyone from stylish young beauties—“You feel very rich and sexy and feminine when you’re wearing his clothes,” says model Lily Aldridge—to modern American moguls. And indeed, when I ask Kors for suggestions of people to interview, someone in his office forwards me a list of nearly 40 people, mostly women, including the First Lady and Hillary Clinton.

“I love wearing his clothes,” says Oprah Winfrey. “In a few days I’m meeting some friends on their boat in Spain, and my clothes are all Kors separates and that fabulous, fabulous linen skirt that he did this year. They’re like play clothes, but they’ve got a little zhoozh. I like clothes with zhoozh.”

One of the things that distinguish the man whom Iman calls “the true quintessential American designer” from other designers of his generation—particularly those men who, like Kors, also worked in Paris to reimagine a storied French house; e.g., Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and John Galliano—is that there is nothing dark about him. He admits that the last time he staged something spiky was for his fall ’93 collection. “We were playing, like, Astor Piazzolla,” says Kors, “and the girls were scowling and they had, like, dirty braids and stomper boots. Carla Bruni, the second girl out, came back and said, ‘There’s a fistfight in the photographers’ pit!’ I remember thinking, Maybe this kind of anger and sadness isn’t really appropriate for Michael Kors.”

It’s no wonder Mario Testino feels such a kinship to Kors. “When Michael first started out,” says Testino, “some people would criticize him for being too commercial, too normal, not edgy or intellectual enough. I suffered the same thing.” Here he quotes a line from a magazine that he’s never forgotten: “ ‘Mario Testino with his happy snappy shots has managed to stay relevant.’ There’s a certain snobbism in the fashion world that positive, up, sunny things are banal. And I like that Michael hasn’t ever fallen victim to that.”

Part of his outlook can be explained by that fact that Kors is pragmatic to the core—a “problem solver,” as he is fond of saying. When he talks about the thrill he gets out of helping a woman put together a wardrobe, he can often sound less like a fashion designer than a stylist or personal shopper. He seems constitutionally suspicious of fashion as pure fantasy. “I think fantasy works for someone going to the Met ball,” he says. “I don’t want to be the clothes you admire, I want to be the ones that you wear.”

At one point, we get to talking about the danger of becoming ridiculous or pretentious in this business. “Fashion is about reinvention,” he says, “so fashion people are also full of self-reinvention. They’re like, ‘Oh, I’m not that person anymore! I am royalty from Albania, and my mother wore couture!’ ” We both laugh, but then he rethinks it a bit. “But, you know, for some designers, it isn’t pretentiousness, exactly, because I think they believe their own makeover!”

This was never a danger for Kors, whose inner teenager is just under the surface. “I’m a suburban boy who, like, got a rush walking into the mall. I remember being fourteen years old and saving up for something: the tissue paper, the shopping bag, the whole thing. I still get it.”

You might think that being the head of a publicly traded global empire that now includes 774 stores around the world, from Romania to Dubai, would feel like a very different life from the one he had pre-IPO. “It feels the same as it was when it was this teeny little thing in the beginning,” he says. “It’s just faster. But life is faster.” He does concede that he is overscheduled—“The calendar is a nightmare!”—which is why his time with Le Pere to unplug and pad around barefoot is now more crucial than ever.

I had been curious to know what, besides more success and a huge payday, motivated Kors to go so big. “It’s just that the world is, at once, both bigger and smaller, so therefore the business is the same,” he says. “And my point of view is applicable to a much broader group of people now than just a handful of women in Beverly Hills and on the Upper East Side.” And in this new big/small world of fast, global fashion, Kors has become an accessory zealot, a true believer in the power of the handbag, which is, of course, what has propelled his brand into the stratosphere: “We live in a world where you can wear yoga clothes, but if you’ve got the right handbag, great sunglasses, and your watch is gorgeous, you’re ready to roll. An accessory cuts through all the barriers. No weather, no season, no age.” His eyes widen. “We have ten-year-old customers,” he says. “Ten! I am knocked out by ten!”

One rainy morning in early June, I meet Kors on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Spring Street for the dedication of the Michael Kors Building, the new headquarters of the New York charity God’s Love We Deliver. As I watch Kors work the rope line, I am struck by the fact that he comes by naturally the skills that most politicians have to work very hard at. It’s that Bill Clinton thing, the ability to meet hundreds of people in an hour and seem to take delight in every one of them. “He genuinely enjoys people,” says Midler. “People of any sort, any class, any rank—he has the ability to put them at ease.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio is here to perform the official dedication of the building, a gleaming, modern, six-floor facility with a state-of-the-art kitchen designed to turn out nearly one-and-a-half million meals a year for thousands of homebound New Yorkers suffering from AIDS, cancer, and other illnesses. It’s the crowning achievement of the designer’s 26-year involvement with the organization, a relationship that began back in 1989, when a close friend with AIDS was very sick at Beth Israel hospital. “Every night I’d leave work and rush over to the hospital to see him, and his parents and his brother and all of our friends would be there. He shared a room with a woman whom no one ever came to see. The head nurse told me that when her family found out she had AIDS, they stopped speaking to her. She was a pariah. It just hit me like thunder.” He had heard about God’s Love, which was just a small, grassroots organization then, and immediately went down to volunteer. “What really inspires me about God’s Love is that this is a very concrete thing: We sat down, we had dinner, I feel nourished. That’s something that we can actually roll up our sleeves and do.”

A quarter-century later, he is standing in front of a building with his name on it. Kors was coaxed by his friend Blaine Trump into making a generous donation to kick off the campaign, but she was gobsmacked when he decided to give $5 million. “That was the catalyst,” says Trump. “It got people saying, ‘Oh, well, if Michael Kors is donating this large sum, we’ll sign on, too.’ ” (Kors has also become an official ambassador to the U.N.’s World Food Programme, where he helps organize food delivery to schools in Africa and Central America. “It’s very similar to the work we do at God’s Love. It’s the instantaneous change in someone’s life.”)

After the dedication, I ask Kors how he feels. “New York has so imbued everything that I am,” he says. “That I am able at this point in life to give back, and to see the concrete results? I am bursting with pride.”

Later that night, I meet Kors and Le Pere at Joe Allen, the famous Broadway-theater haunt, where they are longtime regulars at table seven. They each order a bacon cheeseburger and a vodka as Kors tells me that he grew up in a family that was “ravenous for great theater.” He saw his first musical when he was five—Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun. “It doesn’t get any better than that,” he says, laughing. As a teenager, he briefly thought of acting himself: “Took a few classes. Couldn’t act, couldn’t sing.” When the revival of Hair came to Central Park in 2008, Kors and Le Pere were there, front and center. “Lance is a fabulous dancer,” Kors says. “He moves like lightning. I am the worst dancer on the planet. But, of course, out of my seat and. . . .” He throws his hands in the air and sings, “ ‘Leeeeeet the suuuun shiiiiine. . . .’ I suddenly realize I am dancing in front of the entire Delacorte Theater! Fully uncoordinated!”

“Oh, they all loved it,” says Le Pere.

Theater is such a passion for the couple that Kors is contemplating another way to give back to New York City: by producing musicals. “Lance and I, we’ve seen a few things from the early workshop phase—no sets, nothing—and it reminds me of when we first start working on a collection and we have a few swatches, a piece of yarn, a piece of leather. I love seeing that whole process.” To that end, the couple are hoping to help bring to Broadway a new musical called wonder.land, which is opening in November at London’s National Theatre. “Do I think that I’m ever going to be David Merrick?” says Kors. “No. I’m very happy with the day job.”

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“We are such a contradiction: We love caviar with potato chips, while listening to Joni Mitchell in Capri in flip-flops wearing 10-ply cashmere,” says Lance Le Pere, Michael Kors’s husband. “Everything we love is laid-back but indulgent.” And that feeling is evident in every corner of the couple’s Long Island, New York, home, photographed by Vogue for the October 2015 issue. Big-name design pieces like the George Nakashima chaise in their living room feel easy and approachable set amid a clean palette of whites and tans, billowing curtains, and a simple oversize paper lantern. Above, 12 ways to get this “Big Sur barefoot” vibe in your own space:

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Elizabeth Taylor’s public persona was a study in contrasts: She dressed lavishly in couture clothes and brilliant diamonds befitting her status as a film icon, but was also a tireless philanthropist and advocate, both relatable and forthright in her causes. In the new book 700 Nimes Road—named for Taylor’s Los Angeles address—photographer Catherine Opie explores this connection between Elizabeth Taylor the star and Elizabeth Taylor the person through intimate and at times poignant “indirect portraits” of the icon’s life at home, including shots of movingly personal items like a pair of Taylor’s red baby shoes. Opie, whose portrait work typically explores the relationships of individuals to their social or political communities, spent six months capturing some 3,000 images of Taylor’s residence. (The number was edited down to 129 for the book.) The photos were taken just before and after Taylor’s hospitalization and eventual death in March 2011.

Opie never took a portrait of the actress and in fact never met her during the process. For her, the caring, down-to-earth spirit of Taylor was very much alive in these inanimate possessions. As the late Ingrid Sischy wrote in 700 Nimes Road: “Despite her stratospheric fame, Taylor was always deliciously regular in so many ways. Her materialism should never be confused for shallowness.” Put in Taylor’s words: “You can’t cry on a diamond’s shoulder, and diamonds won’t keep you warm at night. But they’re sure fun when the sun shines.”

Above, 12 touching photos from 700 Nimes Road.

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There’s a reason Victoria Beckham’s stage name used to be Posh—the former pop star, furiously successful designer, mother of four, and wife of David Beckham has never shied away from flashy luxury. In her Spice Girls days, and even several years after, it was all about the labels, the large sunglasses, the diamonds, and the glamorously modern homes around the world. The taste in interiors was one that was nurtured by the friendship between Victoria and interior designer Kelly Hoppen, whose whitewashed, minimal aesthetic once fit perfectly with the family’s lifestyle in L.A., Dubai, and the South of France—until now.

According to the British press, Victoria has replaced Hoppen with the more traditionally minded decorator Rose Uniacke for the renovation of the Beckhams’ nearly $50 million London mansion purchased late last year. Uniacke is a minimalist at heart, but she subtly and brilliantly blends the contemporary with the classic. As Victoria’s mode of dress has become more streamlined and sophisticated throughout the last decade, so too, apparently, has her taste in decor.

This style evolution—and the lavishly antique feel of Uniacke’s spaces—will perhaps bode well for the Beckhams’ purported country home-to-be in the Cotswolds. Listed as the most expensive country house in the U.K. at $41.8 million, the 10-bedroom estate was built in 1862 and has 774.32 acres of land, with neighbors who include Kate Moss, Damien Hirst, Elizabeth Hurley, and Sam Mendes. Though there has been no official announcement of the purchase, one thing is sure: If Victoria’s interior style really is taking a more traditional turn, this is the home that was built for her transition.

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