Vintage Chic

vanityfair:

All 11 actresses from the 2012 Hollywood Cover—click to view larger.

Photograph by Mario Testino, Vanity Fair.

Could May 2010’s issue of Vanity Fair get any better?

Vanity Fair | “Grace Kelly’s Forever Look”
by Laura Jacobs

The rare beauty and stunning self-possession that propelled Grace Kelly into the Hollywood pantheon, onto the Best-Dressed List, and ultimately to Monaco’s royal palace were more than captivating—they were completely genuine. As London’s Victoria and Albert Museum unveils an exhibition devoted to Kelly’s style, which still inspires fashion from Hermès to Tommy Hilfiger to Mad Men’s costumer Janie Bryant, the author looks at the intertwined qualities of an icon: white-gloved ingénue, elegant goddess, passionate—and frankly sexual—romantic.

The cover story from the May 2010 issue of Vanity Fair!

Vanity Fair | “Sorority on E. 63rd St.”
by Michael Callahan

For a small-town girl with a dream, from the Roaring 20s through the 1960s, there was no address more glamorous than New York’s “women only” Barbizon Hotel. A combined charm school and dormitory, it would shelter a parade of yet-to-be-discovered damsels—Joan Crawford, Grace Kelly, Candice Bergen, Sylvia Plath, Ali MacGraw, and many more—nurture their ambitions, and leave some with broken hearts. The author delves into the Barbizon’s mystique, as well as the darker side of its Stork Club–and–stardust allure.

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It opened in 1927, hoping to attract the single, stylish, and thoroughly modern Millies pouring into New York during the Jazz Age to chase their dreams: stardom, independence, a husband. Prospective tenants were required to bring three good references for admission, and were graded on criteria such as looks, dress, and demeanor. From the beginning, the Barbizon existed as a combined charm school and dormitory, one where fretting parents could be confident their girls would be kept safe—and chaste. No men were allowed above the lobby without strict supervision, and parents could require their resident daughters to sign in and out at the front desk. Some were even given their own chaperones. Girls who came in late or, in the parlance of one staff matron, “in bad shape” were spoken to. According to a writer for Time magazine, it was “one of the few places in Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson where a girl could take her virtue to bed and rest assured it would still be there next morning.” What’s more, the building possessed “the greatest concentration of beauty east of Hollywood.”

The hotel’s reputation for housing lovelies really bloomed in the mid-1940s—around the time Cloris Leachman walked through the doors—when it acquired the haute mystique that became its stock-in-trade. It was relentlessly marketed and written about in gossip columns and in the back of fashion magazines, feeding the fantasies of girls who dreamed about becoming, in the words of a breathless advertisement, one of the “ambitious, discriminating young women” who became “Barbizon girls.” The Barbizon sold not a residence but, rather, an ideal: life as portrayed in the pages of Photoplay.

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In my mind, I think of The Barbizon as the Wellesley of the hotel industry.

(via sweetlydispositioned)

Nominations for the 82nd Annual Academy Awards will be announced in half an hour, and what more fitting actress to post a photo of than she who has received the most Oscar nominations in the history of award (15 make that 16) - Madame Meryl Streep.

Here she is with Nora Ephron, with whom she was has made three films: Silkwood (1983) and Heartburn (1986) with Ephron as writer, and Julie & Julia (2009) with Ephron as writer-director.

Nine burgeoning leading ladies pose for Annie Leibovitz on a grassy patch of the Paramount lot for Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue.

This year’s ingénues include, from left to right: Abbie Cornish, 27; Kristen Stewart, 19; Carey Mulligan, 24; Amanda Seyfried, 24; Rebecca Hall, 27; Mia Wasikowska, 20; Emma Stone, 21; Evan Rachel Wood, 22; and Anna Kendrick, 24.

Note the striking lack of racial diversity (again) this year. Also note the striking balance of hair color.