The December issue is here—and for the first time in Vogue US’s history, it has a guest editor. In today’s episode of The Run-Through, Vogue’s Taylor Antrim and Virginia Smith talk to Chloe Malle about working with designer Marc Jacobs to put the magazine together—from the cover story (featuring Kaia Gerber) to portfolios and features focused on dance, extreme beauty, and a dog named Carl. Listen to the full thing here—and read excerpts from the conversation below.
Chloe Malle: This is a big week at American Vogue. True or false, this is the first guest editor ever?
Virginia Smith: That would be true, Chloe.
Malle: Whose idea was this, and why?
Taylor Antrim: It is the first guest editor, although we should say that there s a rich tradition of using guest editors for Vogues in other parts of the world. Vogue France had guest editors once a year for a long time—a lot of film directors, [including] Alfred Hitchcock. But American Vogue s never had a guest editor. And you asked whose idea was it? It was Anna Wintour s idea.
Malle: Okay. Why?
Smith: I don t know if anyone really knows what prompted her. But apparently there was a lunch at Balthazar, where poor Marc Jacobs had no idea what was about to be presented to him.
Malle: Over his chicken paillard.
Smith: Lo and behold, Anna pulls out an envelope and had done sort of a mock-up of some ideas. So she came fully prepared. Marc was presented with this idea of being the first guest editor of American Vogue, which apparently he took some time to think about. I think he was a little overwhelmed by the idea initially, but he got his head around it, thankfully for us.
Antrim: There s a little bit of a history here in that the December issue of Vogue has always been, in Anna s mind, a cause for celebration. We usually try to tailor the fashion stories and the features towards that kind of theme and mood. Then there was also this problem of timing, which is that we would be making the December issue in a time before the presidential election and it would be coming out after the presidential election. So there was really no way around that. There was no way to know what was going to happen and meet the moment afterwards.
So she thought to herself, as she said to me, “Why don t we do something really special that s just like a gift?" Nothing to do with politics whatsoever—just a really creative issue. It seemed like a great opportunity to bring someone else in to do it, and Marc thought the same way. He didn t want to do anything with the news or with politics. It really was meant to be a bit of a creative escape, I would say.
Malle: Were there second and third choices for guest editors or was it Marc or bust?
Antrim: It was Marc or Bust. Marc was the only one. So Anna and Marc have a long relationship and they re really quite close.
Malle: So what were those early meetings like?
Antrim: When Anna arrives to these meetings, she s basically got the whole thing mapped out in her head. Forget the fact that she s actually bringing in a guest editor. She had all of these ideas and really a timetable that was quite accelerated. She wanted decisions to be made right away. I remember looking at Marc, who I was actually meeting for the first time, and he looked a little thunderstruck by the whole thing. At times I thought to myself that he was desperate to escape.
Smith: Marc is someone who I think his creative process is different from Anna s. Anna, the way she works, as we all know, is she is the most efficient person on the face of the earth. If there s an issue, she wants it resolved right then and there, then she moves on to the next thing. Marc Jacobs likes to think about things. He likes to mull things over. He likes to have more time, he likes to reconsider them, come back to them. It s just how he works. That is the antithesis of how we are used to working at Vogue. So I think Marc, in that first meeting…I honestly sort of thought he was going to run out and never come back again. I thought we were going to get a call later on saying, “You know what, thanks, but this is not for me.”
Antrim: He s not an editor, and he was first to say that. So I think there was also a process of him thinking through the fact that the December issue needed to have a real variety of things in it, like any magazine does. Virginia and I have been doing this for a long time and creating a print magazine, which is quite a antique thing to be doing these days, is about curating and it s about the mix. I had the feeling that he was thinking more of a single point of view running through it. Maybe one photographer does the whole thing. That was an idea he had. That really does run counter to what we often do though. That was interesting.
Malle: Right.
Antrim: I think those early meetings, as much as they were sort of like Anna talking over Marc as much as anything else, they were generative. It was interesting to watch these ideas take shape. Marc was like, “I love flowers. I love reading. Literacy is very important to me. I love Steven Meisel, the photographer.” Things that actually came about in the issue when it finally was finished were brought up in that first meeting.
Smith: That s true. We were so lucky to have Steven Meisel do the cover shoot. And Marc was very much hoping he would do that, and it was one of his favorite photographers. So that did come out very early on in that first meeting. I think also he talked about wanting to do something that was celebratory, that was a celebration of creativity.
Antrim: He said he wanted to make something that would make people happy, and that is absolutely in step with what Anna was thinking. So that was good to hear. Of course, with any magazine, you do start with a cover to some degree, and he really knew who he wanted to be his cover star, which was Anna, and Anna was not having that. So she politely let him say it one or two times and then she shut it down and she said, “It’s not happening.” And that was the end of that.
Malle: But you did get a pretty iconic image of Anna in the issue.
Antrim: Right. In those earliest meetings, someone said—it was Marc, probably—“We have to have a picture of the two bobs.” So Anna s hairstyle, Marc s hairstyle, uncannily similar, needed to be shot from behind. So we have these two bobs, and indeed we did create that picture and it s really great.
Malle: So Anna did not want herself to be on the cover. Did Marc immediately have his next idea, or was that a evolving conversation?
Smith: I think Kaia came up very early on in the conversation.
Antrim: Really early.
Smith: Kaia was really discussed because he loves her and has a longstanding relationship with her. So she was settled on early on. We actually did that shoot really early. We did it this summer and Grace Coddington did that story with us. We spent a very fun Friday afternoon in the Vogue closet with a very good-natured Kaia. Marc s clothes are these magical creations, but they take a lot to get on and off.
Antrim: All the clothes in that shoot were Marc.
Smith: Yes, exactly. That was a unique thing. We felt we wanted to celebrate Marc in that way. Marc s very much about wanting to shine the light on others, but he agreed to have the cover story be only his collection. It was actually so fun. It was great to be working with Grace again. It really felt like coming back home, in a way.
Malle: And there s another cover.
Antrim: That s right. This was either the first or the second meeting: He talked about the painter Anna Weyant, who is a friend of his whose work he reveres. He said from the jump, he was like, “We should do a art cover as well as a portrait cover.” So he wanted Anna Weyant to paint Kaia. There is some history of art covers at Vogue. John Currin painted Jennifer Lawrence on the cover of the September issue, so [Marc] was thinking of that, but he was also just really wanting to shine a light on Anna Weyant, who s this superstar herself. But she came to the fitting that Virginia was just describing and got a little time with Kaia and got her photographs that she needed to do her painting. Then she went away and did this amazing painting.
Malle: There s some incredible images in this issue. I m curious about the dance shoot, which seemed like a Herculean undertaking, I have to say. When I looked at it, I was thrilled I wasn t a part of this.
Antrim: Some 20, 22 pages, something like that.
Smith: Yeah, and about 45 trunks of clothes leaving the building. It was quite something. We did that shoot with Alastair McKimm, who works with Marc on his shows, but someone we had not worked with before. It was amazing to be able to work with him.
Antrim: The theme of it, dance, is sort of fitting into this idea of joy and happiness. Marc really was so gung ho about that idea. Raúl Martinez, who s our creative director and who s known Marc since high school, he knows Marc really well and knows that they both love dance. Anyway, he d done all these sort of mood boards about dance and it looked amazing. So that was sort of where it started.
Malle: Okay, now I want to know about one of the more difficult parts of this issue: the albatross that was Marc s house. Marc lives in this iconic Frank Lloyd Wright house that I feel like has been the white whale of every magazine editor for the past five years.
Antrim: You ve been hearing about this house for forever. Early on there was this idea of, well, if Marc Jacobs is going to guest-edit this issue, he has got to give us his house. But these were just Vogue people saying this. None of this was coming from Marc. Raúl was really important here. Raúl was sort of the Marc whisperer, being like, “Marc, you re going to let us shoot at least a room, two rooms, three rooms.”
Smith: Because Marc kept insisting it wasn t ready. Anna was hearing none of that. Something was going to be ready.
Antrim: It was never a 1000% clear to me that it was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, we hear that Marc Jacobs has lined up the incredible art photographer Gregory Crewdson to come and do one picture of The Great Room, which is this sort of living room at this Frank Lloyd Wright house. Gregory Crewdson, his work is very cinematic. It mixes sort of realism and the uncanny. His pictures are really just legendary, but he does not work on a small scale. He arrived with some 40 people.
Malle: Oh, wow.
Antrim: It was an all-day shoot. It s like filming a movie to get one picture. And the other thing is Crewdson s pictures are quite unsettling. But our boss, Anna Wintour doesn t—
Malle: She doesn t love spook.
Antrim: She s not inclined in that direction, I would say. So I thought to myself, oh my goodness, when this Gregory Crewdson picture hits Vogue HQ, it s really going to be something.
Malle: What was the reaction?
Antrim: Oh, she loved it. This picture is undeniable.
Smith: It is.
Antrim: And Marc wanted to write his own piece about his house. This would not be some kind of ghost-written, he ll give someone a few notes and you whip it up and he sort of signs off. This was truly something that he labored over. It s such a personal piece of writing about his attachment to this house, the whole journey of buying it and renovating it, which sounds like quite the adventure, quite the expensive adventure.
Malle: I loved the nails feature. Alastair McKimm also oversaw that.
Antrim: Everybody knows about Marc s nails, so he really wanted to celebrate nails.
Malle: It was sort of over-the-top nails and eyelashes.
Smith: Yes. And Jeremy O. Harris wrote a piece that accompanies the pictures.
Antrim: It s great, full of his personality. Working with Marc on the feature side of things was fascinating. He s so smart and he loves writing and reading and books and so this stuff matters to him profoundly. I remember for this one, he seemed to be explaining it for the 15th time. He s like, “Taylor, I just want a piece that really explains what it s like to have nails out to here and you can t work your phone, but you are determined to have those nails because they are beauty and they make you happy and you won t live any other way. So can you just find me a piece like that?” I was like, yes, sir. Anyway, Jeremy is known for some corsets that he s strapped himself into for the Tonys and things. So he was really on the same wavelength about suffering for your fashion and your beauty. And he wrote a great little piece.
Malle: I want to hear about how you guys felt like children of divorced parents.
Smith: There was a particularly tense sort of release meeting.
Antrim: And let me just explain what a release meeting is. It s when you print out every page of the issue and you lay it out on the table and Anna goes around page by page. It s really a moment to make sure all your ducks are in a row. Up to this point, there were some Marc decisions happening, some Anna decisions happening, and we weren t entirely sure they were the same decisions. So that leads us to this release meeting that was just Anna, not Marc, and all of us with her. We printed out the issue and we had the layouts that she was seeing, but also the layouts that Marc was seeing. So there were a lot of options.
Smith: Finally she said her immortal words, "Marc doesn t like to hear the word no, and neither do I." So at that point we had reached an impasse.
Antrim: She s like "Taylor, Virginia, you have to go over there and get him to understand that these are the layouts."
Smith: We were mortified. We had to take the book to Spring Street. I felt like we were kids in trouble. But thankfully Marc also understood that we were mortified, and we went through the book sort of page by page.
Malle: Was there a compromise?
Antrim: It was all the dance portfolio. Marc was really focused on the dance portfolio being the way he was seeing it. He was so gracious about a lot of what Anna wanted, but he said, “These pictures need to be in.” They were not the pictures that Anna wanted to be in the dance portfolio. So I would say we came back from our summit meeting with things pretty settled, but not all the way settled.
The issue was really different from the issues of Vogue that Virginia and I work on month after month after month. Those differences are really wonderful, and they come out of Marc s sensibility. So I don t want to tell the story as if she forced Marc to say yes to all the things she wanted. She didn t. There were a lot of things that went his way. But these two pictures that he wanted in the dance portfolio, they did get worked out on camera. There s this great making-of-the-issue video; you can see them talking about these pictures that he wanted.
Smith: I don t think one person was the clear winner, to be honest.
Malle: Everyone wins.
Antrim: Guys, Anna won. Anna won!
Smith: Well, on those particular pictures.
Malle: Spoilers!
Smith: But on other things in that portfolio, Marc did win too.
Antrim: Totally. Totally true.
Malle: I want to talk about my personal favorite image, which is the Last Look—the dog wearing Chanel. The dog, whose name was Carl with a C—tell me about casting the dog, Virginia.
Smith: I just remember at one point I was showing Anna some pictures of a dog, and she goes, "I really don t think I need to see these." She goes, "I defer to Marc."
Antrim: Marc had a dog in mind he d seen on Instagram, I think.
Smith: Yes. My colleague Willow Lindley also got very heavily tangled up in this process too, so shout out to Willow for really going full into the dog casting. But finally we found a New York dog named Carl. The expression on Carl makes me smile every time I see it.
Antrim: And wearing Chanel. But guys, you have to get the physical issue, because on the Contributors page, which only exists in print, there s this genius layout where we have a grid of all the dogs that vied for this position. It s great. I do also want to shout out the novelist Dana Spiotta who wrote the cover story.
Dana Spiotta has never done a magazine cover story like this before. It was a great choice for Kaia, because the premise of the Kaia story was a lot to do with Kaia s love of books and her incredibly successful online book club, Library Science. She was so game, and it s a really great piece. Kaia loved meeting her and really felt like she was seen and taken seriously. So that was a real success. I think having some really great writing in the issue, as well as great photography and great fashion, was important.
Malle: Excellent. Well, thank you guys so much. Congratulations.