Hari Nef, DeRay Mckesson, Shailene Woodley: These Are the Bold Visionaries Pushing the Culture—and the Country—Forward
From gun control to transgender rights to Standing Rock, here are the pivotal conversations of our time and the people behind them.
Photographed by Inez and Vinoodh, Vogue, January 20171/8Life Savers
Nza-Ari Khepra, Karina Vargas, and Julianne Moore
In 2010, then sixteen-year-old Karina Vargas was standing in front of her Colorado high school when she was hit by a random bullet. “It’s affected my life like cancer—my family, the people around me,” she says. In 2013, Nza-Ari Khepra’s fifteen-year-old friend Hadiya Pendleton, a neighbor on Chicago’s South Side, was killed by a random bullet. Khepra, now 20 and an economics major at Columbia University, helped found Project Orange Tree, a youth-led violence-awareness organization that in turn attracted the attention of Everytown for Gun Safety, where Julianne Moore serves as the founding chair of their creative council. This past election saw one of Everytown’s objectives—background checks—passed in Nevada, with other gun-safety measures passed in Washington State and California. “In states with background checks, gun deaths have been reduced by close to half in various categories,” Moore says. “I want to take this movement the long way,” says Khepra, “and I want to make sure we finish strong.”Nza-Ari Khepra (far left) wears an Altuzarra dress. Karina Vargas wears a dress from The Row. Actor Julianne Moore wears a Michael Kors Collection dress.
Sittings Editor: Camilla Nickerson
Hair: Christiaan; Makeup: Aaron de Mey
Photographed by Inez and Vinoodh, Vogue, January 20172/8Environmental Artists
Shailene Woodley and Bobbi Jean Three Legs
“Water is life,” said Bobbi Jean Three Legs, a Standing Rock Sioux, this past summer in Washington, D.C., after leading 30 young Native Americans on a 2,000-mile relay run from their reservation in North Dakota to the nation’s capital. They were carrying a petition to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—a petition meant to block the construction of an oil pipeline across the Missouri River, her tribe’s drinking-water source. Actor Shailene Woodley, appalled at the scant press coverage of the run and the mission, was there alongside her, and when Three Legs returned home to North Dakota—where a small encampment of local families soon grew into a major national civil rights protest—Woodley was there too. “Now it’s an international affair,” she says. “Our people have been silenced for so long that they didn’t even want to stand up to voice their opinion,” says Three Legs. “That’s why I stood up. Now people around the world relate to us and everything we’re going through—as part of the human race, not just as indigenous people. Just because the pipeline is right beside Natives doesn’t mean everybody else isn’t going to be affected. We’re all human beings, no matter what color your skin.”Actor Shailene Woodley (near right) wears a Gap shirt and Levi’s 511 jeans. Bobbi Jean Three Legs wears a Gap shirt.
Hair: Christiaan; Makeup: Aaron de Mey
Photographed by Inez and Vinoodh, Vogue, January 20173/8Model Citizens
Alek Wek, Angok Mayen, Ajak Deng, Grace Bol, and Achok Majak
If you or your family are from South Sudan, you worry: The country is embroiled in a bloody civil war, the world just barely taking note. Grace Bol, Ajak Deng, and Alek Wek are immigrants. Angok Mayen has refugee status, and Mayen’s daughter, Alyieth, is a U.S. citizen—born here, like Achok Majak. They are all models (including Alyieth, in this instance). “I would like to see everyone get along,” says Bol. “I love all our tribes.” While her sisters grew up in South Sudan, Majak grew up in L.A., where she saw the sort of anxiety that war refugees feel on arrival in the U.S. “I want a bright future for those who are younger—who are the future,” she says. Wek stresses the need to listen—especially to women—“to really show the beauty of the diversity of us within the continent,” she says. “I think it teaches the younger generation that they can be kind to one another. South Sudan has so much hope—I mean, look at the U.S.: Almost 250 years, and we still have challenges.”Clockwise from top far right: Alek Wek wears a Tory Burch dress. Angok Mayen (with her daughter, Alyieth) wears a Michael Kors Collection dress. Ajak Deng and Grace Bol wear A.L.C. Achok Majak wears a BY. Bonnie Young dress.
Hair: Christiaan; Makeup: Aaron de Mey
Photographed by Inez and Vinoodh, Vogue, January 20174/8Power Brokers
DeRay Mckesson and Tracee Ellis Ross
“I’m hopeful,” says DeRay Mckesson, the activist and educator and an early member of Black Lives Matter, “that in this new year, people will feel empowered to have more public conversations about the complexity of blackness, and about equality and justice.” “I think,” says Tracee Ellis Ross, the actor and costar of Black-ish, “that our ability to have nuanced and complicated conversations about race—conversations that allow for the complexity of what race is today and what race means for everyone—I think that has evolved.” “And these conversations are happening in public,” says Mckesson. “People are learning because they’re being exposed in a way they weren’t before, which is really important.” As important to both of them as the messages they’re pushing and the conversations they’re starting: that all of the above comes from a place of joy, which both Mckesson and Ross agree is a revolutionary concept. “Black people have always been more than our pain,” Mckesson says. “The joy is so much a part of how we have survived and thrived.”DeRay Mckesson wears a Theory shirt and Tom Ford pants. Actor Tracee Ellis Ross wears a Polo Ralph Lauren trench coat.
Hair: Akki; Makeup: Aaron de Mey
Photographed by Inez and Vinoodh, Vogue, January 20175/8The New Girl Bosses
Tory Burch, Allison DeVane, Ericka Lassair, and Emellie O’Brien
When Tory Burch started her company in 2004, supporting young female entrepreneurs “was part of our DNA,” she says. “I knew that the thing that I could actually teach people was how I learned to start a business.” Cut to 2017, by which time the Tory Burch Foundation Capital Program, in partnership with Bank of America, has given more than 700 women entrepreneurs around the country access to almost $20 million in loans. The current fellows include Allison DeVane, the Phoenix, Arizona–based inventor of Teaspressa tea company; Emellie O’Brien, founder of Earth Angel, an environmental-consulting company that helps film- and television-production companies think sustainably; and Ericka Lassair, founder of Diva Dawg, maker of gourmet Creole-style hot dogs. After Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans in 2005, Lassair returned to her hometown to live and work; with help from Burch, she’s just moved her company into Roux Carré, a market that not only brings different foods to a community that doesn’t have a lot of choices but also works as an incubator for start-up entrepreneurs. “They focus on people who live in the neighborhood,” Lassair says. “I’m very excited.”Tory Burch, Ericka Lassair, and Emellie O’Brien wear Tory Burch. Allison DeVane (second from left) wears Tory Sport.
Hair: Akki; Makeup: Aaron de Mey