12 Signs of Spring From Vogue, for You

This is the first installment of a series, Past/Present, in which images and articles from Vogue and Vogue online that have personal significance to our editors will be highlighted.

Looking for glimmers of hope the other day I remembered how, when our son was a little guy in overalls, we used to take walks on which we’d help him look and listen for signs of spring—snowdrops, daffodils, budding trees, bird chirps. I decided to see if I could replicate the experience from the home office (aka the dining room table), and found the archive was teeming with hope-filled spring imagery, some of which you’ll find below.

My first discovery happened after “tripping” over a potato-shaped rock. Curious about Salvador Dalí’s enigmatic April 1, 1944 cover with its banner-woven brick-and-flowers logo and rearing stallion, and that ant-friendly stone in the foreground, I found, on the table of contents, this resonant caption: “Even to [Dalí’s] world of infinite emptiness, battle, and long farewells, spring comes as usual...blessed with birds and bees, trees in leaf, and full blown rose bouquets.” Here was wisdom that reached across time, a reminder that mother nature is mightier than pandemics and financial markets.

From there I turned to some of my favorite Vogue illustrators, such as Georges Lepape, Christian Bérard, and George Wolfe Plank to see what fantasies they had spun around the cheeriest of the four seasons—scroll below to see what they are. My personal favorite among the bunch is the April 1, 1945 collage cover by Eugene Berman, the Romantic painter and set designer. His heroine is none other than spring herself; she’s turned her back on winter, we’re told, in order to better “face a rosier set of tomorrows.”

This is a time to be steadfast and clear, not one for rose-colored glasses; still, we must focus on the future, on the pandemic-free days and seasons to come, because they will arrive—just like spring has.