Table of contents for Hollywood 2024/2025 in Vanity Fair

Surprise! It’s the Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue, a few months earlier than you expected! For 30 years, our tentpole issue has been timed more or less to the Oscars. But as summer film festivals and major fall releases play an ever more important role in the journey toward an Academy Award, we wanted our readers (and listeners, and viewers) to join us for the full scope of the season—to anticipate along with us both the accolades awaiting the films in theaters right now and the movies we can’t wait to see in 2025. Think of this Hollywood Issue, with its new arrival date, as the beginning of a long and glorious red carpet, winding from the critics’ honors and Golden Globes, through the guild and independent film awards, all the…

While its bright green faux fur exterior may evoke visions of the devious Grinch, this colorful handbag’s primary concern is merrymaking. Whether snuggled in the crook of your arm during a chilly evening or basking, like a fluorescent napping lapdog, in the warm glow of a crackling fire, this cozy accessory could lift even a scrooge’s spirits.…

1. FOR THE DANCE REVOLUTIONARY Frank DeCaro’s Disco traces the era’s grit and glitz, with playlists and insider accounts galore. 2. FOR THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL THINKER In Great Women Sculptors, Lisa Le Feuvre fêtes artists from Huma Bhabha to Helen Escobedo (work pictured here). 3. FOR THE HORSE GAL From Duke Phillips III, Ranchlands, a bucolic photo survey of the beloved Western ranch. 4. FOR THE DISCERNING EYE Carla Sozzani: Art, Life, Fashion is Louise Baring’s lush illustrated biography of the Italian fashion editor and retail queen. 5. FOR THE BON VIVANT Bring the Michelin-starred Brooklyn wine bar home with Nick Curtola’s The Four Horsemen cookbook. 6. FOR THE HOST WITH THE MOST Pierre Sauvage lays out the tablescapes and recipes of the fabulous set in How They Entertain: At Home…

IN MAY, the Dia Art Foundation hosted a 600-person lunch at its museum in the Hudson Valley hamlet of Beacon, New York. There are a number of permanent installations at the site, a sprawling former Nabisco packaging factory—Richard Serra’s massive steel whorls, Donald Judd’s plywood boxes, Andy Warhol’s 100-plus canvas masterwork Shadows. The lunch was the vernissage for newly installed exhibitions of artists inducted into the exclusive coterie. The largest new commission, which took over the 160,000-square-foot space’s basement, is by Steve McQueen, the British artist and film director’s first collaboration with the arts organization. Minutes before guests were to arrive, McQueen stood in the middle of his massive installation, titled Bass. McQueen, 55, is one of the world’s great artists working with the medium of film. His videos can…

I FIRST CAME across the name Noel Parmentel Jr. in 2022, when I found a letter Eve Babitz had written to her cousin Patricia Helton in 1976. “There are certain people who never actually venture into my scanning region, people [like] Noel Parmentel Jr. who I’ve heard about all my life from various people who’ve been torn to shreds by him and his charm,” she wrote. “Joan Didion’s next novel is apparently about Noel Parmentel Jr.” Immediately I reached out to the writer Dan Wakefield, close to both Joan, whose friend he’d been since the late ’50s, and Eve, whose boyfriend he’d been in 1971 and whose friend thereafter. The people they knew, he knew. “Haven’t you heard about Noel Parmentel Jr.?” he asked after I read him the relevant…

Which historical figure do you most identify with? Scott of the Antarctic. An angry, disappointed little man. What is your favorite occupation? I have recently fallen in love with barbecuing. I love to undercook chicken and give my family worms. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? I am unable to use scissors. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Telling me the menu is only accessible through the QR code. What is your greatest extravagance? Barbecue equipment. Especially heat-resistant gloves. I am wearing some as I type. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Honesty. I’m sometimes asked by people who’ve just seen one of my films, ‘Do you mind if I’m honest?’ I do. On what occasion do you lie? When asked whether…

When working in her couturier, Coco Chanel often wore her fabric shears as though they were a pendant, dangling from a long ribbon around her neck. The ad hoc accessory serves as inspiration for this diamond-encrusted dress form on an 18-karat-gold necklace. The miniature figure cleverly hides a watch face in the retractable waistline, proving that frivolity and luxury can be practical too.…

LUPITA NYONG’O ACTOR, A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE “I love that world,” says the actor of Brian K. Vaughan’s space fantasy comic, Saga—one of her frequent rereads. “He writes in such a clipped way, and there’s a vibe to his writing that I really enjoy.” ROBIN WALL KIMMERER AUTHOR, THE SERVICEBERRY How to “choose just one book?” the botanist asks. Still, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes, a “powerful story” of Indigenous women’s identity and their cultural plants, “lifts me up.” JON FAVREAU AUTHOR, DEMOCRACY OR ELSE The Pod Save America cohost says Eric Klinenberg’s 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed gave him hope of regaining “the sense of solidarity and community we lost” in the pandemic. ANNA WEYANT ARTIST, “WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG…

ZENDAYA STARS IN Dune: Part Two, Challengers, The Drama Movie star. Emmy winner. Fashion icon. The Euphoria superstar has stepped into her leading lady era with sci-fi and a tennis ménage à trois. As a fierce coach in Challengers, Zendaya had to get physical with her costars—sometimes too physical. “I’m like ‘Goodness, girl, stop putting your hands on people,’” she says. EVEN ZENDAYA WINS some and loses some. Years ago she was gearing up for a movie when it imploded right before production was slated to begin. “At the time we were like, shit,” she says. “Then I got the script for Euphoria, and that ended up shooting in its slot, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, thank God that movie fell apart.’” The gritty HBO drama about a…

ON AN AUGUST MORNING, Karen Read is wheeling my suitcase into her four-bedroom Mansfield home. Her minimalist Colonial is embedded with clues to her current existence. A Ziploc go bag, in case of sudden arrest, sits hidden in the buffet of her blue dining room. In it: Advil, melatonin, toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, drugstore lipstick, strip of paper with her lawyer’s phone number on it, and a bottle of Laura Mercier foundation, left over from her previous life. A copy of David Rudolf ’s American Injustice, a 2021 account of horrifying prosecutorial misconduct, rests atop a stack of finance books. A burner phone and SIM cards—purchased after Read learned authorities were tracking her this year—is stashed inside a safe box beneath a scenic painting. In her closet, a framed Rebel Without…

WHAT MORE CAN you want from a weekend than seeing Zendaya hum along to Solange and play with her miniature schnauzer, Noon? Over two sunny days in September, VF brought a dozen thrilling actors together at Milk Studios in Los Angeles to shoot the cover for our 31st annual Hollywood Issue. Noon was an adorable, and very chill, plus-one. Photographer and director Gordon von Steiner shot the cover and George Cortina styled the stars, as they did so memorably last year, and used American Gigolo as an inspiration. The production involved 24 trunks, 50 boxes, 30 racks of clothing, 200 pairs of shoes, four security guards for the dazzling jewelry, and too many nondairy iced lattes to count. Glen Powell flew in from a set on only one hour’s sleep, said…

Visions of sugarplums will dance on your head with Van Cleef & Arpels’s glistening drop earrings, a combined almost 30 carats of amber-colored spessartite garnets flanked by sparkling diamonds. Just be warned that this impressive pair, set in 18-karat gold, may whisk you away into a marzipan dream state.…