World Wise
PEOPLE SURPRISE YOU. I was reminded of that universal fact reading this month’s cover profile of Dua Lipa, whose COVID-delayed world tour is confirming her as a dance-pop sensation, but whose offstage interests mark her as a person of uncommon curiosity and substance. “I’m always on the side of the oppressed,” she tells our writer Jen Wang— which is the kind of thing people say these days, but a passing acquaintance with Dua’s history reveals that she’s not posturing. Dua is the child of refugees—her parents fled violence in their native Kosovo under Slobodan Miloševic´ ’s tyranny—and she has launched a newsletter and podcast that cover everything from feminism to geopolitics to where to dine out in Tokyo. Dua’s sensitivity and wide-ranging interests have endeared her to a fascinating collection of friends, from the Nobel laureate Nadia Murad to Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing to Megan Thee Stallion. (“She felt like a familiar spirit,” says Megan of Dua.)
Dua navigates the serious and the lighthearted with an ease that feels very 2022. She’s a person that bridges worlds, which I might argue is the quality that matters most right now. We have been thinking a lot about multitasking at Vogue and are drawn to people who mix and match disciplines—like the wonderful actor-writer Danai Gurira, whom our editor Chloe Schama has profiled this month and who is playing Richard III at New York’s Shakespeare in the Park this summer. Or the models photographed by Jack Day in “Model Behavior”—all are content creators themselves, as adept behind the camera as they are in front of it.
Even the brave journalists who have been reporting on the ground from Ukraine, and defining the coverage of that tragic invasion, have broadened our idea of what a war correspondent can do. That the most notable of them happen to be women perhaps matters less than the way they have harnessed the world’s attention and empathy—in words, through audio, and on camera. “I don’t think of myself as a war reporter,” National Public Radio’s Leila Fadel told our writer Michelle Ruiz this month. “I just cover people.” And it is the reports of ordinary Ukrainians that have been so unforgettable—the seven-year-old boy fleeing Kyiv who told The New York Times’ Sabrina Tavernise about losing his baby teeth, or the Kyiv woman who expressed guilt about wanting to get her hair done, or the searing photo by Pulitzer Prize–winning Lynsey Addario—historic already—of the family struck down with their bags lying beside them. The need for stories and images like these couldn’t be greater.