In This Together
AS I INTRODUCE THIS SPECIAL ISSUE OF VOGUE, which we’re launching here ahead of its release next month, I want to say that I hope you are all well and dealing with this deeply challenging moment as best you can. Like you, no doubt, I’ve been left reeling by the dramatic changes we’ve experienced in the space of a few short weeks and the constant emotional challenges of striving to look after our families, friends, colleagues—and ourselves. It’s not as if we haven’t gone through tough times in the past, but this one feels different: The crisis is global in scale, and none of us have been left untouched. We’ve all witnessed terrible scenes and felt acutely how the coronavirus has affected our lives, and we are incredibly grateful for those who have selflessly stepped forward to keep our communities safe. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to medical workers in particular—and we have paid tribute to them here in a series of images taken by the photographer Ethan James Green.
“Having to think on my feet has been the biggest challenge,” says Johnson, a Navy hospital corpsman and respiratory-therapy technician from Maryland. “A lot of this is new—information changes every hour.”
“I’ve never seen this many patients in one place,” says Ratcliff, an Air Force colonel and orthopedic surgeon based in Florida. “This is almost like being deployed—people having to find different places to work and use different resources to get the job done.”
Ethan photographed just a few of the many who have come to New York to help the hardest-hit city in America. These health-care professionals were photographed outside the temporary field hospital created at the Javits Center at the start of April to alleviate some of the pressures on local hospitals. Many of those whose pictures we took came from far away—Florida, California, and elsewhere—putting their own lives on hold and leaving families behind to do something for others. Their selflessness is a poignant reminder of how we are all in this together.
“We came to make a difference in a short amount of time,” says Dagsaan, a Navy reservist and nurse practitioner from California. “Our fellow health-care providers have been working tirelessly, and it’s an honor to be working to give them a reprieve.”
“I came because I don’t have small children,” says Riley, who works for the New York State Department of Health in Albany. “I wanted to do my part so that people with children could stay home with them.”
It’s hard to believe that, as I write this, it has been just over a month since we returned from the fall 2020 collections in Europe, though the shadow of the coronavirus had already started to fall on us even then, as we watched in horror while the situation in Italy began to unfold. We barely had a week back in the office before making the move to working remotely, changing everything—including our June/July issue, which was created as the worlds of fashion, theater, movies, and art were on lockdown. For this special issue, we asked a number of our friends and collaborators—including designers, actors, artists, photographers, and models—to create self-rendered images that reflected the new realities of their lives. We present a wide-ranging portfolio of these images today, and will post more in the days to follow. I want to thank everyone who participated.
This isn’t, of course, the first time that Vogue has documented dark moments in our history: One thinks of Lee Miller’s indelible images of a devastated postwar Europe; of the fashion industry’s response to the heartbreaking AIDS crisis; and of how we played our part in helping and healing our country after 9/11. Yet with this June/July Vogue we are in unexplored territory—commissioning, designing, and producing everything remotely. Thanks to the hard work and dedication of the Vogue staff, I hope that we have created a document of this moment for the years to come: a poignant reminder of how we were all acutely missing the miracles of everyday life and the joy that they can bring.
Speaking of joy, I feel that every time I look at our cover, an unpublished (and breathtaking) photograph—Rose ‘Colour Wonder,’ 1970—by that master of image-making Irving Penn. (Incidentally, it’s our first still-life cover in more than 50 years.) I’m of the great belief that we can find our way forward by also considering the past, and Mr. Penn’s legendary work is a beautiful and powerful conduit between the two; his decades of pictures for Vogue were always adept at conveying both deep emotion and journalistic acuity. I was always proud of every image of his that we published, and this one is no different. I’m also pretty sure that he would have loved it.
I don’t think I am alone in wishing for a little bit of hope right now—though one of the few positives of our current time is that one can find it if one goes looking for it. I’m thinking, for instance, of how quickly people have come together to help. In the immediate days after the crisis began to hit the American fashion industry, Vogue and the Council of Fashion Designers of America launched A Common Thread, a video series where designers and those in the industry up and down the economic scale could tell their own stories of how their livelihoods have been imperiled. There is also a fundraising aspect to this initiative, and so many have already kindly given whatever they could afford to alleviate some of the hardship and uncertainty. It’s a brave act to optimistically consider the future—but that’s the kind of bravery we need now more than ever.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
