The most effective components about growing old, as an artist and a lady, is discovering untapped confidence and reaching absolutely the heights of your technical skills and technique of expression. Except you might be photographer Annie Leibovitz, whose current Vogue cowl shoot with actor Anne Hathaway, in assist of her forthcoming A24 movie Mom Mary, has been met with vitriolic criticism over its lack of fundamental capacity to mild her topic accurately. Or except you might be Hathaway, whose self-reinvention, as touted on the quilt, appears to incorporate withholding her signature fan-favorite smile. Between Anne and Annie, in accordance with the armchair artwork administrators of the web, there’s principally nothing lighting up the room accurately.
“Somebody behind the digital camera must retire,” commented fashion-Grammer Alexandre Feldhaus, on a preview picture launched on Vogue’s Instagram, forward of the August challenge’s July 15 newsstand launch, which options Hathaway in Givenchy as a pastiche of a John Singer Sargent portray, “Madame X” (1883–84), seen hanging within the background. Whereas the artwork is well-referenced and Hathaway’s poised expressions efficiently echo the temper of the eponymous topic, the foreground lighting is in a demise battle with the background, together with Sargent’s portray. Hathaway seems ethereally washed-out in cool blue lighting, the colour stability of which turns the hotter portray mild a sickly inexperienced.
“Can somebody pls get Annie a brand new colorist,” asks digital creator Liam Haehnle. “What the hell is occurring with the edit on these pictures.”
Artwork references paired with picks from Sarah Burton’s March 2025 debut runway assortment for Givenchy maintain coming, with a picture of Hathaway standing in entrance of Franz Kline’s “Mahoning” (1956) on the Whitney Museum in New York. The composition is arresting, the pose is highly effective, and the juxtaposition between portray and mannequin is compelling — however seeming to understand that the images from the Sargent shoot on the Met had been too darkish and funky, Leibovitz over-corrects by making this one a lot too heat. What ought to have been a high-contrast imaginative and prescient of black-and-white is as a substitute a yellowish miasma — the type of diffuse and ominous mild that foretells storm’s-a-comin’ in twister nation.
However the worst, by far, is a second picture from the Sargent shoot, that includes Hathaway sitting cross-legged in entrance of two smaller Sargent work, sporting a high composed completely of big gems. The highest is doing Hathaway no favors — it seems to be like in the event you shrank her all the way down to the scale of The Debtors, after which she borrowed hunks of costume jewellery from the Huge Individuals, after which original it into bizarre advert hoc chain mail for some purpose. You’ll be able to see the onerous flash reflecting off sides of her be-borrowed gems, throwing her careless bedhead coiffure into upsetting aid, and in addition inflicting the frames of the 2 work behind her (whose topics at the least had the decency to be shirtless) to solid large shadows.
In equity, I’m a lady of a sure age who’s principally the identical as Hathaway’s, and I’ve very a lot embraced the “We Do Not Care” summer season. For all of the hate the pictures are receiving, there are many commenters who love them, and Hathaway, on her worst day, nonetheless is extra lovely than me making an attempt my very best. I’m not right here to inform a lady to smile or put on a bra, irrespective of how harsh the lighting or exacting the expectations. However it maybe does bear mentioning that for folks of much more superior age, cataracts can generally have an effect on coloration imaginative and prescient, and perhaps somebody — not saying who — ought to look into discovering ophthalmologist.
