Martha Stewart Is Forever Young | PLUS Demna’s New Gucci

0:05This is The Run Through. I'm Chloe Mal, and it is a big week in the Pod studios. Martha Stewart came to the Vogue offices on Tuesday for a very special live taping of the show. And I have to say, it was a hoot. She was so much fun. She really came to play. She left it all in the field, as they say. She had a lot of fun things to bring up, like people she's dated and how to pose for the perfect thirst trap. But first, Choma is in Milan for Fashion Week, but we will be reunited very soon in Paris. We're staying at the same hotel, so I'm envisioning slumber parties or 6 a.m. playing the new Taylor Swift album when it comes out.

0:52But today, we've invited our beloved colleague, Liam Hess, Vogue's senior lifestyle editor, to the run-through to hear about all the news of the week, but also all the highlights of London Fashion Week, where Liam was boots on the ground. Liam, first of all, I'm going to contradict myself and not talk about London Fashion Week, but go straight to Demna's Gucci debut that dropped a lookbook on Tuesday and then premiered a short film directed by Spike Jonze last night, Tuesday night. Tell us what you thought about this. Yeah, we can jump straight into Milan. These fashion weeks, they go fast. They blend.

1:33They blend. I mean, obviously it was presented as a lookbook with all of these different sort of characters or archetypes. And it was dropped as a surprise. As I mean, it sort of struck me as being a bit of an amuse-bouche for what is going to come next. It does feel like he's wiping the slate a little bit while also tipping his hat to all of the Gucci designers who have gone before. You know, there were nods to Tom Ford in there and Frida Giannini. And I also was especially fond of it because I lived in Italy for a bit. One of my favorite things is the way in which Italians sort of co-opt English words in their very flamboyant accents.

2:18So I was reading all of the names like La Ids Girl. Nerd. L 'Influencer. But yeah, I feel like it was sort of him saying, you know, I've been in the archives. I've been swatting up on the brand codes and here's the synergy between that and my vision. And I feel like next season we'll maybe get to see what his big ideas are. Obviously a very star-studded lineup of attendees as well. We had Demi Moore and Gwyneth Paltrow and my favorite, Alex Consani, doing lots of hilarious interviews outside in her La Bamba faux tiger fur coat. She's a hoot always. Did you watch the film? I haven't yet. No, I need to do that.

3:02And it's by Helena Rain and Spike Jones, right? Yes, there was a screening last night in New York with Gucci branded popcorn. It was super fun. And it also reminded me of how people do runway presentations differently. Some, you know, a fashion show doesn't have to be a fashion show. We see this a few times a season. Glenn Martins also just did that with Diesel in Milan by doing, I mean, I would love to know what you thought about this. There was a scavenger hunt, I believe, with QR code throughout Milan to find these clear Easter eggs that had models inside them. The Melvin Sokolsky, the famous Melvin Sokolsky bizarre shoot of the models in the clear bubbles on the Seine, this very much felt like a version of old school sort of sci-fi and a new way to think about how we're discovering collections.

4:05It did amuse me when I was reading Luke Leach's review of the collection that, of course, they will be scattered all around the city for everyone to see. But that was not going to keep the fashion press happy. So they had to, like, bring them all together just so everyone could see them and then let all the fashionists go on their merry way. Yeah. Liam, what were the highlights of London? Because it's always different what filters through digitally and on the internet versus in real life. Well, I think there was definitely a different energy this season. As you are probably already well aware, there's a new head of the British Fashion Council, the wonderful Laura Weir, who has implemented all sorts of new kind of initiatives to really bring sort of a new energy.

4:56And I think one of the things as well that did come through was, you know, we can't take it for granted for anyone who is in sort of like a position of power or success or within the industry. You need to pay that back. And, you know, there's a reason why it's the most exciting, risk-taking fashion city. And that's because it's all indie designers. And I thought one very visible example of that was the fact that Naomi Campbell walked in a whole bunch of shows. I figure it was sort of part of that spirit of wanting to support these kind of younger brands that wouldn't necessarily have the budget to cast supermodels.

5:38She opened Richard Quinn. She was in Tolu Koka's lookbook, and she made a very memorable appearance at the Dilara Fendikoglu show, which was quite the circus. I haven't seen anything like that in a long time. The show was in this really atmospheric old Iron Mongers hall, and it was obviously very dark and spooky and had this kind of terrifying soundtrack of all of this clattering and clanking. And the models were sort of vamping their way around the space. And it was real. You had to be that kind of moment, as her shows so often are. She has such a brilliant knack for theatricality, but also the quality of the garments is like very impressive as well.

6:21The cherry dress I just thought was one of the more exciting things I'd seen recently on the runway. It was very cool. I could sort of see as it went around everybody in the front row leaning forward to take a closer look and figure out how exactly it was made. I don't know if they were real cherries or not, actually. I mean, they were like staining the white sort of fabric of the corset and the dress. It was quite, there was something very sensual and perverse about it somehow, even though it was fruit. It was interesting how effective I thought that was. Yeah. Tell me about your Burberry experience, because I feel like that's always the big circus moment of London Fashion Week.

7:08It was. um, they actually, the one thing everybody was talking about before the show was the fact that they held it in, uh, the same part of Kensington Park Gardens where sort of back in the day in the mid-2010s, Christopher Bailey would always use that location. Um, and it really was, you know, the era where Burberry was, um, at its peak. And so it sort of felt like a, like a statement of intent really that, you know, Burberry is back. Burberry is, you know, has returned to the heady heights of its dominance during that period. But of course, it was a very different take coming from Daniel Lee.

7:46And it was very cool. It was, you know, inspired, I think, by Glastonbury and sort of British mysticism in the 1960s and 70s. And there was this kind of Black Sabbath soundtrack. And it seems like they're sort of leaning into British music, really, as part of the brand. You know, they did a big festival-themed campaign earlier this year, and these looked like, you know, you could see Alexa Chung or Kate Moss or any of your Glastonbury faves, like, rocking one of these looks with a pair of Hunter Wellies trudging through the mud in Somerset, for sure. I also love that they sort of leaned into the Oasis tour and had the Oasis kids modeling for them.

8:31So I do think Daniel Lee has been quite savvy about that. Liam, You and I have caught up this week already, but you have mentioned that you have been working on a wedding basically every day for the last two months. Such is the plight of wedding season. But I do feel like people think about wedding season being the summer. And to me, the most busy month of the year for weddings is September, without a doubt. What are some of the more exciting weddings that have gone up on Vogue.com recently and that you are eagerly chasing? I mean, they are all equally exciting, Chloe. Oh, there you go. These beautiful weddings.

9:09A wedding, a marital diplomat. One very beautiful wedding that we published last week was Abby Champion and Patrick Schwarzenegger's wedding, which was in Idaho. And Abby wore Daniel Frankel. And Patrick was wearing custom Haida Ackerman for Tom Ford, which I believe is the first time he sort of outfitted someone for a wedding at his new post. I think my favorite anecdote from the wedding was Abby was talking about in the story how it was actually Patrick, not her, who was obsessed with, like, the decor and the flowers and the aesthetic details. Yeah, she was like, I'm just going to leave that to him.

9:49I mean, Graham did plan our wedding, but yes, I'm always impressed by... Yeah. I always, because Elise, our colleague Elise Taylor, who also works on weddings, often says that sometimes with the wedding submissions we look at, it feels she describes them as she's Barbie, but he's just can weddings where it's, you know, very much the bride's moment. But I think this was a nice one because it really, you could tell that both of them had been so involved in every aspect of the day and they really sort of shared double billing in a way that was nice. We love a man who cares about getting the florals just right, you know.

10:22It's true. My favorite photo was the cast of The White Lotus season three, which was extremely charming. It was like, who was it? Alessandro Nivola. Who else? Sam Nivola. Sarah Catherine Hook. Jason Isaacs. The family reunion. Yeah. Plus Maud Apatow, who's dating baby Nivola. Very cute. What other weddings? We love a Vogue at a bride around here. And when our esteemed colleague, Naomi Elise, mentioned that she was getting married, it It was very, very exciting because as we all know, she's probably like the best dressed person in the office, maybe in the world. We knew it was going to be a fashion emergency.

11:01She sort of enlisted the help of a lot of her good friends, including Christopher John Rogers and Rachel Scott of Diatima and now Porenza Skula and Henry Zankov to create this kind of amazing suite of looks on looks on looks. Yeah, so many looks. And it was just a really beautiful, sweet, thoughtful wedding. You know, there were some lovely nods to her Haitian heritage and they had a good friend of theirs, the musician Liv, sort of perform and, you know, without sounding too cheesy, it's like, it was sort of a reminder that like the coolest people and the coolest weddings maybe are the ones that are just feel very effortless, you know.

11:42Liam, what are you listening to right now? Well, I, like many others, have been listening to the Cardi B album a lot. There was the hilarious and brilliant rollout of it all, which I believe Christian wrote about. There was the sort of, yeah, the hilarious way the album has been rolled out. She was in court for quite a bizarre case. And for some reason, I never understand why they do this, but it was being live streamed, her sort of testimony, and just her responses. You know, she's so funny and so charismatic. And she was being asked these sort of often very ridiculous questions. And sort of meeting them with equally absurd answers.

12:27And then she sort of parlayed that into part of the album promo. I think because she was going viral, she then took some of the sort of screenshots of her in court and decided to release a limited edition version of the album with that as the cover. Oh, my God. She's such a marketing genius. She announced last week that she is pregnant with her fourth baby and with, obviously, NFL star Stefan Diggs. And she has some great maternity looks that she's been bringing out. There's a lot of sheer, a lot of lace. You know, she's not afraid to show off that bump. Doja Cat's new album is coming out on Friday.

13:06I'm excited for the Doja Cat album I you know she's sort of this is her big return to pop music really because she's been leaning more into her kind of hip-hop side over the past album or two and it is visually the world she's built around it is already like super cool it's obviously very very 80s inspired sort of Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson vibes and she's also been wearing some incredible archive fashion, lots of Claude Montana and vintage YSL. And I'm excited about, I think there's a new single dropping alongside the album called Gorgeous. And there's been these sort of teasers with lots of supermodels.

13:53It's Anok and Paloma and Irina Shayk and Karen Elson are all going to be in this video, I believe. So it's going to be sort of like the 2025 version of George Michael's freedom. Oh my God, that's so fun. Liam, we are heading straight into Taylor Swift season. Yeah, showgirl season. Showgirl season is upon us. I've always liked Pop Taylor the best. You know, controversially, I'd probably say my favorite album of hers is Reputation. And she's back working with Max Martin and Shelbach, who produced a lot of that album again. And, you know, I just, I wasn't into the moody midnights and tortured poet stuff.

14:33Sorry, Swifties. I'm probably going to need to go into, like, witness protection for saying that. But I'm happy that she's back in her pop girl bag. All right. Well, we can all be excited about that.

14:47We are starting our Shark Week on October 2nd. It will be our big Paris Fashion Week extravaganza. There will be an episode of the run-through every single day for four days straight, on the grounds, straight from the horse's mouth, the horses being me, Nicole, Choma, and others. So stay tuned. The Run-Through will be back with Martha Stewart after this break.

15:23You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney, or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at The New Yorker. So join us every week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

15:53Martha, we are so excited. Wow, look how many people are here. To have you at the World Trade Center. This is amazing. Thank you. I will tell you, this is the room where we have the company meeting, and there's not this big a crowd. So this is a big excitement for us. Big Tuesday and One World Trade. Do you listen to podcasts? I have a podcast. But do you listen to other podcasts? I really don't listen to too many podcasts. I'm sorry about that because I spend a lot of time in the car, but it's usually work-related, the car rides. Okay. So you're doing more calls then. Yes. And I also don't like listening to iPods because I don't use iPods.

16:37Oh, because of 5G or things? I just don't use them. That's how I found my husband was being unfaithful when he was lying in the garden with iPods and he thought he was covered with leaves and he had those things in his ears. That's the early, early days of Sony iPods. Wow. I've hated them ever since. That's a good reason. Yeah.

17:04Martha, I have to say, when we were preparing for this interview, I said, you know, I feel very close to Martha because even though we don't know each other very well, my mother, Candice Bergen, is often confused for you. And I've known you since you were born. You don't even know that, but your mother married an old boyfriend of mine on Lily Pond Lane. Oh. This is her stepfather. That's true. We were neighbors. I didn't know that he was a boyfriend of yours. Yeah, I went out with him a couple times. He was quite the Casanova for a moment. He was nice. He was a very nice man. There was a couple of us.

17:41More than two of us. There's Candace, Diane Sawyer. Everybody thinks I'm Diane Sawyer all the time. All the time. They mistake me for Diane and Candace. And let me see. Not Meryl Streep. Somebody mistook me for Meryl Streep once. Who's the craziest, most surprising mistaken identity you've ever gotten? Oh, no, just those two. Nobody else, I don't think. Those are very beautiful women and very talented women, so I'm happy about that. That's true. You're in good blonde company. Martha, you were out and about at New York Fashion Week last week. Tell me about what— It was busy. It was a booming time.

18:21Oh, my gosh. I had such a good time. I didn't get to a lot of shows, but I did get to Libertine, which is in the Elizabeth Street Garden. And I think Johnson has done a very good job of helping keep that garden alive. So I support him very much. And I love his clothes. So I went to that. I went to Alexander Wang. I know you played Mahjong with Cardi B. Oh, my gosh. Cardi B didn't know anything about Mahjong. But she is so fun. And she looked gorgeous. She looked gorgeous. She brought her little seven-year-old girl. Did you teach Cardi how to play Mahjong? Well, we talked about it, but actually, really, you can't do it that fast.

19:01Do you play Mahjong? That's a big thing right now. I play with one friend up in Bedford. She's a Mahjong freak, and I find it to be one of the most boring and silly games on earth. But I don't have a lot of time to play games like that. But it's interesting. The tiles are pretty, and the ones that Alexander Wang had, These are modern tiles made out of stainless steel and painted with very complex designs. I don't know what they were exactly signified, but they were hard to match up, and especially in the dark room. And we were sitting at tables, mahjong tables, which were about two feet from the floor.

19:37So the celebrity people got to sit at the mahjong tables. Okay. And I thought we would get the mahjong table to take home with us. I'd love to have that. Have you ever made mahjong tables or sets? No, no. Okay. No, I haven't. But they're interesting. Okay. Other Fashion Week parties you went to? Let me see. I went to the J.Crew. Oh, yeah, that looked fun. You were in the room full of cashmere, right? Yeah, it was so fun. And it turns out that there was a room made sort of like a bedroom library. And the blanket on the bed was knitted in dark blue, dark red cashmere, very, very thick cashmere. And my 10-year-old nephew, Silas Slater, had knitted that.

20:19Oh, wow. And he got paid, I think he got paid$1 ,200. He's 10 years old. And his mother had worked on it also and another crafter up in eastern Connecticut. Wow. So how weird is that connection? Oh, you didn't know Silas had done it? No, I didn't know that. They're busy doing all kinds of crafty things. So he did a lot of the combing of the cashmere. And it's quite a, it looked like a Rothko. It was supposed to look like some sort of Rothko blanket. But that was funny. What's your dream night out in New York these days? My dream night out is somebody interesting. Like tomorrow night is very interesting because there are a lot of things going on.

20:58It's climate week. Of course, you all know that. The UN is in session. The traffic is hideous. I am invited by Mayor Bloomberg to go to dinner at the new Frick with the Secretary General of the UN. So that will be interesting. That's a dream kind of dinner to go to because you learn something, you meet some new people, you hang out with Mayor Bloomberg, who I love, and that's fun. What's the best restaurant in New York at this moment? Where do you love to eat? Well, Saturday night I'm going to supposedly the number one restaurant in America. You know what that is? Tatiana? No. Tell me. It was Atomix.

21:39Oh. The Korean-owned restaurant, Atomix. And it's my daughter's birthday, and seven of us are going for dinner at the – you know, that's what it was voted the best. Wow. Have you eaten there before? No. But I did have them on my show for their restaurant in Rockefeller Center, Nara, and that's a delicious restaurant. But we're anxious to see, and they have the harshest critics. My 13 - and 14-year-old grandchildren are real, real restaurant critics. Wow. And they know food. They know food better than anybody else I know. And they can tell you every ingredient in a dish. I don't know how they learned.

22:17I guess their mother taught them, but they are really harsh critics. So we'll see. Well, your 84th birthday was last month. I'm sorry. It's on Wikipedia. They always have to say that. I mean, it's so stupid. Because we're in such awe, and you're launching skincare. This is a great – you're your best ad. Yes. But I wondered – happy belated birthday. Thank you. I wondered how you celebrated. We were in Maine. Okay. And we were, I have a house up in Maine on Mount Desert Island in Acadia National Park. And it's one of our favorite places. And we just had a simple, we had a few friends. Octavia Spencer came.

22:57Oh, wow. And I hadn't met her before. She was so fun and so nice to everybody. I was so happy because there's, you know, family dynamics and stuff. But she got, she waded through all of that. Did she just show up? I mean, she came with some other friends. And a little boy had asked his father, who's one of my friends, that he loves me, this little 10-year-old boy. Could they go to Maine? So they chose my birthday weekend to come. And they brought Octavia. And they brought Octavia. Leonardo DiCaprio recently said that he emotionally feels 32 years old. I wonder how old you emotionally feel. Depends on the day and what I've done.

23:38But I don't think about age. Okay. I think one secret of growing old gracefully is not to think about how old you are. If I started to think about how old I was, come on, it would be horrifying. So I don't think about that ever. But one thing I do do, and it's good for anybody older, if you're over like 60 in the audience, start making younger friends. And of all my friends who are closer in age to me, I am the only one that has really done that successfully and nicely with younger friends. because you get a different point of view. I mean, that's why I like this 10-year-old kid from Charleston, South Carolina.

24:16I mean, I learned something from him. And Silas, the little boy who knitted the blanket, that kid is smart. And he asked for his birthday, which was this Sunday. His mother called me up, and she's like my second daughter, Sophie, her name is. She was my sister's youngest, second youngest child, and her mother died. So I've assumed the mother job. And the little boy, the mother asked Silas, what do you want to do for your birthday? He said, I want to go to Aunt Martha's. So if a little 10-year-old wants to hang out, hang out with them. You're doing something right. I know. You're doing something right, and you learn from them.

24:54There's so much to learn from the youth. Clearly you are learning from the youth, but I also feel like you are constantly teaching people and spreading the Martha gospel. That's what he would say. He would say, I learned something from Martha. Say, that's what's nice. And they do. You know, we try to teach each other things. And one of my favorite mottos of all time is learn something new every day. Would you say that is one driving force for you to be taking on so many projects all the time? I feel like I'm constantly hearing about a different endeavor that you have. Well, I like, first of all, I'm entrepreneurial by nature.

25:33I like starting and doing new things. and I like carrying things through. So to start a skincare line, for example, it's called Elm Biosciences. This has taken a long time. I met my partner, Daval Bonasali. He's an Indian doctor, a dermatologist. His offices are in Hudson Yards and in Florida. He is a very astute researcher. And we started to talk about skincare about five years ago. And we talk and talk and talk and talk. He's advised other companies. SkinCeuticals was one that he advised. He also advised Rode, which has just sold itself for a billion dollars after like two and a half years. Very successful startup.

26:16But he understands ingredients and unusual ingredients. And he pays attention to new trends and new happenings in the dermatological world. So he was the right person for me to get involved with. I love chemistry and I love ingredients. I'm a baker and I like to know how things work. So that has been a very good partnership. And our serum is extraordinary. I've been using it now in different iterations for about a little less than five years. And it really has made a difference in my skin. Your skin looks great. Yeah, flawless, kind of nice feeling. Even my daughter, Alexis, who is the most difficult person to please when it comes to things like skin care.