The most effective elements about growing older, as an artist and a lady, is discovering untapped confidence and reaching absolutely the heights of your technical skills and technique of expression. Until you might be photographer Annie Leibovitz, whose latest Vogue cowl shoot with actor Anne Hathaway, in help of her forthcoming A24 movie Mom Mary, has been met with vitriolic criticism over its lack of primary capacity to mild her topic appropriately. Or except you might be Hathaway, whose self-reinvention, as touted on the duvet, appears to incorporate withholding her signature fan-favorite smile. Between Anne and Annie, based on the armchair artwork administrators of the web, there may be mainly nothing lighting up the room appropriately.
“Can someone pls get Annie a new colorist,” asks digital creator Liam Haehnle. “What the hell is going on with the edit on these images.”
Anne Hathaway in Givenchy by Sarah Burton, photographed by Annie Leibovitz on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork
Artwork references paired with picks from Sarah Burton’s March 2025 debut runway assortment for Givenchy preserve 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 have 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 an alternative a yellowish miasma — the type of diffuse and ominous mild that foretells storm’s-a-comin’ in twister nation.
Anne Hathaway in Givenchy by Sarah Burton and a Bvlgari Excessive Jewellery ring, photographed by Annie Leibovitz on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork
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, carrying a high composed completely of big gem stones. The highest is doing Hathaway no favors — it appears to be like like should you shrank her all the way down to the scale of The Debtors, after which she borrowed hunks of costume jewellery from the Large Individuals, after which customary it into bizarre advert hoc chain mail for some cause. You possibly can see the laborious flash reflecting off aspects of her be-borrowed gem stones, throwing her careless bedhead coiffure into upsetting reduction, and likewise inflicting the frames of the 2 work behind her (whose topics at the least had the decency to be shirtless) to forged large shadows.
In equity, I’m a lady of a sure age who’s mainly the identical as Hathaway’s, and I’ve very a lot embraced the “We Do Not Care” summer time. 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 attempting my best possible. I’m not right here to inform a lady to smile or put on a bra, regardless 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 typically have an effect on coloration imaginative and prescient, and perhaps somebody — not saying who — ought to look into discovering an excellent ophthalmologist.
Vogue August 2025 cowl, that includes Anne Hathaway photographed by Annie Leibovitz
