Among the best elements about ageing, as an artist and a girl, is discovering untapped confidence and reaching absolutely the heights of your technical talents and technique of expression. Except you’re photographer Annie Leibovitz, whose latest 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 primary skill to gentle her topic accurately. Or except you’re Hathaway, whose self-reinvention, as touted on the duvet, appears to incorporate withholding her signature fan-favorite smile. Between Anne and Annie, in line with the armchair artwork administrators of the web, there may be mainly nothing lighting up the room accurately.
“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 hold 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 photographs 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 form of diffuse and ominous gentle 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 prime composed fully of large gem stones. The highest is doing Hathaway no favors – it appears like in case you shrank her all the way down to the dimensions of The Debtors, after which she borrowed hunks of costume jewellery from the Large Individuals, after which original it into bizarre advert hoc chain mail for some motive. You possibly can see the exhausting flash reflecting off sides of her be-borrowed gem stones, throwing her careless bedhead coiffure into upsetting aid, and likewise inflicting the frames of the 2 work behind her (whose topics at the very least had the decency to be shirtless) to forged big shadows.
In equity, I’m a girl 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 photographs 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 girl 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 individuals of much more superior age, cataracts can typically have an effect on shade imaginative and prescient, and perhaps somebody – not saying who – ought to look into discovering ophthalmologist.
Vogue August 2025 cowl, that includes Anne Hathaway photographed by Annie Leibovitz
