Excerpts From The September 2014 Vogue, Presented Without Commentary

On Weddings

And since a wedding day is essentially a time when we’re all looking to the future, I have decided to dedicate the rest of my September letter to some of the things I am most looking forward to this fall.

It takes a village to make [a wedding] happen — and if the village’s residents include some of the most talented designers in the world, that’s even better.

Let us first consider the setting. Fabiola wanted the celebrations to be a “memorable, magical sort of vacation” for her intimate posse of beloved friends and family — something “flowery and cultural with both sun and sea.” Fabiola’s native Venezuela was, of course, too politically incendiary to be a possibility.

Fabiola’s initial injunction to Tisci, who created her wedding ensemble, was challenging: she asked for something “beautiful, modest, sober and yet ornate all at the same time.” The resulting dress required, by Fabiola’s account, some nine fittings and 1,600 hours of impeccable workmanship in the Givenchy haute couture ateliers.

Fans fluttered, and in the middle of the service guests instinctively waved away what seemed to be a particularly loud and persistent hornet but turned out to be a fluttering drone.[…] Sometimes, there are no words.

After the dinner, she changed into Gianni Versace’s 1991 pouf minidress in a vibrant stained glass-color print — all the better to dance to Snoop Dogg.

On Cambodian Orphans

She looked like the apsara, celestial nymphs in Buddhist mythology that dance in stone around Cambodia’s ancient temples.

Her face was bland as a Buddha’s.

On Travel

One long day and a couple of flights later, I was breathless in Aspen. It turns out the altitude is harder to deal with than in the Alps!

Once upon a fairy tale, before Vogue was even a mere sapling, America looked to France for instruction in matters of elegance much as a student looks to a teacher with wonderment and awe.

As a child, I was blissfully unaware of this social hierarchy and failed to appreciate the fact that, upon arrival, we were consistently whisked into a corner banquette on the preferred first floor (the second floor, as regulars know, is Siberia — strictly for tourists).

On Living Life To Its Fullest

When a box filled with a bounty of sumptuous silk prints and gleaming metallic arrives at my door in London, my scarf test-drive becomes official. Gulp.

Their next big project: renovating their recently acquired château.

Chances are, you’ve been mixing chia seeds into your yogurt, sprinkling goji berries on your salad, and blending acai into your smoothies.

On Inspirational Women

Although she may be the world’s most famous critic of consumerism, she understands the joy of shopping.

We’ll all come to wonder how we lived in life before boots, much in the same way we think of life before “Homeland” — or Cara Delevingne’s Instagram account.

When I return a couple of hours later, Lily is arranging a huge bunch of blooms in a giant cream-colored earthenware jug. Somehow she also manages to simultaneously pour champagne for her guests, roast two chickens, make delicious fresh salads, and entertain the group with her tales from the road.

My hands, once so perfect that I worked as a hand model after college, no longer elicit a reaction from the manicurist.

On Clothing and Designers

Later that night, the other girls and I were scrubbed up by a makeup team, and every pot of cream and gloss was Chanel. (Does it get any chicer?)

If the silken and embroidered blossoms that drifted across the garden-party dresses from Giambattista Valli’s fall 2014 haute couture collection looked familiar to me, it’s because they were — he had taken them from the impressionistic dabs in the uplifting plein air paintings of Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, which I had recently seen in Madrid at the delightful house museum dedicated to this great Spanish Belle Époque artist.

When I pair it with ankle-length Miu Miu pants and Aquazzurra flats for sushi with a low-key maestro of the tech world, though, I wonder whether it might be a bit much.

“Nice scarf,” nods the Turner Prize-winner Jeremy Deller, himself no stranger to a rakish kerchief.

The new shape? It’s a mystery. Non-body revealing silhouettes are simply more interesting now, from a boxy tailored camel overcoat to a giant puffball of white fur, both of which sumptuously obscure your hard-earned gym physique.

Anna Fitzpatrick’s words have appeared in Worn Fashion Journal, Hazlitt, Rookie Mag, The National Post, and way too many grody bar bathrooms across Toronto. She is definitely not a figment of Haley’s imagination.