If you have a subscription to Vogue USA then you should expect the February issue any day now. This month’s cover star in Girls creator Lena Dunham, whose hit show is back on British screens on Monday 20th January (yay!).
This is Dunham’s first Vogue shoot and we think she looks great (despite whatever Photoshop rumours may be going around!).
Talking to the magazine about her show, she says that she wanted to produce something real and life-like – unlike a lot of other TV depictions of relationships. “There was a sense that I and many women I knew had been led astray by Hollywood and television depictions of sexuality,” she explains. “Seeing somebody who looks like you having sex on television is a less comfortable experience than seeing somebody who looks like nobody you’ve ever met. Critics said, ‘That guy wouldn’t date that girl!’ It’s like, ‘Have you been out on the street lately?’ Everyone dates everyone, for lots of reasons we can’t understand. Sexuality isn’t a perfect puzzle, like, ‘He has a nice nose and she has a nice nose! She’s got great breasts and he’s got great calves! And so they’re going to live happily ever after in a house that was purchased with their modeling money!’ It’s a complicated thing. I want people ultimately, even if they’re disturbed by certain moments, to feel bolstered and normalized by the sex that’s on the show.”
Despite often being in the headlines for her outfits and comments made in interviews, she says she actually likes to keep her life out of the spotlight. “No one would describe me as a private person, but I actually really am,” she tells Vogue. “It’s important for me to have a lot of time alone, and to have a lot of time in my house by myself. My entire life sort of takes place between me and my dog, my books, and my boyfriend, and my private world. To me, privacy isn’t necessarily equated with secret-keeping. What’s private is my relationship with myself.”
Like many adolescents at high school, she never felt she truly fit in until she met likeminded people in the working world. “I thought of myself as relatively unpopular. It wasn’t anybody’s fault—I didn’t go to high school with mean kids—but I didn’t feel part of it. . . . I didn’t really start to feel like I had friends in a real way until I graduated from college and became engaged with the people I’d be engaged with professionally,” she says.
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Posted by Amy Power.