Is there any artist in the world right now quite like Grimes? Musically, she’s operating on another plane; she was breaking ground in the metaverse before most of us had heard of it. As Devin Gordon observes in his cover profile, she refers to her work as “post-internet” because it’s created in an era when virtually any sound from the past is available in a click. Her current project—appropriately for someone who has been a fan of Dune since she was four—is a space opera. Then there’s her relationship with Elon Musk, known to the rest of Earth as its richest man as well as one of its most stratospherically ambitious and idiosyncratic, but who, on Planet Grimes, plays more of a sidekick role as fellow futurist brainiac, Mars aspirant, and co-parent (more on that in Devin’s revealing piece).
The legendary photographer Steven Klein, in his first collaboration with Vanity Fair, captures Grimes in her element: a mediated world where cinematic glamour coexists with sharp-edged machines. Her real name is Claire, and sometimes she goes by c, as in the speed of light—moving faster than the naked eye can see. Through Steven’s lens, lit up in stark neon, Grimes’s charisma comes arrestingly into focus. She’s joined in our spring Style Issue by the stars of Formula One, whose fame has exploded beyond the race circuit to make them global celebrities. Nick Riley Bentham photographs them in fashion fit for kings—of the road.
In “All That Breathe,” its headline taken from a lyric of “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee),” May Jeong writes about the day last March when a shooter killed eight people in three Atlanta spas, six of them Asian women. May reports in heartbreaking detail on the lives of the victims—the choices and relationships and histories that propelled them to that fateful time and place—and she speaks with their families: the sons and husbands who picked up their phones that evening to learn that their mother, their wife, their beloved, was dead. This is the story of a terrible crime, but it’s also a story about immigration, and the fact that even in our era of global connectivity, leaving one country for another can still trigger a profound and lasting experience of dislocation. The tragedy in Atlanta radiated far outward from its neighborhood. It was a shocking episode of violence in an America where anti-Asian hostility and crime has been on the rise, another insidious expression of deeply embedded racism. And the grief and loss of that day extended across the ocean, as May eloquently documents, to families whose daughters now will never come home.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Grimes on Music, Mars, and Her Secret New Baby With Elon Musk
— The Vanity Fair Oscar Party Returns: Fill Out Your Ballot and Watch the Livestream on March 27
— Netflix, Drive to Survive, and the New Cult of F1 Fandom
— Allegra Gucci on Her Mother, New Book, and House of Gucci
— Melinda Gates Says Bill Gates’s Work With “Abhorrent” Epstein Led to Divorce
— The Birth of Celebrity Outrage Over Vaccines, Masks, and Mandates
— 29 Killer The Batman–Inspired Items for Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz Fans
— From the Archive: How Intense Loathing Brought Down the Gucci Dynasty
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