Daniel D'Addario

Why are celebrities spending so much time and energy on their costumes?

Pumpkin spice lattés have had their day as universal objects of mockery; it’s time to come up with a new cliché for autumn. Maybe late September and October can be redefined as the era of Halloween-related celebrity thirst. From costumes to pumpkin-patch photo ops, there’s no holiday as closely associated with minor stars carrying out long-term plans to seek major attention than All Hallow’s Eve.

Every year, stars pose for paparazzi photo ops, in and out of costume, in the weeks leading up to Oct. 31. The calculus is fairly simple: If you’re a celebrity with kids, and one who wants to promote an image of yourself as committed to family life, you head to Mr. Bones Pumpkin Patch, the Los Angeles gourd dispensary where notables like Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Kyle Richards, pop singer Christina Aguilera, and lifestyle entrepreneur Jessica Alba have been caught on camera in recent years.

Stars interested in creating a splashy impression, by contrast, show up at celebrity costume parties where photographers outside catch their creative (or not) garbs: This year, Teen Wolf star Colton Haynes got praised for his creativity in dressing in an elaborate Princess Fiona (from Shrek) get-up at Glee actor Matthew Morrison’s Halloween party, at which Chris Colfer showed how hip he is by dressing as Grumpy Cat. Last year, Dancing With the Stars performer Julianne Hough was criticized for putting on blackface to dress as Uzo Aduba’s Orange is the New Black character for a party. Her intention, wildly muddled by the execution, seemed to have been to signal how hip she was — she streams the critically-praised Netflix shows, same as you! Either way, the costumes all end up in long photo galleries on gossip sites.

Halloween, for stars, is all about messaging. That’s what most days are all about, too, but Halloween provides a particularly tidy set of coincidences. When pumpkin picking, a big, public place provides celebrities an opportunity to take part in an activity that has positive, nostalgic associations with childhood for just about everyone. Costumes provide stars an easy opportunity to crystallize either something that’s transparently obvious about their persona (usually, how comfortable they are in their bodies) or to introduce a new aspect, like self-conscious wit. Unlike Christmas or Thanksgiving, Halloween, after one is a child, is something of a formless holiday, stretching to the weekend before or after the day itself and occupying no defined purpose. It was primed for celebrities to take it over.

After all, if there’s one thing Halloween does for most people, it’s allowing them to feel like a celebrity for a night. Celebrities are celebrities every night, so with all the practice they’ve gotten, it’s no wonder they’re so good at making Halloween all about them.

His essay didn't minimize the importance of his sexuality. Instead, he acknowledged how being gay has changed his life and worldview

The new wave of social media fashion influencers may long for Vogue's stamp of approval, but they don't need it.

In a year of embarrassing missteps by fashion publications (among them, Marie Claire’s discovering cornrows in the form of Kendall Jenner’s “bold braids” and Elle‘s discovery of Timberland boots), the most memorable was Vogue‘s discovery of the female derriere. “We’re Officially in the Era of the Big Booty,” a Vogue headline read last month, above an article reading “it would appear that the big booty has officially become ubiquitous.” The proof positive, per Vogue, was the newfound prominence of Kim Kardashian, who’d been on a cover of the magazine earlier that year.

Never mind that the magazine has by now reverted to the mean, with its November cover depicting thin, blonde model Natalia Vodianova glorying in the Paris Opera Ballet, rejecting both the concept of “big booty” and the less-than-high brow sort of reality-show fame Kardashian had achieved.

But the Vodianova cover feels like something from a different, less interesting era, while the Kardashian one feels au courant.

The fashion bible still fancies itself an opinion-maker, with the power to anoint trends as officially having happened, or celebrities as officially having merit or beauty. Lately, though, the publication seems to be chasing the trends set by a cadre of public figures rather than setting them; what’s in Vogue is in vogue because the magazine finally noticed.

Consider the case of Kim Kardashian. The reality star finally got her wish when she appeared on the April cover, but the packaging of the spread seemed vaguely critical. It’s quite rare for a man to appear on Vogue’s cover, but Kardashian appeared with fiancé Kanye West, who was possibly considered a more legitimate object of interest given his achievements in music. And then there was an editor’s letter by Anna Wintour that mounted a strange defense of the cover (“As for the cover, my opinion is that it is both charming and touching,” Wintour wrote as though she hadn’t commissioned and chosen it).

The whole thing seemed to hold Kardashian at arms’ length. It was as if the magazine had decided it was impossible to ignore her, just as it is impossible to ignore the fact that that curvy butts are popular. Kim Kardashian, at a voluptuous 5’2”, isn’t a natural fit for a publication that’s usually populated with pale, willowy models. And Wintour’s magazine seemed just as out of its depth honoring her as it did writing about the body shape she’s helped legitimize. In both cases, the magazine felt out of its depth.

Kanye West’s active lobbying for Kardashian’s Vogue cover got one thing wrong: He was right that Kardashian has a more engaged following than does the magazine, but he was wrong that she ought to be on the cover. The manner in which Kardashian cycles through expensive couture—changing her look day-to-day in order to keep her Instagram followers sated—makes her an inapt cover subject for the fashion bible. There’s no one fixed fashion image of Kardashian, or of Beyoncé, the past Vogue cover model whom the New York Times recently, rightly, said was not a fashion icon. Both Kardashian and Beyoncé, and, for that matter, 2014 Vogue cover model Rihanna, dress in well-curated (and expensive) garments, and have no rigidly defined aesthetic. A specific or iconic “look” really only works if one is the sort of person for whom fashion designers tailor a specific genre of clothes for or who are known for a well-defined style like Kate Middleton, Angelina Jolie or Lupita Nyong’o. Kardashian and other entertainers like her have had to be more imaginative to make couture work for them; Kardashian has been particularly successful at this, having shifted like a chameleon from straightforwardly “sexy” looks to intriguingly structural or textured outfits that are outré enough to engender debate in an Instagram comment thread.

And they’ve succeeded. These women push the culture and the aesthetics of beauty further away from the standard fashion model look every time they upload a photo. Vogue, a publication that’s always thrived on being able to label, categorize or dictate each development, can only hope to play catch-up. Officially or no, butts were always “in” for the people who have to figure out how to dress them. And given the difference in Kim Kardashian’s Twitter followers (over 24 million) and Vogue circulation (1.26 million), it’s a substantial fashion-loving audience that Vogue ignores at its peril. The magazine’s new openness to different body shapes is a net good, but it’s not hard to wish that stars like Kim Kardashian would blow off a magazine where they’re only grudgingly included.

She may not be a native New Yorker, but Swift's already giving back to her adopted city

“Welcome to New York,” the first track on Taylor Swift’s new album 1989, has gotten some blowback from those who’ve lived in New York for longer, and under less luxurious circumstances, than Swift herself (who bought an apartment in Manhattan earlier this year). The Village Voice described the city of Swift’s song as “generic, flat, and lifeless a New York as has ever existed in pop culture,” saying the song could as easily be titled “Welcome to Des Moines.” That the tourism department of New York City named Swift a “global welcome ambassador” this week only added to the mockery: Who was Swift to be singing about a city in which she’d just arrived?

But those who thought Swift would be silenced forgot how good she is at shaking things off. Swift announced, in an appearance on The View today, that she would be donating all of the proceeds from sales of “Welcome to New York” to the city’s public schools. It’s both generous and a canny P.R. move, immediately obviating the first significant criticism she’s faced in the 1989 roll-out.

This will likely do nothing to assuage the critics of Swift’s aesthetics or the role she’s taken on as a spokesperson for city tourism. (The haters, as they say, gonna hate.) But it’s a declaration of her citizenship that would seem to solve the conundrum of how Swift has the gall to sing about New York. She may not know the ins and outs of ordering sandwiches at bodegas and may not have a MetroCard, but Swift has committed what is likely to be a huge amount of money to bettering the lives of those who have lived for years in her adopted city; for all Swift can be critiqued as making New York seem dull and safe to outsiders and potential tourists, she’s also set to do more than most of her critics in changing life in the city.

Swift’s long taken inspiration from her life in writing her songs. She’s now putting her lyrics to work in her day-to-day life as, yes, a New Yorker.

Ginsburg's defense of a controversial opera is the latest in a long series of culture-diet revelations from the judges

Every national election gets candidates talking about their taste in television and movies. This is how we found out, two years ago, that Modern Family was just about the only thing that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama agree upon. But candidates for office have to speak carefully in order to please their constituencies, whereas people with lifetime appointments can say whatever they like.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent declaration that she didn’t find anti-Semitic tones in the controversial new opera The Death of Klinghoffer, about a Palestinian terrorist group’s hijacking of a cruise ship in 1985, is interesting on its face as another entry into the heated debate over the opera. It was also proof positive of Supreme Court Justices’ unique place in the culture: They’re people who are simultaneously able to speak their minds publicly without fear of losing their jobs (New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, defending the opera, relied on a free-speech argument without getting into content), and are widely seen as especially learned. When they break their silence on culture, Justices are presumably speaking freely, and their statements, preferences, and cultural choices would seem to carry special weight.

Ginsburg and Justice Antonin Scalia are both outspoken opera fans, for instance, and have used the press to promote favorite opera recordings. This is in line with the ivory-tower expectations around Supreme Court Justices (though it also sheds light on Ginsburg and Scalia’s by-all-reports collegial relationship). Scalia’s professed fondness of Duck Dynasty and Seinfeld in a New York magazine interview last year was yet more revealing: This was a person, unlike a presidential candidate, who made no attempt to present as caught up with contemporary culture (which he dismissed as coarse). His declaration that he’d watched a single episode of the A&E reality show and had “some CDs” of the NBC sitcom showed a far broader audience his philosophy of staying aloof from the ups and downs of intellectual trends than any judicial opinion could have.

Clarence Thomas, who is the tersest of the justices during oral argument, has said he frequently watches Saving Private Ryan at home but “can’t tell you why except we have it and it’s about something important in our lives — World War II.” Sonia Sotomayor has helped to humanize her position through her well-publicized love of salsa music and Major League Baseball (in her confirmation hearings, she compared the associate justice position to that of an umpire). And Chief Justice John Roberts loves both Dr. Zhivago, which he discussed at such length at a judicial conference that the Christian Science Monitor compared him to a “USC film school grad.”

It’s easy to see why the Justices get asked so many questions about their cultural consumption in the Stars-They’re-Just-Like-Us era: It would seem to shed some light on what very smart people think is worth watching, and also gives us real insight into the inner workings of some of the most influential people in America, who have no incentive to answer dishonestly — or to answer at all. (Not every question asked, though, gets an answer: During her confirmation hearing, Elena Kagan couldn’t say whether she was “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob,” which may speak well of her.)

The Supreme Court remains the least visible of the three branches, because its members don’t have to do interviews about what frivolous culture they enjoy in order to keep their jobs; they could just keep influencing our lives without granting much insight into who they are and what they watch. That’s exactly why it’s so important that they do it.

The Noah director continues on his environmentalist bent

The "Chandelier" star is selling a Mason jar into which she exhaled

Sia’s fans consider the Australian songstress, who refuses to face the audience when performing, a breath of fresh air. Let’s hope that assessment is accurate: Sia is set to auction off a sealed jar of her exhalation.

The star has written huge pop hits for Rihanna and Beyoncé, and like any good pop songwriter, she knows how to prevent leaks — including those of her breath seeping out of its glass jar. A spokesperson for the Adelaide Film Festival said, “Gorgeously and magnificently, she breathed into a jar for us. Her breath is in a Mason jar with silver sealing wax, so no one can accidentally open it. Whoever wins it will be able to break the seal — or just let it be.”

It’s a donation that suits Sia’s persona perfectly: Both shunning the sort of spotlight that a donation of her time or artwork might attract, but doing so showily. This self-styled eccentricity draws more attention to Sia than a comparable, more conventional prize (it’s hard to imagine the walk-on role in Anthony LaPaglia’s next film, also up for auction at the Adelaide Film Festival, getting much press). Sia, in promoting her most recent album, has been ostentatiously absent; it’s a strategy that’s paid huge dividends for her, and one she continues by sharing only her exhalations with fans.

The winning bidder will be able to do whatever he or she likes with the jarred air, naturally, but Sia may have left a cryptic hint in her earlier work: Prior to her current renaissance as the singer of “Chandelier,” Sia was best known as the singer of the Six Feet Under final-scene anthem “Breathe Me.”

Marvel's rumored to be negotiating with the Sherlock star. He's the perfect fit

Benedict Cumberbatch is reportedly in negotiations to star in Marvel’s Doctor Strange adaptation, one of many planned superhero movies within the universe of The Avengers.

The British actor and world-famous photobombardier has no shortage of accolades these days—he won an Emmy for Sherlock this year and is already rumored to be a frontrunner in the Oscar race for his performance as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. But this role, should the rumors prove true, would be a chance for the charismatic rising star, charming in just about every interview he gives, to finally become a household name.

In the comics, Doctor Strange is a powerful magician entrusted with protecting planet Earth from supernatural, extra-planetary forces. “Although he moved fearlessly between realities like a prototype psychonaut, his mission as Sorcerer Supreme was ultimately about keeping the doors of perception closed,” writes Grantland’s Alex Pappademas.

Marvel clearly wants an actor with gravitas. If reports are to be believed, the list of considerations for the role include the likes of Joaquin Phoenix–on a winning streak after Her, The Master, and the upcoming Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice—along with Dallas Buyers Club Oscar-winner Jared Leto. But while his competition is talented, Cumberbatch may be the wisest choice of his generation’s heavyweight actors.

First, there’s Cumberbatch’s physical appearance, which lends well to a surreal cinematic universe. If Doctor Strange is to be significantly more surreal than other superhero movies, it needs a more, to put it bluntly, freaky-looking star. Unlike Phoenix, Leto, or other stars around the same age, Cumberbatch has narrow, wide-set eyes and vertiginous cheekbones. To look at him is to be transported into a universe slightly removed from our own. It’s an aesthetic that worked in his favor as Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness.

Cumberbatch is famous, of course, but far less a celebrity-at-large than any of the other actors rumored to be in contention for the role, so he will enter the Marvel Universe, like Chris Hemsworth did, with less pre-existing baggage. (Before he picked up Thor’s hammer, Hemsworth was best known as the star of an Australian soap opera.) Cumberbatch’s vocal fan base will easily help make this movie a hit, but, really, it’s his relative unfamiliarity that makes this a good call. He’s an actor who can fill a screen without becoming bigger than the film itself.