This year has been been great for
awarding winning actress Lupita Nyong’o! Snagging major contracts to be the face of Miu Miu and Lancome, and being added to the cast of the upcoming Star Wars movie, she’s added yet another big achievement to her laundry list of accomplishments. She’s the new cover girl for Vogue Magazine!
We all kind of knew this was in the making, since she already has covered every fashion magazine imaginable, not to mention she was seated next to Vogue’s Anna Wintour during Fashion Week, but to see it truly happen is incredible. Since 1989, only 8 black women have covered the fashion bible (Jennifer Hudson, Beyonce, Oprah, Michelle Obama, Naomi Campbell, Liya Kebede, Halle Berry and Rihanna), and Lupita is only the second African to cover the magazine.
Inside, the new July 2014 issue, Lupita poses for an iconic spread, while dishing everything from the the energy of her glam squad, to her family and living out her dream.
Catch the highlights:
What a year it has been for actress Lupita Nyong’o! After snagging numerous awards for her portrayal of Patsy in 12 Years A Slave, snagging major contracts to be the face of Miu Miu and Lancome, and being added to the cast of the upcoming Star Wars movie, she’s added yet another big achievement to her laundry list of accomplishments. She’s the new cover girl for Vogue Magazine!
We all kind of knew this was in the making, since she already has covered every fashion magazine imaginable, not to mention she was seated next to Vogue’s Anna Wintour during Fashion Week, but to see it truly happen is incredible. Since 1989, only 8 black women have covered the fashion bible (Jennifer Hudson, Beyonce, Oprah, Michelle Obama, Naomi Campbell, Liya Kebede, Halle Berry and Rihanna), and Lupita is only the second African to cover the magazine.
Inside, the new July 2014 issue, Lupita poses for an iconic spread, while dishing everything from the the energy of her glam squad, to her family and living out her dream.
Catch the highlights:
Her team
“You spend so much time with your glam squad,” says Lupita. “Their energy is the last thing you experience before you leave the hotel room—and they make it fun and light and manageable.”On her red carpet experiences
Before she embarked on her fashion marathon, “everyone said, ‘Brace yourself, Lupita! Keep a granola bar in that clutch of yours!’ ” she confides. “I didn’t really understand what they meant, and it was only once it was past that I realized that my body had been holding on by a thread to get through this very intense experience. Nothing can prepare you for awards season,” she continues. “The red carpet feels like a war zone, except you cannot fly or fight; you just have to stand there and take it.” She considers for a moment. “I hope they don’t make that the big quote!” she says, laughing. “Because that would be sad! Tell them not to do that!” She is quick to note that her “red carpet” self “is just one aspect of me; it doesn’t represent the entirety of me, which I am at peace with.”On her family
“My family is very close-knit,” she explains. “My aunt, who was an actor herself, would get all us children together to write and perform plays. I loved manipulating my parents’ emotions.” When her mother, Dorothy, cried out at the tragic denouement of one of the plays, Lupita remembers “feeling very powerful.” They are clearly close; Dorothy has often accompanied her to awards shows, as have her siblings, including her acting-mad little brother, Peter. In Morocco, hearing that Dorothy fretted that her daughter wasn’t eating enough, Lupita spelled out I Love You with her Ksar Char-Bagh breakfast fruit and sent it to her as a charming freeze-frame iPhone video on Mother’s Day.On winning the Oscar
Lupita’s tears were the beginning of a journey that led to her Academy Award. “I had already gotten the nomination, which was truly, truly astounding, and enough,” she remembers. “Even in my dreams of being an actor, my dream was not in the celebrity. My dream was in the work that I wanted to do.” When her name was read out, the experience was, as she recalls, “very confusing, very numbing. I was just repeating my name in my head, so I didn’t know whether I had said my name or they had said my name! And then my little brother screamed, and time was suspended and it was just noise in my head.”On her private life (the magazine references K’Naan as her boyfriend)
She keeps her private life just that. “The safest thing is when I’m indoors in my world,” she says, which for the moment is an apartment in Brooklyn. When she isn’t cooking at home (“I like to cook whole fish. And I make some mean salads”), she is enjoying the borough’s unpretentious restaurants and bars.