Angelina Jolie returns to the Vanity Fair September 2017 cover photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, styled by Jessica Diehl in a portfolio titled Angie Solo — a statement of image, autonomy, and quiet defiance at one of the most scrutinized junctures of her public life.
The shoot was staged at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California — on the very soundstage where Casablanca was filmed — and the weight of that history was not incidental. Diehl, Vanity Fair‘s longtime fashion and style director, built the portfolio around a deceptively simple thesis: that Jolie is not any one thing. She is simultaneously a mother of six, a film director, a humanitarian, an actress, and an icon — and the images refuse to rank those identities. Diehl drew from classic film noir and the visual grammar of Hollywood’s golden-age heroines, dressing Jolie in a succession of looks designed for permanence rather than seasonality. A bespoke white shirt by Emma Willis, Alexander Olch suspenders, and Parlanti riding boots conjured the stern elegance of Katharine Hepburn. A Gucci sequined dress paired with a jade-green Charvet headscarf nodded to the irreverent glamour of Alessandro Michele’s vision. A wide-brimmed hat by Georgian designer Djaba Diassamidze and a Tiffany & Co. choker produced something altogether more cinematic.
The previous September, Angelina Jolie had filed for divorce from Brad Pitt “for the health of the family,” and moved out with their six children. Her Vanity Fair interview offered a carefully measured portrait of her life as a single mother — cooking classes taken at the children’s request, a household described as relaxed and ordinary. It was, by deliberate design, the antithesis of spectacle, and it contrasted pointedly with Brad Pitt’s own GQ cover story from earlier that year, in which he had spoken at length about quitting drinking and finding solace in Frank Ocean. Jolie’s account was quieter, more guarded, more sovereign. The cover images, for their part, were anything but quiet. They were the work of Mert & Marcus at their most controlled: luminous, architecturally composed, built for legacy.
Jolie was not a passive subject on set. Diehl described her as deeply engaged from pre-production onward, bringing a director’s precision to every frame. That instinct was no surprise for a woman who had, that same year, completed First They Killed My Father — a Netflix adaptation of Loung Ung’s searing 2000 memoir about surviving the Khmer Rouge regime, which was responsible for the deaths of nearly two million Cambodians. Jolie and Ung co-wrote the screenplay together. The film cemented Jolie’s standing not as an actress managing a public divorce but as a filmmaker committed to the world’s most demanding histories. The Vanity Fair September 2017 cover story captured both: the icon and the artist, inseparable, on her own terms.
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