Matthew Schneier

<h1>LONDON — To command stages and mesmerize crowds, musicians often have to be larger than life: a bigger head, a heavier foot. But Nakhane slipped quietly into a grand London hotel late one Sunday last month, soft-stepping even in combat boots, taking up little space in a corner armchair with a feline kind of grace.</h1>

Nakhane, 31, who was born Nakhane Mavuso and has used Nakhane Touré as an artist name, had shrugged off the opportunity to show off his East End neighborhood, his home since moving from South Africa in 2018. “My life has always been internal,” he said. “Journalists say, ‘Take us to your favorite places,’ and I never had them. I don’t go anywhere except to the coffee shop around the corner.”

Nakhane’s music, on the other hand, stretches up and out. His voice — grand, sweeping, choir-trained and soul-stirred — is a trumpet blast. And his new album, “You Will Not Die,” released last year in Europe and Africa and in the United States last month, is an LP of aching contradictions, at once sensual and spiritual, wrestling with faith, love, lust and country.

Nakhane’s music has an orchestral grandeur and a quicksilver soul. Raised by an aunt who sang opera, he grew up to a score of Handel, Mozart and Bach, to which his aunt eventually added Marvin Gaye and the O’Jays. But the glamorous spirit of David Bowie hovers over the record, too, and when Nakhane began working with producer Ben Christophers (Bat for Lashes), the singer told him, “Let’s take the second side of ‘Low’ and write songs with it, but as if it was in the streets of South Africa.”

For the moment, though, he has given up South Africa for a life abroad. In his home country, Nakhane, who is queer, has been threatened with both death and damnation. He wrote “You Will Not Die” after leaving his church, for which he had evangelized an anti-gay theology. He ultimately left the country after starring in “The Wound,” a film that set a gay love plot against the backdrop of the traditional initiation ritual for Xhosa boys. The film was a hit on the festival circuit and was South Africa’s submission to the Academy Awards. But it also drew fury for revealing intimate details of the Ulwaluko, the circumcision ceremony he underwent as a young man, and for showing that gayness, far from being a foreign infection as some South Africans prefer to believe, exists among the Xhosa, too.

“I still can’t go home to Port Elizabeth,” he said of the city on the Eastern Cape where he grew up. “I know my people. We are very passionate people.”

South Africa is relatively permissive on LGBTQ issues, but the churches he and his family attended were rigidly doctrinaire. So despite coming out at 17 to his friends and 19 to his family, Nakhane renounced being gay after a chance meeting with a pastor’s son at the record shop where he worked. He threw himself into the church, attending Bible studies, singing in the church band and preaching the possibility of conversion. Eventually, buckling under the strain of denying himself — coupled with a growing awareness of the colonialist implications of the church’s teachings, and a racist dynamic he could no longer ignore — he left.

“I’m not angry at it anymore,” Nakhane said of his life then. He has removed those he knew in the church from his life, he said, but has less venom for them than the press would wish, he added. “They did love me,” he said. “This is all they knew.”

What he knew was the destiny he believed in for himself. “You are going to be one of the most important South African artists to come out of this country,” he recalled telling himself while still a student in Johannesburg. “You don’t know when. You don’t know how. But it’s going to happen. And the work starts now.”

The work started with “Brave Confusion,” a folksy 2013 album released in South Africa that performed better critically than commercially. But it was the collapse of all that he knew — his exit from the church after six years, a period of financial hardship and quasi-homelessness — that led to the emotional breakthroughs he explores on “You Will Not Die.”

Even for someone who had grown up thinking of songwriting as a form of divine inspiration (“It seemed like such a priestly job. You’ve been chosen to write a song”), being chosen is not an uncomplicated blessing, and Nakhane is not romantic about the alchemy of turning experience into art. His work, as he described it, is taking the “shrapnel” of inspiration and forming it into something. “Songs are dangerous,” he said. “Art is dangerous. And painful. You do it because you have to.”

For all its pain and longing, “You Will Not Die” is not bleak: It tracks a long arc toward joy. “Interloper” is dark but up-tempo — self-affirmation to a propulsive beat. “Never live in fear again, no, never again,” is the chorus of “New Brighton,” a single recorded with Anohni, whose music has sonic parallels with Nakhane’s own. The two never met, Anohni said in an email, and completed the track separately. But she called it “exuberant and so heartbreaking,” and Nakhane’s music “very beautiful and soulful and smoldering.”

His fearlessness is drawing admirers. Madonna called him one of her favorite artists, and filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell cast him in his new project, a musical radio-play-by-podcast called “Anthem: Homunculus,” which will debut in late April. “To me, he is some kind of love child of James Baldwin, David Bowie and Grace Jones,” Mitchell said. “He’s the most exciting new renaissance artist I’ve seen this century.”

For now, Nakhane is adjusting to his own new horizons: living in London with a boyfriend, touring his music, beginning to write more. (He is at work on what may turn into his second novel.) He is back on good terms with his family, and spiritual, if no longer religious, about the unique privilege of being Nakhane.

“Someone like me could never have existed in any other era than now,” he said. “The fact that I have an album being released internationally, being an out, political, queer black person who speaks his mind and makes good music? My existence is miraculous.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="07c0060c-35cf-4582-9331-9a92758db093" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/arts/music/nakhane-you-will-not-die.html">The New York Times</a>.

For Nakhane, Songs Can Be Painful and Dangerous. His New Album Is a Balm.

Nakhane, 31, who was born Nakhane Mavuso and has used Nakhane Touré as an artist name, had shrugged off the opportunity to show off his East End neighborhood, his home since moving from South Africa in 2018.

For Nakhane, songs can be painful and dangerous, his new album is a balm

Her nephew George Wallace de Menocal confirmed her death.

Small, fierce and forever in a strand of pearls — real ones, naturally — Mrs. Simpson, as she preferred to be known, worked with many of the titans of fashion photography over her 25 years at Vogue.

She searched out Hemingway in Cuba (he had an eye for the model she brought along, Jean Patchett), dressed Marilyn Monroe for her final sitting with Bert Stern and tramped through Ireland with Anjelica Huston and Richard Avedon. She sat for Horst P. Horst and worked with Irving Penn, but even collaboration with the greats neither cowed her nor cracked her witty, no-nonsense mien.

“I used to sit in the corner and do needlework,” she said in a documentary about Vogue’s editors that was filmed as she was nearing 100. “Otherwise you’d go crazy with boredom. Some photographers took forever.”

Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue and artistic director of Condé Nast, said in a telephone interview: “What she was accomplishing during her time working in magazines was groundbreaking. “While she was shooting Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe, she was also shooting a very simple black dress or a simple suit to give them personality as much as any public figure.”

Beatrice Crosby de Menocal was born into a family of privilege on April 9, 1913, in Beijing (known then as Peking). Her father, Daniel Ammen de Menocal, descended from an aristocratic Cuban family; her mother, Beatrice (Crosby) de Menocal, was a New York society beauty with a Washington Square address.

Beatrice was the oldest of four — Richard, Esmee and Daniel followed — and the family moved to South America before eventually settling in Boston. They lived the kind of life indexed in The Social Register: summers in Nantucket and debutante comings-out, all documented by an affectionate press. Daniel de Menocal settled into a banker’s life, rising to become vice president of the First National Bank of Boston.

In 1935, the young Beatrice de Menocal married William Simpson of Chicago, a Harvard man, in a what The Boston Globe called “one of the most important weddings of the June season.” But the marriage was not to be a long one. Though the newlyweds set up house in Locust Valley, on Long Island’s North Shore — where they lived with an English butler and three maids, according to the 1940 census — after seven years of marriage they divorced and Beatrice Simpson made for New York City.

She dabbled in low culture as well as high — she remembered celebrating the end of Prohibition with a group of boys by heading down to Boston’s tattoo parlors — but fell in with a glamorous crowd in New York, befriending the likes of jewelry designer Fulco di Verdura and hairdresser Kenneth Battelle. She was a regular at Café Nicholson, the midtown Manhattan haunt of Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal that put the establishment in cafe society in the postwar years.

After securing, through a friend, a position in the studio of a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar (she had gone to secretarial school but did not complete it, nor any other higher education, as far as her family was aware), Simpson was eventually tapped by Carmel Snow, the editor-in-chief, to work at the magazine itself. In 1947, at the urging of her friend Barbara Cushing Mortimer, known as Babe — who was leaving the magazine to marry William S. Paley, the builder of CBS — she moved to Vogue.

Simpson remained with the magazine until 1972, working with a succession of its grandes dames, including Diana Vreeland, who called her “the most marvelous editor.” She flew to Paris to see the collections (Dior had shown his New Look the season before her first) and traveled around the world on assignment.

“Nobody had any better taste,” Polly Mellen, another longtime Vogue editor, who overlapped with Simpson there, said in an interview. She wasn’t lordly or haughty, Mellen said; she didn’t name-drop or lean on her connections. “She didn’t have to,” she said. “Those things were not important to her. She just went about being Babs. She went to work — I’m not sure she had to go to work — to do a job that appealed to her.”

Simpson lived a richly cultured life outside the magazine, though friends said she was generally private about it.

“She gave me the best books, important things to know and read,” said Phyllis Posnick, her assistant for a time, who went on to become a senior fashion editor at Vogue herself. “She went to the theater all the time. She went to ballet. She’d say to me, ‘You should really see this, dear.'”

Simpson never remarried (and kept her married name to the end of her life) but found a bohemian companionship with Paul Magriel, an art collector and writer. They lived in the same Manhattan apartment building, on East End Avenue, though they maintained their own apartments on different floors. He died in 1990.

In 1972, Simpson joined House &amp; Garden magazine, where she remained until it closed in 1993. (She kept a beautiful modernist house, designed by Paul Lester Weiner, in Amagansett, on the East End of Long Island, and a garden designed by Bunny Mellon. Oscar de la Renta, a friend, credited her with a lot of his initial garden ideas, his wife, Annette de la Renta, recalled.)

“Her chic was understated and completely authoritative,” said Wendy Goodman, the design writer, who met Simpson at House &amp; Garden. (By then the magazine’s name had been changed to HG.) She was similarly understated about her exploits.

“A lot of people who have very grand lives bring them up a lot,” said Goodman, now design editor of New York magazine. “And with Babs, she absolutely never ever did. The only thing I knew was because of the bird. She said, ‘Oh, the bird just hated all my lovers. The bird would attack So-and-So.'”

The bird was her pet troupial, Tico, which would often perch on top of her head.

In her later years, Simpson sold the Amagansett house and moved into a retirement community in Rye, where her brother, Daniel Crosby de Menocal, lives.

In addition to him and her nephew George, she is survived by three other nephews, a niece and several great-nephews and great-nieces.

Never forgotten at the magazine — “She is a legend, as she should be, in the halls of Vogue,” Wintour said — Simpson had a brief return to the spotlight in 2012, when she was included in the documentary “In Vogue: The Editor’s Eye,” about the fashion editors who have passed through the magazine, and an accompanying book. (Annie Leibovitz photographed the editors for a group portrait, and amid a sea of basic black Simpson wears pink jeans.)

“I think that fashion is important because it revives one,” Simpson said on camera. “I don’t think it’s just frivolous. Because I think it’s very depressing if one wore the same skirt and shirt forever.”

She remained tart even as she tilted toward her centenary. Shown a recent Vogue cover of Lady Gaga, she panned it.

Mellen said, “No one ever came before Babs, and no one will ever come after.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/obituaries/babs-simpson-dead.html" id="c3f154e7-0dd3-31fd-ad0d-9b7e835d0471">The New York Times</a>.

Babs Simpson, a fashion editor and swan of a bygone era whose unfailingly correct taste informed the pages of Vogue, died Monday in Rye, New York. She was 105.

Babs Simpson, Taste-Making Fashion Editor at Vogue, Dies at 105

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Matthew Schneier

Articles written by the author

For Nakhane, songs can be painful and dangerous, his new album is a balm

Babs Simpson, Taste-Making Fashion Editor at Vogue, Dies at 105