Bhavitha Mandava Is British Vogue’s March 2026 Cover Star

There are few things we love more in this industry than a good model origin story. I grew up in the era of the supers, whose tales of serendipitous scoutings have long been fashion lore. There was a teenage Kate Moss, famously spotted at JFK in New York; Naomi Campbell, discovered out shopping in London; Christy Turlington, horseback riding in Florida. Of course, in the age of social media, would-be models are more likely to be found on the Explore page of Instagram than they are on the high street. Now, the algorithm decides who gets spotted. It’s still largely a game of luck and timing – will your image appear as an agent swipes and scrolls? – but one that lacks the magic of universes colliding IRL.

So the arrival of the Hyderabad-raised model – and our glorious March issue cover star – Bhavitha Mandava, whose fashion career began in 2024 when she was spotted on the New York City subway, feels like a fashion fairy tale straight out of the ’90s. A graduate student at NYU, within weeks of being scouted on her commute the 26-year-old was walking the Bottega Veneta runway, then under Matthieu Blazy. When the designer was appointed creative director of Chanel, he took Mandava with him: in December, she became the first Indian model to open a Chanel show when she took to the Métiers d’Art 2026 runway (a repurposed Manhattan subway platform, what else?) and cemented her place as a face for the age. Her swift rise to the highest echelons of the industry is not just a joy to witness – please watch, if you haven’t already, the viral video of her parents’ reaction to their daughter on the Chanel runway – but a smile-inducing reminder of how a chance encounter can change everything.

It’s precisely that sliding-doors philosophy that’s at the heart of director Robert Icke’s new staging of Romeo & Juliet, opening in the West End next month. Starring actors-of-the-moment Noah Jupe (from The Night Manager to Hamnet – if there’s a zeitgeist-y project, you can wager he’s in it) and Stranger Things alumna Sadie Sink, this version of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers will beg the question: what if everything had gone to plan? It was my nephews who introduced me to Sadie via Stranger Things – now I can take them to see her in Shakespeare.

A fresh take on a classic is exactly what’s needed for spring, the sort of energy that can underpin a whole new season. That’s never truer than now, thanks to the new guard of creative directors putting their stamp on houses in every fashion capital. Among them? Dior’s Jonathan Anderson, who is the first designer since Christian Dior to helm every line of the house – womenswear, menswear and couture. “Radical doesn’t have to be loud,” he tells Nathan Heller in an all-encompassing profile. “Radical can sometimes just be about the process of trying to work out what is new.”

And finally, to the piece that has, perhaps, brought me the most unexpected joy in this issue: Gaby Wood’s interview with the incomparable Gisèle Pelicot, whose ex-husband was convicted of drugging and raping her, along with 50 other men, over the course of almost 10 years. This month, she publishes her memoir, A Hymn to Life, which details her incredible, history-making journey to justice. Her bravery is breathtaking, but what has really stayed with me – and as you will see in photographer Annemarieke van Drimmelen’s portraits – is her own capacity for joy. As she tells Wood, she has given herself “permission to be happy”. Now more than ever, words to live by.