Vogue Interview: Inside the world of Amal Clooney

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[size=50]Inside the World of Amal Clooney[/size]
APRIL 10, 2018 7:00 AM
by NATHAN HELLER|photographed by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ


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[size=50]Inside the World of Amal Clooney[/size]

APRIL 10, 2018 7:00 AM
by NATHAN HELLER|photographed by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ






A sudden late snow is falling, bright with just a touch of magic, as the automatic gate to Aberlash House opens. It’s an afternoon in March but, in this powdery landscape, could be January. Footprints lead a few steps down a drive, between a row of trees, and climb to a small colonnaded entryway. A breeze is up; the air is bracing. Amal Clooney swings open the door and gathers me inside.
“I feel as if I know you already,” she says oddly, setting a latch against the cold. Tall, poised, and—unexpectedly for someone often seen in somber barrister’s robes—funny, Clooney is an easy host, and dashes off to hang my coat. She wears a red thigh-length Giambattista Valli sweater, jeans, and leopard-print boots she picked up years ago in Capri. The stately entry hall around us (towering ceilings, crisp Georgian molding) is trimmed with personal details. A softly faded Persian rug extends down the stone corridor. A side table, lit by a simple lamp, bears silver-framed black-and-white photos of her with her husband, George, and friends.
The two of them bought this house, set on a tiny island in the Thames called Sonning Eye, around the time they married, and then spent their honeymoon here, camping out in the unfurnished rooms. Last June, Amal gave birth to twins, Ella and Alexander, and since then the house—much like the Clooneys themselves—has grown giddy with the trappings of first parenthood. “We’ve had some ‘Mamas’ and ‘Dadas,’ ” Amal says. She smiles coyly. “George was very careful to ensure that ‘Mama’ was the first word.”

The many charms of her life, in other words, have not arrived without some background work. I’ve spent the morning interviewing members of her family, but it’s when I meet her that I learn—and this is why she feels we know each other—that she also subsequently interviewed them about me: a barrister’s instinct for discovery, the better to respond by knowing how things stand.
Many people first encountered Amal Clooney in 2014, on her engagement to George. By then, though, she had already built a notable career as a London barrister in international human rights law—the system through which some of the world’s slipperiest transnational villains, such as ISIS, can be held accountable in court. “I remember all the stages in my career where I almost didn’t have enough confidence to try for something,” she says, “almost didn’t have the guts to follow something I was excited about doing, because I didn’t know anyone else who’d done it or other people made me question it.” Recently she’s tried to help young women approach similarly unconventional paths in law.
“What distinguishes a really great barrister in international-law practice is creativity,” explains Geoffrey Robertson, a cofounder of Doughty Street Chambers, the firm where Clooney works, and one of the giants of the field. International law is, as he puts it, “newfangled”: It requires an eye for synthetic connections and an ear for deft persuasion. “She’s been a leading intellectual thinker on the concept of fairness—in a trial where you don’t have a jury and where, sometimes, you don’t have a defendant,” he says. “That set her apart even before she met George.”
If the standard model for Hollywood marriage is either celebrity pairing or quiet consortship (a spouse outside the limelight, a supportive partner on the running board of the career), Amal Clooney quickly flouted such customs. She was not a celebrity, yet she rose to fame’s conventions and constraints. At the same time, she remained carefully herself, heralding a subtle, welcome change in social expectation on the way. Once, a high-achieving working woman would have been trapped in the shadow of her leading man. Now you go out evenings and expect to find women outshining, in their brilliance and accomplishment, whoever dangles on their arm—even George Clooney.
“She’s the professional, and I’m the amateur,” says George, who’s done a share of humanitarian work on his own. “I get to see someone at the absolute top of their game doing their job better than anybody I’ve ever seen.” He was not alone in feeling so, and a shower of jokes followed news of their vows across their world. “Internationally Acclaimed Barrister Amal Alamuddin Marries an Actor,” went one version of a popular headline gag. At the 2015 Golden Globes, Tina Fey met their match with a punch line: “Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected for a three-person U.N. commission,” she said onstage. “So tonight her husband is getting a lifetime-achievement award.” Nobody in the audience seemed to laugh more joyfully than George.

Even with fairy dust settling atop the Clooneys’ union (they married in Venice; she wore an empyrean off-the-shoulder Oscar de la Renta dress), Amal’s hard, sometimes disturbing work remains a major part of their shared lives. On the afternoon I stop by, she is showing around Nadia Murad, a 25-year-old Iraqi refugee she has invited to the house, and whose experiences informed Clooney’s highest-profile legal battle to date. Clooney introduces us, then peers around her vast, lovely home looking perplexed.
“Where would you like to sit?” she asks, gesturing with a mug of espresso. (Two years ago, she and George tried to go on a healthy-eating cleanse. “It was hard to give up the glass of wine in the evening, but even harder to give up the espresso first thing in the morning,” she recalls. “We’re like, Aren’t we supposed to be feeling amazing?” They bailed on day eleven of three weeks.)
We contemplate two rooms off the main entry. To the left is a very correct sitting room (stuffed chairs, a couch, a hearth) decorated with a mix of family photos (Amal’s parents, George’s parents) and photos decidedly not family-like: George and Amal shaking hands with President Obama; George and Amal meeting the pope. To the right is a room, lined with bookshelves, that is ever-so-slightly strange. There’s a framed antique map of Berkshire, the county nearby; a ship in a bottle; and a gold monogram sculpture (G and A). Amal’s laptop is splayed across a cushioned coffee table, and some art books (Bruegel, Gauguin) are stacked sideways on a shelf, near a collection of vintage Penguin paperbacks. The mantel is decorated with wedding photos; the Clooneys love photos above all else. Some of their most cherished paintings, by contrast, are of George’s late, beloved cocker spaniel, Einstein (posed as a physics professor at a chalkboard), and the head of a giraffe (Amal adores giraffes). When some insurance appraisers came by, a while back, they spent some time peering at these paintings of dogs and leaf-munching mammals before issuing a pointedly low estimate on the Clooneys’ art.
“They were like, ‘It’s barely worth getting a policy,’ ” Clooney says, dropping her voice in mock umbrage. “They were very judgmental.”
Murad and I settle into the cozier, more interesting book-laden room, and Clooney goes to make tea: The snow is heavy on the ground, and it is near the sleepy hour of the afternoon. Murad is shy but self-possessed, and wears her history in her manner. She’s a Yazidi: a member of a Kurdish-speaking ethnoreligious minority that follows a faith entirely its own and, as a result, has been virulently targeted by ISIS. In August 2014, when ISIS fighters appeared in her hometown of Kocho, they escorted her and other Yazidis to the local school. Males were separated from females, who were then sorted by age. The older women and the men, including six of Murad’s siblings, were killed in a mass slaughter. Murad and other young women were transported to Mosul and distributed as sex slaves. She was beaten, raped repeatedly, and, at one point, put in a room with six ISIS guards, who violated her two at a time until she passed out. Then finally one day she was able to escape through an unlocked door (she was one of the lucky ones) and made it to a refugee camp. Through a German refugee program, she began a new life in Stuttgart and started telling her story in the West.
In 2016, Murad met Clooney, who took on the Yazidis’ plight. Over months, Clooney interviewed other refugees and survivors, building a case that could carry through the international justice system.
“Not many people stepped up to help as she did,” Murad confides now, through a translator, as Clooney fusses in the kitchen. Murad is wearing jeans and a playful gray sweater with a cat embroidered on it, but she is still hauntedly thin. “I was surprised that someone like her—a successful lawyer with a strong record—would help us. We’re a very small community.”
The Yazidi case brought Murad and her lawyer to the floor of the U.N., in September 2016. There, in crisp barrister fashion, Clooney delivered a rending plea. “She has shown us the scars from cigarette burns and beatings,” she said of Murad. “Nadia’s mother was one of 80 older women who were executed and buried in an unmarked grave.”
She drew herself up. “Make no mistake: What Nadia has told us about is genocide, and genocide doesn’t happen by accident. . . . I am ashamed, as a supporter of the United Nations, that states are failing to prevent or even punish genocide because they find that their own interests get in the way.”
Progress followed incrementally. In late 2016, the German supreme court authorized an arrest warrant against a high-ranking ISIS commander. In 2017, following a second presentation by Clooney, the U.N. Security Council resolved to establish an investigative team to collect evidence about ISIS’s actions in Iraq. “It tells victims that they may finally have their day in court,” Clooney wrote in an opinion piece following the resolution. “Justice is now, finally, within reach.”
To help draw attention to what remains of the fight, Murad recently published a memoir, The Last Girl. (Clooney wrote the foreword.) In cooperation with the French government, she has started a fund-raising campaign, the Sinjar Action Fund, to support schools, clinics, and other infrastructural necessities in her home region. When the more than 350,000 displaced Yazidis can finally come home, Murad hopes to do what she dreamed of before her nightmare started: open a beauty parlor for women in Kocho, where there are none.
“She’s so eloquent,” Clooney says later. “There are many cases where I think, Well, the reality is, politically, nothing will be done. But there is actually no reason why nothing could be done on this case, where the perpetrators were confessing to the crime.” The Yazidi case, she says, is “a test of the whole international system—if the U.N. can’t take meaningful action, something is really fundamentally wrong.”


Questions of destiny and volition have trailed Clooney through her life. Her mother, Baria Alamuddin, is a well-known political journalist, but her first ambition was to be a lawyer. (Her university had no law course.) Amal’s father, Ramzi Alamuddin, was vice president of the Universal Federation of Travel Agents’ Association, which consults with the U.N., so the family was often on the move. For a while, they lived in Paris. By the time Amal, their second daughter together, was born, they had returned to Beirut.
“My pregnancy with Amal was a rather difficult one,” Baria Alamuddin recalls. She had placenta previa and spent two months in the hospital. “At some point I was told that I should lose the baby. I said no. I kept on having these dreams in which I would see her face and how she was going to look.” In the end, the child was born “exactly as I saw her,” she says. Because the birth came during a lull in Lebanon’s civil war, her father named her Amal—Arabic for “hope.”
When Amal was still a child, the family left Lebanon again, for London, and later settled in a Buckinghamshire house with a swimming pool. Extended family often visited, and the kids were left alone to make their own fun. “Amal was the youngest, and because of that always got shafted,” recalls Tarek Miknas, a cousin who was near the same age as Amal. “If we were to put together a music band to entertain the family after dinner, my brother might get two instruments, her sister would get lead singer, I’d get the guitar, and she would get something like the triangle.” Clooney excelled in school but was not one to skulk in libraries. “I wanted to do well academically,” she recalls. “But it was equally important to do things”—she chuckles—“in an effortless manner.”
“All my family, we are party animals,” says her mother. “Amal partied hard and worked hard.” Also, like the other women in her family, Clooney saw no contradiction in being serious and chic, and used to raid her mother’s closet. “She would come and grab a series of shoes and bags and whatever,” her mother says. “I’d say, ‘What are you doing?’ She’d give me this legal argument that went on and on.”
Clooney went to St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she studied law. “I loved it because, having done six years at a girls’ school—a very sort of English country setup—Oxford was much more international. There were boys there!” she says. On graduating, she came to the United States for New York University’s LL.M. program—a more practically oriented course—and did an externship with Sonia Sotomayor, then a judge for the Second Circuit. She left school with a job at the white-shoe firm Sullivan & Cromwell. “If I could leave the office at 10:00 p.m., it would be an amazing achievement because I could still catch friends at the end of dinner,” she remembers. She was part of the defense team for Enron’s lead auditor but also took on pro bono criminal cases. “I cared more about the outcome of those cases than my paid cases,” she says. “And that made me think, Well, why am I not doing more of that kind of work?”
In 2004, she applied for a one-year clerkship at the International Court of Justice, the main judicial organ of the U.N. in The Hague. Friends in her circle tended to regard this as insane. The program came with a subsistence-level stipend of $20,000, and The Hague was—well, not such a fun town. But the post thrilled her, and she went on to spend a year working on the war-crimes trial of Slobodan Miloševi´c. “She gets into the granular detail,” says Philippa Webb, one of two fellows with whom Clooney shared a Peace Palace office in The Hague. “But she also has a deeper reflection on what this is doing to the development of the law.” (“Fortunately, I haven’t been against her yet,” Webb adds. “I really wouldn’t want to be on the other side.”)
Clooney was preparing to go back to practice in New York when she heard about a U.N. investigation in Beirut to prosecute the murderers of Lebanon’s prime minister. “I thought, OK, I’ll just go work there for a couple of months while my visa comes through,” she says. She ended up staying for years, traveling from The Hague to Beirut. “I was in my late 20s, and I was literally living on top of a mountain, in a secured compound, with four checkpoints between me and the outside world,” she says. The danger was real: Investigators like her were being targeted with explosives. The Lebanon tribunal ultimately led her to Doughty Street Chambers, where one of her early assignments was to petition the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of Orange Revolution leader and former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who alleged a politically motivated legal case against her by the Ukrainian government. Meanwhile, free speech was becoming one of Clooney’s focal points. She represented Mohamed Fahmy, the Canadian Egypt bureau chief of Al Jazeera, who, with other journalists, was taken into custody by the Egyptian government. (Fahmy was released from prison following her efforts.) She also represented Mohamed Nasheed, the first democratically elected president of the Maldives, who says he was forced to resign at gunpoint and, after criticizing the government, imprisoned on a terrorism charge. (He is currently in the U.K. as a political refugee.) And she worked on a team representing Julian Assange in his extradition case. (She no longer represents him.)
Much of her work also centers on the mistreatment of women. In 2015, she signed on to represent Khadija Ismayilova, an Azerbaijani investigative journalist who published evidence of corruption by Azerbaijan’s president. Ismayilova had been sentenced to prison on charges that, Clooney sought to show, were fabricated. In 2016, after Clooney submitted evidence to the European Court of Human Rights, Ismayilova was released.
“As women we may not be a minority, but there is a bond that we all share,” Clooney said in a speech a year and a half ago. “It is not a bond of geography. Or religion. Or culture. It is a bond of shared experience—experiences that only women go through, and struggles that only women face.” Today, this brings her to the #MeToo movement. “I think because of the brave women who have come forward to tell their stories, the future workplace will be safer for my daughter than it was for people of my generation,” Clooney says. “We’re in a situation where a predator feels less safe and a professional woman feels more safe, and that’s where we need to be.”
One day in 2013, Clooney’s cousin Miknas was passing through London and suggested that the two of them get dinner. “She’s like, ‘Oh, this is great. I have so much to tell you,’ ” he recalls. When they caught up at a restaurant in town, he asked her for her news.
“She’s like, ‘Eh—I don’t want to talk about it yet. Let’s have a glass of wine. Tell me about you,’ ” he recalls. Miknas did, and then the conversation circled back to her. She balked, strangely: Shyness was unlike his cousin. “She’s like, ‘Uh, ah, second bottle. This one needs a second bottle of wine.’ Finally she goes, ‘Welllll, look. There’s a bit of a romance brewing.’ ”
Some months before, Amal had come along with a friend to George Clooney’s house on Lake Como, in Italy. His parents were staying with him, and everyone talked deep into the evening. “Of course she was beautiful,” George says. “But I also thought she was fascinating, and I thought she was brilliant. Her life was incredibly exciting—the clients she was taking on and the superhuman work that she was doing. I was taken with her from the moment I saw her.”
They became friends; they stayed in touch. Amal is a big emailer, and George responded with a clownish gambit, writing her repeated notes in the voice of his dog Einstein, who claimed to be trapped in various places and in need of legal rescue. By the time she saw Miknas, their friendship was seeming like something more. “ ‘I don’t know what to make of it,’ ” Miknas remembers her saying. “ ‘The worst part is, I really like him. And he’s coming tomorrow!’ ”
“I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ ” Miknas recalls. “ ‘It’s not like you can meet in Starbucks and have a chat. It’s not going to be that easy.’ She’s like, ‘I know.’ ”
In the end, she made them a dinner reservation at one of London’s best restaurants—the sort of thing that one would expect to be a good idea for a discreet date with a movie actor but is actually (she learned that evening) a naive mistake: It put them in the path of waiting paparazzi. Following the dinner, she and George saw each other, more quietly, every day.
“It felt like the most natural thing in the world,” she says. “Before that experience, I always hoped there could be love that was overwhelming and didn’t require any weighing or decision-making.” Now she felt she’d found it, on the strangest of flukes.
“It’s the one thing in life that I think is the biggest determinant of happiness, and it’s the thing you have the least control over,” she says. “Are you going to meet this person? I was 35 when I met him. It wasn’t obvious that it was going to happen for me. And I wasn’t willing or excited about the idea of getting married or having a family in the absence of that.”
George, in his 50s, had reached a similar place. “If you know anything about my crazy life, you know that I’d pretty much committed to the idea of never marrying again,” he says. (He was married to the actress Talia Balsam for a few years in his late 20s and early 30s.) “But I started dating Amal, and I immediately knew that something was very different.” When they went with friends on a safari trip in Africa (giraffes), George had one of those epiphanies that arrive in the interstices of a life.
“Some giraffes walked up to her,” he recalls. “They just came out of the blue. I took a picture of her, and she was smiling. I said to my buddy Ben, ‘You know, I think I should ask her to marry me.’ And Ben said, ‘I think that’s a good idea.’ ”
Amal’s friends and family members say that nothing about her changed after the marriage: She maintained her in-the-moment balance between immersive work and intimate friendships—stunningly so. She wasn’t, after all, a star who’d climbed toward fame through years of waitressing; she wasn’t a politician who had cultivated a place in the public eye. She was a woman with a fully realized adult life who, almost overnight, became a celebrity of inordinate privilege.
Much changed as a result. Once, when she and Miknas were both in New York, he proposed a walk in the park. “She’s like, ‘Yeah, I don’t think we can.’ ” Puzzled, he suggested an alternative—pizza at their favorite restaurant by N.Y.U.—and they set off. “As soon as the car leaves, there are bicycles and mopeds weaving through the streets. A car blocks us to get a shot—I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “When we go inside the restaurant, it all goes away. But the minute you go back out into public space, it’s hard.”
“We definitely do more things in our home to ensure privacy in a context where we can’t otherwise get it,” Clooney concedes. “But that whole side—invasions of privacy and paparazzi, all of that—has happened because of something so happy and so important in my life.”
In Sonning-on-Thames, the Clooney residence is, literally and figuratively, the biggest thing around. The town hugs a river bend hung with willows; it is quiet, English-garden lovely, and half an hour from the Heathrow curb. (Beyond constant travel for their jobs, the Clooneys spend chunks of the year in L.A., where they have a “low-key” house—“not such an entertaining space,” Amal says—and in Como, for the summer.) The staff at the inn nearby, the French Horn, know their friends and family on sight. A local dinner theater puts on productions such as The Hound of the Baskervilles (“An age-old curse. . . . A ravenous monster . . .”), and, when the Clooneys make it to the shows, George meets with the actors to cheer them on.
“Are you brave? Do you want to do the outside?” Amal asks me as snow blows in various directions. She pulls on a winter coat and trudges out. The Thames, around the island, narrows to a few yards of babbling water crossed by two small bridges, one to either bank. “We had to add loads of trees,” she says: The foliage helps to obscure gaping sight lines from paths nearby.
Abutting the house is a small, glass-covered garden room full of citrus trees. Beyond that is a pool, and a glass-fronted pool house decorated as a lounge—“the party zone,” Clooney says. At one end is a bar; white terrycloth robes (monogram: A&G) hang ready. In the back of the room is a photo booth that produces twin copies of every print: One copy goes home with the guests, and the other goes up on the bulletin board here. “You can tell the ones that are from 3:00 a.m., with people in bathrobes,” Clooney says with a chuckle. “Then there are ones that are just, like, George in a hat.”
From time to time, the pool house becomes a workspace. Both Amal and George have offices upstairs: His has the air of a postwar study, with overstuffed leather furniture, and hers, light-filled and nested under a slope in the roof, could be a barrister’s chambers in the city. She mainly works from home these days, so the office is well equipped. There are false-front cupboards (made to look like leather-bound law books but actually stocked with folders of research) and, on a stand by a window, her barrister’s horsehair wig. “You get it when you’re a really junior lawyer making no money,” she says. “You walk out having spent $1,000 on something that’s going to make you look really bad—especially if you’re a brunette.” Generally, she explains, a barrister’s degree of experience can be gauged by the filthiness of his or her wig.
Yet her office, having only one desk, is ill suited to collaboration, which is increasingly required. For the past couple of years, Clooney has been writing a book with Philippa Webb, her Hague officemate, now on the faculty of King’s College London. The book is called The Right to a Fair Trial in International Law—“a real page-turner!” she says—and is ambitious: It seeks to synthesize a full canon of international court literature to create a sort of practical manual for lawyers and judges across the world. Clooney and Webb have collaborated on articles before (last year, in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, they recommended a new international-law standard for “the right to insult”: a free-speech position), and in a couple of days they’ll begin a writing intensive, as they do from time to time: Webb comes to Sonning, they commandeer a table in the pool house, and Clooney stress-nibbles unholy amounts of sour candy. They write from early morning until night. “We say this time we’ll finish the book, but our husbands are skeptics,” Clooney says. “They’ve heard that before.”
At the back of the pool house, she swings open a door to a plush, sixteen-seat screening room. There are candy jars in the corner and a popcorn machine in the back. “This is totally George’s zone,” she explains. “He does editing here, and I come in and get snacks.
“That’s the river over there,” she says as we exit, leading a pathway across virgin snow. She opens the door to a rustic one-room cottage: the river house. There’s a fireplace for the winter and, for the summer, two swing benches on a little porch out back. “I tried to incorporate something of Kentucky,” she says. (It’s George’s home state.) “I designed them so they were going that way”—she gestures to the river—“but George told me, no, in the South, they go this way, facing each other. Which is nice, I think.”
We head inside, where the twins have woken up from a nap. Their nanny brings over Alexander; he gives a big grin as Clooney draws him up into her arms.
“Hi, Mummy’s love!” she exclaims, swooping him through the air. “Say hi to Nathan. Hi, Uncle Nathan! Are you eating again? As you can see, he’s quite a healthy eater.” Not even a year old, Alexander looks exactly like George in a way plain to everybody in the world but his father. (George has finally conceded, possibly, a slight—extremely slight—resemblance around the eyebrows.) Ella, people generally agree, looks like her mother (“Thank God,” George has said).
Balancing motherhood and career is a work in progress—and that’s even for a woman sustained by unusual wealth, with a nanny, a chef, an assistant, and other household staffers. At the moment, “quality time” is in the morning. “Between six and eight in the morning we get to have them in our bed—I don’t schedule any calls before eight,” she says. “When I was nursing, it was much more complicated, because there are two. I had all manner of weird cushions and pillows and machines.”
Alexander goes back to his sister. Soon a FaceTime call flashes across her phone. Clooney flops back on the couch cushions and answers.
It is George. “Hello, my love!” Amal exclaims. “How’s everything?”
“Fine,” he replies, in a happy, tired way that seems to suggest any concerns are not worth bringing up. “Everything’s fine.” He is back in L.A., on a break from shooting a commercial. He is dressed in literal shining armor.
They check in; he asks about “the knuckleheads” (the twins). This is the first time since their birth that he’s been away, and the separation, Amal later tells me, has nagged at him more than he’d expected. Then she has to sign off to prepare for a work call. They gaze affectionately at each other through the screen.
“Goodbye, my love,” she says as the app goes dark.
In an email that evening, Clooney urges me to drop by the next day for lunch, and, when I come, her arms are full of subdued, crinkle-faced babies, just arisen from another nap. Ella, wearing a tiny dress, studies me with such scrutiny that I feel quietly judged. (The verdict seems to be poor.) Her mother is wearing an inverse variation on her previous day’s outfit: a leopard-print vintage Leonard dress with leather boots to the thigh. Much has been made of Clooney’s first-rate closet—an attentive WordPress blog is devoted solely to her wardrobe—and although it can irk her when her dais outfits are discussed more avidly than her human rights cases, she’s at peace with a balance of fashion in her life. “I hate the idea that you somehow, as a human being, have to be put in a box,” she says. “There’s no reason why lawyers can’t be fun—or actresses can’t be serious.” She has been working with a designer she adores to finalize her dress for May’s Met ball, which she will cochair.
When the twins begin to wail, their nanny takes over; Clooney leads me to the kitchen, where her chef has laid out food. There is a salad, spaghetti with turkey meatballs, and chicken breast with lemon sauce. We help ourselves and take a seat at a small table nearby. Two baby chairs with trays hang from the ceiling, facing each other, Kentucky-style.




As of late March, Clooney is back in the U.S.—she has work to do at the U.N., and she is coteaching a human rights–law course as a visiting Columbia professor—but her attention has been turned Stateside for other reasons, too. In the wake of the shooting of seventeen people in Parkland, Florida, she and George donated half a million dollars to the student-led March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C.(Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, and others quickly matched the donation.) Both Clooneys attended the march.
“I’ve seen lots of commentary where people have tried to say, ‘This isn’t about having too many guns or allowing semiautomatic and automatic weapons to be purchased too easily—surely this is about mental health, or about violence and movies,’ ” she says. “The fact is, there are violent movies all over the world, and there are mental-health issues in other countries. But this doesn’t happen in other developed countries. The difference is guns, and how widely and easily available they are.
“I think the Australian example is instructive,” she goes on, referencing the 1996 massacre of 35 people in Tasmania that inspired a comprehensive change to Australian gun law (including the banning of semiautomatic rifles and shotguns). “They had a mass shooting, then they did this commonsense legal reform following that, and they haven’t had a mass shooting since.”
The march donation is by no means their first philanthropic project together. In 2016, George and Amal launched the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which aims to help do, on the community level, a version of what Amal does in court. Last year, it partnered with UNICEF to support eight Lebanese schools serving 3,000 Syrian refugees. In the longer term, it is working on a comprehensive global trial-monitoring program—like election monitoring, except for courts—called TrialWatch.
For such reasons, Clooney is optimistic about the exercise of global justice. Yet she says that free speech is more, not less, imperiled than it was when she began to practice. “Governments can’t get away as easily with taking someone out into the street and shooting them,” she says. “But they can get away fairly easily with using the court system to throw someone in prison.
“The same things keep happening again, and that’s the tragedy,” she continues. Outside, the snow has stopped at last. “We had genocide in Bosnia and then again in Rwanda. Somehow, the system has not evolved to a place where these atrocities are being prevented, nor are they even being properly addressed afterward.” It is only when the guilty of the world are dragged into the light of the judicial process, she thinks, that young women like Murad will be able to live in safety.
“There’s a lot of work still to be done,” Clooney says.

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where are the 9 million dollars in jewels or whatevers?

Front cover, I reckon. It doesn't go nearly as far as you'd think when it's super expensive.

I really liked the interview. I love what she said about George and how happy she is.

Yep.

Thanks so much Katie

Really nice article.  Thanks PigPen, annemarie and Katie!

Yes, it was avery intense article. Gives a lot of informations, similar to the one George had done in Como last summer.

Here's Anna Wintour's editor's letter of the May Magazine:

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MAGAZINE

[size=50]Anna Wintour’s May Editor’s Letter: The Amal Clooney Cover Shoot and the 2018 Met Gala[/size]

APRIL 10, 2018 7:00 AM
by ANNA WINTOUR





One of the many conversations we’ve been having at Vogue lately is about who exactly should be gracing our covers given the radically changed world we now live in. We’ve always taken the position that the women we feature should have substance to them, something that has only taken on greater urgency in the last year or so. That’s why I’m delighted that Amal Clooney, a force to be reckoned with in the realms of international law and human rights, agreed to appear on our May cover. Amal needs no introduction, of course—yet for someone who’s in the spotlight so much, she rarely engages with her fame. It’s as if she has negotiated a life for herself that can somehow happily accommodate being married to a very famous movie star without ever having to sacrifice her passionate attachment to her long and illustrious career as a barrister, most notably her defense of the Yazidis and her challenge to the United Nations to take action on their behalf.
Anyone who knows Amal would hardly be surprised at this. I first met her while she was in the first flush of her relationship with George, not long after they’d met, at a lunch at his home in Lake Como, and they remain as smitten with each other now as they were then. As in all great relationships, it is as if they each affirm each other’s view of the world while also allowing themselves the freedom to be independent. Writer Nathan Heller visited Amal at their home in the English countryside, which—save for the trees planted to protect them from the prying lenses of the paparazzi—shows every indication of being a place where a loving couple are living an unpretentious and idyllic family life. They pursue their working ambitions, defend the values they believe in (the Clooneys were the first in Hollywood to donate a substantial amount to the fund for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School–shooting activists, encouraging others to quickly follow suit), and, above all, enjoy their adorable twins, Alexander and Ella, who are without doubt a mini-George and mini-Amal. (The last time I visited for dinner, the Clooneys answered the door, grinning ear to ear, each with a baby under one arm.)




Amal, along with Rihanna and Donatella Versace, is my cohost for this May’s Met gala, which ushers in the 2018 Costume Institute show “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” Donatella and I have known each other for more years than either of us likely cares to remember, and she is and always has been one of my favorite people in the fashion industry, as much for her humor and loyalty as for her sizable talent. When our children were younger, we’d often vacation together—at a dude ranch one year, if you can imagine. I have a couple of vivid memories of that particular trip: Each day when we’d go riding, Donatella would be atop a horse, blowing smoke rings, huskily declaring, “This is Marlboro country.” Then there was getting there, which entailed taking a noisy, bone-rattling flight to a tiny, dusty airstrip. “Anna, this isn’t a plane,” she said, gripping my arm. “It’s a hair dryer.” Those vacations were enormous fun, and despite the immense challenges she has been through, Donatella remains a relentlessly positive and upbeat figure who has chosen to enjoy her life. I’m thrilled she and I get to collaborate on the Met—though I have expressly told her, even if she has finally given up smoking, that the Met has a strict no-vaping rule!
The exhibition itself has been years in the making, and it will be not only the largest Costume Institute show to date but the biggest show ever at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s hard to not sound hyperbolic about it, but it is going to be an absolutely magnificent experience—spanning some 26 galleries and including work from the likes of Valentino, Gaultier, and Dolce & Gabbana along with more than 40 extraordinarily opulent liturgical garments and accessories on loan from the Vatican. For the first time ever, there will also be an extension of the show running at the Met Cloisters, a museum at Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan, where the more monastic examples of fashion’s inspiration from the Church, such as those from Cristóbal Balenciaga, will be on view. (Should you be visiting New York and planning to see the exhibition, I’d urge you to also take the time to head northward; the Cloisters element will be just as stunning.)
For curator Andrew Bolton, it required endless hours of patience in dealing with the Vatican, given the labyrinthine way that it operates. Invariably, Andrew would finally arrange a meeting with one of the Church’s officials, only to be told they were on a retreat—or, when he actually got to speak to someone in person, he’d discover they were thrilled with the idea of the exhibition . . . they just couldn’t really help, as they were the wrong person to speak with. In the end, the Vatican has been an incredible partner on this show, lending pieces that have been rarely, if ever, seen. One tiara, anointed with 19,000 gems (of which perhaps 18,000 are diamonds), is a masterpiece. Writer Maureen Dowd has crafted a terrific personal essay about the show, which accompanies the sitting by photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Executive Fashion Editor Phyllis Posnick. Maureen’s words underscore the unique experience “Heavenly Bodies” offers: the visceral thrill to be had from a show that connects deeply with faith, history, and creativity.

Thanks to everyone who posted the article - and a special thanks to Katie for the pictures! It struck me that when the author described how Amal greeted him it sounded very much the way George would have greeted a guest. I was interested to learn how and why she moved from corporate law to the work she does now.

There were some interesting glimpses into their personal life, too. Chef, nanny, assistant. Not too shabby. I just wish they had included more pictures of the house. I was really curious about how it's decorated.

Yes Doug Ross.  I realized that too. Now the pics we saw a few weeks ago make sense.   Maybe a new Nespresso commercial for the U.S.?

Enjoyed reading about Amal’s legal career too and how she evolved from corporate law to settle into defending human rights.  Really interesting personal insights from her mom and those who know her well which speaks to the kind of person Amal is.

Celebitichy's take on the interview:

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Amal Clooney covers Vogue, talks about falling for George & having babies

• April 10, 2018
   
  
• By Kaiser
   
  
  
•  Amal Alamuddin, George Clooney
  
  

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Well, well. I should have remembered before now that Amal Clooney is one of the hosts of this year’s Met Gala. One of the hosts always gets the May cover of Vogue. Rihanna is also one of the hosts, but I guess Anna Wintour thought Amal would be a bigger “get.” Amal delivered too: she invited Vogue into her English country home, Aberlash House in Sonning Eye, on the Thames. Amal allowed Vogue to photograph her extensively in her home – go here to see the editorial – and Amal and George both sat for interviews. Amal even got to plug some of her legal cases too – she invited Yazidi Nadia Murad into the interview, and Nadia is photographed by Vogue as well. You can read the full Vogue piece here. There are SO MANY details to absorb. Amal calls George “my love.” That’s her pet name for him. His home office is dark and clubby where her home office is light and bright. And so much more. Highlights:

The babies’ first words: “We’ve had some ‘Mamas’ and ‘Dadas,’ ” Amal says. She smiles coyly. “George was very careful to ensure that ‘Mama’ was the first word.”
George on Amal: “She’s the professional, and I’m the amateur. I get to see someone at the absolute top of their game doing their job better than anybody I’ve ever seen.”

She and George tried a healthy-eating cleanse. “It was hard to give up the glass of wine in the evening, but even harder to give up the espresso first thing in the morning. We’re like, Aren’t we supposed to be feeling amazing?” They bailed on day eleven of three weeks.
They love photos: The mantel is decorated with wedding photos; the Clooneys love photos above all else. Some of their most cherished paintings, by contrast, are of George’s late, beloved cocker spaniel, Einstein (posed as a physics professor at a chalkboard), and the head of a giraffe (Amal adores giraffes). When some insurance appraisers came by, a while back, they spent some time peering at these paintings of dogs and leaf-munching mammals before issuing a pointedly low estimate on the Clooneys’ art. “They were like, ‘It’s barely worth getting a policy,’ ” Clooney says, dropping her voice in mock umbrage. “They were very judgmental.”
Falling for George: “It felt like the most natural thing in the world. Before that experience, I always hoped there could be love that was overwhelming and didn’t require any weighing or decision-making.” Now she felt she’d found it, on the strangest of flukes. “It’s the one thing in life that I think is the biggest determinant of happiness, and it’s the thing you have the least control over. Are you going to meet this person? I was 35 when I met him. It wasn’t obvious that it was going to happen for me. And I wasn’t willing or excited about the idea of getting married or having a family in the absence of that.”
When George knew he would marry Amal: They went on a safari in Africa. “Some giraffes walked up to her,” he recalls. “They just came out of the blue. I took a picture of her, and she was smiling. I said to my buddy Ben, ‘You know, I think I should ask her to marry me.’ And Ben said, ‘I think that’s a good idea.’ ”

[size]
[From Vogue]
There’s so much more, about her law career and what she’s working on now and her career path. She seems to genuinely adore being a mom, and she seems slightly surprised by how much she adores it too. Like, both George and Amal didn’t really have marriage and babies on their radars before they met each other. I mean, is this all some sort of weird Clooney PR? For sure. But I have to admit, I bought it. I bought a large chunk of it.[/size]

Lainey's take:

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Amal Clooney covers Vogue
[size=11][You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]Posted by Lainey12:39 AMApril 11, 2018[/size]
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Amal Clooney is writing a book. This is mentioned in her Vogue cover story, released today:
For the past couple of years, Clooney has been writing a book with Philippa Webb, her Hague officemate, now on the faculty of King’s College London. The book is called The Right to a Fair Trial in International Law—“a real page-turner!” she says—and is ambitious: It seeks to synthesize a full canon of international court literature to create a sort of practical manual for lawyers and judges across the world. Clooney and Webb have collaborated on 
“A real page-turner!”

That’s the key to processing this profile – this is the WHY of this profile. Because certainly she could have done an interview with another publication. But would the content have reached the kind of people she means to reach? That would be me, by the way. 

If I’m honest, I came here for the clothes and the gossip. And Amal definitely delivers on both. But that was the sugar to get to the main event. Which is her work, of course, and who she’s working for. Part of the interview is done with Nadia Murad, a Yazidi refugee. Her family was murdered by ISIS. She was held for months as their slave, tortured and violated repeatedly. She has written a book about her experiences and, with Amal, she has taken her story to the UN where Amal has urged the international community to not only pursue and prosecute these assholes, but put in place measures that prevent further victimisation. This is what Vogue readers are getting in this piece, alongside details about the Clooney twins and, before that, the courtship.

And all of that is who Amal Clooney is. As she says, “There’s no reason why lawyers can’t be fun—or actresses can’t be serious.” 

This Vogue profile of her is both. It’s a great dishy read (George wooed her with emails written in his dog’s voice) and it’s an informative read. It’s about the borderline tacky art that they collect (which is looked down upon by arty edgy types – Justin Theroux? LOL) and the research she’s been gathering to continue pushing for human rights. It’s about where George and Amal entertain (they prefer London and Como over LA) and working on a book on human rights that she’s writing with her colleague at the Hague in the pool house. What I like most is that there’s nothing sheepish about it either. Yes, there are other young legal activists around the world who are not being featured in Vogue. Yes, she has a higher profile than they do because of who her husband is. These are facts. Amal Clooney is not here to deny the facts but she’s also not here to apologise for them. You know why? Because it’s not a good use of her time. 

So, yeah, I like her. A LOT. I especially like this response, which mirrors George’s attitude, about fame and its attendant downside: 

“We definitely do more things in our home to ensure privacy in a context where we can’t otherwise get it,” Clooney concedes. “But that whole side—invasions of privacy and paparazzi, all of that—has happened because of something so happy and so important in my life.”

That’s a great answer that most professional celebrities can’t come up with

And this from dlisted (I also had to laugh how the reporter couldn't describe a greenhouse!):

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Amal Clooney Lords Over The May Cover Of Vogue…And The Clooney Household
April 10, 2018 / Posted by: C.J.
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Back when Amal Clooney was just dating George Clooney, tongues wagged that Angelina Jolie was none too pleased there was another international do-gooder in the George and Brad Pitt pack. Well, years later, Angelina got the boot and is talking trees with THE QUEEN, and Amal is ushering us all into springtime fashion on the May cover of Vogue with an interview. All you need to know has she somehow mandated what her children’s first word was, and the reporter has never heard of a greenhouse.
I got really excited by the idea that Vogue had somehow sent in some reporter who had gone in on Amal for wearing those home conomics-sewn white gloves to the Golden Globes, but I guess Anna Wintour sacrificed her quota of Conde Nast interns for the month and wasn’t feeling as humorous or manipulative as usual. Vogue mostly talked about Amal’s works as a human rights lawyer, the book she’s writing. but they did talk about George. They talked about how George wooed her, and it also seems like he knows his place. Because when it came to their twins learning how to talk, Amal says he knew what he needed to do…or else:

“We’ve had some ‘Mamas’ and ‘Dadas.’ George was very careful to ensure that ‘Mama’ was the first word.”

I’m sure the only reason George did that is because one of the twins came close to saying “Rande Gerber” or “Lady Oceans 11 is gonna suck” as their first phrase, and I have no idea where that could have come from!
I also love how Vogue described a fucking greenhouse:

“Abutting the house is a small, glass-covered garden room full of citrus trees.”

Amal is on the cover of Vogue’s May issue, because she’s co-chairing this year’s Met Gala, which means she’s working with designers over a dress that will most certainly have to get Anna’s approval and not include gloves. With any luck, it will just be a dress made entirely OF gloves and show all those high-fashion harlots (and Kim Kardashian) that lawyers just wanna have fun, too!

Adding this picture, which was with Anna Wintour's editorial:

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It is nice to hear from Amal on her life, I loved the article.

Yes, I thought it was a good read and something of her character comes across.  Nice to know confirmation of nanny, chef and assistant.  I'd guess gardener and driver too?

Not sure I understood Nadia Murad's visit: did Amal really invite her round at the same time as the journalist so that she (Amal) could show her the house?

My guess is knowing Nadia would be there was no problem, vogue is read by many people, this way even more people 

now know about her story. 

This could have been a fluff piece on Amal's fairy tale life but it isn't at all . From this article I get the feeling her work

is still just as important to her as it has always been.

Loved it too. I thought she was exactly how I hoped she would be - very grounded, happy to send herself up given the very real seriousness of what she does when appropriate, and witty - and that last sentence topped it all off for in terms of her feelings. Very sweet too.

I don't think she would ever do a 'fluff' piece without referring or mentioning what her raison d'etre in life is. She will always use every opportunity to voice it in my view, and that was where Nadia came -- and probably she is welcome anytime.

I'm not surprised about the folks they have around them to help - her life has to some extent probably always been like that given her background.The fact that she was motivated to do all the hard work for this all-encompassing worthwhile career some might say is all the more inspiring, because I think it could have been very possible to languish in that lifestyle.

Best pic? Probably something that is how it is in her life quite a lot - the sitting back on the comfy sofa with a ton of papers to wade through/write/correct. There is an awful lot of that which is necessary in her chosen profession.

Love the house - comfort the key and stripped back to reflect its age - the SohoHouse lady did a great job.

Can't believe I'm saying this, but the LaineyGossip piece was spot on

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[size=30]Amal Clooney covers Vogue

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]Posted by Lainey3:39 PMApril 10, 2018[/size]
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Amal Clooney is writing a book. This is mentioned in her Vogue cover story, released today:
For the past couple of years, Clooney has been writing a book with Philippa Webb, her Hague officemate, now on the faculty of King’s College London. The book is called The Right to a Fair Trial in International Law—“a real page-turner!” she says—and is ambitious: It seeks to synthesize a full canon of international court literature to create a sort of practical manual for lawyers and judges across the world. Clooney and Webb have collaborated on 
“A real page-turner!”

That’s the key to processing this profile – this is the WHY of this profile. Because certainly she could have done an interview with another publication. But would the content have reached the kind of people she means to reach? That would be me, by the way. 
If I’m honest, I came here for the clothes and the gossip. And Amal definitely delivers on both. But that was the sugar to get to the main event. Which is her work, of course, and who she’s working for. Part of the interview is done with Nadia Murad, a Yazidi refugee. Her family was murdered by ISIS. She was held for months as their slave, tortured and violated repeatedly. She has written a book about her experiences and, with Amal, she has taken her story to the UN where Amal has urged the international community to not only pursue and prosecute these assholes, but put in place measures that prevent further victimisation. This is what Vogue readers are getting in this piece, alongside details about the Clooney twins and, before that, the courtship. And all of that is who Amal Clooney is. As she says, “There’s no reason why lawyers can’t be fun—or actresses can’t be serious.” This Vogue profile of her is both. It’s a great dishy read (George wooed her with emails written in his dog’s voice) and it’s an informative read. It’s about the borderline tacky art that they collect (which is looked down upon by arty edgy types – Justin Theroux? LOL) and the research she’s been gathering to continue pushing for human rights. It’s about where George and Amal entertain (they prefer London and Como over LA) and working on a book on human rights that she’s writing with her colleague at the Hague in the pool house. What I like most is that there’s nothing sheepish about it either. Yes, there are other young legal activists around the world who are not being featured in Vogue. Yes, she has a higher profile than they do because of who her husband is. These are facts. Amal Clooney is not here to deny the facts but she’s also not here to apologise for them. You know why? Because it’s not a good use of her time. 

So, yeah, I like her. A LOT. I especially like this response, which mirrors George’s attitude, about fame and its attendant downside: 
“We definitely do more things in our home to ensure privacy in a context where we can’t otherwise get it,” Clooney concedes. “But that whole side—invasions of privacy and paparazzi, all of that—has happened because of something so happy and so important in my life.”
That’s a great answer that most professional celebrities can’t come up with. 

Great piece on the interview from The Independent here:

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I also liked what she said about her school days.  She did well academically “but it was equally important to do things” ... “in an effortless manner.”  Amal does come across very well rounded, walking the line gracefully between being a serious legal mind and socially skilled.  She knows how to have a good time.  Her mom even called her a ‘party animal’ in her younger days.

I think Nadia has a close relationship with Amal. My recall is a bit hazy but I think I’ve read that Nadia has been to the Sonning home on more than one occasion.

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[*]INDYSTYLE

[/list]

[size=55]AMAL CLOONEY OPENS UP ABOUT FALLING IN LOVE WITH GEORGE IN FIRST ‘VOGUE' COVER SHOOT[/size]
Annie Leibovitz / American Vogue
'It felt like the most natural thing in the world'

• OLIVIA PETTER
  
  
• @oliviapetter1
  
  
• 2 hours ago
  
  

Amal Clooney has landed her first cover for Vogue, fronting the magazine’s May issue.
Photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the US fashion bible in an eight-page-spread, the leading human rights lawyer radiated in a fuchsia Alexander McQueen top and a pair of decadent Cartier drop-earrings.
In the candid interview, the mother-of-twins opened up about falling in love with George Clooney, gun control and the rise of the #MeToo movement.
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Clooney wears a Johanna Ortiz dress with Van Cleef and Arpels earrings and Christian Louboutin shoes (Annie Leibovitz/American Vogue)
The genetically-blessed duo gave birth to twins in June last year after a star-studded wedding in Venice, Italy in 2016.
The celebrated humanitarian praises her Hollywood husband throughout the interview and describes falling in love with him as “the most natural thing in the world”.
She added that the couple spend a lot of time at home together (they live together in Sonning-on-Thames, a village in Berkshire) to ensure their relationship is kept as private as possible.

• READ MORE
  

Before meeting George at the age of 35, Amal explained she hadn’t been excited by the thought of getting married and having a family.
She also revealed how beneficial she thinks the #MeToo movement has been in giving women a platform to share their stories of harassment, which she hopes will benefit her daughter, Ella, in the future.
“I think because of the brave women who have come forward to tell their stories, the future workplace will be safer for my daughter than it was for people of my generation,” she said.
“We’re in a situation where a predator feels less safe and a professional woman feels more safe, and that’s where we need to be.”
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(American Vogue)
Just two weeks after the couple marched alongside demonstrators at the March for Our Lives protest in Washington calling for stricter gun laws following the Parkland shooting - they also donated $500,000 (£352,150) to the cause - Amal also took the opportunity to weigh in on gun control in the interview:
“I’ve seen lots of commentary where people have tried to say, ‘This isn’t about having too many guns or allowing semiautomatic and automatic weapons to be purchased too easily — surely this is about mental health, or about violence and movies,'” she said.
“The fact is, there are violent movies all over the world, and there are mental health issues in other countries. But this doesn’t happen in other developed countries. The difference is guns, and how widely and easily available they are."

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Love, Brett@BrettDBurger





[ltr]CAN WE JUST commend Vogue for highlighting the fact that she is a lawyer and activist and didn't say something stupid like she was JUST George's wife or JUST a fashion icon. She's a BOSS ASS WOMAN. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]


8:42 AM - Apr 10, 2018

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The cover has proved popular online, with fans admiring Clooney's beauty and praising Vogue for its thoughtful profile.
"Is this the most intellectually accomplished woman ever to make the cover of Vogue?" one person wrote on Twitter.
"What started out looking and sounding like a classic puff piece actually turned into a really interesting read," added another.
"Vogue probably thought they’d gotten the celeb scoop of the year, but instead, Amal got a loudspeaker for her work. Clever cookie."

Donnamarie, your right they are close I remember that Nadia called Amal a mother figure and Amal was like mother lol.

In today’s ‘Washington Post’ an article written by their fashion critic

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[size=56]Amal Clooney in Vogue, and the art of revealing absolutely nothing
[/size]






By Robin Givhan [size=14]April 11 at 9:00 AM [email=robin.givhan@washpost.com?subject=Reader%20feedback%20for%20%27Amal%20Clooney%20in%20Vogue,%20and%20the%20art%20of%20revealing%20absolutely%20nothing%27]Email the author[/email]

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Amal and George Clooney at a February 2016 movie premiere in Los Angeles. Their marriage made the human rights attorney into a high-profile fashion icon, now on the cover of Vogue.

Amal Clooney is photographed on the cover of May’s Vogue magazine looking as she always does, which is extraordinarily stylish, extremely pretty and vaguely amused that you are staring at her. She is the world’s most famous human rights lawyer about whose work the average person knows very little. She is a celebrity by marriage — to actor George Clooney, about whose work everyone knows a lot.

Inside, a story written by Nathan Heller focuses on Amal Clooney’s professional sphere, where she was a notable presence long before the fashion industry began to track her wardrobe in a stream of media alerts and before popular culture began to view her life as charmed. Today, Clooney mostly works from an office in her home, which in this story is a lovely English countryside estate where a March snowfall is said to lend the landscape “a touch of magic” rather than mere unseasonably cold misery. At home, she wears Balmain and Oscar de la Renta sweaters, leopard-print boots and other stylish gear that apparently includes neither yoga pants nor fancy sneakers.

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Amal Clooney, wearing an Alexander McQueen dress, on the cover of Vogue’s May edition. (Annie Leibovitz/Vogue)

Heller, however, quickly moves beyond the magic and charm to get down to a discussion of Clooney’s legal work. But explaining to a layperson, in a few paragraphs, what Clooney does is challenging. Her work is complex, her goals seem impossible. And in today’s short-attention-span news, there’s always something else easier or more pleasant to digest.



Vogue readers are introduced to a young woman named Nadia Murad, who has fled Iraq after being beaten and raped by members of the Islamic State and whose case Clooney has taken up before the United Nations. There is a beautiful portrait of the two seated together in Clooney’s home. Murad’s gaze is cast downward and Clooney, in a Fendi sweater, is gently holding her hand.

The mention of the brand of Clooney’s sweater and the details of her various ensembles, offered up by Vogue, are not meant as a snide suggestion that fashion and human rights work cannot comfortably coexist in a single story. They can. And in the case of Clooney, fashion and style are in service to substance. They don’t overshadow her accomplishments or distract from them. Fashion makes them stand out. Fashion makes us look.

[ From 2014: Why her? Why HIM?: George Clooney, the last of the eligible bachelors, ends his long run. ]

Clooney is a serious woman who uses style to contradict the stereotypes associated with the brainy, righteous realm of human rights work. A woman who wears Lanvin and Giambattista Valli understands the impact of a high-fashion image. Clooney recognizes the power in a single, perfectly styled picture, and she has used that to her advantage.



She has not only made it clear that she will not be lost in the celebrity glow emanating from her husband; she has made it plain that she will glow on her own. She has crafted a remarkable visual narrative about herself. Who is Amal Clooney? She is not simply an experienced lawyer. She is the glamorous and brilliant human rights attorney who can go head to head with any boldface name on the red carpet. In the paparazzi shot. On the cover of Vogue.

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Amal Clooney on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. (Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)

Photographer Annie Leibovitz captures a comfortably glamorous Clooney who exudes femininity and confidence but not necessarily ferocity. She may be precisely that in legal proceedings, but her style of dress favors soft lines over hard edges. Bold colors over no-nonsense black. Style over forgettable uniforms.

The raspberry-colored dress by Alexander McQueen that she wears on the cover is like a wall of fringe that has been molded around the torso. It isn’t excessively body-conscious, and it’s not revealing. It is discreet but dynamic. There’s something intriguing and fascinating about the dress. You want to lean in to examine it more closely, but even when you do, nothing more is revealed.



Clooney recognizes the power of the fashion spotlight and of the pop-culture gaze. If you are willing to settle into it and embrace it, then whenever it illuminates you, it also shines a light on the issues and causes with which you are associated. Fashion has brought her to Vogue. It has led to her being one of the co-chairs of the annual Costume Institute gala,alongside editor Anna Wintour, Rihanna and designer Donatella Versace. And it means she can talk about refugees when interviewed for the magazine’s pages.

But even as Clooney’s work is detailed, her professional life is not articulated with as much clarity and force as her fashion. Her work is earnest and righteous. The facts of it flow out like endless bullet points of injustices. Her fashion message, meanwhile, is succinct and focused: I am here.

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Amal Clooney listens at a United Nations human rights meeting in 2017. (Bebeto Matthews/AP)

As with a lot of politicians who come to Vogue, the goal is to reach a new audience, emphasize that they’re more than a drab bureaucrat and give their earnest work (public service, community organizing) a brush of gloss that can draw attention. Clooney is no different. For an international lawyer, Vogue presents a new audience. And being photographed for its pages in high-gloss glamour is valuable. It’s a form of cultural power.



Do we learn more about the “real” Clooney? No. She is funny, Heller writes, but presumably it’s not the sort of funny that translates well to print because the story offers no notable examples of her wit. Her friends and family think quite highly of her, we learn, and seem even a little bit in awe. She thinks her white horsehair courtroom wig is unflattering. She makes tea. She calls George “my love.”

She is a compelling character who draws your admiring gaze, even if you’re not quite sure precisely what it is that you’re admiring.

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Amal Clooney at the United Nations headquarters in March 2017. (Mary Altaffer/AP)

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But Vogue is not where one goes to bare one’s soul or to dive into the thick of education, freedom of speech or refugee rights. It’s where one goes to engage in a form of alchemy. It’s where one goes to put glamour to work.

Vogue, by the way, needs Clooney. Fashion needs her. In this moment, to be relevant, magazines — fashion magazines — need women of substance and of diverse backgrounds who are engaged with the world. Clooney is not a subversive cover choice, but she’s not a blond starlet, a Kardashian or a Beyonce-Rihanna-Serena either.

Clooney has crafted a fascinating exterior shell: the great clothes, the tousle of hair, the slash of red lipstick, the barrister wig. Who is she really? That’s none of your business. Besides, if you’re glamorous enough, you’ve already got everyone’s attention.
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And the feedback keeps on coming!  Here's an example of super-easy online 'journalism': write a headline then paste in a couple of tweets.  Et voila!  Article done!

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[size=42]Amal Clooney's First Vogue Cover: 5 Things People Are Loving About Her Front Page Debut

'They didn't say something stupid like she was just George's wife or just a fashion icon.'

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• [url=http://twitter.com/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.co.uk%2Fentry%2Famal-clooney-vogue-cover-5-things-people-are-loving-about-her-first-appearance_uk_5acdc802e4b09212968d0d87&text=5 things people are loving about Amal Clooney%27s Vogue cover][/url]
  
  
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[size=18]Vogue magazine has revealed human rights lawyer, Amal Clooney, is their cover star for their upcoming May issue. 
The internationally-acclaimed humanitarian used her front-page debut as an opportunity to discuss everything from her career to politics, and becoming a mother to twins, Ella and Alexander, in June last year.

But the interview is not short on fashion either: photographed by Annie Leibovitz at her marital home in Sonning, England, Clooney’s wardrobe features outfits from Rosetta Getty, Oscar de la Renta and Johanna Ortiz.


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Vogue Magazine

@voguemagazine





[ltr]Amal Clooney stars on the cover of our May issue! Read the full interview: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
4:00 PM - Apr 10, 2018

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Here are the 5 things people are loving about the interview.

1. The lack of George Clooney on the cover. 

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Love, Brett@BrettDBurger





[ltr]CAN WE JUST commend Vogue for highlighting the fact that she is a lawyer and activist and didn't say something stupid like she was JUST George's wife or JUST a fashion icon. She's a BOSS ASS WOMAN. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
5:42 PM - Apr 10, 2018

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2. The celebration of Amal’s academic achievements. 

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Katerina Ang

@katerinareports





[ltr]Is this the most intellectually accomplished woman ever to make the cover of Vogue? [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
4:12 PM - Apr 10, 2018

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3. The acknowledgement Amal’s life didn’t begin when she came a celebrity.

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Dagney Pruner@dagneydevlin




Replying to @polina_marinova @voguemagazine

[ltr]I one day aspire to have anybody write about me with the lede "She was a woman with a fully realized adult life..."[/ltr]
7:36 PM - Apr 10, 2018

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4. The story about how she and her husband met. 

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Chloe Schama

@ChloeSchama





[ltr]What a way to woo. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
7:02 PM - Apr 10, 2018

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5. And what happened on that safari. 

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rachel seville tashjian@theprophetpizza




Replying to @theprophetpizza

[ltr]also what is this Dr. Dolittle seduction style????[/ltr]
5:36 PM - Apr 10, 2018

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The full Vogue interview is already available to read on their website. [/size]
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You're right. I haven't read the article, but I know what's in it, just from headlines and bullet points in reviews like this.

Looked at the pictures here, though. She looks like every 40-year-old woman that I know with two babies and a job. That's snark.

...and a chef and a nanny and an assistant and staff.....

Mmm. I think that was W2O4D's point Lizzy

She has all the help to keep her life running smoothly, which she should have.

But she is still a mother of twins, wife to George and all that comes with that.

Has her job and their foundation to handle family and friends . 

And, even with all the help she looks like any other 40 year old woman.

Katie - Got it. Just a little slow on the uptake this morning.

And, even with all the help she looks like any other 40 year old woman.

Yep, that is exactly how every woman looks when she's working at home with the kids.

My daughter and her friends especially enjoy the part of the day when they don their high-bowed, ankle-length, haltered designer summer gowns to descend the stairs of the terrace.

Please don't get in a huff. I actually don't care. I just find these to be easy jokes.

Way2Old - Totally huff free! Jokes appreciated. I look forward to them.

I’m going to ask a big favour, could someone tell me if they have read the whole thing... because in all honesty I just simply can’t get through it ... I truly tried, but failed.... and now something is bugging me.....

Vogue the tomb that is/was the Holy Grail of fashion, did Amal give her sister Tala a leg up.... it was the perfect opportunity to give a little back to her sis ....a kind thing to do....and honestly no one would mind....

WWHS - I only read the article here on COH, but I'm assuming it's the whole thing. If it is, and if I read it correctly, she didn't even mention Tala.

Admin wrote:Yes, I thought it was a good read and something of her character comes across.  Nice to know confirmation of nanny, chef and assistant.  I'd guess gardener and driver too?

Not sure I understood Nadia Murad's visit: did Amal really invite her round at the same time as the journalist so that she (Amal) could show her the house?

Yeh, and it was a real coincidence that Hubby called at the right time too!!!!!

Nadia thing was definitely planned, it was a way to talk about her story and what she's doing to help people in e same situation. 

Maybe George's call was planned, too. I don't know. But I liked that part.

Of course he knew she was doing the interview, that was the time he had to call so he did. The article said he was on a break from filming a commercial.

Yeah, those two things felt too staged for me. It would have been framed better if Nadia's visit had been part of the interview. As for the call, I find it a little cheesy.