Photos: Age Issue Portfolio 2012
Photographed by Ralph Mecke1/6Game On | Alexandra Kosteniuk
CHALLENGING STEREOTYPES AT 28
Once the province of nerds in Coke-bottle glasses, chess has evolved into a glamorous, coolly cerebral sport played by boys and girls. “The potential for girls to play chess in America is huge,” former world chamption Alexandra Kosteniuk says, “but we need stars.” Between her many personal appearances at tournaments around the world, her website chessqueen.com, her podcast Chess Is Cool, and her Twitter account (170,000-plus followers and counting), she is doing her best to be that star.
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy2/6The Natural | Ginevra Elkann
CREATIVE POWERHOUSE AT 32
Ginevra Elkann is a quiet powerhouse—juggling marriage and motherhood with parallel careers as a movie director, producer, and distributor; museum-world innovator; and all-around barometer of cool. The great-great granddaughter of the man who created the automotive giant Fiat (and one of Italy’s largest private fortunes) may not be able to drive—as Ginevra laughingly confesses—but she is indubitably a locomotive force.
Photographed by Ralph Mecke3/6The Toast of Beijing |
Mona LockeMOVING EAST AT 46
Her love of reporting led her to the broadcasting program at Northwestern’s journalism school and eventually to an on-air job with the NBC affiliate in Seattle. It was there that she was set up on a date with her future husband, then a Washington state legislator so laid-back that he turned up for their dinner in a T-shirt and shorts. When Gary Locke decided to run for the governorship of Washington state and won, she wept on election night because his victory meant her whole life—including the TV job that had once defined her—would never again be what it was. Looking back, the wife of the U.S. ambassador to China believes that her itinerant childhood taught her to be resilient in the face of life’s many changes: “Every phase offers you a chance to reinvent yourself,” she says, “and get a check on where your passions lie.”
Photographed by Ralph Mecke4/6The Ford Factor | Katie Ford
GOING GOOD AT 56
Giving up a family business built over six decades was a hard decision—“I worried that I wasn’t anticipating how terrible I would feel after the fact,” Katie Ford says. Then, two weeks after her last day as CEO of Ford Models, the U.N. asked her to attend a conference in Vienna about human trafficking, a term she was barely familiar with. “Within two hours, I understood exactly why I was there,” she recalls. “I could think of so many things to do to stop trafficking because of the parallels to how we brought models into the U.S. I had this weird set of knowledge about immigration law, a very distinct skill set that not many people have. I thought, I’ve got to do this. It became all-consuming.”
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy5/6Starting Over |
Kati MartonFACING WIDOWHOOD AT 63
“So. My life must be reinvented. No living backward. No living forward. Living in the present. But first: faced squarely. He really isn’t coming back. There will never be anyone else like him. No one will ever challenge, amuse, provoke, or (occasionally) annoy me, nor so get me ever again,” writes author and journalist Kati Marton of the death of her husband, diplomat Richard Holbrooke.
Photographed by Bruce Weber6/6History
A GRANDE DAME AT 89
The youngest and only surviving child of Winston Churchill, Mary Soames was two when Churchill became chancellor of the exchequer: he also purchased a house, Chartwell Manor, in the Kent countryside (it is now a Churchill museum). She therefore lived partly at the official residence, 11 Downing Street, and partly at Chartwell. “My London life,” she writes, “like that of most well-found children at that time, involved a lot of getting in and out of leggings and good tailored coats. . . .” But her country life was storybook. Our solitary heroine (her brother and sisters are older by eight, eleven, and thirteen years) tends baby bantams, breeds billy goats, tames fox cubs, and rears orphan lambs. She corresponds about the golden orfe that swim in Papa’s lake with the former prime minister David Lloyd George. As a little girl, she meets Charlie Chaplin (who impersonates Napoleon, using a walking stick and a coat from the closet) and Lawrence of Arabia (who dresses up in his princely Arab robes for her).
