ELLE February 2015

Cue the hordes: The Fifty Shades of Grey movie is upon us, and it's just as racy as the book. "I don't have any problem doing anything," says Dakota Johnson (right), who stars opposite Jamie Dornan (see page 68). "The secret is I have no shame." Saturday, February 14 February 1 Super Bowl XLIX—fingers crossed it's nothing like last year's. February 3 From the author of About a Boy, Nick Hornby, comes Funny Girl, a novel about an aspiring comedienne. But who will Hugh Grant play? February 5 Biography Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams & Rumours is the story of how the original rock 'n' roll chanteuse learned to go her own way. Bring on the chiffon! February 6 The Matrix goes galactic in Jupiter Ascending, the latest from the Wachowski…

Yves Saint Laurent is also credited with popularizing the peacoat, having shown it on his runway in 1962. 7 Saturday, February 7 Victoria Beckham's unique brand of minimal yet whimsical staples now sit in the designer's first brick-and-mortar on London's Dover Street alongside a repertoire of small leather goods—including the chicest notebook ever—exclusively sold in-store and at Victoriabeckham.com. 14 Saturday, February 14 Fans of Giuseppe Zanotti's supersexy stompers, rejoice: The Italian shoe label leaves its mark on a sky-high wedge—6.2 inches, to be exact—carved and gold-trimmed to emulate the brand's signature G. 21 Saturday, February 21 Celebrate the eighty-eighth birthday of Hubert de Givenchy: One of the last living twentieth-century French couturiers looks back on his extraordinary career with a self-titled volume (Artbook/D.A.P.) coinciding with his first major retrospective, at…

A recent Hollywood Reporter profile of Julie Goler estimates that a quarter of the members of the book clubs she emcees work in Hollywood. And though the 46-year-old, who also works as an English teacher at Beverly Hills High School, admits to catering to "a lot of movers and shakers," all of her clients—stay-at-home mothers and businesswomen alike—are "looking to get back into some intellectual engagement with reading." A Goler-led meeting isn't just a gab session thinly veiled as a Gone Girl recap, after all. Her 10-plus groups, some of which have been convening for more than a decade, partake in weekly, 75-minute salons on titles carefully selected to promote both an emotional journey and intellectual conversation. Joan Didion's fiercely honest 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, for example,…

We couldn't imagine a more fitting star to cap off 2014 than our four-time cover girl, Rihanna. Styled by ELLE Fashion Editor-at-Large Lori Goldstein and photographed by Paola Kudacki, the CFDA Fashion Icon shone in luxe couture and little makeup, and charmed us all with her characteristically unfiltered responses. Far be it from us to surmise a correlation between the timing of her triumphant return to Instagram and her appearance in ELLE's December issue, but the day after @badgalriri posted her first selfie in six months, she dropped every photo from her ELLE shoot, garnering more than three and a half million "likes." Clothed or naked, on camera or off, as the saying goes: When she's good, she's very good, but when she's bad…. Oh Rihanna, please keep doing you.…

In episode 10 of Girls season three, Lena Dunham dons a platinum wig and what looks to be an S&M teddy as imagined by Alexander McQueen. She is role-playing a '40s-inspired femme fatale with her boyfriend, Adam (Adam Driver, for whom the English language has not yet invented the words to accurately describe the primal force of his appeal). Dunham raises the joke to farce by wearing her granny panties under what is meant to be the ultimate in erotic fantasy lingerie, but what she's really doing is acting: playing the hyper-self-aware Hannah Horvath playing the sex kitten in an attempt to incite a little excitement in her relationship. In the millions of column inches that have been devoted to Dunham's impact on the culture—her eight Emmy nominations for her…

Ask any seven-year-old this question and she'll have an answer at the ready, having worked and reworked her list since the moment she first became aware that nickels, quarters, and dollars enable their holder to acquire a whole range of things not available to someone with just a Barbie doll or a pillowcase full of Halloween candy to trade. The answer is bandied about in games with friends and alone, pondering cloud formations on a lazy day in the backyard. It's edited and reedited as the years pass, as ideas about what's valuable and important and beautiful evolve and are shaped by real life. It's an answer that in some simple way defines who we are: What would you do if you had all the money in the world? Melinda…