Indholdsfortegnelse for Volume 1, 2022 i W Magazine

Tim Elkaïm Photographer, “Tour de Force” (page 176) What is your favorite film quote? “I’ll see you in another life, when we are both cats,” from Vanilla Sky. It encapsulates the theory of everlasting love. Which film have you watched the most in your life? The Lion King. Deep story lines and a great musical score. Did you ever act in a school play or student film? I played the neighborhood killer in my best mate’s short. I still have it. I watched it recently, and I just cringed. Let’s just say we were very committed as teenagers. Jazz Grant Illustrator, “All ’90s, All the Time” (page 50) Which film have you watched the most in your life? Amélie. When I was young, it was the first film I became…

Fittingly for a watch owned by Andy Warhol—who famously never wound his, explaining that he didn’t wear it to tell the time, but “because it is the watch to wear”—the Cartier Tank continues to outlive its 15 minutes of fame. An enduring token of luxury and refinement, the Tank has been part of the canon of Very Important Objects since it was created in 1917—the ultimate dress watch for connoisseurs and aesthetes of all stripes. According to Cartier lore, it was inspired by the aerial view of a World War I combat vehicle; the lightweight case resembled a moving turret, and the flanks represented wide treads on either side of the hull. The Tank’s design was unabashedly modern: Punctuated with blued-steel hands, Belle Époque Roman numerals, and a sapphire cabochon…

Last December, the whiskey-pickled chanteuse Justin Vivian Bond and their longtime sidekick, Kenny Mellman, revived a beloved holiday tradition—well, beloved in the sadistic and demented sense that has been their specialty for nearly three decades, as the aging-into-oblivion cabaret duo Kiki and Herb—with a sold-out Christmas routine at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, called Kiki & Herb Sleigh at BAM. In addition to their catalog of unconventional carols, which this time included “Crucify,” by Tori Amos, and Brandi Carlile’s “The Joke,” Bond and Mellman decided at the last moment to sing “Send in the Clowns” as an encore, just a few days after the death of the song’s composer, Stephen Sondheim. “That was a pretty amazing experience, because I knew that song when I was a kid, and now I’m…

Judy Chicago Artist This past year, you had a major retrospective at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, published an autobiography, and held exhibitions of your work across the country, including pieces from your “Birth Project” series, which felt particularly relevant given what’s been going on with the Supreme Court. Your recent show at Nina Johnson Gallery, in Miami, featured a lot of hands. What interests you about that part of the body? I was starting to think about, How do I explore what connects us, as opposed to what separates us? What does it mean to be human? What do human beings do? We make signs, we make symbols, we make marks, we make gestures—it’s something that crosses gender, ethnicity, individual identities. I worked with glass, which allows…

I’ve always been a huge movie fan. One of the things I’ve missed most during the pandemic is going to an actual theater, so when Editor at Large Lynn Hirschberg invited me to a screening of House of Gucci, I jumped at the chance. It was a rainy Friday night, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled to sit back and enjoy the big screen. I loved watching Lady Gaga as Patrizia Gucci, and an unrecognizable Jared Leto as her homely cousin-in-law. The glamour, the drama, the fashion—I loved it all. When we started planning our annual Best Performances portfolio (page 82), we discussed with photographer Tim Walker how we would bring that level of glitz and fantasy to the pages of W. Walker shot 35 of our favorite actors…

Call it the Zuckerberg paradox: The more the 21st century is dominated by smart devices and social media, the more there is a collective longing for the 1990s, the decade that trumpeted the end of the millennium and marked the final gasp of a global culture about to be completely rewired by Big Tech. Everywhere you look, across music, fashion, film, and television, there seems to be a postmodern pining for a less plugged-in era. Few in the public eye wish they could turn back time as much as Adele, one of the music industry’s last remaining recording artists with a capital R. For the release of her latest album, 30, the singer persuaded Spotify to disable the shuffle button on all artists’ album pages, so that tracks would play…

To read the news over the past few years was to believe that fashion, as both a concept and an industry, had officially given up the ghost. In 2020, the sector posted an unprecedented 93 percent decline in economic profit—the worst year on record—according to the McKinsey Global Fashion Index. First Barneys declared bankruptcy, then Neiman Marcus. Viral stories like “Sweatpants Forever,” in The New York Times—which proclaimed that “even before the pandemic, the whole fashion industry had started to unravel”—read like obituaries for a world in which big-name designers influenced style or set trends. The premise seemed to make sense: Who needs couture gowns, or even trousers with a button, when you spend your Saturday nights doom-scrolling on the sofa while half-watching Netflix? But there was one problem with…

What do a crisis manager, a surgeon, a law professor, a 19th-century debutante, and a socialite scammer have in common? They are all grist for the mill for Shonda Rhimes, the writer, producer, and director responsible for network television’s most deliciously dramatic prime-time shows, from Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal to Netflix’s Bridgerton and, soon, Inventing Anna. “You caught me on a ‘lot of hair’ day!” Rhimes jokes when she meets me on Zoom from her home in California, wearing a lilac Lululemon sweatshirt and fluffing her voluminous curls on camera. Behind her, there is an upholstered chair with an ottoman, and a MacBook positioned squarely on the cushion. This, I soon discover, is where the magic happens. “If I write anywhere in a room that has a bed in it,…

In 2021, movies, many of which had been shot during the pandemic, seemed to celebrate family. There were all kinds of relationships: corrosive and complicated, as in The Power of the Dog, in which a brother, played with brilliant menace by Benedict Cumberbatch, subtly tortured his new sister-in-law, played by Kirsten Dunst; ambitious and sexy, as in House of Gucci, in which a scheming wife, perfectly embodied by Lady Gaga, endeavored to destroy a dynasty; and close and rebellious, as in CODA, in which a young girl who longed to sing had to confront her deaf parents. There were compelling films about the complexity of marriage: Denzel Washington plotted magnificently with his wife in The Tragedy of Macbeth; an utterly believable Simon Rex, playing an ex–porn star, persuaded his estranged…