Innehållsförteckning för Volume 6, 2019 från W Magazine

Tim Walker Photographer, “Frank Ocean” (page 58) and “Everyone Is Welcome” (page 80) What is originality to you? “Be yourself—everyone else is already taken.” This anonymous quote sums up the importance to embrace and celebrate your individuality… In a world of ever-increasing algorithms and consequent blandness, this may well be best heeded. Willy Vanderperre Photographer, “Rosalía” (page 68) What makes you an Original? We are all in one way or another an Original. There isn’t a second person exactly like you (yet). If you listen to your instinct and follow that all the way through, a different degree of originality is reached. The minute we try to be original is when we lose originality. What is originality to you? Originality is futuristic, present, dated. What was your style like as…

The New York decorator and design dealer Michael Bargo’s home and gallery space is located on the third floor of a five-story brick building in New York’s Chinatown. Like many tenements on the Bowery, Bargo’s has a storied past (it’s a former flophouse and was the subject of a Depression-era photograph by Berenice Abbott) and a rather unremarkable future (the building shares a block with restaurant supply stores and a karaoke joint). It’s a strange location for someone who traffics in a kind of timeless, blue-chip elegance—Bargo’s primary obsession is French midcentury furniture from the likes of Charlotte Perriand and Jacques Adnet—but the new digs are nothing compared to his previous ones in a mall on East Broadway underneath the Manhattan Bridge, where the floors shook every time a train…

All along, Frank Ocean has been hiding in plain sight. Not on the sites populating your feed, perhaps, because he releases songs and tours sparingly, rewrites music industry conventions with stealth precision, and flouts celebrity social media paradigms at will. But for all the talk of how enigmatic he is, the 31-year-old singer-songwriter has shared more about what moves, drives, and undoes him than pretty much any of his peers. Just listen to “Self Control.” Or “Ivy.” Or other songs on his autobiographical Blonde, the last album he released, in August 2016, which catapulted him to icon status and confirmed his reign as one of the most influential artists of the decade, among the first to blend R&B, soul, rap, rock, and electronic music. In 2012, the year he released…

The country singer Kacey Musgraves relishes defying her audiences’ expectations. During a performance at the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago last August, she played the opening chords of “Rainbow,” a somber piano ballad from her critically lauded album Golden Hour, which has been called “a message of hope for anyone in the midst of dark times.” But then she suddenly paused. She needed to speak her mind. “I don’t know what the answer is, but obviously something has to be fucking done,” she said. She was referring to the horrifying gun massacres that had struck the United States earlier that month: the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. “Maybe somebody will hear us if we all yell together and say, ‘Somebody fucking do something!’ “Somebody fucking do…

I have loved magazines for as long as I can remember. When I was growing up, my bedroom walls were plastered with pages from Vogue, Italian Vogue, Interview, and W. When I applied to New York University, instead of sending in the customary college application essay, I made a mini magazine; after graduating, I was lucky enough to work at actual magazines. Now, writing my editor’s letter as the first female Editor in Chief of W, I feel incredibly honored to have worked for some of the smartest and most boundary-pushing women throughout my career, learning how to make fashion pictures, commission stories, and find my own point of view. When we started putting together this issue, we knew from the beginning that it should revolve around the idea of…

Almost 50 years after his uncompromising films and daring self-portraits made him a defining gay sex symbol of the ’70s, Peter Berlin can’t quite fathom why anyone would still be interested in his work. Yet he’s also bothered that the rest of the world hasn’t remade itself in his image—and that’s just one of the many contradictions that make Berlin so fascinating. He’s an introvert known for his exhibitionism; a gifted photographer whose only subject is himself; a porn star who doesn’t much care for sex; and a man who responded to the artifices that so many gay men constructed to hide their true selves by creating an even more exaggerated sexual and stylistic persona. “I decided, I will not fake my life like Rock Hudson and all of these…

Why does one of Joan Didion’s notebooks contain a reference to a woman who describes her husband as having been “born the night the Titanic went down”? And why did Didion record equally idiosyncratic comments overheard in hotels, elevators, cloakrooms, and supermarket checkouts? Or jot down a recipe for sauerkraut? “In order to remember, of course,” Didion, now 84 and one of the most admired American writers, recalled in her 1966 essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” “But exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it?” “On Keeping a Notebook” is to be republished this fall, this time as a book filled with images by the British photographer Jamie Hawkesworth, who is best known for the work he has shot for…

Chloë Sevigny Actor You are set to star in Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming HBO miniseries, We Are Who We Are. How did you two meet? We had a fast and furious hang-over-lunch-eating-chicken-tenders kind of meeting in Cannes. We just got on like a house on fire. We’ve got a lot of friends in common in fashion and a similar outlook and attitude. Coming-of-age is one of my favorite film genres, and the project with Luca is basically a teen film, but now I’m the parent. You grew up in Connecticut. Do you remember your first trip to New York? My father commuted to Manhattan, so he would bring me in when I was a little girl for, like, Daddy and Daughter Day. I remember I had this little suit and tie,…

Jeremy Scott’s fall 2001 show, a campy homage to game show culture complete with dresses in a fake-dollar-bill pattern stamped with Scott’s face, instantly endeared the then-mulleted wunderkind to the fashion world—as well as to the producers of Wheel of Fortune. They say you should never meet your idols, but later that year Scott did just that when he was invited to dress Vanna White for a week in looks from his collection. “They really got it,” he subsequently told the Los Angeles Times. Well, whether it’s television or fashion, we all love a reboot, and nearly two decades later, Scott obliged with a Moschino show that could have been art directed by Pat Sajak or Bob Barker. Presenters teased shiny prizes, including a cherry-red Ferrari on a revolving stage,…