Innehållsförteckning för Volume 8, 2019 från W Magazine

Max Farago Photographer, “Mothers of Invention” (page 76) What’s the best gift you’ve ever received? An antique Persian ring that my wife bought for me in a shop we love in Venice. What’s the best gift you’ve ever given? Bringing my infant daughter to visit my elderly grandmother. New Year’s Eve: love or hate? I like the night before New Year’s Eve, when you end up partying with friends without any expectations for it to be the best night of the year. What are your New Year’s resolutions? Being more present. Michelle Lee Casting director, “The Long and Short of It” (page 96) What’s the best gift you’ve ever given? I adopted a dog for my brother. Her name was Sweet Potato. Have you been naughty or nice this year?…

Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski had nearly finished her spring collection by the time she went on maternity leave at the end of April, more than four months before her designs would ever appear on a runway. As the creative director for women’s ready-to-wear for Hermès, she prefers coherency to chaos, a characteristic that suits her well at a house that is renowned for a demanding level of quality that is dependent on time-consuming craftsmanship. Only one silhouette still needed to be reworked, so she promised her team a sketch would be forthcoming when she set off to enjoy some time with her husband as they anticipated the arrival of their first child. “My due date was mid-June, and I was really flirting with danger,” Vanhée-Cybulski recalls. “It was funny because I was…

Seeing a frescoed church ceiling from a few inches away is a bizarre experience. To give parishioners in the nave the illusion of looking up into real space, Renaissance painters used a perspective technique called di sotto in sù, resulting in angels and cherubs with stretched out bodies and wonky, bulbous faces and hands. Up close, you can also see the subtle delineations marking each day’s work, tiny seams between batches of plaster. For the past 18 months, a group of art restorers from the Merlini Storti studio, all of them young women dressed in white lab coats and overalls, have spent every weekday tending to frescoes in San Girolamo dei Croati, a church completed in 1589 in Rome. The ceiling, which they reach using a seven-story metal scaffolding, is…

I met the photographer Colin Dodgson 10 years ago in New York City. We were starting our careers and quickly became friends, doing lo-fi shoots at friends’ apartments around the city or at my mom’s house in Los Angeles. Once, when I was moving apartments, Colin used the empty space to stage a show of his work the day before I had to turn in the keys. In many ways, we grew up together in the fashion industry. When the team at W started thinking about who could shoot three of the biggest actresses in the world for our cover, Colin was the first person who came to mind. We wanted to do something unexpected with Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, and Margot Robbie, and I knew Colin’s pictures would present…

When Roger Ailes started Fox News, in 1996, he envisioned the female anchors and reporters as an army of women wearing tight, bright short-sleeve dresses just above the knee, sheer nude stockings, and high-heeled pumps. He treated these employees as both family and property, a dynamic that resulted in a very specific and oddly depersonalizing vision of female beauty. The women of Fox, who were instructed to wear their hair long (and preferably blonde), became a highly organized crew of fembots. They spoke directly to their audience—an ever-increasing cross section of conservative Americans who were eventually mobilized by Donald Trump—and projected a subtly suggestive yet comfortingly old-fashioned idea of femininity. Anchors like Gretchen Carlson (a former Miss America) and Megyn Kelly became interchangeable. In a perverse way, Ailes understood how…