Innehållsförteckning för Volume 3, 2023 från W Magazine

Tyler Mitchell Photographer, “Idol Worship” (page 120) What pop culture moment lives rent-free in your head? Watching Get Out in a New York City movie theater on opening weekend. What music are you excited about right now? I’m an old soul these days. I listen to brass bands, jazz flute, and soul. But if I had to pick something contemporary, I think Ice Spice is fun. And I love Rosalía. What does “pop” mean to you? To me, pop is any important cultural event or image that shifts and shapes our current time. Cassidy George Writer, “Karol G” (page 64) and “Raye” (page 75) Who do you consider the most important pop culture icon of our time? Without question, it’s Kim Kardashian. In my life, though, it’s John Waters, the…

In 1992, Sandra Bernhard showed up as a guest on Late Show with David Letterman in a full Isaac Mizrahi runway ensemble and perfectly coiffed hair fresh from Oribe’s salon chair. Letterman playfully knocked her look as leftovers from The Addams Family, prompting Bernhard to launch into an extravagant explanatory monologue, working the audience into a frenzy and coaxing a bemused grin out of the host. “We’re giving Babe Paley, we’re giving ’60s, we’re giving high glamour…and the audience loves it, they need it, they reach out for it! Sexual tension!” she shouted, before the room erupted in applause. With her flair for titillation, edginess, and playfulness, Bernhard was among the first to meld the worlds of fashion and comedy. Her career, which kicked off in the late 1970s with…

Harold Ancart bristles with so much energy that if you didn’t see the cigarette between his fingers, you might think the smoke was coming out of his ears. Since arriving in New York in 2007 from his native Brussels, Ancart, 43, has ascended the art world on a vertiginous incline. When he ended his representation by the prestigious David Zwirner gallery, in January 2022, his departure might have seemed an uncharacteristic step backward. Not to worry. A few months later, he received a call from the biggest dealer of them all, Larry Gagosian. “It was one of the best studio visits I ever had,” Ancart said. They quickly reached an agreement, and Ancart will have a solo show at Gagosian’s Chelsea outpost in May. He admires the dealer’s straightforwardness. “He…

There are many things that Miuccia Prada hates: The banality of luxury, “good taste,” and the bourgeoisie are just a few of the topics that come up during a conversation from her art-filled home in Milan. These bugbears, however, have been useful over the years. They have given clarity to her work and provided her with something to react against in her collections, beginning in the 1980s with the introduction of handbags and backpacks made of practical black nylon, and continuing ever since with an aesthetic that the designer once described as “ugly chic.” Prada has something else on her mind today. Three years since the pandemic upended people’s relationship with their clothes, and as her company embarks on a generational management shift that will have significant implications for its…

George Clinton Music Legend, Godfather of Funk, Painter Prince inducted your bands, Parliament and Funkadelic (or P-Funk), into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame over a quarter century ago, but it’s only now, at 81, that you’re getting the biopic treatment with Wiz Khalifa, who plays you in Spinning Gold, about the early days of Casablanca Records. What’s it like to look back on that time through the eyes of younger artists? Wiz Khalifa was pretty aware of the music through his parents, but he didn’t know the details. In fact, I just did another movie, Agent Elvis, about Elvis Presley, that’s animated. Your career started when you were a teenager, with the Parliaments, a doo-wop band in suits and ties. What prompted the shift in your sartorial sensibility?…

There hasn’t been a more highly anticipated or talked-about show in recent memory than The Idol. Two years ago, W did a story on Sam Levinson, following his massive success as the writer and director of Euphoria. Ever since then, we have been eagerly awaiting what he would do next—and we are thrilled that his new project is finally here. Usually, film and television publicists are eager to share with journalists what’s to come, but that wasn’t the case with The Idol. When I asked to get a sneak peek, a heavily password-protected link was sent to me, and I knew that I had become a member of the intimate club that had watched a short preview of the show. That snippet was enough to convince me that the Idol…

Karol G When Karol G appears in my Zoom window, she is the quintessential image of the Little Mermaid. The Colombian superstar’s bright red hair is long, wavy, and wet, and her glowing skin looks like it was just sprayed with sea mist. Her love of the fantastical creature is well known—at her concerts, fans in red wigs throw mermaid dolls at her feet—but unlike Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, Karol’s story is about her finding and protecting her voice. Carolina Giraldo Navarro was born and raised in Medellín, Colombia. Her first foray into the industry was as a competitor on the country’s version of The X Factor in 2006, when she was 14. But in the years after her appearance, she was turned away by record label executives, who…

For a compact handbag, the Lady Dior packs a lot of history. Created in 1995 and named after Diana, Princess of Wales, it was gifted to her by Bernadette Chirac, the first lady of France at the time. She was so attached to it, in fact, that of all of Diana’s contributions to style, from her FLY VIRGIN ATLANTIC sweatshirt and cycling shorts combo to the off-the-shoulder “revenge dress” she wore after news broke of her husband’s infidelity, this may be her most enduring one. It’s a quintessential example of how a celebrity and a brand can come together to create a best-seller. A Dior offering ever since, the Lady Dior was hiding in plain sight until the most recent season of The Crown, in which it held its own…

Marie-Madeleine Diouf recalls how it all started: her love affair with indigo. Growing up in Parcelles Assainies, a working-class neighborhood in Dakar, Senegal’s capital, she would gravitate to traditional dance in her after-school programs. That meant raiding her mother’s closet for vintage wraps—and thus indigo fabrics, prized in her family’s Serer culture. “I was 7, 8 years old,” Diouf says, “and ever since then, I’ve seen life in blue.” For 15 years, Diouf worked as a medical administrator. On the side, with a cheap sewing machine, she made clothes that she took on days off to Banjul, the capital of neighboring Gambia, to sell door-to-door. Then, in 2015, she made the jump. Now, as the owner of NuNu Design by DK, she’s one of the bright stars in Dakar’s art…

“I’m always trying to remix the makeup I was influenced by when I was much younger,” says 23-year-old makeup artist (and Dior beauty ambassador) Sam Visser, who started experimenting with cosmetics when he was in junior high; at 16, he had already developed a sizable following on social media for the edgy but glamorous looks he records in photos and videos. “I love makeup that makes someone look beautiful, but I also want to twist it and not make it feel too classic,” says Visser, who uses a 1990s VHS camera to capture hyperreal statements on celebrity friends such as Bella Hadid, Kaia Gerber, and Ariana Grande. His camera may be old-school, but modern technology has played an outsize role in the way he approaches his career. “Visually, technology has…