Innehållsförteckning för Volume 6, 2023 från W Magazine

Ming Smith Photographer, “The Originals: Jeffrey Gibson” (page 160) What art has inspired you lately? The Guggenheim exhibition “Going Dark.” The show felt like one great installation composed of some of my favorite artists of all time. I was honored to be included. If you had to choose a different creative medium from the ones you currently work in, what would it be? Film full-time, but I love painting, sculpture, and dance. I plan to merge all of these together in one creation. Who do you consider the greatest artist of all time? Mother Nature. Matt Benns Hairstylist, “Street Cred” (page 146) If you had to choose a different medium from the one you currently work in, what would it be? I would be a sculptor. I’m so blown away…

You may have seen the photo before. It captures a group of 14 men and one woman clustered together in a sparse room, staring straight at the camera with scowls of varying intensity. The painter Jackson Pollock is perched on a stool in a suit and tie, holding a cigarette. Barnett Newman, seated in the front with his legs crossed, had insisted they all dress “like bankers.” This is the famous portrait of “the Irascibles,” which appeared in Life magazine in 1951. The artists pictured—including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko—would go on to be regarded as pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, a style prized for exuberant, seemingly spontaneous brushstrokes that revolutionized the art world. For Hedda Sterne, the lone female artist in the group, the shoot was not…

Kayode Ojo has developed a shorthand for glamour. The artist deploys it to create sculptural portals into our desires using ready-made—and sometimes ready-to-wear—items. His fashion-flecked assemblages, which have included mirrored shelves studded with glass bottles, and a transparent chair draped with a white blazer and a belt of bullets, evoke cinematic grandeur despite their material economy. Somehow, in his work, grandiosity meets minimalism. Raised in a small town in Tennessee, the 33-year-old New Yorker is a larger-than-life fixture on the art party circuit, often seen snapping candids of moments that would otherwise go unremembered. Ojo started his career as a photographer, and his sculptures remain camera-conscious, drawing attention to the way photography has become a ubiquitous tool in the art-viewing experience. Ojo approaches his exhibitions much like a stylist might…

In 1980, at the age of 20, Jamel Shabazz returned to his native Brooklyn after serving in the Army. He started taking pictures of the world around him with his 35mm camera and soon became a virtuosic urban documentarian—a street-style genius before the genre had a name. As one pages through Back in the Days (2001), the first of Shabazz’s 12 photo books—a Taschen retrospective is due in early 2025—it’s clear that he instinctively understood how streetwear was becoming a form of personal power. The images of B-boys and fly girls striking poses are not just great pictures of people wearing clothes well, but vital records of vigorous selfhood. They became the foundation for a career that has paid tribute to cultural figures, social protest movements, and resilient everyday New…

Four years ago, we had the chance to work on a story with Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos, shortly after he directed her in The Favourite, his Oscar-winning film. It is, to this day, one of my all-time favorite shoots: Stone played a crazy dog-lady surrounded by canine friends, a character that Lanthimos meticulously constructed. Since then, Lanthimos and Stone have continued to awe us. They worked together on the astonishing feature film Poor Things, which I was able to preview earlier this year, and Bleat, a black and white silent short that they shot in Greece, which premiered at the New York Film Festival, accompanied by a live music ensemble and choir. The projects are very different and completely unique, but they both reflect the enduring partnership between two…

“Duran used to say to me, ‘If I see a flat roll of fabric, I freak out because I don’t know what to do with it!’” recalls the designer Kym Ellery, sitting in the audience at her friend Duran Lantink’s spring 2024 show, in Paris. Evidence is growing that he has figured it out. It was only the second runway presentation for the Dutch designer, and his first on the official calendar, but Lantink has already made a name for himself as a champion of upcycling, creating eye-popping statements from existing garments and discarded fabrics. Ellery and Lantink first met during the pandemic, when she gave him carte blanche to reconfigure items from the archives of her brand, Ellery. “Duran vibrates in a different way than most,” she says. “More…

In June 1958, Mark Rothko agreed to create a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant, which was to be designed by Philip Johnson in Mies van der Rohe’s new Seagram Building, in New York. To produce the paintings, the meticulous, intellectual Rothko took a large studio on the second floor of the former YMCA at 222 Bowery. For more than a year, he threw himself into the commission, shifting his palette from the famous bright colors of the 1950s—luminous yellows, oranges, reds, and blues that practically vibrated off the canvas—to darker geometric forms in black or crimson hovering on backgrounds in shades of maroon. By the fall of 1959, Rothko had completed the series—three sets of large, dusky canvases. Then, for the first time, he actually went to…

As a teen growing up in Rome, Maria Grazia Chiuri visited a Frida Kahlo exhibition that left an indelible impression. Looking beyond the surrealistic self-portraits on display, she became fixated on the Mexican artist’s idiosyncratic sense of style—a performative hallmark that defied gender, time, and place. “Frida Kahlo was probably the first woman artist I ever encountered,” Chiuri recalls. “She is so important, so iconic, because she had a strong relationship not only with her body but also with clothes—she really realized herself with clothes.” Little did Chiuri know, Kahlo’s metamorphosis would later inspire her to design an entire collection. In 2016, when Chiuri made fashion history by becoming Christian Dior’s first female creative director, she delved into the Dior archives. “I discovered this incredible map that immediately explains why…

You will represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the upcoming Venice Biennale. As the first Indigenous artist chosen to do so, do you feel a sense of responsibility? I was daunted by what it means to represent the United States, all the complications with Native American history in this country, and all of the oppression we suffered. My goal is to create an atmosphere where everyone is invited, not to create a new hierarchy or form of exclusion. You were born in Colorado, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and are of Cherokee descent, but your upbringing and your work have taken you around the globe. Our motto in the Choctaw is self-determination. After college, my chief said to me, “You would be more effective…

Alexander McQueen did not pull punches. From the time he came out swinging from the star-making Central Saint Martins college, in London, McQueen issued blow after blow to the face of fashion respectability. His runway antics—pyrotechnics, models stumbling down looking like they had just been attacked, telerobotic hijinks—brought to life his dazzlingly subversive imagination. “I don’t think like the average person on the street,” McQueen said in 1996. “I think quite perversely sometimes.” Nowhere was this embrace of provocation and menace more evident than in his knockout accessories. His shoe designs arrived as entirely new forms and were derided by some as experiments in torture. They included the now canonical Armadillo boot, with its apparent disregard for the natural anatomy of the foot, and the 3D-printed Alien shoe, with its…

Visiting the home of L.A. gallery owners Esther Kim Varet and Joseph Varet, in the historic neighborhood of Hancock Park, is surprising from the start—like sipping a drink that looks like cucumber water but turns out to be a vodka gimlet. Despite the house’s strangely plain facade that promises a suburban family home, the interior proves to be beautifully sparse, with carefully considered neo-brutalist touches courtesy of Leong Leong, the New York architecture firm helmed by brothers Chris and Dominic Leong. Then there are the smartly chosen artworks, planted in key spots not to add splashes of color so much as to provoke thought or spark conversation. Upon entering the house, instead of stepping inside a large foyer or great hall where trophy paintings have pride of place, you immediately…