Innehållsförteckning för Volume 4, 2024 från W Magazine

Grace Coddington Stylist, “Urban Renewal” (page 202) Which item in your closet will you never part with? I’ve already thrown out the things I should have kept forever. I had a beautiful coat by Yves Saint Laurent from the ’70s and a long, tight evening dress from the ’80s by Azzedine Alaïa, which I edited out in a crazy purge when I left England and came to America to work for Calvin Klein. What was your first serious fashion purchase? In 1960, I bought a dress by Mary Quant. Gerry O’Kane Stylist, “Full Speed Ahead” (page 134) Which trends are you into right now? And which ones are you looking forward to leaving behind? Leopard print is my favorite. And I’m looking forward to sending boho back to the noughties.…

Bob Mackie was never much for nightlife. “I was in my studio, working away, and I couldn’t have been happier,” he says. But perhaps no designer is more responsible than he is for broadcasting glamour, pizzazz, and pure spectacle into Americans’ living rooms. Born and raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Mackie always knew he wanted to be a designer. Encouraged early on by the legendary costumer Edith Head, Mackie worked for a time under the midcentury pioneer Jean Louis before breaking through on his own with the outfits for Mitzi Gaynor’s Las Vegas revue in 1966. He went on to help shape the stage and screen image of a Mount Rushmore of legendary divas: Carol Burnett, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Diahann Carroll, and, perhaps most iconically,…

Rare is the fashion model whose career has legs as long as her own. For every Carmen Dell’Orefice, Naomi Campbell, or Kate Moss, there are thousands who disappear—none, perhaps, more effectively than Iria Leino. Along with Bettina and Dovima, the Finnish American beauty was one of the first models to go by a single name; then, in 1964, she fled fashion forever. Now Leino is having a comeback, not as a model of brief renown in Europe, but as the artist she was in New York. This month, two years after her death, at 90, from leukemia, Harper’s gallery in New York is introducing that Leino: an obsessive painter of luminous abstractions with only one solo U.S. show to her credit. That show was in 1966. Probably no one in…

“Oh my god!” exclaimed Zoë Kravitz. She was about to change clothes at the W photo shoot when a brightly colored lizard crawled into a corner of the dressing room. The shoot was happening in a modernist 1970s house high in the canyons of Beverly Hills, and somehow the reptile had decided to visit. “Did he come through the window?” joked Kravitz. She was dressed in a short Saint Laurent cream-colored slipdress, and her hair was slicked back into a tight bun. Although Kravitz is only five feet two, she has a commanding presence and seems taller. She is simultaneously funny, curious, and absolutely certain about her beliefs, on every subject from politics to fashion to art. People close to her were not surprised that she wanted to direct a…

When brainstorming for our big fall fashion issue covers, we started talking about obsessions. What were we dying for, and who were we living for? What couldn’t we get out of our heads? The first person who came to mind was Sabrina Carpenter. Even my 3-year-old was singing, “I’m working late ’cause I’m a singer,” the catchy line from the summer hit “Espresso.” It seemed like Carpenter had come out of nowhere, suddenly being blasted on every radio station, appearing on every social media feed, and even showing up as a guest of honor at major fashion shows. But as Editor at Large Lynn Hirschberg explains in “Pop’s New It Girl” (page 152), Carpenter’s rise to fame has been years in the making—she’s been working pretty much nonstop since she…

Looking back on her initial resistance to creating clothes for women, former menswear designer Colleen Allen laughs. When she was working at The Row, she says, “they asked me to design women’s, and I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that!’ I was very rigid. I felt like everything had been said in women’s and there was more to say in men’s. But, eventually, there was an itch at the back of my brain. I realized that there were ideas I wanted to explore.” Those ideas—identity, spirituality, community—culminated in February in the 28-year-old designer’s New York Fashion Week debut, an imaginatively conceived, tenderly executed exploration of femininity anchored by that often maligned archetype: the witch. It was while she was researching how witches have been portrayed over the…

Jamian Juliano-Villani makes unlikely mash-ups. In her paintings, she juxtaposes weirdly nostalgic images that she has voraciously collected from old books, the Internet, her constantly playing television—wherever she finds them. And at O’Flaherty’s, the buzzy East Village art gallery that she runs with her best friend, Billy Grant, she transports under-recognized artists—often, those who were celebrated in their heyday but are now overlooked—into a new context. Her debut solo show this past spring, at Gagosian, reportedly sold well, with prices in the five and six figures. O’Flaherty’s, since it opened in 2021, has punched way above its weight. And yet Juliano-Villani, 37, says she has “no fucking clue” how all this happened. Her only plan, she insists, is to have no plan: “I’d like the paintings to stay as open…

Forty years into your career, you are putting together an exhibition in Paris, at the Jeu de Paume museum, that will focus on some of the themes that unite your work: family dynamics, domestic settings, the trappings and rituals of old money. The museum doesn’t refer to the show as a retrospective or a survey. Why have you skipped that language? When you throw out the term “retrospective,” you think, Oh, yes, beginning to end. This show is trying to talk about many different things, not just chronology. Are you looking forward to the show? It’s a huge undertaking, which I’m both exhausted and excited by. In the ’90s, I did a tour of my series “The Europeans,” so I remember what it’s like to be interviewed over and over…

Handbags mean different things to different women—beyond conferring style, they are signifiers of status, wealth, and identity. Nowhere is this more the case than at Prada, where Miuccia Prada has made a storied career of creating clothes and accessories that are cultural semaphores charged with meaning. As she has famously declared, “What you wear is how you present yourself to the world—especially today, when human contacts go so fast. Fashion is instant language.” As the uniform of fashion insiders, Prada is shorthand for a world beyond frippery. One of the reasons so many of the label’s offerings become classics beloved by intellectuals—real and wannabe—is that they hint at the wearer’s inner life. Launched in 2007, the Prada Galleria bag certainly fits that bill. It has remained stubbornly faithful to itself…

At the couture shows in Paris this past January, the most talked-about accessory was neither an It bag nor a statement shoe but an alien robot baby—a husky, sparkling tot constructed of electronic panels, pearl-covered circuit boards, wires, cables, and thousands of Swarovski crystals that Schiaparelli designer Daniel Roseberry sent down the runway in the arms of model Maggie Maurer. It was made from what Roseberry referred to as “prehistoric technology”—flip phones, computer chips, and motherboards dating back to the days before going viral on social media was considered the ultimate measure of success. Such wild creations are not surprising coming from Schiaparelli. The house’s founder was the mother of surrealist fashion, known for making gloves with claws on the fingertips, trimming boots with long fringes of monkey fur, and…