Innehållsförteckning för Volume 5, 2024 från W Magazine

Some of the world’s most iconic women have entrusted the artist Nadia Lee Cohen with their billion-dollar images. On magazine covers and in editorials, she’s reimagined Kim Kardashian as a 1970s ski bunny, a bespectacled androgyne, and a jockstrap-wearing patriot. She was enlisted by Beyoncé to shoot the teaser clip for Cowboy Carter, and she’s put Rihanna in a nun’s habit and drag queen makeup. But whether she’s photographing celebrities, models, or herself—as she often does—Cohen’s work goes beyond artifice. She aims to capture an imagined character, animated through their belongings and how they choose to present themselves to the world. Cohen grew up in the English countryside, but not all her points of reference were bucolic. American TV and the bleach blonde mothers from Essex she witnessed dropping their…

“Many of our ideas come from going out, sitting at a bar, and having a drink together,” says Michael Elmgreen, the older and more talkative half of the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. “We actually did it just last night.” So, how many drinks does it take? “The good ideas come after one,” says the other half, Ingar Dragset, laughing. They are sitting by a well-stocked bookcase in their Berlin studio, a vast, light-flooded former water-pumping station in the Neukölln district filled with busy assistants and projects in various stages of realization. “And the ideas that are really good, the ones you see, come after five!” The pair met 30 years ago in a nightclub called After Dark, in Copenhagen, Denmark, drawn together by the fact that they were the…

When we started brainstorming cover ideas for our annual Originals Issue, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that A$AP Rocky would be perfect. But how could we make sure that his unique personality and style came across in the pictures? Rocky’s stylist, Matthew Henson, and I were trading ideas back and forth when Henson came across a 2008 issue of W in which Brad Pitt had photographed his then girlfriend, Angelina Jolie. Inspired by that cover, Henson suggested that Rihanna, Rocky’s partner and the mother of their two little boys, shoot the story. I was all in, as was she. After many emails, texts, and calls, we met on a late summer night at the Mercer Hotel, in New York. To say we had fun is an understatement: There…

The morning before the photo shoot for this story, which is taking place in Paris, Marie Adam-Leenaerdt is working at home in Schaerbeek, an attractive neighborhood in northeast Brussels, while a summer storm pummels the greenhouse roof in her garden downstairs. The window from her office overlooks it, and you can’t see anything but sideways rain. In a few hours, she’ll catch the train and stay the night with her boyfriend’s French parents, who are storing the clothes for the models, so that she’ll be ready for the call time tomorrow. The back-and-forth to Paris is something Adam-Leenaerdt, 28, is used to; sometimes she even takes the longer route to get there, by car, so she can bring her Labrador. She doesn’t mind. Not enough to up sticks and move,…

“The line between art and life is fluid and indistinct,” writes the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in the foreword to Inside the Homes of Artists: For Art’s Sake. It’s the third book from the art patron and author Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian, who, in her previous two projects, interviewed collectors about their artistic obsessions and explored the homes of dealers. Her latest, out this fall from Rizzoli, examines the myriad ways artists’ lives, routines, and aesthetics intersect with and depart from the work they put out into the world. “I wanted to understand what it meant to spend one’s life surrounded by and devoted to art, but this time from the perspective of those who create it,” says Atencio Demirdjian. “I wanted to show their journeys and their creative pursuits.” For…

In our age of digital supremacy, in which email, tweets, emojis, and a general disregard for elegant prose have conspired to erode the art of handwriting, the pen is alive and well—nowhere more so than at Montblanc. A German company named for the highest peak in the Alps, Montblanc has been at the summit of luxury since its founding, in 1906—an exemplar of innovation and craftsmanship. The company has appealed to a list of luminaries long enough to line a ski slope—everyone from Queen Elizabeth II and presidents Kennedy, Clinton, and Obama to Ernest Hemingway and Yoko Ono. Montblancs have been used to write everything from love letters and everyday musings to contracts, peace treaties, and documents of historical importance. In 1991, for example, Mikhail Gorbachev signed his resignation as…

In 1971, Elsa Peretti was still three years away from the partnership with Tiffany & Co. that would assure her status as one of the most consequential jewelry designers of the 20th century, but she already had the aplomb of a star. Wearing a tie-dye Halston caftan, perched on an Angelo Donghia chaise longue in her apartment on Irving Place in Manhattan, she explained to a journalist how she came to have it: “You must have a lot of confidence but very little compromise with yourself.” Peretti, who died three years ago at the age of 80, exhibited both those qualities from an early age. Raised in a palazzo in Rome, she chafed at the expectations of her wealthy, conventional family. At 21, she wrote her father a letter declaring…

When A$AP Rocky walks into New York’s Mercer Hotel one July evening for his W photo shoot, he is impossible to miss. He’s wearing sunglasses, a green terry Lacoste robe paired with a thick gold chain that he “got on Canal Street,” and a platinum grill on his molars. An enormous golden bauble on his finger brings to mind a line from his new single, “Highjack”: “Bitch mistake my newest pinky ring for a ice pack.” Slip-on leather mules and a green custom Goyard tote complete the look. “You guys really gotta wish me luck today,” he says in a low voice, a boyish glint in his eye. “I heard the photographer lady is crazy.” The “photographer lady” is none other than Rihanna, Rocky’s partner and the mother of their…