Innehållsförteckning för Volume 1, 2025 från W Magazine

Mert Alas (right) and Marcus Piggott Photographers, “Best Performances” (page 122) Which movie makes you laugh the hardest? MA: What gets me is the “physical comedy” of Peter Sellers’s acting. Every look, every turn or step, is dipped in humor. Who’s your dream costar? MA: Faye Dunaway. Her undeniable acting skills, her beauty, and, somehow, her reputation for being hard to work with attract me. If you could switch wardrobes with any movie character, who would it be? MP: David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Which movie should everyone see by the time they graduate from college? MP: Baraka. It shows us the wonders of the world and how the harmony of nature and mankind should be. Alice Cavanagh Writer, “Flash Forward: All–in” (page 70) Which movie…

John Waters says that by the time he was in high school, he had “already written things that caused trouble.” As a summer camp counselor-in-training, he wrote a short story that had “lots of gore,” about a killer at a family reunion, and read passages to the kids every night. “The parents complained!” he says. A Baltimore native, Waters started making films with his Dreamland crew—a group of locals and childhood friends that included Harris Glenn Milstead (better known as Divine), Mink Stole, Edith Massey, and Pat Moran—in the 1960s. Since his first movie, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, he’s gleefully challenged the idea of good taste: His characters literally eat shit and get raped by lobsters. At 78, Waters is producing work—which now includes a novel, nonfiction, live…

“Timeless” is one of those terms so often used to describe elegant clothing that it has practically lost all meaning—it’s a fashion cliché right up there with “effortless” and “modern.” That is, unless you’re talking about Giorgio Armani, for whom all those words sound exactly right. Does anyone have a stronger claim of ownership to the concept of timelessness than the Italian legend, who turned 90 last July and is now celebrating the 50th anniversary of his business? Like all successful designers, he will tell you that he always prefers to look forward, not back; but his commitment to a singular aesthetic throughout his career has resulted in designs that seemed breathtakingly new when they were introduced in the 1970s and ’80s—when he stripped the stiff linings from suit jackets…

You started your career by interning for Cerruti in 1982, at age 17, and then worked at Armani and Prada. In 2000, you went to Yves Saint Laurent, and in 2004 you became the creative director for eight years. Then there was a three-year head designer role at Zegna. You were 51 when you stepped down. What was it like coming of age while working in fashion? I considered it a beautiful journey. Only a few people get to work for 40 years at something that they really like. That said, if you are a creative person or a designer, you put a lot of yourself into what you do. My personality and my character were defined by my profession, instead of a more intimate knowledge of myself. Today I…

Our annual Best Performances portfolio, which this year is a whopping 82 pages, is quite a production. As you can tell by the behind-the-scenes pictures above, nearly half of our staff practically moved to Los Angeles to make it happen. Over the course of a (very) long weekend, we laughed, dressed up, tried on lots of diamond jewelry, and drank endless Erewhon smoothies with the acclaimed photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott as we celebrated 34 of our favorite actors. Preparations for this issue started months before, with screenings of the films we expected to be Oscar contenders. The first one was Emilia Pérez, which Editor at Large Lynn Hirschberg and I saw at the Paris Theater on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. We were blown away by Jacques Audiard’s completely…

From 1941 to 1972, Le Pavillon was the Manhattan restaurant for families like the Kennedys and the Astors. While the famed French hot spot cycled through many head chefs, the maître d’, Henri Soulé, was a constant. Hailing from the French coastal city of Bayonne, Soulé was tiny (five feet five), well-groomed, and impeccably dressed. As the gatekeeper of New York’s scene-iest restaurant, he accrued great power. He found Harry Cohn, the cofounder and then president of Columbia Pictures, vulgar. Soulé sat him at terrible tables, way in the back of the dining room, even though Cohn owned the building. When Cohn raised the rent as revenge, Soulé simply relocated to the Ritz Tower, on 57th Street—the ultimate chess move. Diners followed Soulé without hesitation. Maître d’s are the maestros…

For Thomas de Kluyver, makeup has always been about more than mere adornment—it’s a medium for exploring identity and a way to create characters. Growing up in Perth, Australia, with a mother who was a theater director, “I was around a lot of performers, and people always spoke to me like I was an adult,” he says. “I think that’s shaped a lot of who I am today.” For his latest story, shot by longtime collaborator Harley Weir, de Kluyver drew inspiration from multiple sources—performance art, theater, dance, and the work of two female painters known for their charged portraiture: Marlene Dumas and Miriam Cahn. “There’s this incredible honesty to their portraits, this emotion and feeling,” explains de Kluyver, who serves as Gucci Beauty’s global makeup artist and recently released…

In 2003, before Phoebe Philo became a fashion deity, Hedi Slimane turned to womenswear, and The Row redefined haute minimalism, there was one designer whose ability to read the culture stood out like a diamond tiara at a stoop sale: Marc Jacobs. Jacobs was then six years into his role as artistic director at Louis Vuitton. If any uncertainty lingered that an American enfant terrible—Jacobs had been fired from Perry Ellis for designing his now beloved “Grunge” collection—was qualified to steer one of France’s premier leather goods brands to global dominance, it was put to rest that spring with the release of Jacobs’s partnership with the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Louis Vuitton x Murakami is regarded as the defining fashion collaboration of the early aughts, and it remained in production,…

In 2024, movies were singing. And dancing. There was an exuberance in creating work that was vivid and often highly theatrical. In shades of pink and green, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo revived the classic musicals of the Golden Age of Hollywood with Wicked. Emilia Pérez, which was part telenovela, part transformation story, used its musical moments and the remarkable troika of Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, and Selena Gomez to depict complicated emotions and shocking plot developments. Saoirse Ronan sang a rallying anthem on the radio during World War II in Blitz, and Nicholas Galitzine played a boy band heartthrob in The Idea of You. There were also biographical studies of singers as varied as the opera diva Maria Callas, played by Angelina Jolie, and the reggae superstar Bob…