Innehållsförteckning för Volume 2, 2025 från W Magazine

Sean Baker (center), Alexis Zabé (left), and Samantha Quan Director, Director of Photography, Producer, “Sprinklelina” (page 136) What’s your favorite opening scene of a movie? SB: George A. Romero’s masterpiece Dawn of the Dead, especially the first shot, which is why I ripped it off in Red Rocket. What are your on-set superstitions? SB: Don’t talk about festival acceptances, awards, or anything else that could possibly jinx it. Which actor, living or dead, do you wish you could shoot? AZ: Charlie Chaplin. He could make you laugh, cry, and feel deeply without uttering a word. You’re given an unlimited budget. What’s the logline for the movie you’d make? SB: A cute little Chihuahua is bitten by a vampire bat and becomes a vampire Chihuahua. Which movie is criminally underrated? AZ:…

Jean Paul Gaultier retired as the creative director of his storied house in 2020 because he felt there were no boundaries left to push. “Fashion was interesting when I could break rules—that was my purpose,” he says. “But at a certain age, what rules do you break?” While Gaultier’s rise in the 1970s and ’80s shocked the stuffy French establishment, today the fashion world has largely remade itself in his image. Long before street casting and inclusivity became industry buzzwords, Gaultier, who is now 72, authentically incorporated those practices into his brand. He turned his back on the traditional Parisian view of haute couture and instead found inspiration in London’s subcultures and nightlife. “They were a lot more permissive and free than in Paris,” he says. “You were judged in…

“I really do love a character,” said Ayo Edebiri on a rainy winter’s day in Italy. She was wearing a seafoam green Chanel skirt with a matching jacket that was covered in sheared faux fur. Her hair was teased into a soft 1960s updo, and diamonds shined on her earlobes—and yet, despite all this extravagance, her expression was sad. “I’m an Italian widow,” explained Edebiri. “Or maybe I’m a mistress who has been jilted by her lover. Either way, I’m alone. In my villa. And to keep myself amused, I’m trying on all of my clothes and jewelry, and I’m wandering around the stunning home that I will have to leave behind.” Edebiri, who, at 29, has won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for outstanding supporting actress and…

Scarlett White In 2024, Scarlett White turned 18, moved from Nashville to New York to study sculpture, and signed her first modeling contract. “It’s amazing, but what I’m most inspired by is doing things on my own time,” she says. “Listening to music, writing poetry that no one’s ever going to see, and fooling around with the guitar.” (In high school, she played bass in a band.) “I still have a lot to learn, and I want to make sure I’m seeing how the old masters did it, how my idols have done it.” Those idols include Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Charley Patton—plus mom, Karen Elson, the English model, who is also a singer songwriter; and dad, Jack White, the musician and onetime guitarist and lead singer of the…

For as long as I can remember, I have loved movies and felt a huge amount of respect for directors. Over the past few years, it has been a dream come true for me to work alongside some of Hollywood’s most brilliant filmmakers—including Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and Steven Spielberg, to name just three—for W’s annual Directors Issue. This time around, I was thrilled to collaborate for a second time with Luca Guadagnino and Denis Villeneuve, and to welcome Sean Baker to the W directors club. Guadagnino is someone who inspires me endlessly. He is always working on something magical, whether it’s shooting a film (Challengers, Queer, A Bigger Splash, I Am Love, and many others that are in the pipeline); conjuring the most incredible spaces via his design…

In 2019, when Zane Li was 18 years old, he moved from his hometown, Chongqing, in central China, to New York, where he enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology. It was his first time in America, and he was excited to breathe the same air as his idols, designers such as Helmut Lang and Calvin Klein. But after just one semester, everything came to a screeching halt with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. “I had to take video courses about patternmaking, which was really odd,” recalls Li. Isolating in his Brooklyn Heights apartment, an ocean away from his family, he couldn’t go to campus, the Garment District, or, really, anywhere. “I’d finish my homework in two hours and spend the rest of the time researching,” he says. He…

An unrepentant lifetime smoker, David Hockney, 87, wheezes from respiratory difficulties. He sleeps during some of the day and is watched over by round-the-clock nurses. His deafness, the first signs of which he noticed in 1979, has worsened considerably, so that even with hearing aids he relies on lipreading to facilitate conversation. In July 2023, he moved to London from his house in rural Normandy, France, partly because he needed to be in close range of a hospital in case of an emergency. And yet, for three hours or so each day, Hockney marshals his energies to sit down and paint. Earlier this year, he was still making pictures to include in his largest exhibition to date, “David Hockney, 25,” a retrospective scheduled to open on April 9 at the…

On a beautiful late afternoon in Los Angeles, Timothée Chalamet burst into the Bar Marmont and bounded straight over to Denis Villeneuve, the Academy Award–nominated director of Dune and Dune: Part Two. Immediately, they embraced and then quickly walked off to a corner of the room, where they huddled and began speaking in French about the evening ahead: Villeneuve would be directing Chalamet in a project for W, photographed by Greig Fraser, the Oscar-winning cinematographer of both Dune films. “Timmy and I have our little French bubble,” explained Villeneuve, who has the calm but decisive manner of a person who has created a cohesive and fascinating cinematic world out of an unwieldy, beloved novel. Hailing from Quebec, Villeneuve is a native French speaker, and Chalamet, who moves fast and has…

Blame Jools Lebron. The social media influencer hijacked the public imagination last summer with her viral phrase “very demure,” a tongue-in-cheek call for restraint and decorum. Soon celebrities such as Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Ortega, to say nothing of Lebron’s millions of regular followers, were quoting her in jest. But if proof was needed that Lebron was on to something and that the culture was serious about entering a new era of ultrafeminine diffidence, it came with Alessandro Michele’s much anticipated debut runway collection for Valentino in September. The designer’s first outing was as ladylike as a bashful debutante, but even among the refined dresses and pantsuits, it was the bow-topped pumps, resting on modest 45-millimeter heels, that seemed to embody the fashion moment best. They were reminiscent of a…

Since 2024, at least 15 head designers have stepped down from fashion houses. So far, 8 head designers are making their debuts at major luxury brands in 2025. Chanel went 190 days without one. At least 11 designers were “rumored” to be up for the job until Matthieu Blazy was named the maison’s 4th ever head designer. At least 8 times in the past year, The New York Times has used the phrase “musical chairs” to describe the fashion industry. About 8 inches is the length of the toe box on the high-heeled shoes in Marc Jacobs’s spring 2025 runway show. At Veronica Leoni’s Calvin Klein debut, 70% of women’s dress shirts were shown buttoned to the top. The show notes for Alessandro Michele’s Valentino spring 2025 couture debut were 200…

There is a legend that has long enveloped the house of Yves Saint Laurent: The designer, over his more than four-decade-long career, produced revolutionary, elegant fashion while his business partner, Pierre Bergé, made sure that an incredibly sophisticated image swirled around it all. But since the spring of 2016, when then 34-year-old Anthony Vaccarello was named creative director, something equally impressive has happened: Saint Laurent has managed to combine fashion excitement with commercial success. Thanks to Vaccarello and the company’s president and CEO, Francesca Bellettini, who hired him, it now has a significant amount of fashion credibility and has become a $3 billion business. “Yves Saint Laurent was always someone who influenced fashion, who all of the other designers followed,” explains Vaccarello. “He designed haute couture, but it was not…