“I wanted long necks, big eyes, a good profile,” says the artist Mark Leckey, talking about the models in this story, his first fashion project for a magazine. He was searching for the kinds of faces that might have fit into paintings from one of his favorite historical periods, “just before the Renaissance,” when Italian artists such as Giotto were, he says, “moving from Byzantine icons to sort of early realism.” Giotto lived in Florence in the late Middle Ages, and Leckey is excited to note that one of the models is Florentine too. “He looks like a kind of angel,” he says. “I always had this expectation that models were not going to be that luminous in real life, but they are. It’s like, the closer you get to them, the more impossible looking they become.”
Working in mediums including film, installation, and performance (he once inhaled refrigerator coolant in order to get into the mindset of a Samsung fridge), Leckey has carved out a unique niche in the art world. Many of his works draw on youth cultures; his most famous film, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, from 1999, is a euphoric but eerie montage of frenzied British clubbers in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. In 2019, at Tate Britain, in London, he re-created the overpass where he used to hang out at night as a teenager in Liverpool; he is about to make a similarly site-specific intervention at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Leckey is also a DJ—he says that the night before our meeting, he cleared the dance floor at the London nightclub Fold by playing “horrible gabber,” the super-fast, super-hard Dutch techno subgenre. One of the chief inspirations for this shoot is the year 1971, sometimes acclaimed as the best year ever for rock music, with landmark albums including Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and Carole King’s Tapestry. “I was only a little kid in 1971,” says Leckey, who is 61, “but it calls to me in some way. There was a notion that you could create a culture from the detritus and waste of contemporary capitalism. I guess I still believe in that.”
The artist, who is wearing a rumpled gray suit and a single piratical pearl drop earring on the day of the shoot, says that, like the rest of his work, the images seen here are a way to try and bring together disparate cultural elements to evoke some kind of mythology. He also incorporated one of his obsessions since the pandemic: the Middle Ages. He’s noticed how club kids have been wearing what he describes as “medieval athleisure”—picture a Joan of Arc haircut, chains, and a tracksuit. “Covid felt very medieval, in the sense of a plague,” he notes. “But I also think that the more ubiquitous technology becomes, the more it paradoxically throws us back into a kind of animistic past.” With the online and offline, Leckey notes, “you’re experiencing the world as both material and immaterial at the same time. And I guess that’s what felt to me akin to kind of a medieval mindset.”
Leckey also wanted to convey something else he often returns to in his work: states of bliss. “I’ve always been fascinated by the ecstatic, whether it’s through music, drugs, or religion,” he says. “I once had a moment of rapture. It was the end of lockdown. I was with my little kid in the pram, walking in the park, freer than I’d been for the whole year. I was listening to Judee Sill’s ‘Jesus Was a Cross Maker.’ The sun came out through the trees, and I was just overwhelmed.” Leckey says that the images and music he makes are an attempt to recapture that transcendent moment. Then he adds: “Because I can’t do yoga.”
George Anderson wears a Prada dress.
Edna Karibwami wears a Rick Owens gown and boots.
Amedeo Mancini wears a Palomo top.
From left: Karibwami, Matilde Lucidi, Anderson, and Geng.
Geng wears a Fforme coat.
Lucidi wears a Colleen Allen cloak.
Anderson wears a Prada dress.
Karibwami wears a Rick Owens gown.
David Gant wears an IM Men coat and pants.
Hair by Claire Grech for Oribe at Streeters Agency; makeup by Daniel Sällstrom at MA World Group; manicure by Chisato Yamamoto for Essie at Caren Agency. Models: Edna Karibwami at IMG; Matilde Lucidi at Society; Athiec Geng at Fusion Models NYC; George Anderson at Viva Paris; Amedeo Mancini at the Claw Agency; David Gant at Models1. Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting.
Production: Farago Projects; executive producer: Sylvia Farago; producers: Kate Duncan, Sarah Aranda Garzon; photo assistants: David Manion, Abena Appiah, Max Lancaster; digital technician: Patricia Benitez; projection technician: Dawid; fashion assistants: Jordan Kelsey, Atalanta Thornton, Maria Vredko, Lily Ramsay; production coordinators: Keri Hannah-Pettigrew; Mia Vinaccia; hair assistants: Kirsten Bassett, Gordon Chapples, Krisztian Szalay; makeup assistants: Martina DeRosa, Martha Inoue, Naomi Gugler; manicure assistant: Tomoko Komiya; tailor: Inna Romanovych at Galedi Agency.
Her films have grossed more than $6 billion worldwide. She won the Academy Award for best actress at 22 (the second-youngest winner in that category) and holds the Guinness World Records title of highest-grossing action heroine in movie history. In May, she received a Peabody Award. Yet accolades make up only a fraction of who Jennifer Lawrence really is.
For W’s Art Issue, three masters of their craft—the American painter Elizabeth Peyton, the French multimedia artist Philippe Parreno, and the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans—conceive of Lawrence, 35, as a work of art unto herself. Painting, film, and photography are woven together into a three-part portfolio exploring the intersection of intimacy and image.
Seated at one of the many cafés on Manhattan’s West Side for our interview, Lawrence wore a red Charvet sweater, a white tee, and a pair of Still Here blue jeans. She became animated as she spoke about her collaborators for this issue. “It doesn’t really matter what you’re doing,” she said. “You just say yes to genius.”
The project’s production spanned three cities, over as many months. In Paris, Parreno cast Lawrence in a short film in which she plays a character who is—and isn’t—Jennifer Lawrence. The 37 pages of dialogue that Parreno provided felt “almost Ang Lee–like,” she said. It helped that the legendary Iranian-French cinematographer Darius Khondji served as director of photography. “I called him Dr. Khondji, appropriately,” she said, grinning.
Dior cape, jeans, and belt; Longines watch; stylist’s own tank top.
Stills from a short film by Philippe Parreno with cinematography by Darius Khondji
Tillmans, whose unglamorized imagery earned him a Turner Prize, photographed Lawrence at both his London home and his former studio in London’s East End, now a gallery run by the famed art dealer Maureen Paley. The shoot was surprisingly intimate and spontaneous, even for Tillmans. “I had this idea to put a T-shirt on her from my 2025 Centre Pompidou exhibition. It reads: Nothing could have prepared us / Everything could have prepared us,” he said. “Then I took her out to this roof area where I had the fondest memories of parties. The intimacy of our house beforehand, that old location where I used to throw parties on the roof, the T-shirt from an exhibition—all that was well prepared, but not planned as to what exactly would happen. And she was totally game. It was amazing to be able to ask her, ‘Could you just dial in 5 percent of friendliness, a tiny hint of a smile?’ And I could see in front of my eyes how it really would be dialed in 5 percent—she was so in control of her expressions. It’s a privilege to be one-on-one with someone you feel is of great talent.”
T-shirt by Wolfgang Tillmans for Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Row long-sleeve top.
Photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans
Photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans
The collaboration furthest from Lawrence’s typical repertoire was, perhaps, with Elizabeth Peyton. Lawrence sat for hours in the painter’s downtown Manhattan studio, chatting and drinking while Elvis played on repeat. “She’s so much smarter than me in every conceivable way,” Lawrence said. “She can have a snippet of wallpaper and think, Oh, yeah, this makes me feel like this. That’s so freeing. At the end of the day, what she does is completely different from me. I mean, I cannot draw.”
Dior men’s shirt and men’s jeans.
‘Jen’ by Elizabeth Peyton, 2025.
Lawrence paused and then reconsidered: “Well, the only thing I can draw is a horse head profile.” I slid my notebook across the table. “And I will draw,” she declared, before sketching a crude equine form with the charming, elementary proficiency of someone who’s reproduced the same image hundreds of times. “I learned it from my older cousin when I was 5 or 6,” she explained. “I actually ended up tattooing this on my friend’s body once.” She signed the doodle with mock solemnity.
Lawrence’s artistic abilities are considerably less open to interpretation in Die My Love, a psychological drama that places her physicality front and center. Directed by the Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay—whose previous excursions into the outer limits of mental health include We Need to Talk About Kevin and Ratcatcher—the film stars Lawrence as Grace, a new mother and would-be author unraveling in psychosis. Her husband, Jackson, is played by the Twilight star Robert Pattinson, whom, it should be noted, Peyton depicted in vampiric white face paint in 2009, after the film became a global sensation.
“My biggest fear is that people are expecting fanfic because it’s me and Rob,” Lawrence said. She conjured an image of legions of YA fans misreading Die My Love—a film one critic described as “placing its hands on the sides of the viewer’s head, violently shaking them, forcing their eyes open like A Clockwork Orange”—as the kind of cinematic crossover event that would’ve sent Tumblr into meltdown circa 2012, when Lawrence starred in The Hunger Games. “Huge mistake to go into this movie with that expectation,” Lawrence playfully warned. “Everybody, pump your brakes and maybe watch a Lynne Ramsay movie before going in.”
Photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans
Adapted from a novel by Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love portrays a shattered emotional landscape. Grace’s selfhood unravels slowly at first, as she mumbles, snaps at people, and wields a fly swatter like a medieval bludgeon. Lawrence said one source of inspiration for her portrayal was the TLC series Baylen Out Loud, which follows a young woman who’s living with Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. (“I’m usually watching that or Little Women.”) She studied the show’s honest portrayal of the mounting tension before a tic, the irresistible urge to act, and the relief that follows—“the visible cycle of buildup and release,” she said.
Grace soon begins acting out with increasing disorder: hurling herself through a glass door, bashing her head against a mirror, stripping to her underwear at a children’s pool party, setting forest fires in the buff. “She’s terrified of being invisible,” Lawrence said. “She would rather her husband be mad at her than not see her.”
Stills from a short film by Philippe Parreno with cinematography by Darius Khondji
At one point, Grace destroys a bathroom in a frenzy of primal fury. On location at a desolate house flanked by the Canadian Rocky Mountains, Lawrence ripped a sink off the wall and clawed down the wallpaper until her fingertips left streaks of blood. “We had only one take, because you can’t un-destroy a destroyed bathroom,” she said. “That was adrenaline-inducing in itself.” Alone in the tiny space with a single camera operator, she didn’t know what she’d do until she was in the moment. “The emotional ‘calling up’ was almost like physical exercise,” she said. The cameraman left with glass in his knee.
Lawrence’s corporeal characterization, often on all fours and wriggling through grass, evokes both Andrew Wyeth’s midcentury masterwork Christina’s World—depicting a young woman, vulnerable yet indomitable, crawling across a desolate field—and performance art in the tradition of body as both subject and medium.
In truth, audiences have watched Lawrence wrestle with anatomy and autonomy for decades. The Hunger Games franchise broke records even as Lawrence accumulated injuries across its productions: a wall-run bruise so severe during the making of the first film that it required a CT scan (her trainer worried her spleen had burst); a punctured eardrum and temporary deafness in one ear from underwater stunts for Catching Fire; and near suffocation from a fog-machine malfunction during Mockingjay – Part 1. On the set of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, she hyperventilated and dislocated a rib. During Don’t Look Up, shattered glass struck her eyelid.
Photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans
Lawrence was deliberate for Die My Love, on- and off-screen, by timing her pregnancy to align with production. “I knew I was going to be doing the movie, and I also knew that I needed a second child before my other son got too old,” she said. Being in the second trimester was the sweet spot for shooting, she explained, because typically “in the first trimester, you’re very sick; and in the second trimester, you start to feel better.” (“Real sexy family planning,” she quipped.)
Her pregnancy lent the film a dose of cinema verité. She understood, quite literally, how motherhood “takes any kind of veneer off, because now you’re seeing the world through somebody else’s eyes—somebody who’s so much more important than you are,” she said. Yet, to her surprise, those same instincts doubled as roadblocks. When Ramsay directed scenes that required Grace to wake her sleeping newborn out of boredom and other “things no parent would ever do,” Lawrence said, her body rebelled. Ramsay held firm, pushing her to dig deeper into Grace’s instability and confront, in real time, the unresolvable tension between maternal instincts and maternal madness that animates the movie. Just as you can “feel” a car chase with 4D seats, you become so intimate with Grace’s flickering disintegration that a strobe warning for the psyche might be warranted.
Dior cape, jeans, and belt; Longines watch; stylist’s own tank top.
Stills from a short film by Philippe Parreno with cinematography by Darius Khondji
For Lawrence herself, Die My Love was what she called an “eight-dimensional ride”: reading the novel when her first baby was six weeks old, becoming pregnant with her second as the film was greenlighted, shooting while expecting, and then screening it postpartum. She’s still wrestling with “what I thought the movie was while I was doing it, versus viewing it afterward,” she said. “When I’m performing, it all has to be real and straightforward. Everything Grace does has to feel grounded.” But after giving birth, she changed her perspective. “Watching it back, I was like, Oh, maybe that was a fantasy. Maybe that was in her mind. I have different versions of how the whole movie could be interpreted now.”
The Row top, sweater, and shorts.
Photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans
It was Martin Scorsese, the movie’s producer, who urged her to take the role. Scorsese will also direct Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio in an adaptation of Peter Cameron’s What Happens at Night, a psychological ghost story about adoption scheduled to begin production in January 2026. Eventually, she plans to direct. “But, you know, I’m also going to see my kids,” she said, adding with resignation, “at least for a couple minutes.”
The dark humor feels earned. “When I had my first child, I felt completely connected to my baby,” she said. “But I also realized the world wasn’t designed around that relationship. Suddenly, you’re like, Wait, how am I supposed to go back to work? Get in a car and drive away? Get on an airplane and fly away from my baby? Like, what are you talking about? Everything looks different after that.”
It’s a postpartum epiphany shared by her character Grace. “She says it in the movie: ‘There’s nothing wrong with me and my baby; it’s the world that’s fucked up,’ ” Lawrence said. “And I don’t know, maybe with a little more time, in retrospect, I’ll be able to tell the difference. I’m still not sure what was acting and what was just me being a mother.”
Jennifer Lawrence directed by Philippe Parreno. Cinematography by Darius Khondji
Still from Jennifer Lawrence’s short film by Philippe Parreno.
Wolfgang Tillmans shoot: Style Director: Allia Alliata di Montereale. Wolfgang Tillmans’s creative team: Olly Shinder, Simon Nicholas Gray. Hair by Gregory Russell at the Wall Group; makeup by Georgie Eisdell at the Wall Group; manicure by Kate Williamson for Dior Vernis at A-Frame Agency.
Philippe Parreno shoot: Style Director: Allia Alliata di Montereale. Hair by Cyndia Harvey at Art Partner; makeup by Lucia Pica at Art Partner; manicure by Ama Cauvas at Artlist. Sound design: Nicolas Becker; production: AP Studio, Inc.; executive producer: Marie Godeau; producer: Leeloo Turmeau; production manager: Charlotte Thizeau; first assistant camera: Vincent Toubel; second assistant camera: Alejandro Asensio; camera intern: Ulysse G. Castel; gaffer: Thierry Baucheron; spark: Jerôme Robin; key grip: Vincent Blasco; postproduction: Jenny Montgomery at Company 3; fashion assistant: Brice Costa; production coordinator: Gabrielle Lussier; unit manager: Jack Sciacca; production assistants: Alphonse Emery, Robinson Guillermet; hair assistant: Ronke Olaibi; makeup assistant: Vladimir Gueye; sound operator: Ondine Novarese; sound operator assistant: Lou Jullien; tailor: Alice Chastel.
Produced by M+A Group; Producer: Stacee Robert; First Photo Assistant: Eliot Oppenheimer; Digital Technician: Haren Mehta; set assistant: Esther Levine.
The Row vest and shirt; stylist’s own hat (throughout).
Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello dress.
Hermès vest, sweater, and turtleneck.
Loro Piana jacket and pants; stylist’s own shirt.
Ferragamo jacket; stylist’s own pin.
Moschino jacket and dress.
Alex Consani wears a Tod’s top and skirt; The Row tights and shoes.
Hair by Benjamin Muller for Rituel by Sisley at MA+ World; makeup by Thomas de Kluyver at Art Partner; manicure by Cam Tran at Artlist. Model: Alex Consani at IMG Model Management. Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting. Set design by Alexander Bock at Streeters.
Produced by Brachfeld; Executive Producer: Clément Camaret; Producer: Adrien Cantenot; Production Coordinator: Anaïs Diouane; Lighting Director: Antoni Ciufo; Photo Assistants: Vassili Bocle, Chiara Vittorini; Digital Technician: Aurentin Girard at Imagin Productions; Retouching: Marie Lanoë at Imagin Productions; Fashion Assistants: Letizia Guarino, Elfé Baroso-Bertrand; Production Assistants: Antoine Truffaut, Fanny Carpentier; Hair Assistant: Mills Mouchopeda; Makeup Assistant: Molly Lynch; Set Assistants: THILOUTHEBEST CYFLAMABAFE.
Chitose Abe is sitting at a conference table in a bare-bones office upstairs at the Paris headquarters of her company, Sacai. The building is a Haussmannian-style hôtel particulier with a stately entrance, but the inside is utterly minimal, with Eiffel-like girders holding up the showroom’s glass canopy roof. Abe is beaming, having just soaked up the last of the congratulations for her men’s and women’s presentation, which is a series of looks arranged on rows of mannequins assembled below us. She says, through an interpreter, that her most recent output is “a return to basics.” But that’s always been true of Sacai.
Since she started the company, in 1999, Abe has created her own language of smartly remixed wardrobe staples—tuxedos, sailor-stripe T-shirts, seersucker, denim, and khaki—and has become a designer’s designer in the process. Devotees like Pharrell Williams, Sofia Coppola, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, all instinctively good dressers who have access to everything, still choose her. “They might have contracts with different brands, but they’re friends who want to wear Sacai in their private life. So when they’re in Tokyo, they come to see me,” she says.
The days of fashion editors changing multiple times a day during show season to wear clothes by the house they’re visiting are over. Still, in the crowd downstairs—fashion insiders checking out the collection up close—there are many who are wearing their own Sacai. Before my interview with Abe, I spotted a pleated oxford-striped tennis dress, a reproportioned trench, one of those hybrid striped T-shirts with the draped fabric back that Abe has perfected over the years, and numerous off-the-shoulder poplin shrug tops, on people of all shapes and sizes.
Sacai is often described as an intellectual brand. Maybe that’s because Abe’s pieces are never just one thing—in fact, they often contain several contrasting statements. Delicacy meets strength in tailoring with sheer inserts that reveal flashes of skin; workwear goes sensual through draping and slouch. Yet, for all their symbols and signifiers, the clothes don’t wear their owners. “Chitose makes quite masculine ideas feel very sensual, and also new and unexpected,” says Anita Templer, a branding consultant who was a loyal Sacai customer long before she started collaborating with Abe on retail and media strategy. “There’s something artful about her clothes, but they’re relatable and easy to wear. I have this bomber jacket with a sweater detail on the front, and I must have had 30 people stop me in the street to ask where it was from. I think it’s to do with her being a woman and wearing the clothes herself. She’s a working mom. She likes to go out in the evening. She likes to dance. Some people might lazily reach a conclusion that if it’s design that comes from Japan, there has to be something somber or strict about it, but there’s a happiness and lightness to Sacai.”
Jacqui Hooper wears a Sacai jacket, dress, and gloves.
Abe was her own unfussy muse when she started customizing her clothes as a teenager, and she launched Sacai to indulge her desire to rethink the basics she always loved. Back then, her dress code was “simple clothes: dress shirts, chinos, cardigans,” she explains. She had left her job as a patternmaker at Comme des Garçons after finding out she was pregnant, and was home with her daughter when she started Sacai, initially with a small range of knitwear. She would try out her designs on tiny dolls. “There were so many brands and so many clothes around the world when I started,” she says. “I wanted to create something that didn’t exist, something new and interesting, but that I would wear in daily life.”
Today that’s an asymmetric black ruffle skirt with an oversize black men’s T-shirt that reads all day, every day, a nod to Abe’s firm belief that clothes should be completely versatile. It’s low-key until you get into the details, like the delicate knife pleats of the ruffles on the skirt, which swirl onto themselves, or the neck of her tee, stretched out just so. The quiet subtlety vanishes, though, when you get to Abe’s wrist, where there’s a magnificent, giant honking watch I can’t stop staring at. It’s a men’s Rolex GMT-Master II in heavy yellow gold, the lug covered in pavé diamonds, the bezel ringed in emerald-cut rubies and sapphires.
I tell Abe it’s fabulous, and she whips it off her wrist and hands it to me with a big smile. “It’s heavy,” she says. “I got it 15 years ago. It wasn’t a special occasion, but I fell in love with it and felt like I would regret it if I let it go. It wasn’t cheap, but I felt like it was worth it.”
No need to apologize or justify. Sacai is a very successful business, and Abe is its sole owner. Back when there were just a few employees, Abe did the books herself; now the brand employs 160 people, is stocked in more than 35 countries, and has ongoing capsule collaborations with Nike, Carhartt WIP, Astier de Villatte, and J.M. Weston. Many of these came about through friends like Fraser Cooke, a director of special projects at Nike. “Our marketing approach is very personal,” says Abe.
It would have to be, because for all her boldface admirers, Abe is deeply unthirsty. She doesn’t bother with the red carpet. She doesn’t do social media. She doesn’t even know who any of the new stars or influencers are. “I don’t have all that much information,” she says. “Whenever the team talks about celebrities, I don’t know who anybody is.”
Betsy Gaghan wears a Sacai vest, shorts, gloves, and boots.
Abe wasn’t even that clear on what Labubu was when her friend Federico Tan, the Hong Kong–based art world connector, gave her one of the dolls with the idea to broker an introduction to Labubu’s designer, the artist Kasing Lung. Next thing you know, Abe had put 14 hysteria-inducing Labubus onto Sacai x Carhartt WIP knit jumpsuits and star necklaces that were sold at a UNESCO charity auction through Pharrell Williams’s online platform, Joopiter, in collaboration with the K-pop group Seventeen. They went for $30,000 each. “We weren’t really familiar with this chaos of Labubu in the world,” says Abe. “It was just a friendly conversation.”
Abe’s team, which includes a network of textile suppliers with whom she creates her own fabrics, has been with her for a long time. When she talks about her inspiration, success, or longevity, she always refers to her collaborators. Her circle extends to the creatives she taps for her lookbooks and runway shows. Karl Templer, who styled this photo shoot, has worked on all of Sacai’s presentations since Abe’s first, in 2011. That show came about through the advice of Sarah Andelman, who was then running the legendary Parisian boutique Colette. “Sarah is a big supporter of Sacai still,” says Abe, “and gave very wise advice to me: If you don’t show your clothes to the world, somebody will start copying Sacai, and then Sacai might be seen as copying them. She did really push me to show in a runway format so that people could actually see what we were doing.”
Abe credits that decision as one of the biggest boosts of her career. Templer already had a very good feel for the clothes, because Anita Templer, Abe’s collaborator, is his wife. “Anita had been buying Chitose’s pieces from Dover Street Market for a while, and I was always impressed with how the attitude of the clothes stood out,” he says. “Chitose has such a strong design signature and the ability to revisit archetypes and proportion, rearranging them to create desire constantly. Observers think it’s the styling, but the pieces are just designed that way, so that when you wear them you feel that little bit more in the know and fashionable and special.”
I tell Abe that I admire how she’s been able to stay the course aesthetically for so many years and ask her if it’s a Japanese thing, because so many of the fashion houses with real creative longevity and rock-solid DNA were founded by her countrymen: Junya Watanabe, Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons. Her answer is typically earthbound: “We tend to think that keeping brand ownership is part of the authenticity.”
There’s no question that to maintain your true north through fashion’s increasingly choppy waters, it helps to own the boat. For Abe, it also helps to go to karaoke regularly—lately, she’s been performing songs by the Japanese pop star Aiko—and to play with Legos. There is a bunch of red Lego roses Abe constructed in a Sacai x Astier de Villatte pitcher downstairs in the showroom. Generally, though, she prefers the old-school blocks to the custom kits of today. They’re freer and allow for more imagination.
Hair by Guido for Zara Hair; makeup by Jennifer Bradburn. Models: Betsy Gaghan and Jacqui Hooper at Next Management. Casting by DM Casting Piergiorgio Del Moro. Set design by Sophear at Art + Commerce.
Produced by Endorphyn; Producers: Magali Mennessier, Emanuela Polo; Photo Assistants: Shri Prasham Parameshwaran, Margaux Jouanneau, Charles Hardouin, Jakub Fulin; Digital Technician: Victor Gauthier; On-Set Retoucher: Ines Leroy Galan; postproduction: DFactory; Fashion Assistants: Brandon Williams, Florence Armstrong; makeup assistant: Mical Klip; Set Assistants: Victor Leverrier, Julian Harold.
I was on an elevator a few years back, on my way to a theater I’d been booked into, when two women boarded, both middle-aged and smelling of alcohol. It was autumn, and they had new-looking sweatshirts on. I assumed that the letters printed across the fronts of them were the initials of a university, and as the doors closed, I tried to guess which one it was. After deciding that the first letter—N—stood for “Northern,” I lost interest, and tried to recall when I’d last been in Traverse City. It’s a pretty little vacation town on a bay of Lake Michigan, the sort of place where it’s super easy to find fudge.
I started performing—a rather grand word for reading out loud—in the late 1980s, in Chicago. Back then, I was living hand to mouth, but always made it a point to dress for a show. I did it out of respect for the audience, but also because it made me look and feel professional, and I needed all the help I could get. It didn’t require a great deal of effort. All I really did was wear slacks rather than jeans or shorts. I’d make certain my shirt was pressed, and put on a tie. I added jackets only after my second book came out, and I began to undertake lengthy tours, lasting anywhere from six weeks to two months at a time. At first, the jackets were bought for me at Barneys by my boyfriend, Hugh, who worked at the Gap in high school and told me that shoppers would sometimes defecate in the dressing rooms there. It wasn’t about a scarceness of toilets—there were plenty in the mall his store was a part of. It didn’t even have anything to do with the Gap. When I started talking about it onstage, I learned that it happened at Banana Republic as well; at J. Crew and Old Navy, even at big-box places like Walmart, where folks would pull down their pants and crouch in the center of those circular clothing racks. It’s a compulsion certain people have.
Hugh learned to fold at the Gap and perfected his technique after college, when, for a brief time, he worked at Comme des Garçons in New York. This was in the late ’80s, when I was still in Chicago. Back then, the men’s Homme Plus jackets could be slightly off-kilter. If you looked at one closely, you’d maybe notice a barely discernible camouflage pattern or see that it was polka-dotted. Examine a shirt or a pair of slacks, and, if you were in any way sensitive to such things, you’d see that they were extremely well made, that the collar wouldn’t fray anytime soon and that the buttons would likely stay put.
It astonishes me that in this day and age anyone might question a man wearing a long skirt. Is it because I have it on sideways? I sometimes wonder when I’m intentionally wearing one sideways.
During the time that Hugh worked at Comme des Garçons, no one ever defecated in the dressing room. Maybe the people who do that sort of thing were too intimidated to enter, though I have to say I’ve always found the sales team in the New York store to be excessively kind and welcoming—the same at the Paris and Tokyo outlets, and at London’s Dover Street Market. That said, it took me years to enter one of their stores. I was afraid that I’d be sized up and judged unworthy. It’s nothing the staff did or said; rather, these were insecurities I brought through the front door with me: I’m not good-looking enough. I need more hair. My legs should be longer. My tongue’s too fat. Comme des Garçons is not about that, though. Its designer, Rei Kawakubo, doesn’t traffic in young and sexy. If she could magically reposition a woman’s breasts—move them from her chest to the top of her head—I have no doubt that she’d do it. Likewise, there’s nothing aggressively masculine about her menswear. (I mean, business shirts with five-foot-long pussy bows?) I started off timidly with ties. Now I buy almost all my clothing there.
The thing about Kawakubo’s more recent Homme Plus wear is that it’s very hard to describe. “It’s a traditional sport coat until the bottom of the rib cage, where the wool is replaced by a sort of gathered curtain, the kind you’d see on the windows of a hearse,” I found myself saying once, in reference to a jacket I’d recently bought. “Five inches of that, and it becomes a sport coat again and falls midway down my calves in a cascade of ruffles.”
The person I was talking to wasn’t getting it.
“You know the black dress Mammy wears to Bonnie Blue Butler’s funeral in Gone With the Wind? It feels like that, but for men, and it’s really heavy.”
The person still wasn’t getting it, so I pulled out my notebook and my pen and tried drawing it, which didn’t work either.
The jacket I was wearing on the elevator that evening in Traverse City, Michigan, was of a regular length but for the side pockets, which drooped like deflated airbags to my knees. With it, I had on a pair of stiff polyester culottes that felt like an outdoor tablecloth and had a pink and gold flower pattern on them. My shirt was white and had long, shoelace-like fringe running from the front yoke to a few inches below my waist.
“Let me guess,” said one of the women who’d boarded, looking me up and down. “Halloween, right?”
We were well into November, so I knew she didn’t actually think I was going to a costume party. Plus, it was a Tuesday. I should have just laughed. Instead I said, perhaps too haughtily, “I am the best-dressed person on this elevator.”
Because I’m such a good customer, Comme des Garçons has started inviting me to its biannual Homme Plus runway shows in Paris.
Then I went to the theater, did my sound check, and peed on the fringe dangling down my front. That’s the thing with some of these clothes. You think, Why aren’t all dress shirts this fun? Then you wear one to Thanksgiving dinner, come away with cranberry sauce on your oversize, leg-o’-mutton sleeves, and realize, Oh, that’s why. Once, I got a shirt that had a slightly larger, second pair of sleeves over the first. The outer ones were shredded from the shoulder to the cuff, and caught on every doorknob I passed.
My audience can name the assistant secretaries of both State and Commerce but has no idea who Rei Kawakubo is. I walk onstage, and as they laugh and point I think, Really? To my mind, I look great, or at least as good as it’s possible for me to look. It astonishes me that in this day and age anyone might question a man wearing a long skirt. Is it because I have it on sideways? I sometimes wonder when I’m intentionally wearing one sideways. Is it because it’s inside out? The salesperson suggested I wear it this way. “You can also tie it around your neck as a cape,” she’d said. “It’s great for keeping your back warm!”
It used to be that people would dress up for a night out, but as the years pass the sartorial difference between me and my audience grows ever wider. “Is that a bathing suit you’re wearing?” I asked a man one night as he stepped up to get his book signed.
He looked down. “How can you tell?”
“It has no fly, there are two strings hanging down the front, and the Nike swoosh is printed at the bottom of your left leg.”
I don’t feel slighted when people in my audience show up in sweatpants and cargo shorts. I’m just puzzled by it. Who doesn’t look forward to putting an interesting outfit together? I wonder. Especially if they’re going to a nice restaurant or have spent a lot of money on a theater or concert ticket? Actually, do you even need a reason? I wake in the morning and then lie in bed, wondering out loud what I’ll wear to my desk. “The upside-down trousers with the mangled sweater, or with a tie and the shirt that was printed to always look filthy?” Later, I’ll change for lunch, then again for dinner. Finally, there’ll be an après-bath outfit. It’s not necessarily called for; I just have a lot of clothes and like to keep them circulating.
Because I’m such a good customer, Comme des Garçons has started inviting me to its biannual Homme Plus runway shows in Paris. Most people in the audience are buyers for whom this might be their sixth appointment of the day. They’re dressed for endurance, which makes sense. Then there are us fanatics, a club of sorts that rarely gets to hobnob. At one of the recent shows, I sat near a man wearing a gown from that season’s women’s collection. What surprised and delighted me was how very unremarkable the part of him not designed by Rei Kawakubo looked. It was like seeing someone’s nebbishy accountant—balding and with squarish, wire-rimmed glasses—being swallowed almost completely by an enormous, man-eating tulip. “You’re amazing!” I shouted, figuring it must be hard for him to hear buried to the temples in all that fabric.
His eyes moved from my head to my feet. “You know who you dress like?” I sucked in my stomach and waited for it. “Mrs. Doubtfire,” he finally said.
The day after the most recent runway show, I spoke to an Argentinian fashion editor I’d met a few years earlier. He’d just broken up with his girlfriend and told me he had spent the entire morning in tears. “Maybe if you beg really hard, you can get her back,” I said. »
“That won’t work,” he told me. “She left because I kind of cheated on her.”
“Okay,” I said. “How about this: Tell her you’re on some new medication. Admit that you hadn’t read the instructions that came with it, and that after a few drinks you woke up remembering nothing in this strange woman’s bed.”
“That won’t work,” the editor said. “The other woman was a friend of hers.” He looked at me then as if for the first time. “What are those shorts you’re wearing?”
“They’re from the Comme des Garçons Shirt line,” I told him. “This current season.”
His eyes moved from my head to my feet. “You know who you dress like?” I sucked in my stomach and waited for it.
“Mrs. Doubtfire,” he finally said.
“Is there anyone worse?” I asked my Japanese friend Michiko, who was standing there with me.
“Who is this Mrs. Doubtfire?” she asked.
“Someone who never cheated on her girlfriend,” I said.
Crushed, I walked back to my apartment and took off the two-tone clown shoes I’d bought because I have bunions and they’re soft with a wide toe box. I took off the culottes that were white polyester and unevenly printed with a madras pattern. Finally, I removed the shirt that was missing half its collar and changed into something an off-duty golf pro might have worn: white slacks and a blue polo shirt. I don’t own any loafers, so I stuck with a pair of suede derbies. Then I walked through the Luxembourg Gardens thinking, Who looks like Mrs. Doubtfire now, you skunk? I hate it when guys cheat and then try to get sympathy for it. “You were crying all morning?” I said, imagining that the editor was in front of me. “What about her? And it was with her friend of all people?”
All it really takes to pull off Comme des Garçons is confidence. With it, you can walk through a hotel lobby in Traverse City, Michigan, or Shreveport, Louisiana, and completely ignore the looks and comments you’re guaranteed to attract. You can appear on TV and laugh when the host makes a joke about your armless jacket because, well, it is funny that it has no arms, that it’s essentially a plaid bell, but that doesn’t mean you don’t look terrific in it. Though one might think otherwise, I never wanted to be stared at. I just wanted to wear the clothes I felt most at home in. If the price for that is unwanted attention, or even being compared to Mrs. Doubtfire, isn’t it still worth it? Especially when the alternative is so boring?
After two turns around the garden, I returned to my apartment and stepped back into some Comme des Garçons. “Do I look stupid?” I asked Hugh.
He kept his eyes on his laptop. “You? Of course not.”
“That’s all I needed to hear,” I said as I headed back into the world, my head held high in part because my stiff Elizabethan collar wouldn’t allow me to lower it.
Paolo Carzana’s studio is just a tiny room above Smithfield Market, London’s main meat market, on the edge of the city’s financial district. Commuter trains rumble in and out of the tunnel underneath the space, which is crammed with clothes. Since starting his brand in 2022, the 30-year-old Welsh designer has made every garment himself here by hand, using intuitive and time-consuming draping techniques. “Each piece is like a life,” says Carzana, whose nails are bitten to the quick. He uses deadstock, organic, and antique fabrics that he dyes with natural ingredients. “I work with logwood, madder, turmeric, red onion skins, avocado stones.… A lot of the time, I’ll mix ingredients. Or I’ll work on a layer, then layer on top, then layer on top.”
So far, Carzana has shown six collections, all with poetic titles like “My Heart Is a River for You to Bend” and “Dragons Unwinged at the Butchers Block.” His last three collections formed the “Trilogy of Hope,” a series “about overcoming, but also being at peace with, darkness—the idea that no matter how far you climb and the obstacles you overcome, you can still be hit and fall to the bottom again.” The first of the shows, fall/winter 2024, was set in heaven; the second was in hell. The trilogy ended in purgatory, in a liminal torment inspired by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings. Knotted dresses looked like they were barely held together.
Carzana’s craft-centric approach runs counter to that of most of his peers—and yet he is one of London’s most feted young talents. On the back of his studio door is a note from Sarah Burton, the new creative director of Givenchy. He was a finalist for the LVMH Prize in 2024; has spent time at Sarabande, a foundation set up by Lee Alexander McQueen to support young talent; and is now the designer in residence at studios run by Paul Smith’s foundation.
Born and raised in Cardiff, the capital of Wales, Carzana took to fashion in high school. He stayed behind in art class during lunch breaks, and his teachers showed him books on McQueen and Gianni Versace. He moved to London to study fashion at the University of Westminster, interned with Walter Van Beirendonck in Antwerp, then went on to a master’s program at Central Saint Martins. One of his tutors was Nasir Mazhar, the founder of the radical London pop-up store Fantastic Toiles and a hero of the city’s fashion counterculture. Mazhar became his mentor. “He encourages me to push myself,” says Carzana. He “pulls out my creativity and constantly questions everything.” Since Carzana started showing, Mazhar has become his collaborator too, contributing ethereal millinery to Carzana’s collections.
The designer Paolo Carzana, in London.
For Carzana, the human form is crucial to his design process. His clothes are often cut on the bias, with “individual pieces put onto a body and sculpted around the model.” There is no fusing, no shoulder construction, no internal scaffolding. The results are sinuous and lyrical, and make it so “skin is revealed in not such a traditional way.” A woman’s dress might be draped so the décolletage wanders down to the navel; the swirl of a toga-like men’s top might leave one side of the chest totally exposed. »
Carzana finds many of his materials at the vintage traders on Portobello Road, in West London. Hand-drawn motifs, like the stenciled large polka dots that appear in his most recent collection, are his newest obsession. But his work grows out of experimentation, not an effort to establish long-term signatures: “I’m actively pushing against honing in. I’m trying to develop and grow and change.”
Earlier this year, Carzana graduated from the British Fashion Council’s NEWGEN program, an initiative that has supported designers such as McQueen, Jonathan Anderson, and Simone Rocha. Right now, he has no additional financial backing, so his business is hand to mouth. He has two international stockists—Dover Street Market in Paris and in Tokyo—and sells through Fantastic Toiles and his own website. “Everything feels purposeful and meaningful, but also I’m aware that I have no money,” he says. Yet Carzana remains clear-eyed about his brand’s mission: “I’m trying to achieve something totally away from an attempt to be cool, or look cool—it’s the complete opposite of having a viral thing.”
Hair by Issac Poleon at The Wall Group; makeup by Bea Sweet at The Wall Group; manicure by Pebbles Aikens for Penhaligons at The Wall Group. Models: Tia Edney at IMG London, Aluel Makuach at Elite London, Julia Rambukkana at Milk; Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting; Set Design by Nana-Yaw Mensah; Produced by Angels Production; Producer: Barbara Eyt-Dessus; Photo Assistants: Lucas Bullens, George Hutton; Digital Technician: Emre Cakir; Retouching: Touch Digital; Fashion Assistant: Kitty Lyell; Production Assistants: Ryan James, Maytee Sangsawang; Hair Assistant: Ana Torres; Makeup Assistant: Vivi Melo; Set Assistants: Ella Kenyon, Jemima Maidment.
In Rome, water cavorts across courtyards, cascades through aqueducts, bursts from the mouths of stone gods, and pirouettes from ledges with such theatrical flourish that it feels directed by a stylish deity. As part of Fendi’s centenary celebrations this year, Delfina Delettrez Fendi, the house’s artistic director of jewelry, has channeled that baroque bravura into Eaux d’Artifice, a collection that glimmers with movement, illusion, and the surreal lyricism of the Eternal City’s fountains.
The name isn’t incidental. Eaux d’Artifice pays homage to Kenneth Anger’s obscure 1953 short film of the same name. Shot in the misty fountains of Villa d’Este (the estate near Rome, not the hotel in Lake Como), the experimental 13-minute film has long had a devoted following among cineasts and occultists. It shows a tiny woman in 18th-century dress haunting a landscape of hydraulic jets and stone spouts. “Honestly, I don’t even remember where I first saw it,” says Delettrez Fendi. “It was just one of those visual memories that live quietly in your mind.”
When Delettrez Fendi started thinking about her designs, the imagery suddenly came back to her, unbidden but luminous. In the finished pieces, there are no literal references to the plot of Anger’s short—because it doesn’t have one. Rather, the film is a poetic translation of a heady Arcadian atmosphere. “It’s a choreography of water,” says Delettrez Fendi. “It doesn’t need to explain itself. It moves, and this is what I also wanted the jewels to do.”
Fendi High Jewelry ‘Cento’ Necklace from the Eaux d’Artifice collection, price upon request
Courtesy of Fendi
Move they do. Necklaces ripple with articulated links and trembling stones. Earrings come undone and transform. A standout piece, the Cento necklace (pictured above), pays direct homage to Villa d’Este’s famed Avenue of the Hundred Fountains, with rock crystals layered over diamonds like mist filtering moonlight. “You get this fish-eye distortion,” says Delettrez Fendi of this refractive combination. “It gives the effect of water in motion, of splashes suspended.” There is theatricality, yes, but also restraint; the collection shimmers with secrets, avoiding the carnivalesque in favor of tempered elegance. Blues are soft and watery; fiery ruby reds and yellows nod to Rome’s incendiary sunsets without veering into tutti-frutti territory. “I wanted to enclose all the skies of Rome inside these droplets,” she says, “but more like fireworks before they explode.”
The idea of heritage was also front of mind when Delettrez Fendi was designing these one-of-a-kind baubles, given the house’s special anniversary. Ancient techniques have pride of place: the use of rock crystals as magnifiers and mood enhancers, the asymmetry of stones set off-center. “Maybe it’s not on trend,” says Delettrez Fendi of the collection, “but it’s beautiful.” What Eaux d’Artifice ultimately captures is not just Rome’s opulence, but its sense of mystery. “Rome is a surreal theater of water and light,” she muses. “It’s always performing.”
This year marks the 35th anniversary of Undercover, the Tokyo-based brand you started when you were 21. You have transformed streetwear with evocatively layered references, from punk and music to film and couture. Has your design process changed since you started?
For the past 35 years, I have continued to create with almost no change, always centering on the things that interest me.
What does the name Undercover mean to you?
The name was chosen from the idea of wanting the brand to have a secretive, mysterious atmosphere.
As a student in the late ’80s, you were the vocalist in a tribute band called the Tokyo Sex Pistols. What drew you to punk?
Music and visuals that break preconceived notions, and a contrarian attitude of looking at things from a slanted angle.
You blurred the line between streetwear and high fashion long before that became mainstream.
For me, someone who spent my youth in the 1990s, blending streetwear and high fashion was a natural thing. Although it seems that many products nowadays imitate that direction, what is important is whether there is soul in them.
While you were at Bunka Fashion College in the late ’80s, Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake were revolutionizing fashion with their designs. What do you remember most vividly about that era?
A struggle between my first experiences with nightlife and an overwhelming load of homework.
Some of your most memorable collections have been beautiful but eerie—for instance, the dresses inspired by the twins from The Shining, from spring 2018, and the terrarium dresses, glowing and filled with roses and butterflies, from spring 2024. What do you want people to feel when they see those shows?
The complex emotions usually kept locked away deep in the heart.
A look from the Undercover fall 2025 collection.
Estrop/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
Music has played a major role in your collections. How do you translate sound into fashion?
Music is always accompanied by record jackets, artwork, and the visuals of artists. I use these elements and translate them into clothing.
What are you listening to these days?
Recently, I listen mainly to Japanese rock and pop. The Kosmik Musik playlist I’ve been releasing on Spotify includes fantastical songs, tracks that emphasize intensity, songs that convey calmness, and more. I hope to express a progression like that of a movie.
You are known as a big runner. What’s your routine?
Three times a week, each time six to 10 kilometers. I’m eliminating negative thoughts. I consider running a meditative activity for fostering design ideas and mental composure.
Painting has been your personal hobby for years. The first public exhibition of your art, They Can See More Than You Can See, was in Tokyo in 2023. What does painting give you that fashion does not?
Drawing is a more personal and free creative activity. What I gain from it is a self I didn’t know before. That is what I seek.
Your paintings often depict hybrid figures or haunting faces. Are they autobiographical in any way?
Maybe so. I don’t particularly pay attention to it, though.
Do you ever see your painting and fashion practices colliding?
Your fall 2024 show was held at London’s Savoy Hotel, in the ballroom where Christian Dior once showed. Alex Consani opened; the soundtrack included Björk, as well as monologues from the viral star Tokyo Toni; and your muse Tish Weinstock closed the show in a wedding gown decorated with discarded iPod headphones. It was…
A mind fuck!
But in a good way! Your brand, which you officially launched in 2021, is built around sustainability—a majority of your garments are made from deadstock fabrics or postconsumer waste. How do you manage to balance that with humor?
You have moments when you’ve been working for 15 hours, and you zoom out and realize that you’re debating the hem on a chiffon dress. Then you’re like, Wow, this is so silly. Humor keeps a sense of lightness that is more necessary than ever before. The first thing I say about sustainability is there’s nothing sustainable about making new clothes. I just try to ensure that everything we’re doing can be held within my conscience in a way that I’m proud of.
You attended the fashion program at London’s Central Saint Martins and continue to live and work in London, but you were born and raised in Bedford, New York. What were your earliest memories of fashion?
There’s a famous story that my mom always tells: One of her girlfriends was over, and at the age of 2 or 3, I was telling her, “I love the way your boots go with your skirt.”
At your fall 2025 show, one of the most talked-about looks wasn’t actually on the runway; it was a white T-shirt that said “Protect The Dolls,” which you wore to take a bow. You ended up selling them and donating most of the proceeds to benefit Trans Lifeline, a crisis hotline.
I was so uncomfortable with how things had gone in the months prior. Donald Trump was reelected; we were watching rights being stripped away. I had to say something, and it came back to this question of, well, what is being threatened right now? This felt like a small way we could provide hope. I could never have expected the response that we got. As of right now, I think we’ve donated over half a million pounds to Trans Lifeline. It feels like the proudest moment of my career.
Rihanna was an early fan of your brand. How does it feel to have that kind of support?
So many things that I dreamed of happening were arranged or cosigned by her. Adwoa Aboah wore a look from my first collection to the Met Gala in 2017. Rihanna came up to her and said, “Who made this?” She followed me on Instagram the next day. I didn’t realize until one of her fans DM’ed me, like, “Rihanna just followed you. Who the hell are you?” I was literally 21 at the time. It led to working for Fenty, her label with LVMH. She always ensured that whoever had something to say in meetings, she would quiet the room for them. One day she came, and I had stayed up all night doing sketches. I was a mess. She came up behind me and said, “Conner!” I turned around, and she was wearing one of my old T-shirt dresses I had gifted her. She gave me the biggest hug.
If you could place five celebrities, living or dead, in your front row, who would you choose?
Marlene Dietrich, next to Eartheater. I feel like they’d be best friends. Marisa Tomei after My Cousin Vinny—she’s almost an unsung hero. Rihanna’s never come to a show, so we have to get her there. Then Diana Vreeland, because so much of my childhood was spent in the fantasy of fashion.
When a collection is over, how do you unwind?
I love to draw. I’m always doing the work. I really struggle with a holiday. So maybe I need a retreat where someone pries the iPhone out of my hands and is like, “You need to go lie in that field and touch grass for a bit.” That sounds really ideal right now, but I would probably lose my mind.
Hair by Kei Takano for ORIBE at Agency 41; Makeup by Bari Khalique for Gucci Beauty at The Wall Group. Models: Rafe Crane-Robinson at The MiLK Collective, Tish Weinstock at Best Represents. Photo Assistant: Connor Egan; Retouching: Marine Ferrante; Fashion Assistant: Brigitte Kovats; Hair Assistant: Mariana Feliziani; Makeup Assistant: Lucy Beacall.
Stepping into Chemena Kamali’s newly renovated Chloé office, in Paris’s 8th arrondissement, is a bit like stepping into her mind. Both are fresh, focused, and warmly lit—in the case of the room, with a Diptyque Feu de Bois candle; in the case of the woman, with a desire, she says, to “carry on working with the heritage of the house while writing a new legacy for Chloé,” where she has served as creative director since 2023. Try to find a screen—you won’t. Kamali has politely turned her phone face down on a table laid with canisters of cashews, a box of chocolates, and a bowl of blueberries. On her desk, a stack of leather-bound journals overwhelms a closed laptop, and an old-school fan whirls away. “When I arrived here yesterday, I said, ‘Okay, this is a good place to start,’ ” says Kamali, taking in the freshly painted walls in the atelier. “It gives you a clean headspace.”
We’re in the waning days of August, and Kamali has just gotten back from several weeks’ holiday on Patmos. “We were supposed to go to some other Greek islands, but we liked it so much we decided to stay,” she says. There was swimming. There was reading—not one but two Susan Sontag books (On Women and Against Interpretation and Other Essays). Kamali mostly retreated into herself, she says, yet she couldn’t help snapping a few photos, aide-mémoires for a certain intriguing way that women were draping their pareos around their hips. The moment went straight into her memory bank, a reservoir of feelings and impressions from which Kamali draws her best ideas. “I love to catch an atmosphere,” she says. “It’s extremely reassuring for me, because everything moves all the time.” You heard it here first, if a few months from now we’re all dressing in beach towels.
Two years into her tenure, Kamali has solidified her place in the upper echelons of French fashion, infusing Chloé with a modern take on the buoyant, easy spirit that has characterized the house from its founding, in 1952, by Gaby Aghion. Kamali’s acclaimed first collection was shown in 2024, after the designer Gabriela Hearst exited the brand. It featured the sort of patent leather half capes, fluttery lace blouses, and liquidy gowns for which Chloé was beloved in the 1970s, under Karl Lagerfeld, and then in the early 2000s, when the Glastonbury Festival met the legendary Parisian nightclub Les Bains in the designs of Phoebe Philo and Clare Waight Keller. “In the streets of Paris and elsewhere, we missed this Chloé girl so much,” Le Figaro’s fashion critic wrote after Kamali’s debut.
Model Angelina Kendall wears Chloé clothing and accessories throughout.
The Chloé girl might be a Parisian archetype, but Kamali, 43, grew up in Dortmund, Germany, near Düsseldorf. Her parents owned several multilabel boutiques called Euro Mode. “I was never interested in selling, per se,” she explains. “What was so magical for me were the fittings, that ceremony of people trying things on.” It was the late ’80s, and Germany had, basically, two major national icons: “There was Karl Lagerfeld and Boris Becker,” Kamali recalls. She chose the sketch pad over the racket. “We all had these typical German slam books, and you’d fill out your favorite movie and what you wanted to be or whatever, and I wrote ‘Modeschöpfer,’ which is German for ‘couturier.’ ” From the age of 8, she never wavered: “This was quite distinctive from the rest of my friends or classmates. There was a very determined, clearheaded obsession about fashion very early on.”
Kamali has always been a paper person—a lover of print, a keeper of records. “Any family member who asked me what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday, I always said magazine subscriptions,” she recalls. The titles piled up: American Vogue, Italian Vogue, W. On the cusp of adolescence, Kamali was probably operating Dortmund’s finest fashion library. “I turned into a very nerdy encyclopedia,” she says. Soon she was cutting out magazine pages and photographs she loved and gluing them into notebooks, collaging them with her own drawings. When she was 11, the family moved to California, where some relatives had already immigrated. “I was incredibly excited to be in a completely different aesthetic world,” says Kamali. “And I still love this European preciseness with a Californian undoneness.”
Even now, Kamali is obsessive about safeguarding references and tracking the creation of every look. “I love recording all the steps of my process, because for me it’s like a creative visual diary,” she explains. “You explore so many different pathways—sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. By recording it, you preserve the ideas, even if they’re killed or modified and become something else.”
This archival urge most often takes the form of photos, shot with iPhone, Polaroid, and digital cameras, printed out, and sorted into boxes that she sources from a specialist art supply store in Paris. (Each box has a digital backup, just in case.) Documenting, for Kamali, is also a way of encouraging transparency in an era in which trends seem to surge up out of the digital morass, with little ownership or explanation. “It doesn’t have to be all about the finished product,” she says. “I think in the times we’re living in, people are interested in seeing where things are coming from—what was the starting point, what were the influences?”
Unlike other designers, Kamali is unusually willing to pull the curtain back on how she works. For this story, she considered Chloé’s essential design signatures—the billowy blouse, mousseline, denim, and lace, among others—and selected a look to capture the spirit of each one. “I love working with the past, and I love working with codes. I’m not afraid of them,” she says. “I don’t want to fight them—it’s about embracing them but making them evolve.” Think of Kamali’s detailed, personal telling of the Chloé story as the opposite of AI slop.
Kamali was 22 and fresh out of Germany’s Trier University of Applied Sciences when she joined Chloé for the first time, as an intern, in 2003. She had gained a highly technical education: garment construction, patternmaking, art history, chemistry. The Paris dream that she had been nurturing ever since her collaging days beckoned, so she begged her way into the atelier, headed at the time by Phoebe Philo. “There was this energy and atmosphere, this complicity,” she recalls. “Women designing for women, and it was so relatable and honest. You kind of wanted to be that girl.”
Over the past 20 years, Kamali has made herself into that girl. After the internship, there was an MA at Central Saint Martins, in London, where she learned to channel her technical prowess into a creative sensibility, followed by stints at Alberta Ferretti and Strenesse, in Milan. Kamali returned to Chloé in 2012 for a little over three years, under Clare Waight Keller. But in 2016, Saint Laurent poached her to become design director of women’s ready-to-wear. The news that Kamali was coming back to Chloé, in the fall of 2023, had the heartwarming logic of one of those wedding announcements that recall how the bride and the groom fell in love in first grade, went their separate ways, and reconnected, with great joy, in midlife. “I always had this really strong affinity for Chloé because the emotional aspect spoke to me very purely and very deeply,” says Kamali. “There aren’t a lot of brands that have this honest voice that goes beyond fashion. I was drawn to the idea of a certain natural femininity, freedom, sensuality, and lightness.”
Kamali came in with a plan. “The pitch was essentially that I wanted to bring back the old fan base,” she says. “Because I knew it was out there—my generation of women who have a memory with Chloé, whether it’s a blouse that they loved or the first perfume they wore.” Kamali’s instincts have proven correct: Her first front row—stacked with millennial icons such as Sienna Miller and Liya Kebede, all outfitted in nostalgic, graffitied cork wedges, their legs crossed so that the shoes hung in the air just so—caused a sensation. (Just don’t mention “boho chic”—at Kamali’s Chloé, the phrase is banned.)
Memory, meme-ified; fandom, activated: Depop, the fashion resale site, reported a 1,137 percent increase in searches since June for the Paddington, the quintessential Chloé bag. Parent company Richemont’s latest annual report noted that sales rose by double digits across its clothing brands, “with an encouraging performance from Chloé.” Kamali says, “In the first and second years, the thing I really wanted to accomplish was to clean up and bring everyone on board and make sure we really navigated the house back to its original roots.”
Now Kamali is moving into the second phase of the plan. It’s all about demonstrating that, in addition to Chloé’s famously fluid look, the house possesses an intellectual suppleness. “What’s really important as I move forward is the understanding that there’s not just one Chloé woman,” Kamali says. In our conversation, certain words surface again and again: “freedom,” “motion,” “flow.” I’m curious about the Chloé palette—famously identifiable, with dusty roses and washed-out sea foams and chalky caramels, yet also famously tricky to wear for women in a certain range of skin tones. “It’s a very valid question, because not everybody loves those colors,” says Kamali. “What I want to do is extend this predetermined idea of ‘Chloé is this’ or ‘Chloé is that.’ It’s good to have these very strong codes that we all associate with a house, but there’s space for moving on from them while preserving the legacy and paying tribute to it.”
Changes that might once have been perceived as heresy feel like a natural progression under Kamali’s gentle stewardship. Chloé was founded explicitly as a ready-to-wear brand, one of the first to encourage women to swear off onerous fittings and instead turn to ease and convenience. Yet, Kamali says, “even though we’re not a couture house, recently I’ve been inspired by the idea of couture.” She continues: “What would it be like if you took all the heavy construction out of those dresses, and you could just put them in the washing machine and completely destroy the preciousness, you know?” Her answer, combining “couture preciseness and light summer cottons,” sounds tantalizing.
Behind us, there’s a magnet wall covered in images and swatches of fabric. It’s not a mood board, exactly, but an extension of the documentation process that Kamali holds so dear, allowing her to get where she’s going by chronicling how she started. We stand up from the table and get closer: There are Guy Bourdin’s leggy, Surrealist women in advertising campaigns for Charles Jourdan, and many pictures from Gaby Aghion’s first Chloé shows, which were held in the late ’50s at Café de Flore and Brasserie Lipp. Kamali is particularly enthusiastic about a book she recently picked up called Shtetl in the Sun: Andy Sweet’s South Beach 1977–1980. She points to the wall, where she’s stuck a picture of senior citizens sunning themselves. “I love the prints, the bathing suits, these old hotels and pools. There’s something so fascinating about these images and the eccentricity.”
I can’t help but notice the hot pinks and lime greens that are popping out of the photos, the apple reds and cornflower blues. “I want to get into some of the colors,” says Kamali, picking up from our discussion about updating the Chloé palette. “I want to go into vivid saturation.” She takes a minute and smiles. “This house really makes me happy and really makes me proud. I brought back the initial, original idea of what Chloé should feel like. But now I’m free to make it evolve, and free to move on.”
Scenes from the model fittings for Chloé’s fall 2025 ready-to-wear show, with some of Kamali’s inspiration images for the collection.
Chemena Kamali: Hair by John Nollet at Forty-One Studio + Agency; Makeup by Anthony Preel at MA+ Group. Photo Assistant: Ryan O’Toole; Digital Technician: Romain Forquay; On-Set Production: Justine Torres at Brachfeld; Hair Assistant: Antonin Gacquer.
Hair by Sébastien Richard at Artlist Paris; makeup by Anthony Preel for Violette_FR at MA+ Group; manicure by Cam Tran for Manucurist at Artlist Paris. Model: Angelina Kendall at the Industry NY. Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting. Set design by Hamid Shams.
The only thing more elusive than the price of couture is the question of who, exactly, is buying it. In W’s March 1999 issue, Juergen Teller photographed a story called “The Clients.” Dennis Freedman, W’s Creative Director at the time, had asked him to shoot the couture collections, and Teller decided to photograph the clothes on actual clients—including Marie-Chantal of Greece, Ann Getty, and Deeda Blair. For our Originals Issue, W Editor in Chief Sara Moonves asked Teller to revisit the portfolio. At the July couture shows, he shot the new generation of couture clients, from Princess Olympia of Greece (the daughter of Marie-Chantal) and Ivy Getty (the granddaughter of Ann) to Alexa Dell (of the technology conglomerate). Below, 11 patrons explain why they buy couture.
Ivy Getty
Ivy Getty wears a Maison Margiela Artisanal dress and mask.
Can you see out of that mask?
You can, but not enough where I’m like, Oh, that’s how the models walked. This is part of couture— it’s not meant to be easy to wear. You’re doing it for fashion.
When did you start going to shows?
My first ready-to-wear Fashion Week ever was in 2015. It was Paris, and I was with my grandma [philanthropist and fashion darling Ann Getty]. For couture, I think it was with the photographer Ellen von Unwerth in 2021. I was very excited that Ellen wanted to go with me to the Giambattista Valli show. Right before it, she came to my room and was like, “Let’s have a photo shoot right now.” A couple months later, she said, “Are you coming to the dinner tonight?” I was like, “What dinner?” She was like, “For the magazine cover.” She put me on the cover of her magazine and didn’t even tell me!
Do you have a group of couture friends?
You get to know people—I used to think maybe these are my fashion friends, but these really are your friends. I get FOMO when I miss couture, obviously because of the shows, but I get FOMO from seeing my friends all together.
A few years ago, John Galliano made you a couture wedding gown. What was it like working with him?
He understands people very quickly—he’ll know me better than I know myself when making any decision. He finds inspiration in literally a crack in the sidewalk. It’s something I won’t ever understand, but it’s like whatever Albert Einstein had with math.
Princess Maria-Olympia of Greece and Denmark
Princess Maria-Olympia of Greece and Denmark wears a Dior Haute Couture dress; Dior High Jewelry necklace; Manolo Blahnik shoes.
What was your first couture show?
When I was 10 years old, I went to the 45th anniversary Valentino couture show in Rome. I sat on my dad’s lap. I ended up interning for Dior when I was 17. After that, I started attending shows on my own.
In 1999, Juergen Teller did a photo series for W similar to this one, and your mom, Marie-Chantal, Crown Princess of Greece, was in it. Have you seen that photo?
It’s in New York in her bedroom. A couple days before I got the email about this shoot, I was standing in the room staring at the portrait, like, God, that really just is one of the coolest photos in the whole world. I would do anything to be shot by him.
Does she still have the feathered Balmain by Oscar de la Renta gown she wore in her portrait?
I’m going to text her right now…. She says, “Hmm, I think I do :)”
Do you get her couture hand- me-downs?
During Covid, I was in the English countryside with my mother. There was a room in the attic. I thought it was a storage space for furniture. I was bored, and I saw it unlocked. I found my mother’s couture dresses. I was like, How has she been hiding this from me for so long?
A few people have described couture as a club. Is that true?
You’re literally so right. The shows are like going back to summer camp or something.
Claire Paull
Claire Paull wears a Dior Haute Couture dress; Dior High Jewelry earrings, necklace, and ring.
Your job is far from the fashion world—you’re the vice president of global marketing at Amazon Ads. How did you get into couture?
My mother had a really beautiful wardrobe. She would always wear Chanel and St. John. I spent a lot of time in her closet, daydreaming. She would say, “You can have all these things Mommy has—you could have even better—but you have to work.” I often tease that when I’m 85 years old and no longer working at Amazon, I’ll be an intern for Chanel or Dior.
Are you the best-dressed Amazon employee?
It’s a tech company. People wear jeans, and it’s very casual. I dress. I often wear a long Dior skirt, a T-shirt, slingbacks, and a cardigan. Or I will wear jeans and a Chanel or Dior sweater.
You live in New York—how often do you make it to the Paris couture shows?
It comes down to what I can make happen. Last July, I was sitting in a conference room in Seattle, and I got a text from Dior: “Claire, will you please come to couture?” All I wanted was to make that happen. Then I remembered: Claire, you shouldn’t. You’re going to have to miss a bunch of things for work.
What’s your favorite piece in your collection?
I think I’m going to order this Dior red dress. If I already owned it, that would be the answer.
Christine Chiu
Christine Chiu wears a Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda blouse, bra, skirt, earrings, necklace, belt, veil, tights, and shoes.
You starred in and coproduced Bling Empire, a reality show about wealthy Asian Americans in Los Angeles. On the show, people got a glimpse of your couture trove.
My dad was a huge Issey Miyake and Armani collector. He put me in Issey Miyake—they don’t make children’s wear, but he would have womenswear cut to my proportions. All I wanted to wear were pretty pink dresses and tutus. I was fortunate enough to marry a man who wanted me to tap into that part of my imagination and creativity. You have to ease into couture. I started with the shoes and accessories. We’re talking about a $40,000 belt and $25,000 boots.
How big is your collection?
I’ve been buying since I was 25, maybe 26. Now I’m 42. I’ve never had a season where I haven’t purchased something.
What’s your favorite piece?
My favorite piece I haven’t worn is a Dior gold house. They were renovating their maison on Avenue Montaigne, and they decided to make a gold human-size replica. I saw it, and I was like, Yes, I have to have that. It’s light enough to walk around in—it’s not solid gold.
What couture etiquette have you learned?
As someone who was a first-generation haute couture buyer at 25, I definitely did not say the right things. My first big faux pas was asking what the price was. There was silence. You could see color drain from faces in shock. You ask for “information,” and they prepare a whole packet. Chanel had tweed portfolios with inserts, and at the bottom was the price in calligraphy. You’re supposed to delicately say, “I would like to discover more information.”
I heard you once bought a Dolce & Gabbana couture dress, and they made you a couture padded booty short to go underneath it.
My husband is a plastic surgeon, so it’s ironic. Surgically, he can help create whatever silhouette I envision for myself, but couture can do the same thing.
Cecily Waud
Cecily Waud wears a Chanel Haute Couture coat, dress, and boots; her own jewelry.
You work in interior design and, as you described it, formerly did “diplomatic stuff.” When did you get into couture?
When I was really young, with my mom, mainly at Dior. Over the years, you get to know everybody. I started being invited to the couture shows before I bought couture, actually.
What was your first couture piece?
I was married before, and Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior did my wedding dress. I rewore the dress for Chiuri’s last show for Dior because all the women had to wear white. A lot of us decided to rewear the wedding dresses she’d made us.
Do you still do shows and appointments with your mom?
I’ll FaceTime her. If she doesn’t like something, she’ll say, “No, we’re not paying for that, sweetie.”
Have you purchased any couture recently?
My family’s color is lavender. I just had a Chanel jacket made, and they did lavender stitching. Their buttons are the most fun thing to pick, ever. They have the biggest selection of the craziest buttons. But they didn’t have one that worked out of, like, 30,000 buttons. I wanted a super light lavender one with a gold star in the middle.
How different are ready-to-wear and couture shows?
Ready-to-wear shows are just such zoos. With couture, it feels a lot more intimate. It’s not Instagram models trying to get a shot to be like, “I came to the show.” Couture is more like going to an art gallery.
Alexa Dell
Alexa Dell wears a Schiaparelli Haute Couture dress.
You come from the tech world—your dad, Michael Dell, started Dell Technologies, and you’ve had a few tech-focused jobs. When did you get into buying couture?
I’m new to collecting and have two pieces so far. The first is my Schiaparelli wedding gown. From September 2024 to March 2025, the dress traveled as much as I did: a muslin fitting in Los Angeles; two fittings at Place Vendôme, in Paris; and a final session back in L.A., where the atelier stitched my name into the lining. The second is from Jean Paul Gaultier Haute Couture by Ludovic de Saint Sernin—the “sand” dress I wore during the wedding weekend.
Will you wear them again?
They’re meant to live, not hide in storage. The Schiaparelli bodice could pair with vintage jeans, and the skirt with a simple tank for an anniversary dinner someday.
How quickly do you know which garments you want?
I can usually trust my first reaction.
Lauren Amos
Lauren Amos wears a Balenciaga Couture jacket, skirt, belt, gloves, and bag.
You’ve been buying experimental fashion for your Atlanta boutiques, Wish and Antidote, since 2004. When did you start personally collecting couture?
I got into couture through Iris van Herpen. I’m on the board of the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta. We brought her in for her first exhibition in America in 2015, and she let me borrow a dress—I ended up buying it. It’s a jump going from ready-to-wear to couture. But she was young in her career, and I knew I was supporting an artist.
How long have you been buying Balenciaga couture?
When Demna came in, I was like, What is this situation? I was obsessed. Then I got really irritated with some of the designs. I felt like, Is someone making fun of me? Are they in a boardroom like, “Hahaha, look at this girl. She spent $5,000 on a polyester dress?” But the things I’m challenged by the most are the things with which I end up having the biggest love affair. Then I got invited to my first couture show—I think it was Demna’s first, too. I remember thinking, Oh my god, this is incredible. I walked my way right into an appointment to buy.
How many fittings are usually required for a couture piece?
Well, Iris has a 3D rendering of my body. We have a mannequin for me at the atelier.
Do you reserve your couture pieces for special occasions?
I’ve worn a couture piece to work before. I try to not put anything on too high a pedestal.
How do you store the garments?
Someone keeps all of my stuff in L.A. I’m a steward of the pieces. I have a responsibility to take care of them, and I have five cats.
Natasha Poonawalla
Natasha Poonawalla wears an Iris van Herpen Haute Couture dress; Rombaut for Iris van Herpen Haute Couture shoes; her own jewelry.
You and your family work in biotechnology: Your husband is the CEO of the Serum Institute of India, the country’s largest vaccine manufacturer, which your father-in-law founded. Now you’re the executive director of the company. But you’re also known as a fixture on the couture circuit.
In India, the idea of customization and craftsmanship is deeply embedded in our culture. One of my first formal purchases was for my wedding: a couture gown by Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla, for our reception in India.
Do you rewear pieces?
Absolutely. That’s the beauty of couture: You buy less, you buy well, and you celebrate the artistry behind it. One of my favorite mix-and-match moments was pairing a Schiaparelli bustier with a Sabyasachi sari dripping with Indian jewels. Whimsical fashion and beautiful things are mood elevators—and sometimes conversation starters, too.
How much do you tweak the runway designs?
Sometimes I have a clear vision—usually a version of the runway piece tailored to better suit my body— but it’s always the designer’s creation. I see myself as a collaborator, not a codesigner.
Allison Sarofim
Allison Sarofim wears a Giambattista Valli Haute Couture bustier gown; Graff High Jewellery earrings, necklace, and ring.
Although you were born and raised in Houston—and spend a lot of time on Oahu, where you developed your beauty line, Loulu Hawai’i—you’re known for throwing the most fashionable Halloween party in Manhattan, which sometimes involves couture costumes. When did you start buying couture?
I’m dear friends with Giambattista Valli, and I was at his first couture show, in 2011. I’ve worn his designs for years to the Met Gala and to my Halloween parties. There may have been a custom cat tail involved when I was Pussy Couture—after the James Bond character Pussy Galore.
What’s the fitting process like for a couture garment?
Luckily, I fit into most of the sample pieces. Giamba will change, like, 2 millimeters on the neck. I’m very short-waisted—the waistlines are a little too long on me, but the hem isn’t. You have to change the waistline, not the hemline. It’s little things like that that make couture very different.
Where do you keep your couture?
I donate most of my pieces back to the designers for their archives. The Matières Fécales suit I wore to this year’s Met Gala is on a mannequin on display in my closet. It’s like the portrait of Dorian Gray in the attic!
Hayley Sullivan
Hayley Sullivan wears a Viktor & Rolf Haute Couture coat; Manolo Blahnik shoes; her own earrings.
In January, you married Deven Marrero, a former MLB player, and wore multiple Dior couture garments for the festivities. Why Dior?
I met with several different houses, and each house came back with some preliminary drawings. Dior just really felt like they zoomed into my soul and saw me. My dress came on a mannequin in a 10-foot-tall box. My mom was like, “How are we going to get this in the house?” Once you understand the craftsmanship and the art behind couture, then you’re like, Well, here I am. Can’t turn back the clock. It’s also part of my professional life as the founder of the Styled by Collective. So I have an easier time justifying being a couture client. We’re not buying fast fashion that ends up in landfills, which is horrible for the environment and in terms of labor laws.
What’s your approach to buying?
These are things that I actually want to live my life in. How you dress is the corporeal experience of your personality and who you are.
Houses typically make one couture garment per continent. How quickly do you have to claim a piece?
I’ve had it happen where I tried something on and I loved it. I needed to think about it—it was early in Couture Week, and I was like, I’m not ready to put the deposit down. Twenty-four hours later, it was gone.
Jordan Roth
Jordan Roth wears a Giorgio Armani Privé jacket; Boucheron headpiece and brooch.
For decades, you’ve been a Broadway theater producer. Your well-documented wardrobe is very theatrical too.
Fashion has always been a vocabulary for me. Couture is the fantasy, that glorious gown on a hill. But it was meant for bodies that didn’t look like mine. It wasn’t until Clare Waight Keller at Givenchy showed men’s couture that I felt invited. I went to the salon to see the first Givenchy pieces, and, my god, going to a couture salon is like the doors of heaven have opened.
Did you buy anything from that collection?
I saw this blouse, impeccably pleated chiffon that hung in an X formation across the body. I thought, Well, that’s the angel. I was a few months away from opening the Broadway revival of Angels in America that I coproduced, and I said, “I’m going to wear that.” In true couture magic, they proposed embroidering feathers on the collar. It’s a two-part play, seven hours in total. The entire time, I sat at the edge of my seat with my back off the chair so that I would not crease this magnificent crepe chiffon.
What’s it like working with the ateliers on garments?
My first several couture pieces were made for special experiences in my life. They would start with something I wanted to express about an event. Often, that would manifest as text I would write to become a vision-slash–mission statement of the piece. And I’d bring that to the right designer to explore the idea.
Has buying couture changed the way you dress generally?
Oh, yes. It’s a constant expanding of the canvas, of the possibilities. Watching it be created is the daily affirmation that anything we imagine can be made real. It’s the unboundedness, the belief in the impossible.
Princess Maria-Olympia of Greece and Denmark: Hair by Patrick Wilson for Oribe at the Wall Group; makeup by Tobi Henney for Mac Cosmetics at the Wall Group. On-set grooming for all talent: Gor Duryan at Agence Saint Germain Paris. Produced by Cinq Étoiles Productions; producer: Lucas Lechevalier; production manager: Jonathan Arapis; first photo assistant: Felipe Chaves; postproduction: Louwre Erasmus at Quickfix; fashion assistant: Mei Ling Cooper; production assistant: Louisa Kocher; tailor: Charline Gentilhomme at the Tailor Team.
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 her intention to live independently; in response, he cut her off financially. Undeterred, she taught languages and skiing at her former finishing school to support herself before settling in Barcelona, where she began modeling and fell in with La Gauche Divine, a group of artists and intellectuals who opposed the fascist Franco regime. At the time, said Stefano Palumbo, the general director and a board member of the philanthropic Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation, which he helped Peretti to establish in 2000, “Europe was not ready for a woman who decided to be an artist, who decided not to get married, not have a family.” To her family’s dismay, she was just getting warmed up.
Peretti’s modeling agency sent her to New York in 1968, and, despite what were viewed as considerable drawbacks—“When I came here, what they liked was the blonde girl. With big blue eyes and very young. I was very tall, very dark, very skinny.… I was everything too very,” she later remembered—she became a favorite of designers like Halston, Charles James, Issey Miyake, and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, who loved her lanky frame and cropped, slicked-back hair. But modeling was a means to an end. When a silver bud vase pendant she designed on a whim for one of di Sant’Angelo’s runway shows proved to be an unexpected hit, she knew she had found her true vocation.
At the time, silver had a down-market reputation that made it a risky choice for fine jewelry. Peretti, however, insisted on using it in her collections. She sensed that grand, formal jewels were as passé as girdles and white gloves; in their place, she offered ease. Her earrings and necklaces were meant to be put on and forgotten about, with no sharp points to catch on sweaters or hair, no warnings about not getting wet, and the designer’s blessing to wear them to sleep. Moreover, she wanted women to feel like they could buy her jewelry for themselves instead of waiting to receive it from a man. “I design for the working girl,” she proudly proclaimed. The response was so overwhelming that Peretti single-handedly turned silver into a viable alternative to gold, netting a 1971 Coty Award for jewelry and her own corner at Bloomingdale’s in the process. When she began collaborating with Tiffany, the venerable house had not sold silver jewelry since the Great Depression.
Peretti’s design process was highly personal, but her biomorphic shapes gave her jewelry a rare timelessness that Tiffany’s customers continue to appreciate. “Elsa used to say, ‘Jewelry is not fashion,’ ” said Palumbo. “It does not have to be discharged as soon as something new comes along.” Her Bone Cuff, for example, which was inspired by religious relics she saw as a child and is so true to human anatomy that it must be bought to conform to one wrist or the other, is as relevant today as it was when it was designed. Her Bone Candlesticks, a riff on an X-ray of her own femur, still look modern, as does her Henry Moore–inspired Open Heart pendant. Her Diamonds by the Yard, shimmering chains that, as the name implies, can be bought at various lengths, were rooted in memories of the way her grandmother casually wore her own diamonds. Now, in addition to the long-standing classics, Tiffany is offering special limited editions of some of Peretti’s favorites to mark the 50th anniversary of this fruitful partnership. These include a diamond pavé Amapola brooch, named after the Spanish word for “poppy” and featuring a black silk bloom, and large 18-karat yellow gold High Tide earrings, which ripple like water.
Halston was instrumental in introducing Peretti to Tiffany executives. He and Peretti were close, and the fashion icon was initially delighted by his friend’s success. When he launched his fragrance, he asked Peretti to design the bottle; she obliged with a curvy flacon shaped like a chic gourd. But once her fame began to rival his own, their relationship, always intense—as Peretti liked to point out, they were both Tauruses and took slights seriously—soured. The low point came during an argument in 1978, when Peretti hurled a sable coat Halston had given her in lieu of payment for the bottle design into the fireplace of his townhouse, on East 63rd Street. She had wanted to deepen their connection with more personal conversation, she later explained, while Halston preferred to keep things superficial, a stance she found…unsatisfactory.
Even by the standards of a famously louche era, incinerating sable was impressively bad behavior. And, indeed, Peretti held her own in those years. She palled around with Andy Warhol, Stephen Burrows, Marina Schiano, Berry Berenson, and Joe Eula. She walked the runway at the Battle of Versailles. She vamped in a Playboy Bunny costume on a terrace for her then lover Helmut Newton, a scene that resulted in one of the decade’s most electrifying images. She was who Victor Hugo, Halston’s streetwise boyfriend, turned to when he needed fast cash. When Studio 54 cofounder Steve Rubell had the temerity to call her “honey pie,” she smashed a bottle of vodka in protest. Halston stepped in, and the showdown turned so heated that Warhol noted in his diary that it was enough to make him want to stay home for the rest of his life (as if).
But even while she was living dangerously in Manhattan, Peretti was building a refuge for herself in the abandoned Catalonian village of Sant Martí Vell, which she vowed to make her home after glimpsing it in a photo in 1968. As soon as she earned the money, she bought and renovated two of its decrepit buildings, then two more, until she had put her stamp on the entire village. She created workshops for the artisans who crafted her jewelry, guest quarters, and living spaces for herself. Although she owned far more luxurious residences, Sant Martí became her home base. She spent the final few months of her life there.
When Palumbo first met Peretti, her insistence on art directing her environment was immediately evident. She interviewed him not in an office but at her summer house overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, under a pergola of strawberry grapes. A few days later, the pair traveled to Jordan to attend a summit on environmental conservation. After the conference, Peretti suggested they rent a car and explore the Jordanian desert. As they neared the ruins of the ancient city of Petra, she announced that they needed music. They stopped at a roadside kiosk, where, to the delight of the proprietor, she requested a cassette by the great Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. For the rest of the trip, that was their soundtrack. “Even in the car, she needed to create her own artistic atmosphere, ‘a room of one’s own,’ as Virginia Woolf wrote,” said Palumbo.
Rebecca Dayan, the actor who played her in Netflix’s Halston, thought Peretti deserved her own show. Palumbo has an even bigger idea. Describing Peretti as a jewelry designer, he said, doesn’t begin to encompass her impact. Instead, “she is a protagonist of history. She belongs not to the history of fashion or design but to the history of art.”
For W’s annual The Originals portfolio, we asked stars of film, fashion, art, music, and more to share their insights on staying true to themselves. See this year’s full class of creatives here.
Cherry World is a new lifestyle brand formed by a ragtag group of idealists: Josh LeVine, cofounder of the Los Angeles–based denim label Frame; Francesca Burns, a stylist, consultant, and publisher who has worked with the likes of Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott; Fergus Purcell, a commercial artist perhaps best known for designing Palace Skateboards’ logo; and the veteran photographer Glen Luchford, whose 1990s campaigns for Prada have been recognized across the art and design worlds.
Josh LeVine: We really just wanted to use Cherry World as a platform to work with our friends. Having been in the fashion space for a handful of years at this point, it’s really just about wanting to do something in our way, and with who we thought were the best of the best.
Francesca Burns: It’s so exciting and exhilarating to work in this constant, dynamic exchange of ideas. Really, it’s very fun. I can’t put a better word to it.
How do you approach who is best at what?
Fergus Purcell: We’re a small group. That means the communication is very fluid, as are our roles. Everyone’s ideas are valid, and they can manifest easily. The solid rock is Josh’s production smarts—and his passion. As a commercial artist, my thing is never solely about ideas; it’s about how you make the good ideas into reality. That’s why Josh occupies the key role: the make-it-happen person.
Glen Luchford: I’m not sure we ever said, “You’re doing this and I’m doing that,” although my experience tells me that’s a good idea. Everyone seems to instinctively know what they’re doing and gets on with it. It’s a hassle-free zone.
Models Brian, Anna, and Elan.
The DNA of the brand binds the skater heritage of Los Angeles, where Josh and Glen live, with the street style of London, where Francesca and Fergus live. Plus, a healthy splash of global cannabis culture.
FB: And we really wanted to create a brand that was focused around a California lifestyle. We talked a lot about a young Rick Rubin, via Snoop Doggy Dogg. This kind of energy, freedom, relaxation, and free-spiritedness. As an English person, I have grown up watching that fantastic part of American culture. The skate culture of California, and South L.A. culture more generally, has always held this real appeal. Often, being an outsider—from that point of view—you become really optimistic about these ideas. When we were researching old skate and surf brands, really going deep into this world, it was just so exciting because these are the things that I grew up looking at and loving. Obviously, Fergus comes from a background in skate culture. So for him, California was such an important part of that identity. And for Glen, too, he started off taking pictures of skateboarders. He talks a lot about how that culture has a real romance to it.
Is the name Cherry World connected to the choice of a scorpion as a logo?
JL: “Cherry” means so many different things. There is the connotation of a cherry red car, or the bowl in the pipe still being “cherry.” And then, obviously, “world” makes it feel so much bigger—bigger than perhaps it is at this point. A subculture aspect is driving the brand identity. It’s liberating to just do whatever you want. What about doing a weed leaf on the button? What about a scorpion logo? I want to get Ferg’s answer on the scorpion.
FP: It’s something to do with the feeling of watching kung fu movies in the afternoon—Shaolin Wooden Men or Drunken Master.
What are the core pieces of the debut collection?
GL: Good clothes, good vibes.
JL: Amazing, beautiful products made in L.A. Killer jeans and killer tees and killer cashmere sweaters and killer woven shirts.
FP: “Let’s make stuff in America. It does cost more to do that, but what a cool thing to do”—that was the position. The resulting product is really good.
GL: Personally, I love the green varsity jacket. But the denim is where we’re putting a lot of energy, and I’m excited about that.
FB: Denim is really the backbone of all of it. Some personal photography from Glen’s archives also appears throughout the collection.
GL: Josh and Ferg suggested some ideas, and I liked them, so we fished them out.
JL: There’s a sweater we’re doing called the Carl, named after Glen’s childhood best friend. He took a photo of Carl when he was younger. We found it and we digitized it, and we’ve done it as a four-yarn jacquard sweater. It almost looks like a photo from way back, but it’s actually a lightweight sweater.
GL: Carl was the first punk I ever met in the late ’70s, so he had to squeeze in there someplace.
FB: Incorporating some of Glen and Fergus’s work has been so, so important.
JL: For next season, we’ve taken some of the first commercial photography Glen did, shooting Lollapalooza back in the day, and Ferg developed a printout of it for shirting. Lots of Ferg’s art has been put into the clothing via graphics, screen printing, embroidery, and intarsia. We want to integrate these ideas in really interesting ways, rather than just screen printing a photo on a T-shirt.
Will any of you make original works specifically for Cherry World?
FB: Glen shot part of the lookbook, and I shot part of it. Glen is English and has been living in America for a really long time, but he has such strong roots in London. So we were casting friends and family, like Mark Lebon, for example. Mark is not only a photographer in his own right, but the father of the photographers Tyrone Lebon and Frank Lebon. He’s also Glen’s old landlord. Glen used to live with Mark. Mark used to be my boyfriend Angelo’s teacher at college as well. So we were like, “Can you come and do some pictures?”
GL: I don’t think a lot of thought went into it. We just got some buds together and had a fun day, which seems to be the number one doctrine of CW: Let’s have a good time.
Hair by Mikey Lorenzano; Makeup by Sam Visser at Art Partner; Models: Anna Cordell, Elan Lee, Billy Luchford, Brian Maxwell, Jaid Nilon; Casting Director: Rachel Chandler at Midland; Casting Producer: Ellie Gill; Produced by Alice Films; executive producer: Laura Lotti; Studio Manager: Aleksandra Zagozda; Makeup Assistant: Laura Dudley; Lighting Technician: Jack Webb; Photo Assistant: Alex de la Hidalga; Production Assistant: Cora Rafe; Styling Producer: Gabby Lambert; Stylist Assistants: Natasha Devereux, Lindsey Eskind.
Eight years ago, as the United States faced an unprecedented presidential election, we asked a group of artists to create the political posters they’d like to see. Four years after that, as Black Lives Matter protests roiled the country, artists of color shared with us their points of view. Astonishingly, we now find ourselves at an even more critical crossroads. With so much hanging in the balance, we are showcasing 14 original posters made by artists over the age of 70—members of a generation that understands firsthand just how important it is to vote. The fact that they took the time to participate—June Leaf passed away at age 94, just days after submitting her contribution—underscores the existential nature of the moment. Proud as we are to publish these works, we hope that in the next electoral cycle we will be in a position where this project won’t feel quite as urgent.
To check your voter registration, find your polling place and make your plan to vote, visit whenweallvote.org.
This message was approved by June Leaf.
Courtesy of June Leaf.
This message was approved by Jessie Homer French.
Courtesy of Jessie Homer French.
This message was approved by Katherine Bradford.
Courtesy of Katherine Bradford and CANADA, New York.
This message was approved by Ben Sakoguchi.
Courtesy of Ben Sakoguchi.
This message was approved by Robert Longo.
Courtesy of Robert Longo.
This message was approved by Betye Saar.
Courtesy of Betye Saar and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.
