Table of contents for Volume 4, 2025 in W Magazine

Karl Templer Stylist, Cover Stories (page 176) and “For the Love of Fashion” (page 194) What is your favorite fashion film? James Bond, Thunderball. Who do you consider a style icon? Gianni Agnelli: the ease with which he dressed and the pleasure he took in living his life fully. What has been an enduring influence on your work? The overall idea of style—not fashion. The high and the low is a continuous influence on the way I work. Jin Soon Choi Manicurist, Cover Stories (page 176) and “For the Love of Fashion” (page 194) What’s one thing you wish people would stop wearing? Personally, I’m not the biggest fan of super logo-heavy looks. For me, style is about expressing who you are, not just showcasing a brand—unless, of course, it’s…

11 creative directors have left major fashion brands this year. 17 are making their debuts at them. 76% of the new designers are men. In June, after 201 days of rumors that Jonathan Anderson would take over Dior, he was publicly named the brand’s head menswear designer. 46 days later, he was named its head womenswear designer. More than 1,000,000 people watched the live stream of Anderson’s menswear debut, in June. In March, after 28 years as the chief creative officer of Versace, Donatella Versace stepped down and was replaced by Dario Vitale, the former design and image director of Miu Miu. 28 days later, Prada Group acquired Versace from Capri Holdings for $1.38 billion. In 2018, Capri Holdings acquired Versace for $2.15 billion. 1 major fashion designer—Rick Owens—has started…

Julie Kegels starts her designs by thinking about archetypes. “I always have a group of women in mind, and they appear in different guises, in different stories,” says the 26-year-old from her studio, in Antwerp. “I think, Okay, this is for a woman who works at the library, is passionate about tennis, and loves to eat mango—I really get into the details.” Her girls are rich in paradoxes: There’s a chronically busy businesswoman who loves to party, and a whipsmart city lawyer with a penchant for extreme nature adventures. These contradictions and juxtapositions are at the core of Kegels’s visual language, which has attracted fans after just three collections. “I’m always looking for a balance of beauty and the off-kilter,” she explains. (Just a couple examples from her second collection,…

To understand Verde Visconti’s relationship with her boss, Miuccia Prada, perhaps the most revered fashion designer in the world, one must first understand the intricacies of Italian. In English, we use the word “you” whether we’re addressing a friend, a stranger, or the King of England. But in Italian, there are two versions of “you”—“tu” and “Lei”—and choosing the right one depends on context. “We have the differentiation when you speak to someone more formally,” says Visconti, who only ever uses “Lei” with her boss. “It’s the equivalent of ‘thou.’” Visconti, who is 56, was hired as a junior press assistant at Prada in 1996, and today she is in charge of talent relations and special projects for Prada and Miu Miu, and is also the PR director at Prada.…

Sitting in his Paris apartment, in an 18th-century building with views of the Seine and the Louvre Museum, Thaddaeus Ropac is discussing his lifelong passion: art. Born and raised in Austria, and now a quite youthful 65 years old, he is wearing his uniform of an impeccably tailored dark suit and a crisp white dress shirt. Since opening his first gallery in 1983, in a modest space in Salzburg, Ropac has championed leading contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Gilbert & George, Antony Gormley, Alex Katz, Lisa Brice, and Elizabeth Peyton. “We have worked with some of the most important artists of our time, and this needs to be documented,” says Ropac. “The gallery is a footnote, in a sense, but the…

If Julia Garner could be blessed with one superpower, she would choose invisibility. “I like to hide,” says the self-described “outgoing introvert” on a Zoom call from London. “I recharge by being by myself.” The 31-year-old arrived in the British capital the day before, but she’s already completed back-to-back press days for the premiere of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, getting fitted into a shimmering Thom Browne gown hours before walking the red carpet. By tomorrow, Garner will be back across the pond to resume filming Netflix’s limited series The Altruists, about the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which she’s also executive producing—followed shortly by the promotion for another film, the horror thriller Weapons. In other words, for the foreseeable future, Garner will have no place to hide. While…

Pat Cleveland Model In the 1960s, as a teenager, you were discovered by a Vogue editor so taken with your look that she chased after you in the subway. By the 1970s, you had become one of fashion’s first prominent Black models. Ever since, you’ve been beautifying the world through modeling, painting, drawing, designing clothes, dancing, and singing. Tell me about the role the arts have played in your life. Well, growing up in Spanish Harlem with a mother who is a painter had everything to do with everything. Wonderful musicians came into my life because she loved jazz and was always at the [Harlem music venue] Red Rooster. That’s how she met my father, who was a Swedish saxophonist. My auntie was a dancer for [African American modern dance…

This issue started with a conversation I had with the stylist Karl Templer, during which we were discussing what we miss most in magazines today. We were reminiscing about the fabulous, glamour-packed fashion stories from the 1990s that were all about making models and clothes look as unapologetically strong and beautiful as possible. As we rattled off our favorite covers and spreads, we kept coming back, over and over, to one person: the incomparable photographer Steven Meisel. I was absolutely thrilled when Meisel, together with Templer, makeup artist Pat McGrath, and hairstylist Guido Palau, agreed to shoot our three covers, delivering images that we could describe only as “the peak of chic.” The iconic Lana Del Rey, sublime in pink Prada and orange Loewe, talks to Editor at Large Lynn…

Like many teenagers in 1990s Manhattan, Mark Ronson started DJ’ing. Unlike most of them, he was talented. The musician, who grew up in London and New York, took it up during his college years at New York University. His mainstream breakout came early—when he was 26—after he produced Nikka Costa’s hit 2001 song, “Everybody Got Their Something.” Since then, he’s collaborated with the biggest names in music, from Amy Winehouse and Duran Duran to Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, and Miley Cyrus. Now, the 50-year-old is chronicling the beginning of his career in a memoir, Night People, out on September 16. “I interviewed over 150 people for the book, including my mom and dad,” says Ronson. The title comes from his “fascination with night, nighttime, and partying, which runs through my…

On the battlefield, lifelong friendships are forged by shared trauma. In the fashion industry, those relationships are often formed by shared drama. The emotionally charged moment that forever bonded the legendary stylist Grace Coddington and the fashion designer Nicolas Ghesquière occurred on the set of a 2003 Alice in Wonderland–themed Vogue photo shoot, helmed by the notoriously exacting photographer Annie Leibovitz and starring the model Natalia Vodianova. Coddington, then the magazine’s creative director, somehow had recruited Donatella Versace, John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, Jean Paul Gaultier, and a host of other iconic egos to both create original looks for the story and pose together in a 19th-century French château dressed as characters from the Lewis Carroll tale. (Galliano wore a Queen of Hearts gown; Marc Jacobs sat cross-legged and smoking atop…

If there is one mantra that has served Michael Rider well throughout his two-decade-long career in fashion, it is this: “I never want to be the last one at a party,” he says, with the sort of casual confidence that can come only from experience. When Rider was named the artistic director of Celine last October, after months of rumors that he would be the one to replace the provocateur Hedi Slimane, much of the industry began poring over his résumé, which includes lengthy stints as a senior designer at Balenciaga under Nicolas Ghesquière, studio design director for Phoebe Philo at Celine (then Céline), and, most recently, creative director of womenswear at Polo Ralph Lauren, where he was lauded as a potential successor to Lauren himself. But there was very…

As an acclaimed actor, director, and producer, Zoë Kravitz has had a tightly focused career. Lately, though, she’s been letting loose and having fun—with pretty great results. Her first Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series, came from a three-episode run on The Studio, on Apple TV+, in which Kravitz plays an egomaniacal version of herself, accidentally indulging in an “old-school Hollywood buffet” of drugs, getting sky-high on mushrooms, and calling Seth Rogen a “Black Jewish queen.” “I ad-libbed that line. I’m pretty proud of it,” says Kravitz, 36. Though she’s had many memorable roles, in prestigious shows such as HBO’s Big Little Lies (season 3 is not happening yet; kindly stop asking, people!) and in the tragically short-lived single season of High Fidelity (“It just sucks,”…

The Bottega Veneta atelier, located in a historic 18th-century villa in Montebello Vicentino, about an hour’s drive from Venice, is a valentine to haute artisanal values. Villa Schroeder-Da Porto, as it is formally known, is the architectural embodiment of the famously logo-less company’s catchphrase, “When your own initials are enough.” The sprawling campus, which underwent a major renovation in 2013, is as lacking in superfluousness as the label’s perennially popular, unadorned Cabat bag. A mainstay of the Bottega Veneta universe, the Cabat has been reimagined over the years in various sizes and guises, including mini, small, medium, and large versions; this year, there is a new frayed-edge iteration. Introduced in 2001 by then creative director Tomas Maier, the unlined, rectangular-shaped, top-handled tote features the house’s most recognizable signature: a woven…

Duran Lantink, the 2024 winner of the LVMH prize for young fashion designers and newly minted Jean Paul Gaultier creative director, believes in the beauty of the serendipitous error: specifically, a production snafu by which a garment in his fall 2025 collection for his eponymous label ended up morphing from one form to another, going from a wrong to a right, albeit one that looked like a wrong. The item in question began as a shirt. But when the sample arrived from Italy, it proved unsatisfactory—the padding Lantink often uses to exaggerate and distort the body was different than usual, and he didn’t like it. Instead of scrapping the sample and starting anew, Lantink began to experiment. When he tried flipping the shirt upside down, he decided that it worked…

“There’s something so romantic about New York City in the summer,” said Lana Del Rey, as she settled into breakfast on the patio of a restaurant in the West Village of Manhattan. It was a beautiful morning: midseason sunny, clear sky, a light breeze. “I’m thinking of sitting on fire escapes and writing in my journal. The mood in the summer is so lazy and engaging.” Del Rey was wearing jeans, ballet flats, and a short red cardigan buttoned over a white tank top. Her long honey brown hair was in loose curls. She was with her husband, Jeremy Dufrene, whom she met in his home state of Louisiana, where he gives boat tours through the bayou for visitors to see alligators. (She went on one of his excursions in…