'WOMEN IN CLOTHES'

We’ve been around for a while now, and we know a lot of our readers might not have had the opportunity to experience our earlier issues. So we wanted to give you the chance to discover one of our favorite stories from our archive. This week we present Camilla Åkrans’ intimate Spring 2009 story with Natasha Poly, featuring fifty-eight photos of our gorgeous cover girl caught in between the sheets.

Twenty-four-year-old Irish singer-songwriter Hozier, born Andrew Hozier-Byrne, did not plan on a career in music. “Up until school finished, I just kind of dabbled,” he relates over the phone from Dublin. “I didn’t think I could make it.” His interest in performance started early—“I was always singing,” he confesses—and his kitchen-table exposure—to Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and “just great live blues stuff”—was equally prescient. After all, before his father turned to banking, he was a drummer in several blues bands in and around Dublin. While Hozier was growing up, the Chicago and Texas greats were on rotation. “Musicians were always around,” he says.

Our fashion director Alastair McKimm picks the ten best Spring 2015 collections from Milan Fashion Week, including Bottega Veneta, Dolce & Gabbana, Fendi, Gucci, Marni, Iceberg, Max Mara, Prada, Sportmax, and Versace.

As he takes on Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s powerful new drama Narcos, take a look back at our Fall 2012 feature on the rising actor from Gus Van Sant’s Milk and David Fincher’s Gone Girl.

We’ve always tried to look at things from a different angle. With that in mind, we decided to spotlight some of our favorite makeup artists and hairstylists, giving them complete freedom to fulfill their own creative ideas in a beauty portfolio. The results, including this intricate design from hairstylist Shon, all offer stark, powerful contrasts to the usual glamour shot. This is what beauty looks like when they get to decide.

With incredible fashion talent seemingly growing on trees these days—the work of the CFDA Fashion Incubator provides ample evidence—an aspiring designer may find it near impossible to create something original, something that stands out. But Melitta Baumeister has done just that.

The ‘French touch,’ a phrase now with diffused meaning, was once reserved for a pioneering form of dance music largely developed, and certainly popularized, by producers in France. The torch was lit by Daft Punk, handed to Justice, and held aloft by so many other imitators. And then came Yelle. Making their début in 2005, the Gallic trio immediately found comfort in kick-and-snare–heavy drums, phasers, and deliciously gritty bass-lines. Both lighthearted and serious-minded, Yelle’s music is expertly crafted, bubbly, and just as easy to imbibe. Unlike so many other bands, however, Yelle does something with their influences.

Our fashion director Alastair McKimm picks the ten best Spring 2015 collections from London Fashion Week, including Burberry Prorsum, Christopher Kane, Giles, Joseph, JW Anderson, Marques’Almeida, Preen by Thornton Bregazzi, Simone Rocha, Thomas Tait, and Tom Ford.

Our hair is a part of us, but it is also, in many ways, something apart. So argues Guido Palau, the British hairstylist who has been, thanks to his consistent work for houses like Alexander Wang, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs, Prada, and Lanvin, responsible for some of the most memorable coiffures to come down the runway in recent years. “It’s just a material, something to be manipulated, teased, and trussed into different shapes and colors to define a style for me,” he explains in an interview with Tim Blanks in his second book, HAIR, out this week. A wealth of those intricate and iconic styles are on display as well, all photographed in stark, bleached portraits by David Sims, one of Palau’s longtime collaborators in his frequent editorial work for W and the American, French, and Italian editions of Vogue.