Style by the Mile

Michael Roberts

Following the practiced eye of new hire Michael Roberts, Vanity Fair crisscrossed the globe-from Los Angeles to St. Petersburg by way of New York, Paris, and Londonto capture la mode du jour

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So much for taking some time to settle in. Since joining V.F. in April, fashion and style director Michael Roberts has traveled to Los Angeles, London, Milan, Paris, and St. Petersburg while overseeing this month's special issue. "The Style Issue was originally supposed to be next year," says Roberts, "but a year in fashion is a long time, and if you don't strike while the iron is hot it's easy to look left behind. Plus I had some ideas that I thought were very Vanity Fair."

One of those ideas: to pair four fall collections with four classic films, from Ludwig to Taxi Driver, in a shoot by Mark Seliger. "I chose the movies by studying the collections and thinking about which films they evoked for me," says Roberts, whose imaginative approach to fashion has taken him to The Sunday Times of London, Tatler, and The New Yorker. "Pure fashion can be deadly dull," he says. "It's like writing about car maintenance."

"Dull" is the last word one would use to describe Rupert Everett's first-person account of Men's Fashion Week in Milan— another of Roberts's brain waves.

"It was great to have Rupert's fresh eye on something I've covered for 20 years," says Roberts, whose illustrations complement Everett's acerbic reflections. "I wish I could find more actors who can write."

Roberts commissioned Arthur Elgort's breathtaking shoot of the Vaganova Ballet Academy, in St. Petersburg, after seeing pictures the photographer had taken there. "The dancers we shot were actual students. They graduated while we were there," Roberts says. Mikhail Baryshnikov, a graduate from a few years back, wrote the accompanying text, while V.F. s fashion department—including senior fashion editor Mary Braeunig—helped realize the vision.

In any project of this magnitude, there are obstacles—and Roberts thought he'd come across a major one en route to Mert & Marcus's cover shoot in London: "I was on the train reading a glossy gossip magazine and it said that Kate Moss had just been seen leaving her house with a huge swollen face, after being smashed in the face by [her ex-boyfriend] Pete Doherty. I had a total meltdown, thinking I was going to find our cover subject with her looks destroyed. As it turned out, she had been photographed on her way to the dentist's with an impacted wisdom tooth. So by the time I arrived she looked fine."

"Pure fashion can be deadly dull. It's like writing about car maintenance."

FOR DETAILS, SEE CREDITS PAGE

And yet one suspects that makeup artist Lucia Pieroni would have found a way to make even a black-andblue Moss look beautiful. After all, who could replace her? As Roberts says, "Kate, I decided, had to be on the cover of the Style Issue because she is the most followed style icon of our time. She looks ravishing whether she's going to the grocery store or walking the red carpet. By happy coincidence, when I looked at the tally of votes for the International BestDressed List, she got the most among women—and since this was her fourth time, she was elevated to the Hall of Fame." Is it really a coincidence, or did the tally prove that Roberts was right? He laughs and says, "I think you'll find that I'm right about fashion almost as often as Kate is right about how she dresses."

MICHAEL HOGAN