A Vogue Runway 21st Century Time Machine

The year 2025 is almost here, which means we’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century. We’re in the business of looking ahead. (And next year is going to be a big one, with debuts at Celine, Givenchy, Tom Ford, and, presumably, Chanel, though we’re still waiting for confirmation on precisely whose debut it will be, plus the inevitable surprises, like Beyoncé turning up at Luar or John Galliano’s transporting Margiela Artisanal show last January, which we look forward to most of all.) But as the keepers of fashion’s most complete 21st century archive—what is Vogue Runway, after all, “but a kind of museum of images?”—we’re also well positioned to look back. And so, each weekday this December we’re deep-diving into a single year, pulling out agenda-setting collections, the most significant red carpet looks, and the innovations, trends, and It-items that shaped not just the industry, but how the world gets dressed. The jumping off point, the year 2000, is particularly important for Vogue Runway. It’s the year our predecessor Style.com was launched, precipitating shifts still impacting fashion to this day. And so that is where this story begins.—Nicole Phelps

Fashion Confronts the US Election

The fall 2017 shows started just weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration and they were marked by protest collections. The models at Missoni wore pink pussy hats in the brand’s signature zigzag knits. The season’s many, many pantsuits looked like a would’ve been/could’ve been wardrobe for America’s first woman POTUS. And slogan tees reading “Make America New York” and “Save the Planet” leaned left. Designers, of course, are often two steps ahead of the rest of us. At her Dior debut, a month before Trump won the election and days ahead of the release of a bombshell video in which the Republican nominee exchanged lewd comments about women with Billy Bush, Maria Grazia Chiuri sent a t-shirt down the runway with Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s essay and rallying cry “We Should All Be Feminists.” It’s still true eight years later.—Nicole Phelps

Adieu, Colette

The Parisian boutique Colette is the mother of the modern concept store and the paradigm against which those that followed are measured. Founded in 1997 by Colette Roussaux and her daughter Sarah Andelman, the shop was a nexus of fashion (by names known and up-and-coming), beauty, art, culture, gastronomy, and tech. There was a water bar, exhibitions, must-see windows, an in-store magazine and compilation CDs, an e-commerce website and another, ilovecolette.com, that was purely creative. Colette was the ultimate manifestation of a mixed “curation.” Its closing in December 2017 was in keeping with a broader vibe shift. “We are at a turning point,” Andelman told Vogue at the time. “I think there’s space for the system to work in other ways than shows and showrooms. You’re seeing much more interest in young brands than high luxury brands, or luxury brands trying to be like young brands. Brands cannot continue to do what they used to do even five years ago.” Plus ça change.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

Takes One to Know One: How Raf Simons Made Calvin Klein an Immigrant’s Portrait of America

Raf Simons’s appointment at Calvin Klein in 2016 reverberated across the industry. What would one of fashion’s most cerebral, avant-garde designers do with an all-American staple?

His predecessor had leaned into the house founder’s minimal roots, but Simons had something different in mind: He turned Calvin Klein into a looking glass for American society, taking up its cultural vernacular and most recognizable codes—films like The Graduate and Jaws, working class and first-responder uniforms, and class signifiers like prep and Ivy League varsity—and poking holes in the American dream and American identity as he did so. While Simons’s predecessors were both immigrants, he is the one who made this all-American brand about the immigrant experience. As a fellow immigrant, I can say that this is a country whose people, even more so in the cultural and political context of 2017, have not always been comfortable with looking at themselves too closely. In the end, Simons’s time at Calvin Klein was short lived.—José Criales-Unzueta

Model Watch: Ashley Graham and Paloma Elsesser Take the Runway, Fashion Reckons With Size Diversity

By the time Ashley Graham walked Michael Kors’s spring 2018 runway, she had been featured on a music video with Joe Jonas, appeared on the The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, fronted campaigns for everyone from Lane Bryant to Liz Claiborne, and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s 2016 swimsuit issue as its first curve model. Mind you, Graham had also been profiled for the April 2007 issue of Vogue by Sally Singer, though it would take a decade for fashion, high fashion, to embrace her. Synchronistically, that same season Paloma Elsesser made her own runway debut at Eckhaus Latta after being discovered on Instagram by Pat McGrath. In hindsight, what their arrival signaled was an industry ready to reckon with its size diversity issue. Needless to say, with the rise of Ozempic this year, there’s still lots of progress to be made.—Ignacio Murillo and José Criales-Unzueta

Model Watch: Kaia Gerber Finally Debuts on the Runway

Speaking of Simons’s Calvin Klein, it was on the Belgian designer’s runway that Kaia Gerber, Cindy Crawford’s daughter, walked the runway for the very first time. Gerber had modeled before, having appeared in a Young Versace campaign in 2012, in another for Alexander Wang in 2016, and, most memorably, as one of the faces of Marc Jacobs’s “Daisy” fragrance.

But new French legislation prevented models younger than 16 from appearing on the runway, which rippled across the industry. Gerber debuted on Simons’s spring 2018 runway; her best walk, though, came later that season when she stepped out of a party bus to walk down Wang’s makeshift runway on the streets of Bushwick—that clip is making the rounds on TikTok today, over half a decade later.—Ignacio Murillo and José Criales-Unzueta

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

Adut Akech Gets Her Moment

The Sudan-born, Australia-raised Adut Akech debuted on the Fashion Week circuit at Anthony Vaccarello’s spring 2017 Saint Laurent show. Years earlier, Jourdan Dunn and Chanel Iman helped change an industry long defined by the sameness of all-white runways, but it was Akech who precipitated the wave of dark-skinned Black models, particularly those of African descent, so visible on the runways today.

Akech was raised in Kenya until she and her mother relocated to Adelaide, Australia, as South Sudanese refugees when she was seven years old. “When I first started modeling internationally I would literally be the only Black, dark-skinned girl in the show,” she told British Vogue for a 2022 cover story celebrating nine African models including Akech, Anok Yai, and Maty Fall. “There were no Sudanese models, no African models,” she continued, “now I go to a show and there are girls from my country, girls from Africa who look like me. There has been a huge change. It has gone from me being the only one at a show to 15 or 20 of us. I’m just so happy that we are finally at this place. I was tired of always feeling out of place and feeling like an outcast.”—Ignacio Murillo and José Criales-Unzueta

Machine Learning at the Met

NFTs were on the horizon and AI but a distant rumble in 2016 when the Costume Institute staged “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology.” An exploration of the interaction between hand and machine, this was an exhibition with a message that became more relevant year-to-year as the world is ever more mechanized and the relationship between what is inhuman and human shifts. Among the pieces on view at The Met that looked “techy” were automated dresses by Hussein Chalyan and Iris van Herpen’s 3D printed wonders; eyes couldn’t reveal which garments had been made using pattern-making programs, however. Curator Andrew Bolton wasn’t just interested in examining how designers had made use of technology; his thinking was more radical. “The wider notion behind the exhibition is we need to try and come up with a new paradigm for fashion that goes beyond the categories of haute couture and pret-a-porter, which are becoming very slightly redundant in the 21st century,” he said at the time. Fast forward to 2024 and it’s the growing divide between luxury and ready-to-wear that is being discussed, as well as how AI might impact not only the fashion industry—but the world.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

Rihanna Robyn Fenty, Entrepreneur

Did you ever think, when Rihanna first broke into the music scene with “Pon de Replay,” that she would become not just the best-selling female recording artist of the 21st century (according to Guinness World Records), but also a self-made billionaire business mogul? Speaking for myself, I could never have imagined then that one day I’d be wearing both Rihanna-branded makeup and sneakers, knowing that these constitute a limited selection of her wide business portfolio.

But here we are: Rihanna’s Fenty empire, which now consists of Savage x Fenty lingerie, Puma x Fenty, and Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin, and Fenty Hair, got its start in 2016 when she presented one of her Puma collections at New York Fashion Week. Rihanna had become creative director of the sportswear brand in 2014, but, until 2016, the partnership was limited to footwear—covetable, constantly sold-out sneakers, that is. With the success of her Puma project first came Fenty Beauty in 2017—which really did revolutionize the beauty industry with its introduction of a wide range of foundation shades to match every skin tone—and then Savage x Fenty in 2018. In 2019 Rihanna would become the first woman to create an original fashion label with LVMH, simultaneously becoming the first woman of color to lead a fashion house for the conglomerate. In the years since, Beyoncé, Harry Styles, Selena Gomez, and Lady Gaga have launched beauty and/or fashion labels to leverage their aesthetic signatures and celebrity. But let’s be honest, there’s only one Rihanna.—José Criales-Unzueta

Beyoncé Was Given Lemons, and She Made Lemonade

All was quiet on the evening of April 23, 2016. On this particular Saturday night, the world could be found in front of their computers or TV screens watching Beyoncé’s Lemonade, the movie that accompanied her concept album of the same name, whose songs were about love and infidelity but also generational trauma, and being Black in America in 2016. It was a complete musical tour de force, but, this being a Beyoncé project, it was also visually stunning. The image of Beyoncé walking down a street in a ruffled yellow Roberto Cavalli gown, holding a baseball bat and smashing it against the windows of parked cars—an homage to Pipilotti Rist’s “Ever Is Over All”—was one of the year’s, nay the decade’s, most indelible images.—Laia Garcia-Furtado

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

Three’s a Trend: 2015 Was a Big Year for Debuts

Jonathan Anderson at Loewe. Alessandro Michele at Gucci. John Galliano at Maison Margiela. Fashion realignments of this order don’t happen every year; in fact, before this the last time we had seen so many major debuts in such short order was 2010 (scroll down to read about the first runway shows of Phoebe Philo’s Celine, The Row, and Tom Ford). But 2015’s shakeup seems especially significant as we head into 2025: With the industry rumoring about Anderson’s future, Michele’s first couture show for Valentino just a month away, and Galliano’s exit leaving an open slot at Margiela, fashion finds itself at another inflection point. Only now we call them vibe shifts.—Nicole Phelps

Rihanna Crowned the Queen of the Met Gala, and the Internet’s Favorite Meme

“Ah! I love a girl from humble beginnings who becomes a big star,” proclaimed André Leon Talley as Rihanna climbed up the stairs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the first Monday of May in 2015. “It’s like the American dream, that’s how you do it,” he continued. “I want more train! I want drama!… This is the queen of the night!” For the gala celebrating the opening of “China: Through the Looking Glass,” Rihanna wore a fur-trimmed robe by Guo Pei that blanketed the Met’s steps and required a small army to carry it as she walked up. This kind of stunt is now the norm, but at the time it was internet-shaking. Pei’s dress became an instant online sensation, photoshopped as everything from an omelette to a slice of pizza. There has not been a single Met Gala look as memefied as this one, though many, many stars and celebrity stylists have tried to match it.—José Criales-Unzueta

From Victoria’s Secret to Vogue: Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss’s BFF Cover

There have been many famous duos on the cover of Vogue: Shalom and Amber, Gisele and Carmen Kass, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger, but none caused the stir that Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss did when they appeared on the March 2015 issue.

At the time one of the world’s biggest pop stars and one of its most famous models came together, they hadn’t known each other for long—they met in 2013 at the Victoria’s Secret show where Kloss walked down the catwalk as an angel, and Swift was performing. But their connection was instant; the night they met, they took a Polaroid together and wrote in Sharpie underneath “BEST FRIENDS FOREVER VS 2013.” Thus an enviable friendship was born.

The beautiful leggy blondes with ocean blue eyes soon became inseparable—they were often described as twins—and were regularly photographed walking hand-in-hand in the streets of New York, differentiated only by their heights (Kloss has four inches on the Swift). Inside the magazine, a profile detailed every aspect of their friendship while a glamorous editorial recreated the legendary road trip to Big Sur they embarked on early in their friendship. Just how iconic is their cover? On eBay, copies of the magazine go for up to $4,599, while Reddit threads continue to pop up to memorialize the moment.—Irene Kim

Joan Didion, Writer, Céline Influencer, Style Icon

In late 2014 Phoebe Philo released the first-ever Celine resort campaign, starring Daria Werbowy (a Philo stand-in, it must be said) looking defiantly at the camera from inside one of those cool ’70s cars, a reference to the iconic portrait of Joan Didion leaning against her Corvette Stingray taken by the photographer Julian Wasser in the 1960s. That the long knit dresses and skirts in the collection also seemed inspired by what Didion was wearing in the photo (and one could imagine easily belonging on her famous packing list), was a bonus. But then Philo’s spring 2015 campaign dropped with Didion herself as the star—photographed by Juergen Teller, no less—in a black fitted dress, a sculptural gold pendant hanging from her neck, and oversized black sunglasses, not smiling but not-not smiling, like a sphynx. Philo had long been our favorite thinking woman’s favorite thinking woman, but this campaign exalted her to another level. In 2022, a year after Didion passed away, the sunglasses sold at auction for $27,000.—Laia Garcia-Furtado

Vogue Runway Launches

Fifteen years after Style.com put fashion shows online, it went through a bit of a metamorphosis, pivoting to become an ecommerce site backed by FarFetch. But runway fans were not forgotten—in 2015 Vogue Runway launched with a rich archive of show images (over a million photos, actually), along with street style pics from fashion weeks around the world, and a very spicy ranking of the top 25 fashion shows of the 1990s. But you know about all that already, you’re here right now!—Laia Garcia-Furtado

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

Hood by Air Explodes

In 2006, Shayne Oliver launched Hood by Air alongside Raúl Lopez, and what began as logo’d screenprinted t-shirts, soon evolved into something bigger and more influential. HBA was as much about the lives lived in its clothes as the garments themselves; and was a sartorial representation of what it was like to be queer, young people of color living between worlds: the streets of Brooklyn, the art scene, clubs in downtown Manhattan and Williamsburg, vogue balls, the New York fashion community. After a brief hiatus, HBA returned with a full-fledged fashion show at Milk Studios, and it was one of the most hyped shows of the season, surpassing expectations with its mix of sportswear, tailoring, and experimental silhouettes shown on models of all genders—a rarity at the time. From that moment, it was off to the races: a Special Prize at the first edition of the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, fashion shows in Paris and in Florence at Pitti Uomo. Hood by Air would disband in 2017—with a one-off return in 2022—but its shows remain a high point in the history of New York Fashion.—Laia Garcia-Furtado

Stars Are Born: Next-Gen Supers Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner Debut on the Runway

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a decade since Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid debuted on the high fashion runways. In a not-so-distant past, before they were both covering Vogue, Jenner was taking catwalk lessons orchestrated by her sister Kim in Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and Hadid was the young aspiring model daughter of Yolanda in The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Together with Cara Delevingne, they jumpstarted the rise of the Instagram model, leading an entire generation of popular “Insta-Girls” off their social media grids and onto the runways. “I think they didn’t believe in me when I came into the industry,” Jenner told Vogue for a cover story in the magazine’s summer issue, which nodded at her 10th anniversary as a model. “That’s been a constant narrative in the hater world online, and at times that’s been really hard,” she continued, “but I always say, I like being a pleasant surprise.” One thing no one’s surprised about? Kendall and Gigi’s staying power.—José Criales-Unzueta

These Jeans Don’t Date

Not long after Vetements introduced its reworked vintage jeans I wrote a piece about the extravagance of $1,500 denim. It’s been lost to time—and a url that switched from style.com to voguerunway.com. In the 10 years since, price hikes across luxury fashion have made the shock I felt at the time feel almost quaint. But you know what hasn’t aged? The low-key cool of Vetements’ straight-legged, high-waisted pieced-together jeans.—Nicole Phelps

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

Virgil Abloh’s Off-White Changes the Game

“Streetwear has a one-trick-ponyness to it. I want to give my point of view and merge street sensibilities in a proper fashion context. I think that if I can merge the two, it’ll make something interesting.” That’s how Virgil Abloh pitched a new brand named Off-White in December 2013 as he announced its launch to Style.com.

Then aged 33, Abloh was at that point an insider’s insider at the emerging intersection of streetwear’s colloquial cool and fashion’s cultural cachet—an intersection he would soon come to define. The Illinois-born DJ and architecture student’s life-arc had changed when he met and clicked with Kanye West back in 2002. Abloh worked on many projects alongside West: in 2009 they attended the menswear shows Paris Fashion Week together and did an internship at Fendi. Shortly after Abloh started a venture named Pyrex Vision that applied collegiate lettering to upcycled Ralph Lauren and new blank t-shirts. However by 2012, shortly after Abloh had established Pyrex Vision as a company, the century-established glassware company also named Pyrex reached out to him to complain.

That snag coincided with a night at Club 79 in Paris, where Abloh regularly DJ’d. Also on the set list was the Italian promoter and DJ Marcelo Burlon, who Abloh had first met in Miami a few years previously. Abloh had been cooking up a sequel to Pyrex Vision named Off-White: he described the idea to Burlon, who had just begun developing his own brand County of Milan. The next week Abloh traveled to Italy and met Burlon and his partners Claudio Antoniole and Davide De Giglio: they struck an agreement to develop and produce Off-White from Milan.

The first collection dropped in 2014, and Abloh’s Off-White was a finalist in the LVMH Prize the following year. Off-White did not only blow up, it also radically altered the direction of that period’s fashion by doing exactly what Abloh had said he planned to: it merged sensibilities. As Amy Verner so perfectly observed of Abloh in the kicker for her fall 2015 review: “he’s two steps ahead of the zeitgeist, and the medium is his message.”—Luke Leitch

Kim Kardashian’s First Met Gala

Before Kim Kardashian was on the cover of Vogue in 2014 she was a first-time guest at the 2013 Met Gala. Then as now, she was dressed up to the nines— “because that’s what we do,” she recently told Vogue. Pregnant with her first child North West (who was born just over a month after this appearance), Kardashian wore a custom floral Givenchy gownby Riccardo Tisci. It was the most memed look in Met Gala history up to that point, starting a now treasured online tradition. Tisci, who was often ahead of the rest of the pack, was the first high fashion designer to embrace Kardashian. What did he know that his peers didn’t? The internet may still have been making Kardashian the butt of jokes at the time, but she certainly had the last laugh: Kim continues to be a regular at the Met Gala, with each of her looks provoking more chatter than the last.—José Criales-Unzueta

Pinterest Takes Moodboards Online

In the digital world, pixels are currency which is stored in “clouds.” Here on Earth, those wanting to tether, organize, and share pictures did so on Tumblr prior to the 2013 release of Pinterest, a moodboarders dream and fashion students’ best friend (for better or worse).  Bright and easy to use, Pinterest is a design-friendly site that now also acts as a trend forecaster. “Fashion should stop and recognize how well equipped it is to deal with the triumph of image over word,” said Pinterest co-founder Even Sharp when Vogue visited Silicon Valley in 2016.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

A Tour de Force Dior Debut From Raf Simons

Raf Simons’s Christian Dior haute couture debut is up there in the pantheon of runway shows. The Belgian designer was coming off a string of subtly sensational Jil Sander collections in Milan, a “couture trilogy” that clearly announced his ambitions and his design acumen, but Dior was in another league. Anticipation was high on the Avenue Montaigne on the day of this show, a quality that was only accentuated by the million or so fresh flowers that decorated the walls of the Dior headquarters and the crush of star designers in the front row, Azzedine Alaia, Alber Elbaz, Marc Jacobs, and Donatella Versace included. Simons’s collection itself was a tour de force, balancing “reverence and iconoclasm” as Tim Blanks argued in his review, and rendering the decades-old bar silhouette both modern and desirable. I can think of few other couture outings of the last quarter century that so informed the shape of fashion moving forward.—Nicole Phelps

When Angelina Jolie Put Her Best Leg Forward at the Oscars

Not every dress gets its own Wikipedia page, but Angelina Jolie’s leggy commitment to her über high slit certainly earned this black velvet Versace gown its place in the pop-culture hall of fame. It was around this time that we started seeing style moments transcend fashion to become viral memes. If this wasn’t the first, it was one of the most memorable.—José Criales-Unzueta

Anthony Vaccarello and the Origins of Naked Dressing

It’s a fact that Angelina Jolie made the single, bare-naked leg stance famous—and meme-able—at the 2012 Academy Awards, launching the trend for “naked” dressing. But it’s also true that months before, an even more daring example of this posture was seen on the runway of a young Belgian designer named Anthony Vaccarello, who used his ANDAM Prize money to put on a spring 2012 show. The designer put his barely-there dress—an exemplar of the type—on Karlie legs-for-miles Kloss. Vaccarello had been inspired by Herb Ritts’s sunlit photos of bodycon 1990s looks on the Supers, and he understood how a new generation of women wanted to dress. “All the models called up, asking to be in the show,” he told Vogue. “For fashion followers, there’s nothing sexier than a designer with a strong vision,” was Nicole Phelps’s summation. It’s taken Vaccarello far indeed.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

When Screen Villains Walked for Prada

One of the best examples of bad meaning good is Prada’s unforgettable fall 2012 menswear show featuring actors who had played on-screen villains, including Dracula’s Gary Oldham. So successful was the show that it has been the subject of odes and explainers in the decade-plus since. Whether the nuances of that “parody of male power” were absorbed or taken at face value is up for debate. In any case, celebrity trumps subtlety on Instagram, and the brand staged a sort of made-to-meme sequel 10 years later, for fall 2022.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

Fashion Hops on Instagram

According to my Instagram app, I joined the platform in November of 2012. I remember it well: I was in high-school and had noticed online friends drifting away from tumblr—may it rest in peace—towards other social media platforms. There was Twitter, though fashion folk never quite got good at it, and there was Blackberry Messenger, which younger Millennials were using like nobody’s business.

Instagram launched in October of 2010, but in its early days it was a platform reminiscent of Flickr, mostly used by photographers to share their work. Its mainstream-ification came with the popular adoption of the iPhone and its powerful camera. And the year 2012 was the tipping point. That’s when Anna Dello Russo, Suzy Menkes, Tommy Ton, and The Sartorialist Scott Schuman all joined. That year, my first-ever post was some highly filtered picture of my breakfast. The second? A snap of a highly annotated issue of Vogue, full of tiny rainbow post-its poking out. The writing was on the wall, as they say.—José Criales-Unzueta

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

The RealReal Launches and Online Resale Gets Real

In 2011, Julie Wainwright founded TheRealReal, a website that brought the classic consignment shop concept to the internet. Fashion fanatics had long been using eBay and Vestiaire Collective (launched in 2009) to buy and sell hard-to-find designer wares, but it was The RealReal that brought the concept fully into the mainstream. Originally The RealReal was a members-only site with a focus on the San Francisco Bay Area, where Wainwright was based at the time. By 2016, the New York Times had declared a new “Age of Consignment,” spurred not just by the proliferation of resale websites, but also the Marie Kondo-inspired furor over decluttering your living spaces, and the fact that, with the rise of social media, fashion fandom was no longer a niche interest. In 2019, The RealReal went public, the same year that Chanel sued the company, accusing it of selling counterfeit goods and misleading the public on their affiliation with the French luxury giant. Other brands embraced the new trends, collaborating with The RealReal (and other popular websites) on curated sales, or otherwise launching their own archive sales.—Laia Garcia-Furtado

“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” the Met Show That Set a New Bar

As curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Andrew Bolton has had too many hit exhibitions to count with one hand. But before he was running the show, back in 2011, Bolton co-curated one of the Costume Institute’s most successful stagings and what is undeniably one of the most famous fashion museum presentations of all time: “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” which opened on May 4, 2011.

It’s easy to understand why “Savage Beauty” became the new bar for the Met and fashion museum shows moving forward. Its run-time had to be extended for a week due its popularity, people lined up Fifth Avenue for hours to see it, and the museum started offering a special ticket to view it on Mondays, when it’s usually closed. The museum accumulated 20,000 new memberships during the show’s run, and stayed open until midnight during its final weekend for the first time in its history. By the time the exhibit closed, over 650,000 people had seen it.

There was, of course, a curiosity about the world of the late Lee McQueen, who had come to epitomize the grandeur and spectacle of fashion in the 2000s and was closely associated with cultural icons like Lady Gaga. But it also happened that the show was simply fantastic. “Even if you never bother with fashion shows, go to this one,” wrote Judith Thurman of The New Yorker. And go they did.—José Criales-Unzueta

Meet the Cambridges: The Most-Viral Wedding of the Century, Before Viral Was a Thing

I remember waking up at around 4:30 in the morning on April 11, 2011 to watch Catherine Middleton marry Prince William. The soon-to-be Cambridges, now Waleses, had captivated the entire world with their upcoming nuptials, but it was the fashion angle I was most interested in. Middleton and Sarah Burton, as we’d come to find out, had successfully kept what then felt like the best-guarded secret in fashion. The Princess-to-be’s dreamy Alexander McQueen gown reverberated through the world as the epitome of a fairytale come to life.

“That such a feat of appropriateness should have been accomplished in intensely secret conditions—and continually denied by the designer—is in itself incredible in a world of Internet gossip, iPhone photos, and instant communication,” wrote Sarah Mower at the time. “More important,” she continued, “it was the symbolism of a partnership in which the individual wishes of a young woman have been expressed and enabled by another young woman of vast talent whose understanding of fashion’s role in serving, and underlining, this historic moment is nonpareil.”—José Criales-Unzueta

The Isabel Marant Bekett Sneaker: Fashion’s First Hybrid Shoe

Before the Balenciaga Croc heels, there was another ugly shoe that became a mainstream phenomenon. The Bekett, a wedge/sneaker hybrid introduced by the French designer Isabel Marant in 2011, was a rare creature—a plush suede calfskin velcro trainer with an ultra-padded tongue and a two-inch internal wedge. It was an immediate success with supermodels like Gisele Bündchen, Irina Shayk, and Miranda Kerr adopting the style as an official part of their off-duty uniform. Hollywood soon caught on: Kerry Washington announced the starting lineup at Dodger Stadium in a black pair, and Beyoncé even wore a glimmering gold version in her “Love on Top” music video.

The sneaker was everywhere, thanks to the many, many dupes designed to cash in on its success, yet it eventually fell out of style a few years later. Flash forward to 2024, though, and the Bekett is enjoying a renaissance following a recent style revamp by the Marant, and a new generation of fashion fans claiming their love for this now-classic.—Irene Kim

How Jenna Lyons Zhuzhed up J.Crew

I’ve always thought of Jenna Lyons’s J. Crew as the lovechild of The Official Preppy Handbook and Carrie Bradshaw. This success story was largely built around the concepts of styling, accessorizing, and strategic alignments. In the Lyons era, you could get a pencil skirt in khaki or a lamé jacquard, while the addition of a tiny garden of sparkling brooches made a traditional school boy blazer look spectacular. She advocated for sequins for day and metallics as new neutrals. Success built upon success—suddenly this mainstream purveyor of Ivy style had a boutique-like appeal that others wanted in on, and many a collaboration was born. Lyons zhuzhed American fashion with flair.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis Was the First Fashion Show to Break the Internet

Helmut Lang has long been credited as the first designer to show a collection on the internet, but Lee Alexander McQueen was the first one to break it.

Titled Plato’s Atlantis after the fictional island that appears in his works Timaeus and Critias, McQueen’s spring 2010 collection is famous for three things: First, it was his last collection presented while he was alive. Second, this is the show where the extraterrestrial Armadillo boots Lady Gaga wears in her “Bad Romance” music video debuted. And third, it was the first show to be streamed live on Nick Knight’s Show Studio platform—the hook being that Gaga would release “Bad Romance,” the song, during the show. Her fans—this writer included—clicked the link so many times we broke it.

Plato’s Atlantis was home to a utopian civilization. With its biomorphic silhouettes and pixelized fish scale textiles, this collection imagined a better future by looking to the past and leveraging technology. McQueen often celebrated the natural world in his work, either by utilizing its materials and textures or by emphasizing its wild and unyielding nature. Wild and unyielding is a proper description of Lee McQueen, who remains one of fashion’s truest and most sincere iconoclasts. as Sarah Mower wrote in her review of the show, he was also at “the leading edge of change.”—José Criales-Unzueta

Phoebe Philo Debuts at Celine, Changes Womenswear Forever

Phoebe Philo had been off the scene for a few years. Before she stepped down to focus on her growing family, she had injected Chloé with a fun, flirty, and ultra-feminine aesthetic that was still dominating women’s wardrobes. Everyone was walking around in babydoll dresses and chunky wooden platforms like a modern flower child. Now she was back at a different French maison also founded by a woman—would she pick up where she left off or introduce something completely different? It was a new vision, of course; not only for Philo, but for womenswear in general. At her first runway show for the brand, she established many of the signatures that are still influencing the way we dress today: sleek leather separates, updates on the classic white blouse, the perfect work pants. Above all, the clothes were grounded by the fact that they were utterly practical, which only made them more desirable.—Laia Garcia-Furtado

Mr. Ford Returns

“Mr. Ford Returns,” announced a spread in Vogue’s December 2010 issue, written by Sarah Mower. The magazine piece offered a first look at Tom Ford’s spring 2011 collection, which marked the designer’s runway comeback after he parted ways with Kering (then Gucci Group) in 2004. The story starred Joan Smalls, Karen Elson, and Amber Valletta, in looks from his women’s ready-to-wear debut.

For that September 2010 show, Ford put on an exclusive, extremely intimate affair at his store on Madison Avenue, and didn’t release any photos. He’d always been famous for starry front rows, but this time the celebrities were on the runway. Beyoncé, Stella Tennant, Karlie Kloss, and Julianne Moore, his close friend and the lead of his debut film A Single Man, dropped everything and modeled for him. Click here to revisit the story written by Sarah Mower and photographed by Steven Meisel.—José Criales-Unzueta

How the Rise of Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Picciolo at Valentino Changed Fashion Recruitment

That the industry has created a designer star system doesn’t negate the fact that fashion is a collective endeavor. Very few creative directors are threading needles or wearing thimbles on their thumbs every day. (As has been the case for a long time, by the way; Coco Chanel once called out Cristóbal Balenciaga as the only designer in their cohort who could construct a garment from start to finish).

With the conglomeratization of the industry in the late 1990s came a new play book, one that attached marquee names to heritage houses. This kind of recruitment started to change in the late ’00s, notably when the Valentino alums Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccoli were promoted from within and  made a success of it. Already steeped in the house codes, they were able to riff on them in a way that felt new, yet connected to what the house stood for. Once MGC and PPP made Valentino a hit, in-house hires became a trusted way of doing things. In the years after their appointment, Olivier Rousteing was elevated at Balmain and Alessandro Michele rose at Gucci. Most recently Julian Klausner, a member of Dries Van Noten’s design team, took over for the house founder.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

Model Watch: Introducing Lea T, One of Fashion’s Trans Pioneers

It was in 2010 that Riccardo Tisci cast the Brazilian model Lea T, who had until then been his friend and personal assistant, as the star of his Givenchy campaign. Here’s how it happened, according to Tisci himself:

“When Lea told her family [she wanted to have gender reassignment surgery], their reaction was not so good. So she called me one day at six in the morning, and she was destroyed. Destroyed. And she said, ‘I want to prostitute myself. I want to go to the street because I don’t have money to do [the operation]. The fact that she told me that she wanted to be a prostitute, it killed me. I decided to do the campaign for two reasons. To help Lea financially, and because who says that a transsexual cannot be a top model?”

There had been the likes of Connie Fleming—a famous Mugler muse—and Tracey Africa before her, but Lea brought trans visibility to the forefront at a time when fashion, and particularly modeling, were at a low point diversity-wise.—José Criales-Unzueta

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

The September Issue Opens the Gates at Vogue

Despite Carrie Bradshaw’s forays, the inner workings of Vogue remained largely a mystery in 2009. But that all changed with the release of the documentary The September Issue, which gave director RJ Cutler unprecedented access to Vogue’s Time Square offices and beyond as the September 2007 issue came together. The movie had everything: There were funny dramatic pronouncements about fashion (Grace Coddington’s “Those poor goddamn Rodartes” when one of their looks gets killed for a photoshoot, and André Leon Talley’s “It’s a famine of beauty!” are endlessly quotable). There were whispers far from the boss’s ear (relatable). And there were, of course, beautiful clothes. On opening weekend I went to see it by myself; I had been in the city for three years and the idea that I would ever one day work at Vogue seemed too insane to ever entertain, but now I can say that the movie’s mix of trembling tension and ridiculously funny moments, and all the fashion! fashion! fashion! is indeed 100% real.—Laia Garcia-Furtado

“Bad Romance” Makes Lady Gaga A Fashion Star

It’s impossible to look back at the past decade or so in fashion without considering the impact of Lady Gaga as a performer and clothes obsessive. Stefani Germanotta came out swinging with “Poker Face,” “Just Dance,” and “Paparazzi”—a trilogy of singles that announced her arrival—but it was “Bad Romance” and its accompanying video that cemented Gaga as a budding fashion icon.

“Bad Romance” was the lead single of The Fame Monster, Gaga’s follow up to her debut album The Fame. The song was released in October 2009 at Alexander McQueen’s spring 2010 show; the video, which followed in November, was directed by Francis Lawrence with styling by Nicola Formichetti, and is still one of Gaga’s most spectacular. The premise is Gaga gets kidnapped by a group of supermodels that drug her and plan to sell her to the Russian mafia at a bathhouse. You likely remember her wearing McQueen’s infamous Armadillo shoes, which had just debuted on the runway, though Gaga wears three full looks from the same collection. Her two-piece latex ensemble was made by emerging designer Rachael Barrett for her 2009 graduate collection, and that outlandish faux polar bear coat hailed from Benjamin Cho’s spring 2005 collection. Her soon-to-become signature pyro bra was made by Tom Talmon Studios. Who else was doing it like her? Well, no need to be rhetorical. The answer is: No one.—José Criales-Unzueta

Tommy Ton Captures the Vibe Shift

It was in early 2009 that Tommy Ton, proto-fashion blogger, street style photographer extraordinaire, and former Style.com contributor, photographed the late Virgil Abloh and Kanye West with their friend group outside the Comme des Garçons show in Paris. This was before Abloh changed fashion, first with the launch of Off-White and then with his appointment at Louis Vuitton menswear. Still, the image was shared so widely that West was featured in an episode of South Park that mocked his style in the photo. The image was taken to capture West, but the reason why it resonates today is because it captures the moment right before Abloh’s decade-long moment.

“Some may think that this is the ultimate street style peacocking image,” Ton told Vogue a few years ago. “But this was actually before street style had become such a phenomenon, and you could really see how much Kanye loved fashion and clothes, and Virgil did too.” So how exactly did Ton make it happen? “I saw Kanye and his posse walk from their car towards us and there was no paparazzi. They saw me and the one other photographer there and just stopped to assemble in formation in front of us. They were all so cool and chill about it and I was more than happy to document this moment.”—José Criales-Unzueta

Dolce & Gabbana Seats the Bloggers Front Row

“It was very splashy of Dolce,” recalled Garance Dore afterwards. In September 2009 Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana sparked something of a ruckus by inviting four pioneering self-employed digital fashion journalists—or “bloggers” as they were called back then—to sit on the front rows of both of their shows for the spring 2010 season.

At the first show, for a denim-defined D&G collection, Dore was seated alongside Scott Schuman, Bryan Boy, and Tommy Ton. Production staff had set up four laptops in front of the quartet. At the second mainline show the new media new faces were spread out a little more.

Afterwards, Stefano Gabbana would recall: “We know about the power of the bloggers because they talk with different people. It’s so important, the point of view of the new generation… I remember it was a shock: very new and very brave, but sometimes people need to start a change.” Dolce & Gabbana had been streaming—aka “webcasting”—its shows live online since 2005, and barely anyone in the mediasphere had taken note. This, however, they really noticed. “Bloggers Crash Fashion’s Front Row,” screamed the headline in the New York Times.

Who sits where at fashion shows is a tangible indication of status. Dolce & Gabbana’s declarative statement about the status of the “bloggers” that season seriously rattled some in a fashion industry that was already spooked by the chill winds of recession. Even the bloggers themselves later confessed themselves to have been various levels of uneasy at their very public promotion (not to mention the prop laptops). Fifteen years on, however, influencers regularly outnumber editors on the front rows. And nobody uses the phrase “new media” anymore, while “legacy media” has become the diplomatic way of terming anything involving paper and ink. Dolce & Gabbana was doing exactly what fashion brands should be doing: anticipating the shape of tomorrow, and then manifesting it today.—Luke Leitch

The Shows of the Year

Most-Memorable Red Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

Michelle Obama—First Lady, Fashion Icon

There was never a chance that what Michelle Obama wore—as a potential first lady and then beyond—would not be scrutinized or analyzed. But perhaps what we couldn’t have imagined was how far-reaching her influence would be. Lucky for us, she had taste and she knew exactly what to do with her newfound attention—thanks in part to the fact that she was working with Ikram Goldman, owner of the chic Chicago boutique that bears her name. It all began with an appearance on late night a few months before the election. “The first thing Jay Leno is going to ask you is ‘what are you wearing?’ And you’re going to say J.Crew,” Ikram recalled in an interview. “[Michelle] says, ‘He’s not going to ask me that.’ And then, the first thing he asked her was, ‘What are you wearing?’”

And thus began Mrs. Obama’s fashion era, which both reflected the style of working American Women (J.Crew, Talbots, Ann Taylor), and also introduced the world to American designers. On election night, she wore a black and red shift dress by Narciso Rodriguez; at the inauguration, a lemon-citron dress and matching jacket in an exquisite jacquard fabric by Isabel Toledo; and later that evening, at the ball, a delicately draped and embroidered dress with an asymmetrical neckline by Jason Wu. Although Mrs. Obama would always emphasize that she dressed for comfort first and foremost, she understood the big picture as well. “My first reaction [when I try something on] isn’t ‘Who made this?’ But ‘Let’s try it on. What does it look like? Oooh, that’s cute,” she said in an interview in 2016. “There are definitely designers that I love, people I love to work with. And who they are as people matters. Are they good people? Do they treat their staff well? Do they treat my staff well? Are they young? Can I give them a boost? But! When all of that is equal . . . is it cute?!’”—Laia Garcia-Furtado

Credit Crunches Fashion

When what had started in the US as a real estate bubble finally popped in September 2008, it signaled a global financial crash on a scale not seen since 1929. As liquidity dried up and sales slumped, businesses and designers scrambled to adapt as best they could. Looking back now, the figures do not perhaps sound especially catastrophic: luxury sales were assessed as shrinking 9% in 2009. Menswear took a slightly higher hit, declining by 12% in the same period. However the effects were significant and long-lasting.

What sales there were would, in part, be fueled by the extreme discounts that hard-pressed wholesale retailers applied to the inventory they were sitting on. Apart from closing stores, cutting jobs, or declaring bankruptcy—which many also did—these fire sales were amongst the very few options open to retailers looking to navigate the crisis. This had a long-term effect in making customers extremely reluctant to pay full price as the wider economic outlook gradually brightened.

Casualties included Christain Lacroix, which closed in May 2009. Yet this was also a period of renewal in which the seeds of future growth were sewn. Thom Browne presented his first show in Europe that same year, while Louis Vuitton’s new sneaker, co-designed by Kanye West, was one of the earliest luxury manifestations of what would eventually be christened “streetwear.” Another long-term shift augured by 2008’s financial collapse was the global luxury industry’s increased focus on servicing China’s emerging middle classes. This shift would help fuel the next cycle of growth.—Luke Leitch

Model Watch: Introducing Karlie Kloss

There hasn’t been a model ascent in the past two decades as meteoric as Karlie Kloss’s. But the way Kloss evolved from a complete unknown on the Calvin Klein runway in 2008, to a John Galliano muse and Victoria’s Secret Angel, to the media mogul she is today as an owner of i-D and Life magazines is a tale equal to those of the supermodels that came before her.

After taking over the runways Kloss had her own cameo role on Gossip Girl in 2010, and co-hosted the revival of MTV’s House of Style in 2012 (picking up a mantle once held by OG super Cindy Crawford), eventually becoming the host of Project Runway in 2018. Meanwhile, she had enrolled at New York University like another OG Super, Christy Turlington, and went on to launch “Kode with Klossy,” an initiative to promote teaching girls about computer science with support from Estée Lauder, where she had a contract.

By adapting the old school Supermodel formula to today, she’s become a role model for all the would-be Supers that arrived after her: Kendall, Gigi, and Bella, et al. Would Gigi, for example, have become the host of Next in Fashion had Karlie not made Project Runway her own first?—Ignacio Murillo and José Criales-Unzueta

Reed Krakoff Makes Over Coach

In 1996, Reed Krakoff was hired as creative director at Coach and tasked with turning the beloved American leather goods company into a maker of bags that would signal desire instead of just practicality. Krakoff redesigned and introduced new bag styles that appealed to a younger generation, one with high-end luxury tastes without the high-end budgets. He opened Coach flagship stores on 57th and Madison and on Rodeo Drive, and introduced a group of ready-to-wear pieces—leather pants and coats, t-shirts, and trench coats—that “related” to his new handbag styles, as he told the New York Times. Its success gave rise to the idea of “accessible luxury.” By 2008, the Coachrenaissance was in full swing, with the brand reporting revenues of $3.18 billion (they were reported at $500 million when Krakoff first took over); and Krakoff’s various bonuses were said to make it so that he earned more than twice CEO Lew Frankfort’s own salary. By 2010 he had raised Coach’s—along with his own—profile so far, that with the company investments he launched his own namesake label.—Laia Garcia-Furtado

Victoria Beckham Brings Her Star Power to Fashion

By the time Victoria Beckham launched her label for spring 2009, we were already used to celebrity labels. Jennifer Lopez and Gwen Stefani had given us Sweetface and L.A.M.B., respectively, but where Beckham’s boldface predecessors focused on the flash of runway shows and clothes for the shopping masses, the former Spice Girl turned her perfectionist streak to high fashion, launching with a carefully considered collection of 15 hourglassy dresses. And she was savvy about the roll-out, inviting editors to one-on-one meetings in a private suite of the Waldorf Astoria, where she subtly wowed us with not just her fame but her commitment to the tiniest details. I can’t say for sure that she foresaw a circa 2025 future that included a documentary film about the making of a Victoria Beckham runway show, but even then, she was thinking long-term. “This has been a lifetime in the making,” she told me. “I don’t want to make dresses that will date. I’ve always been about clever buying.”—Nicole Phelps

Long May He Reign: A Documentary Casts Valentino Garanavi as the “Last Emperor” of Fashion

Matt Tyrnauer struck gold with Valentino: The Last Emperor, a documentary that captures so much more than the making of the couturier’s final collection. Much like a dress is completed by a body, a biopic needs a central character who delivers—and Valentino Garavani doesn’t disappoint. Nor does Giancarlo Giammetti, the designer’s business and one-time lifetime partner. The two share a bond as unbreakable as Garavani’s fastidious commitment to glamour, good taste, and his signature red. As easily as a model dons a dress, Valentino adopted a to-the-manor-born manner. The director lingers on the designer’s lavish, jet-set lifestyle—his pack of pugs, rich upholstery, invisible and efficient butlers, and multiple residences, serving up a sort of time capsule of high life as it was enjoyed by the titled and idle rich from the 1950s through the ’80s in Rome, Paris, New York, MonteCarlo, Geneva, and Gstaad. Tynauer gives us glimpses of the man behind the persona, and definitively holds up Garavani as a symbol of success, a man who represents the fashion dream fulfilled and offers proof of the verity of the old saying that living well is the best revenge.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

The Shows of the Year

Most-Memorable Red Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

Mad Men, Gossip Girl, and Keeping Up With the Kardashians—The Year TV Took Over Fashion

Picture it: It’s 2007 and you switch on the TV. You tune into E! and learn that Paris Hilton’s former assistant, Kimberly Kardashian, is now part of a new reality TV show about her family, aptly titled Keeping Up with the Kardashians—though half of her family uses the Jenner name after her mother, Kris, married Caitlyn Jenner (then Bruce Jenner). You switch to AMC and find a broody but utterly sexy antihero in Jon Hamm’s Don Draper, who is chain smoking Lucky Strikes in a three-piece suit at his fictional Madison Avenue advertising agency, as in Mad Men. As the latest episode wraps—because why would you ever turn off Mad Men?—you move to The CW to see if the teen drama Gossip Girl, promoted as “every parent’s nightmare,” lives up to the marketing hype. You discover then-ingénues Leighton Meester and Blake Lively as Upper East Side frenemies Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen; the former dressed as a true Park Avenue princess and the latter as the embodiment of boho-chic.

What a time to be alive, no? We’ve discussed how Sex and the City embedded itself within the industry and the way The Devil Wears Prada pulled back the curtains to reveal the goings on in luxury fashion. What the simultaneous release of these three soon-to-become gargantuan TV shows did a few years later was shift the conversation around fashion in TV away from designers to focus on style.

Not that designers didn’t try to get in on the action. Michael Kors’s fall 2008 show was directly inspired by Mad Men, which set forth a smoky, sex-fueled, irresistible version of the 1960s. And, yes, Gossip Girl eventually featured cameos by fashion folks from Hamish Bowles to Vera Wang, but at its core it was a show about young women—how they dressed and how their personal style was representative of their identity: Serena’s messiness represented by long, beachy waves and frilly, boho dresses, and Blair’s prim severity by her Peter Pan-collars and A-line shifts. And let’s not even talk about what this show did to school uniforms. You think it was every parent’s nightmare? Try high-school teachers.

And must we elaborate on the effect of Keeping Up With the Kardashians? From launching Kim as the proto-influencer to Kendall’s rise as one of fashion’s highest-paid models to Kylie’s reign as a beauty mogul, fashion has simply never been the same.—José Criales-Unzueta

Henry Holland and the London Renaissance

In the mid-aughts the British fashion scene exploded. Designers like Richard Nicoll, Jonathan Saunders, Preen’s Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi, Roksanda Ilincic, Christopher Kane, Gareth Pugh, and Giles Deacon turned around a sleepy fashion week, each with a singular point of view but unified by the strength of conviction. Then came Henry Holland, a young fashion editor at Bliss, a teen magazine, who on a whim, whipped up some slogan tees with naughty rhymes that declared his love for many of London’s creatives—DO ME DAILY CHRISTOPHER BAILEY, GIVE US A TICKLE RICHARD NICOLL etc. The “fashion groupie” t-shirts, as they were dubbed, went viral before we said things “went viral” when Agyness Deyn, the it-model of the era, was spotted in the tee. (Deyn and Holland were childhood friends.) At the spring 2007 collections, Pugh and Deacon (pictured) took their post-show bows in complementary t-shirts, further igniting their IYKYK popularity. The success of the tees allowed Holland to launch House of Holland, a ready-to-wear label where he was able to expand his playful aesthetic into a full wardrobe. At the end of his first proper collection, Holland took a bow wearing a t-shirt that bore the slogan ONE TRICK PONY.—Laia Garcia-Furtado

Swipe Might: The iPhone Takes Over

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” This is how Steve Jobs (in Issey Miyake) prefaced his presentation of the new iPhone in January 2007. He wasn’t overselling it. The iPhone’s game-changing touchscreen template for a computer/iPod/phone in your pocket did indeed change everything—and fashion was no exception.

That change, however, was gradual. Not only did it take a while for fashion to break its BlackBerry habit—and stop hankering after luxury collab phones like the groundbreaking but long-forgotten LG Prada—but the iPhone also needed several upgrades and several cycles of uptake before it truly took over. Style.com unveiled its first iOS app in September 2008, however the camera built into the phone was still pretty rustic: back then most people (me included) used cameras to take reliable runway shots.

Fashion’s mass migration to the iPhone was most visibly initiated by Apple Store VIC Karl Lagerfeld—he liked to give the devices away at fittings. By the time Elie Tahari presented his iPhone dress in 2015 (although he frustratingly kept it out of his lookbook), the iPhone (and to a lesser extent Android smartphones) had affected fashion in multiple ways via multiple functionalities.

Burberry had already recorded a show entirely via iPhone, the same year its CEO switched employers to Apple. Most showgoing photographers (at least the non-pros) and note takers had retired their cameras, laptops, and notepads in favor of the devices. It freed bloggers to blossom into influencers. The iPhone also became an increasingly influential hardware portal for luxury e-commerce, and through phone cases and other tech accessories even became the basis of a new category of luxury.

So will the iPhone (and its many non-Apple smartphone equivalents) ever be dethroned as our do-it-all personal device of choice? Earlier iterations may have failed to launch, but there are increasingly convincing options out there. For now, however, the iPhone age continues.—Luke Leitch

Model Watch: Jourdan Dunn Breaks the Mold

When Jourdan Dunn stepped on the Prada fall 2008 runway, she would become the first Black model in over a decade to do so, the last having been Naomi Campbell. Dunn was the only one at that show, and, as it happens, on many other runways that season.

The London-born Dunn was scouted when she was 15 at a Primark in her hometown. She was 16 when she first walked international runways, quickly becoming a model of the moment and breaking the mold set a few years before her with the rise of the “Eastern Bloc,” as we’ve mentioned earlier in this time machine. “I find it weird when agents say, ‘You’re the only Black girl booked for the show. Isn’t it great?’” Dunn told Miss Vogue when she covered the second issue of the glossy in 2014. “Why is it great?” she continued. “I don’t know why people applaud designers for having just one ‘ethnic’ model. It’s not like only one type of woman loves fashion.” Together with Chanel Iman, who debuted around the same time and with whom she shared a Teen Vogue cover in 2009, Dunn was the beginning of a new dawn on the runways.—Ignacio Murillo and José Criales-Unzueta

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

“I Want Candy!” In 2006, Fashion Fell for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette

Sofia Coppola became the patron saint of the teenage girl experience with the release of her debut film The Virgin Suicides in 1999, and in 2006 she doubled-down with Marie Antoinette. Starring Kirsten Dunst, the film focused on the fact Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna, as she was born, was just a 14-year-old girl when she arrived at Versailles to marry Louis XVI, the future king of France. But Coppola didn’t set out to make a movie bound to accuracy and historical reenactments; rather she injected her movie with feelings—the one driving force behind every teenager ever.

Saturated pastel colors filled the screen, and every single scene recalled an extravagance of one kind or another: towers of pastries and macarons (Ladurée, setting off a frenzy), lavishly embellished fabrics and floral arrangements (the latter courtesy of Thierry Boutemy, a favorite of Dries Van Noten), sunlight washed scenes and greener-than-green grass. And that’s before we even get to the fashion, with which costume designer Milena Canonero created a fantasy built for, well, a queen, with opulent dresses, a dream wardrobe of custom Manolo Blahnik shoes (“I thought Marie would’ve ordered her shoes from Manolo Blahnik if she was around today. He was our first and only option to design them,” Coppola once told Vogue); and $4 million worth of diamonds and jewelry courtesy of Fred Leighton.

Coppola’s clever mix of the historical, the modern (a memorable scene features a pair of pastel colored Converse sneakers in the background), and her trademark vibes-based approach means the film was basically catnip for the fashion industry—Anna Sui and Jeremy Scott, who was creative director at Moschino at the time—both cited it as inspirations for their collections, while Vogue commissioned a who’s who of designers including John Galliano and Alexander McQueen to create custom dresses for the September 2006 issue starring Dunst. Though the movie didn’t receive rave reviews at the time; in the years since, it has gained cult-status and its influence is wide ranging. Think about it, would Bridgerton exist without it?—Laia Garcia-Furtado

“A Million Girls Would Kill for This Job:” The Devil Wears Prada Births a New Generation of Fashionistas

In London this month, playwright Kate Wetherhead and composer Elton John premiered The Devil Wears Prada, a musical based on the 2003 novel of the same name by former Vogue staffer Lauren Weisberger, which, of course, inspired the famous film, also of the same name, depicting the trials and tribulations of an executive assistant (Anne Hathaway) at a fashion magazine ruled with an elegant hauteur by editor in chief Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). In real life, Weisberger was briefly Anna Wintour’s assistant. Wintour attended the movie’s 2006 premiere in Prada, naturally. She did the same thing in London on December 1. And presumably she’ll wear it again when the sequel, which has been confirmed, is released.

The true impact of The Devil Wears Prada the movie is not its hilarious depiction of the ins and outs of working at a fashion magazine, not the infamous—and quite accurate—“Cerulean blue” monologue, and not any of Emily Blunt’s quotable lines. Its real legacy is the generation of fashionistas it produced, this writer included.

I was 10 years old when this movie came out. I loved fashion in the context of celebrity, and loved designers in the context of the red carpet. I knew of Vogue as a sort of mythological publication, but lived in a country where the magazine was simply not sold or available. The movie contextualized my aspirations—all of a sudden I knew who made fashion magazines happen, and that, beyond the glitz and chaos, it was a real career. I watched the movie countless times, and made my mom watch it with me. She still texts me whenever she sees it, and I text her when I do. Here I am almost 3 years into my own Vogue job, and I still watch the movie every time I’m on a plane. Once a fan, always a fan.—José Criales-Unzueta

Christophe Decarnin Brings Sexy Back at Balmain

Between 2006 and 2011, Christophe Decarnin burned as fast and bright as a comet at Balmain. His spectacular, sparkly journey launched the phenomenon of Balmainia, and changed fashion by challenging the tenets of good taste associated with a maison known for dressing the “jolie madame,” and with luxury more broadly. His Balmain was wildly expensive, but washed and distressed to have a lived-in look, although the craftsmanship was immaculate. “Everythng has to have that casual couture spirit,” he told Vogue. In Decarnin’s world glitz and grunge sat side-by-side, hems were micro mini, shoulders sharply peaked—and they set a trend that swept across fashion. For his Balmain women, freedom was an ideal, and from the looks of it, so was a liberated sexuality. His were clothes that invited you to abandon yourself to desire.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

Model Watch: After the Brazilian Invasion Came “the Eastern Bloc”

One of the most era-defining modeling trends of the last 25 years was the arrival of the “Eastern Bloc.” Eastern Europe had opened to the West in the 1990s, and the fashion world, always eager for newness, began scouting fresh faces. First came Karolina Kurková in the late ’90s, with Carmen Kass and Natasha Poly trailing close behind. Kurková’s first Vogue cover was for the February 2001 issue photographed by Steven Meisel. She had debuted on Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu runway with an exclusive contract, but became a mainstream sensation as a Victoria’s Secret Angel starting in 2000 at the age of 16. Kass first tried her hand at modeling at 14 after being discovered at a supermarket in her native Estonia; it was Karl Lagerfeld who gave her her big break at Chanel. Poly’s own breakout came in 2004, when she moved to Europe after starting her career in her home country of Russia.

It wasn’t only their looks—blonde hair, blue eyes, high foreheads, petite frames—they had in common, but their stories. These women all came from close to nothing. Before becoming one of the most recognizable faces of the 2000s, Natalia Vodianova operated a fruit stand in the streets of Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia, while Kass lived in a one-bedroom apartment with her parents, brother, and sister, and her mom worked three jobs: “She taught us everything…when anyone rang the doorbell she would put all these pillow around us kids and give us knives,” she told Vanity Fair in 2005. “You can see it in their expressions, they don’t have the cheeky cool of a British Kate Moss, the corn-fed simplicity of an American Cindy Crawford, or the fun-loving Brazilian Gisele thing,” wrote Evgenia Peretz. “They exude, rather, a certain seriousness and toughness, even when they’re smiling.” DNA Models president David Bonnouvrier added: “They are survivors. There’s a difference between a Natalia and a Carolyn Murphy, who grew up with cable TV.”

Some of these women are still modeling, but over the years their peak has come to be remembered as a period of sameness. The dominant look of their time was white, thin, and blonde. It would take until the end of the decade to change that.—Ignacio Murillo and José Criales-Unzueta

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

Kate Moss, Sienna Miller Launch a Bohemian Rhapsody

Sienna Miller stomping around Notting Hill in fringed suede pirate boots and a frilly dress. Kate Moss stomping through the Glastonbury Music Festival wearing a tiny tailored vest with micro shorts and not much else. “Boho-chic” got its start off the runways, but high fashion soon caught on—as Phoebe Philo’s iconic spring 2005 Chloé show, with its frilly frocks and wooden clogs, made abundantly clear.

“It was all done with an irreverence that I miss,” Miller said when we spoke earlier this year for a story in the magazine’s Summer issue about the return of the aesthetic she first popularized 20 years ago. “We weren’t self-conscious in the way people are now­, and obviously this was pre-social media: It was easier to be an individual.” Boho-chic was defined by its fabulous and lighthanded mixing of bohemian elements (lots of frills and flounces) with signifiers of true luxury like proper It-bags and good jewelry. But it was, above all, about a freewheeling and irreverent vibe. As most things are in fashion, it was a reaction: “I don’t know that I was conscious of this at 21,” said Miller, “but this softness and femininity has historically appeared in moments of political stress and war—for something to take off in the way this did, it has to be hitting the zeitgeist in some way.”

The early 2000s saw 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the war in Iraq, among other humanitarian crises. What comes around goes around. Then and now, with boho making a comeback, there’s no shortage of things to react against. Click here to read more on the history of boho-chic and its return. —José Criales-Unzueta

Menswear Finds the Spotlight on Men.Style.com

Men’s fashion enjoys considerable influence today thanks to stylish celebrities like Harry Styles and Jacob Elordi, and key designers such as Pharrell Williams and Jonathan Anderson. But it wasn’t always this way. It took five years after Style.com launched for its brother site Men.Style.com to get off the ground. Tim Blanks was there at its genesis: “Menswear was such a volatile business at that point,” he told me in an interview earlier this year. But it did feel “like there was a sort of constituency of people who were ready to experiment and there were designers who were giving them things to experiment with.” One of those things? Hedi Slimane’s Dior Homme skinny jeans. Slimane applied his infamous narrow cut to denim at his spring and fall 2005 shows, starting a chain reaction that slimmed down proportions across both men’s and womenswear. It’s a funny thing to look back on 20 years later and in the age of Ozempic. Read the full conversation with Blanks here.—José Criales-Unzueta

Model Watch: Liya Kebede: “Cover Model With a Cause”

Liya Kebede debuted on the runway as a Gucci exclusive at Tom Ford’s fall 2000 show for the brand; then, in 2003, the Ethiopian-born beauty made headlines when she was named the newest face of Estée Lauder. It was one of the industry’s then most-coveted contracts, and she was the first Black model to land the gig. Kebede was, in many ways, a sight for sore eyes in the fashion world of the 2000s: Take a look at any runway and Kebede was, more often than not, the single Black model cast. “There weren’t a lot of Black people represented, period,” Kebede said when we spoke about the advent—and return—of Boho-chic for Vogue’s summer issue this year. She was discussing the pervasive whiteness of the boho trend, but her statement applies to the industry at large, which her presence changed for the better in the second half of the decade.

Speaking of, it was in 2005 when Kebede covered Vogue solo for the first time; she was photographed by Steven Meisel and styled by Tonne Goodman. Written by Mark Holgate, who wrote the accompanying story, focused less on her runway successes and her forays into film, than on her then-new role as a goodwill ambassador for the World Health Organization for maternal, newborn, and child health. “Growing up in Ethiopia, I was exposed to the problems we’re dealing with on a daily basis,” she told Holgate. “I’ve wanted to get involved with a cause for the longest time, to make a difference, but I never thought I’d get to do it on this scale. It’s because of my career that I’ve been given the chance.” Talk about a role model.—José Criales-Unzueta

Tisci Before Givenchy

Riccardo Tisci entered fashion’s consciousness in 2005 when he presented two collections under his own name. The first, now lost to history, was made in India, where Tisci was living after his contract with Ruffo Research was unexpectedly canceled, and it was full of light and love, having been produced with the help of friends and family. There was strength amid the delicacy of the pieces though; it lit a flame in me that was only fanned when the follow-up was shown in Milan. This one was a near-religious experience where models posed against a wooden cross, and it introduced the Gothic and Catholic tropes that Tisci would carry over into his work for Givenchy. As might be expected, pre-Givenchy Tisci was a bit more emotional and raw. Also personal—it was his own name on the door, after all. But he came out fighting in Paris: Tisci’s first pret-a-porter show for Givenchy featured strict silhouettes and gladiator belts. It was a collection that proved he could compete in the global arena.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

The End of Tom and Dom at Gucci

“Perfection in anything is fleeting,” Tom Ford once said.Yet until it ended in 2004, Ford’s 14-year stint at Gucci included a several-year arcadia that seemed as close to perfection as modern fashion has reached. Which is why his departure alongside Domenico De Sole was such a moment in fashion culture.

To understand that end, however, demands a sense of the beginning. For the first few years after his arrival in 1990, Gucci was deep in the doldrums, dragged down by its founding family’s decadence and dysfunction. Then from the ashes of near-bankruptcy emerged the conditions for Gucci’s Ford-fueled phoenix ascension.

This emergence took shape after the family was bought out by its Bahraini partner, which discovered the house too devalued to flip. Perhaps more in hope than expectation, it promoted Domenico De Sole, a Roman-born, Harvard Law School-trained lawyer who had begun working with Gucci a decade previously, into the role of President and CEO. De Sole in turn promoted Ford, formerly an unsung in-house junior designer, to take charge in 1994.

Following a dud debut that October, Ford—who said he had “nothing to lose”—first attained his state of runway perfection on the Fall 1995 runway. Thus started a golden period during which the Gucci run by “Tom and Dom” would come to dominate Hollywood, go public, and double sales over and over again.

As this incredible July 1999 long read from Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burroughs brilliantly reports, the downside of that success was the covetous attention it attracted. Ford and De Sole, determined to retain control of the juggernaut they had built between them, fought furiously to fend off the efforts of LVMH supremo Bernard Arnault to complete a hostile takeover. After many twists, they achieved that by snagging a white knight previously unknown in the fashion sphere: François Pinault. Following Pinault’s initial purchase of 42% of Gucci in March 1999, Ford and De Sole retained the control they demanded—and set about turning Gucci into a group. Pinault bought them oversight of Yves Saint Laurent, while De Sole and Ford spearheaded the acquisition of Alexander McQueen, Bottega Veneta, Boucheron, Balenciaga, and the co-founding of Stella McCartney.

Post 9/11, however, even Ford’s mercurial guidance could not keep Gucci and its new satellites immune from the broader economic downturn, and it was Pinault’s balance sheet upon which the pressure most fell. When Ford and De Sole announced late in November 2003 that they had failed to agree to new contracts and would be leaving Gucci, the speculation was that money had been the sticking point. They would later clarify that—just as it had been when Pinault first entered the picture—what Tom and Dom cared most about was control.

Even the New Yorker, albeit snarkily, acknowledged the wider cultural impact of their exit. Ford’s final show, in February 2004, made for a breathtaking goodbye. Ultimately, though, both sides benefited from the split. The Pinault clan was left with what would be rebranded as Kering, a luxury conglomerate second only in heft to that of the family against which De Sole had first positioned them. And within a year Ford and De Sole were up and running again—back to the start and with nothing to lose—but this time sailing under their own ensign. It all ended pretty well.—Luke Leitch

America’s Got Talent: The CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Is Established

I started working at Vogue in December 2003, and I remember two things about it then very clearly: Firstly, that the days started super early and rattled by at a quickfire clip, so that for the first few weeks I was in bed every night at 9pm—latest—so I could cope with the following day; secondly, within a few days of joining I heard tell of an initiative for young designers that Vogue was launching with the CFDA early the next year. It was to be the first time I would hear the words CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. And here we are now in 2024, with the fund celebrating its 20th anniversary.

The idea of Vogue officially helping up-and-coming designers wasn’t so new. Nine days after 9/11, with New York Fashion Week canceled, Vogue worked with Style.com to create An American View, where the likes of Peter Som, Rebecca Taylor, Behnaz Sarafpour, Maria Cornejo, and the late Benjamin Cho, among others, took part in a group show in Carolina Herrera’s showroom. (My colleague Laird Borrelli-Persson still remembers being moved to tears by it, and she wasn’t alone: Emotionally, it was a hugely charged experience, as was everything at that time.)

Yet the intensity of those absolutely terrible days and months had people thinking about what more they could do to make a difference; to help. On top of that, there was a sense that American fashion should find its future: Calvin Klein had retired, Donna Karan sold her brands to LVMH, Bill Blass had passed away, and our young designers—Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors, Isaac Mizrahi—were, as Sally Singer pithily put it— “singularly talented…[but] they’d been young designers since the Reagan/Bush era.”

Out of all this came the Fashion Fund, where every year 10 finalists were to vie for three prizes offering financial help, along with mentoring. Late in 2004, I sat at the very first Fashion Fund awards dinner beside Nicole Covolos of the denim brand Habitual and squeezed her hand when she and her husband Michael were announced as runners-up, along with Alexandre Plokhov’s label Cloak. Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez were deservedly the very first winners. The inaugural fund was documented by director Douglas Keeve (who gave us the influential Unzipped) in his documentary Seamless.

It all feels so long ago, because plenty of designers who were in the Fund—from Thom Browne to the Rodarte sisters to Jason Wu to Philip Lim (who just stepped down from his label after two decades) have become today’s establishment. Yet it also feels like yesterday, because in so many ways the founding purpose—to nurture a new generation of American fashion stars of global note—has never gotten any less urgent. How could it not? It’s not easy to launch and sustain a business these days. The industry constantly evolves, and so do our expectations of what designers need to achieve and deliver on.

I joined the selection committee in 2010 and have seen so many terrific designers take part, and very often triumph (sometimes regardless of winning or not): Joseph Altuzarra, Emily Bode, Telfar Clemens, Willy Chavarria, Henry Zankov, Rachel Scott of Diotima, Prabal Gurung, Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour, the Vaquera duo, Christopher John Rogers, Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta of Eckhaus Latta, Aurora James of Brother Vellies… the list goes on and on.

Their successes are their own—what the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund did was (hopefully) give them a nudge in the right direction, propelled by some money (it helps), and pair them with industry titans from whom they could learn. Yet more than that, the designers shaped what fashion could be—and who a designer could be. More than any other fashion capital, New York has become the place where diverse voices can be rightly seen and heard and celebrated—and it’s what separates the city from just about everywhere else.—Mark Holgate

Lagerfeld Said “Yes” and the H&M Designer Collaboration Was Born

The high/low formula that we take for granted in 2024 was still new, even a bit taboo, in 2004 when Karl Lagerfeld paired up with H&M for a collaboration that would make high fashion accessible to the many through mass production and distribution channels. That’s evidenced by the fact that director Johan Renck’s brilliant commercial for the launch played up the then-shocking incongruence of the couturier working with the Swedish mass market brand.

That the program is still going strong two decades on (Glenn Martens is up next) almost definitely has something to do with the success of the Lagerfeld initiative. Not only did it make the designer a global name, among designers, the thinking was that if it was good enough for Karl, it could be good for them too. Read more about the H & M Designer Collaboration project here.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

Model Watch: Gemma Ward, the Wide-Eyed Beauty that Ushered in a New Look

Once in a generation comes a model whose look revolutionizes the entire industry. In the 2000s that face belonged to the Australian Gemma Ward, who rose to fashion’s highest heights after debuting at Australian Fashion Week  in 2003 and then as a Prada exclusive—a coveted modeling debut deal—at the Prada and Miu Miu spring 2004 shows. Ward was only 15 when she broke out, which was not unheard of for a newcomer at the time, though it’s thankfully something the industry has very much moved on from today.

Ward’s look was part extraterrestrial and part baby doll, and it was her doll-like looks that kicked off a trend in casting—think of Lily Cole or Heather Marks. Ward’s Vogue cover was for the September 2004 issue, when she was photographed by Steven Meisel alongside Daria Werbowy, Natalia Vodianova, Gisele Bündchen, Isabeli Fontana, Karolina Kurkova, Liya Kebede, Hana Soukupova, and Karen Elson as one of the “Models of the Moment.” At 17, she became the face of Calvin Klein’s “Obsession Night” fragrance, replacing Kate Moss—the prior once-in-a-generation face.

Ward left the runways when she was just 20 after the spring 2008 shows, officially announcing her retirement from modeling in 2009. During her hiatus, she appeared on-screen in The Great Gatsby and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and she had three children. She is fully back in fashion now, though, having most recently closed Ian Griffiths’s fall 2024 show for Max Mara.—José Criales-Unzueta

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

Y-3 Put Sports on Fashion’s Scoreboard

If you think that the grand love affair between sports and fashion was made “official” in 2024 with the 100th anniversary of the summer Olympics in Paris, think again. Yohji Yamamoto, that poet of dark allure, played Cupid at the inception of the romance more than 20 years ago. In 2002 the Japanese designer was named creative director of the newly created Adidas SportStyle, which launched Y-3, the brand that put what we now know as athleisure in play.

This partnership grew from the runaway success of the sneakers Yamamoto created with the German athletics giant for his fall 2001 collection. Having clocked the growing popularity of trainers in street style, and found them quite ugly, he told Sarah Mower, “I stepped into this arena to restrain the world from being visually polluted.” Y-3, he continued, was conceived as something “bigger” than sports-meets-fashion: “It’s basic and simple products for everyday life,” he said.

Basic? Not so much. Much attention is given to textile development and performance. The result is that you can both work out in a Y-3 track suit and “work it.” Adidas and Yamamoto were not an obvious combination. Yohji was an avant-garde specialist in complex pattern cutting, and he was better known for his interest in music (he still likes to put his own songs on his show soundtracks) than exercise. But the choice was prescient. Twenty years on “Yohji-san” is still involved with Y-3, a brand that transcends the contemporary idea of the collaboration as a comingling or transferring of aesthetics, and is instead an actual integration of form and function. Call it a win-win situation.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

LA Girls Take Over—Juicy Couture Takes Paris, and Paris and Nicole Take Over Our TVs

Hollywood glamour has never not been at the center of American culture, but in 2003 Los Angeles ascended to a position of influence that was curiously grounded not in movie magic but in real life. “Stars!—They’re Just Like Us!” had launched in US Weekly a year before, and suddenly there was a steady stream of photos of celebs like Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Brandy, Jennifer Lopez, Lindsay Lohan, and Kelly Rowland going about their daily routines: yoga, the grocery store, Starbucks, all wearing a velour tracksuit. But it wasn’t just any tracksuit, this one was made by Juicy Couture and it featured a hooded jacket, cropped at the waist (often worn half-unzipped to reveal a classic white ribbed tank top underneath), and a low-rise flared leg elastic-waist pant. In just a few years, the label, founded by Pam Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor in 1997, had become the official uniform of the rich and famous (and those who wanted to look like they were). It was a match made in high-low heaven when Vogue invited the fashionable duo—who often dressed in twinning outfits—to attend the couture shows in Paris. They arrived bearing gifts (for Karl Lagerfeld, a velour tracksuit monogrammed with the word SLIM), and as they went from show to show with the wide-eyed enchantment of experiencing the glory of couture for the first time, they found themselves on the receiving side of some impressive fan-boying. John Galliano revealed that “he wore their tobacco trackpants every day when designing the collection,” and at the post-show Valentino dinner his business partner Giancarlo Giametti needed to be “dissuaded from tearing his clothes off and suiting up” once he received his own monogrammed Juicy sweats. By the time the issue hit newsstands in April of 2003, the pair had sold their company—which was grossing around $47 million—to Liz Claiborne for an undisclosed amount, cementing the athleisure trend (or is it a lifestyle?) for decades to come.

That same year, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie were cast in a new reality TV series called The Simple Life. The show had an.. ahem simple conceit: send the pair to live with a family in Arkansas for a month and make entertainment of the way they struggle to lead the same lives as normal Americans. To further drive the fish-out-of-water element of the show, one of the promo images featured Richie in a “Dude, Where’s My Couture?” Juicy Couture t-shirt. As they ran around farms in ultra-low rise mini skirts and layered tank tops, fake-asking “What’s a Walmart?” to the chagrin and delight of TV viewers, it became apparent that stars were not really like us at all.—Laia Garcia-Furtado

Model Watch: Daria Werbowy—the Face of 2000s Fashion—Debuts on the Runway

Fashion fans will always remember Daria Werbowy as Phoebe Philo’s famous muse and notorious doppelgänger. But before she was fronting campaigns for Philo’s Céline in the 2010s—starting spring 2011, to be specific—Werbowy dominated the most major runways of the 2000s: Prada, Dries Van Noten, and, of course, Philo’s Chloé.

True Werbowy believers will also remember that her first major campaign was Prada for the fall 2003 season, photographed by Steven Meisel. Her first Vogue cover was September 2004, also by Meisel, when she was presented as one of the “Models of the Moment” alongside Natalia Vodianova and Gisele Bundchen. Between her high fashion campaigns, famous runway cameos, and editorial moments, Werbowy quickly became paradigmatic of an entire era in fashion. She for all intents and purposes disappeared from the industry in the mid 2010s, but made a return last year fronting Sabato De Sarno’s first Gucci high-jewelry campaign—the pair met when De Sarno started working at Prada in 2003—and as one of the faces of Philo’s eponymous label.—José Criales-Unzueta

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot

Carrie Bradshaw Has “A Vogue Idea,” Fashion Goes to Mainstream TV

The effect—and effectiveness—of Patricia Field and Sarah Jessica Parker’s costume styling for Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City will be studied as fashion and pop culture history for many years to come. However their success isn’t solely based on the many women Carrie’s intrepid personal style has inspired, but rather in the way they helped push fashion into mainstream culture on TV, and eventually film. The peak of this phenomenon is none other than episode 17 in season 4, which aired in February of 2002, when Carrie famously visits her editor at Vogue and, infamously, “gets drunk at Vogue” in a Vivienne Westwood suit.

Titled “A Vogue Idea,” the episode sees Carrie become a Vogue contributor and receive her first assignment: a piece about trending accessories. She doesn’t get the Vogue tone quite right, and her editor Enid (played by Candice Bergen) has to remind her that she’s not writing for her dating column, so there’s no need to equate a trending handbag to an investment banker—or any other trending boyfriend-type. True to Carrie form, she spirals, retreating with her new friend and Vogue staffer Julian to his office, where she gets drunk at Vogue with an afternoon martini. The episode includes a visit to the magazine’s much-mythologized closet.

There had been other shows—who can forget The Nanny?—that leaned heavily on fashion, but the norm then was to leverage it as a tool for character development. The chord that Sex and the City struck within the industry, up until this point, at least, was it was a show about fashion that was about its power players, but the clothes. Isn’t that what we all like about what we do, anyways: the clothes?! With this episode, that formula changed, as SATC folded Vogue into its lore. Of course, this would not have happened had the show not been wildly popular among fashion folk. Hollywood had never seemed to get fashion right, but now, in going to the source, SATC cemented itself as the show to watch and proved that fashion was something people wanted to see on TV.

As you will see as this timeline of fashion in the 21st century develops, the late 2000s saw an explosion of depictions of fashion—and Vogue—in the mainstream media, all of which all came post-SATC. What an in-vogue Vogue idea this episode was.—José Criales-Unzueta

An American View: The New York Fashion Community Rallies Together Post-9/11

On September 12, 2001, the Style.com and Vogue teams gathered at 4 Times Square to think up ways to support those most affected by the attacks of the day before. One of the initiatives to come out of that brainstorm was the Fashion for America campaign, a joint effort by Vogue and the CFDA to raise money for the Twin Towers Fund. Within the industry, emerging talents were impacted by the 9/11; to assist them, Vogue and Style.com teamed up to host An American View, a group show for emerging designers who had not presented their spring 2002 collections, with the attacks occurring as they did in the midst of the spring 2002 fashion week in New York. “The sentiment that we were encouraging and that all the participating designers were on board with was that this was about giving you visibility, this was about camaraderie, this was the industry coming together,” said Meredeith Melling, reflecting back on the event from a distance of 20 years. Read more of what she had to say.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

Zac Posen is Back in the Spotlight With Gap—Here, We Look Back at His Runway Debut

How hot a ticket was Zac Posen’s first independent show? Hot enough to get major models to walk the runway, Manolo Blahnik to do the shoes and first daughter Barbara Bush to sit in the front row. Even more impressively, the 21-year-old New Yorker lived up to the hype, delivering a strong, if not terribly commercial, message.

But then Posen is not aiming to be the next Ralph Lauren. His inspiration is ’30s fashion—the sort of outfits Jean Harlow might have sported at a cocktail party. Pushing that notion of glamour to the extreme, Posen built his collection around dresses, mostly bias-cut with provocative necklines, which declared a fierce devotion to the female form. The designer incorporated ’30s design elements like contrasting insets, fitted bodices, fluttering ruffles and fishtail trains, and used movie-star fabrics like satin and crepe, but also worked with cotton, leather and mesh. (While many of the looks were entrance-makers, there were also some quietly wearable pieces, like a blush mesh top and a long, mitred tweed coat.) And in a week of muted, monochrome palettes, Posen’s 32 looks were a riot of color: orange, purple, blue and yellow, along with the occasional black and white.

The models, including Karen Elson, Eleonora Bose, Liberty Ross, Teresa Lourenco and the actress Paz de la Huerta, were clearly given a mandate to act up, and they did, vamping for the cameras like seasoned starlets.—Janet Ozzard

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

Parting Shot

Marc Jacobs Launches Marc by Marc Jacobs, Makes Diffusion Lines Cool

Marc Jacobs, the eternally cool, golden child of New York fashion, was already the toast of the town in 2001. His namesake label was an industry favorite, and since 1997 he had been the artistic director at Louis Vuitton, tasked with introducing ready-to-wear to the luxury behemoth. This very year, he would prove his genius when he tapped Stephen Sprouse to cover a suite of Vuitton leathergoods in his signature graffiti—a swift hit that set the precedent for collaborations between high fashion and artists. When he announced he would be launching a secondary line named Marc in the spring of 2001, it largely flew under the radar. No one would’ve guessed it would go on to set the style for how young people got dressed in the decade that followed. (Or maybe it was just me.)

It’s not that Marc by Marc Jacobs, as it later came to be known, was the first lower-priced line—there had already been many successes including DKNY, D&G, and Armani Exchange—it’s just that in typical Jacobs fashion, he somehow knew exactly what young people wanted to wear, and perhaps even more importantly, he understood that they had so far been a forgotten market. For people in their late teens and early twenties, for whom most of the runway tended to skew too old, he provided a clear guide to dressing well and looking cool.

Collection reviews of the time mention an ’80s vibe that permeated the city much to the critics’ chagrin (this was when we were much more skeptical about reviving the past). But it wasn’t just pulled out of thin air. In downtown Manhattan and in a still rough-around-the-edges Williamsburg, and in Berlin and elsewhere, young people were scouring thrift stores for neon colors, batwing sweaters, pencil skirts, and ugly little almond-toe pumps to wear to go out. His fall 2001 collection had ultra-skinny jeans in technicolor blue and black stripes, graffiti-printed sweaters, and shrunken military jackets. A lot of the models looked androgynous, and even if they weren’t, you knew that the point was that everyone could wear everyone else’s clothes and it wouldn’t matter. There was also the fact that Jacobs had devised the clothes to be like the things you come across at the vintage store that you simply needed to have—you didn’t need to buy the full designer ’fit in order to pull the look off. The attitude was the important thing.

I came across this collection on Style.com and I was immediately obsessed. I remember printing out a few of the looks and meticulously collaging them into the little sketchbook I carried around with me at all times. When I left Puerto Rico, where I grew up, to go to school in Philadelphia, the clothes suddenly made much more sense. They stopped being a sort of distant fantasy of who I may want to be one day, and I saw the way they fit in with the people I was meeting at school, the concerts I was going to, the world I was being exposed to. Almost overnight, none of my old clothes made sense to me, I felt like I needed to start fresh. One night, I was doing a random bit of online window shopping when I came across a graffiti sweatshirt from the fall 2001 collection, deeply discounted at $98. At the time it was the second-largest amount of money I had ever spent on something (first place went to my pair of Dr. Martens that I bought with a summer’s worth of babysitting cash), but I knew I needed to have it. It was one of those weirdly life-affirming purchases that help you realize the person you imagine yourself to be. (I still have it.)

In the years that followed, the cult of Marc grew. Every collection that followed seemed to intuit exactly what we were all thinking and how we all wanted to look, and it wasn’t long before a small Marc empire had taken over Bleecker Street in the West Village (there were separate men’s and womenswear stores, and then another space that sold little branded knickknacks, the star of which was an iconic tote bag that read Jacobs by Marc Jacobs for Marc by Marc Jacobs in Collaboration with Marc Jacobs for Marc by Marc Jacobs).

Show any 40-something woman in fashion an image of his studded suede round-toe pumps, colorblocked dresses, denim jackets, or mouse ballet flats—ballet flats with a cartoon mouse face, complete with little floppy ears and whiskers that were a literal interpretation of the Marc Jacobs’ label pointy-toed mouse flats, another It-shoe), and you can count on this: They too will regale you with their own Marc by Marc memories. —Laia Garcia-Furtado

Marc Jacobs and Stephen Sprouse Hook up at Louis Vuitton—Logos Will Never Be the Same Again

Can you remember a time when collaborations didn’t smack of inevitability but had the shock of the new? Collabs have become one of fashion’s most lasting 21st century trends, and like any trend, the magic and myth making of this one has tended toward the formulaic in recent years. But when they’re good they’re still good, and this agenda-setting 2001 hook-up between Louis Vuitton’s Marc Jacobs and his friend Stephen Sprouse was great. It was four years into Jacobs’s tenure at LV, a tenure that began—remember—with a runway show that featured absolutely zero bags, when he did the then-unthinkable (yes, something even more outrageous than not include any bags at all) and invited Sprouse to “tag” the house’s monogram. It was sheer iconoclasm to fuck with something so iconic—and it was an instant hit. If Jacobs hadn’t enlisted Sprouse, would we have had Louis Vuitton x Supreme? Gucci’s “hacking” of Balenciaga? Or Crocs and, well, any of the high fashion designers who’ve partnered with the ugly shoe brand? Oh, probably. But as with so many things fashion (see above), Jacobs got here first.—Nicole Phelps

An It-bag to Conquer Them All: Nicolas Ghesquière’s Balenciaga “Biker” Bag

Fashion lore passed down in the great tradition of front row gossip places the genesis of Balenciaga’s famous City Bag to a visit by Kate Moss to the Balenciaga HQ, during which she spotted a sample of the bag and requested one to wear herself. Supers, true Supers, like Moss were once some of fashion’s great prognosticators. As history has come to witness, and as you will see as this very timeline develops, anything and everything Moss wore became a thing, and the City Bag is no exception.

As for the real story: The year is 2001, and Ghesquière had worked on samples of what would become the Balenciaga City bag—known on the streets as the Balenciaga Biker bag, for its aesthetic and utilitarian connections to biker culture (they do love leather fringe, studs, and a good, soft satchel). Executives were not quite sold on it. “Accessories [at the time] were rigid,” the designer recalled in an interview in 2011. “Luxury leather, especially, was about rigidity. So they were not really happy, and they decided not to produce it.” Still, they sampled a run of them to place in a fashion show. The City Bag didn’t make it to the runway then, but models, including Moss, found it backstage, and asked for samples to carry themselves.

And oh they did. Soon after, the bag went into production, and eventually it became a top seller and one of the era’s first and definitive It-bags. In addition to Moss, Nicole Richie, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, and Sienna Miller were all City devotees. And they wore them everywhere: to the coffee shop and to the club, from day to night—inspiring a generation of women to do the same with either the City or a downmarket version. Huge handbags were in. And while Moss’s eye for what’s next is partly responsible, it must be said that the City was Ghesquière at his truest and most forward-looking best. It was different to other bags out there: Squishy and with an ineffable cool. It was effortless yet dressy, bohemian but also a little rock and roll. Equal parts uptown and downtown. Above all, it represented where fashion and style were going, and became representative of who stylish women wanted to be.

“It was a new, fresh thing, but it looked like an old, good, friendly thing,” Ghesquière once said, attempting to describe it. Gabriela Hearst tried to resurrect the Chloé Paddington with her first few shows at Chloé, and Mulberry has given its Alexa bag a facelift or two. But the City is the only It-bag from that era that has made an authentic return. As I write, I see at least two on my fellow editors’ desks.—José Criales-Unzueta

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“What Did We Do Before Style.com?” How the Site Changed Fashion Forever

To say that Style.com “broke” the Internet isn’t horn-tooting, it’s a fact. The site revolutionized fashion show coverage, not just in terms of speed and scope, but also authority. However, collection coverage wasn’t its raison d’etre at the start.

Officially launched in September 2000 as “the online home of Vogue and W” magazines, the catchy domain was originally intended to be an umbrella site under which many brands would sit. “Our ambition is very simple: To bring the fashion authority of Condé Nast to the Web,” said a company spokesperson at the time. From the beginning, Style.com was conceived as a commerce site that would be actionable in a way that print wasn’t. “Advance’s effort may be the most ambitious yet by an established publisher to combine reading with retailing,” wrote Saul Hansell in a 2000 New York Times article. “The site soon will enable users to act upon those edicts [put forth by the magazines] by instantly buying the items they are told they must have. Think of it as point-and-click from the fashion clique.”

Designer fashion has always been aspirational; likewise, the system of presenting it has long been gated. Style.com is often credited with “democratizing” the fashion show, but it’s probably more accurate to say it provided access to invitation-only events and by extension to a world of surface glamour. Same-day reviews, backstage and details photography, and street style images helped give users a feeling of “being there.” It’s impossible to convey to digital natives what the pre-Internet before-times were like. I mean, broadband was just starting to replace dial-up connections! In any case, fashion hasn’t always been at the forefront of technology; Helmut Lang’s decision to present his fall 1998 collection via CD-ROM marked a tipping point. “It was a shock to the system, but a beginning of the new normal,” he later said. When Style.com launched two years later, not everyone was ready to embrace the brave new virtual world. Early on, a number of designers were wary of such exposure; status and copying were big issues. Soon, though, they’d be desperate to be reviewed (oh, the stories we could tell!) and within a very short space of time, celebrities, editors and stylists, and consumers alike were using the look numbers on Style.com as a kind of insider parlance.

It must be stressed how important it was that Style.com made complete shows available when the norm was to see only a few select outfits, the ones deemed worthy by editors. That shows were accessible all in one place and archived was also major. With additional features like search and moodboard, you could say that Style.com was a Gen-X proto-app that millennials were born into.

I came to the site from the museum world (The Museum at FIT, specifically), leaving behind a universe of materiality and objects, where time was thought of in years and eras, not seasons. At Style.com, instantaneity was the ideal and fashion was made of pixels, and thanks in large part to its influence, the image would soon become just as—or even more—important than the garment. It wasn’t Versace’s plunge-neck dress that went viral (before that was a term), it was the image of Jennifer Lopez in it. In fact, the popularity of the photo gave birth to Google Images; it also meant that fashion was becoming part of pop culture more quickly and reaching more people. The photos became a means through which insiders and outsiders could tell stories about themselves. Vogue Runway, launched in 2015, not only carries forward the mission of Style.com, but maintains its archive, which is essentially a kind of museum of images. Come to think of it, maybe my career change wasn’t as dramatic as I thought.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

Class of 2000: The Individualists

For its July 2000 issue, Vogue gathered 14 designers to be shot, class photo style, in New York by Steven Meisel, with Grace Coddington on styling duties. The designers chosen represented a new wave of talent transforming fashion, and boy, oh boy, were they well chosen. All were, in their own way, pretty darn revolutionary.

The designers were: Nicolas Ghesquière (back when he was at Balenciaga), Hussein Chalayan, Veronique Branquinho, Junya Watanabe, An Vandevorst and Filip Arickx of A.F. Vandevorst, Miguel Adrover, Hedi Slimane (then at Dior Homme), Josephus Thimister, Olivier Theyskens, Lawrence Steele, Burberry Prorsum’s Roberto Menichetti, and Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren of Viktor & Rolf. Collectively, they had upended heritage houses, moved conceptualism to center stage, radicalized silhouettes so that everyone would eventually wear them (hello, skinny jeans), shifted the axis of influence to some quite crucial degree to Belgium (though really it was all about someplace that wasn’t Milan or Paris or London), and generally did that thing that any emerging group of madly inventive designers should do: cast fashion entirely and utterly anew. They’re not the avant garde—they’re the New Guard was the message of Sally Singer’s excellent accompanying essay.

From the vantage point of 25 years later—typing those numbers seems less scary than saying a quarter-century, somehow—we know how their stories played out: Some went on to other iconic houses, others had to disband their labels, and one—Josephus Thimister—is, sadly, no longer with us. But looking at this group shot brings to mind a more contemporary thought: How would you do this photograph now—and who exactly would be in it?

The intervening years have pivoted the industry to a place where heritage houses owned by luxury conglomerates dominate in a way they didn’t back in 2000. Conversely, to be an influential independent designer is even harder to achieve now than it was back then. The Meisel image hints at what looked like perhaps a more even playing field. Creativity is still with us—and how—but this group shot, for all its wonderful prescience about incredible talents, is also a snapshot of a moment before everything changed.—Mark Holgate

The Dress That Launched a Thousand Internet Searches… And Google Images

The world worried that as the 1900s turned to the 2000s the “millennium bug” would crash the planet’s computer systems and create chaos. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. What nobody saw coming was that just two months later the combination of JLo and Versace would bring Y2K Google to the brink.

The fateful date was February 23, 2000. That was the night Jennifer Lopez hit the 42nd Grammy Awards wearing a Versace dress in green jungle print chiffon whose skirt was so split and neckline so deep it altered the history of the internet. As she came on stage to present the first award of the night you could hear the frequency of the audience hum go up a few notches. “This is the first time in five or six years that I’m sure that nobody is looking at me,” observed her co-presenter David Duchovny. Around 25 million viewers watched on CBS.

The next day that dress was a global talking point. Nobody had smartphones to check it out on, but as the word spread around the planet’s water coolers, people hit their computers to search for “JLo green dress.” Over in Palo Alto, the 18-month-old startup search engine Google took note as the volume of search queries stretched their servers to the max. As former CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in 2015: “Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress that, well, caught the world’s attention. At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen. But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: JLo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born.”

That photographic search function, now called Google Images, was launched in 2001 as a direct response to Donatella Versace’s design for Lopez. Fast forward to 2019, and the two reunited for a show in Milan that celebrated the anniversary of the dress that awoke the internet, and created one of the first landmark interactions between the fashion industry and tech. That night JLo wore a new version of the historic dress—and searches immediately spiked all over again.—Luke Leitch

Net-a-Porter Proves It’s Not About Being First, but About Being Best

As the millennium approached, the internet, still a nascent technology, was looked at with equal amounts of excitement and distrust. In the 1990s, the rise of personal computers and the invention of the web browser had given way to the so-called dot-com boom, where much like during the gold rush, people went crazy with possibility and new websites and online companies flourished—consider the fact that literally none existed before—and were rewarded with almost endless amounts of investment money. When the bubble inevitably burst in March of 2000, it seemed to reinforce the doubts that many had about the newfangled technology. At least where e-commerce was concerned, the 2000s kicked off with trepidation; Boo.com, a much ballyhooed online store aimed at young people, carried a mix of fashion and sports merch, and snazzy functionality that included 360-degree views of the garments and a virtual assistant (Miss Boo), that would aid customers with their shopping. Except it turned out that it was all a bit too snazzy, most computers were running on dial-up, which was too slow to load all the animations, and it also initially didn’t work on Macintosh computers. After only two years, and having spent $135 million dollars in investment cash, Boo was forced into bankruptcy.

It was into this ecosystem that LVMH launched eLuxury.com, which sold leather goods by Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, and Fendi, among others, along with beauty essentials like face cream from La Prairie. Around the same time, Natalie Massenet, a former fashion editor, launched Net-a-Porter in 2000, although success didn’t come at once, she slowly built a steady base thanks in part to many of the fashion contacts she had made working in magazines. While eLuxury didn’t survive the decade, by 2005, Massenet’s Net-a-Porter was reporting sales of $16 million, and has since gone on to become the online store that set the precedent for every other store that followed it. The secret likely boils down Massenet’s editorial point of view: she curated Net-a-Porter’s homepage just like the shopping pages of a fashion magazine, highlighting trends but also breaking them down in an approachable manner. Add to that, above-and-beyond customer service that allowed literal first-time online shoppers to take a chance on buying something, knowing that they could easily return it without worrying or incurring extra charges. At the same time, because luxury labels themselves weren’t rushing to join the digital sphere, Net-a-Porter was able to capture the clientele from many brands. As fashion and technology continued evolving, so did Net-a-Porter: a year before Alexander McQueen streamed the legendary “Plato’s Atlantis” collection online, he had staged a mini-runway show for the pre-spring 2009 collection, that was immediately available for purchase and delivered within a day to most locations. A decade later, Net-A-Porter had gone from upstart to establishment; Richemont acquired a majority in the business, valuing it at £350 million.—Laia Garcia-Furtado

When Is a Coffee Table Not a Coffee Table?

Hussein Chalayan had already given the fashion industry one of its most searing images when he dressed models in chadors in an examination of Islamic women’s status in society. And he would go on to develop virtuoso dresses that morphed in front of his audience’s eyes, decade-hopping to a soundtrack of the 20th century that included “the ranting of Hitler, aerial bombing, jet engines, and the beating of helicopter rotors,” as Vogue Runway’s Sarah Mower remembers. Chalayan earned his avant-gardist reputation season-in and season-out, but the one that most completely captured his provocateur’s spirit was fall 2000, when he created furniture-as-fashion. I was in the room, a baby editor at Elle Magazine, and watched as four armchair slipcovers were converted into shift dresses by the models who would slip into them. Then Natalia Semanova stepped into the coffee table and it transformed into a skirt, a remarkable feat of engineering that no one, including the designer himself, was sure would come off until it did. Chalayan is a Turkish Cypriot and his mother experienced the fear of displacement during armed conflict in the 1970s. This show’s ingenuity and subtly pointed social commentary set a high bar that few of his peers have neared in the nearly 25 years since.—Nicole Phelps

The Shows of the Year

Most Memorable Red-Carpet Moments

A Parting Shot