To start, our fashion director, Harriet Mays Powell, has thoroughly curated the season’s new directions, looks, and details, with photographs taken on the runway and off. She’s distilled fall fashion into its most essential elements, and handed them over to our art directors to illuminate; the report begins on page 70. Photographer Marcus Bleasdale, more typically found covering world affairs in Somalia and Sudan, went to the collections for us in New York, Milan, and Paris. With the skill of a pro and the intoxicated eye of a newcomer, he shot the portfolio that starts on page 100; a gorgeous evocation of the mad rush just beyond the end of the runway, and a giant hit to the pleasure center.

Beyond that, we visited the designer Christian Lacroix at his (very probably) last couture show, where the beloved designer of the pouf was near tears among his seamstresses; investigated the crumbling finances of portraitist and fashion photographer Annie Leibovitz; discovered the most comfortable T-shirt ever created, and chatted with the surpassingly lovely Audrey Tautou, who has made herself into Coco Chanel in the film Coco Before Chanel—the story of the designer whose impact on the culture is impossible to overstate. But enough preamble. Start reading: Fall’s best looks await.