Half a year ago, designers predicted what we would be wearing a few months from now, when the last remnant of slush has melted and bare toes are imaginable. In this issue, fashion director Harriet Mays Powell anchors those predictions in some reality; her distillation of the trends starts below. (In a nutshell: white dresses, copious tulle, tribal motifs, shorts at the office, lingerie everywhere.) In theory, the shows are about business. But they’re also a kind of convention of beautifulness, something photojournalist Lauren Greenfield captured as she went behind the scenes in Paris, Milan, and New York.

Bodies and shape have been a hot topic recently, with extremes on both sides, from anorexically thin to dangerously overweight, making news. Our cover model, Christina Hendricks, makes a case for something else entirely: a return to voluptuousness.

And about the business: What are clothes worth? The sample-sale website Gilt Groupe is turning the way fashion is sold on its head.

Andy Spade, once better known as Kate’s husband, has made being a taste impresario his latest career (you didn’t know you wanted an antique globe, but you do).

Sometimes there are happy relationships in fashion, like the one between the sunny Brazilian Lorenzo Martone, a.k.a. Marc Jacobs’s other half; or the annoyingly charming and happy Restoin Roitfeld siblings; or the one Anna Dello Russo, the Italian editor, has with her wardrobe (it has its own apartment).

And sometimes, the pressure to be endlessly, profitably creative overwhelms. As this issue was closing, we learned the terrible news of Alexander McQueen’s suicide. Only 40, he had the old-world skills of a master tailor, an extraordinarily fertile imagination, and demons that he couldn’t quiet. read more [+]