When it came time to cast the cover of this fashion issue, we decided not to limit ourselves to the short list of people who typically appear on the covers of fashion magazines but to embrace a more expansive view of beauty. We came up with five cover subjects, featured below: an 81-year-old woman; a 19-year-old man who can pass quite convincingly as a woman; a mother and daughter who both know what it’s like to be the child of an icon; and an old-fashioned yet newfangled muse. (Click here for behind-the-scenes video from our cover shoot.)

They represent, in part, the evolution of beauty. When Richard Avedon photographed China Machado in the fifties, he had to fight to get her in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar because of her ethnicity. Now a gorgeous Serbo-Croatian teenager named Andrej Pejic is able to model clothing for both women and men. Progress. Yet Isabella Rossellini has long been considered one of the most beautiful women alive: Why should she feel marginalized in this industry upon reaching a certain age?

Turning to another kind of fashion evolution, we also decided to look at the minds behind some of the most iconic brands in the business and the changes they are engineering. Jenna Lyons has invigorated J.Crew with her accessible, quirky sense of style, and now Barneys is reinventing itself by asking what luxury means these days—at a time when the economy makes that question more charged than ever.

The answer: having what no one else has got. Which could refer to some of the clothes in these pages, whether it’s bedazzled ankle boots, a dress covered in translucent goldfish paillettes, or a handbag the size of your arm.

Cover photographs by Brigitte Lacombe for New York Magazine. read more [+]