W Magazine

>> W fashion and style director Alex White, one of the last vestiges of the old guard at the magazine, is to be replaced by Edward Enninful, effective May 1. White, who held the position for 16 years, decided to step down to pursue a range of fashion and lifestyle projects in both digital and social media.

According to W editor Stefano Tonchi, the decision for White to leave was mutual: “Alex is a fantastic stylist and has done incredible work over the years. Everyone at W is grateful to Alex for creating such memorable fashion portfolios, and for the significant mark she has left on the magazine . . . She’s thinking very much about her own brand — the Alex White brand — and at a certain point that’s no longer what W is about.”

White agreed that they were "totally on the same page": “My 16 years at W have been thrilling. I’ve worked with wildly talented people and helped produce a gorgeous magazine. I was delighted to stay and help Stefano through his first, transitional year, and am looking forward new beginnings . . . I helped with getting over the hump. Now it’s time for me to continue my freelance and explore the other things I’m working on, including digital projects." Tonchi indicated that White is thinking about starting her own magazine, possibly online. White had recently been experimenting with her own column online, Alex White Edits, on W's website.

Tonchi and Enninful, meanwhile, hit it off while seated next to each other at a Balenciaga dinner during Paris Fashion Week a couple of months ago, Tonchi says: “I didn’t really think about hiring him, I just thought he was incredibly joyful.” They began discussing a job at W earlier this month and moved quickly from there.

"This is the beginning of a new era at W, and I couldn’t be more delighted to be a part of it,” said Enninful. And Tonchi added: "I'm thrilled that Edward is joining our team, and am confident that he will bring a great deal of creativity, professionalism, and industry knowledge with him."

Enninful, who has been a contributing fashion editor at Vogue since 2005 and at Vogue Italia since 1998, is ending those engagements. “Now I’m going to be focusing my editorial prowess on W,” he explained. “Whenever a relationship ends it’s very sad."

>> Giovanna Battaglia, who moved four weeks ago to New York and has started working more with W, was thrown a welcoming dinner last night at The Upstairs at Cipriani Downtown by Eddie Borgo and his boyfriend, stylist Keegan Singh. Battaglia wore an “I Heart New York” t-shirt studded all across the front by Borgo (left), and celebrated with the likes of Gaia Repossi, Vladimir and Julia Restoin-Roitfeld, and Joseph Altuzarra. W's Joseph Logan designed t-shirts that were passed out, proclaiming “New York Loves Gio,” one of which Altuzarra then customized for Battaglia with a pair of scissors. [W]

>> Stefano Tonchi's take on W has received its share of mixed reactions, but the magazine's March 2011 issue had newsstand sales of 28,000 copies, up 5.4 percent from last March (the same month Tonchi was named W editor), and it received more nominations than any other fashion magazine this morning for the 2011 National Magazine Awards, announced by the American Society of Magazine Editors. Tonchi's first three issues —  September, October, and November 2010 — are up for the Photography prize (notably the three issues Jody Quon worked on as creative director before she left the magazine); Tim Walker's fashion portfolio “The East Enders,” which ran in the September 2010 W relaunch, is up in the Feature Photography category; and W is also nominated alongside Vogue (that magazine's sole nod) in the Fashion, Service and Lifestyle “women’s interest” category. [WWD]

>> Emilio Pucci's Peter Dundas dressed both Carine Roitfeld and Julia Restoin-Roitfeld for Julia's intimate 30th birthday party, held at Indochine back in November. He also dressed a W reporter, who he then brought along to the fete. That reporter writes of the experience in W's February 2011 issue: "The music is deafening; the cigarette smoke is blinding; champagne is flowing copiously; canapes are being shunned. The dancing falls into two camps: conga line (Carine) versus on the banquette (Julia)." And later: "When I explain to the hostess [Carine] that I am writing a profile of Dundas and that I’d be grateful for a quote about the dress she’s wearing, she glares at me, then answers extremely slowly, with the labored patience of a teacher addressing an obtuse child: 'Peter made. This dress. For me. It is Pucci. PUCCI.'"

Dundas, for his part, enlightened the reporter on how he keeps his tan: “I’m building this house in Greece, and there’s a fantastic hippie beach where they go nude nearby.…” His thoughts on sex: “The truth is, it’s something that’s incredibly important to me. I think it should be important to everybody. I mean, it’s fantastic. It’s why we’re here.” And how he ends up making such sexy dresses for Pucci: “It’s not that I think, Oh, I need to make the dress sexy. It’s that the body is just so beautiful to me. The same way that when you make love to somebody many times, you notice different parts of the body, and you celebrate them.”

>> Stefano Pilati has an appreciation for things like Pee-Wee Herman, Glee, Rihanna, and LCD Soundsystem (which now provides music for Yves Saint Laurent's shows), but he also knows how to get serious. Yves Saint Laurent's sales have gone from nearly $100 million in losses to a profit, he tells W's February 2011 issue — not that it's been easy.

Because the label's founder so transcended fashion, Pilati says, he feels obliged to design to a higher standard — creating collections to build a woman's wardrobe over time rather than capturing a moment. His debut Yves Saint Laurent collection, he explains, “was the first time in my career that I didn’t think about a theme, when I started to think about something that could be timeless. I said to myself, You need to be relevant to a different level now. You can’t be only ‘I like red, and clogs instead of moccasins.’”

Working at Yves Saint Laurent has also made Pilati think about more than just the clothes he wants to create. "I’m not a businessman,” he says, “but I’ve become one by necessity.” It's routine for fashion brands to give accessories prime real estate in their ad campaigns — because handbags and shoes account for such a large percentage of their businesses. But Inez van Lamsweerde, who photographs Pilati's YSL ads every season with her husband, Vinoodh Matadin, says: “In the beginning, we almost had to beg him to put a bag in the picture. He said, ‘No, with this dress, you would not wear a bag — that’s not chic; that’s not how it works.’” Pilati has learned since — the latest Saint Laurent ads show Arizona Muse, bag in plain view.

When Pilati is asked whether he wishes he had a business partner counterpart like Pierre Berge to take all the commercial aspects off his hands, he replies: “It would be fantastic to be purely creative. Still, you want to walk in the street and see people wearing your clothes, and to do that you have to direct your creativity. So you already fulfill a part of what we think about as marketing from a commercial point of view. Giving the pantsuit to women — that was creative and instinctive, but it was also supported by the fact that women needed it, and, Berge or no Berge, Saint Laurent was the one who did it. The role of Berge, or today of the CEO, is to create a structure that can help your objective and sell the idea.”

There have been rumors about Pilati's standing at the company, but YSL CEO Valerie Hermann describes her relationship with Pilati as “a nice tension.” They have “constructive confrontations,” she says, but: “I’m learning from what he’s saying and listening with respect. What’s most important is that we always agree about where we want to go with the brand, and the confrontation is about how to get there.”

Pilati breaks his relationship with Hermann down as thus: "The roles are by nature split in the sense that the CEO has to respond to a group with numbers and performance and budget and business plans, while the creative director is almost at the service of the CEO. In those days, Saint Laurent was doing the tuxedo, and Berge helped him sell it. Now we live in a moment when we need to thank the CEO. I’m doing the bags, I’m doing the shoes, I’m doing the satin dresses, I’m doing the tuxedo, but if the performance of the brand is good, it’s because it has been managed well, and that includes managing the creative director.”