Samira Nasr’s May Editor’s Letter: Introducing the Beauty Issue

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

The May issue of Harper's Bazaar pivots toward a different kind of beauty—one that refuses the tidy narrative of perfection. In her editor's letter, Samira Nasr celebrates Chloë Sevigny, who graces this month's cover, as an unlikely exemplar of this ethos. Sevigny's power has never been her conventionality. When she emerged in downtown New York in the mid-'90s, modeling in Kim Gordon's guerrilla X-girl shows, she possessed something more elusive: the ability to make anything she wore feel necessary, even contraband. That magnetism isn't learned. It just exists. And crucially, it exists outside the cage of "most beautiful woman in the world" accolades that can calcify a career. "I've never felt that," Sevigny tells the magazine, in an interview with deputy culture director Laia Garcia-Furtado. "I have a loyalty to my fans and what they're expecting or want of me."

This version of beauty—honest, unconventional, rooted in values rather than symmetry—threads through the entire issue. Painter Lisa Yuskavage, profiled in the magazine's Voices section, creates fleshy, exaggerated, color-soaked portraits of women's bodies that invite both rapture and outrage. Her philosophy is deceptively simple: "I think honesty is beautiful," she says. "I think art is really at its most graceful and beautiful when you give viewers the feeling that they're not alone in this world."

Fashion as Mirror, Not Mirage

Elsewhere, Chanel's creative director Matthieu Blazy demonstrates how a luxury house can reckon with the actual world. His Métiers d'art collection, staged in the New York subway, functioned as portraiture—capturing the everyday style and dignity of commuters most of us barely register. "No one needs a new bag or a new jacket," Blazy tells fashion news director Brooke Bobb. "Chanel has to be a dream." The paradox is that his most aspirational work arrived by paying attention to what was already there.

The issue also features the magazine's annual Skincare Awards, curated after months of rigorous testing by beauty director Jenna Rosenstein. For Nasr, who confesses to skincare obsession, these selections represent a more grounded luxury—the kind you actually use on your face at night, not the kind you photograph.

Throughout, the May Beauty issue argues that the most interesting kind of beauty isn't the one screaming for attention; it's the one you notice on the subway platform, on an older woman with braids and a crochet hat, in the faces of strangers you pass without seeing. Real beauty, this issue suggests, is what we've been stepping over the whole time.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.