Urban Legends

IT'S A STREET-PERHAPS IN MANHATTAN, PERHAPS IN LONDON, PERHAPS ONLY IN THE MIND'S EYE-WHERE CLOTHES CREATE THE CLIMATE.MARIO TESTINO SNAPS 16 MEMBERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL BEST-DRESSED LIST, INCLUDING Ronan Farrow, Dasha Zhukova, Jeremy Irons, AND Betty Catroux, AS THEY STRUT THEIR STYLE

Take a stroll along the Best-Dressed Boulevard. It's an urbane avenue situated somewhere not too far from the "famous thoroughfare" of Irving Berlin's "Puttin' On the Ritz." A fashionable lovers' lane recalling Marcel Proust's Allee des Acacias, it is populated by boulevardiers who pause in their promenades to make phone calls, or who wander accompanied by young beauties. Gleaming vehicles transport veiled ladies who step out for the sole purpose of turning heads. All inhabitants understand that to get dressed is to show respect. The climate is created by the clothing, not by the atmosphere, for it is never too hot for a halo of fur or too cold for a daring decolletage. Children, invested with secret powers, wear heroic costumes, and men and women grow more elegant with age. Pets participate in the pageantry, displaying their natural finery. Exercising in sequined jerseys, women glow; they never sweat. It's a Street of Dreams, not foldable on any Google map and engineered purely by an act of imagination. The Best-Dressed Boulevard, portrayed on these pages, bridges the Atlantic, stretching all the way from Manhattan to London. But the people and the settings are likely to shift suddenly, in the blink of the photographer's eye. For, as Proust noted, the "roads, avenues" where such processions take place are often as "fugitive" as mirages.

AMY FINE COLLINS

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