Vanity Fair's Best Dressed List

It’s that glorious time of year – when the magazine covers unveil the bold and beautiful big guns, when Bryant Park becomes the Mecca for sartorialists worldwide, and when Vanity Fair announces the annual International Best-Dressed List.

Much thanks to the Jezebel team, who created a genius breakdown of the 42-member list. Seventeen percent are or are dating royalty, and our favorite is Carla Bruni, who always looks amazing in her endless array of Dior. Fourteen percent are actors, including Brangelina and Tilda Swinton (yes!), and another 14 percent are socialites, counting the expected Ivanka Trump, Evelyn Lauder and the like. There’s also a small smattering of designers (cheers to Karl Lagerfeld) and journalists like Today show’s Matt Lauer. One dapper rapper named Kanye West also made it on the list.

The list was originally founded by fashion goddess Eleanor Lambert in 1940. Previous honorees include Coco Chanel, Sofia Loren, David de Rothschild, Gianni Agnelli, and of course, Anna Wintour. Vanity Fair’s been assembling it after Lambert’s death in 2003, and since then there’s been talk about the list being too narrow: that it consists only of the very rich and very famous that can afford the stylists to dress them in couture, and that it doesn’t look beyond the European and American fashion moguls to be “international” enough.

Even still, props to Vanity Fair: After all, they did have the guts to honor our favorite British athlete, conspicuously sans an also gorgeous – and probably very peeved – wife.
-Grace Bahk