one and onlys.

Byline: Anna Wintour

This year's Age Issue is a glorious opportunity to check in with women who've been a part of this magazine, and of our readers' lives, for decades. It's very meaningful for me, personally, to celebrate the renaissance of the nineties supermodels (see Sarah Mower's "Big Girls Don't Cry"), since the likes of Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington played a huge role in defining this magazine and its ideals. ("We are Vogue," Linda cheekily suggested in 1990, and she wasn't far off.) Linda is legendary in our business as the ultimate focused professional, so it's especially exciting that she is now pregnant and able, at 41, to embark on the greatest adventure of all. Christy, at 37, is as serenely beautiful as ever; it's a treat to lure her back into these pages, since modeling for Christy was always a means to greater ends.

It's also wonderful to hear again from long-standing writers for Vogue. Three years ago, we asked Nora Ephron to write about aging and her neck. That piece was the seed of a book of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck, to be published this month by Knopf, and we're delighted to bring you another portion of that book, Ephron's grimly hilarious meditation on the rottenness and rewards of being 65. Then, Shirley Lord, who was the Beauty Director of this magazine, writes very movingly in "Rites of Passage" (Up Front) about coping with the death of her husband, A. M. Rosenthal (the former executive editor of The New York ...