Peerless.(fearless friends)(Editorial)

For our annual Age Issue, we thought it would be fun to turn the spotlight on five of our editors--Grace Coddington, Tonne Goodman, Elissa Santisi, Marie-Amelie Sauve, and Tabitha Simmons--whose ages span the decades and whose approaches to style range widely. Normally, my editors are thinking only in terms of dressing the VOGUE reader when they see the collections; this month I asked each of them to show us what they will wear this fall, how they'll wear it, and why. It's perhaps the most instructive portfolio we've ever put together, not least because these are professionals whose job requires them to travel constantly while always achieving a constancy of chicness--looking on-trend and beyond trend and totally themselves.

The women we've chosen to profile this month are, above all, gloriously incapable of being anything but who they are. Our nonagenarian, Roberta McCain, is extraordinary not simply because her son John is running for president but because she embodies an almost outlaw lust for life. Last year, aged 95, she drove a Mercedes-Benz across the country to deliver it to her nephew, in the process picking up a speeding ticket in Arizona for driving 112 mph. Seven years earlier, she and her twin sister, on finding they were too old to rent a car in Europe, had simply bought one in Munich and sped off to Uzbekistan. Betty Fussell is another unstoppable figure: The 81-year-old has just spent the past four years investigating American ranches and slaughterhouses for her new book on grass-fed beef--and this after a life as faculty wife, academic, domestic goddess, ballroom ...