Dance, Dance, Revolution

i’ll admit, i wasn’t exactly familiar with Roberto Bolle when his name initially popped up in my inbox, accompanying an ebullient email from photographer Giovanni Squatriti. But that proves my ignorance more than anything else – a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre and étoile with La Scala, Bolle’s appeared multiple times on the cover of Vanity Fair Italia as well as securing a spot on last year’s international best-dressed list. He was the subject of a photography book by Bruce Weber, Roberto Bolle: An Athlete in Tights. And along with Kendall Jenner (plus one adorable corgi puppy), he fronts this season’s Tod’s campaign. Where have I been?

Clearly not on Google Images, where a cursory search of his name provides so much eye candy – much of it decidedly NSFW – that I had to close the browser window lest my colleagues believe I had diverged from my daily work duties. But his body is as much about function as it is form, and while that isn’t easy to capture in a two-dimensional format, it’s well worth catching a performance of the dancer whose power, emotion and grace means he easily holds his own in a medium that so clearly places the softer sex in the foreground.

Anyway, you get it. Bolle has captured our hearts readily and utterly, as he will yours once you turn to page 132.

Elsewhere in this issue, we honour those whose unrelenting passion has made them unlikely heroes – they aren’t the superstars, the A-listers, the headline grabbers. They’re quiet might and consistent appeal and – we think – the voices of the future. They’re

Naomi Smalls, a RuPaul’s Drag Race finalist whose lean physique, luscious features and tireless work ethic make her an ideal model, male or female. They’re Roksanda Ilincic, the Serbian designer whose colourful frocks aren’t always awards-show staples but are a regular woman’s best friend. They’re Haegue Yang, a Seoul- and Berlin-based artist with prolific and wondrous oeuvre, whose magnetism is limited only by how exceedingly cerebral her process is. They’re boutique book publisher Thames & Hudson, which has discovered an innovative way to balk the downward spiral most of its contemporaries are facing, by returning the power of publishing to the masses.

Let the Pied Piper play – we salute they who dance to their own beat, and we invite you to do the same.