Travis Kelce is our Dec/Jan cover star 🏈! ⁠The Kansas City Chiefs tight end was famous for several years, thanks to his Hall of Fame résumé, his symbiotic relationship with quarterback Patrick Mahomes, but that was just football famous. This year, after winning the Super Bowl, after hosting "Saturday Night Live," after starring in all the commercials, Kelce became inescapable. And that was before—you know. ⁠ ⁠ “Obviously I’ve never dated anyone with that kind of aura about them…. I’ve never dealt with it,”Kelce says about Taylor Swift.⁠ ⁠ When it comes to football, Kelce keeps his own counsel about his round-the-clock physical anguish. “That’s the only thing I’ve never really been open about,” he says, “the discomfort. The pain. The lingering injuries—the 10 surgeries I’ve had that I still feel every single surgery to this day.” ⁠ ⁠ Kansas City longtime tight ends coach, Tom Melvin, says Kelce undersells the pain because the alternative is not playing, and the man will not miss games. “He has phenomenal pain tolerance. He’s played through things that other athletes I’ve coached through the years have not been able to push through. Mentally tough—way off the charts.” ⁠ ⁠ Still, he’s grossly underpaid. His $14 million salary, though near the top among tight ends, is half what the league’s star receivers make, and Kelce often functions as a receiver. ⁠ ⁠ Nothing to be done, he says flatly. The Chiefs know, he says, that he would play for free. They know he loves his city, his quarterback. “Unfortunately, in this business, things gotta get ugly, they gotta get unpleasant [if you want more money], and I’m a pleasant son of a buck.”⁠

No one has profited more from the concept of glam than Kylie Jenner, the youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner clan and the creator of a cosmetics empire that has been valued at over $1 billion. ⁠ ⁠ This fall, she launches Khy, a fashion line in partnership with her mother, Kris Jenner, and Popular Culture’s Emma and Jens Grede, a married couple who are also involved in the multibillion-dollar juggernauts Skims and Good American. ⁠ ⁠ Khy—a play on a nickname of Jenner’s—will feature different guest designers and concepts throughout the year. The brand aims to produce investment pieces at an affordable price point. Nothing in Khy’s first release costs over $200.⁠ ⁠ “The whole line is really inspired by my personal wardrobe, and the different moods that I’m in,” she said. ⁠ Within a family dynasty that has built an enormous fortune based on influence, Jenner might be the most influential of them all. She is digitally native and naturally experimental—her roughly 400 million Instagram followers outnumber the population of the United States. ⁠

Jerry Lorenzo for Fear of God is our 2023 Fashion Innovator!⁠ ⁠ Lorenro did not have formal fashion training when he launched Fear of God a decade ago. Now it has has bumped Supreme off some bestseller lists. “American luxury to me is the freedom to be the best version of yourself,” he says. Style, he adds, “is not just clam chowder from Boston. It’s a gumbo pot of all these different cultures and experiences and points of view that represent visually what America is today.”⁠ ⁠ The label doesn’t have any brick-and-mortar stores and does very little advertising. He chooses not to stage fashion shows on the industry’s traditional calendar, instead releasing collections when he feels they are ready. “I would rather only speak when I have something to say,” he notes. ⁠ ⁠ As a designer who learned how to make clothes not in a classroom but through visiting factories and sampling (and resampling and resampling) his ideas, Lorenzo treats the humble hoodie or denim with as much care as ultra-luxe Italian labels like Canali treat their suits. His cashmere overcoats, jersey hoodies and Tesla Cybertruck–looking slides sit easily on the body—the sartorial equivalent of settling into a low-slung Eero Saarinen Womb Chair. He envisions customers wearing $95 Essentials sweatpants underneath, say, a tidy $1,695 lapelless blazer from Fear of God’s high-end main line.

Martin Scorsese is our 2023 Film Innovator! 📽️⁠ ⁠ In 60 years as a filmmaker, Scorsese has elevated the crime genre with humanity, granular detail and novel camera moves. He’s explored the edges of spiritual faith in “The Last Temptation of Christ” and moral corruption in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” He’s parsed the greatness of other artists in documentaries about Bob Dylan, George Harrison and more. But for all his proven mastery, Scorsese, turning 81 in November, is still a student, searching for truths inside a story and how to frame them. ⁠ ⁠ The filmmaker’s visual language was shaped by the more claustrophobic scenery of his upbringing on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. ⁠ ⁠ “My idea of space was long, narrow hallways. Old, broken-tile floors. Staircases. Naked lightbulbs,” he recalls. “Compartmentalized and closed off with angles and hidden nooks and crannies. That’s how I see the world.”⁠ ⁠ When he was a kid frequenting cinemas around the city, movies helped him make sense of himself and the swirl of identities in his environment. Italian and American. Catholic and criminal.⁠ ⁠ He recently courted peril by putting himself in charge of a story that demanded deep understanding of Native American history, culture and pain. Set in 1920s Oklahoma, "Killers of the Flower Moon" is based on David Grann’s bestselling book about a series of real events known as the Reign of Terror, when dozens of Osage tribe members were killed by outsiders coveting their valuable mineral rights.

Amelia Dimoldenberg is an expert flirt. It’s a skill that comes with the territory of “Chicken Shop Date,” the YouTube series she created and has hosted for nine years. In it, she takes celebrities like Jack Harlow, Daniel Kaluuya and Jennifer Lawrence out to fried chicken shops across the London area and grills them in a fashion that’s half date, half interview.

Her YouTube channel and its 2 million-plus subscribers have thrust Dimoldenberg, 29, onto the red carpet as an interviewer. At events from the Golden Globes to the London premiere of “Barbie,” she’s injected humor into a ritual that’s known for being a bit stale. Twice, she’s gone viral for her flirtatious banter with the actor Andrew Garfield.⁠ ⁠ “It’s dire, isn’t it?” said Dimoldenberg about the state of flirting today. “People are maybe thinking, ‘Why would I flirt in real life when I can just DM them tomorrow or like their photo?’ And it sort of seems like enough, whereas it’s not enough. But flirting is so fun.”⁠

Alix Earle’s empire is growing. 

The 22-year-old TikTok influencer's new podcast, “Hot Mess,” comes out Thursday with the Unwell Network, founded by “Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper. Earle, a recent University of Miami graduate who lives in the city’s Brickell neighborhood, likes to record episodes from her bed. She hopes the show, which includes audio and video, will feel like “I am talking to a friend or I am on FaceTime with a friend.” 

Linda Evangelista is our digital cover star! ⁠ ⁠ The noted supermodel and Steven Meisel have been together through it all. Amid Evangelista’s health struggles, including a rare side effect of CoolSculpting that had left her “permanently deformed” and “brutally disfigured,” as she wrote in a statement on Instagram, and a breast cancer diagnosis in December 2018, which she is revealing publicly for the first time now, the close friends are examining their legacy with a new book, "Linda Evangelista Photographed by Steven Meisel," which Phaidon will publish in September. ⁠ ⁠ “I’ve come through some horrible health issues. I’m at a place where I’m so happy celebrating my book, my life. I’m so happy to be alive. Anything that comes now is bonus,” says Evangelista. ⁠