Every
April for the last 18 years, we've scoured the earth to bring you a
dazzlingly shot portfolio of people who are helping to shape their
cultural moment and looking really good while they're at it. This year,
we decided to blow things out of the water with a mega-edition of
scene-making, earth-shaking, heartbreaking creative folks across a vast
range of disciplines. And because the story happened to coincide with our American Dream issue,
we asked some of them how they define, embody and/or subvert that
elusive ideal. From white-hot fashion duo Eckhaus Latta to lightning-rod
singer and actress Zendaya to cultural critic Ta-Nehisi Coates and
beyond, here are 70 people we only have eyes for in 2015.
I
know people want to talk about the American Dream, but my dream is a
world dream. It's a world in which everyone's main goal would be to help
each other. The first thing I told my team on New Year's Day was, "You
know, people say bad news travels fast, but this year let's make good
news travel faster." You get back what you put out, and the more
positive energy you put out, the more positive energy you'll get back.
We had to do a lot of fighting in the past couple of years to get people
to understand what we want to do, what we will do and what we're
capable of doing. Not just me -- or my DONDA creative team, or my design
team, or my music team -- but an entire generation that has the
information highway and the ability to access information. Information
is not only power; it's simply everything. It can be a scary thing for
people to think universally, to think in terms of the world. It's not
traditional. There's a lot of people who want to make sure things don't
become a hybrid, but the Internet has opened up every conversation,
literally and metaphorically. It starts as homogenizing, but this
hybrid-ing, this interbreeding of ideas, is necessary for us as a race
to evolve. (Thank God for Steve Jobs.) For example, there was an
embroiderer at a fashion house who was in her 90s and she refused to
give anyone her technique. She said, "When I die, this technique will
die also." I think the opposite of that. I think it's so important for
me, as an artist, to give Drake as much information as I can, A$AP,
Kendrick, Taylor Swift, any of these younger artists as much information
as I can to make better music in the future. We should all be trying to
make something that's better. It's funny that I worked at the Gap in
high school, because in my past 15 years it seems like that's the place I
stood in my creative path -- to be the gap, the bridge.
It's
funny to be so famous and noted for one thing, and to have so many
people try to box you out of another form of art, even if you've proven
you're an artist of one form. My goal isn't to "break through the
fashion world;" my goal is to make usable sculpture. My goal is to
paint. My goal is to be as close to a five-year-old, or a four-year-old,
or a three-year-old, as possible. If a three-year-old says, "I like the
color orange," he's not giving an explanation to an entire world that
can give him a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on whether or not he should
like the color orange. I don't care about the thumbs-up or the
thumbs-down. Fashion is something that's in my heart to do -- in my
spirit. There's no world that can stop me from what I love. Not the rap
world, not the fashion world, not the real world. But it hurt me
as a human being to see that article written, with the amount of work
that's there and the potential and what I know I will eventually
do. But behind bravery and courage is the ability to brace for pain, not
the idea of never having pain or trying to avoid pain. Bravery and
courage is walking into pain and knowing that something better is on the
other side. I heard this quote from Steve Jobs: someone came up to him
when he was working on something and said, "Hey, just do it. It will be
easy." And he said, "Wait a second. Anything halfway good is at least
medium hard." There's no easy way out. Just choose what you want to
focus on. Right now, over 70 percent of my focus is on apparel. I
haven't even given my College Dropout of clothing yet. We're still on mixtapes. 
I
heard a comment -- a joke -- about the Tidal press conference being an
Illuminati moment. If there was actually an Illuminati, it would be more
like the energy companies. Not celebrities that gave their life to
music and who are pinpointed as decoys for people who really run the
world. I'm tired of people pinpointing musicians as the Illuminati.
That's ridiculous. We don't run anything; we're celebrities.
We're the face of brands. We have to compromise what we say in lyrics so
we don't lose money on a contract. Madonna is in her 50s and gave
everything she had to go up on an award show and get choked by her cape.
She's judged for who she adopts. Fuck all of this sensationalism. We
gave you our lives. We gave you our hearts. We gave you our opinions! 
When
I was 10 years old I lived in China, and at the time they used to come
up to me and rub my face to see if the color would rub off. It was
really fucked up, but I feel like it was preparing me for a world
perspective that a lot of my friends who never got a chance to travel
didn't get. Now my perspective, a lot of times, is so much wider than
someone who's limited to the concept of any particular so-called world
that's not the real world. I take into account all of what's happening,
from the boom of business in San Francisco to the poverty in Africa --
and that is wide perspective. When I was in fifth grade in China, when
kids would come up to me and touch my face, it was like they had never
seen a black person before, but that was a while ago. That was 20 years
ago and of course we've come a long way now. That's not the current
state of mind. On "Never Let Me Down" I rapped, "Racism's still alive,
they just be concealing it," but for the next generation that's not
necessarily true. Racism is something that's taught, but for the new
post-Internet, post-iPad kids that have been taught to swipe before they
read, it's just not going to affect them as much. They realize that we
are one race. We're different colors -- my cousins and I are different
shapes and we're all from one family. We're all from one family called
the human race. It's simple as that. This race is up against some
interesting things -- poverty, war, global warming, classism -- and we
have to come together to beat this. It'll only be as a collective that
we can beat this, and we can. We can create a better world for
ourselves. 
One
time I was at the dentist's office and I was given nitrous gas and I
was vibing out -- I guess that's my version of Steve Jobs and his LSD
trip -- when I had this first thought: What is the meaning of life? And then I thought, To give. What's the key to happiness? Happiness.
What do you want in life? When you give someone something, should they
give you something in return? No. We don't have to expect to be
compensated by the person we give to. Just give. I'm a Christian so I'll
speak in Christian terms: God will give you tenfold. Then I said in my
mind -- I'm still under the gas and getting my teeth cleaned -- But I just want to be remembered. And I immediately corrected myself. I said, It doesn't even matter if I'm remembered.
I came out of the gas and had a completely new attitude on everything.
It's fine to not get credit for everything; it's almost better. For the
amount of things that I really want to do, it can only work if I'm
credited for about 20 percent of them. Because if I'm really credited
for the amount of things that I'm going to do and what I want to do,
it's just too much. The reward is in the deed itself. The times that
I've looked like a crazy person -- when I was screaming at an
interviewer or screaming from the stage -- all I was screaming was,
"Help me to help more! I've given all I've got. I've gone into fucking
debt. It's all I've got to give. But if I had a little bit more
opportunity, I could give so much more." That's what I was screaming
for. Help me to help more. 
Cyrus
grew up outside of Nashville with her brothers and sisters on a
500-acre farm where, she says, she began a formative practice of getting
up early in the morning and riding a dirt bike around in the nude. In
the year of her birth, her father, Billy Ray, became briefly, colossally
famous for wearing a mullet and performing a country song about getting
dumped. Dolly Parton is her godmother. ("She taught me how to treat
people well," Cyrus says.) In 2006, Cyrus was cast in the title role of
the Disney Channel's hugely popular Hannah Montana, the gig that would handily propel her to mega-stardom.
Since
leaving the Disney cocoon for a pop career, Cyrus has accrued equal
amounts of public adoration and derision. At times the naysayers have
been loud, nearly gleeful. There is, for example, a four-minute YouTube
montage titled "Miley Cyrus Worst Moments" that features her jokily
simulating various sex acts on her buddies, smoking alone in a parked
car and crying while singing. To which I say: who among us has not had
that kind of day? 
1. Marques'Almeida 
2. Faustine Steinmetz 
3. Bethnals 
4. Frame Denim 
5. Wåven 
6. IDA
7. MiH Denim
8. Aries 
9. KÉJI 
10. Story mfg 
