In this conversation writer Vanessa Rosales interviews one of the women who has most inspired and shaped her own work, The New Yorker Style Critic, writer and biographer Judith Thurman.

They talk about the ways in which Thurman writes, the decade-long process of writing Colette's biography, the ways in which she has approached the art of producing portraits of other characters such as Colette, Isak Dinesen, Yves Saint Laurent, Rei Kawakubo, Coco Chanel, among others. They talk about Elena Ferrante's singular and fierce female voice, not without complicating the ideas of womanhood and being female that are also a part of today's cultural subtexts. They discuss fashion criticism, the way it's changed and what it means to look at the subject from a cultural critique perspective. One of the most beautiful questions Thurman's work has articulated focuses on what it means to become a woman and what does it mean to become an individual. Her writing is a source of luminosity.