DREAM CATCHER

Jennifer Lopez, the avatar of personal style, plays both the muse and icon to some of her favorite designers-visionaries who dressed her as they see her: earthy, regal, and above all, inspiring.

By Peter Rubin
Photographed by Carter Smith
Styled by Joe Zee

Jennifer Lopez is not the type to skimp; she doesn't do things one at a time. Careers, for instance. Or kids. Or offices. She has an office in her Los Angeles home; one across town at her Nuyorican Productions film company near UCLA; one at Sweetface, her New York fashion company situated across the street from Bryant Park, home to the city's Fashion Week. And we're sitting in another one now, in her house on Long Island, though "house" is an understatement on par with calling Stephen Hawking "bright." It's less house than estate-compound, even-hidden behind a gate at the end of an all-but-unlabeled street that I completely overshot while driving here. It's less MTV's Cribs than it is Robb Report.

In the same way, this office is less workspace than trophy room. As it should be, really; with Lopez and her husband, Marc Anthony, having sold nearly 50 million albums worldwide between them, that's a lot of platinum and gold plaques to display on the dark-honey wood walls. Add in the various Grammys, AMAs, and other awards, and I half expect to see a PhD diploma in astrophysics tucked in among the hardware. But there's a desk, so it's an office-and behind the desk sits Jennifer Lopez.

She's 39 now. Hard to believe-15 years since her Fly Girl days on In Living Color. We've seen her through two divorces (to Ojani Noa, a waiter-chef, and backup dancer-choreographer Cris Judd) and two other very public relationships: one with Ben Affleck that caved under media scrutiny and a box-office flop, and one with Sean Combs that ended in a postarrest (his) breakup. She has released eight albums (five of them platinum or more) and 21 movies. Her ubiquity has been extraordinary; after breaking out as Tejano star Selena in the eponymous 1997 biopic, it was virtually impossible to open a magazine or turn on a television or radio without a full-blown Lopezapalooza. In 2001, she was the first woman to have an album ( J.Lo, her second) and a movie (The Wedding Planner) both open at No. 1 the same week. She became an entrepreneurial juggernaut, launching fragrances (the best-selling Glow, Deseo, and the new Deseo for Men) and clothing lines that manage to thrive in a millennial recession. Hell, she surpassed Famous Person and went straight to Sociological Flash Point: the cultural import of her butt was more discussed than most political scandals-and would, fortunately or not, allow young women down the road, perhaps those with names that sound like Schmim Schmardashian, to be famous for nothing save for a shapely posterior. Yet today, in her office, Lopez seems happier than she's ever been. "I feel like my life's just begun," she says. "It's the beginning again. And I just love that."

She easily slides through emotions from giggly to serious to deflective. (If you'd been interviewed as many times as she has, deflective would be one of your emotions too.) There's a calm surrounding her. She chalks it up to the birth of her twins, Max and Emme, now seven months old. "All of a sudden," she says, "the world is very clear. 'This is important, this is not, this is okay, this is not.' That's what the world comes down to." She wears little visible makeup, and with her hair in a bun, huge hoop earrings, and a long halterdress on, she's squarely in casual-mother mode, a style Diane von Furstenberg describes as "exotic and earthy."

Well, mostly; her flip-flops are bejeweled Puccis that her friends Dolce and Gabbana picked out for her on a recent trip to Europe. She's still J.Lo, after all, a woman who never met a fabulous outfit she didn't like. "I've always loved the glamour," she says with the slightest shrug. So sue me. "I can't shy away from that. I've always been very girly." She hasn't been indiscriminate, gobbling up every possible trend; hers is an intuitive and nuanced symbiosis with fashion. "Jennifer is a style icon because she knows exactly what fits her and how she [can] look beautiful," says Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld. Even in her early movies, she was aware of the effect her clothes could have, whether charming Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson in a little black dress in Money Train (1995) or seducing Sean Penn in a devilish red one in Oliver Stone's glorious mess U Turn (1997). The best scene from one of her best films, the extended mutual seduction with George Clooney in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998), was escalated from mere smoldering to California wildfire status by the light gray dress that was poured over her curves. "She's got an amazing sense of what looks good on her," Donatella Versace says, "and she knows how to highlight all of her best assets in the most natural way."

Somewhere along the way, though, a transformation took place. We knew Lopez as a dancer, then an actress, a singer, a businesswoman. But even as her stranglehold on the box office and album charts has loosened a bit-a look at IMDB's all-knowing Starmeter shows her often enjoying Top 20 status until after the Affleck/Gigli affair of 2003-her whole has become much, much greater than the sum of her ventures. She's an avatar now, a symbol of throwback silver-screen glamour. "Jennifer is the epitome of old Hollywood," Stefano Gabbana says. "Natural beauty and striking confidence." There aren't many who can match her red carpet Richter ratings, for better or worse. Even those of us with the fashion sense of Britney Spears remember watershed moments such as her plunging green Versace dress at the Grammys in 2000 or divisive ones like her silver minidress with matching head scarf from the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards. "When people start talking about what a person wears and not just about her career," says Sweetface vice president of design Albino Riganello, "that's a style icon." And this one is not prone to second-guessing herself. "My stylist was like, 'Please don't wear that!' " Lopez remembers of the silver dress. "She had this beautiful YSL piece. And I was like, 'No, I love this. It's who I am, it's very MTV, it's pop, I love it!' Cut to a few years later: I'm sitting with MTV for a segment, and they're like, 'Remember when you wore this? Defend your choice.' And I'm like, 'Defend my choice? Kiss my ass!' "

It's that backbone (Marchesa cofounder Georgina Chapman calls it "sophisticated confidence that complements her beauty") that has helped Lopez choose such memorable looks. And it's made her the woman that designers love to dress-in their own clothes, as they see her. For this story, she drew on her long-standing friendships with Dolce and Gabbana ("My babies! I love them, I love them, I love them," she says), Donatella ("We've always had a very sweet relationship. I really got to know her more after her brother had died."), and Chapman ("She could be a model-but meanwhile, she's down there pinning and sewing all these things all over you!"). One designer Lopez hadn't worked with before was Oscar de la Renta, who was delighted to bring her back to an environment both of them know well. "Jennifer's Latin flair and her extraordinary sense of self come across in everything she wears," he says. "We are both proud exponents of where we came from, which is why we chose Washington Heights"-a heavily Latino neighborhood in uptown Manhattan-"for the shoot location." Though Lopez is originally from the Bronx's Castle Hill neighborhood, it was still a trip down memory lane. "We were in the hoody!" she says. "All kinds of locals hanging out, eating out of paper bags, thinking, What's going on around here? It was crazy."

It was the type of neighborhood where Lopez first honed the style sense that would make Michael Kors see her as a born fashion editor. ("She is curious about what's new and what's next," he says, "but at the same time she knows how to edit perfectly for her look and lifestyle.") At 14, she saw a "Lucky Star"-era Madonna and realized what clothes could become. "It occurred to me for the first time that you can take sweatshirts and cut them up," Lopez says. "It was about expressing yourself in a sense, trying different things." So she and her junior high girlfriends took the Bronx by storm in "webo pants"-loose-fitting drawstring pants favored by dancemusic fans-and gladiator sandals. "I wear the Roman sandals now," she says, laughing, "and fashion people don't even realize how Bronx this was in the '80s!" Her love for couture would come later. In the mid-'90s, after In Living Color but before recording her first album-when she was making "enough to say I was a working actress, but not enough to do much except live in the Valley"-Lopez went to Los Angeles' Beverly Center mall, "looking for something for the little bit of shekels I had at the time." In the Shauna Stein boutique, she saw a black Dolce & Gabbana dress that would change her life: "Cut spaghetti straps, tight to the waist, all the way pencil down below the knees, split in the back, just the perfect black dress," she says. "For me, being a curvy person, a lot of times it was like, the waist is big or the hips were too tight, or whatever." She bought it on layaway for $1,095, then wore it to every audition. It was her first splurge. "Jennifer loves beautiful things," says footwear designer Brian Atwood, who created shoes for her for the 2006 Academy Awards and for this story. "And it's through that appreciation that she has cultivated her look." Even during the first six months of pregnancy, Lopez was costume-changing her way around the world on tour with Anthony-and when she finally holed up for her third trimester, she somehow saw it as a fashion opportunity: "I was like, How am I going to rock this moment of my life?" In early February, roughly two weeks before the twins were born, she commissioned photographer Tony Duran to shoot a book of her as a Valentine's gift for Anthony. She has an assistant bring in the book. It is oversize, lushly shot, and frankly looks like the sexiest maternity catalog in existence: Jennifer in full makeup, hair done up, wearing long cashmere sweaters pulled up to expose her nigh-to-bursting belly. "I felt very womanly," she says. "Marc was in a dream. He loved it."

The pregnancy itself was a surprise, as the couple had all but given up on the possibility of having children. They had wanted to start a family as soon as they got married in 2004, she says, "then it just didn't happen." Despite rumors to the contrary, Lopez says that they never pursued in vitro fertilization. "We knew nothing was wrong with either one of us-I had been checked, and he had kids already," she says. "I knew, Something's not ready here, in my head or in my life, and when it is, I know it's going to happen."

And it did, almost exactly three years later. Lopez was by herself in Portugal for a show when she realized she was five days late for her period; Anthony, at home in New York, was convinced that she was pregnant. "I was sitting down doing hair and makeup," she says, "and I felt a flutter. The weirdest little…flourish. My makeup artist said, 'What's the matter?' I didn't say anything, but in my head, I was like, I have life inside me!" As soon as she got back to the States, out came the pregnancy tests. Twenty of them. Including one that she made Anthony take: "I needed to see what a negative looked like!"

CHECK OUT THE OCTOBER ISSUE OF ELLE FOR THE FULL STORY ON JENNIFER LOPEZ