Canadian designer David Szeto is the new elegant. One needn’t look further than his work for proof: the bow-front blouse, the crocheted top, the turquoise silk dress with black leopard print, sleeveless, its twisted straps wrapping like tendrils around the collarbone. Szeto, 40, embodies an eloquence that feels vintage and vanguard.

Photographer Leigh Ledare doesn't simply picture his mother naked. He also takes naked pictures of her.

Ansel Adams liked nature. Terry Richardson prefers the informality of the point-and-shoot. Leigh Ledare, well, he digs his mom. The photographer recently released a book of images, Pretend You’re Actually Alive, which features his mother, a 59-year-old ballerina-turned stripper, in various stages of undress. Some of the pictures include lingerie and boyfriends; many feature a come-hither gaze that wouldn’t be so jarring if the photographer weren’t her son. Ledare, 32, says the project began about eight years ago, when he paid his mother a visit in Seattle. “Basically,” he says, “I arrived home one Christmas, and I hadn’t seen her in a year, and she came to the door completely naked.”