Arlenis Sosa stops by Vogue offices...

It’s not every day Dominican-born model Arlenis Sosa sails into the Beauty department, but she did one recent Friday, wearing a Helmut Lang jacket, skinny leather leggings, and towering booties with heels so high—let’s conservatively say five inches added to her already five-foot-eleven-inch frame—even our editors had to gasp.

Arlenis was on her way to Miami for the weekend with her mother and her aunt (she’d just bought her family a house back home in the D.R.; they were furniture shopping), but first, she stopped by Vogue to show off Lancôme’s spring colors. The collection is called Ultra Lavande (shimmery gel eye shadow, kohl liner, and polish in shades of pumped-up purple), and the campaign, shot by Mario Testino with makeup by Aaron de Mey, stars Sosa. “There’s always good energy and good music on Mario’s shoots,” says Arlenis, who is forever grateful to the multilingual Testino for calming her nerves and speaking Spanish with her in her early days of modeling, before she had learned English. While Ultra Lavande won’t be on counters until February, it has stealthily launched online, today, at lancome-usa.com.

As Arlenis was leaving, she ran into Grace Coddington and Virginia Smith, who were combing through racks in the Fashion department (they, too, admired her sky-high heels). Edward Enninful chased her down the hall to Bookings Editor Valerie Boster’s office, to make sure she had signed on for a shoot the following week with Norman Jean Roy. Costarring Joan Smalls, Jourdan Dunn, Chanel Iman, and newcomers Anais Mali and Ajak Deng, it will be in our March issue, and it is exquisite.

Vogue