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MAY 30 

It might not be able to top the real-life 

drama coming out of DC, but with 

the slogan “We make the terror,” the 

fifth season of House of Cards, available 

today on Netflix, seems inclined to try. 

MAY 3 

Short-listed for the 

Turner Prize in 2013, 

Ghanaian British painter 

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 

who’s earned acclaim for 

her gestural, luminous 

portraits, has her first 

solo show at NYC’s 

New Museum. 

MAY 12 

Filmed in the highoctane, 

tongue-in-cheek 

style of director Guy 

Ritchie, King Arthur: 

YIADOM-BOAKYE’S 

DAYDREAMING OF 

DEVILS, 2016 

Legend of the Sword, 

which stars Jude Law, 

Charlie Hunnam, Djimon 

Hounsou, and Astrid 

Bergès-Frisbey, retells 

the classic folktale. 

MAY 12 

Transparent showrunner 

Jill Soloway transforms 

the feminist, cult-favorite 

novel I Love Dick into an 

Amazon series starring 

Kathryn Hahn and Griffin 

Dunne as a married 

couple who become 

obsessed with a charismatic 

professor played 

by Kevin Bacon. 

MAY 21 

When Twin Peaks 

debuted in 1990, the 

twisty-turny thriller was 

so ahead of its time, it 

lasted only two seasons. 

HOUSE 

OF CARDS 

Now the series returns, 

with cocreator David 

Lynch directing a slew 

of new faces (from 

Eddie Vedder to 

Naomi Watts) 

and many 

originals (Kyle 

MacLachlan, 

David Duchovny, 

and even the 

Log Lady!). 

MAY 26 

Starring Dwayne 

Johnson, Zac Efron, 

Alexandra Daddario, 

and Priyanka Chopra, 

Baywatch, a movie based 

on the long-running (get 

it?) TV series, has all the 

requisite red, high-cut 

BACON 

AND HAHN 

tank suits, chiseled abs, 

slo-mo shots, and bad 

guys, but with a new 

(very welcome) willingness 

to poke 

fun at itself. 

MAY 30 

In Theft by 

Finding: Diaries 

(1977–2002), 

author David Sedaris 

reveals not so much the 

vagaries of his inner 

emotions as the specifics 

of his actual life, and 

proves himself (once 

again) to be one of the 

most observant, wryest, 

and funniest writers alive. 

MAY 31 

Premiering on Netflix: 

I Am Jane Doe, a searing 

documentary narrated 

by Jessica Chastain 

about sex traffcking in 

the U.S. and a lawsuit 

three women brought 

against the classified site 

Backpage.com. 

FRISCO FANTASY 

Looking for a wellness 

reset? Who isn’t! At 

juicebeauty.ELLE.com, 

enter for a chance to 

win a weekend in San 

Francisco living like 

Juice Beauty Creative 

Director of Makeup 

Gwyneth Paltrow. 

You and a guest will 

receive round-trip 

airfare, a two-night 

hotel stay, a skin-care 

consultation at Juice 

Beauty headquarters 

with the company’s 

founder, Karen Behnke, 

and a makeover with a 

top makeup artist. Plus, 

you’ll go to a Gwynethapproved 

workout 

class and restaurant, 

get a facial from the 

brand at Bloomingdale’s, 

and take home 

their skin-care products 

and makeup—in 

a pouch signed by 

Gwyneth herself! See 

page 103 for details. 

Clockwise from top left: Frank Masi; courtesy of Little, Brown and Company; David Giesbrecht; courtesy of Juice Beauty; Getty Images 

(2); courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures; courtesy of Yiadom-Boakye, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Corvi-Mora, London 

28 

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WRINKLES 

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PORES 

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SIGNS OF AGING 

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LET’S BEAUTY TOGETHER

AY 

MAY 29 

Read up on one the biggest names 

in contemporary art—and fashion, 

thanks to his work with Marc Jacobs 

at Louis Vuitton—in this month’s 

Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats 

Its Own Leg (Skira Rizzoli) before the 

artist’s June show of the same name 

at Chicago’s MCA. 

“fab,” for that 

matter—are 

so much 

more than 

just a number. 

3 

1 

MAY 1 

With Prabal Gurung having 

designed a collection 

for Lane Bryant, and 

Ashley Graham stalking 

Michael Kors’s fall 

2017 runway (2), it begs 

the question: Is fashion 

finally waking up to 

the beauty of all sizes? 

Starting this month, 

Kate Hudson’s rainbowhued 

athleticwear, 

Fabletics (1), will run 

from size XXS to 3X. 

Proof that “fit”—and 

2 

MAY 15 

Of course, the 

OG It Girl would 

have a white-hot 

Instagram account 

(1.7 million followers). 

Study her painstakingly 

art-directed posts 

(4)—and, ya know, 

words of wisdom—in 

Assouline’s dreamy 

new pink tome, The Art 

of @BarbieStyle. 

MAY 16 

Putting the feel-good 

factor into four-inch 

stilettos: Aquazzura 

designer Edgardo 

Osorio’s loved-up, 

heart-adorned sandal (6) 

benefits modelphilanthropist 

Petra 

Nemcova’s Happy 

Hearts Fund. 

A quarter of 

the proceeds will 

aid schools in 10 

countries, including 

Thailand, where Nemcova 

survived the 2004 

tsunami. Available at 

aquazzura.com. 

MAY 21 

For a decade, Dutch 

revolutionary Iris van 

Herpen has shocked 

and awed the worlds 

of both fashion and art 

with surreal, sculptural 

clothing (3) utilizing 

groundbreaking technology 

(3-D printing) 

and materials (magnets, 

umbrella tines). 

Iris van Herpen: 

Transforming 

Fashion, at 

the Dallas 

Museum of 

Art (through 

August 20), 

showcases 55 of her 

greatest technical feats. 

Bergdorf Goodman’s NYC flagship becomes the 

place to shop this month with two must-visits: Kicking things off 

on May 1, company SVP and all-round icon Linda Fargo shares a few 

of her favorite things, like a hand-beaded mochilla bag from Ranjana 

Khan (7) and a Caroline Constas silk maxidress (8), in her new 

permanent shop, Linda’s at Bergdorf Goodman. And on the 15th of 

the month, Colombia’s buzzy fashion talent takes over the third floor: 

Mónica Holguín, the second-gen knitwear designer behind the 

oh-so-flattering gowns and separates of Pepa Pombo (9). 

4 

5 

6 

MAY 30 

In his new book, The 

World of Anna Sui 

(Abrams) (5), fashion 

journalist Tim Blanks 

explores Anna Sui’s career 

celebrating culture’s 

coolest archetypes— 

schoolgirls, flower children, 

punks, goths— 

just in time for 

the opening of 

the designer’s 

retrospective at 

London’s Fashion 

and Textile 

Museum (through 

October 1). 

8 

9 

Michael Kors and Iris van Herpen runway: Imaxtree.com; Takashi Murakami: courtesy of Rizzoli New York 

7 

36

870 MADISON AVENUE NEW YORK

May 2017 

ON THE COVER 

64 

ELLE AGENDA: POLITICS 

IS THE NEW BLACK 

Two writers debate fashion’s 

new obsession: feminism 

123 

ELLE SH PS 

Sandals and suits and beach 

bags—oh my! Your one-stop 

shop for all things poolside 

151 

ALTERED STATES 

Be the change! Five ELLE 

editors scrub in for total 

beauty transformations: brow 

tattoos, color contacts, and 

one life-changing facelift 

201 

INDEPENDENT SPIRIT 

Highly personalized hair is 

having a moment, from 

bold bleach jobs to wild, 

unbridled manes 

242 

SUPER GIRLS 

Leading our jam-packed 

Beauty Issue, six absolute 

stunners—Bella Hadid! 

Jasmine Tookes! Hailey 

Baldwin! and more— 

Lycra bikini top, CHROMAT, 

$116, collection at revolve com. 

Sequin skirt,$4,500, vinyl 

sandals, all, ALEXANDER 

WANG. Silver-plated 

hoop earring, ANNELISE 

MICHELSON, $398 (for pair). 

White gold and diamond 

stud earring, HEARTS 

ON FIRE, $895 (for pair). 

Crocodile backpack, NANCY 

GONZALEZ, $3,850. Leather 

clutch, KARA, $275. Silver 

bangles, all, LAGOS, $300 

each. White gold and diamond 

ring, CARTIER, $4,050. For 

details, see Shopping Guide. 

David Bellemere 

38 

VOLUME XXXII NUMBER 9 NO. 381

Andy Warhol: Ambulance Disaster, 1963-64 © The Andy Warhol Foundation / ARS 

Calvin Klein: Classic Denim Jeans (Archival Originals, 1980) and Classic Denim Jeans (Archival Originals, 1982) 

Photographed at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

p.000 

Chrissy Metz into 

stardom, redefining what 

beauty and womanhood 

look like on TV. By 

Maggie Bullock 

95 

ELLE FASHION 

What’s the best way 

to mix of-the-moment 

makeup and straightfrom-the-runway 

trends? 

Our fashion team breaks 

it down 

105 

ELLE ACCESSORIES 

Glide into summer 

with blooming slides, 

metallic extras, gleaming 

emeralds, and more 

118 

THE COLOR CURE 

To see Marimekko’s boho 

charm firsthand, Olivia 

Stren jets off to Finland 

with her mother in mind 

new mold-breaking 

superhero…In The Dinner, 

a Richard Gere–led ensemble 

navigates a familial 

minefield…Charmaine 

Craig’s sophomore novel 

examines identity in midcentury 

Burma…and more! 

222 

HAVEN SENT 

Meet the woman behind 

Manhattan’s make-orbreak 

cooking school. 

By Charlotte Druckman 

228 

THE PROPHET 

As an adaptation of The 

Handmaid’s Tale hits 

Hulu, Canadian literary 

force Margaret Atwood’s 

singular prescience is front 

and center once again. 

By Miranda Purves 

p.194 

p.80 

p.123 

p.242 

prove that fashion’s 

future looks varied 

and bright. By Molly 

Langmuir. Photographed 

by Terry Tsiolis. Styled 

by Samira Nasr 

260 

LAWS OF ATTRACTION 

Models on the rise make 

a splash in unexpected 

Technicolor mash-ups 

and major makeup. 

Photographed by 

Terry Tsiolis. Styled by 

Samira Nasr 

276 

CLEAN BREAK 

This summer’s chicest 

suit is simply white. 

Photographed by David 

Bellemere. Styled by 

David Vandewal 

FASHION 

77 

JET-SETTER: 

PAPERLESS POST-CARD 

Next stop, Peru! Stationery 

guru Alexa Hirschfeld 

details her trip to Lima 

and beyond. By Molly 

Langmuir 

80 

A VERY BETTY TAKEOVER 

America’s favorite 

doe-eyed ingenue, Betty 

Boop, gets a fashion 

editor–approved 2017 

makeover. Illustrated by 

Frank Caruso 

84 

REALITY TELEVISION 

NBC’s This Is Us launched 

272 

AMERICAN GOTH 

You’ve seen her in daring 

roles onscreen and off. But 

who is Mia Goth? By Seth 

Plattner. Photographed 

by Patric Shaw. Styled by 

Sabina Schreder 

284 

MAXIMUM EXPOSURE 

Max Mara hits Shanghai’s 

burgeoning art scene. 

Molly Langmuir reports 

on the ground 

FEATURES 

142 

ELLE INTELLIGENCE 

Introducing Pom 

Klementieff, Marvel’s 

Hailey Baldwin wears a knit top from 

Alexandre Vauthier and a gold necklace 

from Cartier. To get Baldwin’s makeup 

look, try Perfect Brows, The Filter 

Cream Contour & Glow, and Super 

Lips Billow. All, Hailey Baldwin for 

ModelCo. Maria Borges wears a cotton 

tank from Calvin Klein Underwear and 

a gold and diamond earring from 2017 

Tiffany Blue Book Collection. To get 

Borges’s makeup look, try Voluminous 

Original Mascara in Black, Infallible 

Paints Eye Shadow in Brown Sugar, 

Infallible Smokissime eyeliner in Black 

Smoke, and Infallible Paints/Lip in 

Sultry Sangria. All, L’Oréal Paris. Bella 

Hadid wears an organza top and skirt 

from Chanel, and gold earrings and a 

yellow and white gold and diamond 

earring from Chanel Fine Jewelry. On 

subscriber cover: Bella Hadid wears 

a cotton T-shirt from Gap, gold rings 

and a gold and diamond ring from Van 

Cleef & Arpels, a gold ring, a gold 

and diamond ring, and white gold 

ring from Chanel Fine Jewelry. To get 

Hadid’s makeup look, try Diorshow 

Pump’N’Volume mascara in Black, 

Diorshow Khôl in Smoky Brown, 5 

Couleurs Designer palette in Amber 

Design, and Rouge Dior lipstick in 

Ambitious Matte. All, Dior. Elsa Hosk 

wears a pink gold, diamond, and coral 

watch and a pink gold, diamond, ruby, 

and lacquer watch from Bulgari. To get 

Hosk’s makeup look, try Brow Precise 

Perfecting Highlighter, Great Lash 

Washable Mascara in Blackest Black, 

Eyestudio Lasting Drama Waterproof 

Gel Pencil in Sleek Onyx, and Color 

Sensational Creamy Matte Lip Color 

in Craving Coral. All, Maybelline 

New York. Candice Huffine wears a 

silk dress from Fendi, a gold bracelet 

from Lalaounis, and a gold pinkie ring 

from David Yurman. To get Huffine’s 

makeup look, try Brow Stylist Kabuki 

Blender, Voluminous Butterfly Mascara 

in Black, and Colour Riche La Palette 

Nude Intense. All, L’Oréal Paris. 

Jasmine Tookes wears a silk lace dress 

from Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini, a 

gold and diamond earring from Maria 

Tash, a gold necklace from Cartier, 

and gold and diamond rings from 

Tiffany & Co. To get Tookes’s makeup 

look, try The Falsies Push Up Angel 

Washable Mascara in Very Black, The 

Rock Nudes Eye Shadow Palette, and 

Baby Lips Color Balm Crayon in Toasted 

Taupe. All, Maybelline New York. 

Photographed by Terry Tsiolis; styled 

by Samira Nasr; hair by Kayla MiChele 

at Streeters (Baldwin, Hosk), Romina 

Manenti at Home Agency (Borges, 

Huffine, Tookes), and Ward at the Wall 

Group (Hadid); makeup by Frankie 

Boyd at Tim Howard Management; 

manicures by Elisa Ferri at See 

Management (Baldwin, Hosk) and Gina 

Edwards at Kate Ryan Inc. (Borges, 

Hadid, Huffine, Tookes); produced 

by Wanted Media; fashion assistant: 

Yashua Simmons. 

Clockwise from top left: Terry Tsiolis; illustration by Frank Caruso; Devon Jarvis/Studio D (3); Terry Tsiolis (6); 

Alexander Farnsworth; Getty Images (2); Imaxtree.com (2) 

p.64 

44

HOT 

CONTENTS 

123 

SHOPS 

BROKEN 

ENGLISH 

3431 Via Oporto, Newport 

Beach, CA 92663; 

brokenenglishjewelry.com 

232 

EVERYBODY HAS 

HER REASONS 

Several months into the 

Trump presidency, Linda 

Tirado asks women who 

voted for him: How’s 

he doing? 

238 

ASK E. JEAN 

Relationship hell? E. Jean 

Carroll to the rescue! 

292 

AMERICAN DREAM 

Chris Evans on meditation, 

feigning adulthood, 

and hugging exes 

BEAUTY, 

HEALTH, 

FITNESS 

170 

STOCKED MARKET 

Find your new drugstore 

obsession, courtesy of 

international ELLE editors 

and influencers 

173 

SURE SHOTS 

Considering an injectable? 

April Long and Megan 

O’Neill consult leading 

derms on how to get 

the results you want 

from Botox, Restylane, 

and the rest 

181 

INSTANT MESSAGING 

Olivia Stren wades into the 

world of DIY skin care 

185 

SCENT-SATIONAL! 

Frédéric Malle talks with 

April Long about finding a 

perfect, personalized eau 

188 

ELLENESS 

News from the world of 

health and fitness 

194 

IT LIST 

p.170 

196 

AN AWAKING NIGHTMARE 

After years of debilitating 

insomnia, Rachael Combe 

finally finds relief from a 

surprising culprit 

IN EVERY 

ISSUE 

28 CALENDAR 

36 FASHION CALENDAR 

62 EDITOR’S LETTER 

68 LETTERS 

72 HOROSCOPE 

74 BEHIND THE COVERS 

78 CONTRIBUTORS 

291 SHOPPING GUIDE 

WHAT’S THERE: Ten years 

after launching her Santa 

Monica fine-jewelry 

boutique (a favorite of 

Kristen Stewart and 

Gwyneth Paltrow), owner 

Laura Freedman has just 

opened a second Cali 

location—in addition to her 

NYC outpost (right)—in 

Newport Beach’s pristine 

Lido Marina Village. 

PROJECTED WAIT-LIST ITEMS: 

Eternity Hoop earrings 

from Maria Tash and 

Foundrae’s Annex Pairs 

necklaces (above) 

142 

INTEL 

L.A. STORY 

Edan Lepucki, author 

of 2014’s acclaimed dystopian 

novel California, 

continues her exploration 

of the Golden State in 

Woman No. 17 (Hogarth), 

set in L.A.’s Hollywood 

Hills. Alternating chapters—from 

the perspectives 

of a well-off woman 

who mines the selective 

mutism of her eldest son 

for a memoir, and her 

recently hired art-student 

nanny—increasingly circle 

the same complications of 

mother-child dynamics, 

the role and importance of 

art in life, and, soon, even 

the same characters. Lepucki’s 

exploration of personal 

relationships takes 

on an increasingly noirish 

tone: Much like Chekhov’s 

gun, a swimming pool introduced 

early in the book 

takes on the shadows of a 

floating body long before 

the reader realizes this 

might be a possibility. 

—Cotton Codinha 

105 

ACCESSORIES 

Van Cleef & Arpels’s California Beach bracelet, from the 

Parisian brand’s California Rêverie collection, pays homage 

to the Golden State’s sweeping coastlines with diamonds, 

onyx, and pastel-colored sapphires set in 18-karat white gold. 

Diamond, onyx, multicolor sapphire, and white gold bracelet, VAN CLEEF 

& ARPELS, call 877-VAN-CLEEF 

Model: Kat Borchart/thelicensingproject.com; store interior: courtesy of Broken English; 

Trump voters: Skye Parrott; polish spill: Devon Jarvis/Studio D 

p.232 

46

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@elleusa @elleusa @elleusa ELLE Magazine (US) 

LLE.COM 

Ogunnaike 

WILD GUESS 

Rapper A$AP Rocky may not 

throw out his old clothes— 

but don’t call him a hoarder. 

“That’s just called my 

closet,” he says. “Trends 

and styles always come back 

around eventually.” For his 

Ice Cream and Cotton Candy 

summer capsule with Guess 

Originals, he’s putting that 

nostalgic sensibility to use, 

giving a pastel sugar high to 

iconic men’s and women’s 

styles from the brand, which 

celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary 

last year. The line 

includes zip-front miniskirts; 

string bikini tops; cropped, 

boxy jackets; and highwaist, 

flared jeans. The ’90s, 

says Rocky, were when “the 

grunge look met the techno 

look met the urban look met 

the hip-hop look—I wanted 

to pay homage to that.” Read 

more about his vision at 

ELLE.com/A$APRocky. 

THE NAKED TRUTH A new president, an au naturel resistance 

In Alexandria, Virginia, on the outskirts of our nation’s capital, a group of “social 

nudists”—you know, people who just like hanging out naked—gather for “nonsexual” 

get-togethers. As one attendee puts it, if they were all wearing little red hats, they’d be 

Shriners. But is any act of eccentricity also one of rebellion in a political culture that 

seems, at once, more impulsive and buttoned-up than ever before? Washington writer 

Britt Peterson gets up close and personal with the group at ELLE.com/NakedInDC. 

Staffer Spotlight 

GLAM SLAM 

Eight questions with 

ELLE.com Beauty Director 

Julie Schott 

Who’s your spirit animal/ 

beauty icon? 

Amy Winehouse. 

What beauty product has 

stayed with you for more 

than a decade? 

I started using retinol for 

acne in middle school and 

haven’t stopped. 

What are the three best 

things in your bathroom 

cabinet or desk drawer 

right now ? 

Moon Juice Brain Dust, 

which I sprinkle in my 

morning coffee; Ortis’s 

Fruits & Fibres Transit 

Facile—they’re Belgian 

fiber chews!—and Dr. 

Dennis Gross Alpha Beta 

Universal Daily Peel pads. 

What do you always carry 

with you? 

Headphones and lip 

balm—Dior Addict Lip 

Glow Pomade. 

What’s your all-time 

favorite vacation spot? 

St. Barts. 

When you retire, what will 

you wear around the house 

all day ? 

An all-white Adidas men’s 

tracksuit—which also 

happens to be my preretirement 

look. Comfort 

is cool. 

What do you love the most 

about your job? 

A world without ELLE 

.com’s Slack channel is 

not a place I want to live 

in. It’s where I get—and 

give—all my news. 

If you could use only 

one kind of social media 

forever, what would it be? 

Instagram Stories lets 

my obsession with food 

really shine. 

Clockwise from top left: Hannah Sider (creative direction by AWGE); Tyler Joe; Getty Images; 

products courtesy of the brands; Getty Images; Kalle Gustafsson/Trunk Archive 

48

SUPER MAGNATE 

Heidi Klum isn’t just one of the most recognizable faces 

in the world; she’s also a whip-smart businesswoman. This 

month, she’ll let you pick her brain—and her beauty arsenal 

Before Heidi Klum became America’s Heidi 

Klum—before she became the creative director 

of her eponymous intimates line; before 

she launched a multiple Emmy Award– 

nominated TV show; before she appeared on 

the cover of ELLE, not once but three times— 

before all that, Heidi Klum was the daughter 

of a hairdresser and a cosmeticscompany 

executive who lived in the 

little town of Bergisch Gladbach, 

Germany, and planned to go to a 

Düsseldorf fashion-design school. 

“I would have learned everything 

from sewing in shoulder pads to 

buttons to fully designing,” Klum 

says. But then a friend convinced 

the 18-year-old Klum to try out for 

“Model 92,” a 25,000-contestant modeling 

contest, which she entered and proceeded 

to win. “And then,” Klum says, “everything 

was put on pause for about 20 years.” “Everything” 

meaning her serious design aspirations. 

Everything else kicked into hyperdrive. 

After winning the contest’s $300,000 modeling 

contract, Klum spent two years modeling 

in Europe, but it was when she moved to New 

York in 1994 that her career really took off. She 

was appearing regularly in magazine 

shoots by 1995, walked her first Victoria’s 

Secret fashion show in 1997, 

and landed the Sports Illustrated 

Swimsuit Issue cover the following 

year. She also found ways to work her 

early penchant for design into her increasingly 

multifaceted career: Klum 

has executive-produced and fronted 

the 15-seasons-and-counting fashion-design 

show Project Runway (Lifetime) since 2004 

and has worked on a number of design partnerships, 

including a capsule collection for 

Jordache Jeans and two maternity lines called 

TRANSFORMER 

This month, visit 

ELLE.com each 

Monday for stepby-step 

tutorials 

on four of Klum’s 

favorite looks 

COOL-GIRL HAIR 

MAY 1 

“My boyfriend’s 

sister was 

deejaying,” 

Klum says. 

“Normally, I have my team help 

get me ready, but it was a lastminute 

thing.” The can-do Klum 

created her own waves with 

a quick shampoo, a blow-dry, 

and a “really big curling iron.” 

Lavish and Loved. In 2008, she 

became an American citizen in 

what she calls “a double whammy” 

of circumstance. “Most of 

my income was coming in from 

America. I fell in love with America,” 

she says. “And then Obama 

came along, and I was just like, 

Yes, I want to vote for this dude.” 

Klum became the creative director 

of Heidi Klum Intimates 

in 2014, adding four to six yearly 

design meetings to the alreadypacked, 

meticulously colorcoded 

iCal she depends on to 

keep her own hectic schedule 

under control, not to mention 

that of her four children. One of 

Klum’s mantras is “The harder 

OLD-HOLLYWOOD GLAM 

MAY 8 

The key to a long-lasting red 

lip, Klum says, is to “start with 

a stain, and then put another 

color on top of it. So even if 

you kiss that off, or drink that 

off, or eat that 

off, there’s still the 

stain underneath.” 

Clockwise from 

right: Klum 

attends the 2017 

Grammy Awards; 

January 2002; 

May 2003 

you work, the luckier you get.” After spending 

more than two decades modeling swimsuits 

and lingerie sets, Klum has developed an exhaustive 

knowledge of what makes good underthings, 

drawing inspiration from her love 

of fabrics and interest in the fast-developing 

technology of the bra industry. “My motto is 

always ‘More boobs, less bra,’ ” she says. 

Klum’s immense and sustained career 

success has, in part, come from 

her winning combination of smarts, 

drive, and almost ineffable likability; 

she’s serious about her work without 

ever taking herself too seriously. 

For instance, in August 2015, Donald 

Trump told the New York Times that 

Klum was “sadly…no longer a 10.” 

Klum promptly posted a tongue-in-cheek video 

to her Instagram, in which she poses for a 

cameraman—a giant “10” scrawled across a 

paper taped to her chest—and is accosted by 

someone in a Trump mask who rips the “10” 

off to reveal a “9.99.” Klum then shrugs and 

goes on with the shoot. Looking back now, she 

says, “I just thought I would make light of it. 

Because, why not?” (While Klum was a guest at 

the president’s wedding to First Lady Melania 

and “always got along with him very well,” she 

notes, “I wouldn’t say we ever were friends.”) 

When the former supermodel turned 40 

in 2013, she was met with a barrage of “Oh 

my God, you’re 40 now. You’re so old,” she 

says. “And I was like, Old at 40? I’ll show 

you old!” That year, for her famed annual 

Halloween party—the host has a thing 

for elaborate costumes and has shown up 

as everything from Lady Godiva to Jessica 

Rabbit to an ape—Klum transformed into a 

95-year-old woman. Costumes aside, Klum 

has picked up more than a few quick tricks 

to get camera-ready under her own steam. 

This month, visit ELLE.com to slip into the 

career chameleon’s favorite easy-to-replicate 

beauty looks.—Keziah Weir 

DATE NIGHT 

MAY 15 

For an aesthetic 

aphrodisiac, go 

for what Klum 

calls “a big Bambi 

eye” and just give your lips a 

quick gloss. “I don’t have luscious 

Angelina Jolie lips,” she says, 

“so I do lots of lashes, top and 

bottom. And a lot of shading, to 

make the eye really big.” 

VA-VA-VOOM 

MAY 22 

Klum went all out for her 2015 

Jessica Rabbit costume—“an 

iconic sexy woman,” Klum says, 

and a cartoon to boot!—but 

this week, learn how to get the 

sexpot vibe, without 

the prosthetics. 

Purple eye shadow: 

never not flattering. 

Clockwise from top right: Getty Images (4); Billy Farrell/BFA/REX/Shutterstock; Gilles Bensimon (2) 

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EDITOR’S LETTER @Robbiemyers @Robbie_Elle 

You Are So 

Beautiful…to Me! 

My father has four daughters, two from his first marriage and two 

from his third (from two wives who looked so much alike that the 

latter accused my dad of trying to replicate the former), but we look 

like him in many ways. His wide brow is strongly expressed, as are 

his sharp jawline and the upward tilt of his eyes—characteristics that 

my grandmother frequently told us that she was proud to pass on, as 

they were traits of “great beauty” from her family line. 

Beauty is a word that contains multitudes: passion, longing, 

judgment, rebuke—who hasn’t hoped to define it, and possess it? I 

was comforted to learn early on from Grandmother that what people 

think of as beautiful is often relative and deeply narcissistic: It 

wasn’t until I had my own children, of course, that I was witness to 

true beauty, inarguable in any context. Right? 

In putting together our annual May Beauty Issue, we decided to 

look at what’s at the core of attending to our own beauty in ways 

big and small, from changing the arch of an eyebrow to lifting the 

eyebrows through surgery. Transformation is a big word to apply to 

what we’re after when we put on a no-smudge, plumping waterproof 

mascara, but a change in perception—our own and other people’s— 

is what lies in that act. (I’m perfectly comfortable with the tiny dopamine 

hit of pleasure I get from thinking I’ve achieved the perfect 

lip gloss–to–eye shadow ratio; and I no longer feel I’ve abandoned 

feminist principles by counting on science, and Rita Hazan, to bring 

forth the strawberry-blond highlights of my teenagerhood, even 

though when they were acquired “naturally”—i.e., while accruing 

sun damage after school at the beach—I swore I’d never do such a 

thing.) Among perhaps more profound transformations? Feeling 

not like herself anymore, our intrepid Beauty Adventuress, Holly 

Millea, goes for plastic surgery and discovers what’s most unlovely 

about the experience is the reaction of some of her friends. Senior 

Beauty and Fitness Editor Megan O’Neill—who believes that when 

it comes to beauty signifiers, the choices we make should please us, 

first—gives colored contact lenses a try, and finds that while few 

people notice her new eye color, this relatively small transformation 

has a big impact on her swagger. 

We also focus on transformations of the heart and mind: In a 

profile of actress Chrissy Metz, one of the stars of the blockbuster 

series This Is Us, Deputy Editor Maggie Bullock explores the 

charged territory of weight bias—and the cultural shift that can be 

occasioned by one character in a single television show. And Linda 

Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, hits 

the road to talk to female Trump voters about the kinds of changes 

they’d hoped he’d bring to the country. As with any good makeover 

story, Tirado will check back with the women several more times 

this year to see how reality is stacking up with their desires and expectations 

when they cast their ballots. 

In our up-front fashion pages, we’ve built looks around discrete 

beauty elements, since for many women, a ruby lip, say, or a low 

ponytail is not just their signature but an organizing principle for 

getting dressed. Our mission: Helping you dress to accentuate your, 

well, beauty marks. In our fashion well, we’ve expanded this idea 

further, inviting a strong new crop of models to join our six amazing 

cover girls—Hailey Baldwin, Maria Borges, Bella Hadid, Elsa Hosk, 

Candice Huffine, and Jasmine Tookes—to express how beauty and 

fashion work together to enhance individuality, as opposed to styling 

and powdering and hairspraying it away. Diversity and uniformity 

are opposites, after all. And beauty should be in the eye of the 

beholden, every bit as much as the beholder. 

PS: Inspired by just meeting with the most wonderful group of female mayors from 

around the world, who, led by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, were in NYC for the C40 

Women4Climate conference, I want to say that if you, like them, are a lover of natural 

beauty, i.e., Mother Nature, the People’s Climate March in Washington, DC, on April 

29 will be part of the fight to keep her healthy and vibrant—and oppose the proposed 

deep cuts to the EPA and the confounding notion that global warming is not caused by 

humans. For more information, go to ELLE.com/womensmarch. 

62

POLITICS IS THE NEW BLACK 

On fall 2017 runways from New York to Paris, fashion displayed its “woke-ness” 

from head to toe. Is this consumer-friendly activism a sign of feminist progress— 

or just a sellout? Two writers join the debate 

To hear some tell it, there are two ways to be a feminist: One version 

entails ceaseless seriousness, migrating from protest to protest 

with a Dworkin book in your bag. The other—the “fluffy,” 

not-really-feminist feminism—consists of sticking a solid-gold safety 

pin (signifying solidarity with immigrants and minority groups) 

on your Beyoncé-inspired beret and calling it a day. 

Yes, the gold safety pin is real. It costs $233 and has a motherof-pearl 

clasp, and buying it does not in itself constitute a political 

act. Nor does applying lipstick in a shade called “Activist” (by 

British brand Illamasqua) or lacing up a pair of Keds—“Ladies first 

since 1916”—whose latest empowerment-themed tag lines include 

“Make Your Move. Leave Your Mark” and “We’re Wolves in Zebra 

Print Clothing.” Femvertising can take an activist movement and 

turn it into merely a consumer trend. 

Still, feminists are also human women with multiple interests— 

which can include fashion, and pop music, and everything else 

society considers frivolous because it’s feminine. When I put out 

a call on social media for feminists whose early views had been 

shaped by pop culture, Susan Markham, a consultant who advises 

organizations on how to invest in women and girls, and an alum 

of pro-choice organization EMILY’s List, recalled that on her college 

campus at Ohio State University, only a handful of people 

discussed women’s issues. It wasn’t until she went to the ’90s 

music festival Lilith Fair—a girl-power phenomenon that 

was itself parodied for peddling “feminism lite”—that “I 

saw myself reflected. It wasn’t like, Ugh, I’m that nerdy 

girl in the corner,” Markham says. “There were other 

people who felt that way, and it was kind of a hip thing 

to do.” That same sense of belonging and solidarity 

was stoked by the sea of pink hats at 

women’s marches in January—not 

As a young feminist in the ’90s, I relished the dirty looks my Barbara 

Kruger “Your Body Is a Battleground” T-shirt got me on the streets 

of Dallas. Before you could just switch your Twitter avatar to declare 

your beliefs, we declared them through T-shirts, stompy boots, and 

buzzed hair—all signals to allies in enemy territory. We’d rush to say 

hi to one another in bookstores, at concerts, on the sidewalk. “Oh, I 

love your Righteous Babe button!” “And I love your Planned Parenthood 

T-shirt!” 

I wonder, though, what kind of community might be built around 

a Dior “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirt ($710); or the Missoni 

version of the humble pussyhat women were encouraged to knit for 

themselves for the January marches—this one in cashmere, at $190 a 

pop. Do these items signal openness and political awareness to your 

sisters, or simply buying power? 

Fashion and feminism used to have a contentious relationship, 

with feminists charging that designers warped girls’ body images by 

parading size zeros down runways. It didn’t help when, in 2009, Karl 

Lagerfeld, having been asked to “channel” Coco Chanel in an interview, 

said, “I was never a feminist because I was never ugly enough 

for that.” Cut to Chanel spring 2015, when Lagerfeld himself staged 

a feminist-inspired collection featuring models waving slogans like 

“History Is Her Story.” Fashion does love a good flip-flop. 

Now that designers have caught on to the fact that feminist slogans 

can move product, the old “This Is What a Feminist Looks 

Like” T-shirt you could find in a secondhand store for a buck 

or two has gone upmarket with Prabal Gurung’s own “This 

Is What a Feminist Looks Like” shirt—one of 39 slogan tees 

that closed his fall 2017 show. Part of the proceeds from its 

$130 price tag will be divided between Planned Parenthood, 

the ACLU, and an organization benefiting survivors 

of the 2015 earthquake in Gurung’s native Nepal. 

Diane von Furstenberg: courtesy of BFA; Bella Hadid: Kailas (creative direction by David Yassky); remaining images: Getty Images 

Prabal 

Gurung’s 

runway finale 

included 39 

pro-woman 

messages. 

Somali American 

model Halima Aden 

walked Max Mara, 

Alberta Ferretti, 

and Yeezy in hijab, 

becoming fashion 

month’s most 

potent symbol. 

Christian 

Siriano’s (soldout) 

$25 tees: 

100 percent of 

proceeds went 

to the ACLU. 

In London, 

Indian-born 

Ashish Gupta 

spelled 

solidarity in 

sequins. 

DVF with 

the button 

handed out by 

the CFDA at 

40-plus NYFW 

shows. 

Versace 

issued a call 

for unity 

and strength 

in capital 

letters. 

Dior, spring 

2017: A portion 

of the proceeds 

from this tee will 

benefit Rihanna’s 

Clara Lionel 

Foundation.

AGENDA 

to mention that the waves of pink telegraphed a powerful, widespread 

unification to anyone who might want to argue that women’s 

rights are a niche concern. 

Political movements can only succeed with mass support—and 

peer pressure is a reliable motivator: Studies have found that people 

are more likely to vote if their friends say that they, too, voted. 

Likewise, wearing a “The Future Is Female” T-shirt isn’t activism 

per se, but it can help normalize feminist politics. Radical causes 

have always used imagery and celebrity to reach the mainstream, 

whether it’s NBA stars donning T-shirts emblazoned with the 

words “I Can’t Breathe” (the last words Eric Garner spoke before 

a police choke hold killed him) or Laverne Cox using her Orange 

Is the New Black role as a springboard for transgender advocacy. 

Imagine the gateway-drug effect of that mammoth “Feminist” 

sign backlighting Beyoncé’s Mrs. Carter Show World Tour, attended 

by nearly 2 million people and viewed by countless more 

on social media. Is it mere coincidence that in a poll conducted 

the following year by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family 

Foundation, 63 percent of women ages 18 to 34 identified as feminist? 

In fact, the only group more likely to embrace the f word, at 

68 percent, was women 50 to 64, who came of age during feminism’s 

second wave. 

So a young feminist may well begin with a $95 Jonathan Simkhai 

“Feminist AF” T-shirt (100 percent of proceeds go to Planned Parenthood)—or 

even with the oeuvre of Katy Perry, who, as one woman 

wrote to me, has taught her 12-year-old daughter that feminism 

“wasn’t just a thing Mom and teachers were about.” She may be inspired 

by the pussyhats on the runway at Missoni (maybe she’ll knit 

her own), or might plunk down $6 for L’Occitane’s Solidarity 

Balm—benefiting NGOs that facilitate female leadership—instead 

of any old lip balm. As an ardent 

feminist activist, I believe that such surfacelevel 

engagement is not enough on its own. 

But I won’t deny that it can be a critical first 

step. I’ll take “I bought the T-shirt” over “I did 

nothing at all.” 

Missoni: 

A portion of 

proceeds will 

benefit The Circle, 

Annie Lennox’s 

humanitarian 

foundation. 

One hundred 

percent of 

proceeds from 

Public School’s 

$65 snapbacks 

benefit the 

ACLU. 

Mind you, some of these new offerings do not have a charitable 

component; other brands note that they will donate, but won’t 

specify how much. But as long as the money is going somewhere 

worthwhile, what’s there to be cynical about? Even beyond fundraising, 

surely a feminist T-shirt out in the world means more visibility 

for the fight. Every little bit of PR helps, right? 

Last year, the poet and visual artist Anne Boyer, who was diagnosed 

with breast cancer in 2014, questioned whether “awareness” 

should be equated with progress. In a piece in the New 

Inquiry, Boyer wrote that the prevailing cancer narrative of heroic 

fighting and survival glosses over the disease’s “industrial etiology, 

its misogynist and racist medical history, capitalist medicine’s incredible 

machine of profit, and the unequal distribution by class of 

suffering and death.” In other words, if we really want more women 

to survive breast cancer, we need to have uncomfortable dialogues 

about why treatment is so expensive, how screenings lead to false 

positives and unnecessary interventions, and why black women 

have an increasing incidence rate, while the rate for white women 

has stabilized. 

The enemy here is twofold: One is the self-satisfied complacency 

that can be fostered by making an easy, visible statement, patting 

oneself on the back, and moving on. The other is the kind of “cause 

marketing” that enriches corporations under the guise of advocacy—i.e., 

when companies spend megabucks on celebrity-splashed 

ads celebrating their charitable works while donating a fraction of 

that amount to the charity in question. 

Maybe retailers really do want to help. Or maybe they just want 

to look like they do. Feminism, the word, may be fashionable, but 

the hard work of advocating for and creating an egalitarian world 

seems as unfashionable as ever. We should be asking questions 

like “Are these same companies rushing to give the women 

in their factories a living wage?” Feminism can’t just be a 

slogan you can take on and off at will. We should be wary 

of corporations that want to take our good intentions 

and sell them back to us, telling us we’re helping when 

we’re merely helping ourselves to a trend. 

All proceeds 

from Jonathan 

Simkhai’s tee 

go to Planned 

Parenthood. 

Adam Lippes’s 

presentation 

lent publicity to 

a local Planned 

Parenthood 

rally. 

Feminist AF: courtesy of Jonathan Simkhai; models with signs: Alexander Farnsworth; remaining images: Getty Images 

At Tommy Hilfiger, 

Gigi Hadid wore 

the #tiedtogether 

immigration 

solidarity 

bandanna seen 

at shows from Los 

Angeles to Paris. 

Artist Coco 

Capitán took 

the existential 

approach at 

Gucci. 

Balenciaga’s 

fall 2017 

menswear: an 

ode to Bernie 

Sanders. 

66

THE NEW 

HARLEM 

RENAISSANCE 

Photographer Mark Seliger and ELLE 

Fashion Director Samira Nasr found 

inspiration in Harlem for the March 

fashion shoot “Take the A Train”: 

SHE 

EXPLAINS 

THINGS 

In our March profile of 

writer Rebecca Solnit, 

“The Philosopher 

Queen,” Solnit 

told ELLE’s Keziah 

Weir that her new 

book, The Mother 

of All Questions 

(Haymarket), “is about 

everybody…we’re 

all in this liberation 

struggle.” ELLE 

readers loved it: 

“Extremely inspiring @elleusa” 

—tigerlilyhill, Instagram 

“I’m in love with this amazing 

story.” 

—officialamilnaestevao, Instagram 

“S/o to @elleusa, @markseliger, 

and @samiranasr for this amazing 

shoot (in my hood). Errrbody 

needs to check out the March issue 

#eyecandy #harlem.” 

—marielty, Instagram 

THE ARTIST 

IS PRESENT 

For our March cover shoot, Solange Knowles wowed ELLE 

readers with her thoughtful interview (“The Messenger”) and her 

statuesque beauty in striking red-and-white looks, from a Norma 

Kamali puffer coat to a sleek Céline suit: 

“There are a lot of things in the world that make me v sad 

but my…mentor [Salamishah Tillet] interviewed Solange 

for ELLE magazine and it’s lit.”—@crown_vic_, Twitter 

“Solange!!!!!! Best cover I’ve seen in a while!!!!!!!” 

—markpaul_, Instagram 

“@solangeknowles you definitely make [ELLE’s] 

job easy. Beautiful indeed.” 

—@brichtweets, Twitter 

“@solangeknowles. Can we just 

stop a minute to talk about how 

much you slayed?”—@blacksocialite, 

Twitter 

“Spectacular cover, spectacular 

styling.”—biancblue, Instagram 

“Beautiful essay!… 

I keep seeing strong 

essays on women 

from ELLE magazine.” 

—Teresa Walsh, 

Facebook 

“So much to love 

about this piece. The 

little factoid about 

Invasion of the Body 

Snatchers did not 

escape me. (Ha!) 

Out of respect to the 

somber ending to the 

piece, I’ll say that this 

phrase stood out for 

me: ‘her willingness 

to look at the thing 

straight on.’ It was a 

very keen observation 

of a very marked 

quality of [Solnit’s] 

being. Love.”—Natalie 

Batalha, Facebook 

“Fabulous. She is 

prolific, sassy, kind, 

and one of our 

cultural jewels.” 

—Maniko Dru 

Dadigan, Facebook 

“I keep going back 

to A Field Guide to 

Getting Lost.… So 

enjoyed the piece in 

ELLE. Wow.”—Frances 

Thomas, Facebook 

THE FEMALE 

GAZE 

After John H. Richardson’s 

insightful profile (“Junk 

Art,” March), artist Nicole 

Wittenberg—known for 

her paintings depicting the 

nude male form—found a 

fan in an ELLE reader: 

To Wittenberg: “I loved 

reading this article. Always 

knew you’d be a success 

with your natural talent. Still gorgeous 

as ever. And so is your artwork.” 

—Lexi Cardellini, Facebook 

ELLE readers, sound off! Contact us at ELLE, 

Letters to the Editor, 300 West 57th Street, 

New York, NY 10019; or elleletters@hearst.com. 

Letters may be edited for length and clarity. 

Solange: Terry Tsiolis (2); 

Harlem: Mark Seliger 

68

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OSMOPOLITAN 

ROZTHEGOODLIFE 

ARPER’S BAZAAR 

COSMOPOLITAN 

OOD HOUSEKEEPING 

TOWN&COUNTRYMARIE CLAIRE 

ARPER’S BAZAAR 

EDBOOKTOWN&COUNTRY 

OWN & COUNTRY COSMOPOLITAN 

GOOD HOUSEKEEPING 

REDBOOK 

MARIE CLAIRE 

GOOD HOUSEKEEPING HARPER’S BAZAAR 

O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE 

DR. OZ THE GOOD LIFE 

COSMOPOLITAN ELLE 

GOOD HOUSEKEEPING 

OOD HOUSEKEEPINGO, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE 

LLE O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE ELLE GOOD HOUSEKEEPING 

R. OZ THE GOOD LIFE TOWN&COUNTRY O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE 

MARIE CLAIRE 

REDBOOK 

OUR BEAUTY EDITORS 

LOVE OLAY 

Recommending and awarding Olay products 

XMORE than the top 5 selling department store brands. 

ELLE 

COSMOPOLITAN MARIE CLAIRE 

DR. OZ THE GOOD LIFE 

COSMOPOLITAN 

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COSMOPOLITAN 


HARPER’S BAZAAR 

MARIE CLAIRE 

GOOD HOUSEKEEP- 

TOWN & COUNTRY 

ELLE 

REDBOOK 

ZINE 

ELLE MARIE CLAIRE 

Sources: Media Radar, October 2015-September 2016; The NPD Group, Inc., 2015. Participating magazines include: Cosmopolitan, 

Dr. Oz THEGOODLIFE, ELLE, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s BAZAAR, Marie Claire, O, The Oprah Magazine, Redbook, and Town & Country.

Tali and Ophira Edut 

VIRGO (AUG 23–SEPT 22) 

TAURUS You’re on a growth trajectory 

APRIL 20–MAY 20 

May is off to a spirited start as 

the Sun beams through your sign 

until the 20th. What makes sense 

on paper may not land on the Taurus 

notepad, or in your bed. Thank your ruler, 

creatrix Venus—in your twelfth house of fantasy 

all month—for chipping away at your 

pragmatism. Make art for art’s sake and love 

for love’s sake. Your experimentation will yield 

positive results, especially near a partnershipcementing 

full moon on the 10th. Mars boosts 

your money mojo throughout the month. 

Practice your pitch: The new moon on the 25th 

opens the floodgates to abundance. 

GEMINI (MAY 21–JUNE 21) This month’s 

theme: radical reimagining. Adrenaline junkie 

Mars is motoring through Gemini, giving you 

the urge to tear down and rebuild basically everything. 

Wait until Gemini season begins on 

the 20th to fire up the proverbial jackhammer. 

Before then, quiet contemplation begets divine 

inspiration. On the 12th, you’ll electrify the 

world stage, thanks to a crackling current between 

Mars and Jupiter. Flaunt yourself fearlessly. 

People want in to Camp Gemini; but on 

the 19th and 29th, Saturn insists that you clearly 

define partnership parameters so you don’t 

hand out the milk for free. 

CANCER (JUNE 22–JULY 22) May’s futureforward 

star map helps you explore new schools 

of thought and then expand. Tap into technology 

with a lifesaving app, or outfit yourself with 

VR glasses—but avoid the rose-colored variety. 

A murky Mars cycle muddles your intuition in 

personal affairs this month. One exception: the 

full moon on the 10th. This lunation delivers 

shining clarity in the game of love—and even a 

noteworthy milestone. (Time to start knitting?) 

Escape off the grid to recharge near the new 

moon on the 25th. PS: A spotty cell phone signal 

is an underrated serenity saver. 

LEO (JULY 23–AUG 22) Your courageous and 

capable leadership will be called upon throughout 

the month. Shatter those glass ceilings—and 

don’t shy away from controversy. With planets 

pinging your genre-busting eleventh house, the 

element of surprise is the best tactic to deploy. 

An influential woman swings open doors of opportunity 

near the 10th’s full moon, but you 

may also have to put out a few fires with family. 

On the 19th and 29th, Cupid demands airtime, 

calling for structure in your love life, be it a 

weekly date night, a more balanced budget, or 

an exclusive commitment. 

Adele, May 5 

in May, Virgo, as momentumbooster 

Mars spends the month 

in your achievement zone. Streamline 

your goal sheet and focus on 

that one courageous coup. With the 

Sun in your peripatetic ninth house until the 

20th, venture into new territory. Your favorite 

vacation spot could even become a place to do 

business. Celestial seductress Venus slinks 

through your erotic eighth house all month. 

Thou giveth fever—and thou can take it away if 

your amour fails to step up near the 19th! Avert 

disaster by clearly spelling out your terms 

of engagement. 

LIBRA (SEPT 23–OCT 22) You can stop pulling 

petals off that daisy now, Libra. With Mercury 

ending a retrograde on the 3rd, you’ll see 

clearly who’s a “loves me” versus a “not.” 

May’s planets are sowing the seeds of romance, 

so stay present: A partner of lasting 

value could stroll right into your world by the 

20th. Already attached? Strengthen your 

merger in practical ways, like starting a joint 

investment portfolio. Ready your passport 

and backpack after the 20th, when the Sun 

and Mars activate your wanderlust. Your travels 

could be paired with an educational component 

or even teacher training. 

SCORPIO (OCT 23–NOV 21) Meow, Scorpio! 

May’s romantic roundup of planets fills 

your love tanks with diesel. You’re attracting 

keepers—but don’t sleep on self-care! With 

beautifying Venus in your wellness zone all 

month, your lit-from-within glow is the radiance 

to amplify. Eat clean, move often, and get 

your beauty rest. You’ll be ready for your closeup 

when 2017’s only Scorpio full moon pushes 

your achievements into the public eye on the 

10th. Don’t cling to the security of a nine-tofive. 

A side hustle or investment in a start-up 

you ignite after the 20th could flood the coffers 

this year and beyond! 

SAGITTARIUS (NOV 22–DEC 21) Don’t panic 

about May’s languid groove. As long as 

you’re moving the needle, it still counts as 

progress. A measured pace is preferable anyway, 

as the Sun drops anchor in your systematic 

sixth house until the 20th. Further, you’ll 

need to be grounded near the 19th, when a Jupiter–Venus 

opposition dangles temptation in 

your path. The offer may be too good to refuse, 

but research thoroughly! An attractive opposite 

could turn your head near the 25th’s new 

moon, but with strict Saturn in tow, make sure 

this relationship doesn’t derail your own plans. 

CAPRICORN (DEC 22–JAN 19) Modesty? 

Pssh. With the Sun in your flamboyant fifth 

house until the 20th, unleash your superpowers 

in a very public way. Monetary benefits 

flow in near the 9th, and you might even travel 

in pursuit of profit. Romantically, don’t settle 

for less than the royal treatment. But if 

you’re not the one being worshiped, dial back 

the caretaking and make bold requests to restore 

balance. Single? Your girlfriends could 

play Cupid, or you could reconnect with a 

childhood sweetheart. Kick your spring training 

into high gear after the 20th, as the Sun 

and motivator Mars pump up your stamina to 

beast mode. 

AQUARIUS (JAN 20–FEB 18) With the Taurus 

Sun in your domestic sector through the 

20th, May is your month for putting down 

roots. Nurture connections to your neglected 

inner circle, but save space on the calendar for 

new amies. Who knows? You could start a 

business alliance (or a band) with your local 

coffee-shop comrades and, by the 10th’s full 

moon, have many an achievement to blast 

around the Twittersphere. Heavenly heartthrobs 

Mars and Venus stoke your spring fever 

all month. An energetic contender—or a 

major romantic milestone—could arrive on 

the 12th or 25th. 

PISCES (FEB 19–MAR 20) May’s celestial 

winds send you soaring. Use this mercurial 

magic to refresh your friend feed and be a dating 

dilettante. Indeed, romantic travel will be 

sublime near the 10th, but a square-off between 

Venus and Jupiter demands that you 

operate from a stricter budget in May. Remember: 

The best things in life can be free (or 

at least comped). Mobilize with women after 

the 20th, as the Sun joins fiery Mars in your 

feminist fourth house. Ready to pull up 

stakes? A lucky listing could appear on the 

25th, but make sure the commute works with 

your career goals. 

ARIES (MAR 21–APR 19) Game on! After 

spring’s stagnant start, Mercury flips out of retrograde 

on May 3rd and restores your action-star 

status. Charge ahead—just make sure you’re 

working from a plan and a budget. Venus hovers 

in Aries all month, heightening your romantic 

superpowers, and a soul-mate–grade connection 

lures near the 10th’s full moon. If longrange 

goals misalign, however, the promise 

could fade near the 29th. Don’t stress if one door 

closes. With your ruler, trailblazing Mars, in 

#twinning Gemini all month, you’re hardly bereft 

of options. The right duet could strike a 

chord near the new moon on the 25th. 

Getty Images 

72 

For your daily reading from the 

AstroTwins, go to ELLE.com/horoscopes.

LOVELY AND AMAZING 

For this month’s Beauty Issue, we’re joined by a half dozen of fashion’s most 

sought-after glamour girls, who prove there’s no single definition of American 

beauty. They’ve got the looks—and are raising their voices to boot 

Age: 20 Hometown: Malibu, 

CA On her role models: “I was watching 

an Alaïa show from the ’90s, and it’s Naomi 

[Campbell], Cindy [Crawford], Linda 

[Evangelista]—the way they were radiating 

was beautiful. They were so confident. 

Those are the people I look up to.” 

Age: 26 Hometown: 

Huntington Beach, CA On her passion project: 

“My goal has always been to create my own 

beauty line. I have such a unique skin tone— 

when I go on set, makeup artists have to use all 

different mixes of makeup to match my skin. I’d 

love to do a line that has tones for everybody.” 


Washington, DC On finding your voice: 

“Women have to come together in a way 

we haven’t before. We’re united and not 

standing for less than we deserve. It’s about 

celebrating who we are and not backing 

down. It’s not a time to be quiet.” 

Age: 28 Hometown: Stockholm, 

Sweden On learning from failure: 

“When I came to New York [at] 20, I didn’t 

know the level of professionalism required. 

You can’t half-ass it, because people will 

take your place. I screwed up many times 

and had to prove myself over seven years.” 

Age: 24 Hometown: Luanda, 

Angola On the power of representation: 

“The fashion industry is here for everyone, 

[regardless] of color or race. When I was 

growing up, I never saw someone like me, 

and now the other girls can see someone 

like them. It’s all about inspiration.” 


Nyack, NY On industry misconceptions: 

“People think it’s all fun and glamorous, 

but it’s a lot of work, a lack of sleep, and a 

lot of being by yourself, away from family. 

Traveling the world alone when you’re 18 

or 19 is a lot.” 

Terry Tsiolis 

74

Clockwise from top left: The 

luxurious Belmond Hotel Monasterio; 

the Lima restaurant 

Rafael and its grilled octopus; 

Machu Picchu; a pisco sour; 

the colorful wares in Pisac 

Clockwise from top left: Belmond; Getty Images; Viniios Barros; Hans Stoll; 

Getty Images; Alamy; Getty Images; courtesy of Hirschfeld 

PAPERLESS 

POST-CARD 

Paperless Post cofounder Alexa Hirschfeld details 

her recent jaunt to Peru. By Molly Langmuir 

As a child, New York City native 

Alexa Hirschfeld spent a lot of 

time exploring online and learning 

about technology, while her 

younger brother James collected 

stamps and coins and created 

artwork. In 2009, the 

siblings, both Harvard 

grads, combined 

their interests and 

launched the start-up 

Paperless Post, which 

has raised $37 million 

in financing and produced 

200 million–plus virtual and 

Hirschfeld 

paper-stock cards. These days, Alexa, 

33, who caught the travel bug 

early—her first job was working 

on an edition of Let’s Go Greece— 

lives in New York’s East Village 

and heads out of the country 

whenever possible, most recently 

spending two weeks in Peru with 

her London-based boyfriend. 

“It was all about eating,” Hirschfeld 

says about the couple’s time 

in the seaside capital. Their first 

stop was Canta Rana, a casual 

lunch spot with some of the best 

ceviche in the city and great 

people-watching. “Go at 1 p.m. 

and you’ll see Lima’s young, 

cool, hipster society,” she says. 

More-formal options include 

the Japanese-Peruvian fusion 

restaurant Osaka, and 

Rafael, a white-tablecloth 

establishment 

with a memorably 

delicious pisco sour. 

(For the truly upscale, 

there’s Central, a sleek 

spot with artful food that 

is frequently referred to as the 

best restaurant in Latin America; 

its 11-course tasting menu is $107 

per person.) In between noshes, 

the couple visited the Museo 

Mario Testino, established by the 

Peruvian photographer in 2012 

to showcase the 

country’s art and 

culture, and spent a 

few leisurely hours 

on Punta Hermosa, 

a picturesque curve 

of surfer-friendly 

beach about an 

hour’s drive from 

the city center. 

From Lima, they headed to Cusco, 

perched in the Andes at 11,152 

feet (the trip takes a little over an 

hour by plane but a whopping 19 

hours by car). Once the capital of 

the Incan empire, it’s now filled 

with such an impressive mix of 

pre-Columbian and colonial 

architecture that it’s been named 

a UNESCO World Heritage site, 

and it boasts a number of richly 

appointed hotels (including the 

luxurious Belmond Hotel Monasterio, 

situated in a monastery 

built in 1592) to accommodate 

the crowds who flock here. The 

couple used the city as a base to 

explore the surrounding Sacred 

Valley, hiring a driver 

to take them to Pisac, a 

village with a large market 

offering up locally 

produced jewelry and 

textiles, and to Chinchero, 

where Hirschfeld 

bought baby-alpaca 

blankets and the pair 

visited a colonial-era 

church in which Catholic 

imagery mixes with Incan motifs. 

They also traveled to Machu 

Picchu by Inca Rail, a four-hour 

journey that winds through the 

jungle. 

While in Arequipa, their final stop 

in the Andes and the secondbiggest 

city in the country, they 

dined at Chicha, a stone-walled 

restaurant run by Gastón Acurio, 

the country’s most famous 

chef. (Hirschfeld recommends 

the rocoto relleno—a Peruvian 

stuffed pepper.) Finally, they took 

a day trip to Colca Canyon, which 

is twice as deep as the Grand 

Canyon and offers a chance to 

observe condors, with their ninefoot 

wingspans, flying at close 

range. All in all, not a bad way 

to spend two weeks, Hirschfeld 

says. “There’s this 

French expression,” 

she says, “where 

you say something 

is good—then add, 

‘But it’s not Peru.’ ” 

77

Seth Plattner 

@SETHPLATTNER 

SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR, ELLE 

THIS MONTH: “GALAXY GIRL” 

(PAGE 143), “LIPSTICK JUNGLE” 

(PAGE 149), AND “AMERICAN 

GOTH” (PAGE 272) 

“Pom Klementieff, 

whom I interviewed, 

plays one of my 

favorite comic-book 

heroes—Mantis!— 

in Guardians of 

the Galaxy Vol. 2.” 

Reading: “Almost 

done with Hanya 

Yanagihara’s A Little 

Life.” Listening to: 

“It Ain’t Me” by 

Selena Gomez and 

Kygo, Betty Who’s 

The Valley, and 

“XXPEN$IVE” 

by Erika Jayne. 

Watching: “I’m 

the TV editor 

at ELLE, and 

currently I 

love 13 Reasons 

Why, Insecure, 

Westworld, 

Atlanta, and, 

duh, Game of 

Thrones.” 

78 

KLEMENTIEFF 

Linda 

Tirado 

@KILLERMARTINIS 

AUTHOR OF HAND TO 

MOUTH: LIVING IN 

BOOTSTRAP AMERICA 

THIS MONTH: “WHY 

I’M FOR TRUMP” 

(PAGE 232) 

Upcoming projects: 

“I’LL BE REPORTING 

FOR ELLE ON A GROUP 

OF FEMALE TRUMP 

VOTERS ALL YEAR. 

ALSO, I’M IN A NEW 

FILM CALLED NO 

MAN’S LAND. IT’S 

ABOUT THE MALHEUR 

NATIONAL WILDLIFE 

REFUGE ARMED 

PROTESTS.” 

Reading: 

DEATH OF THE 

LIBERAL CLASS, 

BY CHRIS HEDGES; 

A DAY AT THE 

FARE, BY PAMELA 

M. COVINGTON; 

REPUBLIC OF 

SPIN, BY DAVID 

GREENBERG; AND 

DEMOCRACY IN 

AMERICA, BY ALEXIS 

DE TOCQUEVILLE 

Splurge: 

“WHENEVER I’M IN 

A CITY WHERE I CAN 

BUY BOOKS, I GO A 

LITTLE INSANE.” 

Olivia Stren 

@OLIVIASTREN 

FREELANCE WRITER 

THIS MONTH: “THE COLOR CURE” (PAGE 118) AND “INSTANT MESSAGING” (PAGE 181) 

“Going to Marimekko’s Helsinki HQ, even in deepest 

winter, being surrounded by all those fabrics, was 

magical. You cannot be in a bad mood when you’re 

looking at a Marimekko print.” Reading: “I’m on a 

Carrie Fisher journey.” Watching: “The Americans 

just keeps getting better, and Keri Russell’s 

wardrobe alone is a masterpiece.” If I weren’t a 

writer, I’d be: “An illustrator!” Dream vacation 

destination: “I’m currently fantasizing about 

Corsica.” Upcoming projects: “I’m working on a 

collection of personal essays.” 

MARS 

Laura Sampedro 

@LAURAVSAMPEDRO 

MARIMEKKO 

DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR, ELLE 

Listening to: “Bruno Mars’s 24K 

Magic on repeat!” Watching: 

The Great British Bake Off. “Who 

knew waiting for bread to rise could 

have all the suspense of a Hitchcock 

thriller?” First job: “I wrote for a 

music zine (hey, it was the late ’90s!) 

that covered female musicians. I 

transcribed a lot of interviews that 

took place in loud rock clubs.” 

Portraits: courtesy of the subjects; Klementieff, Mars, and Marimekko: Getty Images

MAXMARA.COM

TYLEBOSS 

LADY 

Betty sneaks a quick 

macchiato break at Music.ly’s 

New York HQ. Nothing 

combines chic and effciency 

quite like Balenciaga’s all-inone 

stiletto legging. (Blouse, 

Balenciaga; earrings, 

Jennifer Fisher.) 

A VERY 

BETTY 

TAKEOVER 

Hold onto your hats, 

boys: Everybody’s 

favorite liberated cartoon 

woman is ready to lean 

in! ELLE gives icon Betty 

Boop a (totally hot) 2017 

makeover. Illustrated 

by Frank Caruso 

ELLE has always been interested 

in the personal style of 

power-wielding creative women— 

headline-making entrepreneurs, 

influential politicos, best-selling 

authors, and James Beard Award– 

winning chefs. Yet despite all the 

talent we’ve celebrated over the 

years, never have we featured a 

woman with a career spanning a 

whopping eight decades, as Betty 

Boop has. (Never before have we 

featured a cartoon, either.) Since 

her 1930 debut—in a talkie titled 

Dizzy Dishes—Betty, with her signature 

curves and frank sexuality, 

has embodied many of the characteristics 

we admire at ELLE: She’s 

self-assured, captivating, and always 

in on the joke. 

Now, in a partnership with King 

Features Syndicate, we reimagine 

Betty as the consummate ELLE 

woman, circa 2017; an in-demand 

Manhattanite, running the show 

in a new, very now job (chief ideas 

officer at music-streaming startup 

Music.ly), with a wardrobe 

hot off the spring runways. Boop- 

Oop-a-Doop, indeed. 

©2017 King Features Syndicate, Inc./ 

Fleischer Studios, Inc. TM Hearst Holdings, 

Inc./Fleischer Studios, Inc. 

80

WORKING 

FOR THE WEEKEND 

Awaiting her brunch 

partner at SoHo hot spot 

Le Coucou, Betty catches up 

with a B-school classmate on 

her Louis Vuitton–encased 

iPhone. The look: modeloff-duty 

meets alwayson 

tech wizard. 

READY- 

TO-SCOUT 

As a music-industry exec, 

Betty spends her days, and 

many nights, scouting talent at 

live performances and recordrelease 

parties. Céline’s 

Yves Klein–inspired dress, 

a spring runway hit, sets 

the tone. 

BIG 

LITTLE MEETING 

Box-fresh sneakers and 

a tracksuit-inspired take on 

tailoring (in signature Betty red, 

a real Pantone color) from buzzy 

label Off-White are just the thing 

for a meeting at Facebook New 

York’s supershrunken, Instaready 

miNY room. 

82

REALITY TELEVISION 

We can’t remember the last time everyone was this excited 

about an actress in an ensemble show. But in a single season of 

This Is Us, Chrissy Metz has redefined what a TV star—and a 

romantic lead—can look like. By Maggie Bullock 

On September 20, 2016, the day NBC’s This 

Is Us premiered, actor Sterling K. Brown 

walked up to costar Chrissy Metz and whispered, 

“ ‘All right, are you ready?,’ ” Brown 

recalls. “She said, ‘Ready for what?’ I said, 

‘Ready to be a star!’ ” Metz’s response: “She 

cracked up.” But Brown wasn’t joking. “At 

that point, I had seen the work that everybody 

else had yet to see.” 

Within months, Metz, 36, was a Golden 

Globe nominee being accosted in California 

Chicken Cafe by tearful women thanking 

her for her vulnerability and courage, confessing 

that This Is Us had “changed their 

lives.” There was her smiling face on the 

cover of People, with the line “I’m Proud of 

Who I Am.” Here she was on a SiriusXM 

radio show, slamming online trolls for 

body-shaming Lady Gaga post–Super Bowl: 

“I want to see somebody else get on that 

damn stage and do what she did!” 

American audiences have seen plus-size 

women on reality shows, weight-loss competitions, 

even the odd sitcom. But as Kate 

Pearson on This Is Us, Metz is the first to star 

in a major network drama that treats obesity, 

identity, and self-esteem as a central story 

line. The show has been praised for equipping 

Kate not just with a struggle, but with an 

actual life: She flails in search of a career but 

also has a hilarious, hot-for-her fiancé, Toby 

(Chris Sullivan), and gets propositioned for 

sex by another man. Metz herself has been 

happily dating This Is Us cameraman Josh 

Stancil, 40, for several months. Sitting in an 

unassuming Studio City coffee shop wearing 

a long gray jersey top, black jeans, black 

Christian Siriano flats, and bubblegum-pink 

lipstick, she notes that dating has never been 

a problem. “I know a lot of women, especially 

if they have insecurities, they take whatever 

is thrown at them,” Metz says, with a perfectly 

timed eye roll. “I’m like, girl—please.” 

This dual punch—the actress’s intimate, 

relatable onscreen plight, plus her real-life 

buoyancy and life-of-the-party charisma— 

seems flush with a potential that could transcend 

even almighty TV ratings. Will Chrissy 

Metz be a force for cultural progress and 

acceptance, even empathy and kindness—a 

poster girl along the lines of what ’90s-era 

Ellen DeGeneres became for lesbians: a lov- 

able, known entity, a friend, whose point of 

difference is eventually accepted as just one 

of her many facets? (Metz’s body, after all, 

is a point of difference only in the world of 

media; in the world of actual Americans, 

the average woman is size 16 to 18, and 67 

percent of women wear a size 14 or larger— 

making plus-size people the most underrepresented 

majority on TV.) Okay, that’s a lot 

to hang on a woman nine months into her 

first mega-role. But it’s not totally out of the 

question, either. Metz appears unusually 

at ease carrying the mantle of instant role 

model, one that many actors take decades to 

master, or never do. 

TV wizard Ryan Murphy (Glee, American 

Horror Story, The People v. O.J. Simpson) 

spotted a particular strength in Metz that 

inspired him to put her on the map in 2014. 

He wanted Ima “Barbara” Wiggles, a Park 

Avenue debutante recruited from a wellness 

facility to become the literal fat lady in FX’s 

American Horror Story: Freak Show, to have 

“all different types of appetites,” he says. 

“Somebody who, even back in the ’50s, thin 

or fat, would admit to loving sex and physicality.” 

In Metz’s audition tape, he recognized 

“a strong woman who doesn’t take shit 

from anybody, who struggles with cruelty, of 

course, but takes a stance of ‘I’m not going to 

be a victim of anybody or anything. I’m going 

to push through to be optimistic and hopeful.’ 

” Murphy continues: “Like all pioneering 

people, her spirit is bigger than her circumstances—that’s 

what lifts people up.” 

This Is Us is a feat not just of casting but 

of construction, weaving flashbacks with 

current-day scenes to chronicle the Pearson 

family: sexy-earnest parents Jack and Rebecca 

(the magnetic Milo Ventimiglia and 

Mandy Moore) and their three kids—Metz’s 

Kate and her biological twin, Kevin (Justin 

Hartley), all of whom are white, and their 

adopted black “triplet,” Randall, played by 

Brown. Each Pearson sibling is loved and 

privileged—the show has the comfortable 

Pottery Barn catalog–veneer of wealth familiar 

from network-TV predecessors such 

as Parenthood—and yet each is in some way 

stuck: Type A overachiever Randall longs 

for a connection to his African American 

roots and birth parents; blond, brawny actor 

Kevin is a sitcom beefcake desperate to be 

taken seriously; and witty, vivacious Kate, 

for reasons that unfold gradually over season 

one, has been locked in a battle with her 

Clockwise from top left: Vivian Zink/NBC; Ron Batzdorff/NBC (3) 

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ody since childhood. The show is unapologetically 

melodramatic, and yet it has proven 

irresistible for even the most hard-nosed 

critics. Watching This Is Us is “like getting 

beaten up with a pillow soaked in tears,” 

wrote the New York Times. After one episode, 

queen of snark Sarah Silverman tweeted, 

“I’m a puddle of tears.” 

In January, NBC re-upped the cast’s contracts—not 

for one season, but two. It was a 

savvy way to lock down the freshly minted 

stars of fall’s top-rated new network show, 

not to mention one that had garnered NBC 

its first Golden Globe nod for best TV drama 

in a decade (plus Best Supporting Actress 

nominations for Metz and Moore). But the 

network’s chief exec also noted that this rare 

move was partly an insurance policy for the 

show’s emotionally invested viewers: The 

characters you love aren’t going anywhere. 

If there were any doubts about how directly 

NBC would address Kate’s weight, those 

were dispelled four minutes into the pilot. 

Some 15.3 million viewers have watched 

Metz disrobe down to her underwear, hesitate, 

then remove the last few ounces of 

added weight—her earrings—and step onto 

a scale. The network “does testing when you 

finish a pilot,” says This Is Us creator Dan 

Fogelman. “Needless to say, Kate’s metrics 

were off the charts. People immediately 

responded to the character and to Chrissy, 

which really came as no surprise to anyone.” 

Kate’s ordeal—the exhaustive calorie 

counting and demoralizing weigh-ins familiar 

to any long-term dieter—quickly stood 

out as one of the show’s most compelling 

story lines but also its most critiqued, by 

viewers who found Kate worryingly onedimensional. 

“I think it’s a little silly,” Fogelman 

says. “It’s like saying, Why is Randall’s 

story so often about his biological father, or 

Kevin’s about his acting career? These are the 

crossroad stories we introduced them with. 

Of course, they get a lot of screen time.” 

The parallels Metz sees with Kate “are so 

crazy,” she says. “I feel like it’s forcing me to 

look at these issues every day. Every time I 

pick up the script, every time I go to the refrigerator, 

as Chrissy, as Kate, as Chrissy, 

as Kate…I feel as if I am two people sometimes.” 

When Metz first learned about the 

role, she called her mother, Denise Hodge. 

“ ‘Mom, this role is meant for me,’ ” Hodge 

remembers her daughter saying. “ ‘Kate is 

the person that I was.’ ” Metz meant that 

Kate is just coming to the realization that 

weight itself is not the root of her problems, 

Metz and her 

onscreen “mom,” 

Mandy Moore, at 

ELLE’s Women in TV 

dinner in January 

“There aren’t a lot of 

roles on TV that 

people all over the 

world can relate to,” 

Ryan Murphy says. 

but a symptom—a truth hard-won by the actress 

herself. 

After her thirtieth birthday, “I had a big 

meltdown,” Metz says. She’d moved to L.A. 

at age 23 after being singled out by a talent 

scout at the Holiday Inn in her hometown of 

Gainesville, Florida. But in Hollywood, “I 

can count on my hands how many auditions 

I had in three years.” She landed a Bell South 

commercial and guest spots on My Name Is 

Earl and Entourage, but mostly she worked 

as an agent, booking kids for commercials. 

She’d struggled with her shape since childhood, 

enrolling in Weight Watchers as 

young as 11, but it was during this period, 

she says, that her weight spiraled upward. 

“You’re sitting at a desk,” she says. “Your life 

is literally two clients; they bring you Sprinkles 

cupcakes.” 

The process that followed Metz’s moment 

of reckoning not only gave her the footing 

to radically change her circumstances but 

also the fortitude to eventually access (and 

expose) many of her own vulnerabilities 

through Kate. Over time, she tried several 

therapists, read a lot (including the work 

of self-help guru Marianne Williamson), 

and spent time digging into deep “spiritual 

work.” Yes, her sense of humor applies even 

to that phrase. “People are like, ‘Oh, you 

moved to L.A. and you got so kooky!’ But 

whatever! Everybody’s on their own path.” 

On This Is Us, Kate considers bariatric 

surgery but decides against it—a conclusion 

that Metz, too, arrived at. “People don’t fill a 

void to this extent without some underlying 

issues,” she says. “The quick fixes, the fad 

diets, the surgeries—they don’t assess the 

emotional stuff, the trauma you’ve got to get 

over. The truth is, we’ve all got issues—mine 

just happen to be external.” 

Metz has been candid about long-simmering 

childhood pain resulting from her parents’ 

divorce and its aftermath, during which 

Hodge—whom Metz describes as “as gritty 

as they come”—found herself a single mother 

of three struggling to pay the bills. She baked 

and sold cakes for a while, drove a cab, and 

ultimately got a job in the contracts department 

of the University of Florida, where she 

worked her way up. Metz says that in those 

years, “every penny went somewhere.” 

In another almost uncomfortably close 

parallel with her character—who at the end 

of season one hinted that the source of her 

pain was guilt and grief over her father’s 

death—Metz’s own father looms large 

in her psyche. Growing up, “I had a lot of 

resentment. How does a person leave?” Peripheral 

at best during her childhood, he recently 

came back into the picture, a turn of 

events that has the added, surreal twist of 

her newfound fame. Speaking to him now 

“is like talking to a stranger. I don’t know 

him.” But her father’s own weight struggle, 

and the fact of his quadruple bypass at age 

55, is a sobering connection for Metz, who 

acknowledges that what she’s contending 

with “is obviously hereditary, but it’s also 

issues, dare I say addictions, in my family.” 

Given the similarities between Metz and 

her character, it’s tempting to conflate the 

two—which no doubt adds fuel to audiences’ 

fiercely protective fondness for Kate. “But 

that would be a mistake,” Fogelman says. 

“It actually, accidentally, does a slight disservice 

to what Chrissy’s doing as an actress 

playing the character.” For Fogelman, 

there’s no comparison: “Kate’s a late bloomer, 

shy, not one to hold the spotlight comfortably. 

Clearly marked by tragedy, there is 

a sadness to her. Chrissy is filled with light. 

She’s funny, warm, charismatic. She’s very 

popular with our cast and crew. She is not a 

wallflower. She was a star from day one.” 

There it is again: that s word. Metz may 

find the idea hilarious, but her veteran colleagues 

marvel at a born star. “There’s the 

craft of acting, and there’s the personality 

that is just God-given,” Brown says. “Someone 

who just lights up whatever space they 

walk into. That is Chrissy Metz.” 

Getty Images 

92

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100

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116

From left: Marimekko’s 

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Monrepos (1967), 

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THE COLOR CURE 

In chilly Finland, Olivia Stren discovers the secret to fashion 

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“Your mother looks like a gypsy,” a socalled 

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entrance. It was the mid-’80s. I was about 

10 years old. Among all the other mothers, 

sensibly dressed in their sweatshirts and 

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Born in a taxicab in Casablanca in 1941— 

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had been forced to leave sunny Morocco 

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she arrived in Toronto on April 27, 1969, at 

the age of 27. The next day—she loves to tell 

me, as if still recuperating from the shock— 

Toronto greeted her with a snowstorm. The 

climate was a match, she felt, to the bloodless 

temperament of the stereotypical Anglo- 

Saxon Torontonian. Ill-equipped for this 

place (sartorially, culturally, psychically), 

she felt lonely and marginalized, and resolved 

to dress the part: Her exotic clothes 

became a kind of commitment to not belonging. 

So my classmate’s “gypsy” comment 

did not wound me; to my eyes, her 

mother looked conventional. And in our 

house, conventional, along with its plain sister, 

appropriate, were pejoratives. My mother’s 

dresses, meanwhile, are laced up in my 

memory with all that is feminine and warm, 

but also rebellious. 

Perhaps it’s a reaction to fashion’s recent, 

ardent love affair with minimalism, or an 

embrace of the inclusivity marking the protests 

in the streets, but peasant-style dresses 

feel utterly of-the-moment once again. It’s 

true—there’s something about that look 

that is never completely out of style (my 

mom wore her dresses right through the 

beige, Calvin ’90s). But the effortless, 

breezy vibe and artisanal, slow-fashion 

quality—not to mention the specifics: blouson 

sleeves, rich colors, bohemian prints— 

could be spotted floating down the spring 

runways of Alexander McQueen, Jacquemus, 

Ulla Johnson, and Peter Pilotto. Meanwhile, 

Colombian designer Johanna Ortiz’s 

billowing volumes and the richly embroidered, 

tasseled, Ukrainian-style vyshyvanka 

dresses of Vita Kin are hot sellers on 

Matchesfashion.com. 

My mother would probably be most 

moved, however, by the spring offerings of 

Finland’s iconic fashion house, Marimekko. 

The company has rereleased five archival 

pieces hailing from the ’60s and ’70s, which 

bear only the most minor changes from the 

Courtesy of Marimekko 

118

Portraits: courtesy of Marimekko; runway: Imaxtree.com (2); Vita Kin: courtesy of the designer 

originals. What’s striking is not how old 

these designs are, but how new they look. 

Marimekko’s origin story is the stuff of 

national lore in Finland, as much a part of 

the local identity as saunas and sisu (which 

means strength of will and determination— 

and, I’m told, is a defining local trait). The 

CliffsNotes version: Armi Ratia, a former 

textile designer and copywriter, founded 

Marimekko (Finnish for “Mari’s dress”) in 

1951, when she galvanized a group of female 

artists to create avant-garde prints to 

enliven the oilcloth produced by her husband’s 

company. 

“Armi was a visionary,” says Tiina Alahuhta-Kasko, 

the brand’s current president. 

“She didn’t like the delicate, romantic 

florals of that time. She felt the world was 

longing for positivity, that gray, postwar 

Finland was longing for an injection of 

energy. For her, the prints and the colors 

were an answer to that void.” If those 

life-validating prints served as an anodyne 

to the grim political climate, they also 

were a survival tactic amid the epic, lightstarved 

Finnish winters. 

In 1959, Ratia officially took the brand 

international when she packed an airplane 

full of Finnish models and flew to the 

U.S. The following year, Jackie Kennedy 

snapped up seven dresses during her husband’s 

presidential campaign, appearing 

in a berry-colored Marimekko sundress on 

the cover of Sports Illustrated. Those early 

dresses, designed by Vuokko Eskolin- 

Nurmesniemi, considered one of the 

foremothers of Finnish design, were 

architectural in silhouette and fashioned 

with as few seams 

as possible to facilitate 

movement and dispense 

with restrictions both 

physical and ideological. 

The heavy 

cotton fabrics—never 

anything flimsy 

or fragile—were hardy, 

utilitarian. “The 

woman is sexy, not 

the dress,” the designer 

famously said. 

These were clothes 

intended less to entice 

others than to empower 

their wearers. 

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY 

Blouson sleeves 

and mega prints in the 

spring collections. 

ALEXANDER 

McQUEEN 

PETER PILOTTO 

Two exemplars of 

Marimekko’s 67-year 

tradition of female 

print designers: 

Annika Rimala (above, 

in 1960) and Maija 

Isola (in the 1980s) 

And they were rife with contrasts—between 

the practical silhouettes and the playful 

prints, the humble fabrics and the theatrical 

colors, the Scandinavian minimalism 

and the Russian ornamentalism. Such juxtapositions, 

I’m told by every woman I meet 

at Marimekko, lie at the heart of the company. 

(And the company is 94 percent female, 

by the way; men there are as exotic as 

palm trees.) 

This algorithm of opposites was clearly 

successful. Marimekko prints, headlined 

by the iconic poppy, made their way onto 

everything from sundresses to oven mitts— 

even, my mother tells me, onto the curtains 

(strawberry print) that cheered my parents’ 

tiny gecko-and-salamander–touristed 

bungalow in Tanzania in the early ’70s, 

when my father was completing his PhD in 

African politics. The idea to animate a dress 

and a dinner napkin with the same pattern 

cannily qualified Marimekko as one of the 

world’s first lifestyle companies. Today, 

the company’s Helsinki headquarters 

prints 1.2 million square yards of fabric 

a year in riotous Marimekko designs 

(some 3,500 of them) and debuts 20 

new prints annually. 

In December, I visited 

Marimekko HQ 

and capped off my 

trip with a visit to 

the fortress island 

of Suomenlinna, a 

15-minute ferry ride 

off the wind-frilled 

coast of Helsinki. 

It’s the sort of place 

that might inspire a 

Tolkien epic—which 

is not as far-fetched 

as it might sound: 

Tolkien actually 

fashioned Elvish after 

Finnish. Icicles 

dangle from stone 

buildings like vitrified 

tassels, and 

VITA KIN 

giant rocks are accoutred in ocher-colored 

lichen in patterns that could have inspired 

Marimekko prints, and probably did. With 

its mystical, round-roofed earthen bunkers, 

the island looks like a sort of Hamptons 

for hobbits. 

On my ferry ride over, even the clock tower 

perched above the jetty barracks—washed 

a blush pink—looks ruddy-cheeked from the 

wind, and by 3 p.m., the sun is already setting. 

Chilled to the bone, I try to summon a 

little sisu. “Sisu is a will to make it. It’s what 

you need during a Finnish winter, when 

you’re fighting a hard wind,” says Marimekko 

PR manager Sanna-Kaisa Niikko, though 

I can barely hear her over the gusts. 

My mind wanders to a warmer place; 

I fantasize about spring and trading my 

parka for, say, a rereleased, circa-1967 

circular-hemmed Monrepos dress in a 

print called Keidas (“oasis”)—its charged 

shades of orange and cactus green evoking 

all the rawness and jubilance of a Matisse 

paper cutout. Or the Liidokki dress (1974), 

which conjures Latin American caftans. 

You could see Frida Kahlo wearing it in her 

Casa Azul. Or, for that matter, my mom 

wearing it to run errands. For as long as I 

can remember, she’s worn an airy white 

embroidered summer dress. It’s a Mexican 

wedding dress, but she’d wear it to pick me 

up from playdates or to go to the grocery 

store, always with red lipstick and her favorite 

Guerlain Vol de Nuit perfume. This 

rejection of occasion dressing is another 

shared Marimekko principle: “Marimekko 

is meant for everyday,” Alahuhta-Kasko 

tells me, “because every day is the heart 

of your whole life.” Last summer, at 74, my 

mom wore that Mexican wedding dress to 

accompany me and my two-year-old son, 

Leo, to the sandbox. 

Unlike my mom, I’m more vulnerable to 

trends, and lately I find myself falling hard 

for a full-sleeve peasant dress. I long for a 

closet full of them. It’s a longing, perhaps, to 

recapture my mother’s youth—and maybe 

hang on to some of my own.

Miu Miu runway (5): Imaxtree.com; 

background: Getty Images 

HERE 

COMES 

THE SUN! 

Your search for the perfect 

suit (and, of course, the 

shades, sandals, and coverup) 

ends here. All you need 

now is a getaway plan… 

EDITED BY JADE FRAMPTON

RETRO ACTIVE 

Hit rewind with ’50s pinup–worthy hot pants and superslim knits 

Sunglasses, ALICE + OLIVIA BY STACEY 

BENDET, $350, collection at shopbop.com 

Calfskin tote, AKRIS, $2,390, 

at Akris boutiques nationwide 

UNDER 

$100 

PRADA 

Elevated designer pool slides—the perfect way to offset a throwback look 

Leather platform, TORY SPORT, 

$265, visit torysport.com 

Crystal earrings, CH CAROLINA 

HERRERA, $255, at CH Carolina 

Herrera, NYC 

Terry cloth bikini top, $155, bottom, $130, both, 

MARA HOFFMAN, visit marahoffman.com 

UNDER 

$75 

Leather wedge, NAUTICA, $50, 

similar styles at nautica.com 

Cotton cardigan, $49, leather belt, $30, both, 

LANDS’ END, visit landsend.com. Silk shorts, 

COACH 1941, $250, similar styles at coach.com 

BEAUTY TIP 

Beauty icon Linda 

Rodin was inspired 

by OG beach babe 

Brigitte Bardot 

when creating this 

lipstick shade, 

“So Mod.” 

Lipstick in So Mod, 

RODIN OLIO 

LUSSO, $38, visit 

oliolusso.com 

Calfskin slide, BOSS, $545, 

at Hugo Boss stores nationwide 

Seersucker bikini top, LISA MARIE 

FERNANDEZ, $385 (sold as a set), visit 

lisamariefernandez.com. Polyamide Lycra bikini 

bottom, LONELY, $115, visit lonelylabel.com 

UNDER 

$100 

Crochet straw sun 

hat, BANANA 

REPUBLIC, $58, visit 

bananarepublic.com 

UNDER 

$75 

Recycled-fabric platform, H&M CONSCIOUS 

EXCLUSIVE, $99, visit hm.com 

Runway: Imaxtree.com; Mara Hoffman bikini set, Lands’ End cardigan, Coach 1941 shorts, Lisa Marie Fernandez bikini top, Banana Republic hat, 

and Nautica flatform: Jeff Harris/Studio D (styled by Anita Salerno for R.J. Bennett Represents); lipstick smear: Philip Friedman/Studio D 

124

THE GROVE 

Equal parts boho and bombshell, Bardot’s breezy, 

sexy style is just a citrus (or gingham) print away 

UNDER 

$200 

ALTUZARRA 

Energy Yellow Citrus & 

Honey Patting Splash 

Mask, BLITHE, $45, visit 

glowrecipe.com 

Raffia hoop earrings, MERCEDES SALAZAR, 

$175, collection at Bergdorf Goodman, NYC 

Nylon spandex bikini top, $98, bottom, 

$98, both, WHIT, visit whit-ny.com 

BEAUTY TIP 

No sun-soaked 

vacation in the 

cards? Get a dewy 

glow at home in 

15 seconds with the 

citrus-packed Blithe 

splash mask. 

Gingham dress, RACHEL COMEY, 

$644, collection at shopbop.com 

Sweet, not-so-serious additions offer a certain fresh-picked charm 

Gold, red enamel, and diamond ring, ALISON 

LOU, $945, visit alisonlou.com 

UNDER 

$100 

Cotton top, LUCKY BRAND, $99, 

at Lucky Brand stores nationwide 

Sunglasses, THIERRY LASRY, $385, 

visit thierrylasry.com 

Polyamide elastane bikini top, MARYSIA, $137, 

visit marysiaswim.com. Print shorts, PINKO, 

$338, at Pinko, NYC 

Gold, pavé ruby, and diamond earrings, 

SYDNEY EVAN, $905, visit sydneyevan.com 

Straw tote, KATE SPADE NEW YORK, 

$398, visit katespade.com 

UNDER 

$100 

Polyamide spandex bikini top, $39, bottom, 

$39, both, GUESS, visit guess.com 

Crystal-embellished denim sandal, GIANVITO 

ROSSI, $1,265, collection at Neiman Marcus 

stores nationwide 

Gold chain, $2,400, pink sapphire, green 

tsavorite, black and white diamond, and gold 

charm, $5,810, both, CAROLINA BUCCI, visit 

carolinabucci.com 

Runway: Imaxtree.com; oil spill: Devon Jarvis/Studio D; Rachel Comey dress and Marysia bikini top: Jeff Harris/Studio D (styled by Anita Salerno for R.J. Bennett Represents) 

126

Photographed by Tyler Joe 

always on

SUIT UP! 

Three of-the-moment shapes to highlight your most valuable assets 

WEAR IT WITH 

Nylon spandex swimsuit, ONIA, Polyamide Lycra swimsuit, OYE 

$195, visit onia.com SWIMWEAR, $350, collection at revolve.com 

Polyamide elastane bikini top, $99, 

bottom, $99, both, CALI DREAMING, 

visit cali-dreaming.com 

UNDER 

$125 

Spandex-blend swimsuit, GOTTEX, 

$108, collection at amazon.com 

Neoprene and mesh bikini top, 

$150, bottom, $100, both, STELLA 

McCARTNEY SWIMWEAR, visit 

stellamccartney.com 

UNDER 

$100 

Nylon spandex swimsuit, MYRA 

SWIM, $91, visit myraswim.com 

Polyamide spandex swimsuit, ERES, 

$570, collection at net-a-porter.com 

Neoprene bikini, DION LEE 

[WATER], $320, visit dionlee.com 

Nylon Lycra swimsuit, NORMA 

KAMALI, $150, visit normakamali.com 

UNDER 

$100 

Tactel nylon spandex swimsuit, 

J.CREW, $98, visit jcrew.com 


No time for a 

costume change? 

A sporty bikini 

top does double 

duty as a 

crop top. 

Polyamide elastane bikini, 

ZIMMERMANN, $235, visit 

zimmermannwear.com 

Metallic polyamide elastane swimsuit, 

MARIE FRANCE VAN DAMME, $329, 

visit mariefrancevandamme.com 

Leather bucket bag, MODERN 

WEAVING, $515, visit modernweaving.com. 

Silk-blend shorts, KIT 

AND ACE, $118, visit kitandace.com 

WEAR IT WITH 

UNDER 

$125 

WEAR IT WITH 

UNDER 

$50 

Stretch-denim skirt, PACSUN, $40, 

visit pacsun.com. Leather sandal, 

MICHAEL MICHAEL KORS, $120, 

visit michaelkors.com 

UNDER 

$125 

Cotton 

dress, LOUP 

CHARMANT, $335, 

visit loupcharmant 

.com. Gold-plated 

brass and white 

CZ bangles, 

all, KENDRA 

SCOTT, $110 (for 

set of five), visit 

kendrascott.com 

High-neck swimwear, one-shoulder swimwear, Gottex swimsuit, Norma Kamali swimsuit, and Kit and Ace shorts: Jeff Harris/Studio D (styled by Anita Salerno for R.J. Bennett Represents) 

128

HIT 

SINGLES 

We enlisted a few 

of our fave labels 

to create cuts and 

colors you’ll find 

only in ELLE 


How low can 

you go? A 

full-coverage 

top offsets the 

teeniest bikini 

bottom. 

Polyamide elastane swimsuit, 

ARAKS, $325, visit araks.com 

Detachable Lycra swimsuit, ALIX, 

$250, collection at Club Monaco 


UNDER 

$100 

Spandex-blend swimsuit, GAP, $70, 

at Gap stores nationwide 

Nylon spandex bikini top, $118, 

bottom, $118, both, MIKOH, visit 

mikoh.com 

Neoprene bikini, LISA MARIE 

FERNANDEZ, $395, collection at 

net-a-porter.com 

Straw and grosgrain tote, EUGENIA 

KIM, $495, visit eugeniakim.com 

UNDER 

$50 

Nylon spandex swimsuit, OLD 

NAVY, $43, at Old Navy stores 

nationwide 

Nylon-blend bikini top, $132, bottom, 

$178, both, MADE BY DAWN, visit 

madebydawn.com 

Artisanal woven carryalls will carry you from poolside to party, all summer long 

Woven-raffia tote, SOEUR, $128, 

visit soeur.fr 

Toquilla straw tote, SENSI STUDIO, 

$320, collection at avenue32.com 

Polyamide Lycra swimsuit, 

SOLID & STRIPED, $168, visit 

solidandstriped.com 

Raffia tote, LOEFFLER RANDALL, 

$350, visit loefflerrandall.com 

UNDER 

$150 

Micro-nylon spandex bikini top, $70, 

bottom, $57, both, BODY GLOVE, 

visit bodyglove.com 

Calfskin and natural-fiber tote, 

BALENCIAGA, $1,135, at Balenciaga, NYC 

All swimwear: Jeff Harris/Studio D (styled by Anita Salerno for R.J. Bennett Represents) 

130

BODY ELECTRIC 

Highlighter-bright sporty silhouettes fire up ’90s nostalgia 

BEAUTY TIP 

Water-friendly 

and neon-bold, 

Milk Makeup Lip 

Marker is the 

beauty version of 

the Body Glove 

wet suit. 

UNDER 

$100 

Nylon elastane bikini top, $660, bottom, 

$240, both, LA PERLA, at La Perla, NYC 

UNDER 

$125 

Lip Marker in TKO, 

MILK MAKEUP, $20, 

visit milkmakeup.com 

Sandal, BIRKENSTOCK, 

$100, visit birkenstock.com 

Mesh and nylon rash guard, TOMMY 

BAHAMA, $98, visit tommybahama 

.com. Nylon spandex bikini bottom, 

MOSCHINO, $265 (sold as a set), at 

Moschino boutiques nationwide 

UNDER 

$100 

Handwoven leather and plastic bucket bag, 

TRUSS, $295, collection at net-a-porter.com 

UNDER 

$75 

Wherever you find yourself, eye-popping denim jackets bring a hint of the beach 

UNDER 

$50 

Denim jacket, 

OLD NAVY, $35, 

visit oldnavy.com 

Nylon elastane swimsuit, 

AERIE, $50, at Aerie 


UNDER 

$75 

Sunglasses, GUESS, 

$80, visit guess.com 

Stretch-cotton shorts, ROXY, 

$50, visit roxy.com 

Denim jacket, 

J BRAND, $248, 

collection at Saks 

Fifth Avenue 


UNDER 

$175 

ALEXANDER WANG 

Spandex-blend 

jacket, GUESS, 

$158, visit 

guess.com 

Runway: Imaxtree.com; Aerie swimsuit, Tommy Bahama rash guard, and Moschino bikini bottom: 

Jeff Harris/Studio D (styled by Anita Salerno for R.J. Bennett Represents) 

132

SWIM CLUB 

Three new swim labels to know offer minimalist perfection, with a few well-placed frills 

Launched: 2014 Based in: 

Sydney Vibe: This Aussie 

label’s athletic bikinis and 

high-neck maillots offer cleanlined 

simplicity, plus built-in 

SPF 50 protection. 

Nylon Lycra bikini, 

HER SWIMWEAR, $175, 

visit herthelabel.com 

Nylon Lycra swimsuit, 



Nylon Lycra bikini, 






Her Swimwear and Jonathan Simkhai swimsuits: Jeff Harris/Studio D (styled by Anita Salerno for R.J. Bennett Represents) 


NYC Vibe: The ready-to-wear 

darling’s swim range thrills 

with dramatic ruffes 

and corsetry. 


NYC Vibe: Fashion 

editor Brittany Kozerski’s 

superminimal suits are cut 

from smoothing stretch fabric, 

with the thinnest of straps. 

Spandex-blend swimsuit, 

JONATHAN SIMKHAI, $365, 

collection at net-a-porter.com 

Nylon Lycra bikini top, $80, bottom, 

$80, both, JADE SWIM, visit 

jadeswim.com 

Reversible spandex-blend bikini 

top, $145, bottom, $125, both, 

JONATHAN SIMKHAI, collection 

at Intermix, NYC 

Nylon Lycra swimsuit, JADE SWIM, 

$198, visit jadeswim.com 

Spandex-blend swimsuit, 

JONATHAN SIMKHAI, $325, visit 

jonathansimkhai.com 

Nylon Lycra bikini top, $80, bottom, 

$90, both, JADE SWIM, visit 

jadeswim.com 

Spandex-blend bikini top, $185, 

bottom, $155, both, JONATHAN 

SIMKHAI, collection at 

net-a-porter.com 

Nylon Lycra swimsuit, JADE SWIM, 

$198, visit jadeswim.com

IN WITH THE NEW 

ELLE Fashion Director Samira Nasr on trickle-up style, 

fashion’s new hair obsession, and inner (and outer) glow 

Nasr and Soleimani 

STREET SCENES 

Jamel Shabazz, whose book 

Sights in the City: New York Street 

Photographs (Damiani) comes 

out this month, is the original 

street-style photographer. Both 

a photojournalist and a fashion 

photographer, he documented 

ordinary people in the ’80s 

who were making incredible 

style statements, long before 

the days of social media. Look 

at “Fly Girls” (far right), shot 

in downtown Brooklyn, circa 

1984: The tights with the opentoe 

shoes, the leather minis, 

the matching Kangol hats—it 

kills me! And it’s a look that’s 

relevant all over again, as we 

saw on the Marc Jacobs fall 

runway (above). 

EASY DOES IT 

My friend, makeup artist 

Romy Soleimani—the genius 

behind the enviable glow of 

both Cara Delevingne and 

Kate Hudson—shares the 

four products (shown here) 

every woman should own. 

Pai Rosehip BioRegenerate 

Oil: “I press a little into my 

cheeks to hydrate, soothe, 

and make me look alive!” 

RMS Beauty “Un” Coverup 

concealer: “With the 

right concealer, you can 

skip foundation or tinted 

moisturizer. If you have 

naturally rosy cheeks, add 

concealer around your nose 

and chin, and let your skin 

shine through.” 

Surratt Relevée eyelash 

curler: “It opens eyes, even 

when you’re wearing no 

makeup at all.” 

Kevyn Aucoin The Flesh 

Tone Lip Pencil (shown 

in Hyacinth): “Pencils are 

unsung multitaskers—fill 

your lips for a natural pout 

or press the color into cheeks 

for a healthy glow.” 

Runway: Imaxtree.com (2); “Fly Girls”: from A Time Before Crack, by Jamel Shabazz (powerHouse Books) 

I’m superinspired 

by the cornrows we saw at Saint Laurent 

for spring and again at Fendi for fall. 

For so long, fashion didn’t know what 

to do with black hair—it was always 

straightened or slicked back. Hairstylist 

Shani Crowe (near right), the woman 

responsible for Solange’s braided halo 

on SNL, has been creating major looks. 

Check out her Insta @crowezilla. 

SAINT 

LAURENT 

138 

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GALAXY GIRL 

Marvel gets an ebullient 

(and hilarious) new star 

in Pom Klementieff. 

By Seth Plattner 

When asked who inspired her portrayal 

of the classic Marvel comic-book 

hero Mantis—a bizarre, buggy humanoid 

who can sense people’s emotions 

through touch (and is the newest member 

of Chris Pratt’s ragtag group of celestial 

protectors in this month’s Guardians 

of the Galaxy Vol. 2)—Pom Klementieff 

has a list at the ready: “A praying mantis, 

obviously,” says the 30-year-old 

graduate of Paris’s Cours Florent drama 

school, who, although born in Quebec 

to a French-diplomat father and a Korean 

mother, was ultimately raised by 

her paternal aunt and uncle after she lost 

her father at age five and her mother became 

unwell. “Gollum, from The Lord of 

the Rings; Leeloo, Milla Jovovich’s character 

in The Fifth Element, because she’s 

discovering new things in a new world… 

oh, and Mr. Burns! From The Simpsons—I 

like the way he holds his hands!” 

Though Guardians revolves around 

constant warring and world-saving (fortunately, 

Klementieff was trained in 

boxing and Tae Kwon Do before even 

auditioning for the movie), it’s the actress’s 

offbeat sense of humor that will 

be her signature in the Marvel universe. 

“Female characters in Marvel films are 

usually cool and badass and strong, and 

I love that!” says Klementieff, who’s recently 

finished filming Avengers: Infinity 

War Part I, alongside Robert Downey Jr., 

Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, and the 

rest of the star-studded superhero gang. 

“But Mantis is something different. 

She’s childlike. She listens rather than 

fights. She’s also weird! I get to be the 

total weirdo!” How totally refreshing. 

MOVIES, 

BOOKS, MUSIC, 

AND MORE! 

Emma Holly Jones 

142

©2017 P&G 

s u m m e r 

R E S C U E 

Helps repair even extreme hair damage in just 3 minutes.

LAST SUPPER 

Things will never be the same between two brothers and their wives after 

an elaborate gourmet repast that’s poisoned by proliferating secrets and 

misunderstandings in The Dinner. By Ben Dickinson 

“Families work together; they 

bury the ugly stuff.” At least as 

much aspirational as it is factual, 

that declaration—uttered 

sotto voce toward the end of The 

Dinner—cuts to the heart of this 

bristlingly intelligent, idiosyncratic, 

and sinuously suspenseful 

film. Is it a thriller? An Oedipallytinged 

drama? A midnight-dark 

comedy of manners? It’s all of the 

above, and more. 

Writer-director Oren Moverman 

adapted the international 

best-seller by Dutch novelist Herman 

Koch, published in the U.S. 

in 2013, brilliantly converting it 

from its European mise-en-scène 

into a thoroughly American fable. 

Moverman, who made the highly 

regarded 2009 Iraq War drama 

The Messenger and cowrote the 

intricate script for 2014’s Love & 

Mercy, the biopic about the Beach 

Boys’ Brian Wilson, is an eclectic 

talent whose star is rising. In 2014, 

he also made Time Out of Mind 

Gere 

(the avant-garde movie equivalent 

of ambient music), starring 

Richard Gere as a suddenly homeless 

and rudderless New Yorker. 

Moverman knows every crag and 

angle of Gere’s elegantly aging 

face, and in The Dinner, he has 

Gere playing Stan Lohman, a congressman 

of resplendent charm 

(well, and smarm) who’s now 

campaigning for a governorship. 

You’ll not find a more unctuous 

yet irresistible politico, one who 

finds himself hopelessly and addictively 

tethered to the smartphone 

borne by his ever-hovering 

assistant, Nina (a savvy, sometimes 

smirking Adepero Oduye). 

First, though, we meet Stan’s 

younger brother, Paul (the brilliant 

Steve Coogan), a former 

high school history teacher who’s 

obsessed, in a flagrantly politically 

correct way, with our nation’s 

rampant inequality, the broken 

promise of the Civil War and 

Emancipation, and the legacy of 

Native American genocide. He’s a 

charismatic rager who can scarcely 

bring himself to go to dinner 

with Stan at an ultra–haute cuisine 

restaurant that he knows he’ll despise; 

we’re privy to what appears 

to be a marital ritual as his Earth- 

Motherly wife, Claire (a glowing 

Hall and 

Linney 

Laura Linney), talks him down in 

their bedroom and coaxes him to 

go out. They strike us as both sympathetic 

and symbiotic. 

The restaurant, a dimly lit den 

of clubby luxury, indeed turns out 

to be a surpassingly inappropriate 

place for them to meet with Stan 

and his glam new wife, Katelyn 

(the fab Rebecca Hall—for whom, 

more roles like this, please!). Because 

it turns out that, amid all 

the ridiculous ceremony of food 

fetishism (“These winter roots 

were grown right here in our garden!”) 

and constant interruptions 

by Nina bearing frantic communications 

from Washington, these 

two couples have a deadly serious 

crisis to chew over and somehow 

try to resolve: Their two teenage 

sons have recently done something 

tragically bad but have not 

been found out—but a third son, 

whom Stan adopted from Kenya, 

appears to be on the verge of 

ratting on them. This becomes 

the fulcrum of an almost alchemical 

alteration of our assumptions 

about these four people, and the 

last half hour of The Dinner unfolds 

like a vehicle headed straight 

for a concrete bridge abutment at 

ever-increasing velocity. What is 

it, exactly? Something to behold. 

UNBURIED SECRETS 

In HBO’s The Immortal 

Life of Henrietta 

Lacks, a film based on 

Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 

nonfiction best-seller, 

a greenhorn reporter 

chases a medical 

saga deep into the 

heart of a Baltimore 

family. A biopsy from 

Henrietta Lacks 

(Hamilton’s Renée 

Elise Goldsberry), who 

died of cervical cancer 

in 1951, grew into a 

line of cells that has 

transformed medical 

research worldwide. 

When Skloot (Rose 

Byrne) approaches 

the troubled Deborah 

Lacks (Oprah 

Winfrey) and her 

siblings about their 

mother’s life and 

scientific legacy, she 

sets off a spectacular 

chain reaction 

involving medical 

ethics, race, and 

class—and, now, a 

must-see TV event 

(April 22).—B.D. 

Winfrey 

and 

Byrne 

Clockwise from bottom left: courtesy of the Orchard (2); Quantrell D. Colbert/HBO 

144

DIRECTOR’S SPOTLIGHT 

ABOUT 

A GIRL 

A charismatic child, a heinous 

unsolved crime, a bewildered 

community: all ingredients 

for a bewitching documentary 

Green 

A whole litter of little blond girls dressed 

in red, white, and blue costumes spills 

boisterously forward from camera to stage 

in an audition for the role of JonBenét Ramsey; 

you’d be hard-pressed to pick the real 

JonBenét out of the lineup were she actually 

there. Talk about a through-the-lookingglass 

moment: From the first scene of Casting 

JonBenet, in theaters and on Netflix this 

month, it’s clear that Aussie documentarian 

Kitty Green knows how to take you there. 

“There” would also be Boulder, Colorado, 

where Ramsey, a six-year-old child-beautypageant 

star, was murdered in her home on 

Christmas night in 1996—an infamous case 

that has never been solved and may very well 

stay that way. 

Does this sound like yet another schlocky 

cable-TV exposé about the case? It’s not; in 

fact, the movie is almost all about the casting 

process. And it got 

uniformly adulatory reviews 

at Sundance and, at 

this writing, enjoys a 100 percent “fresh” 

critics’ rating on rottentomatoes.com. Green 

is after something far removed from a rehash 

of the sordid and timeworn details. “How do 

you make sense of senseless horror and tragedy? 

That was always our fascination,” Green 

says. She trawled the Boulder area with open 

casting calls for locals, ranging from dinnertheater 

veterans to folks just off the street, 

to play the central roles—JonBenét’s brother 

and parents and a few other prominent suspects—in 

reenactments of what might have 

happened that mysterious night. Then she 

interviewed them about their memories and 

theories about the case and how it’s affected 

their lives. “We were more interested in the 

cultural obsession, the mythology and legacy 

Casting 

JonBenet’s 

star lineup 

of Ramsey,” she adds, “than in the case itself.” 

When did Green know for sure that she’d 

struck documentary gold? “I think we cast 

the Santa Clauses first,” she recalls. (For a 

time, a chief suspect in the case was a neighbor 

of the Ramseys who moonlighted yearly 

as Santa Claus.) “We had them in a Barca- 

Lounger, and once they sat down, they just 

wouldn’t stop talking. It was actually cathartic, 

or therapeutic, I think, to talk through 

not only their impressions of this tragedy but 

also their own personal narratives and connections 

to the case.” Throughout the film, 

auditioners blurt out unexpected and revealing 

glimpses of themselves. It soon becomes 

clear that we’re beholding, in microcosm, the 

things that people tell themselves to push 

away the darkness and meaninglessness of 

what’s stubbornly unknowable and get on 

with their lives.—B.D. 

TRUST US 

This month: priests and nuns, 

radical writers and lovers 

If this grabs you: “ ‘Before 

they allowed your father 

to be a priest,’ my mother 

tells me, ‘they made me take 

the Psychopath Test. You 

know, a priest can’t have a 

psychopath wife, it would 

bring disgrace,’ ” you’ll 

be wowed by Patricia 

Lockwood’s darkly 

profane and poetic 

memoir, Priestdaddy 

(Riverhead), about 

growing up as the 

daughter of a Catholic 

priest. Lockwood, a 

taboo-breaking doyenne 

of the Twitterverse 

whose book of 

poetry Motherland 

Fatherland Homelandsexuals 

hit it big in 

2014, describes family 

photo-sifting night: 

“My father in a tight, 

appalling sailor suit. 

My father dressed as 

a pro-life Dracula. My 

father wearing a Speedo 

at the lapping edge 

of a picturesque lake, 

between two buff 

buttocky dunes.” 

If you want to read the 

work of Canada’s literary 

It Girl, check out writer 

Durga Chew-Bose’s 

essay collection, Too 

Much and Not the 

Mood (FSG). The 

first (and best) piece, 

“Heart Museum,” 

is a fluid, almost 

dreamlike disquisition 

on finding one’s voice. 

She writes, “Groping 

through the dark is… 

what writing consists 

of anyway. Working 

through and feeling 

around the shadows 

of an idea. Getting 

pricked. Cursing 

purity. Threshing 

out. Scuffing up and 

peeling away. Feral 

rearranging. Letting 

form ferment.” 

If you’re ripe for a 

presummer blockbuster 

that delivers an 

engrossing family drama 

with feisty humor and 

transformative tough 

love, put Saints for All 

Occasions (Knopf), 

J. Courtney 

Sullivan’s latest 

New England–set 

saga (she also 

wrote Maine and 

Commencement) on 

your must-read list. 

This novel’s about 

two very different 

sisters—one destined 

to become a matriarch, 

the other a 

cloistered nun. 

If you’re keen for a 

fresh take on the life 

and work of beloved 

writer Jane Austen, UK 

biographer Helena 

Kelly’s Jane Austen, 

the Secret Radical 

(Knopf) reveals the 

subversive rebel soul 

behind such towering 

classics as Sense and 

Sensibility, Pride and 

Prejudice, and Mansfield 

Park. Good timing! 

Austen’s pensive, 

intelligent face, haloed 

by her Regency-era 

cap, will grace the 

Bank of England’s 

new 10-pound note (it 

debuts in September). 

If you’re at the end of your 

relationship rope, reach 

for Radical Acceptance: 

The Secret to Happy, 

Lasting Love (Atria 

Books) by YourTango 

.com CEO and founder 

Andrea Miller: a thinky, 

shrinky, five-step guide 

to loving by embracing, 

as Miller’s written, “the 

darkness, the murkiness, 

the shadows of 

a relationship and the 

people in it.” 

—Lisa Shea 

From top left: Gregory Erdstein; courtesy of Netflix 

146

Helping you feel 

safe in your lane. 

The 2017 Toyota Corolla’s standard Toyota Safety Sense P 

(TSS-P) 1 is designed to help keep passengers safe with a suite 

of systems including Lane Departure Alert with Steering Assist. 2 

This feature is designed to detect visible lane markers on the 

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and may also provide slight, corrective steering inputs to help 

keep the vehicle in its lane. With TSS-P’s Lane Departure Alert, 

you’ll feel greater peace of mind on the road. 

Prototype shown with options. Production model may vary. 1. Drivers are responsible for their own safe driving. Always pay attention to your surroundings 

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dependent on road, weather and vehicle conditions. See Owner’s Manual for additional limitations and details. ©2017 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.

LOVE AND 

IDENTITY 

A Jewish boy, a Burmese beauty, 

and the WWII savagery they 

endure make for an epic roman 

à clef. By Keziah Weir 

At one point in Charmaine Craig’s 

emotionally complex second novel, 

Miss Burma (Grove Press), married 

couple Khin and Benny are reunited 

after nearly two years of separation. 

“Astonishing,” Benny thinks, facing his wife, 

“how one could go from absolute intimacy 

to utter estrangement.” This notion—of 

human closeness and alienation and what 

constitutes each—is central to Craig’s novel, 

which follows a mixed-race couple and their 

children living in racially charged Burma 

between 1926 and 1965. Miss Burma is largely 

based on the incredible true story of the 

author’s own famous mother, Louisa Charmaine 

Benson Craig—who, at 15, became 

Burma’s first Miss Universe contestant and 

went on to marry an army commander, assuming 

her husband’s military duties at age 

24, upon his assassination. 

Benny, a seven-year-old Jewish boy living 

in Rangoon (then still under British rule), 

is orphaned and shipped off to Calcutta to 

live with his aunts, a pair of rabbi’s daughters. 

But it’s the words of Saint Augustine 

that get to him: “God loves each of us, as if 

there were only one of us.” Returning as a 

young man to Burma, Benny meets Khin, 

an 18-year-old girl belonging to the country’s 

tyrannized ethnic minority, the Karen. 

Benny has all but forgotten his Burmese, 

and Khin understands only a few words of 

English, but they marry and begin an epic, 

complicated love story that unfurls just as 

the world begins to shudder with the horrors 

of World War II. The couple are forced to 

make impossible choices as Burma becomes 

increasingly dangerous for Khin, as a Karen; 

for Benny, who is often misidentified as a 

British spy; and for their children. 

Craig (incidentally, a former actress who 

served as a model for Disney’s Pocahontas) 

masterfully renders the human condition in 

matters micro and vast. And as Benny and 

Khin’s story opens up to include the desires 

and fears of their strikingly beautiful, fiery 

daughter Louisa, she proves to be a singular 

force, a combined product of her parents’ 

separate strengths that reveals the power in 

individual perseverance, even in the face of 

torture and slaughter. 

Like many of the best books, Miss Burma 

feels rooted in its time and place, while also 

laying bare timeless questions of loyalty, 

infidelity, patriotism, and identity—not to 

mention the globally perpetuated unfair 

treatment of women. It also raises one particularly 

resonant concern: What does it 

take to shake us out of complacency? 

THE BIG PICTURE 

Kristen Radtke’s graphic memoir is a cool, capacious 

telling of her life. By Lisa Shea 

Writer and illustrator Kristen 

Radtke has an insatiable attraction 

to abandoned places. She’s 

wandered the hollowed-out 

cities of America’s Rust Belt, 

roamed a lava-buried Icelandic 

village, visited vacated mining 

towns in Colorado, and scoured 

the former U.S. military base 

on the Philippine island of Corregidor. 

These and other trips to 

landscapes of aftermath, ruin, 

and decay gave the Green Bay, 

Wisconsin, native the courage 

she needed to process loss and 

past romantic entanglements, 

and to come to grips with her 

family’s scary medical history, 

forging all of it into her brilliant 

graphic memoir, Imagine Wanting 

Only This (Pantheon Books). 

The book is a family drama, 

youthful romance, obsessive 

adventure, and karmic inqui- 

ry wrapped in a coming-of-age 

tale. It’s her thumbnail history 

of left-behind people and places, 

and a wondrous panel-by-panel 

archive of the interplay between 

her rapacious intellect and her 

expansive imagination. 

Before the book, which took 

“forever” to complete, the 29- 

year-old Radtke says, “I wasted 

a lot of time writing about exboyfriends.” 

After art school at 

Chicago’s Columbia College, an 

MFA in nonfiction at the University 

of Iowa, and a stay in 

Milan, Radtke struggled, but “I 

was always writing about abandoned 

places, about some form 

of aftermath, the place left after 

the action,” she says. She’s consumed 

with the question of how 

“something that is can become, 

very suddenly, something that 

isn’t.” A striking full-page panel 

of an abandoned church in 

downtown Gary, Indiana, that 

Radtke and a boyfriend explored 

presages a later trip the artist 

made to Southeast Asia seeking 

out the ruins at Angkor Wat, 

the gilded stupas in Myanmar, 

and the killing fields of Cambodia. 

Twice these terse words 

accompany the cartoonish yet 

vividly animated drawings that 

drive the memoir: 

“We forget 

that everything will become no 

longer ours.” In places, the commingled 

pictorial and written 

narrative flows like a film, like 

a dreamscape, like the river of 

time itself. It’s Radtke’s quietly 

erudite, observant language 

(“The candles outside temples 

in Laos that looked just like the 

ones we used to light for my 

grandmother”) that grounds her 

intricate and dramatic drawings. 

But maps, photographs, medical 

charts, newspaper clippings, and 

a free-floating Sharpie embedded 

in the almost 300-page book 

enhance the storytelling as they 

surprise and delight. 

Radtke is mindful of women 

comic artists, such as Fun 

Home’s Alison Bechdel 

and Persepolis’s Marjane 

Satrapi. On the last page 

of Imagine, this acknowledgment 

appears: “Every 

woman who has ever put 

a comic into the world has 

made it a little more possible 

for me to do so.” 

148

Smith: Getty Images; LuPone and Ebersole: Joan Marcus 

PIONEER 

WOMAN 

How Caitlyn Smith bucked the 

country music establishment 

to build her long-overdue 

breakthrough. By Dan Hyman 

When it came time for singer-songwriter 

Caitlyn Smith to sign her first record 

deal, the 30-year-old—who’d been kicking 

around Nashville for 15 years, writing hits 

for everyone from Dolly Parton (“You Can’t 

Make Old Friends”) to Meghan Trainor 

(“Like I’m Gonna Lose You”)—wasn’t in a 

glitzy Music Row boardroom but rather on 

her couch, wearing “mom yoga pants,” with 

her six-month-old son, Thomas (whom she 

had with her husband, fellow musician 

Rollie Gaalswyk), hysterically crying on her 

lap. “It’s not how I pictured it!” says Smith, 

now with Monument Records and set to release 

her first full-length album, Starfire, 

this month. “But honestly, it couldn’t have 

been more perfect and beautiful.” 

A small-town Minnesota native, Smith had 

been jockeying for a solo career for years. 

She took her parents up on an offer to use her 

college-fund money to record her first album 

and, while still in high school, started making 

monthly trips to Nashville to attract label 

attention. For the past decade, however, 

Smith, like many female artists looking for 

their break, has had to fight biases that have 

long plagued women in Music City: They’re 

seen as either a sex symbol or just another talented 

songwriter. “Every time I’d try to get 

a record deal or shoot for country 

radio, it just felt slightly contrived,” 

she says. That all changed when, 

on the heels of artists like Kacey 

Musgraves, Maren Morris, and 

Mickey Guyton, who were starting 

to forge a new path for female talent, 

Smith decided to release her 

music independently, leading to 

2016’s breakout EP, Starfire. The 

album debuted at number one on 

the iTunes singer-songwriter chart 

and at last revealed, says Smith, 

“who I am at the core”: a versatile, 

classic-country-loving vocalist 

whose songs mix acoustic Americana 

with gritty blues swagger and 

punchy pop hooks. 

On the full-length Starfire, it’s 

that same mix of tender (“Tacoma”), 

tough (“Contact High”), and occasionally 

silly (“Let’s spin a couple of 

45s and order some Chinese takeout /…I 

couldn’t think of a better way to spend my 

Friday night,” she sings on the sweet ballad 

“Cheap Date”) that illuminates what 

rallied her grassroots fan base in the first 

place: a sense of authenticity in a universe 

of label-packaged product. “Fans who discover 

your music in that way feel even more 

inclined to back you,” says Morris—and she 

would know. Before winning a 2017 Best 

Country Solo Performance Grammy for her 

first single, “My Church,” Morris racked up 

supporters by self-releasing the song to Spotify, 

reaping millions of streams and sparking 

a bidding war among Nashville’s top labels 

(she ultimately signed with Sony Music 

Nashville). Fans appreciate, she says, that 

the work’s “not being paid for or pushed in 

their faces.” While female country artists 

may just now be wising up to the strategy, 

it’s a lesson that rap and hip-hop have understood 

for years, with artists like Soulja 

Boy, A$AP Rocky, and, more recently, Lil 

Yachty and Migos leveraging the Internet 

for a following—and then forcing the industry 

to play catch-up. 

“When I think of my passed-over peers, 

maybe they weren’t 6'3" or a supermodel, so 

they weren’t getting deals,” says Smith, who 

cofounded the quarterly “Girls of Nashville” 

showcase to highlight undiscovered female 

talent. “It’s ridiculous, but I think it’s stirred 

a lot of women. We’re finally like, ‘Okay, 

whatever! You aren’t going to sign me? Fine. 

I’m just going to do my own thing.’ And to finally 

put me out there, the unedited version, 

and have people love it—it’s a confirmation 

that I’m on the right path.” 

LIPSTICK JUNGLE 

While Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon 

duke it out on TV as Joan Crawford and Bette 

Davis, respectively, in the hit FX drama Feud, 

Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole are 

bringing to life another historic tête-à-tête in 

the Broadway musical War Paint. The Tonywinning 

legends enact the storied rivalry 

between Helena Rubinstein (LuPone) and 

Elizabeth Arden (Ebersole), one that made both 

women boundary-pushing beauty moguls and 

renowned figures of female power. To salute that 

legacy, LuPone and Ebersole weigh in on some 

pressing questions—just in time for our May 

Beauty Issue.—Seth Plattner 

What hardships are 

women still dealing 

with that Helena and 

Elizabeth dealt with 

60 years ago? 

Patti LuPone: 

Prejudice. Pay 

equality. Equality. 

Men suck—except for 

my husband, my son, 

and my men friends. 

Christine Ebersole: 

Aging gracefully. 

In terms of rivalry, 

what can healthy 

opposition teach us? 

PL: Acceptance. 

CE: That rivalry can 

inspire us. 

Is there still a 

Broadway role you 

wish you could play? 

PL: Always [Gypsy’s] 

Madame Rose. 

As long as I have 

breath, I’d love to 

play Madame Rose 

again. 

CE: The part of 

Mame, but this time 

on Broadway. 

Who’s a new 

Broadway star who 

inspires you? 

PL: Annaleigh 

Ashford, Lena Hall, 

Cristin Milioti, Denée 

Benton. 

CE: Cynthia Erivo. 

LuPone 

She’s brilliant. 

What’s your one 

weird but faithful 

beauty ritual? 

PL: Montepulciano 

mud on my face. 

CE: Beyond 

moisturizing, I don’t 

have any rituals. 

But I’m open to 

suggestions! 

What’s currently in 

your makeup bag? 

PL: La Perla for the 

lips, Elizabeth Arden 

cream blush and 

lip protectant, plus 

mascara, lip gloss, 

Tylenol, toothpicks, 

and Big Red gum. 

CE: Elizabeth 

Arden cream blush 

and gloss, hand 

moisturizer, and 

Olbas natural nasal 

inhaler—it’s better 

than drugs. 

Finish this sentence: 

Beauty is ____. 

PL: Tough work. 

CE: As beauty does. 

What’s the one thing 

women need to do to 

transform the world? 

PL: Demand their 

place—which is not 

equal, but superior. 

CE: Strive for 

authenticity. 

Ebersole

EDITOR’S TIP 

To pamper 

extensions, avoid 

sulfate-based 

shampoos and 

use your fingers 

(not a brush) to 

detangle. 

Jan Welters/Trunk Archive 

ALTERED 

STATES 

From mile-long hair extensions 

that only lasted for two weeks to 

an Instagram-esque brow tattoo 

that may (yikes!) stick around 

several years, ELLE editors testdrive 

top beauty transformations, 

both big and small. 

EDITED BY EMILY DOUGHERTY 

151

THE BOMBSHELL REBOOT 

X FACTOR 

Cotton Codinha goes from 

gamine to glam 

After a dramatic haircut last fall that left 

my lob a ’90s-inspired mullet, I found 

myself settling into a uniform of oversize 

sweaters, flats, and tinted lip balms. After 

receiving no less than three compliments 

on my “androgynous style” in one month, 

I started to find myself gazing at vintage 

photos of Brigitte Bardot in her cinched 

waists and Scarlett Johansson vamping for 

the camera. “How does that feel?” I wondered. 

And so began an exploration into 

embodying the bombshell. 

The first step in achieving bombshell-dom 

is figuring out exactly what a bombshell 

is, especially in 2017. For almost 80 years, 

the bombshell has been blond, comicbook 

curvy, and magnetic. A bombshell is 

more than hot: A hot girl can wear a bikini; 

a bombshell can make you buy stock in 

the brand and move to the beach. And now 

she’s a contradiction: Emily Ratajkowski, 

with her “feminist af” T-shirt pulled taut 

across her famous breasts; Jemima Kirke, 

with her fallen-angel face and silk slipdresses 

exposing a fringe of armpit hair; Amber 

Rose, with her fembot-perfect features and 

shaved-platinum head. “I don’t even know 

if it’s a ‘look’ anymore,” says a friend. “Or 

rather, yes, it’s about being a babe, but it’s 

less about getting hit on than about telling 

the guy who’s hitting on you a massively 

dirty joke and then laughing because you’ve 

made him uncomfortable.” 

When it comes to that bombshell x factor, 

I’m beginning to conclude that either you’ve 

got it or you don’t, when, at a party for Sexy 

Hair’s new shampoo, I’m treated to a full set 

of waist-grazing clip-ons and an over-thetop, 

costume-y candy-red lip. I snap a selfie 

for my feed, with the caption “So this is 

happening.” The next morning, I wake up to 

three DMs, from men I have either not spoken 

to in years or never spoken to at all, on 

the same theme: “You’re so pretty.” Maybe 

there is something to this. 

The transformation is fairly life-disruptive: 

I need to enlist a whole army of helpers. I 

start with nails. Take a look at Margot Robbie’s 

perfectly tapered ring finger flipping 

off the Instagram world or Rihanna’s everchanging 

experimentation with length and 

color: Nails are Bombshell 101, and the more 

“I don’t work with my hands,” the better. 

The pros at NYC nail salon Valley talk me 

down from acrylics to gel extensions, which 

are very similar to press-ons but are semipermanent, 

tailor-fit, and attached with 

industrial-strength glue. Once the plastic 

nail topper is applied and sculpted (long stiletto 

shape for me, please!), it’s coated with a 

pale gray-pink gel. My fingers immediately 

become exclusively ornamental—the nails 

make it impossible to type. Four days later, I 

lose one when I try to button my jeans. 

Next stop: lashes. Soul Lee of Beautiful 

Soul Makeup Studio (her clients include Zoë 

Kravitz and Chrissy Teigen) is the ne plus 

ultra for glamorous faux lashes, which she 

fastidiously trims individually to make 

wearable (I’ve already lost my sense of 

touch; I’d like to keep my sight). I carve out 

two hours, and Lee gently affixes 150 synthetic 

and silk lashes as I lie back with my 

eyes closed. My rise from the treatment 

table to open my fluttering lids is so Disney 

princess, it’s almost embarrassing. The 

effect is like real-life Facetune, and with 

the makeover I have planned, I’ll be more 

Jessica Rabbit than Belle. Soul warns me to 

avoid oils, sleeping on my side, or pointing 

my lashes directly under the shower stream. 

Now, the hair! After my episode with clipons, 

I know that Sports Illustrated–model hair 

helps, but I’m dubious it can look natural. I 

enlist Joseph Maine of Serge Normant at John 

Frieda salon, who squeezes me in between 

Katy Perry at the Grammys and Kate Mc- 

Kinnon at the Oscars. He applies one-and-ahalf-inch 

hair extensions all over my head in 

a bricklaying pattern to keep the volume uniform 

and to obscure my own strands, then 

chops my hair to armpit length, adding sexy 

rock-chick layers. 

Then, thanks to a consult with ELLE fashion 

editor Yashua Simmons, I embark on a 

mission to acquire the clothes of a young 

Kardashian. My lips are painted vermilion 

24/7, my eyelids and cheekbones are tacky 

with gloss, I’m in a constant low-grade panic 

that my hair extensions are showing—and 

I have a weekend-long date with a guy I’ve 

been seeing. He travels for work, so he hasn’t 

seen the inch-by-inch transformation. I warn 

him about the extensions but leave the rest 

to be discovered as the nature of the experiment 

unfolds. Feeling a little like a Victoria’s 

Secret Angel, I strut up to him in my very best 

From left: Getty Images (2); Matt Baron/Rex/Shutterstock 

152

ombshell travel gear—crop top and Levi’s, 

naturally—and bat my lashes. He goes to kiss 

me hello and…his hand has nowhere to land. 

The nape of my neck? I flinch away; the tapes 

are very stiff there. The side of my face? Fingers 

start to creep right into where the extensions 

are more layered. I sigh deeply and 

steer his hand to my waist. I had anticipated 

tactile, bouncy hair as the ultimate romantic 

accessory, so I’m the truly disappointed 

one. He assures me he likes my hair both 

long and short (good answer!), but I clock a 

wince when I touch him with my dramatic 

manicure. The last day, another nail pings to 

the floor as I put on my pants (what do these 

girls wear that doesn’t require fastening?), 

and I am grateful for the singular dexterity 

I’ll have with that ravaged finger. 

Back at home, a friend and I take my new 

look out for a spin at Mr. Fong’s downtown, 

a fashionable boîte that’s close enough to my 

apartment for me to saunter there in heels. 

I wear my very best off-the-shoulder sheer 

BEFORE 

Wolford bodysuit (undergarments are 

for prudes) under tight vintage Levi’s 

rolled to show the slightest bit of wanton 

ankle and a whole lot of stiletto— 

plus a fire-red lip, piles of mascara, 

and a face full of gloss. My friend and 

I swan in, awaiting collective gasps, 

only to hear…nothing. “Look at that 

girl at the bar,” points out my pal helpfully. 

“She’s wearing less than you 

are.” We order, I flip my hair a few 

times, make my best doe eyes, and feel 

so incredibly…basic. My body hurts, I 

feel untouchable, I haven’t made contact with 

my own scalp in weeks, and my clothes, as 

Cher Horowitz would say, are binding. 

The next day, I wrench off the seven remaining 

nails. (Pro tip: The destruction to 

one’s natural nails is avoidable with salon removal.) 

Maine kindly fits me in to scrape off 

the hair extensions well ahead of schedule. I 

lovingly brush the lashes and pray they never 

leave me. That night, I dress like myself, 

The author, preoverhaul 

(below 

left), and at full 

volume (right) 

but the bombshell formula hasn’t quite left 

me. I pair a worn-in jean with a shrunken 

sweater and keep a bitten red lip. Caught up 

in telling a story at a party, I find myself with 

the undivided attention of two men who 

compete throughout dinner for my conversation. 

Each tails me to the next locale. My 

friend rolls her eyes when they both lurch to 

grab my bar tab. The best part? I snorted my 

beer, laughing at my own dirty joke. 

AFTER 

THE CLAY STATION 

PLAYING 

DIRTY 

Sayonara, soap! Keziah 

Weir learns the key to 

clear skin might just be 

a little dirt 

I have cranky skin (sensitive, 

prone to tantrums), and over the 

years, I’ve tried all manner of 

soaps and tonics and leave-ons 

aimed at calming it down and 

clearing it up, always favoring the 

more extreme formulas strong 

enough, so I thought, to snuff 

out all the oil and dirt clogging it 

up. Until two months ago, when 

I spoke to Manhattan-based 

dermatologist Joshua Zeichner, 

MD, and my skin-care worldview 

was shattered. “Acne doesn’t 

mean you’re dirty,” Zeichner 

told me. “People who wash their 

skin regularly may break out, 

and people who don’t may have 

clear skin.” And then the kicker: 

“Overwashing may disrupt the 

skin barrier.” In other words, 

not only had I not been solving 

the problem, I may have been 

causing it. 

And dirt, long considered my 

foe, might actually be my greatest 

ally. Specifically, dirt’s electrically 

charged component—clay— 

which, as Zeichner explained, 

combats excess oil and draws 

out impurities (e.g., inflammationcausing 

excess sebum) without 

stripping the skin of moisture 

completely. Clay as cleanser isn’t 

anything new—Cleopatra is said 

to have maintained her poreless 

complexion with the help of whiteclay 

masks—but it’s new to me: The 

first standouts in my experiment 

are Fresh’s Umbrian Clay, a nononsense 

gunk-extractor mask, 

and Borghese Fango Delicato 

Active Mud for Delicate Skin, a 

silky, seafoam-colored concoction 

fit for a mermaid. While slathering 

the former on my oily T-zone and 

the latter on my more delicate 

décolletage, I’m struck by how 

natural—and almost spiritual—it 

feels to cover myself in mud. 

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that 

ancient civilizations, from the 

Incans to the Greeks, theorized 

that a creator deity fashioned 

human beings out of glorified 

dirt. (It’s a claim that a group of 

scientists at Cornell all but backed 

up in 2013, when they found that 

clay can act as an incubator for 

DNA and the other building blocks 

of life.) Better yet, the stuff actually 

worked: My windburned skin was 

less ruddy and softer to the touch. 

Now hooked, I consult Yael 

Alkalay, founder of skin-care 

brand Red Flower. A decade ago, 

Alkalay launched her hammam 

set, a clay-centric line partially 

inspired by visits to Turkish and 

Moroccan bathhouses that left 

her with a “feeling of lightness 

and renewal.” I have a similar 

reaction the first time I sluice 

myself down with her Moroccan 

Mint Tea Silt Purifier body wash; 

paint myself from hairline to pinkie 

toe in a thin layer of Jasmine Rose 

Rhassoul Clay combined with a 

capful of apple cider vinegar (to 

balance out the clay’s alkaline 

base); dollop L’Oréal Paris Hair 

Expert Extraordinary Clay Pre- 

Shampoo Mask on my scalp; and 

then soak in the bath for an hour. 

The next morning, the Rhassoul 

Clay has significantly reduced 

a painful cystic breakout on my 

jawline (brought on, I think, from 

forgetting to heed Zeichner’s 

warning about overcleansing), 

and by the next evening, my oilprone 

roots still look as if they’ve 

been freshly shampooed. As my 

new favorite saying goes, a little 

dirt don’t hurt. 

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From top: Frances F. Denny (2); Devon Jarvis/Studio D (6) 

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6 

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I know this sounds dramatic, but it’s true: 

My eyebrows have been a problem for most 

of my life. When I was little, they were as 

thick as caterpillars—not in a face-framing, 

’80s-fashionable Brooke Shields way, but in 

an amorphous, forehead-dominating, doesthat-child-have-eyes 

kind of way. Which is 

likely why, when I was 13, my mother draped 

me across her lap on our living room couch, 

hissing, “I’ve been wanting to do this for 

years,” and went to town with a pair of tweezers. 

The ribbon-thin McDonald’s arches 

that resulted from her savage artistry left me 

looking perpetually surprised, an unlovely 

situation only compounded by my own overzealous 

efforts to mimic Gwyneth Paltrow’s 

Brad-era slivers in the late ’90s. By the time 

I decided to try to let those little hairs grow 

wild and free again, it was too late. 

Over the past few years, I’ve tried virtually 

every arch-enhancing pencil, marker, 

gel, and powder known to humankind, but 

most can endure only a few hours on my 

oily skin before vanishing (quick shoutout 

to long-lasting Benefit Goof Proof and 

Dior Diorshow Brow Styler, without which 

I would have spent even more time looking 

like a clown-school dropout). I’ve also 

experimented with off-label use of the lash 

booster Latisse, which coaxed out a few 

wheezy sprouts but none in the region I actually 

wished to regrow. For 

the most part, I threw in the BEFORE 

towel, growing my bangs out to 

hide my brows like a shameful 

secret, appalled when they’d accidentally 

pop through in photographs, 

making me look as if I’d 

just heard a sudden loud noise. 

When I received an invitation 

to meet with Dominique Bossavy, 

a blond Frenchwoman in her 

fifties who specializes in reshap- 

MY FIRST TATTOO 

After years of struggling with her barely-there brows, April Long calls in 

the big guns (literally) to take on her arch nemeses once and for all 

158 

INK YOURSELF HAPPY 

The author’s pre-tattoo 

“horseshoe” (top); days after 

her second session with 

Bossavy (above and right) 

ing sparse brows with a tattoolike process 

she calls “micro color infusion,” I was both 

thrilled and terrified. If she was as good as 

reputed (Bossavy’s ability to revivify arches, 

disguise stretch marks, and enhance lip contours 

draws Manhattan socialites, Brazilian 

supermodels, and Oscar nominees), then 

my brow woes would be over, but if she was 

heavy-handed, or somehow gave me a shape 

that didn’t suit my face, I might walk out 

looking even worse than when I went in. And 

because this is semipermanent makeup we’re 

talking about, I’d have to live with the results 

for up to three years. 

“You have beautiful eyes,” Bossavy says 

pretty much the second I arrive at Dangene, 

the chic medi-spa where she sees clients in 

New York (she also has salons in L.A. and 

Paris). “But oh, girl, your brows are killing 

you!” She points to my U-shaped arches. 

“You’ve got the horseshoes.” 

Bossavy begins by sketching in my ideal 

brow shape with a soft pencil, then shaves 

away any hairs outside that outline with a tiny 

razor (“Tweezing irritates the skin,” she explains, 

“and I don’t want to start my work with 

any inflammation”). It’s important, she tells 

me, to preserve some asymmetry. “It makes 

people look fake when their brows match too 

perfectly,” she says. “You’re never the same 

on both sides. What you want is for them to 

AFTER 

be sisters but not twins.” Nervously, I ask her 

to err on the side of subtlety: I don’t need wow 

brows, I tell her. I’d just like them to be pretty 

and innocuous. “Don’t worry,” she says. “The 

idea is for no one to be able to tell it’s been 

done.” And then she switches on the machine. 

Bossavy’s procedure involves a customized 

mixture of mineral-based pigments, 

which she delivers with a specially designed 

miniature needle that injects color into the 

skin without cutting or scraping. She’s quick 

to distinguish her technique from microblading, 

the Instagram-fueled sensation in 

which pigment is manually scratched into 

the skin, a process Bossavy says can cause infection 

and end up looking “blobby.” Her pigments—blended 

for each client’s skin tone, 

so the brows not only look natural during 

their life span but also fade without taking 

on any dreaded apricot or blue tones—aren’t 

implanted as deeply as with a traditional tattoo, 

meaning there’s neither bleeding during 

application nor redness afterward. And to my 

surprise, the process doesn’t hurt so much as 

it tickles; I find myself having to stop her repeatedly 

so I can sneeze. 

Over the machine’s hum, Bossavy tells me 

she’s making thin, quick strokes, some of 

which are crosshatched, in order to create a 

“fluffy” facsimile of hair. “I’m giving you little 

wisps at the ends,” she says. “A real eyebrow 

never ends with a hard line.” After 45 

minutes, she’s done, and I peer into a mirror 

to survey the results. My first response is… 

oh! And then uh-oh. I can’t decide how I feel. 

They’re so unfamiliar, so big, so dark. “This 

is the worst they’re going to look,” Bossavy 

says, assuring me that over the next few days 

they’ll fade to a less jarring intensity. I’ll need 

two more sessions before we reach the final 

result; in the meantime, I’m instructed to 

keep my brows away from water (tricky) for 

two weeks and tap on a Vaseline-type salve 

to address any flaking. Retinol and exfoliants 

are no-nos; daily sunscreen is a must. 

For the rest of the day, I can’t stop examining 

my brows in the mirror. It’s like I’ve fallen 

asleep and someone has drawn on my face 

with a Sharpie. The edges seem too precise, 

giving them the stencil-y Instagram-brow 

effect I had hoped to avoid. But I do love the 

shape: They’re smooth where once they were 

hooked, lush where once they were emaciated. 

They now swoop in a seamless arc from 

inner to outer eye, and my nose, wide at the 

bridge thanks to a childhood break, somehow 

looks slimmer. 

When my husband gets home that night, 

he does a double take. “Oh wow,” he says. 

From top: Owen Bruce/thelicensingproject.com; Frances F. Denny (3)

“You look crazy.” And then, while I’m 

trying to conjure some white lie about 

having my brows tinted or something else 

that sounds unscarily temporary, he asks, 

“Is that microblading?” It’s a whole separate 

story how my straight (I promise), 

non-YouTube-video-watching better half 

has any idea what microblading is, but 

suffice it to say I come clean and warn him 

that he might be living with these brows 

for quite some time. “Well,” he says helpfully, 

“you can always start wearing hats.” 

The next morning, I look like Eddie 

Munster. Even my dog looks at me funny. 

But on day three, I catch my reflection in 

the mirror of a dark restaurant and think, 

I look good. Are my cheekbones higher? 

Are the bags under my eyes gone? No, I 

realize, it’s the brows. In the right lighting, 

they’re amazing. 

By the time I see Bossavy two weeks later, 

the color has mellowed considerably. 

The outlines are softer, the strokes less 

noticeable. Certain areas have, however, 

begun to take on a slightly gray hue, which 

Bossavy tells me is only temporary, an awkward 

but necessary phase in treating those 

with fair hair. “If I put just the warm color 

on first, it will not stay,” Bossavy says. “By 

putting the warm shade on top of an ashy 

shade, it becomes a neutral blond.” 

Sure enough, after the—much quicker—second 

pass, the overall effect is more 

consistent, more natural. I find I’m no longer 

tugging my bangs down like a curtain 

to cover my brows; instead, I’m sweeping 

them aside. I love them. I love having 

them “done” without having to do anything. 

I love that they make me feel like I 

need less makeup overall and that out of 

my myriad irrational insecurities, I now 

have one less thing to think about. 

I’ve become obsessed with people’s 

brows. I study strangers’ foreheads on the 

subway, thinking how an attractive brow 

can come in a billion different shapes and 

sizes. The arches I personally find most 

beautiful are those that appear to be only 

moderately shaped, that telegraph some 

kind of individuality. My least favorites 

remain the supersculpted, highly refined, 

social-media-star brows. But ironically, 

I feel like mine look most my own now, 

after maximum intervention. Had my 

mother never stepped in, I might have 

grown up looking half wolf, so I suppose I 

should thank her. But oh, it’s been a long 

journey to find the brows I should have 

been born with. 

AFTER 

THE RAINBOW CONNECTION 

BLUE CRUSH 

Megan O’Neill discovers that a new eye color lends her some serious swagger 

It all started with Kanye. I was 

looking at a photo of him and 

Kim Kardashian from the 2016 

Met Gala, in which Kardashian’s 

spectacular Balmain gown, 

created with actual pieces of 

disco ball, somehow managed 

to accentuate her impossibleto-accentuate-further 

bottom. 

But it was Kanye—love him 

or hate him—whose getup 

ensnared me. It wasn’t his 

crystal-adorned Balmain jacket 

that got me (although that was 

pretty amazing); it was his eyes, 

which he’d transformed for the 

evening into a hypnotic bluegreen 

that was part husky, part 

Game of Thrones White Walker, 

and wholly badass. 

I decided I needed to get 

them myself. (It must be a 

by-product of my growing up 

in New York City, where you 

glimpse all manner of folks with 

outrageous everything, that I 

view the zany as beautiful.) I 

knew, as with Kanye, the wild 

color would pop against my 

dark complexion. 

I track down Kanye’s 

optometrist, Mitch Cassel, 

whose Studio Optix offce 

in Manhattan specializes 

in custom, hand-painted 

contacts. Cassel treats patients 

with eye disfigurements, as 

well as celebs like Leonardo 

DiCaprio, whom he fitted with 

jaundiced-looking lenses for 

The Revenant, but the majority 

of his clients are people like me, 

angling to add an electrifying 

touch to their look. While a pair 

The author 

and her 

power blues 

of his lenses can run well past 

the four-figure mark, Cassel 

insists the result makes you 

walk differently, “like changing 

your hair color.” Perfect timing, 

because my hairstylist had just 

put the kibosh on another round 

of bleach—my look’s current 

source of fantastical zaniness— 

until some of my breakage grew 

out. For the first time in three 

years, my hair was mostly an 

unfantastical brunette. 

Cassel is busy with the 

likes of Leo, so I impatiently 

order myself green, garish 

violet, gold-flecked hazel, and 

dreamy blue contacts from 

LensCircle, a site that stocks 

practically every shade of 

FDA-approved (something to 

look out for!) lenses. I opt for 

“circle lenses,” a style with an 

extrawide outer rim that makes 

your irises appear like saucers 

(think: Lady Gaga lurching 

around in the bathtub in her 

“Bad Romance” video). 

A few days later, I receive 

the package, tear it open, and 

have a ball trying out all the 

different lenses. (Note: If you’re 

considering circle lenses for 

the first time, give yourself, 

like, 45 minutes to actually 

get them into your eyes. It 

feels dreadfully unnatural at 

first—even if you’re used to 

regular contacts.) The violet 

isn’t pigmented enough to really 

show up over my own treebark-brown 

irises. The hazel 

is pretty but not nearly weird 

enough. The green is awesome, 

but the blue—especially in 

contrast to my skin—is it. Forget 

the old-timey stigma that 

women of color who wear 

contact lenses to adopt a 

lighter iris shade are grappling 

with feelings of racial selfhate: 

Mesmerizing crystallinegeode 

eyes—not found in 

nature, people!—and physical 

experimentation are pure fun. 

That Saturday, I make my 

debut as a blue-eyed girl. 

As I walk around SoHo, I’m 

pulsating with that distinct 

energy you acquire from 

wearing a new dress that makes 

your waist look small and your 

legs infinite. I lock eyes with an 

attractively scruffy man, who 

grins at me as he passes. On the 

same block, a dapper-looking 

couple glance at me, whisper 

something to each other, and 

then look back at me and 

smile. As I leave a boutique, the 

security guard tells me I cut a 

nice figure. Why in the name of 

Yeezy have I not been rocking 

these my entire adult life? 

Later, waiting for the subway, 

I feel a tap on my shoulder. I 

turn around to face two women 

dressed like Alexa Chung, the 

kind of It Girl influencer types 

who’d have upwards of 10,000 

Instagram followers each. 

“We just spotted you from 

across the platform—you’re so 

exotic,” one says. “We have 

a clothing line. Would you be 

interested in coming to a casting 

call to model in our fall show?” 

I say I’d love to and take 

their card. As they walk away, 

I think how crazy it is that 

contact lenses are responsible 

for this inordinate amount of 

attention. Or are they? I chase 

after the women. 

“Can I ask you guys 

something?” I say, catching 

them as they step into their 

train. “Did you notice me 

because I have blue eyes?” 

The women peer closer, their 

faces now inches from mine. 

“Ohmygod, you do have blue 

eyes!” one says. “We stopped 

you because we thought your 

hair and style and vibe were 

cool and confident.” 

And then, the door closes. 

From bottom center: Frances F. Denny; Devon Jarvis/Studio D (4) 

160

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ty much lived happily ever after without one. 

In the midst of the indecision and vacillation, 

my iPhone rings. I pull it out, pausing 

at my reflection in the black-screen glass. 

I send the caller to voice mail and turn to 

Liesl: “Count me in.” 

Whenever my editor Liesl calls me into the 

office, I know she’s going to ask me to do 

something I won’t want to do. It’s much easier 

to twist my arm when my arm is in the room. 

Failing that, her headlock is very persuasive. 

“The May issue is all about transformation,” 

she begins, circling my chair. “Megan 

is wearing colored contacts; Cotton is 

getting hair extensions; April is undergoing 

eyebrow tattoos; and Keziah is cleansing 

with dirt.” 

For real? That’s a thing? (Yes. And it is.) 

“But you…you are a Beauty Adventuress. 

And you always want to do something big.” 

Liesl snaps her fingers, points at me, and 

commands: “Say the first thing that comes 

to mind!” 

“Run for the elevator!” 

“The second thing that comes to mind!” 

Shave my head? Pierce my nose? Lose 

BEAUTY ADVENTURE 

THE ONE 

AND DONE 

Holly Millea has long been 

our cosmetic astronaut. For her 

eightieth Beauty Adventure, she 

goes where none in her orbit have 

gone before: She gets a facelift. 

Along the risk/reward curve, 

there’s no procedure more daring. 

Here’s what happened. 

10 pounds? Stop procrastinating? I’d never 

make that deadline. 

But what really comes to mind is a facelift. 

I mean, I’ve been contemplating that 

leap for a while (as has Liesl, among other 

friends), for both professional and personal 

reasons. I earn my living in an industry 

where youth is the greatest currency, and I 

live in a city where women outnumber men. 

Need I say more? Yeah, I do want a facelift, 

in the same way I really do want a man in my 

life—like last night, when I woke up alone in 

my bed and the smoke-alarm battery needed 

changing. Chirp…chirp…chirp… 

But then I think, What if I get what I want, 

and it ends in disaster? I’m not commitmentphobic, 

but I am life-altering-mistake averse. 

The wrong man, a bad facelift—there would 

be nothing worse than having to look in the 

mirror every day knowing I could have pret- 

A few weeks later, the girls are abuzz with 

holiday plans over dinner at Freds at Barneys 

in New York. Virginia is visiting 

family in Philly, Betsy is finishing a 

documentary in Phoenix, and Renata is 

delivering Meals on Wheels in Manhattan. 

I announce I’ll be hiding out in my 

apartment recovering from plastic surgery. 

It goes over like a lead fruitcake. 

“Please tell me you’re joking,” Renata 

says. “What kind of plastic surgery?” 

A brow lift, I tell them (not telling 

them that I’m actually going full Monty). 

I’m finally fixing my Frankenforehead, 

which is so heavy that I have a headache 

from lifting it all day. Having inherited 

this brow from my dad—a ringer for 

Marlon Brando—I ooze masculinity. 

What’s worse, when my brow is relaxed, 

I look beady-eyed, shifty…guilty. I can’t 

get away with anything anymore. 

Virginia’s not buying it. “If you lift 

your forehead, you’ll end up with a 

five-head, and then you’ll have to wear 

bangs. You might as well get bangs now 

and skip the surgery.” 

“I, for one, am excited to see if it 

works,” Betsy says. “What’s the big diff 

between Botox four times a year and 

a brow lift? And you won’t have that 

wonky look everybody has the first week 

Botox settles in. It’s not a big deal…not 

like a facelift.” 

Reflexively, I start pulling at the loose 

skin around my jowls, stretching it away 

from my face like Silly Putty. This is what I 

do when I get anxious. 

“What are you doing?” Betsy asks. 

“And why are you looking at me and doing 

that?” Virginia says. “You think I need a 

facelift?” 

“No,” Renata says, turning to me, narrowing 

her eyes. “Holly is getting one. Only—she 

wasn’t going to tell us.” 

Betsy: “You are? This is very exciting!” 

“Oh, stop already,” Virginia says, holding 

her hand up. “Are you crazy? You’re going to 

end up with your head in a jar!” 

Over the last two decades, I’ve gone on 79 

Beauty Adventures, many of which have informed 

my resolve. I’ve tried and tested all 

sorts of sundry youth-preserving methods. 

Alexandre Weinberger/Trunk Archive 

162

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I am going to do this. I’m not going 

to feel ashamed or guilty or say sorry 

to anyone for saying yes to myself. 

The stopgap measures work—for a while. 

Then it’s out with the credit card, back for 

more. And more. And more often. 

I see the surgery as an investment—and 

for me, it is a major investment. (The national 

average price for forehead, face, and 

neck is $14,429: anesthesiologist, operating 

room, postoperative care, and batteries sold 

separately. The bigger the city, the bigger 

the price tags.) But nothing can dissuade 

me. I’ve done my homework, all the research. 

I’ve even watched the YouTube surgery 

videos. (Trust me, you do not want to 

see how the sausage is made.) I am going to 

do this. I want the mythic “one and done.” 

And I’m not going to feel ashamed or 

BEFORE 

guilty or say sorry to anyone for saying 

yes to myself. Got it? 

Yes, it’s scary. It’s my 

damn face. As we wait for a 

cab after dinner, Renata, my 

philosopher king-of-a-friend, 

says, “Facelifting is the antiaging 

mother lode of courage 

and risk. I don’t believe that 

you think you really need it. I 

think you really want to do it.” 

I feel like a beauty astronaut, 

and this adventure? It’s 

a moon shot. And my mission 

is to go there and back, to return 

safely—and, I hope, recognizable—and 

to report every detail. 

Herewith, the story I wish I could have 

read before I decided to go for it. 

I meet Liesl at the office of David Rosenberg, 

MD, the facial plastic surgeon I interviewed 

on my last adventure, whose scalpel 

has worked wonders on several of my industry 

acquaintances. 

“First off, let’s focus on the brow,” Rosenberg 

says, steering me to the floor-length 

mirror in his exam room. “It’s hard to see 

the upper half of your eyeball when your 

brows are this heavy. And your outer lids are 

actually impeding your peripheral vision. 

An endoscopic brow lift softly elevates the 

entire brow in a way that the outer third is a 

bit more elegant. 

“The inner third comes up in a subtle 

way—there’s no ‘deer in the headlights’ 

look. It just allows you to look rested.” 

He stands behind me, lifting my forehead 

with his fingers, opening up my eyes. “This 

is you,” he says, looking at my reflection. 

“This is pretty. I would say that where you 

are right now is not you. It’s not communicating 

a sense of vitality. It just makes you 

look exhausted and angry.” 

Rosenberg gets down to the nuts and bolts 

of the procedure, or, in the case of an endoscopic 

brow lift, the Endotine absorbable 

fixation device—a triangular piece of what 

looks like plastic, the size of a thumbnail; it’s 

flat on one side, with sharp barbs on the other. 

He pulls one out of the drawer. 

“There are surgeons doing very beautiful 

coronal brow lifts,” Rosenberg says, referring 

to the classic, old-school 

lift, wherein a single incision is 

made from one ear to the other 

across the top of the head, like 

a headband, and a strip of skin 

and tissue is removed. (Some 

consider it the gold standard, 

prized for its precision and permanence.) 

“You could do it, but 

you’re buying a 16- or 18-inch 

scar with the potential for permanent 

hair loss. Endoscopic, 

there’s no hair loss. The [four] 

The author 

10 days 

before her 

surgery 

(above), and 

two months 

post-op 

(right) 

incisions are [each] the length of a pinkie 

nail. It’s the easiest recovery of any operation 

I do.” 

As with the coronal, in this lift the muscle 

and fat are released from the skull and 

elevated to a higher position. Rosenberg 

then attaches two Endotines, securing them 

via two tiny holes he drills into the skull, 

aligning them, in my case, with the middle 

of each eyebrow arch. Placement of the 

Endotines varies depending on the issues 

you’re trying to correct; mine were placed a 

bit farther out than is typical, for maximum 

lift in the area of my forehead with the most 

droop. The five barbs evenly distribute the 

weight of and tension on the brow. “Think 

of it like hanging from a jungle gym,” 

Rosenberg says. “It’s easier to hang using all 

of your fingers than just hanging by one.” 

He holds the device up to the light. “This is 

dissolvable sugar. It stays for five months, 

and the brow heals in the new position.’’ 

Rosenberg estimates he does 200 of the 

30-minute procedures a year. “Best-case 

scenario, three days you’re perfect. If there 

were any recovery issues, there might be 

swelling here around the eyes. Maybe one 

in 50 will get a bruise.” 

He addresses the rest of my mug. “Your 

jawline and cheeks have fallen,” he says, 

manipulating the soft clay of my skin. “A 

deep-plane facelift will restore the architecture 

of your face to reveal beautiful bone 

structure. The cheek will be highlighted, 

the jawline defined; no sense of pull.” 

Pinching the slack skin of my neck, 

he gives it a wiggle. “This loose skin in 

AFTER 

the central neck will be gone.” Rosenberg 

hands me a mirror and, with his 

hand flat, irons everything slightly 

up. “This is a beautiful, elegant, soft 

change. Can you live with that?” 

Liesl erupts, “I can!” We look 

at her. 

I can live with it, too. Houston, I’m 

ready for lift-up in T-minus 10 days. 

But first things first, and the first 

thing is Botox. “You have a very, very 

expressive face,” he says, injecting 

the muscles atop and between my 

eyebrows to prep me for surgery. “I 

can lift your forehead, but when you 

wake up and start frowning, you’re 

going to pull the brow back down. Get 

Botox twice a year, and the lift will 

last a decade.” 

The day comes, December 15, and I’m 

ready for launch. I wake up at 6 a.m., 

From left: courtesy of the subject; Frances F. Denny 

164

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undergo caffeine withdrawal (no foods or 

liquids after midnight), exercise, vacuum, 

shower, do laundry, respond to a slew of 

well-wishers, pop an Ativan (prescribed by 

Rosenberg to prevent presurgical hysteria), 

and wait for Liesl to pick me up, as promised. 

Then she calls; she’s stuck in traffic. So I walk 

alone the three blocks to his office. I know, 

only three blocks. I just wanted someone I 

love to hug me before I went under. 

Wearing green scrubs, Rosenberg enters 

the exam room upbeat, tousle-haired, with 

the energetic confidence of a Grey’s Anatomy 

star: “This is going to be fun!” I find his 

certainty comforting. Staring at me intently, 

he uses a fine marker, drawing incision 

guidelines on my scalp and around my ears. 

I ask questions: Is he sure I won’t lose any 

hair? “Positive.” Will he take a decade off 

my face? “Trust me, you will not be underdone.” 

But will I look like I had work? “Making 

your face more beautiful is an art form. I 

try to perfect doing living art, really individualizing 

it. You’ll look like you.” 

“I’m not going to wake up with a fivehead?” 

“No!” he says. “Now you’re going to have 

to stop talking, and let me go into my zone.” 

The anesthesiologist, Connie Ding, 

checks in, confirms my medical history, and 

takes me next door to the operating room, 

where I lie down and suddenly panic. Ding 

is all business. “This won’t hurt,” she says, 

sticking a catheter in my vein, leaving me 

just enough time to utter what could be my 

famous last words: “That did hurt.” 

Okay, I’m way beyond asleep. Where I am, 

right now, only God and maybe Vladimir 

Putin know. Meanwhile, here’s what’s happening 

as I’m traveling without a passport 

across conscious borders.… 

Van Morrison is playing on Pandora. 

Rosenberg, scalpel in hand, starts at my left 

temple first, careful to work beneath the frontal 

branch of the facial nerve (one slip of the 

knife and no more frowning, no more look of 

surprise, no more knitting of the brow). 

Through a total of four small incisions just 

behind the hairline (one above each eyebrow 

and one in each temple), he inserts an 

endoscope—a fiber-optic camera the size of 

a straw. With the lighted endoscope in one 

hand, his cutting instrument in the other, 

and his eyes on the monitor, he releases the 

muscle fibers and underlying tissues from 

the skull and debulks the fibers—weakens 

them—leaving the forehead with “some 

expression—less harsh than what you had, 

but enough to keep you looking vibrant and 

166 

No one will even 

suspect. Unless 

you tell everyone. 

normal,” Rosenberg says. (It used to be that 

the standard was to remove the muscle completely…which 

left you with a flat facial expression, 

not unlike a lobotomy.) 

He then lifts my brow into an aesthetically 

pleasing position—overcorrecting by 10 

percent to accommodate a slight drop that 

will happen once the postsurgical swelling 

recedes—and attaches it to the Endotines. 

Raising the operating table, he sees how 

gravity impacts the placement and, pleased 

with the result, lowers me back down. This 

has all taken 30 minutes. 

Moving on to my neck, Rosenberg makes 

a one-and-a-half-inch incision just under my 

chin to access the platysma muscle—two 

thin sheets of muscle that extend from the 

collarbone all the way up to the midface, 

overlapping under the chin. 

Like the elastic in a pair of tights, the platysma 

loosens with age, spreading out. The 

skin loses elasticity, too. The fix is removing 

an inch-wide vertical strip of the muscle 

where it overlaps, and endoscopically sewing 

the sides back together with eight internal 

stitches. Fifteen minutes’ work. 

Now Rosenberg turns to the right side of 

my face to begin tightening my jawline and 

redefining my cheek. Using his scalpel, he 

traces the curve where my ear meets my 

face, continuing down to the earlobe, up behind 

the ear, and into the hairline behind my 

ear for an inch and a half. 

He peels back the skin of my cheek, locates 

the top of the platysma muscle, and 

goes under it into the deep plane, but above 

the facial nerve branches, and releases the 

muscle. A slip here, and sayonara to smiling, 

whistling, kissing.… 

Using a pair of $500 porcelain scissors—“so, 

so sharp they require complete 

accuracy”—Rosenberg works above the 

muscle, freeing it from the skin. With the 

muscle suspended, he slides it back up onto 

the cheekbone, anchoring it in place using 

permanent internal stitches. He then moves 

on to the left cheek. 

Redraping the skin, he trims the overage—an 

inch and a half on each side of my 

face and neck—and begins closing up all the 

incisions with such precision that suturing 

accounts for half the operation time. 

Four hours, 100 itsy stitches, 10 staples, 

and two big Novocain injections later, my 

hair is washed, my head is wrapped, and I’m 

lying on a gurney floating back to earth. 

I wake and feel so good (thanks to the painkilling 

Novocain and Percocet) that before I 

even leave Rosenberg’s office, I’m taking 

selfies with my home-care nurse, Melissa, 

and sending them out to my peeps—the 

postoperative equivalent of drunk-dialing. 

Back in my apartment, I fall into a deep 

sleep, sitting up with my head wrapped in 

ice to keep the swelling down. The next 

morning, Melissa removes the bandages, 

and I look in the mirror. Relief doesn’t begin 

to describe it. I feel the kind of euphoria 

one must feel after dodging a bullet or a 

malfunctioning guillotine. I’ve gotten away 

with a crime against nature. 

The next few days are a Percocet blur of 

ice packs and sleeping upright, eating applesauce 

and tapioca pudding and popping 

arnica tablets, friends coming and going and 

calling and texting, and me taking progress 

pictures and shooting them out. 

“Not smart to mass-text pics,” Renata 

texts back. 

I should have locked my phone away. I 

couldn’t tell you whom I exposed myself to, 

or who in turn exposed me, bruised, swollen, 

my bright red ears looking like they’ve 

been removed and reattached, my deep 

purple neck matching my purple pajamas. I 

know firsthand the fascination that accompanies 

plastic-surgery procedures. Friends 

have sent me their pictures, and I’ve had to 

delete them—stat!—to save myself from being 

awful and showing them to other people. 

Don’t ask me what the temptation is. All 

I know is that a close friend sent me a picture 

of her breast implants, and I would have 

flashed it a hundred times if I hadn’t deleted 

it as promised on the life of my dog, Truman. 

Day four, off the pain meds, out of the fog— 

and, I must say, looking relatively good—I 

call Liesl and scold her for not visiting me. 

“I did!” she says. “I brought a bottle of wine. 

Your second cousin was staying the weekend 

with you. She was visiting from Yale. Don’t 

you remember?” I have a second cousin? 

(Apparently Joanna and Germaine came by 

with a bottle of champagne “and we put the 

lights on your Christmas tree,” Joanna says. 

“How do you think they got there?” Elves!) 

The first thing Renata says seeing me is, 

“Holy shit. Good for you! Don’t take this the 

wrong way. It’s not that you look younger— 

it’s that he made you prettier. Honestly, you’ve 

Continued on page 288

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This page, from left: Kat Borchart/thelicensingproject.com; remaining images: Devon Jarvis/Studio D. Opposite page: Devon Jarvis/Studio D 

170

MAYBELLINE 

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171

BEAUTY REPORT 

Whether you’re a filler first-timer or 

a Bo pro, ELLE’s first annual no-fear 

guide to injectables covers everything 

you need to know, from choosing 

the best doctor to the importance of 

taking things slow. Here, April Long 

celebrates all the small things. 

It goes without saying that no one 

wants to look done. Still, we’ve all seen 

it, or maybe it’s even happened to us: 

the brow too high, too low, too frozen; 

the balloonish lips or Angelina- 

Jolie-in-Maleficent cheekbones that 

give the game away. Here is a person, 

these all-too-obvious needleassisted 

interventions say, who hoped 

to look younger, prettier—someone 

who strove to arrest aging, à la Blake 

Lively’s magical imperviousness to 

time in The Age of Adaline, or even 

to reverse it, like Benjamin Button— 

and overshot the mark.

Thankfully, as dermatologists have 

grown more sophisticated in their methods 

and the array of fillers, neurotoxins, 

and fat dissolvers like Kybella has 

become more diverse and specialized, 

patently obvious nonsurgical work is becoming 

the exception rather than the 

rule. (And surely, if the 9 million-plus 

injections done in the United States 

in 2015 had made us a nation of funnyfaced 

freaks, we’d know it.) The best 

needle wielders now recognize that 

the most natural-looking effects are 

achieved incrementally, with tiny, almost 

imperceptible adjustments. 

“I’m a big believer in ‘You don’t fill 

up the gas tank in one try,’ ” says Los 

Angeles–based dermatologist Annie 

Chiu, MD. “Softly adjusting gives the 

most beautiful results, and budgetwise 

it’s more reasonable as well. You can 

always add, but it’s harder to take away. 

Hyaluronic acid fillers are reversible, 

but you obviously don’t want to do that 

unless absolutely necessary.” 

“I CALL THEM little tweak-bits,” says 

New York–based derm Dendy Engelman, 

MD. “This is the secret behind all 

the celebrities who the layperson thinks 

are just genetic phenoms. They are 

able to age beautifully because they’re 

not doing major overhauls. They’re not 

changing their faces, adding tons of 

volume, or erasing their expressions. 

They’re just focusing on tiny changes 

that really fly under the radar. They’re 

not so perceptible that it’s like, ‘Oh, she 

went and got her eyes done’ or ‘She’s 

changed her lips.’ Nobody can tell.” 

With injectables, small hits can have 

a big impact—and not necessarily in the 

places one might expect. Engelman, 

for example, sometimes uses “a tiny bit 

of Botox at the base of the columella, 

which is that divider between the nostrils,” 

to lift the tip of the nose. “There 

are a lot of small physiological changes 

that people don’t really notice as signs of 

aging, which we can address,” she says. 

Another trick: making the eyes look bigger 

by injecting a baby dose of neurotoxin 

just underneath the eye. “If you just 

put one unit of Botox there,” Engelman 

says, “it drops the lower eyelid about 

one or two millimeters and opens up the 

aperture of the eye. So you look a little 

more awake, a little younger or prettier— 

but not noticeably different.” 

In more traditionally 

treated areas, 

derms tend to stay 

with standard doses of 

Botox and fillers—“I 

believe that if you use 

too little between the 

eyebrows, you’re not 

going to prevent those 

etched lines from 

getting deeper over 

time,” says New York– 

based dermatologist 

Whitney Bowe, MD. 

“And I find that I need 

to put in .1 to .2 ccs— 

the more traditional 

doses of filler—along 

the cheekbone in order 

to get the lifting 

effect I’m after.” But 

for the rest of the face, 

Bowe says, “I’ve completely 

changed my 

injection technique.” 

To address crow’sfeet, 

for example, Bowe “wraps” microdoses 

of neurotoxin—delivered with an 

ultrathin tuberculin needle—around the 

eye, starting from the tail of the eyebrow 

and finishing under the lower eyelid. “Instead 

of hitting that area with just three 

injections on each side, which is what 

was studied during FDA trials, I actually 

do a series of about six or seven injection 

sites,” she says. “That way, I get a very 

gentle, natural, widespread effect that 

opens up the eye and lightens up heavy 

lids. It also changes the texture of the skin 

in a way that traditional deeper injections 

don’t, because I’m actually affecting 

only the very superficial muscle fibers. 

So when people complain that they have 

crepey or cigarette-paper skin around the 

eye, it helps to smooth that out.” 

SIMILARLY, BOWE USES minuscule 

doses of hyaluronic acid fillers in 

marionette lines, smile lines, and nasolabial 

folds, placing them shallowly into 

the dermis “to gently hydrate the skin 

from beneath the surface.” This imparts 

an immediate dewy glow but also, she 

says, galvanizes a longer-term benefit: 

“It triggers your own body to make more 

collagen. I’m deliberately wounding 

the skin in tiny points down and along 

those lines in order to tell your body to 

start healing itself. I find that by doing 

“This is the 

secret behind all 

the celebrities,” 

Engelman says. 

this injection technique, I’m able to get 

a much more powerful preventive effect 

from the filler, because I’m creating tension 

on the fibroblast cells, making them 

create more collagen. Again, it’s very 

off-label, but if I see people every three 

months and I use very low doses distributed 

in a lot of different areas, I’m able 

to get healthier-looking skin over time. 

So even after the enzymes in our bodies 

break down that hyaluronic acid filler, 

the skin looks tighter and firmer.” 

The goal, always, should be natural 

movement (nothing should “stop you 

from communicating, emoting, showing 

sympathy or empathy or interest,” 

Bowe says)—even if that means leaving a 

few wrinkles unsmoothed and not going 

full throttle on a particular area, which 

could create, say, an overlarge lip that’s 

disharmonious with the rest of the face. 

Indeed, with cruel irony, anything too 

heavy-handed can actually backfire and 

make someone’s face read as being older, 

rather than younger. “It’s always that fine 

line between doing just enough but never 

Opening page: Jenn Collins/thelicensingproject.com. This page: Charles Marais 

OPEN HERE

BEAUTY REPORT 

teetering over into too much,” Engelman 

says. “I think that although Kylie Jenner 

has had good work, she looks about 15 

years older than her real age. All these 

young girls are doing way too much, way 

too early. I always say to my young patients, 

‘The one thing I can’t give you is 

your actual youth, so you need to ride that 

out as long as you can. When that starts 

to break down—and it will—we can start 

to do things. But in the meantime, don’t 

go messing with it. If you start monkeying 

with it too early, it knocks you into an 

older-looking category.’ ” 

WHEN WE DO SEE overfilled or disconcertingly 

immobile faces, there can 

be several factors to blame, but it nearly 

always involves either an unskilled injector 

or an unscrupulous one who will 

acquiesce to patients who want—and 

are willing to pay for—something they 

don’t need. “Every time I look at celebrities 

who have crossed over to the dark 

side of doing too much, it’s not that I’m 

upset with them; I’m upset with the doctor 

who did it to them,” Engelman says. 

“We all know the right aesthetic.” 

It’s important, therefore, to find a 

board-certified dermatologist or plastic 

surgeon who will work with you to 

strike the right balance—and say no to 

you when necessary. When Bowe encounters 

“millennials who come in with 

Instagram pictures of enormous lips,” 

she says, “I have to counsel them extensively 

about how we have to maintain 

the proper ratios and proportions. I can 

put in only a little bit of product but focus 

on the pillows of the lips, and give you a 

beautiful, sexy smirk when you’re at rest. 

I can turn up the corners or make the 

Cupid’s bow pop. It’s not about pumping 

lips full of product and giving you 

two big sausages.” Even when a patient 

does have naturally thin lips and desires 

a fuller pout, Bowe takes it slow: “I’d 

rather do a series of treatments using 

very small injections at a time. Someone 

might need two syringes to get to the 

point where she’s going to be happy, yes, 

but I’ll do one syringe, and then I’ll have 

the patient come back in a month or two 

to do the second. I like to give the tissues 

a chance to recover, and then evaluate.” 

In general, derms are breaking away 

from a one-size-fits-all approach and 

tackling individual faces with an eye toward 

modest interventions that preserve 

idiosyncrasies and asymmetries; the goal 

is to make us look like better versions of 

ourselves, not like everyone else. “I really 

believe injectables are an art,” Chiu says. 

“Every single face is different, and there 

are vast differences, even culturally, in 

how you approach someone. It’s about 

enhancing—not changing.” 

“WHEN I TALK to patients, new or 

established, I’m actually analyzing their 

expressions and balance and beauty,” 

says New York dermatologist and Mount 

Sinai Medical Center associate clinical 

professor Ellen Marmur, MD. “By the 

time we catch up on our news or introductions, 

I already have an idea of what 

I might like to offer. I draw out a master 

plan with each patient, even using 

an iPad painting tool on a photo of the 

patient. We start with baby steps and 

give touch-ups until we’ve achieved a 

uniquely personalized map of what and 

where to inject.” 

Although it may seem counterintuitive, 

or even wasteful, to invest money in 

something so deliberately invisible, Marmur 

says, “economic analysis has proven 

that routine, under-the-radar procedures 

pay off over time more than the big, dramatic 

antiaging procedures.” No one will 

know how we’ve managed to sail through 

time so remarkably unravaged. And isn’t 

it better to leave them guessing? 

OPEN HERE 

Florian Summet/Trunk Archive

AIN’T THAT THE TRUTH 

There are alternative facts galore when it comes to what to do 

and what not to do when getting a round of injectables. Here, the 

misconceptions get debunked. By Megan O’Neill 

Botox and filler shouldn’t be 

cocktailed in the same syringe. 

FALSE. New York–based derm Doris Day, 

MD, sometimes adds a few units of Botox 

into filler and then injects them together 

for a sleek, natural-looking outcome. “You 

can get some extra tightening,” she says of 

mixing in a line-diminishing neurotoxin 

so that the combined effect with the filler 

yields a smooth surface. “If you want to 

soften the lip lines, it’s a combo that diffuses 

nicely, and you won’t affect how the 

lip moves.” 

“One size fits all” when you’re 

scheduling Botox and filler. 

FALSE. “One size fits none” is Day’s rule for 

tune-up regularity. The FDA gauges that 

neurotoxins last about four months, while 

most soft-tissue fillers endure for about six 

months. But some fillers last much longer: 

Juvéderm Voluma (made of molecules that 

are cross-linked to create a viscous consistency 

that’s suited for adding structural 

support to the cheeks) and Juvéderm Volbella 

(whose molecules are cross-linked 

to form a thinner texture that’s better for 

filling superficial lines around the lips) can 

last up to two years. For Botox and filler, 

the stress surrounding, say, a wedding or 

work—or being athletic!—can cause the 

body to metabolize both substances faster, 

so that treatment may be needed sooner 

than usual. 

Injectables and ultrasound don’t 

play well together. 

FALSE. AND TRUE. Arkansas-based derm 

Missy Clifton, MD, emphasizes the need 

to get procedures done in proper order: 

If she’s administering a deep-heat treatment, 

such as Thermage (radio frequency) 

or Ultherapy (ultrasound), she does 

it first, then waits a few minutes for skin 

to come back to its normal temperature 

before going ahead with filler and Botox. 

Meanwhile, New York–based derm Robert 

Anolik, MD, separates such procedures 

and injections by a few days. “In the scenario 

of a new patient coming in who’s never 

had anything done, I’d inject Botox and 

then have the patient come in after three 

to seven days”—the time it takes neurotoxins 

to reach full effect—for Ultherapy 

or Thermage, he says. “I like the skin to be 

relaxed so that Ultherapy’s or Thermage’s 

tightening effects can occur without being 

compromised by the skin pulling in the opposite 

direction.” 

Blow-outs posttreatment are A-OK. 

FALSE. New York–based dermatologist Patricia 

Wexler, MD, advises patients not to 

break a sweat for a full day postfiller, since 

upping the heart rate increases circulation 

and can cause swelling if hyaluronic acid– 

based fillers are exposed to more fluid. But 

there are sedentary activities that also, 

surprisingly, pose a threat: “Don’t get your 

hair done or cook over a stove for at least 

four hours; the heat can diffuse Botox,” 

says Wexler, even though some derms 

no longer consider such activities risky 

since injection techniques have evolved. 

TRICK OR TREAT? 

Before-and-after photos provide key proof of a practitioner’s 

skill—except when the proof has been tampered with. 

One dermatologist reveals the red flags 

1. LIGHTING 

“Side lighting 

exaggerates every 

crease, while headon 

lighting can 

erase wrinkles 

altogether,” says 

dermatologist 

Robert Anolik, 

MD. “Look at the 

shadows in both 

photos—do they 

match? If not, 

BEFORE 

FAKE 

the lighting has 

been altered.” 

2. MAKEUP 

Beauty products 

are used to enhance 

a feature or 

cover a flaw. “If 

makeup is used 

only in the ‘after’ 

photo, don’t believe 

the comparison,” 

Anolik says. 

AFTER 

She also forbids shoe shopping (bending 

down can upset Botox placement), flying 

(the change in altitude exerts added 

pressure that can be problematic for fresh 

Botox and filler, which both need time to 

integrate into the face), and high-altitude 

skiing (ski goggles pressing against your 

forehead can cause filler to clump) within 

the same time frame. 

You can help extend your Botox. 

TRUE. In a study published in Dermatologic 

Surgery in 2015, researchers separated 

overly square-jawed participants into 

two groups: Both received slimming injections 

of Botox into their masseter muscles 

(the key muscles that move the jaw), but 

one group was instructed to do chewing exercises 

for weeks afterward, and the other 

had no specific instructions. Interestingly, 

the group that chomped more experienced 

the benefits of Botox longer than the control 

group did. “The idea is if we encourage 

patients to purposely use their chewing 

muscles during the few months when Botox 

is active, once the Botox wears off, the masseter 

muscles won’t be relied on as much for 

chewing,” Anolik says. As a result, they’ll 

stay streamlined longer. 

3. CAMERA ANGLE 

Anolik advises that 

unless you’re viewing 

the subject from 

the same camera 

angle in both shots, 

you can’t really 

trust the shot. 

4. POSE “When 

the chin is up, the 

neckline looks 

better; if it’s down, 

BEFORE 

NOT FAKE 

Robert Anolik, 

MD 

the neckline looks 

worse—the face 

looks more jowly,” 

Anolik says. 

5. SELFIE CULTURE 

“Beware of 

patient-provided 

photos. Filters 

are available 

with a few clicks, 

even on a not-sosmart 

phone.” 

AFTER

BEAUTY REPORT 

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO 

The best way to ensure the most refreshed, rejuvenated-looking outcome 

after an injection: Brush up on these key protocols before setting foot inside 

a professional’s offce. By Megan O’Neill 

BE AWARE OF WHERE YOUR 

INJECTABLE CAME FROM 

Make sure your doctor is an 

official vendor of everything 

you’re getting injected. Allergan, 

Merz, and Galderma are three of the 

top manufacturers of neurotoxins 

and fillers, and Allergan also makes 

the fat-dissolving Kybella. To reduce 

the risk of getting a subpar, potentially 

dangerous product, some manufacturers’ 

websites offer a tool to 

search by zip code for every licensed 

physician who’s obtained their product 

legally. 

BIN THE BARGAINS 

If the price is questionably 

low for Botox or filler, you 

may be getting a diluted dosage, 

says West Islip, New York–based 

dermatologist Kavita Mariwalla, MD. 

Another possibility is that your doctor 

purchased the product from a supplier 

in a country such as Canada or 

the United Kingdom, where government 

price controls keep pharmaceutical 

prices substantially lower than 

those in the United States. Not only 

is it illegal (with very few exceptions) 

for doctors to intentionally purchase 

medications outside the country for 

use on patients within the U.S., manufacturers 

also say that unauthorized 

suppliers may compromise the effectiveness 

and safety of injectables by, 

for example, not storing them at the 

proper temperature or even offering 

counterfeit products. 

That said, prices for in-office treatments 

tend to be higher in metropolitan 

regions, such as New York, 

Chicago, and Dallas, where there’s 

a greater demand for cosmetic procedures. 

To find out the price range 

in your area, call around. New York– 

based dermatologist Elizabeth Hale, 

MD, adds that you’re usually better 

off with a doctor who bases his or her 

fee on how many units of product are 

used, rather than how many different 

zones of the face are injected. “All the 

muscles in the face are intertwined, 

and even when I treat, say, just the ‘11’ 

lines between the brows, I always put 

a tiny bit in the forehead to balance 

things out—I don’t count that as two 

[separate] zones.” 

BLOOD-THINNING MEDS 

AREN’T THE ONLY THING TO 

AVOID PRE-INJECTION 

Most Botox and filler veterans 

know to lay off anticoagulants 

such as aspirin and ibuprofen before 

treatment, since those types of drugs 

hinder blood clotting and increase 

the risk of bruising should the needle 

nick a blood vessel. But Manhattan 

dermatologist Patricia Wexler, MD, 

has a longer list of things to forgo, including 

some seemingly innocuous 

pantry staples. “No fish oil, multivitamins, 

green tea, cinnamon, ginger, 

and red wine a full week before 

treatment,” she says. “Antioxidants, 

though not all of them, can increase 

the fragility of blood vessels and prevent 

clotting.” Ask your MD at least 

two weeks ahead of time for a full list 

of what to avoid. 

A CONSULTATION IS CRUCIAL 

“The person performing the 

injection should have you 

smile and frown and raise 

your eyebrows,” Hale says. “An experienced 

professional is carefully evaluating 

you that whole time to see how 

different areas of your face naturally 

move, so that he or she can keep you 

looking refreshed instead of expres- 

“No fish oil, multivitamins, 

green tea, 

cinnamon, ginger, 

and red wine a full 

week before treatment,” 

Wexler says. 

sionless.” Some derms like to ask patients 

to talk about something they’re 

passionate about to gauge facial 

movement. You should also be given 

a thorough health assessment prior to 

the injection. Certain antibiotics, specifically 

in the aminoglycoside category, 

like gentamicin (prescribed for 

bacterial infections), can increase the 

potency of neurotoxins. (To avoid risk, 

don’t receive treatment for the duration 

of your antibiotic prescription.) 

Worst-case scenario: You end up with 

a droopy lid, according to Mariwalla. 

BRUISES CAN BE UNDONE 

Neurotoxins generally require 

finer needles and are usually 

placed more superficially 

than fillers, but any injection could 

potentially hit a vessel, causing blood 

to pool beneath the skin and form an 

unattractive black-and-blue blotch. 

Fortunately, many dermatology practices, 

including Hale’s, offer a nextday 

complimentary vascular laser 

treatment, which breaks down pooled 

blood into smaller particles, thereby 

greatly diminishing bruises within 24 

hours. “It’s a good idea to ask up front 

if whoever you’re going to offers it,” 

Hale says. “Our patients take a lot of 

comfort in knowing they can come 

back for that.” 

NOT ALL FILLERS 

ARE CREATED EQUAL 

“Never get silicone. It’s the 

one filler we see the most 

complications from,” says Mariwalla 

of one injectable that’s occasionally 

used—but not FDA approved—to 

fill wrinkles in the face. Unlike malleable 

hyaluronic acid–based fillers, 

which can be absorbed by the body 

and will eventually break down, 

silicone is a synthetic material that 

can’t be metabolized and can harden 

over time, creating unsightly, 

uneven bulges. “It’s permanent, and 

it does not age well with you,” Mariwalla 

says.

Sabine Villiard/Trunk Archive 

INSTANT MESSAGING 

There’s a new movement in the beauty world, starring antiaging 

concoctions made to be blended at home. But is skin care really more 

effective when it’s freshly mixed? By Olivia Stren 

In my bathroom, I’m whipping up a DIY 

face mask—one that doesn’t involve kitchen 

staples like yogurt or egg whites (and, at 

$420, costs a bit more). I open a gold-lidded 

jar of Lancôme Absolue L’Extrait Ultimate 

Rose Serum Mask and follow the instructions, 

combining, in what looks like a doll’s 

tea saucer, a vial of serum plus a spoonful of 

pearlescent pink beads containing Lancôme’s 

proprietary rose extracts. The pearls, which 

have been bioengineered by grace of 11 patents, 

dissolve as I stir, releasing their precious 

skin-softening cargo. And as I spread 

this confection on my face with the abandon 

of a tycoon heaping caviar on a cracker, a 

scene in an episode of Louis C.K.’s show Louie 

comes to mind. A father of two girls, Louie 

talks about the moment after he secures his 

children in the back seat of the car, closes 

the door, and walks toward the driver’s seat. 

This brief amble, he riffs—when the kids 

are, for those few blessed seconds, quiet, 

fed, safe—is a Carnival cruise. I’m sorry to 

say, as the mother of a two-year-old, that 

I can relate. Drugstore runs pass for “me 

time,” and a shower can feel like a sojourn at 

Canyon Ranch. As my son snoozes and my 

face is scented like a flower garden, I feel, 

momentarily, relaxed and nourished. It’s 

better than a cruise. 

The act of mixing the Lancôme mask 

gives it a pleasurable, ritualistic appeal, but 

this make-it-fresh approach is actually more 

about supercharging results than about ceremony. 

And as with the farm-to-fork megamovement, 

this trend is flourishing in the 

land of skin care. The logic: Some popular 

skin-care ingredients are volatile and can 

lose potency when combined into formulas. 

So keeping these active ingredients in 

protective quarantine until the moment of 

application—“the technology of separating 

and protecting the extract until released,” 

as Macrene Alexiades, MD, PhD, founder of 

Dermatology & Laser Surgery Center of New 

York, says about Lancôme’s rose-pearl-andserum 

meet-cute—helps to safeguard and 

optimize their efficacy. 

The most wildly unstable ingredient is 

vitamin C (ascorbic acid), making it your 

routine’s most high-maintenance star. The 

powerful antioxidant stimulates collagen 

and evens out mottled hyperpigmentation 

by interfering with the oxidative processes 

necessary to form melanin, so skin-care companies 

have long grappled with how to best 

stabilize it in order to capitalize on its properties. 

“Of all the popular skin-care ingredients, 

vitamin C has the shortest shelf life by 

a very large margin,” says cosmetic chemist 

Stephen Alain Ko. Ascorbic acid oxidizes and 

degrades—losing its potency—when it hits 

the air or meets with water, heat, or ultraviolet 

light. It remains most stable in dry powder 

form. But on its own, the powder won’t penetrate 

your skin, so blending it with a liquid 

is the most effective way of getting it past the 

skin’s barrier. 

This equation is what inspired Janet Pardo, 

senior vice president of global product 

development at Clinique, to create the company’s 

Fresh Pressed Daily Booster With 

Pure Vitamin C 10%. The prescription: two 

drops, twice a day, for seven days, to fasttrack 

a brightened, rejuvenated complexion. 

“This is de-aging for the impatient!” she tells 

me energetically, in a way that suggests that 

181

impatience may be something she’s familiar 

with. The product, the company claims, 

works immediately: In-house studies show 

that skin is 36 percent brighter after one 

use. After a month, age spots are reduced by 

32 percent, and lines and wrinkles by 43 percent; 

skin appears visibly lifted by 41 percent. 

It’s the dual-chamber package, Pardo explains, 

that helps to deliver these results. One 

lightproof chamber protects the dry vitamin 

C powder from oxidization, and a neighboring 

chamber contains a serum rife with peptides 

as well as molasses, mulberry root, and 

grapefruit extracts—soothing, cell-renewing 

dancing partners to the powder. Press a button, 

shake, and the two mix into a measured 

single dose of ultrapotent vitamin C emulsion, 

ready to be applied straight to the skin or 

added to the moisturizer of your choice. 

Other cosmetic favorites—vitamin A, 

green tea, resveratrol—may have their own 

stability issues but don’t require such careful 

handling. For instance, Ko explains, green 

tea contains ECGC, a polyphenol that degrades 

from 5 to 10 percent every month—a 

slow rate of breakdown that makes only the 

most negligible difference to the user. 

Jasmi Bonnén, founder of indie line Nuori, 

learned in her former tenure as a marketing 

executive at L’Oréal Paris that the majority 

of skin-care products are designed to last on 

shelves for two and a half years. But time, 

like air and water, can in some cases be detrimental 

to potency. Hence the use of common 

preservatives such as tetrasodium EDTA and 

phenoxyethanol; they not only work to protract 

a product’s life-span but also fight off 

bacteria and potentially harmful microor- 

ganisms. But Bonnén divined a solution that 

1 

2 

would negate the need for synthetic preservatives. 

She fashions freshly blended products 

in small batches and sells skin care in the 

same way you might sell cold-pressed juice— 

to be consumed quickly, with attention to 

its “use by” date. Nuori’s Supreme-C Serum 

also comes in a dual-chamber package: A 

tiny vial holds 100 percent vitamin C powder, 

and another contains a serum replete with 

plant-based, free radical–neutralizing ferulic 

acid. Like all Nuori products, it’s blended 

every 12 weeks in a factory in the countryside 

outside Copenhagen, and if it’s not sold by 

stores within three months, it’s replaced with 

a fresh batch. 

None of this means the moisturizers and 

premixed vitamin C products we’ve been using 

for years are useless. This is just the latest 

way formulators have found to stabilize and 

deliver antiaging powerhouse ingredients. 

To wit: SkinCeuticals’ dermatologist-beloved 

vitamin C serum, C E Ferulic, uses ferulic 

acid, not fancy packaging, as a vitamin C 

stabilizer. It’s a potent union, explains Kavita 

Mariwalla, MD, a West Islip, New York–based 

dermatologist. “It turns out that .5 percent 

ferulic acid with 15 percent vitamin C and 

1 percent vitamin E increases the efficacy of 

vitamin C eightfold, which is very useful for 

the reduction of photodamage.” 

I’m wary of trends, but the intuitive logic 

of freshness over its alternative is persuasive. 

And frankly, I could use a bit of freshening. 

It’s spring, but my complexion appears to 

have lost the memo, continuing to assume 

the undertones of sidewalk slush. Author Jill 

Kargman, in praise of pallor, once told the 

New York Times, “I want to look like a dead 

body.” I don’t. I strive to look alive. So, for a 

few weeks, I mask with rose oil 

and binge on Clinique’s booster 

and Nuori’s serum. My skin, 

flirting with that long-lost look of 

the rested, does appear brighter, 

more petite of pore, more radiant—as 

if my face, if not the rest 

of me, has just returned from a 

Carnival cruise. 

Go with your own glow 

3 

1. When combined, HANACURE 

All-in-One Facial Mask’s Lifting 

Serum and Gelling Solution 

have a tightening effect on skin. 

2. CLINIQUE Fresh Pressed Daily 

Booster delivers a blast of highpotency 

vitamin C with every pump. 

3. LANCÔME Absolue L’Extrait 

Ultimate Rose Serum Mask pearls 

emulsify when mixed with serum 

so that their active ingredients are 

released just prior to application. 

Devon Jarvis/Studio D 

182

T o A B looMing G ood M other’s D ay 

Jo Malone london Boutiques, saks FiFth avenue | JoMalone.coM

AVAILABLE AT MACYÕS 

Feel extraordinary

This is how much of a perfectionist 

Frédéric Malle is: When 

he tests fragrances for his brand 

Editions de Parfums, he wears 

each sample on a different part 

of his arm for eight hours at a 

time, periodically taking notes. 

(The best spot? The warm 

pulse point inside the wrist. “I 

never put fragrance on top of 

my hand,” he says, “because it 

always smells bad.”) Then he’ll 

have someone else spritz on a 

scent and walk in front of him, 

“so I can be sure there’s a trail 

seven feet away.” To prep an eau 

for launch, he’ll often try it on 

his skin in New York, and again 

in Paris. “Because the air doesn’t 

smell the same,” he says. If it 

works in both locales, it’s a go. 

When Malle founded Editions 

de Parfums in 2000, he was the 

first to give perfumers (who so 

often toil behind the scenes) 

top billing, putting their names 

on the bottles and celebrating 

them as artists. The unique, 

often iconic results of their work 

(think Dominique Ropion’s 

alluring Carnal Flower) made 

Frédéric 

Malle 

SCENT-SATIONAL! 

The king of niche, in-the-know perfumery is getting 

“big and beautiful.” On the occasion of his ninth 

store opening, Frédéric Malle tells April Long how 

to find a scent you want to go to bed with 

Malle the de facto father of modern 

niche perfumery. He now 

has eight stand-alone stores—a 

ninth opens in L.A. this month— 

and has branched out into home 

scents and body care. “You can 

be big and beautiful,” he says, 

“as long as you stay true to your 

story and your beliefs. I’ve made 

a promise to the perfumers never 

to betray them, and a promise 

to myself never to do a market 

test–oriented fragrance, ever.” 

What are your thoughts on the 

explosion of niche perfumery? 

It’s a much more interesting 

world than it was. When we 

started, perfumery was dying, in 

a way. It was made by people in 

the mass-market industry who 

were asking perfumers to make 

one-size-fits-all fragrances. 

So there’s been this reaction to 

that, and some very creative fragrances 

have come out of it. The 

public has also become much 

more educated. People smell 

good on the street again! 

What’s the key to a great eau? 

It’s very simple. When I make a 

fragrance, I want it to make the 

person who wears it sexier. You 

can be sexy in many different 

ways, but you still have to smell 

like a human being. A lot of 

flower scents stay on top of people, 

like they’re wearing a room 

spray. But the classics enhance 

the skin and generate sex appeal. 

What’s the defining aesthetic 

now, scent-wise? 

People are looking for big 

volume, particularly with dark 

woods, like patchouli and amber. 

People are relearning what 

quality means, and obvious 

quality in a scent often comes 

from those types of notes—so 

there’s been a move away from 

watery, transparent fragrances. 

What fragrances have had the 

biggest impact on you? 

I was brought up by a mother 

who worked for Dior, so the 

original Miss Dior and Diorissimo 

were like the yin and yang 

of femininity for me. And when 

I was very young, I fell in love 

with so many girls.… I saw them 

in three dimensions because of 

their scents. I fell in love with 

a girl who wore Paris by Yves 

Saint Laurent, and there was an 

innocence about her. But I also 

fell in love with a girl who wore 

Shalimar, and there was nothing 

innocent about her. You have to 

match the right fragrance with 

the right person, and then, together, 

they become irresistible. 

How do I know what’s right 

for me? 

It’s instinctual. It’s important to 

know who you are; I’m not going 

to become Baryshnikov. I wish! 

“It takes a great perfumer and 

a lot of money to get a floral 

aldehyde right,” Malle says. 

Frédéric Malle Editions de 

Parfums Superstitious, crafted 

by Ropion, nails it. 

1 2 

3 4 

THE WORLD’S SEXIEST 

EAUX, ACCORDING TO MALLE: 

1. FRÉDÉRIC MALLE EDITIONS DE 

PARFUMS MAURICE ROUCEL MUSC 

RAVAGEUR: “When it launched, 

it was the opposite of prevailing 

trends. Everyone wanted to copy 

Dior J’adore, and here was this big, 

mean oriental with a flower inside. 

It was really dirty-minded, in the 

nicest way, and it became our first 

best-seller.” 2. NINA RICCI L’AIR 

DU TEMPS: “A false-innocent floral 

perfume ([it smells like] carnations) 

mixed with magnetic musk.” 

3. GUERLAIN SHALIMAR: “The 

perfect alliance of amber, vanilla, 

and animalistic notes. Fire in a 

bottle.” 4. ESTÉE LAUDER YOUTH- 

DEW: “Deep, spicy, and mysterious.” 

But I’m not. You have to find a 

fragrance you’re comfortable 

with physically—you want to 

go to bed smelling like it, or put 

it on when you step out of the 

shower. Avoid trying to smell 

like your BFF or someone you 

admire, because then you’re 

going to appear as if you were 

wearing someone else’s clothes. 

How interconnected are our 

tastes in fragrance and fashion? 

There are very dressed-up 

fragrances, like Superstitious 

[Malle’s new collaboration with 

former Lanvin designer Alber 

Elbaz], which is like a couture 

dress. But, just like Loulou de la 

Falaise used to wear a couture 

Saint Laurent jacket with some 

beads and a pair of jeans, 

maybe you can pull off wearing 

Superstitious with sweatpants 

and still be yourself—and be 

superelegant. Everything is 

an equation. 

185

A 

MOMENT 

OF 

BEAUTY 

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ONE BRAND: A WORLD OF OIL-INFUSED BEAUTY

NEWS 

FROM THE 

WORLD 

OF HEALTH 

AND 

FITNESS 

PLUGGED IN 

The most in-the-know woman in NYC 

wellness shares her fit list 

From her perch as marketing director 

for the ultrachic athleisure brand Bandier, 

Ashleigh Hults sees everything 

from Nike’s top-secret compression 

tights to the latest designer fitness 

collabs before anyone even knows to 

whisper about them. With her own 

side hustle as founder of Poolside (a 

fragrance and beach accessories line), 

how does someone who has access to 

it all optimize her energies? 

BASIC TRAINING “Dance is my 

go-to cardio. It’s an amazing fullbody 

workout and a powerful form 

of expression.” 

RECENT OBSESSION “Infrared 

saunas heat you from the inside and 

cause profuse sweating. I’ve been 

going to Higher Dose, and when 

I can’t slip away, they sell a body 

blanket that you can wrap up in for 

an at-home session.” 

Hults 

THE NEXT BIG THING Ultracor’s 

star leggings (above): “Bandier 

partnered with Ultracor to rerelease 

these unbelievably popular 

leggings in new colors. They’re 

made of an eight-way-stretch Italian 

fabric, and you just want to live 

in them—a few clients even somehow 

got my cell and were texting 

me to try to sneak off the wait list!” 

ESSENTIALS “I’m devoted to the 

Clean Program, a cleanse that 

eliminates bloaters like caffeine. 

I always keep Moon Juice Beauty 

Dust or Sun Potion Ashwagandha 

on hand to mix into my tea or water 

to get that brain kick. Glossier face 

mist is key for midday, postworkout 

skin refreshment, and I always 

keep an extra pair of leggings in 

my bag in case I want to hop into a 

yoga class.” 

HEAD GEAR 

In honor of 

National Bike 

Month, a few of our 

favorite helmets, 

designed to protect 

your best accessory 

TRIPLE 8 Gotham 

Darklight is matte gray 

in sunlight and glows 

reflective silver at night. 

BERN Team Brighton 

passes all bike and snow 

safety certifications, 

making it suitable for both 

streets and slopes. 

GIRO Sutton includes a 

vent that doubles as a 

lock port, so the helmet 

can be clipped to the bike 

for safekeeping. 

HAPPY 

MEALS 

What if there were a way to 

incorporate cookie dough 

into your workout plan? 

According to a study published 

in late 2016 in the 

Journal of Applied Physiology, 

consuming carbohydrates 

during or after intense 

exercise of 90 minutes 

or more was found to not 

only improve performance 

but also reduce the body’s 

stress response, keeping the 

immune system in better 

balance. Lily Kunin, author 

of Good Clean Food and the 

blog Clean Food Dirty City, 

suggests a postgym bowl 

of sweet potatoes, steel-cut 

oats, or frozen bananas with 

almond butter. For a midworkout 

energy bite? “I make 

a ‘raw cookie dough’ bar that 

is blended cashews, coconut 

flakes, and rolled oats.” Sold. 

ANTE UP Remember when kale juice seemed weird? L.A. has just raised the bar. Jing 

City, a popular drink at natural grocery Erewhon Market’s juice bar, contains ant–yes, 

the insect–and deer antler extracts. Staples of traditional Chinese medicine, these tonics 

are believed to improve energy and longevity (little research has been done on either 

ingredient). “They are best taken daily in either capsule or tincture form or in tonic 

beverages and nutritious recipes,” says Melody Zara, senior tonic herbalist for Dragon 

Herbs, which manufactures the (definitely not vegan) supplements. What price vitality? 

At $30 a pop, a daily Jing City would run you $10,950 a year. 

DRAGON 

HERBS 

Deer Antler 

Drops and 

Mountain 

Ant tinctures 

Model: Kyle Schneider; Hults: Audrey 

Amelie Rudolf; Kunin and cashew bars: 

Gemma and Andrew Ingalls 

188

NIGHT 

MOVES 

With soft skin, sparkling 

eyes, and a tantalizing 

pout, May beauty is all 

about kicking spring off 

to a fiery start. 

By Cotton Codinha 

SEVENTH HEAVEN 

Looking for a dose of 

euphoria? Red Flower 

Aromatherapeutic 

Body Oil in Icelandic 

Moonflower promises 

silky skin, insomnia 

relief, and an influx 

of joy with just a few 

drops added 

to a bath. 

SPARKLE MOTION 

Smoky eyes get an update with a 

generous helping of shimmer in 

Stila Magnificent Metals Glitter & Glow 

Liquid Eye Shadow (shown in Molten 

Midnight), a highly pigmented shadow 

that goes on slick and dries to a 

long-lasting powder. 

PEACE, LOVE, AND FLOWERS 

To celebrate the tenth anniversary 

of the beloved berry and jasmine 

fragrance Daisy, Marc Jacobs 

rolls out a limited-edition, all-white 

bottle, along with a brand-new 

spokeswoman, Kaia Gerber. 

KEEP IT SIMPLE 

Charlotte Gainsbourg 

(actress, singer, Lars 

von Trier muse) has 

collaborated with Nars 

on a collection that 

Francophiles will covet, 

starring perfected basics 

like Kohliner in Cours 

Du Soir—insouciance 

optional. 

YOU RED MY MIND 

Layer the velvety matte Tom 

Ford Shade and Illuminate 

Lips kit (shown in Tantalize) 

to create a multidimensional 

custom kiss, or use either 

shade alone for a sweet Betty 

or sultry Veronica effect. 

194 

MIDAS’S TOUCH 

Aerin Tangier Vanille D’Or 

Eau de Parfum updates the 

original best-selling scent 

with more-intense notes of 

Madagascar vanilla, Bulgarian 

rose, and sandalwood, 

resulting in a musk perfect for 

steamy nights. 

PLUM CRAZY 

California minimalist beauty 

brand Lilah B. expands on its 

popular lavender-infused 

B. Kissed Lip Balm with three 

tinted shades (shown in 

B. Savvy), housed in the brand’s 

signature packaging. 

Devon Jarvis/Studio D

AN AWAKING NIGHTMARE 

Rachael Combe was coming apart under the burden of unrelenting insomnia. 

Nothing helped—until one day her dentist, of all people, told her she had the socalled 

“young, thin, beautiful women’s sleep disorder.” Flattered, she investigated 

I’d wake in the middle of the night, gasping 

for breath as though surfacing from a near 

drowning. My heart would be racing, my skin 

clammy, my organs suffused with grief and 

fear, like I’d been pickled in some bitter brine 

while I slept, and now, at 2 or 3 a.m., I was 

fighting my way out of the jar. I’d then proceed 

to lie awake for hours, my life flashing 

before my eyes—but only the sad, bad, mad 

parts. Even the happy scenes curdled in this 

film—I was screwing up my children, ruining 

my marriage, wasting my life. And my life! 

Was I dying? This gasping and sweating in 

the night—something was wrong with me. 

The episodes started in my early thirties 

and went on for years, gradually progressing 

in severity and frequency until, according to 

my Fitbit, I was averaging only four hours of 

sleep a night. I’d always been an insomniac, 

but this was a new level of hell. In the past, 

I’d prided myself on being an efficient, hard 

worker. Now I could barely keep my mind 

on a task for 15 minutes. My body began to 

break down: My ankle gave out mysteriously, 

and I had to wear an orthopedic boot for 

months. I ached everywhere. I developed rosacea. 

It became hard to eat out because everything 

but the plainest food made me sick. 

I am fortunate to have good health insurance, 

and I put it to use. I went to my gynecologist: 

Was it perimenopause? No, she 

said, just stress and postpartum hormones. 

(I gave birth to my fourth child during this 

period—another red herring that threw 

everyone off: “Of course you’re tired! Of 

course you feel crazy! You are crazy.”) I went 

to my general practitioner: Was it cancer, 

Lyme disease, hyperthyroidism, early-onset 

Alzheimer’s? He tested me for all of them. 

Nope. I went to a gastroenterologist and 

a nutritionist, who failed to find anything 

wrong with my stomach or diet. I went to 

a psychiatrist, who diagnosed anxiety and 

prescribed sleeping pills, which did not help 

me get more sleep but did make me feel more 

Eric Ogden/Trunk Archive 

196

cotton-headed the day after I took them. 

I followed all the “sleep hygiene” advice: 

no naps, getting out of bed at the same time 

every day, no caffeine, no screens an hour 

before bed. I exercised daily. I took lavender 

baths, hung blackout curtains, wore a sleep 

mask and earplugs. I took a seminar on 

stress reduction. I meditated. I tried sleeping 

in a different room from my husband. 

I tried giving up wheat, dairy, sugar, and— 

finally, painfully—wine. Nothing worked. 

And then I crunched through the night 

guard I wore to stop me from grinding 

my teeth at night. Oddly enough, it was 

my dentist, Michael Gelb, who diagnosed 

It sounded too good to be true: Curing 

my sleep disorder would cure my 

anxiety, stomach problems, everything. 

my problem when I went to get a new 

one. He peered down my throat and then 

motioned for his assistant to come over. 

“Look at that big tongue! No wonder!” he 

exclaimed. He turned to me. “This is easy. 

I know what you have. You’re waking up 

in a panic? In a cold sweat? Like someone 

just threw a rock through your window?” 

he asked. Yes, yes, yes, I told him. “You 

have low blood pressure? Cold feet?” Uh, 

yeah. “You have anxiety?” Yes.… “You had 

your wisdom teeth out? Were you ever 

told you needed a palate expander as a 

kid?” Umm…yes? “You have UARS. It’s the 

young, thin, beautiful women’s sleep disorder. 

You should write about it!” 

In the 15 years I’ve known Dr. Gelb, he 

has never steered me wrong—an expert in 

jaw pain and snoring, he’s cured both my 

TMJ and my husband’s log-sawing. And yet, 

he’s such a smooth salesman, such an adept 

self-promoter, and so quick to diagnose 

problems that can only be resolved with 

$4,000 retainers, I’m sometimes inclined to 

disbelieve him. I couldn’t hold my freakishly 

huge tongue in check: “Dr. Gelb, please. 

The ‘beautiful women’s sleep disorder?’ ” I 

laughed. “That’s not a thing.” 

Gelb snap-snapped at his assistant, who 

printed out an inch-thick stack of research 

articles from reputable journals. Turns 

out, UARS is a thing. Upper airway resistance 

syndrome was identified in adults 

nearly 25 years ago by medical researchers 

at Stanford University. It’s a form of sleepdisordered 

breathing in which people get 

slightly less air than they should because 

some part of their airway is too narrow 

and—though they’re not actually in danger—their 

body perceives they’re suffocating 

and wakes them up. 

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine 

categorizes UARS as a form of obstructive 

sleep apnea syndrome (OSA)—but 

UARS’s effects are subtler and its diagnosis 

trickier than the apnea most people are 

familiar with. Because the research on it 

is broad but rather shallow—and includes 

few randomized, controlled trials—sleep 

experts disagree about almost every aspect 

of the disorder, from whether it’s distinct 

from OSA to the best therapies to ameliorate 

it. The exact prevalence of UARS isn’t 

known—in part because it’s thought to be 

so underdiagnosed—but the National Sleep 

Foundation estimates that 18 million Americans 

suffer from apnea overall, two or three 

men for every woman. 

That said, there are some established 

facts about UARS: While OSA is associated 

with being older, heavier, and male, UARS 

sufferers are typically younger, leaner, and 

predominantly female, according to epidemiological 

data. A petite build may be a risk 

factor, because smaller bodies have smaller 

airways, which can be more easily crowded 

by adenoids, the tongue, and the uvula, as 

well as relaxation of the throat during sleep. 

(And while the literature is silent on the topic 

of beauty and UARS, one physician told 

me anecdotally that the facial structure that 

can put a woman at risk for UARS is sometimes 

linked with beauty in our culture: a 

small jaw and nose.) High blood pressure 

commonly occurs in tandem with OSA; the 

opposite is true for UARS, in which blood 

pressure can be so low that it leads to fainting 

and chronically cold extremities. UARS 

patients don’t always snore or stop breathing—symptoms 

a bed partner would likely 

notice—but they tend to complain of greater 

fatigue than people with standard apnea do. 

The reason for the excess fatigue is the 

subject of debate. One theory is that people 

with UARS are more exhausted because they 

awaken at the first ragged breath, while the 

“classic” apnea sufferer may sleep through 

his funky breathing—unaware he’s snoring 

and even, at times, not breathing at all. 

Undercutting that hypothesis, though, 

are sleep studies that show that tiredness 

isn’t necessarily related to the number of 

apneas or arousals patients experience— 

and some patients may have fairly normallooking 

sleep studies but still suffer from 

brutal fatigue. These findings have prompted 

some scientists to bore in on the fact 

that UARS coexists with a host of other psychiatric 

and somatic disorders—anxiety, 

depression, posttraumatic stress, irritable 

197

CHRISTIAN TAYLOR 

2 x WORLD CHAMPION 

2 x OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALIST 

bowel syndrome, ADHD, and fibromyalgia, 

among others. They’ve suggested that the 

exhaustion—and somatic disorders—aren’t 

caused by a shortage of sleep but by the nervous 

system’s overreaction to the disordered 

breathing. If that’s true, treating the irregular 

breathing could mean the anxiety or 

fibromyalgia recedes without doing anything 

else. 

It frankly sounded too good to be true: Not 

only did I have Gelb’s “pretty girl’s sleep disorder,” 

but curing it would eliminate every 

ailment I’ve ever had. I felt like one of those 

parents who can’t face that their child has 

a behavior problem and so, instead, blame 

gluten or vaccines or the kid being “too creative” 

for school. On the other hand, I had 

nothing to lose except debilitating insomnia, 

so I headed to the Stony Brook University 

Sleep Disorders Center in Smithtown, 

New York, where much of the research on 

UARS and somatic disorders has been done. 

I walked in fully expecting to be told that 

my dentist was a quack and I was a head case. 

Instead, Susan Manganaro, MD, took one 

look at my history, peered into my mouth, 

and agreed with Gelb (although Stony Brook 

is abandoning the term UARS—they see 

it as a manifestation of OSA and think it’s 

misleading to cordon off sufferers just because 

they’re mostly thin women). Again, my 

tongue was of great interest. “See how it has 

ridges on the side?” Manganaro said. “That’s 

called scalloping. It means your tongue is 

pressing against your teeth because there 

isn’t enough room for it.” (I swear, my tongue 

doesn’t loll out of my mouth like on the Rolling 

Stones album cover.) She said I likely 

needed to use a continuous positive airway 

pressure machine (CPAP), which would blow 

air up my nose and keep my breathing even. 

To confirm the diagnosis and then titrate the 

machine to the right air pressure, I needed to 

do two overnight sleep studies in the hospital. 

Those studies—sensors all over my head 

and body, a tube up my nose, a camera 

watching me while I slept in a Motel 6–ish 

room with pastel ocean scenes on the wall— 

showed 70 arousals in the 6.5 hours I spent 

in bed. I spent two of those hours lying 

awake, giving me a “sleep efficiency” rating 

of 69 percent (normal is anything over 

85 percent). The diagnosis? Moderate sleep 

apnea with mild sleep fragmentation. 

After some tussling with my health insurer 

(Manganaro says insurers seem to prefer 

to wait until people develop the calamitous 

downstream effects of untreated apnea— 

such as high blood pressure and stroke— 

rather than pay for preventive measures), 

my CPAP machine finally arrived. It looked 

like a clock radio, connected by a long tube 

to a mask for your face. I had to try five 

masks before I found one that didn’t give 

me claustrophobia or rub my nostrils so raw 

and pink that I looked like a coke-addicted 

rabbit when I awoke. Ultimately I settled on 

a snazzy ResMed AirFit P10 for Her, size extra-small, 

that goes just into the tips of my 

nostrils and gives me the appearance of having 

a dainty lilac-and-white elephant trunk 

dangling off my schnoz. It’s the least sexy 

thing I’ve ever worn to bed, outside of the 

disposable panties filled with ice packs and 

Tucks hemorrhoid pads the hospital gives 

you after you have a baby. 

I was told it would take a couple of weeks to 

get used to the machine, but it took me nearly 

two months. It was definitely a “nevertheless, 

she persisted” type of situation. At first, 

I had to use sleeping pills to be able to fall 

asleep with the mask, and I’d often rip it off 

in the wee hours. But then the turning point 

came: I woke up one morning and realized I’d 

slept straight through the night—CPAP success! 

But then my heart sank. Where was my 

mask? I didn’t feel it on my face; I must have 

clawed it off without realizing it. I scanned 

my bedside table, looking for my little lilac 

elephant…before realizing it was, in fact, still 

on my face. I’d acclimated! 

Once I was able to wear my CPAP through 

the night without sleeping meds, my fatigue 

and anxiety just…stopped. Another part of 

my brain—the part that had enthusiasm for 

work, playing with my kids, even getting errands 

done—turned on. It was like I’d been 

listening to a fire alarm for decade upon decade 

and then, finally, found the button to 

switch it off. At my follow-up visit with Manganaro, 

my resting heart rate had dropped 

from 79 to 60 beats per minute. 

My sleep still isn’t perfect, but now all the 

stress-reduction and sleep-hygiene tactics 

I’d tried in the past make a difference. Caffeine, 

wine, and PMS pretty reliably give me 

insomnia; exercising and setting my alarm 

for the same time every day improve my 

sleep. Now I’m no longer a black box, where 

nothing I do has the outcomes I expect. I’m 

more of a clockwork gumball machine: You 

put the quarter in and the happy rainbow 

gumballs roll out. 

Four months into my treatment, I’m still 

stunned by the change. Who is this calm, 

elephant-masked woman? I called up Avram 

Gold, MD, director of the Stony Brook sleep 

center, Manganaro’s boss, and among those

Almost two-thirds of women 

experience insomnia at least a 

few nights a week, according to a 

National Sleep Foundation poll. 

who believe that it may not be the extra sleep 

that makes people feel better rested—and 

just all-around better—but the reduction in 

activation of stress hormones. He blames 

the olfactory nerve for UARS. “For all mammals, 

the nasal passage is one of the fundamental 

ways we learn about opportunities 

and dangers,” he said. “Think of the rabbit 

on the lawn, sniffing to find something to 

eat but also sniffing to smell a coming dog.” 

The olfactory nerve is directly connected 

to the limbic system—the emotional center of 

the brain—and senses not only smells but air 

pressure. Gold suspects that UARS patients’ 

limbic systems have come to associate a drop 

in air pressure during sleep with danger. For 

this connection to form, he postulates, there 

must be a stressful sensitizing event, whether 

the trauma of war or the strain of getting a 

divorce or becoming a parent. And perhaps, 

Gold argues, you need to be someone who’s 

more reactive to stress to begin with. 

Manganaro points out that someone else, 

with a different nervous system, could have 

sleep-study results similar to mine yet feel 

completely fine. Though she has to grade 

apnea on a scale of mild to severe for health 

insurers, she is less interested in the number 

of arousals patients have at night than 

in the severity of their symptoms during 

the day. “If your brain is responding to the 

sleep-disordered breathing as a danger, and 

your fight-or-flight system turns on and the 

anxiety syndromes start up, it doesn’t matter 

how many times an hour you’re waking 

up,” she says. 

Of course, not everyone is convinced by 

Gold and his colleagues. Scientists from 

Penn State’s sleep disorder center wrote an 

essay in a prominent sleep medicine journal 

a few years ago, complaining that his conjectures 

are based on small studies without 

control groups and that if physicians act on 

them without more proof, Gold “will have 

a negative impact on the health of our patients, 

on our economy, and, not least, on 

the credibility of our field.” 

It is possible that all the benefits I’ve noticed 

are the result of a placebo effect. Placebos 

are considered particularly robust in 

sleep medicine, accounting for perhaps 50 

percent of the response to sleeping pills. One 

study found that just telling healthy subjects 

they slept well improved their performance 

on neurological tasks compared with subjects 

who’d been told they slept poorly. 

Gold agrees that better studies are needed. 

“Sleep medicine is bullshit. We’ve built a 

branch of medicine on a very weak foundation,” 

he says, referring to the lack of investment 

in research. The result of the failure 

to fund double-blind, controlled studies, he 

contends, is that people whose sleep could 

be improved are instead dying of causes that 

range from suicide and substance abuse to 

cardiovascular disease. 

Christian Guilleminault, MD, the Stanford 

researcher who identified the UARS 

population a quarter century ago, likewise 

lamented the dearth of research into milder 

forms of apnea. Women’s sleep-disordered 

breathing has been especially overlooked, 

he says, calling us “the forgotten gender.” 

I’m almost embarrassed to admit how 

much I believe in Gold’s theories: My experiences 

are anecdotal, and I’ve been reporting 

on science and health long enough 

to know that medicine shouldn’t be a matter 

of faith but of data. Yet for the first time in 

my life, my symptoms make sense, and I’ve 

found a treatment that works. My husband 

used to gently tease me for being, as he put 

it, “highly calibrated,” as I tried in vain to 

come up with something that would relieve 

my unrelenting anxiety, insomnia, and irritable 

bowel (which, frankly, I believed were 

linked, well before I read dozens of papers 

on the topic). My husband was right: I was 

sensitive and remain so. But in the past, it 

was like I was trying to fine-tune an intricate 

machine that was on fire. You need to 

put out the blaze before you can experiment 

with the monkey wrench. I’ve come to think 

of the cool breeze from my CPAP machine 

as a little air conditioner for my brain. It 

turns down the temperature; it cools off my 

hot reactions. It gives me the time and peace 

to regard the beautiful machine of my body 

and mind with gratitude and kindness instead 

of fear and disgust. 

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Maybe it’s gradually 

dawned on you, or maybe it struck you suddenly—say, 

when you were seated at the back 

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car and took the time to really look at the 

dozens of other women gathered before you. 

But by now, you’re probably aware that something 

big and multifarious is going on with 

our hair. We have entered an age where— 

rather than duplicating a few stock looks ad 

infinitum—women are breaking traditional 

rules of presentation and wearing an unprecedented 

variety of self-expressive styles, 

with courage and joy. See Solange Knowles 

on the cover of her latest album, A Seat at the 

Table, her mesmerically pretty, long natural 

curls bedecked with salon-style duckbill 

clips, a sly nod to her own complex relationship 

with hair care (or perhaps to her mother 

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Or Meryl Streep, forgoing stiff professional 

updos in favor of simple, sophisticated 

blow-outs and buns while she increasingly 

uses her time in the spotlight to speak up for 

justice and human rights. Or—yes, yes, yes— 

Zoë Kravitz, with her radiant white braids. 

Modern power hair has rapidly evolved to become 

a more creative, crafty, and individualized 

affair, reflecting our growing desire to 

celebrate the advantages of our natural texture 

and embrace whatever styles happen to 

make us feel strong and happy. 

It’s an enormous shift when viewed 

through the lens of fashion history. For centuries, 

women spent countless hours crafting 

looks that might grant them power, whether 

political, social, or sexual. In eighteenthcentury 

France, women of all classes pumped 

animal fats and potato starch into their hair 

in an attempt to replicate Marie Antoinette’s 

towering pompadour. For most of the nineteenth 

century, young Japanese women wore 

elaborate waxed chignons—women of high 

birth puffed theirs skyward, while courtesans 

sculpted theirs outward. During the ’70s and 

’80s, women dutifully lopped off their feathered 

lengths to get tight, all-business bobs as 

soon as they sensed it was time to get serious 

about their careers (the shearing of Melanie 

Griffith’s magnificent mane in Working 

Girl being a prime example). And over the 

past decade, we’ve spent ample time and 

money cultivating—via extensions, chemicalstraightening 

treatments, and standing appointments 

at a proliferation of blow-out 

bars—the sort of Bachelor/Kardashian-esque 

hair (extravagantly long, straight, or precisioncurled) 

we’ve long been told men prefer. 

Is a departure from such labor-intensive, 

conformist styles toward a wider (and, dare 

we hope, easier to execute) spectrum a sign 

of intersectional female solidarity—a change 

related, however tangentially, to the coast-tocoast 

sea of pink pussyhats? Perhaps. But the 

patriarchy is not, of course, the only culprit: 

Research published last year in the journal 

Frontiers in Psychology found that women 

typically find straight hair more attractive 

than wavier hair because they associate it 

with youth and health. And another study,

eleased earlier this year by the Perception 

Institute, an organization dedicated 

to reducing bias and discrimination in the 

workplace, found that both white and black 

women with smooth, straightened hair exhibited 

negative bias toward naturally textured 

black hair, consistently rating it less 

beautiful, attractive, and professional than 

smooth hair. 

But while some of these deeply ingrained 

and remarkably shallow attitudes and stereotypes 

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delight of black servicewomen) 

are sanctioning more multifaceted definitions 

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this specific way that society is telling us is 

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they leave with wet hair. Women are feeling 

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It’s not all about going natural. While 

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snips soft layers to accentuate natural 

texture and unique growth patterns (“layers 

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recently steered a brunette friend who’d 

been contemplating platinum for years to 

a colorist she knew could deliver the desired 

“rooty, radical vibe.” The impact of 

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the switch was profound. Her friend, who 

got a choppy bob to accompany her new 

white-hot, Debbie Harry–inspired color, 

told Roszak afterward, with a mix of pride 

and amazement, “I always felt like I was 

this person, but I didn’t feel like I actually 

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The shift isn’t just happening stateside. 

In France, hair care has become “all about 

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to Paris-based colorist Christophe 

Robin. He sees plenty of women who’ve 

previously relied on extensions, relaxers, 

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and rehab ragged ends with amino acid–packed KÉRASTASE Resistance mask ($65). A finishing touch? 

SHU UEMURA Hydro-Nourishing Serum ($38) shields against the elements with UV filters, L’ORÉAL 

PARIS EverCurl Sculpt & Hold Cream-Gel ($9.99) acts as a featherlight moisturizer, and glow-getter 

KEVIN.MURPHY Shimmer.Me ($27.50) imparts instant radiance.

8 1 / 2A 

Karlie’s shade

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“I DIDN’T FALL IN 

LOVE WITH MY HAIR 

UNTIL I STARTED 

MODELING. NOW 

I GET BOOKED 

BECAUSE OF MY 

CURLS.” 


L.A.-BASED MODEL ALLIE SILVA 

LOADS HER HIGH-VOLUME HAIR 

WITH MOISTURE—“TONS OF 

SERUMS AND CONDITIONERS,” 

SUCH AS L’ORÉAL PARIS 

EVERSLEEK OIL-IN-SERUM 

($9.99)—“AND THEN I LET IT 

AIR-DRY.” 

TOP BY BANANA REPUBLIC. 

HOOPS BY ROXANNE ASSOULIN.

with a panoply of hairstyles remains a 

great way to blow off steam (all the more 

essential in 2017) and explore and express 

their own changing aspirations and 

identities. Stylist César DeLeön Ramirêz, 

global artistic director for Mizani, gets inspired 

watching women teach each other 

new ways to cut, color, and style. “All you 

have to do now is open your phone or laptop 

and scroll around—everyone has their 

own space where they’re expressing themselves,” 

he says. Perhaps all of us could 

learn from Ramirêz’s client Taraji P. Henson, 

who has fallen for wigs, which give 

her the freedom to show up at events every 

other week with a different style: “Maybe 

today she feels like being long, tomorrow 

she wants curly hair, and the next day she 

wants a pixie cut. Wigs are a great way for 

a woman to not feel trapped in one look.” 

Could that kind of openness and mutability 

help us thrive in other areas of our lives? 

Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the 

University of California, Riverside, and 

the author of The How of Happiness (who 

recently added blue stripes to her dark 

hair “as a kind of post-Trump protest statement”), 

posits that when we feel beautiful 

and satisfied because our hair meets our 

own standards of excellence, it’s likely we’ll 

have more energy and resources to put toward 

achieving the intrinsic goals—professional, 

personal, spiritual—that make us 

feel truly happy and powerful. 

Johnny Wright, who started styling Michelle 

Obama’s hair in 2007, says one of 

the things he respects most about her is 

her decision—despite knowing how eagerly 

the world would judge her every move— 

to “live her life out loud” as First Lady, 

celebrating both adventurous young designers 

and her own textured hair (which 

Wright gently smooths with heat, never 

chemical relaxers), styled into a seemingly 

endless array of glamorous bobs, buns, 

and feathery waves. “Hairstyling is about 

storytelling. The way a woman wears her 

hair always becomes part of her story. And 

when women can do that without following 

rules—other than the rules they set for 

themselves—that is powerful. It’s epic.” 

—Louisa Kamps


TO KEEP HER CURLS “DEFINED 

AND HYDRATED,” NYC- 

BASED MODEL EBONEE DAVIS 

AVOIDS OLD-SCHOOL 

SUPERSUDSY SHAMPOOS 

AND INSTEAD CO-WASHES 

WITH AN ULTRARICH 

FORMULA, LIKE MIZANI 

CREAM CLEANSING 

CONDITIONER ($16). 

T-SHIRT BY MARC JACOBS. 

EARRING BY EDDIE BORGO. 

“MY HAIR IS A 

MANIFESTATION 

OF HOW I FEEL ON 

THE INSIDE. IT’S 

A HUGE PART 

OF WHAT 

DEFINES ME.”

CHOOSE 

YOUR OWN 

ADVENTURE 

How to find your superhero cut and color 

The first step is the deepest: Throw out 

all preconceptions about what your hair 

should be. “Anything is possible thanks 

to all the modern innovations: The darkest 

hair can go blond, the shortest hair 

can be instantly long, and the curliest 

hair can be straight if you want it. But 

only spend the time changing your color, 

changing your shape, if it brings you joy,” 

says Romina Manenti, our hairstylist for 

this shoot. “Power hair can be wash-andgo, 

or it can be high-maintenance. But 

bottom line, your hair should celebrate 

who you are or be a bridge for who you 

want to be.” 

YOUR NEW ECONOMY 

Apply the same high/low approach that 

you use with your wardrobe. However, 

your currency is not just money, but also 

time. The Chanel bag of hair? “That 

high-maintenance blond that needs a 

touch-up every three weeks is a major 

investment, but it’s worth it because it 

pulls everything else together,” says colorist 

Kyle White at New York City’s Oscar 

Blandi salon. “Spend your time making a 

statement—not trying to fit in.” 

AIR APPARENT 

Put your hands up and step away from the 

blow-dryer. If you’ve got fine, thin hair, 

don’t change it with teasing. If you’ve 

got textured hair, don’t try to iron it into 

submission. Instead, your stylist should 

create a cut that looks fantastic when airdried 

and styled with only a few essential 

products. “Power hair to me is embracing 

and enhancing your natural hair texture, 

not fighting against it,” says stylist and 

colorist Riawna Capri, co-owner of L.A.’s 

Nine Zero One salon. 

TIE ONE ON 

Now that office-appropriate color has expanded 

from brunette to platinum to the 

complete ROYGBIV spectrum, how do 

you choose your next new hue? White recommends 

visiting the scarf department. 

If you’re just adding streaks, try wrapping 

a scarf around your neck: “Pick the 

shade that makes your eyes sparkle and 

your complexion glow.” If you are going 

for allover color, wrap the scarf to hide 

your hair. “You need to remove your current 

hair color completely from the equation 

to get a sense of how your new color 

will look,” he says. That said, basic colortheory 

rules are still in play. According to 

White, “If you have pink undertones in 

your skin, go for blues, espresso brown, 

or icy platinum; if you have yellow undertones, 

think corals and pinks, fire-engine 

reds, warm purples.”

4SM 

Isabeli’s shade

SUPERIOR 

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With up to12 tones in each luminous 

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And fade-defying up to 8 weeks. 

What’s not to love? 

SUPERIORPREFERENCE.COM 

BECAUSE YOU’RE 

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Over50 luminous shades 


“I CAN’T REMEMBER 

THE LAST TIME I USED 

A CURLING IRON. 

MY HAIR IS SUPER- 

STRAIGHT, AND 

THAT’S ME.” 


NYC-BASED MODEL 

SHARINA GUTIERREZ 

STYLES HER SLEEK HAIR 

WITH LEAVE-IN 

CONDITIONING SPRAYS: 

“THEY KEEP MY HAIR SO 

SOFT.” TRY REDKEN ONE 

UNITED SPRAY ($22). 

DRESS BY DEREK LAM. 

Hair by Romina Manenti at Home Agency; makeup by Frankie Boyd at Streeters; manicure by Yukie Miyakawa at Kate Ryan Inc.; casting by Zan Ludlum and Paul Brickman 

for Zan Casting; produced by Una Simone Harris for Wanted Media; fashion assistant: Veronika Belyaeva. Still lifes by Jeffrey Westbrook. 

SHOPPING GUIDE: Bumble and bumble, bumbleandbumble.com; Carol’s Daughter, carolsdaughter.com; Christophe Robin, us.christophe-robin.com; Davines, davines 

.com; Kérastase Paris, kerastase-usa.com; Kevin.Murphy, kevinmurphy.com.au; L’Oréal Paris, available at mass food and drug retailers nationwide, lorealparisusa.com; 

Matrix, styleseat.com/matrix; Mizani, mizani.com; Ouai, theouai.com; R+Co, randco.com; Redken, ulta.com; Rita Hazan New York, ritahazan.com; Shu Uemura Art of Hair, 

shuuemuraartofhair-usa.com; Vernon François, vernonfrancois.com.

LIVING 

Cayne with friends, 

including Lela Rose 

(far left), in her 

space’s classroom 

Alison Cayne has just spent the afternoon 

teaching a few of her friends how to master 

the deceptively simple-seeming art of making 

salad in the demo kitchen of the cooking 

school she founded on West 17th Street in 

Manhattan five years ago. “We talked about 

grilling, roasting, blanching, composition, 

balance, texture, dressing, seasoning, and 

plating—oh, and knife skills,” she says, sipping 

a turmeric latte on a sofa beneath a 

giant poster for Luis Buñuel’s 1967 French 

film, Belle de Jour, starring Catherine Deneuve, 

who gazes out over the nook one 

floor up from the classroom. “Meanwhile, 

everyone drank wine, ate salad, and was 

happy—and walked away with at least one 

new thing, like how, when you cut something, 

you should have it flat-side down so 

it doesn’t rock.” 

222 

HAVEN SENT 

Alison Cayne offers up an in-demand lesson at her megahit 

New York City cooking school, Haven’s Kitchen. 

By Charlotte Druckman 

This is exactly what she imagined Haven’s 

Kitchen would be—“a salon where 

I’d hold book clubs and dinners planned 

around a theme.” It’s become so much more 

than that: She may have “pictured it like a 

clubhouse,” but she didn’t realize it could 

be one for the food community at large. She 

also didn’t know paid events would be such 

a big part of it; some of New York City’s 

most intimate and exclusive press dinners, 

book parties, and product launches are 

held here, and it’s a popular wedding spot. 

She never would have predicted that the 

small retail operation at the entrance of the 

building would become a café because the 

“local community wanted to make it their 

clubhouse.” Basically, she’d envisioned the 

school, but not its three-story proportions, 

or how those would be used. 

Before she imagined—or didn’t—any of 

it, Cayne was a stay-at-home mom in Manhattan. 

She gave birth to her first child in her 

midtwenties (after having worked in urban 

planning) and checked out of the workforce. 

At 33, by then a mother of three girls and two 

boys, all under the age of eight, Cayne confined 

her culinary efforts to making lunch. 

“My friends couldn’t understand how I was 

cooking so much, preparing separate meals 

for each kid and for the adults.” Her peers, she 

noticed, had a lot of anxiety about what to feed 

themselves and their children. In 2010, when 

her youngest entered preschool, Cayne, who’d 

received her undergraduate degree from 

Duke, went back to school herself, enrolling 

in NYU’s master’s program in food studies. “I 

wanted to be teaching about the love of food 

and anthropology,” she says. While studying 

for her degree, she had an internship as the 

head of the education station at the Greenmarket 

in Union Square, where she gave 

people of all ages walking tours of the farmers’ 

market and manned the information 

booth. Shoppers would ask her what to do 

with the ingredients they’d purchased, and 

Photographed by Shawn Brackbill

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she’d share her e-mail address with each 

of them, responding to any and all kitchen 

conundrums. 

Eventually, she began telling her kids, jokingly, 

that she’d open a cooking school when 

they left for college—until it stopped being 

a joke. She wanted to offer New Yorkers the 

option of taking lessons in a nonintimidating 

space. “Everyone was so scared of the 

kitchen,” she says. “In so many cultures 

around the world, the kitchen is an altar, it’s 

sacred—it’s a haven. For me, it was where I 

got to be creative and take care of people. It 

was my happy lab.” Cayne admits to having 

had her own hang-ups about signing up for 

classes at the culinary schools that allow 

home cooks to participate. Why, she wondered, 

couldn’t there be an alternative that 

could be a happy lab for others? 

When you walk into Haven’s Kitchen, 

you enter a bright, high-ceilinged, floweraccented, 

subway-tiled space where customers 

sink their teeth into freshly piled 

sandwiches or just-baked chocolate chip 

cookies, and their spoons into bowls of almond 

milk–splashed homemade granola 

or vibrant-hued vegetable soups, all made 

with carefully selected and responsibly 

produced ingredients. On one of the walls, 

beneath graphic black-and-white posters, a 

few lines of text have been stenciled. “Our 

Mission: To help our guests re-connect with 

the land, the table and each other. To help 

family farmers build economically viable 

businesses. To build a new system that feeds 

our whole community sustainable food.” 

The challenge, of course, is to find ways to 

meet that mission while generating enough 

income to do so. “I’m balancing trying to 

do good things for the community and paying 

rent, and supporting my employees so 

they can take care of their families.” She 

planned to be self-sustaining three years 

in; she did it in half that time. And she did 

it while going through a divorce: Two weeks 

after she opened the doors to her dream, 

she separated from her husband—and the 

CAYNE’S 

SALAD 101 

BE DELIBERATE. Start 

by thinking about 

what flavors you crave, 

what’s in season, and 

what you have on hand. 

Pick a base—a green, a 

vegetable, a grain, or a 

bean—and then build from 

there with complementary 

ingredients. 

USE ALTERNATIVE PARTS 

OF THE VEGETABLE. Celery 

leaves are full of flavor 

and act as a delicate 

finish. Most of the nutrients 

in vegetables like zucchini, 

for example, are in the 

skin, so wash them well, 

but there’s no need to 

peel. Broccoli stems 

are crunchy and sweet. 

AVOID TOO MUCH OF 

A GOOD THING. Toss in 

sweet, chewy, or crunchy 

ingredients, but with 

restraint. They should 

be happy surprises for 

your mouth—not the 

main attraction. 

SAY NO TO SOGGINESS. 

Dry greens well and 

add dressing just before 

serving (unless you’re 

making a slaw or a bean 

salad; both need to 

absorb dressing and 

get better with time). 

GO WITH A LIGHT FINISH. 

Toss with a drizzle of olive 

oil and a drop of acid: 

A splash of rice wine 

vinegar is refreshing for 

Asian-inspired salads, 

a squeeze of grapefruit 

juice pairs well with 

creamy avocado, and a 

dribble of nutty sherry 

vinegar is the ultimate 

all-purpose choice. 

Clockwise from left: 

A grilled salmon, 

cucumber, and edamame 

salad; Cayne; a 

broccoli and radicchio 

salad with toasted 

walnuts and pecorino 

school became a very personal 

haven. It gave her a productive 

outlet and a way to start 

rebuilding her life. But the 

learning curve of running a 

business was an all-consuming 

distraction. “I learned 

a lot from my accountant,” 

she says. “She would remind 

me, ‘Ali, it’s a business. 

It’s okay to be a business with 

a heart that tries to do good 

in the world. But it’s a business, 

and if it fails, you can’t 

do that.’ ” 

She has begun to think 

about ways to do both—maintain 

a business and do good— 

beyond four walls. In addition 

to teaching a course on contemporary 

food policy and 

theory at NYU, she’s written 

The Haven’s Kitchen Cooking School, a primer that helps home cooks 

everywhere “figure out what’s appealing to them, and then gives 

them the tools to make it.” If the typical cookbook presents people 

with someone else’s culinary style, Cayne’s bucks the trend; she 

wants her audience to find their own voices at the stove: “It’s not 

what I want you to cook or think you need to cook.” As she writes 

in the introduction to the book, out last month from Artisan, it’s 

“meant to teach and inspire you: It is not a list of recipes or a photo 

collage of unattainable food.… I hope that you will love this book 

forever but only need it for a short while.” 

This afternoon’s salad lesson was intended to serve a similar purpose. 

When her friend, fashion designer Lela Rose, asked which salad 

would be the best to make with kids, the answer was “whichever 

salad they made themselves; it tastes better if you’re invested,” followed 

by, “it’s true for adults, too.” Cayne’s vision hasn’t changed 

all that much. She still wants to “encourage people to cook.” Now, 

though, she wants to turn everyone’s kitchen into a haven—or a 

happy lab—no matter where they are. 

Hair and makeup by Julianna Grogan 

226

WELCOME TO THE TEA HOUSE. 

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THE PROPHET 

One of the most acclaimed novelists of our time, 

Margaret Atwood is as prolific an enviro-warrior Tweeter 

as she is a writer of brilliant fictions. Meanwhile, her classic 

The Handmaid’s Tale is debuting on television, not to mention 

energizing women’s rights advocates around the globe. 

Of course, she saw it all coming. By Miranda Purves 

“You’d better not be late, or Margaret Atwood 

will slap you!” my husband calls as I 

rush to make my flight to Toronto to interview 

the acclaimed Canadian woman of letters. 

He’s referring to Atwood’s cameo in the 

terrifying first episode of a new Hulu series 

based on her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In 

it, the author’s character whacks a young 

woman (played by Elisabeth Moss) who’s 

daydreaming during lessons in how to be a 

womb slave. 

For those of you who missed the book 

when it came out in 1985, weren’t assigned it 

in a college English course, or aren’t among 

the many new readers who’ve recently 

put The Handmaid’s Tale back on the bestseller 

list, the story takes place in a dystopian 

future where an authoritarian Christian 

political faction has taken over America, 

renaming it Gilead. Pollution and venereal 

disease have decimated female fertility, and 

women who can still give birth are turned 

into “handmaids,” required to wear red 

robes and white hoods to denote their status. 

This part might be bearable, as the outfits 

are fetchingly fall 2013 Valentino. But each 

member of the birthing corps is then placed 

in the household of a government higher-up, 

who ritually rapes her as he recites biblical 

passages and his resentful wife sits behind 

the handmaid, whose head is between the 

wife’s open legs. 

“My cameo, my looming cameo! Let’s just 

say there are only a certain number of roles 

in that film for a person of my age,” Atwood, 

who’s 77, says to me wryly. In the series, 

which debuts April 26, she portrays one of 

the cruel spinsters, known as Aunts, charged 

with forcibly converting the captive women 

into obedient handmaids. Moss’s Offred— 

assigned to the house of a commander 

named Fred (Joseph Fiennes)—narrates the 

story, and we quickly learn that her child has 

been taken from her, and her husband shot, 

as the family tried to escape to Canada. 

Atwood and I are meeting at L’Espresso 

Bar Mercurio, a boîte with an edge of 

old-world formality where she, along with 

much of the University of Toronto humanities 

faculty, likes to conduct meetings. A 

lovely floral/herbal smell envelops us as 

we speak, which Atwood says is probably 

her lotion, though she won’t identify it. 

She’s wearing a fuchsia vest, fuzzy polar 

fleece pants, and pearl drop earrings. Like 

the Mercurio, her outfit is both cozy and elegant, 

warm but strict. 

With typical pragmatism, Atwood is having 

none of my grand suggestion that there 

is symbolism behind her being the one to 

strike a blow. (Bruce Miller, the series showrunner, 

affirms my interpretation, however: 

“Of course, she had to have that role.”) 

The Handmaid’s Tale has been perceived as 

an awakening slap—yes, this could happen 

here—since the day it was published. That 

was in the Reagan era, when the Republican 

Party, once champion of causes like the 

Equal Rights Amendment, became entwined 

with the Moral Majority. Cofounded by televangelist 

Jerry Falwell, the powerful lobbying 

group opposed government programs 

that supported single mothers or helped 

women advance in the workforce—the ERA 

was verboten—while promoting prayer in 

schools and sexual-abstinence education. 

But The Handmaid’s Tale seems even 

more prescient now. As in our current 

state—at least if you’re persuaded by White 

House chief strategist Steve Bannon that the 

Western world is at the dawn of a “global 

war” against “jihadist Islamic fascism”—the 

Republic of Gilead is in a holy war with religious 

forces outside its (locked) borders. 

And considering our virtually all-whitemale 

presidential cabinet, for whom controlling 

female reproductive freedom is a 

central agenda and closing the church/state 

gap an ominous subtext, the “Leaders of the 

Faithful,” who run Gilead, sound familiar, 

too. As Moss put it in an e-mail, “The first 

time I met Margaret, I asked her if she felt 

she predicted the future when she wrote the 

book. She said no, but five months later we 

were at a wrap party, and we turned to each 

other and both said, ‘Wow,’ because now 

the beginnings of what she warns us about 

in the book are happening in America.” 

Hulu has invested heavily in the show, 

airing a spooky Handmaid’s ad during the 

Super Bowl, where 30-second spots go for 

around $5 million. The series, also starring 

Orange Is the New Black’s Samira Wiley as 

Offred’s best friend, is open-ended. That 

means Miller—a former showrunner for ER 

who most recently helped create the postapocalyptic 

sci-fi drama The 100—gets to 

collaborate with Atwood to fill in parts of the 

story only alluded to in the book. “What’s 

happening in Canada, which now has a massive 

refugee problem?” Miller says, offering 

examples of new material. “And in Israel, 

where Jewish people have been shipped? 

The officers’ lives? It’s kind of a dream come 

Stills: Take Five/Hulu 

228

Credits Tkers 

er sentences. She’s been short-listed for the 

Man Booker Prize five times (and won once, 

for The Blind Assassin, a plot-twisty historical 

metafiction about two sisters in 1930s and 

’40s Ontario); in March, she won the 2017 

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award 

from the National Book Critics Circle. 

She gets as much attention for her environmental 

and humanist advocacy as she 

does for her 16 novels, 15 books of poetry, 

10 works of nonfiction, 8 short-story collections, 

8 children’s books, and two graphic 

novels. She’s a Twitter adept with 1.4 million 

followers—and can even claim her own 

“gate” hashtag. During Justin Trudeau’s 

successful race to unseat conservative Stephen 

Harper as Canadian prime minister in 

2015, Atwood wrote a piece for the National 

Post criticizing an attack ad against the 

liberal Trudeau that featured the tag line 

“ ‘Nice hair,’ Justin.” (Which candidate, Atwood 

parried, was using taxpayers’ money 

to travel with a personal grooming assistant? 

“Hint: Initials are S.H.”) When the 

right-leaning Post mysteriously removed her 

column for several hours, then brought it 

back with edits, #hairgate spread. 

Part of Atwood’s public appeal is that for 

such a literary heavyweight, she has a light 

touch and a graceful, outward-looking retrue, 

the possibilities for story.” 

Although The Handmaid’s Tale 

has never been out of print, sales 

are up 30 percent since 2015, and 

Penguin Random House has 

had to supply an extra 250,000 

copies to meet postelection demand. 

Other dystopian novels, 

such as George Orwell’s 1984, are 

also resurgent, but Handmaid’s 

is the unofficial spirit guide of 

the protests against Trump administration 

policies. Fans fill Instagram 

with images of tattoos saying Nolite te bastardes 

carborundorum—the words Offred 

found scratched in her closet floor from a 

member of the resistance. At various post- 

Inauguration women’s marches, signs pop 

up with slogans such as “Make Margaret Atwood 

Fiction Again” and “The Handmaid’s 

Tale Is Not an Instruction Manual.” 

In fact, in a wonderful irony, the profusion 

of pink pussyhats at the marches, with their 

earlike protrusions, echo the handmaids’ 

white wimples as they appeared on the 

iconic original book cover. A point Atwood 

makes to me, and notes that she’s repeated 

often, is that everything that happens in The 

Handmaid’s Tale has some historical precedent, 

from the sumptuary laws that determined 

which social class could wear what 

garb, to the impact of pollution on fertility 

(“Look it up in your browser!”), to Americans 

fleeing for Canada. (“It happened 

during Vietnam and when the Loyalists fled 

the Revolution.”) 

Atwood has pulled off the feat of being 

a “living legend who continues to remain 

fresh and innovative on the page,” as a New 

York Times reviewer recently wrote. Over 

the course of her career, she’s coaxed us into 

the dark of injustice with ever-lighter, funni- 

229 

Atwood says she writes 

speculative, not science, 

fiction. Everything 

in Handmaid’s has some 

historical precedent. 

In addition to The 

Handmaid’s Tale, two 

other Atwood books 

are being made for TV: 

Alias Grace and the 

MaddAddam trilogy. 

sponsiveness. She has two other TV projects 

in the works: Black Swan director Darren 

Aronofsky is adapting her MaddAddam trilogy, 

and Anna Paquin is set to star in a sixpart 

Netflix miniseries based on Alias Grace. 

Outside the entertainment realm, Atwood’s 

somewhat cockamamy-sounding (at least in 

2004) start-up idea called LongPen—which 

allows authors to sign books long distance— 

has turned into Syngrafii, a legitimate software 

business that facilitates off-site document 

signing. She’s in on the small-batch 

coffee trend, having helped create “Atwood 

Blend,” the proceeds from which support 

Ontario’s Pelee Island Bird Observatory. 

And she steadfastly refuses to indulge in 

Canada’s predilection for smugness, in full 

tilt since Trump, pointing out that Toronto 

not long ago elected so-called crack mayor 

Rob Ford. “Trump is going to do a lot of the 

same things [Harper did],” Atwood tells me. 

“Muzzle government scientists. Get rid of 

women’s programs. Somebody such as Ann 

Coulter will be put in an Aunt Lydia position 

as the head of all women.” 

At that, the author leans across the table 

and grabs my wrist, bearing down on 

me with her clear, almost impossibly blue 

eyes. “We’re just trying to help you, dear,” 

she says, putting on a splendid Aunt Lydia– 

meets–Ann Coulter performance. “We’re 

going to keep you safe. Stand in that line!” 

The daughter of an entomologist, Atwood 

spent her early years tracking infestations in 

the northern Ontario and Quebec woods for 

her father to study, until the family, which 

also included her homemaker mother, sister, 

and brother, moved to Toronto when 

she was eight. In her memoir-esque In Other 

Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, she 

describes herself as an itinerant wild child 

who wrote and illustrated elaborate stories 

about flying rabbits who had cats for pets. 

As an undergrad, she studied literature at 

the University of Toronto, then went to Radcliffe 

College (still known as the “Harvard 

Annex”) to focus on the Victorians. Atwood 

had decided in high school to become a writer 

229

—notwithstanding her affinity for biology, 

which remains a hobby and a source of material—and 

crafted stories and poetry as 

a grad student, to her colleagues’ disdain. 

“You weren’t a serious academic if you wrote 

[fiction],” she says. “Twenty-three was the 

hardest year. Twenty is hell. It’s iffy. You don’t 

know what the plot is.” 

Then she won the Governor General’s 

Award in 1967 for a book of poems, Circle 

Game. With her master’s but an unfinished 

PhD, she left Harvard and, at 28, returned 

to Canada and the tabula rasa that was her 

native country’s literature scene. She lived 

in Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton, and 

Europe—publishing and teaching at various 

universities—before settling down, more or 

less permanently, in Ontario, first in farm 

country, then, in 1980, in Toronto. When I ask 

if it was daunting to enter a field dominated 

by male authors, she deadpans, “What male 

authors? It was Canada.” She became both 

creator and chronicler of the barely existent 

world of Canadian fiction. “I had an advantage 

in two ways,” she says. “There were no 

huge literary giants—Melville, Hawthorne, 

Whitman, Dickinson—looming over us at 

that time. Yes, there were writers, but they 

weren’t writing crush-your-soul, ‘you’re not 

as good as this’ [books].” 

She also had a sense that writing was an acceptable 

occupation for a Canadian woman. 

“The United States was quite different from 

a lot of other countries because it was started 

by seventeenth-century Puritans, [a group] 

that was very male dominated,” she says. 

“Whereas Canada, on the English side, was 

populated in the early nineteenth century by 

Samira Wiley 

as Offred’s best 

friend, Moira; 

Joseph Fiennes as 

Commander Fred. 

literate women who were already published 

writers. On the French side were nuns who 

were literate and publishing and writing.” 

Not that she didn’t confront inequality: “I 

like to horrify the young by saying things like 

‘When I went to graduate school at Harvard, 

you weren’t let into the Lamont Library—it 

was only for boys. Not only that, in our graduate 

seminar, the girls made tea and cookies 

for the boys.’ ” She doesn’t remember feeling 

angry, she says. “I didn’t even know it was sexism. 

At the time, you didn’t get it that maybe 

there’s a dark side to that. You didn’t resent.” 

This is what she says now, at least. She’s 

been with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson for 

46 years and ends the acknowledgments to 

her most recent novel, Hag-Seed, an adaptation 

of The Tempest, with “my special thanks 

to Graeme Gibson—an old enchanter, though 

happily not the one in this book.” He has a 

T-shirt with a quote from an article about Atwood: 

“Every woman writer should be married 

to Graeme Gibson.” 

But her brilliant first novel, The Edible 

Woman, which immediately established her 

as a significant voice and is considered one 

of the galvanizing works of second-wave 

feminism, tells a different story of Atwood’s 

attitude toward womanhood, circa 1960. A 

novel-length metaphor of anger, resentment, 

and suffocation, the book centers on a young 

woman named Marian living in Toronto. 

Engaged to be married, she slowly anthropomorphizes 

each and every food group, empathizing 

so deeply with their pain at being 

consumed (including the shrieking carrot 

pulled from the ground) that she stops being 

able to eat at all. 

Atwood’s upper hand, of course, was that 

of the confident sublimator who, rather than 

being consumed herself, leveraged her anger 

into the capital of art. To one set of her 

admirers—call them the interior-minded 

realists—the Atwood book that inspires the 

fiercest devotion is Cat’s Eye, an autobiographical 

bildungsroman that put female 

friendship in its rightful place almost a full 

25 years before Elena Ferrante mined the 

subject in her lauded Neapolitan novels. In 

Cat’s Eye, Elaine, a painter, is the daughter of 

an entomologist who moves to Toronto after 

a life in the woods unencumbered by social 

constraints. Readers follow her through an 

early marriage and the birth of a daughter 

(Atwood has a daughter, born in 1976, with 

Gibson) and meet her again when she’s 50, 

visiting Toronto for a retrospective of her art. 

(Through Elaine, Atwood perfectly expresses 

the gall that fills so many women upon realizing, 

with a start, that they’ve become the 

chief domestic and emotional laborer in the 

family enterprise. Elaine is banging around 

in the kitchen while her artist-husband loiters 

in the living room with a friend. “What’s 

wrong with her?” the friend asks. “She’s mad 

because she’s a woman,” the husband replies. 

At which point Elaine stands in the doorway 

and announces: “I’m not mad because I’m a 

woman. I’m mad because you’re an asshole.”) 

But the heart of Cat’s Eye is the evolution 

of the friendship between Elaine and her 

girlhood friend Cordelia, who, when she recognizes 

in the preteen Elaine a sense of freedom 

and scientific curiosity she’s never been 

allowed, endeavors to “improve” her. Cordelia 

selects two henchgirls for the task, and 

the trio slowly psychologically torture Elaine: 

forcing her to walk ahead of them on the way 

home from school while they criticize her 

comportment, rating her locution, teaching 

her manners, and punishing her with exclusion 

and, eventually, worse. 

When I read Cat’s Eye shortly after it was 

published, it was the mean-girl episodes 

that I most related to. Rereading it now, at 

46, about the age when Atwood wrote it, 

I’m moved to tears multiple times at the true 

subject of the book: time itself, the impossible, 

insurmountable layers of loss its passing 

piles on. Now that I know what it’s like to have 

forgotten pieces of my history surface unannounced, 

then recede as suddenly as they 

appear, it’s Atwood’s ability to capture the vicissitudes 

of other selves living within us that 

seems most remarkable. 

After Cat’s Eye, Atwood made a genre 

shift into speculative fiction, which to her 

is based on things that could happen—as 

opposed to science fiction, which she cate- 

Stills: Take Five/Hulu; Atwood: Getty Images 

230

Atwood has produced work that 

is true to her public role, and her 

public role is true to her work—a feat 

perhaps equal to magic. 

gorizes as invented from whole cloth. Her 

later novels—Alias Grace, The Robber Bride, 

the MaddAddam trilogy—are rich in fantasy 

or scientific or historical conceits, and very 

plot driven. These are the books that appeal 

to a second group of devotees, and alienate 

some of the first, who still thirst for her 

chronicling of the folds and nuances of the 

female experience. 

Atwood credits her parents’ child-rearing 

technique, in part, for her willingness to 

embark on brand-new storytelling territory: 

“ ‘Stiffen your spine! Stand up for yourself! 

Don’t waste your brain. Do what’s right even 

if it’s hard! Chop some wood! Drive the boat. 

This is how you make a piecrust.’ Basically, 

they let me do whatever,” she says. 

In a discussion with her friend and fellow 

speculator, Ursula K. Le Guin, at the Portland 

Arts & Lectures series in 2010, Atwood said 

she’d lost interest in contemporary realism 

because it had become overly concerned with 

well-off people and their problems, with little 

room left for “bearing witness” outside that 

sphere. These days, she tells me, only half 

joking, it’s less true, since keeping a journal 

of day-to-day life in the U.S. would be “very 

Le Guin—only, um, real.” Of course, many 

contemporary fiction writers have followed 

Atwood into speculative or science fiction— 

Chang-Rae Lee and Lionel Shriver, to name 

just two—and the genre has positively exploded 

in the YA realm. (And Atwood may be 

in the process of converting those of us who 

wish her to stick with limning the inner world 

of the now: I loved her 2015 novel, the creepily 

mesmerizing The Heart Goes Last, which 

begins as a straightforward dystopian about 

a couple in the near future who agree to live 

in prison half the year to pay for their liberty 

the other half, but veers into an exploration of 

sexual desire in the technological age.) 

Just as she hasn’t hesitated to stretch her 

readers, Atwood has been willing to mess 

with her millennial feminist fans’ heads. She 

recently signed an open letter in defense of 

professor and writer Steven Galloway, who 

was fired by the University of British Columbia 

for undivulged reasons after being 

accused of sexual indiscretions by former 

students. An active member of PEN International, 

which fights for freedom of expression, 

Atwood believed the investigation 

against Galloway was neither fair nor transparent. 

“If it’s a matter of rape, then it should 

be a matter of jail,” she wrote in The Walrus 

magazine. 

This prompted outrage from women who 

thought Atwood should know better than to 

assume publicly challenging a powerful professor 

would be easy, or lead to justice. Along 

with internalizing the lessons her parents instilled 

in her about doing the right thing, Atwood 

comes from the generation of women 

who made it in spite of sexism. So while she’s 

well aware of the systemic problems that impede 

women’s progress, she’s also attached to 

the possibility of individual triumph against 

the odds. She’s as willing to hold women responsible 

as men: A central theme of The 

Handmaid’s Tale is how women get lulled into 

acquiescence with the dominant paradigms. 

For the sheer release of it, the handmaids 

beat to death a man who the regime claims 

is a rapist, even as they suspect he’s actually 

a member of the resistance. Atwood e-mails 

me after our interview: “Remember how old I 

am. Totalitarianisms, many of which existed 

during my lifetime and formative years, don’t 

stop at women! They oppress everyone who is 

not the ruling elite.” 

Although Atwood was able to find her place 

in the literary scene free of competition, now 

that she’s a star, not just in her own country 

but in the world, she does have a “crush-yoursoul” 

good Canadian figure with whom to 

contend: Alice Munro, also a writer of the 

female experience and a genius of the short 

story. While Atwood has collected loads of 

honors, she did not win the Nobel, as Munro 

did in 2013. I don’t ask Atwood if she was 

envious of her colleague and friend’s prize; it 

would go beyond the pale of manners. Whatever 

nugget of envy (surely healthy) might 

lurk has been transformed into a wonderful 

show of sisterhood: Atwood wrote an encomium 

upon Munro’s win for the Guardian. 

Both of them found their early readers 

through a grasp of a distinctly Canadian 

brand of prudish, judge-y limit setting (aka 

tall-poppy syndrome). It’s an attitude, to some 


EVERYBODY HAS HER REASONS 

Over the next few months, Linda Tirado will be talking to a group of women in America— 

here, you’ll meet three of them—about what influenced them to vote for Donald Trump 

and how he’s met their expectations so far. Hint: Social media figures prominently in their 

views, and it’s getting ever more personal. PHOTOGRAPHY BY SKYE PARROTT 

Solipsism is self-soothing. It is easier to believe 

that everyone knows everything you 

do, and thus you can assume that when they 

come to a different conclusion than you have, 

they are being intentionally wrongheaded, 

or selfish, or evil. Only, what if they aren’t? 

What if you, given the information they have, 

would have reached the same conclusion 

they did? What if the problem in America is 

that millions of us, on the right and on the 

left, have been propagandized? In all the 

discussions of fake news, we seem to keep 

missing the most important conversation of 

all: Different information leads to different 

decisions for most rational thinkers. 

Starting this month and continuing periodically 

over the rest of the year in the pages 

of ELLE, I’m checking in with a small group 

of women in America—from rural Oregonians 

to suburban Atlantans—all of them 

intelligent beings who seriously considered 

the world as they understand it and voted accordingly—for 

Donald J. Trump. I’d expected 

to find anger and status anxiety driving their 

votes. What I found instead was fear and misinformation, 

and I had trouble finding women 

who’d go on the record for this series. Many 

were afraid of backlash at work or on social 

media; some worried that I’d mock them in 

these mainstream-media pages. They’re not 

exactly wrong to be afraid: The political has 

become personal in myriad ways. This isn’t a 

sympathetic portrait of the downtrodden or a 

bid to infantilize grown women. I’m interested 

in what people believe to be true and why. 

We have to grapple with the flow of information 

in our society. We aren’t all starting with 

the same facts, and if there is any one thing 

that will kill this nation, it’s refusing to recognize 

and remedy that. 

BRITTANY FEIWELL 

HENDERSON, NEVADA 

Brittany Feiwell is that political unicorn: 

a true independent with a “completely 

mixed social circle,” as she calls it. Her 

Facebook feed is half conservatives in 

Miami and half liberals from California—both 

places she’s lived. She and 

her husband, Scott, were in L.A. for five 

years. They have three children under 

the age of 10, and she stays home with 

them. She says she’ll eventually get back 

into the digital marketing contract work 

she used to do, but for now, she’s focused 

on her family. 

Ten years ago, the Feiwells moved to 

Henderson—the second-largest city in 

Nevada, just 16 miles from Las Vegas— 

largely for quality-of-life reasons: bigger 

house, lower taxes, less crime. Hender- 

232

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son, notably, turns up on many safestcity-in-America 

lists. Since the Feiwells 

do well enough with Scott’s small businesses 

in marketing and material handling, 

the fact that Brittany’s not working 

doesn’t create financial stress for 

the family. 

We discuss the madness that has overcome 

America in recent years, which 

she describes as “kind of astounding, 

really. You used to be able to talk 

about politics, and maybe it was tense, 

but it wasn’t so full of hatred.” We talk 

about the fear we share that the nation 

might be actually breaking apart. She 

always votes in presidential elections. 

She says she voted for Trump on largely 

economic grounds, and doesn’t want 

to get into the weeds of his position on 

abortion. (Trump promised to defund 

Planned Parenthood and suggested 

punishing women who got abortions.) 

She wants the president to focus instead 

on American prosperity. “People are 

angry and afraid when they’re struggling,” 

she says. “We’d do better making 

Continued on page 289 

KIMBERLEY EUSTON 

M A R I E T TA , G EO RG I A 

Kimberley Euston lives in a big, beautiful 

house in the exclusive East Cobb section 

near Marietta, Georgia. Georgia remained 

red in the 2016 election, despite prognostications 

that it might not. But Marietta, a 

town 20 miles up I-75 from Atlanta, has been 

growing bluer with each election, and Clinton 

bested Trump here by about 30 percent. 

A lot of Euston’s friends voted for Trump, 

and a lot of her friends voted for Clinton. It 

was Euston’s dislike of Clinton—and I can’t 

emphasize this enough—that was the animating 

factor in her vote for Trump. 

Euston is a high-level executive at a wellknown 

private accounting firm in Atlanta 

(she doesn’t want to name it), and her earnings 

and those of her husband, Greg, put them 

in the one percent. After she graduated from 

Sweet Briar College in 1992, she worked for 

the State Department in the Bureau of International 

Narcotics and then joined Vice President 

Dan Quayle’s national security staff. 

Greg Euston owns a PR firm that specializes 

in corporate and environmental communications, 

and their sons (she has twin 16-year-old 

boys and a 13-year-old daughter) are soccer 

stars, making her an actual suburban soccer 

mom. Remember them, that mythic voting 

bloc back in 1996? She is on the board of the 

Georgia chapter of Covenant House, which 

works on child homelessness issues; her husband 

is a trustee of the Georgia Conservancy, 

an environmental group. Their conservatism 

is the old-guard sort—as in party-of-Lincoln 

old-guard—and she’s always voted Republican 

in presidential elections. 

Euston is originally from a small community 

in West Virginia, Glen Daniel, 

with family roots in construction and coal 

mining, and the rural working-class mentality 

has stuck with her—even though she 

worked on Wall Street and for the veep. 

She straddles two worlds: the one she came 

from, where “people are poor, are hurting,” 

and the one in which she lives now, where 

“we give everyone participation trophies.” 

She wants a more conservative America, 

and a tougher one, too. 

234

But she’s had her beefs with the Republican 

Party. Euston, who’s 47, voted for John 

Kasich in the primaries and is not happy with 

the state of the GOP and its values since the 

election of George W. Bush, when social 

conservatives were seriously mobilized as a 

voting bloc. “Inclusiveness has kind of gone 

away from the party,” she says. “The religious 

right has had control of the party, but 

the party needs to stay away from the social 

issues.… If I were raped, or my daughter were 

raped, I should have the right to choose what 

I would do with my body.” 

She believes in limited government, 

keeping a strong military to maintain superpower 

status, financial-sector deregulation, 

and entrepreneurship. For her, “a successful 

[Trump] presidency will be if we’re 

seeing an increase in the real GDP and in 

jobs, and I think those things will happen 

if there are fewer regulations, and if we 

can even look at changing the tax code to 

make investing in America better for people 

again because it’s—we have the highest 

corporate tax code among industrial nations. 

So growth, jobs, GDP—that’s what 

I’m watching closely.” 

A reluctant Trump voter, she contends that 

everyone should vote as a matter of civic responsibility, 

and she loathes Hillary Clinton 

on principle, saying that Clinton believes herself 

to be “above and beyond the law.” 

Given her background in DC Republican 

politics and civil service, I ask what she 

thought of the mess that was Trump’s first 

six weeks: his immigration-ban forays and 

his gambit on the repeal of the Affordable 

Continued on page 290 

KRISTIE DAVIS 

HARNEY COUNTY, OREGON 

I first met Kristie Davis at a campfire in Harney 

County, Oregon, in January 2016, where 

she and I were discussing the relative merits 

of armed rebellion. Literally a stone’s throw 

from the thousand-acre farm where Davis 

lives with her husband and two teenage 

daughters, an armed group led by Ammon 

Bundy had overrun the Malheur National 

Wildlife Refuge. Bundy and company 

claimed they were fighting the federal government’s 

jurisdiction over lands on which 

ranchers wanted to graze their cattle, as 

well as protesting the treatment of two local 

ranchers named Dwight and Steven Hammond 

(who didn’t particularly want Bundy’s 

“help”) who’d been convicted of burning 

acreage that belonged to the feds. I was on 

assignment to cover the standoff, and once 

Davis found out I’d been planning to sleep 

outside in subfreezing temperatures—I grew 

up in the mountains and had the proper 

gear, but still, it’s not something you really 

want to do—she insisted that I come stay 

with her family for the duration of my visit. 

Kristie, 45, is headstrong and mouthy, the 

sort of woman you’d describe as taking no 

shit from anyone. She gets it from her mother, 

Sandy Potter, 64, who lives nearby and 

was at that campfire as well. I let them take 

me to where it was warm and there was elk 

steak, because I am not stupid. 

The closest town to Davis’s spread is 

Burns, population 2,757—the largest town in 

Harney County, which is the largest county 

by area in Oregon. Ranching and farming 

are the major professions here, and it’s a 

precarious living; one late spring blizzard 

or one worse-than-usual summer drought 

can easily turn Davis’s tight margin of profit 

growing alfalfa hay, grain, and mint leaf 

(for tea) into a loss. Given that, Kristie and 

her husband, Herb, do well in the context 

of their environs. They pay for their own 

private health insurance—not Obamacare. 

They have one full-time employee, and for a 


ASK E. JEAN 

What to do if you’re living a lucky life? 

Stop making problems for yourself, already! 

Plus, a passel of clever retorts to those who 

insist on inquiring about your childless state 

MODELING 

SINFUL BEHAVIOR 

DEAR E. JEAN: I eloped last year with an 

extraordinary Spartan warrior of a man. 

We lead a charmed life, traveling to faraway 

lands, sleeping together in jungles under the 

stars, and I could not dream of a better mate. 

But something bothers me: Three years ago, 

after he promised to quit his James Bond– 

esque life to be with me and I abandoned a 

promising modeling career in New York to be 

with him, I was at a party and got blackoutdrunk. 

It was the first and last time in my 

life I got that drunk, and I let someone else (a 

puppy-like man whom I’m not attracted to at 

all, at all, at all) kiss me. 

I don’t have any recollection of this. It’s 

just black nothingness. When I was told 

about the kiss, it felt like I was being gaslighted 

by a mean joke. Nothing like this has ever 

happened to me—I’m known as picky and 

standoffish. For three years, I’ve been a sinless 

angel, so this fall continues to rattle my 

sense of identity and self-confidence! How 

can I shake the feeling that when all inhibitions 

are removed, I’m not nearly as extraordinary 

as I think I am? My husband and I 

agree: If a relationship isn’t “something for 

the ages,” why bother? Obviously, I’d never 

tell my husband, but have I ruined our great 

love? I’ve always prided myself on my elevated 

way of behaving, and now I feel the balance of 

our relationship is off. My husband has been 

perfect, and I have done a sad thing. 

—Fallen From Grace 

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! My heart rejoiceth! 

You are the first “sinless angel” to appear in 

an American advice column. 

I don’t know how long you’re planning on 

visiting us down here, Miss Fallen; Earth is 

a strange and marvelous place. You see, on 

this planet, nobody is “perfect.” We all sin 

around here. Today, I myself trespassed and 

forgave those who trespassed against me— 

and hell, it’s not even lunchtime yet. 

You’re “sinless,” Fallen, so excuse my 

bluntness—it’s kindly meant: People here 

aren’t crazy about (pardon me) “picky and 

standoffish” former-model angels flapping 

around. Accordingly, I’m 97 percent certain 

that a “mean joke” was, in fact, played upon 

you by a bunch of humorless mortal dimwits. 

Ping the puppy and ask him what your lips 

were doing. (If they were, in truth, smacking 

him—LOL and forgive thyself. Your love is not 

“ruined”; it’s tougher because 

you’ve learned a lesson.) 

Go easy on yourself, Fallen. 

While visiting Earth, remember 

that no wife or husband 

is “for the ages.” Get that 

straight now, or suffer the 

tortures of the damned when 

Mr. Spartan Warrior forgets 

and leaves his befouled socks 

on the floor, and you discover 

he’s a mortal man—chockfull 

of follies and nonsense. 

PS: Upon your return to 

Heaven, tell those two archangels, 

Gabriel and Michael, 

43 MINUTES 

Morning 

toilette 

14 MINUTES 

Cover 

nakedness 

“hello” from old E. Jean—and that they have 

a good time coming their way if ever they 

drop by. 

MORNING, GLORY: 

MINUTE BY MINUTE 

DEAR E. JEAN: My morning routine: Wake 

up at 6 a.m. Fall back asleep. Wake up again 

at 7 a.m. Look at my phone. Start shouting at 

myself. Enter bathroom. Exit feeling calm and 

fresh. Look at my phone. Discover I’ve spent 

40 minutes in there! At this point, I’m no longer 

calm. I start getting dressed and looking 

desperately for the top I could swear was on 

the drying rack. Now it’s 7:55. This leaves me 

five minutes to do my hair—and I never go 

a day without a compliment on my hair. It is 

8:26 a.m. when I finish my hair. Feeling that I 

am forgetting something keeps me in the house 

until 8:40. I arrive at work at 9:25—late. This 

happens every day! I cannot get myself out of 

this rut! Can you help? 

—The Girl Who Runs Late 

My Girl: Begin your routine 15 minutes 

earlier, and you’ve got yourself the kind of 

gorgeously ambitious day that F. Scott Fitzgerald 

writes of in The Great Gatsby. To wit: 

6:45: Open eyes. 

6:45–6:46: Rise to sitting 

30 MINUTES 

Arrange 

tresses 

1 MINUTE 

Guzzle H2O 

elixir 

position. Raise glass from 

bedside table. Toast to “falling 

in love.” Drink 10 ounces 

of water. All sorts of sweet, 

exciting health benefits are 

ascribed to drinking water 

first thing in the morning on 

an empty stomach (jolts metabolism, 

revs the digestive 

tract, thrills the brain, and so 

on), but these claims never 

mention the main thing: It 

wakes a betch up! 

6:47: Enter bathroom. 

7:30: Exit bathroom. 

7:31: Get dressed. Now, Gatsby had a lot 

of shirts, yes. But if you pry open your closet 

the night before and use your imagination, 

you can style four or five profoundly interesting 

outfits straight from the castoffs in 

the back. (I can only imagine what you may 

find in the front. One need only strike envy 

in the hearts of two or three women on the 

walk to work to understand how really important 

clothes are.) Hang your day’s outfit 

on the closet door the night before. 

7:45: Hair. (And may Auntie Eeee just say, 

Your hair looks stunning!) 

8:15: Exit house. There’ll be no frenzied 

loping through the premises, muttering, 

“Where are my sunglasses? Where are my 

Gregg Delman (styled by Christian Stroble; hair by Eduardo Carrasco at Ford Artists NYC; makeup by Sylwia Rakowska at Ford Artists NYC) 

238

damn sunglasses?” Everything you need for 

the day will be neatly arranged and waiting 

by the front door. Why? Because you put it 

there the night before. 

8:58: Arrive at work. You can’t change the 

world unless you get out of bed. 

WHAT IS IT WITH 

YOU DUDES AND YOUR 

MOTHERS-IN-LAW? 

DEAR E. JEAN: I’m a guy. My wife and I 

met when we were in college. Her mother was 

good-looking and very nice, and as time went 

on, we developed a close relationship. It eventually 

led to cuddling. Clothes on, then naked. 

She never really wore underwear, and I loved 

it. To sum it up, we did oral a few times and 

intercourse twice. She taught me things, helped 

me grow and experience life as most people 

don’t. Eventually our meetings stopped when 

she moved to another state, but I couldn’t quit 

thinking about her. 

After we married, I told my wife everything. 

She said she pretty much suspected this had 

been going on, but she was still mad for a while. 

Then she told me it turns her on to imagine 

what happened. That got me superexcited, and 

we’ve been role-playing during sex. Is this normal? 

Is it okay? I was researching this topic and 

read your answer where you were angry with the 

guy for propositioning his mother-in-law. 

—Good Karma 

Karma, You Bounder: You refer, of course, 

to “Frogman,” the British Royal Marine who 

snuck behind his wife’s back and pestered his 

poor mother-in-law for sex so often that I had 

to forbid him from speaking to any motherin-law, 

including Queen Elizabeth II. 

And as for you, you abysmal chump, let’s 

see: The woman who taught you to “experience 

life as most people don’t” is now out of 

the picture. The lovely, trusting young wife 

you betrayed—lied to, cheated on—does 

she leave you? Does she give you a running 

kick out the door? Does she even excoriate 

you for your faithlessness? No! Her amorous 

romps with you are now twice as exciting! 

What can I say? You’re one of those 

irrepressibly lucky people who escape life’s 

moral muckheaps unscathed. So, naw. I 

will not be “angry” with you. (Just ignore 

the silent rebuke in my eyes.) 

And speaking of mothers… 

THE AGONY OF 

AUNTS 

DEAR E. JEAN: I’m a married 38-year-old 

woman who does not want children. My husband, 

parents, and dearest friends have always 

supported this decision. I’m a devoted aunt to 

my nieces and nephews and have tons of respect 

for parents. I just don’t want to be one. 

However, everyone seems to be pressuring 

me to have kids! People I don’t even know 

well—friends of friends, random taxi drivers—constantly 

comment: “Why don’t you 

have kids yet?” or “You should have kids before 

it’s too late!” 

Can you please help me find a polite, nonaggressive 

way to shut down these conversations 

without sounding like a kid hater? 

—So Ova It! 

Ova, My Orchid: When people ask, “Why 

don’t you have kids yet?,” smile, open your 

arms wide, and cry out: “Eeeeeegads! Am I 

not enough for you?” 

Q: My boyfriend asks why I don’t dress up like I 

once did. He says he longs for “the good old days” 

when I showed I cared about him. But the truth is, 

I’m just so comfortable with him that I feel I can be 

myself. E. Jean, must I put on a dress and mascara? 

A: Yes, you must. You’ll look great in the dress. 

He’ll feel great that you dressed up, and nothing 

will be as great as you both coming home 

together and putting on your old pajamas. 

And then keep smiling, because the question 

will never, never, never cease. When 

you turn 50, people will ask: “Are you considering 

adoption?” (Answer: “Yes. Elton 

John and his husband, David Furnish, are 

considering adopting me.”) When you turn 

60, the question will be: “Why didn’t you 

have kids?” (Answer: “Because I saw how 

your parents’ kids turned out.”) When you 

turn 70, the question will be: “Do you regret 

not having kids?” (Answer: “Are you kidding? 

I still get up every morning and thank 

God I don’t have children!”) When you turn 

80, the question will be: “Do you wish you 

had kids to help you with the house?” (Answer: 

“I wish I had rich kids—can you lend 

me $1,700?”) When you turn 90, the question 

will be: “Who will be at your deathbed, 

since you don’t have kids?” (Answer: “My 

husband, my dog, and my seven lovers.”) 

And when you die serenely at 103, the first 

question the obit writer from the New York 

Times will ask your niece: “Why didn’t your 

aunt have kids?” 

METTA DATA 

DEAR E. JEAN: I’m curious: Should I have sex 

before marriage? 

—XX Metta 

Miss Metta: Before I respond, please answer 

two questions for me: (1) How old are you? 

(2) Are you in love? 

—Ravishing Regards, E. Jean 

AUNTIE EEEE: I’m 22. Just graduating college. 

An old soul. As for being in love, every day 

is like Hozier’s song—I fall in love with someone 

new. Keeping this in mind, I’ve been in love 

countless times, but I’ve never been in a relationship 

with a significant other. 

—XX Metta 

Miss Metta: Well, then, to answer your 

question: Do whatever you like before marriage—let 

the chaps pursue you the way every 

woman wants to be pursued, or move to 

a hut in the wilderness—it’s after marriage 

when you must get down to business and 

“have sex” as often as possible, because if 

you don’t, you won’t be having much sex at 

all during your divorce. 

Ask a question! E.Jean@AskEJean.com or 

Twitter.com/ejeancarroll. Read past columns at 

ELLE.com/life-love/ask-e-jean/. You can watch 

videos, write with anonymity, and exchange 

genius tips on Advice Vixens at AskEJean.com. 

And if you’d like a date: Tawkify.com. 

239

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THE 

BEAUTIFUL 

NOW 

In the hypercompetitive, rarefied 

world of professional beauty, 

what defines the look of the 

moment? In the following 24 

pages, the pulchritudinous Bella 

Hadid and many more models— 

from social media phenoms to 

far-flung global discoveries— 

prove the answer is, for once, 

truly manifold. Consider this 

issue a celebration of progress— 

for diversity of skin color, hair 

texture, and body shape, yes, but 

also dreams and ideas—and a bid 

for much more of it to come. 

Terry Tsiolis 

Gold and diamond 

pendant necklace, 

CARTIER, $4,000, 

visit cartier.com. 

For details, see 

Shopping Guide.

SUPER 

GIRLS 

Their backstories may vary, but these six top models have plenty 

in common: good genes, professional discipline, and the kind 

of star power and charisma that jump through the lens and stop 

fashion lovers in their tracks. By Molly Langmuir 

Photographed by Terry Tsiolis Styled by Samira Nasr 

242

HAILEY 

BALDWIN 

Daughter of The Usual Suspects 

actor Stephen, cousin to model 

Ireland, niece to Alec (not to 

mention onetime love interest of 

Justin Bieber), Hailey Baldwin has 

made a seamless transition from 

Hollywood royalty to fashion rock 

star. “It just happened naturally 

and progressed,” says Baldwin, 

20, who switched her focus from 

ballet to modeling when she 

was 17. Now best friends with 

fellow social-media-queens– 

turned–models Kendall Jenner 

and Gigi Hadid, Baldwin has a 

whopping 9.4 million followers on 

Instagram, where her feed brims 

with not only glamour shots from 

fashion shoots and shows around 

the world but also Bible verses 

(“My faith is something people 

sometimes get surprised by”) 

and casual, makeup-free shots. 

“I think naturally pretty is the way 

to go,” says Baldwin, currently 

the face of Guess and a cohost of 

TBS’s celebrity rap-battle show, 

Drop the Mic. She cites another 

beachy blonde, Claudia Schiffer, 

as her beauty icon. “Girls should 

feel confident in themselves 

without having to alter anything.” 

Far left: Cotton briefs, CALVIN KLEIN 

UNDERWEAR, $28, visit calvinklein 

.com. Rose gold and diamond earrings, 

HEARTS ON FIRE, $5,900. Right: 

Cotton T-shirt, CALVIN KLEIN 

UNDERWEAR, $40 (for pack of 3). Rigid 

Re-Release jeans, FRAME DENIM, 

$269. Silk suspenders, THE TIE BAR, 

$25. Rose gold and diamond earring, 

HEARTS ON FIRE, $5,900 (for pair). 

Steel watch, ROLEX, $6,600. Patent 

leather oxfords, SAINT LAURENT, 

$695. For details, see Shopping Guide. 

243

JASMINE 

TOOKES 

On Jasmine Tookes’s twenty-fourth 

birthday, in 2015, she learned that 

after three years of walking the 

Victoria’s Secret runway, she was 

finally becoming an Angel—one of 

the bewinged models who rep the 

brand year-round. It was a dream 

come true: As a little girl, Tookes 

had staged Victoria’s Secret shows 

at home for her mom, who was a 

stylist. “I had crowns and wings and 

scarves that I’d tie in crazy ways,” 

she says. She’d particularly looked 

up to Tyra Banks for her confidence 

and skill, and also for having 

been the first black woman to don 

the jeweled, multimillion-dollar 

Fantasy Bra, an event that basically 

anoints its wearer as the sexiest 

woman in the world. Victoria’s 

Secret knows that whichever model 

walks the runway in “Fantasy” 

will generate break-the-Internet 

numbers on social media. In 2016, 

when Tookes found out she’d be 

following in Banks’s footsteps and 

wearing that year’s version, she 

burst into tears. After moving to 

New York from Orange County, 

California, to model at 18, she’d too 

often found herself the only black 

model in a show. But since then, 

she says, “the industry has grown.” 

Last February, for the first time, at 

least one model of color appeared 

on every New York Fashion Week 

runway, and more than 30 percent 

of the models were nonwhite. 

244

Far left: Cotton swimsuit, 

MISSONI, $395, at Missoni, 

NYC. Gold and diamond wrap 

bracelet, DAVID YURMAN, 

$4,500. Her own bandanna. Left: 

Bead-embroidered jacket, $5,600, 

satin jean shorts, $2,500, both, 

MARC JACOBS, visit marcjacobs 

.com. Gold and diamond earring, 

MARIA TASH, $575. Gold and 

diamond rings, both, TIFFANY & 

CO., $2,200–$2,950 each. Her own 

earrings, worn on left. For details, 

see Shopping Guide. 

245

BELLA 

HADID 

As a Malibu teen, Bella Hadid— 

half Dutch, half Palestinian, 

all American—spent her time 

working at a juice bar, riding 

horses, and “having the high 

school experience,” she told 

ELLE, or as much as that’s 

possible when your mom is a Real 

Housewife of Beverly Hills and 

your sister, Gigi, has a burgeoning 

modeling career. But once Hadid 

met with a modeling agent at 18, 

“things went a little more full 

force than I expected.” It’s an 

understated way of describing 

the speed with which the now 

20-year-old ascended to the 

supernova status she currently 

holds: 11.2 million Instagram 

followers who fanatically follow 

her every move; more than 30 

magazine covers in 2016 alone; 

campaigns for Topshop, Balmain, 

and Dior Makeup. After long 

looking up to ’90s supermodels 

like Linda Evangelista, Hadid 

is now often compared to them. 

“There’s this extra x factor that 

makes these girls superstars,” 

designer Jeremy Scott told ELLE. 

“Bella has that.”


TOMMY BAHAMA, $112, 

visit tommybahama.com. 

Antique gold earrings, 

GLENN SPIRO. For details, 


247

CANDICE 

HUFFINE 

When Candice Huffine was 15, 

her bedroom walls were plastered 

with her favorite beauty queens, 

and she had years of pageant 

competitions already under her 

belt. So when she traveled from 

DC, her hometown, to New 

York for modeling-agency open 

calls, she assumed it would be as 

simple as signing on the dotted 

line. Instead, she heard over and 

over that they’d love to have 

her—but only if she lost 15 pounds. 

Ultimately, one agency signed her 

as a plus-size model, though the 

category left her confused: “I was 

a size 6! I went so far as to show 

them the label in my pants,” she 

says, noting that these days, she’s 

a size 12. She started booking jobs 

immediately, first for catalogs 

and magazines like Seventeen, and 

then, pivotally, she landed a 2011 

cover of Italian Vogue: “Previously, 

curvy girls had lived a quiet, 

commercial-catalog existence,” 

she says. “It ignited some 

lightbulbs in people’s heads.” 

In 2015, Huffine broke another 

barrier when she appeared in 

Pirelli’s iconic pinup calendar. 

“Growing up, my favorite model 

was Laetitia Casta, the curviest girl 

at the time,” she says. “It’s vitally 

important, moving forward, that 

there’s a woman every girl can 

identify with.” 

248

Far left: Nylon Lycra swimsuit, 

NORMA KAMALI, $150, visit 

normakamali.com. Gold hoop earrings, 

DAVID YURMAN, $2,500. Leather 

sandals, PIERRE HARDY, $845. Left: 

Denim shirt, LEVI’S, $70, visit levi 

.com. Gold chain, VERDURA, $1,425. 

Gold pinkie ring, DAVID YURMAN, 

$1,950. For details, see Shopping Guide. 

249

MARIA 

BORGES 

Born in the midst of the civil 

war in her native Angola, Maria 

Borges was raised by her sister 

from the age of 11, when their 

mother died. Often teased for 

being so tall and lean, Borges, 

who revered Naomi Campbell, 

entered a modeling competition 

in Luanda, the country’s capital, 

at 17, and while she didn’t 

win, she did land a contract. 

In her first New York Fashion 

Week, in 2011, she walked in 17 

shows, despite barely speaking 

any English (“If someone said 

something to me, I just smiled,” 

she says). By her second season, 

she was a Givenchy exclusive 

(she refers to Givenchy’s then– 

creative director Riccardo Tisci 

as her godfather); countless 

editorials, fashion shows, and 

advertising campaigns later, 

in 2015, she became the first 

black Victoria’s Secret model to 

rock her natural hair in a short 

Afro on the runway. “I wanted 

to inspire women around the 

world to embrace their own hair 

and texture, especially African 

women,” she says. Most recently, 

she was named the new face 

of L’Oréal Paris. “I’m happy to 

see this embrace of diversity 

happening right now,” she says. 

“But I hope it’s forever. Girls with 

short hair, tall girls, black girls, 

Chinese girls, Korean girls— 

we all follow fashion.” 

250

Far left: Cotton top, tights, 

$1,015 each, lace skirt, $7,500, 

brass necklace, $1,695, all, 

BALENCIAGA, visit balenciaga 

.com. Left: Gold and diamond 

earring, 2017 TIFFANY BLUE 

BOOK COLLECTION, call 

800-843-3269. For details, see 


Beauty Secret: On lids, try 

L’ORÉAL PARIS Infallible 24 HR 

Eye Shadow in Glistening Garnet. 

251

ELSA 

HOSK 

“Beauty is changing,” says the 

5'9½" Elsa Hosk, 28. “It’s more 

about finding someone with 

beliefs that you look up to versus 

just a pretty face.” For Hosk, 

a highlight of last February’s 

fashion shows was meeting 

Halima Aden, the Somali 

American model who walked the 

runway for Max Mara and Alberta 

Ferretti in a hijab and braces. “I 

was such a silly fangirl,” she says. 

“It’s more important than ever to 

stand up and have a voice.” After 

being “thrown into this crazy 

industry” at 15, then playing 

professional basketball for a 

short time in her native Sweden, 

Hosk moved to New York to 

model full-time at 20, quickly 

landing print work for Guess, 

H&M, and now Givenchy, as well 

as shows like Altuzarra, Oscar de 

la Renta, and Victoria’s Secret. 

“You’re constantly judged on 

how you look,” she says of her 

job. “But over the years, I’ve 

come to not care so much. You 

can’t be perfect—no one is.” 

252

Far left: Leather dress, silk 

chiffon dress, both, GIVENCHY 

BY RICCARDO TISCI, similar 

styles at Givenchy, NYC. Left: 

Polyamide elastane swimsuit, 

GOTTEX, $60, collection 

at Saks Fifth Avenue stores 

nationwide. Satin boots, 

GIANVITO ROSSI, $2,195. For 


Models Maria Borges, Candice Huffine, 

and Jasmine Tookes at IMG (hair by 

Romina Manenti at Home Agency for 

Amika; makeup by Frankie Boyd at Tim 

Howard Management for Tom Ford Beauty 

[all]; manicure by Gina Edwards at Kate 

Ryan Inc. for Dior Beauty; casting by Zan 

Ludlum at Zan Casting [all]). Models Elsa 

Hosk and Hailey Baldwin at IMG (hair by 

Kayla MiChele at Streeters for Message 

Organics; manicure by Elisa Ferri at See 

Management for Chanel Beauty). Model 

Bella Hadid at IMG (hair by Ward at the 

Wall Group for Living Proof). For more 

information, see Shopping Guide. 

253

EXPRESS 

Lucky us—getting to create a beauty-themed issue in a year in 

which American beauty is being redefined, everywhere from 

prime-time TV to fashion’s most-watched runways. 

Let’s take a second to consider the countless ideas and ideals 

that add up to one spectacular now 

American beauty doesn’t have a single 

definition, because no one face or body 

type could ever possibly exemplify all 

of us. From the very beginning, this 

was a nation of immigrants. In one way 

or another, we hail from everywhere, 

and the faces we see in the mirror embody 

countless, multifarious threads 

of DNA that have woven together to 

make each of us unique. No less an icon 

of truth-speaking than Maya Angelou 

once said, “In diversity there is beauty 

and there is strength.” To which we will 

add that there is power, and wonder, and 

joy. How dull would life be if we were all 

alike? American women represent every 

skin tone, every size, and every shape— 

all singular, all gorgeous—and this variety 

makes us more interesting and more 

indomitable, both together and individually. 

No matter how we choose to express 

ourselves with our hairstyles, makeup, 

and clothes—and no matter how often 

we decide to change those things 

up—we all have stories to tell, and all of 

them are good ones. Vive la différence! 

254



NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN THE NEW FACE OF AMERICAN BEAUTY SWEEPSTAKES. THIS SWEEPSTAKES IS IN NO WAY SPONSORED, ENDORSED OR ADMINISTERED BY, OR OTHERWISE 

ASSOCIATED WITH, INSTAGRAM OR FACEBOOK. YOU UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE PROVIDING YOUR INFORMATION TO SPONSOR AND NOT TO INSTAGRAM OR FACEBOOK. THE NEW FACE OF AMERICAN 

BEAUTY SWEEPSTAKES Sponsored by Hearst Communications, Inc. Two ways to enter from 4/18/17 at 12:01 AM (ET)-5/16/17 at 11:59 PM (ET): (i) Entrant must follow Sponsor’s Instagram feed at @ELLEUSA and @LOREAL- 

MAKEUP (the “Instagram Feed”) and during the period that begins 4/18/17 at 12:01 AM (ET) through 5/16/17 at 11:59 PM (ET) (the “Entry Period”), follow the online instructions to upload and submit ONE photograph reflecting 

your vision of The New Face of American Beauty using #BecauseYoureWorthItSweepstakes; or mail a 3 ½” x 5” postcard or letter with your name, age, complete address, telephone number, email address (optional) and a photo with 

first-class postage affxed to: ELLE, The New Face of American Beauty, 300 W. 57th Street, 24th FL, NY, NY 10019. Mail entry must be postmarked by 5/16/17 and received by 5/21/17. If you do not have an Instagram account, you 

can sign up for one for free either at your mobile phone app store or at www.instagram.com. One winner and a guest will be flown to Los Angeles to attend ELLE’s Women in Hollywood event on October 16, 2017. ELLE will provide 

accommodations for two nights, airfare, and ground transportation to and from the airport in Los Angeles. ARV: $2,500. Odds of winning will depend upon the total number of eligible entries received. Important Notice: You may 

be charged data fees in accordance with the terms of your service agreement with your carrier. Must have reached the age of majority and be a legal resident of the US, DC or Canada (excluding Quebec). Void in Puerto Rico and 

where prohibited by law. Entrants via Instagram must have their Instagram profile set to “public.” Sweepstakes subject to complete offcial rules available at ELLE.COM/THENEWFACEOFAMERICANBEAUTYSWEEPSTAKES.

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AWS OF 

ATTRACTION 

Photographed by Terry Tsiolis Styled by Samira Nasr

Crayola-hued puffers and 

logo-laden sweats form 

an unlikely alliance with 

makeup, glorious makeup, 

modeled by a cast of 

fashion’s most intriguing 

new head-turners. And 

what faces they are.… 

Model Hannah Bennett wears: 

Polyamide vest, BALENCIAGA, 

$2,525, at Balenciaga, NYC. Nylon 

spandex bikini top, $62, bottom, 

$60, both, TAVIK. 

Model Alecia Morais wears: Viscose 

bodysuit, VERSACE, $675, at select 

Versace boutiques nationwide. For 

details, see Shopping Guide. Makeup 

artist Frankie Boyd used shades from 

the M.A.C Trend Forecast Spring 17/ 

Eye palette on Morais’s lids and lips. 

261

Model Hyunji Shin 

wears: Cotton and silk 

top, DSQUARED2, 

$700, visit dsquared2 

.com. Cotton-blend 

pants, ADIDAS 

ORIGINALS, $70. 

262

Model Misty Downs wears: 

Gore-Tex parka, LOEWE, $1,150, 

visit loewe.com. Cotton hooded 

jumpsuit, PACO RABANNE, 

$1,790. Nylon spandex sports 

bra, VICTORIA’S SECRET, $25. 

For details, see Shopping Guide. 

On brows, try MAYBELLINE 

NEW YORK Brow Precise 

Fiber Volumizer. 

263

Model Hannah Bennett 

wears: Lambskin top, 

CHANEL, at select Chanel 

boutiques nationwide. Nylon 

jacket, NIKE, $100. Boyd 

coated Bennett’s lashes with 

DIOR Diorshow Waterproof 

Mascara in Catwalk Blue. 

264

Model Charlene Hogger wears: 

Nylon puffer coat, CANADA 

GOOSE x VETEMENTS, $2,750, 

collection at ssense.com. Polyamide 

elastane swimsuit, GUESS x A 

BIKINI A DAY, $79. Velour pants, 

ADIDAS ORIGINALS, $40. Steel 

watch, OMEGA, $4,900. Leather 

fanny pack, ASOS, $28. Leather 

sneakers, REEBOK, $90. For 


265

Model Bhumika Arora wears: 

Cotton sweatshirt, ALEXANDER 

WANG, $165, similar styles at 

alexanderwang.com. Mesh top, 

PUMA, $45. Neoprene pants, 

leather sandals, all, COURRÈGES. 

Ceramic watch, CHANEL, $5,400. 

Metal mesh belt bag, KENZO. 

266

Model Danielle Gordon wears: Wool 

jacket, SACAI, visit sacai.jp. Cotton 

hoodie, $65, sweatpants, $60, both, 

CHAMPION. Magnesium watch on 

rubber strap, BULGARI, $4,950. 

Synthetic patent leather sneakers, 

REEBOK, $160. For details, see 

Shopping Guide. Boyd dabbed TOM 

FORD Violet Fatale on lips. 

267

Model Kenya Kinski Jones 

wears: Cotton hoodie, 

ADIDAS ORIGINALS, 

$70, visit adidas.com. 

Ceramic watch on rubber 

strap, OMEGA, $11,700. 

For details, see Shopping 

Guide. Create the ultimate 

smoky eye with LANCÔME 

Auda[city] in Paris eye 

shadow palette. 

268

Model Sophia Pastorius- 

Young wears: Sequin-panel 

bodysuit, MUGLER, $1,450, 

collection at Barneys New 

York. Crystal-embellished 

velour pumps, CHRISTIAN 

LOUBOUTIN, $1,095. 

269

Model Georgia Pratt wears: 

Mesh top, SPORTS UNLIMITED, 

$10, visit sportsunlimitedinc 

.com. Jacquard bra, CHANTELLE, 

$72. Denim jumpsuit, FENDI, 

$1,800. On lids, try a wash of 

L’ORÉAL PARIS Infallible Paints 

Eye Shadow in Shady Violet. 

Models Danielle Gordon, Georgia 

Pratt, Hannah Bennett, Hyunji 

Shin, and Sophia Pastorius-Young 

at IMG (hair by Kayla MiChele at 

Streeters for Message Organics; 

makeup by Frankie Boyd at 

Streeters for Tom Ford Beauty 

[all]; manicure by Gina Edwards 

at Kate Ryan Inc. for Chanel 

Beauty; casting by Zan Ludlum 

at Zan Casting [all]; produced by 

Una Simone Harris at Wanted 

Media; fashion assistant: Yashua 

Simmons [all]). Models Alecia 

Morais, Bhumika Arora, and 

Charlene Hogger at the Society 

Management, and Kenya Kinski 

Jones at the Lions (hair by Peter 

Gray at Home Agency for Phyto; 

manicure by Dawn Sterling at 

MAM-NYC for Dior Beauty; 

produced by Lisa Weatherby at 

Home Agency). Model Misty 

Downs at IMG (hair by Ward at 

the Wall Group for Living Proof; 

manicure by Gina Edwards at Kate 

Ryan Inc. for Chanel Beauty) 

270

Model Sophia Pastorius- 

Young wears: Tricot-blend 

top, ADIDAS ORIGINALS BY 

ALEXANDER WANG, $150, 

visit alexanderwang.com. Silver 

aluminum watch on Nike Volt 

Sport Band, APPLE WATCH 

NIKE+, $369. For details, see 

Shopping Guide. On nails, 

manicurist Gina Edwards used 

DEBORAH LIPPMANN in 

Weird Science and Xanadu. 

271

Otherworldly actress 

Mia Goth has slayed Shia 

and bewitched a spate of 

Hollywood auteurs. Here, 

with the art of high-drama 

hair, makeup, and fashion’s 

best spring looks, she quickchanges 

through a spectrum 

of roles—and continues 

to keep us guessing. 

By Seth Plattner 

MERICAN 

GOTH 

PHOTOGRAPHED BY PATRIC SHAW 

STYLED BY SABINA SCHREDER

Far left: Cashmere sweater, $1,295, 

cotton poplin shirt, $495, both, 

MICHAEL KORS COLLECTION, 

visit michaelkors.com. Jeans, 

LEVI’S, $88. Gold necklace, 

DAVID YURMAN, $2,600. 

Left: Embroidered dress, silk 

crepe bodysuit, both, LOUIS 

VUITTON, visit louisvuitton 

.com. White gold and diamond 

earring, DE BEERS. White 

gold and diamond rings, 

both, HEARTS ON FIRE, 

$3,450–$6,850 each. Stylist’s 

own headband. For details, see 

Shopping Guide. To get Goth’s 

lip, try NARS Larger Than Life 

Lip Gloss in Rouge Tribal. 

273

Right: Cotton trench coat, 

MAISON MARGIELA, $3,280, 

at Maison Margiela boutiques 

nationwide. Embellished 

T-shirt, DOLCE & GABBANA, 

$355. Custom hat, BRIXTON. 

Stylist’s own scarves. To create 

a soft wave, hairstylist Kevin 

Ryan blow-dried Goth’s hair 

with UNITE Boosta spray and 

added waves with R SESSION 

Tidal Waver iron. 

Far right: Leather jacket, 

COACH 1941, $2,500, similar 

styles at coach.com. Printed 

dress, GUCCI, $4,400. 

Cashmere hat, DIOR. Stylist’s 

own rings. For details, see 


Hair by Kevin Ryan for Unite; 

makeup by Alice Lane at 

the Wall Group for NARS; 

manicure by Mar y Soul at 

Kate Ryan for Dior; fashion 

assistants: Natasha Devereux 

and Lexi Lampel 

274

In 2013, then 19-year-old London actress Mia 

Goth got her big break: a buzzy movie, a legendary 

director, famous costars. All she had 

to do was, well, simulate a lot of graphic sex, 

intimidate and overpower full-grown men— 

sometimes with a gun—and then defile Charlotte 

Gainsbourg. (Google at your own risk.) 

The film was Nymphomaniac Vol. II, the 

second installment of lightning-rod director 

Lars von Trier’s two-part, five-and-a-halfhour, 

unrated psychosexual epic starring 

Gainsbourg and Shia LaBeouf. As a character 

named P, Goth established 

herself as a unique 

kind of actress—one who 

looked so fresh-faced 

and naïve as to resemble 

an actual doll, but was a 

mysterious and, at times, 

disquieting provocateur 

underneath. 

Since Nymphomaniac, 

Goth, now 23, has continued 

to subvert her innocent 

visage—the big 

brown eyes, the button 

nose, the pretty pout—by 

choosing work that flirts 

with the weird, the sexual, 

or the weird and sexual. 

In 2015, she starred 

in Miu Miu’s spring ads, 

dressed in the season’s 

ruffles and florals while 

lying seductively on an 

unkempt bed; the ads 

were banned in the UK 

for sexualizing someone 

who looked so young— 

when, in fact, Goth was 

21 at the time of the 

shoot. (She’s also maintained 

her relationship 

with the house, having 

recently appeared in 

the spring campaign for 

Prada’s La Femme fragrance.) 

That same year, 

she starred in The Survivalist, 

a film that follows a hard-edged loner 

(Martin McCann) making his way through a 

postapocalyptic world—until he meets Milja 

(Goth), whose guile and charm he’s unable 

to resist. Then, this spring, there was the 

twisty-turny, downright freaky A Cure for 

Wellness, director Gore Verbinski’s take on 

cerebral horror, in which Goth was so hypnotic 

as Hannah—a repressed woman-child 

trapped in an eerie Swiss hospital—that 

Verbinski says there were moments “when I 

was so seduced by her performance, I forgot 

to say ‘Cut.’ ” 

Indeed, it’s that tightrope walk between 

coquettish intrigue and dark intensity that 

makes Goth one of the most exciting young 

actors in Hollywood. “I don’t really know any 

other way to do it,” says Goth, the daughter 

of an ice-trucker father and former-waitress 

mother, who spent her childhood in both 

Canada and Brazil—and then, at 12, returned 

to her native London, where she was discovered 

by Storm Model Management. “I never 

went to school to study acting, so I’m doing 

this purely on feeling, and I give it my all.” For 

his part, Verbinski describes her approach as 

“channeling reality from finding something 

to believe in, and then ravenously committing 

to it. When she does that, when she connects, 

it’s transformative.” 

Increasingly, Goth has also become one to 

watch offscreen as well: Soon after Nymphomaniac 

wrapped, she started dating costar 

LaBeouf—who’s known for public, emotional 

pendulum swings, including wearing 

a bag on his head bearing the words “i am 

not famous anymore” (on the red carpet, 

around his neighborhood, etc.). In October 

of last year, Goth married LaBeouf in Las 

Vegas at the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel, 

broadcasting their nuptials via Facebook 

Live. The tabloids can’t get enough of them. 

Still, despite the couple’s 

penchant for the offbeat, 

when it comes to his wife’s 

talents, LaBeouf sounds 

like any other proud partner: 

“Mia is the most beguiling 

actor I have ever 

known. She’s fearless yet 

diffident, laser-focused 

and wide-eyed. She’s a 

truth seeker.” 

LaBeouf may be biased, 

but some of the 

world’s most visionary 

filmmakers seem equally 

impressed. Later this 

year, Goth will join Anya 

Taylor-Joy in Spanish writer-director 

Sergio G. Sánchez’s 

Marrowbone, about 

four children hiding out 

on a mysterious farm after 

their mother dies. She’ll 

then star alongside Dakota 

Johnson and Tilda Swinton 

as a dancer who disappears 

in Suspiria, from A 

Bigger Splash director Luca 

Guadagnino. Next, she’ll 

film Claire Denis’s High 

Life, which follows Goth, 

Robert Pattinson, and 

Patricia Arquette as they 

travel into deep space. 

So much so fast must 

be a little draining, no? 

“When I finish a film, I 

want to feel drained,” says Goth, who, despite 

being so raw in her work, remains circumspect 

about the details of her personal 

life. “I want to feel like I couldn’t have possibly 

done any more to service a character and 

a story. Then I want to go back to life and recharge 

so I have something to bring back to 

my work. Otherwise you run the risk of playing 

yourself. And that doesn’t interest me.” 

275

CLEAN 

BREAK 

CLEAN 

BREAK 

Pack your bags—but leave your baggage behind. Nothing tunes 

out the noise like a sleek, simple suit in purist white. 

Photographed by David Bellemere Styled by David Vandewal

Far left: Nylon swimsuit, $90, leather 

handbag, both, CALVIN KLEIN, visit 

calvinklein.com. Sunglasses, MIU MIU, 

$500. Silver earring, MARIA BLACK, $240. 

Silver earring, CHARLOTTE CHESNAIS, 

$290, worn throughout. Silver bracelet, 

$315, ring, $90, both, MIANSAI. White gold 

and diamond ring, CARTIER, $5,600. 

Left: Elastane-blend swimsuit, LAUREN 

RALPH LAUREN, $104, visit ralphlauren 

.com. Silver earrings, $350, cuff, $890, 

all, AGMES. White gold and diamond 

stud, HEARTS ON FIRE, $895 (for pair), 

worn throughout. Crystal arm cuffs, both, 

MAISON MARGIELA, $1,190 each. Silver 

bracelets, $895–$2,900 each, ring, $400, 

all, LAGOS. Silver bracelet, JOHN HARDY, 

$795. Silver cuff, $370, ring, $160, both, 

EDDIE BORGO. Silver rings, both, MARIA 

BLACK, $140–$155 each. Silver rings, both, 

MIANSAI, $60–$90 each. White gold and 

diamond ring, CARTIER, $5,600. For 


277

Viscose vest, BOSS, $945, visit 

hugoboss.com. Metal mesh top, 

$7,190, skirt, $7,590, plexiglass 

earring, $260 (for pair), all, 

PACO RABANNE. Silver cuff, 

EDDIE BORGO, $370. Silver 

ring, CLOSER BY WWAKE, $176. 

Silver rings, MIANSAI, $90–$125 

each. Chain-metal handbag, 

KENZO. Leather sandals, 

ISABEL MARANT, $690. 

278

Cotton T-shirt, $150, jersey 

hooded top, $540, plastic 

skirt, $2,350, plexiglass 

earring, $260 (for pair), 

calfskin handbag, $1,850, 

all, PACO RABANNE, visit 

pacorabanne.com. Nylon 

bikini bottom, JADE SWIM, 

$80. Brass lipstick case (worn 

around neck), VALENTINO 

GARAVANI, $895. For details, 


Beauty Secret: Get lashes as 

big as the waves you’re chasing 

with MAYBELLINE NEW 

YORK Volum’ Express The 

Colossal Waterproof Mascara. 

279

Viscose dress, TOM FORD, $3,450, 

visit tomford.com. Palladium-plated 

earring, J.W.ANDERSON, $1,650 

(for pair). Leather backpack, $450, 

clutch, $275, both, KARA. White gold 

and diamond rings, both, DELFINA 

DELETTREZ. Silver and diamond ring, 

DAVID YURMAN, $1,200. 

Beauty Secret: CLINIQUE Broad 

Spectrum SPF 30 Sunscreen Body 

Cream offers insurance for a big reveal. 

280

Techno jersey jacket, $795, 

sunglasses, $395, both, MAX 

MARA, at Max Mara, NYC. Velour 

shorts, ROXANA SALEHOUN, $187 

(sold as set). Neoprene brief bikini 

bottom, CALI DREAMING, $110. 

Gold vermeil earring, MODERN 

WEAVING, $155. Iridescent 

backpack, KARA, $495. Silver rings, 

both, MIANSAI, $125 each. For 


281

Embroidered-chiffon dress, MONSE, 

$6,490, collection at Bergdorf Goodman, 

NYC. Silver-plated hoop earring, 

ANNELISE MICHELSON, $398 (for pair). 

Silver cuff, ALYSSA NORTON, $225. Silver 

rings, both, MIANSAI, $90–$125 each. 

White gold and diamond ring, CARTIER, 

$5,600. Leather clutch, KARA, $275. Vinyl 

sandals, ALEXANDER WANG. 

282

Patent leather jacket, $2,875, leather 

belt, $430, handbag, $1,480, ciré 

cap (held with bag), $800, all, MIU 

MIU, visit miumiu.com. Nylon 

bikini top, bottom, both, JADE 

SWIM, $80 each. Metal earrings, 

PROENZA SCHOULER, $695. 

Painted-brass bracelets, both, 

ALYSSA NORTON, $225–$250 each. 

Silver ring, EDDIE BORGO, $160. 

Silver ring, MIANSAI, $90. Silver 

ring, CLOSER BY WWAKE, $176. 

For details, see Shopping Guide. 

Hair by Charles McNair at Jed Root 

for Oribe Hair Care; makeup by Fiona 

Stiles at Starworks Artists for Fiona 

Stiles Beauty; manicure by Geraldine 

Holford at LMC Worldwide for Chanel; 

casting by Sisi Chonco at Zan Casting; 

model: Lameka Fox at IMG; produced 

by Brandon Zagha; fashion assistants: 

Daniel Gaines and Elizabeth Carvalho 

283

MAXIMUM 

EXPOSURE 

On the heels of a contemporary art revolution in China, Max Mara 

brings classic Italian tailoring to an avid Shanghai following. 

Molly Langmuir hits the city’s experimental, cash-infused gallery 

scene and discovers four boundary-breaking new talents. 

Photographed by Jason Schmidt Styled by Morly Guo 

When I arrived in Shanghai one night 

last December, the city was glitteringly 

bright and bracingly cold. In one of the 

world’s most sophisticated urban centers, 

an international technology hub with a 

fluorescent-lit skyline, many buildings still 

don’t have central heating—just one of the 

place’s unlikely juxtapositions. Another is 

that despite the government’s history of censorship, 

over the last few years an art scene 

has developed in Shanghai that’s so dynamic 

and fresh the city has, practically overnight, 

become a global cultural destination. 

“It’s an underground art and music explosion!” 

says Max Mara Creative Director 

Ian Griffiths the next morning, sitting in a 

(frigid) barren room off the cavernous great 

hall of the Shanghai Exhibition Center, 

where the brand was preparing to reveal its 

prefall 2017 collection, titled “Monopolis!” 

“Everywhere you go here, people are talking 

about art or making art or showing art.” Not 

only was Max Mara staging its first show in 

China, it had tapped Beijing-based multidisciplinary 

artist Liu Wei—whose sculptures, 

paintings, videos, and photographs explore 

what it means to live in a rapidly shifting 

urban environment—to collaborate on an 

11-piece capsule collection. Liu also designed 

the set, which, by the following evening, 

had transformed the hall into a runway 

with mirrored columns, planetlike globes, 

and wire sculptures that towered over the 

models and evoked, like much of the artist’s 

work, an environment both slightly dystopian 

and sleekly futuristic. 

Griffiths joined Max Mara in 1987, right 

after graduating from London’s Royal College 

of Art, and rose through the ranks until 

he was named creative director in 2013. 

Roughly two years later, he began to speak 

to the press on behalf of the brand—an 

unprecedented move for the 66-year-old 

family-run Italian business, which (despite 

having hired, from the ’70s on, luminaries 

such as Karl Lagerfeld and the duos behind 

Dolce & Gabbana and Proenza Schouler 

to work in its atelier) had never put 

a designer front and center. “Over the 

years, Ian just absorbed the DNA of 

the brand,” says Giorgio Guidotti, the 

company’s long-standing president of 

worldwide communications and public 

relations. As for what that DNA entails, 

Max Mara remains “geared toward a 

woman who wants to put her personality 

forward, and also wants beautiful 

clothes that last over time,” Guidotti 

says. Both he and Griffiths stress that, 

in an ever more globalized world, this 

woman exists anywhere from America 

to China, where the group (which 

includes Sportmax and Max&Co.) 

opened its first store on the mainland in 

1993 and now has 414 shops across the 

country. Despite Asia’s recent economic 

slowdown, Max Mara’s Chinese market 

remains roughly the same size as that of 

Europe or the U.S. 

Alongside his work at Max Mara, 

Griffiths also teaches fashion design at 

London’s Kingston University. His fluency 

in everything from fine art to indie 

rock plays out in “Monopolis!,” which 

was inspired by ’80s neo-noir film Blade 

Runner, the Chinese electro-pop band 

Nova Heart, and the general creative 

ferment of Shanghai. The designer likens 

the city’s “great love of fashion and 

great love of art” to that of ’70s New 

York and London. 

The fascination with art, at least, is 

fairly recent. Contemporary art only 

really began to be produced in China 

in the ’80s, after the Cultural Revolution, 

and even through the ’90s, 

“there was an assumption that young

VIVIAN XU 

For her work, the bio-artist has grown 

silkworms and even strains of bacteria. 

“We humans experience everything with 

a centric view,” she says. “But that’s only 

one slice of what life is.” With a series of 

images produced for her project 

Living Devices (2012–13). 

Wool coat, MAX MARA, $5,890.

FUNA YE 

Funa once recorded teens discussing a perfect 

world, then superimposed burgers and other 

food floating around their heads. “It looks 

like a colorful, crazy video, but it’s actually 

a documentary,” she says. With wallpaper 

produced for her installation Diamond Nail Salon 

(2015). Wool crepe skirt, MAX MARA, $535. 

OPHELIA S. CHAN 

In some of Chan’s multimedia 

installations and videos, people 

talk about themselves as fictional 

characters: “It’s about performance 

in daily life.” With a still from a video 

titled Dream Lense (2015). Silk printed 

dress, MAX MARA, $1,150. 

artists had to look to the West for subject 

matter,” says Alexandra Munroe, the Guggenheim 

Museum’s NYC-based senior 

curator of Asian art. “Now there’s a sense 

that they don’t need the West anymore, 

whether as an imprimatur or a market.” In 

2012, the Shanghai Biennale, a sleepy exhibition 

when it debuted in 1996, moved to 

the city’s newly opened Power Station of 

Art, one of the largest contemporary art 

museums in the world; the most recent edition, 

which opened last November, drew 

crowds even on weekdays. And the K11 Art 

Mall—a retail/gallery hybrid in which art is 

displayed amid high-end boutiques—was 

launched in 2013 by then 33-year-old Adrian 

Cheng, heir apparent to a wildly successful 

family-run business (its interests span 

property to jewelry) and one of the world’s 

youngest billionaires. It’s just one of the 

city’s art-focused institutions funded by 

China’s relatively new class of ultrarich. 

(Since 2000, the number of millionaires in 

China has grown by a factor of 25, and the 

country now has more billionaires than the 

U.S.) Jacob Dreyer, an American journalist 

who writes frequently about art, arrived 

in Shanghai in 2008, back when “basically 

it was as important to the global art 

world as, say, Quito, Ecuador, is today,” he 

says. “And now, well, now is now. Art has 

gone from being an elite discourse for the 

super-rich to a mass phenomenon—from 

avant-garde to TV.” 

Dreyer spent an afternoon taking me to 

a few of the galleries that have popped up 

in the city. Our first stop, Capsule Gallery, 

opened last October with a show featuring 

eight artists—seven were based in Europe 

and the U.S. rather than China. According 

to Italian owner Enrico Polato, most 

had found the experience so inspiring (and 

fruitful—sales were strong) they’d already 

applied for residencies to return. At Bank, 

a subterranean space in the midst of an installation, 

American expat owner Mathieu 

Borysevicz suggested that the mobile app 

WeChat—imagine Instagram, PayPal, eBay, 

Facebook, and Skype in one—had advanced 

the burgeoning scene. “We use it for payments, 

for sending images, for arranging art 

dinners,” he said. “It’s drawn a web around 

the community.” 

This digital savvy is also reflected in the 

work itself: “Chinese artists are embracing 

new media in a very impactful way,” says 

Xin Li, the deputy chairman of Christie’s 

Asia, referring to a wave of art employing 

computer graphics, robotics, 3-D printing, 

and bioengineering. Or, as Max Mara’s Grif- 

286

Styled by Morly Guo (hair by Yang Changxiu; makeup by Yooyo Ko at Andy Creation; 

casting by Samantha Culp; artists: Wang Xin, Ophelia S. Chan, Vivian Xu, and Funa Ye; 

produced by Lucas Lechevalier and Baba Liu at 5e Productions) 

WANG XIN 

Wang recently produced two pink-lit installations 

that poked fun at art-world careerism. Welcome 

to the Art World (2016), for example, featured a 

human-size hamster wheel with instructions like “Build 

Relationships” and “Create a Mailing List.” With part 

of her installation Every Artist Should Have a Solo 

Show (2016). Cashmere knit top, MAX MARA, $765. 

fiths puts it, “Chinese artists are giving us a 

kind of total review of what can be considered 

art and how you can make it.” Some say 

this is particularly true of the country’s female 

artists. “Many of the most exciting studios 

of digital artists I’ve gone to have been 

women’s,” says David Maupin, cofounder of 

New York–based Lehmann Maupin gallery, 

which represents Liu Wei. 

As for the gender divide in China, “it’s not 

as strong as in the West, because socialism 

always promoted women as equals to men,” 

says Zhang Ga, artistic director of Shanghai’s 

Chronus Art Center. (“Women hold 

up half the sky” is an oft-quoted Maoism.) 

Yet into the ’80s, female artists were a rarity. 

“It’s not that they got forgotten; they just 

didn’t exist,” Munroe says. Today, female 

artists continue to face barriers. Gallerist 

Leo Xu, who frequently shows new media 

work, says clients inquiring about female 

artists often ask, “ ‘Does she have a husband? 

Does she have a kid?’ If she doesn’t, 

they want to wait until she does to see how 

far she can go.” (They’re not as scrutinizing 

when purchasing the work of foreign female 

artists, he adds.) Yet Xu, too, notes the success 

women are having with new media. 

“There’s less hierarchy there,” he says. “It 

gives women an advantage.” 

It’s one that’s being exploited by the four 

groundbreaking female artists in these pages. 

Ophelia S. Chan recently produced a 

multimedia installation focused on stills of 

’70s amputee porn star Long Jeanne Silver, 

“a symbol of female power and of reclaiming 

power,” she says. And Vivian Xu, a bioartist 

whose work explores, she’s written, 

distinctions between “the organic from the 

artificial, the living from the dead,” is in the 

process of building a suit that would enable 

its wearer to pick up electrical currents. 

“Censorship hasn’t affected me much,” 

she says, partly because if work isn’t overtly 

political, the government tends to look 

the other way, but also because she’s based 

in Shanghai—and “if there’s a crackdown, 

Beijing gets hit first.” Funa Ye, who has an 

interest in “ordinary people’s aesthetic,” has 

become known for her work based on nail 

art; for one recent installation, Nailhenge, 

she produced 10 monumental nails covered 

in pastel swirls and rainbows, elevating a 

personal (often female) form of creativity 

into the realm of high art. And finally, 

there’s Wang Xin, a certificated hypnotist 

who puts people into trances to help them 

explore their subconscious. “Society hypnotizes 

people every day, through advertisements 

and stuff like that,” she says. “Really, 

I’m trying to wake people up.” 

Those women are all in the early stages 

of their success. But Liu, 45, is a perfect illustration 

of the reach of Chinese art. Max 

Mara’s Griffiths originally encountered 

Liu’s work at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, 

where, in 2010, he installed ever-so-slightlyskewed 

architectural models of famous 

centers of power—the Pentagon, the Colosseum—constructed 

from dog chews. 

Liu brought his appreciation for imperfection 

to Max Mara, a brand defined by its 

tasteful, precise tailoring. When Griffiths 

shared fabric samples with him, the artist 

routinely turned them over and declared he 

preferred the reverse. The resulting pieces, 

produced in Max Mara’s signature palette 

of camel, black, and white (and made available, 

in a first for the brand, online and in 

some stores directly after the show), retain 

classic shapes—there’s an elegant woolblend 

wrap coat; a slim jacquard pencil 

skirt—but, through trompe l’oeil prints and 

fabrics chain-stitched to evoke topographic 

maps, incorporate a subtle rawness. 

Griffiths, in turn, incorporated certain 

rough elements into the rest of his prefall 

collection. Among the pussy-bow blouses, 

ruched-tulle pencil skirts, and trademark 

coats, there was also the odd ripped-looking 

sweater and a white maxidress covered in 

raw-edged black strips with visible white 

stitching. “It gives the clothes a new kind of 

modernity, which is exactly right for the time 

in which we find ourselves,” Griffiths says. 

Right now, he adds, whether in Shanghai, 

New York, or Rome, “People are looking for 

products that have meaning, that feel secure. 

In that sense, it’s a very Max Mara moment.” 

287

THE ONE AND DONE 

Continued from page 166 

never looked this feminine. It’s the eyes. 

They’re more open. And your eyebrows are 

higher—and arched.” 

She asks whom I’ve seen, heard from, but it’s 

whom I haven’t seen or heard from that hurts. 

They number both family and friends. 

Renata distills it: “When one of us goes for 

it, it gives anxiety to the others, no matter the 

outcome. If it looks good, we’re torn between 

elation that we too can take the plunge, and resentment 

that the voices pushing us to do it just 

got louder: Look, Holly did it. Or if it looks bad, 

now we’re totally panicked because we can’t get 

off the assembly line of aging, and we have to 

stick with our bags and sags. So chances are, no 

one is really happy to see your facelift because 

it triggers too many selfish emotions. But I’m 

happy for you, truly.” 

And she truly is. Renata picks up her iPhone 

and finds two pictures she snapped on the sly. 

One was of me at the pre-op dinner, the other 

taken earlier tonight, when I thought she was 

sending a text. The first photo is unkind; my 

mouth is awkwardly open, my forehead pushed 

up into Shar-Pei creases, my facial wrinkles 

amplified by the overhead lighting. The second 

is a bad angle, but even so, you can see the wave 

of Rosenberg’s wand. I look like me—photoshopped. 

Renata says, “You’re a lucky girl.” 

THE OFT-ASKED QUESTION: “Does it hurt?” 

On a pain scale of 1 to 10, I register whiny. I keep 

a recovery journal, most of which will read like 

a litany of bratty, spoiled, high-end complaints: 

Must sleep on doughnut-hole pillow as ears ache 

inside and outside…scalp numb yet still weirdly 

itchy…neck feels like it’s in a choke hold, major 

bruising…hurts to open mouth and floss teeth… 

mood swinging way up, way down…cheeks, neck 

numb…great day, UPS guy called me “miss”… 

can feel Endotines beneath my scalp like budding 

horns…totally anxious…brushing hair feels 

like brushing doll’s head…sparks flying through 

face as nerves reconnect…lumps under jaw…ears 

sticking out, HUGE…what’s this line still doing 

around my mouth?…me so pretty…earlobes hot, 

swollen…hurts neck to talk too much…forehead 

falling down?…stretching neck back out talking 

too much?…eyes uneven?…did he do enough???… 

Of course, it would not be a Beauty Adventure 

if there weren’t complications. I was the 

one in 50 who got bruising. And two weeks in, 

I wake up to a bald spot the size of a quarter 

right near the front of my hairline. The vanity 

gods are punishing me! Panicked, I call Rosenberg’s 

office. He’s in surgery, his patient coordinator, 

Janie Indursky, says. “But come in; 

Dr. Paul’s here.” 

That would be Dr. Benjamin Paul, Rosenberg’s 

very tall, dark colleague, professorially 

handsome and spectacled in rectangular 

frames. Married. One child. I had to ask. He 

saw me last week when I had my stitches and 

staples removed, and again when I was convinced 

I’d gone forever cockeyed. (Diagnosis: 

uneven swelling. Absolutely normal.) 

Paul enters the examining room, smiling, 

“Who are you?” (That’s a joke—an “I’m so pretty 

now he doesn’t recognize me” joke.) I tell him 

we have to stop meeting like this and point to 

the bald patch. 

“I see that,” he says, confirming I’m not crazy. 

“There’s nothing long-term to be worried 

about. It’s root shock. It happens. It could be 

the anesthesia alone—you could go in for bariatric 

surgery and, just from the anesthesia, 

get these little patches. And honestly, if you 

operate on the scalp, sometimes the neighboring 

hair follicles feel stress from the event and 

they can shed. 

“It can take anywhere from six weeks to three 

months before it starts to regrow. So I wouldn’t 

expect next week it’s going to be growing. Seriously, 

it’s temporary. 

“One thing you can do is change your part 

one millimeter over,” Paul says. “Just take a few 

hairs from this side and pull them over it.” Like 

a comb-over? 

“That’s what I would do. Take a few of these 

hairs.…” He re-parts my hair. “And it’s gone!” 

And yet, still there! 

Paul crosses his arms and furrows his brow: 

“Are you a worrier?” 

No! I’m a woman with a bald spot in the front 

of my head! Poor Dr. Paul. 

“You’re going to be absolutely fine. In a 

month or two, you’ll have forgotten this was 

even a thing. The eyes are looking better, by the 

way. The swelling is down 50 percent.” 

He checks my head for “spit stitches,” the 

dissolvable ones that sometimes work their way 

out to the surface. They feel like little bristles. 

He takes a pair of medical tweezers and plucks: 

Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! 

Rosenberg pops his head in the door. “I just 

finished up, and I heard you were here,” he says. 

“You look great!” I tell him I’m embarrassed to 

admit that I wish he’d hiked my forehead up a 

teensy bit more, say, an extra 5 percent. 

“In plastic surgery, one centimeter is a lot,” 

Rosenberg says. “So you have to balance beauty 

with risk. Yes, there’s a subtle hooding that 

persists over your eyes. I like to keep that. It’s 

perfectly imperfect. Trying to get rid of everything 

becomes evident to the layperson. 

Whereas this.…” No one will even suspect. Unless 

you tell everyone. 

The late, great Nora Ephron, who felt bad 

about her neck, once told me: “Tell one, tell a 

thousand.” 

Every time I see my doorman, he circles 

his face with an index finger and gives me the 

thumbs-up. Neighbors knock on my door under 

the auspices of borrowing something, or to 

ask if my cable’s working, or to invite me over 

or themselves in for a glass of wine, which inevitably 

leads to a play-by-play and an iPhone 

slide show. Doris, a beautiful older woman, an 

actress who makes her living as an extra, stops 

me in the lobby: “Your facelift is great. Now, 

don’t sit in your apartment. Get out there! Don’t 

waste it.” 

I swing by Renata’s New Year’s party, and the 

heads in the room swivel in unison. A woman 

I’ve met once, whose name I can’t recall, tells 

me I look fantastic. I smile, fishing for how 

much she knows. Renata showed you the pictures, 

right? “Yes!” 

Excuse me, but I have to go strangle her. I find 

Renata in the kitchen and let her have it. “But 

you’re writing about it!” she says, apologizing, 

deleting the photos on her iPhone. “You have to 

decide whether you’re a private person or a 

memoirist. And after everything you’ve written 

over the years, I think you know the answer.” 

She’s right, but she’s still wrong. 

Meanwhile, Virginia, one of my oldest, best 

friends, is MIA. Aside from one text—“How’s 

the face?”—we haven’t seen each other since 

our dinner at Freds. Her absence is more painful 

to me than the surgery. 

By the end of March, three months out, all 

the feeling has returned to my scalp, and baby 

hairs are sprouting through my bald spot. My 

ears are still a little sore; my neck still feels 

stiff and tight and numb-ish. Rosenberg says 

it’ll take six months before the final results are 

in. (I promise an update.) But honestly, I don’t 

think about any of it that much. This face has 

become my new norm. I no longer look in the 

mirror wondering, wishing, wanting, waiting… 

no more waiting. 

I meet Germaine for a drink at City Hops, the 

craft-beer pub in our neighborhood where Joel, 

a handsome hipster bartender with a man-bun, 

gives us a round of pints, chats us up, and asks 

if we’re sisters. Huge compliment, as Gem is 

beautiful. (We look nothing alike.) And funny, 

as we’ve been here a dozen times pre-op. Joel 

just doesn’t recognize it’s me. 

Our friend Joanna breezes in, and the place 

starts filling up. Am I imagining this, or are we 

Alexandre Weinberger/Trunk Archive 

288

From left: Take Five/Hulu; Skye Parrott 

getting lots of attention? I mean, even me. 

“I’ll tell you what it is,” Jo says, leaning in. 

“Before, you felt better than you looked, and 

now, you look better than you feel.” 

Oh, I don’t know. I feel pretty great—more 

lighthearted, more open, more brave. Yes, subtly 

and majorly—and still transforming. 

THE PROPHET 


degree, shared with other commonwealth nations, 

whose double remove from the British 

aristocracy, by class and geography, created a 

sniffy social MO to put people in their place. 

Since shame and a rebellion from shame are 

inherent to the human condition, Munro’s 

and Atwood’s familiarity with these psychic 

twins gives them an excellent vantage point 

to connect with a vast readership. 

Munro, though, never changed course; she 

just honed her subject and her form to an otherworldly 

perfection. Munro’s talent is the 

talent of magic, like the Rocky Mountains, or 

some other sublime natural wonder. Atwood 

is not sublime—even her magical confidence 

is made explicable by loving and accepting 

parents. (The only time Atwood is without 

a decisive comment or new addition to push 

our conversation forward is when her mother 

comes up. “She died at 97,” she says, then 

pauses for a long stretch before adding, in a 

tone inflected with the unresolved, “Anyway, 

back to the present.”) But in remaining open 

to the contemporary rather than holing up 

with her muse, Atwood has produced work 

that is true to her public role, and her public 

role is true to her work—an achievement perhaps 

equal to magic. Atwood has what people 

used to want, gravitas and depth, but has also 

grabbed the new golden ring on life’s wacked 

carousel: She’s an image-based influencer. 

“When she came to visit the set for the 

first time,” Bruce Miller says, “everyone got 

into their costumes, and all the actors who 

played handmaids lined up in rows and, as 

she walked through, bowed their heads.” 

BRITTANY FEIWELL 


sure everyone has enough.” 

It takes more than an hour of talking with 

her before we get to the thing that I couldn’t 

figure out: How is it that a moderate, the Jewish 

daughter of a father who emigrated from 

Spain, and a woman who grew up in culturally 

diverse Miami, voted for Donald Trump? 

How is it that she supports the travel ban, 

versions 1.0 and 2.0? She tells me it’s because 

she lived in New York City and worked near 

the World Trade Center, and September 11, 

2001, was her last day of work before she was 

to move to L.A. She slept in a bit that morning, 

and that’s why she wasn’t at her office 

on Wall Street when the planes hit. When she 

woke, she could see the smoking Twin Towers 

out her bedroom window, and all these 

years later during anniversary remembrances, 

she can still smell that terrible acrid smell. 

When Trump talked about Islamic terrorism, 

it resonated with her; it didn’t seem unreasonable 

to have a 90-day restriction on a few 

countries, she says, while the government 

checks people out. “My understanding is that 

it’s temporary—as a way to reset.” 

She gets her news online, mostly from 

social media, but she also watches the Today 

show and The View religiously, as well 

as Meet the Press. She didn’t know about the 

fascists supporting Trump or the alt-right 

conference in late November in DC where 

people sieg-heiled. Her right-wing Facebook 

feeds, of course, hadn’t mentioned them; the 

soft-focus TV shows don’t talk about those 

kinds of things, either; and her liberal friends 

have gotten so enraged that when they started 

screaming about Nazis, Feiwell thought 

it was hyperbole. “I’m Jewish, and I’m the 

daughter of an immigrant, and I’m a woman—and 

I wish people could get themselves 

away from that polarizing view,” she says. 

We’re talking in March, after several weeks 

in which scores of Jewish cemeteries across 

the country had been vandalized, and Jewish 

community centers and synagogues were receiving 

bomb threats. Feiwell tells me, “If we 

had talked last week, I would have been like, 

‘I’m supernervous.’ People really wanted him 

to speak out against hate. Locally, we’ve had 

three bomb threats on our [Jewish community 

center] in the last two weeks, and I have 

friends who work closely with the JCC, and 

we went to temple this morning—so I was 

like, I feel really sick about this. There was a 

lot of social media asking, ‘Why won’t he just 

come out against hate?’ ” He did. Eventually. 

Feiwell accepted Trump’s lateness in commenting 

on the acts: “My husband sent me 

two articles: [Trump] came out against hate 

in the election; he came out against hate [this 

time]. He can’t tackle every issue at exactly 

the moment that everybody wants him to.” 

She’s preoccupied with the rage she sees on 

the left and how impossible it’s becoming for 

her to reason with people, because she isn’t 

actually a white nationalist or a gun nut and 

doesn’t see herself as really anything but a 

moderate who is frequently reminded of the 

most terrifying day of her life and votes according 

to her deeply held fears for the safety 

of her family. Yes, she was cool with the travel 

bans; what made her unhappy was the way 

they were rolled out. “I think that these types 

of policies to protect our country and Americans 

need to be moderate, like I consider myself 

to be. So when we talk about the Muslim 

ban, the way it came out and the way they executed 

it is not moderate. But I agree with the 

principle of it.… But then President Trump is 

so crass and says things exactly as they are in 

his mind, and in a way, that isolates—so I was 

off-put by that.” 

She’d be more inclined to engage with the 

liberals screaming for impeachment if they’d 

stop screaming and start talking. When I say 

that I want Trump impeached—not just because 

I disagree with nearly all of his policies 

(and, so far, all of his appointments and all of 

his executive orders) but because it’s the only 

way that we’ll get the information we need 

on his taxes and foreign entanglements (impeachment 

would mean months of discovery 

and documents that Congress would make 

available to the public) and because I do not 

believe he can govern under the weight of 

suspicion that his campaign possibly colluded 

with Russia—it makes sense to her. “That’s 

not at all what you hear, though,” Feiwell says. 

“You just hear people calling you hateful, and 

it’s hard to engage with that.” 

She cast a single vote in a system of millions 

of voters: Why, she wants to know, is she reduced, 

through willful misunderstanding by 

half the country, to a single decision in her life, 

given all the rest of who she is? “I want people 

to understand,” she says, “that some people 

who voted for Trump really gave consideration 

and thought and care to it.” 

289

KIMBERLEY EUSTON 


Care Act. “He’s really trying to move quickly 

on some of the promises he made,” she says, 

but also says that the conventional wisdom on 

her side of the aisle is that once the right people 

are in key positions, everything will calm 

down a bit. She’s cautiously pleased so far: 

“The stock market has hit record highs since 

he’s taken office; we’ll actually end up raising 

interest rates because of the job growth 

and strong economy, and we’re seeing more 

limited, reduced regulations, which I think is 

helping stimulate business.” February’s positive 

jobs report—unemployment dipped to 

4.7 percent—must have made her happy. Still, 

she says, “I wish he would tweet less.” The 

weekend of the women’s marches, she was 

surprised at how many of her friends joined 

the protests in both DC and Atlanta. (She and 

they are navigating their differences, she says, 

“by not talking about it.”) She wonders why all 

the hair-on-fire stuff is happening now instead 

of before, when it might have made the difference 

for the Democrats. She wouldn’t have 

voted for Bernie, but “I mean, I just feel for the 

Bernie supporters, because Hillary really stole 

the nomination, with what was going on with 

the DNC. Bernie wasn’t given a fair shake. I 

wish more people would’ve been energized 

during the election because I think it would’ve 

turned out differently. I don’t think Trump 

would have necessarily—I don’t think Trump 

would have even received the Republican Party’s 

nomination.” 

That the GOP’s brand is starting to become 

associated with neo-Nazis and white supremacists 

Euston finds “extremely troubling. That 

isn’t anything I approve of at all.” She adds, 

“I’m hoping he’ll stop with the over-the-top 

rhetoric” but also knows it’s that very rhetoric 

that got Trump elected. 

The media landscape disturbs her, too. She 

misses the era when there were just three 

major networks doing the evening news, and 

“when print did journalism”—she’s referring 

to those halcyon days when the news wasn’t 

so full of alternative facts and bloggy opinions. 

We discuss that as recently as the early 

1990s, everyone basically consumed the same 

presentations of the same events. These days, 

it can be hard to parse reality from rumor— 

which is how you get a high-information voter 

like Euston who once had a security clearance 

and doesn’t think Hillary Clinton is running 

secret sex cults in DC pizzerias; but neither is 

she willing to discount the conspiracy that Bill 

Clinton’s deputy White House counsel, Vincent 

Foster, may not have committed suicide. 

Still, it worries her that the country is becoming 

so divided and that good information 

is getting lost in the thicket. Yes, the Washington 

Post and the New York Times do real reporting—if 

you can afford the paywall. (You 

know what’s free? Breitbart.) We joke about 

how bad things are when civilians are trying 

to dissect raw intel just to figure out what’s 

happening in America. 

“When my boys were three,” Euston says, 

“a former colleague from Washington said 

that the biggest fear I should have for them 

growing older—if they don’t have to fight a 

war on foreign soil—is a war in America…the 

haves versus the have-nots. I was speaking to 

this individual recently, and I said, ‘Remember 

when you said this to me, like, 13 years 

ago?’ That’s worrisome.” 

KRISTIE DAVIS 


over the plain and the whole world seems to 

be made new just so you can see it. It’s a good, 

and hard, life. “I wouldn’t trade this for the 

world. Maybe if you gave me a billion dollars, 

but I’d have to think about it,” Potter says. 

If you’re not a rancher or farmer, your best 

hope for a job here is at the Safeway grocery 

store in Burns, or the state and federal government 

jobs…at places like Malheur. Burns 

is way more red than blue—by roughly twoto-one 

margins, the town went for McCain 

and Romney, and by almost three to one for 

Trump—but the standoff at Malheur in the 

first months of 2016 turned up the antigovernment, 

anti-Washington, anti-Hillary (as 

a creature of government and Washington) 

rhetoric. It also changed Davis’s news consumption. 

Her hometown was featured in a 

story that dominated network newscasts for 

weeks—and “nothing anyone was saying was 

right,” she says. “They didn’t tell people what 

was actually happening.” For example, the 

Bundy protest was cast as the armed takeover 

of federal buildings by menacing militiamen, 

when the way Davis saw it was a handful of 

guys overrunning a few bunkhouses and a 

tiny museum and visitor center out in the 

middle of nowhere. She never saw the occupiers 

being violent, only talking about the 

need to defend and preserve liberty: Gun toting 

isn’t a big deal to a rural rancher. She says 

she saw the sausage of narrative and clickbait 

being made, and “it really amazed me how 

so many people went out of their way to tell 

us they hated us without even understanding 

what the issue was.” For her, the issues were 

about water rights and resources, about grazing 

rights, about what she views as her neighbors 

serving time twice for the same crime. 

(A federal appellate court actually ordered a 

retrial, insisting that the lower court had undersentenced 

the Hammonds.) 

The right wing had been preaching that 

Barack Obama made sweeping public-land 

grabs—he did set aside more acreage for federal 

protection than any other president in 

history. And if there’s one thing you can do to 

annoy a rancher, it’s tell her she can’t graze 

her cattle on lands where they’ve grazed for 

decades. Adding to the animus, Oregon has a 

history of racism; when it was granted statehood 

in 1859, it was the only state in the union 

to forbid black people from living, working, 

or owning property there. It was illegal for 

black people even to move to the state until 

1926. The legacy of this resonates even today. 

Davis and Potter haven’t entirely escaped 

their surroundings or the cultural lessons 

they’ve learned. I was uncomfortable more 

than once during our time spent together 

when the topic of Native American sovereignty 

came up; we agree that the problem is 

largely unsolvable now, having been created 

by generations well before us. But it’s indisfew 

weeks, when they have to get done a volume 

of work, like mint weeding, they hire day 

laborers to help out. (Whether they’ve hired 

undocumented workers, Davis doesn’t know, 

though it’s pretty unusual in the West not to 

have hired them. That’s who shows up to do 

the work.) The Davises keep a comfortable 

five-bedroom house and a few head of cattle. 

The schedule and work are brutal, but it’s 

hard to be in too bad of a mood, no matter 

how sore your back is, when the sun is rising 

Skye Parrott 

290

Bottom right: Terry Tsiolis 

putable that if you’re white and you live in the 

Mountain West, you’re living on Native land. 

Over dinner one night, Davis uses the individual 

responsibility argument when asked about 

educational and health disparities between 

Native and non-Native populations. I reply 

that we should honor our treaties and not hold 

Native Americans at gunpoint for protesting 

a pipeline that will run through their burial 

grounds. At least we’re having a conversation. 

She thinks the media is a conglomerate, 

more about making money than about reporting 

facts, and she no longer trusts it. She reads 

whatever stories her friends post on Facebook, 

which are by and large right-leaning. But interestingly, 

Davis still watches the local news, 

broadcast out of Portland, and after she saw a 

TV news story about a Muslim child who was 

blocked from coming to Oregon for medical 

treatment, she thought the travel ban was 

unkind. “They stopped that little girl from 

coming here for heart surgery,” Davis says, 

disgusted. “And how’s a baby supposed to be a 

problem?” She thinks the Mexico border wall 

is a dumb idea: “I don’t believe in building 

the wall; I believe in taking away the free ride 

when they get over here. I mean, I know a lot of 

great Mexicans that aren’t legal, but they still 

pay taxes and work; they don’t live off our free 

welfare system. And I think Trump’s taking 

that a little bit too far.” 

What attracted Davis to his candidacy— 

she and her mom were on board early, having 

voted for him in the primaries—is that he’s 

“an international business guy” who “says 

whatever he thinks,” she says. They liked 

that he rarely plays respectable politics with 

his phrasing. Politics as usual hasn’t really 

helped us as a nation in recent years, and 

“maybe Congress will get off their asses and 

do something” if forced to by Trump’s drainthe-swamp 

mentality. Because he was inexperienced, 

she knew there was a risk in voting 

for him. As of March, she was annoyed that 

his transition and first weeks in office hadn’t 

gone more smoothly. But she still considers 

him worth the gamble—because her other 

option was more of the same, and that wasn’t 

helping anyone she knew. Donald Trump 

“could be really good,” she says. 

For her part, Potter says she hopes “people 

give him a chance, because he’s the president 

now, whether they like it or not.” Davis is, in 

typical fashion, more blunt: “Quit trying to 

wish that the freaking plane would blow up 

or the pilot would have a heart attack, guys; 

you know, [if] he goes down and he fucks 

up, we’re all going down.” She argues that if 

Americans helped him instead of poking at 

him, he might calm himself. “He should slow 

down a bit,” she says, “show more reserve.” 

Whatever happens, it won’t be the status quo. 

The Economic Hardship Reporting Project 

contributed research to this story. 

COVERS 

Bella Hadid wears: Organza top, $29,850, skirt, $58,850, by Chanel, at select 

Chanel boutiques, call 800-550-0005. Gold earrings, $3,100, yellow and 

white gold and diamond earring, $5,700 (for pair), by Chanel Fine Jewelry, at 

Chanel Fine Jewelry boutiques nationwide, call 800-550-0005. 

Maria Borges wears: Cotton tank by Calvin Klein Underwear, $40 (for pack of 3), 

visit calvinklein.com. Gold and diamond earring by 2017 Tiffany Blue Book 

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Elsa Hosk wears: Pink gold, diamond, and coral watch, pink gold, diamond, 

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Jasmine Tookes wears: Silk lace dress by Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini, $2,850, 

collection at Barneys New York. Gold and diamond earring by Maria Tash, 

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boutiques nationwide, call 800-CARTIER or visit cartier.com. Gold and 

diamond rings by Tiffany & Co., $2,200–$2,950 each, call 800-843-3269 or 

visit tiffany.com. 

Candice Huffine wears: Silk dress by Fendi, $2,650, visit fendi.com. Gold 

bracelet by Lalaounis, $10,270, at Lalaounis (NYC). Gold pinkie ring by David 

Yurman, $1,950, at David Yurman (NYC), visit davidyurman.com. 

Hailey Baldwin wears: Knit top by Alexandre Vauthier, $1,251, collection at 

elysewalker.com. Gold necklace by Cartier, $4,800, at Cartier boutiques 

nationwide, call 800-CARTIER or visit cartier.com. 

Produced by Una Simone Harris for Wanted Media [all]; fashion assistant: 

Yashua Simmons [all]. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 38: Skirt, sandals by Alexander Wang, similar styles at Alexander Wang 

(NYC). Hoop earring by Annelise Michelson, collection at saksfifthavenue 

.com. Stud earring by Hearts On Fire, visit heartsonfire.com. Backpack by Nancy 

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visit karastore.com. Bangles by Lagos, visit lagos.com. Ring by Cartier, visit 

cartier.com. PAGE 46: Bracelet by Van Cleef & Arpels, visit vancleefarpels.com. 

TRENDS AND ACCESSORIES 

PAGE 95: Bracelet by Monica Rich Kosann, visit monicarichkosann.com. 

PAGE 96: Handbag by Louis Vuitton, at select Louis Vuitton boutiques 

nationwide. PAGE 98: Top, skirt, platforms by Proenza Schouler, visit 

proenzaschouler.com. PAGE 100: Vest by Milly, visit milly.com. On model: 

Vest, trousers by Michael Kors Collection, at select Michael Kors stores 

nationwide. T-shirt by Hanes, visit hanes.com. Watch by Cartier, call 

800-CARTIER. Ankle boots by Manolo Blahnik for Adam Lippes, call 212-582- 

3007. PAGE 105: Slide by Prada, visit prada.com. Slide by Miu Miu, at select 

Miu Miu boutiques nationwide. PAGE 106: Sunglasses by Louis Vuitton, call 

866-VUITTON. Sunglasses by Dior, call 800-929-DIOR. PAGE 112: Ring by 

Martin Katz, $188,000, at Martin Katz (Beverly Hills). Handbag by Hermès, 

call 800-441-4488. PAGE 114: Watch by Piaget, $52,000, at Piaget boutiques 

nationwide. PAGE 116: Ring by Van Cleef & Arpels, call 877-VAN- 

CLEEF. Bracelet by Cartier, available by appointment only, at 

select Cartier boutiques nationwide. Earrings by Harry Winston, 

call 800-988-4110. 

SHOPS 

PAGE 124: Sunglasses by alice + olivia by Stacey Bendet, visit 

aliceandoliviaeyewear.com. Cardigan, belt by Lands’ End, call 800-963- 

4816. Shorts by Coach 1941, similar styles at select Coach stores nationwide. 

Tote by Akris, visit akris.ch. Flatform by Nautica, call 866-376-4184. Flatform 

by Boss, visit hugoboss.com. PAGE 126: Bikini by La Perla, visit laperla.com. 

Bucket bag by Truss, collection at fwrd.com. Swimsuit by Aerie, visit aerie 

.com. Jacket by Old Navy, at Old Navy stores nationwide. PAGE 128: Dress by 

Rachel Comey, collection at needsupply.com, fwrd.com. Top by Lucky Brand, 

visit luckybrand.com. Shorts by Pinko, at Pinko (NYC). Necklace by Carolina 

Bucci, at Carolina Bucci (London). PAGE 132: Swimsuit by Oye Swimwear, visit 

oyeswimwear.com, collection at Bergdorf Goodman (NYC). Shorts by Kit and 

Ace, at select Kit and Ace stores nationwide. Sandal by Michael Michael Kors, 

call 866-709-KORS. PAGE 135: Swimsuit by Alix, collection at clubmonaco 

.com. Swimsuit by Gap, visit gap.com. Swimsuit by Old Navy, visit oldnavy 

.com. Tote by Soeur, at Soeur boutiques nationwide. 

INDEPENDENT SPIRIT 

PAGE 201: Sweatshirt by Levi’s, $65, visit levi.com. Cuff by Verdura, $9,950, 

visit verdura.com. Cuff by Aurélie Bidermann, $325, at Aurélie Bidermann 

(NYC). PAGES 202–203: Dress, $2,900, top, $2,300, by Gucci, visit gucci 

.com. Hoop earrings by Dolce & Gabbana, $455, at select Dolce & Gabbana 

boutiques nationwide. PAGE 206: Dress by Bottega Veneta, $12,000, call 800- 

845-6790. Earring by Hearts On Fire, $2,500 (for pair), call 877-PERFECT. 

Bracelet by Piaget, $10,500, at Piaget boutiques nationwide. PAGES 210–211: 

Jacket by Sandro, $495, visit sandro-paris.com. Earrings by Bottega Veneta, 

$450, call 800-845-6790. PAGES 214–215: Top by Banana Republic, $78, visit 

bananarepublic.com. Hoops by Roxanne Assoulin, $75, visit roxanneassoulin 

.com. PAGE 216: T-shirt by Marc Jacobs, $250, visit marcjacobs.com. Earring 

by Eddie Borgo, $225 (for pair), visit eddieborgo.com. PAGE 220: Dress by 

Derek Lam, $1,495, at Derek Lam (NYC). 

THE BEAUTIFUL 

PAGE 241: Necklace by Cartier, at Cartier boutiques nationwide. 

SUPER GIRLS 

PAGE 242: Earrings by Hearts On Fire, visit heartsonfire.com. PAGE 243: 

T-shirt by Calvin Klein Underwear, visit calvinklein.com. Rigid Re-Release 

jeans by Frame Denim, collection at net-a-porter.com. Earring by Hearts On 

Fire, visit heartsonfire.com. Suspenders by The Tie Bar, visit thetiebar.com. 

Watch by Rolex, visit rolex.com. Oxfords by Saint Laurent, at Saint Laurent 

(NYC). PAGES 244–245: Earrings by Glenn Spiro, collection at Bergdorf 

Goodman (NYC), call 646-735-5257. PAGE 246: Arm bracelet by David 

Yurman, at David Yurman (NYC). PAGE 247: Earring by Maria Tash, at 

Maria Tash (NYC). Rings by Tiffany & Co., call 800-843-3269. PAGE 248: 

Hoop earrings by David Yurman, at David Yurman (NYC). Sandals by Pierre 

Hardy, visit pierrehardy.com. PAGE 249: Chain by Verdura, at Verdura 

(NYC). Pinkie ring by David Yurman, visit davidyurman.com. PAGE 250: 

Dresses by Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci, similar styles at Givenchy (NYC). 

PAGE 251: Boots by Gianvito Rossi, collection at Barneys New York. PAGE 

252: Top, skirt, tights, necklace by Balenciaga, at Balenciaga (NYC), 

collection at Bergdorf Goodman (NYC). PAGE 253: Earring by 2017 Tiffany 

Blue Book Collection, visit tiffany.com. 

LAWS OF ATTRACTION 

PAGE 260: Bikini by Tavik, visit tavik.com. PAGE 261: Bodysuit by Versace, visit 

versace.com. PAGE 262: Top by DSquared2, DSquared2 (NYC, Beverly Hills, 

Miami). Pants by Adidas Originals, visit adidas.com. PAGE 263: Jumpsuit by 

Paco Rabanne, visit pacorabanne.com. Sports bra by Victoria’s Secret, visit 

victoriassecret.com. PAGE 264: Top by Chanel, call 800-550-0005. Jacket by 

Nike, visit nike.com. PAGE 265: Swimsuit by Guess, visit guess.com. Pants by 

Adidas Originals, similar styles at adidas.com. Watch by Omega, at Omega 

boutiques nationwide. Fanny pack by Asos, visit asos.com. Sneakers by Reebok, 

visit reebok.com. PAGE 266: Sweatshirt by Alexander Wang, similar styles at 

Alexander Wang (NYC). Top by Puma, visit puma.com. Pants, sandals by 

Courrèges, visit courreges.com. Watch by Chanel, call 800-550-0005. Belt bag 

by Kenzo, visit kenzo.com. PAGE 267: Hoodie, sweatpants by Champion, visit 

champion.com, collection at urbanoutfitters.com. Watch by Bulgari, call 

800-BULGARI. Sneakers by Reebok, visit reebok.com. PAGE 268: Hoodie by 

Adidas Originals, at Adidas stores nationwide. Watch by Omega, at Omega 

boutiques nationwide. PAGE 269: Bodysuit by Mugler, collection at Neiman 

Marcus stores nationwide. Pumps by Christian Louboutin, visit 

christianlouboutin.com. PAGE 270: Bra by Chantelle, visit chantelle.com. 

Jumpsuit by Fendi, visit fendi.com. PAGE 271: Top by Adidas Originals by 

Alexander Wang, visit adidas.com. Watch by Apple Watch Nike+, at Apple stores 

nationwide, visit nike.com. 

AMERICAN GOTH 

PAGE 272: Sweater, shirt by Michael Kors Collection, at select Michael Kors stores 

nationwide. Jeans by Levi’s, visit levi.com. Necklace by David Yurman, at David 

Yurman (NYC). PAGE 273: Dress, bodysuit by Louis Vuitton, at select Louis 

Vuitton stores nationwide. Earring by De Beers, $34,000, visit debeers 

.com. Rings by Hearts On Fire, visit heartsonfire.com. PAGE 274: T-shirt by Dolce 

& Gabbana, at select Dolce & Gabbana boutiques nationwide. Hat by Brixton, 

similar styles at brixton.com. PAGE 275: Jacket by Coach 1941, similar styles at 

select Coach stores nationwide. Dress by Gucci, visit gucci.com. Hat by Dior, at 

Dior boutiques nationwide. Yellow pin by Otherwild, at Otherwild (NYC). 

CLEAN BREAK 

PAGE 276: Sunglasses by Miu Miu, at select Sunglass Hut boutiques 

nationwide. Earring by Maria Black, visit maria-black.com. Earring (worn 

throughout) by Charlotte Chesnais, collection at Dover Street Market New 

York, The Line (NYC), Quiet Storms (Brooklyn), Fivestory (NYC), Bergdorf 

Goodman (NYC). Bracelet, ring by Miansai, visit miansai.com. Ring by 

Cartier, at Cartier boutiques nationwide. PAGE 277: Swimsuit by Lauren 

Ralph Lauren, collection at select Macy’s stores nationwide. Earrings, cuff by 

Agmes, visit agmesnyc.com, collection at Barneys New York (NYC, L.A.), 

modaoperandi.com, Tenoversix (L.A.), Alchemy Works (L.A.). Stud earring 

by Hearts On Fire, visit heartsonfire.com. Arm cuffs by Maison Margiela, at 

Maison Margiela boutiques nationwide. Bracelets, ring by Lagos, visit lagos 

.com. Bracelet by John Hardy, visit johnhardy.com. Cuff, ring by Eddie Borgo, 

visit eddieborgo.com, collection at shopbop.com. Rings by Maria Black, visit 

maria-black.com. Rings by Miansai, visit miansai.com. Ring by Cartier, visit 

cartier.com. PAGE 278: Vest by Boss, at Hugo Boss stores nationwide. Top, 

skirt, earring by Paco Rabanne, collection at Just One Eye (L.A.). Cuff by Eddie 

Borgo, collection at shopbop.com. Ring by Closer by Wwake, visit 

closerbywwake.com. Rings by Miansai, visit miansai.com. Handbag by 

Kenzo, visit kenzo.com. Sandals by Isabel Marant, at Isabel Marant (NYC). 

PAGE 279: T-shirt, top, skirt, earring, handbag by Paco Rabanne, collection at 

Barneys New York. Bikini bottom by Jade Swim, visit jadeswim.com. Lipstick 

case by Valentino Garavani, at Valentino boutiques nationwide. PAGE 280: 

Earring by J.W.Anderson, visit j-w-anderson.com. Backpack, clutch by Kara, 

visit karastore.com. Rings by Delfina Delettrez, visit delfinadelettrez.com, 

collection at farfetch.com. Ring by David Yurman, visit davidyurman.com. 

PAGE 281: Jacket, sunglasses by Max Mara, visit maxmara.com. Shorts by 

Roxana Salehoun, collection at matchesfashion.com. Bikini bottom by Cali 

Dreaming, collection at anthropologie.com. Earring by Modern Weaving, 

collection at needsupply.com. Backpack by Kara, collection at ssense.com. 

Rings by Miansai, visit miansai.com. PAGE 282: 

Dress by Monse, collection at Neiman Marcus 

(Beverly Hills, San Francisco). Hoop earring by 

Annelise Michelson, collection at saksfifthavenue 

.com. Rings by Miansai, visit miansai.com. Ring by 

Cartier, call 800-CARTIER. Clutch by Kara, visit 

karastore.com. Sandals by Alexander Wang, 

similar styles at Alexander Wang (NYC). 

PAGE 283: Jacket, belt, handbag, hat by Miu 

Miu, at select Miu Miu boutiques nationwide. 

Bikini by Jade Swim, visit jadeswim.com. 

Earrings by Proenza Schouler, visit 

proenzaschouler.com. Bracelets by 

Alyssa Norton, to special order visit alyssanorton.com. Ring 

by Eddie Borgo, visit eddieborgo.com. Ring by Miansai, 

visit miansai.com. Ring by Closer by Wwake, visit 

closerbywwake.com. 

MAXIMUM EXPOSURE 

PAGE 285: Coat by Max Mara, at Max Mara (NYC). 

PAGES 286–287: Dress, skirt, top by Max Mara, at Max 

Mara (NYC, Palm Beach). 

Prices are approximate. ELLE recommends that 

merchandise availability be checked with local 

stores. 

ELLE (ISSN 0888-0808) (Volume XXXII, Number 9) (May 2017) is published monthly by Hearst Communications, Inc., 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 U.S.A. Steven R. 

Swartz, President and Chief Executive Officer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice Chairman; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary. Hearst Magazines 

Division: David Carey, President; John A. Rohan, Jr., Senior Vice President, Finance. © 2017 by Hearst Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. ELLE ® is used under license from the 

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one year. Canada: $48 for one year. Other international locations: $87 for one year. Subscription Services: ELLE will, upon receipt of a complete subscription order, undertake fulfillment 

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log on to service.elle.com or write to Customer Service Dept., ELLE, P.O. Box 37870, Boone, IA 50037. From time to time, we make our subscriber list available to companies that sell 

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291

AMERICAN DREAM 

Chris Evans may be Marvel’s brawniest paladin, but this 

supersoldier’s real power goes soul-deep. By Mickey Rapkin 

Every couple of years, Chris Evans pulls 

on his red, white, and blue spandex, 

picks up Captain America’s shield, and saves 

the world from impending doom. But his 

smaller, less-talked-about films (Snowpiercer, 

Before We Go) are often just as thrilling. In 

Gifted, out now from 500 Days of Summer director 

Marc Webb, Evans stars as a sensitive 

small-town boat mechanic fighting a custody 

battle for his orphaned niece (a first-grade 

know-it-all who just may be a math prodigy). 

Evans’s own early years were less contentious, 

though they weren’t without drama. 

His mother ran a local children’s theater in 

Concord, Massachusetts, and Evans says he 

and his siblings were basically Boston’s answer 

to the von Trapps. These days, the 

35-year-old—who once spent three weeks in 

India studying meditation—is as likely to 

quote Siddhartha as he is Sondheim. That 

zen, no doubt, comes in handy, whether on 

set for the currently filming Avengers: Infinity 

War Part 1, or in Evans’s personal life, in 

which he’s been linked to Jessica Biel, Minka 

Kelly, Lily Collins, and, most recently, his 

Gifted costar, Jenny Slate. You know what 

they say: Make love, not war. 

ELLE: Early in your career, you were often 

asked to be shirtless. Tell me about a scene you 

might not have done if you’d had more clout. 

CHRIS EVANS: It’s so funny; I woke up this 

morning, and Not Another Teen Movie was on 

TV. I don’t know if you ever saw it, but I had to 

put a banana in my butt. [Laughs] At the time, 

you’re just so happy to be on a job. I just 

looked at it and said, “Who cares? I’m 

earning my stripes.” 

ELLE: You’re at that age where you’re 

going to a lot of birthday parties for 

your friends’ kids. How does that feel? 

CE: I feel deeply connected to my inner child. 

When I see a bounce house and those little 

cups of ice cream, I’m like, “Shit. Where’s 

mine?” I’m not ashamed of the parts of my 

youth that I’m still connected to—whether it’s 

cartoons or Disney World or Christmastime. I 

think they’re a real representation of my true 

self before the world had its impact on me. 

ELLE: Seriously? 

CE: Sometimes when you see a group of 

grown-ups together acting like adults…it’s 

just not in me. I always kind of feel like a lit- 

tle kid trapped in a 35-year-old’s body. 

ELLE: Are your friends pressuring you to settle 

down? 

CE: I don’t think so. Not to my face. 

ELLE: You studied with a guru in India. What 

did you learn? 

CE: It was one of the most eye-opening experiences 

of my life. I had never really meditated 

before. I’d tried it, but I’d always been 

very aware of my thoughts. While I was over 

there, you do it every day. And I really unlocked 

a little door in myself. My mind was 

really noisy, and I had a lot of questions. My 

guru would just say, “Chris, shhh.” 

ELLE: What kinds of questions were you asking? 

CE: It didn’t matter. I had questions every five 

minutes. A lot of our sadness and fears—and 

suffering—is born out of this unnecessary 

constant narrative. The only reason the brain 

wants those questions is because it’s aware of 

the past, and it’s fearful of the future. The truth 

is, you are not your thoughts. If you are able to 

surrender and let your brain be quiet—just for 

a minute—a real sense of beauty emerges. 

ELLE: What’s the last thing you did that 

scared you? 

CE: I took the last year off and moved home 

to Massachusetts. 

ELLE: What’d you do all day, work out? 

CE: That’s what a lot of people asked me.… 

ELLE: I’m kidding. 

CE: To be honest, I didn’t do a whole lot. My 

sister has three kids. I spent a lot of time 

with them, just really hanging out. I got a 

dog a year ago. She’s become a huge part of 

my life. I felt very normal, like a regular hu- 

man. I felt like my 12-year-old self. And I was 

really full of a lot of joy. 

ELLE: Would you tell me about a time you 

were envious of another man? 

CE: I have a lot of really funny friends in my 

life. I’m not one of the funny ones. I’m fun. 

But I’m not funny. And there’s a big difference. 

Anytime I hang out with a guy who 

is hilarious, I’m like, Man, I wish my brain 

worked the way his does. 

ELLE: You’re a big New England Patriots fan. 

And a big Democrat. Was it hard for you to 

hear that Tom Brady called Donald Trump 

personally to congratulate him? 

CE: This whole year has had so many tricky 

ups and downs. But the Brady-Trump connection 

is the one part of it that I truly 

have been unable to process in 

any capacity. My brain just cannot 

reconcile that. I truly chose 

to stick my head in the ground 

and pretend that doesn’t happen. 

I can’t afford to lose my love of Tom 

Brady. 

ELLE: What would you say if you met Brady? 

Would you talk politics? 

CE: No way! I’d be lucky if I could even form 

words. I would be focusing on being cool, 

calm. Don’t be a weirdo. Small sentences. 

Don’t aim too high. 

ELLE: Why hasn’t there been a stand-alone 

Black Widow movie yet? 

CE: That’s a good question. It would really just 

clean up, wouldn’t it? Scarlett [Johansson] is 

so good at everything she does. She’s played 

such a crucial part in the other films. She always 

makes her presence so felt—even when 

there are 50 different superheroes running 

around onscreen. I wouldn’t be surprised if 

that happens at some point in the future. I’m 

sure Scarlett would be open to it. 

ELLE: You’ve dated a number of actresses. 

How do you handle running into exes in L.A.? 

CE: It’s very rare. But I’ve had no bad breakups 

in my life. Typically, if I see an ex, I give a big 

hug, and it’s wonderful to catch up. If you’re 

ever fortunate enough to love someone and 

have them love you back, it’s worth protecting 

that. It’s rare that someone can truly know 

you. And if you’ve broken through that kind 

of wall, I think it’s important to value that. 

ELLE: Would they say the same about you? 

CE: I hope. 

Clockwise from top: Mark Mann/August; Getty Images; Everett Collection (2) 

292

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