Roger Stone Still Did Nothing Wrong Tee Shirts Black

Roger Stone Still Did Nothing Wrong Tee Shirts Black

Buy it:  Roger Stone Still Did Nothing Wrong Tee Shirts Black “Though today is the Roger Stone Still Did Nothing Wrong Tee Shirts Black first Monday in May, we are not rolling out the red carpet on the front steps,” says the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Marina Kellen French Director Max Hollein. But that doesn’t preclude the release of exciting new information about the Costume Institute’s two-part 2021 exhibit “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” and “In America: An Anthology of Fashion.” Hollein was joined by Eva Chen of Instagram and Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute, this morning at a virtual press conference that revealed all the details about the upcoming exhibits and galas. Part one of the exhibition, “A Lexicon of Fashion,” will open September 18 at the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Met, marking the Costume Institute’s 75th anniversary. An intimate gala to celebrate the exhibit’s opening will take place on September 13, cochaired by Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Amanda Gorman, and Naomi Osaka with honorary chairs Tom Ford, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri, and Anna Wintour. The exhibit will be organized to resemble a home, with intersecting walls and rooms that will establish what Bolton calls “a new vocabulary that’s more relevant and more reflective of the times in which we’re living.” “Traditionally American fashion has been described in terms of the American tenets of simplicity, practicality, and functionality. Fashion’s more emotional qualities have tended to be reserved for more European fashion,” Bolton says. “In part one we’ll be reconsidering this perception by reestablishing a modern lexicon of fashion based on the emotional qualities of dress.” The many rooms in this part of the exhibit will be titled to reflect the personal and emotional relationship we have to fashion: “Well-Being” for the kitchen galleries, “Aspiration” for the office, and “Trust,” the living room, for example. In pushing the human connections to our clothes, Bolton is writing a new history of American style that focuses less on sportswear and Seventh Avenue dressmakers, instead framing designers as creators, innovators, and artists. “Taken together these qualities will compromise a modern vocabulary of American fashion that prioritizes values, emotions, and sentiments over the sportswear principles of realism, rationalism, and pragmatism,” he says. Pieces from Christopher John Rogers, Sterling Ruby, Conner Ives, Prabal Gurung, and Andre Walker feature in part one of the exhibition. Ruby’s Veil Flag, a short film presented at Paris Fashion Week, was recreated at the Met, and its central piece, a denim American flag, will open the show. Director Melina Matsoukas will also create a film for the exhibit that will evolve over the course of its run. Part two, “An Anthology of Fashion,” will open May 5, 2022, in the period rooms of the museum’s American Wing. In this, it’s a natural coda to the museum’s trio of in situ Costume Institute exhibits that began with 2004’s Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century held in the French period rooms and 2006’s AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion set in the English period rooms. “In its conceptualization, part two actually preceded part one and actually inspired and informed it. For many years now we’ve been examining our collection to uncover hidden or untold stories with a view to complicating or problematizing monolithic interpretations of fashion. Our intention for part two is to bring these stories together in an anthology that challenges perceived histories and offers alternative readings of American fashion,” Bolton explains. My favorite is one that two of my cousins made. It has a multicolor array of yellow, orange, and red ribbons standing out against the red printed backdrop. Sometimes, she will even wear a beaded buckskin bag with it that my sister made. Decked out in her look, she certainly blends into her surroundings at the powwow, where exquisite craftsmanship and color is everywhere. Seeing my mom in a colorful ensemble is always a shock to the senses, but it makes total sense. “Be proud of who you are,” she’ll always tell me. I’ve grown to love how she keeps her ribbon skirts reserved for special occasions. Her dramatic switch-up from all black into her colorful regalia always causes you to focus in on all of its beautiful details just that much more, as though she deliberately holds back in her day-to-day wardrobe to make you notice it more when she does dress up. An underarm guard (shaped like a shoulder pad, but it’s for your underarms) or any undershirt for that matter will add a protective layer to avoid staining and perspiration marks which are tricky to clean.Cedar blocks aren’t effective against all moth infestations, but they do thwart the growth of the insect. Place a couple in your closets and drawers and replace when the blocks lose their piney scents. For more intense preventative measures, pick up some Moth prevention traps. Now, the category of “puffy” is admittedly a wide-ranging one—the Boa Pouf and Bellini sofa, for example, have a number of glaring aesthetic differences. (Here’s our best attempt at a definitive categorization: anything that looks like it belongs in the home of the Michelin Man or Pillsbury doughboy.) It’s a design canon that might not hold its weight ten or 20 years from now—many of these pieces belong to other distinct design movements anyway—but in this very moment, we are certainly gravitating to everything thick and squishy. It’s a shift from recent predilections: Mid-century modern, the design style du jour of the past decade, is known for its clean, geometric lines and visible peg legs. These gentle, curved offerings are anything but. “There’s been quite a dramatic shift with the popularity of the rounded shape furniture. It’s trickled from bigger pieces like sofas and chairs to even coffee tables and sculptures,” says interior designer Erick Garcia of Maison Trouvaille. Just as structured jackets and tight pants went to the wayside last March, it seems so did any sleek and stiff furniture. “During our quarantine last year, we all spent so much time at home working on our laptops, Zooming and being domesticated—furniture had to be more cozy and inviting while lounging in our sweat suits,” Garcia says. It only increased amid political and social unrest: “We wanted to be comforted by these round, curved and tactile chairs and sofas—almost like receiving a big soft hug,” Garcia adds. While recently decorating celebrity hairstylist Jen Atkins’ Los Angeles home, Garcia sourced a pair of squishy, circular Pacha armchairs for the bedroom, along with an Afra & Tobia Scarpa sofa for the living space. Now that the world is opening up again, will puffy and plump pieces be here to stay? “The trend will definitely continue and evolve,” Garcia says, although perhaps don’t plan for a complete overhaul of your mid-century look: “There’s room for both—the beauty and fun of design is that we can mix it all together.” Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this new column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds. One might think that a pandemic year spent mostly single would make me long for a partner, but in truth, that’s simply not the case. I’ve become mildly obsessed with spending time exactly the way I want to, without having to take someone else’s dietary restrictions or Netflix-viewing habits into consideration. The one exception comes when I see a couple that seems to shine in each other’s presence, and this week, said couple was none other than the actor pair of Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale. I’ve long been of the opinion that Byrne is one of the most criminally underrated comedic actresses out there (if her turn in Bridesmaids isn’t enough to convince you, watch her truly excellent cameo in the just-okay 2010 film Get Him to the Greek), and I’ve been obsessed with Cannavale since he played one of the few genuinely memorable boyfriends-of-the-week to Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones. What cinched my love of them as a couple, though, was a recent paparazzi shot of the pair embracing one another on an Australian beach—and that was after 14 days of mandatory quarantine together. Again, maybe I’ve just gotten too set in my bitter-spinster ways, but if I were locked in a hotel room with someone—even the love of my life—for two straight weeks, I’m not sure I’d be in the mood to glowingly wrap my arms around them on the sand at the end of our stint together. Byrne and Cannavale have been together since 2012 and have two children together, yet they still look like besotted spring-breakers one or two rum punches away from recreating the From Here to Eternity beach scene. One of the best aspects of Byrne and Cannavale’s beach escape is the fact that they are, intentionally or not, matching. (I simply refuse to use the word “twinning.”) They’re both clad in jeans, white T-shirts, and baseball hats—a watercolor print for Byrne, and an extremely on-brand Yankees logo for Cannavale—and part of me suspects that a significant portion of their shared closet is devoted to this kind of on-the-fly, unfussy ensemble. Actually, do celebrities share closets, or do they each have their own in separate wings of their Brentwood mansions? I digress. Byrne and Cannavale have worked together several times in the past, most recently co-starring in a Brooklyn Academy of Music run of Medea, but they rarely do press together. “We’re generally pretty private,” Byrne recently told Vanity Fair. Why is it always the celebrity couples you actually like that maintain an air of mystery, while the ones who make you despair of the future of society can’t stop gushing about each other on camera? Actually, maybe the answer is in the question. Either way, mazel to Byrne and Cannavale on what appears—to the totally untrained, contextless eye—to be a genuinely fun relationship. If I ever pass you in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood, I promise to subtly gawk, but refrain from Instagramming. The COVID-19 emergency in India has shown no signs of abating in recent weeks, with hospitals jam-packed and supplies of oxygen running short. More than 300,000 people a day are reportedly becoming infected; and while it can be difficult to conceive of a humanitarian crisis of that magnitude, there are plenty of ways for those in the U.S. and abroad to help. Below, find a list of organizations working to provide food, oxygen, personal protective equipment (PPE), medical supplies, and other forms of care to India, all of which are currently accepting donations. This U.K.-based nonprofit is collecting funds to buy highly in-demand medical necessities like oxygen concentrators, CPAP machines, and other diagnostic tools, all to be sent to India and distributed in hospitals and care centers. Donate here. This United Nations agency is on hand in India to share information on stopping the spread of COVID-19 and provide more than 3.6 million people with critical water, sanitation, and hygiene supplies and services. Donate here.The Indian Red Cross Society is soliciting and distributing shipments of oxygen concentrators, ventilators, bedside monitors, and other medical supplies across India, as well as providing emergency services. Donate here. Donations to this U.S. nonprofit working out of Kolkata can go toward PPE for hospital staff, oxygen cylinders, or cardiac monitors, depending on the amount of money pledged. Donate here.This nonprofit is soliciting donations for PPE and groceries for families living below the poverty line who are facing food scarcity due to India’s ongoing lockdown efforts. Donate here. It was a snippet of a video that was taken right before President Biden’s first address to Congress: a clip of Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman of the United States and a longtime high-powered lawyer (he was a partner at the law firm DLA Piper before leaving his post last year for a new teaching gig), blowing his wife kisses and waving lovingly at her. A girl on Twitter posted the video with a caption about how the perfect man is out there, and that got me thinking about what a profoundly modern marriage Vice President Kamala Harris has. It’s the kind of marriage that women in my mother’s generation didn’t know could exist. For decades, popular culture has told American women that they had a choice: marriage or career. The idea that you could marry for the first time in your late 40s was something unimaginable to my mother’s generation. Harris married Emhoff in 2014, when they were both almost 50; it’s Emhoff’s second marriage and Harris’s first. By that time, Harris was a two-term attorney general for a state that is larger than many countries. In a nation where the median age for a woman to get married is about 28, Vice President Harris is an incredibly exciting outlier. It’s hard to write about the first female vice president’s marriage without taking a moment to reflect that one of the things that derailed Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice-presidential candidate in a general election, in 1984, was her marriage. (Her husband, John Zaccaro, pled guilty to fraudulently obtaining bank financing in a real estate transaction.) That was 36 years before America managed to elect a female vice president. Few cultural shifts have been as seismic as the one that occurred in the veep’s office since Biden moved into the White House. The Trump administration had many Handmaid’s Tale–like elements to it (the worst of which was probably allowing the Violence Against Women Act to expire), but none was more personally vexing to me as the daughter of a second-wave feminist than the former vice president’s incredibly antiquated notions of marriage and gender roles. The Pence marriage was like something out of another century. Mike called his wife “mother” and refused to dine alone with other women. He and Karen became evangelicals together. Mike had a set of rules to “avoid any infidelity temptations, or even rumors of impropriety.” It was the kind of marriage that would have seemed old-fashioned in the 1950s. When Karen introduced Mike at CPAC, she said her “job is to keep him humble.” I mean I guess we should have been happy that she didn’t say her job was ironing, but we got the idea: Wives were charming accessories, supporting actresses in their own lives. Rolling Stone reported, “Pence reportedly calls Karen the ‘prayer warrior’ of the family.” And of course, Karen is super-duper antichoice, telling the group at the March for Life, “Before we came to Capitol Hill, we were supporting crisis pregnancy centers and speaking for life.” Despite the fact that this was actually Mrs. Pence’s second marriage, a fact often omitted from stories about the Pences, there was something alarmingly puritanical about the whole thing. We don’t know what really happens in people’s marriages. Writing about them is a highly speculative endeavor. But despite the impossibility of understanding how a couple behaves behind closed doors, from the standpoint of feminist representation, it’s powerful to see a career woman, in such a public role, with a different kind of love story. I am pleased that my teenage daughter can see a woman who has it all: a loving husband, two stepchildren, and the second most powerful job in the country. The only thing that would be a better message for young girls is if that woman had the most powerful job in the country. Even if you aren’t familiar with his comic alter ego, Anthony Mackie is a familiar face. Over the last two decades, he’s defused bombs in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, rap battled Eminem in 8 Mile, and been a consistent scene-stealer in the movies and television shows that comprise the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For seven years and six films, he’s portrayed Sam Wilson, a.k.a. Falcon, the Air Force veteran turned superhero, who has served as a fan-favorite supporting player within the Avengers roster. This March, Mackie and his character graduated from his wingman post and took the lead in the Disney+ breakout miniseries Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The show, which ended its first season earlier this month, explores what it means to be a modern hero and a person of color in 2021. It ends (spoiler alert) with Wilson stepping up to become the new Captain America and the first Black man to take up the mantle in a live-action production. Representation has become a media priority, but it’s still relatively rare for Black and Brown performers to serve as leads in tentpole franchise films, making Mackie’s ascension to de facto Avengers leader meaningful for the actor and audiences. “It poses questions. Now you have white kids who will look up to a Black Captain America,” Mackie told me via Zoom. “I have four little Black boys, and now they’re also going to have a conversation with their white, Asian, and Latino friends. That’s what is most important. When you take the [familiar] and spin it on its head, what do those conversations look like?” Diverging from the familiar is Marvel’s current M.O. Its first two MCU TV spin-offs use their serialized format to expand the notion of superhero content while referencing a plethora of old media. If WandaVision was the studio’s madcap overview of television tropes, Falcon honors the tenets of summer blockbusters. In between its societal critiques, the show nods to the genre standards of the late ’80s and early ’90s. There are shades of Tom Clancy–style espionage thrillers each time Sam and Bucky Barnes chase superpowered terrorist group the Flag Smashers across international borders. Likewise, the banter-filled scenes that highlight their mismatched partnership nod to buddy-cop action flicks like Lethal Weapon and 48 Hrs. In the comedy variant of that subgenre, the one-liners are as frequent as the explosions, and every altercation serves as code for bro-y codependency. In its lighter moments, Falcon and the Winter Soldier veers in that direction with zingers and meme-able visual non sequiturs. Programming that balances multiple genres and moods is the selling point of prestige TV, but it demands performers who can walk a tightrope. A Juilliard alum who cut his teeth in New York’s theater scene, Mackie fits the bill. Still, putting on his winged Cap suit for the first time was an emotional experience. “I called my sister and talked to her for a while about it,” he says. “There were so many things I wanted in my career growing up as a young actor. I didn’t go to Hollywood and say, ‘Make me a star.’ I didn’t do some of these other things to get recognition; I worked for 21 years to get to where I am. [So] to have that moment of realizing that all of your hard work has paid off, it’s very humbling.” Comics have a long history of social commentary—X-Men’s allusions to the HIV crisis, Black Panther’s debut at the height of the civil rights movement—and Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s exploration of America’s history of white supremacy continues that tradition. Race informs every arc, whether it’s referenced via the indignity of Wilson getting pulled over by police for walking while Black, or through the struggles of Isaiah Bradley, a World War II–era super-soldier whose story directly parallels that of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the U.S. government’s history of experimenting on Black bodies. Connecting to the news cycle within the fantasy of a world rife with Norse gods and time travelers could have been problematic, but Mackie credits screenwriter Malcolm Spellman for the series’ nuanced handling of real-world issues. “I was blown away by it—Malcolm went in deep on these characters,” he says. “I don’t know if anybody else would have had the balls to do that. The fact that we have Isaiah Bradley in this series and [acknowledge] everything he meant not only to the history of America and the forming of Captain America is monumental. I don’t know if anyone but Malcolm would have had the balls to do that.” Bradley represents the abuses of the past, but it’s through Wilson that the complexities of being a Black man in 2021 are illustrated. Burdened with the understanding that his position as Captain America will be objectionable to those more comfortable with his blond, blue-eyed predecessor, the character debates becoming the symbolic representation of a nation where people of color remain targets. “The relationship between America and African American men is a very tumultuous, abusive relationship,” says Mackie. “It’s something that needs to be rectified and healed. So the idea of [Sam] being Captain America recognizes all of the hardships and things that Black men and women have gone through in this country. Still, it’s also about the future and what we can look forward to for our kids to experience in this country.” Father to four boys, Mackie has already gotten a taste of the youth reaction to his tenure as Cap. “My two littlest ones looked at the TV, they looked at me, and they looked at the TV, and they’re like, ‘Dad, that guy looks just like you,’” he says. “And then they went back to playing with their Legos.” Toddlers may not be impressed, but the internet has been buzzing, especially since the announcement Marvel is developing a fourth Captain America film with a script from Spellman. In keeping with the studio’s reputation for secrecy, Mackie only found out about the project after the fact. “It’s funny when I saw that news; I was like, ‘No one called me!’” With Sam’s trajectory a closely guarded secret, Mackie is eager to see where the character goes and what his message will be. “I think Sam Wilson is more so about unifying and equality,” says Mackie. “A Captain America for everyone instead of Captain America for a specific few.” BTS and BLACKPINK still rule the K-pop roost, but competition within South Korea’s pop industry is both gruelling and fierce, with a group debuting (seemingly) every other week. So, when ENHYPEN (part of the Hybe family, alongside BTS) made their much-awaited first comeback on April 26 via a live-streamed press conference with new single “Drunk-Dazed,” they rather aptly called the music landscape a “battlefield,” noting that between the latest groups (known as the K-pop’s fourth generation of idols) there is a war to be the hottest and the best. The fourth generation includes groups such as Stray Kids, ITZY, ATEEZ, and TXT, all of whom debuted after 2018 and have already achieved significant success across the globe. They’ve been joined by a slew of rookie idols looking to make their own mark on the world of music. Korea’s “idol” music, with its progressive-pop values, has long emphasized saturated colors, glitchy synths and tweaked-out vocals, lending a sense of euphoria to its millions of fans. StayC’s debut single, “So Bad,” arrived with a bubblegum-pink bang, its traditional fly-high pop chorus beefed up with club bass and twitchy flourishes that sound like the voice message button on South Korea’s messaging app KakaoTalk being repeatedly and impatiently pressed. They were an instant hit, and their EP, Staydom, made them the rookie girl group with the highest first-week sales of 2020 to 2021. When you’ve got Black Eyed Pilseung (South Korea’s celebrated songwriting/production duo) as your CEO and producer, prepare to expect the unexpected. A much-debated topic over the past few years has been idol “noise music.” Loosely categorized by fans as disjointed K-pop, it contains ultra-heavy electronic beats (often influenced by rave culture) and mechanical sounds, for example, Red Velvet’s “Zimzalabim” (2019). P1Harmony’s second single, “Scared,” sits in the middle of this divisive genre, but it’s where you really sense their bigger potential. Alongside the clanging metallic hook, they deliver a rallying call for self-belief to outsiders. Their latest EP, Disharmony: Break Out, is wall-to-wall social observations, and a must-listen for those who like their K-pop loud, high-energy and defiant. Aespa are SM Entertainment’s first new girl group since 2014, and excitement reached fever pitch for their debut single, “Black Mamba” (2020), whose simple “Aya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya” hook embedded into the brain with frightening ease. Their visual concept is rooted in digital art, AI and virtual reality: Aespa contains four human members and four virtual ones. How the two sets of girls interact with each other, and potentially their fans, was demonstrated through a short video called “My, Karina,” but with only two tracks thus far released, we’re yet to see SM’s tentpole ideas (and Aespa’s storyline) in action. “Black Mamba” has racked up a staggering 141 million views in just five months, however, so there’s clearly no shortage of fans waiting for that moment. how I-Land, a joint venture between K-pop giants Big Hit (now Hybe) and CJ E&M, ENHYPEN amassed a huge fanbase before their debut EP, Border: Day One, had even dropped in November 2020. Their producer, Wonderkid (a.k.a. Kim Tae Yun), has delivered psychedelia and tinges of rock to their 2021 EP, Border: Carnival (which has notched up a staggering 400,000 pre-orders), putting down the bedrock to enhance ENHYPEN’s biggest strength: their stage performances. New single “Drunk-Dazed,” with its complex, demanding choreography, is well worth watching again and again and again. Two warm-up singles—the unapologetically ballsy rock of 2020’s My Heart Skip A Beat and R&B-pop of “Can We Talk Again” (2021)—showed off the group’s range, while single “Ponzona” (2021) added yet another dimension to Purple Kiss. The track fused K-pop’s stalwart ‘girl crush’ concept with lashings of Billie Eilish and the darker, edgier feel of fellow K-Pop group (G)I-DLE. No matter what you call this process—a jumble, a fusion, a melting pot—K-pop’s ability to create a coherent, engaging tapestry of sights and sounds from a dozen pop-culture references never fails to astound. Though one can never predict K-pop’s breakout acts from smaller agencies, by matching this alchemy to a group such as Purple Kiss whose presence can be felt even through a laptop screen, you may well be looking at the next big thing. It takes a strong will to resist Weeekly’s 2020 debut, “Tag Me (@Me),” with its brat-pop cuteness, which, like all good K-pop, marries a dozen styles including a wistful bridge and hyperactive outro. One of the industry’s advantages is that everyone is catered for, from gothic to candy-colored, hip-hop to balladry, serious to sentimental, and Weeekly—who nabbed the New Artist of the Year award at South Korea’s Melon Music Awards 2020—have released three EPs (2020’s We Can and We Are, and 2021’s We Play) that sparkle with some truly wholesome fare, particularly on B-sides “Top Secret,” “Butterfly” and “Lucky.” If your taste leans towards fizzy escapism, allow Weeekly to whisk you away. After years of bouncing from group to group, Cho Seung-youn found firm footing on his own as WOODZ, releasing 2020’s earworm “Love Me Harder.” His debut EP, Equal (2020), was a heady spin through perhaps too many styles and sounds, but on the second EP, 2020’s Woops!, he struck a groove with warm, acoustic-led pop-rock. His latest single, “Feels Like” (2021), is, arguably, his best. Breathy and seductive with treacly guitar riffs, this is WOODZ creatively pushing himself to the point where he sounds like no one else in K-pop’s current climate, and that alone demands attention. Princess Charlotte is growing up right before our very eyes.On May 2, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s second child turns six years old. To mark the occasion, the family shared a new portrait of the young royal at their country home of Anmer Hall in Norfolk, England. In it, a charming Charlotte beams at the camera, her blondish-brown hair framing her face. She wears a blue floral print dress adorned with red buttons and trim.Kate Middleton took the official photo of her one-and-only daughter, just as she did with her youngest son, Prince Louis, who turned three on April 23. The photograph is just the latest glimpse the public has gotten of the little princess. Recently, she also appeared in a video celebrating her parents’ April 29 wedding anniversary. The footage showed Charlotte, as well as her brothers George and Louis, running around on the beach, playing on a see-saw in their backyard, and toasting marshmallows. The princess is seen happily smiling throughout. Usually, this official portrait of Princess Charlotte would be tweeted or posted on similar channels—however, this weekend, the family is boycotting social media in support of English football players of color who have been subject to racial abuse. What are the best travel mugs and reusable coffee cups? Ask a Vogue editor, and their excitement for their favorite vessel might rival that of the latest great fashion collection. If one of your 2021 goals is to live more sustainably, buying a reusable coffee cup, tumbler, or travel mug is a simple way to bake the virtue into your everyday life. Many of us are guilty of grabbing a latte and, after an hour or two, quickly discarding that paper or plastic cup into the trash. In 2018, Reuters reported that 64 percent of Americans are drinking more coffee daily (the highest level since 2012). But there’s no need to actually give up your daily coffee, just bring a cup that will help reduce the amount of single-use plastic disposed each day, but can also be chic, too. As Emily Farra, Vogue’s Senior Fashion News Writer notes, she gets more compliments on her ceramic W&P travel mug than anything in her closet. Below, 18 Vogue editors spill about their favorite reusable coffee cups and best travel mug selects.Two things I love about Hay’s Sowden cup: 1. the good design (contrasting colors! sleek lines!) and 2. its ability to keep your coffee cold, or hot, for twelve hours. Considering I still drink ice coffee in the depths of New York winter, I likely won’t ever need the latter temperature meticulously maintained! But it’s still nice to have options. A friend introduced me to this reusable coffee cup a few years ago. I like it so much that I’ve now gifted one to every member of my family. It has all the environmental benefits of a reusable cup with the insulating qualities of a Yeti so my coffee stays warm. The resealable lid and handle make it really easy for a multi-tasker like me to cart it all around without spilling everywhere. I drink a lot—actually, way too much—coffee and I hate lugging a giant thermos around with me all day. When I found this collapsible coffee mug, it was bliss. It folds down to fit in my small purse, so once I’m done chugging a cold brew I can pack it up and not think about it … until my next cup. Sorry, cappuccino lovers, I cannot stand the taste of coffee—like not at all. Instead, tea is my morning drink of choice. I feel really fancy when I’m sipping it from my favorite Tea Forte cup. It has a lid that allows me to take it with me when I’m on the go, and the pretty flower print makes me feel like an extra on Bridgerton. Over the years, I’ve really come to love sipping a great cup of tea or warm water with lemon throughout the day but hate lugging around a bulky tumbler! The Moonstone tumbler has been a minimalist’s dream with a sleek design that never fails to keep my beverage of choice warm. It’s the perfect no fuss, no gimmick product. Just great insulating technology! I love my Kinto travel mug for hot and cold coffee alike. The clever double lid not only prevents awkward (or dangerous!) spillage, but also keeps ice cubes at bay.I love this Ember cup as I am a slow coffee drinker and it keeps my cup warm for hours. Perfect for lazy Sunday mornings at home! I’m obsessed with my Keep cup. It’s a great size and most like a traditional to-go cup for me. Plus, it’s super easy to clean which means I’m way more likely to keep using it!I think I get more compliments on my blush W&P travel mug than anything in my closet. Admittedly, it is really cute, but it’s also very petite! For days when I need more than 12 ounces of coffee (which are most days), I’m picking up their new, larger version in slate gray. These sleek ceramic coffee mugs come in three color ways: black, white, and mint (which is my personal favorite). Not only is it compact in size, but its double insulated walls help keep my hot coffee hot and ice coffee cold no matter what temperature it is outside. Even better—its bamboo cap is leak-proof so I can drop it in my bag without worrying about a spill. I’m not a huge coffee drinker but I do love my tea! This reusable mug from Miir is my go-to whenever I am on the run and need to take my drink on the go. I also love the sleek and modern design of the mug! This speckly thermos looks like something a loving 1950s housewife would have filled with coffee and left waiting on the counter for her husband’s morning commute. I’m no housewife, but it does pair well with my midcentury vintage wardrobe! For someone like me whose coffee order is good ol’ drip and a bit of half & half, (which might just make me the only non-non-dairy coffee order in New York) there’s something about drinking it out of a ceramic imitation of the classic bodega paper cup. Perfect for sipping joe or some tea daily at my desk or right at home—sans paper and plastic. I use my Joco Cup faithfully every day. The annoyance of washing it every morning is offset by the righteous virtue I feel as I wait in line to pay among all the single-use plastic holdouts. I used to be a diehard disposable cup user because I’m probably lazy and myopic when it comes to recycling, etc. But I have to say, I love this coffee cup that I keep at my desk and get my morning coffee in. I haven’t used a disposable cup since I bought it. I like this little blush cup from W&P—it is not too large, so you can avoid over-caffeinating!As any true born-and-raised Minnesotan would, I have a strong affinity for all things Scandinavian. So naturally these hand-painted Dansk coffee cups, designed by legendary Danish ceramicist Niels Refsgaard, are the perfect vessel for my afternoon caffeine boost. I love that they are microwave and dishwasher safe without compromising their old-world stoneware charm. This soccer mom—tennis mom, actually—was yearning for a spot of tea while watching matches, so the hubsters lent me his Zojirushi thermos/mug. It’s sleek. It has a lock function. It keeps things super hot, or super cold. I was sold. I wished for one for Christmas and Santa came through with a gift that keeps on giving. Now I don’t leave the house without it. As we approach the summer of 2021, with countless cinemas across the world still shuttered and the future uncertain, Netflix—exceeding all expectations—continues to roll out hit after hit. Up next? A psychological chiller featuring Amy Adams and Julianne Moore, a miniseries chronicling the life of a fashion icon, and the return of two binge-worthy shows that proved to be essential quarantine viewing the first time around. These are the five releases to add to your watch list now. A distressed Amy Adams plays an agoraphobic child psychologist who watches her neighbors through the windows of her New York brownstone in Joe Wright’s twisty horror movie based on the novel by A.J. Finn. She makes a new friend (Julianne Moore) but then witnesses her being attacked, after which her cloistered existence unravels entirely. The supporting cast is stellar (Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie, Brian Tyree Henry, and Jennifer Jason Leigh) and the powerful sense of claustrophobia undeniably timely. Directed by Daniel Minahan and executive produced by Ryan Murphy, this glittering five-part drama casts Ewan McGregor as the titular designer who changed the face of American fashion. As we track his stratospheric rise and eventual downfall as a result of addiction and ill-advised business decisions, expect flamboyant 1970s costumes, wild nights at Studio 54, and an introduction to his circle, which included actor Liza Minnelli and jewelry designer Elsa Peretti. What happens when a group of mercenaries is hired to retrieve $200 million from a Las Vegas casino during a zombie outbreak? Prepare to find out in Zack Snyder’s delightfully bombastic action epic, which centers on Dave Bautista as a war hero who assembles an eclectic crew (Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Tig Notaro, and Matthias Schweighöfer). It has all the ingredients of a summer blockbuster: shoot-outs, spectacular set pieces, and laughs, not to mention a zombie tiger. As charming as it was quietly revolutionary, the first season of Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s high school comedy about Indian American teenager Devi won hearts the world over. Now its magnetic lead, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, is back for the second installment with a slew of new additions, from Megan Suri as a fellow student to Common as a potential love interest for Devi’s mother (Poorna Jagannathan). If you’re still reeling from the cliff-hanger ending of the first part of George Kay’s ingenious thriller, take solace in the fact that the second half is on its way. It’ll follow the charismatic Omar Sy in the role of Assane, a thief hell-bent on avenging his father’s death whose son (Etan Simon) has just been abducted by his enemies. There are sure to be more shocking revelations, tense standoffs, elaborate disguises, and the same sleight of hand that made the earliest episodes so irresistible. For the summer, I would like nothing more than a glitzy, can’t-miss-it chain belt. After watching a lot of Jennifer Lopez recently, specifically her 2001 music video “Love Don’t Cost a Thing,” my love for the piece has been reignited. In the noughties scene, Lopez drips in gold jewelry, including a fat chain necklace with a large horn pendant, a gilded link number clanging on her wrist, a fistful of Midas-touched rings, and her signature fist-size hoops. She says to a supposed lover who has gifted her a gold bangle in lieu of showing up in person, “The last thing I need is another bracelet.” As Lopez lingers on the word “bracelet”, the camera pans to a Michael Kors-era Celine chain belt. The gleaming piece isn’t threaded through the belt loops of her skin-tight jeans but rather, it lazily hangs off of Lopez’s hips. As she walks down an empty road and sheds the rest of her jewelry while singing “think I’m gonna spend your cash/I don’t”, the chain belt’s double-C charm clangs from side to side, bouncing off her upper thigh. The whole moment is, well, rich. This yesteryear Celine belt serves no purpose other than to be seen. It’s not actually securing her pants from falling down, which is what belts do. It’s just there, an excessive garnish for Lopez’s otherwise plain look. My own imagined outfits for reemergence hinge on that very chain belt. That sort of gaudy-chic aesthetic feels apropos for the world coming out of hibernation. In the early aughts, It girls and pop stars loved chain belts. Aaliyah opted for a thin gold incarnation strung over a simple pair of white pants at a film premiere in 2001, while Christina Aguilera always went the brash route with multiple chains in multiple sizes. On the runway, the chain belt has been a Chanel signature time and time again. A moment from the Spring 1995 show is burned in my brain, with Brandi Quinones trotting down the catwalk in an itty-bitty baby pink button-up polo and a mini skirt with a slit. A chain belt hangs off the skirt, once again, it’s just there. Speaking of the runway, the piece made a comeback at Chanel’s spring 2021 show, strung across a bodysuit or a pair of trousers. Y2K-minded Blumarine’s fall 2021 show featured so many chains on one look, it resembled a flashy octopus. The trend continued at Marine Serre, where a stone bauble hung from a chain.Think of a chain belt as jewelry but for your waist. It’s made to draw attention and be pretty, and not do anything other than that—the cherry on the top of a sartorial sundae. In other words, it’s worth linking up with a chain belt this summer. We’ve all chuckled when someone cracks a joke about changing from our daytime pajamas into our nighttime pajamas. It’s funny because it’s true, and all too familiar. Pajamas are becoming far more than just a creature comfort to enjoy when crawling under the covers; they are a way of life. But what to do when temperatures rise and the cozy set that got you through hibernation season now sends you tossing and turning by night and hot-flashing by day? Flannel will not do for May, and with summer creeping up on us, visions of airy linen sets and billowy poplin nightgowns now dance in our heads. From starchy oversized nightshirts to slinky silk negligees, the perfect summer-weight sleepwear is out there waiting for you, begging to be worn 24 hours a day. So next time you’re lying awake, sweating in your winter sleepwear at 2 a.m., take a look at our favorite lightweight options and the best summer pajamas for women, below. (The sheep you’re counting won’t mind, we promise.) Silk camis, short sleep shorts, and sweet bloomers will have you feeling like you’re wearing nothing at all.Swap your long-sleeve shirt and pajama pant sets for something shorter. These coordinated cotton and linen pajama sets are summer’s version of the classic sleep set, or in this case, the best summer pajamas for women. From counting sheep to pouring coffee, these oxford and T-shirt gowns will take you from sweet dreams to Sunday mornings.The perfect women’s boxer short does exist. So long to borrowing (stealing) from the boys. Just throw on your favorite T-shirt and snooze.What better season to sashay around the house wearing vintage-inspired sleepwear than summer?Your bedtime routine just got sweeter thanks to these luxe, wind-down robes, from a crisp seersucker and lightweight linens. At last, our dreams of safely attending soirées could soon become a reality, which is why thoughts of picking the best party dresses to wear to future gatherings are slowly infiltrating our minds. Likewise, designers are also planning for the return of going out ensembles. Did you see Saint Laurent’s latest collection? Come fall, Anthony Vaccarello’s jubilant micro-mini skirts, metallic bodysuits, and sequin jackets could be spotted at a gala or—dare I say it—an in-person, red-carpet event. Yes, we miss those, too. Brands like Michael Kors, Caroline Hu, and Ashish are also keeping our “dressed to the nines” dreams alive with festive looks fit for a reemergence celebration. In the same vein, we’ve gathered some of the best party dresses around. If the invites to graduation parties, weddings, or cocktail events are starting to pour in, you’ll find something below for every type of invite. Whether you require a little black dress or a long-sleeve mini, It doesn’t hurt to start looking and planning early. There are times when being a member of the LGBTQ+ community—and a lesbian in particular—feels like an Easter-egg hunt for representation. Queer women are used to mining everything from a cryptic celebrity Instagram to the discography of Taylor Swift for clues that someone in the public eye might be one of us, and to be honest, the constant hustle to be seen—especially for lesbians who don’t fit the skinny, white, femme, upper-middle-class, L Word mold—can be exhausting. All that might explain why the work of an artist and writer like Alison Bechdel feels so pivotal. Bechdel has been woven into the fabric of lesbian cultural identity ever since she started publishing the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983, and at no point in her decades-long career has she ever compromised on directly addressing her sexuality. To understand Bechdel as a chronicler of lesbian issues only, though, is to sell her short; the exploration of queer identity makes up just one part of her broad oeuvre, along with the family trauma she examined in the 2006 graphic memoir (and later Broadway musical) Fun Home, the psychoanalysis she delved into in 2012’s companion piece Are You My Mother?, and—most recently—the lifelong obsession with exercise that she crystallizes in next month’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Outside of the niche queer-graphic-novel world, Bechdel is perhaps best known for the Bechdel Test, a measure of the representation of women onscreen and in print. (For a work to pass the test, two female characters must talk to each other about something other than a man.) When, on a recent call, I ask Bechdel what it’s like to be forever enshrined in feminist history thanks to her eponymous test, she laughs and responds, “I feel very pleased by it, but for a while I felt a bit befuddled. I never sat down and said, ‘This is going to be a thing,’ but I’ve come to accept it and even feel proud of it.” Bechdel isn’t the type of artist to believe her own hype, even when said hype is well warranted. When I ask how it feels to have created work that so many queer people identify with, she’s hesitant: “I went through a period of feeling very anxious about that, because many young people would tell me that my comic-strip characters were the first lesbians they’d met. I was like, Oh, my God, what am I telling these people? I should be more careful. I don’t feel that concern as much anymore, partly because there are hundreds and thousands of people writing about queer stuff. It’s just a much wider field these days.” Perhaps it’s the widening of that field that freed Bechdel up to write The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Some might read the memoir’s description and expect an account from a woman beholden to Pilates or Flywheel or any other trendy boutique fitness class where an hour in a sweaty room costs roughly the same as a nice meal out. But for Bechdel, exercise isn’t really about aesthetics; it’s about strength, a virtue she’s been in thrall to ever since she first saw bodybuilder Charles Atlas on TV as a child. At 60, Bechdel appears wholly uninterested in perpetuating the workout-as-self-care trope; she makes it clear that her relationship with exercise is something much deeper and more fraught. “I made a decision not to discuss body image in the book because I think it’s unusual for women not to talk about it.”“I love to see people exercise just because they want to. I don’t think it should be connected to anything else, or it will just become miserable,” says Bechdel. She admits, though, that it’s hard to center a whole book around exercise without occasionally falling into the trap of presenting it as a moral imperative. “I do feel a little sheepish about being so pro-exercise without having a thorough critique of sizeism, but I made a decision not to discuss body image in the book because I think it’s unusual for women not to talk about it.” Bechdel’s complex, often painful life story is a matter of public record—in Fun Home, she wrote about losing her long-closeted father to suicide shortly after coming out as a lesbian, and in Are You My Mother?, she chronicled her thorny relationship with her often-distant mother. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, though, exercise is presented as a possible corrective to all that pain, a lifelong pursuit of self-improvement and internal balance that helped Bechdel through some of her toughest years. “Exercise is the one part of my life that isn’t riddled with conflict,” she says, adding, “I don’t want to come off as an exercise evangelist because I think that can be off-putting, but I like to think of it as a bit of relief from my cerebral life.” Bechdel’s graphic novels are often placed into contextual conversation with the work of other writers, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength is no exception. She ping-pongs between her own ideas and those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jack Kerouac, and Adrienne Rich, creating a canon around the art of moving one’s body that joyfully complicates the notion of exercise as an anti-cerebral activity (even if that is partly why Bechdel is drawn to it). Bechdel and her partner—the artist Holly Rae Taylor, who colored the book’s images—live in Vermont, where they favor long hikes and bike rides. Like many others, however, Bechdel had trouble adjusting her exercise routine to fit the confines of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying, “I was very sad to fall off the weight-lifting wagon when the gyms closed.” When I ask Bechdel what she hopes people take away from the book, I expect her to say more about the discipline that exercise has brought to her life. Instead, she’s almost philosophical in response: “I hope people take away a belief that it’s possible to really change. That’s a question I’ve often had for myself—like, Am I really making any kind of psychic or spiritual progress in my life? But I really do think that if we apply ourselves, we can change. The only thing is that it takes so much longer than anyone ever suspects! If we really knew how long it took to make real change happen in ourselves, we would quit immediately.” The concept of exercise bringing about change is one that’s all too familiar, given the rise of wellness influencers peddling at-home fitness routines and the ever-present onslaught of Noom and Weight Watchers ads that encourage prospective dieters to trade physical movement for extra food. It can be incredibly freeing, though, to begin to view exercise as Bechdel does, as a kind of ongoing commitment to oneself, rather than a snake-oil cure for the so-called problem of existing in a corporeal form. It feels overly simplistic to say that Bechdel is queering the act of exercising, but there’s a distinctly antiestablishment flavor to her desire to get stronger in a world that commands women to shrink down and cower before the male gaze. Bechdel says she’s heartened by the strides that the LGBTQ+ community has made since she first started writing and drawing, but she’s also aware that gains can always be lost and that progress only goes so far. (She singles out the recent legislative attacks on the trans community as “particularly troubling.”) With The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Bechdel has—intentionally or not—provided a kind of handbook for a community whose right to bodily autonomy and self-governance is still frequently called into question. And really, what could be more subtly revolutionary than that? This past Friday, Symone, aka The Ebony Enchantress, was named the winner of the 13th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and the experience has helped her take her beauty game to a whole new level—and pace. “When I first started doing drag, it would take me about four hours just to do the makeup part,” she says. “The Race—it is truly a race. It’s in the name, it’s not a joke, we ain’t playing around here, okay? So I can do my makeup now in about an hour, hour and a half. They don’t call it the Olympics of drag for nothing.” Symone notes that the expedited process has helped hone her muscle memory and perfect her application. “Once you have it you got it, and baby there’s no mistaking, I got it.” The crowned queen likes her skin care routine well-honed—“I keep it real simple, real clean, real cute, and effective”—relying on Sunday Riley products, her mainstay being the brand’s Good Genes All-in-One Lactic Acid Treatment, followed by a touch of moisturizer from Tata Harper. “Being a full-time queen, you have to take care of your skin,” she explains. “It’s the base of everything, and you’re putting makeup on it everyday for hours on end. So I make sure she is stunning.” Eyeshadow primer offers a buildable base for a series of shimmers layered in pinks and purples (“the color of royalty, if you did not know”), the colorful look as playful as it is powerful. A coupling of kohl and liquid liner team for a geometric cat-eye, with a sky-reaching, feathery lash furthering the drama. More blending and a fluffy brush to end the baking round out the technicalities, and Symone finishes the look with highlight and a lined, glossed lip. I’m moving into a new apartment this week and am basically starting from scratch with home decor. Dusen and Dusen’s striped towels have been on my wishlist for a while now—and on everyone else’s it seems too, since they seem to be sold out almost everywhere on the internet! Thankfully I was able to snag one of the bath towels as I patiently wait for the restock of their fun sets. They’re just the kind of summery pop of color I’m looking for to brighten up my bathroom. “Never hang stretchable fabrics such as knits, bias cut, and heavily-embellished, heavy garments because they could get distorted. Store these items flat in a breathable garment box or folded with acid-free tissue to avoid creasing. You cannot use the same hanger type for every article of clothing in your closet even though that may be aesthetically pleasing.  There are specific hangers that are best for certain types of clothing, so be sure to always choose the appropriate hanger. For example, broad-shoulder hangers for heavier coats, pant-suit hangers with clips for slacks, and padded hangers that provide cushion for delicate items. When in doubt, store the item flat instead of on a hanger. No wire hangers, EVER!” Bechdel’s complex, often painful life story is a matter of public record—in Fun Home, she wrote about losing her long-closeted father to suicide shortly after coming out as a lesbian, and in Are You My Mother?, she chronicled her thorny relationship with her often-distant mother. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, though, exercise is presented as a possible corrective to all that pain, a lifelong pursuit of self-improvement and internal balance that helped Bechdel through some of her toughest years. “Exercise is the one part of my life that isn’t riddled with conflict,” she says, adding, “I don’t want to come off as an exercise evangelist because I think that can be off-putting, but I like to think of it as a bit of relief from my cerebral life.” Lastly, don’t overthink it. Just embrace the joy it can yield. “With mask-wearing being the norm, the eyes are the only part you get to see, so keep some bright shades in your bag or car and change it up in a pinch,” says Cheng. “As you update and change your wardrobe, I think it’s just as much fun to do so with your makeup routine.” Roger Stone Still Did Nothing Wrong Tee Shirts Black Buy it:  Roger Stone Still Did Nothing Wrong Tee Shirts Black “Though today is the Roger Stone Still Did Nothing Wrong Tee Shirts Black first Monday in May, we are not rolling out the red carpet on the front steps,” says the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Marina Kellen French Director Max Hollein. But that doesn’t preclude the release of exciting new information about the Costume Institute’s two-part 2021 exhibit “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” and “In America: An Anthology of Fashion.” Hollein was joined by Eva Chen of Instagram and Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute, this morning at a virtual press conference that revealed all the details about the upcoming exhibits and galas. Part one of the exhibition, “A Lexicon of Fashion,” will open September 18 at the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Met, marking the Costume Institute’s 75th anniversary. An intimate gala to celebrate the exhibit’s opening will take place on September 13, cochaired by Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Amanda Gorman, and Naomi Osaka with honorary chairs Tom Ford, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri, and Anna Wintour. The exhibit will be organized to resemble a home, with intersecting walls and rooms that will establish what Bolton calls “a new vocabulary that’s more relevant and more reflective of the times in which we’re living.” “Traditionally American fashion has been described in terms of the American tenets of simplicity, practicality, and functionality. Fashion’s more emotional qualities have tended to be reserved for more European fashion,” Bolton says. “In part one we’ll be reconsidering this perception by reestablishing a modern lexicon of fashion based on the emotional qualities of dress.” The many rooms in this part of the exhibit will be titled to reflect the personal and emotional relationship we have to fashion: “Well-Being” for the kitchen galleries, “Aspiration” for the office, and “Trust,” the living room, for example. In pushing the human connections to our clothes, Bolton is writing a new history of American style that focuses less on sportswear and Seventh Avenue dressmakers, instead framing designers as creators, innovators, and artists. “Taken together these qualities will compromise a modern vocabulary of American fashion that prioritizes values, emotions, and sentiments over the sportswear principles of realism, rationalism, and pragmatism,” he says. Pieces from Christopher John Rogers, Sterling Ruby, Conner Ives, Prabal Gurung, and Andre Walker feature in part one of the exhibition. Ruby’s Veil Flag, a short film presented at Paris Fashion Week, was recreated at the Met, and its central piece, a denim American flag, will open the show. Director Melina Matsoukas will also create a film for the exhibit that will evolve over the course of its run. Part two, “An Anthology of Fashion,” will open May 5, 2022, in the period rooms of the museum’s American Wing. In this, it’s a natural coda to the museum’s trio of in situ Costume Institute exhibits that began with 2004’s Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century held in the French period rooms and 2006’s AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion set in the English period rooms. “In its conceptualization, part two actually preceded part one and actually inspired and informed it. For many years now we’ve been examining our collection to uncover hidden or untold stories with a view to complicating or problematizing monolithic interpretations of fashion. Our intention for part two is to bring these stories together in an anthology that challenges perceived histories and offers alternative readings of American fashion,” Bolton explains. My favorite is one that two of my cousins made. It has a multicolor array of yellow, orange, and red ribbons standing out against the red printed backdrop. Sometimes, she will even wear a beaded buckskin bag with it that my sister made. Decked out in her look, she certainly blends into her surroundings at the powwow, where exquisite craftsmanship and color is everywhere. Seeing my mom in a colorful ensemble is always a shock to the senses, but it makes total sense. “Be proud of who you are,” she’ll always tell me. I’ve grown to love how she keeps her ribbon skirts reserved for special occasions. Her dramatic switch-up from all black into her colorful regalia always causes you to focus in on all of its beautiful details just that much more, as though she deliberately holds back in her day-to-day wardrobe to make you notice it more when she does dress up. An underarm guard (shaped like a shoulder pad, but it’s for your underarms) or any undershirt for that matter will add a protective layer to avoid staining and perspiration marks which are tricky to clean.Cedar blocks aren’t effective against all moth infestations, but they do thwart the growth of the insect. Place a couple in your closets and drawers and replace when the blocks lose their piney scents. For more intense preventative measures, pick up some Moth prevention traps. Now, the category of “puffy” is admittedly a wide-ranging one—the Boa Pouf and Bellini sofa, for example, have a number of glaring aesthetic differences. (Here’s our best attempt at a definitive categorization: anything that looks like it belongs in the home of the Michelin Man or Pillsbury doughboy.) It’s a design canon that might not hold its weight ten or 20 years from now—many of these pieces belong to other distinct design movements anyway—but in this very moment, we are certainly gravitating to everything thick and squishy. It’s a shift from recent predilections: Mid-century modern, the design style du jour of the past decade, is known for its clean, geometric lines and visible peg legs. These gentle, curved offerings are anything but. “There’s been quite a dramatic shift with the popularity of the rounded shape furniture. It’s trickled from bigger pieces like sofas and chairs to even coffee tables and sculptures,” says interior designer Erick Garcia of Maison Trouvaille. Just as structured jackets and tight pants went to the wayside last March, it seems so did any sleek and stiff furniture. “During our quarantine last year, we all spent so much time at home working on our laptops, Zooming and being domesticated—furniture had to be more cozy and inviting while lounging in our sweat suits,” Garcia says. It only increased amid political and social unrest: “We wanted to be comforted by these round, curved and tactile chairs and sofas—almost like receiving a big soft hug,” Garcia adds. While recently decorating celebrity hairstylist Jen Atkins’ Los Angeles home, Garcia sourced a pair of squishy, circular Pacha armchairs for the bedroom, along with an Afra & Tobia Scarpa sofa for the living space. Now that the world is opening up again, will puffy and plump pieces be here to stay? “The trend will definitely continue and evolve,” Garcia says, although perhaps don’t plan for a complete overhaul of your mid-century look: “There’s room for both—the beauty and fun of design is that we can mix it all together.” Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this new column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds. One might think that a pandemic year spent mostly single would make me long for a partner, but in truth, that’s simply not the case. I’ve become mildly obsessed with spending time exactly the way I want to, without having to take someone else’s dietary restrictions or Netflix-viewing habits into consideration. The one exception comes when I see a couple that seems to shine in each other’s presence, and this week, said couple was none other than the actor pair of Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale. I’ve long been of the opinion that Byrne is one of the most criminally underrated comedic actresses out there (if her turn in Bridesmaids isn’t enough to convince you, watch her truly excellent cameo in the just-okay 2010 film Get Him to the Greek), and I’ve been obsessed with Cannavale since he played one of the few genuinely memorable boyfriends-of-the-week to Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones. What cinched my love of them as a couple, though, was a recent paparazzi shot of the pair embracing one another on an Australian beach—and that was after 14 days of mandatory quarantine together. Again, maybe I’ve just gotten too set in my bitter-spinster ways, but if I were locked in a hotel room with someone—even the love of my life—for two straight weeks, I’m not sure I’d be in the mood to glowingly wrap my arms around them on the sand at the end of our stint together. Byrne and Cannavale have been together since 2012 and have two children together, yet they still look like besotted spring-breakers one or two rum punches away from recreating the From Here to Eternity beach scene. One of the best aspects of Byrne and Cannavale’s beach escape is the fact that they are, intentionally or not, matching. (I simply refuse to use the word “twinning.”) They’re both clad in jeans, white T-shirts, and baseball hats—a watercolor print for Byrne, and an extremely on-brand Yankees logo for Cannavale—and part of me suspects that a significant portion of their shared closet is devoted to this kind of on-the-fly, unfussy ensemble. Actually, do celebrities share closets, or do they each have their own in separate wings of their Brentwood mansions? I digress. Byrne and Cannavale have worked together several times in the past, most recently co-starring in a Brooklyn Academy of Music run of Medea, but they rarely do press together. “We’re generally pretty private,” Byrne recently told Vanity Fair. Why is it always the celebrity couples you actually like that maintain an air of mystery, while the ones who make you despair of the future of society can’t stop gushing about each other on camera? Actually, maybe the answer is in the question. Either way, mazel to Byrne and Cannavale on what appears—to the totally untrained, contextless eye—to be a genuinely fun relationship. If I ever pass you in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood, I promise to subtly gawk, but refrain from Instagramming. The COVID-19 emergency in India has shown no signs of abating in recent weeks, with hospitals jam-packed and supplies of oxygen running short. More than 300,000 people a day are reportedly becoming infected; and while it can be difficult to conceive of a humanitarian crisis of that magnitude, there are plenty of ways for those in the U.S. and abroad to help. Below, find a list of organizations working to provide food, oxygen, personal protective equipment (PPE), medical supplies, and other forms of care to India, all of which are currently accepting donations. This U.K.-based nonprofit is collecting funds to buy highly in-demand medical necessities like oxygen concentrators, CPAP machines, and other diagnostic tools, all to be sent to India and distributed in hospitals and care centers. Donate here. This United Nations agency is on hand in India to share information on stopping the spread of COVID-19 and provide more than 3.6 million people with critical water, sanitation, and hygiene supplies and services. Donate here.The Indian Red Cross Society is soliciting and distributing shipments of oxygen concentrators, ventilators, bedside monitors, and other medical supplies across India, as well as providing emergency services. Donate here. Donations to this U.S. nonprofit working out of Kolkata can go toward PPE for hospital staff, oxygen cylinders, or cardiac monitors, depending on the amount of money pledged. Donate here.This nonprofit is soliciting donations for PPE and groceries for families living below the poverty line who are facing food scarcity due to India’s ongoing lockdown efforts. Donate here. It was a snippet of a video that was taken right before President Biden’s first address to Congress: a clip of Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman of the United States and a longtime high-powered lawyer (he was a partner at the law firm DLA Piper before leaving his post last year for a new teaching gig), blowing his wife kisses and waving lovingly at her. A girl on Twitter posted the video with a caption about how the perfect man is out there, and that got me thinking about what a profoundly modern marriage Vice President Kamala Harris has. It’s the kind of marriage that women in my mother’s generation didn’t know could exist. For decades, popular culture has told American women that they had a choice: marriage or career. The idea that you could marry for the first time in your late 40s was something unimaginable to my mother’s generation. Harris married Emhoff in 2014, when they were both almost 50; it’s Emhoff’s second marriage and Harris’s first. By that time, Harris was a two-term attorney general for a state that is larger than many countries. In a nation where the median age for a woman to get married is about 28, Vice President Harris is an incredibly exciting outlier. It’s hard to write about the first female vice president’s marriage without taking a moment to reflect that one of the things that derailed Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice-presidential candidate in a general election, in 1984, was her marriage. (Her husband, John Zaccaro, pled guilty to fraudulently obtaining bank financing in a real estate transaction.) That was 36 years before America managed to elect a female vice president. Few cultural shifts have been as seismic as the one that occurred in the veep’s office since Biden moved into the White House. The Trump administration had many Handmaid’s Tale–like elements to it (the worst of which was probably allowing the Violence Against Women Act to expire), but none was more personally vexing to me as the daughter of a second-wave feminist than the former vice president’s incredibly antiquated notions of marriage and gender roles. The Pence marriage was like something out of another century. Mike called his wife “mother” and refused to dine alone with other women. He and Karen became evangelicals together. Mike had a set of rules to “avoid any infidelity temptations, or even rumors of impropriety.” It was the kind of marriage that would have seemed old-fashioned in the 1950s. When Karen introduced Mike at CPAC, she said her “job is to keep him humble.” I mean I guess we should have been happy that she didn’t say her job was ironing, but we got the idea: Wives were charming accessories, supporting actresses in their own lives. Rolling Stone reported, “Pence reportedly calls Karen the ‘prayer warrior’ of the family.” And of course, Karen is super-duper antichoice, telling the group at the March for Life, “Before we came to Capitol Hill, we were supporting crisis pregnancy centers and speaking for life.” Despite the fact that this was actually Mrs. Pence’s second marriage, a fact often omitted from stories about the Pences, there was something alarmingly puritanical about the whole thing. We don’t know what really happens in people’s marriages. Writing about them is a highly speculative endeavor. But despite the impossibility of understanding how a couple behaves behind closed doors, from the standpoint of feminist representation, it’s powerful to see a career woman, in such a public role, with a different kind of love story. I am pleased that my teenage daughter can see a woman who has it all: a loving husband, two stepchildren, and the second most powerful job in the country. The only thing that would be a better message for young girls is if that woman had the most powerful job in the country. Even if you aren’t familiar with his comic alter ego, Anthony Mackie is a familiar face. Over the last two decades, he’s defused bombs in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, rap battled Eminem in 8 Mile, and been a consistent scene-stealer in the movies and television shows that comprise the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For seven years and six films, he’s portrayed Sam Wilson, a.k.a. Falcon, the Air Force veteran turned superhero, who has served as a fan-favorite supporting player within the Avengers roster. This March, Mackie and his character graduated from his wingman post and took the lead in the Disney+ breakout miniseries Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The show, which ended its first season earlier this month, explores what it means to be a modern hero and a person of color in 2021. It ends (spoiler alert) with Wilson stepping up to become the new Captain America and the first Black man to take up the mantle in a live-action production. Representation has become a media priority, but it’s still relatively rare for Black and Brown performers to serve as leads in tentpole franchise films, making Mackie’s ascension to de facto Avengers leader meaningful for the actor and audiences. “It poses questions. Now you have white kids who will look up to a Black Captain America,” Mackie told me via Zoom. “I have four little Black boys, and now they’re also going to have a conversation with their white, Asian, and Latino friends. That’s what is most important. When you take the [familiar] and spin it on its head, what do those conversations look like?” Diverging from the familiar is Marvel’s current M.O. Its first two MCU TV spin-offs use their serialized format to expand the notion of superhero content while referencing a plethora of old media. If WandaVision was the studio’s madcap overview of television tropes, Falcon honors the tenets of summer blockbusters. In between its societal critiques, the show nods to the genre standards of the late ’80s and early ’90s. There are shades of Tom Clancy–style espionage thrillers each time Sam and Bucky Barnes chase superpowered terrorist group the Flag Smashers across international borders. Likewise, the banter-filled scenes that highlight their mismatched partnership nod to buddy-cop action flicks like Lethal Weapon and 48 Hrs. In the comedy variant of that subgenre, the one-liners are as frequent as the explosions, and every altercation serves as code for bro-y codependency. In its lighter moments, Falcon and the Winter Soldier veers in that direction with zingers and meme-able visual non sequiturs. Programming that balances multiple genres and moods is the selling point of prestige TV, but it demands performers who can walk a tightrope. A Juilliard alum who cut his teeth in New York’s theater scene, Mackie fits the bill. Still, putting on his winged Cap suit for the first time was an emotional experience. “I called my sister and talked to her for a while about it,” he says. “There were so many things I wanted in my career growing up as a young actor. I didn’t go to Hollywood and say, ‘Make me a star.’ I didn’t do some of these other things to get recognition; I worked for 21 years to get to where I am. [So] to have that moment of realizing that all of your hard work has paid off, it’s very humbling.” Comics have a long history of social commentary—X-Men’s allusions to the HIV crisis, Black Panther’s debut at the height of the civil rights movement—and Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s exploration of America’s history of white supremacy continues that tradition. Race informs every arc, whether it’s referenced via the indignity of Wilson getting pulled over by police for walking while Black, or through the struggles of Isaiah Bradley, a World War II–era super-soldier whose story directly parallels that of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the U.S. government’s history of experimenting on Black bodies. Connecting to the news cycle within the fantasy of a world rife with Norse gods and time travelers could have been problematic, but Mackie credits screenwriter Malcolm Spellman for the series’ nuanced handling of real-world issues. “I was blown away by it—Malcolm went in deep on these characters,” he says. “I don’t know if anybody else would have had the balls to do that. The fact that we have Isaiah Bradley in this series and [acknowledge] everything he meant not only to the history of America and the forming of Captain America is monumental. I don’t know if anyone but Malcolm would have had the balls to do that.” Bradley represents the abuses of the past, but it’s through Wilson that the complexities of being a Black man in 2021 are illustrated. Burdened with the understanding that his position as Captain America will be objectionable to those more comfortable with his blond, blue-eyed predecessor, the character debates becoming the symbolic representation of a nation where people of color remain targets. “The relationship between America and African American men is a very tumultuous, abusive relationship,” says Mackie. “It’s something that needs to be rectified and healed. So the idea of [Sam] being Captain America recognizes all of the hardships and things that Black men and women have gone through in this country. Still, it’s also about the future and what we can look forward to for our kids to experience in this country.” Father to four boys, Mackie has already gotten a taste of the youth reaction to his tenure as Cap. “My two littlest ones looked at the TV, they looked at me, and they looked at the TV, and they’re like, ‘Dad, that guy looks just like you,’” he says. “And then they went back to playing with their Legos.” Toddlers may not be impressed, but the internet has been buzzing, especially since the announcement Marvel is developing a fourth Captain America film with a script from Spellman. In keeping with the studio’s reputation for secrecy, Mackie only found out about the project after the fact. “It’s funny when I saw that news; I was like, ‘No one called me!’” With Sam’s trajectory a closely guarded secret, Mackie is eager to see where the character goes and what his message will be. “I think Sam Wilson is more so about unifying and equality,” says Mackie. “A Captain America for everyone instead of Captain America for a specific few.” BTS and BLACKPINK still rule the K-pop roost, but competition within South Korea’s pop industry is both gruelling and fierce, with a group debuting (seemingly) every other week. So, when ENHYPEN (part of the Hybe family, alongside BTS) made their much-awaited first comeback on April 26 via a live-streamed press conference with new single “Drunk-Dazed,” they rather aptly called the music landscape a “battlefield,” noting that between the latest groups (known as the K-pop’s fourth generation of idols) there is a war to be the hottest and the best. The fourth generation includes groups such as Stray Kids, ITZY, ATEEZ, and TXT, all of whom debuted after 2018 and have already achieved significant success across the globe. They’ve been joined by a slew of rookie idols looking to make their own mark on the world of music. Korea’s “idol” music, with its progressive-pop values, has long emphasized saturated colors, glitchy synths and tweaked-out vocals, lending a sense of euphoria to its millions of fans. StayC’s debut single, “So Bad,” arrived with a bubblegum-pink bang, its traditional fly-high pop chorus beefed up with club bass and twitchy flourishes that sound like the voice message button on South Korea’s messaging app KakaoTalk being repeatedly and impatiently pressed. They were an instant hit, and their EP, Staydom, made them the rookie girl group with the highest first-week sales of 2020 to 2021. When you’ve got Black Eyed Pilseung (South Korea’s celebrated songwriting/production duo) as your CEO and producer, prepare to expect the unexpected. A much-debated topic over the past few years has been idol “noise music.” Loosely categorized by fans as disjointed K-pop, it contains ultra-heavy electronic beats (often influenced by rave culture) and mechanical sounds, for example, Red Velvet’s “Zimzalabim” (2019). P1Harmony’s second single, “Scared,” sits in the middle of this divisive genre, but it’s where you really sense their bigger potential. Alongside the clanging metallic hook, they deliver a rallying call for self-belief to outsiders. Their latest EP, Disharmony: Break Out, is wall-to-wall social observations, and a must-listen for those who like their K-pop loud, high-energy and defiant. Aespa are SM Entertainment’s first new girl group since 2014, and excitement reached fever pitch for their debut single, “Black Mamba” (2020), whose simple “Aya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya” hook embedded into the brain with frightening ease. Their visual concept is rooted in digital art, AI and virtual reality: Aespa contains four human members and four virtual ones. How the two sets of girls interact with each other, and potentially their fans, was demonstrated through a short video called “My, Karina,” but with only two tracks thus far released, we’re yet to see SM’s tentpole ideas (and Aespa’s storyline) in action. “Black Mamba” has racked up a staggering 141 million views in just five months, however, so there’s clearly no shortage of fans waiting for that moment. how I-Land, a joint venture between K-pop giants Big Hit (now Hybe) and CJ E&M, ENHYPEN amassed a huge fanbase before their debut EP, Border: Day One, had even dropped in November 2020. Their producer, Wonderkid (a.k.a. Kim Tae Yun), has delivered psychedelia and tinges of rock to their 2021 EP, Border: Carnival (which has notched up a staggering 400,000 pre-orders), putting down the bedrock to enhance ENHYPEN’s biggest strength: their stage performances. New single “Drunk-Dazed,” with its complex, demanding choreography, is well worth watching again and again and again. Two warm-up singles—the unapologetically ballsy rock of 2020’s My Heart Skip A Beat and R&B-pop of “Can We Talk Again” (2021)—showed off the group’s range, while single “Ponzona” (2021) added yet another dimension to Purple Kiss. The track fused K-pop’s stalwart ‘girl crush’ concept with lashings of Billie Eilish and the darker, edgier feel of fellow K-Pop group (G)I-DLE. No matter what you call this process—a jumble, a fusion, a melting pot—K-pop’s ability to create a coherent, engaging tapestry of sights and sounds from a dozen pop-culture references never fails to astound. Though one can never predict K-pop’s breakout acts from smaller agencies, by matching this alchemy to a group such as Purple Kiss whose presence can be felt even through a laptop screen, you may well be looking at the next big thing. It takes a strong will to resist Weeekly’s 2020 debut, “Tag Me (@Me),” with its brat-pop cuteness, which, like all good K-pop, marries a dozen styles including a wistful bridge and hyperactive outro. One of the industry’s advantages is that everyone is catered for, from gothic to candy-colored, hip-hop to balladry, serious to sentimental, and Weeekly—who nabbed the New Artist of the Year award at South Korea’s Melon Music Awards 2020—have released three EPs (2020’s We Can and We Are, and 2021’s We Play) that sparkle with some truly wholesome fare, particularly on B-sides “Top Secret,” “Butterfly” and “Lucky.” If your taste leans towards fizzy escapism, allow Weeekly to whisk you away. After years of bouncing from group to group, Cho Seung-youn found firm footing on his own as WOODZ, releasing 2020’s earworm “Love Me Harder.” His debut EP, Equal (2020), was a heady spin through perhaps too many styles and sounds, but on the second EP, 2020’s Woops!, he struck a groove with warm, acoustic-led pop-rock. His latest single, “Feels Like” (2021), is, arguably, his best. Breathy and seductive with treacly guitar riffs, this is WOODZ creatively pushing himself to the point where he sounds like no one else in K-pop’s current climate, and that alone demands attention. Princess Charlotte is growing up right before our very eyes.On May 2, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s second child turns six years old. To mark the occasion, the family shared a new portrait of the young royal at their country home of Anmer Hall in Norfolk, England. In it, a charming Charlotte beams at the camera, her blondish-brown hair framing her face. She wears a blue floral print dress adorned with red buttons and trim.Kate Middleton took the official photo of her one-and-only daughter, just as she did with her youngest son, Prince Louis, who turned three on April 23. The photograph is just the latest glimpse the public has gotten of the little princess. Recently, she also appeared in a video celebrating her parents’ April 29 wedding anniversary. The footage showed Charlotte, as well as her brothers George and Louis, running around on the beach, playing on a see-saw in their backyard, and toasting marshmallows. The princess is seen happily smiling throughout. Usually, this official portrait of Princess Charlotte would be tweeted or posted on similar channels—however, this weekend, the family is boycotting social media in support of English football players of color who have been subject to racial abuse. What are the best travel mugs and reusable coffee cups? Ask a Vogue editor, and their excitement for their favorite vessel might rival that of the latest great fashion collection. If one of your 2021 goals is to live more sustainably, buying a reusable coffee cup, tumbler, or travel mug is a simple way to bake the virtue into your everyday life. Many of us are guilty of grabbing a latte and, after an hour or two, quickly discarding that paper or plastic cup into the trash. In 2018, Reuters reported that 64 percent of Americans are drinking more coffee daily (the highest level since 2012). But there’s no need to actually give up your daily coffee, just bring a cup that will help reduce the amount of single-use plastic disposed each day, but can also be chic, too. As Emily Farra, Vogue’s Senior Fashion News Writer notes, she gets more compliments on her ceramic W&P travel mug than anything in her closet. Below, 18 Vogue editors spill about their favorite reusable coffee cups and best travel mug selects.Two things I love about Hay’s Sowden cup: 1. the good design (contrasting colors! sleek lines!) and 2. its ability to keep your coffee cold, or hot, for twelve hours. Considering I still drink ice coffee in the depths of New York winter, I likely won’t ever need the latter temperature meticulously maintained! But it’s still nice to have options. A friend introduced me to this reusable coffee cup a few years ago. I like it so much that I’ve now gifted one to every member of my family. It has all the environmental benefits of a reusable cup with the insulating qualities of a Yeti so my coffee stays warm. The resealable lid and handle make it really easy for a multi-tasker like me to cart it all around without spilling everywhere. I drink a lot—actually, way too much—coffee and I hate lugging a giant thermos around with me all day. When I found this collapsible coffee mug, it was bliss. It folds down to fit in my small purse, so once I’m done chugging a cold brew I can pack it up and not think about it … until my next cup. Sorry, cappuccino lovers, I cannot stand the taste of coffee—like not at all. Instead, tea is my morning drink of choice. I feel really fancy when I’m sipping it from my favorite Tea Forte cup. It has a lid that allows me to take it with me when I’m on the go, and the pretty flower print makes me feel like an extra on Bridgerton. Over the years, I’ve really come to love sipping a great cup of tea or warm water with lemon throughout the day but hate lugging around a bulky tumbler! The Moonstone tumbler has been a minimalist’s dream with a sleek design that never fails to keep my beverage of choice warm. It’s the perfect no fuss, no gimmick product. Just great insulating technology! I love my Kinto travel mug for hot and cold coffee alike. The clever double lid not only prevents awkward (or dangerous!) spillage, but also keeps ice cubes at bay.I love this Ember cup as I am a slow coffee drinker and it keeps my cup warm for hours. Perfect for lazy Sunday mornings at home! I’m obsessed with my Keep cup. It’s a great size and most like a traditional to-go cup for me. Plus, it’s super easy to clean which means I’m way more likely to keep using it!I think I get more compliments on my blush W&P travel mug than anything in my closet. Admittedly, it is really cute, but it’s also very petite! For days when I need more than 12 ounces of coffee (which are most days), I’m picking up their new, larger version in slate gray. These sleek ceramic coffee mugs come in three color ways: black, white, and mint (which is my personal favorite). Not only is it compact in size, but its double insulated walls help keep my hot coffee hot and ice coffee cold no matter what temperature it is outside. Even better—its bamboo cap is leak-proof so I can drop it in my bag without worrying about a spill. I’m not a huge coffee drinker but I do love my tea! This reusable mug from Miir is my go-to whenever I am on the run and need to take my drink on the go. I also love the sleek and modern design of the mug! This speckly thermos looks like something a loving 1950s housewife would have filled with coffee and left waiting on the counter for her husband’s morning commute. I’m no housewife, but it does pair well with my midcentury vintage wardrobe! For someone like me whose coffee order is good ol’ drip and a bit of half & half, (which might just make me the only non-non-dairy coffee order in New York) there’s something about drinking it out of a ceramic imitation of the classic bodega paper cup. Perfect for sipping joe or some tea daily at my desk or right at home—sans paper and plastic. I use my Joco Cup faithfully every day. The annoyance of washing it every morning is offset by the righteous virtue I feel as I wait in line to pay among all the single-use plastic holdouts. I used to be a diehard disposable cup user because I’m probably lazy and myopic when it comes to recycling, etc. But I have to say, I love this coffee cup that I keep at my desk and get my morning coffee in. I haven’t used a disposable cup since I bought it. I like this little blush cup from W&P—it is not too large, so you can avoid over-caffeinating!As any true born-and-raised Minnesotan would, I have a strong affinity for all things Scandinavian. So naturally these hand-painted Dansk coffee cups, designed by legendary Danish ceramicist Niels Refsgaard, are the perfect vessel for my afternoon caffeine boost. I love that they are microwave and dishwasher safe without compromising their old-world stoneware charm. This soccer mom—tennis mom, actually—was yearning for a spot of tea while watching matches, so the hubsters lent me his Zojirushi thermos/mug. It’s sleek. It has a lock function. It keeps things super hot, or super cold. I was sold. I wished for one for Christmas and Santa came through with a gift that keeps on giving. Now I don’t leave the house without it. As we approach the summer of 2021, with countless cinemas across the world still shuttered and the future uncertain, Netflix—exceeding all expectations—continues to roll out hit after hit. Up next? A psychological chiller featuring Amy Adams and Julianne Moore, a miniseries chronicling the life of a fashion icon, and the return of two binge-worthy shows that proved to be essential quarantine viewing the first time around. These are the five releases to add to your watch list now. A distressed Amy Adams plays an agoraphobic child psychologist who watches her neighbors through the windows of her New York brownstone in Joe Wright’s twisty horror movie based on the novel by A.J. Finn. She makes a new friend (Julianne Moore) but then witnesses her being attacked, after which her cloistered existence unravels entirely. The supporting cast is stellar (Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie, Brian Tyree Henry, and Jennifer Jason Leigh) and the powerful sense of claustrophobia undeniably timely. Directed by Daniel Minahan and executive produced by Ryan Murphy, this glittering five-part drama casts Ewan McGregor as the titular designer who changed the face of American fashion. As we track his stratospheric rise and eventual downfall as a result of addiction and ill-advised business decisions, expect flamboyant 1970s costumes, wild nights at Studio 54, and an introduction to his circle, which included actor Liza Minnelli and jewelry designer Elsa Peretti. What happens when a group of mercenaries is hired to retrieve $200 million from a Las Vegas casino during a zombie outbreak? Prepare to find out in Zack Snyder’s delightfully bombastic action epic, which centers on Dave Bautista as a war hero who assembles an eclectic crew (Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Tig Notaro, and Matthias Schweighöfer). It has all the ingredients of a summer blockbuster: shoot-outs, spectacular set pieces, and laughs, not to mention a zombie tiger. As charming as it was quietly revolutionary, the first season of Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s high school comedy about Indian American teenager Devi won hearts the world over. Now its magnetic lead, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, is back for the second installment with a slew of new additions, from Megan Suri as a fellow student to Common as a potential love interest for Devi’s mother (Poorna Jagannathan). If you’re still reeling from the cliff-hanger ending of the first part of George Kay’s ingenious thriller, take solace in the fact that the second half is on its way. It’ll follow the charismatic Omar Sy in the role of Assane, a thief hell-bent on avenging his father’s death whose son (Etan Simon) has just been abducted by his enemies. There are sure to be more shocking revelations, tense standoffs, elaborate disguises, and the same sleight of hand that made the earliest episodes so irresistible. For the summer, I would like nothing more than a glitzy, can’t-miss-it chain belt. After watching a lot of Jennifer Lopez recently, specifically her 2001 music video “Love Don’t Cost a Thing,” my love for the piece has been reignited. In the noughties scene, Lopez drips in gold jewelry, including a fat chain necklace with a large horn pendant, a gilded link number clanging on her wrist, a fistful of Midas-touched rings, and her signature fist-size hoops. She says to a supposed lover who has gifted her a gold bangle in lieu of showing up in person, “The last thing I need is another bracelet.” As Lopez lingers on the word “bracelet”, the camera pans to a Michael Kors-era Celine chain belt. The gleaming piece isn’t threaded through the belt loops of her skin-tight jeans but rather, it lazily hangs off of Lopez’s hips. As she walks down an empty road and sheds the rest of her jewelry while singing “think I’m gonna spend your cash/I don’t”, the chain belt’s double-C charm clangs from side to side, bouncing off her upper thigh. The whole moment is, well, rich. This yesteryear Celine belt serves no purpose other than to be seen. It’s not actually securing her pants from falling down, which is what belts do. It’s just there, an excessive garnish for Lopez’s otherwise plain look. My own imagined outfits for reemergence hinge on that very chain belt. That sort of gaudy-chic aesthetic feels apropos for the world coming out of hibernation. In the early aughts, It girls and pop stars loved chain belts. Aaliyah opted for a thin gold incarnation strung over a simple pair of white pants at a film premiere in 2001, while Christina Aguilera always went the brash route with multiple chains in multiple sizes. On the runway, the chain belt has been a Chanel signature time and time again. A moment from the Spring 1995 show is burned in my brain, with Brandi Quinones trotting down the catwalk in an itty-bitty baby pink button-up polo and a mini skirt with a slit. A chain belt hangs off the skirt, once again, it’s just there. Speaking of the runway, the piece made a comeback at Chanel’s spring 2021 show, strung across a bodysuit or a pair of trousers. Y2K-minded Blumarine’s fall 2021 show featured so many chains on one look, it resembled a flashy octopus. The trend continued at Marine Serre, where a stone bauble hung from a chain.Think of a chain belt as jewelry but for your waist. It’s made to draw attention and be pretty, and not do anything other than that—the cherry on the top of a sartorial sundae. In other words, it’s worth linking up with a chain belt this summer. We’ve all chuckled when someone cracks a joke about changing from our daytime pajamas into our nighttime pajamas. It’s funny because it’s true, and all too familiar. Pajamas are becoming far more than just a creature comfort to enjoy when crawling under the covers; they are a way of life. But what to do when temperatures rise and the cozy set that got you through hibernation season now sends you tossing and turning by night and hot-flashing by day? Flannel will not do for May, and with summer creeping up on us, visions of airy linen sets and billowy poplin nightgowns now dance in our heads. From starchy oversized nightshirts to slinky silk negligees, the perfect summer-weight sleepwear is out there waiting for you, begging to be worn 24 hours a day. So next time you’re lying awake, sweating in your winter sleepwear at 2 a.m., take a look at our favorite lightweight options and the best summer pajamas for women, below. (The sheep you’re counting won’t mind, we promise.) Silk camis, short sleep shorts, and sweet bloomers will have you feeling like you’re wearing nothing at all.Swap your long-sleeve shirt and pajama pant sets for something shorter. These coordinated cotton and linen pajama sets are summer’s version of the classic sleep set, or in this case, the best summer pajamas for women. From counting sheep to pouring coffee, these oxford and T-shirt gowns will take you from sweet dreams to Sunday mornings.The perfect women’s boxer short does exist. So long to borrowing (stealing) from the boys. Just throw on your favorite T-shirt and snooze.What better season to sashay around the house wearing vintage-inspired sleepwear than summer?Your bedtime routine just got sweeter thanks to these luxe, wind-down robes, from a crisp seersucker and lightweight linens. At last, our dreams of safely attending soirées could soon become a reality, which is why thoughts of picking the best party dresses to wear to future gatherings are slowly infiltrating our minds. Likewise, designers are also planning for the return of going out ensembles. Did you see Saint Laurent’s latest collection? Come fall, Anthony Vaccarello’s jubilant micro-mini skirts, metallic bodysuits, and sequin jackets could be spotted at a gala or—dare I say it—an in-person, red-carpet event. Yes, we miss those, too. Brands like Michael Kors, Caroline Hu, and Ashish are also keeping our “dressed to the nines” dreams alive with festive looks fit for a reemergence celebration. In the same vein, we’ve gathered some of the best party dresses around. If the invites to graduation parties, weddings, or cocktail events are starting to pour in, you’ll find something below for every type of invite. Whether you require a little black dress or a long-sleeve mini, It doesn’t hurt to start looking and planning early. There are times when being a member of the LGBTQ+ community—and a lesbian in particular—feels like an Easter-egg hunt for representation. Queer women are used to mining everything from a cryptic celebrity Instagram to the discography of Taylor Swift for clues that someone in the public eye might be one of us, and to be honest, the constant hustle to be seen—especially for lesbians who don’t fit the skinny, white, femme, upper-middle-class, L Word mold—can be exhausting. All that might explain why the work of an artist and writer like Alison Bechdel feels so pivotal. Bechdel has been woven into the fabric of lesbian cultural identity ever since she started publishing the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983, and at no point in her decades-long career has she ever compromised on directly addressing her sexuality. To understand Bechdel as a chronicler of lesbian issues only, though, is to sell her short; the exploration of queer identity makes up just one part of her broad oeuvre, along with the family trauma she examined in the 2006 graphic memoir (and later Broadway musical) Fun Home, the psychoanalysis she delved into in 2012’s companion piece Are You My Mother?, and—most recently—the lifelong obsession with exercise that she crystallizes in next month’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Outside of the niche queer-graphic-novel world, Bechdel is perhaps best known for the Bechdel Test, a measure of the representation of women onscreen and in print. (For a work to pass the test, two female characters must talk to each other about something other than a man.) When, on a recent call, I ask Bechdel what it’s like to be forever enshrined in feminist history thanks to her eponymous test, she laughs and responds, “I feel very pleased by it, but for a while I felt a bit befuddled. I never sat down and said, ‘This is going to be a thing,’ but I’ve come to accept it and even feel proud of it.” Bechdel isn’t the type of artist to believe her own hype, even when said hype is well warranted. When I ask how it feels to have created work that so many queer people identify with, she’s hesitant: “I went through a period of feeling very anxious about that, because many young people would tell me that my comic-strip characters were the first lesbians they’d met. I was like, Oh, my God, what am I telling these people? I should be more careful. I don’t feel that concern as much anymore, partly because there are hundreds and thousands of people writing about queer stuff. It’s just a much wider field these days.” Perhaps it’s the widening of that field that freed Bechdel up to write The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Some might read the memoir’s description and expect an account from a woman beholden to Pilates or Flywheel or any other trendy boutique fitness class where an hour in a sweaty room costs roughly the same as a nice meal out. But for Bechdel, exercise isn’t really about aesthetics; it’s about strength, a virtue she’s been in thrall to ever since she first saw bodybuilder Charles Atlas on TV as a child. At 60, Bechdel appears wholly uninterested in perpetuating the workout-as-self-care trope; she makes it clear that her relationship with exercise is something much deeper and more fraught. “I made a decision not to discuss body image in the book because I think it’s unusual for women not to talk about it.”“I love to see people exercise just because they want to. I don’t think it should be connected to anything else, or it will just become miserable,” says Bechdel. She admits, though, that it’s hard to center a whole book around exercise without occasionally falling into the trap of presenting it as a moral imperative. “I do feel a little sheepish about being so pro-exercise without having a thorough critique of sizeism, but I made a decision not to discuss body image in the book because I think it’s unusual for women not to talk about it.” Bechdel’s complex, often painful life story is a matter of public record—in Fun Home, she wrote about losing her long-closeted father to suicide shortly after coming out as a lesbian, and in Are You My Mother?, she chronicled her thorny relationship with her often-distant mother. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, though, exercise is presented as a possible corrective to all that pain, a lifelong pursuit of self-improvement and internal balance that helped Bechdel through some of her toughest years. “Exercise is the one part of my life that isn’t riddled with conflict,” she says, adding, “I don’t want to come off as an exercise evangelist because I think that can be off-putting, but I like to think of it as a bit of relief from my cerebral life.” Bechdel’s graphic novels are often placed into contextual conversation with the work of other writers, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength is no exception. She ping-pongs between her own ideas and those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jack Kerouac, and Adrienne Rich, creating a canon around the art of moving one’s body that joyfully complicates the notion of exercise as an anti-cerebral activity (even if that is partly why Bechdel is drawn to it). Bechdel and her partner—the artist Holly Rae Taylor, who colored the book’s images—live in Vermont, where they favor long hikes and bike rides. Like many others, however, Bechdel had trouble adjusting her exercise routine to fit the confines of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying, “I was very sad to fall off the weight-lifting wagon when the gyms closed.” When I ask Bechdel what she hopes people take away from the book, I expect her to say more about the discipline that exercise has brought to her life. Instead, she’s almost philosophical in response: “I hope people take away a belief that it’s possible to really change. That’s a question I’ve often had for myself—like, Am I really making any kind of psychic or spiritual progress in my life? But I really do think that if we apply ourselves, we can change. The only thing is that it takes so much longer than anyone ever suspects! If we really knew how long it took to make real change happen in ourselves, we would quit immediately.” The concept of exercise bringing about change is one that’s all too familiar, given the rise of wellness influencers peddling at-home fitness routines and the ever-present onslaught of Noom and Weight Watchers ads that encourage prospective dieters to trade physical movement for extra food. It can be incredibly freeing, though, to begin to view exercise as Bechdel does, as a kind of ongoing commitment to oneself, rather than a snake-oil cure for the so-called problem of existing in a corporeal form. It feels overly simplistic to say that Bechdel is queering the act of exercising, but there’s a distinctly antiestablishment flavor to her desire to get stronger in a world that commands women to shrink down and cower before the male gaze. Bechdel says she’s heartened by the strides that the LGBTQ+ community has made since she first started writing and drawing, but she’s also aware that gains can always be lost and that progress only goes so far. (She singles out the recent legislative attacks on the trans community as “particularly troubling.”) With The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Bechdel has—intentionally or not—provided a kind of handbook for a community whose right to bodily autonomy and self-governance is still frequently called into question. And really, what could be more subtly revolutionary than that? This past Friday, Symone, aka The Ebony Enchantress, was named the winner of the 13th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and the experience has helped her take her beauty game to a whole new level—and pace. “When I first started doing drag, it would take me about four hours just to do the makeup part,” she says. “The Race—it is truly a race. It’s in the name, it’s not a joke, we ain’t playing around here, okay? So I can do my makeup now in about an hour, hour and a half. They don’t call it the Olympics of drag for nothing.” Symone notes that the expedited process has helped hone her muscle memory and perfect her application. “Once you have it you got it, and baby there’s no mistaking, I got it.” The crowned queen likes her skin care routine well-honed—“I keep it real simple, real clean, real cute, and effective”—relying on Sunday Riley products, her mainstay being the brand’s Good Genes All-in-One Lactic Acid Treatment, followed by a touch of moisturizer from Tata Harper. “Being a full-time queen, you have to take care of your skin,” she explains. “It’s the base of everything, and you’re putting makeup on it everyday for hours on end. So I make sure she is stunning.” Eyeshadow primer offers a buildable base for a series of shimmers layered in pinks and purples (“the color of royalty, if you did not know”), the colorful look as playful as it is powerful. A coupling of kohl and liquid liner team for a geometric cat-eye, with a sky-reaching, feathery lash furthering the drama. More blending and a fluffy brush to end the baking round out the technicalities, and Symone finishes the look with highlight and a lined, glossed lip. I’m moving into a new apartment this week and am basically starting from scratch with home decor. Dusen and Dusen’s striped towels have been on my wishlist for a while now—and on everyone else’s it seems too, since they seem to be sold out almost everywhere on the internet! Thankfully I was able to snag one of the bath towels as I patiently wait for the restock of their fun sets. They’re just the kind of summery pop of color I’m looking for to brighten up my bathroom. “Never hang stretchable fabrics such as knits, bias cut, and heavily-embellished, heavy garments because they could get distorted. Store these items flat in a breathable garment box or folded with acid-free tissue to avoid creasing. You cannot use the same hanger type for every article of clothing in your closet even though that may be aesthetically pleasing.  There are specific hangers that are best for certain types of clothing, so be sure to always choose the appropriate hanger. For example, broad-shoulder hangers for heavier coats, pant-suit hangers with clips for slacks, and padded hangers that provide cushion for delicate items. When in doubt, store the item flat instead of on a hanger. No wire hangers, EVER!” Bechdel’s complex, often painful life story is a matter of public record—in Fun Home, she wrote about losing her long-closeted father to suicide shortly after coming out as a lesbian, and in Are You My Mother?, she chronicled her thorny relationship with her often-distant mother. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, though, exercise is presented as a possible corrective to all that pain, a lifelong pursuit of self-improvement and internal balance that helped Bechdel through some of her toughest years. “Exercise is the one part of my life that isn’t riddled with conflict,” she says, adding, “I don’t want to come off as an exercise evangelist because I think that can be off-putting, but I like to think of it as a bit of relief from my cerebral life.” Lastly, don’t overthink it. Just embrace the joy it can yield. “With mask-wearing being the norm, the eyes are the only part you get to see, so keep some bright shades in your bag or car and change it up in a pinch,” says Cheng. “As you update and change your wardrobe, I think it’s just as much fun to do so with your makeup routine.”

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Buy it:  Roger Stone Still Did Nothing Wrong Tee Shirts Black “Though today is the Roger Stone Still Did Nothing Wrong Tee Shirts Black first Monday in May, we are not rolling out the red carpet on the front steps,” says the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Marina Kellen French Director Max Hollein. But that doesn’t preclude the release of exciting new information about the Costume Institute’s two-part 2021 exhibit “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” and “In America: An Anthology of Fashion.” Hollein was joined by Eva Chen of Instagram and Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute, this morning at a virtual press conference that revealed all the details about the upcoming exhibits and galas. Part one of the exhibition, “A Lexicon of Fashion,” will open September 18 at the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Met, marking the Costume Institute’s 75th anniversary. An intimate gala to celebrate the exhibit’s opening will take place on September 13, cochaired by Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Amanda Gorman, and Naomi Osaka with honorary chairs Tom Ford, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri, and Anna Wintour. The exhibit will be organized to resemble a home, with intersecting walls and rooms that will establish what Bolton calls “a new vocabulary that’s more relevant and more reflective of the times in which we’re living.” “Traditionally American fashion has been described in terms of the American tenets of simplicity, practicality, and functionality. Fashion’s more emotional qualities have tended to be reserved for more European fashion,” Bolton says. “In part one we’ll be reconsidering this perception by reestablishing a modern lexicon of fashion based on the emotional qualities of dress.” The many rooms in this part of the exhibit will be titled to reflect the personal and emotional relationship we have to fashion: “Well-Being” for the kitchen galleries, “Aspiration” for the office, and “Trust,” the living room, for example. In pushing the human connections to our clothes, Bolton is writing a new history of American style that focuses less on sportswear and Seventh Avenue dressmakers, instead framing designers as creators, innovators, and artists. “Taken together these qualities will compromise a modern vocabulary of American fashion that prioritizes values, emotions, and sentiments over the sportswear principles of realism, rationalism, and pragmatism,” he says. Pieces from Christopher John Rogers, Sterling Ruby, Conner Ives, Prabal Gurung, and Andre Walker feature in part one of the exhibition. Ruby’s Veil Flag, a short film presented at Paris Fashion Week, was recreated at the Met, and its central piece, a denim American flag, will open the show. Director Melina Matsoukas will also create a film for the exhibit that will evolve over the course of its run. Part two, “An Anthology of Fashion,” will open May 5, 2022, in the period rooms of the museum’s American Wing. In this, it’s a natural coda to the museum’s trio of in situ Costume Institute exhibits that began with 2004’s Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century held in the French period rooms and 2006’s AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion set in the English period rooms. “In its conceptualization, part two actually preceded part one and actually inspired and informed it. For many years now we’ve been examining our collection to uncover hidden or untold stories with a view to complicating or problematizing monolithic interpretations of fashion. Our intention for part two is to bring these stories together in an anthology that challenges perceived histories and offers alternative readings of American fashion,” Bolton explains. My favorite is one that two of my cousins made. It has a multicolor array of yellow, orange, and red ribbons standing out against the red printed backdrop. Sometimes, she will even wear a beaded buckskin bag with it that my sister made. Decked out in her look, she certainly blends into her surroundings at the powwow, where exquisite craftsmanship and color is everywhere. Seeing my mom in a colorful ensemble is always a shock to the senses, but it makes total sense. “Be proud of who you are,” she’ll always tell me. I’ve grown to love how she keeps her ribbon skirts reserved for special occasions. Her dramatic switch-up from all black into her colorful regalia always causes you to focus in on all of its beautiful details just that much more, as though she deliberately holds back in her day-to-day wardrobe to make you notice it more when she does dress up. An underarm guard (shaped like a shoulder pad, but it’s for your underarms) or any undershirt for that matter will add a protective layer to avoid staining and perspiration marks which are tricky to clean.Cedar blocks aren’t effective against all moth infestations, but they do thwart the growth of the insect. Place a couple in your closets and drawers and replace when the blocks lose their piney scents. For more intense preventative measures, pick up some Moth prevention traps. Now, the category of “puffy” is admittedly a wide-ranging one—the Boa Pouf and Bellini sofa, for example, have a number of glaring aesthetic differences. (Here’s our best attempt at a definitive categorization: anything that looks like it belongs in the home of the Michelin Man or Pillsbury doughboy.) It’s a design canon that might not hold its weight ten or 20 years from now—many of these pieces belong to other distinct design movements anyway—but in this very moment, we are certainly gravitating to everything thick and squishy. It’s a shift from recent predilections: Mid-century modern, the design style du jour of the past decade, is known for its clean, geometric lines and visible peg legs. These gentle, curved offerings are anything but. “There’s been quite a dramatic shift with the popularity of the rounded shape furniture. It’s trickled from bigger pieces like sofas and chairs to even coffee tables and sculptures,” says interior designer Erick Garcia of Maison Trouvaille. Just as structured jackets and tight pants went to the wayside last March, it seems so did any sleek and stiff furniture. “During our quarantine last year, we all spent so much time at home working on our laptops, Zooming and being domesticated—furniture had to be more cozy and inviting while lounging in our sweat suits,” Garcia says. It only increased amid political and social unrest: “We wanted to be comforted by these round, curved and tactile chairs and sofas—almost like receiving a big soft hug,” Garcia adds. While recently decorating celebrity hairstylist Jen Atkins’ Los Angeles home, Garcia sourced a pair of squishy, circular Pacha armchairs for the bedroom, along with an Afra & Tobia Scarpa sofa for the living space. Now that the world is opening up again, will puffy and plump pieces be here to stay? “The trend will definitely continue and evolve,” Garcia says, although perhaps don’t plan for a complete overhaul of your mid-century look: “There’s room for both—the beauty and fun of design is that we can mix it all together.” Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this new column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds. One might think that a pandemic year spent mostly single would make me long for a partner, but in truth, that’s simply not the case. I’ve become mildly obsessed with spending time exactly the way I want to, without having to take someone else’s dietary restrictions or Netflix-viewing habits into consideration. The one exception comes when I see a couple that seems to shine in each other’s presence, and this week, said couple was none other than the actor pair of Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale. I’ve long been of the opinion that Byrne is one of the most criminally underrated comedic actresses out there (if her turn in Bridesmaids isn’t enough to convince you, watch her truly excellent cameo in the just-okay 2010 film Get Him to the Greek), and I’ve been obsessed with Cannavale since he played one of the few genuinely memorable boyfriends-of-the-week to Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones. What cinched my love of them as a couple, though, was a recent paparazzi shot of the pair embracing one another on an Australian beach—and that was after 14 days of mandatory quarantine together. Again, maybe I’ve just gotten too set in my bitter-spinster ways, but if I were locked in a hotel room with someone—even the love of my life—for two straight weeks, I’m not sure I’d be in the mood to glowingly wrap my arms around them on the sand at the end of our stint together. Byrne and Cannavale have been together since 2012 and have two children together, yet they still look like besotted spring-breakers one or two rum punches away from recreating the From Here to Eternity beach scene. One of the best aspects of Byrne and Cannavale’s beach escape is the fact that they are, intentionally or not, matching. (I simply refuse to use the word “twinning.”) They’re both clad in jeans, white T-shirts, and baseball hats—a watercolor print for Byrne, and an extremely on-brand Yankees logo for Cannavale—and part of me suspects that a significant portion of their shared closet is devoted to this kind of on-the-fly, unfussy ensemble. Actually, do celebrities share closets, or do they each have their own in separate wings of their Brentwood mansions? I digress. Byrne and Cannavale have worked together several times in the past, most recently co-starring in a Brooklyn Academy of Music run of Medea, but they rarely do press together. “We’re generally pretty private,” Byrne recently told Vanity Fair. Why is it always the celebrity couples you actually like that maintain an air of mystery, while the ones who make you despair of the future of society can’t stop gushing about each other on camera? Actually, maybe the answer is in the question. Either way, mazel to Byrne and Cannavale on what appears—to the totally untrained, contextless eye—to be a genuinely fun relationship. If I ever pass you in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood, I promise to subtly gawk, but refrain from Instagramming. The COVID-19 emergency in India has shown no signs of abating in recent weeks, with hospitals jam-packed and supplies of oxygen running short. More than 300,000 people a day are reportedly becoming infected; and while it can be difficult to conceive of a humanitarian crisis of that magnitude, there are plenty of ways for those in the U.S. and abroad to help. Below, find a list of organizations working to provide food, oxygen, personal protective equipment (PPE), medical supplies, and other forms of care to India, all of which are currently accepting donations. This U.K.-based nonprofit is collecting funds to buy highly in-demand medical necessities like oxygen concentrators, CPAP machines, and other diagnostic tools, all to be sent to India and distributed in hospitals and care centers. Donate here. This United Nations agency is on hand in India to share information on stopping the spread of COVID-19 and provide more than 3.6 million people with critical water, sanitation, and hygiene supplies and services. Donate here.The Indian Red Cross Society is soliciting and distributing shipments of oxygen concentrators, ventilators, bedside monitors, and other medical supplies across India, as well as providing emergency services. Donate here. Donations to this U.S. nonprofit working out of Kolkata can go toward PPE for hospital staff, oxygen cylinders, or cardiac monitors, depending on the amount of money pledged. Donate here.This nonprofit is soliciting donations for PPE and groceries for families living below the poverty line who are facing food scarcity due to India’s ongoing lockdown efforts. Donate here. It was a snippet of a video that was taken right before President Biden’s first address to Congress: a clip of Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman of the United States and a longtime high-powered lawyer (he was a partner at the law firm DLA Piper before leaving his post last year for a new teaching gig), blowing his wife kisses and waving lovingly at her. A girl on Twitter posted the video with a caption about how the perfect man is out there, and that got me thinking about what a profoundly modern marriage Vice President Kamala Harris has. It’s the kind of marriage that women in my mother’s generation didn’t know could exist. For decades, popular culture has told American women that they had a choice: marriage or career. The idea that you could marry for the first time in your late 40s was something unimaginable to my mother’s generation. Harris married Emhoff in 2014, when they were both almost 50; it’s Emhoff’s second marriage and Harris’s first. By that time, Harris was a two-term attorney general for a state that is larger than many countries. In a nation where the median age for a woman to get married is about 28, Vice President Harris is an incredibly exciting outlier. It’s hard to write about the first female vice president’s marriage without taking a moment to reflect that one of the things that derailed Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice-presidential candidate in a general election, in 1984, was her marriage. (Her husband, John Zaccaro, pled guilty to fraudulently obtaining bank financing in a real estate transaction.) That was 36 years before America managed to elect a female vice president. Few cultural shifts have been as seismic as the one that occurred in the veep’s office since Biden moved into the White House. The Trump administration had many Handmaid’s Tale–like elements to it (the worst of which was probably allowing the Violence Against Women Act to expire), but none was more personally vexing to me as the daughter of a second-wave feminist than the former vice president’s incredibly antiquated notions of marriage and gender roles. The Pence marriage was like something out of another century. Mike called his wife “mother” and refused to dine alone with other women. He and Karen became evangelicals together. Mike had a set of rules to “avoid any infidelity temptations, or even rumors of impropriety.” It was the kind of marriage that would have seemed old-fashioned in the 1950s. When Karen introduced Mike at CPAC, she said her “job is to keep him humble.” I mean I guess we should have been happy that she didn’t say her job was ironing, but we got the idea: Wives were charming accessories, supporting actresses in their own lives. Rolling Stone reported, “Pence reportedly calls Karen the ‘prayer warrior’ of the family.” And of course, Karen is super-duper antichoice, telling the group at the March for Life, “Before we came to Capitol Hill, we were supporting crisis pregnancy centers and speaking for life.” Despite the fact that this was actually Mrs. Pence’s second marriage, a fact often omitted from stories about the Pences, there was something alarmingly puritanical about the whole thing. We don’t know what really happens in people’s marriages. Writing about them is a highly speculative endeavor. But despite the impossibility of understanding how a couple behaves behind closed doors, from the standpoint of feminist representation, it’s powerful to see a career woman, in such a public role, with a different kind of love story. I am pleased that my teenage daughter can see a woman who has it all: a loving husband, two stepchildren, and the second most powerful job in the country. The only thing that would be a better message for young girls is if that woman had the most powerful job in the country. Even if you aren’t familiar with his comic alter ego, Anthony Mackie is a familiar face. Over the last two decades, he’s defused bombs in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, rap battled Eminem in 8 Mile, and been a consistent scene-stealer in the movies and television shows that comprise the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For seven years and six films, he’s portrayed Sam Wilson, a.k.a. Falcon, the Air Force veteran turned superhero, who has served as a fan-favorite supporting player within the Avengers roster. This March, Mackie and his character graduated from his wingman post and took the lead in the Disney+ breakout miniseries Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The show, which ended its first season earlier this month, explores what it means to be a modern hero and a person of color in 2021. It ends (spoiler alert) with Wilson stepping up to become the new Captain America and the first Black man to take up the mantle in a live-action production. Representation has become a media priority, but it’s still relatively rare for Black and Brown performers to serve as leads in tentpole franchise films, making Mackie’s ascension to de facto Avengers leader meaningful for the actor and audiences. “It poses questions. Now you have white kids who will look up to a Black Captain America,” Mackie told me via Zoom. “I have four little Black boys, and now they’re also going to have a conversation with their white, Asian, and Latino friends. That’s what is most important. When you take the [familiar] and spin it on its head, what do those conversations look like?” Diverging from the familiar is Marvel’s current M.O. Its first two MCU TV spin-offs use their serialized format to expand the notion of superhero content while referencing a plethora of old media. If WandaVision was the studio’s madcap overview of television tropes, Falcon honors the tenets of summer blockbusters. In between its societal critiques, the show nods to the genre standards of the late ’80s and early ’90s. There are shades of Tom Clancy–style espionage thrillers each time Sam and Bucky Barnes chase superpowered terrorist group the Flag Smashers across international borders. Likewise, the banter-filled scenes that highlight their mismatched partnership nod to buddy-cop action flicks like Lethal Weapon and 48 Hrs. In the comedy variant of that subgenre, the one-liners are as frequent as the explosions, and every altercation serves as code for bro-y codependency. In its lighter moments, Falcon and the Winter Soldier veers in that direction with zingers and meme-able visual non sequiturs. Programming that balances multiple genres and moods is the selling point of prestige TV, but it demands performers who can walk a tightrope. A Juilliard alum who cut his teeth in New York’s theater scene, Mackie fits the bill. Still, putting on his winged Cap suit for the first time was an emotional experience. “I called my sister and talked to her for a while about it,” he says. “There were so many things I wanted in my career growing up as a young actor. I didn’t go to Hollywood and say, ‘Make me a star.’ I didn’t do some of these other things to get recognition; I worked for 21 years to get to where I am. [So] to have that moment of realizing that all of your hard work has paid off, it’s very humbling.” Comics have a long history of social commentary—X-Men’s allusions to the HIV crisis, Black Panther’s debut at the height of the civil rights movement—and Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s exploration of America’s history of white supremacy continues that tradition. Race informs every arc, whether it’s referenced via the indignity of Wilson getting pulled over by police for walking while Black, or through the struggles of Isaiah Bradley, a World War II–era super-soldier whose story directly parallels that of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the U.S. government’s history of experimenting on Black bodies. Connecting to the news cycle within the fantasy of a world rife with Norse gods and time travelers could have been problematic, but Mackie credits screenwriter Malcolm Spellman for the series’ nuanced handling of real-world issues. “I was blown away by it—Malcolm went in deep on these characters,” he says. “I don’t know if anybody else would have had the balls to do that. The fact that we have Isaiah Bradley in this series and [acknowledge] everything he meant not only to the history of America and the forming of Captain America is monumental. I don’t know if anyone but Malcolm would have had the balls to do that.” Bradley represents the abuses of the past, but it’s through Wilson that the complexities of being a Black man in 2021 are illustrated. Burdened with the understanding that his position as Captain America will be objectionable to those more comfortable with his blond, blue-eyed predecessor, the character debates becoming the symbolic representation of a nation where people of color remain targets. “The relationship between America and African American men is a very tumultuous, abusive relationship,” says Mackie. “It’s something that needs to be rectified and healed. So the idea of [Sam] being Captain America recognizes all of the hardships and things that Black men and women have gone through in this country. Still, it’s also about the future and what we can look forward to for our kids to experience in this country.” Father to four boys, Mackie has already gotten a taste of the youth reaction to his tenure as Cap. “My two littlest ones looked at the TV, they looked at me, and they looked at the TV, and they’re like, ‘Dad, that guy looks just like you,’” he says. “And then they went back to playing with their Legos.” Toddlers may not be impressed, but the internet has been buzzing, especially since the announcement Marvel is developing a fourth Captain America film with a script from Spellman. In keeping with the studio’s reputation for secrecy, Mackie only found out about the project after the fact. “It’s funny when I saw that news; I was like, ‘No one called me!’” With Sam’s trajectory a closely guarded secret, Mackie is eager to see where the character goes and what his message will be. “I think Sam Wilson is more so about unifying and equality,” says Mackie. “A Captain America for everyone instead of Captain America for a specific few.” BTS and BLACKPINK still rule the K-pop roost, but competition within South Korea’s pop industry is both gruelling and fierce, with a group debuting (seemingly) every other week. So, when ENHYPEN (part of the Hybe family, alongside BTS) made their much-awaited first comeback on April 26 via a live-streamed press conference with new single “Drunk-Dazed,” they rather aptly called the music landscape a “battlefield,” noting that between the latest groups (known as the K-pop’s fourth generation of idols) there is a war to be the hottest and the best. The fourth generation includes groups such as Stray Kids, ITZY, ATEEZ, and TXT, all of whom debuted after 2018 and have already achieved significant success across the globe. They’ve been joined by a slew of rookie idols looking to make their own mark on the world of music. Korea’s “idol” music, with its progressive-pop values, has long emphasized saturated colors, glitchy synths and tweaked-out vocals, lending a sense of euphoria to its millions of fans. StayC’s debut single, “So Bad,” arrived with a bubblegum-pink bang, its traditional fly-high pop chorus beefed up with club bass and twitchy flourishes that sound like the voice message button on South Korea’s messaging app KakaoTalk being repeatedly and impatiently pressed. They were an instant hit, and their EP, Staydom, made them the rookie girl group with the highest first-week sales of 2020 to 2021. When you’ve got Black Eyed Pilseung (South Korea’s celebrated songwriting/production duo) as your CEO and producer, prepare to expect the unexpected. A much-debated topic over the past few years has been idol “noise music.” Loosely categorized by fans as disjointed K-pop, it contains ultra-heavy electronic beats (often influenced by rave culture) and mechanical sounds, for example, Red Velvet’s “Zimzalabim” (2019). P1Harmony’s second single, “Scared,” sits in the middle of this divisive genre, but it’s where you really sense their bigger potential. Alongside the clanging metallic hook, they deliver a rallying call for self-belief to outsiders. Their latest EP, Disharmony: Break Out, is wall-to-wall social observations, and a must-listen for those who like their K-pop loud, high-energy and defiant. Aespa are SM Entertainment’s first new girl group since 2014, and excitement reached fever pitch for their debut single, “Black Mamba” (2020), whose simple “Aya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya” hook embedded into the brain with frightening ease. Their visual concept is rooted in digital art, AI and virtual reality: Aespa contains four human members and four virtual ones. How the two sets of girls interact with each other, and potentially their fans, was demonstrated through a short video called “My, Karina,” but with only two tracks thus far released, we’re yet to see SM’s tentpole ideas (and Aespa’s storyline) in action. “Black Mamba” has racked up a staggering 141 million views in just five months, however, so there’s clearly no shortage of fans waiting for that moment. how I-Land, a joint venture between K-pop giants Big Hit (now Hybe) and CJ E&M, ENHYPEN amassed a huge fanbase before their debut EP, Border: Day One, had even dropped in November 2020. Their producer, Wonderkid (a.k.a. Kim Tae Yun), has delivered psychedelia and tinges of rock to their 2021 EP, Border: Carnival (which has notched up a staggering 400,000 pre-orders), putting down the bedrock to enhance ENHYPEN’s biggest strength: their stage performances. New single “Drunk-Dazed,” with its complex, demanding choreography, is well worth watching again and again and again. Two warm-up singles—the unapologetically ballsy rock of 2020’s My Heart Skip A Beat and R&B-pop of “Can We Talk Again” (2021)—showed off the group’s range, while single “Ponzona” (2021) added yet another dimension to Purple Kiss. The track fused K-pop’s stalwart ‘girl crush’ concept with lashings of Billie Eilish and the darker, edgier feel of fellow K-Pop group (G)I-DLE. No matter what you call this process—a jumble, a fusion, a melting pot—K-pop’s ability to create a coherent, engaging tapestry of sights and sounds from a dozen pop-culture references never fails to astound. Though one can never predict K-pop’s breakout acts from smaller agencies, by matching this alchemy to a group such as Purple Kiss whose presence can be felt even through a laptop screen, you may well be looking at the next big thing. It takes a strong will to resist Weeekly’s 2020 debut, “Tag Me (@Me),” with its brat-pop cuteness, which, like all good K-pop, marries a dozen styles including a wistful bridge and hyperactive outro. One of the industry’s advantages is that everyone is catered for, from gothic to candy-colored, hip-hop to balladry, serious to sentimental, and Weeekly—who nabbed the New Artist of the Year award at South Korea’s Melon Music Awards 2020—have released three EPs (2020’s We Can and We Are, and 2021’s We Play) that sparkle with some truly wholesome fare, particularly on B-sides “Top Secret,” “Butterfly” and “Lucky.” If your taste leans towards fizzy escapism, allow Weeekly to whisk you away. After years of bouncing from group to group, Cho Seung-youn found firm footing on his own as WOODZ, releasing 2020’s earworm “Love Me Harder.” His debut EP, Equal (2020), was a heady spin through perhaps too many styles and sounds, but on the second EP, 2020’s Woops!, he struck a groove with warm, acoustic-led pop-rock. His latest single, “Feels Like” (2021), is, arguably, his best. Breathy and seductive with treacly guitar riffs, this is WOODZ creatively pushing himself to the point where he sounds like no one else in K-pop’s current climate, and that alone demands attention. Princess Charlotte is growing up right before our very eyes.On May 2, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s second child turns six years old. To mark the occasion, the family shared a new portrait of the young royal at their country home of Anmer Hall in Norfolk, England. In it, a charming Charlotte beams at the camera, her blondish-brown hair framing her face. She wears a blue floral print dress adorned with red buttons and trim.Kate Middleton took the official photo of her one-and-only daughter, just as she did with her youngest son, Prince Louis, who turned three on April 23. The photograph is just the latest glimpse the public has gotten of the little princess. Recently, she also appeared in a video celebrating her parents’ April 29 wedding anniversary. The footage showed Charlotte, as well as her brothers George and Louis, running around on the beach, playing on a see-saw in their backyard, and toasting marshmallows. The princess is seen happily smiling throughout. Usually, this official portrait of Princess Charlotte would be tweeted or posted on similar channels—however, this weekend, the family is boycotting social media in support of English football players of color who have been subject to racial abuse. What are the best travel mugs and reusable coffee cups? Ask a Vogue editor, and their excitement for their favorite vessel might rival that of the latest great fashion collection. If one of your 2021 goals is to live more sustainably, buying a reusable coffee cup, tumbler, or travel mug is a simple way to bake the virtue into your everyday life. Many of us are guilty of grabbing a latte and, after an hour or two, quickly discarding that paper or plastic cup into the trash. In 2018, Reuters reported that 64 percent of Americans are drinking more coffee daily (the highest level since 2012). But there’s no need to actually give up your daily coffee, just bring a cup that will help reduce the amount of single-use plastic disposed each day, but can also be chic, too. As Emily Farra, Vogue’s Senior Fashion News Writer notes, she gets more compliments on her ceramic W&P travel mug than anything in her closet. Below, 18 Vogue editors spill about their favorite reusable coffee cups and best travel mug selects.Two things I love about Hay’s Sowden cup: 1. the good design (contrasting colors! sleek lines!) and 2. its ability to keep your coffee cold, or hot, for twelve hours. Considering I still drink ice coffee in the depths of New York winter, I likely won’t ever need the latter temperature meticulously maintained! But it’s still nice to have options. A friend introduced me to this reusable coffee cup a few years ago. I like it so much that I’ve now gifted one to every member of my family. It has all the environmental benefits of a reusable cup with the insulating qualities of a Yeti so my coffee stays warm. The resealable lid and handle make it really easy for a multi-tasker like me to cart it all around without spilling everywhere. I drink a lot—actually, way too much—coffee and I hate lugging a giant thermos around with me all day. When I found this collapsible coffee mug, it was bliss. It folds down to fit in my small purse, so once I’m done chugging a cold brew I can pack it up and not think about it … until my next cup. Sorry, cappuccino lovers, I cannot stand the taste of coffee—like not at all. Instead, tea is my morning drink of choice. I feel really fancy when I’m sipping it from my favorite Tea Forte cup. It has a lid that allows me to take it with me when I’m on the go, and the pretty flower print makes me feel like an extra on Bridgerton. Over the years, I’ve really come to love sipping a great cup of tea or warm water with lemon throughout the day but hate lugging around a bulky tumbler! The Moonstone tumbler has been a minimalist’s dream with a sleek design that never fails to keep my beverage of choice warm. It’s the perfect no fuss, no gimmick product. Just great insulating technology! I love my Kinto travel mug for hot and cold coffee alike. The clever double lid not only prevents awkward (or dangerous!) spillage, but also keeps ice cubes at bay.I love this Ember cup as I am a slow coffee drinker and it keeps my cup warm for hours. Perfect for lazy Sunday mornings at home! I’m obsessed with my Keep cup. It’s a great size and most like a traditional to-go cup for me. Plus, it’s super easy to clean which means I’m way more likely to keep using it!I think I get more compliments on my blush W&P travel mug than anything in my closet. Admittedly, it is really cute, but it’s also very petite! For days when I need more than 12 ounces of coffee (which are most days), I’m picking up their new, larger version in slate gray. These sleek ceramic coffee mugs come in three color ways: black, white, and mint (which is my personal favorite). Not only is it compact in size, but its double insulated walls help keep my hot coffee hot and ice coffee cold no matter what temperature it is outside. Even better—its bamboo cap is leak-proof so I can drop it in my bag without worrying about a spill. I’m not a huge coffee drinker but I do love my tea! This reusable mug from Miir is my go-to whenever I am on the run and need to take my drink on the go. I also love the sleek and modern design of the mug! This speckly thermos looks like something a loving 1950s housewife would have filled with coffee and left waiting on the counter for her husband’s morning commute. I’m no housewife, but it does pair well with my midcentury vintage wardrobe! For someone like me whose coffee order is good ol’ drip and a bit of half & half, (which might just make me the only non-non-dairy coffee order in New York) there’s something about drinking it out of a ceramic imitation of the classic bodega paper cup. Perfect for sipping joe or some tea daily at my desk or right at home—sans paper and plastic. I use my Joco Cup faithfully every day. The annoyance of washing it every morning is offset by the righteous virtue I feel as I wait in line to pay among all the single-use plastic holdouts. I used to be a diehard disposable cup user because I’m probably lazy and myopic when it comes to recycling, etc. But I have to say, I love this coffee cup that I keep at my desk and get my morning coffee in. I haven’t used a disposable cup since I bought it. I like this little blush cup from W&P—it is not too large, so you can avoid over-caffeinating!As any true born-and-raised Minnesotan would, I have a strong affinity for all things Scandinavian. So naturally these hand-painted Dansk coffee cups, designed by legendary Danish ceramicist Niels Refsgaard, are the perfect vessel for my afternoon caffeine boost. I love that they are microwave and dishwasher safe without compromising their old-world stoneware charm. This soccer mom—tennis mom, actually—was yearning for a spot of tea while watching matches, so the hubsters lent me his Zojirushi thermos/mug. It’s sleek. It has a lock function. It keeps things super hot, or super cold. I was sold. I wished for one for Christmas and Santa came through with a gift that keeps on giving. Now I don’t leave the house without it. As we approach the summer of 2021, with countless cinemas across the world still shuttered and the future uncertain, Netflix—exceeding all expectations—continues to roll out hit after hit. Up next? A psychological chiller featuring Amy Adams and Julianne Moore, a miniseries chronicling the life of a fashion icon, and the return of two binge-worthy shows that proved to be essential quarantine viewing the first time around. These are the five releases to add to your watch list now. A distressed Amy Adams plays an agoraphobic child psychologist who watches her neighbors through the windows of her New York brownstone in Joe Wright’s twisty horror movie based on the novel by A.J. Finn. She makes a new friend (Julianne Moore) but then witnesses her being attacked, after which her cloistered existence unravels entirely. The supporting cast is stellar (Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie, Brian Tyree Henry, and Jennifer Jason Leigh) and the powerful sense of claustrophobia undeniably timely. Directed by Daniel Minahan and executive produced by Ryan Murphy, this glittering five-part drama casts Ewan McGregor as the titular designer who changed the face of American fashion. As we track his stratospheric rise and eventual downfall as a result of addiction and ill-advised business decisions, expect flamboyant 1970s costumes, wild nights at Studio 54, and an introduction to his circle, which included actor Liza Minnelli and jewelry designer Elsa Peretti. What happens when a group of mercenaries is hired to retrieve $200 million from a Las Vegas casino during a zombie outbreak? Prepare to find out in Zack Snyder’s delightfully bombastic action epic, which centers on Dave Bautista as a war hero who assembles an eclectic crew (Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Tig Notaro, and Matthias Schweighöfer). It has all the ingredients of a summer blockbuster: shoot-outs, spectacular set pieces, and laughs, not to mention a zombie tiger. As charming as it was quietly revolutionary, the first season of Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s high school comedy about Indian American teenager Devi won hearts the world over. Now its magnetic lead, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, is back for the second installment with a slew of new additions, from Megan Suri as a fellow student to Common as a potential love interest for Devi’s mother (Poorna Jagannathan). If you’re still reeling from the cliff-hanger ending of the first part of George Kay’s ingenious thriller, take solace in the fact that the second half is on its way. It’ll follow the charismatic Omar Sy in the role of Assane, a thief hell-bent on avenging his father’s death whose son (Etan Simon) has just been abducted by his enemies. There are sure to be more shocking revelations, tense standoffs, elaborate disguises, and the same sleight of hand that made the earliest episodes so irresistible. For the summer, I would like nothing more than a glitzy, can’t-miss-it chain belt. After watching a lot of Jennifer Lopez recently, specifically her 2001 music video “Love Don’t Cost a Thing,” my love for the piece has been reignited. In the noughties scene, Lopez drips in gold jewelry, including a fat chain necklace with a large horn pendant, a gilded link number clanging on her wrist, a fistful of Midas-touched rings, and her signature fist-size hoops. She says to a supposed lover who has gifted her a gold bangle in lieu of showing up in person, “The last thing I need is another bracelet.” As Lopez lingers on the word “bracelet”, the camera pans to a Michael Kors-era Celine chain belt. The gleaming piece isn’t threaded through the belt loops of her skin-tight jeans but rather, it lazily hangs off of Lopez’s hips. As she walks down an empty road and sheds the rest of her jewelry while singing “think I’m gonna spend your cash/I don’t”, the chain belt’s double-C charm clangs from side to side, bouncing off her upper thigh. The whole moment is, well, rich. This yesteryear Celine belt serves no purpose other than to be seen. It’s not actually securing her pants from falling down, which is what belts do. It’s just there, an excessive garnish for Lopez’s otherwise plain look. My own imagined outfits for reemergence hinge on that very chain belt. That sort of gaudy-chic aesthetic feels apropos for the world coming out of hibernation. In the early aughts, It girls and pop stars loved chain belts. Aaliyah opted for a thin gold incarnation strung over a simple pair of white pants at a film premiere in 2001, while Christina Aguilera always went the brash route with multiple chains in multiple sizes. On the runway, the chain belt has been a Chanel signature time and time again. A moment from the Spring 1995 show is burned in my brain, with Brandi Quinones trotting down the catwalk in an itty-bitty baby pink button-up polo and a mini skirt with a slit. A chain belt hangs off the skirt, once again, it’s just there. Speaking of the runway, the piece made a comeback at Chanel’s spring 2021 show, strung across a bodysuit or a pair of trousers. Y2K-minded Blumarine’s fall 2021 show featured so many chains on one look, it resembled a flashy octopus. The trend continued at Marine Serre, where a stone bauble hung from a chain.Think of a chain belt as jewelry but for your waist. It’s made to draw attention and be pretty, and not do anything other than that—the cherry on the top of a sartorial sundae. In other words, it’s worth linking up with a chain belt this summer. We’ve all chuckled when someone cracks a joke about changing from our daytime pajamas into our nighttime pajamas. It’s funny because it’s true, and all too familiar. Pajamas are becoming far more than just a creature comfort to enjoy when crawling under the covers; they are a way of life. But what to do when temperatures rise and the cozy set that got you through hibernation season now sends you tossing and turning by night and hot-flashing by day? Flannel will not do for May, and with summer creeping up on us, visions of airy linen sets and billowy poplin nightgowns now dance in our heads. From starchy oversized nightshirts to slinky silk negligees, the perfect summer-weight sleepwear is out there waiting for you, begging to be worn 24 hours a day. So next time you’re lying awake, sweating in your winter sleepwear at 2 a.m., take a look at our favorite lightweight options and the best summer pajamas for women, below. (The sheep you’re counting won’t mind, we promise.) Silk camis, short sleep shorts, and sweet bloomers will have you feeling like you’re wearing nothing at all.Swap your long-sleeve shirt and pajama pant sets for something shorter. These coordinated cotton and linen pajama sets are summer’s version of the classic sleep set, or in this case, the best summer pajamas for women. From counting sheep to pouring coffee, these oxford and T-shirt gowns will take you from sweet dreams to Sunday mornings.The perfect women’s boxer short does exist. So long to borrowing (stealing) from the boys. Just throw on your favorite T-shirt and snooze.What better season to sashay around the house wearing vintage-inspired sleepwear than summer?Your bedtime routine just got sweeter thanks to these luxe, wind-down robes, from a crisp seersucker and lightweight linens. At last, our dreams of safely attending soirées could soon become a reality, which is why thoughts of picking the best party dresses to wear to future gatherings are slowly infiltrating our minds. Likewise, designers are also planning for the return of going out ensembles. Did you see Saint Laurent’s latest collection? Come fall, Anthony Vaccarello’s jubilant micro-mini skirts, metallic bodysuits, and sequin jackets could be spotted at a gala or—dare I say it—an in-person, red-carpet event. Yes, we miss those, too. Brands like Michael Kors, Caroline Hu, and Ashish are also keeping our “dressed to the nines” dreams alive with festive looks fit for a reemergence celebration. In the same vein, we’ve gathered some of the best party dresses around. If the invites to graduation parties, weddings, or cocktail events are starting to pour in, you’ll find something below for every type of invite. Whether you require a little black dress or a long-sleeve mini, It doesn’t hurt to start looking and planning early. There are times when being a member of the LGBTQ+ community—and a lesbian in particular—feels like an Easter-egg hunt for representation. Queer women are used to mining everything from a cryptic celebrity Instagram to the discography of Taylor Swift for clues that someone in the public eye might be one of us, and to be honest, the constant hustle to be seen—especially for lesbians who don’t fit the skinny, white, femme, upper-middle-class, L Word mold—can be exhausting. All that might explain why the work of an artist and writer like Alison Bechdel feels so pivotal. Bechdel has been woven into the fabric of lesbian cultural identity ever since she started publishing the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983, and at no point in her decades-long career has she ever compromised on directly addressing her sexuality. To understand Bechdel as a chronicler of lesbian issues only, though, is to sell her short; the exploration of queer identity makes up just one part of her broad oeuvre, along with the family trauma she examined in the 2006 graphic memoir (and later Broadway musical) Fun Home, the psychoanalysis she delved into in 2012’s companion piece Are You My Mother?, and—most recently—the lifelong obsession with exercise that she crystallizes in next month’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Outside of the niche queer-graphic-novel world, Bechdel is perhaps best known for the Bechdel Test, a measure of the representation of women onscreen and in print. (For a work to pass the test, two female characters must talk to each other about something other than a man.) When, on a recent call, I ask Bechdel what it’s like to be forever enshrined in feminist history thanks to her eponymous test, she laughs and responds, “I feel very pleased by it, but for a while I felt a bit befuddled. I never sat down and said, ‘This is going to be a thing,’ but I’ve come to accept it and even feel proud of it.” Bechdel isn’t the type of artist to believe her own hype, even when said hype is well warranted. When I ask how it feels to have created work that so many queer people identify with, she’s hesitant: “I went through a period of feeling very anxious about that, because many young people would tell me that my comic-strip characters were the first lesbians they’d met. I was like, Oh, my God, what am I telling these people? I should be more careful. I don’t feel that concern as much anymore, partly because there are hundreds and thousands of people writing about queer stuff. It’s just a much wider field these days.” Perhaps it’s the widening of that field that freed Bechdel up to write The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Some might read the memoir’s description and expect an account from a woman beholden to Pilates or Flywheel or any other trendy boutique fitness class where an hour in a sweaty room costs roughly the same as a nice meal out. But for Bechdel, exercise isn’t really about aesthetics; it’s about strength, a virtue she’s been in thrall to ever since she first saw bodybuilder Charles Atlas on TV as a child. At 60, Bechdel appears wholly uninterested in perpetuating the workout-as-self-care trope; she makes it clear that her relationship with exercise is something much deeper and more fraught. “I made a decision not to discuss body image in the book because I think it’s unusual for women not to talk about it.”“I love to see people exercise just because they want to. I don’t think it should be connected to anything else, or it will just become miserable,” says Bechdel. She admits, though, that it’s hard to center a whole book around exercise without occasionally falling into the trap of presenting it as a moral imperative. “I do feel a little sheepish about being so pro-exercise without having a thorough critique of sizeism, but I made a decision not to discuss body image in the book because I think it’s unusual for women not to talk about it.” Bechdel’s complex, often painful life story is a matter of public record—in Fun Home, she wrote about losing her long-closeted father to suicide shortly after coming out as a lesbian, and in Are You My Mother?, she chronicled her thorny relationship with her often-distant mother. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, though, exercise is presented as a possible corrective to all that pain, a lifelong pursuit of self-improvement and internal balance that helped Bechdel through some of her toughest years. “Exercise is the one part of my life that isn’t riddled with conflict,” she says, adding, “I don’t want to come off as an exercise evangelist because I think that can be off-putting, but I like to think of it as a bit of relief from my cerebral life.” Bechdel’s graphic novels are often placed into contextual conversation with the work of other writers, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength is no exception. She ping-pongs between her own ideas and those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jack Kerouac, and Adrienne Rich, creating a canon around the art of moving one’s body that joyfully complicates the notion of exercise as an anti-cerebral activity (even if that is partly why Bechdel is drawn to it). Bechdel and her partner—the artist Holly Rae Taylor, who colored the book’s images—live in Vermont, where they favor long hikes and bike rides. Like many others, however, Bechdel had trouble adjusting her exercise routine to fit the confines of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying, “I was very sad to fall off the weight-lifting wagon when the gyms closed.” When I ask Bechdel what she hopes people take away from the book, I expect her to say more about the discipline that exercise has brought to her life. Instead, she’s almost philosophical in response: “I hope people take away a belief that it’s possible to really change. That’s a question I’ve often had for myself—like, Am I really making any kind of psychic or spiritual progress in my life? But I really do think that if we apply ourselves, we can change. The only thing is that it takes so much longer than anyone ever suspects! If we really knew how long it took to make real change happen in ourselves, we would quit immediately.” The concept of exercise bringing about change is one that’s all too familiar, given the rise of wellness influencers peddling at-home fitness routines and the ever-present onslaught of Noom and Weight Watchers ads that encourage prospective dieters to trade physical movement for extra food. It can be incredibly freeing, though, to begin to view exercise as Bechdel does, as a kind of ongoing commitment to oneself, rather than a snake-oil cure for the so-called problem of existing in a corporeal form. It feels overly simplistic to say that Bechdel is queering the act of exercising, but there’s a distinctly antiestablishment flavor to her desire to get stronger in a world that commands women to shrink down and cower before the male gaze. Bechdel says she’s heartened by the strides that the LGBTQ+ community has made since she first started writing and drawing, but she’s also aware that gains can always be lost and that progress only goes so far. (She singles out the recent legislative attacks on the trans community as “particularly troubling.”) With The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Bechdel has—intentionally or not—provided a kind of handbook for a community whose right to bodily autonomy and self-governance is still frequently called into question. And really, what could be more subtly revolutionary than that? This past Friday, Symone, aka The Ebony Enchantress, was named the winner of the 13th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and the experience has helped her take her beauty game to a whole new level—and pace. “When I first started doing drag, it would take me about four hours just to do the makeup part,” she says. “The Race—it is truly a race. It’s in the name, it’s not a joke, we ain’t playing around here, okay? So I can do my makeup now in about an hour, hour and a half. They don’t call it the Olympics of drag for nothing.” Symone notes that the expedited process has helped hone her muscle memory and perfect her application. “Once you have it you got it, and baby there’s no mistaking, I got it.” The crowned queen likes her skin care routine well-honed—“I keep it real simple, real clean, real cute, and effective”—relying on Sunday Riley products, her mainstay being the brand’s Good Genes All-in-One Lactic Acid Treatment, followed by a touch of moisturizer from Tata Harper. “Being a full-time queen, you have to take care of your skin,” she explains. “It’s the base of everything, and you’re putting makeup on it everyday for hours on end. So I make sure she is stunning.” Eyeshadow primer offers a buildable base for a series of shimmers layered in pinks and purples (“the color of royalty, if you did not know”), the colorful look as playful as it is powerful. A coupling of kohl and liquid liner team for a geometric cat-eye, with a sky-reaching, feathery lash furthering the drama. More blending and a fluffy brush to end the baking round out the technicalities, and Symone finishes the look with highlight and a lined, glossed lip. I’m moving into a new apartment this week and am basically starting from scratch with home decor. Dusen and Dusen’s striped towels have been on my wishlist for a while now—and on everyone else’s it seems too, since they seem to be sold out almost everywhere on the internet! Thankfully I was able to snag one of the bath towels as I patiently wait for the restock of their fun sets. They’re just the kind of summery pop of color I’m looking for to brighten up my bathroom. “Never hang stretchable fabrics such as knits, bias cut, and heavily-embellished, heavy garments because they could get distorted. Store these items flat in a breathable garment box or folded with acid-free tissue to avoid creasing. You cannot use the same hanger type for every article of clothing in your closet even though that may be aesthetically pleasing.  There are specific hangers that are best for certain types of clothing, so be sure to always choose the appropriate hanger. For example, broad-shoulder hangers for heavier coats, pant-suit hangers with clips for slacks, and padded hangers that provide cushion for delicate items. When in doubt, store the item flat instead of on a hanger. No wire hangers, EVER!” Bechdel’s complex, often painful life story is a matter of public record—in Fun Home, she wrote about losing her long-closeted father to suicide shortly after coming out as a lesbian, and in Are You My Mother?, she chronicled her thorny relationship with her often-distant mother. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, though, exercise is presented as a possible corrective to all that pain, a lifelong pursuit of self-improvement and internal balance that helped Bechdel through some of her toughest years. “Exercise is the one part of my life that isn’t riddled with conflict,” she says, adding, “I don’t want to come off as an exercise evangelist because I think that can be off-putting, but I like to think of it as a bit of relief from my cerebral life.” Lastly, don’t overthink it. Just embrace the joy it can yield. “With mask-wearing being the norm, the eyes are the only part you get to see, so keep some bright shades in your bag or car and change it up in a pinch,” says Cheng. “As you update and change your wardrobe, I think it’s just as much fun to do so with your makeup routine.” Roger Stone Still Did Nothing Wrong Tee Shirts Black Buy it:  Roger Stone Still Did Nothing Wrong Tee Shirts Black “Though today is the Roger Stone Still Did Nothing Wrong Tee Shirts Black first Monday in May, we are not rolling out the red carpet on the front steps,” says the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Marina Kellen French Director Max Hollein. But that doesn’t preclude the release of exciting new information about the Costume Institute’s two-part 2021 exhibit “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” and “In America: An Anthology of Fashion.” Hollein was joined by Eva Chen of Instagram and Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute, this morning at a virtual press conference that revealed all the details about the upcoming exhibits and galas. Part one of the exhibition, “A Lexicon of Fashion,” will open September 18 at the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Met, marking the Costume Institute’s 75th anniversary. An intimate gala to celebrate the exhibit’s opening will take place on September 13, cochaired by Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Amanda Gorman, and Naomi Osaka with honorary chairs Tom Ford, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri, and Anna Wintour. The exhibit will be organized to resemble a home, with intersecting walls and rooms that will establish what Bolton calls “a new vocabulary that’s more relevant and more reflective of the times in which we’re living.” “Traditionally American fashion has been described in terms of the American tenets of simplicity, practicality, and functionality. Fashion’s more emotional qualities have tended to be reserved for more European fashion,” Bolton says. “In part one we’ll be reconsidering this perception by reestablishing a modern lexicon of fashion based on the emotional qualities of dress.” The many rooms in this part of the exhibit will be titled to reflect the personal and emotional relationship we have to fashion: “Well-Being” for the kitchen galleries, “Aspiration” for the office, and “Trust,” the living room, for example. In pushing the human connections to our clothes, Bolton is writing a new history of American style that focuses less on sportswear and Seventh Avenue dressmakers, instead framing designers as creators, innovators, and artists. “Taken together these qualities will compromise a modern vocabulary of American fashion that prioritizes values, emotions, and sentiments over the sportswear principles of realism, rationalism, and pragmatism,” he says. Pieces from Christopher John Rogers, Sterling Ruby, Conner Ives, Prabal Gurung, and Andre Walker feature in part one of the exhibition. Ruby’s Veil Flag, a short film presented at Paris Fashion Week, was recreated at the Met, and its central piece, a denim American flag, will open the show. Director Melina Matsoukas will also create a film for the exhibit that will evolve over the course of its run. Part two, “An Anthology of Fashion,” will open May 5, 2022, in the period rooms of the museum’s American Wing. In this, it’s a natural coda to the museum’s trio of in situ Costume Institute exhibits that began with 2004’s Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century held in the French period rooms and 2006’s AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion set in the English period rooms. “In its conceptualization, part two actually preceded part one and actually inspired and informed it. For many years now we’ve been examining our collection to uncover hidden or untold stories with a view to complicating or problematizing monolithic interpretations of fashion. Our intention for part two is to bring these stories together in an anthology that challenges perceived histories and offers alternative readings of American fashion,” Bolton explains. My favorite is one that two of my cousins made. It has a multicolor array of yellow, orange, and red ribbons standing out against the red printed backdrop. Sometimes, she will even wear a beaded buckskin bag with it that my sister made. Decked out in her look, she certainly blends into her surroundings at the powwow, where exquisite craftsmanship and color is everywhere. Seeing my mom in a colorful ensemble is always a shock to the senses, but it makes total sense. “Be proud of who you are,” she’ll always tell me. I’ve grown to love how she keeps her ribbon skirts reserved for special occasions. Her dramatic switch-up from all black into her colorful regalia always causes you to focus in on all of its beautiful details just that much more, as though she deliberately holds back in her day-to-day wardrobe to make you notice it more when she does dress up. An underarm guard (shaped like a shoulder pad, but it’s for your underarms) or any undershirt for that matter will add a protective layer to avoid staining and perspiration marks which are tricky to clean.Cedar blocks aren’t effective against all moth infestations, but they do thwart the growth of the insect. Place a couple in your closets and drawers and replace when the blocks lose their piney scents. For more intense preventative measures, pick up some Moth prevention traps. Now, the category of “puffy” is admittedly a wide-ranging one—the Boa Pouf and Bellini sofa, for example, have a number of glaring aesthetic differences. (Here’s our best attempt at a definitive categorization: anything that looks like it belongs in the home of the Michelin Man or Pillsbury doughboy.) It’s a design canon that might not hold its weight ten or 20 years from now—many of these pieces belong to other distinct design movements anyway—but in this very moment, we are certainly gravitating to everything thick and squishy. It’s a shift from recent predilections: Mid-century modern, the design style du jour of the past decade, is known for its clean, geometric lines and visible peg legs. These gentle, curved offerings are anything but. “There’s been quite a dramatic shift with the popularity of the rounded shape furniture. It’s trickled from bigger pieces like sofas and chairs to even coffee tables and sculptures,” says interior designer Erick Garcia of Maison Trouvaille. Just as structured jackets and tight pants went to the wayside last March, it seems so did any sleek and stiff furniture. “During our quarantine last year, we all spent so much time at home working on our laptops, Zooming and being domesticated—furniture had to be more cozy and inviting while lounging in our sweat suits,” Garcia says. It only increased amid political and social unrest: “We wanted to be comforted by these round, curved and tactile chairs and sofas—almost like receiving a big soft hug,” Garcia adds. While recently decorating celebrity hairstylist Jen Atkins’ Los Angeles home, Garcia sourced a pair of squishy, circular Pacha armchairs for the bedroom, along with an Afra & Tobia Scarpa sofa for the living space. Now that the world is opening up again, will puffy and plump pieces be here to stay? “The trend will definitely continue and evolve,” Garcia says, although perhaps don’t plan for a complete overhaul of your mid-century look: “There’s room for both—the beauty and fun of design is that we can mix it all together.” Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this new column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds. One might think that a pandemic year spent mostly single would make me long for a partner, but in truth, that’s simply not the case. I’ve become mildly obsessed with spending time exactly the way I want to, without having to take someone else’s dietary restrictions or Netflix-viewing habits into consideration. The one exception comes when I see a couple that seems to shine in each other’s presence, and this week, said couple was none other than the actor pair of Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale. I’ve long been of the opinion that Byrne is one of the most criminally underrated comedic actresses out there (if her turn in Bridesmaids isn’t enough to convince you, watch her truly excellent cameo in the just-okay 2010 film Get Him to the Greek), and I’ve been obsessed with Cannavale since he played one of the few genuinely memorable boyfriends-of-the-week to Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones. What cinched my love of them as a couple, though, was a recent paparazzi shot of the pair embracing one another on an Australian beach—and that was after 14 days of mandatory quarantine together. Again, maybe I’ve just gotten too set in my bitter-spinster ways, but if I were locked in a hotel room with someone—even the love of my life—for two straight weeks, I’m not sure I’d be in the mood to glowingly wrap my arms around them on the sand at the end of our stint together. Byrne and Cannavale have been together since 2012 and have two children together, yet they still look like besotted spring-breakers one or two rum punches away from recreating the From Here to Eternity beach scene. One of the best aspects of Byrne and Cannavale’s beach escape is the fact that they are, intentionally or not, matching. (I simply refuse to use the word “twinning.”) They’re both clad in jeans, white T-shirts, and baseball hats—a watercolor print for Byrne, and an extremely on-brand Yankees logo for Cannavale—and part of me suspects that a significant portion of their shared closet is devoted to this kind of on-the-fly, unfussy ensemble. Actually, do celebrities share closets, or do they each have their own in separate wings of their Brentwood mansions? I digress. Byrne and Cannavale have worked together several times in the past, most recently co-starring in a Brooklyn Academy of Music run of Medea, but they rarely do press together. “We’re generally pretty private,” Byrne recently told Vanity Fair. Why is it always the celebrity couples you actually like that maintain an air of mystery, while the ones who make you despair of the future of society can’t stop gushing about each other on camera? Actually, maybe the answer is in the question. Either way, mazel to Byrne and Cannavale on what appears—to the totally untrained, contextless eye—to be a genuinely fun relationship. If I ever pass you in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood, I promise to subtly gawk, but refrain from Instagramming. The COVID-19 emergency in India has shown no signs of abating in recent weeks, with hospitals jam-packed and supplies of oxygen running short. More than 300,000 people a day are reportedly becoming infected; and while it can be difficult to conceive of a humanitarian crisis of that magnitude, there are plenty of ways for those in the U.S. and abroad to help. Below, find a list of organizations working to provide food, oxygen, personal protective equipment (PPE), medical supplies, and other forms of care to India, all of which are currently accepting donations. This U.K.-based nonprofit is collecting funds to buy highly in-demand medical necessities like oxygen concentrators, CPAP machines, and other diagnostic tools, all to be sent to India and distributed in hospitals and care centers. Donate here. This United Nations agency is on hand in India to share information on stopping the spread of COVID-19 and provide more than 3.6 million people with critical water, sanitation, and hygiene supplies and services. Donate here.The Indian Red Cross Society is soliciting and distributing shipments of oxygen concentrators, ventilators, bedside monitors, and other medical supplies across India, as well as providing emergency services. Donate here. Donations to this U.S. nonprofit working out of Kolkata can go toward PPE for hospital staff, oxygen cylinders, or cardiac monitors, depending on the amount of money pledged. Donate here.This nonprofit is soliciting donations for PPE and groceries for families living below the poverty line who are facing food scarcity due to India’s ongoing lockdown efforts. Donate here. It was a snippet of a video that was taken right before President Biden’s first address to Congress: a clip of Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman of the United States and a longtime high-powered lawyer (he was a partner at the law firm DLA Piper before leaving his post last year for a new teaching gig), blowing his wife kisses and waving lovingly at her. A girl on Twitter posted the video with a caption about how the perfect man is out there, and that got me thinking about what a profoundly modern marriage Vice President Kamala Harris has. It’s the kind of marriage that women in my mother’s generation didn’t know could exist. For decades, popular culture has told American women that they had a choice: marriage or career. The idea that you could marry for the first time in your late 40s was something unimaginable to my mother’s generation. Harris married Emhoff in 2014, when they were both almost 50; it’s Emhoff’s second marriage and Harris’s first. By that time, Harris was a two-term attorney general for a state that is larger than many countries. In a nation where the median age for a woman to get married is about 28, Vice President Harris is an incredibly exciting outlier. It’s hard to write about the first female vice president’s marriage without taking a moment to reflect that one of the things that derailed Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice-presidential candidate in a general election, in 1984, was her marriage. (Her husband, John Zaccaro, pled guilty to fraudulently obtaining bank financing in a real estate transaction.) That was 36 years before America managed to elect a female vice president. Few cultural shifts have been as seismic as the one that occurred in the veep’s office since Biden moved into the White House. The Trump administration had many Handmaid’s Tale–like elements to it (the worst of which was probably allowing the Violence Against Women Act to expire), but none was more personally vexing to me as the daughter of a second-wave feminist than the former vice president’s incredibly antiquated notions of marriage and gender roles. The Pence marriage was like something out of another century. Mike called his wife “mother” and refused to dine alone with other women. He and Karen became evangelicals together. Mike had a set of rules to “avoid any infidelity temptations, or even rumors of impropriety.” It was the kind of marriage that would have seemed old-fashioned in the 1950s. When Karen introduced Mike at CPAC, she said her “job is to keep him humble.” I mean I guess we should have been happy that she didn’t say her job was ironing, but we got the idea: Wives were charming accessories, supporting actresses in their own lives. Rolling Stone reported, “Pence reportedly calls Karen the ‘prayer warrior’ of the family.” And of course, Karen is super-duper antichoice, telling the group at the March for Life, “Before we came to Capitol Hill, we were supporting crisis pregnancy centers and speaking for life.” Despite the fact that this was actually Mrs. Pence’s second marriage, a fact often omitted from stories about the Pences, there was something alarmingly puritanical about the whole thing. We don’t know what really happens in people’s marriages. Writing about them is a highly speculative endeavor. But despite the impossibility of understanding how a couple behaves behind closed doors, from the standpoint of feminist representation, it’s powerful to see a career woman, in such a public role, with a different kind of love story. I am pleased that my teenage daughter can see a woman who has it all: a loving husband, two stepchildren, and the second most powerful job in the country. The only thing that would be a better message for young girls is if that woman had the most powerful job in the country. Even if you aren’t familiar with his comic alter ego, Anthony Mackie is a familiar face. Over the last two decades, he’s defused bombs in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, rap battled Eminem in 8 Mile, and been a consistent scene-stealer in the movies and television shows that comprise the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For seven years and six films, he’s portrayed Sam Wilson, a.k.a. Falcon, the Air Force veteran turned superhero, who has served as a fan-favorite supporting player within the Avengers roster. This March, Mackie and his character graduated from his wingman post and took the lead in the Disney+ breakout miniseries Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The show, which ended its first season earlier this month, explores what it means to be a modern hero and a person of color in 2021. It ends (spoiler alert) with Wilson stepping up to become the new Captain America and the first Black man to take up the mantle in a live-action production. Representation has become a media priority, but it’s still relatively rare for Black and Brown performers to serve as leads in tentpole franchise films, making Mackie’s ascension to de facto Avengers leader meaningful for the actor and audiences. “It poses questions. Now you have white kids who will look up to a Black Captain America,” Mackie told me via Zoom. “I have four little Black boys, and now they’re also going to have a conversation with their white, Asian, and Latino friends. That’s what is most important. When you take the [familiar] and spin it on its head, what do those conversations look like?” Diverging from the familiar is Marvel’s current M.O. Its first two MCU TV spin-offs use their serialized format to expand the notion of superhero content while referencing a plethora of old media. If WandaVision was the studio’s madcap overview of television tropes, Falcon honors the tenets of summer blockbusters. In between its societal critiques, the show nods to the genre standards of the late ’80s and early ’90s. There are shades of Tom Clancy–style espionage thrillers each time Sam and Bucky Barnes chase superpowered terrorist group the Flag Smashers across international borders. Likewise, the banter-filled scenes that highlight their mismatched partnership nod to buddy-cop action flicks like Lethal Weapon and 48 Hrs. In the comedy variant of that subgenre, the one-liners are as frequent as the explosions, and every altercation serves as code for bro-y codependency. In its lighter moments, Falcon and the Winter Soldier veers in that direction with zingers and meme-able visual non sequiturs. Programming that balances multiple genres and moods is the selling point of prestige TV, but it demands performers who can walk a tightrope. A Juilliard alum who cut his teeth in New York’s theater scene, Mackie fits the bill. Still, putting on his winged Cap suit for the first time was an emotional experience. “I called my sister and talked to her for a while about it,” he says. “There were so many things I wanted in my career growing up as a young actor. I didn’t go to Hollywood and say, ‘Make me a star.’ I didn’t do some of these other things to get recognition; I worked for 21 years to get to where I am. [So] to have that moment of realizing that all of your hard work has paid off, it’s very humbling.” Comics have a long history of social commentary—X-Men’s allusions to the HIV crisis, Black Panther’s debut at the height of the civil rights movement—and Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s exploration of America’s history of white supremacy continues that tradition. Race informs every arc, whether it’s referenced via the indignity of Wilson getting pulled over by police for walking while Black, or through the struggles of Isaiah Bradley, a World War II–era super-soldier whose story directly parallels that of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the U.S. government’s history of experimenting on Black bodies. Connecting to the news cycle within the fantasy of a world rife with Norse gods and time travelers could have been problematic, but Mackie credits screenwriter Malcolm Spellman for the series’ nuanced handling of real-world issues. “I was blown away by it—Malcolm went in deep on these characters,” he says. “I don’t know if anybody else would have had the balls to do that. The fact that we have Isaiah Bradley in this series and [acknowledge] everything he meant not only to the history of America and the forming of Captain America is monumental. I don’t know if anyone but Malcolm would have had the balls to do that.” Bradley represents the abuses of the past, but it’s through Wilson that the complexities of being a Black man in 2021 are illustrated. Burdened with the understanding that his position as Captain America will be objectionable to those more comfortable with his blond, blue-eyed predecessor, the character debates becoming the symbolic representation of a nation where people of color remain targets. “The relationship between America and African American men is a very tumultuous, abusive relationship,” says Mackie. “It’s something that needs to be rectified and healed. So the idea of [Sam] being Captain America recognizes all of the hardships and things that Black men and women have gone through in this country. Still, it’s also about the future and what we can look forward to for our kids to experience in this country.” Father to four boys, Mackie has already gotten a taste of the youth reaction to his tenure as Cap. “My two littlest ones looked at the TV, they looked at me, and they looked at the TV, and they’re like, ‘Dad, that guy looks just like you,’” he says. “And then they went back to playing with their Legos.” Toddlers may not be impressed, but the internet has been buzzing, especially since the announcement Marvel is developing a fourth Captain America film with a script from Spellman. In keeping with the studio’s reputation for secrecy, Mackie only found out about the project after the fact. “It’s funny when I saw that news; I was like, ‘No one called me!’” With Sam’s trajectory a closely guarded secret, Mackie is eager to see where the character goes and what his message will be. “I think Sam Wilson is more so about unifying and equality,” says Mackie. “A Captain America for everyone instead of Captain America for a specific few.” BTS and BLACKPINK still rule the K-pop roost, but competition within South Korea’s pop industry is both gruelling and fierce, with a group debuting (seemingly) every other week. So, when ENHYPEN (part of the Hybe family, alongside BTS) made their much-awaited first comeback on April 26 via a live-streamed press conference with new single “Drunk-Dazed,” they rather aptly called the music landscape a “battlefield,” noting that between the latest groups (known as the K-pop’s fourth generation of idols) there is a war to be the hottest and the best. The fourth generation includes groups such as Stray Kids, ITZY, ATEEZ, and TXT, all of whom debuted after 2018 and have already achieved significant success across the globe. They’ve been joined by a slew of rookie idols looking to make their own mark on the world of music. Korea’s “idol” music, with its progressive-pop values, has long emphasized saturated colors, glitchy synths and tweaked-out vocals, lending a sense of euphoria to its millions of fans. StayC’s debut single, “So Bad,” arrived with a bubblegum-pink bang, its traditional fly-high pop chorus beefed up with club bass and twitchy flourishes that sound like the voice message button on South Korea’s messaging app KakaoTalk being repeatedly and impatiently pressed. They were an instant hit, and their EP, Staydom, made them the rookie girl group with the highest first-week sales of 2020 to 2021. When you’ve got Black Eyed Pilseung (South Korea’s celebrated songwriting/production duo) as your CEO and producer, prepare to expect the unexpected. A much-debated topic over the past few years has been idol “noise music.” Loosely categorized by fans as disjointed K-pop, it contains ultra-heavy electronic beats (often influenced by rave culture) and mechanical sounds, for example, Red Velvet’s “Zimzalabim” (2019). P1Harmony’s second single, “Scared,” sits in the middle of this divisive genre, but it’s where you really sense their bigger potential. Alongside the clanging metallic hook, they deliver a rallying call for self-belief to outsiders. Their latest EP, Disharmony: Break Out, is wall-to-wall social observations, and a must-listen for those who like their K-pop loud, high-energy and defiant. Aespa are SM Entertainment’s first new girl group since 2014, and excitement reached fever pitch for their debut single, “Black Mamba” (2020), whose simple “Aya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya” hook embedded into the brain with frightening ease. Their visual concept is rooted in digital art, AI and virtual reality: Aespa contains four human members and four virtual ones. How the two sets of girls interact with each other, and potentially their fans, was demonstrated through a short video called “My, Karina,” but with only two tracks thus far released, we’re yet to see SM’s tentpole ideas (and Aespa’s storyline) in action. “Black Mamba” has racked up a staggering 141 million views in just five months, however, so there’s clearly no shortage of fans waiting for that moment. how I-Land, a joint venture between K-pop giants Big Hit (now Hybe) and CJ E&M, ENHYPEN amassed a huge fanbase before their debut EP, Border: Day One, had even dropped in November 2020. Their producer, Wonderkid (a.k.a. Kim Tae Yun), has delivered psychedelia and tinges of rock to their 2021 EP, Border: Carnival (which has notched up a staggering 400,000 pre-orders), putting down the bedrock to enhance ENHYPEN’s biggest strength: their stage performances. New single “Drunk-Dazed,” with its complex, demanding choreography, is well worth watching again and again and again. Two warm-up singles—the unapologetically ballsy rock of 2020’s My Heart Skip A Beat and R&B-pop of “Can We Talk Again” (2021)—showed off the group’s range, while single “Ponzona” (2021) added yet another dimension to Purple Kiss. The track fused K-pop’s stalwart ‘girl crush’ concept with lashings of Billie Eilish and the darker, edgier feel of fellow K-Pop group (G)I-DLE. No matter what you call this process—a jumble, a fusion, a melting pot—K-pop’s ability to create a coherent, engaging tapestry of sights and sounds from a dozen pop-culture references never fails to astound. Though one can never predict K-pop’s breakout acts from smaller agencies, by matching this alchemy to a group such as Purple Kiss whose presence can be felt even through a laptop screen, you may well be looking at the next big thing. It takes a strong will to resist Weeekly’s 2020 debut, “Tag Me (@Me),” with its brat-pop cuteness, which, like all good K-pop, marries a dozen styles including a wistful bridge and hyperactive outro. One of the industry’s advantages is that everyone is catered for, from gothic to candy-colored, hip-hop to balladry, serious to sentimental, and Weeekly—who nabbed the New Artist of the Year award at South Korea’s Melon Music Awards 2020—have released three EPs (2020’s We Can and We Are, and 2021’s We Play) that sparkle with some truly wholesome fare, particularly on B-sides “Top Secret,” “Butterfly” and “Lucky.” If your taste leans towards fizzy escapism, allow Weeekly to whisk you away. After years of bouncing from group to group, Cho Seung-youn found firm footing on his own as WOODZ, releasing 2020’s earworm “Love Me Harder.” His debut EP, Equal (2020), was a heady spin through perhaps too many styles and sounds, but on the second EP, 2020’s Woops!, he struck a groove with warm, acoustic-led pop-rock. His latest single, “Feels Like” (2021), is, arguably, his best. Breathy and seductive with treacly guitar riffs, this is WOODZ creatively pushing himself to the point where he sounds like no one else in K-pop’s current climate, and that alone demands attention. Princess Charlotte is growing up right before our very eyes.On May 2, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s second child turns six years old. To mark the occasion, the family shared a new portrait of the young royal at their country home of Anmer Hall in Norfolk, England. In it, a charming Charlotte beams at the camera, her blondish-brown hair framing her face. She wears a blue floral print dress adorned with red buttons and trim.Kate Middleton took the official photo of her one-and-only daughter, just as she did with her youngest son, Prince Louis, who turned three on April 23. The photograph is just the latest glimpse the public has gotten of the little princess. Recently, she also appeared in a video celebrating her parents’ April 29 wedding anniversary. The footage showed Charlotte, as well as her brothers George and Louis, running around on the beach, playing on a see-saw in their backyard, and toasting marshmallows. The princess is seen happily smiling throughout. Usually, this official portrait of Princess Charlotte would be tweeted or posted on similar channels—however, this weekend, the family is boycotting social media in support of English football players of color who have been subject to racial abuse. What are the best travel mugs and reusable coffee cups? Ask a Vogue editor, and their excitement for their favorite vessel might rival that of the latest great fashion collection. If one of your 2021 goals is to live more sustainably, buying a reusable coffee cup, tumbler, or travel mug is a simple way to bake the virtue into your everyday life. Many of us are guilty of grabbing a latte and, after an hour or two, quickly discarding that paper or plastic cup into the trash. In 2018, Reuters reported that 64 percent of Americans are drinking more coffee daily (the highest level since 2012). But there’s no need to actually give up your daily coffee, just bring a cup that will help reduce the amount of single-use plastic disposed each day, but can also be chic, too. As Emily Farra, Vogue’s Senior Fashion News Writer notes, she gets more compliments on her ceramic W&P travel mug than anything in her closet. Below, 18 Vogue editors spill about their favorite reusable coffee cups and best travel mug selects.Two things I love about Hay’s Sowden cup: 1. the good design (contrasting colors! sleek lines!) and 2. its ability to keep your coffee cold, or hot, for twelve hours. Considering I still drink ice coffee in the depths of New York winter, I likely won’t ever need the latter temperature meticulously maintained! But it’s still nice to have options. A friend introduced me to this reusable coffee cup a few years ago. I like it so much that I’ve now gifted one to every member of my family. It has all the environmental benefits of a reusable cup with the insulating qualities of a Yeti so my coffee stays warm. The resealable lid and handle make it really easy for a multi-tasker like me to cart it all around without spilling everywhere. I drink a lot—actually, way too much—coffee and I hate lugging a giant thermos around with me all day. When I found this collapsible coffee mug, it was bliss. It folds down to fit in my small purse, so once I’m done chugging a cold brew I can pack it up and not think about it … until my next cup. Sorry, cappuccino lovers, I cannot stand the taste of coffee—like not at all. Instead, tea is my morning drink of choice. I feel really fancy when I’m sipping it from my favorite Tea Forte cup. It has a lid that allows me to take it with me when I’m on the go, and the pretty flower print makes me feel like an extra on Bridgerton. Over the years, I’ve really come to love sipping a great cup of tea or warm water with lemon throughout the day but hate lugging around a bulky tumbler! The Moonstone tumbler has been a minimalist’s dream with a sleek design that never fails to keep my beverage of choice warm. It’s the perfect no fuss, no gimmick product. Just great insulating technology! I love my Kinto travel mug for hot and cold coffee alike. The clever double lid not only prevents awkward (or dangerous!) spillage, but also keeps ice cubes at bay.I love this Ember cup as I am a slow coffee drinker and it keeps my cup warm for hours. Perfect for lazy Sunday mornings at home! I’m obsessed with my Keep cup. It’s a great size and most like a traditional to-go cup for me. Plus, it’s super easy to clean which means I’m way more likely to keep using it!I think I get more compliments on my blush W&P travel mug than anything in my closet. Admittedly, it is really cute, but it’s also very petite! For days when I need more than 12 ounces of coffee (which are most days), I’m picking up their new, larger version in slate gray. These sleek ceramic coffee mugs come in three color ways: black, white, and mint (which is my personal favorite). Not only is it compact in size, but its double insulated walls help keep my hot coffee hot and ice coffee cold no matter what temperature it is outside. Even better—its bamboo cap is leak-proof so I can drop it in my bag without worrying about a spill. I’m not a huge coffee drinker but I do love my tea! This reusable mug from Miir is my go-to whenever I am on the run and need to take my drink on the go. I also love the sleek and modern design of the mug! This speckly thermos looks like something a loving 1950s housewife would have filled with coffee and left waiting on the counter for her husband’s morning commute. I’m no housewife, but it does pair well with my midcentury vintage wardrobe! For someone like me whose coffee order is good ol’ drip and a bit of half & half, (which might just make me the only non-non-dairy coffee order in New York) there’s something about drinking it out of a ceramic imitation of the classic bodega paper cup. Perfect for sipping joe or some tea daily at my desk or right at home—sans paper and plastic. I use my Joco Cup faithfully every day. The annoyance of washing it every morning is offset by the righteous virtue I feel as I wait in line to pay among all the single-use plastic holdouts. I used to be a diehard disposable cup user because I’m probably lazy and myopic when it comes to recycling, etc. But I have to say, I love this coffee cup that I keep at my desk and get my morning coffee in. I haven’t used a disposable cup since I bought it. I like this little blush cup from W&P—it is not too large, so you can avoid over-caffeinating!As any true born-and-raised Minnesotan would, I have a strong affinity for all things Scandinavian. So naturally these hand-painted Dansk coffee cups, designed by legendary Danish ceramicist Niels Refsgaard, are the perfect vessel for my afternoon caffeine boost. I love that they are microwave and dishwasher safe without compromising their old-world stoneware charm. This soccer mom—tennis mom, actually—was yearning for a spot of tea while watching matches, so the hubsters lent me his Zojirushi thermos/mug. It’s sleek. It has a lock function. It keeps things super hot, or super cold. I was sold. I wished for one for Christmas and Santa came through with a gift that keeps on giving. Now I don’t leave the house without it. As we approach the summer of 2021, with countless cinemas across the world still shuttered and the future uncertain, Netflix—exceeding all expectations—continues to roll out hit after hit. Up next? A psychological chiller featuring Amy Adams and Julianne Moore, a miniseries chronicling the life of a fashion icon, and the return of two binge-worthy shows that proved to be essential quarantine viewing the first time around. These are the five releases to add to your watch list now. A distressed Amy Adams plays an agoraphobic child psychologist who watches her neighbors through the windows of her New York brownstone in Joe Wright’s twisty horror movie based on the novel by A.J. Finn. She makes a new friend (Julianne Moore) but then witnesses her being attacked, after which her cloistered existence unravels entirely. The supporting cast is stellar (Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie, Brian Tyree Henry, and Jennifer Jason Leigh) and the powerful sense of claustrophobia undeniably timely. Directed by Daniel Minahan and executive produced by Ryan Murphy, this glittering five-part drama casts Ewan McGregor as the titular designer who changed the face of American fashion. As we track his stratospheric rise and eventual downfall as a result of addiction and ill-advised business decisions, expect flamboyant 1970s costumes, wild nights at Studio 54, and an introduction to his circle, which included actor Liza Minnelli and jewelry designer Elsa Peretti. What happens when a group of mercenaries is hired to retrieve $200 million from a Las Vegas casino during a zombie outbreak? Prepare to find out in Zack Snyder’s delightfully bombastic action epic, which centers on Dave Bautista as a war hero who assembles an eclectic crew (Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Tig Notaro, and Matthias Schweighöfer). It has all the ingredients of a summer blockbuster: shoot-outs, spectacular set pieces, and laughs, not to mention a zombie tiger. As charming as it was quietly revolutionary, the first season of Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s high school comedy about Indian American teenager Devi won hearts the world over. Now its magnetic lead, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, is back for the second installment with a slew of new additions, from Megan Suri as a fellow student to Common as a potential love interest for Devi’s mother (Poorna Jagannathan). If you’re still reeling from the cliff-hanger ending of the first part of George Kay’s ingenious thriller, take solace in the fact that the second half is on its way. It’ll follow the charismatic Omar Sy in the role of Assane, a thief hell-bent on avenging his father’s death whose son (Etan Simon) has just been abducted by his enemies. There are sure to be more shocking revelations, tense standoffs, elaborate disguises, and the same sleight of hand that made the earliest episodes so irresistible. For the summer, I would like nothing more than a glitzy, can’t-miss-it chain belt. After watching a lot of Jennifer Lopez recently, specifically her 2001 music video “Love Don’t Cost a Thing,” my love for the piece has been reignited. In the noughties scene, Lopez drips in gold jewelry, including a fat chain necklace with a large horn pendant, a gilded link number clanging on her wrist, a fistful of Midas-touched rings, and her signature fist-size hoops. She says to a supposed lover who has gifted her a gold bangle in lieu of showing up in person, “The last thing I need is another bracelet.” As Lopez lingers on the word “bracelet”, the camera pans to a Michael Kors-era Celine chain belt. The gleaming piece isn’t threaded through the belt loops of her skin-tight jeans but rather, it lazily hangs off of Lopez’s hips. As she walks down an empty road and sheds the rest of her jewelry while singing “think I’m gonna spend your cash/I don’t”, the chain belt’s double-C charm clangs from side to side, bouncing off her upper thigh. The whole moment is, well, rich. This yesteryear Celine belt serves no purpose other than to be seen. It’s not actually securing her pants from falling down, which is what belts do. It’s just there, an excessive garnish for Lopez’s otherwise plain look. My own imagined outfits for reemergence hinge on that very chain belt. That sort of gaudy-chic aesthetic feels apropos for the world coming out of hibernation. In the early aughts, It girls and pop stars loved chain belts. Aaliyah opted for a thin gold incarnation strung over a simple pair of white pants at a film premiere in 2001, while Christina Aguilera always went the brash route with multiple chains in multiple sizes. On the runway, the chain belt has been a Chanel signature time and time again. A moment from the Spring 1995 show is burned in my brain, with Brandi Quinones trotting down the catwalk in an itty-bitty baby pink button-up polo and a mini skirt with a slit. A chain belt hangs off the skirt, once again, it’s just there. Speaking of the runway, the piece made a comeback at Chanel’s spring 2021 show, strung across a bodysuit or a pair of trousers. Y2K-minded Blumarine’s fall 2021 show featured so many chains on one look, it resembled a flashy octopus. The trend continued at Marine Serre, where a stone bauble hung from a chain.Think of a chain belt as jewelry but for your waist. It’s made to draw attention and be pretty, and not do anything other than that—the cherry on the top of a sartorial sundae. In other words, it’s worth linking up with a chain belt this summer. We’ve all chuckled when someone cracks a joke about changing from our daytime pajamas into our nighttime pajamas. It’s funny because it’s true, and all too familiar. Pajamas are becoming far more than just a creature comfort to enjoy when crawling under the covers; they are a way of life. But what to do when temperatures rise and the cozy set that got you through hibernation season now sends you tossing and turning by night and hot-flashing by day? Flannel will not do for May, and with summer creeping up on us, visions of airy linen sets and billowy poplin nightgowns now dance in our heads. From starchy oversized nightshirts to slinky silk negligees, the perfect summer-weight sleepwear is out there waiting for you, begging to be worn 24 hours a day. So next time you’re lying awake, sweating in your winter sleepwear at 2 a.m., take a look at our favorite lightweight options and the best summer pajamas for women, below. (The sheep you’re counting won’t mind, we promise.) Silk camis, short sleep shorts, and sweet bloomers will have you feeling like you’re wearing nothing at all.Swap your long-sleeve shirt and pajama pant sets for something shorter. These coordinated cotton and linen pajama sets are summer’s version of the classic sleep set, or in this case, the best summer pajamas for women. From counting sheep to pouring coffee, these oxford and T-shirt gowns will take you from sweet dreams to Sunday mornings.The perfect women’s boxer short does exist. So long to borrowing (stealing) from the boys. Just throw on your favorite T-shirt and snooze.What better season to sashay around the house wearing vintage-inspired sleepwear than summer?Your bedtime routine just got sweeter thanks to these luxe, wind-down robes, from a crisp seersucker and lightweight linens. At last, our dreams of safely attending soirées could soon become a reality, which is why thoughts of picking the best party dresses to wear to future gatherings are slowly infiltrating our minds. Likewise, designers are also planning for the return of going out ensembles. Did you see Saint Laurent’s latest collection? Come fall, Anthony Vaccarello’s jubilant micro-mini skirts, metallic bodysuits, and sequin jackets could be spotted at a gala or—dare I say it—an in-person, red-carpet event. Yes, we miss those, too. Brands like Michael Kors, Caroline Hu, and Ashish are also keeping our “dressed to the nines” dreams alive with festive looks fit for a reemergence celebration. In the same vein, we’ve gathered some of the best party dresses around. If the invites to graduation parties, weddings, or cocktail events are starting to pour in, you’ll find something below for every type of invite. Whether you require a little black dress or a long-sleeve mini, It doesn’t hurt to start looking and planning early. There are times when being a member of the LGBTQ+ community—and a lesbian in particular—feels like an Easter-egg hunt for representation. Queer women are used to mining everything from a cryptic celebrity Instagram to the discography of Taylor Swift for clues that someone in the public eye might be one of us, and to be honest, the constant hustle to be seen—especially for lesbians who don’t fit the skinny, white, femme, upper-middle-class, L Word mold—can be exhausting. All that might explain why the work of an artist and writer like Alison Bechdel feels so pivotal. Bechdel has been woven into the fabric of lesbian cultural identity ever since she started publishing the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983, and at no point in her decades-long career has she ever compromised on directly addressing her sexuality. To understand Bechdel as a chronicler of lesbian issues only, though, is to sell her short; the exploration of queer identity makes up just one part of her broad oeuvre, along with the family trauma she examined in the 2006 graphic memoir (and later Broadway musical) Fun Home, the psychoanalysis she delved into in 2012’s companion piece Are You My Mother?, and—most recently—the lifelong obsession with exercise that she crystallizes in next month’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Outside of the niche queer-graphic-novel world, Bechdel is perhaps best known for the Bechdel Test, a measure of the representation of women onscreen and in print. (For a work to pass the test, two female characters must talk to each other about something other than a man.) When, on a recent call, I ask Bechdel what it’s like to be forever enshrined in feminist history thanks to her eponymous test, she laughs and responds, “I feel very pleased by it, but for a while I felt a bit befuddled. I never sat down and said, ‘This is going to be a thing,’ but I’ve come to accept it and even feel proud of it.” Bechdel isn’t the type of artist to believe her own hype, even when said hype is well warranted. When I ask how it feels to have created work that so many queer people identify with, she’s hesitant: “I went through a period of feeling very anxious about that, because many young people would tell me that my comic-strip characters were the first lesbians they’d met. I was like, Oh, my God, what am I telling these people? I should be more careful. I don’t feel that concern as much anymore, partly because there are hundreds and thousands of people writing about queer stuff. It’s just a much wider field these days.” Perhaps it’s the widening of that field that freed Bechdel up to write The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Some might read the memoir’s description and expect an account from a woman beholden to Pilates or Flywheel or any other trendy boutique fitness class where an hour in a sweaty room costs roughly the same as a nice meal out. But for Bechdel, exercise isn’t really about aesthetics; it’s about strength, a virtue she’s been in thrall to ever since she first saw bodybuilder Charles Atlas on TV as a child. At 60, Bechdel appears wholly uninterested in perpetuating the workout-as-self-care trope; she makes it clear that her relationship with exercise is something much deeper and more fraught. “I made a decision not to discuss body image in the book because I think it’s unusual for women not to talk about it.”“I love to see people exercise just because they want to. I don’t think it should be connected to anything else, or it will just become miserable,” says Bechdel. She admits, though, that it’s hard to center a whole book around exercise without occasionally falling into the trap of presenting it as a moral imperative. “I do feel a little sheepish about being so pro-exercise without having a thorough critique of sizeism, but I made a decision not to discuss body image in the book because I think it’s unusual for women not to talk about it.” Bechdel’s complex, often painful life story is a matter of public record—in Fun Home, she wrote about losing her long-closeted father to suicide shortly after coming out as a lesbian, and in Are You My Mother?, she chronicled her thorny relationship with her often-distant mother. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, though, exercise is presented as a possible corrective to all that pain, a lifelong pursuit of self-improvement and internal balance that helped Bechdel through some of her toughest years. “Exercise is the one part of my life that isn’t riddled with conflict,” she says, adding, “I don’t want to come off as an exercise evangelist because I think that can be off-putting, but I like to think of it as a bit of relief from my cerebral life.” Bechdel’s graphic novels are often placed into contextual conversation with the work of other writers, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength is no exception. She ping-pongs between her own ideas and those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jack Kerouac, and Adrienne Rich, creating a canon around the art of moving one’s body that joyfully complicates the notion of exercise as an anti-cerebral activity (even if that is partly why Bechdel is drawn to it). Bechdel and her partner—the artist Holly Rae Taylor, who colored the book’s images—live in Vermont, where they favor long hikes and bike rides. Like many others, however, Bechdel had trouble adjusting her exercise routine to fit the confines of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying, “I was very sad to fall off the weight-lifting wagon when the gyms closed.” When I ask Bechdel what she hopes people take away from the book, I expect her to say more about the discipline that exercise has brought to her life. Instead, she’s almost philosophical in response: “I hope people take away a belief that it’s possible to really change. That’s a question I’ve often had for myself—like, Am I really making any kind of psychic or spiritual progress in my life? But I really do think that if we apply ourselves, we can change. The only thing is that it takes so much longer than anyone ever suspects! If we really knew how long it took to make real change happen in ourselves, we would quit immediately.” The concept of exercise bringing about change is one that’s all too familiar, given the rise of wellness influencers peddling at-home fitness routines and the ever-present onslaught of Noom and Weight Watchers ads that encourage prospective dieters to trade physical movement for extra food. It can be incredibly freeing, though, to begin to view exercise as Bechdel does, as a kind of ongoing commitment to oneself, rather than a snake-oil cure for the so-called problem of existing in a corporeal form. It feels overly simplistic to say that Bechdel is queering the act of exercising, but there’s a distinctly antiestablishment flavor to her desire to get stronger in a world that commands women to shrink down and cower before the male gaze. Bechdel says she’s heartened by the strides that the LGBTQ+ community has made since she first started writing and drawing, but she’s also aware that gains can always be lost and that progress only goes so far. (She singles out the recent legislative attacks on the trans community as “particularly troubling.”) With The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Bechdel has—intentionally or not—provided a kind of handbook for a community whose right to bodily autonomy and self-governance is still frequently called into question. And really, what could be more subtly revolutionary than that? This past Friday, Symone, aka The Ebony Enchantress, was named the winner of the 13th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and the experience has helped her take her beauty game to a whole new level—and pace. “When I first started doing drag, it would take me about four hours just to do the makeup part,” she says. “The Race—it is truly a race. It’s in the name, it’s not a joke, we ain’t playing around here, okay? So I can do my makeup now in about an hour, hour and a half. They don’t call it the Olympics of drag for nothing.” Symone notes that the expedited process has helped hone her muscle memory and perfect her application. “Once you have it you got it, and baby there’s no mistaking, I got it.” The crowned queen likes her skin care routine well-honed—“I keep it real simple, real clean, real cute, and effective”—relying on Sunday Riley products, her mainstay being the brand’s Good Genes All-in-One Lactic Acid Treatment, followed by a touch of moisturizer from Tata Harper. “Being a full-time queen, you have to take care of your skin,” she explains. “It’s the base of everything, and you’re putting makeup on it everyday for hours on end. So I make sure she is stunning.” Eyeshadow primer offers a buildable base for a series of shimmers layered in pinks and purples (“the color of royalty, if you did not know”), the colorful look as playful as it is powerful. A coupling of kohl and liquid liner team for a geometric cat-eye, with a sky-reaching, feathery lash furthering the drama. More blending and a fluffy brush to end the baking round out the technicalities, and Symone finishes the look with highlight and a lined, glossed lip. I’m moving into a new apartment this week and am basically starting from scratch with home decor. Dusen and Dusen’s striped towels have been on my wishlist for a while now—and on everyone else’s it seems too, since they seem to be sold out almost everywhere on the internet! Thankfully I was able to snag one of the bath towels as I patiently wait for the restock of their fun sets. They’re just the kind of summery pop of color I’m looking for to brighten up my bathroom. “Never hang stretchable fabrics such as knits, bias cut, and heavily-embellished, heavy garments because they could get distorted. Store these items flat in a breathable garment box or folded with acid-free tissue to avoid creasing. You cannot use the same hanger type for every article of clothing in your closet even though that may be aesthetically pleasing.  There are specific hangers that are best for certain types of clothing, so be sure to always choose the appropriate hanger. For example, broad-shoulder hangers for heavier coats, pant-suit hangers with clips for slacks, and padded hangers that provide cushion for delicate items. When in doubt, store the item flat instead of on a hanger. No wire hangers, EVER!” Bechdel’s complex, often painful life story is a matter of public record—in Fun Home, she wrote about losing her long-closeted father to suicide shortly after coming out as a lesbian, and in Are You My Mother?, she chronicled her thorny relationship with her often-distant mother. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, though, exercise is presented as a possible corrective to all that pain, a lifelong pursuit of self-improvement and internal balance that helped Bechdel through some of her toughest years. “Exercise is the one part of my life that isn’t riddled with conflict,” she says, adding, “I don’t want to come off as an exercise evangelist because I think that can be off-putting, but I like to think of it as a bit of relief from my cerebral life.” Lastly, don’t overthink it. Just embrace the joy it can yield. “With mask-wearing being the norm, the eyes are the only part you get to see, so keep some bright shades in your bag or car and change it up in a pinch,” says Cheng. “As you update and change your wardrobe, I think it’s just as much fun to do so with your makeup routine.”

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