There’s absolutely no wardrobe essential that has been more disrespected or overlooked than socks. Sure, they’re not always the center of attention in an outfit, like your favorite high-waisted jeans or your go-to coat. We stuff them into our thigh-high boots, or maybe allow them to peek through when we wear them with our loafers. And they’ve become somewhat of a joke around holiday season. (Really? You got your family socks, again?) But truly, they deserve better. And the fashion crowd has come around to this idea that ankle socks can be a pretty exciting staple—not just an afterthought.
Wearing ankle socks with your sandals were an infamous fashion “don’t.” But when legitimately-cool designers like Collina Strada and Dries van Noten started sending their models down their runways with the look, people took notice. It didn’t take long to spot stylish Instagrammers pairing their Tevas with tie-dye socks in the summer, their pointed-toe heels with sheer socks in the fall. And since then, statement ankle socks have risen up there with it-bags and celebrity-approved jewelry as must-have accessories for any given season. It helps that it’s a wardrobe essential you can get for $15 or less, whether you style them with your summer shoes or with your favorite chunky sneakers.
Ahead, we round up some of our favorite eye-grabbing ankle socks for under $15.
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In fashion, when we talk about hype, it usually has to do with a sneaker drop, anything Rihanna touches, a highly anticipated designer collab—rarely does a relatively plain, season-less item of clothing get that type of attention. But one wardrobe essential recently defied the odds, gaining a devoted fan base (and 1,500 four- and five-star reviews).
The British brand Heist is best known for making Meghan Markle’s (alleged) favorite stockings. But outside of tights, it also sells socks, shapewear, and one very well-received bodysuit. Called The Outer Body the super-simple design comes in six different colors, and is available in sizes XS through XL (roughly from a 2 to a 20). Given the fanfare it was receiving online, four Glamour editors decided to put the $138 bodysuit to the test and ask: Is it really as good as everyone says it is?
Read on for our reviews—and to see how you can style the bodysuit four different ways for fall.
It’s not quite a cause for celebration, but August 21 is Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, which marks the point in 2019 at which the average black woman’s wages at last catch up to what a white man earned in 2018.
For women overall, it takes about 16 months to make what a white man makes in 12. But for black women, that number is higher. It takes 20 months to even out. Native American women won’t meet the benchmark until late September. Latinas will hit it in November. But to mark this, uh, inauspicious occasion, we invited Meena Harris, founder of the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, to interview Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza. Harris, who also serves as commissioner on the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women and holds a leadership position at Uber, established the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign to raise awareness about social causes in partnership with non-profit organizations that support women’s rights on the ground. Here, she and Garza chat about the gender wage gap, the economic importance and potential of black women, and what it means to be an activist.
Meena Harris: Today is Black Women’s Equal Pay Day (BWEPD) which, as you know, signifies the approximate day a black woman has to work into the new year to make what a white man made at the end of the previous year. Based on census data from 2019, black women are only paid 61 cents to every dollar that a white man makes. Can you talk about the significance of this as an economic issue?
Alicia Garza: When you hear statistics about the gender wage gap in America, we often hear that women make 78 cents on the dollar that white men make. Actually, those are statistics looking specifically at white women. What it points to is that the economy is organized by race and by gender all at the same time. There are communities who sit at the intersection, and one of those communities is black women. So, If we’re not looking at how the economy is organized by race and gender and the communities that sit at those intersections, when we try to develop policies or solutions to a pervasive problem, we will leave communities behind and black women are very susceptible to that.
We see this happen all the time with issues when they’re not viewed from an intersectional perspective. For Black Futures Lab’s 2019 Black Census Project, you looked at priority issues and concerns for black people across the country and found that the issue of low wages not being enough to support a family was the number one concern of black respondents. How does this map onto the wage gap for black women?
AG: First and foremost, what’s important to know is that black communities are rarely asked how and what we experience in the economy, democracy, and in our society. That’s why we set out on this project particularly in leading up to a major presidential election. Every time we see a presidential candidate come up on the stage, they’re talking about how they’re going to improve the economy. The reality is that not everyone is experiencing the economy in the same way.
Any policy or proposal that wants to tackle this issue has to look at how the economy is organized by race and by gender. We find when you start with the people who are experiencing the problem the worst and most frequently, it actually creates the most possibilities for everyone to rise.
So, we know that, when we do right by black women—particularly those who are primary breadwinners, particularly those who are also dealing with other economic issues like mass incarceration or inadequate schools for their children—and when we raise their wages, the entire country benefits. It’s not just about numbers. It’s about families and what’s keeping us up at night, and the solutions we know can help to change the lives of everyone in America.
“As a black woman who’s worn my hair natural since 1995, I’ve understood how important hair and hair texture is for women, especially the issues we’ve had surrounding our hair,” says Eggleston Bracey. That’s also why she felt a corporate responsibility to expand on [Unilever brand] Dove’s commitment to real beauty and diversity. “I was looking out around the room, and I was looking at how diverse the legislative officials were; how many of our black legislative officials had textured hair. And it occurred to me, ‘Wow, with this critical mass, we can change this.'” Her plea to those legislators? Find a resolution to hair discrimination.
Eggleston Bracey’s speech cut right to Mitchell’s core. “It’s personal for me from many perspectives,” the senator tells Glamour. Growing up, she wore braids with decorative beads through high school—a style that helped solidify her sense of self. She now wears locs. “Fast forward several years, to having my son in high school. He wore twists to school on the first day of his junior year, then came home that evening and made the decision to take them out, because he wasn’t comfortable with bullies,” she says, adding, “I graduated from high school in 1982 in Riverside [California], which wasn’t a bastion of progressive politics. At no point was my wearing braids to school every day an issue. I thought, How did we go backward?”
Mitchell flagged down Eggleston Bracey as soon as she got off the podium.
“I followed her out of the breakfast, grabbed her staff member, gave them my card, and said, ‘Here I am, a state senator in California, the fifth-largest economy in the world. A progressive, important state legislature, and I’m loc’d. I think it would make sense that I carry the bill,'” Mitchell recalls. It’s a crucial example of just how vital representation in our boardrooms and our legislation truly is—in few other scenarios could two people with the power to make change not only empathize but honestly understand why the need for protection against hair discrimination is so imperative.
From there, the two went to work, recruiting the help of a handful of activist organizations to co-found the CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Coalition. While Mitchell began drafting language for the bill, Eggleston Bracey led Dove’s CROWN Research Study, in which the brand surveyed 2,000 women ages 25 to 64 who worked in office settings to uncover just how societal norms and corporate grooming policies unfairly impact Black women in the workplace. The results, depending on your own awareness, were either shocking…or not.
“What the study showed is how pronounced and prevalent the issue around hair is,” says Eggleston Bracey. “Eighty percent of women reported that they’ve changed their hair from its natural stage to fit in a corporate environment. That’s four out of five black women in the study. I knew it would be an issue, but to see how broad-scale and pervasive it was [was surprising].” Another stat that was widely reported from the survey? Black women were 50 percent more likely to have reported having been sent home or know of a black woman sent home from the workplace because of her hair.
The stats and Mitchell’s powerful introduction of the bill spoke for themselves. In July, the California state assembly unanimously passed The CROWN Act. Five days later, the governor signed it into law, making California the first state to legally enforce that locs, twists, and braids are just as school- or business-appropriate as any other hairstyle. New York state followed 12 days later with its own anti-discrimination bill.
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Some have made the argument that there are more pressing issues to set legislation around than hair, a complaint both Malalis and Mitchell have heard repeatedly. “When we first came out with our guidance, there were some folks who said, ‘Hair? Who is going to care about hair?'” says Malalis. “But there were other folks who said, ‘I cannot believe you actually have to say this. I can’t believe people don’t know this is racist.’ The reality is that so many people have been experiencing this because schools and employers have never really cross-examined their own policies or what’s behind them. Is this really about health and safety? No, it’s not. Because even the U.S. Army who exacts the highest degrees of health and safety amongst its ranks has also said this is not okay. So if it’s not about health and safety, what [are these rules] really based on?”
This article contains spoilers about the seventh—and final—season of Orange Is the New Black, now streaming on Netflix.
Adrienne C. Moore (Cindy Hayes, the inmate who converts to Judaism in season three) is in Atlanta for her 20-year high school reunion when she calls. “I’ve been to past reunions since the advent of Orange Is the New Black, and one thing I love about my friends is they know Adrienne,” she tells Glamour. They may occasionally blurt out that she’s on a show, she concedes, but “they’re Atlanta folks, and Atlanta folks are very down-to-earth kind of people.”
Like so many members of the sprawling Orange ensemble, Moore was a relative unknown when she was cast on the series. She was booking theater roles, commercials, and guest spots in New York, sure, but breakout opportunities for women, let alone women of color, were rare. Nobody knew who she was.
Adrienne C. Moore as Cindy Hayes
Netflix
“This industry is hard,” says Laura Gómez (Blanca Flores, who thought she was being released from Litchfield only to be sent to an immigration facility). “You’re put in a box.” She auditioned for Orange while she was writing and directing a short film at New York University; by that point, she remembers, “I was considering maybe going to Spain to turn things around. I don’t know that I was about to quit acting, but I was thinking of ways to quit the torture that I was experiencing here.”
Selenis Leyva (Gloria Mendoza, who at times was head cook and the leader of the prison’s Spanish Harlem) shares a similar story. “I started acting at the age of 18,” she says. “I did a lot of guest roles, theater—sometimes it was free and sometimes it was as if it was free. You name it.” She was two decades into her career and on the verge of dropping out when she was tapped to play Gloria. “Literally, I said, ‘I’m done with acting,’” she recalls. “And then Orange popped up.”
“What the show did for so many of us, if not all of us, was open or reopen big doors,” Gómez says. “It put us on the map.”
When Orange premiered in 2013, there was some skepticism about whether it would sugarcoat prison. After all, the series is based on a memoir by Piper Kerman—a white middle-class Smith graduate—and stars Taylor Schilling as the fish-out-of-water inmate. But as creator Jenji Kohan explained from the outset, Piper was her “Trojan horse”: a stock blond that gave entrée into a more expansive world, one where women of all colors, shapes, sexual orientations, and ages coexisted. Orange wasn’t a Pollyanna prison story, and Kohan wasn’t making TV as usual.
It’s been a few days since I first watched Miley Cyrus‘ episode of Black Mirror, but my mind is still spinning. The story is simultaneously fresh and familiar: We’re introduced to a pop star named Ashley O. (Cyrus), whose songs are as bright and whimsical as her neon-purple wig. But underneath the smiley press appearances and sleek bops is a young woman deeply unsatisfied with her life. She desperately wants to shake up her image and sound but feels pressure from her manager-slash-aunt, Catherine, to stay the same. So Ashley’s team gives her pills—illegal ones—to balance her mood and, essentially, control her. Eventually she realizes what they’re doing, but her efforts to break free end in horror.
I can’t say much else without revealing major spoilers. Watch it for yourself to see what I mean. And when you finish, I wonder if you’ll be thinking what I am right now: that Cyrus’ episode feels very similar to the #FreeBritney movement on social media.
For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, #FreeBritney started in April by fans who wanted to advocate for pop singer Britney Spears. At the time, they were widely speculating that Spears was being held without her permission in a mental institution after refusing to take medication requested by her father, Jamie, who’s also her conservator. Spears has since gone on the record denying the claims and telling fans “all is well.”
That may be, but it’s still hard not to think of #FreeBritney while watching Cyrus’ Black Mirror episode.
Getty Images
At the center of the #FreeBritney narrative—I’m calling it a narrative because nothing’s been verified—is a pop superstar very similar to Ashley O. We don’t know how Britney Spears feels about her music or image, but we do know from past interviews that she finds the parameters of her conservatorship constraining. “I don’t feel like [my life] is out of control. I feel like it’s too in control,” she said during her 2008 MTV documentary Britney: For the Record. “There’s no excitement. There’s no passion. It’s like Groundhog Day every day.” My mind immediately recalled this soundbite while watching Cyrus in Black Mirror, specifically when her character looks out the car window at a grungy dive bar she wants to perform in. Instead, she’s selling out stadiums.
Miley Cyrus as Ashley O. in Black Mirror.
Netflix
It’s the freedom of choice that Ashley O. misses—the ability to play where she wants, sing what she wants, and go where she wants. Spears has often expressed a similar yearning for autonomy; she allegedly isn’t even allowed to drive. (In For the Record, her “surprise” for a day is getting to drive her car on the freeway, and the rumored catalyst for #FreeBritney was the fact she was caught behind the wheel of a Mercedes.)
I’m hesitant to discuss the medication component of #FreeBritney because even though it’s believed by some that she takes some kind of mood-stabilizing medicine, it’s never been confirmed. In Black Mirror, though, we see Ashley’s Aunt Catherine use drugs as a vehicle to keep her niece on a straight, narrow, lucrative path. When Ashley expresses a desire to do anything outside her shimmery pop shell, her team doesn’t listen: They just up her dosage. Conspiracy theorists allege the same thing is going on with Spears, but, again, that’s highly speculative.
What does track is Spears feeling like the people around her don’t take her requests seriously. “When I tell them the way I feel, it’s like they hear me but they’re really not listening,” she also says in For the Record, likening her situation to prison. “Even when you go to jail, you know there’s the time when you’re gonna get out.” I have no doubt that Ashley O. has similar feelings in Black Mirror. Both she and Spears (according to the #FreeBritney movement, that is) are confined to the expectations the world has for women in pop: to be affable, beautiful, likable, calm, and, above all, malleable.
