The people have spoken, and they want Mike Johnson to be the next Bachelor. The fan favorite from Hannah Brown’s The Bachelorette season made viewers swoon with his big heart and even bigger smile.
He made his fellow castmates swoon, too—well, kinda. “I’m really hoping Mike’s the next Bachelor because I think he wears his heart on his sleeve,” says Dylan Barbour, who also appeared on Brown’s season and is slated to go on Bachelor in Paradise later this summer. “Based off the first impression, I was really intimidated by Mike. But after talking to him, he’s a great guy, he’s a real teddy bear, and he’s also strong at the same time. He’s intelligent and really in tune with himself, so I hope he’s able to have the opportunity to find love.”
Adds the infamously-named John Paul Jones, another contestant from this season: “I think it would be pretty cool to see Mike Johnson as the next Bachelor. I think he’s definitely a fan favorite, and there’s never been an African American Bachelor, so that would be interesting to watch.”
Jones is right: Johnson would be the first black Bachelor, but also the first veteran Bachelor. (He served in the Air Force.) ABC has the potential to make history by selecting Johnson—but how does he feel about the gig? We caught up with him during the taping of the Bachelorette “Men Tell All” episode, which aired tonight (July 22).
Read, below, to get his thoughts on that, plus why he “slid into Luke’s DMs.”
Glamour: A lot of the guys would like to see you as the next Bachelor.
Mike Johnson: It’s really cool the guys would like to see me as the next Bachelor. I know that Hannah said I was the leader in the house, which was not something I was trying to do. That was just me throughout. It’s awesome people feel that or say that, whether it’s Bachelor Nation or my castmates. I’m grateful they say that.
You would do it, wouldn’t you?
M.J.: I don’t know that, honestly. I don’t know that.
OK. Why the hesitation?
M.J.: The hesitation is because I don’t do it for…to be the first veteran Bachelor, I would do it because I feel the 30 potential suitors are there for the right reasons. I know that in Bachelor and Bachelorette, love can happen in this process. I just want to make sure the 30 suitors are there for the right reasons as well.
The final episode of Game of Thrones was controversial, but one plot line most people seemed to appreciate was (spoiler alert!) Sansa Stark—played by Sophie Turner—being crowned the Warden of the North. Because she’s one of the few characters whose story didn’t end in gut-wrenching tragedy, some have wondered if Sansa might make an appearance in one of the many spinoff shows GoT writer George RR Martin has said are in development. But that probably won’t happen. In a new interview with Sky News this week, Turner said she’s pretty much done with Sansa for now. As she put it, revisiting her character would “just be more trauma.”
“I think it’s time to say goodbye to Sansa,” Turner said, “I’m ready-ish to say goodbye to her, I think my watch has ended. I just think it’s been 10 years of my life and the best 10 years of my life by far, and I finished in a very happy place with Sansa and it’s time to let her go.”
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Sophie Turner started filming Game of Thrones when she was 14 years old, and the show has followed her into adulthood. She previously shared that the show caught her in a rough part of adolescence: She battled depression and frequently turned to her co-star and close friend, Maisie Williams, who played her sister Arya Stark. After the show ended, she took some time off to focus on her mental health.
HBO
“I actually am still on my break,” she said. “I took a break off of work to focus on my mental health because I thought it was important.”
Turner commemorated the end of the show with an epic tattoo that showed a direwolf and the text, “The pack survives.” It seemed like a very final gesture, but who knows how things will change as the spinoffs take shape. So far, we only know about a prequel in the works, and it takes place thousands of years before Game of Thrones—so we definitely shouldn’t plan on seeing Sansa.
A few months ago, several rumors hit the Internet alleging Meghan Markle‘s staff finds her “difficult” and demanding. Apparently, the Duchess of Sussex’s “up and at ‘em west coast energy”—which includes sending emails at 5 A.M.—has baffled employees on more than one occasion. Can you imagine your boss sending emails? The nerve! The horror! But for real: When did enthusiasm at work become a bad thing?
According to a new report from ELLE, the answer is “never.” A well-connected royals source tells the magazine that stories about Markle rubbing royal staffers the wrong way are complete rubbish. In fact, the duchess is reportedly well-liked by the people she works with, and they’re excited by her fresh perspective.
PHOTO: Getty Images
Not only that, but Markle is “anxious” to learn about royal protocol and takes her new gig within the royal sphere seriously. According to ELLE‘s source, she’s also been receptive to the people on the inside helping her adjust. This sounds more realistic than royal staffers ducking for cover every time Markle sends a G-chat.
PHOTO: Getty Images
Oh, and as for those rumors about Markle and Kate Middleton feuding? The source tells ELLE they’re not true, either. “The stories of the two duchesses having a major ongoing feud are just overblown,” the source said. “They have enormous respect for each other and are both devoted to representing Her Majesty in the humanitarian and charitable work they do.”
There you have it, folks. Meghan Markle is just a grown woman trying to do her job and live her life as best as she can. There’s literally nothing to see here. No feuds. No demands. No nothing.
At this year’s Golden Globes, the biggest story wasn’t who was snubbed or which celebrities were dressed the best. (Although we do have thoughts on that.) No, the night was all about Kelleth Cuthbert, the 30-something woman caught photobombing several celebrities on the red carpet while holding a tray of Fiji Water. If you’ve looked at any red carpet photos from the 2019 Golden Globes, you’ve definitely seen her:
PHOTO: Stefanie Keenan
Dubbed “Fiji Water Girl,” the memes quickly came flooding in about the mysterious woman with the excellent photobombing skills. “If Bradley Cooper doesn’t bring the Fiji girl out on stage to perform ‘Shallow’ with him I’m turning this show off,” one new fan wrote on Twitter. “FYI: I have already written 200 pages of the Fiji Water girl’s inner monologue tonight,” said another. A star truly was born.
The memes were fun, but we had questions. Mainly, how did this all come together? And what’s Cuthbert’s story? What does it feel like to reach sudden Internet fame just for standing there?
We were able to track down Cuthbert after the red carpet, once she was off the clock and had changed out of her signature blue dress (to match Fiji Water’s bottle cap color, of course) and into jeans. Turns out, she’s a model and actress in her early thirties, married, and from Toronto but currently living in Los Angeles. Cuthbert used to be a social worker in Canada, specializing in mental health and addictions counseling, while modeling on the side. She was going to apply for grad school, but the modeling work was going so well she decided to take a year off and fully commit to it. She never went back.
In the years since, she’s done commercials, PSAs, short films, and worked modeling gigs at other award shows, but this is by far the biggest exposure. Cuthbert tells Glamour she’s confused and overwhelmed by all the attention, though she thinks it’s hilarious. “I do love a good meme, so I think it’s incredibly ironic and funny that I’m one now,” she says. “The first meme of 2019, apparently! My husband is laughing very hard about all of this.”
“This is something I would go viral for,” she jokes. “I feel like I’ve been photobombing people since I was a kid.”
Cuthbert says it took a while for her to realize something was happening. “A couple people came up to me and were like, ‘FIJI’s going viral,’” she says, but she assumed it was about all of the women there for Fiji. “I thought maybe I’m in the background of a couple shots.”
But more and more strangers started coming up to her to tell her she had become A Thing. Others asked for selfies (no celebrities though, womp). Hours later, when she finally went on break, she looked at her phone and saw hundreds of texts and DMs from people. Her Instagram following the morning of the Globes was 53,000; now, it’s at 76,300 at press time. “One of my print agents tagged me in a meme of myself,” she says, with a laugh. “I called my mom on my break, and she was already laughing when she picked up the phone. My parents are not very hip to things going on, so the fact that they had already received this information says a lot about how viral it already went.”
When Cuthbert woke up that morning, she certainly didn’t expect Internet stardom. This was just a side gig in between modeling and acting. She did her own hair and makeup before the event, though, “I wish now that I hadn’t chosen to sleep in a little longer. I thought, ‘I don’t need to put that much effort into myself…no one’s really going to see me.'” Yeahhh, that didn’t happen.
Cuthbert says that the report her moves were calculated isn’t true. “I never said that. I just stand where I’m told, wherever there is an opening.” Cuthbert tells us she simply moved from spot to spot and passed out water as she tried to keep a neutral-but-pleasant face. “Everyone has their work or event persona,” she explains. “You try to look at least somewhat pleasant and not have too much resting bitch face. You have to look somewhat friendly and happy to be engaging with people.” She wasn’t trying to photobomb everyone, she says: “Sometimes you’re caught between a lot of cameras, so there’s a lot of photographers at different angles. You’re just kind of trapped sometimes. See that’s the thing: I feel like I was looking away, but sometimes I was looking so I could move out of the way.”
PHOTO: Stefanie Keenan
So what’s next for Cuthbert now that she’s a star? First up, processing it all. “I haven’t even had the time to sit down and think about what could come from this, but truly anything would be exciting. I would love to get an acting role. That would be amazing.” Before all of this happened, her goals were to get a theatrical agent to shift away from modeling. More doors might be open now, but Cuthbert is taking it in stride. “I definitely think I’m ready for [the fame], but such is the nature of the Internet that these things just go by in a flash,” she says. “No one will find this funny in a week. We’ll see! I think all of this stuff is very fleeting. I enjoy the craft of acting, but all the other stuff around it is just noise. It’s light and fun, and I think it’s meant to be taken that way. Not too seriously.”
That said, “I saw a good [meme] of me that said, ‘Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.'”
When I moved across the country last year, cycling through the same outfits for months before my boxes arrived, I turned to L.A.’s wealth of very good vintage stores to replenish my wardrobe. I began to collect vintage T-shirts, always finding the right messaging for whatever mood I was in at the time, like pulling oracle cards—or maybe, like tarot, they read me: I was “Raisin’ Hell” and “Captain Chemical” and “Keyed Up,” and I wanted anyone who saw me to know it. Thus began my love of slogan tees.
I grew my collection with shirts with styles not just from brick and mortar shops, but also from Etsy, eBay, and even Instagram. I began to notice fast-fashion clothing racks and e-commerce sites peddling contemporary takes on them. Except, they seemed to echo the cringe-y messaging of the Limited Too tops I remembered from my youth, only with slightly more grown-up slogans that scream a message of aww shucks faux-girlishness (and more grown-up vices.) “Tequila Is My Co-Pilot.” Oh dear. “World’s Okayest Runner.” Huh? “I Love Everyone Tous Les Jours.” Honey, you don’t have to!
But through all that noise, a few designers emerged as leading the “slogan tee trend” in a much more pointed, political direction—like Monogram Studio and Rachel Antonoff, which are direct but not diminishing, coy but not doormat-ish with their expressive graphics. Often, they’re a little pissed off. They feel more authentic, more personable. Like something you, a real human woman, might actually be thinking, or feeling, or texting your friends.
PHOTO: Amanda Edwards
Actress Elizabeth Banks wearing a T-shirt by Monogram at the 2018 Women’s March in Los Angeles.
“Especially right now, with so much that’s going on nationally, internationally, I think people want to have a vehicle that expresses how they feel,” says Lisa Mayock, co-founder of Monogram Studio, which sells vintage-inspired expressive tees for men and women.
“Our ‘BULLSHIT‘ tee shirt is one of our most popular shirts ever, and I think it’s because everyone can relate. They wear it to the office, in a meeting, and feel very subversive, using their voice without actually having to say it out loud.” Like how Janelle Monáe, as part of an interview with Rolling Stone in which she came out as pansexual, was photographed wearing a Monogram muscle tee that reads: “THE RUMORS ARE TRUE.” “She was using the shirt to broadcast the message in a very literal way. That’s exactly our intention with some of the messaging,” Mayock adds.
One Monogram hit that’s sold out four times is its “RESIST, PERSIST, INSIST” tee, which was originally made in collaboration with Design for Progress for a post-election fundraiser, to benefit organizations including Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, The Southern Poverty Law Center, among others. After the event, seeing the mass appeal of the message, Mayock decided to continue producing the shirt as part of her regular collection. It now comes in two colors, and 20 percent of the proceeds of each sale go to Planned Parenthood. Monogram also has an anti-gun tee shirt that features the phrase “DISMANTLE THE NRA” written out six times, each iteration a little more broken and illegible; 20% of the sales from that go to Everytown.
“It’s something that feels important right now,” says Mayock. “Tee shirts are such a time capsule.”
Antonoff had been making “Reproductive” tees for a while before she really started to see them blown up. “When we started doing [them], it was a different time—the world hadn’t gone full Handmaid’s Tale yet,” she says. “The female reproductive system has always been politicized, but it wasn’t fully like it is now.”
After the 2016 election, Antonoff’s designs took on a new meaning, as did most of everything. “It culminated in a lot of our tee shirts that weren’t meant to be political becoming politicized all at once,” she remembers, like a T-shirt riffing on the old classic I’m With Stupid, except reading “I’m With Her,” that predated Hillary Clinton’s campaign. (Her “Equal Pay Now” graphic, unfortunately, is evergreen.) Her Reproductive collection started as a more apolitical inside joke—think of it as wearing your heart, or your uterus, on your sleeve—but has become one of her top sellers. She donates part of the proceeds from each sale to Planned Parenthood, and estimates she’s raised nearly $10,000 for the organization to date.
PHOTO: Rachel Antonoff/Edith Young
A T-shirt from Rachel Antonoff’s Reproductive collection.
PHOTO: Rachel Antonoff/Edith Young
A T-shirt from Rachel Antonoff’s Reproductive collection.
It is worth noting that this new wave of single-issue slogan tees pre-dates the major cultural shifts and conversations of the past few years, as fashion tends to do. Months before the #metoo movement went viral last fall, the actress Sarah Ramos collaborated with Antonoff on a new slogan, “Pretty But Doesn’t Know It.” The phrase, and others like it, is something she encounters often in descriptions of female film and television characters. “She’s gorgeous, but she suffers from low self-esteem—that’s not a personality,” says Ramos. And it’s not just on-screen; in Hollywood, “You need to be pretty, but no one can know you put effort into it.” Ramos notes that she was surprised by how vulnerable she felt wearing the shirt, her version of Amy Schumer’s One Direction parody, out in public, giving voice to a harmful rule she says she’d been taught since childhood. “[The T-shirt] is a conversation starter,” she adds.
These shirts and their messaging allow us to reclaim certain words and phrases, to share directly about hard-to-articulate and uncomfortable topics or ideas without being interrupted or cut off. They are subversive. They are a modern manifestation of wearing one’s heart on sleeve, or…er, her chest. “’Hysterical Female‘ was the first time that we decided to reclaim a narrative about us that’s annoying,” says Antonoff of another best-seller. It acts as a snarky cousin to Meena Harris’s “Phenomenal Woman” tee, which has raised over $100,000 for seven different charities.
“Even the small act of buying a tee, I believe, is an act of resistance,” says Harris, who left her job at Slack to run the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign full time.
“I’m really angry, a lot of the time, and I like the idea of putting it out there in a non-cutesy way,” says Antonoff. “I like the idea of being able to sit on the subway in silence, but I’m still saying something.”
If logo-less normcore flourished under the Obama administration, let President Trump’s time in office, with the personal becoming increasingly politicized, be the new era of the slogan tee. And let them be heard. A now threadbare Marc by Marc Jacobs style I’ve had since George W. Bush’s second term—”WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?“—could use a rest, anyway.
For the past week or so, Ariana Grande has been using music to comment on her split from Pete Davidson. She first started with “Thank U, Next”, the song she surprised-dropped last Saturday night that name-checks several of her exes, including the SNL comedian. “Even almost got married / and for Pete, I’m so thankful ,” she sings at the top of the track.
Grande followed this up with a performance of “Thank U, Next” on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that featured lots of wedding imagery, from a multitiered cake to reception tables and all-white outfits. Because Davidson is the only ex we know of who almost married Grande, it’s safe to assume this was a nod to him.
But she just took her Davidson commentary out of the music and onto Instagram. The sleuth-ish account Comments by Celebs captured a rather savage reply Grande wrote on a Zoe Report post teasing the “13 tips & tricks for finding the perfect engagement ring.”
“Don’t,” Grande wrote with no capitalization or punctuations. Oof. Welp, that makes her opinion on her short-lived engagement to Davidson very clear.
Davidson and Grande confirmed their engagement over the summer, but in mid-October news broke they had called things off. He’s since made several jokes about the situation in stand-up routines and on SNL. After he fake-proposed to singer Maggie Rogers as a joke for one of the show’s promos, Grande hit back on Twitter, posting (and later deleting), “For somebody who claims to hate relevancy u sure love clinging to it huh. Thank u, next.” Little did we know those last three words would be the title of the song heard (literally) around the world.
