If Kim Kardashian West has made one thing clear, it’s that she doesn’t believe in “staying in your lane.” The business mogul and TV personality has tried her hand in everything from makeup to fragrance to digital technology—and in September of last year, she launched Skims, a shapewear line designed to “smooth, enhance, lift, and tone.” The products come in nine shades and are made to accentuate the natural shape of various body types, with sizing from XXS to 5XL. For Kardashian West, longtime shapewear enthusiast, keeping inclusivity top of mind was important from the jump. “I’m not that tan, so I thought, ‘If I can’t find shapewear that’s dark enough for my skin tone—what are my friends doing? What is my daughter going to do one day when she’s older and wants to wear shapewear?'” And Skims was born.
The Skims launch presentation at the Nordstrom flagship store in NYC.Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
Five months after the hugely successful brand launch that left much of the line sold out in mere moments, Skims’ best-selling collections SolutionwearTM, Fits Everybody Underwear, and accessories (body tape and pasties included) are now available to shop online and at 25 Nordstrom locations—with additional debuts planned on a monthly basis.
Thanks to the brand’s first retail partnership, more consumers than ever can get their hands on the line—and Kardashian West hopes to make consumers more confident in the process, no matter what they’re wearing or how many eyes are on them. “The reality is, not everyone is comfortable. I was wearing this other skirt earlier and I wasn’t comfortable leaving knowing that flashes were going to hit me from all angles. Maybe it’s my security blanket, but if I have my sculpting short on, which I did—it makes me feel better. It makes me feel confident and secure, like I can just get on with my day,” said Kardashian West.
Kardashian West stands alongside models at the Skims launch event at the Nordstrom flagship store in NYC.Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
Lizzy Brockhoff and Elizabeth Shaffer had their babies within 24 hours of each other, just the latest tag-team effort for the friends and co-workers. At the time, the two both worked at e-commerce startup Jet, a business they’d joined from their previous jobs at Moda Operandi. In the lead-up to becoming first-time moms, the women quickly learned there was a lot of stuff they needed to buy ahead of their baby’s arrival.
Brockhoff and Shaffer were introduced to “baby lists,” giant excel sheets and documents moms swap with each other. The lists are essentially a product-based version of What to Expect When You’re Expecting and include women’s personalized recommendations for the goods to outfit a nursery to which strollers are worth the price tag. The lists are sourced from all over the internet and the result of thousands of soon-to-be parents’ impassioned googling, but they’re not organized. Brockhoff and Shaffer sensed an opportunity.
They came up with the idea to launch a platform that would deliver real reviews from real people for all their product needs, baby-centric or otherwise. To date, MASSE have surfaced three million goods through its app, harnessing, as Fortune put it, the purchasing power of Facebook mom groups to drive the business.
Here, the co-founders break down using their maternity leave as an early-stage incubator for the company and explain how becoming moms pushed them to take the leap and launch their company.
Sometimes you have to balance bottles with business calls
Lizzy Brockhoff: On maternity leave, we only had small chunks of times between feedings, bathings, etc. So it was all about how much we could get done between those moments. We’re inherent planners, and are project managers by trade, so we set ourselves goals along the way to chip away at things. It was a lot of Google Hangouts and planning. Then the big concern became, how would we continue to work on this when we went back to work? It was a challenging time because we were trying to do three things: our full-time jobs, build out MASSE, and then also care for our families.
Elizabeth Shaffer: We both went back to work at Jet, and were working on this on the side, so that was really a challenging period. One of the hardest things about having kids and starting a business is that you don’t have time to catch up on the weekend. Your weekends are for your kids. But a lot happens after the baby goes down to sleep. It was really all evening work. We’d both go to work during the day—we’re both fortunate to have great childcare—and then we would come home, spend time with the babies, put them down, then post-8pm, get back online. It wears you down, for sure, but we both felt like it was such a passion of ours that we pushed through—and on an emotional level it was really helpful to have each other. I’ll also give a call out to our husbands who have really been phenomenally supportive and helpful with this. I think that’s often not talked about. Husbands and fathers have a really big role to play in working mothers re-entering the workforce.
Launching a company isn’t an individual decision, it’s a family one
Brockhoff: We’ve heard this from other women and colleagues. That having that first child is a real catalyst for thinking, “Where do I really want to be spending my time?” I think having a little one propelled us a bit more because there’s such an opportunity cost to what you’re doing, so we really felt it was time to take the leap.
Kylie Jenner, certified billionaire, announced this week that she’s adding another line to her Kylie Cosmetics empire—and some people aren’t super pleased about it.
On Thursday, Jenner posted on Instagram that she would be launching a “Birthday Collection” in honor of her 22nd birthday on August 10, and in subsequent Instagram Stories, she revealed that the theme would be money. And she didn’t hold back on going all the way with the theme: The collection includes beauty products like lip glosses, eye palettes, and highlighters, packaging emblazoned with dollar signs and fake Benjamins. A lipstick trio masquerades as a roll of $20s, except this is Kylieland, and they’re $22 notes instead for her birthday. Twitter also had a lot to say once they got a peek at some of the names of the shades, which include “Work for It,” “On a Budget,” and “Money Ain’t Everything.”
Here are some glimpses of the new collection:
Obviously, Twitter had some thoughts.
There’s also a palette that tells customers that they’re “so money baby”—part of a quote from 1996’s Swingers—in glittery hot pink block letters, but one can be forgiven for misreading it. (It seems like a lot of people are.)
It seems like Jenner might have anticipated the backlash, however. After a few people commented and asked if she was planning to donate some of the money from the sales to charity, Jenner said on Instagram Stories that “we, I, am giving back. Actually, I do mean ‘we’ because we are doing this together. You guys are going to help me give back in a huge, huge way. All I wanted for my birthday was to do this money collection and give it all away.”
Jenner also added that she has a “special person” helping her with the collection and that “we are going to do amazing things.”
What all this means isn’t entirely clear right now, but we’re sure more details will come closer to the launch.
Michelle Obama is officially back with a new initiative post-White House, and true to form, she’s using her platform to stand up for girls globally.
To kick off International Day of the Girl on Thursday, the former First Lady announced her first major project from the Obama Foundation on the TODAY Show: The Global Girls Alliance. Their mission is right in line with much of the work Obama did during her time in Washington D.C.—to empower adolescent girls around the world through education, giving them the tools to support their families, communities, and countries. According to program, 98 million girls are not in school. But with the alliance, and some help from community, Obama intends to change that alarmingly high number.
“The stats show when you educate a girl, you educate a family, a community, a country,” Obama said in front of a live audience filled with young women. “It makes no sense that girls and women are not getting educated, that they’re not in school. If we care about climate change, if we care about poverty, if we care about maternal child health, then we have to care about education.”
“Think about our daughters, with all their promise, with all that they have in them,” she told TODAY hosts (and moms to daughters) Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie. “You know even now at this young age that there is something burning in them that is dying to get out. Well, that is true for millions of girls around the country and they are battling through misperceptions, violence, stigma to get their way into a classroom. And many of them don’t have access to a classroom so we want to play a role in building an alliance of young people who are out there doing the work on the ground. And we want to give them an opportunity to network with one another because working on these issues out in the world can be lonely.
And all this as she gears up for the launch of her much-anticipated new book, Becoming, which documents Obama’s own experiences growing up in Chicago and her road to the White House with former President Barack Obama.
News of Obama’s latest project to support girls isn’t surprising: One of her signature initiatives during her husband’s presidency was “Let Girls Learn”, which she and President Obama launched in 2015. The program focused on recruiting government agencies, corporations, and nonprofit organizations to invest in adolescent girls’ education around the globe. (The Trump administration chose not to continue “Let Girls Learn” as a standalone program, though they say they are continuing some aspects of its work.)
And then, of course, there was Obama’s #62MillionGirls campaign which launched under the “Let Girls Learn” umbrella in 2015. With 62 million girls not attending school around the world, the social media campaign asked celebrities (like Kerry Washington) and supporters to share their education stories using the hashtag. In a video announcement at the time, Obama said, “I see myself in these girls. I see my daughters in these girls. These girls are our girls, and I simply can’t walk away from them. So for me, this is truly a moral issue.”
That same year, Obama participated in Glamour‘s “The Power of an Educated Girl” panel with former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gallard, Sophia Bush, and Charlize Theron.
“For me, this is personal,” Obama said during the panel. “When I think about the 62 million girls not in school, I think of myself and my daughters—all my girls, all our girls. I think about where I would be in my life if I didn’t work hard in school and had the opportunity to go to college and law school. I wouldn’t be here. It’s imperative—and it’s my passion and my mission—that every girl on the planet has the same opportunity that I have and my daughters have.”
This new alliance will leverage Obama’s massive platform and popularity to give support and raise awareness of organizations already doing amazing work in this space. To that end, the Global Girls Alliance’s goals include driving public awareness and action, bringing together grass-roots leaders who don’t have necessary funding, fundraising, and engaging people in the United States and around the world. “The world is a sadly dangerous place for women and girls, and we see that again and again,” Obama said on TODAY. “I think young women are tired of it. They’re tired of being undervalued. They’re tired of being disregarded. They’re tired of their voices not being invested in and heard. And it’s not just around the world, it’s happening right here in this country. And if we’re going to change that, we have to give them the tools and the skills through education to be able to lift those voices up.”
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There are going to be a lot of different ways to get involved and engage with the Global Girls Alliance. Grass-roots groups will be able to access a Facebook network where they can share research, resources, and helpful best practices. Global Girls Alliance is also partnering with GoFundMe to create a fundraising platform that will vet specific programs and enable people to give directly to the project of their choice. The Alliance will also work to inspire and challenge young people to learn about important issues and will offer toolkits that girls can take back to their own schools and communities to affect change.
We can’t wait to see what’s next; we all know the power of girls and women can be a massive force for change when we work together.
For more information on the Global Girls Alliance, click here or here.
Ahead of Donald Trump’s announcement of his choice for a nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, pro-choice groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL, Shout Your Abortion, and Advocates for Youth are gearing up for a fight over one of the nation’s most divisive issues—a woman’s right to choose and the possible overturning of the landmark Roe v. Wade, the court case that ostensibly legalized abortion in the United States.
Today, they are launching a social media campaign called #OneInFour where they are asking women to share their own abortion stories (if possible) or to stand with those who are. Participants can also tag their senator and ask them to oppose any SCOTUS nominee who does not voice explicit support for Roe v. Wade. (You can find your senator’s Twitter handle here.)
That’s almost a quarter of the female population and yet there is still an incredible amount of stigma attached to women talking about their own abortions. Not to mention the online trolls. But as the Shout Your Abortion website states: “Abortion is normal. Our stories are ours to tell. This is not a debate.”
When women share their abortion stories, we see that there is not one type of woman who makes the choice to end her pregnancy. And that there are also legions of women standing behind her, supporting her right to do so.
And that’s just the beginning as women keep talking and keep sharing.
We will know more about the battle ahead for the pro-choice movement Monday night after the president names his SCOTUS nominee, but the future of access to safe and legal abortion is most certainly in jeopardy.
With help from the French government, the Cannes Film Festival is planning to launch a hotline that victims can call to report incidents of sexual assault or harassment at the event this year, following allegations that producer Harvey Weinstein had assaulted multiple women during the prestigious festival in the past.
At a press conference in Paris Friday, Marlène Schiappa, France’s gender equality minister, said those attending the festival would be warned to mind their behavior when they arrive at the French Riviera for the 2018 festival, which kicks off May 8, according to Agence France-Presse,
“We’ve gone into partnership with the Cannes Film Festival to tackle sexual harassment and set up a helpline,” Schiappa said at the event. “One of the rapes that Harvey Weinstein is accused of happened at Cannes, and so the festival cannot fail to act.”
Actresses including Alice Evans, Annabella Sciorra, Judith Godrèche, and Zoë Brock have all come forward with stories of unwanted advances Weinstein allegedly made toward them at hotels during the multiday film festival. Actress Asia Argento told The New Yorker that in the French Riviera in 1997, Weinstein forcibly performed an oral sex act on her. Weinstein has denied all nonconsensual sexual activity.
Cannes has spoken out against Weinstein in the past. After accusations of sexual misconduct and abuse were reported in The New Yorker and The New York Times, festival director Thierry Frémaux and president Pierre Lescure released a statement, condemning his actions.
“These acts are part of an unpardonable behavior that can only give rise to a clear and unqualified condemnation,” the statement read. “Our thoughts go to the victims, to those women who have had the courage to testify and to all the others. May this case help to denounce once again serious and unacceptable practices.”
People have criticized Cannes for other issues of gender inequality and representation over the years. Although Cate Blanchett was chosen to be this year’s jury president, The Guardian points out that few women directors actually make it into the annual festival selections (only three women will compete for the top festival prize, the Palme d’Or, this year). The upcoming competition also marks a return for Lars von Trier, the Danish director whose production company was accused of sexual harassment and who had been banned from the festival for seven years after making anti-Semitic remarks.
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