On Tuesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer met with President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in the White House to discuss a proposed wall on the southern border and whether Trump would, in fact, shut down the government if he doesn’t get the cash he wants for it.
The conversation, which was televised, quickly turned heated and ultimately ended without a compromise—but with the President accepting and owning the possibility of government shutdown. The Democrats took that as a win. And as soon as images of Pelosi emerging from the West Wing started making the rounds, Twitter was abuzz at the sight of the Speaker-designate’s power look: the sunglasses, the smirk, the impossibly fabulous rust-colored coat. The memes soon followed.
The Times was also one of the first to correctly identify the maker of the coat: Max Mara. This wasn’t fresh-off-the-runway, just-hit-stores Max Mara, though—Pelosi’s burnt-red style dates back to 2013. In order to authentically get the House Minority look, you’d have to dig deep into the resale market, scouring the eBay’s, Tradesy’s, and TheRealReal’s of the world to buy the Glamis coat.
PHOTO: REX/Shutterstock
Except that late Wednesday afternoon, the Italian fashion house sent out a press release that not only confirmed the origins of Pelosi’s coat but also announced that Max Mara would be reinstating the Glamis into its outerwear collection in 2019. “In a variety of colorways,” no less! A spokesperson for the brand confirmed to Glamour that the decision to bring it back was inspired by Pelosi.
Ian Griffiths, the creative director of Max Mara, issued a statement on the Pelosi sighting too: “You develop an emotional relationship with a coat like nothing else in your wardrobe. I can imagine why Ms. Pelosi chose to wear it for this important moment, and I’m honored.”
Remember that iconic cerulean scene in The Devil Wears Prada? Of course you do: It’s one of Miranda Priestly’s iciest, most savage moments. It takes place after Andy (Anne Hathaway) snickers over a discussion of which belt is best for a shoot. Miranda (Meryl Streep) quickly shuts her down with a monologue about where, exactly, Andy’s sweater came from.
Here’s a clip, in case you forgot:
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Now play the whole thing back in your head and imagine that it’s about her plaid skirt instead of a sweater—because that’s how it went down in an early version of the script.
The Devil Wears Prada screenwriter, Aline Brosh McKenna, shared some intel about the monologue during a discussion at Vulture Festival L.A. this week. We can recite every line of Miranda’s clap back about the origins of Andy Sach’s “lumpy blue sweater” now, but originally McKenna had toyed with the idea of making the lecture about plaid.
“There was a point when [costume designer Patricia Field] thought it was going to be a plaid skirt. I wrote a whole Vivienne Westwood angle—obviously. But there was a sweater, and it was blue. The short version is, they sat on the script for a long time, and I made that script speech longer, longer, longer,” McKenna said. “Then I worked with Meryl [Streep] and [director] David [Frankel] and made it way too long. I sent it to David and said, ‘This is way too long; you’ll never use all of this, but this is what I’ve got.’ I had also sent Meryl a list of blues: lapis, azure, cerulean. She picked cerulean.”
Meryl Streep, of course, nailed the scene, but McKenna said not everyone was pleased with how it turned out. “A lot of the fashion stuff I just made up because none of it was going to be real. It just sounded real,” McKenna said. “After the movie came out, someone was dinging us that it wasn’t based on real fashion stuff.”
In a new clip teasing Sunday’s episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, all the Kardashian-Jenner siblings—minus Khloé—find out about Tristan Thompson’s cheating scandal for the first time. To say their reactions are shocking is an understatement; rather, the sisters are absolutely gobsmacked by the news. Remember, Tristan was caught cheating on Khloé just days before she went into labor, which added a whole other layer of insanity to this already-surprising story.
The video opens with a shocked Kendall sharing the news with Kourtney’s ex-boyfriend Scott Disick. “Stop,” Disick says in response. “That’s pretty serious, isn’t it?”
We then see a montage of Kylie, Kourtney, and Kim reading the news on their phones. Interestingly, Kim was in the middle of interviewing a segment for KUWTK when she found all this out. “There’s video of Tristan making out with a girl last night,” Kim says to a producer, who’s so shocked that they actually say something audible on camera: “Oh no!” “Khloé’s ‘gonna die,” Kim then remarks.
What follows is an intense minute where the sisters decide how they’re going to break the news to Khloé. No one wants to tell her, but Kylie steps up to the plate and sends her an article with the news. “No one had the courage to tell Khloé because we knew she was days away from giving birth. We didn’t want to stress her out. We knew that it was the right thing to do,” Kylie says. “So I’m the one that told Khloé.”
Watch all this unfold for yourself, below:
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Keeping Up With the Kardashians airs on Sundays at 9 P.M. ET on E!
The moment was the antithesis of one of Aretha Franklin’s most popular hits. As the world stopped to celebrate the homegoing of The Queen of Soul on Friday—the traditional black church gathering to celebrate Franklin’s transition from earthside to the Lord—the dark cloud of patriarchy and misogyny threatened to overshadow the service when a bishop failed to R-E-S-P-E-C-T pop star Ariana Grande, inappropriately touching her breast area for the world to see.
As part of the celebration, Grande sang Franklin’s hit, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” At the conclusion of her performance, Bishop Charles H. Ellis III called Grande to the pulpit, wrapped his arms around her (his fingers touching her breast) and made the racist remark that he’d thought “Ariana Grande” was a meal at Taco Bell. Some laughed and many cringed. But it was Bishop Ellis’ inappropriate touch that triggered most women, especially those who grew up in the church. It was a moment that, even a decade after Tarana Burke created #MeToo and its meteoric digital rise last year following the Harvey Weinstein accusations, proves that it is past time to publicly reckon with the mistreatment of girls and women in holy spaces.
Many church girls like me knew that moment. We’ve experienced it from pastors, deacons and older men who, under the guise of complimenting, have inappropriately commented on how nice we looked on Sundays. Later, how well we were growing into womanhood. Our girlhood, in church and on the street, cut short under the surveilling eyes of men. We made the same face as Grande (the embarrassed drop of the head, that uncomfortable chuckle) as we tried to maneuver out of unwelcomed embraces that lasted too long and lingering touches we never requested. And the shame was on us to carry. This behavior—almost always accepted or dismissed, even enabled—that made us coil our changing bodies inward, feeling the stinging humiliation of being fondled, the betrayal that our bodies were budding breasts and curves for the consumption of men.
Following Bishop Ellis’ apology and in response to those who came to his defense, many remembered when their complaints were dismissed with “that’s just how he is” and “he is just being friendly.” Others remembered why they never told anyone.
For many women, this is why they have turned away from the church. It’s the deeply embedded culture that allows for the violation of girls and women, that refusal to hear us when we say what we don’t want, and, in Grande’s case, the way we boomerang the blame back to the victim. (This was evident in the scrutiny of Grande’s black dress, which eventually evoked the rape culture rhetoric that it was what she wore to the funeral that resulted in her assault). This isn’t unique to the church—this violent culture of toxic masculinity that wrongly holds women accountable—but there’s something deeply troubling about the sexual violation of girls and women in sacred spaces. Especially when that environment is intended to be a balm to society’s ills.
The work of the #MeToo movement and other women’s movements has brought attention to the ways men abuse power in every sphere of society—and the church’s refusal to take seriously the issue of sexual misconduct is rooted in society’s investment in the power of men. For as beautiful as Franklin’s homegoing was, it represented every aspect of that reality. Heavily dominated by the presence of men, we were reminded that women are often only given room to sing and lift our spirits but rarely the space to preach and save our souls. As a preacher’s kid, teen mom, and one who pursued a secular career as opposed to gospel, Aretha Franklin often felt the sting of the church. And in the final celebration of her life, she felt it again.
Franklin, along with Grande and the women who have lived that moment before, deserved so much more from an institution many of us love and still believe in. And it has become clear that these conversations about the experiences of girls and women can no longer just be held in the privacy of our homes. It’s time to address this misconduct on a global scale.
We have no choice: If sexism and patriarchy could not take the day off to honor Aretha Franklin in the house of God, it will never stop its assault against us.
Candice Benbow is a writer and the creator of The Lemonade Syllabus, whose work focuses on faith, feminism and pop culture.
There’s a moment in the upcoming Netflix filmSierra Burgess Is a Loser, about 40 minutes in, that will feel very familiar if you’ve ever seen an early Channing Tatum movie. In the scene, Sierra (Shannon Purser) is cat-fishing popular athlete Jamey (Noah Centineo) on the phone. Their conversation’s going well—it’s cute, there’s giggling—when Jamey starts lamenting that he doesn’t consider himself a “jock.” “I love football because every game is like a story,” he says with complete sincerity. “For a few hours, there are villains and there are heroes. Every pass is a triumph; every tackle is a tragedy.”
This dialogue makes Jamey an archetype we know all too well in pop-culture: the Sensitive Jock, an athlete who’s more than just a hunky, shallow lunkhead. Think Chad Michael Murray in A Cinderella Story or the aforementioned Tatum in She’s the Man. Maybe he reads poetry or likes theater or isn’t into the bitchy head cheerleader. In Jamey’s case, he likes astronomy. Or, in teen movie parlance, he’s also a nerd. (A nerd with a six-pack, obviously, because an unbreakable caveat of the Sensitive Jock is he’s also ripped.)
It’s not a coincidence you haven’t seen the Sensitive Jock in movies as much as you used to. That’s because our entertainment—for many reasons—has by and large abandoned the romantic comedy, a genre that dominated theaters for decades and serves as the primary home for these types of guys. In 2013, The Hollywood Reporter officially declared the romantic comedy is dead, noting studios are prioritizing films that can be “sequelized” and translate overseas (i.e.: big-budget superhero blockbusters or anything with “Jurassic” in the title).
PHOTO: Marcos Cruz
Jacob Elordi and Joey King in Netflix’s The Kissing Booth (2018)
Vulture refuted this claim in 2017, arguing that romantic comedies aren’t dead—they’re just changing. They’re on television (Insecure, Younger) or indies with more progressive stories (The To-Do List, How to Be Single). So in some respects, yes, the classic romantic comedy—ones where women are reduced to male-obsessed beings—is dead. And good riddance.
But Netflix is doing something radical: It’s bringing back the rom-com in all the right ways. During the past year, the streaming giant has released seven original movies that have the glossy sheen of a 2003 romantic comedy, minus the offensive tropes. You’ve probably watched a few already: Us and Them, The Kissing Booth (which features a Sensitive Jock!), Set It Up, Alex Strangelove, Ali’s Wedding, Catching Feelings, or The Week Of.
These movies aren’t perfect—The Kissing Booth, in particular, has caught some criticism—but as a whole, they’re more nuanced than their ancestors. And they still feel like romantic comedies. They’re shamelessly over-the-top: swelling with love, bombast, cheesy music, and even cheesier lines. In Set It Up there’s an actual meet cute. The dialogue in Sierra Burgess Is a Loser would’ve easily worked in a Molly Ringwald movie from 1985, as would the plot twist at the end of The Kissing Booth or the dad-on-dad shenanigans from The Week Of. At their core, these movies are capital R-C Romantic Comedies. The difference, though, is that they’re more inclusive in their DNA, which makes them even more enjoyable to watch.
“We’re in such dark times right now. People want movies that feel good.” — Lindsey Beer, screenwriter, Sierra Burgess Is a Loser
Netflix’s rom-com renaissance isn’t an accident: More than 80 million user accounts have streamed a romance film in the last year, according to data provided by the streaming service. That’s nearly two-thirds of Netflix’s global audience, so executives at the helm are just creating content they know their audience wants. “It’s pretty simple: We want to make more of what our members want to watch. And we’ve seen that our members around the world are watching a lot of rom-coms,” a representative for Netflix told Glamour in an email.
“A lot” is a bit of an understatement. According to Netflix, one in three people who watched The Kissing Booth streamed it a second time, which is 30 percent higher than Netflix’s average re-watch rate. Plus, the cast members’ social media followings have grown exponentially. Before The Kissing Booth premiered, Joey King (Elle) had 600,000 followers on Instagram; she now has 4.8 million. Jacob Elordi (Noah) had 15,000 and now has 4.4 million, and Joel Courtney (Lee) went from 300,000 to 1.9 million. So not only are these movies sticking, their lead actors are turning into bonafide superstars—much like what happened to rom-com queen Julia Roberts in the nineties.
The streaming numbers and Instagram followers are just two indicators of our rom-com hunger, though. Lindsey Beer, the writer of Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, thinks something deeper is at play. “We’re in such dark times right now. People want movies that feel good,” she tells us.
PHOTO: Awesomeness Films
Lana Condor, Anna Cathcart, and Noah Centineo in Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)
Susan Johnson, who directed To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the highly-anticipated adaptation of Jenny Han’s hit novel (due out in August), expressed a similar sentiment. “I think the last few years have been all about the negative side of growing up: bullying, how tough it is, acceptance, gender issues, and sexual orientation issues,” she says. “Sometimes it’s nice just to drop into something that makes you happy.”
That’s very true: Netflix’s new slate of romantic films will make viewers quite happy, but they’re not escapist fluff. The central female characters are diverse, complicated, and interested in love—this is a romance movie, after all—but they’re interested in other things too. Sierra Burgess, for example, is a literary whiz who by accident starts thinking about boys. Beer was excited to present a character like her in a romantic comedy—and push the genre forward in the process.
“We’ve been introducing more female characters lately. We’ve gone through the Katniss Hunger Games warrior model, and we’ve seen Wonder Woman,” she says. “I think the natural branch-out from that is: What are these different flavors of women that we can portray as characters? I think that the next [phase] is: Well, we can also show women who are in more girly roles than some of the other roles we’ve seen now and show there’s no one right way to be a modern woman.”
“We’re always aching to see a wide variety of things, and this is something we haven’t seen for a while,” she adds. “I was really excited to write a character that was down to a much more human level. By virtue of being herself, and fighting for the ability to be yourself, that feels heroic to me.”
PHOTO: KC Baily
Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell in Netflix’s Set It Up (2018)
“Heroic” is a crucial word to describe Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and the rest of Netflix’s new rom-coms. The female characters have love interests, but they don’t need saving. They demand respect. These movies aren’t frivolous “guilty pleasures”—a sexist phrase often used to describe fluffy “chick flicks”—but on par with any film that explores the human condition, regardless of genre.
“I think [calling romantic comedies ‘guilty pleasures’] is silly and narrow-minded,” Beer says. “I don’t understand why positive-emotion films are often thought of as less serious than things where people are being blown up. I think that a well-written rom-com—just like all the John Hughes ones [and] When Harry Met Sally were—don’t have to be silly guilty pleasures.”
To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before hits Netflix August 17, and Sierra Burgess Is a Loser debuts not long after on September 7. The platform will also premiere two more romantic films this summer: Like Father (August 3), starring Kristen Bell and Seth Rogen, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (August 10) with Lily James. If you’re keeping track, that’s nearly a dozen rom-coms Netflix is releasing over the span of just a few months.
PHOTO: Walter Thomson
Daniel Doheny in Netflix’s Alex Strangelove (2018)
These movies are all different in terms of tone, plot, and cast, but they have one commonality: love—and not in the clichéd way. Love in these movies takes many diverse forms, which is what both Beer and Johnson hope the revamped genre do in the future.
“[I want romantic comedies] to be more inclusive and look like the world,” Johnson says. “I think love should be multicultural. I would like to see more romantic comedies—there are several out right now—that are [about] a gay couple or a mixed-race couple. I think all of those stories should come out, and I hope there’s a time where [there] can be romantic comedies about people who are really different—opposites attracting—and it’s not about the fact they’re black and white or lesbian or gay. That it’s just a story about love.”
Beer shares a similar outlook.”I hope [the rom-com genre] continues to promote messages of love being important and love being OK and for both men and women to want love—I feel like we’ve started to shy away from that—but also encourages themes of independence and loving yourself and not loving somebody else at [the] expense of yourself. There’s a lot of positive messages that can be communicated through rom-coms, and I hope the genre continues to move the needle forward.”
Christopher Rosa is the entertainment staff writer for Glamour.
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have had no shortage of adorable moments—either before or after their royal wedding for the ages. Case in point: That time recently when Harry, ever so gallantly, stepped in in the nick of time to save Markle from a topple. It’s honestly all a bit much sometimes, but just to compound the cute, the Most Reverend Bishop Michael Curry has spoken out in an interview with Us Weekly about the moment he knew that the two were really, truly in love (as if there were a doubt!).
If you remember, Bishop Curry was the real star of the royal wedding (the couple getting married excluded, obviously). He gave a rousing sermon, the likes of which many in the audience had never heard before, aptly named The Power of Love. Given that he’s pretty much an expert on it, of course he was the right person to talk about the moment he knew the two were 100-percent smitten.
“They look at each other like they love each other. I remember thinking after the sermon, once I preached the sermon, I said, ‘These two people love each other,'” he told Us Weekly. “They look at each other, and their love brought the rest of us together.”
But he wasn’t done yet—he had something even more poignant to say about the couple who once stood before him.
“Their love, even if it was just for a few moments, showed us the power of what unselfish love that gives itself to another can actually do,” he told the magazine.
Well, if that isn’t #couplegoals, we don’t know what is.
