I’ll never forget getting measured for my quinceañera dress and being horrified that my hips were double the size of my chest. I felt uneven, incomplete. Here I was—literally preparing to be presented to God as having officially entered womanhood—feeling the complete opposite of womanly.
Those feelings stuck with me well beyond my 15th birthday. And they’re largely why I’ve always struggled to view myself as sexy, especially when it comes to shopping for lingerie. That’s partly because I grew up surrounded by hypersultry, hyperstylized underwear ads broadcast everywhere from mall store windows to primetime television. I needed bras and underwear, but I was intimidated by the prospect of walking into a store and buying them—hell, I was repelled by it. Gisele Bündchen was sexy. Tyra Banks was sexy. Me? I was a work in progress.
Something is changing for me, though: I’m turning 30 in a few months, and I’ve started to feel like I’m running out of excuses to be flippant about what I wear underneath my clothes. I’m supposed to be “thirty, flirty, and thriving,” so shouldn’t my bras make me feel grown-up? It’s a doubly significant milestone for me, because it marks 15 years since my quince. (Some Latinas celebrate a doble quince when they turn 30.) Considering how the singular experience of getting measured for my dress led to so much insecurity about my body later on, it seems fitting that I begin to take that power back now. And that begins with my underwear drawer.
The process was easier than you might expect, in part because the ads and marketing we see for lingerie are changing: Indie brands like Lonely Label and TomboyX, as well as buzzy names like Aerie and Savage X, release campaigns that feel personable and welcoming, with different types of bodies and faces. They’ve inspired me to think about this type of fashion in a new way.
Models at Savage x Fenty’s show during New York Fashion Week
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“The turn away from supermodels to more relatable, everyday models for intimate apparel has been significant,” says Cora Harrington, founder of the blog The Lingerie Addict and author of In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie. “When I first started The Lingerie Addict over 10 years ago, this conversation was just starting in the lingerie blogger community, and now it’s a part of our everyday dialogue when we’re discussing lingerie brands.”
Her advice to me on how to build my lingerie collection? “Only buy things you love and want to wear,” she says. “It’s easy to go a little overboard, especially when you’re first becoming interested in lingerie—I know I did. It’s equally easy, especially if you’re a hard-to-find size or if you’re not used to having options, to feel like you have to just buy everything. But you don’t want a drawer full of things you never wear or—God forbid—that you hate.”
Up to this point, my underwear drawer has been filled with rather blah bras I’ve picked up in bargain bins over the years. My focus this time was on finding everyday bras that were comfortable first and foremost, but that also felt feminine and sexy.
Harrington recommends starting with a little bit of research, if only to have a realistic understanding of what you need and what you’ll find. “Most of us aren’t really taught or exposed to much in the way of lingerie education,” she says. “A lot of people don’t understand that bra construction must change as the breast size changes.” For example, an F or K cup can’t be built the same way as a B or D cup is. “It’s not that manufacturers want you to have ‘ugly’ bras—it’s that a flimsy wire, thin straps, or too-delicate lace is simply not supportive enough.”
Ariana Grande is rich. Very rich. She has a reported net worth of $50 million and apparently bought that insane New York City apartment she and ex-fiancé Pete Davidson lived in all summer. If she wants a baby pig, all she has to do is snap her fingers and, poof, it’s there. There’s even a song on Grande’s album “Sweetener” called “Successful” that talks about how paid she is. It literally sounds like a robust 401K package. Listen to three seconds of that track and you’ll immediately think, “Yup, Ariana Grande is a luxe queen.”
And what do luxe queens do on a free Sunday in New York City? Drop thousands of dollars at Chanel, that’s what! OK, so we don’t know exactly how much money Grande spent at the Chanel store in SoHo yesterday (October 21), but she walked out with two large bags and a look on her face that said, “My bank account is endless, and so is my power.”
For the occasion, Grande swapped her signature ponytail for a tight top bun, which makes total sense. She couldn’t risk her long hair getting in the way of the credit card machine when she swiped her Black Amex! You know what they say: The higher the hair, the higher the credit limit. (Like Ariana Grande even has a limit.)
PHOTO: Splash News
It’s unclear if Grande’s shopping spree had anything to do with her breakup with Davidson. Some think the pop star was engaging in a little retail therapy, which might be true. However, an equally-as-plausible theory is Grande just woke up and said, “Wow, I’m rich and feel like spending money today.” I hear rich people do this all the time!
That being said, this seems like as good of a time as any to let y’all know Pete Davidson is reportedly looking for a roommate. The comedian gave everyone that update during a gig in Los Angeles over the weekend. “Well, as you could tell, I don’t want to be here. There’s a lot going on,” Davidson reportedly said. “Does anybody have any open rooms? Looking for a roommate?”
Large bags have gotten a bad rep: You overpack, you schlep, you can’t find anything inside… They’ll cause you to breathlessly explain to everyone you see, “Ah! Sorry for all of this stuff.” It takes up an extra seat at restaurants. It’s the reason you’ve saved every receipt you didn’t know you had.
That might explain why fashion rallied behind those super-cute mini bags that can really only fit some credit cards, a tub of lipstick and maybe, if you’re lucky, your iPhone—but definitely not the plus. The most popular one was by French designer Jacquemus, which was six centimeters tall and ten wide. It’s so cute, it’ll initially make you squeal… before inevitably making you scream when you realize there are so many things you need to carry that there’s no room for. But for Spring 2019, Jacquemus appears to have done a 180: At his most recent Paris Fashion Week show, he debuted the exact opposite—totes that were large, spacious, and perfect for emptying the entire contents of your life into.
Jacquemus wasn’t the first to indulge a love for over-packing: Proenza Schouler, Maison Margiela, and Jil Sander have all released large shoulder and tote handbags within the past year, having models tuck them under their arms or wear just one strap on their shoulder so that the other flails in the wind. Being a lady with lots of things is nothing to be ashamed of.
So go ahead and get ready to carry everything you own and see below for the best large handbags, in order of how much stuff they can actually fit.
When I got engaged, I found myself caught in some sort of wedding planning purgatory: I knew I wanted a fairytale ballgown dress and a formal evening ceremony, but I wasn’t concerned with other “proper” things we’ve been told by the billion-dollar wedding industry we’re “supposed” to have—“something borrowed,” elaborate tablescapes, a cocktail hour with better food than dinner, and so on. I was at a crossroads between tradition and my feminism, and the whole industry is built around fairly-young customs amplified by magazines, blogs, and advertisers into things you must do. We first began planning just a few hours after the proposal (we were excited and knew we wanted to be married in the winter), and my mind went to The Dress.
When you get engaged, you quickly learn that everyone has an opinion on what a wedding should be like and how much it should cost: Grandparents think of the cost in 1950s dollars (as if inflation never happened), parents want everything to be just perfect (and draped in flowers, which: expensive), friends want to be there to support but are simultaneously trying to Jedi mind-trick themselves out of the wedding party (all those pre-ceremony festivities add up). And then, there’s this idea of looking so unfathomably perfect on the best day of your life. That’s where The Dress comes in.
All of a sudden, I was filled with regret for not having a secret wedding-planning Pinterest board. I didn’t have a clear vision for The Dress, but I spent hours thinking about it and researching designers… only to find that the ones I liked cost between $10,000 and $25,000.
How much is too much to spend on a pile of tulle and silk you’ll wear for a maximum of ten hours? Some would say you can’t put a price on it—I say $2,500. I don’t recall how I came up with that number, but it felt feasible given our overall budget. Of course, that was before I started looking into wedding dresses and realized that $2,500 doesn’t go very far. (In general, everything wedding-related costs two to four times what I thought it would.)
So, in the span of one week, my mother and I decided to embark on a marathon dress shopping sprint, in both New York (where I live) and Los Angeles (where I grew up, and where I’m getting married in December). This was within the same week I got engaged and left the traditional workforce to start my own financial business, so you could say the stakes were high. I probably tried on 60 dresses—everywhere from Say Yes to the Dress institution Kleinfeld Bridal to budget-friendly David’s Bridal. We laughed, we cried, we got in one (1) explosive argument, we learned to communicate with our minds when a dress wasn’t right and we needed to move on… I probably had enough tulle draped on me to circumvent the earth once or twice. Another lesson learned: It’s not just the dress you’ll have to budget for—it’s the shoes, the veil, the hairpiece, the alterations, the pressing of the dress… I nearly lost it when a saleswoman at a designer boutique told me that the cap sleeves attached to one style (made from what I estimated to be about a dollar’s worth of tulle) would be an additional $250.
Of course, you can find a dress for under $1,000—it just wouldn’t be the one I had conjured up in my head for years when I envisioned my wedding: huge ball-gown skirt, with just enough avant-garde details to make it more Comme des Garçons than Cinderella. Fabric costs money, and I wanted a lot of fabric. At the same time, I’m a financial planner, and I’m constantly thinking about how each dollar I spend could be a dollar saved and invested. Could I justify paying more than I ever had in monthly rent on something I’d wear for only a day? Then again, money is personal, and so is how much you should spend on your dress. And if you’ve been dreaming about it for decades, doesn’t that make it something worth the cost?
By the way, I did find The Dress—and just like all the advertorials said I would, I knew it immediately. (It’s a Carolina Herrera number from the brand’s Fall 2017 bridal collection—stunning, classic, dramatic with just the right amount of modern weirdness—purchased from Glamour Closet, a retailer that deals exclusively in deeply discounted samples.) What I learned during this process is, first and foremost, that you don’t have to know what you want, but it’s worth starting with a number, to at least rein in what can be a very intimidating (and expensive) market. Also: These four non-traditional tips could help you put together your dream bridal look for less than your rent. Read on.
Shopping for swimwear can be a tough and vulnerable process. As if the inconsistency in sizing across brands and the harsh fluorescent lighting in changing rooms weren’t enough, it can be intimidating—and overwhelming—to contend with all the available choices and take stock of all the new trends coming up on Instagram or on the runway. Asking friends and family for tips can help, but we decided to take it a step further and go straight to the source for the best swimwear shopping tips: the designers behind some of your go-to brands—the ones choosing every stitch, seam, wire, cup, and strap you live in come summertime.
Just over a year-and-a-half into Donald Trump’s presidency, Ivanka Trump announced that she’s shuttering her namesake fashion line.
In many ways, it’s been a long time coming. Marketed as a purveyor of affordable basics for working women since it launched in 2007, with its face being Trump herself, the brand—once valued at $100 million—has experienced a considerable decline since its founder left to join her father’s administration in January 2017. Ivanka Trump, the brand, has taken one hit after the next as many shoppers and retailers have distanced themselves from its products, with pieces increasingly popping up on the resale market post-election.
Then, there were the boycotts.
Grab Your Wallet and similar campaigns against Trump’s products, which have gained steam thanks to the power of social media, have contributed in part. Their goal is to be “a centralized resource for the flexing of consumer power,” specifically as it pertains to Trump-affiliated companies. Shannon Coulter, a San Francisco-based digital marketing expert, is at the center of Grab Your Wallet—as the initiative’s co-founder, she and Sue Atencio helped launch this movement in 2016, encouraging people to use their spending to protest then-candidate Trump following the release of that now-infamous Access Hollywood tape (hence the name). The hashtag quickly went viral, and the Grab Your Wallet website was launched as a resource for customers to check whether the places they shopped had a relationship with the Trump family, as well as to provide tips for people who wanted to call companies with ties to them. When the first Women’s March took place in 2017, 350,000 people visited the site during a 24-hour period, according to the New York Times.
A year-and-a half later, Coulter and Grab Your Wallet have what she described on Twitter as “a win.”
PHOTO: The Washington Post via Getty Images
Shannon Coulter, co-founder of Grab Your Wallet.
“All over the world, women have so much consumer power and influence and their awareness of that influence is growing,” Coulter tells Glamour. “I’ve watched so many individual women successfully get companies to make significant, positive changes over the last twenty months simply by communicating with them. It’s been dazzling to behold and it makes me believe we could use that power to help remake the world into one that puts a premium on equity, peace, education, and care. I think that’s only a dream for as long as we fail to roll up our sleeves and do it.”
Coulter, for one, doesn’t believe Ivanka Trump, the person, when she says the decision to close Ivanka Trump, the brand, had nothing to do with sales. “I don’t think any Trump would willingly shut down a profitable company with a bright future,” she argues. “I’ve seen several indications that Ivanka Trump’s line has probably been performing poorly for some time on several measures, especially brand. I think Ivanka likely wanted to avoid the embarrassment of more retailers dropping her line in the future. At the consumer level, the Trump brand has become permanently politicized and she knows it.”
In 2015, the Ivanka Trump line was reportedly raking in $100 million annually, per public statements from G-III, the company that made its clothing. Then, the election happened: Ivanka joined her father in Washington, and formally stepped away from the company’s day-to-day operations—though, she never divested her ownership, and still made $5 million from the company in 2017, according to financial disclosure documents.
That’s when things started to take a turn, as consumers increasingly found it difficult to separate Ivanka Trump, the product, from Ivanka Trump, the political operative.
PHOTO: MANDEL NGAN
Ivanka Trump.
In an interview with Refinery 29 from early 2017, Abigail Klem, president of Ivanka Trump, claimed the brand had its best-performing weeks in its history following President Trump’s inauguration. According to the e-commerce search platform Lyst, sales of the brand spiked by more than 700 percent in February 2017, compared to February 2016.
Around that same time, the backlash began to strike Ivanka Trump’s stockists. Nordstrom became the first major U.S. retailer to announce it would no longer carry the brand, in February 2017, citing poor sales: “We’ve said all along we make buying decisions based on performance,” a spokesperson told Racked at the time. According to an e-mail sent to employees that week, though, Nordstrom executives reportedly did express disagreement with President Trump’s policies—his executive order restricting travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, in particular, writing: “We currently employ more than 76,000 people who comprise different races, ethnicities, and genders. It’s important that we reiterate our values to all of you and make it clear that we support each of our employees.”
PHOTO: MANDEL NGAN
Trump, wearing an Ivanka Trump dress.
“By then, a dozen companies had already announced they had severed ties with the Trump brand, but when Nordstrom announced it was dropping Ivanka, I knew the movement had achieved real momentum,” Coulter says, noting how a New York Times news item quoted an anonymous source from a third-party consumer data company who said that Grab Your Wallet kept coming up in Nordstrom customer feedback.
Other retailers were feeling the heat, too. A source at TJ Maxx tells Glamour that the retailer received hundreds of angry letters and phone calls in 2017 because it sold Ivanka Trump products; the retailer instructed its employees via a note to throw out signs promoting the label in stores. And for those stockists that continued to carry Ivanka Trump in the post-#GrabYourWallet landscape, the pressure never really eased up: Just this month, Canada-based Hudson’s Bay announced it was dropping the brand—in a statement, it offered: “As part of our regular course of business, we review our merchandise offerings and make appropriate changes.” Coulter says that Hudson’s Bay was the 40th company to be removed from Grab Your Wallet’s master list.
While a statement from the Ivanka Trump brand insisted on strong sales through 2018, when the company launched its own e-commerce, the numbers publicly available—the company is privately held, so not many are—suggest a different story.
PHOTO: Spencer Platt
Ivanka Trump shoes, available for purchase.
Following the reported surge that followed the Inauguration, Lyst reported that order growth for Ivanka Trump dropped to 288 percent in March 2017, then to 114 percent in May 2017, and then to 6 percent in July 2017; in August 2017, order volume was down negative one percent compared to August 2016. This downward spiral continued into 2018, as sales for Ivanka Trump products online at Amazon, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Zappos fell almost 45% in June 2018, compared to June 2017, according to data from Rakuten Intelligence reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Simultaneously, Trump couldn’t distance herself from allegations that she was using her new political capital to profit unethically from her White House role. For instance, she wore a $10,800 bracelet from her fine jewelry collection for an appearance on “60 Minutes” in 2016 promoting her father’s presidential win—and the Ivanka Trump brand sent out a press release for it, presumably to drum up sales. Then, when news broke that Nordstrom was dropping the label, President Trump sent out a Tweet blasting the retailer for the decision on his person account, which was then retweeted by the official @POTUS Twitter handle. As recently as May 2018, there were reports that the First Daughter had won new trademarks from China—13 in three months—which set in motion a firestorm from ethics experts questioning whether Trump was using her influence with foreign governments for personal gain. Meanwhile, the brand contended with controversies of its own unrelated to its founder’s political affiliations: In the spring of 2017, news broke that the factories in China where Ivanka Trump products were being produced were facing labor violations.
PHOTO: Bloomberg
Trump, wearing Ivanka Trump shoes.
To be sure, the Ivanka Trump brand is far from the first company to be at the receiving end of negative attention—Uber, United, and Chick-fil-A are but a handful of examples—but not all consumer-driven boycotts have had nearly as big impact on a company.
“Social media provides a platform for people to have these conversations that didn’t exist 10 years ago,” Barbara E. Kahn, a professor of marketing at the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at The Wharton School, says. Still, negative attention doesn’t necessarily mean the death knell for a brand: “There could be lot of negative activity on social media, and that doesn’t necessarily translate into changes in purchase behavior or sales.”
Think of how Chick-fil-A enraged many after it publicized its anti-gay marriage position in 2012—the company barely registered a hit, beyond some bad PR. Many fashion brands and retailers have faced accusations of sweatshop labor that have resulted in boycotts, but it hasn’t truly affected their bottom lines much.
“Boycotts are not created equal,” Bruce Hicks of The Alliant Group/Houston, a longtime public relations and crisis management consultant, explains. “What comes into play is how important the product is to people lives. Is it a crucial product? Is it an important brand to people? With Ivanka Trump you have a brand that is insignificant, it’s not a commodity product. People don’t need to buy her shoes, there are a lot of choices out there. Mix that up with emotion over President Trump, and it’s easy for people to make the decision to spend their dollars elsewhere.”
PHOTO: Chip Somodevilla
Trump, wearing an Ivanka Trump dress.
With the Ivanka Trump brand closing its doors, the Grab Your Wallet campaign strikes off one of its main targets. What comes next? According to Coulter, the fight isn’t over—not even close.
“The Grab Your Wallet community seems really excited to continue doing this,” she says. “Our goal now is to develop a more comprehensive, sophisticated knowledge base about the moral and ethical dimensions of consumer brands and then disseminate that information in highly impactful ways. We’re also looking at the possibility of partnering with organizations that advocate for fair wages, labor rights, and equity in hiring in order to continue making an impact.”
The retailers that remained on the Grab Your Wallet boycott list for continuing to carry Ivanka Trump through its final season will be removed, per Coulter, “although we will be making a note that they failed to divest from the Trump brand prior to Ivanka’s company being shut down.”
