Meghan Markle and Prince Harry currently live such public lives that it’s easy to forget when their relationship was quite private. Remember, the duo waited until November 2017 to confirm their relationship—through an engagement announcement, no less. Before this, everything was speculative. No one knew whether Markle and Prince Harry were dating because they were so inconspicuous when they spent time together. There were rumors Prince Harry would fly back and forth between London and Toronto, where Markle was filming Suits at the time. She reportedly made the same trip every few weeks, as well. And they even, reportedly, had a secret way with which they communicated long distance. It’s nothing crazy: They used their cell phones, but Prince Harry reportedly used a secret Instagram account to direct-message Markle.
This comes from royal expert Omid Scobie, who says the early stages of the couple’s relationship was dependent on DMs because they lived in different countries. Prince Harry is reportedly a big fan of emoji and uses them quite often when communicating with Markle, both then and now. “A lot of their early days were spent DM-ing and texting back and forth,” Scobie told Royal Box, according to the Daily Express.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle back in November 2017.
Getty Images
Scobie says Prince Harry’s secret Instagram account still exists, and he also has a secret Twitter one he uses to keep tabs on the media. “Prince Harry told me that he follows a lot of the royal correspondents on Twitter to see what they’re up to,” he also told Royal Box. “I think he does pay attention to what’s being written about him and, of course, now his wife.”
Because Meghan Markle and Prince Harry mostly travel together now, the amount of DMs they have is probably limited. That being said, I’m dying to know what emoji he uses when he’s annoyed by a rumor. Angry-face emoji (?)? Crying emoji (?)? Side-eye emoji (?)? All are fine choices.
Samira Wiley never expected to see herself in fashion imagery. “When I grew up, it was during a time when most people [in ads] weren’t as dark as me,” she tells Glamour. “You definitely didn’t see natural hair. It was very homogenous. It felt like there was one thing you could be, maybe two things, and if you weren’t those things, you couldn’t really be in this industry. You couldn’t be a spokesperson for what was sexy. You were told over and over again how much you weren’t those things, just by ads being in your face. I don’t know necessarily if I really have felt like I have seen myself represented before I was able to be the one representing myself.“
As one of Aerie‘s new Role Models, Wiley is now making those very images she could never see herself in. “I can be that for someone else where I didn’t have anyone be that for me,” she says. And she’s not afraid to use her new platform: “I’m thinking about things in a different way. I’m blessed to be able to have people looking up to me. So I’m wanting to use that for good. That’s one of the main reasons I partnered with Aerie—I realized that this is the exact thing that I care about.”
Ali Mitton
Wiley’s most well-known roles—those of Poussey in Orange Is the New Black and Moira in The Handmaid’s Tale—touch on these values too. On both shows she plays a character who faces adversity due to being “different,” in ways that have largely been underrepresented in television. “To be able to give a character like that life was something that I never thought would be possible,” she says. “I honestly don’t know why I do what I do, and I can’t take something from all of the characters that I play, but I think something that I love about Poussey and admire about her is that she’s such an honest, amazing woman with amazing potential. And she’s just a really damn good friend. I think I’ve become a better friend—I return more phone calls from playing Poussey.”
Wiley’s approach to fashion has changed a lot over the years. “I was definitely the kind of girl who went to high school every day with jeans and a T-shirt and my hair in a ponytail, and that was my thing,” she says. “If you would have asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you that I don’t like fashion—point blank, period. I didn’t understand the kind of fashion that I liked because I wasn’t seeing it everywhere.” She credits her relationships with designers like Christian Siriano (he designed her wedding dress) who build their brands on inclusivity for opening up her worldview and showing her the transformative power fashion can have.
Ali Mitton
“I don’t even remember exactly how I first collaborated with Christian,” Wiley says, “but I know it was just serendipitous because the way that he has made sure to include all different kinds of bodies and women, not just in terms of the clothes that he makes but also on his runway. It’s awesome to see so many different ways a woman can be sexy.” By working with these people, Wiley has learned how limiting the long-standing “normal” of fashion has been—and how radically different it can be when you just change it up. “The rules don’t fit what our country looks like right now,” she says. Sometimes it can be powerful just “to say, ‘No, I’m not going change.'” It’s why she’s happy to front the Aerie campaign, which includes Paralympians and other actors. “I think putting on certain clothes, standing in the mirror, making sure you’re right before you walk out of the door, that has so much to do with self-confidence,” she says. “It has so much to do with how we see ourselves in this world. I think we sometimes try to diminish clothes, but I think they can do a lot for our own self-esteem.”
Kate Moss has become one of the most well-known names in fashion, and her artistic editorials rank among the most iconic images in the industry. Many of them involve the supermodel posing topless—and, in retrospect, the model feels she wasn’t always comfortable with them.
In a recent interview on Megyn Kelly Today, Moss was asked if she ever felt pressure to pose with no top on, particularly when she was starting her career. The model immediately answered, “There was pressure.”
Moss continued: “I worked with a woman photographer called Corinne Day, and she always liked me with no top on. And I did not like it at all when I first started.”
Day was behind the lens for Moss’s infamous 1993 Calvin Klein campaign, in which she posed nude with then-boyfriend Mario Sorrenti. Moss reflected on the shoot: “And then I suppose—Mario was my boyfriend so I was kind of used to it but I was still always like, ‘Can I just put some clothes on?’ But that was the job, so I kind of just did it.”
Moss’ comments are particularly poignant in the wake of the #MeToo movement, particularly as it pertains to the modeling world. Last year, there were a number of sexual assault allegations made against some high-powered photographers, which led to several new regulations and programs to protect models.
Moss offered some advice for anyone who, like her, has felt pressured to pose without their clothes on: “They don’t have to do it if they don’t want to do it I wouldn’t let my daughter [15-year-old Lila Grace Moss-Hack] do it—I look at her now and she’s 15, and to think that I was going topless at her age is crazy.”
That doesn’t mean she isn’t supportive of her daughter’s burgeoning modeling career, though. “I will support her, obviously. I’ll be her manager,” she said. “Her momager?” Megyn Kelly asked. “Yes, I’ll be her momager,” Moss said. “If she wants to, I’ll support her in anything she wants to do.”
Although New York Fashion Week has become noticeably more inclusive than it was five years ago, progress has been slow, particularly when it comes to body diversity. According to The Fashion Spot, which releases a report every season that surveys diversity in Fashion Week castings in the four major cities across a range of categories, only about 0.4 percent of the models to appear on the runway or at presentations were plus-sized. That translates to a total of 30 non-straight-sized models appearing in New York and Paris; London and Milan, meanwhile, didn’t have any. Those numbers don’t get more encouraging when it comes to the people going to the shows, either—in recent seasons, critics have been vocal about the ways in which mainstreamstreet-style photography seemingly captures only one type of person (and body type) in their imagery, despite the fact that the crowds at Fashion Week can be pretty diverse.
This season, though, one blogger is shepherding in change using the hashtag #FatatFashionWeek.
Kellie Brown of And I Get Dressed came up with the hashtag while at a New York Fashion Week event hosted by 11 Honoré, the plus-sized luxury retailer—”an event filled with boss bigger women: influencers, super models, fashion directors of major publications,” she tells Glamour. “And while writing my caption, I thought to myself, How can they (the industry) pretend no stylish fat women exist?“
“I created the tag as a way to kind of show receipts that there are many bigger women working in the industry, influencing the industry and consumers alike, and looking great while doing it,” Brown adds, noting that this whole realization and conceptualization took about 30 seconds.
She’s tagged her New York Fashion Week-related posts on Instagram with #FatatFashionWeek, and has incorporated it into her Youtube coverage of the week.
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Other bloggers, influencers, and plus-sized Fashion Week attendees have joined in, too, including Alex Michael May, Alex Larosa, Kelly Augustine, and more. (At press time, the hashtag has over 130 posts published to it.) “I’ve seen editors using it, which is one of the biggest compliments,” Brown says.”A few people came up to me [at New York Fashion Week] to tell me they loved the hashtag and were excited to use it.”
“I started attending [New York Fashion Week] over 12 years ago as a publicist, and then I always felt like the ONLY one,” Brown explains. “I know I wasn’t, but without the luxury of social media then, we weren’t connected. I love seeing so many larger models on runways [and] diversity at shows, but there’s still much to be done.”
Brown believes that hashtags like #FatatFashionWeek are helpful because they remind everyone (in the industry or otherwise) that these people are present, as well as inspire those who are following the events from afar but don’t feel like they’re presented in the images coming out of it. “There are up-and-coming bigger people who want to work in the industry and can follow the hashtag and see that they belong here, too,” she says.
It may have started a spur-of-the-moment post, but Brown is already thinking bigger picture: “The goal is now to grow it—I’d love to see models, makeup artists, people who work backstage [and] in PR, inclusive designers using it… Hopefully more to come next Fashion Week!”
You like drama? Stories with strong female voices? Shade in spades? Then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings are the show for you—oh, also because they’ll directly, and significantly, affect your life. Unfortunately, this bit of must-see TV airs when most everyone’s working or watching their kids—so we’re here to recap each day of these monumentally important proceedings.
There’s a chance—if you were in your office, or at a doctor’s appointment, or on a treadmill—that you spotted some of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings on mute. If you did, then you saw a lot of white guys. And so perhaps you assumed that it was them who stole the show.
Not so. A chorus of women’s voices—those of the senators on the dais, and those of the protestors in the gallery—became the soundtrack of the day. Women spoke when they were called upon, and frequently when they were not.
That unfamiliar audio—the sound of women interrupting men—gave Day One of Kavanaugh’s grilling on Capitol Hill an unexpected vibe. An event that could have felt (and sometimes did feel, what with a group of Offred-themed protestors in the halls) like one step closer to life inside the Handmaid’s Tale, delivered occasional moments of triumph. Brave women delivered a flat-out, top-of-their-lungs refusal to let one more man bent on legislating their bodies breeze into power without a fight.
The battle began just seconds into the hearing. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the committee chairman, had barely finished clearing his throat when Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) jumped in.
“Mr. Chairman,” she said, “I’d like to be recognized for a question before we proceed.”
Harris went on to ask for a delay based on the late release of 42,000 pages of documentation related to Kavanaugh’s job in the administration of President George W. Bush. A lawyer for Bush released the papers to the judicial committee just last night. Yes, last night—as in the tail end of #ldw, as in 12 hours before the start of the hearings, as in barely enough time for these senators to digest their hot dogs and aloe their sunburns, let alone read the equivalent of the entire Lord of the Rings series 27 times. Harris’s peers on the Judiciary Committee (the Democratic ones, at least)—Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Mazie Hirono (D-HI)—picked up her lead, demanding that Sen. Grassley adjourn the session until they could review the material.
Sen. Grassley steadfastly denied the Democrats’ motions, but he couldn’t thwart the momentum of the women on the committee. There was the quiet swagger of ranking member, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), slyly rocking Planned Parenthood pink and giving Kavanaugh a taste of how she plans to come for him on his record on reproductive freedom. “The impact of overturning Roe [v. Wade] is much broader than a woman’s right to choose,” she said to him. “It’s about protecting the most personal decisions we all make from government intrusion.”
There was Sen. Klobuchar, who achieved the burn of the day while discussing Kavanaugh’s assertion that sitting presidents can’t be prosecuted. The question the hearings must answer, she said, is “whether this judge, at this time in our history, will administer the law with equal justice as it applies to all citizens, regardless of whether they live… in a small house or the White House.”
There was Sen. Harris, making her opening statement late in the afternoon, and commenting bluntly on the way the Supreme Court—Brown v. Board of Education, to be exact—has affected the arc of her own life. Without it, she said, “I most certainly would not be sitting here as a member of the United States Senate… So, for me, a Supreme Court seat is not only about academic issues of legal precedent or judicial philosophy. It is personal.”
And, every minute or so for much of the morning proceedings, there were the largely female protestors, each of them exacting their own tiny revenge against civilization’s long tradition of men talking over women. You know whom life did not prepare for this gender bender? One Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT). He was visibly rattled as protestor after protestor screwed up his what-a-good-man speech about Kavanaugh.
(Side note: Don’t ask Orrin Hatch to be your best man unless you like such pillow-soft jokes such as: “You also apparently like to eat pasta with ketchup, but nobody’s perfect.” As far as I’m concerned, it’s marinara and bodily autonomy, or bust. That’s just a simple matter of good taste.)
After one too many ladies made themselves known, chin trembling, Sen. Hatch gathered himself and said, “I don’t know that the committee should have to put up with this type of insolence.”
Insolence—yes, that’s the word you were looking for, if you think that women concerned for their own liberty and mortality are just being brats.
Insolence—yes, that’s the word you were looking for, if you think that women concerned for their own liberty and mortality are just being brats. That’s the word you were looking for, if you think women exercising their right to free speech are the same as toddlers who refuse to hold your hand in the parking lot. That’s the word you were looking for if, despite your literal seat of power, you can’t help but feel—as Sen. Hatch so clearly seemed to—like you’ve never been closer to losing control.
So there’s the big takeaway from today’s episode of Who Wants to Revoke Reproductive Freedom? But there are little ones we need to discuss, too. A few distinctions from the day’s events:
Least effective prop: Big quotes.
PHOTO: Bloomberg
Some poor staffer was at the FedEx store all weekend, getting these big quotes just right, and it’s on his or her behalf that I beseech you, senators: For whom are the big quotes? For whom! They’re behind the rest of the people on the committee, and we at home can’t see them at all. Down with big quotes.
Best athletic performance: The aide behind Sen. Chuck Grassley. During the chaotic first hour of the hearing, this poor guy was out of his chair and squatting to whisper into his boss’s ear every 15 seconds. His quads had to be on fire.
Most sympathetic onlookers: Kavanaugh’s family.
PHOTO: Tom Williams
“My daughters, Margaret and Liza, thank the committee for arranging a day off of school today,” Kavanaugh quipped early into the proceedings. Good thing he made it clear that was a joke; otherwise I’d nail him for perjury. Nothing underscores how poorly this man understands women than the assertion that these two would rather be sitting here listening to politicians drone than be at school during the crucial week in which summer makeovers are revealed and fall alliances are formed. (And they still had to hear about Marbury v. Madison multiple times.) Also, my heart goes out to the aunts, uncles, and cousins Kavanaugh says are sitting behind him. This day was like, six and a half baptisms, except worse, because Ted Cruz talked.
Least sympathetic onlooker: The woman in navy just over Kavanaugh’s shoulder.
PHOTO: SAUL LOEB
She smirked. She rolled her eyes. She laughed. She seemed, generally, to think that she was at a talk show taping, and I bet she’s still wondering why there wasn’t a prize beneath her chair.
Best Law & Order antics: Sen. Richard Blumenthal. After lunch, when the Democrats resumed their complaints about the previous night’s document dump, Sen. Grassley snapped, exasperated, that his staff was able to read them all by 11 p.m. Then Blumenthal was all, like, But the documents weren’t even fully uploaded by 11 p.m.! You got a time machine or what, Chuck?
Dumbest theory: Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE). Sen. Sasse took some shots at the protestors, calling them “people trying to get on TV.” Yeah. For sure, in 2018, when we have Instagram, YouTube, and near-constant editions of Bachelor franchise programming, the easiest way to earn fame is to hike to D.C., sit through government proceedings, and yell about fundamental rights, all in hopes of being the roughly one in 25 protestors you can partially see on camera for exactly one second. Nailed it, Sasse.
Most worthy of further exploration: Hold on—ketchup on spaghetti? Is that some sort of sick joke?
Megan Angelo is a TV critic; catch her Kavanaugh recaps here all week.
Even if you haven’t touched a pair of false lashes since your junior prom, chances are you’ve probably still heard of Lilly Lashes. That’s because they’re as much of a regular on the red carpet as Kim Kardashian these days, and as visible in your Insta feed as any beauty influencer you can think of. That’s no coincidence: Kardashian, along with other celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, Cardi B, Kylie Jenner, and Shay Mitchell, are constantly sporting the brand’s mink lashes. But that raises the question: What is Lilly Lashes doing that other lashes aren’t?
Founder Lilly Ghalichi, the Texas-born daughter of immigrants, didn’t mean to dominate an industry. In fact, she was more into the law than lashes. “My whole life, I thought I wanted to be this big litigator—until I actually became an attorney,” she tells Glamour. But the buttoned-up environment felt like a total contradiction to who she was. “As a female who’s into fashion and makeup, it was very difficult to have to go to work every day and be told by the partners of my firm that I needed to wear less makeup, or that I needed to dress a little bit…not modestly, but toned down,” recalls Ghalichi.
She left the law firm after three months to begin a now-defunct swimwear line, which caught the attention of producers at Bravo’s hit reality show, Shahs of Sunset. Lilly joined the show, where she could be her glammed-up, over-the-top self, in its second season in 2012—which is when the lightbulb went off. Well, technically, it happened when she spent hours in hair and makeup for the show.
“Lashes alone would take 30 to 45 minutes,” says Ghalichi. That’s because at the time, there were only two options for falsies: human hair, which gave a natural look (a little too much so for Ghalichi) or synthetic, which is the kind most people reserve for Halloween. So she and her makeup artist went the DIY route for Ghalichi to get the dramatic—but not comically large—lashes she wanted. “We would get human hair and glue on three and four different strips,” she explains. “So we had to put the strip on, let it dry, put another strip on, let it dry, put a third strip on, let it dry, cut out the strip, and put those pieces in. I thought there had to be a better way.”
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So Ghalichi took matters into her own hands—literally. She glued sets of human-hair lashes together, tracked down a lash supplier, and sent her handiwork to them, asking if they could recreate it on a large scale. The supplier agreed to recreate them in mink, so they’d be less flimsy, and Ghalichi was down. The one problem: The supplier had a minimum quantity for orders, meaning Ghalichi had to purchase at least 100 pairs of her new lashes.
Ghalichi went all-in and purchased the required 100 sets. She had a blog at the time, and quickly wrote a post putting those spare lashes up for grabs to anyone who wanted them. “I got a sandwich and came back to hundreds of emails from girls wanting to buy the lashes,” says Ghalichi. “It was at that moment I knew that there were so many girls like me who wanted glamorous lashes, and there just wasn’t anything out there for them to buy.” A few months later, in 2013, Lilly Lashes was born.
While it sounds like an entrepreneur’s dream—come up with idea, execute it well, succeed almost instantly—that wasn’t exactly the case for Ghalichi. “It took me four years until I established a well-oiled machine,” she says. She initially struggled with input from people around her, who encouraged her to keep it natural. But Ghalichi, true to her nature, wanted to go big or go home. So she created the brand’s 3D Lashes. “We were stacking so many strips to make our one style, it was three-dimensional,” says Ghalichi. But her friends, family, and even makeup artists she worked with told her, “You know, these are just too much. I know you like them, I know a couple other girls like them, but you should make more everyday, wearable styles.”
She launched her six 3D Lash styles anyway, and they sold out within a matter of hours. That was her first aha moment—and one that taught her to trust her gut. “I let that noise, as I like to call it, affect me,” she says. “One of my biggest hurdles was learning to overcome the noise and trust my intuition and what I want to do.”
And it paid off big. One of Ghalichi’s closest friends, celebrity makeup artist Ariel Tejada, used the 3D Lashes in Miami when doing Kylie Jenner‘s makeup. “I’ll never forget,” says Ghalichi. “He left her house and texted me: ‘Hey, here’s Kylie’s address, she wants to know if you can send her more of Miami.'” Ghalichi, a self-professed Kylie Jenner fangirl, freaked out. And that was only the beginning.
Soon after, you could find celebrities, from Jenner to Jennifer Lopez, wearing her 3D Lashes. “J.Lo’s people reached out and said, ‘Jennifer doesn’t want to wear anything besides the style Tease for her Vegas residency. Can you send us 90 pairs to last her the next three months?'” she recalls. “That was all thanks to Mary Phillips, who had done her makeup and used the lashes.”
In fact, Ghalichi has her network of loyal makeup artists—whom she befriended behind the scenes at shoots for her swimwear line and during her stint on Shahs of Sunset—to credit for her brand’s huge celebrity following. “I got very lucky that I’m friends with so many celebrity makeup artists,” she says. “They were naturally and organically using the lashes on celebrities, which made the celebrities fall in love with them.” Plus, she debuted her show-stopping, they’re-definitely-not-real lashes at a time when unapologetic glamour, or whatever you’d call the opposite of no-makeup makeup, hit a high. “In the past, you didn’t want anyone to know you were wearing false lashes, you didn’t want anyone to know you were wearing hair extensions—and suddenly that reversed to where it became glamorous to have the made-up look,” she explains. Lilly Lashes was made for that demographic.
Ghalichi also takes a lot of pride in the quality of her lashes. “Our lashes will last 25 to 30 wears,” she says, which accounts for the relatively steep price of $30. (Once you do the math, though, it works out to about $1 per wear.) “Our lashes will be the best quality you can find so they’ll look the most natural on your eyes.” She’s confident in her quality in part because she serves as the brand’s guinea pig. “I design all the styles that we’ve launched, test them out, and wear them, so all the products we’ve released, I have worn and loved multiple times just in the sample making,” she explains.
Ghalichi’s best guess as to what’s made Lilly Lashes such a runaway success is that it reimagined lash designs—and, in doing so, set itself apart from other false-eyelash brands. “I think things that are disruptive in any industry will always create the biggest impact, like the Beautyblender,” she says. “A sponge has been around for years, but they did something innovative with the sponge that just took off.”
Ghalichi, who’s now six-and-a-half months pregnant with her first child, isn’t resting on her laurels, though. She has a few big developments in store, the first of which is finally giving her friends’ advice a shot and creating more natural designs. “I have two zones: no makeup and heavy glam,” she says with a laugh. “So I’m working right now to expand beyond what I wear, and you’ll see a natural collection of 3D Lashes coming out.”
She’s also working to make the line more inclusive by offering lashes for a range of eye shapes. In fact, Ghalichi has hired women of different ethnicities for the sole job of testing new lashes. “It’s not one size fits all,” she explains. “People have round eyes, almond eyes, hooded eyes—and lashes are going to look different on each.”
What’s most surprising is that considering Ghalichi’s affection for all things glamorous and excessive, you’d think that she grew up with it. But it was anything but. “I was born to two immigrant parents,” she says. “We didn’t have a lot of money growing up at all, and five of us lived in a two-bedroom house.” That context makes Lilly Lashes’ rise to fame even more magical, and serves as a testament to her work ethic.
“I thought growing up in a certain income level or a certain demographic, I could only go so far—I wasn’t as privileged as maybe a trust-fund person or went to private school—but my business has shown me that that’s not true at all,” she says. “You can go as far as you want to work.”
