Lara Jean approaches Valentine’s Day fashion with the zeal of—it must be said—a boyfriend girl. She is a sexy human Hallmark card, and to that, we say—good for her! “When Jenny and I were swapping mood boards, one of the ones that were on her mood board was this 40’s style, empire waist Chain of Hearts dress made by HVN for Opening Ceremony, which was not current season. We couldn’t find it anywhere and I spent so many nights online searching designer resale until I finally found it on a website out of France, Vestiaire Collective. Her shoes are a red patent leather Oxford lace-up from Gravity Pope.”
Lara Jean’s baking outfits are an exquisite combination of Etsy, Anthropologie, and Little House On The Prairie chic. Sadly, the apron is available only to the craftiest among us. Carson handmade it from a retro 1950s pattern, then hand-dyed it blue. The pink blouse is from Free People and the hair bow is from Simon’s.
In the final scene of the movie, our heroine puts on an evening gown, curls her hair, and lays in the snow. Carson confirms that, as a costume designer, this was very hard to accept. “The dress is a J. Mendel, a red carpet gown. It just created such a beautiful silhouette and became a fantasy, magic, romantic gown on her, it was so lovely,” she says. “We also needed to cut it shorter for Lana, because it had been on, I think, a six-foot model initially. So I took the bottom tier of ruffle and draped it across her shoulders and attached it to the front, making it reminiscent of a 1950s neckline to give it a touch of vintage and to make it Lara Jean. There were only one of these dresses existing—there were no more available—and we needed her to dance and make snow angels in it. It was like gold. We like to put it in lockdown at night.” Carson paired the gown with a pair of nude suede heels from Aldo.
Whether you’re studying for your pre-calc exam or considering opening a sensible mutual fund, go forth to the paradise of feminine details and vintage-accented boots! Well-tailored driving coats, spangly hair clips, ruffle-covered gowns, and patent leather Mary Janes are in your future.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
In a new episode of David Letterman’s Netflix series, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, Ellen DeGeneres gives a powerful interview about the sexual assault she experienced as a teenager. In it, DeGeneres describes how her stepfather—who she describes as “a very bad man”—groped her, using her mother’s mastectomy as a pretext.
“My mother had had breast cancer right after they got married,” she tells Letterman, according to E!. “So she had a breast removed, and they had a very, very sexual relationship, which was also very uncomfortable for me. And he told me when she was out of town that he’d felt a lump in her breast and needed to feel my breasts because he didn’t want to upset her, but he needed to feel mine.”
She continues, “Again, because I didn’t know about bodies, I don’t know that breasts are all different. Anyway, he convinced me that he needs to feel my breasts and then he tries to do it again another time, and then another time he tried to break my door down, and I kicked the window out and ran ’cause I knew it was gonna do—it was gonna go more to something.”
“And I didn’t want to tell my mother,” she says, “because I was protecting her and I knew that that would ruin her happiness.”
“I should never have protected her,” she adds, according to EW. “I should’ve protected myself, and I didn’t tell her for a few years and then I told her, and then she didn’t believe me and then she stayed with him for 18 more years.”
This isn’t the first time the talk show host has spoken out about her stepfather—that was in a 2005—but as DeGeneres tells Letterman, she continues to talk about her sexual assault as a way to help other survivors.
“That’s another thing that, you know, I’m angry at myself because….I was too weak to stand up—I was 15 or 16 and…I mean, it’s a really horrible, horrible story and the only reason I’m actually gonna go into detail about it is because I want other girls to not, you know, ever let someone do that,” she says, adding later, “That’s the only reason I think it’s important to talk about it because there’s so many young girls, and it doesn’t matter how old you are, and when I see people speaking out, especially now, it angers me when victims aren’t believed because we just don’t make stuff up. And I like men, but there are so many men that get away with so much.”
“It is just time for us to have a voice,” she says. “It’s time for us to have power.”
The full episode will be out when season two of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction premieres on May 31.
When Jay-Z and Beyoncé aren’t busy being two of the biggest stars on the planet, they’re changing lives. The latest example of their altruism came Wednesday night (September 19) at their most recent stop on the couple’s On the Run II Tour, in Glendale, Arizona. The dynamic duo surprised an Arizona teen, Mikayla Lowry, with a $100,000 college scholarship.
“They said my name and I was like, ‘WHAT?’,” Lowry told ABC about the experience. “It just felt unreal.” The scholarship comes courtesy of an initiative from the Shawn Carter Foundation and the BeyGOOD Initiative, which is responsible for doling out over $1 million in scholarships to youths who are in major need of assistance.
On Sunday, Jay and Bey were in Houston, where they continued making dreams come true. “I didn’t know what to say, and she gave me a huge hug and Jay-Z was just like chilling,” Alezae Uresti, another 17-year-old who received a scholarship (this time in Bey’s hometown) told ABC. “So I gave her a hug, and then after that, me and Beyoncé took a picture and I told Jay-Z, ‘Come on, come on, get in the picture,’ so we all took a picture.”
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Each winner of the scholarship is selected by the Boys & Girls Club of America, an organization devoted to enabling “young people most in need to achieve great futures as productive, caring, responsible citizens,” according to an official official press release. According to the Shawn Carter Foundation website, “The mission of the Shawn Carter Foundation is to help individuals facing socioeconomic hardships further their education at post secondary institutions.”
Beyoncé has a long history of giving scholarships to exceptional teens in need of financial aid. After her game-changing Coachella set in April, she donated $100,000 to four historically black colleges and universities.
As for Mikayla, she’ll get to be the first person in her family to go to school, thanks to the scholarship. “Everyone was just happy for me,” she told ABC. Watch Mikayla have her life changed forever, courtesy of DJ Khaled, in the above video.
Monday morning I received a text telling me to be careful. Something about bad energy. I made a mental note to ask if another planet was in retrograde for the fifty-eleventh time. But I was quickly snapped out of my levity when I read the next part of the message: My friend informed our group chat that a white man attacked two black women on Bay Area Rapid Transportation (BART) in Oakland, California.
One of them died. The other survived the brutal attack with injuries to her neck. And the assailant was still on the run.
Questions about what happened and the motive behind the attack rushed through my mind as I hurried to get out of the house that morning. (While many suspect the attack to be racially motivated, police have yet to confirm.) And even though I hadn’t completely processed the information, I knew to change my route to work. A route that, every day, finds me standing on the BART platform where Johannes Mehserle took Oscar Grant’s life. Every day I look into a painting of Grant, installed at the station after he was handcuffed and shot by a police officer, staring back at me. A reminder of the black pain in my hometown, the distrust of police, the historical race violence that spurred the creation of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966. But the morning I learned about the death of Nia Wilson, an 18-year-old aspiring paramedic and rapper, and the assault on her sister Lahtifa Wilson, I took the bus to San Francisco instead of the train.
Once I got to the office, I pulled up every article I could find to get details. The sisters were attacked at the MacArthur BART station on Sunday night. It was the third reported killing on BART within a week. Local news reported that the incident was random; the sisters hadn’t interacted with the man at all. Police later apprehended a suspect, identified as John Lee Cowell, a 27-year-old man recently released from prison. Cowell also has a history of mental health issues.
But Nia’s death felt anything but random. Unprovoked? Yes. But for a woman aware of the recent rash of gender-based attacks (and hate crimes in California, which have jumped 17 percent in the last year), the violence often associated with BART stations (up 69 percent in the past decade), and the overall racist climate of the nation, I received the news of this tragedy as yet another example of the constant attacks on black women and girls.
“I want to go home, but I’m afraid to get on the train,” I texted my friends. Several people offered to pick me up, but I declined. I’d have to go out on my own at some point. And would their presence help? The two Wilson sisters were together and there were other people at the station. And even that didn’t deter their attacker.
PHOTO: AP Images
A candlelight vigil for Oakland teenager Nia Wilson
There is no doubt that being a woman in this world can be dangerous. In fact, the United Nations Population Fund describes violence against women as “one of the most prevalent human rights violations in the world.”
“It knows no social, economic, or national boundaries,” the website reads. “Worldwide, an estimated one in three women will experience physical or sexual abuse in her lifetime.”
For black women, the stakes are higher. Last year a CDC report found that black women have a homicide rate of 4.4 per 100,000 people, more than any other race of women in this country. The factors vary—from institutional racism, to overpolicing (and underpolicing), intimate-partner violence and more, it’s hard to pinpoint any one reason black women are disproportionately targeted in America. Pair that with the statistics that find black girls are punished more harshly in schools, that we appear to be older than we are, that we’re “fast,” or that we experience less pain than other women (which often ends up deadly for black women seeking medical help or in childbirth), we are left with a narrative that black women and girls don’t need or deserve protection.
Or that anyone will seek justice for us once we’re hurt. Or worse, killed.
Nia Wilson’s brutal killing can’t be examined in a vacuum, siloed from the very real and lived experiences of black women daily. It’s why the outrage has been palpable. Her death is a reminder of the danger we face daily, the stereotypes that perpetuate the ideas that our lives are not to be valued and how far some news outlets will go to maintain that narrative. (One of the local stations decided to post a photo of the victim with what appeared to be a gun. It wasn’t. It was a cell phone case.)
The people of Oakland—many of which are likely daughters and granddaughters born from the civil rights movement and the Black Panther Party—have held demonstrations to bring attention to the crime. This idea, that black women aren’t worthy of being protected, is why women are taking matters into their own hands. It’s why activists like Ashley Yates are crowdsourcing to “place self-defense tools directly into the hands of black women + femmes and queer people in Oakland and the Bay Area.”
It’s why the Anti Police-Terror Project announced that, during a candlelight vigil in Nia Wilson’s honor, Community READY Corps would provide on-site self-defense training for anyone interested.
“We also know that we are each other’s best defense,” the invite read.
I considered the idea of registering for a martial arts class. Maybe it was finally time to go to the shooting range and look into a license. That last thought scared me. And it made me realize how extreme and radical it was, that black women in 2018 must arm themselves to ward off an attack when going through the benign routines of our lives.
Who else faces this degree of terror?
Here are the facts: Black women, cis and trans, are killed at higher rates in the U.S. than women of any other race. #YouOkSis and #SayHerName serve as constant reminders that black women and girls don’t get justice. Every day we are fighting for basic rights, whether it be equal pay or proper treatment in the classroom. We fight to stay alive during childbirth and to be able to make it home alive from our regular travels.
That’s a level of fight, a level of fear that is deeply unique for us. However, it shouldn’t concern only us.
Nia Wilson’s death is a problem for all of us. In the last week it’s been great to see the number of people coming together, sharing messages about the value of black lives, and refusing to remain silent. But until everyone in the country is truly invested in the lives and safety of black women—beyond posts and hashtags—we’ll never reach full liberation.
Niema Jordan is a writer and filmmaker from Oakland, California.
