If you assumed that cutout mini dress and matching blonde wig was Pretty Woman‘s most iconic look, you just made a big mistake. Big. Huge.
Everyone knows that the polka dotted dress Vivian Ward donned for a polo match is the ensemble that has withstood the test of time—so much so, that Pretty Woman star herself, Julia Roberts, recreated the look for a recent outing.
The actress stepped out at the Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic in Pacific Palisades, California, on Saturday, channeling her onscreen counterpart in head-to-toe polka dots. Roberts put a modern spin on the entire look, opting for a black-and-white Michael Kors jumpsuit instead of a chocolate brown, sleeveless sundress. Both Roberts’s Ward’s outfits even featured pleats and belts—Roberts used a simple white belt to cinch her jumpsuit.
And while Ward pulled her hair into a messy updo and topped it with a prim sun hat in the iconic 1990 film, Roberts wore her hair down in loose waves. She completed the outfit with brown aviators, a black manicure and white laced-up loafers—better for divot stomping, clearly.
Compare the two looks, worn by Roberts almost 30 (!) years apart, below.
We’ve all had those fitting-room moments where we stare into the mirror and wonder: Does this really have to be so hard? But when a fashion CEO has one of those moments, that’s when real change can happen. Fran Dunaway may run one of the most buzzed-about underwear brands, but after she had a double mastectomy last May, she found herself an almost complete loss when it came to bra shopping. A three-time cancer survivor, the TomboyX co-founder had already experienced one of the less-talked-about aesthetic effects of battling the disease: how breasts can change shape or size after radiation treatments. She remembers wishing she had a bra where she could add an insert on just one side or stack a couple of inserts. Then, after her recent mastectomy, she opted not to have breast-reconstruction surgery. “The reality was that it would mean two more surgeries for me and I’d had enough surgery, thank you,” she says. “For me, I just couldn’t get my head around putting myself through that to make other people feel comfortable with how I look now.”
After the surgery, she also couldn’t get her head around how underwhelming the bra options were, especially considering how many women undergo the same surgery. “I was given a prescription and told I could go to a department store to be fitted for a mastectomy bra and I thought, that’s awesome,” she says. “But when I got there, the options for me were pretty limited.” Rather than seeing bras designed with her situation in mind, she was given regular bras adapted with a flimsy piece of fabric meant to hold a prosthetic, in styles much more frilly and femme than anything she’d ever wear. Not only were the options off-putting and ill-fitting, “the ones I got were coming apart within two weeks—hardly an empowering experience overall,” recalls Dunaway, who continued to lead the TomboyX team throughout her most recent breast-cancer treatment and recovery. “I thought, well, it’s a good thing I own a bra company!”
Of course, Dunaway also knew firsthand that a perfect bra is easier to dream up than actually build. “Bras are one of the most complicated things to make, right up there with shoes, because of all the various components required to do it well and to do it comfortably,” she says. TomboyX’s first bra styles had focused on simplicity and ease—”for lounging around, not bouncing around.” Yet she immediately set out to design bra options more functional, comfortable and versatile for women interested in using prosthetic inserts for whatever reason—post-mastectomy, during transition, or just to even out asymmetrical breasts. The resulting styles—the Ruched Bralette with Removable Inserts and the Soft Sports Bra with Removable Inserts—feature built-in pouches large enough that you can easily insert prosthetic breast forms, if desired, without any struggle or worry that they’ll pop out.
When I was in kindergarten—and very much in the closet as transgender—I had begun to crave a ponytail like I saw on many of the girls in my class. I’m well aware that for many girls and women, the ponytail is a “bare-minimum” style, often for lazy days, but the girls I saw in my class emulated the women I saw on television who were strong, confident, and successful. I thought they were cool, and I understood immediately I could never have one.
Even at six, I knew better. I was raised in deeply conservative Texas, in a world with firmly cemented gender roles. I was a boy and I had better keep to “boy things.” The bouncy ponytail of my dreams? Not a boy thing.
In 1999, when I was 12, the U.S. Women’s National Team won their second World Cup, and Mia Hamm became a personal icon. For weeks, I dreamed of what it would be like to have the freedom to sport a ponytail like Hamm. By then, I was fully aware of a desire within me to be a girl, but I kept it buried in the back of my brain, suppressed whenever possible. Still, it sometimes crept up, summoned by the most mundane signifiers of female-ness. Mia Hamm was confident and beautiful and successful, and although I had no sense of what “womanhood” meant to me, I couldn’t help but feel like her hair represented all the things I was missing. I wanted an authentic life. I wanted to feel confident. I wanted a ponytail.
The author
Courtesy Charlotte Clymer
I got through high school by pushing these thoughts down deep and leaning into whatever “male” things I could stomach. I played football. I engaged in some sort of half-hearted male performance when I interacted with relatives, including one who told me to “stop listening to faggot music” and was deeply upset after I purchased a scented lotion from Bath & Body Works. I joined the military—and even went into the infantry, which at the time coincidentally excluded women.
I did the things I was told a “male person” should do, believing I’d eventually be cleansed of this painful longing. Instead, the facade exacerbated my depression and anxiety. I went to therapy for years had numerous uncomfortable conversations, and came out as a trans woman in late 2017. It is the best choice I’ve ever made. It saved me.
But it took my hair took a lot longer to catch up with the new me. I’d grown accustomed to army-issue crewcuts, which grow out fast. It didn’t occur to me immediately that the hair I’d dreamed of would take years to come in, and I didn’t feel confident enough to wear a wig. So I had to wait it out, for over a year, fiddling with my hair after a shower to see if it was long enough yet and consistently bummed when it wasn’t quite there.
I hadn’t tried putting my hair up in months when one evening in late July, I absentmindedly grabbed a hair tie off my shelf and made a go of it. After some awkward handling and smoothing of rogue strands, I adjusted the band high on the back of my head and turned toward the mirror. I don’t know how to adequately articulate the combination of happiness and relief that I felt in that moment. It’s just hair, I thought. But then I glimpsed the waves, how the strands bundled together so beautifully. I couldn’t help it. I got emotional.
Here I stood on a summer night; with a life my six-year-old self wouldn’t have dared to imagine. I’m 32 now and old enough to admit my anxiety over seemingly trivial things. I think some part of me was worried this thing I’d wanted for more than 25 years would look terrible once I finally got it. I’m pleased to report: It was perfect.
And to me, the ways in which a blow job veers away from that imagined semen milking machine are not limitations. The closer you can make your mouth into a jerk-off device, a lubed-up flesh light, etc, what have you won? In fact, I argue that only once you’ve learned to retain and revel in whatever you perceive your specific limitations to be, there, then, you will have found your blow job voice.
Jacqueline Novak during her one-woman show Get On Your Knees.
Monique Carboni
Cast out the swirl of concerns on technique in favor of a simple notion: that putting your face near someone’s dick is already radically sexy. It’s generous. Not in terms of providing an orgasm, but in terms of being willing to have someone stare at your face so close to their dick. Your face is the center of your dignity, your most specifically you place. It’s the big front facing fingerprint, that which will remain, past death, in a gorgeous portrait on your grandchildren’s stairwell, in a newspaper clipping about your greatest achievement, in your loved one’s locket. The willingness to put that, your site of dignity, posterity, identity, the most recognizable part of yourself, right up near someone’s silly dick! That’s so cool.
And it’s not just cool because it’s your face, but also because it’s your mind. They say “giving head,” and I never liked the term, but there’s a metaphor there I can get into the spirit of. To bring a dick right up into your skull, into the realm of your beautiful brain, your seat of memories, curiosities, notions, and dreams…there’s a kindness there. To elevate the simple, pulsating penis by bringing it so close to your sparkly, neon, neural network, nothing but a roof a mouth between the two? It’s like inviting a dog into your special study, a library of your rarest books. You’re letting someone’s wet dog roll around in the site of your most glittering wonder.
Any intersection of your face, mind, mouth with someone’s dick? It’s outrageous, and it’s enough. So if someone says, “What in the hell kinda blow job was that?” You can say, “That? That was my head on a stick.”
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) has announced that she’s dropping out from the race for president, becoming the first woman in a diverse field to exit the crowded Democratic primary. As the New York Times reported, she decided to withdraw after she failed to qualify for the third Democratic debate.
The move is a blow to some women; Gillibrand was a vocal champion of the Me Too movement and has centered issues of sexual assault both in her Senate career and in this campaign.
In an official statement Gillibrand wrote, “Today, I am ending my campaign for president. I am so proud of this team and all we’ve accomplished. But I think it’s important to know how you can best serve. To our supporters: Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Now, let’s go beat Donald Trump and win back the Senate.”
She also spoke with New York Times. In the interview she shared that while she plans to endorse another candidate, she hasn’t picked a favorite. However, she did hint that she would like to see a woman clinch the nomination. “I think that women have a unique ability to bring people together and heal this country,” Gillibrand told the Times before adding, “I think a woman nominee would be inspiring and exciting.” Still, she was clear: “I will support whoever the nominee is, and I will do whatever it takes to beat Trump.”
Gillibrand first announced that she was running for president in January 2018 while appearing on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert. During the segment she said, “I’m going to run for president of the United States because as a young mom, I’m going to fight for other people’s kids as hard as I fight for my own.” And family remained at the center of her campaign. But she also faced criticism for being the first Democratic senator to ask then Senator Al Franken to step down after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct.
While she hasn’t made an official announcement on her post-campaign plans, Gillibrand also told the Times that she would, “absolutely consider anything that was asked of me, because my goal is to serve.”
As of now, ten of the Democratic candidates have qualified for the next debate, and three of them are women. Those female hopefuls include Senator Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.), Senator Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.).
Taylor Swift‘s been quite outspoken about the sexism she’s faced in the music industry. When she was promoting her 1989 album in 2014, she called out the double standard of being criticized for writing about her exes even though male artists like Ed Sheeran do the same thing. Earlier this month, she opened up about the treatment she received after her 2012 album Red topped the charts.
“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, ‘How cute that she’s having some hit songs,’” she told Vogue. “‘How cute that she’s writing songs.’ But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore.”
Now she’s doubling down on this message with a new song, “The Man” off her album Lover (which dropped today). In it, Swift muses about how her life and career might have panned out if she were a man.
“I would be complex. I would be cool,” Swift sings. “They’d say I played the field before I found someone to commit to. And that would be OK for me to do. Every conquest I had made would make me more of a boss to you.”
Swift isn’t the first pop singer to call out this troubling dichotomy. Everyone from Madonna to Nicki Minaj has drawn attention to the fact that women in music aren’t allowed to be strong without being branded “divas.” “When [Lil’] Wayne walks on the set, and says, ‘Don’t talk to me. Have my music ready,’ it’s cool. But every time I put my foot down and stand up for myself, it’s like, ‘We’ve heard about Nicki Minaj,'” Minaj said in 2012.
