There are two kinds of jeans that get people really riled up: low-rise jeans and high-waist jeans. There are plenty of other styles to choose from, but these are the real conversation starters—the ones that everyone has an opinion on (in the case of the low-rise and its potential comeback), and everyone definitely has a preference.
Over the past few years, shoppers have rediscovered the best high waisted jeans, which have shed their “mom” and “dad” reputation and have been embraced for their comfort and versatility. Like low-rise jeans, they’re nostalgic, but unlike them, they feel timeless, worn by everyone from Fran Lebowitz to Gigi Hadid. And just like with any good tried-and-true wardrobe staple, each person swears by one brand that makes the best. Even a quick poll around the Glamour office revealed the sheer variety of options available on the market. Ahead, we’ve rounded up their recommendations for the absolute best high waisted jeans.
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Saoirse Ronan being cast as Jo March in Greta Gerwig’s remake of Little Women is a stroke of brilliance, to be sure. But now Ronan is revealing just how much she shares in common with the Louisa May Alcott protagonist.
In a new joint cover story with Timothée Chalamet for Entertainment Weekly to promote the film, Ronan discussed her deep connection with Jo and revealed the interesting ways she channeled the headstrong heroine during rehearsals and filming. “Jo’s ethos is ‘Everything everyone else is doing, I’m going to do the opposite,’” she tells Entertainment Weekly. “[I had] to try things that I’d never tried before. Be a bit messier with a performance.” This included ignoring the specific instructions—“Don’t shake hands! Don’t gesticulate with your arms!”—from an etiquette instructor that Gerwig had set up for the cast.
“I felt like I had tapped into something I’d never gotten the opportunity to tap into before, or I just didn’t have the guts to tap into myself,” Ronan says. “Finding that was just amazing.”
Naturally, people are already counting down until the film’s release date on Christmas Day. Gerwig, who also worked with Ronan and Chalamet in Ladybird, wrote and directed the project. “The two of us, it’s a relationship I have with no other director,” Ronan says of Gerwig. “She makes me feel like I can try anything.”
Rounding out the cast are Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen as Jo’s sisters (Meg, Amy, and Beth, respectively).
But even with such a variety of interesting female roles available in the story, Ronan says she knew from the beginning that she was meant to be Jo. “When Louisa [May Alcott, the author] describes Jo, it felt like someone describing me physically,” she says. “Sort of gangly and stubborn and very straightforward, and went for what she wanted.”
Netflix’s Dead to Me and GLOW also focus on female friendships over a major will-they-or-won’t-they romance. There are relationships with men, sure, but they’re not at the center. Even Dead to Me’s James Marsden—who has a face created for the longing glances that define will-they-or-won’t-they couples—is mostly there to get in the way of Christina Applegate’s and Linda Cardellini’s characters. He’s simply an instrument used to create tension between the women.
Both Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Broad City came to an end this year without the culmination of a will-they-or-won’t-they couple finally getting together. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend especially seemed like it might end with a romantic climax—the show did begin with a woman moving across the country for her ex-boyfriend, after all—but Rebecca’s romantic pursuits were in truth a reflection of her mental health, and that was the note on which the show ended. Meanwhile, Broad City expertly subverted the trope throughout its run: First with Abbi’s flirtation with her neighbor, which culminated in a single night, and later through her relationship with her former coworker, which ends with a rejected marriage proposal.
The will-they-or-won’t-they trope isn’t totally dead, though—it’s just evolving. There’s no better example of this than Killing Eve. If the Big Little Lies formula is about female characters finding deeper intimacy among their friends than their romantic partners, Killing Eve takes that and turns it up 10 notches. The show’s central will-they-or-won’t-they couple is a pair of female friends. That is, if Eve and Villanelle are friends? Or are they in love with each other? Or both? Whatever the case, Sandra Oh’s Eve, a British intelligent investigator with amazing hair, and Jodie Comer’s Villanelle, an assassin with whom Eve becomes obsessed, are one of television’s steamiest couples, with the question being: Will they get together? And, Won’t they end up killing each other?
Name a sexier duo than Sandra Oh’s Eve and Jodie Comer’s Villanelle.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag also found a fresh way to execute the trope. In season two, Fleabag’s love interest is the Hot Priest. (Oh, his beautiful neck.) Of the two, the Hot Priest is the softer, more sensitive, vulnerable character. He essentially takes on the characteristics of how female characters are traditionally been written, as he shyly flirts with Fleabag, torn between his infatuation with her and his religious obligations. Fleabag, on the other hand, is the pursuant. The flipping of the traditional roles, which in turn flipped the power structure, made for a thoroughly engaging dynamic.
What books were on your high school English class syllabus? Maybe William Shakespeare’s historic plays like Romeo and Juliet and a A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Or perhaps you explored the great American classics of the lost generation like Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. While these are all essential reads, we chose to reimagine an ideal syllabus for young women all over the world in honor of International Day of the Girl. And we called upon some of our favorite writers and thinkers to help fill our list with the books that expanded their minds, taught them hard-won truths, and made them feel seen. Women like New York Times journalist Jodi Kantor, actress Josie Totah, and two of the 2020 presidential candidates.
Read on for the books that they’d love to see on the shelves of girls everywhere.
All products featured on Glamour are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
But aside from that, I think using products with petroleum in them, as my skin care regimen was probably not ideal. Although I’d love to bring back Indian Earth, which was my mother’s favorite product.
What’s one beauty rule you swear by?
If it’s good for the planet, it’s good for me.
What’s one beauty rule you think is B.S.?
The idea that you have to alter yourself to fit into someone else’s model of beauty. That is such B.S.! By the way, that boyfriend is going to break up with you in a year. And then you’ve changed a body part because he demanded it, and the next guy is going to be like, “Why did you do that? I loved those pictures of you from four years ago!” You never want to be the person who continues to alter themselves for the next lover, you know what I mean? Enough. You gotta learn to be happy with that.
Fill in the blank: “I love my hair…”
I love my hair after swimming in the ocean, for sure. It’s like, let it be where it’s supposed to be naturally. I just I love that. It feels so good to have salt water in it.
You travel constantly. What city or country gives you the greatest beauty inspiration?
Probably the greatest beauty inspiration is when I’m in a really moist climate in nature on a hike, and I feel fresh air and dew on my skin. I’m like, “Oh, I’m always meant to feel like this.”
You’re stranded on a desert island. What are the three products you bring with you?
I would have to be hydrated, so I would definitely bring my True Botanicals Radiance Oil and Hydrating Mist, for sure. And then I have a rose deodorant that’s natural. It smells good, and I think that might be a good call.
I think Tom Petty should be played as much as possible. Because then we still have him with us.
Your hair is gorgeous. What do you to keep it in such great shape?
You know, I thank you. I’ve tried—but not always succeeded—in not overprocessing it over many years as an actor. When I do, it suffers. So I try to treat my hair as naturally as we’re talking about with skin care.
What’s your favorite way to take a moment for yourself?
For the past several weeks, whenever anyone—friends, parents, my therapist, in-laws—asks me which topics I’m working on these days at Glamour, I’ve taken a deep breath, looked them in the eye, and said: female pleasure.
There’s been a lot of awkward silences.
We’re more sex positive than ever as a culture. But we still haven’t erased some fundamental truths: women’s bodies are still policed, sex education is still lacking, and talking about sex still carries a stigma. “We have never, ever, in the entire history of the world, been enabled to bring the female lens to bear on sexuality, and the world is a poorer place for it,” says Cindy Gallop, founder of Make Love Not Porn.
“Female pleasure really is considered less of a priority,” says Jennifer Wider, M.D., women’s health expert and partner of sexual wellness brand K-Y. (The first systematic mapping of pleasure in the female brain didn’t occur until 2011—decades behind the scientific study of men’s sexual pleasure.) Cue the countless headlines about the orgasm gap—a term which sums up the chasm several studies have found between the number of orgasms women and men in heterosexual relationships have. But the gap goes beyond the bedroom. Even in an era where porn stars make political headlines, female pleasure is conspicuously absent from the conversation. Even in places where sexual wellness should be right on the top of the list of discussion topics. “When we go to the gynecologist, we’re asked, ‘Are you sexually active? Do you want birth control? And do you want to be tested for STDs?’ says Cindy Eckert, CEO of Sprout Pharmaceuticals and the woman behind female sexual desire drug Addyi. Rarely does whether or not you actually enjoy your sex life ever come up.
The stigmas surrounding women and sex—and especially good sex—run deep. So deep that the very idea of what it means to have good sex is murky, filtered by unrealistic portrayals of women on screen who who often orgasm seductively after five seconds of penetration.
The real definition of good sex is simpler, and so much more complex all at the same time. “Good sex is sex that makes you feel great,” says Gallop. “I don’t mean as in ‘Oh, you just had a phenomenal orgasm and you feel great about that.’ What I mean is literally how comfortable you feel in your sexual skin. I’m talking about feeling at one with yourself as a sexual being, feeling perfectly at ease with how you express yourself sexually, feeling accepted in every possible respect, and therefore feeling really great about sex and all its manifestations.”
Good sex, in other words, is sex that makes you feel like Beyoncé. “There is no objective, outside measure of that at all,” Gallop says. “There is no formula. There is no rule book.”
This is not about about ways to get your partner to better satisfy you in bed (though women’s magazines, including Glamour, have certainly filled the internet with countless articles on that). This is about women owning their own pleasure—partner or no partner. It’s about putting an end to the taboo that makes talking about something as intimate as your pubic hair grooming practices fair game over drinks with your friends, but talking about your favorite masturbation techniques feel cringey.
The pleasure gap and leaves women with a literal deficit. “I can’t tell you how many women I’ve seen over the years—brilliant women, successful women, women who have achieved anything and everything—who are bankrupt in their relationship to themselves and their bodies,” says Nan Wise, Ph.D., a certified sex therapist, cognitive neuroscientist who studies pleasure in the female brain, and author of the aptly named book Why Good Sex Matters. “Good sex is about enjoying the experience. Good sex is about a pleasurable connection with yourself.”
The Power of Good Sex
The ripple effects of that are powerful—like self-care on steroids. “I think as we become educated consumers of our own bodies, we become better citizens: more connected, more powerful, more empowered,” says Wise. “Who we are sexually is an absolute fundamental driver of everything to do with how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about other people, our relationships, our life, our happiness,” echoes Gallop.
