And it’s not what you might have thought.

The royal wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry feels like a lifetime ago – particularly now that the pair have relocated to the US after stepping down as senior royals two years after the big day – but one big beauty question has remained since that day which we’d never had a clear answer on: What nail polish colour was Meghan wearing? Many speculated it was Essie’s Ballet Slippers (the colour favoured by The Queen), which seemed like a pretty good guess, but it turns out it was a custom shade.

In a new report by British Vogue, the site revealed that Meghan visited London’s DryBar ahead of her big day for her CND shellac manicure and that the end result was a mix of two shades. The Duchess opted for one coat of Unmasked (a baby pink hue) as the base layer, followed by two coats of Negligee (a very sheer, pale white-pink) on top. For her pedicure, she chose Cashmere Wrap (a soft neutral).

Markle played by the rules for her wedding day mani by opting for a light, neutral colour. On previous occasions, she broke the unofficial palace nail protocol by wearing darker hues on her fingers. But let’s face it, she wears both very well.

Whether you opt to replicate the look during your next at-home manicure, or visit to a salon as the country slowly begins to reopen, we think this is the perfect wear-with-everything hue for summer – and we suspect we’ll be seeing it everywhere now that the news is finally out.

And the new juice is about being truly and unapologetically you.

Marc Jacobs has many tattoos—some fun and whimsical and others that hold a deeper meaning. At least two are also inspo for his work: “Shameless,” tattooed on his chest, is the name of the Marc Jacobs Beauty foundation line (launched in 2018), and “Perfect,” which is inked on the inside of his wrist, is the jumping-off point for his latest fragrance.

But Jacobs’s new scent isn’t about striving for perfection. When he first got the tattoo, it was to serve as a bulwark against negative thoughts and insecurities like “I could be stronger in this way or better at that thing,” he explains in the press release for the fragrance. “I can just say ‘No, I’m exactly how I need to be right now.’ So…perfect.”

The campaign boasts a cast of 42 people selected via social media for a series of portraits celebrating individuality. One of those faces is none other than Lila Moss, the 17-year-old daughter of supermodel Kate Moss, who made an entire career out of what some have called her “imperfect beauty.” The OG Moss has been a muse and BFF to Jacobs for almost three decades, starting with the first show he cast her in—the infamous Perry Ellis Spring 1993 grunge collection—which roundly offended fashion sensibilities and got Jacobs fired but proved to be ahead of its time.

The young Moss’s first modelling gig was in 2018 as the face of Marc Jacobs Beauty. “It felt a bit like an intersection of my personal and professional life coming full circle as we gathered in the studio,” Jacobs wrote on Instagram. When asked about what “perfect” means to her, Lila said: “It’s about having the confidence to be yourself and knowing that you’re perfect as you are. There’s definitely not one thing that makes you perfect; it’s a combination of all of your great qualities.”

Perfumer Domitille Michalon Bertier set out to create a scent that would live up to its name. Described as an addictive floral, the fragrance features the daffodil, which was a deliberate choice. “The idea was to find a flower that is not perfect,” she explains. Unlike the elegant and hardy rose, the springtime bloom is a wildflower that is fragile and cannot be cultivated. When used in perfumery, the scent needs to be quickly extracted before it fades away. Michalon Bertier also used rhubarb—“that is also not an easy smell or taste for people because it’s very acidulous”—to add a crispy top note and paired it with almond milk, cedarwood and cashmeran for a creamy, musky finish.

Jacobs was involved in every aspect of the scent’s development and was determined to perfect the details on the bottle cap, which include a cherry, a star and dice—all recurring motifs in his designs. The end of the project happened to coincide with the designer’s wedding. Last April, Jacobs tied the knot with his longtime partner, Char Defrancesco, in New York City. It’s only fitting that Kate Moss and her daughter were in attendance to celebrate another major milestone in his life.

Perfect by Marc Jacobs is available now for $145 for 100ml or $115 for 50ml. Click here to get yours. 

We’re bored in the house and in the house bored, but that doesn’t mean we can’t dress up. Take it from Wan-Ji Chang, 83, and Sho-Er Hsu, 84, owners of the Wansho Laundry in Taiwan.

The octogenarian couple went viral on Instagram for their quarantine ‘fits and expert modeling, bringing a much-needed bright spot to our timelines. In just over a month, the pair have gained 622K followers and counting on their page Want Show As Young, where you can find them posing in bucket hats, oversized suits, and sunglasses.

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Over the decades, Wan-Ji and Sho-Er have collected hundreds of pieces of clothing that have been forgotten by customers. The couple’s 31-year-old grandson Reef Chang noticed his grandparents becoming aimless and sad during self-isolation, so one day, he decided to recycle the clothes for their amusement.

“I hope that through the [Instagram account] I can let everyone know that they must remember to pick up the clothes,” Chang told ELLE.com. “Besides, seeing the life of my grandparents [in quarantine] is very boring. I hope to give them some change and fun.”

Reef Chang

Chang, who has been working at Wansho since he was a child, is responsible for styling, directing, and shooting his grandparents. After 61 years of marriage, Wan-Ji and Sho-Er are embracing their newfound fame together.

“They are very happy [with the success],” Chang adds. “[Followers] encourage them and praise them as if [they have] many more grandchildren in the world. They also feel that they have done a good thing, [to remind] elderly people not to limit themselves.”

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Reef Chang

As for the business, Chang and his grandparents hope to find new homes for the clothes to promote “sustainable fashion” and “environmental protection of the earth.” But not all the clothes will be given away… “At present, two guests remembered the clothes they forgot to take because they saw the news,” Chang reveals. With the growing popularity of Want Show As Young, there’s sure to be more customers remembering their laundry.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

Indigenous creative Sage Paul is one of several Canada-based creatives who are involved in the new showcase.

Nearly one hundred years ago, the first Santa Fe Indian Market took place in New Mexico. And this month, the Market–which is sponsored by the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA)–has taken an enhanced online approach to highlighting the work of Indigenous talent across North America.

“The virtual platform has been a new experience, and an interesting one,” says fashion show producer, Amber-Dawn Bear Robe. “I’m excited to see the final projects.” Bear Robe has been busy coordinating a selection of digital presentations for the Market’s month-long online presence that includes six days of designer spotlights featuring former Project Runway participant Patricia Michaels of the Taos Pueblo community, as well as Montreal-based Mohawk brand Skawennati, Coast Salish Territory/Puyallup designer Korina Emmerich, Dene jewellery designer Catherine Blackburn of Saskatchewan, Anishinaabe/Ojibwe beadwork and textile artist Delina White, and Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto founder and fashion artist Sage Paul, who is from the English River First Nation.

A final intimate fashion show and designer Q&A will be streamed on August 16^th, and centres around a new capsule collection by Orlando Dugi. “He does really intricate beading,” says Bear Robe of Dugi’s complex designs, noting that he even ground up beetles to create the Cochineal Red hue that’s so important to Dugi’s Navajo culture. “He puts a lot of time and effort into his clothing,” she adds.

Attention to craft is prevalent in the work of all the creatives featured in SWAIA’s programming, and Paul expresses excitement at the potential for her to give a global audience a peek at her practice. “I don’t do commercial work, it’s more custom,” she says of her creations. “[And] I don’t always take these kinds of opportunities because my goal isn’t to sell clothing–I like to present it,” she adds, addressing how her digital presentation will give consumers an augmented sense of the labour involved in her artistic process. “Showing [an audience] the process of designing, drafting and building a piece–not many people get to see that,” she says.

Paul also says that being involved in the virtual Market allows her to be part of a larger community of Indigenous figures whose voices are gaining more traction thanks to the reach of social media and other online platforms. “The Market has been around forever, and it’s such an honour to be a part of it,” she says. “It’s such an incredible opportunity to show how fashion can be created here in North America.”

But Bear Robe’s sights are set on promoting more than the talent based on this continent as the Market continues on. “This is going to be the start,” she says of this inaugural foray into the virtual space. “I really want to build this into something larger and I have the support of the new director, Kim Peone, in this vision.” In addition to keeping the Market running year-round online, Bear Robe is focused on incorporating Indigenous perspectives from around the world in future projects, including designers from New Zealand who have been on her radar for a while.

This attention to broadening the scope of who participates in the Market speaks to a larger goal of those like Bear Robe and Paul, who have built careers in advocating for the support of Indigenous creatives who exemplify a rich range of practices that draw from traditional and contemporary influences. “Indigenous designers are following their own creative vision that may be grounded in their culture, but it’s not adhering to an expectation of what ‘Indian dress’ should look like,” Bear Robe says.

The Market’s platform facilitates the opportunity for consumers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to gain insight into the diversity within communities who have for many years been “grouped into a pan-Indigenous context”, as Bear Robe notes. “I’m from Canada, and you never really hear much about SWAIA Market there,” she says. “But down here, it’s everything for Indigenous artists and designers. But it’s the same thing in the States–we don’t hear about Indigenous designers from Canada. There’s a disconnect, and I wonder why because it’s North America–we’re all from the same land. Before there were borders, Indigenous people were always moving and trading and exchanging ideas.”

Style Points is a new weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.

In the early evenings, Esther Povitsky heads outside to begin her meditation. This being Los Angeles, you might think that involves crystals or ashwaganda, but, she says, “‘Sit down, hold your back up, close your eyes and think about nothing’—that’s not on the table for me.” The comedian, actress and podcaster prefers to keep her hands busy with her contemplative new hobby: tie-dyeing. In fact, she loves it so much, she recently started an all-tie-dyed line of “24-hour basement wear,” Sleepover by Esther, that channels what her fiancé calls her “celebrity at the airport” signature style. (Or, as she captioned one Instagram photo of her full tie-dye look: “I dress like a person who hasn’t woken up before noon since the McDonald’s breakfast menu became available all day.”)

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Tie-dye has been trending in fashion circles for years at this point—from Kwaidan Editions’ cult-hit spiral T-shirt in 2017 to the fetishization of Grateful Dead shirts by streetwear-loving tastemakers from Jonah Hill to Quavo. Rihanna went viral late last year in a one-off tie-dye dress by the brand Asai, whose popularity remained at such a high that the designer recently put it into production, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to charities that support Black Lives Matter.

Still, it’s arguably reached its mass inflection point in quarantine. In the early days of the lockdown, the tie-dye sweatsuit became the official uniform for everyone from antsy celebrities stuck at home to hype-house teens. Hailey Bieber sported a rainbow set by her husband’s line Drew; Jordyn Woods wore a green version. The style equivalent of a shruggie emoji, it was casual, cheery, and youthful all at once.

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

As comforting as the process of making tie-dye is for Povitsky, it’s even more comforting to wear. “I’m soothed by the youthfulness” of the motif, she says. It also evokes the sunny idealism of its sixties heyday. Naomi Fry, a staff writer at The New Yorker who has written about the tie dye-centric early days of the brand Online Ceramics, thinks the phenomenon is built on “reaching back to the past as a kind of comforting thing…There’s a nostalgic element there; there’s a yearning for simplicity, for innocence. Whether it’s imagined or not is another issue.” Writer Jonah Weiner, who co-founded the fashion newsletter Blackbird Spyplane, notes that the clothing evokes “music festivals, jam-band tours, and other posi-vibed mass gatherings, all of which COVID made impossible and which we’re feeling especially nostalgic for as a result.”

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Personally, I associate this particular expression of tie-dye so much with this point in time that I wondered if, to slip into programming language, it was a feature or a bug of contemporary fashion. When we look back on 2020, will it resemble, in hindsight, a sea of tie-dye in the same way that 2010 felt synonymous with digital prints? Will we still want to wear it after the ever-anticipated moment when “all this ends?”

But just when I thought I was out, tie-dye pulled me back in. A look through the resort shows led me to the conclusion that it isn’t going anywhere—it’s simply mutating. Dior, Chanel, and Gabriela Hearst were among a clutch of designers showing tie-dye for the season, but their takes felt more subdued: at Dior, it showed up on the collar of a jacket or at the hemline of a skirt, while Hearst opted for overall prints in subdued, autumnal colors.

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

For Fry, the print’s presence on the runway “brings it to a different realm. It’s taking something that was associated with a particular look and moving it a register.” At this point, tie-dye “almost becomes a neutral,” she says. Like khakis, jeans, or a white T-shirt, it has become “part of the American fashion vernacular that’s not wholly identified with any one label or with any one movement,” she says. “[It] can be incorporated into a person’s look in a way that doesn’t have associations that completely kill it.”

While she’s not a fan of the mass-produced iteration of the trend, Fry has a soft spot for tie-dye that feels authentic, like a homemade T-shirt she found on the street in Park Slope. “It was clearly handmade, that someone had made at camp,” she says. “When it feels more singular, or it’s less identifiable and feels a little bit more personal, I feel like that sort of thing is still quote-unquote OK to wear, and will probably continue to live on, as something relevant and not copycat-y.” Weiner’s preferred type of tie-dye is “something that a human hand made, full of idiosyncrasies and imperfections.” Along those lines, he says, “tie-dyed clothes might speak subliminally to the isolation that people are feeling right now—not to mention the vogue for making things at home, whether it’s a shirt or a loaf of bread.” And indeed, at-home tie-dye is booming: Kacey Musgraves’s merch store now features a $99 “self-care kit” that includes a DIY tie-dye kit.

Certainly, diehard aficionados, the kind Fry calls “total trainspotters [who] can tell things I can’t, like ‘This shirt is from this tour from 1982’’” aren’t letting go of their spiral-dyed Grateful Dead grails anytime soon. “It’s important to distinguish between different audiences when we think about this,” Weiner says. “There are Dead fans who looked great wearing tie-dye 10 years ago and who’ll look great wearing it ten years from now, regardless of what people in the fashion world think. And at another extreme there’s a super mass audience that will buy junky industrially printed tie-dye now because it’s in ads on their Facebook feeds.” What he finds striking is that the two are, for now, coexisting: “Even though the mainstream has fully hopped onto the trend, that hasn’t killed its appeal yet for fashion-minded people who fell in love with, like, tie-dyed Kapital pants a few years ago.”

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Blackbird Spyplane published a recent edition addressing the tightrope walk between coolness and lameness that is wearing tie-dye in 2020. Under-the-radar labels like Ni En More and Tezomeya were among their recommendations, and keeping the color palette subtle is crucial. “We personally have an interest in looking ‘under the radar,’ so yeah, at this point when it comes to tie-dye we’re most interested in natural- and veggie-dye techniques, where the colors are striking and subtle and age in beautiful ways, and which connect to culture-spanning, centuries-old techniques that are trend-proof,” Weiner says. “Also industrial dyes are a huge pollutant, whereas using pomegranate skins to get a shade of yellow doesn’t have the same ecological impact. And we’ve been looking at designs that deviate from the more-familiar spiral patterns, like big color-blocks or super intricate shibori where you can’t believe the piece was hand-dyed.”

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

In fact, the demand for Povitsky’s hand-dyed work has been so great that she’s planning to expand beyond just producing it herself. Like the ultimate comfort food, macaroni and cheese, tie-dye seems to have staying power, whether it’s the artisanal version or the from-a-box classic. For her, tie dye “is always in the conversation,” she says. “It’s just [a question of] how are you using it?”

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

Introducing the ‘M(ask) Me’ initiative.

Two Canadian womenswear brands – NONIE and SOPHIEGRACE – have teamed up on a new collection of face masks with an incredibly important message. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, domestic violence rates continue to rise across the country so designers Emma May and Nina Kharey have designed the ‘M(ask) Me’ collection to offer discreet support for abuse victims during this time.

“COVID-19 has had a significant impact on women across this country, and as stresses mount for so many, those facing violence at home are even more trapped,” May said in a release. “I am proud to collaborate with [Kharey] to provide our communities with high quality, Canadian-made, reusable masks while raising money for organizations that help victims of domestic violence and create programs to change patterns that lead to the destruction of too many families.” Kharey adds, “The initiative with Emma is a way for us to help those in need, those who may not know where to go for help and those whose lives may be in danger, by making a simple identifying mask as a symbol of hope and support.”

Each of the masks features a ‘M(ask) Me’ logo on the side, which indicates that the person wearing the mask can provide information about local resources and help in reaching out to them. Plus, $10 from the sale of every mask will be donated to various organizations providing support to victims at this time, including the YWCA Calgary.

Speaking of the initiative, Jan Damery, the vice president of external relations and engagement at YWCA Calgary, said, “The pandemic has created new challenges and restrictions in all our lives. Many women experiencing abuse now see their options as even more limited than before. Creating opportunities to talk about abuse helps remove the secrecy in which it thrives.”

The masks are now available for purchase on SophieGrace.ca and HouseofNonie.com for $30 each. They are made with 100 per cotton, have an internal filter sleeve and come in a medium size which fits most. For more information on the initiative, click here.