Her story is familiar for many women, who are increasingly using sperm donors to build families, with or without partners. Perusing profiles on sperm donor websites is “like being on Match.com, but in reverse,” said Cari Rincker, who was 37 when she went through a breakup and decided she was ready to find a sperm donor to use with her frozen eggs.

Users can search for donors by education level, hair color, race, and height, all while looking at pictures of donors as babies or kids. But it’s not all fun and games. Picking a sperm donor can be an emotional process, Rincker explains, because it doesn’t necessarily line up with the fairytale that many women dream of.

And how do you know what to look for, anyway? Some women confess to being hyper focused on height, while others are dead set on finding someone with a master’s degree. But what actually matters, and how do you know when you’ve found The One? I spoke to women who went through the sperm donor selection process about how it works and what they learned along the way.

How do you start the process?

Going to a fertility clinic is the first step in the process, and while picking a doctor you’re comfortable with is important, you don’t need to worry too much when it comes to landing on a sperm bank. Most sperm banks are FDA compliant, and there isn’t really a risk involved in choosing any one of them, Dr. Zaher Merhi, medical director at Rejuvenating Fertility Center in New York City, said.

Fertility doctors will walk you through all of your options when it comes to getting pregnant, and oftentimes, they’ll even guide you in the direction of a specific sperm bank. After speaking to a fertility specialist, Seltzer signed up for an account on the California Cryobank website, one of the most popular options.

The sign-up process is simple. First, you pick a cryobank website that feels like a good fit for you. With a simple Google search, you’ll come across a wide range of options, and as Dr. Merhi said, you really can’t go wrong. It’s important to note that you don’t have to live in the area where the cryobank is based in order to qualify for receiving donor sperm. For example, you don’t have to live in California to use the California Cryobank.

Once you pick a sperm bank that feels like a good fit for you, you create an account on that website. You can pay for à la carte options as you look through the donor profiles, depending on the information you want access to. On California Cryobank, a popular sperm donor website, for example, users can look at donor profiles, medical histories, personal essays from the donors, and staff impressions of the donors for free, but additional features come at an added cost. For a bundle that includes extended profiles, childhood photos, and the “Express Yourself” feature, where donors are encouraged to describe who they are, you have to dish out $145, but doing so gives you access to the extended profiles, etc. for all the donors you search through. You can also add features to your experience. A handwriting analysis, for example, will cost you an additional $25.

Buying sperm is a lot like buying anything else you’d purchase online. “You basically add them to your cart—the way you would anything at Amazon,” said Holly Meloy, a managing partner at a design firm, who decided to pursue motherhood on her own at age 37. For most sperm bank websites – including California Cryobank and the Fairfax Cryobank, the sperm can cost anywhere from $500 to $1,300, depending on specific factors like whether or not the donor wants to be contacted.

Are all donors anonymous?

For many women, picking an anonymous donor is important. Seltzer specifically looked for a donor who chose to be anonymous, and she wanted it to be as private as possible. “A donor is someone that chooses to help others, and that’s all it is,” she said. “It’s not family,” she added. “It’s strictly to help those that need sperm donors.”

But sperm can come from both anonymous donors and open donors—those who consented to at least one form of agreed-upon communication from their offspring when they turn 18. And there isn’t necessarily a price difference; both options cost $1,045 at California Cryobank, for example. But for ID donors—those who allow the future child to request the donor’s identifying information when they turn 18—the sperm costs $1,245.

What’s the difference between IUI, IVF, and ICI?

Sperm donor material is used to conceive a baby if there isn’t viable sperm available. After the sperm is purchased on a cryobank website, it is sent to the hospital or clinic where the insemination process eventually takes place.

There are three processes you can pursue once you acquire the donor sperm: intrauterine insemination (IUI), in vitro fertilization (IVF), or intracervical insemination (ICI).

During IUI, the doctor places sperm directly into the uterus with a small catheter. This process aims to improve the chances of getting pregnant by increasing the number of healthy sperm that ultimately reach the fallopian tubes when the woman who is trying to get pregnant is most fertile.

With in vitro fertilization IVF, the patient undergoes a range of procedures. Mature eggs are collected from the woman’s ovaries and fertilized—by donor sperm, in this case—in a lab. The fertilized eggs are then transferred to the woman’s uterus. Ultimately, one full cycle of IVF can take about three weeks, and sometimes the different steps of the process are split up, which can drag things out longer.

In the ICI process, the doctor uses a syringe to place the donor sperm directly inside of the woman’s cervix.

What do you need to do before picking a donor?

Doing your homework is important, of course, and genetic testing is a big part of that. The first step is to go to your doctor and get a genetic carrier screening. The test, which is typically a blood or saliva test, checks for recessive genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis, tay-sachs, and thalassemias.

It’s also important to check your Cytomegalovirus (CMV) status, a herpes virus that becomes latent after a primary infection, but can reactivate at a later time and shed virus. Before purchasing donor sperm, a patient should make an appointment with a physician first to discuss this part of the process, said Dr. Kimberly Thronton, an OB-GYN and reproductive endocrinologist at Reproductive Medicine Associates of New York. In these cases, the physician typically routinely orders the CMV test, which is separate from the infectious disease test. “A patient could ask for this separately, but their physician should routinely order it if they know they are planning to use donor sperm,” she said. If not, as a patient, you can specifically ask for it.

If you’re CMV negative, it’s best to pick a CMV negative donor; if you’re CMV positive, you can pick either a negative or a positive donor. If you are CMV positive, you have already had a prior infection and have antibodies, Dr. Thornton pointed out. This means you are not at risk for acquiring CMV through sperm. About one in every 200 babies is born with congenital CMV, according to the CDC. Most people who have been infected don’t have symptoms, and that’s why it’s important to get tested.

“Typically the doctor’s office will just check and verify paperwork given by the sperm bank to make sure there are no medical issues or concerns regarding the selected donor,” said Dr. Thronton. Once everything checks out, the sperm banks typically ship the sperm directly to the doctor’s office in storage tanks.

Most women have personal preferences when it comes to things like education level, hair color, eye color, race, and height, but CMV status and genetic screenings should be prioritized first and foremost, according to experts. After that, “the non-medical fun party kicks in, and they can apply those preferences,” Dr. Thornton added.

How do you know the sperm is safe?

Doctors evaluate the donor’s genetic screening and CMV results and perform vigorous infectious disease testing, testing for diseases like HIV, hepatitis B, Zika, and West Nile Virus. Donor sperm has to be frozen and quarantined for three to six months to ensure that the donor does not have infectious diseases that could be transmitted through insemination, Dr. Thornton said. This process legally protects both the donor and the intended parent.

Fertility centers will also check to make sure the sperm donor has adequate sperm on a semen analysis. This test also determines if the donor is fertile, if the woman is working with a donor she knows. If you’re purchasing from an anonymous donor, however, the sperm bank checks the donor’s fertility in advance.

How do you narrow down the list of potential donors?

Narrowing down the list of potential donors comes easy for some women, but for most, the number of options and factors to consider can be overwhelming. It’s also important to have backups. “I’ve seen women get their hearts set on a donor and they’re so into it, and then the sperm is not available, and they’re devastated,” acupuncturist and fertility expert Aimee Raupp said. “There’s this real connection that can get formed.”

One of Raupp’s clients had a child with donor sperm and wanted to use the same donor to have a second child, but the donor didn’t have any other samples available. To avoid this, you can inquire about how much sperm you would need at the outset for getting pregnant and growing your family. “Ultimately, it was a lack of education, resources, and support that led to this problem,” Raupp pointed out. Women should make sure there are multiple samples available from the same donor if they’re interested in using the same person’s sperm to have another child in the future. You can buy several samples at once and save them for future use.

Evaluating the compatibility of the donor’s stats and sample—and having more than one option—is important. Once Seltzer narrowed down her decision to two donors, she printed out all of their information and shared it with her family and a couple of close friends. She was looking for someone who was tall and athletic, with dark hair and brown eyes, but above all, she wanted a donor who was highly educated. Her family and friends looked at the profiles and gave her feedback that helped her make her final decision. Before selecting him, Seltzer got to hear an interview between the donor and one of the employees at the sperm bank. “I loved his voice,” she said, adding that he sounded like someone she would love. “It was a perfect match.”

Meloy was also very methodical about her sperm donor search and final selection, creating a detailed spreadsheet that she shared with her close friends and family. She ruled out donors who had a family history of alcoholism and focused on health history, education and head size—yes, you read that correctly—as her priorities. With this in mind, her loved ones used a carefully curated checklist to narrow down the list of sperm donors.

How did the recent SCOTUS ruling impact sperm donation?

The climate surrounding terminating pregnancies shifted dramatically this year. Dobbs v. Jackson, a landmark SCOTUS decision in which the court held that the US Constitution does not grant women the right to an abortion, has “limited the treatment options many physicians are able to offer their patients,” Dr. Thornton said. In some states, women are being forced to carry pregnancies to term only to watch their child die after birth.

“In the fertility realm, there is a lot of concern how the overturn of Roe will impact patients utilizing IVF for both infertility and fertility preservation such as egg and embryo freezing,” Dr. Thornton said. Some states have been attempting to enact personhood laws that consider every embryo a legal person. This means embryos created via IVF could be at risk. Ultimately, personhood laws have the ability to limit or ban access to IVF. They also lower success rates and drive up the costs of IVF.

Is the process stressful?

The process is definitely stressful and filled with so many decisions and factors, but the women I spoke to said every moment of stress was worth it.

For Seltzer, picking a donor was stressful and anxiety-inducing, but after she landed on her final pick, she felt excited and confident in her selection. Her son Aiden is three years old now. “He makes my days bright and my life much more fulfilled and happier,” she said, adding that she’s become more joyful and stronger after having him.

Rincker felt excited about the process at first, but ultimately, it wasn’t an easy journey. “The period of my life trying to become pregnant was an emotional roller coaster,” she said. Now she puts her son, who is almost a year-and-a-half now, to sleep every night and is reminded of the love he adds to her life. “In some ways, my family is nothing that I would have dreamed for myself,” she said. “But in other ways, I have more than I ever could have hoped for.”

Meloy also said the process was “very stressful,” and she cried after buying donor sperm for the first time. “I had suddenly made this massive decision on behalf of my unborn child,” she recalled. She remembers asking herself if she made the right choice. She wondered, “Will my future child be okay? How much of growing up is nature versus nurture?” But now, her daughter—who she gave birth to thanks to a sperm donor—is almost seven years old. “Every year on her birthday, I say a solid thank you to the man who we will never know, but who gave me the greatest gift anyone could ever give me.”

The post Everything You’ve Ever Wondered About Choosing a Sperm Donor appeared first on Chronicle Fashion.

The camerawoman to whom Hosk is referring is Carson Meyer, a highly sought-after doula in Los Angeles, who also happens to moonlight as a photographer when she attends births. At just 28, Meyer has become a visible advocate for natural births, and is so beloved among a certain Hollywood contingent that models and actresses like Hosk, Mandy Moore, and Gigi Hadid have entrusted her to help shepherd them through the grueling and seemingly mystical experience. Meyer works with many women who imagine hospital birth as an impersonal medical ordeal, and want an experience that they think they will have more control over. Doulas are considered non-medical support and can be certified after just three to five days of training (though certification is not required), but they can be an important ally for clients. Meyer, for her part, counsels pregnant women on prenatal and postpartum nutrition; educates them on the various stages of pregnancy and labor; and prepares them for the sometimes-destabilizing three months postpartum. She also helps connect them to her many contacts in midwifery and obstetrics. And she does so while framing the birth experience not as a hellish vortex, but as a transformative undertaking. When she attends births—whether at home or in the hospital—she serves as a kind of maternal support blanket and air traffic controller.

People tend to light up when her name is mentioned. “She’s such an old soul, and so empowering as a person,” Hosk says. The birth photography is just a bonus. Spending time with Meyer, it’s easy to understand why she’s earned the trust of so many A-list clients. I first meet her early one evening in April at a farm-to-table restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina, where she moved recently with her boyfriend, the musician Johnathan Rice. In a flowy, boho-chic dress with a chunky cardigan draped over her elbows, she radiates calm, intimacy, and a gentle confidence that makes you feel as if nothing could ever go wrong in her presence. She’s 10 weeks pregnant with her first child, but you get the sense she’s always glowing like this, no matter what state she’s in. She neither sensationalizes nor sugarcoats anything related to childbirth. “I try to help women really understand what the process is,” she tells me. “I think we’re raised to think that [birth] is a broken thing that you need to be saved from. But the more you know about how the process unfolds, the more trust there can be in the process.”

Because she began working as a doula at age 22 with no children of her own, Meyer has had to grapple with her own lack of personal experience in the birthing department. At first, she was insecure about it. “What am I doing here?” she remembers thinking. But then she began to realize that her childlessness could prove useful. She likes to tell her clients, “I could have a hundred kids, but no two births are ever alike. It doesn’t matter how many times I give birth; it will never be yours.” Even after she gives birth herself and joins the ranks of her birthing clients (she plans on having a home birth and will use a doula), she’ll reiterate the same sentiment: “I’m not going to project my experience onto you,” she says.

For Hosk, the experience was serendipitous. She got pregnant in the middle of 2020. Lockdown had allowed her to connect more intensely with her body during pregnancy, and she didn’t love the hurried nature of hospital appointments. She and her boyfriend watched The Business of Being Born, a hugely influential 2008 documentary about the history of birthing practices in America, and began to discuss the possibility of a home birth. She was seven months pregnant when they made the decision to give birth at home and to hire a doula.

One day while browsing through clothes in a store, they started talking about how to proceed. “The guy who worked at the store was like, ‘I know a doula!’ Her name is Carson,” Hosk remembers. “We called her, and found out that we had a lot of friends in common. I instantly felt comfortable with her, so we just hired her on the spot.” Hosk’s pregnancy was classified as low-risk, but the birth itself was “psychedelically intense”—she went through two and a half days of contractions, and it took two hours of pushing just to get the nine-pound infant’s head out. But Hosk still says she’ll never consider anything but a home birth in the future. “I felt so lucky that I got to have this other experience, and to think of my birth as this beautiful thing that made me stronger instead of taking my power away from me,” she says.

Prior to 2020, just a fraction of the pregnant women Meyer worked with were comfortable with the home birth route, instead preferring to have her beside them in the security of a hospital. In March of that year, though, attitudes changed rapidly. Pandemic shutdowns took effect, and suddenly pregnant women’s birthing plans were upended. “Overnight it was like, ‘Oh, your doula can’t be there. And oh, your partner can’t be there, either,’” Meyer recalls. “So now you’re going in completely solo.” Now the fear usually surrounding the home birth—fear of the unknown—had transferred to the hospital setting, where the threat of severe illness from a novel virus lurked. “It was a huge shift in the direction of home birth,” Meyer says. “If you ask a midwife, they had to shut off their phones because they were getting calls all day long: ‘I want a home birth!’” The demand had shifted so much that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released an official statement in April of 2020 gently nudging women away from home births, citing a more than twofold increased risk of perinatal death. “Data has long demonstrated that hospitals and accredited birth centers are the safest places to give birth,” the statement read.

During this period, the number of births Meyer attended on a monthly basis rose from three to seven. By the end of 2021, anecdotal accounts from individual midwives and doulas became hard data: A CDC report showed that home births in the United States had increased 22 percent from 2019 to 2020, the highest level since 1990. Of course, America’s new home birth rate of 1.26 percent was nothing compared to that of countries like the Netherlands, where about a fifth of all births take place in the home. And plenty of women, Meyer says, explored the option of home birth during the pandemic before ultimately deciding to stick with the hospital. But still, 45,464 women that year decided to do what, to many, is unthinkable: fill up a pool of water on their living room floor and bring life into the world in the same space where they eat and sleep.

Meyer counsels pregnant women on prenatal and postpartum nutrition, educates them on the various stages of pregnancy and labor, and prepares them for the sometimes-destabilizing three months postpartum.

Among those clients was Hadid. The supermodel revealed her pregnancy in spring 2020, and gave birth to daughter Khai that fall at her family’s farm in rural Pennsylvania. Hadid had initially planned to deliver at a hospital in New York, but when COVID protocols threatened to alter her birthing plans, she started to consider other options. She’d hired Meyer, who attended her high school, as her doula. “What I really wanted from my experience was to feel like, ‘Okay, this is a natural thing that women are meant to do,’” she told Vogue. Meyer attended the birth over Zoom, and Hadid’s then partner, the pop star Zayn Malik, even “caught” the baby, generating a tidal wave of headlines about every minute detail. (“Gigi Hadid’s Doula Zoomed In for Her Birth,” read one.) Hadid, with her 75 million-odd Instagram followers, had given home birth its biggest platform ever.

Meyer first became interested in birth work when, as a young actress and student at NYU, she watched The Business of Being Born, the same documentary that inspired Hosk’s home birth. Together, the filmmakers—former talk show host Ricki Lake and director Abby Epstein—take viewers through their own childbirth journeys. The documentary narrates the history of hospital births and obstetrics, portraying medicalized deliveries as quasi-tragedies that rob women of the most self-affirming experience of their lives. The film also reframes highly common interventions like epidurals, Pitocin inductions, and Cesarean sections as choices that may have been made to suit obstetricians rather than birthing women. The film is a one-sided love letter to home birth that goes beyond simply arguing in its favor or making claims as to its relative safety—it even implies that women who receive Cesarean sections may have difficulty in adequately bonding with their children immediately after birth.

With these sorts of ideas dangled in front of viewers, it’s no wonder that the film became such a highly impactful form of birthing messaging. Still, despite the film’s pro-home-birth bent, there’s a twist at the end that offers the film an undercurrent of objectivity, and thereby commonsense credibility in the eyes of viewers who might have been otherwise dissuaded by its dogma: At the end, Epstein’s home birth plans are thwarted when she learns her baby is in a breech position. She undergoes an emergency C-section in a hospital, and later, she’s shown nursing and bonding with her son. “Maybe that’s the way he needed to come,” she says.

“I saw The Business of Being Born and I was hysterical,” Meyer tells me. “So taken aback. Fifty percent of me was sobbing to learn about the health care system and how we had been failing women and made birth into this illness, when it’s really such a sacred rite of passage. The other half of me was sobbing in absolute amazement.” She explained that she had “never seen a video of a birth that wasn’t a Hollywood depiction,” referencing the scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life where dozens of masked hospital workers swarm around a birthing mother with absurd medical machines.

A client of Meyer’s named Rosie, giving birth to her daughter in Los Angeles in 2020.

Meyer, in fact, comes from the world that helped create the popular images that inform the way we think about birth. A Malibu native, she was raised in the heart of Hollywood culture: Her father is Los Angeles power broker Ron Meyer, who co-founded Creative Artists Agency and presided over Universal Studios for two decades. Her mother, Kelly Chapman Meyer, is an environmentalist and health advocate who helped instill a crunchy streak in Meyer from an early age, teaching her about clean beauty at age 10. Meyer went to Malibu High School, the institution that counts women like Kaia Gerber and both Hadid and her sister Bella among its graduates.

After graduating from NYU, Meyer found herself back in L.A. taking acting gigs. She also founded a clean beauty company, C & The Moon, which saw its sales jump after January Jones (a friend of hers) posted about her body scrub. Meyer was at a birthday party in Los Angeles when she spotted a woman who she assumed was an actress or model, but was in fact a midwife. Sensing her enthusiasm, the woman encouraged Meyer to enroll in doula training. Soon Meyer completed a three-day course, received her certification, and started attending births. Her first client was a neighbor she met one day while sharing an elevator. Meyer was also mentored by Lori Bregman, one of Los Angeles’s most prominent doulas and maternal wellness experts, whose client list includes Heidi Klum and Anne Hathaway.

The Business of Being Born, which is nearing its 15th anniversary, was a pivotal narrative of the dynamics between celebrity, Hollywood imagery, and birth. At the time, Ricki Lake was somewhat of an anomaly among her peers in her decision to give birth at home. “I’m so not the type,” Lake tells me. “I remember hearing that Demi Moore had had a home birth, but it wasn’t on my radar.” The documentary provides a snapshot of cultural perceptions of birth in the early 2000s. This was the era of “too posh to push,” the expression used by British tabloids to describe celebrities and super-ambitious career women who opted to schedule C-sections rather than deal with the hassle of a surprise labor. “These women had that view of birth that was like, ‘We gotta get it over with so we can get back on the runway,’” Meyer says.

At just 28, Carson Meyer has become a visible advocate for natural births.

But Hollywood attitudes about birth have swung in the opposite direction in the years since. In 2009, Kourtney Kardashian was filmed giving birth to her son, Mason, during which celebrity obstetrician Paul Crane, MD, instructed her to “pull” and Kourtney reached down and literally pulled her newborn out of her body. That scene was perceived as yet another envelope pushed onscreen by the Kardashians, but it may have also helped spark a newfound curiosity about home birth among the reality-television-watching masses. “I hear it all the time: ‘Am I going to catch my baby like Kourtney Kardashian did?’” Meyer says. “I think that was one of [few] times that kind of birth was really shown.”

Now pregnancy and birth seem to be a major part of many celebrity women’s brands, and home birth—once considered an outlandish ordeal chosen by hippies—has been reframed as an aspirational rite of passage. If birth was once an experience so sacred or traumatic as to be kept private, it is now a portal to empowerment and public self-inquiry, and sharing birth stories on social media has become one way for celebrity women to connect to their audiences and to cultivate authenticity. The subtext of some of these birth stories is that natural or home birth is another way of proving your mettle—of applying a kind of empowerment-driven ambition to every arena of life. It’s a form of achievement that dovetails neatly with the wellness-as-lifestyle era in which well-to-do women are swapping out antidepressants for psychedelics or experimenting with at-home coffee enemas. Home birth, in this view, is one more step toward being a holistically self-actualized modern woman.

The paradox of home birth, and its popularity among a certain subset of the Hollywood elite, is that it is often shown as an alternative to the medical establishment—and yet the home-birthing world can only thrive with the support of a hospital. Home births are typically chosen by self-selected pools of low-risk women, but up to 27 percent of those giving birth for the first time still end up transferring to a hospital mid-birth nonetheless. The actress and director Lake Bell had two home births, the second of which resulted in her newborn being rushed to the hospital and held in the NICU for 11 days after going without oxygen for over four minutes. “I was insistent to have a home birth. I’ve dealt with that since,” she said on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast.

Once you start noticing them, the celebrity home birth stories are everywhere. There’s Ashley Graham, who delivered her first son at home in early 2020, and even chose a home birth for her twin boys this past January—a grueling experience that included full-blown hemorrhaging. Hilary Duff birthed two of her three children at home and later posted a set of epic, candid photos of herself mid-labor, grimacing in agony. And Catherine, Princess of Wales, has lit up the British tabloids over the years with news that she was interested in birthing at home. Even those who give birth in a hospital often bring their followers along for the ride: The high-concept pregnancy photo shoot (or even short film, in the case of Emily Ratajkowski) is now part of the celebrity-content industrial complex.

Meyer rubs a client named Danielle’s back during her labor in L.A. in 2018; she had a boy.

All this sharing has opened up space on social media for less-perfect birth stories, too. Mandy Moore, another one of Meyer’s clients who was sold on the idea of a home birth after watching The Business of Being Born, hatched grand plans for a home birth that included her husband serenading her with his guitar, but complications prompted her to switch to a hospital birth, leaving her with a complex tangle of emotions. “Just caring about what other people that were planning to do home births and feeling this weird twinge of jealousy,” she said on the Informed Pregnancy podcast. “I know that sounds ridiculous…but I’m also kind of sad that I don’t get to have that experience that I was hoping for.”

There are, of course, a couple of obvious reasons why home birth has an outsize presence among famous women. “You run in the same circles,” Hosk explains. “It’s sad, because it’s a little bit of a privilege thing—sometimes it costs out of pocket, and there’s a little bit more work involved. If it’s not so popular in the circles you hang around, how are you going to know? How are you going to understand how it works?” For celebrities, home birth is also, crucially, a private birth, free from prying eyes and sneaky iPhone cameras. (No need to clear out a whole maternity floor, as Beyoncé was rumored to have done for the birth of her daughter, Blue Ivy.) By the same token, it’s easy to understand why someone like Meyer, who grew up among the glitterati, would be appealing to a famous mom-to-be: She is so unfazed by their celebrity that she can treat them like normal women. “Her other clients didn’t cross my mind at all. She never mentions them,” Hosk says.

Before she gave birth to her daughter, Hosk had a habit of rolling her eyes every time she came across a birth story online. “Ugh, not another pregnancy story! Everyone always makes it seem so dramatic,” she says. Then she gave birth herself. “Giving birth to a human is an insane thing. It made me realize how important it is to share it,” she admits, almost sounding a bit sheepish. Within a week, she had posted an epic play-by-play of her home birth to her Instagram Stories. “I’m beyond exhausted and my body goes into complete shutdown and sleep in between the waves,” she wrote in one slide. “Birthing is really confronting yourself, your fears and doubts, and coming through the other side.” The one thing she still has not been able to fully confront, though, are those photos that Meyer took. “I think it’s something that I’m going to have when I’m older, and able to look at it, because it’s so fresh now,” she tells me, laughing. “It’s not beautiful.”

This article appears in the November 2022 issue of ELLE.

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I’ve been traveling since I was born. My parents had a boat, so it was part of my upbringing—specifically, traveling by sailboat.

When I was three years old, my parents split up, and my mother moved to the Hamptons to raise me. At age 10, my parents decided to get back together, and we moved onto my father’s sailboat. We sailed from New York to Florida in August 1978 and spent the winter in Key Largo.

While there, I won an essay contest where the prize was traveling with a few other kids to a deserted island in the middle of the Everglades. It sounds crazy by today’s standards—even though we did have chaperones—but we slept in tents on the island for a few days. We had to wake ourselves up every morning, and I still remember getting out of my tent and finding a spot on the island to watch the sunrise by myself.

It was the Everglades, so of course there were alligators and snakes, but no one ever said “be careful,” and that really helped shape the person I am today. There was virtually no one else around, and I had to take care of myself. That was the moment I figured out who I was and what I loved—I don’t ever remember feeling more alive, and I’ve spent a lifetime going back and forth between those glimmers of me, just me, and the self-imposed societal expectations of me.

The author at age 10 sailing the Intracoastal Waterway while living on a boat with her family.

As a Hamptons kid, I was in the nightclubs of New York City by the time I was 13 years old. Then, of course, I moved to Manhattan to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology—it was the next step on my way to a glamorous metropolitan lifestyle.

I was 17 when I went on my first trip by myself, from New York to Europe. I had family in Germany, so first I flew to stay with relatives, but spontaneously decided to jump on a train to Rome, and then Paris. The visa laws changed while I was there, so I didn’t know I needed a visa to get into France and was detained at the train station for not having one. I was put on a train back to Germany in the middle of the night, so I got off the train at the border, found a hotel, and secured my visa the next day. I went right back to Paris. At the time, I didn’t speak more than high school-level French, and it never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t be capable of taking care of myself even when hardships were presented to me.

I don’t remember anyone thinking it was strange for me to go off to Europe alone. The next year, I went to Ecuador to volunteer with Earthwatch, an environmental nonprofit that pairs volunteers with researchers. We went up into the Andes to work with Indigenous tribes. I felt privileged at 19 that I was accepted and allowed to be there, and I was cognizant of my purpose finding a deeper connection to both the world at large and myself.

The author in Iceland in August 2021.

During that time period, I was working as a waitress at the fancy Upper East Side restaurant Le Bilboquet with celebrities all around me, but I was absorbed in reading Diane Fosse’s Gorillas in the Mist. I felt depressed and wondered what I was doing with my life. I feel like I spent my entire 20s going back and forth between my inner self—what felt right for me and made me feel whole, which was traveling—and the adult expectations of a job and money. In some ways, it felt like a pipe dream for me to do what I actually wanted to do.

Once again, I packed up and headed to Southeast Asia for almost a year. While there I had what I’ll call a Mowgli moment. I was in the jungle with a tribe on a small island off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia and I saw my reflection in a pool of water. I sat there in disbelief, because I realized I hadn’t seen myself in a month. Honestly, it rocked my world. It hadn’t even dawned on me to worry about what I looked like while there. I never once thought, do I have a pimple? Or if I had bags under my eyes, or if my hair was a mess. I was living with approximately zero thoughts about my external appearance. The few clothes I had were washed in the river. My nails were never done, and I found it all so liberating, especially coming out of the Hamptons and New York City society.

In Guatapé, Colombia, circa June 2019.

Spoiler: I did return to traditional life and stayed in it for over 20 years, but now I find myself casting off identifying labels like mom, wife, teacher, and reconnecting with the 10-year-old version of myself I found in the Everglades.

My social media accounts are named “Never a Roadmap” because in so much of life, we always have a destination in mind, a place we’re supposed to go, and a road map to get there. But life happens along the way—if we’re too focused on always following the path, I think we risk not enjoying the present moment. So many people talk about trying to find themselves, which implies that you lost yourself. I feel like we do lose ourselves in jobs and relationships, particularly as women.

Many women reach out to me on social media saying they’d love to travel like I do, but they’re scared. I want to change the narrative that women should feel unsafe wherever we go. If I can inspire other women who see me, an average woman, driving off-road, snowmobiling on glaciers, taking little boats to hostels in the middle of exotic locales, and staying in treehouses and boutique hotels, all the while meeting fabulous people around the world that treat me with kindness and seeing the sheer joy I feel by believing that the world is kind, I’ve done my job. My tendency to travel alone makes people feel confident about making changes in their own lives, however small. I recently told one woman who reached out, “Go to a rock climbing gym somewhere near you.” It takes bravery to go to a climbing gym by yourself, never having done it before, in another part of town—that’s a solo journey to me. It doesn’t have to be Patagonia to start.

I’ve traveled with family and friends, but I prefer traveling solo. When you travel by yourself, it really gets to the core of who you are as a person. You strip everything away, all of the titles, and reconnect with the person you are inside.

I’m going to Bali soon, and I have my first three nights booked, but then I have a month where I don’t know where I’m staying or what I’m doing. Every once in a while, I’ll look at someone else’s Instagram and think, Oh, I have to go there. Sometimes I go, but more often than not, I tell myself to stop so I can create my own vision and not just follow someone else’s. When I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going, it makes the experience more authentic—when there’s no destination, you can’t get lost.

I don’t think there’s really an end of the road for me. All I can picture is that in my 60s and 70s and 80s, I want to be doing exactly what I’m doing now. So long as I can keep returning to a place of my inner ten-year-old and where I’m most happy and vibrant, I’ll keep moving.

The post The Case for Traveling Alone appeared first on Chronicle Fashion.

A Bold Perspective

Designed to leave a lasting impression, the graphic silhouette and aerodynamic lines of Jaguar’s F-TYPE are a striking sight—exuding sensational beauty at every angle that emphasizes its powerful stance and superior performance.

Earrings, Yves Saint Laurent.

Luxuriating in the Afterglow

Often, our vehicles become our sense of escape. The Jaguar F-TYPE offers up the ability to cocoon you in its plush interior, swathed in rich textiles and finishes—effectively kindling a transportive experience that enlivens your daily behind-the-wheel experience. Complemented by customizable ambient lighting, it actualizes your mood to embody your own unique style and carefree attitude.

Sunglasses, Thierry Lasry. Earrings, vintage. Top, SemSem.

An Unprecedented Magnetism

Jaguar has a knack for cleverly designing racing machines under the cloak of elegantly sculpted, moving works of art so consider the all-electric I-PACE an archetype for quintessential contemporary British design—all while integrating the future-forward innovation of Jaguar DNA and FIA Formula E Racing technology.

Earrings, Yves Saint Laurent. Jumpsuit, SemSem. Cuff, Jean Paul Gaultier.

The Statement Piece

If the little black dress or jumpsuit are considered ageless wardrobe staples, it’s the little two-seater coupe that demands attention upon arrival and departure. The F-TYPE’s Deep Desire Red shade is rich with subtle metallic pigment, achieving a glossed, midnight effect designed to catch the light at all the right angles and captivate the gaze like a form-fitting sequined ensemble.

Earrings, Chanel. Jumpsuit, SemSem. Shoes, Dolce & Gabbana. Suit, Hugo Boss. Shirt, Giorgio Armani. Shoes, Jimmy Choo.

Tailored Sophistication

Jaguar vehicles often find influence in fine tailoring and sartorial staples too. Inside, the I-PACE boasts meticulous twin-needle stitching that echoes the effortlessly luxe style of Pitti Uomo habitués—further adding to its allure that simply cannot be dismissed.

Styled by Odile Iturraspe; hair by Brenton Diallo; makeup by Yuki Hayashi.

The post Jaguar’s Future Is Driving Towards Style and Self-Expression appeared first on Chronicle Fashion.

Then, over glasses of wine one weeknight, I found myself saying to a fellow go-getter: “I’m just not that busy lately.” As someone who has always had a sense of pride in her work ethic and found a sense of purpose in her career, this was a shocking, satisfying, and slightly shameful admission. I realized that something had shifted for me, too.

Women are in the midst of a revolutionary reckoning with our ambitions. We’re not resigning en masse—because who can afford to quit her job in this economy?!—but we are trying to figure out a new set of goals and guidance for our professional lives. Thanks to long-simmering inequality and stubborn sexism, clarified by the pain of the pandemic, our definitions of success increasingly lie outside the realm of work. We are waking up to the fact that our jobs are never going to love us back. And we are trying to adjust accordingly.

The girlbosses who once dominated our social media feeds have been ousted and mocked, and are now selling cottagecore trinkets in Brooklyn. On TikTok, “bimbofication” converts preach the gospel of not trying to prove you’re the smartest or hardest-working person in the room: Just concentrate on your looks and let someone else pick up the check. Essays about the disappearance of ambition and the liberating power of saying “no” go instantly viral. And yes, I’ll say it: When Kim Kardashian was dragged for declaring, in her signature vocal fry, that “nobody wants to work these days,” she was a little bit right. We don’t want to work ourselves to the bone, clocking overtime hours without overtime pay, for a vanity title at a soulless corporation anymore.

At this point in our collective professional history, women are looking for something more. Or is it something less?

If you narrowly define ambition as the pursuit of money and power, then the last century was one of increasingly ambitious women. In the early 20th century, just 20 percent of women worked outside the home, with Black women twice as likely as white women to have wage-earning jobs. After World War II, the numbers ticked up steadily (Rosie the Riveter is an icon for a reason), and by the 1970s, half of single women and 40 percent of married women were employed. Women were helped along by some important feminist gains: We could finally access birth control, get a credit card in our own name, and enjoy some basic protections against pregnancy discrimination and sexual harassment. But even after the heavy-shoulder-pads energy of the 1980s and early ’90s, our workforce participation peaked in the late ’90s.

Women’s progress stalled before our ambition did. In the 21st century, “although women now enter professional schools in numbers nearly equal to men, they are still substantially less likely to reach the highest echelons of their professions,” said then-Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen in a 2017 speech. The gender pay gap stubbornly persists, even among men and women of similar education and occupation, and is particularly yawning for women of color. A 2021 McKinsey report found “a disconnect between companies’ growing commitment to racial equity and the lack of improvement we see in the day-to-day experiences of women of color.” No wonder the pandemic—and its accompanying crisis of caregiving—pushed many women with stagnant paychecks out of the workforce and into full-time childcare. In 2020, a full quarter of U.S. women considered leaving the workforce or downshifting their career, according to another McKinsey report in March 2021.

Millennials, particularly those of us with college degrees and feminist impulses, once thought we could crack the ambition code. Where boomers had failed to shatter glass ceilings and Gen Xers had failed to fully scale the corporate ladder, my generation would do better. And if we couldn’t change corporate America, we’d build our own businesses and simply sidestep the problem. We all know how that worked out! It’s become apparent that many of the promised rewards of professional striving are never going to materialize. Why, some women are wondering, should I keep trying so hard?

“Some people feel as if they’ve been tricked,” says Paco de Leon, author of Finance for the People. “And they’re waking up to this realization: There’s gotta be a better way to make money and save for all my goals—and not feel like I’m constantly burning the candle at both ends.”

In a fall 2021 Gallup survey of 13,000 U.S. employees, the top quality that women sought in a job was “greater work-life balance and better personal well-being”—just slightly ahead of higher pay and benefits. Despite the damning statistic that there are 1.8 million fewer women in the labor force than before the pandemic, the vast majority of workers don’t have the financial option to drop out entirely. Some of us wouldn’t want to even if we could.

I know a few women who are fantasizing about fundraising a seed round or making partner. But most of my friends are running the numbers to figure out if they can afford to quit without another job lined up, or go down to four days a week without taking a significant salary hit. They are applying for positions that don’t require overtime so they can be more present for their children, their elderly parents, the causes they care about, their own creative practice. Some are thoroughly burned out and want to work less for the sake of their own health. Still others spent much of the past two years collecting unemployment, and found the experience more radicalizing than demoralizing.

“Yes, I’m ambitious,” a friend told me recently, “but climbing the corporate ladder does not interest me like it used to. A title, a bump in pay—it’s not satisfying. What I need to feel successful and fulfilled is completely different. Am I doing something that brings satisfaction? Do I feel like I’m learning? Do I feel like I’m contributing? Do I feel like I’m connecting to other people? Do I feel like I have flexibility in this new way we live and work? Am I given not only responsibility but autonomy? Am I in a place that aligns with my values? The things that I am looking for have changed.”

What’s happening now is a restlessness, a searching, a wholesale reexamination of the role that work should play in a woman’s life and identity. “If we look at the second wave of feminism, the goal was to access the things that white men had,” says Mia Birdsong, author of How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. But now, instead of breaking the glass ceiling, Birdsong says she and many other women would rather leave the building altogether. “I want to go and sit beneath trees, or sit in a field, or whatever,” she says, laughing.

Of course, some women—particularly those working for hourly wages—never had any illusions that work was a path to personal fulfillment. Work has always been a necessity, and therefore less about narrowing the national wage gap and more about just putting food on the damn table. Many of these women have been sounding the alarm about the untenable nature of American labor for years now, and are leaders in the movements to organize at places like Starbucks and Amazon.

But this rethinking of ambition is a more recent twist for those of us who get paid a salary with benefits, and who absorbed the idea that we could possibly advance feminism while also advancing our own careers. “Girlboss,” now a verb, finds itself grouped with “gaslight” and “gatekeep” in what Vox called “a kind of ‘live, laugh, love’ of toxic, usually white feminism.” The widespread Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020 prompted many of us to develop a new understanding of the unfair systems that underpin much of American life. And of course, the pandemic has revealed everything from the gaping holes in the safety net to the unequal domestic work of heterosexual relationships to the fragility of our health—both mental and physical. For many of us, the ambition to rise through the ranks in our chosen field has dissolved into something simpler: the desire to not feel so stressed and exhausted all the time.

Working fewer hours was supposed to be our collective reality by now. In 1965, a U.S. Senate subcommittee projected that thanks to advancements in technology, workers would be so productive that we’d all enjoy a 14-hour workweek by the year 2000. (That sound you hear is the bitter laughter of every American worker.) Instead, we are clocking an average of 44 hours per week, with one in five workers working 49 to 59 hours. Meanwhile, for women, sexist barriers to professional advancement remain stubbornly in place. On The Economist’s glass-ceiling index, which ranks OECD countries from best to worst when it comes to women’s chances for equal treatment at work, the United States recently fell by two places to the 20th spot on the list.

No matter how hard we hustle, the statistics say that most of us will still hit that proverbial glass ceiling—especially if we are women of color and/or parents, and most especially if we are parents of more than one child. “I do think that there’s a very seductive element to [the idea that] if I work hard enough, if I do the right networking, if I have the right internet presence, then I will get the life that I want,” says Samhita Mukhopadhyay, former executive editor of Teen Vogue and author of the forthcoming book The Myth of Making It. And that has certainly worked for a handful of women—you probably follow at least one of them on Instagram. But for most of us, in the absence of universal health care, worker protections, and affordable childcare, those illusions have crumbled.

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to scale back our attachment to our former professional ideals. For some former straight-A students, the challenge is psychological. There are no performance reviews for friendship or personal well-being, so it can be harder to set goals in nonwork arenas. Rainesford Stauffer, author of the upcoming book All the Gold Stars, makes a distinction between ambition that is rooted in personal meaning and ambition that is about proving external worth. Meaningful ambition often centers on things like community and creativity, with goals like feeling connected, whole, and healthy. It “typically doesn’t come with that pressure cooker sensation of, ‘Oh my God, I’m falling behind. I’m the only one who isn’t doing enough.’”

Then there’s the bigger picture: Are we failing future generations of women when we don’t throw ourselves wholeheartedly against the glass ceiling? Even the question is a bit of a trap, says Mukhopadhyay, placing an individual burden on women when it should be a collective one. It’s not on each of us, as workers, to better the world for all women. The gains of previous generations of social-justice movements teach us the truth: Collective progress isn’t gained through one exceptional individual’s achievements.

When that panicked not-doing-enough feeling kicks in, Tiffany Dufu, founder and CEO of peer coaching service The Cru, counsels women to have a clear sense of what matters most to them. “Because when you’re overwhelmed and you’ve got a ton on your plate, you need to figure out, What are you going to delegate and what is just going to, like, roll all over the floor?” Redefining ambition is about knowing which professional things to set aside, and it often takes some support to figure it out. She adds, “It’s one thing to know you want to shift your career and maybe align it with more purpose and meaning, or really focus on a more value-based way of living. It’s another thing to actually figure out, Okay, well, what does that mean? And how am I going to actually make that happen?”

Letting go of the idea that our titles or salaries define us is difficult even for those of us who say we know better, because American culture venerates the idea that we are all individually responsible for our success as human beings. We’re taught that we can get anything that we need on our own, that if we don’t succeed it’s because of some failure within us. In reality, “most of what you need is going to be outside of you,” Kate Bowler, author of No Cure for Being Human, said in an interview with GQ last year. “It’s structural justice and a community that holds you, and coming to terms with your own limitations and frailties.”

For ambition to be sustainable, it has to be personal and complex, not just about rising through the ranks. For every woman who is burned out after placing too much value on work as a key component of her identity, the task isn’t letting go of ambition altogether. It’s relocating those ambitions beyond the traditional markers of money, title, and professional recognition. Ambition does not have to be limited to a quest for power at the expense of yourself and others. It can also be a drive for a more just world, a healthier self, a stronger community. And it’s definitely achievable in soft pants.

What Famous Women Have to Say About Ambition

This article appears in the September 2022 issue of ELLE.

The post What Comes After Ambition? appeared first on Chronicle Fashion.

But my real wedding in 2021 was nothing like what I’d pictured. For starters, the husband of my dreams was actually my wife, Mariah. I couldn’t have conjured up a better life partner and soulmate if I tried. But queerness was nowhere on my life bingo card growing up, so when I realized, just after graduating college, that I had feelings for one of my best friends, it altered everything.

The author, Brea Baker, left, with her wife, Mariah, right.

Suddenly church, this place I loved, became a place of conflict. At my church, queerness wasn’t accepted and certainly not celebrated— that was made clear to me in both overt and subtle ways. But it was also the place where I celebrated Black History Month and sang spirituals. It was where my community organizing began, where I interacted with multiple generations of Black people, and where most of my close friends spent their time. For so long, my childhood and overall cultural identity were tied to the Black church. We like to say that “love wins,” but when choosing love, I didn’t know how much it would change me. For a while, I couldn’t make out the prize I had supposedly won.

So when it came time for Mariah and I to select a venue for our wedding ceremony and reception, we didn’t even entertain the idea of trading vows in a church. I worried: Would they consider our union sacrilegious? Would we be lectured by a presiding pastor who doesn’t “believe” in homosexuality? Would I feel affirmed and loved on the day, or would we be anxious about any last-minute backlash? It didn’t feel right to invite people to turn us down during what was otherwise the happiest day of our lives. Why put ourselves through the anguish of unrequited care?

Preparing for this next phase, I felt lonely for one of the first times in my life. My career was beginning to take off, and I’d actively worked toward the healthiest relationship I’d ever had. Yet a community that always felt like safety for me couldn’t, or wouldn’t, bear witness to the home we’d found in one another. Growing up, we were taught that God is love, so what did it mean that love’s earthly representatives didn’t find us worthy of binding ourselves in what was supposed to be a sanctuary and source of refuge? We were lucky to have amazing people in our lives who’d supported us from the very beginning, but in those early moments of being engaged, I was coming to the realization that the one thing I had craved for so much of my life might never be.

The thought of having to jump through hoops to find a church that felt culturally relevant and was willing to accept us made me reflect on all the hardships we faced just by being our authentic selves: The holidays we spent away from extended family. Our constant internal conflicts around religion. The never-ending need to educate loved ones. The friends and family who weren’t there when it mattered most. There was so much time we’d never get back—and so much disappointment still in store.

I may have drowned in that loneliness had it not been for the land—89 lush, green acres of Southern land that my paternal grandfather spent his pension and the final years of his life making possible. He affectionately dubbed it Baker Acres: a plot of land covered in thin, towering pine trees and roaming white-tailed deer with two sprawling freshwater lakes fed by a winding brook. It was to be a safe haven for any of his children or grandchildren. And less than a decade later, the Baker Acres became a refuge for my wife and I when we said “I do.” I can’t remember exactly when I first had the idea of getting married on my family’s land, but it was like having a song stuck in your head. Once I entertained the thought for even a moment, it felt like what I was always meant to do.

The couple getting married at Baker Acres.

The family land freed me in more ways than one. There was no gatekeeper there to tell me that our love was too blasphemous or that the Lord’s house was too sacred. As Imani Perry wrote in her bestselling book South to America: “The trees don’t know your race or your gender identity or your sexuality. The trees don’t expel you for rumors or bigotries.” In fact, the hallowed ground modeled what love really was: the insistence upon blooming no matter the conditions. Over the years, this land has been home to many people; first, the Indigenous Lumbee people, followed by colonizers, and eventually, us Bakers. Through extractive agriculture, natural disasters, and over-yielding, the land never stopped being exactly who She had always been. In good times, the land offered bountiful harvests and a foundation for shelter. In bad times, the land listened and learned resilience. She welcomed Mariah and I without judgment, presenting us with a clean slate. As a queer Black couple, everything about it felt too good to turn down. With my grandmother’s blessing and my aunt’s support, we set to work planning our special day.

When Aug. 14, 2021, finally rolled around, I no longer felt alone. I was better at setting boundaries and unwilling to be phased by anyone who wasn’t there for the explicit purpose of celebrating our love. I cherished those who had traveled to be with us. I realized that the sacredness of the day wasn’t lost, and God didn’t need a building to make His presence known. I felt God through my mother and Auntie Tyra, who pulled me to the side, just before I got dressed for my big day, to share marital wisdom. I felt God when what should have realistically been a 90-degree day was cooled off by a rain that completely encircled the land—without more than a drizzle reaching our party’s plot. I felt God in my Uncle David, who walked me down the aisle and always affirmed that being Christian and being queer are not mutually exclusive.

As our sisters co-officiated the ceremony, I stared ahead at my bride, thankful. “How lucky am I,” I thought to myself, “that God saw it fit to send me a life partner and use this wedding as a reminder that church exists all around us.” I thought about my ancestors who were enslaved in this county and may have worked this land with their dirt-caked hands. I thought about the white men who tried to beat this land and Her stewards into submission but failed. I thought about what it meant to build a love strong enough to withstand not only the test of time but also fear—to be brave enough to find God and love everywhere I go.

In an 1996 article for Orion Magazine called “Touching the Earth,” bell hooks wrote:

For many years, and even now, generations of black folks who migrated north to escape life in the South, returned down home in search of a spiritual nourishment, a healing, that was fundamentally connected to reaffirming one’s connection to nature…When the earth is sacred to us, our bodies can also be sacred to us.

In this way, I’m grateful for every closed door that led my wife and I to the land. I haven’t looked back since.

The post Something Old, Something New appeared first on Chronicle Fashion.

Skeptics (hi, dad) think cryptocurrency is too risky and speculative. Believers think it’s the currency of the future, and that it has the opportunity to close wealth gaps, empower artists, and change the way we use money, as cryptocurrencies are exchanged without central regulatory authorities like banks or PayPal. Crypto’s fans are also not afraid of the world’s many acronyms. Fest attendees were largely in the latter camp; one described this moment as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to change money distribution.”

Festival-goers stroll the grounds at Idyllwild Arts Academy.

The festival took place at Idyllwild Arts Academy, a private high school on a sprawling campus in the woods. Being white and in my 30s, I appeared to be in the majority, though the population skewed male. Otherwise, I made no attempt to blend in with crypto’s cool kids—I ignored the “bucket hat” bullet on the packing list that we were sent in advance. Many others didn’t. The uniform, as one attendee explained to me, was coded luxury: “Your sunglasses are from a truck stop and your shorts are Old Navy, but then the sneakers are Balenciaga.” On day one, I was deeply off-brand in a pink floral LoveShackFancy dress. I also had the feeling that everyone was on mushrooms without me.

In between performances by artists like Sudan Archives, L’Rain, Kilo Kish, and James Blake, there were hikes, meditation, and foraging. Panelists hosted talks on the future of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and topics like “How To Eat a Fruit.” Tickets to the all-inclusive weekend cost .5 ETH (shorthand for Ether, the currency on the Ethereum blockchain), or about $927 at the time of writing.

FWB members pack into the food hall during the fest.

Full membership to the FWB community will cost you 75 FWB tokens. A single token currently trades at $9.33, though it’s been as high as $186. (FWB does offer a “local” membership for 5$FWB, or around $50.) Unlike other DAOs, where entrance requires only buying the token, FWB functions like an internet version of Soho House, requiring both an application approval process and purchase of their currency. As holders of the token, members are incentivized to contribute to projects that raise the token’s value, and they can earn more of it through their participation. After you’ve gotten through the gates, it all goes down in the Discord, the private server where members vote on issues and discuss NFT drops and new projects.

Every DAO serves a different purpose—some raise money for charitable causes, while others offer rewards like first access to NFTs. There are thousands. In 2021, the singularly-minded ConstitutionDAO raised $47 million in ETH to bid on a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution at Sotheby’s. (They lost, and the organization has since disbanded.) FWB is a social DAO, “focused on merging culture and crypto.” Its co-founder is Trevor McFedries, a DJ, music artist, and tech luminary who created the token in 2020 and sent it to his network of friends, granting them access to a private Discord. At first, FWB was essentially a chat room for artists and musicians who were impacted by the pandemic; it’s since grown to 3,000 global members.

A key difference between members-only places like Soho House and a DAO is that “our members vote on expenses every month, our members vote on partnerships every month. Nothing happens without people’s say. Even my salary, if someone had issue with it, they could vote ‘no,’” said Raihan Anwar, one of FWB’s cofounders and their “digital social butterfly.” Like many other FWB members I spoke to, he had an extreme level of enthusiasm for the community. “Our goal was to build the most positive workshop for artists and creatives to explore crypto.”

Musician James Blake with FWB co-founder Trevor McFedries.

A few festival attendees brought their dogs and some bought their kids, including a baby named Eeth, after the cryptocurrency. Everyone seemed less interested in the Web3 gold rush (Web3 is the umbrella term for crypto, NFTs, and DAOs) than they did in meeting their Discord friends IRL. McFedries explained a shift towards crypto’s new era: the crowd wasn’t so much Libertarian types but those “interested in creating better economies for creators.” The weekend had at the forefront energy without being smug.

Next to a Menotti’s truck on the festival grounds, where one could get a coffee and a coffee NFT, I sat down with Eileen Skyers, FWB’s head of marketing. “It’s so important for me to be here early and for me to onboard other underrepresented creatives,” she told me. (Skyers is Jamaican and Filipino and identifies as both African American and Asian American). “I’m a first generation immigrant—a lot of our parents didn’t have 401ks. I’ve talked to people here who identified that same way, where they were like, ‘Yeah, I got into crypto for this expansive possibility it has to close wealth gaps.’ On top of that, I think we’re just in a generation that was born into the internet and financial crises—we don’t really believe in 401ks. Why am I going to build forever for this financial future when there may be no future? There are all these questions coming out of the pandemic that make investing in this space look really attractive to young people.”

Although there was plenty of Instagram bait in the swag and scenery that was also attractive to young people, I didn’t see a single arm extended for a selfie, and hardly any bent-neck scrolling. At the music sets I attended in the parachute-covered amphitheater, festival-goers watched not through the screens of their phones but, radically, with their own eyes.

In this universe, social currency isn’t earned through Instagram followers or by how closely we can reach the ever-changing beauty standards. Web3’s main platforms are Discord and Twitter, where identities are often shielded by avatars. Expertise, connections, and getting “alpha” info ahead of the curve—that’s the clout this crowd runs on.

But the educational elitism and buy-in comes at the cost of accessibility. “Crypto has an access problem. There’s such a high barrier to entry in terms of understanding half of what is going on,” Makayla Bailey told me in between music sets. Bailey is a 28-year-old Black woman based in New York and a director at Rhizome, a digital arts nonprofit. “I think saying ‘we welcome everybody’ is not enough. You have to do things that address some of the structural issues at hand, like class, race, and diversity.” But of FWB, she said, “It’s one of the more welcoming spaces in Web3 that I’ve experienced so far.”

While Web3 promises for equity and access—the language can at times lean utopian—the same dynamics that exist in corporate spaces exist in these communities, too. The “Social Justice and Web3” event, led by Naaya Wellness founder Sinikiwe Stephanie Dhliwayo, was one of the most dynamic but least attended events I sat in on. At another discussion, held in a classroom and led by three women, one male attendee walked in late, sat at the teacher’s desk, and seemed to speak louder and longer than all three women who were leading the discussion.

Still, there’s progress. At Saturday’s keynote “Dissent by Design,” Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of the feminist protest art collective Pussy Riot, discussed using Web3 for activism. In response to the war in Ukraine, Nadya’s UnicornDAO raised nearly $7 million in two days with the sale of an NFT of the Ukrainian flag. Without the threat of government interference or the bureaucracy of a traditional non-profit, funds were raised and quickly distributed to Ukrainian citizens. One major donor was the Ukrainian-American owner of OnlyFans, Leonid Ravinsky, who donated $1.3 million. “It showed us the power of Web3. Crypto is useful not just for people pumping their bags, but for public good and for peace,” Nadya said at the panel. And in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, UnicornDAO created an abortion fund that provides transportation, lodging, and health services.

Since cryptocurrency can be used without the location tracking of banks or ATMs, it’s been critical to Nadya’s survival. “As an activist in Russia, we needed to use [cryptography] to stay alive.” After Pussy Riot performed an anti-Putin “Punk Prayer” at a Moscow cathedral in 2012, Nadya, along with her fellow members, was jailed for 21 months. She’s considered a “foreign agent” of Russia, and due to her status, she doesn’t share her location in real time.

Later in the evening, she and I sat together on a porch outside the artists’ cabin, behind the twinkle-lit bar serving natural wine from Martha Stoumen and offering cans of the disturbingly-named water Liquid Death. The artist Weyes Blood was playing a set in the amphitheater. I asked Nadya, whose latest Pussy Riot album is titled MATRIARCHY NOW, how to bring more equity into the cryptosphere. “In a lot of cases, when women or any other underrepresented communities are being asked to participate in something, they’re just being used as currency for virtue signaling, and it’s important to make sure that they actually get paid or get tokens for their participation. Make sure to bring real value to people who contribute to your diversity,” she told me.

“Last year only 5 to 10 percent of total NFTs sales were done by female artists, which is terrible,” she said. To shift those stats, UnicornDAO collects art by women-identified and LGBTQIA+ people. Its board members include the musicians Sia and Grimes. “If we keep [this community] exclusive, it’s gonna be just a room of white males sucking their own dicks, which is how most of the parties look these days.”

Nadya of Pussy Riot, who says she’s used cryptography to “stay alive.”

I considered our psychedelic-forest surroundings; how I hadn’t been at a gathering this large since 2019, or one this specific, ever. Is crypto the future, or is it just a moment in time? I asked Nadya. “I believe it is the future. It brings ownership back to people. On Instagram your account could be deleted at any given second. Even though I provided my content for free, and helped [Instagram] to develop their platform and create generational wealth for Mark Zuckerberg, I can be kicked out at any time. When you join Web3 social media platforms, you own your piece, you own your properties. You own a piece of land in that social media system.”

Another accessibility issue is the time commitment that understanding and keeping up with a constantly-evolving ecosystem demands. The always-open market breeds a culture of FOMO. On Sunday, a conversation on mental health was led by Yana Sosnovskaya of Zora, where artists expressed the anxiety of seeing their NFT prices fluctuate, and others shared the pressure they felt to have all the right expertise and language in the Discord. A great way to deal with the ups and downs of crypto and Web3, one attendee said, was “to have friends who don’t know what crypto and Web3 is.”

Despite the anxieties, there was a hopeful and quietly rebellious energy to the weekend, perhaps not unlike the gold prospectors who rushed the region in the 1860s, most of whom came up empty-handed. These Friends With Benefits seemed happy simply to find relief from pandemic loneliness and a place to channel millennial disillusionment. That’s a party I can get behind. Whether or not it yields gold feels beside the point.

The post A Weekend in the Woods With Crypto’s Cool Kids appeared first on Chronicle Fashion.

Fashion is empowering, energetic, and emotional. The industry can also be frivolous. It’s estimated that 39,000 tons of textile waste are dumped in the Atacama desert each year. And it is just one of the world’s landscapes overflowing with clothing waste. According to some reports, 90% of clothing is thrown away long before it should be, which has significant negative effects on the global environment. Perhaps more shocking: Less than 1% of discarded clothes are recycled into new garments.

Every year 39,000 tons of textiles are dumped in the Atacama desert.

The reality of the Atacama (and similar textile dumping sites) deeply resonated with Electrolux. As experts in clothing care, the world’s second-largest appliance maker is an industry leader focusing on sustainability. And as the Swedish company develops advanced garment-care technologies, that are gentle on fabrics to preserve their quality, it is committing to a goal of making clothes last twice as long for half the environmental impact by 2030. Extending the life of clothes by just nine months, for example, can reduce their climate impact by 20-30% in terms of the water used and waste produced. The Atacama is a metaphor for how unsustainable fast fashion has become, which can incite a critical conversation about the need for taking better care of garments to make them last longer.

Powerful Partnerships

In addition to technological goals, Electrolux has collaborated with visionary sustainability leaders. One such initiative is with Rave Review, a Swedish design duo dedicated to crafting high-end fashion with upcycled materials. Together the brands imagined a capsule collection created solely from discarded garments sourced from the Atacama desert.

The collaboration is a model for how designers can approach upcycling—it’s about rescuing waste materials to exalt and beautify them. “We all must change in one way or another,” says Livia Schück, Rave Review’s co-Founder and Creative Director. “When it comes to fashion, taking care of what we already have is probably the most tangible and easy way to do it.”

The capsule collection by Rave Review in collaboration with Electrolux is made entirely from discarded textiles from the Atacama desert.

After being salvaged from the desert and shipped to Stockholm, the chosen garments were washed and cut. The designers then built their creations based on available fabrics. All clothes were then dyed in an Electrolux high-efficiency washing machine in hues of purple and green. In this design, the duo wanted to reinforce the feeling of imperfections and create character in the fabric, making it even more eye-catching.

In tune with the circular purpose of the initiative, the collection will not be for sale; instead, its purpose is to provoke a conversation about the ability to reuse fabrics.

The Atacama collection.

Waste not, want not—one key to mitigating fashion’s environmental footprint is through garment care that extends closet longevity. Consumer behavior can have an impact: We are what we wear, and individual change can help break the pattern to achieve progress in the fight against the climate crisis. In partnership with Electrolux, here are some simple yet impactful tips for creating a sustainable wardrobe.

Wash clothes in cold water—it’s better on the garment and the globe.

Take Care: On average, clothes are worn only ten times and thrown away long before they need to be. Making them last longer not only saves time and money, it cuts our consumption and helps reduce our carbon footprint. And it all starts with more sustainable laundry practices.
Step one: Wash less. Unless something is visibly dirty or hard on the nose, challenge yourself to wear your garments at least three times before they hit the laundry.
Step two: Reduce the amount of detergent you use and go for liquid rather than powder. Liquid detergents tend to work better than powder in eco-friendly cold-water wash cycles and are gentler on fabrics. As a rule, use half the prescribed amount of detergent and half a cup of baking soda, which acts as a detergent booster. This will make your clothes just as clean and can help you lower your footprint.
Step three: Turn down the temperature. According to the company, if colder washes became the norm across Europe, it could be the equivalent of removing more than 1.3 million cars from the road. “Lowering wash temperatures and switching to liquid detergent from powder could mean saving the equivalent of approximately 50kg [110 pounds] of CO2 per appliance per year. It could create a huge impact when scaled up to millions of consumers following the same example,” says Vanessa Butani, Electrolux VP for Group Sustainability.

Cold water is better for both the environment and the longevity of garments.

Invest in Pieces: Buying long-lasting items is the ultimate sustainable power move. Choose cross-functional and versatile staples to get more use per wear. And be ready to eschew trends. By repeating favorites (and buying less), you can help to reduce unnecessary landfill waste and diminish your overall environmental impact.

Repair and Store Right: Another key to giving your closet longevity is proper storage. Invest in shoe trees, for example, and cubes for sweaters. Repair is also an essential part of sustainability. Buy from brands with alteration and repair services, and look for local specialists, including tailors and cobblers, to help maintain your garments.

The most sustainable clothes are the ones we already have. Find out how to make them last longer at experience.electrolux.com/breakthepattern.

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Put simply, mental health is health. But for women and girls—especially those from marginalized communities—it’s an aspect of human health that continues to be underfunded and undervalued. For this year’s Global Mental Health Day on October 10th, the kate spade new york Social Impact Council is raising awareness of the importance between female empowerment and mental health—two issues that have historically been seen as separate, but are in fact very interconnected. The Council is an inspiring lineup of women activists, each with unique backgrounds, who are focused on initiatives that work toward one overarching belief: Good mental health is a fundamental right, and is now more than important than ever.

Founded in January of 2022, the kate spade new york Social Impact Council champions women and girls on a global scale by financially supporting organizations that empower gender and mental health as a primary objective. This year, kate spade new york and its foundation, in partnership with the Social Impact Council, are investing over two million dollars to provide access to women’s empowerment and mental health resources around the world, with the ultimate goal of empowering 100,000 women and girls with mental health support by 2025. Watch the video above to get to know this collective of galvanizing leaders, and read on to learn more about each.

Taraji P. Henson

You know Taraji P. Henson from barrier-breaking films and television. What you might not know about the charismatic, award-winning actor, filmmaker and entrepreneur is that, in fall 2018, she launched the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation in honor of her late father who struggled from mental health challenges without support or resources. The foundation’s mission is to get rid of stigmas around mental health in the Black community.

“World Mental Health Day is taking a very difficult conversation and putting it on a global platform. When you do that, you dismantle stigmas,” Henson explains. “Every walk of life, people suffer from anxiety and mental health struggles, so it’s important that we have these platforms to talk about such a heavy subject. You create these circles of people where you can create a safe space to talk about the hard subjects in life; you find commonalities with other humans and you build from there.”

Elisha London

A UK-based entrepreneur and mental health advocate, Elisha London is the Founder and CEO of Prospira Global, a mental health consultancy that works with businesses, philanthropists and investors to implement mental health support programs. London’s personal and professional journey has focused on mental health for years now. Prior to her launching Prospira Global, she was the director of the Heads Together campaign, a mental health initiative from the royal foundation. In 2018, London founded United for Global Mental Health, an organization which works to raise awareness, reduce stigma, and increase support for mental health on a global scale. “Having good mental health is about having a healthy mind that enables a life well lived,” she says.

Catherine Tinsley

Catherine Tinsley is a chair professor in the management department at Georgetown University. There, she studies gender dynamics in organizations as well as personal and social perceptions, which she describes as how we process information and form judgments about other people.

In her view, “Mental health is about balance. It’s about awareness. It’s about some modest amount of self control. You can’t stop yourself from having feelings and you can’t stop the ups and downs of life, but good mental health creates a positive boundary between you and the outside world.” In her role as an expert on gender intelligent leadership, Tinsley has participated in global symposiums as a speaker on the role confidence plays in economic empowerment for women.

Latham Thomas

Latham Thomas works to advance reproductive justice and birth equity. She’s the founder of Mama Glow, a maternity lifestyle business that includes a women’s center and a roster of doulas who support women at every stage of reproduction. She also launched the Mama Glow Foundation—an organization focused on birth equity that works to transform reproductive health in the United States through education, advocacy, and the arts.

“A lot of us suffer because we don’t have access to a sense of empowerment. We don’t have access to a sense of personal wellbeing,” she says. “Our mental health is just as important as every aspect of our wellbeing. In the West, we separate physical health from mental health and emotional health, [but] all of this is connected.”

Jazz Thornton

New Zealand mental health advocate, award-winning film director, and author Jazz Thornton co-founded Voices of Hope, a non-profit working to erase the stigma around mental health, in 2014. Her short film, Dear Suicidal Me, captures real people—including herself—reading suicide notes they wrote, then explaining why they’re grateful to be alive. It struck a major chord, garnering over 80 million views within the first 48 hours of being posted online.

“Empowerment means knowing that you have the potential to live out whatever it is that you may want to do,” she says. “For me, growing up facing mental health battles from such a young age is what made me understand the importance of talking about it, learning how to look after your own mental health, and also how to look after the mental health of those around you.”

Norette Turimuci

As the former executive director of Resonate—a leading women’s social enterprise in East Africa that offers education and confidence-building workshops to women and girls—and a gender equality advocate, Norette Turimuci has dedicated her career to empowering and fostering future female leaders.

When asked, during our video shoot, to define mental health she said, “Mental health is when my thoughts and my heart are aligned in a space that is free of judgment, of guilt, of shame, of control, of worry, and when it has space for gratitude. For feeling grateful for life, for my own being, and for feeling like I deserve to be here.”

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Partake In a Friendly Cocktail Contest

A little healthy competition is always a good time—and so is a tasty drink. Why not marry the two and challenge each other to a mixology competition? Choose a single spirit, like Johnnie Walker High Rye, then assemble two identical baskets of ingredients. Turn on some tunes and get mixing, each of you creating a unique cocktail for the other. Trade drinks, give a little cheers, take a sip, and rate each other’s beverages on a scale from 1 to 5 for presentation, creativity, and taste. Whoever wins is exempt from cleanup duty.

Play—or Learn—in Cyberspace

Board games can wait. There’s an emergence of online experiences that will make you feel like you’ve been transported well beyond your four walls. Take a peek at a virtual event platform where you’ll find all kinds of games—murder mysteries, trivia, Bingo, escape rooms—as well as classes such as whisky tastings and chocolate making. Choose an activity and spend some quality time making memories with your boo. For even more fun, make it a double (or triple) date, and invite some friends to join you.

Set Up A Spa Night

For something a little more low-key, turn your bedroom into the ultimate spa experience. Go all out in terms of setting the mood—don your coziest robes, turn down the overheads, light lots of candles, and turn on some new age music. Break out your essential oils and give each other sultry massages, run a bath, set up a home pedicure station, or lie back on the couch with homemade face masks on your skin and cucumbers over your eyes. Use this time to relax together at the end of a long week and reconnect with your partner.

Host a Staycation

Don’t bother jetting to the tropics for the weekend—bring the island to you! Pick a destination, then go all in on it. “Travel” to Hawaii and dress up like you’re heading to a luau—even though you’re just rolling into the living room. Whip up cocktails made with Johnnie Walker High Rye and tropical favorites like pineapple and coconut, turn on some yacht rock, and lounge in beach chairs set up right on your carpet. Make like a tourist and embrace those steamy, shore-front feels.

Go Camping…

…in your backyard, that is! On a clear, balmy night, there’s nothing better than spending the evening under the stars with your partner, complete with a romantic campfire to cozy up around. Pitch a tent stocked with lots of fluffy pillows and blankets, then mix yourselves a pitcher of your favorite cocktail made with Johnnie Walker High Rye. Set up a s’mores bar, light your bonfire, then sit back and relax. For bonus points, drape a white sheet over a low-hanging branch and project your partner’s favorite rom-com onto it for a movie under the stars.

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