Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2015 i ELLE

November 1 Inside the Instagram-friendly Rain Room at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Californians looking to remember life before the drought can walk through falling water (and remain dry). November 3 A forbidden passion survives forces both political and private in Isabel Allende’s The Japanese Lover, another epic novel from a master of the form. November 5 Season four of Elementary, in which a modern-day Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) solves crimes with Dr. Watson (Lucy Liu), finds the show’s tongue-in-cheek humor firmly intact. November 6 In the new 10-episode Netflix show Master of None, Aziz Ansari stars as the prototypical millennial: a 30-yearold actor with little direction but much self-regard. It’s loosely based on Ansari’s own life, with his real-life parents playing his onscreen mom and dad.…

Alexei Hay PROVENANCE: Spent his early years in Miami, Tehran, and New York City NOW: New York City with his wife and two children PROFESSION: Photographer BONA FIDES: BA, literature, Brown University; work has appeared in Jalouse, Adweek, Town & Country, Details, Flair, Marie Claire, and Harper’s Bazaar Arabia THIS MONTH: “Gena Rowlands” (page 304). “Ms. Rowlands told me while she was in hair and makeup that she was going to slap me at some point during the course of the day. I feel like I didn’t live up to her expectation of provoking her enough.” LATEST SPLURGE: “My Billingham safari/photo/flak jacket.” FIRST GIG: “I shot dozens of assignments for Time Out New York, one of which was to cover pickle factories on the Lower East Side. The protagonists of…

Liz Goldwyn may be Hollywood royalty—her paternal grandfather was film mogul Samuel Goldwyn; her mother, Peggy Elliott, wrote for classic television comedies like That Girl; and her brother, Tony, plays the president on Scandal—but she has forged a career for herself mostly outside of the industry. Her first book, Pretty Things, was about burlesque dancers, and she turned the interviews she did for it into an HBO documentary. Her latest, Sporting Guide: Los Angeles, 1897, is a collection of fictional stories about madams (their brothels, patrons, and sexual-hygiene rituals) in nineteenthcentury boomtown Los Angeles; it is based on archival research Goldwyn did at the Huntington Library. She spoke to ELLE from La Jolla, California, where she was holed up writing her first-ever television series. —A.F. ELLE: How did you become…

NEW YORK For resort, designer Lela Rose is branching out with a characteristically uptown range of handbags. As a nod to her love of entertaining, detailed in the new tome Prêt-a-Party (Rizzoli), each of the four styles is named after a cocktail, from the Shandy envelope clutch to the Paloma minaudière, shown here. Bottoms up! lelarose.com LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND Come fall, fashion-loving shredders can tear up the half-pipe on Emilio Pucci skateboards. Design students at the École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne reworked the Florentine label’s signature swirl patterns with graphic elements representing la dolce vita, such as fruit, pasta, and gelato. emiliopucci.com NEW YORK Comme des Garçons puts its signature polka-dotand-heart-emblazoned spin on the first U.S. outpost of its Pocket concept boutiques, now serving Play—the label’s popular diffusion line, plus a…

Each season, Chloé ticks the boxes for what we consider the ideal wardrobe: feminine, strong, and subtly sexy. And the house’s new saddlestyle Drew bag delivers all three, while simultaneously answering the work-toevening conundrum. It’s sturdy and classic enough for day, yet compact, with a delicate gold-chain handle that feels dressed up. The Drew is so ELLE, in fact, that the French maison designed this striped navy water-snake-and-lambskin version exclusively for us. What more can we say? C’est magnifique!…

Nineteen-year-old Alessia Cara isn’t the kind of pop star who shriek-sings about taking a bunch of MDMA and dancing until the world ends. Her rallying cry is more “You do you.” “I don’t know how to talk to people I don’t know,” the Ontario, Canada, native says with a laugh. “I don’t really dance. I don’t drink or smoke. Being at parties is very awkward.” That antisocial tendency inspired the YouTube-bred singer-songwriter’s Billboard Hot 100 hit, “Here,” a sultry, bluesy, beat-heavy koan to going to the party…and desperately wanting to leave. The song, one of five tracks from her August-released EP, Four Pink Walls, roused everyone from Taylor Swift to Lorde, Jimmy Fallon to Drake—and, especially, those of us whose socially anxious teen selves still live in our subconscious. On…

As you read Witches of America (FSG), a tasting tour of modern pagan culture cum memoir by Alex Mar, and The Witches: Salem, 1692 (Little, Brown), Stacy Schiff’s psychological study of colonial America’s tragic witch trials—it’s impossible not to contemplate the boundaries of your own spirituality, credulousness, and appetite for the gothic and spectral. With fresh feminist insight, Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, plumbs the mind-set of late-seventeenth-century New England to explain our original “national crackup,” the “preternatural plague” of charges and countercharges of witchcraft that disastrously flourished there. Cut off from England by distance and growing mutual distrust, and facing bloody Native American attacks, the Puritans feared for their mortal lives and eternal souls, every day imbibing dire scriptures stressing the obligation of all people, born in sin, to…

In one of my favorite pictures of my mom at the age of 25, she’s perched cross-legged on a tufted velvet chaise, her hands in motion as if caught midstory. Her round, dark-rimmed glasses are slipping down the bridge of her nose, and her hair—a thick, honey-hued curtain—is draped to one side, so long that it stretches past the hemline of her paisley micromini. In my eyes, as a child and still now as an adult, her mane was the holy grail: the real-life epitome of “shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen, long, beautiful hair”—that is, hair worth writing a musical about. My love for extreme lengths may have started with my mom, but it certainly didn’t end there. Growing up, my muses included Marcia Brady, her strands silky from ritual…

There comes a moment in Alex Garland’s coldly brilliant thriller, Ex Machina, when Swedish newcomer Alicia Vikander—as Ava, a serious piece of AI work—stands in a boreal field under a bold summer sun, impassively awaiting transport but unmistakably telegraphing to us at the same time that she has opened a magic, transformative door and is now walking through it. It’s an apt metaphor for Vikander’s own arrival at your local multiplex, which is currently exploding like a fireworks display. But wait—first, about that magic door, or rather a whole succession of them: Director Joe Wright happened to see Vikander as a teenager in a 2009 Swedish film, Pure, in which she portrayed a troubled young woman’s attempt to reinvent herself. “I thought she was adorable and beautiful,” he says bluntly.…

There’s a pivotal scene in this fall’s Oscar-bait Black Mass in which Dakota Johnson, playing Lindsey, the girlfriend and baby mama of notorious crime boss Whitey Bulger, tells her murderous paramour—and in a pitch-perfect “Southie” Boston accent—to “go fuck yourself.” The couple has taken their young son, who suffers from Reye’s Syndrome, to the hospital. And in that waiting room, for a moment, she’s the terrifying one. “When something that devastating happens,” Johnson says, “the monster inside you shows itself a bit.” To allow Johnson a chance to conjure the monster inside— even for a moment—is, of course, to flip the script on the role with which she’s become all but synonymous. Countless column inches have been devoted to the casting of Anastasia Steele, the lip-biting, S&M-exploring object of Christian…

Aziz Ansari—so good as Parks and Rec’s sweetly delusional wannabe Lothario— could have a second career as a relationship expert. And to some degree, now he does. His recent book, Modern Romance: An Investigation, written with NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg, breaks down courtship in the digital age and is filled with relevant factoids. (For instance: Online dating is now the single biggest way people meet their spouses.) Ansari’s very funny new Netflix series, Master of None, dives even further into this terrain. It’s a comedy about what happens when everyone around you starts to settle down and procreate—but with a few dick jokes and a cameo from Claire Danes. Ansari comes by his curiosity naturally. He grew up in South Carolina, the product of an arranged marriage; his parents had…

November 1 Karl Lagerfeld recements his éminence grise status with a book of sketches featuring his most iconic designs from his 50 years as Fendi’s creative director. Meanwhile, the Roman fashion house debuts its Gems collection of jewel-toned, crocodile-skin couture handbags. Solid-gold turn-lock closures inlaid with precious stones? Magnifico! November 3 The nonprofit RxArt, which transforms children’s hospitals from sterile environments into cheerful spaces, holds its fifteenth annual gala (sponsored by Coach). Support the effort—and get a little art therapy yourself— with this artist-designed coloring book, complete with a John Baldessari cover (at rxart.net). November 7 Gucci sponsors the fifth annual LACMA Art + Film gala, honoring master of light James Turrell and Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu, while Sam Smith serenades and cochairs Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio hold…

Geena Davis is a walking, talking font of knowledge and outrage about the representation of women in film. Her Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has worked tirelessly for eight years to research, shed light on, and engage conversation about inequality in media and entertainment. And while female equality in Hollywood may look as dim as it does in Congress (which, by the way, is currently 19.4 percent in the House and 20 percent in the Senate), Davis—who is planning the second year of this spring’s Bentonville Film Festival, which champions women and diversity in media and guarantees distribution for all its winners—isn’t letting the data get her down. Here, she talks candidly about her agency for change, bolstered by an “impatient optimism.” Can you pinpoint when you became…

“I don’t miss winter,” says Anine Bing, a Danish model-turned-designer who came to Los Angeles 12 years ago for work and never left. The 33-year-old sun-kissed blonde, who launched her self-titled line in 2012, seems to have acclimated well to La-La Land, what with her penchant for such quintessential Angeleno activities as bargain hunting at the Melrose Trading Post flea market (5) and hiking in Runyon Canyon (2), overlooking the Hollywood sign. But one thing Bing can’t stand about her new hometown is celebrity style. “It’s so trend driven,” she says. “And so bright!” At Bing’s flagship (1) on West Third Street—a shopping strip filled with cafés and boutiques more laid-back than nearby Melrose Avenue—you’ll find something altogether more timeless. The Anine Bing collection is a tight edit of deep-V…

When a twenty-something Canadian artist named John Hardy arrived on the fabled Indonesian island of Bali for a vacation in the early ’70s, he was only looking to unwind. But then, completely taken with the island’s natural beauty and its residents’ eco-conscious way of living, Hardy decided to stick around. Soon enough, the metalworking skills of local artisans, which date back to ancient Balinese culture, inspired Hardy to pursue jewelry design. After he developed his signature link for a range of sterling bracelets, Hardy’s tiny operation quickly gathered steam; 40 years on, it’s grown into a full-fledged green community. The brand’s compound, set near picturesque Ubud, comprises a workshop and a boutique. Down the road, you’ll find the Green Village, which includes residences available for sale or rent, and, nearby,…

WHO: Daniel Corrigan, 30, and Jake Sargent, 28 PROVENANCE: Seattle and San Francisco CURRICULA VITAE: Neither of the designers behind Simon Miller—a ready-to-wear collection inspired by Japanese selvage jeans (those woven on traditional shuttle looms) and other hand-dyed indigo staples—has formal fashion training. Corrigan studied graphic design and typography at the California Institute of the Arts; Sargent majored in business marketing at L.A.’s Loyola Marymount University. BLUES CLUES: What the co– creative directors lack in traditional design backgrounds, they make up for in a shared passion for the centuriesold art of indigo dyeing that borders on obsession. Corrigan’s extracurriculars include making large abstract paintings that feature dark-blue swirls and smudges of the pigment. “To me, it’s really about storytelling,” he says. “Denim fibers have to be soaked in vats of…

“I was a little grommet on the beach just frothing for this movie,” says Luke Bracey of his childhood spent on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. “When I first heard about the remake, my reaction was, ‘Siiick.’” That remake, of course, is Point Break, a globally set reimagining of the 1991 SoCal surf thriller that has the 26-year-old Bracey strapping into the role that funneled Keanu Reeves to megastardom. Johnny Utah, Reeves’s Buckeyes quarterback–turned–undercover FBI agent who infiltrates Patrick Swayze’s (now Edgar Ramirez) band of wave-breaking bank robbers, is still idolized for his straight-edge-with-a-death-wish gumption. Thus the part seems less in line with an actor who played Leighton Meester’s love interest in 2011’s Monte Carlo, and was most recently seen in the fluffy Nicholas Sparks adaptation, Best of Me. But…

TOGETHER, ON TWO PATHS Director Catherine Hardwicke’s Miss You Already is, on the one hand, a straightup melodrama about two lifelong besties in London—Jess (Drew Barrymore), who’s struggling to have a baby via IVF; and Milly (Toni Collette), who has to tell her young family she has breast cancer. On the other hand, the script is rollicking funny and edgy, and Collette absolutely, devastatingly owns her role. TORN BETWEEN WORLDS Nick Hornby has fashioned Colm Tóibín’s admired novel Brooklyn into an evocative script for a film that’s backlit with When-the-World-Was-Young ’50s nostalgia. Saoirse Ronan glows as an emigrant from the Emerald Isle who falls for an Italian Lothario, then is impelled back to her Irish hometown for some unfinished business—and faces an insistent undertow of reasons to stay. FEELING THE…

It’s couture week in Paris—le sigh—that rarefied fashion lover’s nirvana at which designers showcase their dreamiest, most extravagant concoctions for the one percent of the one percent who can afford them. And, despite being smaller and considerably less frantic than those for ready-to-wear, the couture shows still have the City of Light in their grip. Chanel stages a casino complete with roulette tables and double C– stamped slot machines at the Grand Palais, a Beaux Arts exhibition hall on the Champs-Élysées; Dior constructs a plexiglass Garden of Earthly Delights on the lawn outside the Rodin museum; and Giambattista Valli throws a postshow flower-themed ball in the splendidly baroque Paris Opera House to celebrate his lipstick collaboration with M.A.C. Picture it: Naomi Campbell, in a plunge-necked, floor-length black gown, dancing next…

When not on the clock, Hollywood lets down its hair, so to speak. From wash-and-wear crops to long, tousled waves to neo-naïf braids, the key is to look pretty without being overpolished. Embracing one’s natural texture is step one, says Mara Roszak, the Los Angeles–based stylist behind the top crops of Emma Stone, Kate Mara, and Lily Collins. “No one should have to fight with their hair.” With the world watching, even a day off requires some time in front of the vanity. The winning strategy, says Lupita Nyong’o’s makeup artist, Nick Barose, is to start with luminous skin and “enhance it with interesting pops of color,” such as a slick of bright lipstick, the handsdown low-effort, big-impact favorite among the famously cool. The resulting look, Barose says, is “fresh…

The celebrity makeup artist occupies a very particular place in the life of a Hollywood actress. Beyond getting her red-carpet-and-camera-ready, a star’s go-to beauty pro, often working in extremely intimate and/or highpressure settings, can ascend to something more: a sounding board, a therapist, sometimes even a best friend. And on the occasion of Dior’s sixth-annual luncheon with Operation Smile, held at the Terrace in L.A.’s Sunset Tower Hotel—for every celeb/artist pair in attendance, Dior funds one of the charity’s cleft-palate surgeries— attendees were happy to engage in a little glam talk, all for a good cause. NICOLE RICHIE AND BEAU NELSON NICOLE: It’s very easy for makeup to wear me instead of me wearing the makeup. But Beau has this way of doing the most beautiful makeup, and it doesn’t…

Despite growing up with artists in her family, Santa Monica native Coco Kislinger didn’t consider herself creative—until sinus infections and stomach woes led her to raid her mother’s pantry one night in 2012 searching for sweets that wouldn’t make her sick. Freshly graduated from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, Kislinger, the daughter of L.A.-based jewelry designer Cathy Waterman, had recently ditched gluten, dairy, and refined sugar in order to relieve her allergies, but her classic culinary education only prepared her so much for a diet that forbade such pastry staples as cream and flour. The 27-year-old Kislinger, who also earned a degree in political science from L.A.’s Pitzer College, had been trained that baking was “a science, like chemistry,” she says, “but pretty soon, I tossed all that out the…

For untold millions, Kate Winslet is and always will be our Rose, the one who survived Titanic: a young lady of privileged conventionality, but one who’s also soulful—and capable of turning Leo DiCaprio into a man by blurting out huskily, in the right circumstance, “Put your hands on me, Jack!” Ah, Rose…. “She was young—19, I think—and she’d lobbied hard for the part,” director James Cameron says. “I wasn’t too interested in her until I met her and worked with her at the audition— she just completely won me over. Leo was very devilmay-care on set, and Kate was very serious and in character.” But that character is definitely not Winslet—the kind of blithe spirit who, having just made your acquaintance by phone, can exclaim, “Oh, fuck you! I’m not…

For Martin Luther King Jr., the road began in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and led to the state capital of Montgomery, 50 miles away. The march revealed the brutality of the Alabama state troopers, and in so doing pushed LBJ to pass the voting rights legislation that would, for the first time, grant meaningful citizenship to black Americans in the Deep South. For Ava DuVernay, the director who chronicled these events, the road to Selma began in South Central Los Angeles, where she came of age amid the hip-hop ferment of the mid-1980s. After UCLA, the road then took what might seem like an unlikely turn: more than 14 years in Hollywood publicity and marketing. In 2003, she found herself doing PR for Michael Mann’s movie Collateral, starring Jamie Foxx…

A virtually unknown Carey Mulligan braced herself to watch a preview screening of what she knew could be her breakout role. It was 2009’s An Education, a small British indie in which she plays a precocious London schoolgirl who allows herself to be swept up in the glamour of a predatory, and charming, older man. “I came out of the theater sobbing,” she recalls. “I was on the phone with my mum: ‘It was so boring, I don’t do anything, and it’s rubbish.’ I’d played supporting roles, but this was the first time I felt, ‘Shit, this is all on me.’ I felt like an enormous failure.” She was nominated for an Oscar, and the film, of course, made her young career. Mulligan is a spectacularly bad selfcritic, but more…

New York Fashion Week is about half over, which means the season has barely begun, and so far it’s been such an eclectic mix—lace and satin slipdresses and tops at Givenchy’s muchdebated 9/11 show, set on a pier in the shadow of One World Trade Center and illuminated at dusk by the twin beams that shoot into the sky commemorating the fallen towers and the human beings who died that day. Then there was Tommy Hilfiger’s breezy island girl; Alex Wang’s masterful elucidation of the cool girl, even as he celebrated his tenth anniversary—making him what? A new old guy? An old new guy?—and Carolina Herrera’s beautiful, poetic pink parade of couture shapes and light-as-air confections that played as well to the young birds lighting up the lower step in…

SET PIECE When photographer David Bellemere and the ELLE team hit the beach in Malibu for “Adult Swim,” the scene wasn’t unfamiliar to model Cora Emmanuel (@coraemmanuel). The 24-year-old hails from the sandy shores of Martinique, which she left at age 18 to become a model in New York. On this shoot, however, Emmanuel swapped the usual gauzy cover-up for the season’s most coveted furs. “The beach is my playground, so I was comfortable,” she says. “People looked at me like ‘I feel bad for you,’ but I have a high tolerance for heat.” GOOD EVENING Melodie Monrose (@melodiemonrose), who blurred the line between daywear and eveningwear in “Time to Shine,” left her native Martinique beaches for fashion runways at age 18. Today, she lives in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood,…

So there’s this bird up at Mary-Louise Parker’s farmhouse in upstate New York. “And it keeps flying into the same fucking spot in the window,” the actress says on a summer afternoon at her apartment in Brooklyn, planting her feet in the plush rug and gazing out the wall of windows, as though expecting the bird to be out there now, circling her penthouse aerie. It has been happening all summer, she says. She’ll be listening to records or something and then—thwap! Parker bangs her fist into her hand. “And I just know it’s this massive metaphor. But what do I know?” she says. Maybe it’s just a strange bird. Kind of like Mary-Louise Parker herself. A few minutes earlier, she’d answered her door clutching a box she was decoupaging…

At a loft party in SoHo one early fall night in 1999, I met a man—a brilliant and respected writer. He was 40, wild, irreverent, feeling the first flush of literary success, recently separated from his wife, and on the prowl. I was 22, youthful, guileless, recently graduated from college, wearing a black miniskirt with knee-high leather boots, and thrilled to meet the author of the incendiary magazine essay I’d pored over and underlined the day before. Anyone could have predicted where this meet-cute was headed, but after an initial frisson, our relationship settled into something much rarer between men and women: a deep and genuine friendship uncomplicated by sex. This man was obsessed with a beautiful older woman, an Israeli academic who lived with an investment banker. She wanted…

FLOWEN Only upon close inspection does it become evident that the impossibly detailed, delicate-looking webs of metal in the new Flowen Specimens collection are, in fact, earrings and pendant necklaces. Inspired by both rock formations in Iceland and cellular structures, the pieces designed by the husbandand-wife team of Juan Azulay, 41, an architect and media artist, and Flavia Lowenstein, also 41, an accessories designer, are first digitally fabricated from silver powder using a next-gen 3-D modeling process and then plated with materials— including gold and a rubberized coating called gommato— by master craftsmen in Italy. “It’s a marriage between cuttingedge technologies and old-world luxury craftsmanship,” Lowenstein says, offering an apt description of the collection as well as their partnership. —Alison S. Cohn BEEK Kenna Florie and Birgit Klett of Beek—the…

In Hollywood, no matter what role you play—be it the sophisticated starlet, the wide-eyed ingenue, the quirky crossover, or the sultry bombshell—wardrobe is key. Here, we analyze the style of four hot properties who don’t follow the rules of the game, they rewrite them—so that you can, too.…

She’s been Glinda the Good Witch in Wicked. She was nominated for a Tony for her supporting role as a snappy, lovelorn shoemaker in 2013’s Kinky Boots. She won a supportingactress Tony this year for her hilarious portrayal of a childlike candymaker who, despite her dismal dancing skills, dreams of being a ballerina in You Can’t Take It With You. And on Showtime’s Masters of Sex, her Betty Dimello, the mouthy call girl–turned–sex study assistant, has ascended to fan favorite. If there’s one through line to Annaleigh Ashford’s characters, it’s pluck. Next, the 30-yearold actress will play Matthew Broderick’s talking dog. Seriously. In a role originated off-Broadway by Sarah Jessica Parker in 1995, Ashford returns to Broadway in Sylvia, the A. R. Gurney comedy about a New Yorker (Broderick) who…

“Human love is the vilest thing in the world,” Ginger Roberts tells her husband, Paul, in Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare (Pantheon), the author’s much-anticipated third novel. The couple has formed a relationship with Velvet Vargas, an 11-year-old Dominican American girl from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, through a free summerenrichment program that has placed Velvet in their upstate New York home. While staying with the Robertses, she develops an unusual bond with a horse at the barn next door, and Ginger, a childless forty-something, becomes maternally attached to Velvet. Velvet’s own mother seems, to Ginger, at best neglectful, at worst abusive. In one scene between the two women, Velvet has to translate her mother’s Spanish: “She said, ‘My mom wants you to look and see how ugly I am.’” Love is not…

INTO THE BLUE “Instead of wearing jewelry, I love the idea of makeup as an accessory—like this gorgeous jewel tone,” says makeup artist Robin Black. Some blues can skew a little green or yellow when they’re blended out, but Black loves Sisley Phyto-Eye Twist in Lagoon, a satin pencil with just a hint of sheen, because it holds its rich sapphire color whether it’s laid on thick or thin. It makes brown eyes “even deeper” and “brings out the blue in pale eyes,” she says. To apply, Black plays to the eye shape: “Intense color on the lower lash line can overwhelm some people. When I apply it underneath, I use the thickest color on the outside edge and thin it out toward the inner corner,” she says. “This gives…

SLIM FAST For clients seeking to streamline exercise-resistant bulges, dermatologist Annie Chiu, MD, goes hot and cold—pairing the radio-frequency device Vanquish, which kills fat cells with heat, with CoolSculpting, which destroys fat cells by freezing them. “Clients love the two together,” Chiu says of Vanquish’s ability to treat broad expanses, such as the abdomen, and CoolSculpting’s capacity to zero in on hard-to-tone areas, such as saddlebags. For a quick, pre–awards show fix, Chiu recommends Futura Fit, a device that couples ultrasound (to break down fat with sonic vibrations) with an electrical current that prompts muscles to involuntarily contract, efficiently sweeping the fat into the circulatory system, where it’s naturally metabolized by the body. “People will do it the day of an event to get into their dress,” Chiu says of…

I spend a lot of time with teenage girls. Teenage girls who wear assiduously applied makeup every time I see them, and teenage girls in jeans and T-shirts who look as if they’ve never touched a mascara wand. And, occasionally, teenage girls more or less like the teenage girl I once was: usually barefaced, but occasionally glopping on such heavy liquid liner that they look like droopyeyed raccoons. Sometimes we talk about their college visits or their weekend plans. They tell me about the semester they spent on a sailboat in the Caribbean or the Eric Garner protest their kick-ass social-studies teacher took them to. Sometimes they’ll shyly ask whether I felt nervous about moving away for college, too. But mostly we talk about every teenager’s least favorite subject (and…

Darlings! I’m on ELLE family leave. I gave birth—my first—to a strapping little app called Damn Love—a ridiculously hilarious dating game (and a lampoon of Tinder!). You can dandle her on your knee at the App Store. And while you’re doing that, I’ll just gather the most popular letters in Ask Eeee’s 22-year history. See you in a minute. [Two days later….] Well. It turns out to be a very, very strange group of letters, indeed. Not at all what you’d expect. This first letter ran three years ago, and though Joan Didion is probably right when she said that “almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening,” I can say this to you, Joan: Ha! The chap who…

Just six months ago, Amy Schumer was still obscure enough that she could announce, from the stage of the MTV Movie Awards, “Half of you don’t know who I am, and half of you think I’m Meghan Trainor,” and get a laugh. Even then, it wasn’t true, of course—she was hosting the thing—but today, she couldn’t get away with that crack. That’s because, in the last year or so, Schumer has zoomed from semi-anonymity to near-ubiquity. Her self-titled, Peabody Award–winning Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer, became a must-watch (among the highlights of its third season: the episode “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer,” in which an all-male jury debates whether the leggy 34-year-old blonde is “hot enough” to be on television). In September, she opened Madonna’s Rebel Heart tour…

Salma Hayek was playing the title role in the popular telenovela Teresa in 1991 when she left Mexico to try to crack into Hollywood. One night she landed as a guest on a Univision talk show hosted by the comedian Paul Rodriguez. “Why are you here?” he asked her, in Spanish. “In Mexico you are a big star, and here you are an extra. There are no roles for us here, haven’t you noticed?” “I have. And I am going to change that,” Hayek replied. Director Robert Rodriguez, who had been searching for the female lead opposite Antonio Banderas for his thriller Desperado, caught Hayek’s appearance. The next day, he called her to audition, and, after doing some convincing, she got the part. In the 20 years since, that fire…

When Gena Rowlands enters a room, the first thing you notice is the hair: an impossibly thick, sensual, wavy blonde mane so illuminating that her late husband, John Cassavetes, nicknamed her “Golden Girl,” and so enviable that, not long ago, a woman in a restaurant sent her kid over to give it a yank to see if it was a wig. “I thought it was rather funny,” the actress says wryly in her gentle, gravelly voice. Today in her understated Hollywood Hills home—bought in 1963 and mortgaged time and again to finance Cassavetes’s influential avant-garde films—the fabulous hair is restrained with Jackie O sunglasses atop her head, while on her nose sits a pair of peach-tinted aviators. She’s so cool. “Would you like a glass of rosé?” Rowlands asks, gesturing…

To grow up in New York City in the ’90s was to witness the convening of ravers and hip-hop kids, skaters and goths. The city’s schoolyards saw an explosion of hoodies, mohair, puffers, jerseys, saggy, wide pants, and a lot of nylon. Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne, the designers behind Public School, came of age during this time—in Jackson Heights, Queens, and Kensington, Brooklyn, respectively—and their line is full of unexpectedly sophisticated revisions of those urban staples: dressed-up track pants, elongated polo dresses, tailored basketball shorts, luxe bombers, graphic sweaters, and sporty anoraks paired with pleated skirts. And yet with the source references barely recognizable, the aesthetic they’ve created feels at once familiar and entirely original—a kind of sharply cut, elevated activewear, and a uniform for modern times. Chow, whose…

COVERS Amy Schumer: Cotton poplin shirt by Calvin Klein Collection, $350, at Calvin Klein Collection (NYC). Satin bra by Hanro, $98, visit hanrousa.com. Alicia Vikander: Sheer top, bra, leather pants by Louis Vuitton, prices on request, at select Louis Vuitton stores nationwide, call 866-VUITTON. Aluminum bracelets by David Yurman, $250 each, at David Yurman (NYC), visit davidyurman.com. Dakota Johnson: Eel skin jacket by Calvin Klein Collection, $3,995, at Calvin Klein Collection (NYC). Silver necklace by David Yurman, $9,500, at David Yurman (NYC), visit davidyurman.com. Salma Hayek: Double-face wool dress by Stella McCartney, $4,395, collection at Neiman Marcus stores nationwide, visit net-aporter.com. Diamond and platinum rings by Harry Winston, prices on request, at Harry Winston boutiques nationwide, call 800-988-4110 or visit harrywinston.com. Carey Mulligan: Crystalembroidered tulle gown by Valentino, $21,000, at…

THIS MONTH FOR SCORPIO: (OCT 23–NOV 21) This month brings the year’s most generous new moon, arriving on the 11th, and lucky you, it’s in Scorpio! In the two weeks that follow, choose a goal you’d love to achieve and take steps toward it— the universe will help clear a path. If finding love is your wish, Neptune’s move out of retrograde on the 18th will be a big help. At the full moon on the 25th, you may find yourself concerned with finances, and with Saturn opposing this moon, you could also see your career hit a difficult patch. Take no risks and go with the flow until this aspect passes in December, because you aren’t out of the woods yet: On or around the 29th, when the Sun…