Jenni Avins

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Basel, Switzerland

Recently, I was invited to a “Women’s Circle” hosted by True Botanicals, a Mill Valley, California-based skincare company, at Ojai Vista Farm, a 10-acre estate on an avocado farm north of Los Angeles. Perhaps the event’s unusual title or idyllic location should have indicated it wouldn’t be the average power luncheon. But I still anticipated the afternoon with a smidge of trepidation.

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In Gwyneth Paltrow’s inaugural weekly podcast for her lifestyle brand, Goop, she interviews Oprah Winfrey in a wide-spanning conversation on the topics one might expect from two media moguls and lifestyle gurus: mindfulness and meditation, the #MeToo movement, how to ignore the haters, and so on.

The blackout on Hollywood red carpets is officially over.

There aren’t many “This old thing?” moments on the red carpet at the Academy Awards, where most actresses wear custom-made gowns loaned by designers and chosen by professional stylists. This Oscars night, Rita Moreno was a refreshing exception.

Does it feel like everyone you know just got an Instant Pot?

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As an avid cookie baker, I found myself oddly resistant to Alison Roman’s internet-famous salted butter and chocolate chunk shortbread.

There’s a famous scene in the 1989 film Say Anything in which Lloyd Dobler—a lovesick, aimless high-school graduate played by John Cusack in an oversized trench coat—stands defiantly outside the window of the woman who has recently dumped him, holding a boombox over his head with Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” on blast. It’s a fleeting scene that doesn’t actually move Cameron Crowe’s plot forward much, but it became an archetypal example of persistence in the pursuit of romance (and of Cusack’s general excellence as an offbeat romantic hero).

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“In a so-called high-pressure age we are now doing high-pressure cooking,” wrote Jane Nickerson for the the New York Times in April of 1946, and the statement is true again some 70 years later.

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Subscribe to the Quartzy newsletter to receive this in your inbox each Friday.

Subscribe to the Quartzy newsletter to receive this in your inbox each Friday.

In her rousing speech at the Golden Globes, Oprah Winfrey said “speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.”

As hotbeds of political subversion go, Disneyland has never struck me as particularly high on the list. But a funny thing happened when I visited the amusement park in December.

The red carpet at the Golden Globes wasn’t supposed to be about fashion today. Instead, the spotlight was on the #TimesUp campaign, which some 300 women in Hollywood launched to raise awareness—and funding—for blue-collar women who have suffered sexual harassment and discrimination. They asked that women (and men) show their solidarity on the red carpet by wearing black, instead of the usual array of jewel tones, dazzling metallics, princess pastels, and blazing reds and yellows.

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WWD confirmed this morning that Phoebe Philo, the British designer at the helm of Céline, will depart the label after presenting her final collection, for Fall 2018, in March. While the game of designer musical chairs between fashion labels has become commonplace, Philo’s exit after a decade marks the end of an era at the LVMH-owned fashion house, and for the world of women’s fashion overall.

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My first holiday season in New York, I lived in a single-room apartment and shared a bathroom with the other people who lived on my hallway. The apartment came furnished with a Murphy bed, a hotplate, and a bookshelf—to which I added a string of twinkle lights (there was no room for a tree). This makes it sound like Manhattan of 100 years ago, but it was only 2003, at the beginning of what I still remember as the coldest winter of my life.

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