The Year of Balenciaga

Demna Gvasalia and I meet in the metaverse, in a glassed-in conference room in an unnamed city. Though the buildings suggest Singapore by way of the Jetsons. “This is kind of trippy,” said the avatar otherwise known as the creative director of Balenciaga, upon materializing in the room. “What do I have on? What kind…

Addison Rae’s Holiday Gift Guide

“My perfect cozy afternoon?” Addison Rae muses over the phone with ELLE.com. “Probably hot chocolate with a lot of marshmallows and a really good rom-com. Maybe an older rom-com…any Jennifer Aniston romcom, really. That is my perfect afternoon with lots of blankets and maybe no makeup, just lounging.” Rae is TikTok’s sweetheart. Not too sweet,…

LaChanze, at Home in ‘The Color Purple’ House

“The Color Purple” house — that’s how the actor LaChanze refers to her five-bedroom home in lower Westchester County, N.Y. This has nothing to do with the exterior (it’s gray) or the interior (plum, lavender, lilac, fuchsia, mulberry and violet are underrepresented). But it has everything to do with LaChanze’s Tony-winning performance in the 2005…

Feeling Bad About … Your Hair?

“We know that the fiber curvature of hair changes and gets less regular as we get older, but we don’t know exactly why that happens — just that it happens,” said Dr. Thomas, who is also a principal scientist behind Hair Biology. John Barrett, a hairstylist who tends to Martha Stewart’s and Hillary Clinton’s trademark…

Emma Grede’s Holiday Gift Guide

Emma Grede seems to have it all. The business mogul behind the Kardashians’ sprawling fashion empires (Grede is the co-founder and CEO of Good American alongside Khloe Kardashian and a founding partner of Kim Kardashian’s Skims), she has also used her platform to promote Black businesses as the chairwoman of the Fifteen Percent Pledge, an…