It's a Vogue World after all
I didn't know it was a pussy palace.
Hello and happy Friday, Messketeers!
Finally, a week where we got a little good news here in NYC! I can’t tell you what a relief it is that Zohran won. I also appreciate the way his campaign caused many celebs and influencers in this city to go full mask-off Islamophobe, as it’s useful to know who I never need to pay attention to or take seriously ever again.
Last night I was on a lovely little panel for
’s podcast with uber-charming and chic gals and . Thank you to both of them and the audience for indulging me as I monologued about every vague trend that’s been rattling around in my brain all year. That convo should be posted for you to listen to in the coming weeks! In preparation for the evening, I took a look back at what exactly happened this year in fashion and I can’t believe all of that went down in 2025. It feels like both nothing and too much transpired over the last ten months. We kicked off this year contending with Bianca Censori’s visible labia only to close it out with a plastic pubic wig. That’s some gorgeous symmetry right there.What else. I participated in a deviled egg competition and now I can’t stop smelling deviled eggs everywhere I go. Given that I had unfettered access to this hors d’oeuvre, I obviously ate far too many, and it has put me off eggs for a week straight, but I did win “creepiest” deviled egg of the night (I dyed them black) so it was all worth it in the end.
I also went to the DMV last week lol. I finally renewed my driver’s license and tragically they took away my old New Hampshire one in the process which had a wayyy too zoomed-in photo of my face taken when I was 16. I will miss her! And now I am living in fear waiting to discover what horrific image of myself awaits me on my new ID card that I will have to live with for the next decade. I already know it can’t be good because the lady made me retake it, and when in your life have you ever heard of a DMV employee being sympathetic enough over a bad photo to let you try again?……..This does not bode well for me, but I do think that is kind of the fun of the driver’s license photo experience. It is a microdose of ugly punctuating your day — exposure therapy to all of the worst angles of yourself. Anyway, I treated myself to a donut afterwards as it was very well-deserved. And what is the point of being an adult if not to bribe yourself into doing all the bad adult things?
Oh! We also had our book club zoom meeting for Masscult & Midcult the other week and I am obsessed with our troupe of Lowlifes. Everyone is so smart and interesting and brings so much to the discussion every month. We’re actually talking about making the meetings longer because there’s simply too much to say! This month we’re tackling Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger and, as I wrote in Mess Recs yesterday, I am now seeing doppelgangers everywhere I look. Most recently, in the news that Tom Brady has cloned his dog…….Anyway, we’re going to keep discussing Doppelganger into December as it’s the holidays and there are a bunch of supplementary readings and movies that go along with it that feel worthy of our attention as well. So please join us on that academic curriculum if you’re so inclined!
Since we last spoke, my Elle Fanning cover story for i-D came out. I hope you guys enjoy reading these profiles as much as I enjoy writing them. I had breakfast with Elle in the West Village and was totally charmed by her by the end of our meal. My biggest takeaway from interviewing A-list starlets is that charisma is extremely real and they’ve all got it in spades. And I highly recommend going to see her new movie Sentimental Value! It’s finally out in America and it is so, so good.
It was also my greatest honor and pleasure to be interviewed by my pal
for her piece in InStyle on the history of merkins. Finally, the world is recognizing my fake bush advocacy lo, these many years!!!Ok my sister’s in town visiting so I gotta run, but here’s some slop for you to pore over until we meet again!
I have to begin today by allowing us all to let out a great collective sigh of relief. That’s right, we finally received the first and ONLY pumpkin patch photoshoot of the season! And just in the nick of time. It came to us courtesy of America’s Duke and Duchess, which I really feel like I should have foreseen. I am still baffled as to how Meghan and Harry were the only celebs who found their way to this classic seasonal agricultural activation, but thank god they did. It wouldn’t truly be All Hallow’s Eve without at least one staged, folksy image with gourds.
Merkin Madness
I also just wanted to highlight what I believe might very well be the first-ever appearance of the word “merkin” in a People magazine headline???!! I know logically this has nothing to do with me, but it does feel like some massive personal accomplishment. THIS is the true Mess agenda. This is how I win. Corrupting the media, one real, legitimate fashion publication at a time, by forcing them to talk about plastic pubic wigs.
Painted On
And listen, I know I’ve already raised the alarm in these pages that we have a Kardashian mole in our midst, but it’s genuinely getting freakier by the day. As a reader suggested, I’m going to have to Wagatha Christie this situation in order to ferret them out. I’m doing my best to not go full K-Anon conspiracy theorist here, so in the case of Kim suddenly wearing a trompe l’oeil outfit painted directly onto her flesh — something I explicitly told her to do in a newsletter from August of last year — I’m just going to assume, as this editorial was styled by Jahleel Weaver, that he is likewise a big fan of the Clermont Twins and their very nude stylings and was just organically inspired to recreate their acrylic-based attire on his latest celebrity client. That, or this family is officially stalking me, and I’m going to have to take out the first-ever cyber restraining order against them. Stay tuned!
Rotten Tomatoes
Ok, and I was pretty committed to never watching this television program as I feel that, as a reformed American Horror Story fan, I have already suffered enough at the hands of Ryan Murphy and will no longer be fooled into watching his brain-rot drivel no matter what shiny bells and whistles he attaches to it. But honestly, after seeing the way this program has been getting ruthlessly panned and dragged for its life in the press, I might have to tune in after all. That 0% rating has me wondering if this could be a The Room situation where the TV show is actually so abysmal it circles right back around to fabulous again….
And if that wasn’t enough to pique my interest, Kim then proceeded to post a litany of terrible office siren outfits that a real lawyer would surely get disbarred for wearing in all 50 states. But this bumster pencil skirt also made me wonder, why the hell is Kim not wearing things like this in real life?? This is a thousand times more interesting than her wardrobe of Skims unitards and rib-crunching gowns. I do think it’s the wrong style thong for such a garment, but beggars really can’t be choosers in this dynamic.
Anyway, if one of you has watched this star-studded “camp” production, please let me know if I should give it a spin as well. OR BETTER YET, what if I did a deranged fashion recap of it??? idk you guys tell me in the comments!
The Breastplate Returns
A friend sent me this image of Irene Sofia Lucio wearing a cast of her own bust to the opening night of her play Liberation, which she performs completely in the nude, and I am obsessed. Apparently, in the show, her character says that her favorite physical feature is “her tits,” and so Irene decided to use this opportunity to show them off. The top is made by Misha Japanwala, who specializes in these types of breastplates and also made the silver one Lupita Nyong’o wore to the 2023 Tony Awards. Irene told Playbill of the decision to wear this boob armor to the premiere, “I get to commemorate this moment and my body in this moment in time. I will look back at this piece hanging up on my wall and say ‘Damn, I did that.’”
Of course, Tom Ford first ushered this concept into the zeitgeist with his Spring 2020 collection, promptly creating a number of custom Jeff Koons-esque metal tops for celebs like Zendaya and Gwyneth Paltrow. But Irene’s top addresses one of the major complaints I had with Ford’s version at the time, which is that it was only ever shown on small-breasted women (with Desiree Busnelli being the one extremely notable exception — a photograph of whom remains one of my favorite fashion images of all time). I love that Irene’s chest plate shows what real large breasts look like and how they hang instead of some stylized concept of an “ideal” chest. I think it makes it both more confronting and infinitely more compelling.
Make Fashion Kinky Again
On the topic of Tom Ford, there were some requests on Instagram for my thoughts on Teyana Taylor’s ensemble by the brand, and so of course, I must oblige. Frankly, this is far too chic to appear in these pages, although I suppose it does fulfill my general criteria of slutty and scandalous perfectly. This, to me, is the true genius of Tom Ford — especially with Haider Ackermann now at its helm. The brand has an incredible ability to make sexy dressing feel fresh again. While we’ve already run the gamut of extreme red carpet nudity and sheer dresses with thongs, the mere addition of this razor-thin strap running up the sternum before looping around the neck adds a whole new layer of intrigue. It feels kinky without being explicitly kink. If I had to make one minor note, it’s that I think the thong straps should be pulled up a scooch higher so as to better mirror the angle of the neckline. Otherwise, I give this my full-throated Mess stamp of approval.
Ye Olde Vogue World
Since we last got the chance to speak at length, Vogue World transpired. Why? No one knows. But transpire it did! And apparently, all the advertisers are thrilled with the return on their investment in the form of the social media impressions this spectacle made. I don’t know about all of that, but I wanted to bring it up because while I understand that this was a Hollywood inspired affair and the models were all wearing costumes from a number of classic films, I just found the choice to reference the Renaissance period via Tilda Swinton’s costume from Orlando (left) and to dress Julia Garner up as Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (right) at this particular juncture in America to be…..interesting! If you want to know why I find those outfits to be particularly funny and fraught, may I suggest reading my essay “Chainmail as Pre-Capitalist Yearning” and then following that up by googling the current levels of wealth disparity in this country. Isn’t history fun?!
The 2026 Forecast
Anyway, while I found the looks on the runway to be pretty snoozy and out-of-touch, there were a small handful of looks in the FROW that felt quite timely and plugged in to a number of trends that I’m foreseeing only getting bigger in 2026.
Jacob Rott pulled an Alexander Skarsgård, showing up in an ERL tailcoat and tighty-whities and gunning for his own coveted Calvin Klein contract. I feel like we’ve been seeing quite a lot of this brief-based black tie this year, and I’m all for this sleazier take on the classic tuxedo. That said, I would also love to see some men rocking this silhouette but swapping out the underwear for a hot pant made of suiting material — just putting it out there!
I thought Alix Earle looked surprisingly high fashion in the FROW. A difficult feat for someone who built her internet legacy in part by shamelessly puking and pissing on all of her party outfits and then telling us about it. But what struck me in particular about this Saint Laurent mini dress was the giant oval appliqué completely obscuring her torso. I’ve been thinking for a minute now that all of the bulbous gown shapes we saw out there this year might give way to giant pieces of 2D geometry, and this feels like yet another harbinger of that trend to come.
And I also wanted to quickly point out Hailey Bieber’s plush Mugler cocktail dress as it instantly reminded me of the padded-out shoulders on Emily Ratajkowski’s Jean Paul Gaultier gown the other week, and I feel like we are going to start seeing a lot more of this type of cushioned apparel. It’s sort of like the bumper car bolsters we saw on Meg Thee Stallion and Shanina Shaik earlier this year, but applied to the entire body — like a onesie made of foam or an inflatable sumo wrestler costume.
Underscored Curves
And finally, there was one other micro-trendlet I picked up on this week that I thought might be of interest. I noticed that we’re starting to see crop tops and hemlines that outline the curves of the chest and posterior like a reverse sweetheart neckline. It feels like a way to underscore and emphasize their existence while still keeping everything totally covered up. It’s like those body parts have been highlighted within the text of this garment. I particularly like Cynthia’s Jean Paul Gaultier top as it reminds me of one Julia Fox wore at the end of last year that made it look like her breasts were being dragged down to the floor which fits nicely within my “breasts made strange again” 2025 prediction.
Ok, well, I’ve got to run before I get “we saw you from across the bar”’d by this deeply cursed throuple. But I’ll see you back here next week with a special Halloween-themed YouTube video and a weekly fashion rundown exclusively for paid subs. Later taters!!!
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