Mex-Femme July 2019
COLLEGE READING
4 BOOKS TO READ BEFORE YOU GRADUATE
DRESS TO IMPRESS
BEST UNDER $50 OUTFITS FOR YOUR GRADUATION
Books
Books you need to read before graduating from college Book reading does not have to be boring. These 4 books will prepare you for life after college. By Alex Strike.
There is no college student who would like reading books, they say. Can you believe it? We hardly think so! Yes, reading is fashionable. Again. And every college student is always in fashion as a rule. But a sufficient ammount of other reasons why books are worth reading for students can be found which are more essential than simple fashion following: books widen your vocabulary; books help students find new models for academic writing; books improve your cognitive skills; books expand your view of the world around; books let students remember grammar and punctuation rules autmatically; books help students learn a subject better; books help you avoid a social exclusion (according to this study of the Basic Skills Agency). Every college student has their own list of mustread, or at least must-check, books; but what if we tell you there are some writing masterpieces that are worth your attention and are essential for college students to read? Check the list below! 1.- Freedom by Jonathan Franzen This is a story about a relationship, a love triangle which subjects first met in college. What will become more important to them: love or friendship? Is there any decision for this difficult situation,
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when you love but do not want to lose your best friend? Every college student should know the answer to these questions..
2.- 1984 by George Orwell A world divided between three totalitarian states. A total control, elimination of all human values, and attempts to survive in this world full of hatred. Will you be able to challenge the system? Are you strong enough to remain for ever one and not to lose your individuality? 3.- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez This is a myth-novel, an epic novel, a novel-paroemia about the evolution of humanity where each of us is doomed to loneliness, and where loneliness is the only thing that dominates the world where everything is tangled with the ties of fatal love. A perfect reading for college students to understand and estimate the importance of a family and close people who support them. 4.- Lolita by Vladimir Nobokov Full of humor and intrigue, this novel about forbidden love between a man and a young nymphet remains controversial today but can teach us understanding, sacrifice, forgiveness and many other traits that are so important but forgotten by so many people today.
How many books from this list have you read already? Do you have anything to add or change here?
Interview
Leandra Medine Get to know the founder of Man Repeller
Leandra Medine is the brain behind Man Repeller - the satirical style website. While her personal style has us moodboarding for days, her own career journey has us researching for equally as long to understand what it takes to turn a style blog into a business leading brands are lining up to work with. Mango is the latest. They’ve snapped Leandra up to take part in their Journeys series exploring the world’s most exciting cities, all while wearing the best of the Spanish brand’s latest offering. We’re particularly into the flared jeans Leandra rocks in the photos below. What do you find is the most difficult thing about managing a team? he most difficult thing about having a team is certainly managing the team. If I’m being really honest, I’ve always considered myself a people person and I certainly still think that I am one but I tend to get quite impatient and I’m quick to come to conclusions. You have to recognise that you’re managing people not necessarily a business. The people are supposed to be, essentially, working the business and if you’re managing the business and not the team, you’re operating as a micro manager and that is definitely a flaw that I maintain to, like, the nth degree. Working with people has been the most challenging aspect of this job, because once you become a manager you’re no longer just a creative or a business woman, you’re also a psychiatrist, amongst other things. What do you look for when you hire someone? This has changed a lot over time but I think I’m finally nailing what it takes
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to find the right employee and specifically when I’m hiring for my business team. The truth is that you spend the majority of your time with the people who you work with, so they need to be people that you really admire and respect as individuals. Respect is a really big piece of it. I don’t know how to describe exactly what the feeling is but I always know straight away when someone really understands Man Repeller and more than anything that feels like the most important character trait, because it’s such a unique and amorphous brand. It’s part-influencer, part-media company, part-agency, design lab. There’s so many moving parts, it’s kind of an organism in its own right. And so, it’s very hard to find specialists who genuinely understand all of those pieces, so when I do I really click. What’s something about your job that people will be really surprised that you have to do? I take out the rubbish pretty regularly, you know we’re a really, really small team, we’re only 16 people and it drives me crazy when the office is messy. No one thinks of it as their own living room the way that I do, because it’s my office, so I find that I’m tidying up and cleaning and taking rubbish out very, very often. Cleaning up after employees and I’m on bathroom duty a lot. Where do you find your biggest inspiration? I always have a hard time answering this question because I’m not typically cataloguing what inspires me but I interviewed Ralph Lauren before his show during NYFW and he said something that really stuck with me which
is that he’s really inspired by living and so I’m going to borrow that sentiment from him because I think it’s really true and the way to stay inspired and to stay true to yourself is to be inspired by the life you’re living and to create a life for yourself that you want be inspired by. How do you define your relationship with the Man Repeller
I had to compare it to a relationship I would like to say that Man Repeller is like your older sister’s very cool friend, who is surprisingly kind. Who do you admire? I interviewed Cindy Crawford not that long ago and I was so taken aback by how kind she was and how excited and enthusiastic and energetic she still was to talk about her career as a supermod-
reader? We’ve done a very, very good job of developing what seem like really deep and strong relationships with our community of readers, particularly because the writing is so honest and candid, it really doesn’t sugar coat much and I often say that Man Repeller is a platform that just refuses to iron out the wrinkles, but it is also a luxury media brand so there’s this interesting tension that speaks for a really successful product, which is we’re not necessarily your sister or your best friend but we’re also not this profoundly prescriptive space that’s telling how to feel and what to do and not listening to you in response. So, if
el. I found that very motivational, and she’s experienced so many different careers over the course of the last 30 years and it’s quite inspiring to see someone like that who’s never really succumbed to burnout and to who’s been able to forge such a path for herself, and to maintain a personal life. Do you think it’s really important to be a flexible person in this industry? Yes, absolutely, I think that’s probably true in every industry, but particularly in fashion because it is an industry that has embraced tech so wholly, and it’s changing so fast, no matter what you do today, three months from now it might be deemed irrelevant, and I
think that having a flexible mind, the ability to stretch the boundaries of how you think and what you do is incredibly important. Leandra’s top five career tips: There are no mistakes – if you enter into an industry or into a job that you find is not for you, just be grateful that now you know what you don’t want to do. Two really important character traits to maintain and to be successful in business are focus and discipline, and I kind of learned that the hard way. I would say that if those are two character traits that are hard for you, really, really try to narrow in on fixing that up. Don’t let your career become the sum of your existence, because that will set you up to feel less. If you’re not having fun every single day, don’t think that means you’re in the wrong profession, which sounds probably a little bit hypocritical given the last thing I said in the previous question, but I find that the millennial teaching is such that you’re supposed to love every element of every single day in the work-place, and it is really beautiful to love your job, and you can love your job without loving every aspect of it - it’s not supposed to feel like a paid vacation, it’s work. It’s called work for a reason, and so recognise that. Make sure that your personal goals align with your business goals, because if you enter into a career that doesn’t suit the life that you want to live, well, why are you doing that? I mean, we work to accommodate our personal lives.
Shopping
Shopping vintage could make your whole dang outfit
By Pandora Sykes How should I shop in today’s world? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly in the aftermath of Fashion’s Dirty Secrets, a BBC documentary that aired in October and revealed that in the U.K. alone, we dump 300,000 tons of clothes in landfills each year (that’s the weight of a small family car every two minutes). When The Guardian’s fashion editor, Jess Cartner-Morley, recently debuted a new column, she told her readership: “I’m going to change what I wear and what I write about. Every week’s look will include old favourites from my wardrobe and discoveries from vintage stores. There will still, always, be gorgeous hand-picked pieces that are avail-
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able to buy. But we won’t pretend that’s the whole story.” Up until that point, and certainly during my tenure as a fashion columnist at a competing broadsheet, The Sunday Times, there was an idea that if your readers couldn’t buy something, you shouldn’t shoot it. What kind of service were you doing for the audience if they couldn’t shop your solutions? But when I left the newspaper, I decided I wanted to make vintage clothing not only a part of my wardrobe (it was already a large part of that) but part of any fashion journalism that I did. My intention: to take things out of the retail cycle as much as I put things in, to inspire personal style interpretations of these vintage pieces and to encourage the hunt for
one’s own unique version of what I’m wearing. Of course, not all vintage comes cheap. Pre-owned designer clothes — seasons old rather than decades old — can be expensive (just look at old Celine). Part of the fun for me, however, is unearthing “steals” from the vintage shops I frequent, like this Gucci wool blazer you see here — my favorite, would-save-it-in-a-fire piece of clothing, which was £50 ($61) from Portobello Market. I found the balloon-sleeved Aran knit cardi in the slideshow above for £30 ($38) from there, too. My pearl-strewn beret, £15 ($19), is from Beyond Retro. This suede skirt, £20 ($26), is from ASOS Marketplace. My suede and sheepskin coat from eBay (bought in 2010) was £65 ($83). I have an electric blue kilt from eBay that I bought
for £5 ($6.40) and a lace T-shirt from a flea market in the South of France that I found for £1 ($1.28). (For what it’s worth, I’ve learned that the best way to find said gems is to have specific pieces you’re looking for in mind, and to keep your eyes out for anything you buy on repeat. I, personally, buy suede coats and white frilly blouses over and over again.) This is not me saying that I am winning at sustainability. I still shop more than I should; I am not immune to the “new in” section. But I do have a rule that if I see something new that I like, I have to see if I can find the vintage version of it first. It isn’t an entirely altruistic endeavor, either. Whether it’s clothing, furniture, art or crockery, I love vintage shopping: the hunt
(trawling through market racks and web pages, eyes the size of saucers, refusing to give up until I find what I am looking for), the score, the bargain, the knowledge that no one else has that piece. I love it so much that I’ve done a trawl for you to give you a head start on your own hunt. Here are some of my favorite bargains online at the moment with a similar luxury counterpart to show how you can still shop “in fashion” at a fraction of the price. You have no idea how much I wanted to keep those finds to myself. But then, I can’t be too selfish about them, given that I found, and bought, a Burberry kilt on Etsy while writing this…
Photo Essay
NYC Fashion Week
The concept of fashion week — which, in the US, usually refers to the New York Fashion Week that takes place in February and again in September — is relatively simple: designers presenting collections for the following season to a room full of their peers in the fashion industry. Its genesis can be traced back more than 75 years, but over the past decade, NYFW has become something else. It’s possible it peaked in the late 1990s, a!er Sex and the City brought the glamour of New York fashion parties into living rooms countrywide, or maybe it was in the excesses of the mid-2000s, when fashion became an increasingly common business venture for celebrities, just before the recession Susie Lau wears a beige Miu Miu two-piece set outside the devastated the economy. Still, each time fashion week rolls Miu Miu fashion show in New York. around now, the same debates have to be litigated: Should fashion week still exist?
Editor wears a Dolce and Gabbana green dress as she walks to enter the D & G fashion show in NYC.
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Singer Celine Dion walks in NYC on her way Power couple Veronika Heilbrunner and to Chanel Justin O’Shea wear Chanel and walk the Fashion Show wearing custom Chanel. streets of NYC after the Chanel show.
Actress Gabrielle Union wears custom dress Miu Miu in New York City as she walks to the Miu Miu fashion show.
Influencers (from left to right) wear Chanel, Prada, Miu Miu and Dolce and Gabbana as they walk on their way to the Chanel fashion show last week in New York.
Latinas
Sandra Lopez-Langley Brownsville native paves the way for Latinas in Leaderhsip
B
rownsville native, Sandra Lopez-Langley did not dream of becoming a banker when she was a little girl. Growing in a low-income family in the area of East 10th and Van Buren, Lopez-Langley wanted to be a teacher. However, life had other plans for Sandra. Passionate about the city where she was born and raised, Lopez-Langley attended Texas Southmost College while working as a job teller at the old First National Bank, there, she discovered banking suited her. “It’s about the service,” she said to the Brownsville Herald two months ago. “As far as I can tell you, pretty much every bank offers the same products. It’s really the service. I can honestly say I have a passion for it. What I really enjoy is working with people, building the relationships with customers.” Lopez-Langley has been working in banking for more than 41 years. She worked 27 years with Wells Fargo, eight with Compass bank and 7 with First Community Bank, where she is the vice president of business development. The businesswoman was also a United Way of Southern
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Cameron County board member for eight years, serving as campaign chair and board chair where she stills volunteers. She is also a member of the North Brownsville Rotary Club and serves on the boards of the Boy Scouts of America Rio Grande Valley Council and the Ronald McDonald House in Harlingen. Lopez-Langley says United Way has a special resonance with her because she is a product of that organization. The banker remembers going to the Good Neighbor Settlement House with her mom and sister. “We were little,” she said. “She was a single parent with children, and we would walk to the laundry mat to do our laundry, but we would stop at Good Neighbor Settlement House from time to time because we could get things that were really, really cheap — 25 cents, 50 cents. We were very poor. We didn’t have anything.” Now, Sandra Lopez Langley is a mother, grandmother and pet lover. Thank you, Sandra, for paving the way for us. But most importantly, thank you for being a Latina in leadership.
How to
How to celebrate when everything feels bad
By Emma Bracy There
is this Lucille Clifton poem, “won’t you celebrate with me,” that my chosen sister Sarah just sent me, handwritten, in the mail: won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. As soon as I read it I could feel the hot pressure building behind my eyes. Tears soon followed. The poem reminded me that around this time last year, I was so, so sad. I was living in Alabama, a thousand miles away from my closest blood relative. I was going days without leaving my apartment. I wasn’t writing. I probably smelled. At the time, it was hard to think of reasons to celebrate. I think this is because I have always linked celebration with joy, and how does one turn to joy when pain is so present? After receiving Sarah’s letter, I couldn’t shake the question. Couldn’t stop thinking about celebration — the shapes it can take. The reasons we do
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it at all. “I was so moved by the poem you sent me, sister,” I texted her a few days later. She went on to tell me that it was another sister of ours, Nabi, who first shared the poem with her last spring. Sarah had been hurt in love, but in denial about it for a while. One night, she finally broke down crying in Nabi’s lap, letting herself be as heartbroken as she truly was. “It was the morning after that that Nabi recited that poem to me,” Sarah shared. “When she got to those final lines — ‘everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.’ — that brought some strength back to me. Made me feel noble and brave. Made me feel less alone while at the fucking greasy bottom of one of the worst heartbreaks of my life.” I have vivid memories of talking with Sarah throughout this period of her life. For all the months that she was putting herself back together, she held those lines close. Everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. That failure? It gave her a reason to celebrate. And Clifton’s lines gave her permission to. In our culture, the act of celebrating is very tied to specific reasons for celebration — birthdays, graduations, marriages and the like. There are certain markers that are universally understood: We eat cake. We dance. We break piñatas. “But shame-eating a cake in your crib because you’re stressed and lonely is different than eating cake with your best friends because someone had a baby,” Sarah says. “In that sense, celebration is
an energy, an awareness, it is possible at all times and is present wherever there is a human spirit.” Clifton’s poem reframes what celebration can mean because it expands the reasons for doing so in the first place. Embodying the idea that resistance itself is a reason to celebrate, celebration becomes not just about turning to joy, but about overcoming — a reframing that has been incredibly useful to me. The other day, I brought home a tiny treat that I intended to eat after dinner. “Whatcha got there?” my roommate asked me when she saw me walking in with the small box. “A celebration cake,” I replied matter of factly. When asked what I was celebrating, I said, “Not turning away from myself.” I may not have been able to consciously turn to joy during those months of sadness I experienced in Alabama, but that experience felt like it was trying to kill me, and it did not. I may not have left my apartment for days, but I did overcome every day. Sometimes it was through the simple act of waking up. Sometimes it was in doing my hair, or talking on the phone with Sarah, or drinking milkshakes with Nabi. Those acts? They became both reasons to celebrate, and acts of celebration in and of themselves. Because they marked the movement that allowed me to get here. And I don’t know, maybe it’s reductive to
think of celebration in this way, but when existence is actually persistence, it’s hard to think of a more worthy cause.
PRADA
A short film STARRING MARGIT on prada.com