ELLE August 2022

1 FLYING SOUTH Ready to experience all the sights and sounds of Colombia for yourself after reading about Maria Claudia “Cloclo” Echavarría’s wedding (page 62)? Escape to the beach in Barú at Sofitel Barú Calablanca, a favorite of ELLE editor-in-chief (and native Colombian) Nina Garcia. Just in time for summer, the hotel is opening a beachside food truck featuring local favorites, as well as workshops and dance classes with local artists and artisans. sofitelbarucalablanca.com. 2 KEEPING UP “It is work,” new skin care entrepreneur (and no stranger to hard work) Kim Kardashian says about her routine. For the launch of SKKN by Kim, Kardashian collaborated with her longtime aesthetician, Joanna Czech, to create a nine-piece collection that includes hardworking ingredients like hyaluronic acid, vitamin C, and exfoliators. The hand-tooled stone packaging was inspired by…

For actress Ana de Armas, finding a place to call home has been a lifelong quest. This month’s cover star has now happily settled F on the East Coast, away from the Hollywood fishbowl. (She calls L.A. “a city that keeps you anxious.”) Coming from Cuba, where she grew up with food rationing and power blackouts, de Armas has never fully considered herself an insider. As an immigrant myself, I can relate to this feeling of displacement and wistful longing for the country of your birth. “I assumed—and I say this with real embarrassment—because she had come from Cuba, that she had just arrived,” says her Knives Out costar Jamie Lee Curtis. “I made an assumption that she was an inexperienced, unsophisticated young woman.” She would quickly learn that de Armas…

CAMI TÉLLEZ ISN’T AFRAID of a little neon. On a recent rainy afternoon, the 24-year-old CEO and creative director opens the door to her Tribeca apartment in a silky chartreuse blouse and trousers. Parade, the irreverent underwear brand she launched with cofounder Jack DeFuria in 2019—backed by $3.5 million from venture capital investors—has a new offce a few minutes’ walk away. But Téllez still frequently works from her giant circular dining-room table, surrounded by coffee-table books. One focuses on photographer Oliviero Toscani, known for his campaigns for United Colors of Benetton, while another, titled The Art of Playboy, is full of the surreal and sensual images that filled the magazine’s pages in the 1960s. The books—and the brand they helped germinate—represent a different aesthetic universe than the one Téllez encountered while…

THE BODY DIVERSITY PIONEERS ESTER MANAS “IN 2018, it was not so cool,” says Ester Manas of body inclusivity in fashion. That was the year she and her label’s codesigner and cofounder, Balthazar Delepierre, both alums of visual arts school La Cambre in Brussels, presented a collection titled Big Again at the Hyères fashion festival. It grew out of a magazine, Big, that Manas created for her La Cambre entrance exam to call out fashion’s valorization of thinness. The two, who have interned at major Paris houses, felt that high fashion often leaves out curvier women. So, inspired by an IKEA extendable table, they included flexible, one-sizefits-all looks that accommodate every size, from XS to 3XL. For their fall 2022 collection, titled Come As You Are, the two presented their wares on an…

THE AI-DESIGNED LABEL THAT TOOK ON NYFW Two years after Hanifa designer Anifa Mvuemba shook up fashion month with her 3D digital runway show, designers continue to seek new ways to push boundaries, not only in terms of how they present their work, but also in their creative processes. Enter Younhee Park of the Korean label Greedilous, who teamed up with Tilda—a virtual human and AI artist created by LG to specialize in pattern design—for her fall 2022 show at New York Fashion Week. There was no overflowing moodboard, simply two words: flower and Venus. From there, Tilda created hundreds of patterns, which informed the collection’s bold prints and have since sparked interest from Miley Cyrus. Park offered another nod to her collaborator, giving her models brightly-colored bobbed wigs that resembled…

COMMUNITY PROPERTY Local collectives are pushing back against fashion’s obsession with star designers. THE TYPICAL FASHION narrative involves a star skyrocketing to fame. But behind every name is a cadre of collaborators. Though social media has enabled even newcomers to earn global accolades, more designers are thinking collective—and hyperlocal. Brooklynbased Gogo Graham has tapped industry friends across disciplines for her shows, while Pyer Moss’s Kerby Jean-Raymond has launched Your Friends in New York with the luxury conglomerate Kering to nurture creatives. Antoine Gregory has enough jobs to fill several résumés: fashion editor, consultant, brand director of Theophilio, and founder of the Black Fashion Fair. Launched in 2020, the latter project grew out of his desire to archive great Black designers past and present. “We want to make sure that we’re supporting brands right…