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      At the Japan State Dinner, Jill Biden Turns to Oscar de la Renta

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      The first lady was glittering in crystals — four days after Melania Trump stepped out in pink at a Palm Beach fund-raiser. Together, the pictures offer a harbinger of what is to come.There were cherry blossoms. There were silk and glass butterflies. There were toasts. There was an entree inspired by a California roll and a performance by Paul Simon. But before that, there was the photo op, and the fashion.On Wednesday evening, as the Bidens hosted Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan and his wife, Yuko Kishida, at the fifth state dinner of the Biden administration, Dr. Jill Biden, wearing an evening dress from Oscar de la Renta, stood with her husband to greet their guests of honor at the North Portico.Designed by Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim, the dress flowed in a watery fade from sapphire blue to light silver and was covered in hand-embroidered floral geometric beading.Why did it matter? It wasn’t as symbolically obvious as the cherry blossom print gown worn by Naomi Biden or Hillary Clinton’s heavy silk caftan, but in opting for de la Renta, the first lady was not simply supporting an American company that represents the melting pot myth of the country. She was connecting to a longstanding relationship: Oscar de la Renta has dressed almost every first lady since Jackie Kennedy; Dr. Biden first wore the label for her inaugural state dinner in 2022.On a night meant to underscore another powerful relationship — that of the United States and Japan — and reaffirm the strength of that mutual commitment through political stagecraft, the label was an apt choice.And it suggested that Dr. Biden, who has not always seemed interested in the game of fashion diplomacy, is gearing up with every means at her disposal to help amplify her husband’s message, not just as president but as the Democratic presidential nominee as he faces off against an opponent who revels in the reality TV nature of politics — complete with costumes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion’: 5 Takeaways

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      Former employees of the brand, a Gen Z fashion favorite, recount race and size discrimination in a new documentary on HBO.The clothing store Brandy Melville is known for selling diminutive, single-size pieces popular among Gen Z: linen short shorts, heart-print camisoles and sweatshirts printed with the word “Malibu.”Behind its Cali-girl aesthetic is a business that mistreats teenage employees and cashes in on young women’s insecurities, according to “Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion,” a documentary released on Tuesday on HBO.The documentary intersperses former employees’ accounts of racism and size discrimination while working in its stores with a broader look at the labor and environmental costs of the fast-fashion industry. The filmmakers said Stephan Marsan, the company’s mysterious chief executive, did not respond to several requests for comment.Eva Orner, the documentary’s director, said in an interview last week that it was a challenge to get former employees on camera because so many were fearful of the company. Those who were included were identified by only their first names. “I’ve done a lot of stuff in war zones, and with refugees and really life-or-death situations, and people have been more comfortable being on camera,” she said.Eva Orner, the director of “Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion,” said many former employees feared retaliation from the company if they participated in the documentary.Lucas Allen/HBOMs. Orner, an Australian who won an Academy Award for the documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” had not heard of Brandy Melville before producers mentioned the company to her in 2022 as a potential subject of investigation. The more she learned, the more she was disturbed by the brand’s cultlike following among teenage girls, who see it flaunted by celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dianne Brill, a 1980s ‘It Girl,’ Makes a Splashy Return

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      “I’m back,” she says at her 66th birthday party. “Maybe not everyone knows it yet, but I am.”When Dianne Brill arrived at the Soho Grand Hotel for her 66th birthday party on Saturday night, she did so with the same sense of spectacle that made her an icon of Manhattan nightlife in the 1980s.People stopped and stared as she stepped out of a black S.U.V. Standing 6-foot-3 in white platform boots, Ms. Brill was wearing a silver satin wraparound dress and holding a glittering wand in one hand. Her hair was big and blonde, and she wore a big necklace that read “B-R-I-L-L.”“I’m back,” she said. “Maybe not everyone knows it yet, but I am, and that’s why I’m having this birthday party. To show everyone I’m back.”The party was billed as “One in a Brillion.” The dress code on the invitation was “Strictly Brill,” meaning the kind of thing Ms. Brill might have worn at nightclubs like Area and Danceteria four decades ago.She came to New York at age 22 from the suburbs of Tampa, Fla. Soon she seized the mantle once occupied by Edie Sedgwick and Bianca Jagger as downtown’s reigning “It” Girl. She also became a muse to Andy Warhol, who once stated, “If you were at a party and Dianne Brill was there, you knew you were at the right party.”Ms. Brill poses for Andy Warhol in 1984.Roxanne LowitWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Virgil Abloh’s Legacy Reaches a New Stage

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      Shannon Abloh and the Fashion Scholarship Fund unveil a new plan.Many companies, including fashion companies, may be going silent about their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the face of political change. The last round of major designer appointments may not have included a single creative director of color. But at least one group is doubling down on its commitment to broadening the style-talent pipeline.At its annual gala on April 8, Peter Arnold, the executive director of the Fashion Scholarship Fund, the nonprofit that is dedicated to expanding access to the industry for underprivileged students, and Shannon Abloh, the widow of Virgil Abloh, will unveil a new strategic plan for the Virgil Abloh “Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund. The new initiative will double the number of recipients and expand the way the fund defines support.As such, it marks the next step in Ms. Abloh’s efforts to consolidate her husband’s legacy.Mr. Abloh, the pioneering Black designer who founded the brand Off-White, collaborated with Nike and became the first Black creative director of Louis Vuitton men’s wear, died in late 2021 of a rare form of cancer.“When he became successful, Virgil was the first Black face that many kids saw in a room they didn’t know they could enter,” Ms. Abloh said via Zoom from Chicago just be fore getting on a plane to fly to New York for the Fashion Scholarship Fund event. “He and I talked about, How can we turn this into something that really means something over time?” The Virgil Abloh “Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund was part of the answer.Shannon Abloh with the designer Aurora James at the CFDA awards ceremony in November 2022.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesNow, she said of the D.E.I. reversals, “it’s really nerve-racking, seeing the changes that are happening. But for me, all it means is that the work needs to continue to be louder. It just makes me double down and say, ‘OK, then we need to fight harder.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sobhita Dhulipala of ‘Monkey Man’ Charts an Unusual Path to Hollywood

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      Sobhita Dhulipala considers herself an outsider — wherever she is.She grew up in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, making her an outsider in the country’s financial and fashion capital, Mumbai. Her native tongue is Telugu, making her an outsider in predominantly Hindi-speaking Bollywood.And now, with the release on Friday of the high-octane, Jordan Peele-produced “Monkey Man,” in which she stars alongside Dev Patel, she is again an outsider, thrust into Hollywood’s limelight. In fact, the premiere of the film at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, last month was the first time Ms. Dhulipala, 31, had ever set foot on American soil.“In India, I’m South Indian,” Ms. Dhulipala, who lives in Mumbai, said in a video interview from her hotel room in Los Angeles. “When I come to America, I’m Indian.”“It’s amazing that I get to come to this country with a film,” she added. “It’s like I come with an offering.”In the Amazon Prime series “Made in Heaven,” Ms. Dhulipala portrayed a social climber, navigating her way to ever higher rungs of Indian society.Amazon Prime Video IndiaThat real-life feeling of being an outsider is the undercurrent for many of her onscreen roles. In the Amazon Prime series “Made in Heaven,” Ms. Dhulipala’s character is a low-income nobody who schemes her way into upper-class circles. In “Monkey Man,” she plays Sita, a call girl whose business is the pleasure of powerful but despicable men.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Giorgio Armani Doesn’t Think Much About Age

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      For those of us who grew up in the shadow of war, ambition was something natural, a vital drive. It was not so much a desire for fame and notoriety but rather an urge for personal fulfillment, a way to assert oneself outside the hardship and to overcome it. My mother and father taught me the value of commitment and hard work to get things done. It is a lesson that has never left me.It took me some time to find my way. First, I studied medicine, then came La Rinascente [an Italian department store, where Armani worked in display] and Cerruti — fashion, in other words. That was the moment when I found my ambition, when I discovered the power of clothes not only to change the way you look but, more profoundly, to influence the way you are and behave.Looks from Giorgio Armani Privè’s couture spring 2024 collection, shown in Paris in January. →Giorgio Armani PrivéGiorgio Armani PrivéGiorgio Armani PrivéGiorgio Armani PrivéGiorgio Armani PrivéGiorgio Armani PrivéGiorgio Armani PrivéGiorgio Armani PrivéGiorgio Armani PrivéGiorgio Armani PrivéGiorgio Armani PrivéI think the challenges — or problems — and the rewards of staying in the game go hand in hand if you do this work for as long as I have and if you remain present. The main pressure is staying relevant without giving in to the pressures of the moment, which often feel very urgent but are forgettable in the long run.In truth, I don’t think about age much. In my head, I am the same age I was when I started Giorgio Armani. Situations and people change, but the challenges and problems are all the same in the end. My way of tackling them hasn’t changed — with great determination. Audiences evolve, however, and this cannot be underestimated. Stylistic coherence, therefore, must be elastic. Otherwise one becomes rigid. The ultimate gratification is to become a classic — outside of and above fashion — and to be identified with a style.Current and upcoming projects: Designed 14 men’s, women’s and haute couture collections in 2023.This interview has been edited and condensed. More

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      LSU’s Kim Mulkey Courts Controversy in Style

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      Inside the coach’s winning fashion playbook.The smog of a Washington Post exposé may have been hanging over Kim Mulkey’s head during the L.S.U. game on Saturday afternoon, but the highest paid coach in women’s collegiate basketball wasn’t going to hide. How could you tell?Well, in part because at the start of the N.C.A.A. tournament, she had given a news conference threatening a lawsuit about the article, thus calling to attention to it. In part because there she was, running up and down the sidelines and screaming her head off. And it part because … goodness, what was she wearing?A gleaming pantsuit covered in a jumble of Op Art sequined squiggles, as if Big Bird had met Liberace and they’d teamed up for “Project Runway.”Kim Mulkey, resplendent in sequins at the L.S.U. Sweet Sixteen game on March 30.Gregory Fisher/USA Today, via ReutersEven in the context of basketball, a sport in which players and coaches understood the power of personal branding through clothes long before almost any other athletes, Ms. Mulkey stands out. More than perhaps anyone else in the league — possibly in all of women’s basketball — she has made her image a talking point, a reflection of her own larger-than-life personality and a tool to draw attention to her sport. She is basketball’s avatar of the Trumpian era, offering a new version of The Mulkey Show at every game and costuming herself for the moment. As her team meets the University of Iowa again in the Elite Eight, brand Mulkey will most likely be raising the stakes once more.It would be wrong to call her clothes “fashion.” They have little to do with trends or silhouette. But love what she wears or hate it, love how she behaves or hate it, her sometimes ridiculous, always eye-catching outfits are, like her winning record, abrasive personality, problematic comments about Covid-19 and reported homophobia, impossible to ignore.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New York’s Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival Brought Out Spring’s Best Style

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      New York City welcomed a hint of spring, with a bit of warm sun that turned this year’s Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival into a rousing success.Fifth Avenue was filled with magnificent hat wearers, sauntering up and down 5th Avenue with charm and excitement that rivaled children who might be scouring parks for Easter egg hunts. A recurring cast of milliners and costumed spectators trading nods with the more casual participants — who found creative ways to create their own grand impressions — was a particular delight to see.The colorful flow of her hat (center) was as lovely as her help with a friend’s outfit.Some parade goers’s outfits harkened back to another age.It’s not Fifth Avenue without a perfectly placed shawl.A profile to show off that stunning splash of red hair.Don’t lose your hat! A sea of Easter fashion in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.Soft paisley and a basket for those found Easter eggs.It was unclear whose job it was to protect the treats.A pup tired out from all the excitement.Another splendid example that proves leopard print really does go with everything.A fascinator, but as glasses!Spotted: a fancy wicker bunny in the crowd.This spectrum of violet was almost royal.Baking up the goods in an array of flavors.Spring anyone? This flower on white ensemble was the perfect introduction to the season.What mysteries lay inside this egg?Outfits that summon the look of a certain chocolatier.A fan of the carousel showed up.Easter in every shade.White gloves on one person, black on the other brought a touch of synergy to these two.Pointy bunny ears in front, lace and floral in back.It was easy to find little bursts of joy throughout the parade.More than just coordinating, couples were leveling up to synchronization.The way these gloves matched the handbag was a serious consideration.Some brought messages of their own to the parade.Wondering if the puppet may need its own hat.A constellation of beige.This golden look had faces every which way. More