Spend even a few minutes scrolling beautiful homes online, and you'll probably come across Sarah Sherman Samuel’s work. With clients including Mandy Moore and Garance Doré, the designer has shaped some of interiors’ most recognizable aesthetics: sculptural forms, natural materials, vintage accents, and spaces that make you want to stay awhile.

Samuel approaches getting dressed much the same way she designs a room. As she wanders through her closet, opening drawers and pulling dresses from their hangers to jog her memory, it’s clear the clothes she wears aren’t separate from the world she’s built—they’re an extension of it. Nearly every piece prompts a memory: where she found it, what season of life she was in when she bought it, or why it survived yet another closet purge. She talks about her outfits in terms of texture, silhouette, balance, and proportion, but when I ask how she arrives at those decisions, she pauses. “It’s very intuitive,” she says. She knows something is right long before she has the words for why.

That sense of self has only sharpened since she traded L.A. for Grand Rapids, Michigan, nearly six years ago. Away from the style bubble of the West Coast, Samuel says, she’s become more discerning about the inspiration she lets in, drawing from travel, architecture, and designers whose work genuinely resonates with her rather than simply what’s around her. “My work wardrobe feels much more like me because I’m intentionally seeking out stuff that reflects and connects,” she says.

These days, Samuel’s life leaves little room for overthinking. When we speak in July, Samuel is raising two young children while leading a growing design team. Midway through our conversation, her daughter wanders in after stubbing her toe. Samuel calmly comforts her, helps her find the rest of the family, then returns without missing a beat to tell me about the architectural Acne Studios skirt she recently rediscovered in her closet—more than a decade after she bought it—and wore to her New York gallery opening. It feels like the clearest expression of her approach to work and personal style: creative, instinctive, and adaptable enough to withstand the unpredictability of everyday life.

Her Outfit Formula

I don’t have a strict uniform. On most workdays, I’m wearing a high-waisted pant or skirt with a cropped top. The proportions work for me, and it’s comfortable enough for whatever the day involves.

One of my favorite pieces is a pair of high-waisted, elastic-waist pants that are so fluid they almost look like a skirt. They’ve become my travel uniform because I can take the six a.m. commuter flight to New York, land at eight, and head straight into meetings without changing. In the summer, I wear them with a cropped tank. When it gets colder, I add long underwear underneath and a fitted turtleneck. I’ve worn them in every season.

Her Designer Shortlist

I’ve always loved fashion. I spent years poring over fashion magazines, and I still love discovering designers with a strong identity.

When I have a photo shoot or an event coming up, I’ll usually turn to A.W.A.K.E. Mode, Cult Gaia, and Ganni. They experiment with shape in ways that are sculptural and unexpected, and I know I’ll find something that reflects how I want to present myself.

Her Style Reset

When I lived in West L.A., I found myself dressing almost by osmosis. It was prairie-dress season, and everyone was wearing them—including me. It wasn’t until a few years after moving to Michigan that I looked through my closet and realized, I’m not a prairie-dress girl anymore.

Living outside that bubble made me seek fashion out instead of simply absorbing what was around me. Between work trips to New York and California and traveling through Europe and Japan, I’m exposed to a much wider mix of references now. I’m more selective about what I bring home and less likely to buy something just because it’s everywhere.

Her Forever Pieces

I have a Heidi Merrick dress I’ve owned for years that could have been designed today. It has slightly extended shoulders, a cinched waist, pockets, and a lightweight, fluid skirt. The shape is almost 1950s but more relaxed. The color sits somewhere between apricot and a peachy nude—unusual but still fairly neutral.

Then there’s a Zara dress I’ve worn for the past decade. The fabric is lightweight but nubby, almost like upholstery, with oversized brown buttons down the front. There aren’t many one-piece outfits that still make me look dressed, but that one always does. I’ve realized that material often determines whether something remains in my closet. Quality fabrics—or even fabrics with real character—tend to age well.

Her Fashion Hard No

I almost never say never with fashion because tastes change, but I’m pretty confident I’ll never embrace Bermuda shorts. The proportions don’t work on me; maybe because I have a short torso. No matter how I style them, something always seems off. A trend has to suit the person wearing it. It doesn’t matter how popular something is if you’re constantly trying to convince yourself it works.

Her Greatest Closet Rediscovery

I recently had a gallery opening in New York during design week, which would normally be the perfect excuse to buy something new. But I was so busy that I ended up shopping my own closet instead.

In the overflow closet in our guest room, I rediscovered an Acne Studios skirt I’ve had for at least 15 years. It’s cobalt blue, with contrast piping, a large slit in the front, and a shorter layer underneath. I remember pulling it out and thinking, This is so good. Why haven’t I worn this?

I probably wore it just once when I first bought it, but the moment I put it on again, it looked like something I could’ve chosen yesterday. I almost can’t believe I bought it back then—I had so much less money—but the best pieces have a way of staying with you.

This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.

Everyone knows what a boardroom looks like, or thinks they do: a table the length of a municipal pier; dark wood paneling; leather chairs; men in navy suits deciding the fate of a company, a country, or a very expensive merger. It is corporate power at its most cinematic. What you have almost certainly never seen is how anyone gets in—and women have been on the wrong side of this secret for a very long time.

In the early 2010s, they held about 10 percent of corporate board seats. Then came the pressure: organizations tracking the numbers, investors pushing companies to diversify, a post-2020 moment when representation briefly became something corporations were expected to prove. The number climbed until it reached about 30 percent. Then, around 2022, it began to stall— and has hovered there since.

That stall matters because corporate boards are not ornamental. They hire and fire CEOs, approve strategy, oversee risk, shape compensation, and decide—in ways both obvious and invisible—what kind of company a company is allowed to become. And unlike most powerful positions, board seats are rarely applied for in any ordinary sense. There is often no posting or neat application portal, no tidy little moment when a qualified person raises their hand and gets considered. A name moves from one trusted person to another, through rooms most people never see, before anyone outside the room knows there was an opening at all. For most of their history, seats have been filled by men who knew other men through golf clubs, alumni networks, and private dinners—the kinds of introductions that were never extended to women.

Now an entire cottage industry has cropped up to try to change that, built by a handful of women who saw a wall and decided to build something around it. You can now spend $14,500 on a five-day intensive at Harvard Business School or $750 on a two-day boot camp at a law school in North Carolina, both designed to prepare women for corporate board service. You can attend curated dinners where the guest list is split between women who want board seats and the people who can grant them. You can take a workshop, join a networking fellowship, or add your name to a searchable database of board-ready candidates. The question now is whether any of it can actually open the door from the other side.

Almost a decade ago, after a fellowship at the Aspen Institute, Jocelyn Mangan founded Illumyn Impact with a simple premise: If women weren’t part of the existing networks that filled board seats, she would build a new one. So she interviewed a hundred board members. When she asked how they had found their last director, she didn’t hear much about formal searches or résumés. She heard about friends, dinners, investors, trusted people recommending other trusted people. “They gave me all these personal-network stories, and a lot of them were at private dinners,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Okay, well, we can do that.’ ”

Illumyn now operates as both a nonprofit and a for-profit, generating revenue through placement fees when a woman lands a board seat, corporate sponsorships, and a paid fellowship. The dinners themselves are free for the women at the table. Nearly 200 dinners later, the model remains simple: Seat board-ready women next to CEOs, investors, and sitting directors—the three powers that actually decide who gets a seat. “The official stat is that less than five percent of board opportunities flow through recruiters,” Mangan says. “It’s a big word-of-mouth network of opportunities.” The case for diversifying that network, she argues, isn’t just moral. “Boards fail when they’re composed of the same perspectives. And it’s not just demographic sameness. This is experiential and cognitive sameness.”

When the model works, it works spectacularly. Liz Jenkins, like most women who’d never been part of those networks, had absorbed the standard cultural programming of board service. Then the CFO of Hello Sunshine and a cofounder of FEME (Female Executives in Media and Entertainment), Jenkins, who is currently Chief Business Officer at NBCUniversal Entertainment, met Mangan at a dinner in late 2018 and was stunned to learn that she was already board-ready. “It wasn’t on my bingo card for my 40s, frankly,” she says. “My images are what I’d seen in movies. I’ve got to be 65 or 70, a retired CEO.”

That image matters, because if the boardroom is treated like a place for older people previously anointed by the system, even highly qualified women can fail to recognize themselves as candidates. Mangan’s response was less gentle reframing than loving correction: “Are you kidding me? You are a CFO. This is the candidate people are dying for.”

Jenkins declined the first invitation—she was deep into building a company and had no bandwidth left—and couldn’t make the second. But when the third invitation arrived, something about the guest list caught her attention: She realized she didn’t recognize almost anyone on it. “I looked at the names, and I think I only knew one person. I’m like, ‘This is interesting. It’s L.A. Don’t I know everybody?’ ” So she went. At the dinner, she met Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO of GLAAD—who, it turned out, had heard Jenkins would be there and came specifically to meet her. “Well, I came to this dinner because I wanted to talk to you and see if you’d be interested in joining the board,” Jenkins remembers Ellis saying.

Within a year, Jenkins was on the board of both GLAAD and Snapchat. She went on to chair the first and become audit chair of the second. “I just need to tell you what an impact you’ve made,” she remembers telling Mangan. “One dinner—and what kind of came out of that.”

But an introduction, however powerful it may be, doesn’t teach you what a board actually does, how seats get filled, or why nothing about the process resembles anything else in corporate life. For that, there’s the classroom.

Picture this: It’s the week after Thanksgiving. A hundred and fifty women who, collectively, have enough executive experience to run a small nation are checking into dorms at Harvard Business School. They have been assigned suitemates. They will do homework. Some of them have not had a roommate since Reagan was in office. The women are chosen to clash productively: different countries, different industries, different functions. For five days, they will learn what board service actually is. On Tuesday afternoon, they will open up to their suitemates about what brought them there and where they want to go next. By Wednesday, they’ve bonded. And by Friday, they leave with sharper instincts, a global network, and a $14,500 receipt.

The program is called Women on Boards: Succeeding as a Corporate Director, and it has run annually since 2016. The curriculum is built around Harvard’s signature case-study method. Guest speakers are sitting corporate directors, and sessions cover everything from fiduciary duties to committee structures to the strategic mindset the boardroom demands. Vicki Good, who has directed it since the beginning, says the goal has always been governance education: “We made the conscious decision back in 2015 that this program was not a placement program,” she says. But education is only part of what the women take away: “Where they come as individuals, they leave as part of this incredible network, and I think they really feel empowered,” she says.

At the other end of the price spectrum, Lissa Broome has been working on the same problem for 20 years. At the University of North Carolina School of Law, Broome directs the Director Diversity Initiative, a program that began in 2006 after two law school graduates went to the dean with a concern: There didn’t seem to be many Black people on corporate boards. Broome widened the frame to include women and built an operation that now runs an annual two-day boot camp, monthly webinars, a searchable database of more than 1,500 prospective directors, and curated resources—21 boot camps and counting, with 59 companies coming to DDI to find board candidates in 2025 alone.

It’s $750 for the boot camp. Everything else is free. That matters because many women who find DDI are not the obvious heirs to the boardroom pipeline. “A lot of people who are from nontraditional backgrounds find their way to us because they’re not a sitting CEO or a sitting chief financial officer whose company is helping them get a board seat,” Broome says. Some companies do sponsor their executives to attend board-readiness programs, but not every woman pursuing a seat has that kind of backing. Women at smaller companies, in nontraditional industries, in between roles, or who are building portfolio careers on their own are navigating the ecosystem with their personal money and time. “If you’re doing that on your own, then I would question, ‘Is this really worth the money?’” Broome says. “‘Is this how I want to spend my limited resources?’”

More programs, more dinners, more boot camps, more databases than ever—but women are still stuck at 30 percent. Heather Spilsbury, the CEO of 50/50 Women on Boards, leads an organization that has tracked this number since 2010. She is unequivocal on the talent question. “There’s no shortage of qualified women to serve on boards,” she says. “They are phenomenal women.” But she is candid about what preparation can and cannot do. “To overeducate and overprepare yourself has become a business, and that concerns me,” she says, “because it’s a business of a relationship—someone’s got to know you.” Preparedness alone, she argues, won’t change who gets appointed.

“Companies, investors, recruiters also have a responsibility to broaden their networks and strengthen board succession practices.”

The backdrop makes all this feel more urgent. In 2024, 90 percent of companies included DEI language in their annual reports. By 2025, that number had collapsed to 34 percent. Broome has watched the momentum build and cool firsthand. “There’s been a plateauing of the focus on corporate board diversity, both for women and for people of color,” she says. “And it’s, in part, as a result of the kind of changing political climate that we’ve experienced."

Nicole Jeffries, an independent director at Interstate Batteries who found her way to a board seat through DDI’s webinars, saw the divide firsthand. Her male colleagues treated the process as something they could figure out as they went along: “Yeah, I’m just going to go apply to a board. I know a guy who knows a guy, and they’re going to love me.” Women, meanwhile, were thinking: Oh, I need to make sure my board documents are perfect and they’ve been reviewed by the 50 best people I know and that I’ve gotten 10 certifications and 14 references. The result: “They want to go and do all the proving so that when they show up in the room, they’ve got those 10 boxes checked,” she says.

The wall these women have built an ecosystem to get around may be getting higher even as the scaffolding grows, but the work has not been wasted: Mangan has placed roughly 200 women on boards, Jeffries used the free webinars and landed a seat before even starting the boot camp, and Jenkins went to one dinner and ended up chairing two boards. “I find joy in helping open doors and seeing people land opportunities that they are so capable of but maybe would not have had access to,” Mangan tells me. “There’s no shortage of work to do. It’s not like I feel like we’re done or we’re close.”

Karen Coyne had spent eight years as a chief sustainability officer at a pharmaceutical company—her dream role, as she describes it—when she took the Harvard program in 2018. It changed how she understood the job. “You no longer can be the doer,” she says. “You have to have a strategic mindset.” The discipline, as she describes it, is almost physical: “As a board director, you have your nose into the business but your fingers out.”

Coyne was so energized by the experience that she helped grow what Harvard hadn’t built yet: an alumni network called Women Execs on Boards, which started as WhatsApp groups and check-in calls, has grown to nearly 400 members across 32 countries and now sends its members back to Harvard each year to speak to the newest cohort. She estimates that about 40 percent of them now sit on compensated corporate boards. The network exists because of the question that rippled through the very first cohort the moment the week ended: “They left and said, ‘Well, this is great. How do you actually get on a board?’”

She has served on nonprofit and advisory boards, and on the board of a small company she helped manage. But the seat she set out to find—a paid fiduciary role on a corporate board—has eluded her. “I’ve interviewed and come close to being second up,” she says. It has been eight years.

This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.

Alana Mayo knows better than anyone that championing diverse, genre-defying filmmaking can be an uphill battle. Six years ago, when Mayo was named president of Orion Pictures, at a time when many American industries were making promises of inclusion that they ultimately wouldn’t keep, she saw it as her purpose. Two Oscar wins and several acclaimed films later—from Women Talking and Bottoms to Is God Is and Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother—the 42-year-old is seeing the fruits of her labor.

Mayo, a lifelong cinephile, came of age when Orion was known as a Hollywood heavyweight, making blockbusters that ranged from awards powerhouses to box-office phenomena. She grew up surrounded by entertainment as both a fan and an insider, voraciously consuming movies with her brothers while watching her parents work as radio and legal nonprofit executives. “I was watching my dad [Barry Mayo] found and sell a company by the time I was a teenager,” she says. “My first internships were at the age of 10 for my mother.” Her family instilled in her a work ethic and the importance of supporting Black culture and creating business opportunities for Black people. “It was early preparation for what, ultimately, we’re trying to do with Orion.”

Sitting in a meeting room at Orion’s NYC headquarters, Mayo speaks about her decades of industry experience with earnest reverence: She ascended from interning with Lee Daniels and Warrington Hudlin to climbing the ranks at Paramount to becoming the head of production and development at Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society. Mayo took over Orion, then a subset of MGM, at a time of great transition; 18 months after she joined, Amazon acquired the mid-sized studio. Still, she made the bold move to steer a directive that hit close to home: Continue to support original projects and first-time filmmakers, with an emphasis on bringing underrepresented audiences stories that reflect their culture.

Mayo has already made good on her word. At the 2023 Academy Awards, Sarah Polley’s Women Talking became Orion’s first Best Picture nominee since The Silence of the Lambs in 1992, and Polley took home the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The studio has continued to release awards frontrunners, like American Fiction, which garnered five Oscar nominations and saw writer-director Cord Jefferson win Best Adapted Screenplay. Mayo is not just an awards whisperer but also a talent incubator: The female filmmakers who’ve worked with Orion, from Chinonye Chukwu to Rachel Sennott to Tessa Thompson, have only continued to flourish.

None of this has been easy. In early 2020, chief-level positions at mainstream studios skewed 91 percent white and 82 percent male, while senior executives were 93 percent white and 80 percent male. Despite the boom in diversity hiring later that year, several Black female industry veterans have since left their roles. This is despite a decade of studies— and the success of movies like Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters—showing that films that reflect the diversity of moviegoers perform better at the box office. In this fraught landscape, Mayo stands out in a cohort of visionaries who are ensuring that inclusion isn’t just a buzzword but a successful policy.

On falling in love with storytelling

I was consuming a lot of things at the height of the home-media era. My dad had a huge LaserDisc collection of movies like All About Eve and Apocalypse Now but also new movies. My brothers and I are of that generation where we would watch movies for fun. But I loved reading books more than anything. I would read in the shower, on road trips. Story was the thing that was both entertainment and escape. That was the way I engaged with the world that felt safe and exciting.

On the women who inspired her career path

I was working for Lee Daniels [in college], and he had two brilliant women working for him at the time, Lisa Cortés and Doreen Oliver. One of them ran production, and the other one ran development. You’re supposed to connect to really good material, connect filmmakers with material, and have a point of view on what should get made and why, and then produce it. Those women were just so amazing at all of those things. It was truly a stroke of luck that I had that internship, because I could then leave college and say, “I want to be a production and development executive.” This language that would’ve taken me years to find, had I not worked for that company for a summer.

On the most fulfilling part of her job

That first conversation with a filmmaker who is interested in us being the studio on their film is all speculation. It’s all dreaming and imagining what a movie could be, months, if not years, down the line. That journey of collaborating with filmmakers across the life cycle of a film is incredibly fulfilling. A lot of my job is business stuff, which I love—but ultimately, my job is to be a part of making movies that people hopefully see to a large extent and love. It’s unbelievable to see something tangible exist, where now other people are watching and texting and saying, “We love that scene,” knowing that it all started from a conversation or a read of a script or hearing a pitch.

On her commitment to telling underrepresented stories

Executives are not supposed to be the story; it’s the movies and the people that make the movies. The reason why I’m a little bit more outward facing is that I and all of the people that work at Orion are trying to create a space for something that doesn’t really exist. It’s very important to me, not so much that people attach my face to that but that I am somebody who is loudly and proudly talking about this thing that we are trying to build. We’ve got to [connect] audiences who want to see films that are more representative of them to filmmakers who are interested in their story, their identity, their culture, their background. I want them to connect these movies to a larger effort that’s not just me. It’s very important to me that people know that we are thinking about these movies in a super-intentional way of trying to meet an unmet appetite for more types of storytelling coming out of Hollywood.

On Oscars recognition

Looking for any sign of external validation can always put you in a trap, but striving for making movies that will be excellent creatively and commercially is a much easier goal to meet. I don’t think anything is perfectly fair or a meritocracy, but it was really rewarding to know that these movies that we made, because we thought that the scripts were excellent and the filmmakers were excellent, that they were validated in that way by the Oscars voting body too. I am a book nerd, so the more exciting thing for me was to be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay three times and to win it twice [for Women Talking and American Fiction]. I felt very proud of that because we love writers here, and those movies all started with literary material that blew you away, adapted into scripts that blew you away on the page. So that was, for me, selfishly, a real boon, a lot of wind in my sails.

On her personal role model

My mom is as smart of a person as I’ve ever met in my life. She’s equal parts good and kind and lives the values that she preaches.

On how she hopes to impact Hollywood’s legacy

That we scaled Orion in a way where two things happen: One, the filmmakers we’ve worked with are consistently creating work in the world, in part because that first film was made possible by Orion; and two, we shine a light on a business model that every other studio could and should be doing, which is investing in original films by great filmmakers that feature people of color, queer folks, and women.

This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.

As they drove away from Kabul, Sinah tried not to think about what would happen if police stopped their car. The cool fall weather turned to dry heat as they crossed the rugged provinces separating the capital of Afghanistan from the southern border with Pakistan. She rode with her sister, two little brothers, her mother, another young family, and, in the driver’s seat, a man who never spoke—their smuggler. Women were no longer allowed to travel without male relatives in Afghanistan, and if they were caught attempting to escape, the Taliban’s punishment would be harsh.

Sinah was 14 when the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan and barred girls her age from school. For a student who had been first in her class, excelled in biology, and dreamed of becoming a doctor, Sinah’s hopes of a high school diploma and a university education were slipping away. She was lucky that her parents believed in education. Her mother had a high school diploma; her father a university degree in journalism. They decided Sinah and her sister would go to Pakistan, where it was safer to study. With her long dark hair, gentle smile, and soft demeanor, Sinah didn’t give the impression of a rule breaker, but she saw no other choice.

The family couldn’t afford a visa, so they hired a smuggler and crossed Afghanistan by car, heading south from Kabul to Kandahar. Around midway, as they drove through the high plateaus of Ghazni province, Sinah noticed there were no women on the streets—they had all but disappeared from public life. She was keeping a diary of the trip on her phone, and she typed a short poem about oppression, ignorance, and how unfair it all was.

Despite Sinah’s fears, their car moved unimpeded. By evening, they neared the border of Pakistan. At the edge of a sandy expanse, they got out. A group of around 40 other Afghan refugees was already waiting.

They listened for the sound of cars—Taliban or Pakistani border authorities—but all was quiet. Sinah looked at the mountains separating her from Pakistan and thought the distance felt insurmountable. With each step, she sank into the sand. She grabbed her family’s hands and they began to run.

When they reached the mountain, they started climbing. In the early hours of the morning, 10 hours after they’d set off, they hit a border fence. The smuggler clipped a hole, and one by one they slipped through. Sinah feared authorities might be waiting on the other side, but no one was there. An hour later, cold and exhausted, they were picked up by a truck and taken to the nearest city, where they transferred into a car and began the 17-hour drive to Karachi. When Sinah’s worst fears were realized and a police officer stopped their vehicle, the driver slipped him a little money and they went on their way.

In the country she’d just left behind, Sinah was one of an estimated 2.2 million girls out of school. Banning girls’ education was among the first decrees the Taliban made after it overthrew the Afghan government in 2021, declaring that such schooling violated both Islamic law and Afghan cultural mores. At first, the education minister claimed access to secondary schools and universities would be reinstated after “technical issues”—such as dress codes and curriculum—were resolved. That was years ago; today, girls are still barred from school.

But secretly, many take great risks to continue their education, even as the Taliban’s grip grows stronger and the world’s attention moves on. The remaining options are dangerous or ineffective: The Taliban frequently raids underground schools and illegal tutoring centers, beating and arresting students and teachers. Online courses are often blocked by internet shutdowns. Inside Afghanistan, with no prospects for their daughters’ futures, families are desperate. Those who can leave have become refugees in neighboring countries. And a lucky few have found their way to the only school in the world designed just for them—hidden away in a former hotel on a different continent some 3,500 miles away.

On the leafy outskirts of a large African city is a compound of low-slung buildings where girls in long blue dresses scamper to and from classes. This isn’t a stuffy boarding school in London or Geneva, and the classrooms are not filled with the children of politicians and CEOs. This is the world’s only boarding school for Afghan girls, and it sits in the heart of East Africa. The School of Leadership, Afghanistan, or SOLA, first relocated to the residential neighborhood of Kigali, Rwanda, amid the violence that consumed Afghanistan in 2021. For the past five years, it has operated in exile—the same status held by its students and much of its staff. Students live and attend classes in a cluster of three-story stucco buildings encircling a lush courtyard and swimming pool. The cafeteria’s banquette seating and a faded roadside sign are the only clues that this was once a hotel. Neighbors strolling past the tall walls and iron gates on their way to work or school are likely unaware of the extraordinary experiment taking place within.

In some ways, SOLA is a typical boarding school: Students’ days are filled with classes, sports, and extracurriculars. They have dorm parents, and vision boards decorating their walls. On a recent spring afternoon, a science class examined the innards of a dissected chicken, and math students slogged through a fractions worksheet. In the art room, a painting of Taylor Swift hung over students putting the finishing touches to final projects. At night, girls streamed in and out of the library holding laptops, their fingers stained with henna from a recent celebration marking the end of Ramadan.

In every other way, SOLA is impossibly unique: Since the Taliban banned girls’ education after age 12, many of the school’s students have not entered a real classroom since 2021. The 118 current students and their families have made a choice that means they may never be able to go home. Even thousands of miles away, their choice could have repercussions inside Afghanistan, and so the students are banned from social media and cannot even send photographs to their families without each file being stripped of its metadata.

While the students have been in Rwanda, some of their parents have been taken by the Taliban. Others have had a sibling die. But none have returned to Afghanistan. Their futures, as one student put it, rest on three things: "Time, patience, and Shabana-jan."

Shabana Basij-Rasikh is the petite 36-year-old head of SOLA. She has a soft voice and a throaty laugh that punctuates nearly every sentence. She cofounded the school when she was only 18, first as a small tutoring program to help prepare Afghan girls to study at American boarding schools. She hoped that one day they would return to help rebuild Afghanistan from the ruins of war. But then she thought: What if they didn’t have to leave? In 2016, Shabana opened the country’s first girls’ boarding school in a rented building in Kabul. She envisioned a future Afghanistan led by the young women her school produced.

Though the Taliban was not in power then, she had lived through its rule once before. To her, it was clear that it saw girls’ education as a direct threat to their power because, as she says now, “of the intensity and commitment they have to stopping it.”

Shabana was six years old in 1996 when the Taliban first took Afghanistan and banned girls from school. Her parents decided to dress her in boys’ clothing and send her as the “escort” for her sister. Under the guise of running errands, the two would attend one of the illegal schools operating in homes across Kabul. Each day they’d take a different route. By the time the U.S. invaded and overthrew the Taliban, in late 2001, Shabana had spent nearly six years studying in disguise. At age 17, she made her way to Middlebury College in Vermont, and from there returned to Afghanistan to begin building SOLA.

Then, and now, this history has been utilized to sustain Shabana’s mission. She repeats it again and again, at commencements and in panel discussions, speeches, and op-eds. And it is worth it because once people hear her story, they will do almost anything to help. The funding for SOLA is entirely private, and some of the most recognizable names in tech, philanthropy, and entertainment contribute generously. With their help, she has educated more than 300 girls in the past decade.

In 2016, its first year, SOLA received 70 applications and accepted 24 students. Five years later, in the spring of 2021, the U.S. military began to withdraw from Afghanistan. Already gaining power in the north, the Taliban moved rapidly toward Kabul. Shabana began to formulate a plan: She would set up a one-year study-abroad program in a neighboring country and take the entire school out of Afghanistan.

When no nearby country wanted to take in a group of Afghan students, a donor suggested she look at Rwanda. Shabana was unconvinced: What would her students’ parents say when she proposed bringing their daughters to a country many of them had never heard of? But the donor made a call to the President’s office. Nearly two decades earlier, President Paul Kagame had liberated Rwanda from a genocide that left an estimated 800,000 people dead. Since then, he’d turned Rwanda into a beacon of development in the region. Now he invited the Afghan girls to take refuge there. On August 5, 2021, Shabana flew to Rwanda and toured a hotel in a quiet neighborhood of Kigali.

She hadn’t yet signed the papers when her timeline shifted dramatically. On August 15, the Taliban stormed into Kabul with unanticipated success.

Thousands of terrified Afghans rushed to the airport, where U.S. forces were hastily evacuating.

Shabana’s quest for girls’ education had not gone unnoticed by the Taliban, and her name had appeared on its hit list. For that reason, Shabana learned that she was a priority for evacuation. Before going to the airport, she burned the records of every SOLA student. When she arrived, she informed the American military that she would not be leaving without her students and faculty, who were frantically attempting to reach the airport. Just 10 days earlier, she’d told her husband she was pregnant. She dreaded telling him that she’d turned down a seat on a flight that could save her life.

Over the years, SOLA had developed an impressive roster of supporters, from Melinda French Gates to Hillary Clinton. Now Shabana would need to pull every string she had to get her students, staff, and their families into the heavily fortified Kabul airport and out of Afghanistan. As the crowd outside grew increasingly desperate, she slept in 10-minute increments. After three days, all SOLA students, staff, and their family members had boarded flights out of Afghanistan.

On August 19, they landed in Doha and were placed in housing built for the World Cup. That first night, some students dragged their mattresses into one room and slept side by side. In the coming days, they lined up to receive basics like shampoo and underwear. Nine days after the Taliban took Kabul, they were on a flight to Rwanda.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the newly reinstated Taliban regime promised that it would allow girls’ education to continue. But a month later, girls were banned from middle and high schools. About a year after, female students were barred from public universities. Then women working in universities, NGOs, and government jobs were fired.

But in a quiet neighborhood in Kigali, Shabana was hurriedly rebuilding SOLA out of a hotel. Her students’ mothers were sewing uniforms and teaching Rwandan cooks how to make Afghan staples like pilaf, salads, and doogh, a tangy yogurt drink. The girls were decorating classrooms, setting up their dorms, and reckoning with what had happened in the flurry of evacuating: They had left their homeland and their families. And they might never go back.

Sinah and her family had made it to Pakistan, but the situation there was not better. Sinah tried to enroll in school, but Afghan refugees weren’t eligible. She tried to rejoin her online classes, but Afghans were not being given identity cards to purchase phone data and WiFi. For four months, Sinah was out of school. Finally, one of her father’s relatives agreed to let her come over and attend online classes on her phone. But before long, the family’s disabled daughter began having panic attacks, and they asked her to leave: They feared that Sinah carried a curse.

Then one day, on a WhatsApp group, someone dropped a link to SOLA. On its website, Sinah read about the all-girls boarding school offering a free year-round education to any Afghan girl who passed a rigorous admissions process. It offered basketball, advanced science classes, a student newspaper. It sounded too good to be true, but when she Googled it, she saw that it had been featured on American television. She applied.

In the years since the Taliban takeover, SOLA’s admissions process had exploded. By 2023, there were 1,950 applicants, but the school had space for only around 30. In a year-long process, each prospective student is reviewed by at least three people and goes through multiple interviews. Shabana sits in on every final interview—hundreds in all. She knows the ideal SOLA student can’t be found just by checking grades or testing for English skills.

“We’re looking for girls who understand this education is not just for them— it’s beyond them,” Shabana says. “And they have the resilience to handle all that means: leaving your families behind and coming to a new country.” By 2025, there were nearly 5,400 applicants, and the administrators stretched the admitted to 53 new students—an acceptance rate of less than 1 percent.

Often, at night, Sinah went up to the roof of her family’s apartment in Karachi to try to find reprieve from the stifling heat. She’d listen to music, watch the birds, and wonder if she would ever fly away like they did. Sometimes she cried, thinking about all she’d been through and prayed for everything to turn out okay. Now, with her SOLA application submitted, she cried, thinking it actually might.

For future SOLA students, getting accepted is just the beginning of an arduous journey: visas that cost thousands of dollars, medical tests, school records that are locked away under Taliban control. Arranging travel to SOLA’s campus is so difficult that students arrive in batches throughout the year, and sometimes a full year after they’ve been accepted.

In February 2025, Sinah logged on to what she thought was her third Zoom interview with SOLA. Instead, she was told that she’d been accepted. A year had passed since she’d applied, and she’d buried the possibility deep in her mind to avoid disappointment. Suddenly, her fantasies of flying away were becoming real. “I think those cryings helped a lot,” she says now. “Because when I got into SOLA, I was literally saying to myself that all the things I was aspiring to came true.”

She video-called her dad in Afghanistan to tell him the news. He cried too and told her that she was also realizing his dreams. But Sinah’s difficulties were not over. To leave Pakistan, she needed vaccines and bloodwork, but local doctors were not allowed to treat illegal Afghan refugees. For days, she and her mom visited hospitals and clinics before they found a doctor willing to help. Then there was the exit permit, which Sinah’s family couldn’t afford—but SOLA agreed to cover it. After that was a 20-hour ride to Islamabad, a city where she knew no one.

On her final day in Pakistan, Sinah went to the airport alone. If she was stopped by police, at least she now had the right papers—her mom did not. When she met the seven other incoming SOLA students there, the whole group was crying. She tried to comfort them and their parents: “We are not going to war,” she told them. “We are going to get an education.” In early summer 2025, five months after she’d been accepted, Sinah landed in Rwanda.

When new students arrive, they’re greeted at the airport by the school’s big-sister committee holding signs and flowers. Back on campus, the whole student body waits at the gate to welcome them. And after a period of quarantine, there is a party. Loud music—now banned in Afghanistan—blasts through the courtyard. Not long after, the new students jump into the pool. Few have ever swum before, and many later say it’s the first time they’ve truly felt free.

Recently, when the newest batch of arrivals sat in their first morning assembly, one of them stood to speak: “After five years of delay, I sit in a classroom and I wear a uniform and it feels so good,” she said. Nearly everyone in the room cried.

As the years stretched on under Taliban rule, SOLA began offering intensive classes to help bridge the gap for students who had missed years of formal education. In 2024, Shabana and her husband, Mati Amin, launched SOLAx, a WhatsApp-based education platform that now reaches more than 40,000 users.

For students like Husna, a 19-year-old from Kabul, the lost years weigh heavy. Before the Taliban takeover, she’d been on track to graduate high school in 2023. Since then, she has gone from being a middle-class teenager to attending illegal courses and online schools in Afghanistan to being a refugee in Uganda and, finally, to studying at SOLA in Rwanda. “There’s a huge difference between our lives and the lives of ordinary girls,” she says. “It’s easy for them, like drinking water. But for us, we have to fight for every step. We have to prove that we deserve to study, to have this chance.”

Sinah had been out of school for nearly four years when she arrived at SOLA. Even so, she found it was a seamless transition into life on campus: The food was Afghan, the uniforms were Afghan dresses with light-blue headscarves, and the school celebrated Afghan holidays like Nowruz and Eid. It was, she thought, “a mini Afghanistan.” Other aspects took time to adjust to; the ban on social media was particularly difficult. Sinah considered herself the journalist of the family, and she had always shared current events with them. Now a physical distance was compounded by a new digital detachment.

So far from home, SOLA is “forced to be both their school and their parents,” Shabana says. She is the legal guardian of every student at SOLA. And she worries about their safety all the time. She knows that her mission inspires a zealous hatred in extremists thousands of miles away. “The less people know about the girls and their families, the more I feel safe,” she says.

Even in Rwanda, the girls wear masks when they go out because curious bystanders occasionally take videos and post them online. There are also new, more localized threats that the students and staff must adapt to: Since their arrival in Rwanda, the country has tackled Covid-19, Marburg virus disease, and an Ebola outbreak in neighboring countries.

At an assembly near the end of this school year, Shabana stood to address these rules: Not long ago, some students had managed to circumvent the firewall to download social media apps, and she urged them to think about why the ban stood. “It’s perfectly normal for this phase of your life to push against authority,” she said. “As we look at the situation in Afghanistan, things are not getting better, things are getting worse—[and] one day you might go back.”

The social-media detox was probably good for her, Sinah conceded. She made fast friends with her roommates and classmates, and she took to academia. In creative writing, she pulled inspiration from her life for fictional stories and poetry. In humanities, she participated in debates about current events and human rights. She decided she wanted to study international development, to make sure no one else would experience what she and her family had faced.

Earlier this year, Sinah was accepted to a social-justice workshop at the University of Oxford. She and five others—“the Oxford Six,” as they were called on campus—were overjoyed. Sinah, who calls herself a very spiritual person, considered it a miracle. But the U.S. and U.K. had recently banned Afghan nationals from getting student visas. Even with a Rwandan passport, travel is difficult, if not impossible. The Oxford Six were not given visas. They joined the workshop virtually, and on the night of the formal banquet in England, they dressed up in traditional Afghan outfits and ate cake with their teachers in the cafeteria in Kigali.

Even as politics seem to fence them in, SOLA’s students foster global ambitions. On a recent summer afternoon, they presented their yearlong personal projects. In nearly every classroom, students stood behind tables, holding elaborate displays. “First I have an advertisement,” one girl was instructing a visitor. “If you want to learn about nuclear bombs, go to Kimia. If you want to learn about genetic engineering, go to Madina, and if you want to learn about galaxies and black holes, go to Nargis.”

As Shabana walked from table to table, she couldn’t stop tearing up. She excused herself for a moment after a new student hugged her and exclaimed in Dari, “SOLA girls can do anything!” Later, after watching a video of a student performing a traditional Hindi dance, Shabana learned that the student’s father would not approve. “How can I follow my passion when it might disappoint the people who sacrificed everything for me?” the student asked. Shabana dabbed her eyes. “You have to make a choice most people don’t have to make,” she replied. She got choked up in front of a massive gorilla made out of plastic bottles collected on campus, and again while watching a presentation about a future smart city for Afghanistan. “This is too much for me!” she said, laughing, gesturing at the hall full of aspirations.

Sinah had written a policy paper examining barriers to education, titled The Impacts of Inaccessible Education Across Four Countries, and formatted it like an official NGO report. “When the sacrifice of a girl becomes a compulsive need, it potentially endangers a generation,” she wrote. When Shabana approached her table, Sinah handed her a copy and told Shabana she had friends in Afghanistan who’d lost their education and been forced to get married. While writing the paper, she’d realized that girls across the world had experienced the same thing. “I learned I’m not the only person deprived of education,” she told Shabana.

That day, SOLA students noticed that Shabana visited every table and deposited a personal note in each handmade feedback box. Her own picture featured in numerous projects about global female leadership. One by one, nearly every student presented her with a neatly wrapped copy of their work. To them, she is more than a surrogate parent or school leader—she’s something of a guru. They say that she knows what’s inside their minds and hearts better than anyone.

To spend any time on SOLA’s campus is to think about how many students are not there. And to talk to the students is to realize they think about it too—all the time. Written in blue pen on 14-year-old Saweya’s wrist is: “Let them”—a reminder not to dwell on what she cannot change and to focus on the rare opportunity she’s been given. “I carry hopes and wishes of millions of girls who couldn’t be here,” she says. “All 118 of us here—and all the girls who came before, and all the girls who will come after us—will experience this.”

One of the school’s aims is to keep the students too busy to consider the weight on their shoulders. On school days, every hour is scheduled. There are no extended breaks in the year: spring, summer, and winter holidays are packed with workshops and extracurriculars run by volunteers from around the world.

“My family says, ‘Do you miss us?’” says Kawsar, a 16-year-old who was so thrilled to arrive at SOLA, she wanted to sleep in the school uniform on her first night. “I say, ‘Sometimes, when I think about it; but we are a big family here, and we don’t have time to miss you.’” When girls do start feeling homesick, Kawsar says, the student-led happiness committee places chocolates or pick-me-up notes on their beds.

But SOLA’s staff know that parents are desperately missing their daughters. Feroza, the school’s live-in psychologist, will never forget last Eid, when the students’ families decided to mail their daughters new dresses. When the outfits arrived, not a single one fit. Feroza cried as she made the alterations. “Parents are missing seeing their children grow up,” she says.

This August marked five years since Kabul fell to the Taliban and five years since SOLA arrived in Rwanda. Only seven students who arrived in the original evacuation are left on campus. SOLA is not yet internationally accredited, and the oldest students are sent to secondary institutions to get their high school diplomas. One hundred percent of SOLA students have gone on to college. Soon, Shabana hopes, that middle step won’t be necessary.

On the fifth anniversary of its exile, SOLA will open a new campus: its first permanent home. On a chilly June morning, Shabana heads out of Kigali to visit the site, peeling off the highway past snack shacks and a nearby memorial to the Rwandan genocide.

At the end of a tree-lined road, the next phase of Afghan education in exile is taking form. Housing and classrooms have been built into the hillside, and when the campus is finished it will host a farm, a pottery studio, a tandoor oven for baking Afghan bread, and a mosque oriented toward Mecca with a blue-tiled minaret. There will be a museum to tell the story of the school and its remarkable relocation. By next year, SOLA aims to have its international accreditation, so the students will be able to graduate on this campus.

“I focus a lot more on the promise of this place,” Shabana says, looking around as more than 1,000 construction workers are leveling the soccer field and pouring concrete for the pool. “The loss is there. But I look at this as a way of returning to Afghanistan.”

But what if there is no future for SOLA or its graduates in Afghanistan? The students don’t talk about that possibility. They also do not ask how or when they can see their families again. They understand the sacrifice they’ve made. “Hope is one thing that keeps you alive,” says Feroza, the psychologist. “We all hope one day we will go back. Then you will have that pride to face your people and say, ‘Yes, I have done something.’”

For Sinah, as well as most other SOLA students, returning is a distant milestone, one that will mark the completion of the circuitous path her family has taken.

Before she was born, Sinah’s parents left Afghanistan for Iran. When she was 2 years old, they decided to return home: In Iran, Afghan refugees weren’t allowed to study, and both of her parents dreamed of receiving an education. Over dinner, sometimes, Sinah’s father would tell her about how his own parents wouldn’t let him make the hour-long walk to school and that he had made himself notebooks out of discarded cigarette cartons. Back in Afghanistan, Sinah’s mother got her high school diploma, and, not long after, Sinah’s father came home in his graduation cap and gown, holding a university degree in journalism.

It was just a few years later that Sinah was thrown off her own path and sent on a dangerous journey to get an education. When that happened, she would think: They continued with those hardships, so why should I not continue? A few months after she got to SOLA, her father sent her a video of his family throwing a traditional celebratory feast in honor of her acceptance. “They are celebrating my experience, that I’m here,” Sinah says. “That one daughter from our family left, not because we had to but because of education.”

This story appears in our 2026 Legends issue.

Tanya Taylor saw the first signs of change in her fitting rooms. The designer built her namesake label around a simple promise: great clothes across a broad range of sizes. But lately, the demand has noticeably shifted in one direction. “We’ve tracked clients who were a size 16 or 18 and are now a 10 or 12,” Taylor says. “Shapes are getting slimmer.”

This is in large part due to the rise of GLP-1s. Roughly one in eight Americans is now taking one, which is perhaps why nearly one in seven apparel exchanges last year was for a smaller size, a three-year high, according to Narvar, a platform that tracks returns. As more shoppers size down, the fashion industry is doing what it has always done: making less for everyone else.

The shift is particularly hard on smaller brands like Taylor’s. She says wholesalers ultimately decide which sizes they will carry, leaving brands with limited control over what reaches the sales floor. Many of her retail partners have pulled back from ordering extended sizing.

Meeting the demands of the majority is not a new concept for business owners, but when it comes to fashion, there are larger ramifications. “I just hope the industry does not confuse a change in current demand with the disappearance of an entire customer,” Taylor says.

For the past decade, the industry appeared ready to evolve beyond the razor-thin beauty standards it had long idealized. Size inclusivity became a marker of progress, pursued through expanded ranges, more representative campaigns, and broader runway casting.

By fall 2026, that progress had begun to unravel. In a Vogue Business analysis of the season’s collections, fewer than one percent of models cast were above a straight size. The clothes told the same story: shorter skirts, lower backs, skinnier jeans, and a renewed fixation on a narrow silhouette. On major runways, the change has been impossible to miss. Ahead of his Gucci debut, Demna publicly said he was no longer interested in oversized silhouettes, and his first collection for the house marked a turn toward leaner, body-conscious shapes.

“Five or 10 years ago, there was such a great movement toward more representation,” says Olivia Villanti, founder of the made-to-measure tailoring label Chava Studio. “The past couple of seasons have been scary. I feel like we’re in the early ’90s again.”

The same retreat is playing out at every level: in who gets cast, which sizes get stocked, and which brands can afford to keep making clothes for the women the industry only recently promised to include.

For customers, fashion’s idealization of thinness, combined with retailers buying and making fewer extended sizes, can determine whether a woman can walk into a store and find clothes that fit her at all. Sarah Chiwaya, founder of the #PlusSizePlease movement and contributing Marie Claire editor, says that those changes often happen under the radar. “Many brands do it quietly,” she says. “I often find out because I see a sudden influx of plus-size pieces on discount sites, get suspicious, and then head to the brand’s website to find the plus or extended section gone completely.”

As brands narrow their size assortments, plus-size shoppers are increasingly squeezed out of mainstream retail and left relying on a shrinking group of labels that still consistently carry their size. That shift places more responsibility on independent brands—but also more financial pressure.

Villanti has largely avoided that burden by operating Chava Studio on a made-to-order model. But as she begins producing more inventory in advance, she has to predict not only which pieces customers will want, but also how many to make in each size. “It’s terrifying for me,” she says. A miscalculation can leave a small label with money tied up in unsold clothing. Unlike made-to-order production, every size has to be committed to months before a customer buys it.

Naomi Mishkin wants her New York label, Naomi Nomi, to be one of the brands shoppers can still rely on. “I have every interest in making clothes for the bodies that exist in the real world,” she says. “Quite frankly, I find that much more interesting. Where is the design challenge in designing for only one kind of body?” Her average customer remains a medium, with large and extra large among the brand’s strongest-selling sizes. The rush toward smaller bodies may not be reflected in her customer base, but serving that customer still requires expenses many indie labels struggle to sustain.

Every additional size comes with its own costs— it requires new patterns, additional fittings, more samples, and a larger upfront investment. Mara Hoffman, whose 24-year-old label shuttered in 2024, raised a similar concern when she expanded into extended sizing in 2018, describing it as “a whole new approach to fit and sizing” that required significant investment before a brand could know whether the demand would justify it.

That trade-off is prompting some brands to consider alternatives to simply expanding or narrowing their ranges. Taylor introduced a program that lets shoppers try up to eight pieces at home as their bodies change, while Mishkin has explored adjustable construction and fabrics with more give. Neither approach eliminates the cost of serving a wider range of shoppers. But they show how smaller labels can remain nimble even with limited funds—and raise the question of what larger companies, with far greater resources and reach, are willing to do.

Universal Standard has built its entire business around the belief that changing bodies shouldn’t require changing who gets to participate in fashion. The brand offers sizes 00 through 40, and cofounder and CEO Polina Veksler says its commitment is not subject to whichever body type happens to dominate the conversation.

“The moment we’d start narrowing our focus based on whatever size the culture currently finds acceptable is the moment we’d become exactly the kind of brand we set out to replace,” she says.

Not every brand was built around that mission—or is equally willing to uphold it when demand shifts. As more labels narrow their size ranges, fewer companies are left carrying the cost of serving every body. Ultimately, someone will pay for it.

This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.

Megan Thee Stallion knows her fans are growing impatient. So is she. While I wait for her at New York’s Ludlow House on a perfect July Sunday, she’s on X, assuring the hotties—her fiercely loyal fan base—that Act III is coming soon. “I really appreciate how passionate they are, and it makes me feel good knowing that I have a fan base that cares about rap as much as I do,” she says when she arrives. “They’re very serious about my career.”

She’d wanted to give them another Hot Girl Summer. Instead, she spent much of the season in Miami with her producers, recording and rewriting until the album felt right. “I was very sad because I came to the realization that I was not gonna drop a summer album,” she says. “I wanted to take my time and record and really write and figure it out.”

We’re seated at two tables in front of the curtained screen of Ludlow House’s otherwise empty private cinema. Her bodyguard is just down the hall, eating lunch at a table facing the open door of the theater; her publicist and a patient waiter hover nearby. “I feel like I’m happy about this album, even though it didn’t come [out] in the summertime. But that’s okay, because it’s Tina Snow,” she adds, referring to her Pimp C– inspired alter ego.

The album is one reason she’s in New York this weekend. She’s here to put the finishing touches on it, with hopes of releasing it soon. But all that work should also come with a little bit of fun: She spent the previous two nights in the Bronx, attending Jay-Z’s Yankee Stadium shows. The second night turned into a bit of a rager for Meg, who didn’t get back to her hotel until dawn.

“When I go out, I have to make it a movie because I barely get the chance
to go out,” she says. After the show, she ended up at a comedy club with her friends (“I was like, ‘Wow, this what y’all are saying in the New York comedy club?’ They better not put that on social media!”). “New York is giving Alice in Wonderland,” she says of the nightlife scene. “You could end up going through a washing machine and end up in a club.”

Looking at the glammed-up rapper, you couldn’t tell that her weekend plans had led her down a late-night rabbit hole. Her makeup is flawless as ever, with a glowy matte finish. Her cropped gray T-shirt bears the word LUXURY, displayed like a baseball-team logo, revealing her enviable abs. She pairs it with a Yankees cap, ripped skinny jeans, a chrome Louis Vuitton monogram bag, and a pair of strappy heels that add several inches to her 5’10” frame. She looks like she’s ready for another night out, but all she really wants is lunch.

“I’m hungry,” she says, the first real tell of the night before. She’s low-energy but not disengaged, ordering a grapefruit juice for herself and spinach artichoke dip for us to share.

Given the year Megan has had, a late night followed by a quiet recovery lunch feels well-earned. Her career hit a massive turning point this year as she expanded her brand and name outside of rap. She’s been exploring her creative side, making her Broadway debut as Zidler in Moulin Rouge! The Musical and appearing as Daniel Radcliffe’s love interest, a divorced mail carrier named Denise, on the NBC series The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins. She even took a role in the Adam Sandler–produced Netflix film Roommates, as a prisoner named Louise. And beyond entertainment, the business of being a hot girl never stops. She opened her first Popeyes franchise in Miami’s South Beach at the start of the year and launched a Hot Girl Summer perfume.

For all that expansion, though, music remains a nonnegotiable. “I don’t ever see a world in which I [leave] music or let music be the backseat to anything I do,” the 31-year-old says, in case her fans were worried that the Act III delay meant she was pivoting away from it. “I don’t want to ever be just a product or an artist that doesn’t feel relatable. I am a person at the end of the day. I want to resonate with people. I feel like that’s how you have longevity, when you really connect with your audience.”

After a year in which the demands of being Megan Thee Stallion have repeatedly collided with the needs of the person underneath, that distinction feels like a necessity. Both Megan’s health and love life took massive hits this year, and she’s just starting to piece them all together again. “No matter what’s going on, I always pick myself up and go, ‘Girl, hot-girl shit,’" she says. And she doesn’t wish away those parts either. “I was supposed to learn. I was supposed to grow. I was supposed to do all the things, from my best moments and my worst moments,” she says. “I was supposed to go through that, learn from it, and survive it. It’s hard sometimes to get up and keep going, but I have to.” Clearly, she has.

This spring, Megan was in New York for what was scheduled to be an eight-week run as Zidler in Moulin Rouge! The Musical. The show's emcee doubles as the owner of the titular club, and Megan was the first female-identifying actor to play the role. It was an honor for the theater fan, who had dabbled in performing back in college. “It was one of the best experiences, as a performer, in my life,” she says, adding that she had been nervous going into it. She knows how to perform as Megan Thee Stallion every day, on tour and off—but in this role, she needed to be prepared to slip into another character eight times a week.

“I don’t think I was aware of how much I was going to be putting my body through,” she admits. When she’s in Stallion mode, she’s already pretty strict with herself. She’s never late for her shows and always tries to do everything— recording, touring, visuals—to the best of her abilities. But Broadway was a whole new experience. Megan was working alongside a cast and crew who had been putting on this show for years, and for the first time, she was just one part of a much larger machine. “These people are working hard, like anybody in theater,” she says. “They’re working all week except for Mondays. I know they tired. Like, when I walked in that bitch, I be tired. And they be so happy and just upbeat. I stopped complaining.”

Kelsie Watts, who played Satine in the production, remembers having multiple conversations with Megan during rehearsals and the first week of their run together about how overwhelmed the Grammy winner was. “She was burning the candle at both ends,” Watts says. “If she wasn’t in rehearsals, then she was going to work on her album, or she was going to do press or a photo shoot. A lot of people don’t realize, eight shows a week is just different. Until you do it, you can’t describe it, but it’s really freaking hard, and I think she was just exhausted.”

Megan gave her first performance in Moulin Rouge! on March 24 to an audience full of her passionate hotties who had traveled far and wide to see her debut. She was ecstatic, moved, and already growing close with the cast. But the pressure and stress were beginning to take their toll on her physically. During her March 31 performance, just one week into her run, she was rushed to the hospital.

“I didn’t want to let anyone down,” she says. Her eyes have begun welling up, and she dabs them carefully with a napkin as she recalls the incident. At the time, Megan was aware of how depleted she had become. In spite of the demands of the musical, she hadn’t been eating properly and was dehydrated. She admits she had been showing up to the job every day “a little bit mentally not okay.”

“I thought I was having a stroke,” she says. “I wasn’t getting any oxygen to my brain, so my hands had froze. My face had froze. I was trying to tell everybody that I don’t think I’m okay. They only thought I was dehydrated.”

Watts remembers observing how different Megan looked at the beginning of that performance. “The very first time that we interact is after the song ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,’ and we come out onto what’s called the passerelle. It’s right next to the front row, and we have this little interaction scene with each other. I looked at her, and she had barely any color in her face, was shaking, was sweating, and I was like, ‘This is not normal,’ especially for her and for someone who does work as hard as she does and wants to push through. When I got offstage, I was like, ‘Something’s gonna happen. She’s not okay.’”

The production paused for about 20 minutes. Watts recalls how much convincing it took to get Megan, who wanted to keep performing, to go to the hospital. “She wanted to keep doing the show because she knew that so many hotties were there and so many people were excited to see her, but she had to [go],” Watts says. At the hospital, Megan was exhausted and having a panic attack.

But for someone whose body had just forced her to stop, Megan didn’t stay stopped for long. She was back onstage just two days later and stayed with the show for another month before ending her run two weeks early on May 1. Within months, she was back in the studio.

“I’m definitely trying to stay more hydrated and be more calm,” she says when I ask her how she’s been taking care of herself since. Watts saw some of those changes firsthand: Megan cut her schedule from eight shows a week to seven and stopped packing her days with work outside the theater. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, when Moulin Rouge! puts on two shows a day, Megan and Watts would spend some downtime together between performances, then grab low-key dinners together after the shows.

“It was like a little bit of a better balance instead of her trying to put so much into one day and so much on her plate,” Watts says.

After taking some time to settle back into being Megan Thee Stallion rather than Zidler, she was able to return to the role on very different terms. In June, just over a month after leaving the show, she reprised the character at the Tony Awards, alongside host P!nk. “It was amazing,” she says. “I was so happy.”

But Broadway wasn’t the only thing weighing on Megan that spring. In late April, before announcing her early departure from Moulin Rouge!, Megan took to her Instagram story to announce that she and her then-boyfriend, Dallas Mavericks star Klay Thompson, had ended their relationship.

On Instagram, she accused Thompson of cheating, getting “cold feet” and having “HORRIBLE mood swings” during the basketball season, all while he had her “playing house” with his entire family. She further indicated that Thompson had claimed to her that monogamy might not be for him. In a later statement, she said, “Trust, fidelity and respect are non-negotiable for me in a relationship, and when those values are compromised, there’s no real path forward. I’m taking this time to prioritize myself and move ahead with peace and clarity.”

The pair had gone public with their relationship in 2025 and let the world in on what felt like a romantic fantasy. They posted joint workout videos and pictures of large dinners with Thompson’s family, including meals Megan appeared to have cooked for the entire clan. Last October, she had hinted at the two moving in together, sharing a photo of their two hands forming a heart and holding a set of keys in front of a home.

When I ask how she is thinking about love at this point in her life, she takes a long pause. “I’m not thinking about anything romantic,” she says after ordering more water. “I’m definitely not thinking about no damn relationship.”

It’s clear the subject is still tender. The typically extroverted, bawdy star is quiet, careful, and, again, trying to stave off tears as she speaks. She says she has been letting herself feel it rather than trying to rush past the heartbreak. “I’m not pretending I’m 100 percent okay,” she says. “I ain’t never been through nothing like that in my whole life. I’ve never, ever, ever been in a relationship like that, ever. So I’m definitely not worried about another one for a long time.”

She is still grieving the loss of the future she thought she had found, she adds. “It was so abrupt. I’m in shock still.” But from where she is now, Megan believes she’s better off on her own—and shies away from further details on what transpired.

“When something is meant for you, it’s gonna be easy,” she says. “It’s gonna be right. It’s not gonna feel like a panic all the time. I feel like that’s what I was in, constantly on edge. My nervous system needed to calm down. I feel like I was in a panic 24/7. I’m still not eating all the way right. I’m feeling all the feelings. I’m not trying to take no shortcuts.”

The breakup, she says, was also a reminder to trust her intuition. “Sometimes I be knowing in my gut and in my heart, then you give so much benefit of the doubt,” she says. “No, the gut is always right. Listen.”

We start discussing the onslaught of hard lessons we’ve both experienced in our early 30s, the realization that making it through the messiness of your 20s does not exempt you from entirely new messes. She had spent so much of her life begging God for signs that someone was right for her. At this point, she’s over it. “No more signs,” she laughs. “Send us an email. Call, please! They never, ever stop. Sorry I asked. I ain’t asking for shit right now.”

This year had plenty of hard lessons, but they all taught Megan that she can—and should—take back control of her life. She’s more conscious of how she spends her days: focusing on one job at a time, making art with people she trusts, spending time with people who make her feel safe, and limiting external noise and critique. The only social media apps she has on her phone these days are Pinterest and TikTok. (She only got access to her X account by borrowing her social media manager’s phone earlier in the day.) “I’m not looking at anything anybody is saying, because I would be in my feelings all day,” she says.

“Anything you create, you feel sensitive about. If somebody don’t compliment your food, you’re gonna be upset about that. If you put on an outfit you really put thought into and somebody has something to say, you’ll be like, ‘Damn, I thought my shit was fire.’ I had to realize one of the things that makes me sensitive is social media.”

She’s carefully curated a TikTok algorithm that maintains her peace. Her For You page serves up videos on aliens, the ocean, Frenchies, Dobermans, and mukbangs. She’s big on BookTok too, and she consumes murder mysteries and thrillers on her phone, every free moment she has. “I really love reading, and I’m trying to figure out what I can do in that space,” she says, mulling a book club or a Kindle partnership. “I want to engage the hotties in reading.”

She pulls out her phone, secured inside a teddy-bear-shaped case, to list off her recent favorites: Nita Prose’s The Maid, Alafair Burke’s The Better Sister, anything by Ruth Ware. After picking up One of Us Is Dead, she dove into all of author Jeneva Rose’s work.

“If she is making a movie, please put me in it. Because whatever I gotta do to be a part of that...” Megan says. “That book was so good. I could finish a book in probably like two days. I’m staying through it, top to bottom all day, through glam, through a shoot, on a break, on a plane. I’m finishing the book. That was a good book. Jenny ate that.”

Megan was an early Colleen Hoover fan too but is so offline that she didn’t realize how popular the author’s books had become until the drama around the 2024 film adaptation of It Ends With Us blew up. “I had nobody to talk about it with because none of my friends read these kinds of books,” she says. “I’m keeping up with the movie and the drama. It was tea for me.” Even celebrities escape through other celebrities’ drama.

Her friends may not share her taste in books, but they have been a constant for Megan through a difficult year. As she talks about her chosen family, her face lights up. She does everything with her hairstylist Kellon Deryck. “As soon as I met him, I feel like we just connected instantly, barely any words,” she says. “He read my mind, and I feel like I was reading his.” She considers her manager T. Farris to be family. “He’s like my brother,” she says. “That’s not even a friend, that’s family. After my mama passed, he took me in, and he’s been with me ever since.” Then there’s Jayla, her best friend since college, whom she met back in Houston in 2013. Though Jayla now lives in Dallas, Megan still sees her as a steady, reliable “ride or die.”

With them, she rarely has to ask for support. “When I’m having a bad day, I damn near forget I’m having a bad day because they’re just there, and it just takes my mind off of it immediately,” she adds. That circle has grown alongside her newer creative pursuits, including Watts, who bonded with Megan over their Texas roots while working together on Broadway. The two have kept in touch all summer.

“She FaceTimed me while I was in a show the other day,” Watts says. “Conveniently, it was during intermission. We talked the whole intermission.” On the call, Megan invited her out to Miami to work on a song together after Moulin Rouge! closes in August. “She’s an international superstar. I didn’t expect to make a friend,” Watts adds, noting that Megan had already made plans to come to the closing party for the show. “She is just 100 percent a girl’s girl. What you see is what you get. She’s real. She’s honest. She’s a really hard worker. She’s fun. She’s kind and loving and energetic. She really is what you would want in a friend.”

Megan clearly knows how to find the right work families. She gushes about the entire cast of Reggie Dinkins, especially her primary scene partner, Radcliffe. “I was on that set, calling that man Harry Potter all day,” she exclaims. He clearly took it in stride. “Daniel made me feel so, so, so comfortable. We were literally talking and joking the whole time. I think that’s why the chemistry was so good.”

“We were honestly so lucky to get Megan to be on the show,” Radcliffe says. “Normally, it takes a few seasons for people as famous as she is to guest-star. But Megan dived in and was totally game, from the first moment she stepped on set. She’s a total pro, a delight to work with, and really fucking funny.” Megan had such a good time on set that she’s hoping they call her back for season two. “They have to,” she says. “They did not give my girl enough time. That love story needs to develop.”

Work has pushed Megan hard this year, but the studio also remains a place where she can make sense of what she’s going through—or simply find some relief from it. She unleashes everything through her music, either by explicitly detailing what she is going through in her lyrics or by making songs that allow her to escape in the moment. “I do make music that reflects the way I feel,” she explains. “But I could be having a terrible, terrible, terrible day, and then I would go write something like ‘Freak Nasty’ just because I feel inspired to go write something hard. So in my new album, I feel like I went through all the feelings.”

We barely make a dent in the spinach-artichoke dip before we have to clear out for a screening in the cinema. We move to a small table in the room where her bodyguard had been stationed. “I have the [same] ring,” she says, noticing the giant pink bauble I got from Mondo Mondo now that we’re sitting closer. “The girls don’t have that. They don’t know.”

Once we’re settled, the conversation turns back to Act III. Megan makes it clear there is still a lot left she wants to prove to herself. She says she stopped caring about making people like her after releasing her album Traumazine. “I’m not fighting for validation,” she says. She thinks back to being young, still discovering her voice, and being genuinely unconcerned with what anyone thought. Fame complicated that. At some point, she says, keeping the career she had built began to feel tangled up with keeping everyone on her side. “I just had to learn, when somebody makes their mind up about you, that’s what it is,” she says. “I feel like I was able to be a little more free in making music and making decisions because I feel like, for a long point in life, I was definitely trying to make people like me.”

Working with many of the same people from her recent projects has given her enough familiarity to experiment, and one piece of outside criticism has given that experimentation a target: the claim that every Megan Thee Stallion song has the same flow. “I think I have such a distinct voice, such a distinct sound, such a distinct accent. I feel like sometimes people are interpreting it as ‘She sounds the same on all her songs.’”

For the record, Megan would push back on that characterization; she believes she switches up both her flow and style plenty. But she has started wondering whether her “thick-ass accent” makes those differences harder to hear, so this time around, she began stretching her voice in new directions. “It was a little bit out of my comfort zone to try my voice in a different way or over a different kind of beat,” she says. “I was a little shy this go-round, but everybody has been so supportive in hyping me up. I feel like the hotties are gonna appreciate this.”

If Act III is where Megan has gone “through all the feelings,” she doesn’t seem interested in making the result sound solemn. In a June preview of a new song, she rapped, “All that wifey shit is dead/Put that shit to bed.” For Megan, all that healing leaves even more room for hot-girl shit. “It’s always hot-girl shit,” she confirms, with a big, bright smile. She remains coy about the sound but not the attitude; any longtime listener knows that when Megan says it’s time for hot-girl shit, it means that good vibes are coming. “No matter what’s going on, I definitely always pick myself up,” she assures.

Megan’s learning how to move forward without pretending everything is behind her. Act III, it turns out, is being made from somewhere in the middle.

Stylist Dione Davis | Hairstylist Kellon Deryck | Makeup artist Priscilla Ono | Manicurist Jay | Set designer WayOut Studio

This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.

The unspoken contract of being a Black woman on reality TV usually goes something like this: Be yourself but not too much. For a handful of Black women occupying space on the predominantly white shows of Bravo TV, the feeling of having to shrink is commonplace—some might even say it’s their job. While they may carry it with grace, seemingly meshing well with friend groups and doing so with a smile most of the time, those of us who understand the complexities of being Black women know there is always more happening beneath the surface.

For me, that awareness came early. I was 5 years old and one of only two Black girls in my kindergarten class when I first realized what it meant to be seen as different. And while at the time I couldn’t have begun to comprehend what that feeling of incongruousness would mean for the rest of my life, it was palpable.

To understand the experience of having that feeling play out for millions of viewers every week, I sat down with four of Bravo’s most prominent Black cast members on a late June afternoon in Brooklyn: Lake Rucker of Southern Hospitality, Jasmine Goode of The Valley, Venita Aspen of Southern Charm, and Mia Calabrese of Summer House. Together, we unpacked what it means to exist so publicly in a universe that rarely includes or uplifts Black women. For the first time ever, they said out loud what they’ve only ever said in private.

Marie Claire: Do you feel like you’ve been given the space to be messy, angry, vulnerable, all of it, on reality TV?

Mia Calabrese: I mean, we can do it, but we just know the backlash is going to be very different than our white counterparts.

Venita Aspen: At the end of the day, the backlash doesn’t feel worth it. You know, you sit with that for however long the show’s on. So say it’s like three months—every week for the next three months, someone’s going to tell you that you shouldn’t act like that. “You acted like this” or “You’re looking bad for the community” or “Of course the Black girl’s acting like this; of course the Black girl’s angry.”

Jasmine Goode: The other cast members, they’re allowed to act that way. They can act up, get loud, do this and that—everyone will still listen to them. But the moment I show some emotion, it’s looked at like, “Oh, you’re doing too much. You need to calm down.” That’s frustrating.

Lake Rucker: Growing up, especially growing up in the South, my parents always taught me that I have to work 10 times as hard as the white people around me because I went to PWIs [predominantly white institutions]. So it was always hard, having to navigate that. Not being able to fully express my emotions because you’re either deemed as aggressive or overly emotional, and sometimes you just want to be vulnerable and be yourself.

MC: How have you all been received by the Black community as Black women on these predominantly white shows?

JG: I’ve been getting a lot of “Get new friends, you don’t need to be on this show.” And it’s like, But this is literally my life. I’ve been in this friend group. These are my friends; I can’t leave my friends because you think I need to have only Black friends. So I’m getting some support, but then it’s these people always saying, “Why are you in this group? This is your fault, you did it to yourself.”

VA: Or like when you post a picture with them and they’re always like, “Oh my God, do you not have Black friends?”

MC: Lake, your mom’s advice about not involving non-Black people in Black people’s business went viral this season. Do you wish you’d listened sooner?

LR: Oh, 100 percent. I love my mom’s advice, that’s why I speak to her about it. She’s always giving me the best advice with counseling me, being there for me, helping me be the amazing woman that she is raising me to be. I feel like I made so many mistakes this past season, but I’m also growing and learning. I joined this business when I was 21 years old. I’m 23, and I’m allowed to make mistakes and learn from them. Going back to the Black community, responding back to those mistakes, it’s been a struggle because seeing the feedback and the backlash from this past season, it’s been kind of hurtful. But, you know, it’s only making me stronger and want to learn from those mistakes and come out on top.

MC: Do you feel pressure to defend your castmates when they say something that the Black community takes issue with?

VA: They make it very hard not to see it. And when it’s happening, like when the whole Emmy [Sharrett], Leva [Bonaparte], Brad [Carter] situation was happening, the amount of messages I received on Threads being like, “You should speak up, you should say this, you should say that.” And at the end of the day, do I have my thoughts? Yes. But I’m not going to put myself in a crossfire when I’m not the main one in it. Why do I have to do it? Why can’t Madison [LeCroy] speak up about it? Madison and Leva are also friends. Why can’t Austen [Kroll] speak up? Why can’t anyone else do it? Why does it have to be me?

LR: I had several conversations with Emmy, telling her that what she said was wrong. I made it very clear to her my feelings on it, and I made it clear to Brad. I made it clear to Leva as well. Leva is a very strong businesswoman, and she can hold her own. And when it comes to Emmy, it was just very disheartening to see how long it took her to realize what she had done was wrong. As someone who has viewed her as my closest friend on the cast, when your closest friends are Black, it’s kind of like, Well, how do you see me if you saw Brad this way?

MC: Mia, you were called aggressive at the Summer House reunion. What was that like?

MC: Yes, after the reunion, someone called me aggressive. I won’t say his name. But I was asking maybe uncomfortable questions, direct questions. But being direct, does it make someone aggressive? That makes me sure of myself. We cannot confuse those two. It’s okay to ask hard questions, because those questions need to be asked and answered.

JG: The fact that you were even called that is crazy to me, because I feel like other people on your cast have been reckless and no one’s ever calling them aggressive.

MC: Even when we’re looking at the reunion, I typically don’t raise my voice, and there’s not an aggressive bone in my body. I’m not aggressive. It was actually like one of the first times I’ve been called that, and, of course, it’s by a white man. I found that fascinating because I’m watching this and I’m like, Okay, well, let me watch this back. And I’m watching my white friends onstage, who to me were a lot more aggressive than I was, and those words never came out of his mouth about them.

MC: In which ways have you all censored yourself for the show?

VA: I kept myself kind of cookie-cutter, in a box. I had to be the perfect Black girl, if you will. But even Mia knows, I cut up. I think that this is the first year I’m allowing myself to fully be who I am and not care what my castmates have to say about it on the other end of it, when they see it back in a few months. I can’t worry about how they feel because it is true, I haven’t been fully myself. And now I’m just like, you either like it or not, take it or leave it.

JG: I’ve always been tiptoeing and being careful with what I say around the group. Sometimes I’m worried they’re going to perceive me this way if I say something, so it’s like, Okay, don’t act that way, Jasmine, because the world is going to look at you crazy. So it’s been a struggle. Hopefully one day, I’ll get there, where I don’t give a shit. I think I’m starting to get there slowly. Like, this season, I’m starting to have those tough conversations and letting people know, “Look, this is how I’m feeling.” But in the beginning, it was really hard to be my true self. I was always nervous that somebody was going to be judging me.

VA: They’ll judge us regardless.

MC: It’s also kind of like a push and pull constantly, being a Black woman. It’s like, how far can I really go without being called aggressive? It’s like, how far can I push this?

JG: And then you see other cast members doing something, and I’m like, I act that way too, right? Because they’re doing it. But I’m like, No, you can’t do it. It’s not the same for you.

MC: What has your experience of dating on TV been like as Black women— and, for Jasmine and Lake, queer women?

LR: You know, I’m Gen Z so it’s a lot more lax when it comes to sexuality, fluidity, and dating outside of your race. But I’ve always just dated who I vibe with.

JG: Me and Melissa, we were dating before the show even was a thing. So it’s like, yeah, this is my relationship. We live in L.A., thank God, in a state that’s accepting. So I think it’s been great that we can show representation.

VA: I think I’m in a place in my life where I truly don’t care about what people think, because who I fall in love with doesn’t have shit to do with you. When I’m dating somebody, that’s who I’m with. My mom never raised me to be like, “Oh, you can only take one type of man.”

MC: My relationship was not typical, right? We were in a long-distance relationship. In the beginning, it worked—until it didn’t. People were like, “You should do this.” And I hear everything you’re saying, but I care about how someone treats me. Are you kind to me? Are you respectful to me? Do you listen to me? It’s not the perfect relationship; whose relationship is perfect? But if the foundation is there, that’s what matters to me. I think that’s not always shown, Summer House is not a show about my romantic life. So that part was not shown. I was getting a lot of blowback about that, and while everyone’s entitled to their opinion, it doesn’t mean I have to listen to it.

MC: Do you think reality TV has a problem with not addressing racially charged moments when they happen?

MC: Yes, and I also think we don’t always know how to have those conversations with our white counterparts. Like, we can sit here right now and have this conversation for hours and hours and hours and hours. But if this was a mixed group, I don’t know. Would we be able to have the conversation so comfortably? And also, would they be receptive towards it? When we had our conversation, me, KJ, and Ciara, last summer, what I took from that was, Wow, they sat there and listened to us. Nobody was interrupting. Nobody was saying, “Well, it’s actually not like that.” Which, in my past when I’ve tried to have those conversations with white friends, that’s kind of where the conversation goes.

JG: And like you said, I think especially for me this season, the fact that they’re airing the tough conversations I’m having with my friends is, like, a big deal for me. I’m like, Thank you, because that’s what I want. I feel like a lot of my cast members love everything being out there and open. I think that’s really big. And you know, it’s hard.

MC: Would you say it’s worth it, being a Black woman on Bravo?

JG: I think we talked about that last night—about how, with all the struggles and the things that we deal with, the trolls and comments, it’s still worth it.

MC: It’s also representation. It is so important for little kids or young women or young men, whomever, to look at what we’re doing and say, “That person looks like me, that person has gone through similar life experiences that I’ve gone through.” And that, to me, makes it all worth it. I get a percentage of viewers that don’t like me, but the larger percentage that does, that sees me, that’s what matters.

MC: What have you learned about yourself through this journey?

MC: When I was given this opportunity, I said I wanted to be 100 percent myself, no matter what that looked like. My lesson is that I just have to continue to be me. And if people don’t like you, that’s okay, but at least you’re being true to yourself.

VA: The greatest lesson I’ve learned about myself is that even on my worst days, I’m still showing up better than my counterparts.

LR: I feel like I’m learning a lesson every single day; I feel like I’m growing every single day. I’m so young, and I have so much more life and lessons to live. But what I tell myself every day is, It’s okay.

JG: I’m so proud of all of us. I think being a Black woman on TV is hard. I’ve been on a couple shows. It’s not easy. So I’m just proud of all of us being proud of ourselves.

Stylist Cassy Meier | Goode's hairstylist Anari LaBoard | Goode's makeup artist Billie Gene | Rucker's hairstylist Nika Pearl-Edwards | Rucker's makeup artist Renee Garnes | Calabrese's hairstylist Ester Rojas | Calabrese's makeup artist Renee Sanganoo | Aspen's hairstylist Karen Miller | Aspen's makeup artist Brittany Whitfield

This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.

If you ever wanted to know who is on your favorite singer's playlist, or what albums inspired the latest “it girl” the most, tune in for Marie Claire’s resident music franchise Listen Up. In this interview series, we ask musicians about their listening habits and the specific records that informed their taste—and inherently their journey as an artist.

When Carly Rae Jepsen debuted in the mainstream with the inescapable and polarizing “Call Me Maybe” in 2012, the world decided that she would be a one-hit wonder. Since then, she’s proven she’s anything but.

Although the song was successful across many metrics, the singer-songwriter from British Columbia, Canada, felt it didn’t do justice to her range and, for years, was left fighting against being a “singles artist.” But she took the challenge in stride, refusing to be boxed in by the industry. “There was always this idea, especially when I first came to L.A., you have to be one thing. I fight that idea,” says Jepsen, 40, from her sunlit home office in L.A.

“Especially as women, we’re so many things.” Three years after the success of “Call Me Maybe,” the musician proved as much by releasing E•MO•TION, a cult-beloved ’80s-inspired fantasia, which she created with a coterie of Grammy winners and indie favorites including Shellback, Devonté Hynes, and Ariel Rechtshaid. The LP gave her a new level of critical acclaim and a devout fan base that has followed her as she’s continued to experiment with genres, from 2019’s electro-pop playground Dedicated to 2022’s folk-tinged The Loneliest Time.

By defying another of pop’s litmus tests—that female artists have an expiration date—she has made her most authentic album to date, Day and Night. “I really was allowing myself to ask, ‘What’s my contribution to this genre of music?’ which I don’t think, on any album before this one, I ever nailed,” Jepsen says. But on this 24-track double album, she did so by embracing every part of herself. “I call myself a bit of a late bloomer in general. It took me a second to stand in my own confidence of being unapologetically myself.”

Day and Night feels like a snapshot of what it might’ve been like to turn the radio dial in the early ’70s, when four-on-the-floor music gleamed and songs on the folk station experimented with disco. The album, she says, was made possible by the “incredible, mind-altering, life-altering change” she’s experienced in the past four years—during which she got engaged to, married, and welcomed her first child with music producer Cole M.G.N.

While the pop star’s next few months are largely focused on taking Day and Night out on the road (with her newborn son in tow), she’s also in the throes of working on one of her greatest passion projects: scoring the Broadway musical adaptation of 10 Things I Hate About You. “It has been the most gratifying, exciting new flavor of creativity that I've ever been a part of,” she says of the stage show opening in August 2027. (She’s partnering with Ethan Gruska on the music while Lena Dunham and Jessica Huang co-write the book.)

Jepsen says she and the Girls alum had been eager to work together in some capacity for years before theater producer Mike Bosner brought them together for the project. “If we’ve done our job right, it’s going to be funny,” she says of the musical to be directed by Christopher Wheeldon; she points to the Tony-winning Oh, Mary! as a comparison. “I go to work, and I leave in stitches from what their brains have come up with and how dark and twisty and silly we all get together.”

While Jepsen is known for embracing indulgence, it’s safe to say she’s doing so now more than ever—and flourishing.

In a candid May interview, Jepsen talks about the current stage of her life as well as the classics she grew up on, her little-known love for jazz, and what music she’s already sharing with her son.

James Taylor. I have a profound memory of one of the first times that I was left alone at the house; I had the record player, and I put on James Taylor, loud, and went up on the roof. He’s also the first artist I saw live, so that is going to be profound no matter what. I thought, Oh, my God. What could be a better career than this? How do I make that happen?

In terms of pop artists: Sinéad O’Connor. Holy shit, I thought, this is a once-in-a-lifetime voice.

It was by the Spice Girls. My girlfriends and I had our Lip Smackers and nail polish, and we would all trade [being the Spice Girls]—we all wanted to be Baby because she had the lollipop—and we would make up dances. It was a rite of passage.

I’m having a beautiful relationship with my record player again. In the morning, with my baby, I put on a different record for the week. Right now, I’m really blown away by Earth, Wind & Fire’s Greatest Hits. To me, it’s like watching a really good figure skater, where you’re like, “You’re making this look so easy, but I know it’s really hard.” Funk music—being so danceable and also so intelligent but so effortless feeling—I really am bowing down to how much I’m hearing that’s going on and how well it’s done.

A little-known fact about me is that I also have this deep love of jazz, which actually comes out in moments on this album, more so than any other before. I think the ’40s could also be really interesting because a lot of what I’m listening to at home is Billie Holiday. There’s something about hearing how those jazz songs are actually incredible pop songs too. To me, that is really, really wild.

More and more, what I’m loving is knowing two people who haven’t met and ought to meet. It’s almost like, “What’s your favorite color?” and I’m like, “Well, I like color combinations, actually.” I really have been obsessed with this band Say She She—I’ve never met them—but working with them and bringing them to [my frequent producer] Patrik Berger would be an incredible combination. That’s one of my dreams.

This Tegan and Sara T-shirt I bought when I first saw them, before they had broken into the U.S. [market.] It was luck. I was at a festival in Canada somewhere. I was an immediate fan. I went to the [merch tent], and I was like, “Who was that? I’m buying something.” It was a small enough festival that you felt like your contribution of $20 for a T-shirt might help them get to the next festival. I was in a similar place at the time, where I was like, “I need all the help I can get.” So I bought their shirt, and I still have it and cherish it deeply.

Then, fast-forward, they were on my dream list of people to collaborate with, and we got to work together. I waited until session number three, when I was like, “So, not to creep you out, I’m a huge fan.”

It would be all the people I have yet to see. Van Morrison—he's on my bucket list. I would love to see Say She She. I think Doja Cat is one of the most incredible performers of our generation. I really love Feist. I would also bring all my friends. I would bring Bleachers;. I would have Dev Hynes there, absolutely.

I don’t think there’s a better pop song than “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Prince [performed by Sinéad O’Connor]. It’s got everything, all the yearning in the world.

Laura Mvula’s “Show Me Love” was something I was really jealous of in a good way. It’s one of those songs—almost like a good Billie Holiday song—where you’re happy you’ve experienced heartbreak so you can relate to how good the song is.

Lykke Li. She does sad so beautifully. The lyrics [of “hard rain”]: “If you like the feeling of the hard rain falling / I have a sea full, I can give you an ocean.” When [the album so sad so sexy] came out, I remember being like, “Oh, good. I’m set for all my sad feelings this year. I have my playlist.”

The last time I went out was to the Lily Allen concert, and I was listening to her album [West End Girl] to get ready. You feel sassy, you feel vindicated. I don’t know a woman who can’t applaud that she said it for all of us, to that one ex we all know needed to hear it. That was such a satisfying art piece of an album.

That is too much pressure for me. I'd be a terrible DJ because I couldn't stay focused. I'd start somewhere, and then pretty soon we'd be listening to Jesus Christ Superstar. But if somebody hands it to me, I’ve been listening to The Temptations with the baby, and we’re having a great time, so that could be a nice party starter.

[They’re] from “Habits of Creatures”: “It’s nice the way you look at me / Daffodils grow on my street and awful free / I think you can be the one to plant my lemon tree.” It means, you’re the one I want to do this domesticated business with and be blissful, and we’ll slow things down. It feels like a romantic idea, like, when you know, you plant the lemon tree with a person.

I’m a new mom. My baby is fresh. So “All Night Long (All Night)" [by Lionel Richie].”

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

This piece originally appeared in Marie Claire's 2026 Legends issue.