Lifestyle
Your 12-year-old emo self stays winning. Giselle Lopez is a case in point
A bag becomes a different thing entirely when worn by different personalities — similar to how no one perfume smells the same on two different people. To test out this idea, we invited four different artists to style the same bag into their personal look and lifestyle for one day, dreaming up places across L.A. where they would wear it. The bag? The Acne Studios rivet wine box bag from the brand’s spring/summer ’24 collection. It felt like a bag tough enough to withstand a long day in L.A. and lightweight enough to not drag you down.
In the third installment of the series, Giselle Lopez, a model, stylist and DJ, takes the bag to Mariachi Plaza, where she sees cumbia sonidera bands play on the weekends with friends. For Lopez, the Acne Studios bag summons her inner emo tween who just won’t quit. “I’ve tried colorful styles. I’ve tried classy or minimalist,” she says. “But I always go back to all black, studs, spikes.”
Who are you and what do you do?
I’m a DJ, a model, stylist and I also run a party with my friend Dante called Discoteka. We go as DT:33. We do them monthly and invite a lot of DJs from Mexico or outside of L.A., just to bring in new music and new sounds to people.
Describe your personal style.
I would say my 12-year-old emo self really won. Everything is always inspired by that. I’ve tried colorful styles. I’ve tried classy or minimalist. But I always go back to all black, studs, spikes. Really into punk as well. That has been the main inspiration.
I’ve tried colorful styles. I’ve tried classy or minimalist. But I always go back to all black, studs, spikes.
— DJ, model and stylist Giselle Lopez
Talk to me about dreaming up an outfit around this Acne Studios bag.
I think about accessories first because they always make an outfit. So if you want a choker — which is usually what I like to style myself with, I like cross necklaces, spike chokers, all of that — I usually look at my [other] accessories I have to style, which is a bag. From there I go, “Maybe I want to do a dress, a skirt, see what I have in my closet.” I usually search on EBay. EBay is my No. 1 place to shop. I go on my Notes app a lot. I write down, “black halter top, belt, skirt …” and then I go back to it.
How does sense of place inform sense of style? How do you travel through L.A. with style in mind?
The party scene in L.A. has always inspired my fashion ever since I started playing out here. I was a little raver girl five years ago, so just seeing all the colorful looks people wear that are very inspired by Japanese culture, Japanese raver fashion, Fruits magazine and all that. I like to mix it up by doing a little raver in there, but also keep it still very punk and dark. I chose [to bring the bag] to Mariachi Plaza because when I first moved here, I spent a lot of time in Boyle Heights, and this became one of my favorite spots. On weekends, they would have cumbia sonidera bands playing here and I would come and see them with my friends. My grandmother is from Guadalajara and my little brother plays in a mariachi band, so I grew up around a lot of mariachi. Seeing men in their mariachi suits, it’s very special to me. It feels like home.
Producer: Mere Studios
MUA: Andrés Nuñez
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession.
Focus Features
hide caption
toggle caption
Focus Features
Two big horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, just smashed all box office expectations. So much of their success has been driven by Gen Z, which is now the biggest moviegoing demographic. But what makes a movie a Gen Z movie? Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse talks about this trend with Sam Adams and Reanna Cruz.
If you want to hear more about these movies, check out these episodes:
In ‘Obsession,’ love hurts. It really, really, really hurts.
‘Backrooms’ brings YouTube horror to the big screen
Zendaya brings ‘The Drama,’ we bring the spoilers
Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:
Letterboxd / Facebook
Our weekly newsletter
Support Pop Culture Happy Hour+
I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.
-
Politics3 seconds ago
Seth Doane and Jim Axelrod among contenders for ’60 Minutes’ roles
-
Science7 minutes agoContributor: The crucial medical question that AI can’t ever answer
-
Sports10 minutes agoCommentary: Lionel Messi is the ultimate summer romance
-
World22 minutes agoSpain pitches €850bn per year in common EU borrowing
-
News45 minutes agoDOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote
-
Los Angeles, Ca2 hours agoBicyclist killed by hit-and-run driver in Long Beach
-
Detroit, MI2 hours agoChild shot while riding bike outside home on Detroit’s west side, police say
-
San Francisco, CA3 hours agoBay Area restaurant has strict policy on acceptable children behavior
