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This designer uses role models instead of runway models in her fashion shows. The result is magical.

These women are changing the face of fashion — one runway step at a time.

What do you expect to see when you're sitting front-row at a fashion show?

I envisioned Anna Wintour and other fashion bigwigs stoically watching models walking down the runway. I was wrong.

I can tell she's not thrilled. Or maybe she is. WHO KNOWS? GIF via "60 Minutes."

This year, there was a show at New York Fashion Week that totally blew it out of the water. And the crowd? We reacted like this:

Encore, encore!

"What is this alternative fashion universe you speak of?" you ask.

Well, it certainly isn't your momma's fashion show. Are you ready?


Buckle your seatbelts. You're going to be blown away.

Meet Carrie Hammer. At a time when model diversity in the industry is still painfully absent, this designer is revolutionizing fashion and celebrating diversity in a serious way.

Carrie Hammer takes the runway after a successful show.

A few years ago, Hammer noticed there was a lack of options for fashionable yet professional women's clothes. So, she started her own line designed to make women feel good — inside and out.

Not only does she create amazing designs, but this year's fashion show felt like a party and a revolution to celebrate "role models not runway models."

Yep. That's right. Hammer doesn't use traditional models for her shows. Instead, she focuses on role models. As she explained to Upworthy:

"They embody what it means to be a positive, powerful woman. They make the clothes come alive. That's why I make these clothes — to make women feel incredible and empowered. And what better women than the women I'm making these clothes for to model them?" — Carrie Hammer

The women she chose to walk her runway transcend race, disability, and body types — they're a reflection of the people we see everyday, including ourselves. At a time when diversity in the fashion world is still severely lacking, Carrie Hammer's work is a breath of fresh air. And her shows provide a glimpse of what the future might look like if we truly celebrated differences in fashion.

Here are just a few of the amazing women who helped Carrie Hammer lead a runway revolution, one stiletto step at a time:

— La Neice Collins,communications and advocacy advisor at the United Nations

"I wanted to [walk in the show] because I actually want to see people on the catwalk who look like me. Whenever I see fashion shows, I think, 'Oh those clothes are nice. I can never wear them.' So I thought, 'You know what? It might be nice to get over my fears and actually be a normal-sized woman with lumps and all on the catwalk.' And maybe someone will be like, 'Oh my god! That's fantastic!'" — La Neice Collins

After spending years working for media outlets like NBC, NPR, and CNN, Collins took her producing, writing, and editing skills to the United Nations to make an even bigger impact. Now, she's using her expertise to help women and girls who are subjected to sexual violence in conflict.

— Tolu Olubunmi, social entrepreneur and DREAM activist

"Fashion to me means individuality. It's being happy with what you have on — whatever that is. Expressing yourself in whatever way makes you feel the most satisfied with your person, I think that's fashionable." — Tolu Olubunmi

You don't have to adjust your screen — that is a photo of Olubumni with President Obama behind her. She's a Nigerian-born activist who has used her experience and public policy expertise to push for immigration reform, including the passage of the DREAM Act. Her social entrepreneurship was recognized by the World Economic Forum, which named her one of 15 women changing the world in 2015.

— Rakia Reynolds, founder and president of Skai Blue Media


"My favorite part [of being in the show] was meeting so many women! These women are boss! Bad. Ass. And the fact that I got to be around so many badass women was ah-mazing."— Rakia Reynolds

Reynolds is a Philadelphia-based public relations guru who has brought her talents to places like MTV, TLC, and Discovery Health. Her work's been so great that, in 2012, she was recognized on Dell's Inspire 100 list of world-changers. Check out her entrepreneurial journey on the White House blog and read her full bio on her company's site.

— Maysoon Zayid, comedian, disability advocate, and writer

"I have a really weird relationship with fashion because I mostly wear gym suits since I'm from New Jersey. I learned a lot about fashion this week because I learned that a dress can change how you feel and how you look. I never thought a dress could be that transformational, but it was." — Maysoon Zayid

Zayid is another woman kicking butt in so many realms. In addition to her acting and writing experience, she is an outspoken activist for people with disabilities and Palestinian rights. If she looks familiar, it may be because Maysoon's TEDWomen talk was the site's most popular in 2014, raking in over 7 million views. Read more about her and her work on her website.

Hammer's movement is already having a ripple effect. Other designers are diversifying their models, too.

Last season, actress Jamie Brewer of "American Horror Story" fame walked in Hammer's show, making her the first person with Down syndrome to walk the runway at Fashion Week. This season? Australian model Madeline Stuart modeled for FTL MODA, becoming the second person with Down syndrome to model at Fashion Week.

Carrie Hammer with actress Jamie Brewer backstage. Photo by Grant Lamos IV/Getty Images.

Check out the full listing of this year's models and check out the fashion revolution on Twitter and Instagram: #RoleModelsNotRunwayModels.

Joy

Woman builds an elaborate hotel in her yard for stray cats to stay cozy through the winter

People are calling it "Hotel Catifornia" and "The Fur Seasons."

A woman in China provides a cozy home for stray cats in her neighborhood.

As winter approaches, people may wonder how stray animals stay warm and safe. Stray cats in particular are highly adaptable creatures and their home is the great outdoors, so most of the time there's not much that people need to do to protect them. But when temperatures dip to dangerous levels, caring humans naturally want to make sure strays have a place to go to get out of the harsh elements.

One woman has taken that desire to a whole new level with an elaborate cat apartment she built for the many stray cats in her neighborhood. We're not just talking about a shelter–it's like luxury hotel living for her feline friends. The apartment has multiple rooms, cushy blankets that get taken out and cleaned and even a temperature-controlled water source so they're always able to find drinking water in frigid temps.

Check this out:

The woman who built the apartment actually lives in China and shares videos on TikTok.

Welcome to the Meowtel Catifornia

Of course, the clever hotel jokes and puns started rolling in first thing:

'Welcome to the hotel catifornia."

"Such a lovely place."

"They can check out any time but they won't ever leave ^^"

"I prefer Hotel Calicofornia."

"Meowriott."

"Given my skill, mine would be more like Meowtel 6."

"Pawliday Inn.'

"The Fur Seasons."'

"Meowne Plaza."

People loved seeing the care and ingenuity she put into the "meowtel," as well as how happy the cats seem with the arrangement. In fact, some people were sure their own house cats would move out just to go live in this kind of cat commune.

"My cat just looked at me and sighed…"

"All the neighbours be looking for their cats and they’ve bailed to live at the kitty motel."

"They’d pack their little bags and move in without a second thought."

"They wouldn't even wait to pack their bags."

"Alright Carol it’s been real but we’re gonna head out. Found a great deal on a luxury apartment so yanno… take care."


@5fimnl9m

Create a single apartment on the third floor of a four story winter cat shelter for stray cats#fyp #cat #cute #Straycat#salvation

Cats live where they want when they want

Those people may have been joking, but several people shared that their cats really did ditch them to go live with neighbors who had more desirable living situations.

"I’ve had two cats do this. One was annoyed at our second dog’s puppy energy so she moved in with an older lady a street over. We used to see her all the time until she passed. The other missed our kids being little so she moved next door where there’s a little girl. We talked to both neighbors and said if they get sick of them to let us know and we’ll take them back but both lived the rest of their lives with their new families."

"One of our cats moved next door because he loves children and wanted to be with the little girl next door. Because it’s a very small village, he goes to the school most days to wait for her and they come home together. School is 3 buildings away."

"We had a cat do the same thing about 20 years ago. She hated the barks of our new puppy and would put her paw on his mouth to try and stop it. One day, she slipped outside and I found her a month later, two streets over, hanging with a couple who didn’t have a dog. They said she just showed up at the door and moved in. I gave them all her cat food and hope she had a nice quiet life."


@5fimnl9m

After two months of production and renovation, the basic facilities for wintering stray cats in the courtyard are almost complete#fyp #cat #cute #Straycat #salvation

Is it a bad idea to feed and shelter stray cats?

People have differing opinions about whether it's good to feed stray cats or not, as cats can cause problems for local wildlife and it's not great to encourage an increasing stray cat population. However, there are responsible ways to care for stray cats, which includes spaying and neutering those in your area.

According to the Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon, here are the best practices for feral and stray cats:

- Spay/neuter to prevent additional litters

- Find homes for friendly cats

- Feed outdoor cats on a schedule

- Remove food & dishes when they are done eating

- Pick up scraps and keep the feeding area tidy

- Provide fresh water

- Provide a warm place for the cats to sleep

So go ahead and care for those kitties and keep them warm through the winter—just make sure they can't make any more kittens.



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Culture

Nathan Fillion shared a sweet pay-it-forward story after a Costco employee helped his mom

Well done, Les from Costco. Well done, Fillion family. Thanks for giving us the boost of faith in humanity we need right now.

Nathan Fillion/Facebook

In a time when we've watched people fight over toilet paper, argue over mask-wearing and storm government buildings with firearms, a nice random act of kindness story is always appreciated. And when that random act of kindness happens to someone who is famous-adjacent, the impact somehow seems all the more pure.

Actor Nathan Fillion, best known for his starring roles in the TV series Firefly (and subsequent movie, Serenity) and Castle, shared one such story on Facebook back in 2020—and people are still loving it. After all, two things will always remain timeless in our collective hearts: Nathan Fillion and Costco.

He wrote:

"The other day in Canada, a woman buying gas at a Costco had trouble with her credit card. The attendant bought her gas out of his own pocket and asked only that she pay it forward. That Costco was in Edmonton, that attendant was Les Thompson, and Les? That woman was my mother. You restore my faith in humanity, sir. My dad and I are sending three iPads and headphones to a nearby senior care facility so that folks there can visit with their families. Right now, we could all stand to be less afraid, and a little more Les. (Canada, Costco, Les, iPads, and my mom not pictured.)"


Fillion's post has been shared nearly 30,000 times, and commenters have expressed their gratitude for highlighting the fact that there are lots of good people out there. Some said they were proud to be Canadian. (Canada is well known for the general kindness of its people.) Others said the story reminded them that hope is not lost, even in the face of fairly constant bad news. Some inquired as to whether or not Fillion was married. (He's not.) But most simply thanked him for sharing a seemingly small, but oh-so-meaningful story about the power of a simple, selfless act of generosity.

Well done, Les from Costco. Well done, Fillion family. Thanks for giving us the boost of faith in humanity we need right now.


This article originally appeared on 5.27.20

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Family

Mom took heat for cleaning her teen's bedroom. Her response was a lesson in grace.

She won the #CleanTok controversy.

@organizedchaos4/TikTok

"It costs you nothing, and it creates this ripple effect of kindness."

The corner of the internet devoted to grime and muck being scrubbed away to oh-so satisfying perfection, otherwise known as #CleanTok, is mostly wholesome, cathartic fun. But every once in a while, controversy comes in.

For a mom named Audrey (who clearly has a passion for cleaning hacks, given her TikTok handle of @organizedchaos4), that moment came after she filmed herself doing a deep clean on her 12-year-old daughter’s room. Several people chimed in to accuse her of spoiling her kid, essentially.

Granted, Audrey admitted that she had posted the video “hoping that the trolls would get those thumbs a-movin’.” So when they did indeed come after her, she was ready.

“I surprised my daughter by cleaning her room for her. She's been getting herself up for 6 a.m. practices, she gets herself to school, she's out of the house before the rest of us have even woken up,” Audrey says in the clip.

“Keep in mind she's 12. In return for all that she's been doing, I thought it would be a nice treat if I just did a quick speed clean of her room. It was no big deal.”

Audrey goes on to say that the point of her follow-up video was to reiterate the importance of “extending grace.”


@organizedchaos4 When we throw empathy out the window, we throw grace out the window. If you saw the video and your first reaction was to say, “why isn’t she doing it herself?” Ask yourself, “have I EVER left a room messy because I was overwhelmed, tired, busy?” If so, then you are in no position to judge a child for the same thing. #grace #kindness #help #parenting #cleaning #kids #mom ♬ original sound - Organized Chaos | Audrey


That's what I did for my daughter. She had fallen behind on her room and I helped her.,” she says. “It costs you nothing, and it creates this ripple effect of kindness. We all have setbacks, we all have failures, we all make mistakes and if you say you don't you're lying. By extending grace we are spreading kindness, we are spreading compassion. If you can't extend grace to your own children then there's no way you're going to extend it to anyone else in the world and that's a scary world to live in.”

Audrey then argues that being kind to others often makes it “easier” to be kind to ourselves, which is “vital for our mental health.”

She then concludes, “so if you watched the video yesterday or you're watching this one today and you're thinking negative thoughts, ask yourself, ‘Am I quick to judge, be resentful, be negative or am I quick to extend grace or ask yourself have I ever stumbled and wish grace had been extended to me?’”

Down in the comments, we see that Audreynis certainly not alone in her thinking.

“Kindness costs nothing and provides everything,” one person wrote.

“This will only inspire your daughter to keep working hard and give back when she has a chance to, and know she can rely on you when she struggles,” added another.

Several other moms even chimed in about doing something similar for their kids.

“Exactly I did the same thing for my 23-year-old daughter who works full-time and is a full-time college student. She’s 100% independent. I just want to take some off stress off her plate,” one mom shared

Another said, “I do this for my daughter still, and it's her house.”

As with all things in parenting, balance is key. Of course we don’t want to instill laziness, but at the same time, kids can’t be expected to overachieve in all areas, at all times. Adults can’t even manage this without a little help. Sounds like this is truly a case of a good kid acting as responsibly as humanly possible, and a mom just wanting to help out where she can, all why'll teaching her the world can be a safe place. Hard to see anything wrong with that.

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Modern Families

'It's never too late': 19-year-old who aged out of foster care adopted by her caseworker

"We're so happy; we both wanted this for so long."

via ABC Action News

It's never too late to find your family. That's the heartwarming message being shared by Leah Paskalides and the daughter she adopted in 2021, then-19-year-old Monyay.

At the age of 11, Monyay was placed into a foster care group home. The pain of having to go through life without a family was always difficult, but it hit hard in her senior year of school. "My senior year is when I went through one of those, 'I don't want to do it anymore, I'm done,'" she told ABC News.

Monyay finished school a year early and took the extra time to focus on volunteering with foster children like her. But she faced a tough road ahead, as she was about to age out of the system.

According to the Children's Home Society of Minnesota, the 23,000 children who age out of foster care every year without families face many challenges. Only 3% earn a college degree, half will develop a substance abuse problem, 60% of boys are convicted of crimes, and 70% of girls become pregnant before the age of 21.

After she turned 18, it looked like she would have to enter the real world as an adult without any real support. But then her caseworker and mentor from the Safe Children Coalition stepped up.

Leah had always wanted to adopt Monyay but it was a conflict of interest with her work.

"She always said, 'I wish you could adopt me, wish you could adopt me,' and I couldn't because of the job and then I was watching a documentary where the person had been adopted as an adult, and I had never really heard of it," Leah said.

So she decided to adopt Monyay as her adult daughter. "It was important to me that she knew that she was wanted by somebody, that somebody loved her," Leah told Fox 13. "I could say that as many times as I want, but actions speak louder than words."

On Tuesday, a judge signed the paperwork making the adoption official.

Rose Rising on Twittertwitter.com

"Being told 'no' so many times, to hear that 'yes' and to hear them pronounce her as my mom, it's something that's like, oh my gosh, this is for real," Monyay told Fox 13.

The funny thing is the two didn't hit it off at first. Five years ago when Leah was assigned her case, Monyay didn't like her. "She told me what she was going to be doing and helping me out with my case, and I didn't like her; she'll tell you that," said Monyay.

But over the past five years, the two forged an unbreakable bond.

"She was very motivated and had aspirations for a future, and so I knew she just needed support," Leah said. "She was always a kid that did not deserve to go through life without a support system of a family."

The newly-formed family is sharing their story to bring hope to children in the foster care system by letting them know they can be adopted as adults. "It's never too late because I'm grown but I'm still being adopted," Monyay said. "Just because it didn't happen then it doesn't mean that it won't happen."

Monyay hopes to one day open her own group home for teens to help children who grew up like she did.


This article originally appeared on 4.28.21

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Wellness

Justine Bateman boldly embraces her aging face, putting a new spin on 'aging goals'

"I find it wrong that women absorb the idea that faces need to be fixed. That it's being treated as a matter of fact."

@libbybakalar/Twitter, Justine Bateman/Instagram

Aging is a weird thing. We all do it—we truly have no choice in the matter. It's literally how time and living things work.

But boy, do we make the process all kinds of complicated. The anti-aging market has created a 58.5 billion-dollar industry, with human beings spending their whole lives getting older spending buttloads of money to pretend like it's not happening.

I'm one of those human beings, by the way, so no judgment here. When I find a product that makes me look as young as I feel inside, I get pretty giddy.

But there's no doubt that our views on aging—and by extension, our perspectives on our own aging bodies—are influenced by popular culture. As we see celebrities in the spotlight who seem to be ageless, we enviously tag them with the hashtag #aginggoals. The goal is to "age well," which ultimately means looking like we're not aging at all. And so we break out the creams and the serums and the microdermabrasion and the injections—even the scalpel, in some cases—to keep the wrinkles, crinkles, bags, and sags at bay.

There's a big, blurry line between having a healthy skincare routine and demonizing normal signs of aging, and we each decide where our own line gets drawn.

This is where Justine Bateman comes in.

The 58-year-old actress/filmmaker is turning the idea of #aginggoals on its head by simply, boldly embracing her face as it is. No apologies. No avoidance. Just a simple message of "Yeah, this is my face."

She hasn't always had such radical self-acceptance. After Googling herself during the writing of her first book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, she saw that the autocomplete after her name read "looks old." So she looked at the photos people were sharing of her 40-something-year-old face as "evidence."

"I thought my face looked fine," she told PEOPLE. "Because of some of the fears I had, unrelated to my face, I decided to make them right and me wrong....I became really ashamed of my face, ridiculously so."

"I looked the same the day before as I did the day after," she said, "and yet I felt totally different about my face...The only difference was that I had read the criticism."

That experience led her to explore how society views women and aging, a topic she explores in her new book Face: One Square Foot of Skin. It also led to her truly embrace her face, just as it is.

Instead of fighting the aging process like many of us do, she decided to fight the fear attached to it.

"I hated the idea that half the population was perhaps spending the entire second half of their lives ashamed and apologetic that their faces had aged naturally," Bateman writes in her book.

She also shared with PEOPLE how she feels about society painting the physical signs of aging as inherently negative.

"I find it wrong that women absorb the idea that faces need to be fixed," she said. "That it's being treated as a matter of fact. I feel that we've skipped over the phase where we talk about whether or not we should criticize women's faces as they get older."

"I think getting all this plastic surgery is just people pleasing," she continued. "You don't want people to criticize you anymore so you appease them. The more you do that, the further away you get away from your true self. It doesn't work for me. If somebody said to me now we could do some surgery, wouldn't I be signaling that I'm super insecure? To me, it would."

In her book, Bateman describes what people are really seeing when they look at her face in its aging glory:

"You're looking at f***ing determination and truth and creativity. You're looking at loss and sorrow and the effort for a deeper perspective. You're looking at satisfaction and happiness. You're looking at a manifestation of a connection so deep and rooted that it's more real than I am. You're looking at my face."

YES. What a refreshing perspective to add to the conversation surrounding beauty and aging. It's odd that seeing a woman simply accept the lines in her face is inspiring, but it really is.

Perhaps we should recalibrate #aginggoals to be more about how we feel than how we look. After all, if anyone is "aging well," it's the woman who feels—as Bateman told Vanity Fair—"empowered to walk out in the world with an attitude that says, 'Fuck you, I look great.'"

Right on, Justine Bateman. Thanks for helping us embrace our faces just as they are.


This article originally appeared on 4.15.21

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