Yahoo Finance Jenna Lyons Says Her Signature Glasses And Hair Combo Was A Complete 'Accident'
Over the years Jenna Lyons' name has become synonymous with thick-rimmed, oversized glasses and sleeked back hair fixed back into a low bun.
This 'signature look' was even parodied by Lyons' friends Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, the co-creators of Girls, with whom she attended the 2017 Met Gala in coordinated Lyons-inspired looks.
So what is the story behind her signature look?
Well there isn't really one, the former J.Crew executive director tells ELLE UK during a game of It's A Mood. The look happened by chance - Lyons needed glasses for reading and the hairstyle was practical.
'It’s funny, I think having a signature look happened by accident. The glasses… the only ones I seemed to like or look good on me were those heavy rimmed glasses, I tried everything. The hair back was ease and all of a sudden it was thing, an "iconic look". It was an accident, it was definitely not intentional,' she admits.
Even though the fashion designer is know for her 'trademark' style (and made us all covet a pair of spectacles), she has catalogue of enviable past looks that reach far beyond the realms of glasses, scraped back hair and sharp tailoring.
To coincide with her departure from J.Crew and subsequent ventures into TV show and beauty, Lyons has switched up her glasses game and consciously worn her hair down a lot more - as you can see in the stunning pictures from a shoot in the February issue of ELLE UK.
One of our favourite Lyons looks was the J.Crew skirt (taken from a wedding dress), Celine shirt and Prada fur jacket the New Yorker wore to Solange Knowles' 2014 viral aesthetically-pleasing New Orleans nuptials (Knowles confirmed she had split from her husband Alan Ferguson in 2019).
As Lyons tells us in the video, though she looked the part at the wedding (her outfit garnered a lot of attention at the time), she was feeling a little bit fragile after partying with the wedding guests the night before and hurriedly getting ready for the ceremony after Solange amended the schedule at the last minute to evade the paparazzi.
'I think we were up until like 4:30 in the morning, like a little later than that, actually. And I remember waking up and looking at my phone, and because of the paparazzi, they had moved the wedding up an hour. So I woke up at 1 o'clock and the wedding was now at 2...
'What you can't see underneath is I'm wearing high heels. And I remember going out onto the lawns, and there was Beyoncé and Jay Z. And of course I'd seen them the night before at the rehearsal dinner, so I felt like, you know, hey, there's my friends. I remember walking and sinking down into the grass at every step.And I'm like, I look cool, I've got this,I did not look cool at all... But they were so lovely and gracious and nice.'
Another A-list interaction that makes Lyons squeal with glee in 'It's A Mood' was her encounter with Kate Middleton when she and her new husband visited New York City in 2011.
'[She] was literally the sweetest, most charming person on the planet,' says Lyons. 'She walked right up to me and put her hands on my sparkly shirt and said, “Oh, I know you.” I was told I wasn’t allowed to touch her, she walked up and touched me and I was like, thank you! She was so nice, it was so exciting.’
Spilling the beans on what it's really like to attend the Meta Gala, Lyons shed light on where you'll find the stars hiding out.
‘The thing that I discovered the first year is that everyone’s smoking in the women’s bathroom,' she reveals. 'I was like, “Where is everyone?” and literally went into the bathroom and it was like a pouf of smoke coming out of there. Everyone is in there, it’s kind of like the hangout.'
Watch the video in full to see Jenna Lyon's most whimsical looks (as well as one which, she dubs the 'worst picture I've ever seen of myself') and a little cameo by her dog Popeye too!
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