Back Row with Amy Odell

Harry and Meghan are back in the UK, six years after leaving the royal family. In the first part of Back Row's deep dive into Meghan Markle, Amy and former Us Weekly and Hello! editor Justin Ravitz — who has interviewed Prince Harry and worked with the couple's team — trace Meghan's story from her Los Angeles childhood to the night she met Harry.

Part two is available to Back Row Premium subscribers.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction

09:00 Meghan's Los Angeles childhood

12:30 Age 11: taking on Procter & Gamble

16:15 Briefcase No. 24 on Deal or No Deal

22:45 Landing Suits

30:00 The Tig blog and Meghan's Goop dream

35:30 Social climbing and Soho House

43:30 Humanitarian ambitions and meeting Harry

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Buy The Palace Papers by Tina Brown: https://link.amazon/B02EAsx6X

Follow Back Row: @backrow · Follow Amy: @instamyodell · Follow Justin: @jaydubargh

Edited by Chrissi Harris.

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PJ Smith, director of fashion policy for Humane World for Animals (formerly the Humane Society), has spent almost 20 years getting companies from Gucci to Net-a-Porter to go fur-free.

Now that most top fashion brands have sworn off fur, is wool the next big target for animal welfare activists? PJ talks about why, thanks to LVMH, the fur fight isn't quite over, how he got brands to change their mind about fur, and what's next.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction

02:30 Why fur-free NYFW is historic

08:00 How Humane World actually changes brands' minds

18:30 Fur farming down 85% — the numbers

22:30 PETA vs. H&M: the wool protests

25:30 Is wool humane? Mulesing explained

46:30 Exotic skins: the next target

52:00 PJ's biggest lesson after 20 years

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Follow Back Row: @backrow · Follow Amy: @instamyodell

Edited by Chrissi Harris.

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Superfakes have never been better and counterfeiters have never been smarter — so how can consumers buy secondhand luxury with confidence?

Sarah Davis started Fashionphile on eBay in 1999, while she was in law school. Resale has exploded since: Her company now employs more than 350 people and authenticates roughly 1,500 luxury bags a day. Sarah reveals how she turned luxury authentication into an almost CIA-like operation, what gives away a fake Birkin bag, and how a $35,000 machine can tell if a Cartier Love bracelet is real or not.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction

02:00 Law school, eBay, and the Fashionphile origin story

15:00 A real Chanel, a fake one — can you tell?

21:00 Fake bags bought at real stores

23:30 "Your dupe isn't cute"

26:30 The $75 fee that killed the counterfeits

29:30 The $35,000 machine that catches fake Birkins

44:30 Where resale goes next

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Follow Back Row: @backrow · Follow Amy: @instamyodell · Follow Sarah: @justsarahdavis · Shop Fashionphile: @fashionphile

Edited by Chrissi Harris.

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Trend forecaster Sean Monahan coined the "vibe shift" five years ago to describe the unease millennials felt coming out of the pandemic. Of all the terms Monahan has coined — from "normcore" to the "boom boom aesthetic" — the vibe shift may have been the stickiest. He and Amy revisited his predictions from five years ago and discuss what he got right and wrong.

Monahan offers predictions on whether smart glasses will take; where rage bait is heading; the future of "flexing"; where the Met Gala goes from here; and what luxury fashion has to do to recover.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction

03:00 The boom boom aesthetic and the '80s that weren't

06:00 Why crypto killed streetwear

08:30 Normcore, and the anxiety behind it

19:00 Did tackiness give way to taste?

24:00 Smart glasses, glassholes and surveillance

38:00 Rage bait and the clipping economy

47:30 'The Devil Wears Prada 2' and Jeff Bezos

1:04:30 How does luxury fashion recover?

📩SUBSCRIBE to the Back Row Newsletter: https://www.backrow.net/subscribe

Back Row on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@amy_odell

📷 Follow Back Row on Instagram: @backrow
📷 Follow Amy on Instagram: @instamyodell

Follow Sean Monahan
📷 Follow Sean on Instagram: @8ghtb4ll
📩 Read 8Ball: https://www.8ball.report/
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Amy Chozick has spent her career writing about polarizing women — she covered Hillary Clinton for The New York Times, profiled Elizabeth Holmes right before prison, followed Stormy Daniels for Vogue, and wrote the widely dissected profile of Lauren Sánchez Bezos.

Her new novel, With Friends Like You (https://amzn.to/4yjRlvI), follows Emily, a broke new mom in Manhattan, who goes looking for the college friend who vanished — and finds her working as a high-end escort to billionaires.

To write the book, she researched the world of the ultra-rich obsessively. She also reveals what surprised her about Lauren Sánchez Bezos, discusses the detail everyone rehashed from that profile, and more.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction

02:00 A new mother, a missing friend, and a billionaire's escort

4:00 Billionaires' Row and the empty towers

13:00 Covering Hillary Clinton, and what power does to people

17:00 Profiling Lauren Sánchez Bezos

23:00 "They stopped apologizing" — the new rich

30:00 Hillary's suits, Lauren's taped-up Vogue pages

41:00 Is fashion getting tackier?

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Buy With Friends Like You: A Novel: https://amzn.to/4yjRlvI

Follow Back Row: @backrow

Follow Amy: @instamyodell

Follow Amy Chozick: @amychozick

Edited by Chrissi Harris.
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