Fashion

A Conversation With Marcella Nunez-Smith, Co-Chair of Biden’s COVID-19 Advisory Board

“We are in the darkest place now—period, full stop. Can we disrupt this? I think and hope so, if we can all get unified around the things we know work.”…

When we talk about preexisting conditions and the risks that are conveyed with those conditions, we don’t look backwards. It can be easy to say people have made bad choices and that’s why they are living with diabetes or hypertension. But prevention begins with access to high-quality health care. We don’t think about the environment: Is there access to healthy food, safe outdoor space for exercise? We don’t talk about the environmental toxins that contribute to asthma or other conditions. We don’t talk about the over-representation of Black and brown people in frontline jobs that we have deemed essential—or people who have to go out to sustain their livelihoods. It’s important to put those factors on the radar. Otherwise, it can seem like race is a biological phenomenon—which it is not—and it puts the onus on the individual to do better without understanding the broader picture.

We have surpassed a number of deaths that seemed inconceivable when the pandemic began, with more than 250,000 people dead from COVID-19. And yet, people continue to behave in ways that put themselves and others at risk. Do you think that this is persisting because of a degree of racism in the way that people are processing those deaths?

From my perspective, it is troubling how slowly the reality has been sinking in. This is all anecdotal, but I have heard that some people, in more affluent communities early on, said things like, “This is a disease that affects people of color.” It became this othering that allowed people to say, “I’m not part of that group, I don’t need to curtail my behavior or socially distance or use face coverings.”

But the sad reality is that it’s getting harder and harder to find a person of any background who doesn’t know someone who has been significantly affected by COVID. So much of how we experience information and how we experience truth is through our tight social networks. There might be, for many, an understanding now that they didn’t have in March.

According to a PEW Research Center survey from September, the number of people who say they would get a vaccine is fairly low and has been declining over the course of 2020. [This was before the Pfizer and Moderna announcements in recent days.] Reluctance is particularly high among Black Americans, who have cited racist medical interventions of the past in their reasoning. How do you counter this kind of thinking and help people become comfortable with the vaccine?

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Entertainment

A$AP Rocky Turned An Entire Manchester City Kit Into His Album Rollout

Photo: DannyB Photos / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A$AP Rocky doesn’t do album rollouts quietly, and this one recruited an entire Premier League club to help. Manchester City, PUMA, and Rocky teamed up on a limited apparel run tied to “Don’t Be Dumb,” his 2026 album, timed around his September 5th show at Co-op Live.

The centerpiece is a long-sleeve PUMA King jersey in black and archive gold, with “DON’T BE DUMB” running down the sleeve and AWGE branding worked in throughout. A bold “MANCHESTER” graphic covers the back. Fans could also add limited “A$AP 11” name-and-number printing onto the club’s actual Home, Away, or Third kits, while supplies lasted at retail.

There’s a players-only version too, and it never went up for sale. That one sticks closer to City’s usual sky-blue identity, with its own sleeve detailing and back graphic — the kind of piece that exists purely because a handful of people got lucky.

The whole rollout kicked off with a one-night pop-up on September 4th, when PUMA turned a spot in Manchester’s Northern Quarter into a pop-up cafe for the night, mixing football, music, and street style into one room before the wider release hit the stadium store the next morning. Some of those jerseys even came with golden tickets to the concert or that Saturday’s match.

Rocky has called the project true to his own design language, and it’s not even his only club collaboration this cycle — a similar drop with AC Milan landed around the same time. At this point, the line between fashion week and matchday has basically disappeared.

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Entertainment

Quavo And Lids Are Going All In On Atlanta With Their New Cap Pack

Photo: Finish Line / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Quavo has never been shy about his hat obsession, and Lids just gave him another outlet for it. Their new “Atlanta” pack drops September 12th, marking another round in a partnership that’s been running strong since 2019.

The collection is a love letter to the city, spread across three very different caps. One mashes up pinstripes, script lettering, and Braves branding into a single design, working navy, red, white, and light blue into the mix. Another goes the opposite direction entirely — fully iced out in crystal detailing, done up in black and red, with both the Falcons and the Braves showing up in the design. The third strips things back to an old-school “ATL” trucker cap in red, white, and gold, the kind of understated piece that lets the city’s name do the talking.

None of this is new territory for Quavo. He’s talked before about waiting on hat releases as a kid, and that same excitement seems to be what’s kept this partnership going years past most celebrity collabs. His earlier Lids run leaned on one moment — the Braves’ 1995 World Series win — but this pack pulls from the city’s whole sports history instead of just one highlight.

Lids has called Quavo one of the rare voices who can blend music, fashion, and sports without it feeling forced, and this drop backs that up. Given how fast his past releases have moved, Atlanta might want to set an alarm for September 12th.

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