over these songs. At home, she says, she listens to nothing at all.

“ I just think I have too much anxiety to listen to music,” she explains.“ Sometimes it feels like noise, and sometimes it’ s so affecting that I can’ t recover from it.” CTRL, she adds,“ is the product of the realization that I have none.” In fact SZA’ s life has felt decidedly out of control of late, and her eyes fill with tears as she lists off the people she has had to bury in the last year: three friends, the mother of her longtime boyfriend, her own grandmother. The album is informed by these hard lessons but is also, she says, an exploration of feeling at all times out of place, permitting others to make decisions for her. She digs out her phone and plays me a snippet from an unfinished collaboration with the hip-hop artist Travis Scott, which addresses the theme of dependency with bone-dry humor:“ Give me paper towel / Give me another Valium / Give me another hour or two with you.”

In interviews, SZA has hinted that this new album may be her last. Today she hedges a bit.“ I’ m always hedging,” she explains. She can imagine setting music aside for film. She’ d like to take a whack at environmental science and maybe get lost in the Brazilian jungle. But she also confesses to wanting to win a Grammy. If SZA’ s music finds a mainstream audience, it will be on account of its refusal to posture and its invitation into the fraught inner world of its author. One of the most trenchant pop lyrics of 2016, emerging out of that ambivalence, can be found in a song that SZA co-wrote for and recorded with Rihanna, called“ Consideration”:“ Let me cover your shit in glitter / I can make it gold.”

What most pop princesses might wish to dress up, SZA prefers to lay bare.“ I learned everything the hard way— like, literally everything.” she says.“ I know that God does that to people that he has lessons for. I just wish that I had learned less extreme lessons. I wish God would chill the fuck out.” □

LOUD MOUTH

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between the complete Pantone palette of carmines and scarlets and the sense that many dissatisfied women were collectively demanding more. Maria Cornejo, long admired for her collections of strong, inventive womenswear, collaborated with the makeup artist Dick Page to send models down her fall runway with clean skin and a warm, glossy brick lip. It was as much a colorful complement to her velvet dresses in chocolate and crimson as it was a purposeful statement.“ If you’ re just wearing red lipstick, you’ re usually not wearing much else, and I think that shows confidence,” says the Chilean designer, long a devotee of Shiseido’ s matte bullets.“ You can still be a feminist if you wear lipstick and look pretty.”

These days, feminists are recognized as coming in all shapes, sizes, and shades, and there is no fashion prerequisite for membership— or at least that seems to be the message echoing from voices like Sarah Sophie Flicker’ s. The performance artist, activist, and a leading organizer of the Women’ s March is rarely seen without her go-to bow of MAC’ s Ruby Woo, the classic orangey-matte pigment that she and