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As of late, Lady Gaga has taken a monochromatic approach to style: All black all the time. Today proved no exception. The singer arrived for a taping of Late Night with Seth Meyers dressed in head-to-toe black (literally—her recently blonde hair has now taken on a raven hue).

While she’s previously embraced a summertime Gothic look, Gaga today opted for a more rock’n’roll ’fit, styling a black pebbled leather sleeveless vest over a pair of black leggings, and her beloved towering knee-high black platform boots. She finished off her look with a pair of black leather opera gloves—over which she wore her impressive engagement ring—a pair of oversized wraparound shades, and a black mini Hermès Kelly, worn with a crossbody strap.

Early last month in Los Angeles, Gaga affixed a red and black Labubu to her Kelly, the little doll weighing down her even smaller bag. (It wasn’t just any Labubu, but dressed in a replica of her “Abracadabra” costume—a custom job by LA artist Marko Monroe.) But today, Gaga’s Labubu was nowhere in sight, a full return to her all-black look.

As the Labubu craze continues to seep into every aspect of pop culture, is Lady Gaga already moving on? Or is she just waiting on her next custom?

When Michaela Coel headed to the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival to promote her latest film—Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers—she wanted to use her red carpet fashion to make a statement. “Sudanese women have been on the frontlines of every revolution in Sudan—2019 was even called a women’s revolution. I’m inspired by their resilience and determination, and wanted to pay tribute to them and help give their stories a platform for recognition,” Coel tells Vogue.

For the premiere, Coel donned a toub, a traditional Sudanese garment worn draped over the body and around the head. “The toub made me feel elegant and powerful,” she says. “I chose espresso because dark-skinned women face prejudice and persecution in Sudan. The color is beautiful, and this hue needs to be seen as such.”

When it came to her jewelry, she turned to Nisreen Kuku for her earrings and necklace. The necklace was inspired by West Sudanese jewelry, which Coel notes “is the epicenter of the world’s largest famine and genocide.” “These earrings are called Al Qamar Boba or Fidwa, from the word ‘fidya’—ransom or sacrifice,” she adds. “For Sudanese women, gold has always carried that meaning, not just beauty but protection. In this war, that symbolism has turned tragic. Wearing this is about honoring their sacrifice and the immense suffering Sudanese women are enduring.”

Coel also commissioned custom grills from London jewelry brand Alighieri—who only works with recycled gold—for the occasion. “I went to visit Rosh [Mahtani, the CEO] in Hatton Gardens at her shop. We spoke for hours, sometimes very poetically, about tectonic plates,  tension and creating volcanic change,” she says. “She had never [made grills] before. It took 4 hours with Rosh and the grillz technician to design them.”

Coel’s henna was also a labor of love. “It took five hours to do. The artist came to visit me two weeks ago to test the henna on my skin. On the day she came with her daughter, Sonia, a 20-year-old girl who moved from Sudan at eight years old,” Coel says. “I spoke about her journey to the UK, being dark skinned, and the different facets of colorism that she has faced both in Sudan and in the UK. We cried, we laughed, we ate sambosa that her mum made.”

Every last detail of Coel’s look was highly considered. She credits Ebaa Elmelik, co-founder of Media for Justice in Sudan, with helping her bring it all together. “I told her I wanted to wear a Sudanese toub, and she helped connect me,” she says. “She also introduced me to the henna artist as well as the jewelry designer, Nisreen.”

Here, Michaela Coel takes Vogue behind the scenes as she gets ready for the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

Do you feel it? There is a ripple in the firmament, a vibration in the foundations, a bracing of the cosmos … yes, Mark Ruffalo is preparing to Act again. This time, he stars in crime drama Task, created by Mare of Easttown’s Brad Inglesby, as a former priest turned FBI agent nursing a great sorrow in the suitably grey environs of suburban Philadelphia. Tom Brandis ends every day in a drunken semi-stupor and begins every morning with prayer and a head-dunk into an ice-filled sink. Do you think we might be in for a meditation on guilt, sin and the possibility of redemption? Yes, I wearily agree.

So. Brandis is taken off the desk duties he has been assigned since his great sorrow. This is evidently connected to the sentencing hearing for a third-degree murder conviction he is due to attend next week, where his daughter Emily may be giving a family impact statement – but we will have to wait just long enough for it to feel outright manipulative before we get the full explanation of who killed who and how. Brandis is assigned to a new taskforce to investigate a series of armed break-ins at drug houses owned by the Dark Hearts biker gang, in the hope that arrests can be made before Philly is consumed by a turf war. He has three youngsters to help him: the charmingly arrogant, Catholic-raised Anthony (Fabien Frankel); the supremely competent Aleah (Thuso Mbedu); and the supremely incompetent Lizzie (Alison Oliver). Their single characteristics allow Brandis to prove his priestly credentials (God-talks with the lapsed Anthony), his generosity of spirit (this middle-aged man is not threatened by youthful ability!) and patience (I would return her to Quantico instantly, bearing a large label that read “Not fit for purpose”) and not much else.

The raids are being conducted by garbagemen and best friends Robbie (Tom Pelphrey) and Cliff (Raúl Castillo), who can tell from the trash cans on their route which dealers’ houses have recently disposed of drugs and filled up with cash. How they know which are Dark Hearts facilities and why they are specialising in those will again become clear in the fullness of time. They are accompanied on the raids by younger friend Peaches (Owen Teague), who you might suspect is marked for death the moment he expresses his joy at the fact that he has just become engaged. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Apropos nothing, Task ticks all the expected boxes. There are bloody shootouts, corpses and bags full of fentanyl instead of cash grabbed in chaotic getaways which will then require selling. Which requires finding a buyer. Which requires becoming further enmeshed in the drugs world – and more identifiable to those seeking to destroy you for killing their men and taking their 12 kilos of fentanyl in the first place. Especially as you also kidnapped a child witness in the process.

Now, Mare of Easttown was no picnic. But it had plenty of black humour and was full of vividly drawn, wholly believable family relationships and friendships that gave it a sense of life in the round. The criminality mattered because it affected people in all walks of life. Task, by contrast, is relentlessly bleak, humourless and narratively airless. It is not just the Brandis family that is crushed by terrible griefs and burdens. Robbie’s wife has left him and he is mourning the death of his brother Billy. His niece Maeve (Emilia Jones), Billy’s daughter, is dying by inches under the strain of looking after Robbie’s motherless children, which does not seem a fair trade for letting him move in with her after her father’s death left her with a house.

It flattens the characters into ciphers, deadens the story and as time goes on, makes the whole thing inescapably boring. It is not as if we haven’t seen everything on show before. Let’s find another way to propel a plot – or maybe even find another plot entirely – especially in Philadelphia.

But if formulaic yet weighty stuff is your bag, if gestures towards bigger issues rather than actual interrogations of them are all you’re up to at the moment, then a relatively enjoyable Task lies before you. For anything else, you can always rewatch Mare of Easttown.