Meena Harris has built a brand at the intersection of Inspiring and Relatable. She posted a squirm-face selfie—the de facto expression of the year—to announce her number-one spot on the children’s bestseller list. Her Twitter feed boosts impeachment manager Stacey Plasket (“looking SO FLY IN A LITERAL CAPE DRESS”) in between calls to support Indian farmers and the American minimum-wage movement. And when Harris turned up on the Today show, she wore a sweatshirt because who’s dressed in anything else? Hers, of course, comes from her Phenomenal label: a cheery pink design with AMBITIOUS across the front, reclaiming a once-dismissive term used to describe her aunt, Kamala. But the implication is that the 36-year-old lawyer turned entrepreneur—@meena, to her first-name-basis Instagram followers—is in the trenches with everyone else. She just has a sizable megaphone in hand.
Where on that matrix of public figure and social-media force does influencer fit in? “I hate that word,” Harris said in a phone call from San Francisco at the start of February. It was a couple weeks after the inauguration; two of the day’s breakout stars, Amanda Gorman and Ella Emhoff, had already nabbed modeling contracts. Meanwhile, Harris was talking to me as a newly minted MONDAY Muse—what the hair-care brand MONDAY, which just made its Stateside debut, has taken to calling its real-world role models. Aligning with a beauty company inherently means shaping how people kit out their own bathrooms. But if influencer has “come to feel almost elitist” to Harris—with its implication of status objects promoted by big names—the shampoo-and-conditioner range here aims to sit, well, at the intersection of Inspiring and Relatable. The curvilinear bottles (in a rose tone one associates with a certain age demographic) look considered on the edge of the tub—and on the shelves at Target and Ulta, where a bottle starts at $8.
MONDAY Smooth shampoo and conditioner, part of the eight-piece line that recently launched in the U.S.
Courtesy of MONDAY.“As a brand, we want to be a small part of people’s stories—the backseat conversations and aspirations for the modern woman,” said MONDAY founder Jaimee Lupton, speaking from Auckland, where the brand first took off. (“We sold six months’ worth of stock in just six weeks here in New Zealand,” she added.) MONDAY arrives to meet a next-gen phase of clean beauty, with packaging partly made from recycled plastic and formulas that skip unsavory ingredients; at the same time, the lineup addresses hair needs across a range of textures. The Muse series rolled out as a way of approaching those bigger-picture concerns on a more personal level. “It’s the entrepreneur, it’s the philanthropist,” Lupton said of the featured subjects. “It’s the mother, sister, daughter.”
And niece. “Sometimes I have to remind myself—and it’s still shocking, right?—that this is the first female Vice President in the history of our country,” said Harris, referring to a lifelong muse of her own. Here, she talks about Monday angst; the charade of work-life balance while raising two young girls, Amara and Leela; and the quick-swipe makeup product that gives the illusion of effort, even if the pandemic has been a lesson in “not giving a fuck how I look on camera.”
Vanity Fair: We’re speaking on a Monday, as it turns out. How has the meaning of that day shifted for you?
Meena Harris: Mondays, they’re busy but nevertheless still feel pretty mundane nowadays with COVID and being stuck in my house for most days: moving from the bedroom to the kitchen, taking my coffee to the den where my makeshift office currently is. I honestly kind of dread Mondays because it’s coming out of the perceived quiet of the weekend, where I can send emails and not get responses back or not have other distracting noise. Then Mondays is when I know there’s just going to be an avalanche. Even though I dread it, I also feel motivated to just hit the ground running and get stuff done. Today, my mind space was still exhausted from last week and the weekend. One of the privileges of, for the most part, being an entrepreneur and running your own thing is that you can often control that. I try to be mindful of: are there things that I can push back or even take off my calendar that are not urgent or a priority?
What’s your morning routine: shower or not; elaborate breakfast or just coffee?
No, I definitely did not shower! Usually, if it’s a day where I think I can work in a Peloton ride, the first thing I’ll do is put on my workout pants, just to motivate myself to grab that 30 minutes—which is also why I don’t really shower in the morning anymore, if I’m being honest. It’s putting on my workout pants and immediately getting coffee. Maybe this makes me sound insufferable and basic, but I’m very specific about my iced lattes in kind of a coffee snob way, so one of my big things was figuring out how to replicate that at home. After a lot of testing and tasting, I finally came up with a hack that works for me. So I do that in the morning, and then I start working.
What brought you together with MONDAY?