Kristen Stewart has been working on her first screenplay and teased a little of her writing prowess at the Chanel show. The show opened with a short film starring Stewart as herself, with voiceover lines, including: “It’s important to burn down your best yesterday, every day, so you can start again.”
“I wrote them,” Stewart said after the show. “I’m such a better writer than I am a candid speaker. I mean, I can at least get close to expressing myself when I have a minute alone.”
The actress said it reflects her philosophy on constantly challenging herself, and that’s in line with the current cultural climate.
“We’re all now allowed to morph daily and evolve, and I think it’s really important, not to necessarily burn it down, but to never feel like you’ve landed or to be so proud of some fixed notion because every day the world changes,” she said.
The film, directed by Inez and Vinoodh, is a bit of a play on paparazzi and living life in the spotlight, as photographers stalk Stewart as she’s leaving a restaurant. In it she also says the world is “highly pressurized” and moving so fast it gives her “whiplash.”
“You’re not always going to be on the forefront of change in progress, because you get f–king old,” said the 32-year-old. She said while it’s hard to define yourself, particularly in the era of social media and ever-changing mores, if you don’t do it yourself, someone else will do it for you. “And that’s painful. That kind of ruins lives,” she said of the tabloid culture.
The former child star reflected on growing up in the 2000s when the media treated young female stars harshly and expected a hyperfemininity. “It was a really rough, rough time for women, so judgmental, and unbelievably rigid, in terms of what we were allowed to be. Now it just feels sprawlingly free.” She said that while she did grow up on camera in that era, she’s never had social media, which gives her an ability to distance herself from the buzz constantly swirling around her.
To that end, the star attended the show with her fiancée Dylan Meyer and sported a new short pixie mullet.
“When I was little, people would be like, ‘Oh, you look like a boy.’ Nobody would say that any more … we’re cracking open words in certain ways that to me feels like liberation,” she added.
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A very tired Jennie, fresh off of global promotions for Blackpink’s latest album, was tucked away on a white couch backstage and admitted to a little bit of jet lag on a 36-hour trip to Paris. The pop star, who has her first acting role in the upcoming HBO series “The Idol,” said she was “mesmerized” by the film screen that surrounded the room.
Stewart’s film was overlaid with scenes from Alain Resnais’ “Last Year in Marienbad,” projected larger-than-life on a screen that enveloped the runway.
“Kristen was sitting right next to me, so it felt like more of an unreal situation for me,” she said of her place in the front row next to the star.
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For an American actress, Kristen Stewart does a mean existential monologue. Chanel opened its show with a black-and-white clip, shown on wraparound screens, of the “Spencer” star stepping out of an arthouse cinema in Paris and answering a reporter’s question with some thoughts about the meaning of life.
“We’re living in such an accelerated period of growth, it gives me whiplash,” she began.
“It’s exhilarating and it’s highly pressurized because our identities are these lifelong evolving art projects,” Stewart said. “It’s no longer important to know who you are or even what you want. I think it’s important to burn down your very best yesterday, every day, so you can start again.”
It could have been a dialogue from one of the films she’s made with French director Olivier Assayas, making her the first American actress to win a non-honorary César at the prestigious French film awards.
Chanel has contributed costumes and financing to several of these projects, underscoring the strength of its relationship with Stewart, who has been an ambassador for the French fashion house since 2013. The actress, sporting a Joan Jett-esque pixie cut, was the face of the spring 2023 collection press kit.
“She really represents for me the Chanel of today, but the Coco Chanel,” creative director Virginie Viard said in a preview. “On top of that, she looks very French.”
Cinema is a key source of inspiration for Viard, who began her career as a costume designer, working on films including Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Three Colors: Blue.” Building a collection around Stewart wasn’t easy, she said. “I don’t want to disappoint her.”
She needn’t have worried. The actress worked the looks to perfection, whether posing in an Art Nouveau-style brasserie wearing a side slit black monogram slipdress fastened with a black satin bow over one hip, or standing in a flared white tweed coat dress on the mirrored Art Deco staircase in Chanel’s historic haute couture salon on Rue Cambon.
Stewart, who sat in the front row, has embraced every facet of the brand’s collections, from the quirky to the sublime. “She never asks to change anything. She gets everything,” Viard said, snapping her fingers for emphasis.
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