ON REFLECTION

In fashion as in life, Kristen Stewart has always challenged gender norms with her androgynous beauty—which makes her the perfect face of Chanel’s new fragrance, Gabrielle, inspired by the legendary founder of the couture house. But she is also very much

Kristen Stewart has a photograph of herself from when she was five years old. In the picture, she’s standing against a fence at Disneyland with her older brother and she’s wearing Levi’s jeans, black Vans, a baseball cap, and a white T-shirt with a pocket on the chest.

She glanced at the picture again recently and then looked down at what she was wearing and realised it was “the exact same thing”: jeans, T-shirt, trainers.

“I haven’t really changed my style since I was a little kid,” she says. As if to prove the point, today the 27-year-old Stewart is wearing blue Levi’s, black Vans, and a ripped white T-shirt emblazoned with a monochrome image of the British band Madness. “I love Madness,” she says. “Ska is some of my favourite music.” The only striking difference from that childhood image are the tattoos on her arms and her hair, which is cropped close to her scalp with frosted-blonde tips, giving her the appearance of a delicate elf dipped in gold.

Some moments earlier, Stewart had been dressed in a long, draped, cream-coloured gown as she posed for the BAZAAR shoot in Coco Chanel’s Paris apartment. This was an alternate Stewart: swanlike, elegant, her image reflected and refracted a dozen times over in the slivered mirrored surfaces; her face fine-boned and fragile as she gazed to one side and then the next and then, with unapologetic directness, straight into the camera lens.

There is a duality to Stewart; a liquid, shape-shifting magnetism that makes her compelling to watch. She is an actress who has embodied everything from a semi-vampiric adolescent in the Twilight movie franchise to a haunted fashion assistant in the critically acclaimed Personal Shopper, directed by Olivier Assayas, who won the Best Director award at Cannes.

Stewart directed her own short film earlier this year and has just wrapped Underwater, her first big-budget action feature. She plays one of a team of scientific researchers trapped in an underwater laboratory after an earthquake and “was literally dripping in sweat for the entire two months”. And yet, in all these roles—from box-office catnip to offbeat independent cinema—Stewart imbues each part with an intensity that comes straight from a desire to connect.

“All I want to do,” she says, “is to be understood and express feelings and know that, when they come across honestly, you’re just becoming closer to other human beings.”

In person, Stewart is a woman at ease with her fluidity, who has dated men (most famously Robert Pattinson, her co-star in The Twilight Saga), is currently in a relationship with the Victoria’s Secret model Stella Maxwell, and who earlier this year opened an episode of Saturday Night Live saying she was “soooo gay”. When Stewart shaved her head in March, the transformation felt metaphorical as well as physical, as if she were leaving the long tresses of her girlhood behind.

So it seems particularly fitting that we’re meeting in Chanel’s apartment on Rue Cambon. The designer was renowned for challenging traditional notions of gender and womanhood through clothes. When she started her business in 1910, women were still trussed up in corsets. It was Chanel who introduced men’s tailoring to the female wardrobe—simple cardigan-like jackets and straight, sporty skirts—lending women a sartorial dignity and freedom that had previously been an exclusively male preserve. Chanel wore trousers. She bobbed her hair. She was daring, empowered, unconstrained by social convention.

How apt, then, that Stewart has been chosen as the face of Chanel’s latest fragrance, Gabrielle, a scent intended to channel the designer’s rebellious spirit and appeal to a new, contemporary audience. Stewart was recently taught the French word insoumis, which doesn’t have a fully accurate translation in English. The closest way of expressing it would be to say “unsubmissive”. It’s a word Stewart feels encapsulates both Chanel’s and her own refusal to conform.

As a child, growing up in Los Angeles with three older brothers, Stewart was “a total tomboy”. She used to dress as a boy and it was only at school that she realised it was “not the most normal thing. Not all little girls are that way. And it actually hurt my feelings, like badly. Like, I remember being in sixth grade [aged 11] and [people would say], ‘Kristen

looks like a man. You’re a boy’, or whatever, and I was so offended, horrified, and embarrassed.”

She pauses, and looks at me, the gaze spooling out sideways from green-hazel eyes.

“Now I look back on it and I’m like, ‘Girl, be proud of that!’”

Everything shifted when Stewart hit puberty and grew her hair long. Suddenly she was accepted as one of the pretty girls, “and I was like, ‘F*ck all of you!’” It gave her an insight into how fickle and superficial acceptance could be. The real challenge, she realised, would be to remain true to herself.

“There’s nothing worse than growing up and then having someone say, ‘Oh, I mean, we could all tell that you ultimately were going to date girls in your life, we could tell from day one,’” she says.

This bothers Stewart because it undermines the authenticity of her previous, straight relationships. “I’ve been deeply in love with everyone I’ve dated. Did you think I was faking it?” She shakes her head, cat-like, as if ridding herself of a fly. “I’ve always embraced a duality. And really, truly, believed in it and never felt confused or struggling. I just didn’t like getting made fun of.” So would she date a guy again in the future? “Yeah, totally. Definitely ... Some people aren’t like that. Some people know that they like grilled cheese and they’ll eat it every day for the rest of their lives. I want to try everything. If I had grilled cheese once I’m like, ‘That was cool, what’s next?’”

She means this literally: we’re talking on a lunch break from the shoot in a room filled with freshly cut flowers, soft-white furnishings, and scented candles. The caterers have provided several food selections: chicken, salmon, or strips of Parma ham with melon. Instead of narrowing her options, Stewart has brought them all in with her, laid them out neatly on the coffee table in front of us, and is eating a bit from each plastic box as she talks. When she finishes, she places the lids carefully back on each one and takes them to the bin herself.

It’s the sort of thoughtfulness I imagine she inherited from her parents, both of whom work behind the scenes in film and television. Her father, John, is a television producer, and her mother, Jules, a script supervisor and director. Stewart began acting at eight, after an agent spotted her in a school Christmas play. She never really thought of doing anything else because her parents always seemed to have so much fun on set.

Her breakout role came at the age of 11, when she played Jodie Foster’s daughter in David Fincher’s Panic Room in 2002. But it was the Twilight movies that fully catapulted Stewart into the unforgiving glare of the limelight. Seventeen when she starred in the first one, and 21 by the time the series drew to a close, she struggled with the media attention and sometimes seemed an awkward presence on the red carpet. Media commentators accused her of being ungracious and moody. Really, Stewart says, she was overwhelmed by the attention.

She still has bouts of anxiety, where her hands will seize up and she finds herself unable to perform the simplest of physical tasks—when she won a 2015 César Award (the French equivalent of the Oscars) for Best Supporting Actress for Clouds of Sils Maria, she had to ask the presenter to hold the statuette for her because her hands were so clenched that she was afraid of dropping it.

“Fame is valued quite ridiculously,” Stewart says. “So then there’s this idea that you’re beholden in some way, and I resent that. And it comes across like I’m ungrateful or something but, actually, I just find it weird to talk to the general public as a whole. Like, you can relate to a person, you can relate to an individual, but addressing the world at large is something that just perplexes me.” I ask her whether, like me, she suffers from Resting Bitch Face— that affliction whereby your normal, relaxed face projects an unwitting sense of glowering annoyance—and she says, without pause, “Completely. I’m really not introverted—I’m just not acting all the time, which is what it would take to look like how people expect famous people to behave.” She’s being real, she says. She is being herself. Besides, she hates the word “b*tch” because “there’s no equivalent for that word that could be applied to a man.”

“I’ve been deeply in love with everyone I’ve dated. Did you think I was faking it? I’ve always really embraced a duality.” – Kristen Stewart