FACING Forward
WHEN ALESSANDRO MICHELE, CREATIVE DIRECTOR at Gucci, sets out to conceptualize a scent for the house, he wants a juice that expresses total authenticity. After all, he’s known for his bold embrace of individuality. His latest result—Bloom Profumo di Fiori—is a bold floral combination of soft jasmine, warm tuberose and exotic rangoon creeper, and it’s captivatingly unpredictable. Michele wanted to channel that same distinctive energy into the campaign for the perfume by representing the “different ways of being a woman.” So he invited the iconic Anjelica Huston to star alongside actor Jodie Turner-Smith, singer Florence Welch and designer Susie Cave.
Huston seems the ideal embodiment of that ethos: an unapologetic and striking force who laughingly describes herself as a confident person “on a good day” and has recently fallen for vegetable gardening.
Her spotlight-stealing self-assurance was hard won, it turns out—the product of as much care as she has been giving her carrots and corn. “I had confidence when I was in my mother’s house, and I lost confidence when I lived in my father’s house,” she explains. “My father [the late director John Huston] was quite critical of me when I was 15 or so, and I started to have quite a few complexes about how I looked. Those were difficult times.” Huston retreated into herself, appearing aloof and detached. “But I was just terrified,” she says now. “After my mother’s death when I was 17, I struck out on my own. I went to America [from Ireland] and started modelling, and I built up my own form of confidence—I knew what suited me, and I knew how to do certain things: I was a good dancer; I developed a style.” She won an Oscar for Prizzi’s Honor and starred in cult classics like The Witches and The Addams Family. This fall, she’s lending her talents to Wes Anderson’s much anticipated The French Dispatch. “I wasn’t a conventional beauty by any standards, but confidence has a way of transforming what might not look like an imposing set of features into something with a purpose—and things with a purpose are always more interesting.” ®