Kristin goes to the ball
Despite 30 years of red carpets, Kristin Scott Thomas had never been to the Met Gala – until now. She talks to Lisa Armstrong
Dame Kristin Scott Thomas was doing peak Dame KST when I poked my head around the door of the fitting room in east London last week where she and Erdem were cooking up a sartorial riot for her Met Ball appearance.
Whence springs the trademark poise? This is a woman who until recently never employed a stylist, and coincidentally appears never to have put a foot wrong on the red carpet, although someone else’s foot trod on her 1947 vintage Balmain train once and it ripped clean off. Her school uniform at Cheltenham Ladies’ College was green tweed. “Scratchy green tweed,” she emphasises. That must teach you something about resilience – and deportment, if only to offset the itchiness. To this day she can’t wear
green tweed.
The gown she has on now makes its own demands. Floor-length moire taffeta, it has a train that falls from the shoulders, a raised neckline and a trellis-worth of embroidered flowers. Scott Thomas, with bookish specs and cropped hair through which she regularly rakes her hands until it looks like a recently tornadoed prairie, resembles a 17th century prelate as envisioned by French Vogue, appropriate as this year’s Met theme is Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.
It’s also ice-blue – a shade she has never before countenanced (“too cold,” which is interesting given her reputation for switching to frost mode when she deems it appropriate). None of that today, and that blue – the one you see in renaissance depictions of the Virgin – is an exact match for her eyes, emphasising an unexpected fragility (inevitably she’s smaller than you’d imagine; about 5ft 5in). “Ooh I love fittings,” says Erdem, eyes glinting, “especially with someone as aware of their presence and the way they move as Kristin is.”
Exactly how much will she have to move, I ask, eyeing the narrow armholes. “I don’t think I’ll be hailing any taxis…” “Don’t be so sure,” counters Erdem, who, because of a “clerical” error one year found himself accompanying his guest in a yellow cab while she put the finishing touches to her make-up. I retreat downstairs so they can finish the fittings (there’s another black cocktail dress Erdem’s designed for the after-after party).
Twenty minutes later, she has changed into a chic brown, mid-calf cashmere dress, provenance long forgotten, but it cost a thousand dollars when she bought it 20-odd years ago in New York – “huge money then, quite huge now, actually” – knee-length boots and an Apple watch that keeps ringing without any of us knowing how to turn it off. We’re installed in Erdem’s book-lined office. On one wall, bought from the Duchess of Windsor’s estate, is a portrait of Wallis Simpson, of whom KST could surely give the definitive rendition. “Been asked,” she says. “Not interested.”
Typecasting: her bête noire. She withdrew from films altogether for four years – nothing intriguing came her way. She seems to have vented some of her frustration in fancy dress. There was the Dressed to Kill James Bond theme when went she went as a doctor. Naughty KST, especially given that her ex-husband is a gynaecologist. “No one got it,” she says. And the one when she rigged herself up as Rihanna’s mum. “Bunches, low cargo pants, high boots, cap, massive nails, little bomber jacket. I thought no one’s going to recognise me, this is fantastic – and everyone knew immediately it was me.”
Her range in French films has always been wider – notably when she played a woman released from prison after 15 years in I’ve Loved
You So Long. “This woman had fallen off the radar. We had to buy things that were too big or too small and everything was obviously second-hand.
One coat was M&S from the Eighties, and it had stains down it. It was perfect.”
It’s refreshing to hear an actress engage viscerally with clothes. “They’re the tricks of my trade,” she says. Her favourite wardrobe was
Katharine Clifton’s in The English Patient, perhaps her most famous film. “That bias cut white dress…” she says swooningly. There were more bias dresses in
Gosford Park. “Hah,” she says. On Gosford she encountered a dress that looked fishily familiar. She went over to the actress and peered at the label. KST’S name was on it, crossed out, as was that of her sister, the actress Serena Scott Thomas. “There are these huge warehouses where all the costume designers go…” The glamour.
For years she refused to take fashion seriously, mindful of her “middle-class, quite Catholic English upbringing, where modesty was important and you don’t show your assets”. But she didn’t spend 30 years in France without learning to appreciate fashion’s cultural relevance. These days she darts between Paris and north-west London and seems confused as to where she actually lives. She keeps a lot of her clothes. “The problem is, one day you put something on and it just no longer looks right… ageing. Argggh!” Mostly she’s OK with growing older – she loved the white wigs she wore as Clementine Churchill in Darkest Hour and was tempted to take them home. At least in France, they don’t equate age with sexual lockdown, I say. “True. And they don’t dress like dollybirds past a certain age either,” she says.
We’re wading into dangerous territory: KST has previously found herself in hot water for allegedly suggesting British women slap on too make fake tan, get drunk and wear mini skirts when they haven’t got the legs for them. She was likely taken out of context. She was stirred by the potency of the all-black show of dresses at the Baftas and the Oscars, although she also understands those French actresses who wrote the open letter defending men’s right to get their sexual advances wrong. “It’s probably a generational thing. I can see both sides,” she says.
She has bestridden three epochs of red carpeteering: the one where “you just sort of bought a dress yourself ” (she can’t even remember if there was a premiere for her first film, Under
The Cherry Moon, Prince’s infamous stab at auteurism); the Nineties, when designers began paying attention to the Oscars and now, when it’s a branding vortex. “Red carpet posing for me is a bit of a cringe thing,” she says. She knows the deal though. “You’re there to support the character.” At the recent premiere of
Tomb Raider, she chose a plungeback, ultra-severe Valentino gown (“super-fun to wear”).
With or without a stylist, she has always been able to call on the best houses. For her first Oscars – she was nominated in 1997 for The
English Patient – she wore Christian Lacroix. For
Darkest Hour, an elegant evening coat from Christian Dior. As increasingly seems to happen to actresses who can last the course, the interesting projects are coming in again – not least, her first directing project, a loose reworking of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s 1959 novel The
Sea Change, about a marriage in crisis. “I just have to look where I’m going and try to remain dignified,” she says.
And the Met Ball – a red carpet like no other.