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| Starring Florence Welch; Directed by Greta Gerwig; Photographs by Tina Barney; Styled by Sara Moonves |
Birds Nest: Greta Gerwig and Florence Welch Make Their Private Domestic Fashion Fantasy Come Alive
“It’s like Safe meets Grey Gardens meets Rosemary’s Baby.”
by Alix Browne
Feb. 20, 2018
We are in a house. A ramshackle Victorian pile, not far from the ocean. Flocked wallpaper in faded silver and gold. Ceilings cracked and peeling where the rain has found its way in. The house is all doors and secret corners. One room is strewn with empty violin cases and countless unframed oil paintings depicting tumultuous seascapes. Another, inexplicably, teems with butterflies. In the kitchen, among jars of pickles and stacks of canned goods, jugs of cheap juice and boxes of dried pasta, a store-bought birthday cake sits on the Formica table, its pink candles melting onto the soft white icing.
A woman dresses herself, as if preparing to go out. As if preparing to leave. She puts on a pair of smart slacks. A cape. A dash of lipstick. She makes her way tentatively down the stairs, steadying herself against the wall. Day after day she enacts this exact same ritual. She never makes it past the front door. Maybe tomorrow…
Greta Gerwig’s first fashion shoot plays out very much like a film set, with her as director, the artist Tina Barney as director of photography, W’s Sara Moonves as costume designer, and the British singer Florence Welch in the role of the heroine. “It’s like Safe meets Grey Gardens meets Rosemary’s Baby” is how Gerwig, 34, describes the narrative, which is at once creepy, poignant, and defiantly demented. “The theme was dark fantasy, and, in a certain way, Florence already lives there, so I didn’t want to double down on what she’s already made,” Gerwig says. “It would actually be her dark fantasy—trapped in a house as a housewife forever.”
Greta Gerwig: Can we give her a purse? “I’m finally ready to leave the house”—Florence, that’s your emotion. Florence Welch: Am I happy about leaving? Or scared? Gerwig: I think you’re thrilled. You are excited but also nervous. You haven’t left the house in 12 years! Welch: Do people take butterflies as currency? That’s all I have. Butterflies and tears!
Missoni dress.
Gerwig has been caught up in her own interminable loop of sorts for months, doing press for Lady Bird, a film she both wrote and directed. The quietly heroic and deeply resonant coming-of-age story, in which Saoirse Ronan plays a teenage girl with an outsize sense of her own destiny (the assumption is that the film is autobiographical, though Gerwig insists it is not), earned Gerwig a Golden Globe for best motion picture, musical or comedy, and five nominations, including best picture; Ronan picked up a Globe for best actress.
The two reunited in New York, over waffles and pierogi at Veselka, a Ukrainian joint in the East Village, and talked about working on a project together. “One of my very favorite parts of making Lady Bird was working with Jon Brion on the music,” Gerwig says. “Getting to be in another person’s world is really exciting. When you love someone else’s art, and it’s not an art you can make, it’s like a contact high being around them. You have superpowers I can’t possibly understand, but I can also love your superpowers.”
Marc Jacobs minidress; Stephen Jones for Marc Jacobs turban; Falke tights.
Welch: I’ve never had anyone describe my music in the most perfect way. Greta said, “I like it because it’s like the deepest, darkest well of pain, and then you just throw a big party in there and invite everybody.” Gerwig: That’s right, that’s what her music sounds like to me. Your music makes me cry uncontrollably, which is a good thing.
Like Welch, when Gerwig is performing, she seems completely uninhibited, and as a result she is often mistaken for the confident, slightly screwball characters she has played in her films. Yet, up until the W assignment, Gerwig’s experience of fashion shoots, of being in front of that camera, was a feeling of unbridled self-consciousness about the fact that she wasn’t a model, and a fear of ripping the clothes.
“It’s funny where people find their freedom,” Gerwig observes, recounting something Rebecca Miller, who directed her in Maggie’s Plan, once told her. “Rebecca is a good actor, but it never fit with her. She said to me, ‘One of the great pleasures of directing is that you get to be invisible, and it feels great.’ I have felt invisibility as an actor, which is very seductive at times, but I’ve never felt invisible once the film is out and I have to smile and do the things. When I was on set making Lady Bird, I knew what Rebecca meant.”
Welch: I had a boyfriend say, “I keep dreaming that you’re building a house full of rooms that I cannot go into.” And when you make a record, that is literally what you start doing. You start taking your desires and your secret treasure, and you start making this house. Gerwig: When we first met and talked, I remember you saying that and thinking it was so weird because I had a partner, and ex-partner, say to me, “You’re building a house inside of our house—you’re building a minihouse where you go and live, and I’m not invited.” And I was like, “Yeah, I’m also building a secret escape tunnel. You have no idea what’s happening underneath.”
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