“What is this—interview by PowerPoint?” Florence Welch exclaims as she gestures toward the large drop-down projector screen that dominates the tiny office where we are meeting, in the back of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The room itself couldn’t be more of a contrast to the surrounding Aladdin’s Cave of spaces d with jewellery, costumes, and decorative items from every continent and era, which the Florence and the Machine singer has spent the past half hour blissfully browsing. “I spent so much time here as a kid,” she says, sinking carefully into an as if it were one of the priceless antiques on display. “My mum is a professor of Renaissance studies and a trustee, so I’d hear her lecture on things like a pair of gloves—why they were scented, why they meant so much to Florentines at the time. It’s funny, mum studies clothes and she’s very chic, but she doesn’t understand my wild passion for fashion at all. She’d rather write about stuff than buy it.” She pauses, then: “I wonder if I have a daughter if I’ll be like, ‘Look at this dress!’ And she’d be like, ‘No, Mum, not interested.’”

It’s a typical Welch monologue: free-form and unguarded. Her parents split when she was 13, with Welch and her younger brother and sister acquiring a total of four new step siblings. “There’s a lot of creativity on both sides. Both parents are amazing, interesting people,” she says.