The Fashion Bazaar - 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 her own woman, as independent spirited when it comes to fame and feminism as she has been in facing down Donald Trump.

- Elizabeth Day

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.