Awards season favourite Jessie Buckley knows the transformative power of clothes, but she hadn’t expected to embody a fabulous new alter-ego on the New York subway on Tuesday night. The scene: Chanel’s métiers d’art show staged in the depths of the decommissioned underground Bowery station. The look: a zebra print trench coat belted at the waist and accessorised with a delicious knowing half smile.
“I felt like a woman who had committed something very naughty, but is just getting on with her day,” the Irish actor tells British Vogue from her front-row seat somewhere between the J and Z lines. There were plenty more of Buckley’s favourite type of clothes – those boasting “singular characteristics and stories” – in Matthieu Blazy’s first Manhattan-centric métiers collection for the house. While the retriever-printed skirt suit (“you have two accessories in New York,” said Blazy: “a dog and a coffee cup”) was Instagram’s instant favourite, Buckley bookmarked an ’80s pinstripe power suit and an exquisite off-the-shoulder black cocktail dress that would look picture perfect come Academy Awards luncheon day.
Buckley will have her pick of the bunch. A new friend of the house (she has previously attended Chanel’s seasonal film parties with Charles Finch), under the stewardship of Hollywood’s hottest styling export Danielle Goldberg, the métiers show was Jessie’s first. “I was so intrigued!” she smiles, her wide eyes masked behind the requisite front-row sunglasses. “It felt like we were invited into a secret underworld before being so moved by the youthful expression of the collection.”
An actor’s actor through and through, Buckley’s personal style hinges on both the narrative arc of a look (“I love things that aren’t perfect”) and comfort (“I need to be in something that can get me somewhere quickly”.) While her red-carpet archive is positively chameleonic, the press tour for Hamnet, the Maggie O’Farrell book adaptation for which she is Oscar tipped, has seen a more refined version of the Jessie Buckley we know and love.
“I want to feel like I’m absolutely myself,” she muses on what her moment on Tinseltown’s main stage will look like. “But elevated with incredible clothes.” Buckley will still wear her signature natty tailoring, teamed with homemade tees printed with the pictures she fangirls over, but she’ll have a Chanel bag thrown over her shoulder or a pair of double-C dotted pumps grounding her. There were plenty to choose from in Blazy’s second edit for the brand.
