The Greats

‘It’s easier to show pain or joy through my work than to say it out loud.’

By Nick Haramis Photographs by Lise Sarfati Styled by Suzanne Koller

‘I knew that there was something that I could do that didn’t have to go back to the figure. My brain wasn’t built for anything like that.’

By Sasha Weiss Photographs by Justin French

‘People died in order for my smiley ass to come out here and carry a Gucci purse.’

By Adam Bradley Photographs by D’Angelo Lovell Williams Styled by Ian Bradley

‘I was totally amorphous and penetrable. So to begin with, pretending to be other people gave me at least somebody to be.’

By Susan Dominus Photographs by Luis Alberto Rodriguez Styled by Charlotte Collet

ON A WARM Paris night this past July, in the same neo-Classical palace off the Place de la Concorde where coronation balls were once held for Emperor Napoleon I and King Charles X, Balenciaga was hosting a dinner for Demna, its artistic director of seven years. Earlier that day, the 41-year-old Georgian designer had presented his second couture collection for the French fashion house founded in 1917 by Cristóbal Balenciaga, the Spanish designer whose bubble hemlines, sack dresses and cocoon coats offered an adventurous postwar alternative to Christian Dior’s hyper-feminine New Look of the late 1940s. Now, in a grand reception room of the recently restored 18th-century Hôtel de la Marine, the magician David Blaine was performing a card trick for the pop star Dua Lipa; the actor Alexa Demie was chatting with the reality star and real estate agent Christine Quinn, whose Balenciaga handbag, one of only 20 in existence, was also a Bang & Olufsen speaker; and Kim Kardashian, the brand’s most loyal and most famous customer, posed in one of the designer’s tinted polyurethane face shields, which made her look like she’d stepped out of a John Baldessari photograph.

Demna was seated at a long banquet table with Kardashian; her mother, Kris Jenner; the actor Michelle Yeoh; the supermodels Naomi Campbell and Bella Hadid; the rapper Offset; the country musician Keith Urban; and his wife, the movie star Nicole Kidman, who’d walked her first runway show a few hours earlier in a silver-coated silk taffeta gown with a long train knotted at the hip. To allay his sometimes-severe social anxiety at such events, Demna has always surrounded himself with a circle of confidants — including his husband, the composer and musician Loïck Gomez, also known by his stage name, BFRND, whom he met online in 2016 and married in 2017. But after weekly sessions with his life coach, he decided to try exposure therapy this time. (He’s been working with the same therapist since just before starting at Balenciaga; often he finds it easier to communicate emotion through a garment he’s made than with words.) “Am I going to say something wrong to Nicole?” he worried. But when I glanced over to check on him, I saw that Demna was face to face with Kidman, whom he’d only just met. Her hand was on his heart, and his hand on hers, neither of them moving or speaking. They stayed like that, silent and staring at each other, for almost two minutes; it’s her preferred way of connecting to someone, she says.

Balenciaga wool hourglass jacket and wrap skirt in black-and-white houndstooth, fluid blouse in white silk and boudoir thigh-high boots in patent calfskin from the fall 2016 collection. Photograph by Lise Sarfati. Styled by Suzanne Koller

Across the room at the friends’ table, I found myself where Demna would usually be, with the painter Eliza Douglas, Demna’s longtime muse; her partner, the artist Anne Imhof; the pop singer Róisín Murphy, who would later perform a few songs in the courtyard; the model Julia Nobis; the photographer Nadia Lee Cohen, who shot Balenciaga’s fall 2022 campaign; Martina Tiefenthaler, the company’s chief creative officer and one of the founding members of Vetements, the influential fashion collective Demna started in 2014; and Tiefenthaler’s boyfriend, Gian Gisiger, the graphic designer behind the latest iteration of Balenciaga’s logo. Among other things, Demna is known for being loyal to his tribe, a creative gang — and informal focus group — of like-minded nonconformists who walk in his shows, star in his look books and cheer him on. “What a crazy carnival of people,” Tiefenthaler said to me with pride. “And there he is, in the middle of it all.” She motioned in the direction of the designer, whose gray cotton hoodie stood out amid all the sequins.

His sense of alienation isn’t incidental to his work or a talking point on a press release; it’s visible in every garment he makes — if you know where to look.

Demna was hired by Balenciaga in 2015 with a clear mandate: to make the clothes feel urgent again. As an heir to the legendary tailor once described by Dior as “the master of us all” and by Coco Chanel as “a couturier in the truest sense of the word” — as well as a more immediate successor to the urbane, forward-thinking French Belgian designer Nicolas Ghesquière, who spent 15 years at the brand’s helm before departing in 2012 — he was not an obvious choice. Cristóbal Balenciaga was a perfectionist intent on achieving sculptural purity through minimal construction, a feat he came closest to realizing in his spring 1967 collection, which included a wedding dress held together by a single seam. Demna, who looks like a headbanger, in torn jeans and ratty band T-shirts, with piercings in both ears, seemed to have emerged onto fashion’s biggest stage straight from a Rammstein concert.

Balenciaga’s spring 2019 show included an immersive LED-screen-paneled tunnel by the Canadian artist Jon Rafman. Imaxtree

But since his appointment at Balenciaga, Demna has become, if not his generation’s most important designer, certainly its most exciting. In an industry where strategy teams struggle to get people talking about their brands, he can’t release a pair of shoes without them turning into a Cardi B lyric. What’s more striking, though, is how dexterously he has exhumed the archives, reinterpreting Cristóbal’s classic silhouettes with cheek and reverence, splicing house codes with streetwear style principles, making haute couture not just from satin and velvet but nylon and denim, as well. His contributions to the house have ranged from homage (his fall 2016 debut opened with a two-button gray flannel jacket that flared at the hips, a subtle take on the trademark Balenciaga bell shape of the 1950s) to histrionic (for spring 2020, he took the construction to its extreme, exaggerating the form so that models in matching gold and silver lamé gowns resembled a pair of Hershey’s Kisses on creatine).

Much as he might want to recede at times, Demna has found himself ever more scrutinized. In this way, too, he recalls his predecessor: Back in the 1940s and ’50s, Balenciaga the man became an international fashion star despite his best attempts at anonymity. As Mary Blume, author of “The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World” (2013), told NPR, “Nobody knew how tall he was, if he was slim or fat. … Several French journalists thought he wasn’t one person but that he was a team of designers. And this is simply because he did not appear.” In 2021, Demna attended the Met Gala with Kardashian, both in matching black fabric face coverings. Although his attendance was meant to signal his emergence as an industry star, many people speculated that it was Kanye West, Kardashian’s estranged husband at the time. Still, the mask served at least two purposes: Wearing it calmed his nerves, and it prevented the flashing cameras from capturing unflattering photos of him. “I’ve always had a problem with myself in the mirror,” says Demna, whose somewhat stern features — pale skin, strong nose — are softened by his hazel eyes and a warm smile. Since then, he’s chosen to wear one whenever he has to have his picture taken.

Balenciaga ultraviolet low-neck pantadress, leggings and booties from the fall 2020 collection. Photograph by Lise Sarfati. Styled by Suzanne Koller

Words like “rebel” and “iconoclast” are thrown around so often in the fashion industry that they might as well be the names of new fragrances. And while it’s impossible to think of the creative evolution of clothes without the contributions of such brilliant, genuinely tortured souls as Yves Saint Laurent or Lee Alexander McQueen, brands almost reflexively market their designers, especially the ones without name recognition, as misfit mavericks who’ve arrived, against all odds, to alter not just a dress but the very notion of fashion itself. In Demna’s case, however, this happens to be true. His sense of alienation isn’t incidental to his work or a talking point on a press release; it’s visible in every garment he makes — if you know where to look.

WHEN DEMNA WAS 11, he was convinced he was going to die. About a year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, ethnic conflict broke out between Georgians and the people of Abkhazia, a disputed area of land in the northwestern region of the country. Early in the war, Abkhaz troops descended on the Georgian-held city of Sukhumi, where Demna was born, laying waste to the popular subtropical tourist destination on the Black Sea. For months, every night at 7 p.m., the wail of an air-raid siren signaled that it was time for him to join the rest of his family — his Georgian father, Guram, the owner of an auto repair shop; his Russian mother, Elvira, a housewife; his younger brother, also named Guram; a pair of uncles and their four combined children; and his paternal grandmother — in their underground garage, where Demna played music to drown out the thunder of exploding shells.

Before the area was reduced to rubble, Demna and his family evacuated their home, packed the car with only a few essentials — food, warm clothing and photo albums, as well as some weapons with which to protect themselves — and followed the other estimated 240,000 displaced Georgians into the Caucasus Mountains on their way to Tbilisi, the country’s capital, where they had relatives. They drove as far as they could, at which point they took what they were able to carry and started walking. When Demna’s grandmother became too weak to continue, Elvira, a natural negotiator, traded a machine gun for a horse.

Demna wears his own Balenciaga clothing, Balenciaga Toe Low sneakers in Black Knit and Balenciaga Couture Engineered by Mercedes-AMG F1 Applied Science face shield. Photograph by Lise Sarfati. Styled by Suzanne Koller

For nearly three weeks, they traveled from village to village, sleeping mostly outdoors or in the back of an abandoned truck. Before his displacement, Demna had been a good-natured boy who loved to put on musical shows for his family, give his grandmother fashion advice and draw pictures of the Miss Universe pageant contestants; now all he could think about was the “Chechen tie,” a particularly sadistic form of mutilation he’d heard about involving the tongue. One night on the road, Demna walked in on his father, a former soldier, explaining to an uncle what he’d do if they were ever taken hostage. “I have the grenades,” he recalls his father saying, by which Guram meant that he would sooner kill himself and his boys than risk being captured and tortured.

Until this point in our conversation, Demna — who no longer uses his last name, Gvasalia, professionally, to separate his private self from his work persona — has been recounting the story of his family’s escape like someone telling the plot of a war movie. But he utters those four words the way I imagine his father might have: steely voiced yet in pain. “Just the idea that he. …” Demna says, unable to complete the sentence. “I think he would never have done it, but it made me afraid of him. And I was never afraid of my father before that.”

The Gvasalias arrived safely, but penniless, in Tbilisi. Demna, wearing oversize hand-me-downs, the sleeves on his shirt dangling well past his fingers — a motif he would revisit later artistically — shared a mattress with his brother that first night. “Sleeping on a bed — I will never forget it. What more do you need in life?” he says. Just then, the waiter at our bar arrives with drinks, jolting Demna back to the present: a wood-paneled simulacrum of a Gilded Age drawing room in Manhattan’s financial district on a muggy May afternoon. The next day, he’d become the first designer ever to stage a show on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. “I’m sorry,” he says with a slightly embarrassed laugh. “I don’t mean to abuse you as a therapist.”

The fall 2022 show took place inside a glass-domed arena, with models battling wind and artificial snow. Courtesy of Balenciaga

That child, that experience, is never far from him. This past March, 10 days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Demna presented Balenciaga’s fall 2022 show at an exhibition complex a few miles outside of Paris. Separated from an indoor arena by a glass dome, an audience of fashion editors and celebrities — including Kardashian, who wore a catsuit made from what appeared to be yellow barricade tape — watched like spectators in an operating theater as models in stretchy dresses and large hoodies, many of them hauling leather trash bags, struggled to stay upright against a battery of wind and artificial snow. Originally conceived by Demna as an indictment of our failure to address the climate crisis, the presentation had become an allegory for the plight of the roughly one million Ukrainians, mostly women and children, who in that first week of war had fled to neighboring European countries. In the accompanying show notes, Demna wrote, “The war in Ukraine has triggered the pain of a past trauma I have carried in me since 1993, when the same thing happened in my home country and I became a forever refugee. Forever, because that’s something that stays in you. The fear, the desperation, the realization that no one wants you.” Today, he tells me, “That’s why fashion has never really mattered to me. I love doing it, but I don’t care, to be honest. I’ve seen things that make fashion seem so irrelevant.”

Demna is often thought of as fashion’s playful saboteur, suffusing his work with comedy bordering on contempt — and yet behind it all is a kind of sincerity that can sometimes be difficult to discern amid the spectacle. No other working designer is as confessional; with each collection, what seems like irony is often a chapter in an ongoing autobiography. Take the $270 DHL-branded T-shirt he made for Vetements in 2016, which was alternately derided by critics as puerile and anti-fashion. “I’d see these guys every single day delivering parcels to our office, and then we’d have to pay DHL bills, which was a lot for us,” he explains. “It was so visually present in my daily professional life. And that’s what I often do. I take something and I make something.” Then there’s his resort 2023 collection for Balenciaga, which included models in wool coats and sequined gowns worn over full-body latex bondage suits — for another designer, the S&M gear might have been little more than an outré gesture, but that, he says, “was very personal to me, part of my sexual education.”

HIS SEXUALITY IS something Demna can’t discuss without some degree of sadness creeping into his voice; an early encounter with a neighborhood friend ended abruptly when a family member walked in on them and forbade Demna from seeing the boy again. The first man he fell in love with, who introduced him to sex clubs and cruising spots, “taught me how to love him,” he says, “but unfortunately not how to love myself.” The most difficult indignity, though, is the one that hasn’t happened: “I can’t go back to Georgia because people have threatened to kill me if I return. … My own uncle is one of them.”

Balenciaga Couture swing-back trench coat in taupe gabardine, gloved top in white jersey and Collant Pantalegging in black stretch mesh from 2021. Photograph by Lise Sarfati. Styled by Suzanne Koller

He didn’t come out to his parents until he was 32, although he had a boyfriend at 25. Demna studied international economics at Tbilisi State University but, even then, he was regularly sketching clothes. He befriended a group of “sort of criminals” who probably knew he was gay but didn’t care and protected him from anyone who did. “Growing up in a country where I couldn’t say I was gay, I always tried to look like the kind of tough guy who would survive in the neighborhoods where I lived,” he says. “But I didn’t feel like that on the inside.”

After graduating, Demna came across a newspaper article about Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the Belgian college that gave birth to the Antwerp Six: the influential fashion designers Dirk Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee, who all graduated from the school in the early 1980s. Against his mother’s wishes, Demna applied. Van Beirendonck, who taught in the academy’s fashion department at the time and is a designer known for his own playful riffs on kink, found in Demna a kindred spirit. “We are both stubborn, and we want to dream out loud,” Van Beirendonck said in an email. “Being critical, making political statements and adding irony and humor in our work is important, but so is our love of perfect tailoring and beautiful fabrics.”

‘That’s why fashion has never really mattered to me. I love doing it, but I don’t care, to be honest. I’ve seen things that make fashion seem so irrelevant.’

Demna’s first big job out of fashion school was at Maison Margiela, known for being a laboratory of experimentation and a leader in avant-garde fashion. The hiring committee gave him a week to submit a project. He sent them 10 looks for consideration in a greasy pizza box; two weeks later, he was living in Paris. After a couple of years there, he was hired to work at Louis Vuitton in 2013 at the end of the Marc Jacobs era, during which the American designer introduced fashion to art, collaborating with Stephen Sprouse on graffitied monogram bags and Yayoi Kusama on a polka-dot collection. Although their time together was brief, Jacobs showed Demna that a luxury house could engage with pop culture, anticipating Instagram fashion even before the age of influencers. “I love Marc,” says Demna, who learned valuable lessons from Jacobs, like how to make an entire collection in three days. Plus it was fun: “He’d be working at midnight, doing Barbra Streisand karaoke.” When Ghesquière took over for Jacobs a few months later, the mood became more serious. Still, Demna found it helpful to watch Ghesquière execute his sophisticated and futuristic vision of luxury — one very different from his own. For a few seasons, he was charged with designing complex outerwear garments, including the most expensive piece he’d ever made. “I flew business class for the first time thanks to a crocodile coat,” he says. “You couldn’t fold it, so the coat had its own ticket.”

The spring 2020 presentation was made to resemble a parliamentary assembly. Courtesy of Balenciaga

But he was growing weary of developing only other people’s ideas and, finally, he launched a label of his own with a group of friends. The name Vetements, which in French (with a circumflex) means “clothes” — a bit of a joke, since none of the collective’s members were French — came to Demna over lunch at a falafel restaurant as an alternative to his original thought, Factory of Found Ideas. “When I started Vetements, I was at a point where I was so frustrated with the industry,” he says. “I couldn’t pay my bills, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to make clothes.” During his five years as the brand’s creative director, and with his brother, Guram, as its C.E.O., he organized a show in the basement of a gay club, which one critic complained smelled like a lavatory (fall 2015); partnered with 18 different brands, including Manolo Blahnik, Brioni and Juicy Couture, for a single collection of dubious collaborations (spring 2017); and held what was referred to as a no-show with life-size photographs of nonmodels shot around Zurich, and presented in a parking lot in Paris (spring 2018).

Vetements became a sensation because of the confusion it caused: No one could tell if Demna was joking or not. Although there was the sense that he was having a good time, there was also the fear that he might be laughing at the industry, a community that, despite its tolerance for frivolity, takes itself extremely seriously. Some of the clothes were ill-fitting, others covered with corporate typefaces — all of them embraced … not ugliness, exactly, but not beauty, either. “It was more of a provocation,” Demna says. “What I wanted was to trigger an emotion. It didn’t matter to me which one.” As more people began paying attention to his off-balance prairie dresses and big bomber jackets, which were immediate hits at stores such as Dover Street Market, journalists started drawing parallels between Demna’s deconstructions and those of Martin Margiela. “I was really mad,” Demna says. “Suddenly I was in a place to do what I wanted, and it was getting reduced to those two years [I spent] at Margiela.”

So for his fall 2019 collection, unsubtly titled the Elephant in the Room, Demna dragged his audience to the Paul Bert Serpette flea market on the northern outskirts of Paris to show them where these so-called Margiela designs were really born — from someone else’s clothes. He laughs now thinking about all the stunts he pulled: For his spring 2020 show, another response to feeling misunderstood and marginalized, he paraded models in law enforcement gear around a Champs-Élysées McDonald’s to the sound of attack dogs. “I felt barked at by this industry,” he says. He even added an umlaut to the reappropriated Bose logo on a T-shirt, translating the name of the audio equipment company into the German word for “angry.”

Balenciaga Couture high-collar jacket and godet skirt in blue denim, opera gloves in black viscose and space pumps in black glossy rubber from the 2022 collection. Photograph by Lise Sarfati. Styled by Suzanne Koller

In 2015, on the heels of Vetements’ initial success, he was approached by an executive at Kering, the multinational corporation that owns Balenciaga, Gucci, Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen and Bottega Veneta. He recalls being asked, “ ‘Would you be willing to give up what you do now and go to a big house in Paris?’ He didn’t tell me where it was.” Demna said that he might be, on the condition that he could keep running Vetements. In the taxi going home, he opened his phone to the news that Alexander Wang was stepping down as Balenciaga’s creative director.

DEMNA COMPARES THE experience of being at Balenciaga to that of Jesus carrying his cross. “The legacy is amazing and nourishing,” he says, “but it’s also very heavy.” When he arrived at the house in 2015, Paris, he says, “was asleep.” Like Alessandro Michele, who took over at Gucci that same year, Demna knew what was expected of him. “My job was and is to create desire,” he says, although it’s notable that neither brand has relied heavily on sex for sales: Michele’s Edenic universe celebrates romance rather than lust, and even when Demna explores kink, it’s more about the exchange of power than of fluids. In 2019, four years after his appointment, Balenciaga reported record annual revenues, surpassing €1 billion (about $1.12 billion) for the first time.

Every designer of a major luxury house has a fiscal responsibility. But they’re supposed to do something else, as well: create clothes that not only bring in profits but that become somehow symbolic of a cultural moment. And Demna has had plenty of those in the past decade. For Balenciaga’s fall 2020 collection, a deranged twist on Cristóbal’s ecclesiastical garb — the designer tailored one of his first velvet dresses for a marchioness to wear in church — he sent models in blacked-out contact lenses, chastity belts and flowing clerical robes wading through recycled Paris gray water as the sound of a storm echoed throughout the auditorium and lightning forked across a digital sky. During the early days of Covid-19, when shows could no longer be presented live, he partnered with Epic Games on “Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow,” a video game set years in the future whose characters battle it out in Balenciaga’s fall 2021 collection, which included NASA-stamped outerwear, his signature red puffer coat and boots recalling medieval-style armor. Following the return to in-person assemblies for spring 2022, Demna transformed the red carpet into a runway — or maybe it was the other way around — using the footage of celebrities arriving at his show as the show itself by broadcasting the images inside a theater filled with editors, buyers and friends of the house. The “show” culminated in the premiere of a special mini-episode of “The Simpsons” that follows Marge and Bart as they pursue modeling careers in Paris (all dressed in Balenciaga, of course).

The spring 2022 show featured a special mini-episode of “The Simpsons.” Courtesy of Balenciaga

Although he has many fans, Demna is not without his detractors. One journalist called his work at Vetements “the bastard attire of a broken generation,” while another recently admonished him for selling an $1,850 pair of torn and stained Balenciaga sneakers, a “barely wearable shoe costing more than some people’s monthly rent.” Demna was surprised by the reaction. “It’s just a dirty shoe,” he says. “But if you want it to be my shoe, it has to look like somebody just dug it out [of the ground].”

It’s not hard to understand why the designer frustrates some critics. It can feel at times like he’s throwing out too many ideas all at once, making it impossible to absorb any one of them. As he works through the attendant concerns of his own identity — as a Georgian refugee, an outsider with impostor syndrome and a gay man with body issues — he’s simultaneously expressing a broad spectrum of emotions and creating content for his fans the way they consume it: with the relentlessness of a million open tabs. Taken together, what Demna has accomplished isn’t just a selfie of the first designer who truly understands internet culture. It’s also a snapshot of a chaotic digital world.

And yet he is also a great assembler, decontextualizing, then recontextualizing, logos and memes — a $2,145 leather Balenciaga bag inspired by the big blue plastic totes sold at Ikea for 99 cents; a raincoat with a logo recalling the one from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign for Balenciaga’s fall 2017 men’s wear collection; a T-shirt advertising a fictional outpost of the now-defunct Planet Hollywood restaurant chain for Vetements’ spring 2020 collection — to create new logos and more memes. Part of what Demna has been able to do so well is poke fun at, while also being openly complicit in, fashion’s endless loop of iteration. Nothing is too banal to be copied. And therein lies something else that separates him: Whereas most designers are inspired by a pretty artwork or landscape, he’s more interested in the industrial, the unpretentious, the everyday. “I don’t like that luxury is always intended to communicate that you’re rich,” he says. “I’d rather wear a bag that doesn’t make me look like the rare bourgeois bitch who can afford it.”

The fall 2021 presentation came in the form of a video game titled “Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow.” Courtesy of Balenciaga

ON THE WAY to Demna’s new pied-à-terre in the Eighth Arrondissement of Paris, I pass by the string of luxury fashion stores, including Maison Margiela, Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga, that line the Avenue Montaigne. Although he moved away from the city six years ago — he and Gomez bought a home outside of Zurich, where Elvira now lives, too, and where, Demna says with relief, “everything is neutral and beige” — his work requires him to spend about half his time here. After walking a few flights up a grand marble staircase, I enter his apartment, which feels almost punitive in its emptiness yet somehow lived-in, too. From the foyer, a long hallway with herringbone parquet flooring leads to a balcony overlooking the Eiffel Tower just across the Seine. Along the corridor, there’s a Tejo Remy bench composed of neatly stacked Balenciaga blankets; a blue airbrush painting of a parent embracing their child titled “Hold” (2022) by the New York-based artist Austin Lee; and a vase of yellow chrysanthemums and carnations atop an antique console.

What Demna has accomplished isn’t just a selfie of the first designer who truly understands internet culture. It’s also a snapshot of a chaotic digital world.

In the dining room to the right, alcove shelves display assorted tchotchkes: six porcelain figurines of Diana, Princess of Wales; a glazed ceramic object made to resemble a Balenciaga sneaker; and a piggy bank. Demna leads the way into his kitchen, a mostly white box, where he brings a bottle of water and two Baccarat crystal tumblers to the table. He sighs contentedly. “I feel really empty in a good way,” he says. It’s the morning after his second couture show — and the nerve-racking dinner that followed — and he seems relieved. (It’s also the day of the show for Vetements, where his brother took over as creative director last year, but Demna, who left the brand in 2019, wouldn’t be attending: “I’ve had to learn to let that go,” he says, admitting that it took him about a year to do so. “It’s not my story anymore.”) The previous day, editors and clients gathered at 10 Avenue George V, the site of Balenciaga’s original salon, and watched, mesmerized, as he sent out models in molded black neoprene scuba dresses, pants composed of upcycled vintage leather wallets, sculptural aluminum-infused jersey shirts and a massive bell-shaped wedding gown with 820 feet of tulle that took 7,500 hours to embroider. The looks, which Demna refers to collectively as “a heritage-inspired futuristic extravaganza,” demanded as many as 10 fittings per garment, as opposed to the three or four he normally does for ready-to-wear.

Demna wears his own Balenciaga clothing, Balenciaga Toe Low sneakers in Black Knit and Balenciaga Couture Engineered by Mercedes-AMG F1 Applied Science face shield. Photograph by Lise Sarfati. Styled by Suzanne Koller

Over the phone a few weeks after the show, Nicole Kidman tells me that she ranks Demna among such designers as John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld and Alexander McQueen. “He uses fashion to communicate the world at this time,” she says, and compares Demna to the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. “Stanley would always say to me, ‘Don’t ever put me on a pedestal. Let me have bad ideas and make mistakes, otherwise we’re done for.’ ”

But it’s another compliment, given to him by Naomi Campbell over dinner the night of the show, that makes him emotional. “I felt in your approach,” he recalls her saying, “the way you made that dress” — creating a silhouette by pinning it down to the exact millimeter — “how important this work is and how much you were putting into it. You weren’t just making a dress with a Cristóbal collar. You understood the coutureness of it all.” He adds, “She said the last time she felt that was with Azzedine,” referring to the French Tunisian couturier Azzedine Alaïa, who died in 2017.

It’s then that Demna starts to cry. Between apologies, he wipes away tears with his sweatshirt sleeve; he normally saves this type of vulnerability for his work. “They just think I’m good at making sneakers and selling,” he says about his critics in the fashion establishment, although he seems to be referring, as well, to a longer, deeper history of rejection: the classmates who bullied him, the men who didn’t return his affection, the family members who turned on him. He pulls himself together and sits a little taller in his chair. “I’ve given myself a mission in fashion to make it move forward by questioning it, by never being satisfied, by challenging the status quo and whatever the rules have been telling us we’re supposed to do for the last 100 years.

“The roughness of certain silhouettes and the moods of my collections express a lot of [what] I went through,” he adds. “It’s easier to show pain or joy through my work than to say it out loud.” Though he is working on that, too. At the couture presentation, before the show got underway and the music began to swell, a poem was broadcast over the sound system. Demna had written it in French with the author Sophie Fontanel. “I love you,” said the A.I.-generated voice reading Demna’s words. “I have loved you for 30 years. I’ve been waiting for you since I was 10 years old. … I closed my eyes and I thought of you.” It was a love poem, of course, but also one of longing. And then the models started coming down the runway.

Models: Shivaruby at Storm Management, Toni Smith at Elite, Blessing Orji at IMG Models and Barbara Valente at Supreme. Hair: Gary Gill at Streeters. Makeup by Karin Westerlund at Artlist using Dr. Barbara Sturm. Set design by Giovanna Martial. Casting by Franziska Bachofen-Echt. Production: White Dot. Manicurist: Hanaé Goumri at The Wall Group. Digital tech: Daniel Serrato Rodriguez. Photo assistants: François Adragna, Jack Sciacca. Hair assistants: Tom Wright, Rebecca Chang, Natsumi Ebiko. Makeup assistant: Thomas Kergot. Set assistants: Jeanne Briand, Vincent Perrin. Styling assistants: Carla Bottari, Roxana Mirtea. All product images in this story courtesy of Balenciaga

I KNEW I was supposed to meet Lynda Benglis on a Thursday in Santa Fe, N.M., but I didn’t know exactly when or where. There was a vagueness surrounding our interview, and a sense of tension emanating from her gallery assistant and studio manager, as if the meeting might just as easily not happen as happen. After several hours of waiting, I got a call from her assistant: She had Benglis on the line. Benglis’s work is irreverent and definitive, no matter the medium, and I had expected someone prickly. But the voice that greeted me was easygoing, conspiratorial.

After making sure I was comfortably settled at my hotel and deciding that I should walk over to see her at one of her two homes in town, Benglis asked if I was wearing pants or a dress. It was hot out, and I figured she wanted me to stay cool. I had planned on pants, I told her. Should I reconsider? She laughed, a little seductively. “No!” she said. And then she added, “Have you ever jumped an adobe wall?” She would be waiting for me on her porch and suggested I simply climb over the wall. Her assistant interjected dryly, “She might just go through the gate.” But I told her I’d be game to try: Benglis, it quickly became clear, is the kind of person who’s fun to please.

When I arrived at her house, I discovered that scaling the wall would have been all but impossible — it was surrounded by bushes and trees — and was led through the back gate by a member of Benglis’s New Mexico team. In the yard, several small bronze sculptures of Benglis’s — squat, pocked, puckish — were scattered around the garden. I sat on a modest porch and waited. Minutes passed. Her assistant brought me a snack and periodically checked to see if I needed anything.

Benglis’s work sits at a meeting point between will and submission.

As I waited, I speculated about Benglis’s failure to appear. Was this her way of asserting control over the interview? An indication of profound disorganization? Or was she simply someone who lives by her own whims, unconcerned about anyone’s expectations?

Everything I knew about Benglis pointed to the last explanation. She is a giant of postwar American sculpture, a figure in the same cohort as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Richard Serra and Frank Stella. Though her art is collected by major institutions and, at 80, she is still exhibiting new work, she’s not accorded the same reverence as her male peers, and she’s far less renowned. This may have something to do with the art itself, which has a teasing, elusive quality and is impossible to categorize. Her work constantly shifts: in scale, materials and technique. Benglis has poured, molded, flung, cast, burned, stretched and dismantled wax, latex, bronze, cotton, glitter, paper, gold leaf, glass, ceramic. Few other artists have displayed such nerve, or been less obedient. She has shaped the trajectory of various artistic movements — the heroic eloquence of Abstract Expressionism, the grandeur and engineering feats of post-minimalism, the gaudy cleverness of pop — and yet belongs fully to none of those traditions.

You might view her oeuvre as an ongoing investigation of flow, her seemingly miraculous ability to arrest liquids. “If you think about each one of my works as a body,” Benglis told the curator Andrew Bonacina in 2020, “that body is always in motion.”

The artist’s “Untitled” (1970), one of a number of sculptures made with poured polyurethane foam. © 2022 Lynda Benglis/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), N.Y.

When Benglis finally appeared in her garden, after about 30 minutes, it was with little fanfare and no apologies. She wore a striped shirt, a silk scarf around her neck, a pearl necklace and loose leggings with a tie-dye pattern of blacks, whites and yellows — ladylike on top, psychedelic on the bottom. She sat down across from me and launched into a wildly associative stream of stories, starting from the very beginning. “I was born in Lake Charles, La.,” she said, describing a large house with five children, an overburdened and sensitive mother and a father who taught his daughters to be outdoorswomen. There was a cascade of names from her early days in New York in the ’60s, where she was quickly embraced as an innovator: Carl Andre, Jennifer Bartlett, Leo Castelli, Paula Cooper, Eva Hesse, Joan Mitchell, Barnett Newman. I couldn’t always follow the connections that she was making, but I was buoyed along by the darting currents of her thought.

Throughout our conversation, she kept returning to the subject of water — how she was attracted, ever since she was a girl, to what lived beneath it. “I learned to scuba dive in L.A.,” she told me, “and I went to Australia, scuba diving. New Zealand, diving.” The first time she did it, she felt great — “like I was back in the womb.” But this comforting sensation yielded to a sinister one: “They have the thing called rapture of the deep. If you’re down there too long or too deep, your brain changes.” She smiled and added, “These kinds of temptations interested me.”

I suggested that this close relationship between menace and wonder was important to Benglis, especially in relation to her varied materials, and her intimate, sensual relationship with each one. How does she know where to start?

The origins of her practice, she explained, are rooted in memories and intuitions. She began working her hands together as if she were holding two ropes. “I had a boat,” she said. “We had crawfish lines strung with a piece of bread.” The crawfish build muddy, bulbous mounds to protect themselves and their young. “They look like my textures,” she said. “I was born with the sense of building textures. We’re born with patterns.

“Close your eyes,” Benglis commanded. “We see things. So that in itself is a starting point: How do you pattern your energy?”

Benglis, photographed at her studio in Santa Fe. Justin French

BENGLIS’S CHILDHOOD WAS adventuresome and kinetic. Her father was an avid football player and all-around sportsman, and taught Benglis to throw and sail. She would go out on the water all day with her best friend, Norma Jean, crisscrossing the bayous in her 17-foot mahogany boat, collecting tadpoles and mosquito hawks or water-skiing. She takes some pride in being the eldest sibling — “I was the boss,” she said — but also felt encroached upon (her favorite things were always disappearing). After her youngest sister was born, her mother fell into a depression and received shock treatments. Her illness was a small calamity in an otherwise happy childhood. Though Benglis remains deeply attached to her two sisters and two brothers, she has no children of her own: Having to help her mother care for her siblings when they were little influenced her desire not to have a traditional family life.

The house was a place where art was made. Her mother was a seamstress and an amateur painter, and she would enlist her daughters in craft projects. Benglis’s father ran a building supply company, and she would sometimes join him on trips, sitting in the back seat of the car studying his catalogs full of materials (she still keeps sample catalogs of metals and resins in her house). On drives down to visit her father’s relatives in Mississippi, Benglis would beg him to stop at a fun house in New Orleans whose imagery became a touchstone of her work. “You could go in these carts and through the dark, and these things came out at you,” Benglis explained. “There were the phosphorescent environments. There was all this stuff: color, costumes, clowns.”

At Newcomb College in New Orleans, she majored in ceramics. She then attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art’s summer program in Connecticut, where many of her professors did figurative work in printmaking. Though she admired and was encouraged by some of her teachers, she felt a difference in her own way of thinking, an urge to push forward. “I knew that there was something that I could do that didn’t have to go back to the figure,” Benglis told me. “My brain wasn’t built for anything like that.”

She was eager to get to New York, and moved there in 1964, enrolling in the now-defunct Brooklyn Museum Art School, and eventually worked as a grade-school teacher. She was embraced by Barnett Newman and his wife, Annalee, who threw parties at their house for young artists, and hung out with the painter Gordon Hart (whom she briefly married), the sculptor Robert Murray and Stella. It was a time of wild invention and boundary pushing, the pinnacle of the postwar American art scene. Jasper Johns was making enigmatic bronze casts of beer cans. Andy Warhol was making screen prints of Marilyn Monroe and of the death chamber at New York’s Sing Sing Prison. Judd published his treatise on minimalism known as “Specific Objects,” in which he outlined a desire for a new kind of art that was “neither painting nor sculpture.” Benglis speaks of this heavily mythologized era with casual aplomb. The mood, she said, was: “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” Stella told me over the phone that he thought of Benglis as “Ms. Natural.” With her, art making seemed like “an untroubling enterprise.”

Benglis’s three towering fountains, “Bounty, Amber Waves, Fruited Plane” (2021), were part of a recent retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. © 2022 Lynda Benglis/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), N.Y. Photo: Kevin Todora Photography, courtesy of the Nasher Sculpture Center

She was working in an unheated studio downtown, using wax instead of paint on oblong surfaces that were the length of her arm — an oblique reference to her body. Benglis was interested in the liquidity of paint but disliked the idea of a frame or canvas. She painted with wax on Masonite board; each new layer would catch the irregularities of the previous brushstrokes, so that the surfaces became bumpy and sculptural, the wax creating a kind of skin. The paintings were sexy, a little disturbing: She called them “a mummified version of painting.” One day, she noticed how the wax kept spilling onto her studio’s floor. She’d been looking for a way to release herself from the limitations of a frame or a wall, and here it was: She would try throwing the material directly onto the ground. She opened the phone book and found a rubber maker with a small lab to mix custom latex paint for her. Back in her studio, she used buckets full of it and poured their contents in a heaving motion, the latex spreading like gorgeous chemical spills.

The poured sculptures were celebrated by critics, and Benglis, only 28, was profiled in Life and New York magazine. In the Life spread, a series of photographs shows her midpour, alongside a photo of Jackson Pollock flinging paint onto a canvas on the floor. She looks focused and determined, a female counterpart to the soulful Abstract Expressionists — yet her works wink at theirs, mocking the idea of the precious mark of the artist’s hand.

It pleased her that, soon after the Life article was published, she also appeared on the cover of Rubber Developments, a trade publication for the rubber industry. She liked everyday materials that were also used in things like pillows and bicycles. Warhol made art about mass-produced objects, but Benglis was among the first in the vanguard of artists who consistently incorporated industrial materials into their visual vocabularies. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the pours, slyly feminist and populist, were occasionally received with condescension. One of her early sculptures, a 33-foot-long piece called “Contraband,” was to be included in a major 1969 show of post-minimalism at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art called “Anti-Illusion,” but Benglis didn’t appreciate the spot the curator had chosen for her work — on a ramp. She pulled the piece.

In the following years, she continued to develop her practice of pouring, working with polyurethane foam, another liquid material that she could stop in its tracks, and which retained its look of softness and malleability even after it solidified. A number of the resulting foam works — “Quartered Meteor” (1969); “For Carl Andre” (1970) — seemed to ooze against the corners of gallery walls. They were at once naturalistic and cartoonish, attractive and repellent, inviting touch. She also began making huge interventions into the gallery space, building undulating armatures of wood and chicken wire up to 12 feet high, and then climbing on a ladder to pour polyurethane foam over them, wearing goggles and a mask. She called this strenuous work a kind of drawing or, borrowing a phrase from the art critic Robert Pincus-Witten, a “frozen gesture.” When the chicken wire frames were removed, what remained were huge, ghostly forms that seemed to leap off the gallery walls.

In 1971, Benglis used this method to create six large-scale installations at art institutions across the country. Some of her flying, lavalike monsters were lacquered black; others were colored bright red and pink; still others were coated in phosphorescent pigment — echoes of the thrilling fun house of her childhood. Sometimes, she had them taken down and destroyed in a matter of weeks. They were an expression of Benglis’s ferocity. She was a rigorous formalist, yes, but she was also theatrical, a kind of witch. The critic and curator Klaus Kertess wrote of two of these installations that “the intensity of their black rage is unprecedented in contemporary art … their openness and freedom are almost embarrassing to contemporary mores and aesthetics.” He meant this as a high compliment.

In “X-Ray” (1973-74), Benglis examines the knot form, a recurring subject. © 2022 Lynda Benglis/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), N.Y. Photo: Brian Buckley

BENGLIS WAS OFTEN photographed while making these monumental works. She knew the force of her own appeal — young, strong, a dancer in the air — and would deliberately face the camera from high up on a ladder. Her awareness of how her image was used in the press, and her desire to manipulate it, gave rise to a series of performances — in the form of videos, advertisements for her gallery shows and photographs — culminating in a work so provocative that it continues to define Benglis’s career, and the course of feminist art.

In 1974, knowing that a serious appraisal of her art by Pincus-Witten would be published in the November issue of Artforum, she placed an ad in the magazine, a work of art in its own right. It’s a portrait of her, naked, riding a comically large dildo and wearing winged sunglasses that obscure her eyes. Her mouth is suggestively open — though it’s hard to say whether she’s grimacing or in the throes of pleasure. Her body is slicked with oil, and she flaunts her tan lines and rib cage, shoulders up, elbow bent, ass out: an exaggerated posture of arousal. Despite its in-your-face sexuality, the image is complex. It’s trashy but defiant, exploitative but self-possessed, intended to poke at the primness of the art establishment and what Benglis saw as the rigidity of feminism — another movement she was adjacent to but not quite a part of.

The ad scandalized the art world, and prompted endless feminist debates: Was she debasing herself by pandering to men or breaking open constraints on female desire and making space for unbridled self-expression? (Two of the magazine’s editors were so offended that the ad had run at all that they famously left Artforum to establish the more conservative journal October.) The image is considered one of the most important Pop and feminist artworks of the 20th century — up there with Warhol’s bananas in the change it wrought in art history — but it is an anomaly in Benglis’s career. The rest of her work, though highly charged, is never so explicit. Yet the aura of controversy surrounding her as a result of the ad has never entirely dissipated, and has arguably eclipsed discussion of her enormous body of work, which is, subtly, more radical.

She was a rigorous formalist, yes, but she was also theatrical, a kind of witch.

That image of her, which would go on to appear in hundreds of art history articles and syllabuses, is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget that it’s part of a larger sequence of photographs, made in the early ’70s, that Benglis called “sexual mockeries.” In these images she explored social role-playing, posing herself as a seductress, as a woman on a pedestal, swaggering next to a car. She was trying on personae, creating a reel of feminine archetypes and burlesques that she could adopt and discard with ease — anticipating by several years photographers like Cindy Sherman, with her experiments in constructing selves, and Nan Goldin’s unguarded depictions of sexuality. Benglis scrambled the categories of objectified and objectifier, and modeled gender fluidity decades before such conversations would go mainstream.

Looking at the Artforum ad almost half a century after its original publication, you feel less shock than wonder at its ambiguity. (Benglis’s studio assistants told me they still receive requests to reproduce it several times a year. It remains controversial; New York Times standards prevent it from being shown here.) Seen alongside the next 40 years of her career, the image feels like a sketch for ideas Benglis would elaborate with more suppleness: the contradictory experience of living in a body, the relationship between attraction and repulsion, the willfulness and even aggression that go into making art and presenting it to the world. Benglis doesn’t relish being asked about the ad in interviews; she tends to answer questions about it with what feels like put-on guilelessness. “I was just trying to express myself,” she told me. “That’s it.”

“I knew that there was something that I could do that didn’t have to go back to the figure,” Benglis said. “My brain wasn’t built for anything like that.” Justin French

IN ADDITION TO a studio complex in the desert, Benglis has two properties in Santa Fe, about a mile apart from one another. The first, where I initially met her, is a traditional adobe structure built in 1931 — low, cool, compact, bristling with bright paintings by friends and raffish clay vessels she made in college that already look like Benglis’s. The other house, built in 1915, is much wider, with airier rooms. She likes to move between the two, depending on her mood. In fact, she usually migrates all over the place — between a home in Walla Walla, Wash., near one of the foundries where she casts her bronzes; her loft in SoHo; her studio on the Bowery; her house and studio in the Hamptons; her grandmother’s ancestral home on an island in Greece — but during Covid-19 she’d stayed put for longer stretches than she was used to. She said she can decorate a house in two weeks flat.

To spend time with Benglis is to submit to her insistent sharing of appetites — I must make time to go to Ojo Caliente spa near Santa Fe, I must meet some of her artist friends in town (“I’m really here for you,” I told her at one point, to which she replied rather sharply: “Well, look, I like to always share. I don’t believe in categorization”), I must see the Girard collection of toys at Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art, and acquire a dachshund like hers. Near the end of our time together, she took charge of the conversation to tell me about her dreams, explaining that they always have the same preamble. “I shut my eyes and I would be on a platter, like a bird, bound,” she said. “I went through a long warm oven.” There would be doors on either side of her and she would always choose where the dream went next. It was important to her to get this across: Even while dreaming, she was making choices, exerting her will.

When it felt like the conversation had lost momentum for a moment, prompting me to ask if she needed a break, she never took the openings I gave her to retreat. A wave of languor would pass and then we’d be on to the next thing — a meal of lemony roast chicken and cold carrots; a conversation about her great love, the molecular biologist, philanthropist and collector Anand Sarabhai, her partner for over 30 years before he died in 2013. Benglis told me that when Sarabhai died, she knew she didn’t want anyone else. Her restlessness seems to have found a permanent home with him.

Benglis speaks the way she works, changing topics like she changes materials. She is committed to anything that interests her — until it doesn’t anymore, and then she finds a new thing to push and pull. For several decades, Benglis was fascinated by knots. “Everything is a knot,” she told the poet and teacher Judith Tannenbaum in 2009. “A growing plant is a knot, a body is a knot, every embryo is a knot.” First, she began making knots out of aluminum wire mesh that she covered with cotton muslin or gauze and then with plaster. She would twist and tie these and color them with glittery paint, hanging them on the wall. She later created metalized knots, spraying them with vaporized metals; other knots were encased in sheets of brilliant gold leaf. Knots eventually transformed into fans, pleated wire mesh forms that she also sprayed with metal, and which evoke lungs, angels, flight.

Even as she fashioned these smaller, creaturely objects, she kept working on a large scale, making monumental fountains that were displayed in the United States and Europe, and ceramic sculptures that she would put through an extruder so that they came apart in places, which she would then mold with her hands so that they bore the marks of both machine and human. She enlarged some of these and cast them in shiny metals — jagged, ritzy trophies. She was also fashioning chicken wire into gracefully twisting forms, echoes of the Gothic churches and the caryatids she had seen as a girl with her grandmother on a trip to Greece, layering them with thick, wet sheets of paper. When the paper dried, it took on an unpredictable topography.

For “Contraband” (1969), Benglis poured pigmented latex directly onto the floor, collapsing the boundaries between painting and sculpture. © 2022 Lynda Benglis/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), N.Y. Collection: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

After a long day of sitting and talking, Benglis was suddenly restless. She wanted to show me some of the paper pieces she’d been working on in her studio. So she flung an orange scarf around her neck, and off we drove in her white pickup truck. The day was cooling and there was a wildfire in the desert, the progress of which Benglis tracked with fascination as smoke hurled itself into the sky. She studied the clouds — a bulging one that resembled one of her sculptures caught her attention. “Looks like a brain,” she said. “The cloud has a mind.” We got off the highway and bounced down a rugged road, parking at her studio complex comprising three adobe buildings. Here, Benglis stalked around, purposeful, watching the progress of the smoke, noticing disapprovingly the trees that had been improperly watered, studying a new angle of shadow on the mountain across the arroyo. We walked to another building, her main work space, and calm descended. Benglis said: “This is a gentle place here. It’s like a church to me.”

A number of her paper pieces hung on the walls, all captured in a posture of stilled transformation, as if she had fixed them in their moment of becoming. Many of them were painted in glimmering reds, greens, blacks. Glitter is another material that connects to a sensual experience from Benglis’s childhood: She wore a sparkly outfit in dance class, twisting her baton, thrilling to the possibilities of performance. Modern glitter was invented in the mid-30s, and it made a big impression on her as a girl. “Sequins were one thing,” she said, “but sparkles were just something else.” She sat down on a low stool and looked up at the pieces on the wall. “To me, they express themselves. They look back at you.”

In another building were more recent examples of her paper pieces, which she’d made to look cracked and decaying. They were white, unpainted, their skins peeling to reveal their chicken wire girding. The process of the paper drying “animates them,” Benglis told me. “The cracks and crevices animate them — as we have in our earth cracks, and crevices in our faces and our skins.” She looked, perhaps for the first time that day, earnest. The works made her think, she said, of “eroding, death.” Some of the paper pieces were far away, at shows in Dallas and Philadelphia, but these she was keeping close. She wasn’t finished finding out what could happen with them.

BENGLIS’S FINAL EXHORTATION to me was to go see an exhibition of her work at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. I must see her group of three fountains, “Bounty, Amber Waves, Fruited Plane,” unofficially referred to as “The Bounties,” that were installed in the garden, completed last year. I changed my ticket and stopped there on my way home the next day.

One of the paths to the fountains is through the alleyway created by a 1987 Richard Serra work called “My Curves Are Not Mad,” two 14-foot-tall walls of Cor-Ten steel, each seeming to list, perilously, toward the other, creating a narrowed perspective. The corridor it forms is about 10 feet long, cocooning and oppressive, and you can’t see your way out until you’ve almost come to the end.

When I emerged into the light a few seconds later, I was greeted by Benglis’s work. Like “My Curves Are Not Mad,” the piece insists on its own grandeur, while gently rebuking Serra’s intensity. Benglis’s sculpture consists of three 25-foot-tall fountains, each constructed out of a pile of bulbous, cone-shaped bowls suggestive of her childhood crawfish mounds, their height both sublime and goofy. It made me laugh. If you stand too close to the fountains, they splash you a bit, inviting you to play.

Benglis’s work sits at a meeting point between will and submission. Her manipulation of materials, her way of catching transformation in the act, may be masterful, but she also courts spontaneity. Her work requires a period of waiting — as the rubber hardens, the paper adheres to the wire, the water rushes out of dozens of hidden valves. Emerging from the darkness to encounter the sculptures felt like another invitation from Benglis, the same one she has been offering to herself for most of her life: Stay with this for however long you like. You know what to do next.

BRODIE IS A platinum blond, loose curls cascading down the shoulders. Lil Flip is a raven do with ends flipped up just so, flirty and fierce. And then there’s Pee Wee, a mod black bob reminiscent of Ringo Starr’s mop top circa 1966, around the time the Beatles gave up all pretense that they were just four nice lads from Liverpool. On a Saturday night in mid-August, the three are arranged on Lucite wig stands in Anderson .Paak’s dressing room backstage at the Dolby Live amphitheater at the Park MGM resort in Las Vegas. A stylist attends to them while .Paak lounges on a sofa, fuzzy Kangol bucket hat on his head, blacked-out Gucci shades on his eyes, wearing shorts and a short-sleeved button-up shirt open at the chest to reveal a “Hotter Than July”-era braided-and-beaded Stevie Wonder tattoo.

At 36, .Paak seems to have it all figured out: how to have his hair done from 10 feet away; how to pair commercial success with critical acclaim, as he has with Silk Sonic, the soulful superduo he conceived in 2017 with the pop star Bruno Mars, which will be playing in about two hours; how to make music that defies and defines genres, as demonstrated by the multiple collaborations he’s released just this past summer with everyone from the pop singer and actress Hailee Steinfeld to the Haitian Canadian house producer Kaytranada; how to be a married man and father to two young children.

But I can’t stop thinking about those wigs. Anyone who’s followed .Paak’s career since his 2014 studio album debut, “Venice,” or before that, with his direct-to-SoundCloud releases as Breezy Lovejoy during the early 2000s, knows that he has a penchant for hats. He owns hundreds, from thrift-store fedoras to knitted beanies to the bucket hats you’ll often see him rocking today. What began as a practical workaround for the common condition of thinning hair soon became a point of pride. “That’s gonna be my whole thing,” he recalls thinking. “Kids are gonna dress like me for Halloween!”

Then “I realized that every pop icon had a head of hair on them,” he says, in the swaggering yet self-effacing tone he adopts when picking up awards, another thing he’s been doing these days. Visions of Prince and Rick James, Robert Plant and Bon Jovi dance in my head. “I’m [messed] up in the game if I think I’m gonna make it real big as a musical icon and I ain’t got something I can swing,” he says, whipping his head back and forth. Then he goes still and, through smoky lenses, I see his eyes clearly for the first time. “It really was an epiphany,” he says. “I put it on, and it just did something to my soul.”

“Soul” is an essential term for .Paak, so much so that he gave his firstborn son the name. .Paak is a living embodiment of this bedrock Black musical tradition that variously expresses itself in gospel and funk, hip-hop and punk. Soul is the imperative governing all of his music: the will to move the crowd. You can hear him do just that on his 2016 breakout hit, “Come Down.” In under three minutes, .Paak sings, raps and chants. He grunts and he moans. Words are ancillary to feeling, and feeling expresses itself in rhythm. “The way he attacked [the track] reminds me of, like, James Brown,” the Cincinnati-based hip-hop producer Hi-Tek, who made the beat, said in 2017.

.Paak wears a Louis Vuitton jacket, $15,700, and pants, $1,370, louisvuitton.com; Kenzo hat, price on request, kenzo.com; Vans x Anderson .Paak shoes, $120; and his own glasses. Photograph by D’Angelo Lovell Williams. Styled by Ian Bradley

Vocally, .Paak is more Sly Stone than Brown, but he shares with the latter a genius for rhythm. Both artists exercise their voices as emotionally percussive instruments. “In my older music,” .Paak says of the songs he released on SoundCloud, “I loved being inside of the beats and just vibing.” Often he was simply “swagging out,” relying on attitude and delivery rather than on vocal arrangement and songcraft. But with “Come Down” and “Suede,” another 2016 song that figures prominently in his rise to stardom, .Paak unlocked a signature style: raspy in its low registers, honeyed in its highs. “[Someone on] Twitter describes it as if Newports could sing,” he says with pride. He raps with rhythmic subtlety, exploring the possibilities within the pocket of the beat, while exercising a melodic impulse by punctuating phrases with artful vocal runs. He sings, often sublimely, as on Silk Sonic’s “Put On a Smile,” by making the limitations of his physical instrument a part of his style, exerting control over volume, timbre and phrasing. His is a voice under pressure that sometimes sounds just this side of fraying. “It’s not pretty,” .Paak says. Voices capable of conveying such depth of emotion rarely are.

Though .Paak is rooted in tradition, he’s not in thrall to it. Rather, he is activating the past in the present to secure a future for Black music. “There’s no way we could make this funk and bring it into the new age without [our audience] knowing that this is where it starts,” he says. Soul music was medicine for a wounded people emerging from the 1960s, confronting the reality that the legal advances of the civil rights movement and the martyrdom of a generation’s great leaders did not deliver unfettered freedom. For our parents and our grandparents, at least some measure of freedom could be found on the dance floor, at the rent parties and discos that gave way to the block parties and basement jams of hip-hop. The music and the movement enacted a ritual of sonic expiation, a freedom born in sound. We need that sweet soul music urgently again today. .Paak is among the few who supply it.

The ‘closest I get to meditation,’ .Paak says, is playing drums. ‘That’s the closest I feel like I am to God.’

IT’S RARE TO find a picture of .Paak where he isn’t smiling — in family photo albums and fan selfies, photo shoots and promotional images. In August, he hopped on a viral trend, started on TikTok, where users posted their own blackmail-worthy photos of adolescent awkwardness to a pitched-up chorus from the one-hit wonder Wheatus’s 2000 anthem “Teenage Dirtbag.” In the 13-second clip he posted to Instagram, .Paak first appears as his effortlessly cool present-day self, with chunky shades and a straw-colored beanie. A scrapbook follows: .Paak with his prom date; blowing out candles on a chocolate cake; wearing a pink lei around his neck on high school graduation day. In all the images, he looks well-fed and happy, usually with glasses on — the corrective kind, not the cool kind. The clip is at once self-deprecating and celebratory, embracing .Paak’s past while marking the distance he’s traveled.

“I’ve always been a silly person who likes to have fun and joke around,” .Paak says. “My mom tells me my dad was the same way. But he was from Philly, from one of the hardest places — his [twin] brother, too. And I don’t see no pictures of them smiling,” he says, then pauses. “Maybe those years of hard living from ancestors meant that I could finally smile because they couldn’t.” He considers this, and the way that he’s dressed. “People died in order for my smiley ass to come out here and carry a Gucci purse.”

From left: .Paak hosting a party in Los Angeles; in Paris in June for Fashion Week; at this year’s Met Gala after-party; onstage at the 2022 Grammys; and performing in New Orleans in 2016. From left: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Selvarey; Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images; Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times; Rich Fury/Getty Images for the Recording Academy; RMV/Shutterstock

.Paak was born Brandon Paak Anderson on Feb. 8, 1986, in the city of Oxnard, Calif., a coastal community 60 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. His mother, Brenda Paak Bills, of Black and Korean heritage, was adopted from a South Korean orphanage by a Black American couple who lived in Compton and then in Oxnard. His father, Ronald Anderson, relocated from Philadelphia to Southern California after joining the Navy. The couple met at a nightclub in 1982, married in 1985, then had .Paak seven months later, and his sister Fielding two years after that. (.Paak is the second youngest in a blended family of nine siblings.) Brenda had a hustler’s mentality; .Paak recalls her working all the time during his childhood, building a strawberry farm business that eventually had her wholesaling to grocery stores and restaurants. Ronald held things down as best he could at home, though he suffered from addiction and was in and out of rehab.

One summer evening in 1993, a 7-year-old .Paak and his 5-year-old sister witnessed their father confront their mother as she came home from work. He threatened her with a gun and began strangling her in the middle of the street. Charged with attempted murder, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison, of which he would serve six and a half. He died in 2011. A decade after the assault, .Paak’s mother — who had remarried, moved the family to a sprawling home in the foothills of Ventura and given up the strawberry business after consecutive harvests ruined by El Niño — engaged with her husband in a series of business dealings that caught the attention of the F.B.I. She pleaded guilty to 22 counts of securities fraud and spent seven and a half years in prison. When she was released in 2011, .Paak was 25 years old. He’d been homeless for a time, during which he relied on friends for shelter.

Listen closely to .Paak’s songs from his solo projects and you’ll hear an autobiography told in fragments. Pieced together, the lyrics present a mosaic of a fractured life made whole through the sustaining love of family — both biological and chosen — and the restorative power of art. On “The Season/Carry Me,” a two-part, nearly six-minute-long song from .Paak’s sophomore album, “Malibu” (2016), he makes it plain: “Your mom’s in prison / Your father need a new kidney / Your family’s splitting, rivalries between siblings.” Later in the song, he offers a summation without self-pity: “When I look at my tree, I see leaves missing / Generations of harsh living and addiction.” The chorus of “Carry Me” voices a searching question, left unanswered: “Mama, can you carry me?” Two years later, on “Saviers Road,” titled after a well-known street in Oxnard, .Paak recounts one of his most memorable hustles — processing marijuana plants: “Trimmin’ flowers in the Marriott with little cuz / Send ’em off to Arizona, let ’em build a buzz.”

In 2004, the recordings that .Paak, who had just graduated from high school, was making in his bedroom and posting online began to attract the interest of labels. He resisted, however, their plans to package him and constrain his sound (“I didn’t have anything they could really market,” he told the comedian Marc Maron on his podcast in 2019. “This is in the height of crunk music” — up-tempo, club-oriented hip-hop — “and that’s really what they wanted me to make”), so he turned down those opportunities and even considered quitting music for a time. But over the next decade, he established himself as a fixture in the Los Angeles music scene, along with his band, the Free Nationals. Through his 20s and early 30s he was a session player, a onetime drummer for the former “American Idol” contestant Haley Reinhart, a successful touring performer and an eager collaborator with artists across genres.

.Paak at the Mark Hotel in New York for the Met Gala in May. Calla Kessler for The New York Times

It was shortly before a 2015 meeting with Dr. Dre that he decided he needed a different name; he just couldn’t introduce himself to the rapper and producer as Breezy Lovejoy. The “Anderson” is self-explanatory. “Paak,” which he gets from his mother, is an accidental corruption of “Park,” the third most common surname in South Korea. As for that period, he explained it most clearly to an NPR interviewer back in 2016: “The dot stands for ‘detail,’” he said. “I spent a lot of time working on my craft, developing my style and, after I came out of my little incubation, I promised that I would pay attention to detail.” In the years since he signed with Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment label in 2016, .Paak has won eight Grammys, half of them on a single night (April 3, 2022) for a single song (Silk Sonic’s “Leave the Door Open”). Together, making their way to accept the final award of the night, for Record of the Year, .Paak and Mars struck a choreographed pose, then strutted up to the stage. “Listen, listen, listen,” .Paak began. “We are really trying our hardest to remain humble at this point. But in the industry, we call that a clean sweep!” Then he flipped his wig.

.PAAK’S BRAVADO, HIS love of fashion, his whole persona — from the wigs to the red-carpet antics (witness him at this year’s Met Gala affecting an English accent) — all place him in the long vernacular tradition of the trickster. In 1958, making the case for the jazz legend Louis Armstrong as the epitome of the archetype, Ralph Ellison offered a description that could also apply to .Paak: “[H]e emphasizes the physicality of his music with sweat, spittle and facial contortions; he performs the magical feat of making romantic melody issue from a throat of gravel.” As different as they are, Armstrong and .Paak both transform personal pain into public joy through feel-good music that issues from its proximity to, rather than its distance from, suffering.

Sometimes when he is alone, like on a long flight, “I just break out and start crying randomly,” .Paak says. “I’ll just be watching a random thing on TV and I’ll start sobbing. Even watching a blank screen and just sobbing.” The smile on his face is both a genuine expression of joy and a way to master pain. “I smile when I’m happy, smile when I’m angry,” he says, “smile when I’m hungry, smile when I’m full.” The smile, like the wigs, helps free him to make art out of even his most brutal experiences.

.Paak is in a period of reconciliation now — with his past, and with what he wants to do next artistically. He has grown increasingly close to his mother, who lives in Atlanta these days in a home he bought for her. He and his wife, the South Korean-born musician Heyyoun Chang, have two sons (Soul, 11, and Shine, 5). During quarantine, when touring stopped, .Paak seized on the opportunity to connect with his family, especially with his older son, who was interested in building his YouTube channel. .Paak went to work, filming skits for Soul. The channel grew even as his son’s interest shrank, and .Paak has gone on to direct lush and cinematic music videos for himself and others, including Leon Bridges (“Motorbike”) and DOMi & J.D. Beck (“Smile” and “Take a Chance”), the first artists signed to his new label, Apeshit, Inc. At June’s BET Awards, .Paak was named Video Director of the Year. And he’s signed on to direct and star in his first feature film, a dramatic comedy called “K-Pops!,” in which .Paak plays a washed-up American musician who travels to South Korea and discovers he has a son (played by Soul) who is part of an up-and-coming K-pop group. What begins as a calculated attempt to restart his career on the back of his estranged son’s burgeoning fame becomes a story about fatherhood and redemption.

Yet what still brings him the most solace — and inspires the most fervor in fans — hasn’t changed. The “closest I get to meditation,” he says, is playing drums. “That’s the closest I feel like I am to God.” The history of popular music has only a handful of drummer-lead singers, though among them are some of the greats. A few choose to step away from the drums when moving to the front of the stage, like the Eagles’ Don Henley and Genesis’s Phil Collins, while others continue to do double duty, like Sheila E. and the Band’s Levon Helm. .Paak began drumming out of necessity; he and his band couldn’t lock the right drummer down and, besides, it was “one less person to split the money with.”

But .Paak was also made for the drums. He heard rhythms in his head before he knew what to do with them. In elementary school, he would tap on tabletops and try to beatbox. “The teachers started calling me saying that Brandon was disturbing the class because he was noisy,” .Paak’s mother told the ESPN reporter (and her former Oxnard neighbor) Dwayne Bray, who in 2021 published an account of .Paak’s family life. When .Paak was in middle school, his stepfather bought him his first drum kit; his mother, recognizing her son’s talent, encouraged him to play along to soul music: Archie Bell and the Drells, lots of James Brown. By age 12, at the prompting of his godsister, he began attending a Baptist church, where he learned the importance of paying dues. “I was there every day just in the pews, waiting for my chance to play,” .Paak recalls. “I couldn’t play that well, but I got better and better. Before I knew it, I was playing every song.”

Drumming in church taught .Paak versatility; he had to switch up the rhythm at the whim of the preacher, the singer, the congregants or all of them at once. It also taught him humility; as a musician in service to the Lord, he had to accept his role as God’s vessel. He started playing drums in school, too, learning about jazz and funk, rock and punk. When he attended punk shows, .Paak noticed an unlikely connection between how kids moved in a mosh pit and how worshipers did in church when struck by the spirit. “It’s just energy,” he says. “It’s all based off different breaks in the music, right?”

Black American music inhabits the intersection of the sacred and the profane. .Paak’s signature call of “Yes, Lawd!” is born of hundreds of hours spent in service to the spirit. It helped prepare him for secular stardom. Soul and gospel share a language of supplication, for a lover or for the Lord; singers brought to their knees in carnal passion or in prayer. Performing for a Silk Sonic audience in Las Vegas, .Paak says, is “like playing for a bunch of Black church people that are singing the songs with so much energy.”

Another rare image of .Paak without a smile. Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, $1,600, pants, $8,900, and glasses, $570, celine.com; Judy Turner tank top, $250; Vans x Anderson .Paak shoes; and his own jewelry. Photograph by D’Angelo Lovell Williams. Styled by Ian Bradley

THE SOLD-OUT SATURDAY night concert I attend is Silk Sonic’s 30th since February, after an early summer hiatus during which .Paak played for 100,000 fans a night while opening for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Europe. It seems like an unusually diverse crowd for a Vegas show: a plurality of Black women in their 30s, 40s and 50s, but people of all ages and races, too. In my section alone, I talk to a young Black father and his 11-year-old son; two 20-something Korean couples; a white husband and wife in their 70s.

.Paak and Mars are unlikely musical partners. Given their adulation for all things 1970s — the poster for their Vegas residency features Mars in a bell-bottom leisure suit and .Paak in a wide-collared satin shirt — you might consider them as an updated version of TV’s Odd Couple: Mars as the fastidious Felix and .Paak as let-it-all-hang-out Oscar. When working in the studio, Mars obsesses over songcraft, exploring the possibilities in pre-chorus and chorus, verse and hook, whereas .Paak favors a vibe-driven approach. In their collaboration, which they developed when .Paak was opening for Mars during a 2017 tour of Europe, they’ve found something that neither could achieve alone. “My ears are different now,” .Paak says.

‘I couldn’t play that well, but I got better and better. Before I knew it, I was playing every song.’

About a half-hour before curtain, I’m asking .Paak what it’s been like to share the stage with Mars, one of the most accomplished showmen in entertainment. Does he ever feel overmatched? “That’s the fun of it,” he responds. “To be with one of the best, man. He has such a good understanding of entertainment because he’s been entertaining since he was a —”

As if on cue, the door flies open and it’s Mars. Instead of a greeting, he starts singing: “Cut my life into pieces!”

.Paak, still lounging on the couch, jumps up and belts his response: “This is my last resort!”

Mars grunts some power chords (“Junt-dunt. Junt-dunt”), accompanied by a mean air guitar. I recognize it as the opening bars of the nu-metal band Papa Roach’s 2000 hit, “Last Resort,” an old song not yet burnished by nostalgia. But .Paak and Mars embrace it without irony, performing an impromptu 30-second cover for an intimate audience: me and .Paak’s longtime photographer and videographer, Israel Ramos.

“They got that and, uh: Do you have the time …” Mars sings.

“To listen to me whine,” .Paak responds, answering the call of Green Day’s 1994 hit “Basket Case.”

“Now do the harmony,” Mars commands.

Their voices intertwine, with .Paak taking the main vocal line and Mars singing high harmony: “Sometimes I give myself the creeps.”

“You gotta say it like ‘crepes,’” Mars says, smiling like a schoolboy.

“Sometimes I give myself the crepes. / Sometimes my mind plays tricks on maaaay!”

“Start a mosh pit!” .Paak says.

.Paak performs as D.J. Pee .Wee at the Museum of Modern Art in June. Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

On his way out the door, Mars turns to make eye contact with me and with Ramos: “What up, y’all?” Then he’s gone. The whole thing lasts two minutes. It tells you all you need to know about Silk Sonic: the spontaneity and play, the rigor and craft.

Theirs is a show fit for the Las Vegas stage, with an eight-piece band; big, brassy horns; sequined suits; tightly choreographed dance moves; just the right amount of pyrotechnics. Mars’s vocal runs, his steps and slides, are flawless. Meanwhile, .Paak does most of the patter, teasing the crowd, exhorting them. Twice they roar simply because he takes off his sunglasses. The rapport between the two men is irrepressible; their repartee might be the most vintage part of the evening, harking back not to 1970s funk and soul but to the vaudeville of the 1910s.

Later that night, around 12:30 a.m., at a club called the Barbershop, .Paak, in a blue Gucci suit (Mars once teased him for being a “Gucci whore”) with Brodie on his head, and Mars, casual in a short-sleeved shirt with crisply pleated white pants, red Solo cup in hand, rip through a set of new rock standards — including the well-rehearsed “Last Resort” — in a surprise show. Then, around 1:30 a.m., they make their way to the Main Room, part of a speakeasy called On the Record at the Park MGM, where .Paak (as D.J. Pee .Wee, but with the Brodie wig still in place) spins vinyl for hours with the Las Vegas D.J. and promoter Eddie McDonald by his side pulling albums from the walls. Mars dances most of the time, clinking cups with whoever’s at arm’s length, as .Paak plays Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” and the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).”

Back when .Paak was still just Brandon, he frequently went with his mother and some of his friends to Las Vegas when she and his stepfather would gamble. He and his friends would explore, starting from the family’s comped suite at Caesars Palace and stretching out across the Strip. “I just loved going to restaurants, going to the pool, [ordering] room service and seeing shows,” he recalls — the entertainers Siegfried & Roy, the illusionist David Copperfield, the magicians Penn & Teller, the comedian Carrot Top. He saw Earth, Wind & Fire, even Wayne Newton. “I think that set the standard for me, as far as entertainment goes,” he says. “Vegas is a place where you can’t be out here and have a bad show.”

When his mother walks the Strip now to go watch her son perform, she can see him projected 30 feet tall against the sides of buildings. “It’s crazy, man,” .Paak admits. He still carries the underdog inside of him from all of those years of work and struggle and perseverance. If Mars is a celebrity in a traditional sense, .Paak is one in a different mold — the wigs, the glasses, the hats: All of them help him maintain some anonymity. “I’m hiding in plain sight,” .Paak says. When he cracks a joke backstage about being on billboards but still having to talk his way into clubs, I catch a glimpse of the kid on that Oxnard street 30 years ago. Then he delivers the punchline, which is also the truth: “That’s me!” he says, pointing to the sky. “That’s me right there.”

Hair by Adrianne Michelle at Six K L.A. Grooming by Alana Wright Palau using Shiseido at the Canvas Agency. Set design by Kelly Infield. Production: Connect the Dots. Photo assistant: Rashad Allen Royal. Set designer’s assistant: Kayla Ephros. Tailor: Olena Pletenetskaya. Stylist’s assistant: Andrew McFarland

IF MICHELLE WILLIAMS had been cast to play you in a movie, she’d do all the things you’d think she’d do: She’d watch you in videos and interview your family members. But she might also meditate on a piece of jewelry you liked. She might request a set of teeth to shape her mouth like yours. She might decide those teeth were not good enough and ask for a better, more natural set. She might invent a back story about your grandmother or send the director photos of hairstyles that you wore — or that she thinks the version of you that she’s playing, who is not actually you, would have worn. She’s not an impersonator; she’s an actor. She takes the character in the script, gathers scraps of relevant evidence, imagines the rest and then imbues it with whatever parts of herself will meld. She works hard, but the part that’s all empathy, which spills out of her and fills up her performances, comes naturally.

Steven Spielberg recently cast Williams to play his mother, or the role closely modeled on his mother, in his new film, “The Fabelmans,” out next month. The movie tells the story of the American director’s own unusual family upbringing. A concert pianist, a restaurateur, a pet monkey adopter, his mother, Leah Adler, was a charismatic partner in play for her son, someone who nurtured him creatively and loved him fiercely. At times, the filming was difficult: Spielberg, 75, has lost both his mother and his father in the past six years. Seeing his own childhood brought to life in such vivid detail sometimes left him flooded with emotion. In one of those moments, Spielberg says, he found solace in the woman who remained enough in character, even off camera, to comfort him in just the way he needed to be comforted. “Michelle knew how to hug me,” he says, “the way my mom used to.”

Louis Vuitton shirt, price on request, louisvuitton.com; and A.P.C. Jane Birkin pants, $325, apc-us.com. Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Charlotte Collet

WILLIAMS, WHO IS 5-foot-4, keeps her container small: She doesn’t go for big heels or hair. Her cut is short and close to her head; she prefers ballet flats, her feet as near to the ground as possible. Right now, she is expecting a baby, due this fall, her third child, and her second with her husband, Thomas Kail, who is best known for directing “Hamilton” (2015). But Williams appears serene when she turns up in June at a cafe of her choosing in Brooklyn, a place near her home that’s ordinary enough to be almost empty. In jeans and a crisp white maternity shirt, she seems not just content but in a state of surprise at the pleasures that the past three years have brought her: marriage, a second child, a third pregnancy, low-key joy over family dinner. “It’s like I’ve walked a path that was rocky, and I didn’t know where it was going,” she says. “And it led to a meadow. And here I am in the meadow.”

Even the most casual observers of popular culture might forever associate Williams, 42, with a kind of tragic embodiment of grief, in life and in art. Williams lost Heath Ledger, the legendary actor who was the father of her daughter, Matilda, when she was 27 and he was 28; in “Manchester by the Sea” (2016), released eight years later, a scene of her as a bereft mother, tearfully trying to assuage her ex-husband’s pain, is surely the most indelible of the film. Williams offers audiences portrayals that seem to encompass the agony the public associates with her youth, while also transcending it, making of it something original in each iteration. For much of her career, her characters have suffered in ordinary lives, often because of a longing that threatens to undo them: the charmless, unvarnished Wendy, of “Wendy and Lucy” (2008), a lost soul determined to make her way to Alaska; a bright woman in “Blue Valentine” (2010) who mistakes deep romance for the makings of a marriage; a young wife in “Take This Waltz” (2011) who pursues sexual desire with the wobbling propulsion of a child intent on learning to walk. Such performances make her a rare kind of leading lady, a character actor whose visual appeal is just another tool in her possession. By the time she played Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn” (2011), Williams had earned the right to inhabit a mythic figure whose fragility was partly what made her so much larger than life. Eight years later, she won her first Emmy and her second Golden Globe Award for her crackling, complicated portrayal of the 20th-century Broadway star Gwen Verdon, the collaborator and wife of the brilliant but philandering choreographer Bob Fosse, in the FX mini-series “Fosse/Verdon” (2019). Verdon demanded much of herself and of others, in her relationships, in her work, and Williams captured that hunger, along with the vulnerability that so much wanting lays bare. With the part of Mitzi Fabelman, Williams seems to be building on that energy, with a brave, at times gutting portrayal of a loving, conflicted mother who brings more drama into her family’s life than is easy for them to bear.

Williams wears a Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, $1,450, celine.com. Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Charlotte Collet

Spielberg says he first noticed Williams, who had a starring role on the television series “Dawson’s Creek,” when he watched the show with his kids in the late ’90s. He has followed her closely ever since: “There’s not a lying bone in her body of work,” says the director, who started thinking of her seriously for the role of Mitzi while working on the screenplay with its co-writer, the playwright Tony Kushner. To be asked to play the creative force behind one of the most important creative forces in modern cinema can only be considered a professional landmark — an anointing, even. (“I know,” says Williams, nodding her head, practically slap-happy with wonder. “I know. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know.”) At first, when they spoke about the project, she didn’t quite grasp what Spielberg was offering her. “When I realized what he was asking, it took me so long to get my head around what was happening,” she says. “And then afterward, I just laughed for a day, and then cried for a day. It was a lot to hold.”

AFTER “FOSSE/VERDON,” it wasn’t obvious to Williams how, exactly, her career would continue to grow. Many actresses start to despair of the scripts being sent to them once they hit 40. But more than that, she wondered, now that she was content, what the engine of her creativity would be; much of what drove her for so many years was one kind of longing or another.

‘All she cares about is trying to get into the skin, and under the skin, of this character, as much as she possibly could.’

Some people start acting because they want to be big, to see themselves onscreen; Williams wanted to be a small part of something bigger than she was — that throng of people having fun, up there, onstage or even backstage. She started out as a girl in a car pool: Williams and some other kids from San Diego making the two-hour drive to Los Angeles for auditions, leaving school early to get there. Small parts suitable for a lively girl next door came her way — a role in the family film “Lassie” (1994), a bit part on “Baywatch” the year before — but were few and far between. Then, when she was 15, she did what she says was common among the child actor crowd, for purely professional reasons: She became an emancipated minor, which afforded her an early, unnatural independence. She was living on her own in Los Angeles before she was 16. “You could work the hours of an adult,” she says. “You [didn’t have to have] a social worker or a teacher with you, which makes you more cost-effective as a hire.” A hint of darkness creeps into her voice as she continues: “So I didn’t have to have anybody looking out for me.” Her father — a trader who dabbled in Republican politics — was conservative in many ways, but her parents didn’t discourage her from leaving school or moving out.

When she was cast in “Dawson’s Creek” at 16, she was sleeping on a two-inch-thick egg crate mattress; breakfast was pizza with orange juice, dinner was pizza without. “It felt like somebody was withholding all the secrets,” she told GQ in 2012 — “how to take care of yourself and where to get the things that would help you take care of yourself.” When she talks about that early phase of her professional life, she sounds like someone who thinks a lot about what could have been a near-catastrophic car crash: The car swerved just in time, but she still feels the chill of how close a call it was. “The place where I started, at the bottom, is where the people are who give this business a bad reputation,” she says.

If the life of a young actor didn’t serve her, the work itself did. “I was totally amorphous and penetrable,” she says. “So to begin with, pretending to be other people gave me at least somebody to be.” With the encouragement of Mary Beth Peil, the opera soprano and Broadway actor who played the grandmother on “Dawson’s Creek,” Williams started driving to New York from Wilmington, N.C., where the series was filmed, seeking out bookstores, independent cinemas and theater companies, eventually auditioning for stage roles. While she was still acting in her television teen drama, she was also, during its filming hiatus, performing in Tracy Letts’s dark Off Broadway hit “Killer Joe” (1993). Within a year of the “Dawson’s” finale, she played Varya in a 2004 Williamstown Theatre Festival production of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” (1904) that Tony Kushner still recalls with some awe. “I had one of those moments where you just can’t believe what you’re seeing,” he says. “What I love about Michelle is that there’s not a moment’s concern about how she is going to come across — is she going to be lovable enough? All she cares about is trying to get into the skin, and under the skin, of this character, as much as she possibly could.”

Heath Ledger and Williams in “Brokeback Mountain” (2005). © Focus Features/Everett Collection

With “Brokeback Mountain” (2005), in which she played the wife of a man in love with another man, came a new level of fame: awards shows, celebrity, paparazzi. Her relationship with Ledger, one of the film’s leads, also brought her Matilda (now 16), though she was separated from Ledger by the time he died of an accidental prescription drug overdose in 2008. Already feeling vulnerable as a single mother, she became an object of morbid fascination in the tabloids, fleeing Brooklyn for “the country” — even now, she instinctively avoids identifying the location, as if still protecting the privacy she had to fight for back then. After that, the drive to act came from a different place: an overwhelming sense of responsibility. “I only related to my work for a very long time as our only means of survival,” she says. “Work was how I made money, and money was how I could propel my own family out into the world.” Work was hard — she had to keep getting better to keep getting work, but to keep getting better, she believed, she had to keep taking harder roles, which meant learning, but also sometimes risking humiliation in front of other people.

She committed, for example, to working with the director Kelly Reichardt, who had directed her in “Wendy and Lucy,” in “Meek’s Cutoff” (2010), an indie film about pioneers trying to survive crossing the Oregon desert in 1845. She, along with the rest of the crew, spent a week in the blazing heat learning how to light a fire without matches, and how to put up tents of that era, so that it would look rote. Beyond that, says Reichardt, it was a film with so many long shots that called for a particular skill in acting; Williams’s face was covered with a bonnet for parts of the movie, so that her body — the stance of her shoulders, her gait — had to do much of the work of communicating her character. That kind of total conversion of the self is something at which she excels, says Kenneth Lonergan, who directed her in “Manchester by the Sea.” He considers one of the most exquisite moments of that film to be a gesture that he only noticed in the cutting room: Williams’s character, years after her own tragedy, attending a funeral, nervously brushing a lock of her coifed hair into place — a woman almost anxious to appear composed. “There was something about it that just said everything about what she’s become since the tragedy, and what she’s trying to do,” he says of the character, as portrayed by Williams. “It breaks me up every time I see it.”

Chloé jacket, $3,050, chloe.com; A.P.C. Jane Birkin top, $125; Hermès pants, $6,450 (sold as part of a suit), hermes.com; and Adidas Originals by Wales Bonner sneakers, $160, walesbonner.net. Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Charlotte Collet

The physicality with which Williams inhabits a character is perhaps her greatest talent; it seems at times as if all her molecules have fallen apart and been reassembled to create a slightly different version of herself, the material attributes the same but the essence transformed. This quality, says Lonergan, is what puts Williams in the company of actors like Robert De Niro, someone whose very handshake is invented anew with every character he plays. She sheds her beauty as if it were a useless skin in “Wendy and Lucy” but owns and somehow amplifies it in “My Week With Marilyn.” To watch her body of work is to understand that so much of how the world decides who we are depends upon how we hold ourselves. And yet consistent throughout is something intrinsic to Williams herself, some outward manifestation, perhaps, of what an especially vulnerable young adulthood can do to someone who, despite the artifice of growing up on camera, fought hard to hold fast to her natural, searching curiosity.

THE PHENOMENON OF Williams’s embodiment is never more remarkable than in “Fosse/Verdon” (five episodes of which were directed by Kail). It’s one thing to learn a dance, or even how to dance, and Williams, who also starred as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret” on Broadway in 2014, has taken many lessons; it’s another to try to manifest, in your every moment onscreen, the spirit of one of the greatest dancers and performers of her time, the self-conscious artfulness of a true show-woman. “She really got to a whole other place with it, down to her fingers,” says Reichardt. After Williams runs her hand over her face following one teary breakup scene, her hand trails away with a slight, expressive waving of those fingers. In most characters, the movement would be overly stylized, but for Williams’s Verdon, the gesture is a natural channeling of feeling outward through her body.

Williams says the biggest challenge of playing the part was in accessing the energy of Verdon, the kind of charismatic performer who could be ruthlessly seductive, almost insatiable in her desire for recognition but also in her pursuit of originality. “I realized I was going to have to make myself a bigger person to play her,” Williams tells me at the coffee shop; even as she says this, she is unrecognizable as a movie star, a quietly stylish pregnant woman drinking a decaffeinated cappuccino. “Because that is not my aura. I was going to have to expand my magnetic field to encompass this great woman. How great for me, Michelle, that I got to work on those kinds of less prominent aspects of myself. It was good for me.”

Williams in “Fosse/Verdon” in 2019. Eric Liebowitz /©FX/Everett Collection

On the first day of filming in 2018, a set dresser came up to Williams and mentioned to her that she was wearing only one earring and would have to take it off — otherwise, it would look strange on camera. Williams thought for a moment. In the scene, she was rushing away from a beach house after a painful breakup with Fosse. Maybe it would be perfect for her to be missing an earring, she suggested — the dialogue even had her saying, “Let’s see, what am I forgetting?” When the dresser pushed back, Williams decided to bring her idea up with Kail, the director of that episode, whom she barely knew at the time. “I was like, ‘What’s his name, Tom? Tommy?’” she says, recalling the moment she approached him: “I really want to do this thing. I was told there’s a problem with continuity, but I think it’s kind of perfect.” He responded with two words: “Yeah — great.” From that moment, she realized, as she puts it, “Oh, OK, I can bring things here.” She had ideas — ideas like wanting that set of teeth, to shape her face more like Verdon’s; wanting more dance lessons, more voice lessons. “And when you have that kind of permissiveness, it opens up the whole world inside of you,” she says. “Because you don’t stop anything. And that was our experience for six months. We started on that day — we just sort of kept going with each other and then, all of a sudden, you can wind up in places you wouldn’t have expected.”

In June 2018, Williams told Vanity Fair that, after many years of looking for the radical acceptance she’d felt from Ledger, she was “finally loved by someone who makes me feel free.” She was about to marry the songwriter and singer Phil Elverum, and she was sharing the news of her happiness, she told the reporter, in the hope that she might help other women who were like her, in the club of single mothers, to keep the faith.

Her marriage to Elverum proved short-lived. “I made a mistake,” she says. “It’s embarrassing to have lived some mistakes in public — in my personal life and my professional life — but I’m proud of my desire to keep going.” Ultimately, she found what she was looking for in Kail: the openness, the joie de vivre, the spirit of expansiveness she discovered on set. By December 2019, six months after the show aired, she and Kail were engaged, and she was pregnant with their son, Hart.

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“I spent my entire life thinking, ‘When will you know you’re in love?’” she says. “ ‘What is it? How do you know? How do you know into whose hands you should put your life? And your children? And your children’s lives? Who do you trust with that, and how do you know and when will you know?’ I have made decisions using my heart, and I made decisions using my head. None of those seemed to work for me. Then I started thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll make decisions based on signs from the universe. Maybe I’ll interpret things — signs — falling from the sky.’ That didn’t work out for me. Then I realized: It was experiences. For me, it was having experience with this person and knowing how they would respond in all different situations. On a Monday morning; on a Wednesday afternoon; on a Friday night. Trusting the depth of that experience to make a decision about a life and going forward in a life together.”

There, in the coffee shop, she was spontaneously delivering a reverie, a monologue: sweet, building, moving. As she spoke, I had the sense that I was sitting across from an actor who could also have been a writer. “It’s too late for that,” she says. “I never went to high school. I don’t know any punctuation.”

To watch her body of work is to understand that so much of how the world decides who we are depends upon how we hold ourselves.

Often actors known for well-chosen roles with artistic integrity lead with an evident intensity or intelligence; Williams’s characters, by contrast, often present humbly, as she herself does, belying a reserve of power that’s there all along. Even if Williams confesses to a lingering sense of insecurity, she nevertheless spoke up, strongly, when news broke in 2018 that she had been vastly underpaid for the reshooting of scenes for the film “All the Money in the World” (2017), compared to her co-star Mark Wahlberg. She talked to the press about sexism in pay disparities in Hollywood but also beyond the film industry; she spoke at the Capitol Building on Equal Pay Day at a news conference; and when she won an Emmy for her performance in “Fosse/Verdon,” she returned to the subject in her acceptance speech. “The basic impulse for any kind of genuinely progressive politics is generosity,” says Kushner. “It has to be outward expanding and outward reaching. And she has that in her art, and in her mind.”

From left: Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano), younger Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord) and Mitzi Fabelman (Williams) in “The Fabelmans,” co-written and directed by Steven Spielberg. Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment

WE AGREED, AT the coffee shop, to meet the next day at a bookstore in Brooklyn. Both of us were late; one of us — Williams — was clearly relaxed nonetheless, even though she had lost her cellphone in a Lyft earlier that day. She wore a loose white dress with embroidery at its neck, looking cool and unbothered by the suffocating heat of another of the summer’s endlessly steaming days. She was enjoying the freedom of a temporarily phoneless existence, rather than fighting to fix it.

Instead of browsing through novels as planned, we headed straight to the cafe for peach kombucha and some more talk about the meadow: “I really hope I get to stay in the meadow,” she told me. “I really want to stay in the meadow.”

Williams’s professional life did not start with her relationship with Ledger, any more than it stopped with his death. But his death marked the beginning of a new phase of adulthood, as unexpected as it was painful and prolonged. “When I meet people now who are grieving, the one thing I would say is, ‘It’s a decade. It’s not a bad month or a year or two. It’s a decade,’” she says. “So give yourself time.” During that period, when she lived in the country, teachers at her daughter’s Montessori school took her and Matilda into their homes, supporting her but helping her grow, too; helping her learn how to grow things — how to raise a garden, to cook, to feed her child. For someone who had taken on the mantle of adulthood before she could really wear it, feeding her family, she says, still strikes her as a remarkable achievement. “It’s when the combination of the foods is right, and each of the three foods is perfect in its own right, you have a synthesis, and then you have balance,” she said. If she could have any superpower, she told me, it would be to spontaneously throw a meal down for 20 people at a time — to be able, with ease, to entertain a group, to be the place where that group wanted to go. Her husband is the same way: “He always says if he hadn’t been a director, he’d be a camp counselor.”

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Our conversation made us hungry for cookbooks, and we wandered among them, comparing notes on home-meal triumphs, puzzling over why we cared so much, trying to decide whether there was something beautiful or reactionary about this love of feeding our families. But Williams’s mind was also working through our previous conversation at the cafe. “It’s such a relief not to be in that kind of grief anymore,” she said. She looks back on her wedding, in March 2020, a day when she could see how happy Matilda was, how connected she was to Kail, as a moment that was “free of the shadow side.”

Finally, it was time to head back to her children and her husband. On the walk there, Williams talked some more about suffering, which she seems to understand more fully in her current state of happiness — how it could bind humanity, even be an exquisite vehicle for connection. It was not permanent, she knew — her own life was evidence of that — but it was not adjacent to the path of life, either. She had committed to memory a line quoted by the author Rebecca Solnit in one of her books of essays: “Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves,” itself a quote from a 14th-century Tibetan sage. “Life is suffering,” Williams said emphatically. A middle-aged woman who was walking by made eye-contact with Williams and nodded knowingly, as if to say, “You can say that again.” A few minutes later, Williams repeated some variation on the sentiment, and laughed to see a Chihuahua on a leash, stopped in its tracks and looking up at her with its sad, sweet empathetic face, so that it, too, seemed intent on acknowledging that truth.

We parted ways, and then Williams kept going, her mind on dinner, her step light, on her path home.

Hair by Lucas Wilson using Oribe at Day One. Makeup by Sally Branka at LGA Management. Set design by Ian Salter. Production: AP Studio, Inc. Manicurist: Gina Edwards for Dior Vernis. Lighting technician: Ian Rutter. Digital tech: Michel Oscar Monegro. Photo assistant: Donna Viering. Set assistants: Robert Forbes, Scott Kuzio. Tailor: Matthew Neff. Stylist’s assistant: Shant Alvandyan