Before I get the chance to say “H-”, a brief ruckus breaks out over deblurring the Zoom background, as a laptop is ferried through a hotel suite and positioned beside Gillian Anderson, who is seated by a window overlooking the Croisette. “This is all new to me,” she says. “How special.” The Chicago-born, London-raised actor has, of course, been to the Cannes Film Festival before – for television work, and as an ambassador for its sponsor L’Oréal – but this is the 56-year-old’s first time promoting a film there: Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, showing within the Un Certain Regard section. “People seem to like it,” she says, her accent slipping stateside. “But you can never really believe a journalist, can you? They do a very good job of pretending they like a film.” I haven’t seen the movie, and resist the urge to tell her how much I loved it.
What I had seen, though, was the Miu Miu look Anderson would wear to the film’s premiere that evening: a crystal-harnessed column gown in pale-pink satin sablé. “It makes perfect sense for the film, which is out-there and kitsch, rebellious and young,” she says – a description that could just as easily serve as a strapline for the brand itself. And while she enjoyed an earlier Miu Miu number – a faded champagne, ankle-skimming dress surfaced with floral appliqués and paired with an ’80s-style perm for the photocall – precisely because it was unlike anything she would normally wear, the premiere look aligned more closely with Anderson’s own style mantra: “No pattern, uniform in colour, with something interesting.” It’s a formula she has refined with the help of stylist Martha Ward, to whom she is effusive in her gratitude. “I should have started working with a stylist long before I actually started,” Anderson says. “There were years, early on in my career, where I made some dire choices.”
Fair enough, no? Anderson was still living on unemployment cheques when she first shot to fame on The X-Files in the ’90s. “The thought of spending money on a stylist was just… I couldn’t imagine it,” she says. Instead, her agents would pull in favours from designers, with Anderson trying looks on in her bedroom and emailing over pictures in search of a kind of group consensus. “I didn’t think about fashion at all,” she adds. “I didn’t think about fashion enough.” Which is interesting, given how romanticised the pre-celebrity-stylist era has become – the belief being that a self-styled look, however questionable, offered a more faithful portrait of a person. “I don’t know if what I chose to wear represented who I was,” Anderson says. “In fact, what it represented was somebody who didn’t know themselves. It’s only by working with somebody that I thought, ‘Hang on a second, I’ve got to take this seriously’.” Three decades in, Anderson says she has only recently begun to “figure it out”, that like her filmmaking, what she wears should also be in service of some sort of inner truth.
Few fashion houses hold a mirror to Anderson quite like Miu Miu. Whether through the release of her 2024 bestseller, Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous, her nootropics drinks brand G Spot, or her roles in Sex Education and now Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma – in which her Norma Desmond-esque character, Billy, enters into a psychosexual relationship with Hannah Einbinder’s “woke” filmmaker, Kris – Anderson has become an almost perfect avatar for a brand so preoccupied with the politics of desire that it last month staged an entire literary festival around the subject. Miuccia Prada, of course, had it sussed before anyone else, inviting Anderson to walk the boggy marsh of the autumn/winter 2026 Miu Miu show in Paris in a beaded apron dress sagging just below the bra-line. “I’d been asked before and couldn’t fit it into my schedule,” she says. “But the requests make sense now. I went into it so naïve, which is a good thing, because I would’ve freaked out otherwise.”
Cut to Anderson sprinting through the back corridors of the Palais d’Iéna, with her daughter Piper’s voice echoing in her head: “‘What do you mean, you’re closing the show?!’” “I didn’t realise that I’d be the last person walking,” Anderson says. “Nor did I realise the pace required to keep up with the other models, whose legs were double the size of mine. Doing that in thick-heeled shoes on clumpy grass, hurtling as fast as you can through the hallways, up the stairs, back round again, and then re-entering as if you’re not out of breath… I thought I was going to die.” As Anderson enters this new phase of her relationship with fashion, I wonder how her understanding of it has changed. “I’ve realised that fashion is a form of art,” she says. “It’s about not feeling beholden to it, but holding it with the appropriate reverence.” And what about desire? (Fashion is nothing, of course, without it.) “I would rather be desired than desire. Desire itself can be painful, quite a lonely place to be, if it’s not reciprocated,” she adds. “Yearning is lovely only when the other side is interested.”