“I feel like I have my armor on,” she said as she readied for the red carpet in a copper column gown.

Alicia Vikander hit the red carpet Sunday evening for the premiere of her upcoming series “Irma Vep” in a custom Louis Vuitton copper column dress, readied as if going into an extremely stylish battle.

“I feel like I have my armor on, a very beautiful Cannes version. I’m excited to see the light hit it when we are on the red carpet,” Vikander told WWD as she dressed in the Louis Vuitton suite minutes ahead of the premiere.

The gown blended two looks from last week’s cruise show in San Diego with warrior cues in copper beading. Created with Nicolas Ghesquière, the pair started on the look as soon as the festival lineup was revealed in mid-April. It took two weeks and over a thousand hours to construct the sculptural gown.

Vikander, who has been an ambassador for Vuitton since 2015, said she has developed not just a creative clothing partnership with Ghesquière but also a friendship.

“The incredible thing is he has such an eye to make beautiful creations and gowns, but he also sees me as a person wearing it. It’s incredible when I get the sketches, it’s defined that he knows me and I can see that,” she said. “The thing with Nicolas is that his own style is very much looking back and honoring classic fashions or styles, honoring those materials and craftsmanship and bringing it out and mixing it up to become something almost ahead of its time,” the actress added.

When she started on the “Irma Vep” project with director Olivier Assayas, she saw some synergy and brought the two together.

“The most exciting thing was that both Olivier and Nicolas, I had separately heard them talking about each other and say that they are fans of one another, so it was one of those things that I was so happy to make sure they met and made that connection,” she said. The result was Ghesquière designing all of the costumes for Vikander’s character in the series.

The series is a remake of Assayas’ own 1996 film “Irma Vep,” which itself is a remake of the 1915 soap opera “Les Vampires” from Louis Feuillade. The new series plays with those contradictions in time as well as toys with the idea of being a movie within a movie, confusing what is real and what is part of the plot.
Continue reading  »

“This is the part she’s been dying to play.” Starring Alicia Vikander and Directed by Olivier Assayas, #IrmaVep premieres Monday June 6 on @ HBOMax.

I added the new photoshoot that Alicia Vikander did for Harper’s Bazaar. You can go to the gallery and enjoy the photos!

If you like the site and want to help to keep this online, please, feel free to go here to donate. I really need help to maintain the site. Every little bit helps! Thanks for all.

The Oscar-winning Swedish actress Alicia Vikander tells Sasha Slater about her unconventional upbringing and playing the ultimate femme fatale

It is a sunny, but bitingly cold, March morning on a quiet side street in Paris. Alicia Vikander, tousled, draped in diamonds, bare-footed and wearing a filmy black negligée, is posing on a rooftop for the Harper’s Bazaar shoot. There are 17 people milling around her holding coffees, warm robes and blusher, including the florist, the make-up artist and the photographer. And everywhere, spring flowers are piled up in drifts, while the stylist teases individual petals on a particularly lush, creamy bloom to get it ready for a close-up. It’s quite a scene.

The next morning, Vikander and I meet in the belle époque splendour of the Salon Proust at the Ritz Paris. She appears alone at precisely 8am, having been awake since six, playing with her one-year-old son. “He’s learning to walk,” she says. “So it’s good there’s carpet everywhere.” I shouldn’t be surprised she’s so punctual. She says she’s never late: “never. My mum was strict about time.”

At 33, Vikander already has an Oscar win under her belt (for The Danish Girl). In the course of her stellar career, she has stepped into Angelina Jolie’s combat boots as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider and has played an android in Ex Machina, the feminist writer Vera Brittain and the political activist Gloria Steinem. Along the way, she fell in love with her now-husband, the Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender; they have been married for five years and have just set up home together in Lisbon.

We are now in France to talk about her latest, and perhaps strangest, role to date: a Sky Atlantic television series called Irma Vep, written and directed by the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas. In it, she plays Mira, an American film star who comes to Paris to act in a remake of Les Vampires, a French silent classic about a criminal gang, whose antiheroine is the wholly amoral, black-catsuited femme fatale Irma Vep (an anagram of vampire).

This show offers a fresh take on Assayas’ cult 1996 film of the same name, which featured the Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung as the actress portraying the villainess. As Vikander says in her (almost) perfect, charmingly transatlantic, English, “it’s so meta, it’s eating itself “. She declines to define what the series is, exactly: melo-drama? Crime caper? Comedy? “I think, while I was making it, I played five roles… It’s like Chinese boxes. There’s always something else going on. I think that’s the beauty of the project.” The series also has a voyeuristic edge, giving a convincing impression of the drama behind the scenes on a struggling film whose director is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Continue reading  »