Sienna's Vogue September 2007 interview
In early July at Rome's Fiumicino airport, I'm waiting for my suitcase to materialize when I see a blonde who reminds me of Sienna Miller. Her hair is pulled into a scruffy ponytail, and she wears a long gray tank top over a magenta bra; skinny jeans; collapsed Westwood pirate boots. The only thing that makes me think she's not Sienna Miller is that she's wandering around alone in search of her luggage carousel, and no one is paying her any heed. She's just a little blonde girl with a Sienna Miller look.
"Hi, Sally," I hear. I turn to find Sienna Miller next to me. She has flown in from Barcelona, where she has attended a fashion show in her capacity as the face of Pepe Jeans London. (That relationship has since come to an end so amicable that Pepe owner Carlos Ortega is now backing Twenty8Twelve, a clothing line Miller and her sister Savannah have just launched.) Barcelona was fun because she got to hang out with Jade Jagger, a Pepe face herself, who gave Sienna the big, glitzy cocktail ring that she's wearing now. Jagger also offered to hook Miller up with passes for the Rolling Stones show that, by coincidence, is taking place in Rome on this weekend otherwise dominated by the celebration of Valentino's forty-fifth anniversary. Miller says, "Can I borrow a euro off you for a luggage cart?"
I have no change, but I have a cart, and in due course Miller drags her suitcase toward it and heaves her battered Samsonite next to my T. Anthony trunk. "Chivalry is dead," she mutters because her suitcase is enormous and heavy, and because a condition of celebrity is that you get third-party attention only when you don't want it.
SCENE 2
At the Hotel d'Inghilterra, just off the Via Condotti—Rome's Rodeo Drive, albeit with the Spanish Steps thrown in—I knock on Sienna Miller's door. She has occupied her modest suite for all of ten minutes, and already it looks like the bedroom of a teenage club chick who can't pick an ensemble for Saturday night. Her suitcase has apparently erupted. Streaming from it, or thrown out of it, are nude patent Burberry ankle boots; Chanel silver python flats; an ostrich boot from Louis Vuitton ("That's the perfect boot; sorry to sound so fashiony"); snakeskin platforms from Terry de Havilland; a 1920s vest worn by Vietnamese soldiers; a blue sequined V-back sweatshirt from Peter Jensen ("I quite love sequins; I think it's the drag queen in me"); an Ossie Clark dress covered in pansies ("a proper hippie dress"); a 1989 STEEL WHEELS Rolling Stones T-shirt pilfered from ex-boyfriend model/rocker Jamie Burke; gray linen overalls from Isabel Marant; a black beaded halter top ("a sl*tty kind of thing"); a 1920s wedding dress with an arm coming off; Vivienne Westwood vintage tops for Wolford; a Lurex granny-square vest by Wayne Rogers for Granny Takes a Knit; JET track pants; an "oversize doll dress" by an English line, PPQ; black sports shorts with a red heart on them (A. Olivieri from Euphoria, London); an orange alligator clutch from Bridget Romanek. "There's nothing that goes with anything else," Miller remarks.
The incompatibles further include a black sequined vest from Biba, red jeans from Twenty8Twelve, flats from Miu Miu, wedges from Chloé, frocks from Stella McCartney, and a mini-corset "prostitute top" bought at Portobello Road Market and once worn to a "boudoir chic party" and "quite nice over a T-shirt." And beneath all of this, more clothes are bubbling up. This suitcase is still active.
"I don't know why I bring these things, because I never really wear them," the 25-year-old actress says, laughing. She's puffing on a Marlboro Light. As Martin Amis once wrote about John Self, the hero of
Money, Sienna Miller is, unless the context suggests otherwise, always puffing on a Marlboro Light.
SCENE 3
We have sneaked out the back door of the Inghilterra (to avoid the swarm of paparazzi) and gone to Nino, a been-there-forever trattoria, for spaghetti Bolognese and a carafe of Pinot Grigio. Nino is old-fashioned and staffed by waiters who charmingly pester Miller for autographs. I catch up on what she's been up to since we last met, in 2005, when she was about to shoot
Factory Girl. At 23, she was bored with her identity as the poster girl for boho chic and the wronged girlfriend of Jude Law, from whom she'd just split. It's fair to say that these mantles have been successfully shrugged off and that her artistic reputation, after her turn as Edie Sedgwick, has grown and will doubtless grow further with the release of Steve Buscemi's
Interview, inspired by the Dutch original from murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh. ("It was made the way I think films should be made: three cameras, not a lot of money, no fuss, no trailers.") But what about her?
This is the very question that preoccupies the actress. She has figured out that Hollywood stardom is not necessarily a form of self-expression. There was the time she told the
Guardian that people do drugs because they're fun (even her mother, who raised her to be open, advised her not to give all of herself away). She called Pittsburgh "Shitsburgh" in
Rolling Stone; and at the 2006
Vanity Fair Oscar party, she made the mistake of thinking she was at an actual party rather than a photo op. "I was wearing really high shoes and took them off. I kissed my girlfriend on the lips"—she does this with close friends and family—"and it was apparently shocking. I'm free-spirited, and it gets me into trouble. It's hard to be yourself and be accepted in the world I move in. I look around and see a lot of miserable people. But I'm really happy."
We leave Nino by the front door. On the street, Miller guilelessly approaches a group of businessmen for a light. They see a golden-haired creature in a fluttery sixties Empire chiffon frock and metallic sandals, and they scramble through their pockets. For some people there are always flames to hand.
SCENE 3½
(Apropos of her flame situation, Sienna will make the following statements over the course of her Roman weekend: "I'm craving civility in romantic life. I'm not in the mood for one-night stands, even though it's summer and I should be." She also says, "If I'm in a relationship, I want it to be grounding and solid. I see my sister, and she has this wonderful marriage and a wonderful husband." About Jamie she says, "He lives in New York, and I live in London. I'm at the point in my life where if I'm going to be in a relationship, I don't want to be on the phone for an hour a night." And about her "amazing three years" with Jude, case also closed. "I was 21 when we got together, it was a mad love, we were both working and traveling and seeing each other, and I'll love him forever. We didn't have time to breathe on any level. The stolen moments—getting a curry and sitting in the garden—were bliss." She adds, "I want to grow from that experience and have time to digest it. I don't want to repeat patterns or carry baggage.")
SCENE 4½
The Palazzo Torlonia is a majestic frescoed pile across the street from the Hotel d'Inghilterra. There's a courtyard with a garden and statues of well-endowed men. There's also a room in which Sienna Miller and Mario Testino and Tonne Goodman are trying to decide on her look for the weekend. The fashion point of the shoot is feathers. The challenge is taking Miller's naturally ruffled beauty and making it glossy. A bad bobbed wig is tried and discarded. A chignon is deemed too ladylike. Only when Didier Malige scrapes her hair back into a vertical ponytail, cockatoo-style, does everybody nod seriously in agreement. Eyebrows are darkened, lips are reddened, and suddenly the actress is more Marilyn than Sienna.
Her work ethic, though, is unmistakably her own: She's punctual, cheerful, and always game, even when she's asked to wear a woolly feathered sweater from Nina Ricci and black tights in 95º heat on the steps near Piazza del Campidoglio ("I feel like pork sausage at a Jewish wedding," she says with a giggle). The shoot takes place in the Colosseum, the Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum, a traditional bakery in Trastevere, and various piazzas, with a flock of fake, smoking cardinals (as in princes of the church, not birds), a trio of buff gladiators on leave from the set of
Rome (as in the HBO series), and Italy's answer to Ashton Kutcher (more on him later).
The shadow of Valentino falls over the proceedings. Every five minutes, it seems, we drive by the Museum of Ara Pacis, where the maestro's most breathtaking dresses from the 1960s to the present are displayed in the side windows. By the end of the weekend, Miller will have worn three dresses by the designer, the undisputed master of plumage and femininity, and will look far more glamorous than she or the world has ever seen her before. It's a coming-of-age of sorts that seems aptly Roman—at least in the sense of the fateful city depicted in postwar popular culture. Audrey Hepburn got that chic, short boy's cut here; it's where characters played by Marcello Mastroianni turned women's worlds upside down; and where a woman splashed around in a fountain wearing an evening dress, just because.
Sienna doesn't get her feet wet or her heart broken. But she does get to hang out with Keith Richards.
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