Sardonic, smart, and just a little bit unpredictable, Dakota Johnson does not suffer fools. Born into a dynasty of Hollywood elites, she is blasé about maintaining Los Angeles pleasantries. “Aren’t you supposed to let people talk on this show?” she once asked Jimmy Fallon, who is known to finish his guest’s sentences. And then there’s the much-memed smirk: “That’s not the truth, Ellen.” She could (if she wanted to) play a convincingly droll mobster in some kind of dark and brooding A24 movie.
Dakota Johnson in New York on January 23, 2024
BACKGRID
And so, it’s fitting that—in a month when lots of people are discussing the rise of the mob-wife aesthetic, which is six-and-a-half times more popular than eclectic grandpa and five times more popular than the office siren—Johnson seems to have started dressing like a fictional character. The actor emerged from a New York hotel yesterday afternoon in full-look Bottega Veneta. She’s not quite wearing a zoot suit, but the pinstripes on that two-piece nonetheless evoke the image of a classic gangstress.
But Dakota Johnson does not strike me as the kind of person that keeps abreast of fleeting TikTok fads—she is, after all, asleep for 14 hours of the day—and so this moment is, at best, a coincidence. If she really wanted to cosplay as a glamorous oligarch of the New York crime scene, she might have called on the work of Raul Lopez at Luar or John Galliano at Dior or Alexander McQueen at Givenchy. The broad shoulders and the leopard print, the purring come hither, and the paralyzing bite that follows.
This article first appeared on British Vogue.