“So,” says Dakota Johnson, upon realising that our conversation is being recorded, “I shouldn’t say anything naughty?” Throughout our time together, it can, in places, be difficult to decipher what the 36-year-old actress is getting at, because almost every answer is preceded by a pause, and followed by a giggle. What soon becomes clear, however, is that Johnson has lived her entire life with a heightened sensory awareness. “When I was little, I was very aware of how fabrics felt on my body,” she says. “I loved the way my mother dressed, so I wanted to wear jeans, but I had to wear tights underneath, because I didn’t like how denim felt on my skin.” She’d pair them with Mary-Janes – “because The Wizard of Oz” – and a flower-embroidered mesh vest she thought was “pretty rad”, and because her mother, Melanie Griffith, wore sunglasses, she did too. “I looked like an insane person.”
That sensitivity has followed her into adulthood. “I say to Kate [Young, her stylist]: no turtlenecks, no mohair,” she adds. “It gets stuck in my mouth.” In fact, it was the absence of fabric altogether that drew her to the look she wore to Alessandro Michele’s spring/summer 2026 Haute Couture presentation for Valentino: a feather-cuffed, boxy-shouldered, matelassé shrug over a pussy-bow leopard-print blouse, tucked into lace micro-shorts, with floral-embroidered tights and metal-tipped, ankle-strapped, pin-thin-heeled Rockstud – these are, Devil Wears Prada or not, going to be a thing once more – pumps. “No pants feel like home to me,” she says, her team erupting in another fit of laughter again. “And Alessandro is one of the great loves of my life. I love following his creative genius and I love watching his mind and heart work and I just feel honoured to be on this journey with him.”
Johnson took her place in the audience beside Michele’s latest recruit, Lily Allen, to watch the collection reveal itself through a series of Kaiserpanoramas – a form of stereoscopic entertainment that predates cinema – staged at the Tennis Club de Paris. As spectators stood to peep through little squares built into the walls, models found their light one by one, beginning with a dress draped in 1980s fashion, plunging to a knot at the navel with full, batwing sleeves in a Valentino red – an ode, of course, to the Pantone-protected shade invented by the house’s founder Valentino Garavani, who passed away in Rome a week and a half ago, aged 93 – and closed on a show-stopping, pleated, faded-gold lamé ball gown, cinched into an elaborate, cheese-cutter waist. “There are many, many moments that Alessandro and I have had together,” Johnson says. “And that I will never speak about.”
It’s been a while since Johnson attended more than one show per season – and that’s unlikely to change, given that she was recently announced as Valentino’s global brand ambassador – but you get the sense she’s perfectly content with that. “I am always grateful to witness beautiful art at work,” she says. “But I often feel intimidated by fashion week, because of the volume of people, and the plethora of conversations about clothing.” (This is, after all, the same person who explains her approach to dress with lines such as: “I’m wearing a dress, and whatever story you wanna make up in your mind, that’s the right one.”) Which, frankly, I understand: the absolute last thing I want to do at fashion week is talk about fashion. Still, Johnson has more to say than she lets on. “I’m into a lingerie moment, a slip dress over jeans, or panties over tights.” And as for what she’s really not into? “Shorts, in general. I don’t like them,” she says, her finger practically hovering over the recorder. “That’s it. We did it.”
