A brunch date in New York at a chic apartment that is also a boutique in which everything is for sale, and everything is expensive. My date is nowhere to be seen but the whole place is a codification of her identity.
There’s the array of perfect and eyeball-spinningly spenny mid-century furniture. (Later, on the Quarters website, I discover the pair of Franco Bresciani armchairs — I have been sitting on one of them — come in at $33,500.)
There’s the munificent buffet that looks like an Arcimboldo painting and has, I am told, been conjured up by the coolest chef in Los Angeles, flown in specially. When I ask what a bowl of small wonky green fruits are, I am told they are “kiwi berries”. Of course they are. Some courgettes in a bowl have been engraved with — a big clue this — the letters “GWYN”.
And there, big clue number two, on a record player, is the Coldplay album Parachutes — though not, incidentally, being played.
Suddenly the world’s most celebrated conscious uncoupler is upon me. Gwyneth Paltrow is here to talk me through her new fashion brand, GWYN — a relaunch and, apparently, “elevation” of her previous brand G Label, which I always thought sounded like a car, an opinion with which, it would seem, the actress-cum-lifestyle phenomenon is in agreement. “When we launched nine years ago we couldn’t use anything with Goop because of a trademark issue, so it was kind of last minute, and it always felt a little impersonal to me. It didn’t conjure anything.”
Is GWYN a nickname? “I have so many nicknames. I am Gunny, Gwinny, Goo-Goo. Everyone at work calls me GP. Like, I have a million. But GWYN is not a name I have ever been called.” Nor is it a name that has ever been seen on a courgette before, I say — sorry, zucchini. “I know what a courgette is,” she says, laughing. “My London years.”
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Her London years — “I call it my British era” — are the inspiration for the collection hanging on the rails next to us, she says; the kind of low-key pieces that fashion types default to these days, pared back and slightly mannish, almost entirely navy, black, grey and white. The collection is available from Sunday/September 21 on goop.com.
Paltrow “lived in jumpers” when she was in the UK, she says, so there are plenty of those, the tailored jacket style in navy or cream particularly special ($750). There’s also a black iteration of the cult phenomenon known as the barn jacket that she says would have fitted right in “in Belsize Park” and that is so long it might more accurately be called a barn gown ($1,095). Her creative director, Sofía Menassé, formerly of Maison Margiela and The Row, who is hovering in the background, is indeed wearing it like a dress. Very Flambards.
Tailored jacket style lived-in jumper, $750
Paltrow herself is sporting an actual dress, a scoop-neck box-pleat sleeveless number made from charcoal suiting fabric that looks very upscale indeed ($995), especially when paired with some Alaïa wedge heels that will also set you back just under a grand as Goo-Goo — sorry — Gwyneth has done. Another standout piece is the sharply tailored black wool coat ($1,195).
Charcoal sleeveless dress, $995
She says that apart from the odd example of “something fun”, like “my Alaïa shoes”, she has “lived in” her own label since it launched. “I am in it all day, every day. I want to make things I can wear all day. When I started G Label I was still dropping people off at car pool, then going to the office, then maybe going to a book thing or whatever, and I wanted to be kind of chic and comfortable and appropriate all day like so.
“I have a style that hasn’t really changed that much,” she continues. “I mean the silhouettes change, but ultimately I was raised on the Upper East Side [of New York] mixing preppy button-downs with my own kind of stuff, and GWYN reflects that.”
What it also reflects is her belief in women wanting to be like her, whether that is to wear the same clothes as her, to cook the same #boyfriendbreakfast as her (the most recent one she posted for her 9.2 million followers on Instagram was homemade duck confit with potato hash and eggs, for heaven’s sake), or to use the same $125 Goop Beauty Lift + Depuff Eyemasks as her. I can report that having peered as avidly as was polite (maybe), her eye area is both lifted and depuffed.
Tailored black wool coat, $1,195
But all is not entirely depuffed in the world of Paltrow. She has said of Goop that it has “spent a long time dodging bullets”, and last year the brand laid off 40 of its 216 staff. Critics believe Paltrow’s seeming control-freak tendencies and lack of business expertise may have stopped her brand growing in the way that other celebrity-figurehead operations such as Hailey Bieber’s explosively successful Rhode Skin have. Certainly Goop hasn’t fully capitalised on how ahead of the game it was entering the celebrity lifestyle/beauty/wellness space when it launched in 2008.
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In her recent biography, Gwyneth, Amy Odell claimed the star’s “impatience and perfectionism” have affected Goop’s ability to achieve “sustained profitability”. She also described a workplace that was allegedly “chaotic and sometimes toxic”. Odell, who has also written a biography of another 21st-century ice queen, Anna Wintour, noted that the Goop gang “seemed cagier than many of Wintour’s former employees”, noting that “many had signed NDAs”. Paltrow, for what it’s worth, is almost ostentatiously charming and funny at our brunch, albeit with a whiff of the school prefect about her.
Some see her return to acting and her first major role in five years in Marty Supreme — a sports comedy-drama also starring Timothée Chalamet due to be released in December — as a sign of tough times at Goop. (She is 52. He is 29. She plays his lover, the latest in Hollywood’s spate of younger-man-older-woman plot lines.) Others think it’s premature to write her business off. The launch of GWYN would seem to support that.
Paltrow insists her silver-screen comeback is simply because her two children and two stepchildren have now left home. “So, the nest is empty,” she said recently, “and I feel like there’s this really grief-filled part of it and then there’s this part of it that’s like, ‘Well, maybe I can explore my own creativity again’.” And also, it would seem, her love of jumpers.
The Fall collection of GWYN will be available to Goop subscribers on September 19 at goop.com and in all eight Goop retail locations from September 21