Hari Nef Is This Second’s New York Doll—Subsequent Cease, ‘Barbie’

The pantheon of It women isn’t pushed by the mere spectacle of dressing up. “They merely do as a result of they should,” Hari Nef says on a crisp Sunday in Decrease Manhattan. “Whether or not it’s Edie or Parker or Chloë,” that means Sedgwick, Posey, and Sevigny, “or Dianne Brill or RuPaul.” Everlasting icons all—nonetheless, phrase on the road is that many actors cling to a really set picture: “They don’t wish to put on wigs, take dangers with make-up. I don’t relate to that.” Character play confers a sure freedom. “I can get bare behind that,” provides Nef.

Eight years after her runway debut helped ink a headline-making IMG contract, the spring 2023 collections noticed the actor again on the circuit, this time with an unmissable copper bob. She served retro kink at Batsheva (PVC gown, aqua cat eye), outré glamour at Jason Wu (grungy hair, curve-hugging robe), courtier punk at Matty Bovan (corset, jagged black wig). “It’s this consolation within the chameleon,” Nef says of the season’s guises, starting with Collina Strada’s Look 1 plaid pants and “Received Milkweed?” slip gown. It’s a nod to the runway location: a Brooklyn butterfly protect, the place the plant is a necessary meals supply for monarch caterpillars. “I wished her to open [the show] as a result of I felt just like the actress in her might actually embrace the butterfly vitality that we had been going for,” says Collina Strada artistic director Hillary Taymour. “And she or he actually simply set a tone in such a gorgeous, putting means.”

Lepidopteran metaphors are acquainted to Nef. “I wished to place a ways between me and the chrysalis,” she informed Vogue final 12 months, trying again on a interval of biking by means of pal teams, hair colours, and pronouns—a part of settling into life as a trans girl. However the Nef of at present has arrived. There’s the non-public arc: In GQ, Nef wrote about getting turned away from a queer social gathering in Berlin as a result of the door woman mistook her for a cisgender girl. (“What a disgrace, I assumed, and what a pleasure.”) And in profession phrases, a busy slate of tasks—together with the climate-centered Extrapolations on Apple TV+ and HBO’s The Idol—builds to this July’s neon-bright Barbie, set to catapult her into the big-budget firmament.

“Simply being a chunk of it felt like some sort of preposterous manifestation,” Nef says. “The world of Barbie is a playground of femininity, and it’s a playground of artifice”—in different phrases, a warped mixture for a doll that tasks unreachable perfection. “You can personal her and subsequently have all the pieces that she had,” the 30-year-old says, “however you may by no means actually be her.” For Nef, childhood Barbies acted as avatars, a pocket-size invitation to experiment with fashion. How does that manifest on the silver display? “It’s not a query of what’s my Barbie look. It’s a query of which one,” she teases, cautious to not spoil a shock. “It’s extra costumes than I’ve ever worn in anyone factor”—dress-up on the grandest scale. “Within the audition for Barbie, there was a observe that mentioned, ‘Every thing on this scene is actual to this particular person.’ It’s not this airheaded factor, it’s not ditzy, it’s not bitchy—it’s not any of that. It’s actual.”

Barbie’s make-up is perhaps stamped on by Mattel, however mutable magnificence cues have accompanied Nef onstage in two latest off-Broadway performs. Final fall in Denis Johnson’s Des Moines, she performed a loose-cannon trans girl who offers Father Michael (Michael Shannon) a yearned-for face portray. “There’s an intimacy to make-up, not simply due to contact however due to this intention to carry inside to the outside,” she says of that tender transformation. This spring, she took on the position of chicly morose Sasha in The Seagull/Woodstock, NY— Chekhov by means of Thomas Bradshaw. As Nef tweeted: “My 12 months of Enjoying Extraordinarily Sad Girls ❤️”.

The slyly refined magnificence assertion seen right here—grayscale eye shadow with glowing sweeps of canary yellow blush—as an alternative displays what make-up artist Marcelo Gutierrez sees as Nef’s duality: lightness alongside a “robust, seductive vitality.” (This Alaïa bodysuit, a marvel of refined sculpting with a cheekily positioned jewel, has an analogous edge. “I don’t appear like this, however I do now!” the actor cooed on set, the place the prep started with freshly bleached brows, set in place with a glue stick. “Drag secret,” Nef defined from the make-up chair—a nod to the various classes she has absorbed, from club-kid maximalism to Kabuki’s work on Intercourse and the Metropolis.) Gutierrez took inspiration from Ingres’s Odalisque in Grisaille, an unfinished model of the painter’s 1814 masterwork, discovering the palette to be a foil to at present’s hypercolor extra. In spite of everything, by eternally altering her look, Nef is herself a piece in progress: “Why not? There’s one thing to be mentioned for preserving your self in your toes.”

HAIR, EVANIE FRAUSTO; MAKEUP, MARCELO GUTIERREZ; MANICURE, MIKU TSUTAYA; HAIR PRODUCTS, BUMBLE & BUMBLE; MAKEUP PRODUCTS, MAC COSMETICS; NAIL ENAMEL, CHANEL LE VERNIS; SET DESIGN, HENRIQUE CIRILO, EMMA MAGIDSON. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY THE CANVAS AGENCY AND ICE STUDIOS. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.