Rachel Sennott on Subversive Power Dressing and Balenciaga’s Creative Range

Rachel Sennott has entered the Balenciaga cinematic universe. It’s Sunday afternoon in Paris, and the actor is on the phone, recounting her first time at one of the house’s mood-piece runway shows. That morning, for Demna Gvasalia’s spring 2024 collection, the setting was red-curtained grandeur layered with familial intimacy. “The casting was incredible because it felt personal,” Sennott says of a lineup that included the designer’s influential teachers from Antwerp Academy, longtime muse Eliza Douglas, and nightlife fixture Amanda Lepore. (The buxom performer—unmistakable in a décolletage-baring lace dress and trademark red lips in Sennott’s Instagram Story—cut a hyperfeminine figure next to the collection’s lurching silhouettes.) “His mother opened the show,” the actor continues in her effervescent rundown, “but on top of it there was just this range: different ages, all different types of looks. It felt like a movie because you were seeing a whole cast of characters.” 

That industry is, of course, more Sennott’s comfort zone. Her breakout role arrived with Shiva Baby, Emma Seligman’s 2020 feature expanded from an earlier short. The A24 ensemble thriller Bodies Bodies Bodies followed in 2022. This summer’s Bottoms—a high school buddy movie, with Sennott and Ayo Edibiri playing the outcast lesbian captains of an all-girls fight club—helped cement both their places on the fashion month circuit, for much the same reason that Gvasalia cast near-and-dears as models: Sheer force of personality makes the moment, on and off the runway. Besides, one senses that Sennott and the man behind Balenciaga share a philosophy around getting dressed. “Fashion should be fun!” the designer told Vogue’s Sarah Mower in an interview about the collection. There’s joy in sidestepping expectations and shirking the top-down dictates of the luxury market, he explained: “What is often seen as quite provocative about me is—I do bottom up.” 

That brings us, in a way, to Sennott’s styling for the day, those hybrid boot-pants demonstrating Gvasalia’s idiosyncratic way of getting a look off the ground. “I’m so drawn to Demna and Balenciaga because there’s a sense of humor and it’s subversive, but it also can make fun of fashion and call things out,” says the actor. (Indeed, he is the rare designer who can mount a one-off episode of The Simpsons in lieu of a runway presentation, as he did in 2021.) 

The fact that Senott is in the front-row mix is a recent turn of events. “Honestly, it was never a world that I really imagined myself getting to be a part of,” she says, describing how her early fashion exploration took shape on social media—“being overtly sexual in a way that was sort of calling out the way women are expected to be on Instagram.” If Balenciaga is known for shaping a new wave of power androgyny, as seen in the exaggeratedly stiff-shouldered coats for spring, the house just as seamlessly trafficks in “dresses that are so snatched and fitted,” Sennott points out. She appreciates such versatility because it’s her mode too. For her 28th birthday party last month, she chose a plunging pink dress with a heart-shaped cutout at the belly button. “That’s power dressing for me,” she laughs. “I’m sure some people are like, ‘This is insane,’ but that’s what I feel good in.”

Still, between shows is where the fashion week pressure starts to mount. “Everyone in Paris is just so cool. It actually hurts to go downstairs,” she jokes, describing the humbling experience of a morning coffee run without the smooth glide of a borrowed look. (She credits her stylist, Jared Ellner, with his skills in bringing ideas to fruition: “I’m like, ‘It’s a milkmaid doing whatever,’ and he’s like, ‘Perfect, it’s this.’”) Stress-packing was inevitable. “I honestly brought so many clothes. I’ve worn basically none of them because on the first day I went shopping with my friends and I bought all this stuff.” The group’s original destination was a talked-about vintage shop with a strict occupancy cap, so they wound up at a young designers’ pop-up across the street, where Sennott picked up a matching lace top and shorts. “She’s like, ‘I made that out of my curtain,’ and I was like, ‘Of course. Of course you did.’ So I bought this girl’s old curtain.”