The image of Suki Waterhouse striding through New York in Lili Curia knee-highs and a crystal-monogrammed Gucci bodysuit with a perfect beam of soft light trained on her face is among the least candid photos I’ve ever reported on. But then you learn the context: that she had just performed for the first time at Madison Square Garden and was photographed en route to a celebratory dinner at The Crane Club in West Chelsea, still wearing her stage costume. And you think… yes, actually.
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The musician is currently touring North America as the opening act for Laufey, and her performance wear has run the gamut from boudoir-ish Scarlett Gasque dressing gowns, Taller Marmo maxi dresses and metallic Nomasei go-go boots, to lace Balmain jumpsuits, silk Fiilk capes and Balenciaga ankle boots. It’s a sort of glam-rock vision of bohemia that rides on what stylist Cassy Meier once described as “that innately cool, ’70s thing” when she dressed Waterhouse in a twinkling Stella McCartney playsuit for Coachella in 2024. Sure, it’s a little extra, but as Julia Sarr-Jamois, who styled Waterhouse’s British Vogue cover, put it, “Suki can really wear ‘fashion’ pieces. I mean, she was a model before she was a musician.”
And what else would you expect from someone who named her album Memoir of a Sparklemuffin – an “absolutely ridiculous” title, Waterhouse said, for that same Vogue cover, borrowed from a “very fuzzy, wildly colourful spider” native to eastern Australia. Waterhouse explained how the creature, roughly the size of a grain of rice, is known for performing a “razzle-dazzle” mating dance, which she considers “an interesting metaphor for being in the public eye”. “If they don’t like your dance,” she said. “They will eviscerate you.” Perhaps that’s exactly what she was doing: giving it some jazz hands, for everyone’s sake.
