Tessa Thompson Doesn’t Want Fashion to Feel Like Armor

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Tessa Thompson has spent years being one of the most consistently interesting people on a red carpet — the kind of woman who wears Vaquera to an industry event and makes it look inevitable. But in a recent conversation according to Harper's Bazaar, the actor made clear that her relationship with clothes has quietly, deliberately shifted. Less spectacle. More self.

Thompson — who built her career through films like Dear White People, the Marvel universe, and now Broadway's Hedda, while founding production company Viva Maude in 2021 — talks about fashion the way she talks about character work: with intention and a little obsession. She's thrifted since childhood (out of necessity first, then by choice), spent time in the archives of Vivienne Westwood's Spring/Summer 1988 collection, and openly credits Prince, Diane Keaton, and her own mother's 1985 oversize blazer moment as style touchstones. Her current roster runs from Chanel and Valentino to Diotima and a vintage Dolce & Gabbana skirt suit sourced from Norway. Most recently: a 1930s cone bra from a deliberately unnamed Manhattan vintage shop. "You have to find it yourself," she said.

When the Armor Comes Off

The most interesting thing Thompson said wasn't about what she buys — it's about why. She's done with the idea of fashion as armor, a phrase she once used herself and now actively rejects. "I kind of don't want armor," she said. What she wants instead is integration: clothes that don't create a wall between her private self and the room she's standing in. For Hedda, that meant spending months wearing red in her everyday life before stepping onstage — getting comfortable enough with the color that she could wear the costume rather than disappear into it. "People notice you," she said. "And you have to be ready to meet it."

Her shopping habits are equally unguarded. She owns a savings-of-a-lifetime mesh prom dress from Melrose Avenue she still has. She's accumulated double digits in pointy-toe flats (most recently, green Loro Piana). She had — and has since confronted — multiple storage units across New York, Los Angeles, and, briefly and mortifyingly, Philadelphia. Her dream buy is a museum-quality Margiela Artisanal piece, specifically the black leather glove top, which she describes less as fashion and more as something that would bring her "delight and joy" every time she saw it hanging in her closet. Which, honestly, is the only real reason to buy anything.

When getting dressed stops being performance and starts being pleasure, that's when your wardrobe actually starts working for you.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.