I remember reading once that Michelle Williams likes to repeat the same look multiple times before she scraps it and moves onto the next one. I think of this often when cycling through the same pieces, and am curious to know, during an opportune moment before the Cos spring/summer 2027 show during New York Fashion Week, if she’s still a uniform kind of woman.
“I like to build a lot of memories in an outfit or in a specific beloved item, and then, when I’ve had a good run in it, I throw it away, memories included, and give it to my children,” says the Montana-born, Brooklyn-based actor, who distils her sense of style down to three words: “Ready to run.”
Williams’s four kids will soon be the lucky recipients of an impossibly polished Cos show ensemble – a neat black jacket, with a high-neck and cinched waist, louche cream silk trousers and point-toe pumps – that makes Michelle “feel modern and relaxed”. “I always find that helps me sit comfortably in the moment,” adds the star, for whom show season is a chance to see what her friends have been up to. “It’s a community I’m adjacent to, and it also reintroduces me to the city. For me to be out and about is really an exciting change of pace.”
True to form, her list of New York Fashion Week essentials boils down to just one product: Clary Collection’s signature balm, while her autumn wardrobe wish list is not everything she’ll see on the Cos runway (she’s a devoted shopper of the pants and outerwear anyway), but simply to “build my baseball cap collection”. “Where from?” I probe on behalf of everyone who has ever coveted her Kate Young-honed aesthetic. “That is the question! That’s why I don’t have a good baseball cap collection.”
Williams’s pre-show routine is a little more laid-back than, say, a red-carpet premiere, because she headed to The Fifth Avenue Hotel straight from home (“there’s nothing like waking up in your own bed and then experiencing beautiful clothes”) after a morning of (“I sat down to watch one with my children and it pulled a tear”), Alice Coltrane on the sound system and omelettes. She’s been up late devouring Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s , and rather than post-show drinks with her Cos seat mates Sharon Stone, Lupita Nyong’o and John Boyega, Michelle plans to watch , the latest bingeable TV thriller by Elizabeth Meriwether.
“How would I describe my next project?” she ponders when I ask what we’ll see her in soon. “A cat fight that takes you to hell and back”. (Translation: A Place in Hell by Chloe Domont.) This gamine Hollywoodite might live for a simple transitional fashion staple like the rest of the world (flip-flops, since you asked), but when it comes to work, the ambitious actor is, like her style, always “ready to run”.
Catching her briefly post show, Williams will later say, “There was a lot of love on the [front] row – numbers were shared”. She had us all at her £15 lip balm.
