Ashley's Anything-Goes Style

As Cole Porter's wife in the biopic De-Lovely, Ashley Judd steals the spotlight in dazzling, Jazz Era-inspired clothes by Giorgio Armani and jewels from Verdura. Here, the star opens up about her flair for understated elegance

Ashley Judd has no gimmick. Unlike her contemporaries, she has no fashion trademark no quirky hats à la Cameron, no Angelina-ish tattoos, nor Hermès bag--accented Gwyneth-like uniforms. So when she hobbles on crutches to the door of her hotel room at Le Parker Meridien in Palm Springs, there is no clue to prove that this creature in an unassuming cotton floral Marni skirt and white T-shirt (her only accessory: a cell phone with an attached ear piece) is actually her. She has been in the desert all day shooting an advertising campaign and looks six shades darker than expected--thanks to residual layers of tan makeup. A blue cast from a foot injury that she incurred on Broadway during her recent run as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is making this normally graceful woman a bit less, well, graceful. The signature Southern manners, the extensive vocabulary and the sharp wit, however, will soon expose her as the real deal.

But first things first; she has to rinse off that tan. "If you'd indulge me for just a few more moments while I take a shower, I'd be so grateful," she says. When Ashley reappears, it seems clear that for someone who must surely have an impressive wardrobe, she's determined not to let it define her. To punctuate this point, she is about to spend this entire interview in a hotel robe with wet hair, picking at a burger from room service. Finally, the fashion gabfest can begin.

Ashley is not a woman short on opinions or hypotheses, but even she admits that her style, which ranges from couture goddess to down-home country girl, is hard to explain. "I like skirts and dresses," she says, then shrugs. "And if something looks like faded old wallpaper from a farmhouse, I'll buy it." To complicate matters further, a quick study of her film roles reveals that she looks equally at ease in state-issued prison blues (Double Jeopardy), Southern belle pieces (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) and the Jazz Era movie-star gowns that she wears in her latest movie, the Cole Porter biopic De-Lovely which is in theaters now.

To hear Giorgio Armani talk about his friend Ashley, for whom he designed a real-life wedding dress in 2001, when she married race-car driver Dario Franchitti, as well as some of the showstopping pieces in her wardrobe as Porter's wife, Linda Lee, you'd think that Ashley was a throwback to a more elegant time.

"I went to visit the set in England, and what struck me was that Ashley, in costume, seemed as though she stepped out of that period," Armani recalls. (The movie, which portrays the complex and largely platonic marriage of Cole--played by Kevin Kline--and Linda Lee Porter, shows Ashley's character age dramatically over the course of close to 40 years, never missing a fashion beat.) "I'm not American, but the impression I get is that Ashley is a classic American beauty. You might at first think she's fragile, but there's nothing fragile about her at all."

Armani makes no bones about his affinity for the styles of the early decades of the 20th century, when both men and women had a penchant for tailoring and formality. 30 when the director and writer of De-Lovely, Irwin Winkler and Jay Cocks, respectively, approached Armani about providing wardrobe for this movie, the latest of more than 100 films to which Armani has contributed costumes (including, notably, American Gigolo and The Untouchables), it was an easy fit. "There was a natural connection with the story line, the characters," explains Armani. "The Porters were an amazing couple with strongly defined personal styles that reflected their eccentric lifestyles."

Janty Yates, the Oscar-winning costume designer who worked on De-Lovely, mixed vintage Armani pieces with items from more recent collections (fluid satiny gowns, palazzo pants and dainty lace jackets for Ashley) to create a working paradox: The movie provides a historically spot-on glimpse of the ex-pat lifestyle of the Jazz Age while still looking relevant today. Thus, watching De-Lovely is a bit like a 20th-century fashion-history lesson with a couple of modern diversions, somewhat like the experience of talking to Ashley Judd.

With Ashley, who studied French literature at the University of Kentucky, it seems that nearly every conversation has an academic slant. She won't even talk about clothes without packing her sentences chockablock with factoids, anecdotes, feminist gravitas, and lots and lots of opinions--from the symbolism of the color green (it's surprisingly complex) to the pioneer spirit of American fashion.

"I like American style. I love our contribution to sportswear--not the Sansabelt trouser, of course," she says of the '70s-era, elastic-waist pants. "I think about where our country came from, people crossing the continent in covered wagons. Things had to be practical." Of her own style, Ashley is less committal. "I'm curvy, so I don't always feel totally comfortable in pants," she says, and later, "I love color."

Tracing her style influences, Ashley cites such disparate sources as '20s icon Louise Brooks in the film Pandora's Box ("She was such a little hussy ... she has that bob, and she's sitting on the chaise. So incendiary.") and her mother, country singer Naomi Judd (who used to favor "thrift-store chic and a lot of '40s shapes"). But by her teens, Ashley had sought out her own inspiration: "I was into fashion in junior high and high school. I would buy European magazines, and I loved cutting out pictures for my wall. I remember this Yves Saint Laurent dress ... it was black, and it had little bows on each shoulder and a little diaphanous thing that flowed behind it like a cape. It was a slim silhouette, a column dress, and it captivated me. I described it to someone who said it was a very important dress; I would love to find it."

Thanks to some of her stunning red-carpet turns, often in Armani, it's likely there's now a picture of Ashley on a teenager's wall in a place like Franklin, Tennessee, one of the many towns in which she lived growing up. That these wall-sanctified fantasies have become her reality is a plot twist that isn't lost on her.

"I was with Mr. Armani in the bathroom of his New York City apartment when he was pinning fabric on me for my wedding dress," she says. "He had on his beautiful navy cashmere T-shirt with all of these straight pins in it. He was talking about color and tone, and I was looking in the mirror watching him work. It was a great moment."

To preserve the fruit of these "moments," Ashley recently had a cedar-lined closet built in her home outside of Nashville that protects her growing collection of costumes, as well as gowns from Armani and another fabulous fashion friend, Valentino. "I don't want to be a pack rat, but some of the clothes are worth being archived," she says.

Swishy is how Ashley describes the feeling of putting on a Valentino. "In a Valentino, you definitely feel elite. The pieces are beautiful and very feminine," she says. "Valentino lends you some of his signature. Armani is a bit more about you being relaxed and being who you are. I think the word to describe Mr. Armani's clothes is effortless. It's easy to forget how incredible an Armani looks because it is so comfortable.

"You know the wedding dress Armani made for the film? I stomped around in that for days. It was like wearing a T-shirt," she explains. "When I laid down on the grass [between takes], my costumer had to draw the line!"

Not to minimize Mr. Armani's talent, but Ashley's comfort level in a silk satin, bias-cut wedding gown with a draping train might say more about her own comportment than the cut of the dress. It's hard, after all, to imagine any other modern actress spread out on the lawn in that gown with a hefty jeweled necklace and several museum-quality diamond bracelets with that amount of unabashed ease.

Most of the jewelry Ashley wears in the film is from Verdura, based on period designs by Fulco di Verdura, whose career (first designing jewelry for Chanel and then later for his own line) was largely launched by Linda Lee Porter. Linda Lee, in fact, presented her husband with a jeweled Verdura cigarette case on the opening nights of 16 of his musicals. When selecting jewelry for De-Lovely, costume designer Yates consulted with Ward Landrigan, Verdura's current president, who couldn't help but notice how the house's jewels and the film's leading lady enhanced one another. "[Ashley] has sass, which may be why she wears the jewelry so well," he says. "There are people who let the jewelry wear them because they're afraid to draw too much attention their way. That's not one of Ashley's problems."

Offscreen, the actress's current jewelry obsession is "black South Sea pearls. I saw Maria Shriver wearing a couple of strands with a T-shirt and jeans, and she looked so chic," she explains. "I spontaneously bought some in New York last fall."

The pearls and the swishy dresses, her tendency to interrupt thoughts with phrases like deary me and what a dish, and the call-it-as-you-see-it honesty leave little wonder why people describe Ashley as a throwback, in a Katharine Hepburn sort of way. There is also the actresses' shared obsession with gardening.

"My mother-in-law told me that she saw a special on Miss Hepburn, and she was packing up to go to her summer home," Ashley says. "In her station wagon, she had all of her staff, along with all of her plants! My mother-in-law said, 'She had all of her plants with her! She reminded me so much of you.'"

Still, it might be Ashley's politics and her thinking-woman's reputation that merit the comparison most.

"Katharine Hepburn is definitely one of my fashion icons. But I like where her mother [a former president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association and an early supporter of Planned Parenthood] comes from, too," Ashley says. "She was a real educator of women, no nonsense about that stuff." Ashley herself is not shy about her pro-woman views on such matters, appearing on The Tonight Show, for example, in a T-shirt that says THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE.

So maybe that's as close as you can get to a definition of Ashley Judd's style: It's not so much of a throwback as it is a prototype. She's a feminine neofeminist--equally smashing in dressed-down denim or a sexy halter gown with ruffles. And to those backward-thinking relics of the world who still believe that a woman can't be seriously minded and also concern herself with something as frivolous as fashion, Ashley has an earful.

"Everybody has the right to believe what they want to believe," she says. "And if in their struggle for equality and eradicating the miseries that plague this world, they think that a dress is not only superficial but also dangerous, that's their prerogative. I don't look at it that way. I think you get to be who you want to be, achieve the things that you're capable of achieving, and be a woman ... in whatever way that means to you. It's your ability to choose that's radical."

Harper's Bazaar 07/2004 >> Back