Fashion loves celebrity offspring. Jaggers, Le Bons, Baldwins, Hadids and Jenners — they’re all over catwalks and billboards, popping down the generation line like Russian nesting dolls, each one tinier and more beautiful than the last. And with most of these mini-mes now speaking to a social-media following that overshadows their parents’ legacy, it pays brands to lend their patronage. The most recent to join the fold is Lily-Rose Depp, the 17-year-old daughter of Johnny Depp and the French singer Vanessa Paradis, and now the face of Chanel’s new fragrance, No 5 L’Eau. It’s a canny move by the house, which wants to woo the millennial market with a fresh take on the classic scent — L’Eau is its lightest incarnation yet.
In industry terms, landing the No 5 campaign is the biggie, and it separates Lily-Rose from the rest of the current “daughter of” herd. She follows in the footsteps of Catherine Deneuve, Nicole Kidman, Gisele, even Brad Pitt. And then there’s her mother: Paradis has been a friend of the brand ever since she fronted a campaign for its younger fragrance, Coco, as a teenager in the 1990s.
Now Lily-Rose has picked up the baton. At the Chanel Metiers d’Arts presentation in Paris two weeks ago, she opened the show, slinking through the revamped Ritz hotel, leading a pack of the next-next-generation stars, including Keith Richards’s granddaughter Ella and Bob Dylan’s grandson Levi. So why has the venerable house found a muse in this 17-year-old? It’s partly because she was born to one of Hollywood’s most bohemian couples (Depp and Paradis split in 2012 after 14 years together, but remain on good terms); and it certainly helps that she’s a doppelgänger for her mother. They have the same tiny, birdlike frame, the sleepy eyes, the slight snarl to the smile — though the trademark gap tooth has skipped a generation.
We meet at yet another Chanel show, but this time Lily-Rose is sitting on the front row, sandwiched between Patrick Demarchelier and the singer Usher. Afterwards, when we sit down to chat backstage, she is unfazed by comparisons to her mother. “I love my mum’s style. Everyone looks up to their mum and wants to dress like her, especially when they are growing up,” she says, in between sips of fizzy water. She goes on to cite her mum as one of her fashion icons. “I stole all her make-up, her shoes, her high heels, when I was a baby. I was the worst!”
Born in Paris (she now spends most of her time in LA), Lily-Rose is chatty and laid-back — no Gallic froideur here, nor any hint of a French accent — although once in a while she struggles for a word and reverts to French. She’s dressed head to toe in Chanel, of course, in a Tetris-print tunic and white shorts, with lined red lips. Most impressive are her thick, untamed brows, in the vein of that other mega-millennial, Cara Delevingne. “I never tweeze them, ever, because it hurts! I have a low pain threshold. Even in the middle, I don’t touch them, unless it’s getting out of control. They pretty much stay as they are.” Really? A teenage girl not worrying about a monobrow? “I just fill my brows in with a pencil and brush through them with brow gel,” she shrugs. “I love a kind of boy brow.”
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What about your dad’s eyeliner? There must be legions of kohl stockpiled from the Jack Sparrow days — have you ever borrowed his? “I actually haven’t, no.” Does he borrow yours? “No,” she laughs. “He hasn’t asked. We’ll borrow each other’s hair ties, but that’s it. No, I stick to my mum’s make-up — it’s what I trust.”
It was with her mother that she made her first proper public appearance, in March last year, when they arrived arm in arm at a Chanel event (there are a lot) in New York. Until then we knew relatively little about the demi-Depp: the only mention had been in 2007, when, aged seven, she was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital following a life-threatening E coli infection. Her parents spent three weeks camping out on the ward; her father was filming Sweeney Todd at the time and referred to it later as “the darkest period in my life”.
Yet four months after that New York show, she was fronting Chanel’s eyewear campaign, and in February had her first magazine cover, for the SS16 issue of Love. When it comes to her own style, she says: “I love Jane Birkin, I love Brigitte Bardot ...” She pauses. “But I don’t try to dress like anybody. I think the best thing to do is wear what you are comfortable in. When I’m at home, I’ll wear a T-shirt or a tank top and jeans and sneakers every single day. But I also love statement stuff and the more out-there pieces that you don’t see all the time. I love a lot of jewellery, especially rings, as you can tell” — every knuckle is gem-encrusted — “and hoop earrings. I wear hoops every day.”
It’s not unironic that the tagline for No 5 L’Eau is: “You know me and you don’t.” Unlike her peers, Lily-Rose seems to keep a mantle of relative privacy. She doesn’t do Twitter, Snapchat or Facebook, although there is, of course, an Instagram feed with 2.3m followers, but it’s closely curated, not full of selfies and overshares. We know her favourite movie is the Wizard of Oz, that she’s friends with the Victoria’s Secret model Stella Maxwell, and has known Karl Lagerfeld since she was eight. She supported Bernie Sanders in the US presidential election (or at least the teen equivalent of political activism — reposting screenshots of his speech). She comes to the UK a lot. In fact, she is a bit of an Anglophile. “I love English rappers — I like Skepta, and we listen to Dappy also.” (Yes, that’s Dappy from N-Dubz and a former contestant on Celebrity Big Brother.) She even gets a British friend to save copies of Style for her.
Apart from the West Coast-to-Left Bank lifestyle, Lily-Rose is pretty much your average 17-year-old: every sentence peppered with “like”, Beyoncé songs soundtracking her nights out (“Her older stuff especially, like Baby Boy”). There was a bit of a hoo-ha when she supposedly came out as sexually fluid on Instagram last August, but she clarified her comments later — she’s just not into labels. She has been linked to the 25-year-old British model Ash Stymest for the past year, though the topic is off-limits. (What teenage girl would want to talk about her love life with a stranger?) Possibly best of all, for her 16th birthday last year, she threw an alternative French Revolution-themed “Sour Sixteen” party, complete with guillotine, swords and a dungeon. The birthday girl wore a pout and a garland of onions around her neck.
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And she is nothing if not on-brand. “I’m never not wearing No 5,” she says, in her LA drawl. “I put it on as soon as I get out of the shower.” The house perfumer, Olivier Polge, has taken apart the 80-plus ingredients of the original formulation to emphasise its greener top notes — lemon, mandarin, orange — and tone down the powdery vanilla base. It’s meant for generous spritzing: “I spray it in my hair because I heard it sticks better, and I spray it on my neck, on my wrists and on my clothes a little bit, too.”
As is tradition, there is an epic video to accompany the launch (remember Baz Luhrmann’s No 5 film with Nicole Kidman?). This one is made by Johan Renck, the Swedish director behind Bowie’s 10-minute Blackstar video. “Johan was so much fun to work with,” she says. “He was super-nice and welcoming. We talked about what to do to a certain degree, but he was very, like, ‘If you want to try that, let’s try it, and if it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t matter, we’ll just try other things.’”
She’s serious about her acting career, however, dropping out of high school earlier this year to focus on it. She made her debut in Yoga Hosers, a quirky little film by the Clerks director Kevin Smith, who is an old friend of her dad’s. She has been friends with Smith’s daughter, her co-star Harley Quinn Smith, since they were five. In fact Depp, Paradis and even her younger brother, Jack, all had cameos in the project, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Next on the horizon is a meatier role, as the younger sister of Natalie Portman in Planetarium, a tale of psychic siblings set in the 1930s. Then there’s The Dancer, with the French singer Soko. It screened at Cannes in May — there are YouTube clips of Lily-Rose doing her publicity in perfect French on the Croisette like a pro.
“I am selective, I only want to do things I really, really care about,” she says emphatically. “I’d rather just do a few things that I’m excited about than do a bunch of stuff all the time.” You get the feeling people will be happy to wait.
Make-up, used throughout: Skin Hydra Beauty SEorum, £59, Hydra Beauty Flash Instantly Hydrating Perfecting Balm, £43, and Les beiges healthy glow foundation, £36. Joues Contraste powder blush in Rouge Profond, £31. Eyes: Les 4 Ombres eyeshadow in Candeur et Experience, £40, Stylo Yeux Waterproof eyeliner in Agape and Eros, £19, and Le Volume de Chanel mascara in Noir, £25. Lips: Rouge Coco lipstick in Catherine 410, £26. All Chanel
