When Barbie Ferreira greeted me in her Sydney hotel room for our interview, it was like seeing your highschool best friend on the first day after summer holidays. Like the warmth her Euphoria character, Kat Hernandez, receives from Alexa Demie’s ‘Maddy’ and Sydney Sweeney’s ‘Cassie’ in the Emmy Award-winning series’ second episode “Stuntin’ Like Her Daddy”, Ferreira welcomes me with an effusive embrace.
Her Margaret Keane-esque doe eyes and megawatt smile immediately shed any apprehension that Ferreira could be an aloof, ‘too cool for school’ member of young Hollywood. She’d only been in town for less than 12 hours but welcomed me into her suite like it was her own home.
“I love being home, being home is like really rejuvenating for me,” Ferreira said, fussing over me ensuring I put my bag on a table and not the floor. “It’s so you don’t lose money!” her publicist said, with the actress, again treating me like we’ve been friends since kindergarten, remarking “Once my grandma told me that I never did it again!”
For most of my generation, Ferreira is lionised as the zenith of cool. Though Julia Fox was referring to herself when she said, “I know the influence, I know the impact and I know the vibes” you could easily apply that same candour to Ferreira.
Yes, that’s in part due to the aforementioned role placing her in front of millions, but it’s also a quality she’s maintained with her high-octane energy, staunch fearlessness and sartorial prowess. (That photo of Ferreira casually sporting a slinky, cut-out and art nouveau-print Ottolinger dress to eat sushi in lives in my mind rent-free).
For the uninitiated, allow us to briefly catch you up on Ferreira’s decade-long career. A relic of the Tumblr epoch, Ferreira’s Photo Booth selfie-filled blog led her to get hit up by an American Apparel ad scout about an open casting. She booked the job. Then another one. Then became the face of a major untouched campaign, catapulting her to be the face of the “not model” movement (though she was refreshingly real, she’s never not been a model).
She booked a small part on an HBO show. Then a leading role on one of HBO’s biggest shows of this century. Fast forward now, she’s halfway around the world attending a soiree under the harbour bridge thanks to her work with the world’s largest jewellery house, Pandora.
“Starting to act was a big deal for me, just because I wanted it for so long,” Ferreira explained. “When I was able to transition to that and be an actor, because that’s what I modelled to do, that was amazing! When I moved to LA I was like, ‘OK I’m a full-blown ‘working actor now’.
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“Some people would still say that I’m a ‘model slash actor’, but not to me. I classify myself as an actor, and then someone who does photoshoots. But both are great careers to have…”
I asked her if perhaps she just enjoys being in front of a camera, irrespective of the circumstance, but she gently reminded me of her previous point. She’s not a ‘slash’ anything: “I like to act and I love fashion, so there’s something to that.”
Ferreira’s career is an amalgam of incredible devotion, sacrifice, resilience and talent, but throughout our conversation, I realised how much of her pivots or business decisions are rooted in her total adoration for fashion.
“I’m starting to do things that I feel good doing. That’s been working on acting projects I can sink my teeth into and has nothing to do with the way I look.”
“Sometimes, especially being a model and being in this space of doing a lot of photoshoots, you get caught up in the way you look or what you dress like. So, it’s nice to do a project where you are the opposite of what you want to do.
“You want to be a person who hasn’t found themselves because it’s fun to lose yourself in that. It’s a weird thing because I love fashion so much that when I play a character, which is most characters because they’re not fashion girls, it changes my perspective on my every day because I’m wearing something I wouldn’t necessarily wear.”
But fear not, Ferreira assured me there will be a moment when she’s in a period piece rocking a corset just as well as she does off-screen.
Naturally, with Ferreira and I both young 20-somethings with an affinity for fashion—“mid-20s, but thank you, I did play a teenager,” she interrupted me—I had to know her shopping secrets.
“I love SSENSE. I have such a problem with SSENSE. Every other month I have a huge problem because I have huge packages that just get stuck at customs… It’s literally my drama at home.” Not a bad drama to have, I quipped back.
Aside from the usuals—Depop for t-shirts, Grailed for tracksuits and fashionable friends Ferreira can “steal ideas” from, she cited collaborations and lessons from her stylist Chris Horan, lots of small designers (“I love people who make it [clothes] in their house”) and scrolling a certain runway app as her main sources of sartorial inspiration.
“I troll so much on Instagram and I look up to a love of the girls that I love who are plus-sized models like Paloma [Elsesser], Precious [Lee], Jill [Kortleve] because I used to be a curve model so I always see what they’re modelling because I know it will fit me… and them being supermodels they are selling me the clothes!”
It’s this affinity for admiring what the women in her life are doing that inspired Ferreira’s love of jewellery, and what spurred this journey from LA to Australia. “I have always used jewellery as a form of experimentation.”
“I didn’t grow up with much so it’s a symbol of hard work and very culturally important.”
“My mum and my grandma still wear hoops and then gold and have these very specific traditions. It also keeps me connected to my family. Growing up I’ve always had pieces of their jewellery or taking things from people’s closets in my house. I don’t have any siblings, so it was always like through my mom or my grandma.
“Jewellery is embracing that as well and kind of always having parts of them reflected in me even though we are just very different was just saying how I don’t have a family heirloom so I have to start one!”
If Ferreira is open to suggestions of what her soon-to-be familial antique could be, may we suggest something from Pandora’s newly minted lab-grown diamonds category? Unveiled into the Australian market over a cocktail dinner on the banks of Sydney harbour—a soirée Ferreira made the 12-hour pilgrimage to join us at—the jeweller immersed us in a dazzling universe to introduce their new lab-grown diamonds collection; Infinite, Nova and Era.
Dispelling the doctrine that diamonds are inaccessible stones reserved for exclusive occasions, Pandora is pioneering a movement democratising the gem. For many, possessing a diamond is through familial lineage, as Ferreira noted, or upon your engagement.
Quelling this convention, Pandora is encouraging this extravagant ‘rock’ to be part of your everyday uniform, proudly declaring diamonds are for all occasions and for everyone. Comprising the same physical, chemical and optical properties as mined diamonds, this new category also boasts the benefit of having a substantially lower carbon footprint than traditional diamonds.
Ferreira, dressed for the occasion in a silver Coperni maxi dress adorned with twisted rosettes, twinkled like the lights of the Sydney Harbour Bridge reflecting on the water in her glistening Pandora jewels. Sartorially embracing the infinite possibilities of Pandora’s brand-new, lab-grown bijoux, Ferreira sported a melange of diamonds, including the 14k Infinite double chain bracelet and one-carat diamond ring realised in a four-prong setting.
“Who would I bring to a Pandora dinner? Hmm, let’s see. Cate Blanchett! She’s my favourite Australian, she’s so gorgeous oh my god just wonderful.”
Though, as anyone with a conventional high school experience would be aware, all things must pass. There comes a moment when you must conclude that chapter, walking away from what you know and into the unknown. Though, hopefully, you take those friends you made with you.
As our conversation wraps up, I ask Ferreira what’s next for her. In the last few months, her name has been entangled with a television show she stepped away from, handling the controversy that surrounded her exit with grace and matter-of-factness.
“It’s really hard to be a young woman in the public eye. I just overthink everything, I still do, I overthink everything. I’m so heady. I just want this next chapter of my life to be me being creatively stimulated without overthinking so much. I think that’s a problem and everyone thinks that way.
“But, there’s a time in your life where you’re like ‘Ok, either I do things that I want’ and be a self-fulfilled person or I’m going to always just be in chaos, even if things are going good. It’s the chaos of it on the mind. So, for me in my 30s I hope to just be more selfish and not care what people think.
“I’ve been working since I was 16, so thankfully, and this is a very privileged place of being, but I can kind of, find pockets of time to do stuff for myself. I didn’t always have that when I started working. I was modelling and travelling five times a week when I was 18, which sounds really nice and cool, and it was, but it was just it was very exhausting, and mentally not good because I was such a kid being thrown into all these situations.
“I couldn’t say no for a long time because I had to work, but it’s nice to be at a point in time where I have done all that and it has led me to this.”
As Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen said: no is a full sentence.
“I still like always doing something, but if my heart’s not in it, it always is so much tougher to get through the job and it’s mentally straining. So, now I feel like most of the stuff that I do is pleasant and stuff that I love.”
Barbie Ferreira is graduating from this phase of her life and is evolving onto the next; shining brighter and stronger than ever. Possessed with these jewels of wisdom, it’s difficult not to.
This story first appeared on GRAZIA International.