Five Minutes With Zen-like Fashion Week Rookie Nathalie Kelley
Most fashion week rookies are all about the photo-ops, but not actress Nathalie Kelley. While her fellow celebrity models were primping before Thursday night’s Red Dress Collection, she sat in the lotus position reading Neil LaBute’s “The Way We Get By.”
Minutes away from her runway debut at the Manhattan Center, the “Fast and the Furious” actress was calm as could be, wearing her red Randi Rahm dress under a monogrammed red robe. At the Red Dress to help the cause, Kelley said her identity and ego were not wrapped up in what was about to happen. “I don’t care where I’m placed or if I’m seen in the photo,” she said with a laugh. “I meditate a lot.”
Related stories
Brandon Maxwell Gets a Reality Check
Model Behati Prinsloo Teams With Seven For All Mankind
Jordyn Woods, Skai Jackson, Rosanna Arquette Play Up Empowerment at Red Dress Collection Show
Losing her phone in a cab en route to another fashion show earlier in the day did not rattle her either. “I made a decision that I wasn’t going to make it a problem,” she said. “It was so nice to be fully present. “Everybody is always waiting for the show to start [pretending to swipe a phone]. I was drinking it up. It’s theater — the setting, the sound, the lighting, even watching the people. As an actress, I’m devouring that.”
Area, Jonathan Simkhai and Dion Lee were her NYFW planned stops. The actress has met Simkhai and Lee through a friend who owns the Sydney boutique Desordre. “As an artist to be in somebody else’s artistic medium is so exciting. L.A. is not really the epicenter of fashion. To come here and see people who care about it…I don’t know if I’m a fashion-fashion person, but I love aesthetics, design and form in the way that it manifests itself in fashion week.”
Appearing in the first season of the CW’s reboot of “Dynasty” has made her want to expand her skill set. “I took a bit a gamble. It really wasn’t a genre or a network that I resonated with. It was a lot of exposure, and I’m grateful for it,” she said. “But it was really hard for me to bring that material to life. I’m not a soap actress and it was very soapy. I just learned a big lesson from it. I have pretty good powers of manifestation but I need to be more specific next time. I didn’t love it.”
Her agents and her husband, Jordy Burrows, would like her to take another TV show because she is supporting her family and it is “really good solid money.” Once her next role is secured, she hopes to return to New York to do a play. In the meantime, she has been busy nesting — hanging a Seventies disco ball in her living room — on the West Coast, eager for her new husband to move from Australia to help open the Edition hotel in West Hollywood. Despite the city’s highly competitive real estate market, Kelley secured a rental for a Thirties house overlooking the Hollywood Bowl. Sending the landlord a drop box with professional photos of her last rental “to show the care she took with its design” locked it up, Kelley said. “We won on personality. She told me, ‘Wow, no one else did that. We would like to have you next to us.’ It was a deal.”
Get more from WWD: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Newsletter
