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Dree Hemingway is tHe moDel turneD actress from one of
a m e r i c a ’ s m o s t fa s c i n at i n g a n D t r a g i c D y n a s t i e s . s H e t e l l s
d e r e k b l a s b e r g H o w s H e r e f u s e s t o b e D e f i n e D b y H e r fa m i ly
Fashion: Lucy Ewing. PhotograPhs: Emma tEmPEst
i
n an industry full of models with surnames such as Jagger and Jenner, it’s little
wonder why fashion fell in love so quickly with Dree Hemingway. Check out the
27-year-old model and actress’s antecedents: her mother is Mariel Hemingway, the
Oscar-nominated actress and one-time muse of Woody Allen; her aunt is the late
Margaux Hemingway, one of the industry’s first supermodels, who earned milliondollar pay packets and graced a slew of magazines from French Vogue to Playboy.
And, oh yeah, her maternal great-grandfather is Ernest, one of the 20th century’s
most influential writers.
As a kid growing up in Ketchum, Idaho, she attended Ernest Hemingway Elementary
School, soon realising the impact of her surname (she was actually born Dree Louise
Hemingway Crisman, but later took the famous family name). “People always expect me
to tell them something new about Ernest, but I never met the guy. I can only read the
same books and biographies that you do,” she says, smiling.
Today, Hemingway lives in East Village, New York. “I’m a home body. I wake up every
morning and I get coffee and read a book or write in my journal. Preferably both.” Her
apartment is typically bohemian, but gives a hint at her lofty heritage; framed and propped
against a wall is a 1961 cover of Life magazine featuring her great-grandfather and hanging
on the fridge is the cover of an April 1982 issue of Andy Warhol’s Interview, featuring an
illustration of her mother. And what of a strand of beads hanging above the doorway to her
bedroom? “They were blessed by the Dalai Lama,” she says. Turns out, when she was 16
and her father, the film-maker Stephen Crisman (her parents amicably divorced in 2008),
was making a documentary about the holy one, she met him in India. “I knew about him,
but I didn’t know what it meant to meet him. When he walked in, his energy was so
intense and beautiful that I burst into tears. He made a beeline for me, grabbed my face
and patted my head. And then it was waterworks for the next two weeks, crying every
night. I wanted to know the meaning of life and the purpose of why I was here.”
Growing up, Hemingway “was always going at the beat of my own drum and trying
to find myself in different ways”. She admits that her teens weren’t ordinary, but seems
blasé about exactly how extraordinary — when she was 15, she attended Le Bal des
Débutantes in Paris with her mother. “I got to wear a Christian Dior gown that John
Galliano designed. It was flamenco-inspired, with ruffles everywhere, and the front was
a metal cage. I couldn’t lift my arms and by the end of the night I had bruises everywhere,
like the top half of me was one giant hickey.”
As a teenager, she was enrolled in a “very boring, very Christian” high school in Los
Angeles; she dropped out in her junior year and moved to New York to study ballet.
Wo o l j u m p e r ( w o r n a s a s c a r f ) , £ 87 5 , w o o l - b l e n d j a c k e t ( t i e d r o u n d c h e s t ) , £ 1, 3 8 5 , a n d s t r e t c h - w o o l t r o u s e r s , £ 1,18 0 , b y
G i o r g i o A r m a n i . R i g h t e a r : g o l d c r e s c e n t s t u d , £ 13 5 f o r a p a i r, b y F e r s , f r o m Wo l f & B a d g e r. G o l d h o o p s a n d s t u d s , f r o m £ 115 ;
l o v e a d o r n e d . c o m . P e a rl b a n g l e , £ 8 0 , b y D o r o t a T o d d , a n d s t a c k i n g r i n g s , £ 9 5 e a c h , b y E d g e O n l y, f r o m Wo l f & B a d g e r
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f a s h i o n
By 19, she was back in California and interning at the
fashion and society magazine LA Confidential. “They
basically had me doing layouts, and I got sick of sitting in
front of the computer for hours and hours and then being
the door girl at their parties.” So she did what any selfrespecting young woman would do: she moved to Paris. “I
wanted to be an actress, but thought I needed more life
experience before I went into that.”
The fashion industry welcomed her: first, she met the starmaking stylist Katie Grand, who dyed her hair platinum and
shot her. (The two are close friends.) The rest of the industry
soon followed. The cult photographers Inez & Vinoodh shot
her for W magazine and, soon after, she made her catwalk
debut in 2009 when Riccardo Tisci cast her exclusively to
appear in one of his Givenchy shows. Then came campaigns
for Gucci and Valentino. Now she is following in the footsteps
of Chloë Sevigny and Anja Rubik as the face and brand
ambassador of Chloé Eau de Parfum. “That was a dream
come true, because I’ve always thought of the Chloé woman
as a self-assured bohemian.”
Hemingway, whose style is very fairy child (think worn-in
jeans and fluffy peasant blouses), has created her own
community in the industry. In addition to Grand, the
photographer Angelo Pennetta and stylist Francesca Burns
are close pals, and she is godmother to the photographer
Sean Thomas’s little boy, Huck. “My last name may have
opened a few doors for me, but I’ve had to prove myself to
stay in the room,” she says. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk
— appreciating the opportunities her family name has offered
her, but not being limited by it. (When we first met in 2009,
she told me her favourite writer was F Scott Fitzgerald, which
she says now was youthful rebellion.) “I am so honoured to
be a part of this bloodline, and when I read Ernest
Hemingway’s literature, I do feel like there is connection —
the love of travel and adventure, and his love of the sea.”
In 2013, her mother featured in the documentary Running
from Crazy, which charted the family’s history of mental
illness. Not only did Ernest kill himself (in 1961), so did his
father, Clarence, as well as his siblings Ursula and Leicester.
Margaux killed herself in 1996, on the day before the
anniversary of Ernest’s suicide. Although the film was well
received — “I’ve seen people come up to my mother and say
it changed their lives, or that it helped other families who
have dealt with suicide” — Hemingway herself has never
seen it and says she has no plans to do so. One of the topics
it covers is the sibling rivalry between Mariel and Margaux;
Dree thinks her aunt grew jealous of how her mother’s
career seemingly plopped into her lap while her own
languished. Hemingway has a close relationship with her
own sister, Langley Fox, an illustrator two years her junior,
who is also on the way to becoming a top model. “I really
held onto the fact that she was a child for a very long time,
and recently it dawned on me: ‘She’s not a child, she’s
actually my best friend.’ She is an amazing woman.”
As Hemingway continues on the path of model-turnedactress — her debut was the lead role in Starlet (2012), and
she has three films scheduled for release this year — what
advice does her mother have? “I can see both my mother
and my aunt Margaux in me, and my mother has never
been anything but supportive. She has always pushed me
to be the best version of my own person.” v
T H I S PA G E
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OPPOSITE
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