Dakota Johnson is proud of her vibrator.
The actor, producer, and fashion muse is due on the carpet at the Met Gala soon, and her hair and makeup teams are applying their finishing touches in a suite at New York’s Crosby Street Hotel. Turns out Johnson has a touch all her own—she used a vibrator on her face this morning as a makeshift lymphatic drainage massager. The device was from Maude, the sexual wellness company she joined a few years back as co–creative director.
“You showed me how to use it on my face,” says Kate Young, her longtime stylist and date for the night. Young turns to me and points to her cheeks: “I use her vibrator.”
She’s still in gray sweats, sitting patiently as the teams scurry around. An electric teakettle is boiling. Room service french fries are being passed around. There’s a bottle of Sancerre on ice.
“I’m on a conveyor belt of beauty treatments,” she says. “You know that scene in The Wizard of Oz? One of them is getting stuffed with hay, and the Tin Man is getting polished. I feel like that’s me.”
Tonight, she will be wearing a custom lace and beaded Gucci bodysuit, which currently hangs on a door nearby. The house’s designer, Alessandro Michele, was a close friend before Johnson came on as a brand ambassador in 2017. “We talk a lot, we text,” she says. “I don’t feel he’s elsewhere when I speak to him, which I feel most of the time when I speak to people that work in fashion.” Gucci has welcomed Johnson’s input on tonight’s creation—“They’ve been wonderful to me about that”—and she will appear on many of the evening’s best-dressed roundups. As if that weren’t enough, Oscar Isaac will see her in a corner and tell her she looks like a rainstorm.
Right now, it’s drizzling outside, Johnson is running late, and there’s a camera crew at the door waiting to film her getting ready.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to just stay here?” she says, only half-kidding. “Go downstairs, have a nice dinner?”
She prefers to do her own bangs for public appearances—a good luck charm of sorts—and once everything else is set, she slips into the bathroom to ensure that she looks like herself. That done, she and a styling assistant privately deal with black star-shaped nipple covers that won’t stick.
“We are so late,” says Young, now in her own green Gucci frock.
Johnson disappears for what feels like half a second, reemerging in the bodysuit and choosing between two black heels, as the masked camera crew and Italian public relations team enter the room to capture some contractual content.
“Do I need a wallet?” Johnson asks Young, hitting her marks for the videographer while subtly checking her bodysuit for pockets.
There are none, of course. Just chains, beads, lace, and flesh.
“I got it,” says Young, emptying Johnson’s credit cards and ID into her own clutch. “We gotta go!”
In the hallway, a pair of tourists stand against either wall to make way for Johnson’s velvet robe. Only one elevator is working. When the doors open, it’s too packed. Jaws drop at the sight of her. As the doors close again, the least stunned of the folks in the elevator, a mom, calls to Johnson, “You look beautiful!”
“You guys too!” Johnson says.
While we wait, she realizes something and suddenly freezes in panic.
“There’s a hole in my crotch,” she says.
Young’s assistant drops to his knees to investigate.
“How bad is it?” Young asks.
“I mean, finger-sized,” says Johnson. Hearing herself, she feigns shock and scandal in my direction: “Hey-o!”
“You won’t be able to see,” the assistant says. “Just don’t twerk.”
Laughter fills the hallway
Ifirst meet Johnson shortly before Easter at the Malibu home she shares with Coldplay’s Chris Martin. We walk through the couple’s succulent garden, then wind down a narrow canyon path to the Pacific. Johnson’s dog, Zeppelin, leads the way. The actor is wearing some delicate jewelry; a blue tie-dye sweater from the Elder Statesman; the kind of perfect vintage Levi’s that a dozen women are, at any given moment, scouring the shops of Topanga Canyon for; and a pair of fancier-than-usual collab-looking Birkenstocks. With the sun striking behind her, it could be Jane Birkin from La Piscine walking with me.
Johnson and Martin have been together almost five years. They met through a friend and have “never really left each other,” she says. Johnson tours with him when she’s not working. In October, while onstage in London, Martin pointed to her in the balcony as he introduced a new song called “My Universe.” “This is about my universe,” he said. “She’s here!” The crowd, and the internet, went wild.
As for Johnson and little Zeppelin, their relationship stretches much further back. Zeppelin, a Jack Russell terrier–schnauzer mix, has been at her feet, and in her arms, since she was 18. He was there before her sunburst of a scene steal in The Social Network, before the star-making Fifty Shades of Grey (the trilogy she’ll later refer to as “those big naked movies”), and before last year’s surprising, redefining performance in The Lost Daughter. To be specific, Zeppelin has been around since Johnson had a very bad breakup the summer after high school.
“I was like, ‘Fuck it. I’m going to cut my hair and get a puppy,’ which I did,” she says. “Both of those things.”
What was the haircut like?
“It was short and choppy. Not a pixie cut, but not a bob. It was bad.”
A mullet?
“Yeah,” she chuckles, remembering. “You could say that.”
Malibu has become a refuge. Martin surfs. Johnson swims and zips up and down the Pacific Coast Highway in a 1965 Mustang he gave her a few years ago for her birthday. She calls the car Dixie, and if she’s ever in a crash she plans to tell people, “My Dixie wrecked.” Say it out loud. You’ll get it.
Johnson and Martin guard their privacy, partly because theirs is a big, blended family and partly because of Johnson’s upbringing. She is one of seven half siblings, and Martin shares two teenagers with Gwyneth Paltrow. “Maybe I think about relationships like that differently because I grew up in my family,” she says. “We were all cool.” With each other, she means. “Obviously, there were times where it was not cool, but I experienced that, so I don’t want that in my life. I don’t want any kids to experience anything like that. It’s better to be kind, and it’s also really nice that everybody actually really loves each other and has each other’s backs.”
