SHOUT IT OUT: British singer-songwriter Celeste lent her powerful vocals to the soundtrack for the Zimmermann show Monday morning. “I just did some screaming, you could say some experimental vocal expression,” Celeste said ahead of the show, which celebrated women’s empowerment. “Originally, I was asked to write a poem,” she explained. “Once I heard the music it didn’t really feel right to write a song or a poem; it felt like the two didn’t really go together. So instead I went for what I’ve been doing a lot, which is be less in the mind and more in the body, and just sing whatever comes out naturally.”
That, it turns out, was a scream. “There was this feeling in the past year of this united scream,” she said. “I’ve felt that all the women I knew and all the women artists were like ‘aaarrggh’ and it came out in music and art in a really interesting way.…I suppose it is a shout in a way, to just scream at the world and say, ‘Hear our voices. Let us exist in the way we want to exist.’ There’s a lot of feeling the past two years that we were losing agency over our own bodies. I think everybody felt this way, that we need to be able to speak and be ourselves.”
Like Oprah Winfrey further down the front row, she chose a powerful design language in sharp-shouldered brown leather for the occasion. Other guests including Jessica Chastain and Naomi Watts picked out colorful suiting, in orange and pink respectively, while former “Saturday Night Live” regular Ego Nwodim chose a short denim number.
Leila George is also working on her vocal technique, but in a different register. “I’m doing a South Bend accent, which I’ve never done before,” she said of her current project, a Netflix miniseries based on S.A. Cosby’s novel “All the Sinners Bleed.”
“It’s a kind of true detective serial killer show set in Virginia,” she shared of the project, in which she plays an investigative journalist.
This is worlds apart from her role as Kelly Klein in “Love Story,” which hit screens last month and has resulted in the kindling of a friendship between George and the real-life Kelly Klein. “I reached out to her to tell her how honored I was to portray her and that I hoped she liked it,” she explained. “She loves it, so she kept asking me, what else are we going to do, do we have more seasons with Carolyn [Bessette]; she refers to us as a ‘we,’ she’ll send me a screenshot and say, ‘look at us,’ she’s so sweet and lovely and supportive.”