Hunter Schafer: ‘It’s freaky that a machine is deciding what we consume’

It wasn’t until she saw her own face, lined up in a row next to the likes of Estelle Lefébure, Jerry Hall and Eva Mendes, that it really hit Hunter Schafer that she was now one of the Mugler Angel girls. “I had the privilege of going to the Thierry Mugler exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum,” she says. “There’s a whole room devoted to the fragrance and they had all the different iterations of the bottles over the decades and the different campaigns, and then mine was at the very end. I couldn’t believe it. It felt historic.”

When Mugler’s Angel Eau de Parfum came out in 1992, it forever changed the perfume world. Irresistibly luxurious and vulgar like the fashion house it came from, Angel was the first gourmand fragrance, a vanilla caramel and cotton candy creation that birthed a whole new category of perfume. Whether you hate it or love it (Hilary Clinton is reportedly a surprise fan), in the years since it’s been impossible to miss – the unapologetically sweet scent having found a home everywhere from the girls’ locker room to backstage at the strip club. It’s something that Schafer discovered once she joined the brand as the face of Angel Elixir.  

“It’s been really cool how many people in my life have come forward and been like, ‘Oh, I’ve been wearing this for years’ or ‘My mom used to wear this,’” she tells Dazed excitedly over Zoom. Schafer is just as great as you hope she will be – enthusiastic, sweet and engaged when answering questions, no matter if the topic is social media algorithms, her artistic process or the partnership with Mugler which she felt so excited about she sent a drawing to the team after meeting with them. The passion came, in part, because of how connected Schafer felt to the iconic perfume.

“The fragrance just feels really in line with who I am and how I like to navigate fashion and assemble myself. It has these contrasting elements of strength and power but also soft and sensual,” she says, pointing to the sweeter notes of vanilla and jasmine and the harder elements of pink pepper and wood. “There’s these contrasts and these dichotomies that I like to bring to my looks and how I navigate the world.”

Here, Dazed spoke to Schafer about social media algorithms, learning to put up boundaries and being one of Mugler’s Angels.

Why did you want to be a part of this campaign and work with Mugler?

Hunter Schafer: The legacy of Mugler is just incredible. They were trailblazers in terms of fashion and even fragrance – carving out their own space that’s really unique. Even when it comes down to the bottle for Angel, they had to create new machinery to create the star shape. When they put the glass in the mould, they have to spin it around really fast to get it into the star shape. I’m explaining it really poorly but it’s really cool they had to invent their own machinery to bring this vision to life. And I feel like that’s integral to how the brand is, too. They brought fashion and fragrance into the world that couldn’t have existed before them. So I think that’s something I feel really honoured to be a part of. 

The campaign is amazing. How was it to film?

Hunter Schafer: It was so cool. It was what I imagined filming a superhero movie would feel like. Casey Cadwallader does the creative direction for all of their shoots and runway shows, which are cinematically really cool, and he definitely brought all that energy to this shoot as well. And the director Quentin [Deronzie] had all these contractions of cameras that he could programme to move around me. I was flying up on cables, like 50 feet in the air. It was so much fun! I do a lot of shoots and I have never done anything like that before. So it was a new experience working in that way, and really cool that we got to do all of that, like stuff that they use in Marvel movies, to make a fashion film. 

How has your relationship with fragrance changed throughout your life?

Hunter Schafer: It’s definitely morphed. It’s not something I used to really consider until I became aware of it. This is a weird analogy, but when I first started learning about different brands of cars and what cars I liked, all of a sudden I started seeing them everywhere. I think the same thing happened with fragrance where I keep learning a lot about fragrance, especially since I’ve come into the Mugler family. 

There’s this whole literary element to it which I just think is so much fun. It’s really artistic having to articulate a scent and a feeling that it brings to you. There’s this whole literary library that I am becoming accustomed to and learning how to talk about. I mean, it’s a scent and it’s tangible when you’re smelling it. But it feels artistic to learn how to talk about it.

It’s true because with other beauty categories it’s all visual, but with scent you don’t have that. It’s much more conceptual so you have to rely on storytelling or emotions to convey what it smells like. You have a lot of fun with beauty, though – like the Studio Ghibli nails or the sculptural face mask at the Met Gala. Do you enjoy playing around with it?

Hunter Schafer: Absolutely. It’s one of my favourite parts of what comes with what I do. I get to have fun with all these resources to assemble looks that are just out of this world. I can use my imagination with other amazing creative people to build these images, ideas and concepts. It feels like a big art project a lot of the time. It’s why I like films and making movies or TV shows, because it feels like I’m part of a bigger project. That’s how styling looks and making images feels as well.

I wanted to ask you about your art. During lockdown, you said that you had a big creative outburst. Now that you have free time again because of the strike, are you having a similar period of creativity?

Hunter Schafer: I’ve just bought a house so I’m working on putting that together right now. I’ve never done that before, you know, putting a space together. It’s a new experience so that’s where I feel like my creative energy is going. But that’s typically how I work creatively, it comes in big bursts.

So you come and go from your art during different times in your life?

Hunter Schafer: Yeah, I love it when it’s for something and there are deadlines and goals to work towards. I think I need structure to finish things, because I’m pretty sporadic with my ideas. I’ll start writing a script on a plane and then spend five hours on it and build a whole idea. And then not look at it for two years. 

But I feel like that’s how stuff comes to be, I just trust that things will resurface when they’re supposed to. That’s typically how it’s worked. And it’s also cool because I have a reservoir of ideas to pull from when I do need to bring something to the table.

You had a conversation with Viviane Sassen for AnOther magazine recently where you talked about how you make art that you know will never see the light of day because you don’t want to have to deal with other people’s opinions and comments. I really wanted to talk to you about that and the boundaries that you need to put in place to keep your sense of self and identity when you spend so much time in the public eye.

Hunter Schafer: It’s really, really important, and that has become more clear. I got thrown into this [industry] when I was 19. I’m 24 now, and I feel like I have a pretty good sense of what to keep for myself and what to put out into the world. Because putting something out into the world, whether you like it or not, it changes your relationship to it. I describe it a lot of the time like having a baby. When I’ve directed music videos, it really feels like this birthing process where I’ll put work in for three months on something and it’s just mine, or mine and my friends. And then I put it out into the world and it’s recontextualised, there are opinions and all of these things that burst your bubble – which is great and that’s part of the artistic process, but it doesn’t have to be like that for everything. 

I think it’s really important in the age of social media, and this fast reward system that we’ve developed where it’s like, ‘I’m making something, oh, I should be documenting this, I should be putting this on my story. People should know that I’m doing this.’ And it can be dangerous because it gets murky around why you’re doing something. 

Yeah, the artists that I get to speak to have said how social media makes it hard to experiment with different types of art or just try new things, try out different ways of making things, because everyone sees everything all the time. So you can't make mistakes, you can’t try anything new or learn or grow or experiment.

Hunter Schafer: Yeah, it’s also scary with that algorithm – I mean, I don’t want to get too deep into the algorithm and spiral but everything that you’re consuming is being curated for you by something that is not tangible. Even when you’re sourcing inspiration or consuming things in general, I think it’s really important to broaden the horizon beyond social media because it’s a little freaky that some machine in a building somewhere is deciding what you’re consuming.

It makes our perspectives so narrow. The internet could be so expansive but instead we get stuck in these algorithms. Last question – what are you manifesting at the moment? 

Hunter Schafer: I’m manifesting my industry to figure out how to proceed in the midst of this strike. And I’m really hoping that people at the top can make the right decision soon so that we can get back to work and keep doing what we love.

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