Gucci cape, $3,700, dress, $11,000, shoes, $990, and rings, $730-$21,500, gucci.com.
"What is this—interview by PowerPoint?" Florence Welch exclaims as she gestures toward the large drop-down projector screen that dominates the tiny office where we are meeting, in the back of London's Victoria and Albert Museum. The room itself couldn't be more of a contrast to the surrounding Aladdin's Cave of spaces filled with jewelry, costumes, and decorative items from every continent and era, which the Florence and the Machine singer has spent the past half hour blissfully browsing. "I spent so much time here as a kid," she says, sinking carefully into an office chair as if it were one of the priceless antiques on display. "My mum is a professor of Renaissance studies and a trustee, so I'd hear her lecture on things like a pair of gloves—why they were scented, why they meant so much to Florentines at the time. It's funny, Mum studies clothes and she's very chic, but she doesn't understand my wild passion for fashion at all. She'd rather write about stuff than buy it." She pauses, then: "I wonder if I have a daughter if I'll be like, 'Look at this dress!' And she'll be like, 'No, Mum, not interested.'"
It's a typical Welch monologue: free-form, unguarded, and filled with asides about her much adored family. Her parents split when she was 13, with Welch and her younger brother and sister acquiring a total of four new stepsiblings. There were initial tensions, but now they're all friends. "There's a lot of creativity on both sides. Both parents are amazing, interesting people," she says.
Welch's father is a former adman who now runs an eco-friendly campsite. "He used to manage my band and drive our camper van, but he's not exactly authoritarian," she says. Her mother is the worrier—insisting when Welch was moving out of the family home in South London a couple of years ago that her new place be only a five-minute cycle ride away. "My mum still wishes I'd gone to university; she's very protective of me," Welch says, adding, "The music industry frightens her."
Gucci Fine Jewelry ring, $21,500, gucci.com.
Welch herself is a study in contradictions. She is undeniably a free spirit, who is not above enjoying the rock 'n' roll rambunctiousness of the road. (She once accidentally set her hotel room on fire.) But she makes no attempt to hide her upper-middle-class background, speaking in clear Queen's English tones, her speech dotted with "please" and "thank you." Then there's today's ensemble: velvet J Brand flares and a burgundy Gucci scarf shirt, loafers, and belt contrasting with her makeup-free face, shaggy titian bangs, and vintage hippie-trail linen coat. "People tease me about this belt on Instagram, I wear it so much," she says. "But you know when something holds everything together?"
It is that inherent style that brings the 24-year-old singer to the museum. Welch was just named the ambassador for Gucci's watch and jewelry collections, and the brand's creative director, Alessandro Michele, created the clothes she's wearing on her current world tour, which kicked off its American leg in the spring.
Welch, who describes Michele as a "kindred spirit," first met the designer in New York last year. The pair bonded instantly over their shared dramatic sensibilities. "I love the romance of what Alessandro does," says Welch. "Like me, he's interested in making things beautiful but with this unsettling element; feminine but with an edge to it."
The jewelry in the new collection ranges from simple yellow-gold bands decorated with white enamel and colorful gemstones like citrine quartz, London topaz, and pink tourmalines to glorious flora-inspired pieces done in pink gold, diamonds, and sapphires. There's also a direct correlation to the irreverence of Michele's ready-to-wear creations: cocktail rings in the likeness of a tiger's head; cascading earrings that show the face of a lion in diamonds and rubellites; green and blue topaz snakes that coil around the finger. At the center is Gucci's latest watch, a G-Timeless automatic decorated with bees, hearts, and stars.
"I've always been interested in femininity that had a darkness; nothing could ever be too pretty," Welch says. "When I started performing at around 20, I wore pop socks. I guess I looked quite bookish and girly, and then"—she lets out a hoot—"I would sing songs about coffins and violence. Alessandro's designs have all these snakes and tigers and bleeding hearts, a Baroque sensibility. It's like he wants to give people his whole world. It feels really generous; it takes a lot of love."
Welch's music even served as Michele's soundtrack while he was pulling together his first collection as top designer for Gucci last year. She remembers being overwhelmed upon learning this fact. "I found that when he'd been designing he thought about what the Medici woman would have worn, and I'd spent so much time in Florence as a child visiting the Medici palaces to look at the frescoes, the pictures of saints with their breasts cut off," Welch says. "I was really amazed."
Gucci Fine Jewelry necklaces, $1,250-$1,500, gucci.com.
Flamboyance is at the core of Welch's mojo, but lately she's been channeling a more muted style, both musically and sartorially, to reflect all that happened between making her second album, 2011's Ceremonials, and 2015's How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. After four thrilling but exhausting years, during which she moved quickly from playing pubs to a life of hit albums, nonstop tours, awards ceremonies, fashion shows, and a new social circle that includes Jay Z, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift—all of which she embraced wholeheartedly—she found herself on the verge of burnout. "I had a gung-ho idea of being in a band," she says with a smile. "It was like, get drunk, cover yourself in paint, jump off the stage."
Welch decided to reset her compass. She spent some time on different retreats in Los Angeles ("there was lots of chanting; after a while you get sick of it"). While recording How Big, she cycled to the London studio, made her own packed lunches, and adopted Steve Jobs's habit of wearing the same outfit every day to avoid distractions. "There'd been so much going on that felt very raw and real that it was important for me to strip everything down to a basic level," she explains, her hands waving expressively, displaying ringed, tattooed fingers decorated with a birdcage design (she keeps a collection of birdcages) and the fire and earth alchemical symbols. "Before then I'd used clothes as an armor, because it's scary to be in the public eye, so this was about me being naked, and it was liberating."
Even more crucially, Welch says, she stopped drinking. "I'd been really self-destructive for a while, and I really didn't want to keep breaking things—whether it was relationships or physical stuff. Not drinking was such a healing process that I thought, Let's just keep going with this. And what I've learned is that I'm naturally a sensitive, open person who's just super-high on life without any drink or drugs."
It's with this clear-headed, reborn mentality that Welch is approaching her 30th birthday, in August. "Oh, my God!" she cries when I remind her of this. "I'm looking forward to it. My 20s have been quite a sea, a whirlwind of working out who you are. I feel I was a bit of a nightmare for everyone before—fun, I hope, but an absolute chaos merchant as well. I'm very lucky not to have come out feeling swallowed up."
There's a feeling of Welch's delight in pausing before moving on to the next phase of her life. "As I come into my 30s, I have a sense of getting to know myself a bit better, and I feel good about it," she says. "I have more of an idea of who I am now." So who exactly is Florence Welch today? "Oh, that will probably change," she demurs. "Get-ting into the core of you is a life's work, though I'm definitely part of the way into doing that." Welch laughs yet again. "The colors are coming back in the dresses."
Gucci top, $4,500; Gucci Fine Jewelry ring, $14,950, gucci.com.
Hair: Tony Collins; makeup: Sarah Reygate for Natura Bissé; production: Sarah Gent for Lemonade Productions. Special thanks to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
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