After Jenny Slate wrapped shooting for Dying for Sex, in which she plays Nikki, a freewheeling thespian taking care of her best friend, who has terminal cancer, she cut her hair short. “Emotionally speaking,” she tells VF, “there’s just so much going on for me all the time, that I don’t like a lot of fuss anymore around my physicality.” At Sunday night’s Emmys 2025 ceremony, where she received her first nomination for outstanding supporting actress in a limited series, her hairstylist Jordan M gave it a middle part and a face-framing bend. The new style is the kind of dramatic change one might expect of a classic breakup haircut—and in some ways, it is. The show, she says, helped her let go of some deep-seated self-criticism and emerge with a newfound self-understanding. “I can’t contort myself or over-adorn myself to try to send a message to anyone before I send a message to myself about what’s going on. I actually know very well how I like to feel and what I like to look like.”
Slate, whose work has long explored a childlike curiosity toward the weirdness of the world, delighted in the fact that her Emmys dress, by Rosie Assoulin, is the silhouette she sketched as a kid when she was drawing “fancy people”: strapless, with a sweetheart neckline. “I had one of those moments that people sometimes have with their wedding dress where they’re, like, Whoa,” Slate says. (She had it, in fact, with her own wedding dress when she married her husband, the writer Ben Shattuck, in their living room.) Still, the dress was all grown-up, Old Hollywood glamour. Its sculptural black bodice contrasts with a billowing and slightly sheer white skirt, a tonal echo of the monochrome Slate, with the aid of her stylist Jordan Johnson, has been drawn to recently. (Her stand-up-special tuxedo and the gown she wore to accept her award for outstanding supporting performance in a limited series at this year’s Gotham Awards, for instance, both by Thom Browne.) It falls, she says, into the perfect combination of structure and comfort. But the big red flower on the sternum, which reminds Slate of when “a pie wins first prize,” is pure pleasure. “The dress is an exact expression of how I feel about myself and my work right now,” Slate says. “I feel strong. I have a preparatory process. I am structured. I feel matured, but I also feel like it is total fucking party time for me, and that I am really, really in a moment of vibrant bloom.”
For the Emmys she kept her jewelry (“little, tiny things in my ears”) and makeup similarly minimal. Kirin Bhatty, her makeup artist for more than a decade, mixed a Chanel Water-Fresh Tint with moisturizer for a light, unencumbered finish. “I used to do lashes,” Slate says. “Now I’m just starting to pare it down.” But, in a trait she shares with the real-life Nikki Boyer she portrays on screen, “I love a lip.” After mulling a couple options, she went with Chanel Rouge Allure Liquid Velvet in Énigmatique. To foreclose pre-carpet nerves, her getting-ready soundtrack includes Adrianne Lenker, Big Thief, Aldous Harding, and—to invoke the feeling of her grandmothers, of true love and “soft, cushy feelings”—Chet Baker.
Slate seems comfortable dwelling in places of contrast. When we speak about her look, a few days before the ceremony, she’s in Cleveland, wrapping the shoot on a not-yet-announced film, and living in a football-themed rental apartment provided by the movie’s producers. “It’s just a ton of team spirit in here,” she says. “The sconces even say Cleveland Browns.”
Slate, consummate team player, has been thinking a lot about the ways outward appearances can mirror or support inner change. Her onscreen persona experienced a style evolution of her own. A few minutes into the first episode of Dying for Sex when, outside of a Brooklyn deli, Nikki learns from her best friend Molly (Michelle Williams) that the cancer she kicked into remission two years ago is back, metastasized, and incurable, Nikki is a study in muchness. Her plaid coat and mustard crushed velvet bag are oversized, her hair is loose, she wears a tangle of gold necklaces, and her hands glint with bracelets and rings. She moves through most of the Kübler-Ross grief stages, and then some, in mere moments, shifting from a stunned recitation of everything Molly’s done to keep the cancer at bay, to body-shaking sobs, to glorious, cathartic anger channeled toward the shop owner telling her to keep it down. “She’s an actress,” Molly tells the man, gravely. “Her emotions live very close to the surface.”
