On Thursday, InStyle’s editor-in-chief Laura Brown announced that the magazine’s February cover star, Drew Barrymore, created the ultimate TBT and took to Instagram sharing how the concept came to life. Brown wrote: “OK, so here’s the story. Last year I noticed that Drew was Instagramming the cleaning-out of her storage unit in LA. My fantasy was that said storage unit was a magical place (ETs! Everywhere!).
What happened next, as they say, is the making of a really, really cool photoshoot. “I emailed Drew and asked if exploring remnants of her past life could be a jazzy concept for a cover story,” Brown explains. “That’s so cool, but I don’t really have that much stuff,” was her reply. But then she suggested she dig up some pictures from her childhood, and lo, inspiration!”
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Barrymore recreated her most iconic looks from her childhood from 1980 to 1985 for the magazine, including the outfits she wore to a mother-daughter fashion show at the Beverly Hilton hotel (where the Golden Globes take place) in 1983, the Academy Awards she attended when E.T. was nominated for Best Picture, and posing for Vanity Fair in 1984, at the age of nine. “I like that my mom dressed me like an 80-year-old woman, but I’m six… or eight,” Barrymore tells InStyle.
Barrymore credits that sort of freedom of expression, style-wise with influencing her now, as a designer for Dear Drew, her first contemporary brand with Amazon Fashion. “I kept feeling this burning desire to build an apparel brand for women by women, to explore something romantic,” she says. “I took it back to my love of tailoring and having been in a costume house my whole life.” She continues, “I have a body type that I tend to cover up,” she says. “So it’s nothing tight, not big and boxy, more of a fluid drape that feels like the ’20s, ’40s, and ’70s. Not utterly casual but efforted in its effortlessness.”
“I’m very conscious about the way people feel,” Barrymore says of her line, which she considers “a love letter to women.” “When I was making movies, I just didn’t want to tell a depressing story; I wanted to tell one about some type of self-improvement. I thought, ‘There’s enough shit in life. I want optimism and joy.’ At the same time, I don’t like magic-wand happy endings — and now I don’t like magic-wand makeup or magic-wand clothes.”