Gwyneth Paltrow’s love of the high-low is legendary. “It’s what makes life interesting, finding the balance between cigarettes and tofu,” she once said. A weekly smoke, a weekly can of Coke—at one point or another, they’ve found their way into an otherwise pristine routine so well-documented, it’s been cemented into pop culture and propelled a wellness empire.
When we chat for this story, Paltrow is in Umbria, Italy, where she’s been celebrating her 52nd birthday with a close-knit group of friends. And fresh off a weekend of indulgence, she’s feeling better than ever. “Weirdly, I come to Italy, and I eat pasta and cheese and [drink] wine, and I actually feel amazing,” she tells me. “I feel like I’m eating some kind of superfood diet.” Sure, highly regulated European food processing has something to do with it, but she’s also treating herself to what she truly wants. “I think pleasure’s really important, and I think being too ascetic or too strict can be punishing,” she says. “We live in a culture where we’re supposed to be all these things, which I think I certainly fell prey to for many years, and I just think that it’s so important to feel good and explore what that means for each person.”
Pleasure over perfection would be a welcome aphorism for goop’s next era—since launching as a newsletter in 2008, Paltrow’s brand has explored everything from vaginal wellness to skincare, psychedelics, cashmere, and conscious uncoupling, all the while, influencing a generation of women to be their best selves. Now, she’s dropping new wisdom around self-love. “I tried to start a practice of acceptance around physical signs of aging when I was turning 50, and it started as an intellectual kind of thing, like, ‘let’s try not to say bad things about yourself to yourself,’ ” she says. Slowly but surely, she’s recoding her nervous system to react differently to old triggers (the how-to we all need!). “You can sort of decide if you’re going to let your blood pressure get out of whack by a piece of weird news [or not].
If you can just slow that down, there’s a lot of wisdom in it,” she says. “I’m not successful at that all the time, by any means, but I’m definitely getting better at it.” It’s some of life’s most challenging inner-work, but for Paltrow, radical self-acceptance is poetic.
“It’s hard to explain exactly, but it sort of feels like this unclenching around it, as if this warm breeze is coming, and with it comes peace, wrinkles, your inner thighs starting to fall down, and this deeper acceptance that I haven’t quite ever experienced before.”
Almost two decades into goop, Paltrow’s latest product forays also reflect a kind of self-assured authenticity you get from a seriously involved founder. When I ask her about her skincare routine lately, she’s abuzz about the brand’s latest release, the 3x Retinol Regenerative Serum, a clean retinol serum that minimizes irritation with collagen-boosting peptides. “I am not just saying this, I am a total goop beauty devotee,” she says. “I am so psyched about the retinol, which I’ve been using since the lab gave me a sample of it.” The serum has made it into her everyday routine, which also includes sauna, meditation, and dry brushing. “[When it comes] to treating your body and your skin with good care, there’s a topical way to do it of course, and our products are really fucking amazing, but I think that there’s a whole internal part that goes with it as well,” she says.
Goop’s skincare range is newly and exclusively available at Holt Renfrew in Canada, something that Paltrow has been manifesting for ages. She discovered the store while in Toronto working on one of her first films in the ’90s and would visit often. “I must have been like 20 at the time and I used to go to Holt Renfrew and walk around and just be obsessed,” she says. “I couldn’t really afford anything at the time, but it’s just such a perfectly curated store and I was always like, oh my gosh. You know when you see something when you’re young and it’s sort of emblematic of luxury? It’s always been that for me.”
On the clothing side, goop’s G. Label brand is out with another collection of effortless pieces for the fall/winter season that encapsulate Paltrow’s style ethos. “I think I’ve always gravitated to the same sort of thing, with some well-documented deviations along the way, but for the most part I think I like tailored, kind of clean designs that are beautifully made,” she says. As such, G. Label focuses on reimagined classics built for today. “I love a button-down shirt, a cashmere sweater, a great trouser; classics make me feel pulled together and not trying to wear something that’s too trendy.” Paltrow is already picking out her G. Label wardrobe for the holidays—a thin cashmere knit turtleneck with a puffed sleeve is perfect for Europe, where she’s thinking about returning to for Christmas.
Imagining Paltrow back in Europe in perfectly chic attire is easy. After all, she’s been a permanent fixture on the unofficial Euro vacation mood board since her portrayal of Marge Sherwood in the 1999 thriller, The Talented Mr. Ripley. In the film, Paltrow swans about the Amalfi Coast in crisp white shirts, floral midis, and other ’50s staples in a vision that still inspires. (When I recently asked Dakota Fanning—who also played Sherwood in the Netflix adaptation of Ripley—about it she agreed, saying, “When you watch the movie and you see Gwyneth playing that character, you’re like, ‘I want to be that woman.’ ”) When Paltrow looks back, she sees Sherwood as an extension of some of her own favourite style moments. “I guess when I look back, the things that resonate most are the things that look like they kind of could have been worn at any decade,” she says, recalling a blush pink Prada gown with a bow-tied halter neckline and an open back that she wore to the Venice Film Festival in 2011, which she cites as her all-time favourite fashion moment. “It looked like it could be in any era and I think that’s true with my favourite costumes, like The Talented Mr. Ripley—obviously they’re ’50s, but they kind of look like they transcend that particular time period. So, I guess timeless is sort of a theme for me.”
On top of Paltrow’s latest skincare and fashion launches, 2024 saw a furniture collaboration with CB2, and a return to acting in the upcoming Marty Supreme, an A24 film about 1950s table tennis culture co-starring Timothée Chalamet. That last one threw fans for a loop–Paltrow’s last on-screen role was in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, after which she said she’d be taking a step back in Hollywood. When I ask if there’s some new arena she has yet to dabble in, she laughs, saying, “No, I think I’m good.” There’s an astrological caveat, however. “But I’m a natural Libra, I love beauty, I love the pursuit of feeling beauty in the air, and I think it’s kind of endemic to who I am, and I find lots of different ways to express that,” she says. As if to say: expect the unexpected. Paltrow is full of surprises.
“…I’m a natural Libra, I love beauty, I love the pursuit of feeling beauty in the air, and I think it’s kind of endemic to who I am, and I find lots of different ways to express that,”
When I ask the Oscar winner where she sees herself in 10 years, I’m expecting to hear about the next frontier she’s ready to conquer. Antarctic expeditions, perhaps? Instead, she surprises me, saying, “I have this dream that not only will I be doing less, but my nervous system will have downshifted significantly too, and I won’t need to feel the need to be so busy.” Busyness, just like being hard on herself, is the result of old coding, she thinks. “I’d love to deprogram that a little bit and just take life a little easier,” she says. Something tells me Paltrow’s infinite curiosity and enterprising spirit will continue to find her exploring new ways to optimize her life, and in turn, ours.
