Four years after the release of her debut album, Not Your Muse, which earned her the BRITs Rising Star Award and the title of BBC Sound of 2020, Celeste has returned with her new album, Woman of Faces – a sombre, haunting record that she previewed earlier this year on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.

I hear Celeste before I see her. The intricate jacket with dangly beads she is wearing – which she later tells me she “found in a vintage shop in West London” – rattles in rhythm with the clack of her heels. When she introduces herself, I am struck by how similar her speaking voice is to her instantly recognisable rich, smoky singing voice.

“There’s an expectation that you arrive in a costume … as a spectacle”

She sets the records she has brought to Cambridge on the coffee table. I ask her about the album cover, a striking image of her wearing an elaborate feather headpiece, black leather jacket, and white feather skirt. “Well, that was inspired by John Galliano really, and the way he constructs an outfit.” Galliano – creative designer first for Givenchy, Dior, and later Maison Margiela – is famous for his theatrical staging of runways, turning runway shows into dramatic spectacles. Celeste suggests she shares a penchant for theatricality in fashion, pointing out that “all of those pieces were actually from the National Theatre archive in London … Quite often I go there and just put things together because it can kind of have that eclectic look that a couture look or piece has.”

“As a female, if you arrive at an event or red carpet without makeup, people might think you’re having a mental breakdown!”

From the feather-moulded jacket she wore at Glastonbury this year to the elaborate headpiece on her album cover, feathers are a key feature in Celeste’s wardrobe. “The feathers are meant to represent the angel, which is kind of like the woman of faces. The wings are kind of like a guardian and protection, and it’s kind of about you getting your strength – so that’s where all of the feather motifs [come from].” Celeste’s strength has certainly been tested recently; in October, she took to social media to openly criticise her record label for having “shown little support” for her new album and to call out the “male-dominated industry” for breeding “a lot of men who mostly listen to themselves […]”, forcing artists to assume a “role of subservience”.

Her new album uses the language of fashion to explore the feeling of artistic restriction. In the first track, ‘On With The Show’, she laments how ‘There’s so much wrong […] / But I must dress up and move like this / On with the show’, and in the titular track, ‘Woman of Faces’, she sings ‘To be a woman, she must face it / Pick a style and display it’, suggesting a sense of limitation enforced by the expectation to become a commodified spectacle and to conform.

“Some days I wear all this stuff and I think: this is not who I am today”

Photos and videos of Celeste’s live performances reveal how fully she embraces theatricality, with dramatic costume, makeup and hairstyle. “Sometimes a costume can help build a character for you, to let you switch something on for your audience,” she says, but this is not always a natural choice for her. “Some days I wear all this stuff and I think: this is not who I am today.” She pauses to reflect: “In the last couple of years I’ve had this back and forth between how to be raw and how to be yourself, but also living and appearing in places where there’s an expectation that you arrive in a costume […] as a spectacle.”

Celeste diagnoses this internal conflict as a consequence of becoming a music star. “I actually think as a human being that’s what happens when you become a commodity through your music … So I’m always figuring out where I am being allowed and able to be authentic through my music and dress, and when that becomes a kind of false and superficial shield.” She suggests that this pressure falls mainly on women in the industry, half-jokingly remarking that “there’s also a feeling within my world and my work that, as a female, if you arrive at an event or red carpet without makeup, people might think you’re having a mental breakdown!”

“I’d rather feel like I’m breathing and I’m living”

Talking to her, it becomes clear that reclaiming artistic agency is a top priority in this new chapter of her career – and this has manifested in her seizing more control over her wardrobe choices. “Recently I’ve gotten into doing my makeup myself again a lot because I feel like I can be much more connected to how I want to appear on the outside,” she says, and more generally she reflects on “the importance of dressing yourself, doing your own makeup and doing your own hair – even if you don’t look as polished as the figures you’re seeing in the media and even some of my peers that I see in person”. This marks a shift from earlier in her career, when large fashion houses such as Dior and Gucci often styled her; however, she welcomes this change, “I’d rather feel like I’m breathing and I’m living as the closest and truest version to who I am.”

For Celeste, style is not synonymous with glamour. When I ask what she wears to feel most confident, she responds, “To be honest, I think at the moment … I feel most confident in some organic cotton cosy clothes that I wear at home.” Her favourite looks, however, remain the glamorous pieces she wore during “the period of time in my life where I was being dressed a lot by Gucci and Alessandro Michele was the creative director”. Those elaborate outfits, she says, “embodied that more eccentric and colourful side of how I wanted to dress.” From haute couture to cotton basics, Celeste certainly is a woman of many styles.