Elle August 1995

Elle (August 95)

Her eyes have a flinty look, a wind machine saws at her hair, and she wears an unaccustomed scowl. Sandra Bullock shifts in her director's chair, looking less like the softly approachable token collector of While You Were Sleeping, her big summer hit, or the tomboyish bus driver of Speed, than a wary lioness. Her dusky makeup and the new brass-colored streaks in her hair are the outward expressions of the darkly feline attitude that Bullock summons automatically in response to the photographer's unstated whims. Afterwards, she admits that the occasion, this ELLE fashion shoot, in which she models Calvin Klein's sexy but understated clothes for fall, left her feeling a little unhinged. "I dread photo shoots so much- they're nothing like making a film. In front of a movie camera you never have to struggle to emote, but with a still camera you do, and you feel so false sometimes."

Still, the session serves its purpose, in this case to help Bullock slide into character for her next role, as Denis Leary's acquisitive, socially ambitious girlfriend in the bleak comedy Two If By Sea. She says of her part, "I didn't want to stereotype the girl from Jersey, chewing gum, and with that accent, you know." Instead, Bullock approached her through clothes. The character "wears a black, shiny trench coat, lots of fluorescent pinks, reds as red as you can get, and yellows like neon. There is nothing subtle about her choices. She aspires to be stylish, to have class. And she kind of takes fashion literally."

She is, in short, a departure from Bullock herself, who uses clothes as an expression of some inchoate status craving, but as both a canvas and a shield. Bullock cultivates a simple look- accesible but somehow indefinable. "Anything Calvin Klein does, I love to wear," she says. "His clothes work with my sensibility- I want a clean statement. And I don't want too much attention paid to what I wear." Impeccably groomed, wearing the designer's austere black two-piece sheath, Bullock is the screen on which we project our most sophisticated fashion fantasies.

But at other times she is all loose ends, suggesting a waywardness she can't be bothered to conceal. "I'm a comfort person," she says. "I like looking a bit disheveled. I'm a little wild, and for me, clothes need to be able to move, to shed layers. Anything too perfect or controlled is old-fashioned." The messy, uncalculated, potentially explosive side of her seems to act as a magnet on Klein. "There's a spirit to her and an energy," the designer says. "I think she really represents in many ways what modern women are about." Call her a work in progress. Bullock's style, still evolving, seems the product of conflicting impulses: to stay a free spirit, on one hand, and yet look as conventional as anyone else. In some ways, the actress, now twenty-nine, never recovered from her childhood. Her mother, an opera singer, with whom she traveled through Europe until she reached her teens, "wanted to keep me original," Bullock once said. "She was telling me, 'You don't need to conform.' But to be accepted back in the States you needed to conform."
On coming home, she felt "a little behind the times- or a little ahead of the times. I couldn't quite figure out which. I was still in green velvet bell bottoms when everybody else was wearing straight legs, because I'd just come back from Germany. And I always had these stupid little barrettes holding my hair back. I was just a couple of beats off."

These days she more hip. She credits fashion shoots with having taught her certain subtleties. "The more I do, the more ideas I get. Not long ago I bought a slip for eight dollars and put a Calvin Klein sweater over it," she says, exultantly. "I'm feeling open-minded now....like, Let's see- how creative can I get?"

But for all her new daring, Bullock shows every sign of remaining a vanilla brunette. She emits a sweet- even bland- amiability designed to cover an eroticism prowling under her skin. It is just this suggestion of unplumbed depths that accounts for her extreme marketability. Bullock, who appears this month in The Net, a techno-thriller, now reportedly commands a salary in the high seven figures.

No one is more incredulous than she at her own fantastic fortune. Or more determined to keep things cooly in perspective. When work on Two If By Sea took her to rural Nova Scotia earlier this summer, Bullock began each day in rapturous contemplation. "There was a simplicity to the place," she says, describing the small A-frame house on the water that she shared with her best friend and assistant, Mark Brunetz. "It was so incredibly peaceful; it made you feel introspective. You don't have that in New York, with all its great, manic energy. But there you would think you should confront whatever it was that bothered you. I'd wake up to the sound of the ocean, come out, and sit with my coffee and the sunrise"- she pauses dreamily- "and I'd say to myself, So....this is called serenity."