Jennifer Lawrence reinvents the ‘cool girl’ for a new generation

Jennifer Lawrence in February 2025, wearing a beanie with a chic leopard-print coat. Her streetstyle has earned her a new reputation, as a fashion icon. (XNY/Star Max/GC Images/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Jennifer Lawrence is one of the most widely admired and well accoladed actors on the planet: she was the world’s highest-paid woman in Hollywood in 2015, and has four Oscar nominations and one win (all before the age of 26). She is a genuine movie star in an era when social media virality seems to eclipse generational staying power.

But a style icon? That’s a new one.

“I’ve never looked at J. Law and thought, ‘You’re a fashion girl,’” said Marie Claire editor-in-chief Nikki Ogunnaike. “Nothing about her red carpet (clothing) has ever made me say, ‘Yes, this woman cares about fashion. She cares about what she’s wearing.’”

But now, Ogunnaike observed, “Somehow her streetstyle has turned her into an icon.”

Over the past few months, as Lawrence promotes her Oscar hopeful “Die, My Love,” her red carpet ensembles, and especially her paparazzi-enshrined streetstyle, have spurred countless primers to her wardrobe on Substack and in magazine shopping roundups. The Cut praised her postpartum looks, and Harper’s Bazaar celebrated her “perceived effortlessness” in combining oversize tailoring with “quirky accessories.”

On Substack, where shoppable guides to improved daily dressing are a cottage industry, writers have seized on her relatability: “Jennifer Lawrence Is Dressing How I Think I Dress,” wrote one Substacker, while another said Lawrence was leading the way in reviving the improvisational appeal of celebrity dressing that has dissipated amid brand deals and super stylists. In the shopping digest Magasin, where founder Laura Reilly steers readers towards a hyper-refined breed of minimalism, the style was crowned “Coldwater Creek chic.”

Lawrence, who has worked with stylist Jamie Mizrahi (who also works with Lawrence’s pal Adele, plus Riley Keough, Jeremy Allen White and Pedro Pascal) since 2023, doesn’t look particularly exceptional: she wears track pants with oversize sweaters, or a leopard print coat over a sweatsuit, or a loose slip skirt under a big T-shirt with a vintage Fendi bag.

But that’s just why so many women are drawn to it, said Erika Veurink, who writes the Substack Long Live. Veurink wrote a treatise on getting the Lawrence look that has been widely shared – especially, she said, by postpartum mothers. (Lawrence gave birth to her second child earlier this year.) She said Lawrence’s style captures precisely how many women want to look in this moment. “I wouldn’t say classic or timeless. It’s very ‘right now,’” she said. But it doesn’t appear difficult to pull off or replicate.

“She’s a very thin woman,” Veurink acknowledged, “but I think there’s so much fatigue around celebrity outfits where it’s like, ‘Congrats, you took Ozempic and now you’re a zero, and you can wear Tom Ford anything.’ There is an everywoman feeling to these loose clothing items that are a little nondescript.”

“It’s aspirational, but it’s not completely out of reach,” said Ogunnaike.

Of course, there’s more to Lawrence’s low-key makeover than meets the eye.

Over a decade ago, Lawrence’s celebrity was solidified as the ultimate Hollywood cool girl: her relatability, embarrassing screwups and perceived humility made her a pop culture sweetheart. In a series of essays, writer Anne Helen Petersen compared Lawrence to the antihero of Gillian Flynn’s thriller “Gone Girl,” who is defined in what’s become an iconic passage:

“Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot.”

Lawrence became a Dior ambassador in 2012, around the time designer Raf Simons took over the brand’s womenswear, which added to that cool girl reputation: she tripped over her gown hems – twice! – and yukked it up on red carpets in Simons’s strange but pure designs. I’m just the hot goofball in the zillion dollar couture gown, her style seemed to say.

As she returns to the spotlight, Lawrence has spoken at length about, if not abandoning that persona, then downplaying it. She is still self-deprecating and loose – she told the New Yorker about getting a breast augmentation, then said she hasn’t gotten the deep plane facelift popular among celebrities but, “believe me, I’m gonna!” But she is often accompanied by a publicist, rather than plunking down with a reporter and demanding a beer and fries. She describes her former interviews as “cringe,” and the person she sees in those interviews from a decade ago as “annoying.”

Now she seems to have been enveloped in another cool girl persona. On social media, this era’s cool girl is defined not by men but by women: an elusive figure drenched in the minimalist mythology of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and tastemakers like Lauren Santo Domingo, drawn to cashmere sweaters and Elsa Peretti jewelry and big beige robe coats. Incidentally, today’s cool girl isn’t necessarily known for talking; scant interviews with Bessette Kennedy even exist. All over Substack are cool girl guides – to Valentine’s Day, to effortless style, to brooches, to fall, to burnout and stress. (Glad to know there’s a chic way to crash out!)

Lawrence has worn a number of pieces coveted by such women: High Sport pants, Yaser Shaw scarves, rare coats by The Row, Rothys clogs, and Paloma Wool skirt-pants. “Her clothing is a lot of the same clothing that all of these women are already wearing,” said Ogunnaike. “It’s like, ‘You, the celebrity, are confirming that my style is good.’”

Is it a trap, or liberation? Ogunnaike sees it as the latter. “She’s gone through the Hollywood cycle where, maybe she’s not getting to show her true personality in the way that she did when she was a little younger, and she was tripping up the steps and that sort of thing. It seems like her fashion is reflecting the fun, kooky side of her a bit more,” she said. In other words, like Princess Diana or Bessette Kennedy, the clothes show the personality that Lawrence now prefers to keep more to herself.

And the shift may also reflect her priorities as a performer. She talks about herself as an artist, rather than a celebrity. In the years since the peak of her fame, has married a gallerist and had two children, which has also helped her craft a more private life and reputation. “It’s a very grown-up style. These are outfits you would wear to a parent-teacher conference or a 5:30 drink with a friend,” said Veurink. “It’s not the Sabrina Carpenter pop star girly thing.”