In the late ’90s, there was “Something About Mary.” These days, there’s something about Zooey.
“She’s adorable and quirky, but also seems to possess an endearing intelligence and approachability,” says fan Adam S., 33, who didn’t want his full name printed. “She [Zooey Deschanel] really encapsulates what the ideal girlfriend would be.”
Plus, says the New York-based entertainment lawyer, “She’s got that Billie Holiday chanteuse thing going on.”
The 30-year-old actress and singer has become the standard-bearer for glamorous, old-timey, don’t-try-too-hard stardom. Her style, which the actress has described as “whimsical and feminine,” regularly includes vintage pieces and unique pairings — “I’ve always enjoyed wearing old-fashioned clothes,” the actress told The Guardian newspaper, and “I try to stick to classic pieces. I don’t go to fashion shows or pay attention to what other people are wearing.”
In an era in which the red carpet can seem as if it’s been styled by a single person (One-shoulder dresses are in! Everyone wear red!), Deschanel’s independent sartorial spirit makes her a Hollywood anomaly.
Deschanel, an actress whose film career was launched with a breakout role in 2000’s “Almost Famous,” is also a celebrated singer-songwriter. After a 2001 gig singing with a cabaret outfit, she paired up with indie guitarist M. Ward in 2008 to form the band She and Him. Their two albums — succinctly titled Volume One and Volume Two — are throwbacks to sunny ’60s and ’70s pop, and have attracted a sizeable following largely thanks to Deschanel’s jazz-singer vocals. She’s also married to a musician: Ben Gibbard, lead singer of the band Death Cab for Cutie.
Today, when She and Him plays a free show on Governors Island, Zooey’s devoted fans will be there in droves — many of the female members styled in the manner of the chic Deschanel herself.
When the band played Bowery Ballroom last year, the crowd was dotted with girls in bangs or wearing cute retro-style outfits.
“People were really into the show. They were singing along to all the songs, super-enthusiastic,” says Cheryl Abramson, an ad-agency employee, who was there.
Deschanel’s fans seem equally distributed between genders, but she certainly seems to evoke ardent crushes in men. When She and Him played the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee earlier this month, Deschanel’s closing-number rendition of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You” “prompted several indie boys to loudly proclaim their love for the indie songstress,” Rolling Stone magazine wrote.
“I would give anything just to get a glimpse of her,” says 19-year-old Texan Tyler Busby, who recently created a Deschanel fan page on Facebook that instantly generated heat. “I just made it for a couple of my friends,” Busby says, “and then I saw that 700 people had added it!”
Even her “(500) Days of Summer” co-star and longtime friend Joseph Gordon-Levitt sounded a little infatuated when he did interviews about their romantic comedy last year. “Every morning on my way to work I [would] listen to She and Him to hear her singing; her voice and her songs and her beautiful melodies. It made it very easy to play smitten, to have those songs in your head,” he told Film.com.
She’s even inspired a Web page devoted to artistic renderings of her: at the Zooey Deschanel DeviantArt page, you can find her image depicted in every style from pencil-drawn portrait to impressionist to . . . cat. Yes, someone drew Deschanel as a house cat.
Inevitably, there are also Deschanel detractors. Her film roles often fall into the category of the “MPDG” (manic pixie dreamgirl), a cinematic trope defined by the Onion AV Club as “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”
This certainly applies to many recent Deschanel roles: the mysterious Summer in “(500) Days of Summer”; the quirky singer Jovie in “Elf”; Jim Carrey’s free-spirited girlfriend in “Yes Man.” But somehow Deschanel makes it work; even at her quirkiest, she’s way less annoying than, say, the Natalie Portman character in “Garden State” (the most widely reviled of the MPDGs).
Off-screen, Deschanel is indisputably influencing the fashion choices of a generation of hipster girls. “She’s definitely got a downtown vibe,” says a salesperson at Daha Vintage on Orchard Street. “She’s very, very cool. Whenever I see her in a magazine or at a premiere, she always looks really great.”
American Apparel employee Eve Chien agrees. “I definitely see girls coming in here who look like that sort of quirky style.”
Even Deschanel’s ad for cotton last spring was a big hit. Yes, cotton. As in “the fabric of our lives.” She wrote and sang the song in the commercial, and it stuck in people’s heads. “Excuse me, but I’m going to go buy something made out of cotton now,” wrote Lindsay, a blogger for Videogum.com. “Downloading a song about cotton might be pushing it . . . but just a tad. She’s Zooey Deschanel, darling. She can do anything.”