43 of Dakota Johnson’s Best Fashion Moments of All Time

Dakota Johnson is not like other celebrities. On late night television, she comes across as sardonic and smart and unpredictable, as if she is secretly conspiring with all the regular folk in the audience. The daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, I imagine she spent her childhood flitting between film studios and glamorous dinner parties, making well-timed, withering remarks at all the toupés and the optic-white veneers that get normalized in Hollywood circles. She’s seen behind the veil and thought, “I’m cringing for you.” And then she did the most cringeworthy thing possible and played Anastasia Steele.

Perhaps that’s why Johnson seems so blasé about maintaining Los Angeles pleasantries: She can see the funny side to all this nonsense. “Aren’t you supposed to let people talk on this show?” she once asked Jimmy Fallon, who is known to finish his guest’s sentences. Then, when taking a video team on a tour of her house, she encountered a surprise bowl of artfully arranged limes and said: “I love limes, I love them. They’re great. I love them so much and I like to present them like this in my house.” And then, of course, there is the much-memed smirk: “That’s not the truth, Ellen”.

Her comments about getting dressed are just as deadpan. “I’m not telling a story,” she told Vogue while slipping into a fringed Gucci gown for the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. “I’m wearing a dress, and whatever story you wanna make up in your mind, that’s the right one.” Fair enough. Johnson knows she could wear almost anything and still make headlines, because everything else about her does the work. Or, as her stylist Kate Young once put it: “Dakota looks best in super simple dresses, because she’s so beautiful, her body’s so beautiful. It doesn’t require distraction.”

This knowing awkwardness (combined with a set of bohemian bangs that belong to some kind of How To Be A French Girl manual), has made Johnson a people’s favorite. It’s also led to Gucci ambassadorships and co-signs from Chanel and Stella McCartney and Dior and Schiaparelli. And even before she landed breakout roles in middle-aged erotica and arthouse Luca Guadagnino films, she was an ambient presence on the red carpet, sometimes in a ’00s baker boy cap at Disney premieres. Now 36, we travel back over some of Dakota Johnson’s best moments in fashion.