Dakota Johnson Goes Totally Mad as a Deranged Housewife in Haute Couture

“You just want to go on any adventure with him,” Dakota Johnson says of her collaborations with the director Luca Guadagnino, which include 2016’s A Bigger Splash, in which her character’s island vacation goes from glamorous swoon to off-the-rails; the soon-to-premiere remake of Suspiria, in which her character suffers all sorts of trauma, onscreen and off; and now this high-fashion fever dream for W, which was photographed by Guadagnino (he previously shot Rianne van Rompaey and Adwoa Aboah for this magazine) in upper Manhattan. “We were shooting in this incredible house on the Upper West Side—it was crazy magnificent—and we created this story of a trapped housewife who completely loses her mind,” Johnson explains in an exclusive interview with W. “I was also wearing couture, and the makeup was insane, so it was fun to do something wild like that.” It seems like something wild is exactly what happens every time these two get together. Here, see Guadagnino’s portrait of Johnson as a society woman on the verge of (and then beyond) a breakdown—in haute couture, of course.