Kristen Stewart on the People Who Critique Her Red Carpet Poses: “I Don’t Care About the Voracious, Starving Shit Eaters”

“I
have been criticized a lot for not looking perfect in every
photograph,” Kristen Stewart tells Vanity Fair contributing editor
Ingrid Sischy in July’s cover story. “I get some serious shit about it.
I’m not embarrassed about it. I’m proud of it. If I took perfect
pictures all the time, the people standing in the room with me, or on
the carpet, would think, What an actress! What a faker! That thought
embarrasses me so much that I look like shit in half my photos, and I
don’t give a fuck. What matters to me is that the people in the room
leave and say, ‘She was cool. She had a good time. She was honest.’ I
don’t care about the voracious, starving shit eaters who want to turn
truth into shit. Not that you can say that in Vanity Fair!”

On
top of battling personal reluctance, Stewart also struggles with the
public’s preconceived notions about her personality. “People have
decided how they are going to perceive her,” Robert Pattinson tells V.F.
of Stewart. “No matter how many times she smiles, they’ll put in the
one picture where she’s not smiling.”

But for all her
nose-thumbing at critics who demand perfection, she looks pretty perfect
in the photographs from July’s Vanity Fair, in which she poses at
locations across Paris in spring’s couture for contributing photographer
Mario Testino. In some of the most glamorous photographs, Stewart wears
haute couture at the ballet, posing with dancer Jérémie Bélingard in a
pantless Jean Gaultier corset and dripping in Fabergé diamonds and
emeralds, at right. Of her personal style, she tells us she’s evolved
into loving wearing “some cool shit” from the world’s most respected and
avant-garde designers, although she wasn’t always attuned to the power
of fashion. “Look at a picture of me before I was 15. I am a boy. I wore
my brother’s clothes, dude! Not like I cared that much, but I remember
being made fun of because I wasn’t wearing Juicy jeans. I didn’t even
think about it. I wore my gym clothes. But it’s not like I didn’t care
that they made fun of me. It really bothered me. I remember this girl in
sixth grade looked at me in gym and was like, ‘Oh my God! That’s
disgusting—you don’t shave your legs!”

Now past the initial sting
of her harsh childhood critics, Stewart has developed into a wry and
at-ease adult, and Sischy caught her in the mood for modest
adventures—like when she takes the actress to a quiet, tucked-away table
in the back of a Parisian seafood restaurant, where they are offered
escargot, a dish that Stewart has never tried. After warily eyeing the
snails, she dives right in—washing them down with white wine and
bread—and says with a grin, “Pretty good. Though I just don’t want to
eat a whole plate of them.”

Of her life as a major star, she
reflects on the moment when she realized that Twilight had changed her
life. “You can Google my name and one of the first things that comes up
is images of me sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe with my
ex-boyfriend and my dog. It was [taken] the day the movie came out. I
was no one. I was a kid. I had just turned 18. In [the tabloids] the
next day it was like I was a delinquent slimy idiot, whereas I’m kind of
a weirdo, creative Valley Girl who smokes pot. Big deal. But that
changed my daily life instantly. I didn’t go out in my underwear
anymore.”

For her part, author Sischy sees “something so
endearing, so human, about [Stewart’s] combination of bravado, kindness,
self-preservation, self-assertion, and revved-up fierceness that I
found her cheering. Of course, her idealism and drive to tell it as she
sees it—the voracious, starving shit eaters be damned!–could be just a
product of her youth. She could grow up to be another narcissistic
snore, but my sense is that’s not in the cards here.”