When has Los Angeles lore not been in fashion? As the Chateau Marmont earns its nonagenarian stripes this month, that “high-thread-count clubhouse” lives on as the nexus of Hollywood’s foibles and fascinations. In 2011, when the ingenue Lana Del Rey released the single “Video Games,” the music video shimmered with vintage footage of the property. Years later, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele took his own deep dive into Marmont memorabilia, turning out logo-embossed satchels and reimagined laundry bags for his Cruise 2019 collection. “It’s possible that no hotel in America inspires so much nostalgia, speculation, and sheer devotion,” writes Mark Rozzo in the 2019 Hollywood Issue of Vanity Fair. It’s not a surprise that Del Rey and Michele are fans.

This time, the musician and the designer are coming together for a different kind of rewind—back to an era of body-hugging jumpsuits and sparkling laundromats, hairspray and patchouli-tinged perfume—to launch the campaign for Gucci Guilty. Del Rey, the face of the his-and-hers fragrance alongside Jared Leto, recalls meeting Michele early into his Gucci tenure. “He told me that he had been putting together a lot of his collections while listening to my music,” she says in a call from rainy Los Angeles. “Needless to say, I was definitely flattered!”

The campaign has a big-screen flair, with locations ranging from a classic diner to a nondescript supermarket (a roaming ostrich notwithstanding). The glamour—like the hair, styled by Paul Hanlon—is dialed way, way up. “We hadn’t really been thinking about nostalgia but just something that had a forever feel,” she says, likening the shoot to her recent Super 8-style music videos. “If you can mix that sensibility with a modern one”—Gucci’s mission in a nutshell—“you know you’re doing it right.”

Lana Del Rey on the set of the new fragrance campaign. Courtesy of Gucci.

Here, Del Rey, whose sixth album, Norman Fucking Rockwell, is out later this year, unpacks that loaded title, laughs about the slow-dance lesson with a teenage crush, and talks up her version of self-care.

Vanity Fair: The title of your new album brings to mind a certain classic vision of America. What was your headspace like for this record?

Lana Del Rey: It was weird how that actual title came to me. I was riffing over a couple of chords that Jack [Antonoff] was playing for the title track, which ended up being called “Norman Fucking Rockwell.” It was kind of an exclamation mark: so this is the American dream, right now. This is where we’re at—Norman fucking Rockwell. We’re going to go to Mars, and [Donald] Trump is president, all right. Me and Jack, we just joke around constantly about all the random headlines we might see that week, so it’s a slight cultural reference. But it’s not a cynical thing, really. To me, it’s hopeful, to see everything as a little bit funnier. The chaos of the culture is interesting, and I’m hopeful that there’s room for there to be some movement and excitement within it.