Sky Ferreira: A Rebel, When Time Permits

By MARISA MELTZERAPRIL

Sky Ferreira, who describes herself as “a little bit of a hell child.”

Around 3 in the morning after the last Met Ball, the singer Sky Ferreira met one of her idols, Madonna. “By ‘met,’ I mean ‘attacked,’ ” said Ms. Ferreira, 21, over iced tea at a Cuban restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she lives. “I think I sat in her lap at one point.” She showed a photo of the two of them on her phone.

Ms. Ferreira’s first full-length album, “My Time, Night Time,” was released last fall by Capitol Records. The album and its first video, “You’re Not the One,” have a distinctly downtown, early ’80s, Madonna-at-Danceteria aesthetic, all slick hair and leather jackets. But unlike her predecessor at this age, Ms. Ferreira already has a healthy sideline as a fashion model with many corporate clients. “For money,” she said. “But I do enjoy doing it.”

With her angular face and pouty lips, she has become a kind of muse to the Saint Laurent Paris designer Hedi Slimane, who featured her in pre-fall 2013 ads; she is wearing his lipstick shirt on another video, “I Blame Myself,” released this week in partnership with the site ssense.com, where fans can buy it. She has also appeared in ads for Tommy Hilfiger, CK One, Forever 21, Adidas, Myspace and H-and-M, and is represented by IMG Models.

Ms. Ferreira performing at the Barclays Center this month.

Ms. Ferreira walked her first runway, for Marc Jacobs’s spring/summer 2014 show, during New York Fashion Week last September. “I’m like five-seven and everyone was 10 times taller than me,” she said, so she said she “stuck together” with the more petite models Charlotte Free, Cara Delevingne and Georgia May Jagger. “We were the dwarfs of the show.”

A few days later, she and her boyfriend, Zachary Cole Smith, a musician, were pulled over for vehicle and traffic violations in Ulster County, N.Y., on the way to the Basilica SoundScape festival.

Police searched the vehicle and charged Mr. Smith, who was driving, with possession of heroin and a stolen license plate. Ms. Ferreira was charged with possession of ecstasy and resisting arrest, according to Joseph A. Sinagra, the Saugerties, N.Y., police chief, and was released on bail.

It was unclear from the police chief and the Ulster County District Attorney’s office whether the charges had been dropped.

“I got myself in a stupid situation,” Ms. Ferreira said. “That’s really all I can say about it. I’m really sorry about it, and I’m not trying to promote drug use by any means. I guess I’ve always been a little bit of a hell child. I’ve never been, like, clean and pure, or looked at that way. I never really started out in the Disney sense, or the mainstream pop world.”

At the Pitchfork Music Festival last summer in Chicago.

She is currently on tour, opening for Miley Cyrus.

Ms. Ferreira was raised in Venice Beach, Calif., and Hollywood by divorced parents and a grandmother. “I was so painfully shy that I became mute at one point,” she said. “I was like, ‘I have nothing to say anymore.’ ”

But she said that always sang: “I was humming before I could talk. It was one of those things I knew what I was going to do.” By 14, after she began posting demos she had written and photos to her Myspace page, she was approached by producers, including Bloodshy and Avant, who had worked with Britney Spears. Capitol Records signed her and, busy making a record and writing for other people, she dropped out of high school at 15.

“I kind of turned into an adult very quickly,” she said.

Ms. Ferreira, who plays “the bitchy friend” in Eli Roth’s coming movie “The Green Inferno,” flouted standard pop-star protocol by appearing on her album cover topless, in a shower, looking sinister. “My face at that moment was where my head space was at that day,” she said. “Not that day, but that week. I was having a very hard time.”

The nudity is something she shrugs off. “I don’t find it a big deal, personally,” she said. “I don’t think there is a rule book on being a feminist, but there are lots of people that will go back and forth about me being naked on my album cover. I read something so ridiculous: ‘She took off her top for record sales?’ You know what sells records at Walmart? Girls with pretty faces, cropped, and being nonoffensive. That’s what sells. Not someone who looks like they’re about to stab someone, naked in the shower.”

Ms. Ferreira walking her first runway for Marc Jacobs in September. She has also become a kind of muse to the Saint Laurent Paris designer Hedi Slimane, who featured her in advertisements. 

Despite two previous EPs, “As If!” (2011) and “Ghost” (2012), Ms. Ferreira has been on more than one occasion dismissed as just another fashionable girl of the moment. “I used to be a lot more bothered by it, because when people think of It girls, they don’t think of people with jobs,” she said. “They just think of socialites or someone who doesn’t really do anything.

“I’m not just going to events and hanging out with cool people, you know? I work every day. I’m in a van with 10 guys traveling the country.”

But she likes to reclaim her femininity while on tour, combing thrift stores for items like the vintage Chanel bomber jacket she found for $40 in Ohio, watching Lifetime movies and putting on makeup “to make myself feel like a girl again.”

Ms. Ferreira, who collaborates with the stylist Kate Young, was wearing a slip dress, vintage plaid jacket and sturdy boots (“I don’t wear high heels,” she said). Her was hair was dyed platinum, though she’s since changed it to a deep brunette, and cut it short after it started breaking off. “Now I have the Edie Campbell mullet,” she said.

The first time she wore an outfit chosen for her by the Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci, she wore it with beat-up combat boots. “Everybody was freaking out that I was going to offend him, because Riccardo chooses the outfit and no one’s going to change what he does,” she said. “But I didn’t know that, and then that’s how he ended up liking me, ironically.”

At Saint Laurent, “I have a 50 percent discount worldwide,” Ms. Ferreira said. “It’s pretty expensive, though. On tour I have to use my business card for everything, like gas, but I also I buy my clothes on it.” Describing a trip to Saint Laurent, she said: “I go there and it gets rejected, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, this is embarrassing.’ I didn’t tell them my name until she was like, ‘You’re Sky, you’re in the ads.’ And I said, ‘This isn’t working right now, I’ll come back in an hour. I swear there’s money in there.’ ”