Janelle Monáe Peels the Onion

One evening in December, Janelle Monáe materialized at the Grand Salon of the Baccarat Hotel, in midtown, looking like a creature from another dimension. Enveloped in a faux-coyote-fur armchair, she wore a houndstooth top hat over her dyed-blond hair, a tweed black-and-white skirt with a matching tie, and platform saddle shoes—Catholic schoolgirl meets “A Clockwork Orange.” The outfit, she told me in a soft, Kansas-accented voice, was by Thom Browne, one of her favorite designers, and it captured both “the structure of a uniform” and the “whimsy of who I am.”