French Singer Petite Meller Is Winning Over the Music and Fashion Worlds One Rouged Cheek at a Time

Petite Meller, the enigmatic and ardently pro-rouge pop singer, is talking about one of the friskier animals featured in her "Baby Love" video, shot in Nairobi late last year. "They first give me a lady giraffe," she says (voice: high and granular; French accent: thick), "but she didn't want to kiss me for an hour. And then we change it to the male and he kiss me all over." To which pretty much all of us at PAPER shake our heads and mutter, Lucky giraffe.

"Baby Love" is the latest in a run of cinematic, erotically complex music videos in which Meller deadpans into the camera, dances strange steps of her own invention (or thrashes ecstatically), waterskis, gets carried across New York by an unidentified man and generally draws you into a sun-glazed dreamworld where the delineations of waking life don't apply. Her first video, "NYC Time," appeared in 2012. The man who would become her manager discovered it while trying to figure out the time difference between London and New York; thanks in part to that serendipitous googling, Meller is now finishing up her first album, which will come out this year via Island/Universal.

Asked how she aspires to use her voice as an artist, Meller references the Stephen Hawking theory (she's also finishing up a master's at the Sorbonne) that there's "a multiplicity of realities at the same time. In my videos I create my small realities, because I believe we have to take all the desires and the fantasies and expose them. To bring the unconscious life to reality: that's what I like." Below, we invite you to spend a moment in Meller's strange and wholly irresistible reality.