Kristen Stewart covers the July issue of Vanity Fair magazine. These are some selected photos from the Mario Testino shoot – thoughts? I’ve praised Kristen’s makeup artist before, and once again, I think her makeup looks great… but I’m gradually coming to the opinion that Kristen simply has a face that “takes” extreme makeup. You know, some girls can’t DO dramatic makeup – I’m one of them. I look better when my makeup is natural and “dewy” – not “dramatic”. Kristen can pull off extreme makeup looks. I think the little dog on her lap is kind of dumb, though. She’s not Paris Hilton. She’s not a fashion girl carrying around a little dog in her Birkin.

As for the VF interview… well, VF really went out of their way to release some of the best quotes. It feels like VF is really trying to win over the all-powerful Twihard contingent, especially when Kristen goes off, yelling at her biggest critics (although I don’t think she accurately assesses her critics’ arguments).

“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 sh-t 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 sh-t in half my photos, and I don’t give a f–k. 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 sh-t eaters who want to turn truth into sh-t. 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 sh-t” 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.”

[From Vanity Fair]

In case you missed it, the word of the day was “sh-t”. When she was interviewed in Elle, the word of the day was “f-ck”. I know she’s super-cool and somewhat intelligent (I go back and forth on that), but she really needs to change up her vocabulary. I cuss like a sailor too, but every other word out of my mouth isn’t “sh-t” and “f–k”. Also: did anyone else not really see Kristen’s delineation from “delinquent slimy idiot” and “a weirdo, creative Valley Girl who smokes pot”? Plus, I just don’t think anyone should refer to themselves as “a weirdo, creative Valley Girl who smokes pot.” That’s like Rooney Mara calling herself “aloof”.

Here’s the Vanity Fair behind-the-scenes video for the K-Stew-stans.

Photos courtesy of Mario Testino/Vanity Fair.