This 18-Year-Old Filmmaker and Gucci Model Has Reinvented the Concept of “Home Movies”

There’s a changing of the guard in fashion and culture. Gen Z creators are pushing the conversation forward in ways both awe-inspiring and audacious. Our latest project, Youthquake, invites you to discover how these artists, musicians, actors, designers, and models are radically reimagining the future.

So much about the current pandemic-lingering moment can feel so painfully static that it’s a little hard to clock just how much can still happen in the life of a teenager. The pandemic, in fact, has been a moment of artistic development and professional blossoming for Zelda Adams, an 18-year-old filmmaker and model who has been crafting films with her family—and we’re not talking reunion reels—since she was a child. It has even made it more convenient: “When Covid hit at the end of tenth grade it was really good timing, actually,” she tells me. “It’s when I started making my second horror film, so it’s been a good fit for me, to do my schoolwork online.” The freedom allowed the family to travel, too. “We bought a truck and a trailer and went all around America—to Maine, Texas, the coast of Washington, Oregon.”

When I speak with Zelda, she’s momentarily camping out at her grandparents’ house in the Catskills, which is just three miles away from her own home. (The grandparents have better WiFi.) The walls behind her are painted a peachy pink; a light fixture that looks like something Schoolhouse Electric would crib hangs from the ceiling; and at one point she has to pause our conversation to allow a grandfather clock to finish its chiming. It’s a cozy scene. Adam’s great-grandparents moved to this part of upstate New York as immigrants from Ireland, and the family has maintained what Zelda called “a little monopoly in one corner” of the surrounding landscape ever since. It’s early in the new year, a time when many second-semester seniors might still be shaking off the holiday torpor, but Adams has been busy working on her college applications; she’d like to attend an art school, hopefully in New York City.

Among the accomplishments she might outline in these applications are the seven feature films she has made with her family: her mother, the actor Toby Poser; her father, John Adams, a former model (he appeared in ad campaigns for Gucci, Giorgio Armani, and Calvin Klein in the ‘90s); and her 23-year-old sister Lulu, who lives in Hawaii but remains an active member of the creative crew. (Her parents met in New York City in the late 80s. “My dad invited my mom to a punk rock show,” Zelda says. “It piqued her interest.”) The initial motivation to form their family production unit, which took shape as Wonder Wheel Productions, occurred about a decade ago, when the family was living in L.A. John was working on a reality T.V. show, but parts were sparse for Toby, and so the family hatched an idea to make their own film. Zelda had just seen Twilight, and was into the idea of becoming a famous movie star a la Kristen Stewart.