What Would Gwyneth Do?

Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's newly ambitious lifestyle platform, has been polarizing since the day it was launched seven years ago - and that might be its greatest asset.

- Anjali Mullany, photograph by Williams + Hirakawa

Gwyneth Paltrow removes her coat, revealing a sleeveless black Atea Oceanie wrap dress. The dress is simple, trimmed in white and very low cut, the effect both wholesome and daring. Her hair and skin glow. Her arms look soft and strong, like those of a woman decades younger than 42.

Paltrow is the founder-and the living embodiment-of the lifestyle brand Goop and is in Chicago on this April afternoon to oversee the launch of a pop-up store in Chicago's Waldorf Astoria hotel. She walks across the showroom, past racks of $2,000 Stella McCartney dresses and $400 Phillip Lim gym shorts, to sit beside Goop's CEO, Lisa Gersh, on a burnished steel French daybed. She folds her arms, clutches her elbows, and calls out to her head of brand collaborations, Brittany Weinstein, to turn up the heat. Then she crosses her legs, stretches her neck as high as it will go, poses her arms to one side, and looks off serenely into the distance.

Paltrow is often criticized for seeming, at best, removed from the cares of ordinary life, and right now she does look like she belongs to a different, superior species. The public has always felt this way about her simultaneously drawn to, and repelled by, her seemingly unattainable perfection. In 2013, for example, she was named People magazine's Most Beautiful Woman and also Star magazine's Most Hated Celebrity. Spend a little time on the Internet-or mention Paltrow's name at a dinner party-and you'll quickly see that people tend to have a strong, visceral reaction to her.