Issue 15: Chloë Sevigny and the Creation of a ‘90s It Girl

The coolest girl in town is still just a girl…

“That city sewer slut's the vibe
Internationally recognized
I set the tone, it's my design
And it's stuck in your mind
Legacy is undebated
You gon' jump if A. G. made it
If you love it, if you hate it
I don't fucking care what you think…”

(“360” - Charli XCX)

The New Yorker. "Chloe's Scene." October 31, 1994. Jay McInerney.

(Image via New Yorker.)

(Read the profile here.)

Chloë Sevigny has it. People have been saying this about her for decades. The teen model turned actress has grabbed our attention since the early '90s and continues to be the representative of a particular kind of fame. She's cool, talented, stylish, and funny. She was Harmony Korine's muse and modelled for Kim Gordon's brand. She's an Oscar nominee whose short films have played at Cannes. Her wedding was covered by Vogue, as was her 2023 clothing sale of her impressive fashion archive. She once performed unstimulated oral sex on Vincent Gallo for a movie and won a Golden Globe for playing the Mormon wife of a polygamist. Most recently, she was in the music video for '360' by Charli XCX, where she starred alongside a number of modern day internet cool girls. She seemed like the effortlessly cool queen of the crop, the true It Girl to end all It Girls.

Defining an It Girl is as vague and amorphous as the term itself. The expression originated in early 20th century British high society, with novelist Elinor Glyn writing a novel called It in the '20s that was turned into a star vehicle for Clara Bow. "It can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction," she wrote. That's an idea that Bow, one of the true megastars of the decade, seemed to possess in spades. She was just so alluring, so magnetic and impossible to ignore, that she seemed imbued with a quality so specific yet tough to pin down. Is it charisma? Beauty? Intellect? Yes, no maybe?

As the decades passed, many women were crowned with the title of It Girl. They weren’t usually actresses, though, but models, society girls, those of impeccable breeding or startling style that made them stand out amid a crowded field. Warhol loved an It girl, like Edie Sedgwick. Studio 54 made its floor available to It girls like Bianca Jagger. The clubs, the galleries, the runway, they all made themselves homes for It. By the '90s, the scene was changing, and it opened the door for someone like Sevigny to be discovered, both by the indie music and film world and writer Jay McInerney, who wrote about her ascendance in the New York social scene for The New Yorker.

 Sevigny didn't come from a rich family or have famous parents. She grew up as the child of middle-class parents in a Catholic household who lived in a neighbourhood far more affluent than themselves. During her teen rebellion years, she experimented with drugs and was sent to AA meetings by her mother. During one of her school-skipping trips to Manhattan, she was spotted by a fashion editor of Sassy magazine and became a model. Hers is truly a story of being plucked from the crowd, the ‘90s version of Lana Turner being spotted at the malt shop and turned into a movie-star. She’s grunge-adjacent, a street rat who isn’t necessarily ready for the mainstream but the mainstream wants her on board. They’d get her eventually, but at this point in time, when McInerney talks to her, she hadn’t made a single film. Kids, the Larry Clark drama that inspired a firestorm of controversy over its depiction of teen sexuality and AIDS, was on the horizon.

As McInerney notes in the profile's opening, Sevigny is already well-known enough for the downtown set to start recognizing her. Girls ask her where she got her shoes from then seem to run off to buy their own pair. She has the air of the coolest girl you know, or, as McInerney puts it, "watching Chloe read a fashion magazine makes you think of Alexander Woollcott devouring a ten-pound lobster à l’américaine or Casanova undressing a servant girl” (Woollcott was a critic who inspired the character of Nero Wolfe and was largely known as a scathing wit who lived the high life.) McInerney doesn’t compare her to, say, Dorothy Parker, which intrigues me. She’s like a man in her specificities through his eyes.

This is largely referring to Sevigny’s style, which was and remains influential to a certain subset of fashionistas. McInerney seems fascinated by her thrift shop choices and "just throw it on and make it work" attitude, and the more he describes Sevigny's clothes and body (because of course we get comments about her "blunt" nose and exact weight of 110lb), the more beguiled he is by her. I think he’s trying to verbalize the mania that was growing around her, something he was evidently caught up in, but the peril of trying to define It is evident. It’s not just him, of course. There’s Andrea Lee Linett, the fashion editor at Sassy, who spotted her at a newsstand in the Village and fought to put her in a shoot, then the photographer who saw her in Washington Square and asked to photograph her for i-D. Sonic Youth put her in a video, with the stylist for it being impressed by Chloe's preppy remix look at the time, which was ahead of the trend (“All the hip-hop kids were sporting Polo then,” Chloe explains. “They called it ’Lo. But now it’s not hip. Everyone wears it now.”)

All of these people speak of Chloe as though she’s a wizened and knowing trendsetter who is defining the world through her specific choices. They’re adoring of her enthusiasm and spontaneity, all of which seems pretty standard adolescent fare in hindsight. Sure, Chloe’s cool but she’s also still a teenager, not old enough to drink yet. The fetish of youth is all over this piece, albeit in less notable ways than, say, the gross Rolling Stone piece on Alicia Silverstone we covered in a previous issue. Walter Cessna, a writer for Paper, describes trying to be her manager for modelling gigs and her not turning up to major shoots. "At the time I was pissed, but now I kind of admire it," he says. Does he see her teenage petulance and lack of commitment as a daring career move? McInerney seems drawn in by her "seeming indifference to marketing herself [which] may be her most attractive quality." I really just want to pull him aside and be like, “Yeah dude, she’s a teenager. We were all like that at 17.”

McInerney certainly knew a thing or two about being crowned a societal wunderkind. After working as a fact-checker at The New Yorker, he became an instant literary star thanks to his debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City. The Village Voice declared him to be part of a writerly brat pack alongside Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz, thanks to their novels about young people living lives of privileged distress and drug-heavy trauma. Being crowned a voice of your generation always sucks, and McInerney has long struggled against his early image as a cultural icon (a matter made all the more complex by the protagonist of Bright Lights, Big City clearly being based on himself.) As he explained to Newsweek, "Obviously, I'm no longer a 25-year-old bon vivant, but [that] gave me what I always wanted: the opportunity to be a full-time writer. It hasn't been entirely fair to my other books, and I've had to deal with a lot of idiocy on the part of the critics and the cultural commentators." So, it’s interesting that a guy who knows about the pressure put on one’s shoulders at a young age to embody their era would look at a 19-year-old and want to write a seven-page devotion to them for the classiest magazine in town.

And there’s a real clash of cultures between that hallowed world of mainstream entertainment and arts and what Sevigny inhabits: a place of skateboarding kids, $2 dresses, and a total lack of boundaries. Trying to capture lightning in a bottle is hard enough when adults are involved, let alone adolescents. We see the beginning of production on Kids, a project Sevigny was cast in partly because the role was inspired by her. A Teamster working on the film says that everything on this set feels too real, as though the cast are just children plucked from the streets, which they were.

That was one of the most divisive aspects of the film, the decision to cast non-professionals in a story about hard drug use, rape, and a teenage boy spreading HIV to as many girls as possible. Sevigny's character of Jennie, who loses her virginity and contracts HIV at the same time, was originally going to be played by Mia Kirshner, a Canadian child actress who had previously worked with Atom Egoyan. This was a move that Harmony Korine, the film’s then 21-year-old screenwriter, abhorred. “I hated her!” Harmony shouts. “I wanted to punch her. So Larry said, ‘Do you have anybody else in mind?’ and I said, ‘Why not Chloe?’ ” The actress was fired. I’m not sure Kids would have been any less controversial had it been populated by seasoned performers, but the idea of young people being plucked from the skatepark to act out something so dark felt exploitative to many. I don’t think Sevigny was exploited, per se. It’s more that so much of her early career and status as that It Girl seemed rooted in imbuing her with a maturity she didn’t necessarily possess. No 19-year-old is ever as smart or self-aware as they think they are, but at least most of us didn’t have a New Yorker writer treating us like a mystical idol during those times.

If Sevigny represents anything in this profile, it’s the adult and mainstream intrusion onto youth and indie culture. That’s an age-old practice, and McInerney is king of the “how do you do, fellow kids” focus. He’s not that unfamiliar with this scene, particularly in the moments where he accompanies Sevigny to grimy clubs where everyone is high and dressed in “fabulous extremes.” This is the dude who wrote Bright Lights, Big City, after all. He knows what coke is. But it is pretty startling to see a barely adult Sevigny talk so casually about doing drugs and hanging out with addicts as they get arrested for credit card fraud. She knows a lot of people who are either using hard drugs, dependent on them, or have died from overdoses. It seems so normal to her, as easy to discuss as which clubs and scenes have gotten too corporate or which movies she likes (she doesn't like Keanu Reeves, which is a major knock against her.)

In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, the New Yorker profile is described by the writer as, in hindsight, reading "like the slightly doddery engagement of a middle-aged man with youth culture, and for whose purposes any modish 19-year-old woman may have served." You certainly get the sense reading the piece that McInerney is trying to solve a riddle that is both too simple and too hard for him. The closing lines of the piece go to Gabriel Feliciano, a stylist and friend of Sevigny. Watching her look evidently awkward and unsure of herself at a major fashion show, Feliciano says, "People want to project their desire on one girl. She’s smart enough to hold back, and that allows us all to project whatever we want to. I could go on and on about Chloe, but actually I know very little about her." Sometimes, the great unknowable is just a teenage girl who makes you feel uncool but curious.

(Image via The Cut.)

It’s debatable as to whether or not we still have It girls. Social media can make anyone famous and the homogeny of these platforms encourages sameness over the spark that It requires. When The Cut wrote their special 2023 issue on the history of the It girl, they noted that many of the original tools required, most notably extensive coverage in the press and blogs, is unnecessary when you can document it yourself on Instagram. That ineffable quality of It doesn’t entirely gel with our modern hustle culture, where everyone has to be a multi-hyphenate to get attention and you’re competing with more candidates than ever. The closest we have, in my opinion, to a 2024 It girl would be Julia Fox, and even that feels like a reduction of her qualities. But she is savvy enough to embody the modern and traditional ideas of It without falling foul of burnout or changing fads. With the It trend, there’s this notion of stardom being thrust upon the woman and Fox is too clever at cultivating attention to fit that description. I’m not sure you can be an It Girl if you want it too much.

Sevigny works consistently and has never lost that allure, even when she’s in extremely mainstream work or playing roles that go against her indelible image. Often, that It girl brand robs her of the credit she deserves as a truly fascinating actress. Still, she’s happy to lean into her own lore, whether it’s through the Charli XCX music video or her hilarious interviews where she fires off quips about her feelings on Los Angeles. There’s a moment in the New Yorker piece where someone asks about Sevigny by saying, “She seems so together.” I think that’s as close as we can get to an all-encompassing definition of It: the sheer confidence and power of knowing who you are and having your sh*t together. And having Jim Jarmusch’s phone number certainly doesn’t hurt.

Thanks for reading. You can find my work scattered across the internet. Over on Pajiba, I wrote about the cringe and conundrum of JoJo Siwa, the panicky flop sweat of Katy Perry’s comeback, and why it is completely okay to be a childfree cat lady (even though I don’t have a cat.) For Inverse, I wrote about one of my favourite vampire movies, Park Chan-wook’s Thirst. I was on BBC Radio 4’s Screenshot talking about pop fans and the depiction of music fandom in film (you can listen to me on the podcast!)

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