Chloe Sevigny: Queen of cool fashion

"Funny, then, that so much of Chloë Sevigny’s appeal over the years — as an actress as well as a fashion star — has come from playing it so cool. “Oh... Scorpios,” she sighs. “We’re really jealous and on fire and can be nasty without meaning to be. It’s tough being a Scorpio. We’re very strong and powerful. We’re all or nothing.”She is not just beautiful and louche. She is evidently a grafter. She says she did the range “between jobs” to avoid being “totally idle”. Since then, she has been in Wales and Spain filming Mr Nice, a biopic of the one-time drug-dealer Howard Marks, starring Rhys Ifans, and in San Diego, for My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, directed by the weighty Werner Herzog and produced by David Lynch, two of the film-makers she respects most in the world.I ask her to “take me through her outfit” (you’re allowed to do that sort of thing, you know, at a grand fashion parade like this). Well...” she says in mock Dolly Parton, “I’m wearing... a top from my new line! It’s silk and has a pocket here if a girl wants to wear it with no bra! And I’m wearing some vintage Claude Montana leather shorts I got in Rellik the other day, and some buckled wedges from my new line, which also come in suede, which is very nice.”On Sevigny, it comes off as the essence of a modern fashion statement. We sit having a tea in the corner, away from everyone. “I’d never want to become famous now,” she says. “I feel like there’s a real cockiness with young people today. Maybe it’s protective, a shell. But the new celeb daughters and sons, the pop stars, are wise beyond their years. “And,” she adds, “that really irritates me.”Next to their brassiness, their knowingness, Sevigny does seem oddly fresh, and this despite being 34 now, and having been in the game for some 15 years. It was the mid-1990s when, as a 19-year-old suburban escapee, she was spotted hanging with the skateboarders in Washington Square Park by her future boyfriend, the director Harmony Korine. Korine cast her in Kids and swept her into the centre of New York’s art, music, film and fashion communities.Soon she was starring in Sonic Youth videos and turning up on the cover of The Face. Every kind of credibility was hers. Then there was the part about being named “the face of the 1990s”. Did she ever believe her own hype? She doesn’t do false modesty. “I don’t wanna sound like an asshole, but I was into cool stuff, I had cool friends. I wasn’t being offered major studio projects, but, generally, the people I liked liked me.”If she ever worried about not making it into the big league, choosing to appear in smaller-budget indie films than her agent would have recommended, she’s now safely installed in the most enviable of careers, working with the best directors — and nobody can touch her. Of Ifans, her Mr Nice co-star (she plays Marks’s wife, Judy), she says: “Yeah, he was a dream. He’d known Howard for years, so he was very into the part. And he’s totally the king of Wales! Everywhere, everybody adored him.” Did he smell at all? He always looks like he might have smelly feet. “He smelt quite nice, actually. Every day he wore patchouli oil — you know, actors use certain ways to take them to a place.”Her bread and butter is the American television series Big Love, in which she plays a girl from a Mormon family living a polygamous lifestyle, but with a serious shopping addiction. It’s a hit in the States, and has just been recommissioned for a fourth seriesShe’s the definition of what the French call “bien dans sa peau”. Her cool is old-school and pre-internet. She’s never played anyone else’s game. Any ambition is kept under wraps: she’s always claimed to be too lazy even to show up to auditions. She doesn’t buy high fashion because everyone else does, so she buys vintage. One day matronly in a pussy-bow blouse and antique YSL earrings, the next vamping it up in a black Balenciaga cocktail dress. You never really know who you’re going to get. Still, I have to ask, has she started to think about dressing her age?Success has its price: a lot of time spent in LA, a city full of wannabes she doesn’t feel comfortable in. Does she feel threatened by younger actresses? “Sometimes when I’m out, I do. But I have something different: I’m a woman. It’s a shame men find it threatening. They’re not after a woman who’s together and successful... I don’t meet enough successful men.”
There’s a pregnant pause. She wants a family, kids, she’s said so often. “Yeah, before I’m 40, at least a child or two.” Where does a girl as in charge of herself as Sevigny find a man worthy of her time? It’s hard to imagine artsy boys holding the same appeal these days. Last summer, I saw her at one of those downtown rooftop parties where someone builds a fire in an oil can and people sit around drinking beer and smoking roll-ups. Her natural habitat, maybe, but hardly a place to score yourself an alpha male with an architect-designed flat. If that is indeed what she wants.
Chloe Sevigny with Jake Gyllenhaal presenting "Zodiac" in Cannes Film Festival 2007.

“I don’t know where to find a successful guy. Maybe branching out into different circles? Art parties? The boys from my generation are less driven than the women. I meet great women all the time. We all go out and say, ‘There are so many beautiful varieties of women here. Where are the men that deserve them?’ Anyway,” she says with purpose, “it doesn’t happen when you’re looking. For now, I’ll carry on working, maybe do some more clothes.” “No. It’s fun to be involved in fashion campaigns, to stay relevant to a certain extent, but I’ve never consciously pursued it, and I’m not going to start now.” We get onto plastic surgery. I tell her about a famous surgeon’s latest declaration that a woman’s face reaches its peak of attractiveness at 35. “My friends say I’m better-looking now than when I was younger. And my body is intact, although soon I’m gonna have to work harder. As for dressing, I’m more body-conscious and sexier. I know what works on me.”
Does she feel like a woman of substance? “I’ve always had substance,” she says.

Chloe Sevigny for Opening Ceremony will be on sale at Selfridges and Dover Street Market from August".
Source: women.timesonline.co.uk