TEEN SPIRIT

Chloë Sevigny’s ’90s Nostalgia (VIDEO)

The actress reveals two never-before-seen videos of her salad days for Nowness. By Isabel Wilkinson.

The 1990s are back. They’re on the runway in shades of Hedi Slimane’s new collection for Saint Laurent, the year 1993 is the singular subject of a new show at New York’s New Museum, and punk will be the subject of a sweeping show at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute this spring.

And where there’s a ’90s revival, Chloë Sevigny is never far away. Now, in a “takeover” of the über-cool video site Nowness, Sevigny—practically the poster child of ’90s irreverence—releases two never-before-seen videos of herself as a fresh-faced actress in the early years of the decade.

The first film, Surface, is a home movie shot by Michael Cleary and styled by Alister Mackie in Mackie’s London apartment. In the footage, filmed soon after she completed filming for the cult-classic Kids, Sevigny wears an Yves Saint Laurent Le Smoking and Chanel jewels as she robotically ticks through her to-do list. “Get some fresh air…water the plants…try and get some more Valium.”

“The inspiration for the film was really Chloë herself,” Mackie told Nowness. “The anti-fashion aesthetic and deconstructed finishes…it was the last really revolutionary period in fashion where things actually changed.”

In 1995, Sevigny starred in X-Girl, a short film directed by Phil Morrison and made for designer Kim Gordon’s mid-’90s line that bore the same name. The film is a winding but hilarious window in her world, featuring a bowl cut and a "Marc Jacobs situation."

As Christopher Bollen wrote of Sevigny in Interview in 2008 (PDF): she “has been her generation’s heroine, fashion icon, and girl-on-the-edge,” all wrapped into one.

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