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.”
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SURFACE on Nowness.com.
“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."
X-GIRL on Nowness.com.
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.
