from the Sunday Telegraph UK
Model? Actress? Whatever
(Filed: 27/11/2005)
Chloë Sevigny, Oscar-nominated actress and undisputed queen of downtown chic, is now every bit the uptown girl: modelling for Dolce & Gabbana, starring in big-films, effortlessly starting trends every time she leaves the house. She talks to Susan Dominus about the ‘torture’ of fashion shoots and that brief time when she wasn’t the world’s coolest woman
Slumped over, her head resting on the table, her shimmering blonde hair entirely covering her face, the actress and reluctant model Chloë Sevigny looks much like someone in desperate need of a nap.
'I can't stand modelling... it's like torture'
She's now in the third hour of a four-hour photo shoot, so her fatigue is understandable. Compared with the picture of lethargy that Sevigny presents, the young men around her are models of industry, busily adjusting lighting, clicking through images on the computer monitor nearby, conferring eagerly with the photographer for whom Sevigny is posing.
Every now and then someone addresses her directly and Sevigny, dressed in a simple sleeveless white top by Dolce & Gabbana, lifts up her head and looks out, just barely, from her curtain of hair - she is listening, but it clearly pains her to do so.
She may have been bored, but in the photographs taken over the course of the day Sevigny looks luminous, intriguing, sexy and wise - her default setting, it seems. Dolce & Gabbana, which has recently called upon Sevigny to model the firm's fashion whenever possible, would be pleased with her work. Sevigny, however, isn't so sure.
'I can't stand modelling,' she tells me later, once the shoot is over. 'It's like torture for me. Having to sit in front of the mirror for two hours while they do your hair, and then everybody's looking at the pictures and critiquing, "Oh, maybe we should do this with her hair or her make-up…" I don't like people nit-picking at me.'
Sevigny has made a career crystallising a kind of over-it-all, cooler-than-thou chic, starting with her first film role, playing a hard-partying New York teen in Larry Clark's Kids (1995). But even before that, she'd already been held up as an emblem of the 1990s New York downtown aesthetic, after a fashion editor at the magazine Sassy - then a hip, mildly subversive bible for young girls - spotted her in beige corduroy overalls and eventually hired her as a stylist.
A regular club-goer who spent her late teens drinking in Washington Square Park with other stylishly scruffy types, Sevigny was also the subject of a 1994 profile written by Jay McInerney for the New Yorker, which officially decreed her the 'coolest girl in New York'. This kind of label can easily destroy its recipient (surely, you must already be over by the time a thirtysomething writer at a stodgy magazine gets around to noticing you). Instead, 11 years after that profile appeared, Sevigny is still going strong, still modelling for top designers, still acting in intelligently odd films, and yes, still embodying a distinctive brand of cool.
In the minds of the media, true cool is supposed to come from somewhere gritty, like the truckstops of Arizona where the (possibly fictional) fiction writer JT LeRoy claims he grew up watching his mother turn tricks. Cool can come from the tenements, or perhaps from downtown Detroit. True cool does not, however, usually come from Darien, Connecticut, the wealthy, waspy community an hour outside New York City where Chloë Sevigny, now 31, grew up.
She was part of a small clique of kids in Darien - 'We were the rejects,' she says - who did everything they could to look like no one else. Taking a cue from her older brother, now a DJ and a band manager, who had dyed his hair blue, she shaved her head. She also pierced her nose - a fashion cliché for today's 17-year-olds, but at the time, especially in a town like Darien, practically illegal. Her father, a painter who made his living in insurance, kicked her out of the house for all of three days.
'I thought I looked really boring,' Sevigny says now, recalling why she was so eager to adopt a punk aesthetic, if not the chew-up-the-furniture lifestyle. Sitting in a café near the studio, Sevigny looks a touch abashed as she remembers undervaluing her own good looks, the very thing that turned out to be her stock-in-trade.
'I had the blonde hair, the blue eyes, so until I shaved my head, I looked like every other girl in my school.'
Sevigny's looks are just unusual enough for a film star - her eyes don't pop, her nose is unusually shaped - for you to expect to find someone even less appealing in person, someone who suffers without the magic of Photoshop and expert make-up and touch-ups, perhaps someone more laide than jolie. In fact, in person, she is even prettier than on camera. Without an ounce of make-up, her skin is flawless, and she's easily the most glamorous woman in the room, dressed in a black leather fisherman's cap, a fitted vintage black leather jacket over a long grey cashmere cardigan, and narrow black jeans from, she explains, Sass & Bide.
Sass and who? I ask. She takes a pen and writes the name of the designers down on paper, her penmanship displaying the same self-conscious, uneven girlish style that it might have had when she was a teenager.
'I guess they're all the rage now,' she says, her voice inflected with a note of irony. 'I didn't know, but my friend told me Kate Moss and Lindsey Lohan and all the girls wear them now. The designers gave them to me, so…' She drifts off, not sure whether, in her effort to clue in the clueless, she has established herself as au courant, or merely a follower of other people's fashion. She ends up deciding to laugh at the conversation itself, proving once again that she is not as aloof as her aesthetic would suggest.
A regular on the best-dressed lists (also, a frequent target of self-designated fashion police, for the detour she made into a head-scarfed immigrant look, or the odd choice of oversized white Ray-Bans), Sevigny is, actually, known for setting trends rather than following them. She obviously wears clothing beautifully, the line of her own body clean enough to show off the garment's shape. At the same time, her face is just imperfect enough for her to lend an extra layer of interest to even a very simple outfit.
She is a regular on the covers of i-D and Interview, and she has been featured in Vogue and The Face - the magazines she pored over for inspiration when she was growing up in Connecticut. She has appeared in advertising campaigns for Miu Miu and H&M, and recently starred in a lavish and strange promotional film for Ritz Fine Jewellery. Last March, when she went to Dolce & Gabbana simply to borrow something to wear to their show, the designers loved her look so much that they insisted that she went down the catwalk modelling their clothing.
She happily complied, wearing a long, fur-trimmed, Victorian coat. In exchange for continuing to model their clothes, Sevigny has been granted near-unlimited access to their vintage collections. 'I got to go into their archives and borrow a bunch of pieces,' she says.
'I go to a lot of events, and normally, a week beforehand, I would have been on style.com trying to come up with an outfit. This way, I have a whole closetful of outfits, and it's made it a lot easier the past year.'
In the past year Sevigny has needed all the time she could get: rather than fading as a 1990s icon, she has been getting more work than ever, and in bigger budget films. This year she acted in Zodiac, about the serial killer by the same name, alongside Robert Downey Jr and Jake Gyllenhaal (to be released next year), and also spent six months in Los Angeles filming Big Love, a television series about modern Mormonism of which great things are expected, and which is scheduled to run this spring on HBO, the American home of The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. Sevigny plays one of three wives married to the main character.
'I think I have more dialogue in the first episode than I have had in my entire film career combined,' she says, laughing so hard at the absurdity of the film industry that she is practically gasping for air. 'I'm manic five out of the 12 episodes, absolutely manic, so hopefully I'm good in it, I don't know, and hopefully people will see my range, and have something to identify me with other than the girl from Boys Don't Cry [for which Sevigny won an Oscar nomination] or whatever the last thing they saw was.'
That last role could have been Sevigny's performance as Christian Bale's demure and endangered secretary in American Psycho.
Or else it could well have been her infamous role as Daisy in The Brown Bunny, which featured Sevigny performing, for ten long minutes, oral sex on the director and star, Vincent Gallo - also her ex-boyfriend. Perilously close to p*rn*gr*phy, the film, it has been alleged, led Sevigny to be dropped by her agents, William Morris; Sevigny's camp says that she left voluntarily, because her former agents were not seeking films with broad enough appeal for her.
Either way, her career has hardly suffered a setback since then - both Jim Jarmusch and Woody Allen have cast her in their films (in Broken Flowers and Melinda and Melinda, respectively), and her role in Zodiac marks her 'first studio role', she says proudly.
'I'd like to make bigger films, just so I have more opportunities,' she says. 'It's not like I want to go mainstream. I'd still like to make good, subversive movies.' Although the critics savaged The Brown Bunny, it may have been just the career turn to save her, permanently, from the risk of becoming another perky blond, like Kirsten Dunst (who was considered for the role of Daisy).
As for Gallo, she says that the two of them talk every so often, but they're not in close touch. She hadn't even heard the rumours that the famously garrulous polymath had put his sperm for sale on the internet, at a price of $1 million. 'No! Really?' she says. 'God…' she looks away, as if wounded on his behalf. 'He probably wants to have a baby and can't find anybody. That's sad.'
She herself does not seem to be having any second thoughts about the demise of that relationship, nor about the one she had, on and off for seven years, with the film director Harmony Korine, with whom she has completely lost touch.
'No more directors,' she says emphatically. 'They're too narcissistic.' Despite a brief break over the summer, she is now back together with Matthew McAuley, a musician in the rock band ARE Weapons. Sevigny, a devout Catholic, has always spoken openly about her desire to have children young, and now that she's 31, the question is starting to loom. McAuley is not yet ready. 'I don't think I'd have a kid on my own,' she says. 'I'm pretty traditional, and my friends who have kids say you just can't do it alone, it's just too much work. I'm not agonising yet, although I think about it all the time.'
Meanwhile, Sevigny says, 'I don't know if I'm ready anyway. I still like to go dancing. I still like being young and not having that responsibility.' As she says that, she looks longingly in the direction of her bike, which is parked by the bar. A recent present from her brother, it is a vintage Bianchi that folds up, with a ladybird bell perched daintily on the handlebars.
She has been working all day, and now she is ready to peel off on her new toy. She has to get home and get dressed. There's a party that night, and she'll be there soon enough - looking, no doubt, cool.
some people naturally seem so much younger (while others look older, more mature)
the ed!!! 
