It's a savagely cold December afternoon in Manhattan, and the wind could freeze the tears in your eyes. I'm with the actor Chloe Sevigny, driving at a crawl to a photo shoot where she will model outfits from her first clothing line, which she has designed for downtown boutique Opening Ceremony. The line is a charmingly sincere ragbag of patterns and influences, inspired by the "clothes collages" Sevigny would throw together as a bored adolescent in the commuter suburb of Darien, Connecticut. Nothing ever happened in Darien. Sevigny has claimed she would yell every night at her parents, "I can't believe you're bringing me up here! You guys are, like, evil!" Entire afternoons were whiled away watching her older brother, Paul, and his pals skateboarding in the backyard. Mostly, she sewed. "I had nothing better to do, so I made my own clothes."
Moonlighting at Opening Ceremony has brought her full circle. "I just came up with stuff I'd want to wear," she trills in a tra-la-la voice. "A little quirky and funky. Pretty classic, but with a twist. I was thinking about Neneh Cherry, the New Wave bands I was into in junior high, the boys I knew who liked the early hip-hop scene. It's a mishmash of alternative things that suburban kids were into. When you're young, you're mixing things up. You're a sponge. The Opening Ceremony stuff is like me going back to my youth. My last hurrah."
Although it's her first stint as a designer, Sevigny was previously responsible for the thrift-store look of the 1997 film Gummo, her then-boyfriend Harmony Korine's spaced-out ode to white-trash America. She made swimsuits and pink felt bunny ears that she ran up on her sewing machine. She also appeared in the film. You couldn't miss her: she was the one with albino-blond hair and eyebrows, and electrical tape on her nipples. Other actors could have played the part, but none could have looked so spookily blithe or blaze.
Sevigny has been acting for 13 years, but it's still impossible to take her face for granted. There is no one in US cinema who looks like her, no one with the same mash up of feline beauty and loutish toughness. "She's one of those cases where you turn on the camera and she changes instantly," says Kimberly Peirce, who directed her in Boys Don't Cry. "My director of photography looked at me in astonishment because the second the camera started rolling, she became this other creature, this thing the camera loves. With some actors you have to keep them active or they don't sustain your interest. But Chloe doesn't have to do anything and she will still command your attention."
Although the 33-year-old Sevigny is tall and slender in tight, dark jeans, black boots and baggy leather jacket, she walks with a slight galumphing awkwardness, planting her feet purposefully as she goes. Her face is long and elegantly pointed, offset by a formidable jaw on which you could crack open a bottle of beer. Her droopy-lidded eyes can lend her a docile vagueness, which came in handy during an early run of movies set in the white-trash hinterland (Gummo, Boys Don't Cry, Julien Donkey-Boy), in which she played characters for whom a move to the ass end of nowhere would have represented unimaginable social promotion.
As we inch through the gridlock, she becomes antsy, eventually suggesting to the driver that we may be heading the wrong way. He phones his boss, who confirms this to be the case. "Why did they give me wrong directions?" he wonders. Sevigny slumps back in her seat and glares out of the window. "So that we get there late," she replies, seething quietly, "and then they can make me work all night." Well, it's a theory.
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