On a recent afternoon at the Bowery Hotel, over a burrata caprese salad, green beans and a Coke, the British television host, model and pop-culture phenomenon Alexa Chung was explaining her hair color, which often calls to mind a grown-out dye job. “I said ‘I want to look like Kurt Cobain,’” said Chung, 26. “I said, ‘I’m going to America and they’re going to try and make my hair shiny and I don’t want it. I want to look like Kurt Cobain.’”
In town filming Thrift America, a new television series about shopping for vintage clothes and other paraphernalia, Chung was wearing a dark skirt from J.W. Anderson, an Isabel Marant cardigan and Russell & Bromley flats — her penchant for flats being but one characteristic, along with her oft-copied ombre hair, that has captivated fashion’s capricious higher ranks.
“All of my beauty icons are men,” she said in her throaty alto. “It’s all about effortlessness. It’s all about looking underdone.”
photo: REUTERS
Chung’s sartorial flair (when a dress didn’t arrive in the mail recently, she wore black shorts and a white button-down shirt to the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Awards) has earned her a coterie of high-powered admirers. She’s a hipster muse for Karl Lagerfeld; a regular on the pages of fashion and music magazines; and an inspiration for young bloggers, who track her every look as if she were a deer in the crosshairs.
“She’s become the Kate Moss for this new generation,” said Jane Keltner de Valle, the fashion news director for Teen Vogue. There was a time when all the pretty young things wanted was, as Keltner de Valle put it, “Kate, Kate, Kate. And now they say ‘Alexa!’”
Chung’s run at “it” girl-dom in the US (a title she dismisses) has not been without strain. Though she is a huge star in England, her American television debut, MTV’s It’s On With Alexa Chung, was canceled last year after two seasons.
But that hiccup has hardly damaged her A-list status in the fashion world. In the last year, thousands of people placed themselves on a waiting list for the Alexa, a US$1,150 buffalo-leather handbag named for Chung by Mulberry, the British luxury goods company. Inspired by Chung’s carrying of a vintage Mulberry men’s briefcase, the new bag was “an immediate best-seller,” the company’s chairman and chief executive, Godfrey Davis, told investors.
And it spawned an array of other satchels like the Alexa Hobo and the Oversized Alexa.
Many pieces in a collection Chung helped design for Madewell, the chain owned by J. Crew, sold out quickly after its debut in September. (Among the offerings: a fisherman-knit sweater and a blue silk dress with mini polka dots.) Millard Drexler, chairman and chief executive of J. Crew, told investors on an earnings call that women were curious about Chung: “Especially the 20-something crowd — they are Googling her all the time.” (He also said he suspected that outside of New York, most people had probably never heard of Chung.)
FIRSTHAND VIEW
While Chung has been on the covers of the British editions of Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar and was identified last month by the Sunday Telegraph as one of the 100 most powerful women in Britain, the American mass audience thus far appears to be more interested in the antics of the Kardashian sisters and Kate Gosselin than Chung’s brand of offhanded chic. Scheduled to be broadcast on PBS next summer, Thrift America might introduce Chung to a larger segment of the nation. On the show, she and Maya Singer, the series creator and the editor of special projects for Style.com, will comb the country’s consignment shops, garage sales and flea markets for old clothing, furniture, music equipment and other potential treasures to use in various creative endeavors. A few of the places they plan to visit include Orlando, Florida; Detroit; Nashville, Tennessee; Alabama; and Brooklyn, New York (and, on a less populist note, fashion capitals like Paris and London as well). In the first episode, Chung helps Pamela Love, a gothic jewelry designer, create a pop-up shop in London during Fashion Week.
Think of it as Antiques Roadshow meets the foodie romp Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. Singer said viewers hoping to replicate Chung’s high-low style will see firsthand: “What does Alexa Chung pull out of the crap bin at the yard sale?”
Chung, known in England as a model, a presenter of various fashion and music shows, and the girlfriend of Alex Turner, the front man of the band Arctic Monkeys, does not employ a stylist, which has earned her a kind of a street cred.
Corin Nelson, who was an executive producer and show runner for It’s On With Alexa Chung, said that while television hosts typically wear what is picked for them, Chung said the clothes that were bought for her weren’t really her style. So she dressed herself each morning instead, mixing her own vintage items, like high-waist Levi’s denim shorts, with Chanel booties, new T-shirts and sweaters.
“She very much marches to the beat of her own fashion drum,” Nelson said.
Chung’s style might be described as tomboy-meets-Lolita (delicate mini-dresses and brogues). To achieve the look, she relies on an ingrained English skill of layering. “The weather plays a big part over there,” she said at the Bowery. “It’s always cold and unpredictable. And also I quite like the slightly dorky aspect of English dressing.”
In person and in photographs, certainly, Chung exudes none of the polished standoffishness of another current British style maven, Victoria Beckham. Having grown up with two brothers, she is quick with a comeback and wary of being precious.
“She has this persona of your cool best friend or of your cool big sister,” said Izzy Grinspan, editor of shopping blog Racked NY. “It’s not aggressively sexual at all. It’s not aggressive.”
It’s the antithesis of the warrior goddess look of Beyonce and Lady Gaga, Grinspan said. “You can very easily dress like Alexa Chung and it feels really fresh and new right now because it’s such a change.”
And unlike many other trendsetters her age, Chung is more likely to flash paparazzi a peace sign than her underwear. “No kind of parenting can prepare you for how odd it is to be in front of a baying mob of flashbulbs and having to act natural or pose,” she said. “And I’m really bad at being elegant and graceful and doing this sort of thing.”
Despite the attention, Chung shrugged off the idea that she is original. “A lot of my friends dress like this, and so I feel somewhat bad about how I’ve made a career out of it,” she said.
LONG LEG, NO BOOBS
She said she inherited from her father, a graphic designer, an eye for good proportion. “I just apply that to clothes,” she said. “And I’m dressing for my body. So it’s very flattering that other people might want to borrow my style, but really it’s just making the most of what personally suits me, which is that I’ve got a long skinny leg and no boobs. So I dress to accommodate that.”
Chung is the youngest of four children who hail from a small village called Privett in Hampshire, England, about 113km west of London. Her mother is a housewife, and fashion was not a priority.
“It was just kind of more about horse riding or going to dog shows,” Chung said. Her fashion obsession was sparked in the 1980s by a British television series, The Clothes Show. At 16, she was scouted by a modeling agency at the Reading music festival. But the profession disappointed.
“I can’t express how bored I was and how my self-esteem just diminished,” Chung said. “I felt worthless because I was doing a job that had nothing to do with my own merit. It was to do with something that was given to me by my parents.”
“The most beautiful girls in the world that I met while I was modeling were also the most depressed,” she said.
But in 2006, Chung got a job as a host of her favorite television music show, Popworld. “It just really pulled me out of a quite depressing moment in my life,” she said. “Because I’d had my opinions suppressed it was really freeing to be able to express myself in that way because the tone of the show generally is quite sarcastic. I became known for being quite cutting.”
She went on to host other popular English television programs like Frock Me, Gok’s Fashion Fix, and now, Gonzo With Alexa Chung. She plans to continue modeling (for pet projects), writing (she is a contributing editor for British Vogue), taking photographs (there is talk of an exhibition) and designing, perhaps a second Madewell collection. “I hope so,” she said. “They sent me nice flowers for my birthday.”
Someday, she’d like to live in New York again, Chung said, eying the last of the fiery leaves clinging to trees beyond the hotel’s heated patio. Eventually, she’d like children. And a house. The other day, she said, her boyfriend asked, “What do you want in life?”
“Everything,” Chung told him.
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