She bought a Miu Miu hat because she saw it twice — once on a runway she'd walked herself, and again months later on her own shoulder, in a photograph shot for a fall campaign she was fronting. Seeing the same object come back around, on her own body, in two different contexts, was apparently what closed the deal. She's also been circling a pair of Chloé shearling boots for a while, the kind that call back to the red pair Kate Bush wore in the seventies — an item she hasn't bought yet, just tracked, the way a person tracks a word they keep almost using.
The woman doing the tracking is Chloë Sevigny, who for thirty years has been shorthand for a specific downtown cool: the girl who could wear anything and make it read as a decision rather than an accident. She's aware of how that reputation calcified into a costume of its own. "I feel like when I was younger, I wanted to project so much of like an edginess," she's said, "like it was an armor." The word is doing real work there — armor implies something worn for protection, not pleasure, a garment chosen to keep a version of herself at a safe distance from the room.
What she describes now is a slower negotiation: "trying to find a way to refine my kind of alternativeness and make it still feel like me, but also feel more like a woman." Not abandoning the alternativeness — refining it, which is a different verb, and a harder one. She's fronting Mytheresa's fall campaign this year, the retailer's first celebrity face for the season, shot by her longtime friend Cass Bird — and she's said what drew her to the job wasn't the exposure but the retailer's stated interest in dressing "women of a certain age," a category she is now, at fifty-one, plainly and unapologetically inside of.
She recently purged her closet to make room for a smaller, better-chosen rotation, inspired by a friend who buys only a few key pieces a season and wears them on repeat. The purge held for about as long as purges usually do — she'd added a vintage Nicolas Ghesquière dress and a gingham Prada piece within weeks. Call it the arrows going around their own little triangle, which is how she describes it herself: things leave, things come back, the shape stays roughly the same even as the specific objects rotate through it.
There's a category of dress she calls, half-joking, her Cinderella dresses — the fancier evening pieces she's typically borrowing for a night and returning the next morning, never quite owned, never quite hers to keep, gone by the time the arrows come back around the triangle.
