Chloë Sevigny in full bloom
NEW YORK —You never know where Chloë Sevigny may turn up. She has battled zombies — alongside Bill Murray and Adam Driver — on the big screen (in the Jim Jarmusch film “The Dead Don’t Die”), filled her car trunk with watermelons on the small screen (as the main character’s mother in a “Russian Doll” flashback on Netflix) and taken a spin down the Simone Rocha runway at London Fashion Week. And that was just in the first six months of 2019.
Since then, she was announced as a cast member in Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming HBO series “We Are Who We Are,” set to film in Italy between now and the end of the year. In October she’ll start popping up on coffee tables across the country as one of the ’90s-era New Yorkers featured in Walt Cassidy’s book “New York: Club Kids,” and, by Thanksgiving weekend, she’ll be back at the multiplex in Lena Waithe’s “Queen & Slim.” Her third short as a director, “White Echo,” debuted at Cannes, and is winding its way through the festival circuit.
And, thanks to a just-dropped collaboration with L.A.-based perfume maker Régime des Fleurs, you can now dab a little bit of Chloë-inspired rose eau de parfum on your wrists so that the scent — like the myriad roles of her nearly quartercentury-long career — is everywhere around you all at once.
This last project is why, on a humid August afternoon, Sevigny popped up amid the teeming masses crowding New York’s Grand Central Station — solo and wholly unrecognized — and headed for a back table at the Oyster Bar to talk all things film, fashion and fragrance. She arrived wearing a pair of Adidas track shorts paired with a sleeveless white one-off Maison Margiela top and an unlined blue blazer (also Margiela). Slung over one shoulder is a bag by avantgarde unisex label Telfar.
“I call it preppy edgy — or edgy preppy,” Sevigny said of her current street-style vibe, explaining that she’s just arrived on the train from visiting her mother in Darien, Conn., to roll a few interviews before going to an art opening that evening. She said she’s not keen on talking to the press (“Because I’m not good at it,” she said) but she’s here because she knows that her celebrity status can garner attention for projects and designers she cares about.
In this case, it’s highlighting the work of longtime friends Alia Raza and Ezra Woods and their 5-yearold brand. “It’s a small brand, independently owned by two people that I really respect and admire [along with] all the other products that they put out into the world,” Sevigny explained. “It’s [about] wanting to help them and lift them up. And I get to do a perfume!”
Sevigny likened the project to her stint as creative director of friend Tara Subkoff ’s Imitation of Christ label in the early aughts; the several-season collection she designed with Opening Ceremony a decade later; and, more recently, her appearance on the London Fashion Week Simone Rocha runway in February of this year.
“I had worn [Simone Rocha] to the [2016] Met Ball, and she came to New York to do the fitting of the dress and I just fell for her as a person, what she does and how she kind of exists a little bit outside of regular fashion,” Sevigny explained. “So when she asked me to [walk in the show] I was like, ‘Of course I want to come!’ ”
It was also one of the goals of her many high-profile red-carpet appearances at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, plotted out, outfit by outfit, with stylist Haley Wollens.
“We were trying to draw attention to some designers that maybe don’t [get attention that] often,” Sevigny said. “So we showcased people like [Mugler creative director] Casey [Cadwallader] and Marine Serre — the woman who does the [crescent] moon dresses.”
Sevigny said she and Wollens also used the Cannes red carpet as a chance to showcase the lessoften-seen side of the actor-director. “There was also the idea of doing more Hollywood glam,” she said. “People always see me as this hipster — whatever the hell that is. So I wanted to do something more classic Hollywood.”
Longtime favorite Miu Miu was in the mix, as was Loewe (an eyecatching dress overflowing with eyelet lace and pearl accents) and the aforementioned French designer Marine Serre.
But the hands-down most memorable — and glamorous — was the Mugler gown she wore to the premiere of “The Dead Don’t Die”: a custom black silk crepe dress with a thigh-high leg slit and nude corset accessorized with black harness gloves.
The high point of the one-woman glamour parade further underscores Sevigny’s style synergy.
“Haley pulled a bunch of references to old Mugler, sent them to Casey [Cadwallader], he did a bunch of sketches, they talked about it, he created a custom [dress], and then we did the fitting in Paris,” Sevigny said. “And now she’s styling [his upcoming runway] show in Paris. Having it all come together like that is a dream come true — everybody gets elevated, everybody wins, and I get to wear beautiful dresses!”
Sevigny said she first started working with Wollens a few years ago — mostly for big events like Cannes — after a long stretch of going it alone. “I’d look at style.com or whatever and then have my publicist call [things] in. It’s not that that’s such a hard thing to do but it just takes a lot of brain power. And I want someone else to tell me what looks good. I think I can fall into a bit of a fashion rut sometimes, and she’ll think of things that maybe I wouldn’t.” (On the cover, Sevigny is wearing a Margiela top and Levi’s cutoffs.)
That doesn’t mean Sevigny doesn’t have opinions when it comes to her characters’ onscreen style. “I always get in trouble for trying to, you know, give my two cents in places where it doesn’t belong on film sets,” she said. “Well, not in trouble, exactly, but I sometimes feel like I’ve crossed a boundary, and often it’s hard for me to hold my tongue.”
During her run as prairie-skirtwearing polygamist wife Nicki Grant on HBO’s series “Big Love,” for example, she pushed for a more buttoned-up wardrobe. In “We Are Who We Are,” in which Sevigny plays an Army colonel and mother, it’s a decidedly different vibe.
“She’s military, she’s married, she’s out [of the closet] and she’s, I’d say, more butch,” Sevigny said. “And she’s also still holding onto a bit of a ’90s rebellious thing.” Her hair is cut short because, Sevigny said, “A large percentage of women in the Army have shorter haircuts” but also because Guadagnino “also had this vision of my hair as being kind of like [philosopher and gender theorist] Judith Butler’s.”
During the three weeks of hair, makeup and wardrobe preparations in Italy, Sevigny said she had a real-life person in mind when it came to offering suggestions to costume designer Giulia Piersanti. “There was an artist who just had a show at the New Museum, Sarah Lucas, and kind of the way that she dresses, sort of a looser T-shirt with a big collar and jeans tucked into motorcycle boots, kind of like a tough girl. So I made references to Sarah Lucas, and [Piersanti] was kind of on the same wavelength.”
Likewise, Sevigny has infused her perfume project with Régime des Fleurs with inspirations and references, both large and small, plucked from her personal life. The baby blue and gold colors on the Chloë Sevigny Little Flower bottle were her idea (partially inspired, she said, by her collection of Herend figurines), and the typography on the bottle was tweaked to underscore the connection to classic Hollywood glamour. What nobody knew when the yearlong development process started was that another favorite of hers would be the key.
“I love tea, I drink a lot of tea — as I am right now,” Sevigny said, holding her glass of iced tea aloft for emphasis. “And I love the scent. I think we were in the lab smelling different things and I asked to smell the [black tea] scent, and the essence of it was so amazing.”
The resulting juice is a cipher of a scent; simultaneously traditional and subversive, light and dark, romantic and mischievous. The Ottoman rose absolute and black tea notes, along with blackcurrant bud, pomelo, peony and honeysuckle (among others), result in something that smells less like a rose and more like the air in a greenhouse filled with fresh-cut roses — buds, stems and leaves, some speckled with dark, wet soil.
Although the launch of the fragrance is still several weeks away at the time of our Oyster Bar sit-down, Sevigny told us she’s been wearing it almost exclusively for a while now (she has connections, after all). So maybe it’s our mind playing tricks on us when, after she’s gone—out of the restaurant, through the humid human soup of Grand Central Station and down the subway escalator to pop up somewhere else — the smell of fresh-cut roses seems to linger ever so briefly in the air. By Adam Tschorn