On a particularly warm fall day, Chloë Sevigny looks summery and relaxed when she arrives at a café on St. Marks to talk about her new line for Opening Ceremony. Face flushed from the heat, her T-shirt sleeves pushed up over her pale, girlish shoulders, and sporting high-waisted, mid-length denim shorts and leopard-print flats with white cotton ankle socks, Sevigny's perfectly particular style is quick to affirm how she might come to design clothes for one of New York's most avant-garde downtown boutiques. And just to clarify: When she told Jeffrey Deitch in our pages last year that she'd never want to design "a whole line," what she meant was, "I would never want to do something cheap for a mass-market chain—and, obviously, I would never [try to] compete with high-fashion designers," she says. "I don't want to come off like some celebrities who say, 'I'm now a designer!'"
Sevigny says the partnership with Opening Ceremony came about "so organically" -- someone at Fashion Wire Daily asked her with whom she might want to work if she ever were to design a line; she said Opening Ceremony; Humberto Leon called her up; done and done. Then on hiatus from Big Love, Sevigny seized the opportunity. "In the beginning I was really excited. I had a lot of ideas and I went in with a lot of sketches," she says. "And then the fear started to set in: What if it doesn't work? What if people don't like it? I started really doubting myself." That fear, she says, lasted right up until the unveiling. Now pleased with a finished product (the collection's available starting Feb. 4) and a generous response to the eclectic, Chloë-esque line, Sevigny is excited. "I think my favorite part of the process will be when I see a girl walking down the street in the clothes."
Chloë models her new line.
Chloe will celebrate her new line with a party at Webster Hall on
Monday, Feb. 4th at 10 p.m. with a performance by The Slits and DJ sets
by Paul Sevigny, Benjamin Cho, Leo Fitzpatrick, Brian Degraw and Nate
Lowman.
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