Chloë Sevigny on Making Fucking Awesome Booty Shorts
"My husband says, 'Your face is on more clothes than any other actor in history," a laughing Chloë Sevigny says from a rented vacation house in Massachusetts. "He might be right."
Really, no one else could've designed the first-ever womenswear collection for skate label Fucking Awesome other than Chloë Sevigny. It makes almost too much sense: Sevigny not only has ample design chops but also lent her face to a now-very-expensive Fucking Awesome skate deck nearly a decade ago.
This means that this new Chloë Sevigny x Fucking Awesome is part of a greater legacy, a legacy that wouldn't exist without Sevigny's mug.
Sevigny's grin has graced garments from brands that include Supreme, Pleasures, Opening Ceremeny — for whom Sevigny designed several capsules — and X-Girl, the undersung X-Large spin-off brand co-founded by similarly iconic Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon.
Putting a smiling Chloë Sevigny face on a T-shirt "isn't intentional on my part, it's the brands'," said Sevigny. "They just wanna sell clothes, but then I don't get to wear them. Am I allowed to? It's a real shame because that Gummo jersey [from Supreme Spring/Summer 2022] was one of the nicest things I've seen in a long time."
This is part of being, literally, iconic. Yes, "iconic" is tossed out so frequently that it often loses weight but Chloë Sevigny is the dictionary definition of the term. It's not hyperbole.
Thinkpieces have been written about Sevigny since she was getting street-cast for magazine covers, rife with quotes from the era's most influential artists.
Sevigny was the archetypal Cool Nineties Girl and became the quintessential renaissance woman of the aughts. She's starred in music videos for Sonic Youth and Beck, acted in Harmony Korine and Larry Clark films, and defined fashion eras by just wearing the stuff she liked.
She even predated the celebrity creative director era with her work for pioneering IYKYK art label-turned-fashion-brand Imitation of Christ.
I know this all sounds fawningly sycophantic but, really, I'm just recounting all the things that make Chloë Sevigny, Chloë Sevigny.
There's a reason that folks lined up 'round the block for a chance to shop Sevigny's closet and, even better, actually meet her.
As for why Sevigny's once again working with Fucking Awesome, well, this latest endeavor came about as organically as basically every other project bearing her name.
"They were like 'We wanna do the skateboard again,'" recalls Sevigny.
"And I was like, 'Okay, but do we wanna do the skateboard again? Like wasn't it nice that it was this one fleeting, covetable thing?' But they talked about how there's this new generation of young skaters so I was like, 'Let's do it but different.' So we did it with a glitter pink background, and we were going to re-do the T-shirt differently when we were like, 'Why don't we just do some girls' pieces?'"
Too be clear, this wasn't a one-off request from a brand that Sevigny barely knew but a reunion between longtime pals.
"I first met [Fucking Awesome co-founder Jason] Dill in the early aughts through [Supreme videographer] Bill Strobeck," she says. "We went to Ozzfest together, and I just fell for him. We'd hang out through the years and, when he [founded Fucking Awesome], I just fell in love with the graphics, the team. I felt his authenticity coming through everything.
"I love Fucking Awesome, man. Even their name, I mean, it's so confrontational. It feels truly — and people don't use this word this way anymore — alternative."
This all goes back to Sevigny's youth. Skateboard culture is one of the founding principles of her oft-imitated, widely-admired wardrobe and it was absorbed from an early age.
"My older brother was a skater and he brought everything into our house," Sevigny says. "I remember him with all those big skate videos, the Powell Peralta T-shirts, the Vision graphics; they were the fabric of my childhood."
It was also the fabric of Sevigny's approach to style, founded on earnestness and authenticity. Those are my words, though, because as a genuinely cool person, Sevigny doesn't deign to stoop to self-descriptors. Still, she knows what she likes.
"Authenticity meant something where I was growing up," she muses. "There was this earned thing. You can just tell when something's real, like Jim Jarmusch, you know?"
Certainly, you can't buy your way into something real. But if you were to try, the capsule that Sevigny has designed for Fucking Awesome would be a good start.
Available on Fucking Awesome's website and its physical stores from September 6, the latest Chloë Sevigny x Fucking Awesome collection brings back the hits and then some.
The inimitable FA board and matching T-shirt both return, leading over a half-dozen new items that range from co-branded hoodie to yet another T-shirt bearing one of Sevigny's yearbook photos. Impossible to have too many of those.
The design process was collaborative and partially based on clothes that Sevigny herself likes to wear — during our interview, by the way, she was wearing a lacey skirt and T-shirt from Supreme's ingenious Bernadette Corporation collab. "I bought every piece!" exclaims Sevigny.
A defining piece for her FA collection is a hybrid skirt inspired by a vintage piece that Sevigny herself cut and stitched with some doily-like fabric.
"They'd never done a skirt so that was scary for them," recalls Sevigny. "They'd never done a baby tee, either, and no one was doing that! Like, why not? Really, [the collection is] technically unisex but I was very into doing a skirt and I was inspired by, cut-off kilts, which I feel is very skinhead girl."
That's a reference to '80s British working-class movement that aligned with the post-punk, new wave, and ska boom, indicative of the concise collection's far-reaching stylistic cues.
"This was all pre-Barbie but the original idea was to bring bringing pink and lace and bows into this generally hetero world," says Sevigny.
"I was thinking about classic back-to-school [looks] and all the knits that FA does so well so I also wanted to do, like, a sweater vest and polo shirt, these kinds of staples that can also be turned on their head very easily."
But the collection's hero item is definitely not a staple.
"The first thing that came to me was a booty short that said 'FUCKING AWESOME' on the ass," Sevigny laughs. "I want to see boys walking around with 'FUCKING AWESOME' on their ass.
"I really wanted to get Sean Pablo in the booty shorts but Mike [Piscitelli, FA co-founder] was like, 'Mmmm, I don't know if anyone on our team is gonna wear them,'" Sevigny says, chuckling. "I was like, 'C'mon!'"
