Chloë Sevigny at Forty

Chloë Sevigny inaugurated the modern It Girl paradigm yet also broke its main rule by outlasting the scene that she originally personified.Photograph by Chris Weeks / Getty for Coach

You would guess that Chloë Sevigny might object to defining the word cool, like a chef who won’t reveal the ingredients to her most popular dish. Actually, she’s fine with it. “Cool has a certain mystery to it. It’s being removed. To me, the coolest thing is to keep something to yourself,” Sevigny told me recently, over tea.

She offers this definition without my asking, which is a delicious contradiction, as are a lot of things about Sevigny. Take, for instance, her disinterest in Instagram. For years, she resisted joining, until two months ago, when a publicist talked her into it. Yet she’s long been an unwitting fixture on the platform; her name has been tagged more than twelve thousand times. And some of Sevigny’s recent projects seem designed to provoke likes and shares, such as a photo series in which she is nude save for a Proenza Schouler coat, jewelry, and a lobster. (Its claws splay across her hips like a Surrealist string bikini.)

Perhaps the biggest contradiction about Sevigny is that she inaugurated the modern It Girl paradigm yet also broke its main rule, by outlasting the scene that she originally personified. In Larry Clark’s “Kids,” which premièred twenty years ago this July, she played a grunge ingénue drifting through raves and skate parks. In one scene, her friends debate the merits of “sex, making love, and fucking.” The women of “Love and Friendship,” an upcoming Whit Stillman-directed Jane Austen adaptation that she’ll appear in, would probably prefer “courtship.”

Sevigny’s latest project aims to stitch together her diverse pursuits. “Chloë Sevigny,” a photo book published by Rizzoli, due out tomorrow, collects a hundred and seventy images from the span of her career, taken by friends and collaborators including Harmony Korine, Mario Sorrenti, and Inez and Vinoodh, with essays by Kim Gordon and Natasha Lyonne. It’s not an art book or a scrapbook, she says, but a fan book, in the vein of teen fanzine tributes to River Phoenix or Matt Dillon. “Can I make a fan book of myself?” she wonders, with a laugh. “I’m not sure.”

The idea, Sevigny says, came from a trip to Japan, where she stumbled on the book “Perfect Style of Chloë.” Its title was nestled inside a heart; pink cursive lettering spelled out her name on the cover. Inside, the book features hair-style collages, paparazzi photos, and twee, misattributed solecisms (e.g. “I am shopaholic”). Needless to say, the authors didn’t ask her permission. “Japan used to be wild,” she says. “Now the girls all just want to look cute.”

Lots of photographers have made the mistake of trying to make Sevigny look cute or pretty. None of these photos made it into the book_._ Here’s what did: Sevigny smoking a cigarette on the set of “Gummo,” eyebrows bleached; a senior-prom photo from the year she shaved her head; fan mail from her time as a Sassy intern; a flyer from cult rave boutique Liquid Sky. Images are organized achronologically, paired around loose themes. A tabloid shot of an accidental underwear flash, for instance, sits to the left of a photo of Sevigny coyly raising her skirt by choice. “NOT NORMAL,” the first headline declares.

Today, It Girl hopefuls tend to orchestrate their rises via social media. Sevigny, by contrast, was plucked from the streets at the age of seventeen by a Sassy editor who liked her overalls. The story sounds like a grunge fairy tale and articulates Sevigny’s brand of removed cool. Elusiveness has long been a trademark: “It’s a neat trick to be able to suggest hidden reserves—to be a tabula rasa and seem to be the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Jay McInerney wrote in his 1994 New Yorker Profile of Sevigny, for the magazine’s first-ever fashion issue. “Chloë’s friends all eventually allude to this sense that she is holding back.”

When McInerney asked to write about her, Sevigny had a demand: “I told him I’d only do the story if he got the magazine to buy me a red rubber Helmut Lang dress with pink lace,” she remembers, laughing. In the end, she did the piece but bought the dress herself. She still has it, like almost all of her old clothes. The collection sits in storage in Darien, Connecticut, where Sevigny grew up and her mom still lives. How does she organize the collection? “Alphabetically!”

When we meet, she wears denim overalls and chunky patent-leather sandals topped with perforated bows, from her most recent Opening Ceremony collection. She looks how you would expect Chloë Sevigny to look, and yet, at this Park Slope coffee shop, no one is staring. In this neighborhood, she's rarely paparazzied—a perk. Until 2013, she lived in the East Village, where it happened incessantly. Manhattan tends to bum her out. “I was out on the Lower East Side the other day and it was like being in Murray Hill,” she says. “Everybody’s so square! Where are all the interesting weirdos hanging out?”

Sevigny spots a Sharpied “X” on my hand and asks me where I was last night. I tell her about a party in a bus yard in Gowanus. “You’re young,” she says. “I’m forty. What am I going to do, go to a party in Gowanus with like, a 'tall boy'? But I would like to walk down the street or go to a café where I can look at interesting people.”

It Girls don’t usually make it to forty happily. Clara Bow, the actress who first popularized the phrase with her 1927 silent film, “It,” retired from cinema at the age of twenty-eight. Edie Sedgwick died of an overdose at the same age. Sevigny has long been compared to Sedgwick, but she shouldn’t be. In 2014, the year she turned forty, she acted in four films, appeared in three TV shows, and produced a fashion collection. The lobster photograph, published in Marfa Journal in March_,_ prompted as many scandalized headlines as a Miley Cyrus stunt.

In many ways, Sevigny’s new book is a window into a less-networked, less-corporate New York with particular appeal to a new generation. McInerney, in his 1994 Profile, describes “down low” as the guiding force behind “Chloë’s scene”: “ ‘Down low’ is a cherished concept: secret, alternative, not commercial—everything one wants to be.” Down low doesn’t really exist anymore: in today’s New York, selling out is an economic necessity. Because of that, refusing to do so has become an even more romantic idea. We can’t live in the nineties, so we simulate them, with Polaroid cameras, vinyl records, or a notion to move to Detroit.

Sevigny’s wary about being the face of a scene that’s ended—and of the contemporary nostalgia for it. “I hope you don’t think this book is a nostalgia piece,” she says after I ask one too many questions about nineties New York (or my Tumblr-filtered image of it). The book is more than that, of course. Like Sevigny, it doesn’t quite spell out what it is. You read in it what you want to.