How does fashion shape adolescence? Every month, Claire Healy deconstructs the ways that style culture has contributed to the idea of the teenager in new series Extreme Adolescents.
A languid East Coast drawl narrates a strange but familiar montage; crop haired girls trying on neat A-Line shifts and tight-fitting t-shirts: white, red, black. “We'd often go look for clothes. We’d shiver as we walked up and down the aisles, staring numbly at the racks. But more often we'd be disappointed.” The voice belongs to a young Chloë Sevigny, and the clothes are all X-Girl: the cult brand founded by Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon and stylist Daisy von Furth in 1993. Starring in and narrating the Phil Morrison-directed film for the line’s second collection, Sevigny and her co-stars channel the somber outlooks of French New Wave heroines. They also echo the sentiments of a generation of American teenage girls who just wanted one thing from fashion: clothes that actually fit them properly.
Created as a complement to the boys-only streetwear brand X-Large, X-Girl started out in LA, with a New York outpost on Lafayette Street following soon after. The brand’s champions read like a who’s-who of downtown 90s New York – Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, and Budapest-born artist Rita Ackermann were collaborators, artist Mike Mills designed the graphics, and Kathleen Hanna was a devotee. And the clothes? Dresses and ringer tees were fitted without being too tight – as von Furth exclaims in an MTV clip, “No Lycra!” – with subtle logos and a distinct 60s kick. As Sevigny later described the X-Girl style in an interview, “They were going almost for an androgynous kind of look, these very simple A-line dresses that were very Godard.” In other words, as von Furth adds: “The store was so Helvetica.”
Clouded with nostalgia, our own self-styled narrative of the nineties often refers to this vague notion of ‘simplicity’: Kate Moss for Calvin Klein and Courtney Love’s nightdresses. But Kim Gordon, the so-called ‘godmother of grunge’, actually rebelled against a grunge aesthetic that, in 1993, was swamping girls in swathes of ‘borrowed-from-the-boys’ layers. Instead, through X-Girl, Gordon and von Furth created a preppy look that feminised the skater girl/riot grrrl aesthetic while actually promising to flatter the manifold body types of adolescence and beyond: as the pair put it in one lookbook introduction, “X-Girls = women curves up and down.” Offspring lines from Miu Miu to Marc by Marc Jacobs (RIP), looking to appeal to a younger customer, have always tread the line between tomboy and girly girl in much the same way.
“X-Girl’s sidewalk guerilla fashion show was a success in that it came off at all,” – so says Kim Gordon in her new autobiography, talking about the brand’s legendary first runway outing. Taking place on the streets of Soho – just down the road from the Marc Jacobs show, as it happened – and starring Sevigny in a faux bridal dress, the whole thing was thankfully documented by MTV’s House of Style. It also took place just a few days after Kurt Cobain – who was close to Sonic Youth – committed suicide. There were never any grand narratives when it came to X-Girl, though. The show remained full of optimism, pep and a future-facing teen spirit.
Unfortunately for the girl power generation that never grew up, today one has to resort to serious Etsy-rummaging to have any chance of sporting that iconic X-Girl logo for oneself. Shutting shop and selling out to a Japanese company in 1998, X-Girl is the brand teens loved that only lasted as long as teendom itself. The same fate, weirdly, is met by a number of other labels of the 90s – including Sofia Coppola’s own t-shirt line, Milk Fed – that find a fulfilling afterlife in the land of the super-kawaii. Of course, it’s found its way back in various incarnations – most notably last year, in a Tavi Gevinson-fronted release sold through VFiles. But X-Girl’s lasting influence is about more than a brand name and (admittedly awesome) plastic barrettes. It’s the brand ethos – clothes that fit, for the girl cool enough to wear them – that was such a vital force in determining not only the girls who wore X-Girl, but the girls they grew up to be. As Gordon puts it in Girl in a Band, “In a way X-Girl gave me far more notoriety than Sonic Youth ever did.”
Watch Chloë Sevigny in the X-Girl movie below:
