an Chloë Sevigny serves up a
h Régime des Fleurs.
Alex Phillipe CohenFor The TimesNEW YORK —You never know
where Chloë Sevigny may turn up.
She has battled zombies — along-
side Bill Murray and Adam Driver
— on the big screen (in the Jim Jar-
musch film “The Dead Don’t Die”),
filled her car trunk with watermel-
ons on the small screen (as the
main character’s mother in a “Rus-
sian 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 Gua-
dagnino’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 pop-
ping 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 per-
fume maker Régime des Fleurs, you
can now dab a little bit of Chloë-in-
spired rose eau de parfum on your
wrists so that the scent — like the
myriad roles of her nearly quarter-
century-long career — is every-
where around you all at once.
This last project is why, on a hu-
mid August afternoon, Sevigny
popped up amid the teeming mas-
ses 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 fra-
grance. 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 avant-
garde 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 eve-
ning. 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 ce-
lebrity 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-year-
old brand. “It’s a small brand, inde-
pendently 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 de-
signed with Opening Ceremony a
decade later; and, more recently,
her appearance on the London
Fashion Week Simone Rocha run-
way 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 per-
son, what she does and how she
kind of exists a little bit outside of
regular fashion,” Sevigny ex-
plained. “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 ap-
pearances at this year’s Cannes
Film Festival, plotted out, outfit by
outfit, with stylist Haley Wollens.
“We were trying to draw atten-
tion to some designers that maybe
don’t [get attention that] often,”
Sevigny said. “So we showcased
people like [Mugler creative direc-
tor] Casey [Cadwallader] and Mar-
ine 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 less-
often-seen side of the actor-direc-
tor. “There was also the idea of do-
ing 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 eye-
catching dress overflowing with
eyelet lace and pearl accents) and
the aforementioned French de-
signer Marine Serre.
But the hands-down most mem-
orable — and glamorous — was the
Mugler gown she wore to the pre-
miere of “The Dead Don’t Die”:
a custom black silk crepe dress witha thigh-high leg slit and nude corset
accessorized with black harness
gloves.
The high point of the one-wom-
an glamour parade further under-
scores Sevigny’s style synergy.
“Haley pulled a bunch of refer-
ences 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 run-
way] show in Paris. Having it all
come together like that is a dream
come true — everybody gets elevat-
ed, 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 go-
ing it alone. “I’d look at style.comor
whatever and then have my publi-
cist 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 try-
ing 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-skirt-
wearing 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 gen-
der theorist] Judith Butler’s.”
During the three weeks of hair,
makeup and wardrobe prepara-
tions in Italy, Sevigny said she had a
real-life person in mind when it
came to offering suggestions to cos-
tume 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 under-
score the connection to classic Hol-
lywood glamour. What nobody
knew when the yearlong devel-
opment 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, hold-
ing her glass of iced tea aloft for em-
phasis. “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, ro-
mantic and mischievous. The Ot-
toman rose absolute and black tea
notes, along with blackcurrant bud,
pomelo, peony and honeysuckle
(among others), result in some-
thing 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 fra-
grance 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 Sta-
tion 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.CHLOËSevigny’s perfume collabora-
tion with Régime des Fleurs, top.
Sevigny steps out in Preen, Simone
Rocha and Alber Elbaz for Lanvin.KRTKevin MazurWireImageDaniele VenturelliWireImageLATIMES.COM/IMAGE S SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2019P7
O miniseries “We Are Who We Are,” which will be shot in Italy.Chloë Sevigny
in full bloom
By Adam TschornRégime des Fleurs