Does Alexa Chung Still Have ‘It’?

It was a different world when Alexa Chung rose to sartorial power.

She wore high-neck blouses with flat pointy shoes. She wore black tights under denim shorts. In paparazzi photos, holding hands with her indie rock boyfriend, she wore peacoats over minidresses. So women around her age, give or take five years, wore peacoats over minidresses, too.

The year was 2009, and “influencer” and “creator” were not yet jobs. Chung, then 26, was an MTV host during the final era of that job being the coolest on the planet.

On a sticky afternoon this summer, inside a dark bar on Avenue B in Manhattan, I asked Chung, now 40, how she defined her job these days.

“It’s so hard, isn’t it?” Chung said. “I guess designer.”

She had recently asked the 12-year-old daughter of her partner (actor Tom Sturridge) what the kid thought she did. “You’re a writer,” the girl replied. That’s also true enough; Chung contributes sporadic essays to the Financial Times. In 2013, she released a pink coffee-table book, It, during a particularly active time in her social life.

“My editor at the time had to come to the East Village and literally trap me in the apartment to finish it,” she said. Friends buzzing at her door were turned away. Parts of the book were drafted on bar napkins. “I had a panic attack at the book launch because I was like, ‘I don’t even know if this really represents me, and I feel really weird about it.’

“As time goes by, I’m much more proud of it,” she continued. “Even the fact that it was so off the cuff and written in bars, that speaks to the fun I was having.”

“I guess broadcaster,” Chung said. “And geriatric ‘It’ girl.”

The question of her occupation was easier to answer from 2017 to 2022, when Chung ran the fashion label Alexachung. Her clothes were stocked by major retailers including Selfridges, Bergdorf Goodman and Net-a-Porter. The brand showed so much promise that the New York Times wondered whether it could be the next Tory Burch.

When the company shuttered, resulting in 26 people losing their jobs, Chung took a break from the public eye.

“I was the type of boss that was kind of annoying and wanted everyone to like me,” she said. “I felt a lot of shame. I let people down.”

She wanted time to recover. She renovated her house and learned how to make ceramic tiles.

Then Madewell came calling.

The first half of their nearly 30-piece collaboration will be released on Wednesday (US time). It includes high-rise flared jeans, button-down shirts, long denim skirts and dresses from US$128 ($205) to US$850. The most expensive item is an ankle-length cognac suede coat. The second half of the collection will drop in November.

The capsule is simple and wearable, reminiscent of Western workwear and Dustin Hoffman’s wardrobe in Kramer vs. Kramer. It is almost aggressively untrendy.

“This is a very tranquil, quite plain, back-to-basics thing,” Chung said. “It’s far less personality than I had in my brand, which was quite wacky at times. This is sedate. A palate-cleanse situation.”

The same could be said for Madewell, a sister brand to J. Crew, generally. “No one wants to ever be referred to as, like, trendy,” said Steven Cateron, Madewell’s cheerful 41-year-old head of design, who wore double denim with “little suede shoes” and his hair in a bun on our video call. He began bookmarking photos of Chung even before he joined the brand in December.

The project is a reunion for Chung and Madewell, which refers to her as its “original” muse. They previously released collaborations in 2010 and 2011. To promote them, Chung threw parties at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles and played DJ in college towns across the United States.

At the time, she appealed to a certain demographic: young women who prided themselves on being well-read and liking alternative music; in wearing thrifted Peter Pan-collared tops to gritty clubs; in having Jane Birkin bangs and knowing who Jane Birkin was. Their Tumblr pages were collages of quotations by Joan Didion and photos of Chung squatting on sidewalks, drink in hand. (At the East Village bar, Chung, quite a physical comedian, pantomimed the pose.) Those girls have now grown up.

“I cannot tell you how many years in a row I was taking photos of Alexa Chung to a hairstylist and being like, ‘I just want to look like Alexa Chung,’” said Tyler McCall, a 38-year-old writer and the former editor of Fashionista, a website that chronicled Chung’s look.

Specific photos are still burrowed into her brain, like Chung at the airport wearing denim overalls, two-tone Chanel flats and a Burberry trench. “That era was so formative for me, because it was right around the time I was figuring out my style and what I liked and what I felt good in,” McCall said. “If I really interrogated it, I probably am still copying Alexa Chung.”

When the “indie sleaze” aesthetic threatened to return in 2022, Chung wrote about it for the Financial Times: “If it’s coming back around again, I am more than happy to dry-clean my blazer, minidresses and ballet flats, because it’s a uniform I have never strayed far from.”

I was surprised, then, to be asked by a publicist in advance of our interview to limit my questions about that era. (I did not.) Chung seemed to embrace nostalgia, both professionally and personally. The Madewell collection is 1970s-esque. The bar where we met to discuss it was owned by a friend of Chung’s and furnished with the same wooden stools as an old pub they frequented in London.

Chung’s concern, it turned out, was that indie sleaze had become something to parody. “Even though it looks LOL now, the thing that was actually really special about that era is that it birthed a lot of creative people,” she said, citing musicians who are “still going,” like Florence and the Machine and Blood Orange. “When it becomes silly, it’s a shame, because people were really serious about their art at that time.”

She left the bar to smoke. Inside her Bode tote, a pack of cigarettes had been tucked into a ballet flat. It was a bit on the nose. Chung worries about being too on the nose. She likes Mary Janes, for example – like the Sandy Liang versions seen all over the Lower East Side – but recently hesitated to buy a pair.

“Ugh, it’s so me to want to wear these,” she said. “If I have a regret, it’s that I shrouded myself in sexless clothing at the time when I was probably my hottest.”

It is a dilemma familiar to many millennials: She has the urge to dress sexier but also realises her clubbiest days may be behind her. Friends have settled down. There are gardens to tend. The indie music at her 40th birthday party was played by a string quartet.

“When I was younger, I was stressed about different boys in different bands,” she said. When her mother told her, “There will come a time when you won’t want to stand side-of-stage,” she said, “I was like, ‘No, there won’t.’”

Of course, that time came. But could she pinpoint the moment she no longer wanted to climb on to tour buses?

“Probably last year,” Chung said.

I nodded, assuming she was serious.

“No, I’m joking.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Written by: Jessica Testa.

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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