If you, like 6.3 million other people, follow Alexa Chung on Instagram, you probably noticed that she was feeling sentimental recently—reminiscing about her old days in New York City, in the exposed-brick East Village apartment she referred to as “the cry cave.” (Presumably, it played host to some twentysomething sturm und drang.)
It turns out, those misty water-colored memories weren’t just fueled by a random burst of nostalgia. Chung happened to be in town on a design visit for her new collaboration with Madewell, her first since 2011. In the midst of discussions over Pantones and packaging details, she took a detour downtown and asked a friend to take a picture of her outside her old apartment.
Her own New York nostalgia—as well as films set in the city, like Midnight Cowboy—had a major impact on the new collection, out today. Back when she was designing the earlier capsules, which, along with Kate Moss’s Topshop linkup, helped usher in a spate of It girl collaborations, “I didn’t think about the future, necessarily. It was fun and instinctive. This one was still instinctive, but also, time has marched on. We’re a bit more responsible with how we invest in clothes,” she says. Thinking about the longevity of the items was important, especially when it came to what she calls the “dream jeans,” based on her favorite vintage pair, “because they’re the thing I’m asked about the most. And I was like, ‘Here, you can have them.’ I was annoying my friends by being like, ‘People don’t have to come up to me in the street anymore! I can actually just send them the jeans.’”
Yes, people really do go up to Chung all the time and ask about her jeans. No, they don’t necessarily always know they’re approaching an It girl. The approaches vary based on geography, she says. “In America, I feel like people are more positive: ‘Hey, love your YouTube.’ Or they’re quite specific about what they like and it isn’t always necessarily related to style. Whereas in the U.K., it’s more item-based. They’re like, ‘Sick shoes.’ I get that a lot on the tube.”
When she returned to the halls of Madewell, “I think I was overly sentimental. I was like, ‘Guys, I’m back.’ Everyone’s like, ‘Yeah…we’re different.’ But I found that the nucleus of that company is very much the same thing as before. Everyone’s so positive and delightful to work with. The process was similar, but I’ve grown up along the way, as has my wardrobe. The things that I was excited to design back then really spoke to that time, whether it was the Brooklyn illustrated T-shirt or a Peter Pan collar velvet dress. I really wanted to look like a Mary Quant/Julie Christie’s ’60s ingenue.”
Now, at 40, Chung has grown into her style, but some things remain the same. She still loves a high-waisted short and a menswear-style jacket, for example. “I think those codes are still there, that juxtaposition between femininity and masculinity. But whereas the Peter Pan collar used to look Belle du Jour or ’60s French maid or Anna Karina, when I put it on now, I just feel that’s not me.” These days, many of her style influences are male: “George Harrison with too many buttons undone on a shirt, or a slightly more louche, Serge [Gainsbourg] lounge lizard. There’s more sexiness to it now, I think.” In fact, when we speak, she’s in an artfully semi-buttoned blue menswear shirt, accented with an oversized pendant.
But her distaste for prescriptive fashion rules remains. When she wore a tuxedo to the Met Gala in 2010, “Everyone was like, ‘Whoa.’ Or, ‘Who wears flat shoes and ballgowns?’ I didn’t know that I was doing anything weird. So I certainly don’t expect that to leave me as I age,” she says. “I really have an immense disdain for anyone that’s playing into patriarchal dogshit ideas about what women should or shouldn’t be doing.”
Chung’s re-entry onto the design scene (she ran her namesake label from 2017 to 2022) comes as Gen Z is hitting peak nostalgia for the era she spent in New York. Call it Tumblr era, indie sleaze, or the 2010s revival, but it’s indisputably everywhere, complete with a soundtrack of peppy recession pop. When we speak, images of Charli XCX’s birthday, photographed by scene mainstay the Cobrasnake and featuring a bevy of young stars looking refreshingly unselfconscious in the manner of party pictures of that time, have hit the timeline. When Chung saw them, “it brought back happy memories,” she says. “But also, it no longer belongs to me. They’re repurposing that look and that vibe. And if it’s about giving young people a really fun time, then I’m all for it, because I think between the pandemic, being bogged down by too much technology, and our attention spans shrinking, if there’s a trend which is related back to a time when it was more carefree and you were no longer bound with anxiety to catch up with people in a two-dimensional form, if it’s about living in the moment and enjoying your friends and music and letting loose, then I think that’s fantastic.”
That was also the time when Chung first began to be called an It girl, her street style meticulously copied by women everywhere. She likens the experience to a scene in the William Klein movie Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? when the bobbed, kohl-eyed main character sees herself replicated everywhere. “At first it was quite weird” to see all her doppelgängers crowding the streets of Williamsburg and East London. When “It” girl first got affixed to her name, “I think I was really insulted by it as a label. And then as I’ve gotten older, I’m so flattered. In my mind, It girls in England were high-society Tatler girls. And so I was surprised to be called one because I thought I had a real job, and whatever. But now I see it applied to Gabbriette and I’m like, Wow, amazing. I guess it just means you typify a moment or you’re beyond categorization. I don’t know why I kicked against it so much.”
While she became known for her unfaltering personal style, Chung’s new collection comes at an uneasy moment for the concept. People have resorted to getting their colors done and coming up with three-word catchphrases in an effort to summarize their sartorial essence. Chung believes that personal style can be learned, that it’s not inborn. Hers came by funneling her way through music and pop culture icons, whether Patti Smith or Chloë Sevigny: “I would borrow and pillage from people until I felt like myself.”
Now that that idea of herself feels more secure, she’s been happily ignoring trends. When I ask her about the return of ballet flats, she admits, “Real talk, I honestly had no idea they went away. I’ve continued wearing them this whole time. I’m not necessarily fashion-led, even though I’m lucky enough to get to go to Miu Miu shows or whatever. I’m less fad-y in my day-to-day life. If something suits me and flatters my physique, then I’ll stick at it. So I never stopped wearing the loafers, the jellies, or the ballet flats. They were my ride or die.”
When Chung made that trip back to her old stomping grounds, she says, “It was a bit like watching Sex and the City season one. I was seeing younger versions of myself walking around, but now they had mini rah-rah skirts on and they were talking to their Matt Hitt and arranging their night with their Tennessee Thomas.”
“There’s something hopeful in that,” she adds. “I love that they’re referencing things, but then making them their own. It’s exactly what we did. It’s comforting to know that every generation thinks that they’re inventing it when actually, it’s just nature.”
Véronique Hyland is ELLE’s Fashion Features Director and the author of the book Dress Code, which was selected as one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year. Her writing has previously appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, W, New York magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Condé Nast Traveler.