Happy Birthday, Chloë Sevigny! My, How You’ve Grown

"I used to tell my parents I was going to Greenwich or New Rochelle. Then I'd drive into the city. The summer of '92 was when I first met everyone. I came to the city with two girls from Connecticut who were my homegirls. We'd go to Washington Square Park and I'd meet people. Ever skater in the city was there. I'd go every weekend and hang, and than stay at different skaters' homes."

She looks down at her jellies--transparents plastic sandals. Now that practically everybody's wearing big, chunky, cleated boots and platform sneakers--even people who shlump every day to offices uptown--Chloe has moved on. She's already gone.

Watching Chloe read a fashion magazine makes you think of Alexander Woollcott devouring a ten-pound lobster a l'americaine or Casanova undressing a servant girl.

"In the summer of '93, the ravers came in and took over Washington Square Park. If you were a geek in high school, you could be a raver. Anyone could go to a rave. At a hip-hop club, everyone's putting on a front. Everyone's tough. At a rave, everyone is high and mellow. But then heroin came along and made it much darker and more depressing. There was this big ecstasy dealer everybody knew on the scene. He died of a heroin overdose, and it really fucked everyone up. But they still do it."

Generally she shops at thrift stores; not at vintage shops, which are thrift stores with an attitude, and not even at Manhattan thrift stores--forget about Cheap Jack's and Andy's Chee-Pees, which she considers self-conscious and hopelessly picked over. Chloe favors places in Brooklyn and her native Connecticut.

Certainly anyone who has heard Chloe's laugh--which alternately suggests a mallard surprised into flight and a drowning victim gasping for air--would be hard-pressed to call her jaded. But it's probably her spacey aid of mystery and reserve as well as the street chic that keep causing people to ask, "Who is that girl?"

"So I say, Chloe, where do you want to be picked up tomorrow, and she says, 'I don't know,' and I say, 'What do you mean, you don't know?' and she says, 'I don't really live anywhere,' and I say, 'What? You're homeless? What am I, s'posed to pick you up at cardboard box No. 7?"

Finally, they decided to give Chloe a beeper, so they could find her each morning wherever she had crashed.

When Kids wraps a few days later, Chloe isn't sure what she'll do next. First she's got to move her stuff back up to her parents' house in Darien, simply because there isn't anyplace else to put it. She might go to London for a few weeks--she's never been. And then she's going to get her portfolio of drawings and apply to college.

Someday, somebody should erect a statue to Chloe in Tompkins Square Park, with the amazing legend, "She didn't want to be an actress or a model"--although she is going to do the Martin Margiella show at Charivari, since she likes Margiella clothes. What she thinks she'd really like to be is a costume designer for period films.

Clutching a wineglass and watching his friend, Feliciano says, "People want to project their desire on one girl. She's smart enough to hold back, and that allows us all to project whatever we want to. I could go on and on about Chloe, but actually I know very little about her."