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The clothes were a little bit mod, a little bit Godard girl, a whole lot tomboy. They were like slimmed-down versions of what their brother brand X-Large had done for skaters and wannabes and poseurs. X-Girl made pants you didn’t drown in, cuts that made you look like a girl, but, you know, still cool. I had a sleeveless A-line minidress, a ringer tee, a pair of pants—the pants ruled—and a gray and black check microminiskirt. They were fairly inexpensive, considering; they topped out around $60, but that was still about 20 times the cost of everything else in my closet, which tended to run around a few bucks per item, each of which bore permanent staple wounds from its thriftstore price tag. They were the first clothes I owned in forever that had a normal hem—ones that I hadn’t purposely ripped, scissored, doctored, patched, safety-pinned, handsewn. They were also my first experience of fashion, a universe as alien to me then as the moon, corporate America, grown-ups in general. I wore that miniskirt in particular to actual shreds.
X-Girl, created by Kim Gordon and stylist Daisy von Furth, with Chloë Sevigny as the brand's most prominent face, had a brief but far-reaching run from 1993 to 1998. (It's since changed hands and is based in Japan; stateside, Opening Ceremony paid homage to its heyday last year.) It was the gateway fashion drug for ’90s girls like me who were anti-establishment, anti-mainstream, anti-consumer, strictly secondhand, skate-schooled, reared on DIY ethics, on punk, hip-hop, with a shot of indie rock. We weren’t skaters ourselves, so much, but our guy friends and our boyfriends skated the streets, ramps, curbs, and abandoned malls of our town, and every other unguarded concrete stretch within range, and we were sure as hell well steeped in more than our fair share of brand-name and homemade and bootleg skate videos. We started bands and we made our own zines and posters at Kinko’s late at night on copy cards liberated by our friends employed there. We went to school and worked our own menial jobs by which we formed an underground economy—you always had a friend or two behind the counter at the movie theater, the bookstore, the coffee shop, the sandwich shop, the convenience store. We collected records, tapes, books, stuff.
I now work among people at Vogue who can expertly rattle off all sorts of arcane info about fashion collections and runway shows they only read about in their teenage years the way my friends and I still talk albums and bands and concerts and films. Our social lives centered around sagging porches and living room and basement house shows and a skate ramp out back. We bought up bags full of random old T-shirts at the thrift store and screen-printed and stenciled our drawings and band designs right over the original logos. That, in our universe, was about as high fashion as things got.
At the same time we were escapist small-towners, aspiring to worlds beyond, and X-Girl was like raiding the closet of a downtown, streetwise big sister. The clothes played on classic styles like football and baseball shirts, but reengineered for a crowd that scorned the stadium, was more at home near a half pipe. It was preppy with eye-rolling reform school subversiveness: a tweak of the uniform and you could sneak out of the dorm to the house show and still look cool and what’s more, you’d never get caught.
I could respect the fact that X-Girl had roots in its sibling street brand X-Large, helmed by Mike D of the Beastie Boys, alongside label founders Eli Bonerz and Adam Silverman, and, radical in its own right, designed by dudes, for dudes.
I could respect the fact that I first caught wind of X-Girl in Sassy magazine. I dug the line's funny and weirdly enigmatic New Wave–esque fashion film, in which Sevigny wanders the United Nations, brazenly quizzing guards and strangers and members of the fashion cognoscenti—Naomi Campbell, André Leon Talley, Hamish Bowles.
And I could respect the fact that X-Girl’s first fashion show, in 1994, was not a runway show at all, but held out on the streets of Soho, guerrilla style—a punk move I could get down with (my own band had a practice of "storming the stage" at house shows and playing our set). Gordon and Von Furth’s friends Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze, pre-romance, had the genius idea to hijack Marc Jacobs’s show which was happening right at the same time—“We’ll get all the traffic from Marc’s show,” Coppola, then doing her own line, Milk Fed, told Cindy Crawford on MTV’s House of Style. It was a true microcosm of the ’90s, a mashup of supermodel fashion and indie rock. J Mascis, of Dinosaur Jr. was in the audience and so was Sofia’s father, Francis Ford Coppola. Stella Tennant was there, and so was Donovan Leitch and Zoe Cassavetes and Wendy Mullin of Built by Wendy, X-Girl’s patternmaker. Two days before the show Kurt Cobain had killed himself. “There was a such a strange feeling that was sort of lingering,” Gordon later remembered.
There were bullhorns, there were walkie-talkies, there was a white bedsheet spraypainted with the label’s name, tacked up to a storefront, and girls catwalking the sidewalk. There were definitely no permits, but there were also no cops. Who cared? It was all in fun, and you could get away with things back then. X-girl successfully crashed the party. Getting around the elite nature of fashion, subverting the industry standard, and, in the clothes, reappropriating deadstock tropes, X-Girl was a precursor to the likes of Vetements—but at a much more likable price.“No Lycra, nothing tight,” Von Furth said of the clothes. They weren't sausage casings or capital-S Sexy, but they were created with a specifically female shape in mind. The pants, she explained, “were meant to get skater girls out from the whole oversize thing. They can get the wide legs all the way down but they’re tight up here.” For all of us who lived in thrifted Dickies pants, boys’ Levi’s with the waistband folded over, overalls, and baggy cords, this was liberating news and also a challenge. X-Girl freed the skater girl, whether she actually skated or not, to look like a real girl when she felt like it. And not, thank god, a girly one.Gordon was the brand's best poster girl though that day, seven months pregnant, she'd temporarily grown out of all the clothes she’d designed. “I’m having a girl,” she confirmed on the sidelines, clad in a down jacket. That same year she’d recruit Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna to appear in Sonic Youth’s “Bull in the Heather” video. “I hope she’s a riot grrl.”[#cneembed: script/playlist/56be30deff2afb50ef000026.js?autoplay=1&muted=1&theme=light]||||||