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As a teen-ager, long before I lived in New York, I felt the city urging me toward it. N.Y.C., with its art and money, its drugs and fashion, its misery and elation—how tough, how grimy, how scary, how glamorous! For me, one of its most potent siren calls was “Chloe’s Scene,” a piece written for this magazine, in 1994, by the novelist Jay McInerney, about the then nineteen-year-old sometime actress, sometime model, and all-around It Girl Chloë Sevigny. Despite not having done much at that point besides be young, hang out downtown, and have an innate sense of style, Sevigny seemed to be the font from which absolute cool flowed. The kind of culture-making that she represented was “secret, alternative, not commercial—everything one wants to be,” McInerney wrote. She was New York. When the piece came out, I was living with my parents in Haifa, in northern Israel, and, though I was only a couple of years younger than Sevigny, I was not the font of much of anything. I was a sideline observer, a meek fan, a wary fantasist, biding my time until my real life began.
Even though I grew up in Haifa, my father’s job as a scientist meant that our family had spent some time in Seattle, and my parents were longtime New Yorker subscribers. I had leafed through the magazine in the past, but hadn’t paid it much attention until I came across the Sevigny profile. I had already read and reread McInerney’s 1984 novel, “Bright Lights, Big City,” which was about New York but also about cocaine and, marginally, The New Yorker itself, where McInerney had once been a fact checker—a job that sounded stressful and sophisticated. I had also already heard of Sevigny from Sassy, a teen magazine I subscribed to. She had been an intern there, and everyone at the office was so obsessed with her that they featured her in the publication, wearing outfits whose ingeniously jumbled argot (handmade hats, baggy corduroys) borrowed from skaters and prepsters. (“Our intern Chloe has more style in her little finger,” the headline read.) I didn’t know it then, but McInerney’s article—flashier and more youth-oriented than what might have run in The New Yorker in decades prior—was published under the magazine’s newish editor, Tina Brown, who was fresh from her sexy remaking of Vanity Fair. (In a television segment about Brown that I’d watched on the couch with my parents but can no longer find, I seem to recall her tossing her blond head back and laughing uproariously into a phone receiver while announcing a plan to secure an interview with the Pope for Vanity Fair’s Christmas issue.)
Though some people in 1994 were using dial-up internet, I wasn’t yet, and whatever cultural knowledge I was able to accrue was mined at the altar of the printed word. In “Chloe’s Scene,” I read along as Sevigny went uptown to West Fifty-seventh Street to model in a Martin Margiela show at the clothing emporium Charivari; as she listened to Pavement’s “Slanted and Enchanted” in her Second Avenue walkup; as she shot a scene for Larry Clark’s “Kids” at the Chelsea club Tunnel; as she ran into the “slouchy poet laureate of the downtown lowlife” Jim Carroll, famous for writing the memoir “The Basketball Diaries”; as she wore a fake Chanel bracelet that she got on Canal Street. “Chloe’s Scene” offered not only a certain New York topography with which I could familiarize myself but a bonanza of references I could pore over, puzzle out, learn by heart. I had never heard of Pavement before, or of Margiela, or of “The Basketball Diaries,” but now I had the tail ends of these strings firmly in my hand. This was an education.
It was also an education to realize that here was the type of thing you could do when writing for a magazine: you could paint a picture of a world so vividly that the reader might feel as if she were in it. Sometimes this reader would follow the words so closely, study them so intently, that she’d even manage to scrabble her way into that world herself. And although it wouldn’t be exactly what she had imagined—it never is—it would nonetheless be something that she, too, could write about one day. ♦
