“I’m glad I grew up during the last vestige of cool, in the 1990s, when everything wasn’t blogged and on the Interwebs, when things were more on the downlow and underground. I guess I am stylish, but I would rather have people come up and say ‘I really liked your performance in this or that’ than ‘I really like the way you dress.’ That irks me. Anyway, the term It girl gets used too loosely…Today the term is used to describe, say, Peaches Geldof—a girl who doesn’t do anything but is just sort of around. The original It girl was the 1920s movie star Clara Bow; then, in the 1960s, with Edie Sedgwick and Warhol, It girls turned into socialites, ladies of leisure—people who had ‘it’ just for being ‘fabulous.’ But Edie was just a rich drug addict, and when I got called the It girl everyone thought I was that too. I looked like a junkie because it was the 1990s and grunge was the fashion. But I felt I was doing stuff, not just being a socialite.”

–One of our picks for best dressed of the year, Chloe Sevigny opens up to Playboy about being called an “it girl” by Jay McInerney in a 1994 New Yorker profile–and what the term has come to mean.