| The label “It Girl” never appears in “Chloe’s Scene,” Jay McInerney’s 1994 profile of a rising model, actress, and trendsetter named Chloe Sevigny. But that’s clearly what she was. Sevigny, then nineteen, had been discovered at a newsstand in the West Village, where she so captivated an editor for Sassy magazine that the editor put her in a photo shoot in the same outfit she’d been wearing on the street. The editor then went out and bought the clothes for herself—a testament to Sevigny’s power as a muse, given that McInerney describes the centerpiece of the look as “baggy tan corduroy overalls.” In the roughly two years since her breakthrough, Sevigny had become a subject of sustained fascination among a certain downtown crowd in Manhattan. She continued modelling; she partied late; she appeared in music videos for Sonic Youth and the Lemonheads. Still, the source of her allure wasn’t entirely obvious. She was “weird-looking,” according to a TV producer; and she had a tendency to blow off promising opportunities, including a photo shoot for Italian Vogue with one of the fashion industry’s top photographers. (Sevigny was also, to her own great shame, from the suburbs.) McInerney, a former New Yorker fact checker, had become a literary It Boy in his own right in the previous decade, with the publication of his novel “Bright Lights, Big City,” and his portrait of Sevigny both answers and amplifies the mystery of her appeal. Whatever “It” is, Sevigny—who turns fifty in November—has still got it. Charli XCX, the Zeitgeist-y singer responsible for 2024’s so-called brat summer, cast Sevigny in one of her recent music videos, and on Thursday the actress makes her début on “Monster,” her second buzzed-about Ryan Murphy series this year. “She just sits there,” a friend observed to McInerney in 1994, “but she controls the whole scene.” | 
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