As her new book of photographs is published by IDEA, Angela Hill talks about the atmosphere of a guerilla runway show that would go down in history
In those days between Christmas and New Year, when time feels liminal and the days blur together, photographer and IDEA Books co-founder Angela Hill had a sudden urge to do a clear out. At the bottom of a box that had moved from house to house over the years, she discovered something remarkable: negatives documenting a moment that has gone down in the fashion history books as one of the most ingenious guerilla runway displays of the 1990s. To her amazement, she barely even remembered being there.
The event in question was X-Girl’s fabled debut 1994 New York show. Staged by founders Daisy von Furth and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon on a cold spring morning in Manhattan, the impromptu display was slyly timed to coincide with the moment 90s supers and the city’s fashion press were spilling out of Marc Jacobs’ on-calendar runway show. The models weren’t models at all, but artists part of Gordon’s tight-knit circle of friends – Pumpkin Wentzel, Luisa Reichenheim, and Chloë Sevigny – and the pair had Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze heading up production. Tearing through the crowded pavements in soon-to-be-cult graphic tees, A-line mini skirts, and skater silhouettes, the joyful, subversive display made it clear X-girl wasn’t about clothes – it was about being part of something.
A photographer’s photographer, Hill is best known for her quiet studies of young women, often capturing them alone in nature or at home in scenes of muted, gentle introspection. The X-Girl images, on the other hand, are a flurry of energy and impulse, made all the more imperfect by their decades spent at the bottom of a box. While the shots feel rougher than those in her two subtly sequenced books, Angela and Edith, Hill still wanted to share them with the world. As Chloë Sevigny writes in the introduction: “The exuberance captured in Angela’s photos was a combination of being part of something that didn’t happen all too often. We did it without permits or permission, we broke the ‘fashion’ rules, a few city rules too, and we froze our asses off.”
Here, in her own words, Hill tells the story of X-Girl’s infamous show:
“It was 1994. I was a photographer getting no work in London, living in a west London flatshare. I had an idea to do a magazine that had no writing on the cover at all, no explanation, no nothing. My flatmate worked in fashion and liked the idea. We knew a few things were happening in New York at the time, so we decided to go over and get inspiration, talk to some artists in New York and just hang out.
“I remember being so excited when we landed in the city. We hardly got any sleep, which we were happy for. We’d wake up every morning and just go and hang out with some guys in the West Village, go to shows, go to anything. We were staying at the flat of a completely mad artist who was obsessed with the letter ’A’. She lived downtown in a dodgy area that wouldn’t be dodgy now, of course. Her art practice was based around fax art. She would get faxes buzzing through the machine all night long from Brazil, Singapore, Japan or Hong Kong. We were sleeping on the floor on two futons.
“We happened to be there during fashion week, and we knew [the x-Girl show] was taking place after [Marc] Jacobs show. They were very clever, the X-Girl lot, and they deliberately timed it to happen on streets where the Jacobs lot would come out after the show. I always used to walk around with a camera, snapping away at everything. [The images] probably have that [immediate] energy because I was not an official photographer there at all. I was probably just jostling to get a place to see.
“There was an amazing energy on the street. MTV turned up. Kyle MacLachlan and Linda [Evangelista] were there – they were going out at the time. The Beastie Boys were there and Sofia Coppola and her dad, Francis Ford Coppola. The day was bright but cold, but I barely remember being there. I know I didn’t see it as a big thing because when I found the negatives, just this Christmas gone, I had forgotten about them for 30 years.
“I didn’t think they would become a book immediately. I showed them to some guys in the office, and they said, ‘Oh, they’re really cool.’ We’ve got some guys as young as 20 working for us here, and I was surprised they knew about the show. I guess it’s become so legendary.
“X-Girl was really its own thing. Like the show, it just looked very thrown together – almost like a garage band that start mucking around on a Friday night and after half an hour end up with a number one song. I actually wore the clothes. I had a little check miniskirt and a matching sleeveless tabard top. I bought them at Slam City Skates in Covent Garden. Lev, who now runs Palace, was a sales assistant at the time.
“Chloe’s been a friend of IDEA forever, so it was the perfect thing to have her voice in there. I‘m really proud of my track record so far of who has written introductions for me. With my first book, Sylvia, I had Nadia Lee Cohen write the introduction. My second book, Edith, I had Collier Schorr. Now I’ve got Chloë to do number three.
“[My previous two books] are properly me. This is not my usual photography. But I’ve done it because it’s a lovely memory of that morning – a moment in time that you don’t realise when it’s happening could be so significant.”
X-Girl Show by Angela Hill is published by IDEA Books, and is out now.
