ALEXA CHUNG: ‘AT 40, I’M IN MY ECCENTRIC AUNT ERA’
Alexa Chung has just moved back into the house she’s been renovating and is giving me a virtual tour of her new shoe cupboard. It’s the stuff of dreams – a floor-to-ceiling wardrobe filled with row upon row of beautiful shoes. Then the camera pans to the floor and reveals a giant pile of yet more shoes. “I will be honest and say that shoes are my problem,” Chung confesses. “I built a cupboard for them which was my dream my whole life, but they don’t all fit. From where I’m sitting now, I can see three pairs of Carel Mary Janes,” she admits, quickly adding, “but I do wear them every day.”
It’s comforting to know that even the woman whose style is the envy of so many has clothes storage problems too. And hasn’t this always been the crux of why Chung has become an almost unrivalled representative of effortlessly cool British style? Chung is at once incredibly relatable – she wears jeans and loafers just like the rest of us! – while also very much not. She can pull together outfits which look devastatingly great on her but would appear either very normal or just plain odd on the rest of us. If she needs an overflowing shoe collection to do it, so be it.
Now 40 years old, Chung’s appeal is as potent as ever, especially at a time when the classic, preppy look which she made her own as a T4 presenter in the noughties is back in fashion once more. Having shuttered her own label, Alexachung, in March 2022 citing the challenging environment created by the pandemic, she’s now embracing opportunities to collaborate with brands again. Earlier this month, she released a denim collection with US label Madewell and today she’s releasing another collaboration with Barbour, a brand she’s been synonymous with since the earliest days of her fame.
“We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the original reason I liked Barbour was because I found it funny,” Chung explains, lying back on her bed following the conclusion of her shoe show-and-tell. “I found it ironic to like them because they were the domain of the granny in the country. I thought it was amusing to wear it in London as a young person, and that was the genesis of our relationship.”
As creative director of The Edit by Alexa Chung, she has designed 11 pieces which are available to buy on Barbour’s website ranging from updated takes on classic Barbour coat silhouettes through to a pair of gardening clogs she can wear to pick up her morning coffee and Made-in-Scotland knitwear spanning beatnik stripes and ladylike cardigans.
Knitted cardigan, £299; Clog welly, £49.95, both Barbour
“It’s quite hard to find the coat that genuinely keeps you warm and dry. So thank God for Barbour because they genuinely work,” says Chung. This season, every designer and high street store might have created a “barn coat” but it’s a silhouette which riffs on what the South Shields-based label which is loved by the Royal family has been doing for decades. If every aristocratic pile in the land once had several hanging in its boot room, Chung has helped to tweak and update familiar silhouettes for a new generation.
“Since I last collaborated with them [in 2022], my affection for very oversized silhouettes has really kicked into gear, so these are a bit bolder,” she says. “My favourite coat in the collection is called Liam and it’s hooded which is so important. I realised that none of my Barbours really had hoods, and actually that’s so vital for winter. I love that it’s really slouchy, one that you can wear in the city or the country.” As its name suggests, the style emulates the parkas loved by Oasis in the 90s and so could prove an essential garment if rain is forecast for the band’s British shows next summer.
For Alexa, a good waterproof can unlock your winter dressing up potential. “I’ve realised that a weatherproof coat means that you can actually wear a nice outfit underneath. In winter, it’s impossible to get dressed. But with my coat now I can wear a normal outfit rather than 55 layers, and then put that one over the top,” she says, in words spoken not only like a sometime New Yorker but a true southerner, too.
Dorothy wax jacket, £369; Liam wax jacket, £469, both Barbour
With the pieces which weren’t coats, Chung, who is reportedly engaged to her boyfriend of two years, Tom Sturridge (the actor is Sienna Miller’s ex and the father of her 12-year-old daughter Marlowe), wanted to provide a counterpoint to practicality, like with the flounced Maximillian shirt. “I have a lot of gay male friends who are always trying to borrow my blouses, but they can’t fit into them, so I had them in mind,” she tells me. “I think sometimes the androgyny that Barbour naturally has needs a bit of frill or femininity to carry it.”
Turning 40 last November hasn’t dimmed her appetite for style experimentation. “I’m in my Grey Gardens, eccentric aunt era,” Chung laughs, referring to the 1975 documentary about two ageing eccentrically dressed relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy, when we discuss her current predilection for headscarves and long necklaces.
She wanted to create a silk scarf with Barbour but it didn’t work out, so she recommends sourcing a vintage one instead. “When I think about my favourite things in my wardrobe, they’re all vintage,” she reflects. “I don’t know if it’s because they’re romantic in my mind that no one else can have them, or whether it’s just that they used to make things better in the olden days, but the treasure hunt is the big appeal as well.”
Her standout vintage purchase? “I’ve got a really weird jumper. It’s red and striped from the 70s in a kind of disgusting polyester fabric. I love those things that you stall on, that you’re like, do I like it or is it ugly? I really can’t tell.” She also loves the bargain element of secondhand shopping. “If something is £7 as opposed to however many hundreds of pounds then I’ll get it and I’ll see if I like it, it can be a bit more playful.”
Knitted jumper, £259, Barbour
For a woman who’s probably most famous for turning up at parties and fashion shows looking great, Chung claims her best outfits are the ones she puts together for the morning coffee run. “It’s really depressing, I wear the same jeans and navy blue jumper pretty much every day,” she insists, bemoaning the lack of jeans to fit her long legs (she relies on old pairs from Agolde and APC or vintage styles with a 34 or 36-inch leg). “Or when I’m not wearing that, I’ll do a really good outfit to go and get a coffee, and then I’ll think ‘should I take a picture of that really good outfit’?”. Her footwear of choice for the caffeine dash has, until recently, been JW Anderson x Wellipets frog rubber clogs, but she was intent on making her own take with Barbour. “I’m a huge wellies girl,” she tells me.
Chung’s biggest recent style experiment was dying her hair a gingery-red shade in the summer. Hinting at the change being the result of a difficult period in her personal life, she explains that, “I was having a time, and I felt weird.” She asked her friend Alex Brownsell, founder of Bleach London, to make her dream of having “hair which matched my skin” become a reality, a move many of us who have turned hair transformations to lift our spirits will relate to.
“I loved it,” says Chung of the new colour, which happened to coordinate perfectly with the emerald green dress, inspired by the one worn by Keira Knightley in Atonement, which Nensi Dojaka created for her to wear to this summer’s Serpentine summer party. But once it began to grow out, “I realised how much your personality is your hair colour. I really hate the word kooky, but if you’re someone that’s a little bit kooky, having kooky-coloured hair really doesn’t work. I need the brunette to ground everything,” she laughs.
Brunette – and those old faithful Barbour coats.
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2024-09-19T06:03:34Z dg43tfdfdgfd