Keep It Going

The menu on the Eurostar has changed, and Alexa Chung isn’t thrilled about it. “I suppose some might say it’s nicer,” she says. “But it’s a bit more mousse-y, gelatine-y, amuse-bouche-y. And I quite like the stodge of dodgy cod, or meat and potatoes. I like it a bit more straightforward.” Chung, as a busy fashion luminary, takes the London-to-Paris route fairly often, this time being for a shoot with Boucheron, for which she’s an ambassador. Her impromptu reflection on train cuisine is characteristically unguarded, offering a gleeful (or so I read it) contrast to the glamour and luxury with which she is otherwise associated.

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On her way back to London, earlier today, Chung was booked into one of the tables with single seats facing each other. Sitting across from a complete stranger, she settled into a moment of precious anonymity. “It was actually really helpful and motivating for reading,” she tells me. “I was thinking, I can’t look up and just have lunch with a random lady, so I just put my head down in the book.”

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The book was The Wizard of the Kremlin, 2022, by Giuliano da Empoli, an award-winning novel originally published in French before being translated into English in 2023, that takes the reader into the heart of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. A movie adaptation is in the works with a cast including Jude Law, Paul Dano, and Chung’s partner, Tom Sturridge. “The writing’s amazing,” she says. “But there is a passage where he’s describing this girlfriend he has; she basically wants to do everything, but she gets bored really easily and never really commits. I was like, Oh my God, is it about me?”

Chung, 41, has so many projects, roles, and collaborations that indeed it can be hard to keep track of what is what and who is who. At the time we speak, there is much to talk about—her recent collections for Madewell and Barbour, the video she’s shot for Mango, a catwalk appearance for Miu Miu—all to the usual backdrop of frivolous reportage. One recent headline: “Alexa Chung cuts a typically cool figure in a black leather jacket as she joins her stylish fiancé Tom Sturridge on North London outing.”

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It’s a challenge, gathering together the threads of her 25-year career. A couple of times, Chung jokingly refers to “the lore,” or the publicly accepted chronology of her life. The knowing way in which she uses the phrase hints that the story it tells is imperfect but, in the end, good enough. It’s the byproduct of a couple of decades of magazine interviews, T.V. appearances, and tabloid froth, where peculiar factoids and random phrases have been repeated so often they’ve inadvertently become part of Chung’s official mythology. But it captures the basic contours—she needn’t quibble over little inaccuracies.

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For example, when I ask about her oft-repeated origin story, in which she is propelled into modeling after being spotted by a scout at the Reading Festival in Berkshire, she tells me that it’s a simplification: She’d actually been scouted several times already before that. There was the time on the beach in Majorca with her parents, and another in the middle of a textiles class at the trade event Clothes Show Live. The approach at the music festival happened when she was 16—the first time her parents were open to her saying yes—but the truth is a bit less clear-cut than “teenager is plucked from obscurity while going about her business.” The industry was already knocking. She would have made it in one way or another.

The rest of the lore goes something like this: Chung—who grew up in Hampshire, southwest of London, the youngest of four siblings—modeled for four years, then quit out of boredom. In 2006, she was hired as a co-host on the T.V. program Popworld before becoming a defining face for a certain era of British television, with appearances ranging from hosting the breakfast show Freshly Squeezed in 2007 to a stint as co-presenter and “roving reporter” for the series Gok’s Fashion Fix in 2008. She carried her zeitgeist-y energy over to the American networks, too, with the 2009 MTV vehicle It’s On with Alexa Chung.

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At the same time, her reestablished modeling career transcended into muse status. She’s been, at various moments, the face of Lacoste, DKNY Jeans, Longchamp, Tommy Hilfiger, Pepe Jeans, L’Oréal Professionnel, Maje, Code8, AG Jeans, Nails Inc., Marks & Spencer, and Superga. Her chic, indie rock-adjacent appearance was usually burnished by way of cat-eye makeup and one of at least 20 hairstyles (“feathered fringe,” “volumized bob,” etc.) that she simultaneously claimed as her signatures. Her off-duty outfits became a source of wonder, thanks in part to a gift for contrast, where high and low elements, or masculine and feminine ones, matched in a way that felt coherent and relaxed. High heels and dungarees. Mary Janes and miniskirts. She popularized the so-called boyfriend sweater and is never far from a pair of ballet flats. Everyone was emulating her style; there were entire regions of Tumblr dedicated to her. In 2010, Mulberry took her as its inspiration for its Alexa handbag, placing her in the same tradition as one of her stated style inspirations, Jane Birkin, whose eponymous Hermès bag had been introduced in 1984.

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Her standing as the first authentic It girl of the 21st century was augmented by deeper collaborations. She designed collections for various brands and fashion houses. She launched her own label, Alexachung, in 2017 (and closed it in 2022 citing pandemic-related difficulties). She’s been a contributing editor at Vogue, and a columnist at various magazines and newspapers, and wrote a book called It in 2013.

Speaking of literature, besides The Wizard of the Kremlin, Chung’s recent reads include Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, 1989, and Emmanuel Carrère’s Lives Other Than My Own, 2009. The latter in part recounts the author’s experience of witnessing the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history, in which approximately 230,000 people died, many while on holiday in the countries bordering the Indian Ocean. Something not in Chung’s lore is that she survived that same catastrophe.

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She had travelled to Ko Lanta, an island off Thailand’s Andaman coast, intending to spend Christmas and New Year’s in the tropical climate. After arriving at her hotel, she recalls having a sense that something wasn’t right. “The sea wasn’t as close as it had looked in the pictures,” she recalls. “But I thought, I don’t know, I’ve never been here.” As the waves struck, she ran to the top of a nearby hill. The geography of the island, with its long sloping beaches and reef-filled surrounding waters, spared Ko Lanta from the large death tolls experienced by its neighbors. Chung was 20 years old. “It had a huge impact,” she says. “Fuck, life is so chronically short.”

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By that point, she had been modeling for four years. Her plans to enroll for a degree in either art or literature (she’d been accepted by both King’s College London and Chelsea College of Arts) had been sidelined—temporarily at first, then seemingly indefinitely. “Modeling was really easy money,” she reflects. It was great, until it wasn’t. “I hadn’t used my brain much for the years that I was doing it, and I was becoming less and less sure of myself. I didn’t know what my opinion on anything was.”

In pursuit of a more fulfilling path, she signed up for a Meisner acting course, took up life drawing classes in the evening, and made new friends. “I thought, It doesn’t really matter if you don’t have a plan, as long as you put energy into your interests. So rather than thinking that I was going to be this or that, I just decided to say yes to anything that was fun.”

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The Popworld gig came two years later. It was the gateway to household-name status, but getting into T.V. wasn’t a slam-dunk decision. Unlike many, Chung didn’t find the prospect of being on television alluring in and of itself. “I paused before accepting it,” she says. “ I couldn’t really think of anyone that I thought was cool that did that job. But then I thought, Maybe there’s a way to do it that I could live with and be happy with.”

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Behind Chung’s self-effacing way of talking about herself, a steely single-mindedness can sometimes be glimpsed—a determination to be true to whatever it is she finds interesting about the projects she chooses. I ask her if she has any defining obsessions. It’s clothes, she says. No, really. She is genuinely, forensically fascinated by them. “Not even necessarily collections… I’m interested in everything,” she says. “What is Asics selling? Silk Laundry? Also fabrics. I’m a trainspotter for fabrics.” Her eyes light up when she talks about the colors in her Barbour collection: “There’s pillar box red, lilac, and brown. There’s a zingy, sunny yellow anorak. There’s a really warm stone color.”

Chung’s personal style is often described as effortless. Likewise, her public persona has always rested on the linked notions that, one, she’s more grounded and less distant than other celebrities of her stature, and two, she is more or less unfiltered in what she says. There is an impression that the person we see is the person she actually is. Yet Chung says that her private self might not be what people expect. “I spend long stretches of time on my own, and I’m quite a lot more insular than I think people might presume,” she offers. “I’m also a lot more shy.”

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A side effect of her public face is that people feel, on some level, like they personally know her. And if you’re introduced to as many people as Chung is, the probability of being approached by someone who acts like they’re your friend but is a complete stranger poses certain risks. “If someone says hi to me, I presume I’ve met them and know them, and I just am going to have to figure it out,” she says. “But sometimes it’s not someone I know. It’s just a random person. I’ve spent 10 minutes talking to them about where they’re going on holiday before I realize that it’s actually a fan. By then, I’ve handed over loads of intimate details because I’m blabber-mouthing.”

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These days, Chung is in the habit of referring to herself using phrases like “geriatric It girl” and “ancient grandma.” She’s joking, of course. The projects and the shoots are still a nonstop concern. That said, there’s a sense that the desire to be true to herself has only gotten stronger with age. By way of illustration, she describes how, while presenting an award to Margaret Barbour at last year’s British Fashion Awards, she was overcome by a case of nerves. “I used to not be scared of that sort of thing, but the older I get, the more apprehensive I am,” she says. “I think it’s from a concerted effort to no longer rely on cortisol and adrenaline to mask shit. It feels uncomfortable and unnatural because it is. You’d be a psychopath to get up on stage at the Royal Albert Hall in front of every peer in your industry and not be scared. So, I went bright red. I fluffed my lines. But I was like, I just don’t want to do the fake version anymore.”

Talent ALEXA CHUNG at FINCH IMAGE.
Hair stylist PAULA MCCASH at BRYANT ARTISTS using BABYLISS PRO.
Makeup artist EDDY LIU.
Manicurist ANGEL MY LINH at A-FRAME AGENCY LONDON.
Prop stylist PAULA SALINAS ARNAU.
Lighting director OLIVER MATICH.
Photo assistants OLIVIA SCOTT and PHOEBE SOMERFIELD.
Production THE CURATED.