It’s 1994, springtime in New York, and everyone is freezing their asses off. The likes of Kyle MacLachlan and Linda Evangelista, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Meisel, and the late Bill Cunningham are emerging from the Marc Jacobs show. From the other end of Mercer Street, a parade of girls in primary-colored ringer tees, skater jeans, baby barrettes, and mini-skirts walk a makeshift runway—Pumpkin Wentzel, Luisa Reichenheim, Michele Lockwood, Jutta Koether, and a pre-fame Chloë Sevigny, with a blonde bowl cut and roots spray-painted pink, wearing a white T-shirt dress. Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” blares from a van. A bedsheet—stolen from the Paramount Hotel down the road—is taped to a brick wall, with the word “X-GIRL” scrawled on it.
This is a now-infamous moment when X-Girl co-founders Daisy von Furth and Kim Gordon, along with Sofia Coppola, staged the first show for their now-cult streetwear label. X-Girl defined a new era of style for young women in the ’90s: it feminized the skater-girl aesthetic with mod-ish silhouettes, offering girls something outside of the pooling baggy jeans and gargantuan hoodies their boyfriends slouched around and skated in.
There to witness this renegade, era-defining moment was Angela Hill, fresh to the city from London. Now, the English photographer and co-founder of fashion’s favorite cult bookstore, Idea, has compiled her photos from the day into the photobook X-Girl Show.
Hill and her flatmate had come to New York with plans to launch a magazine and just so happened to be in the right place at the right time. “It was my first visit to New York,” Hill recalls. “It felt like a film set. We were going to these loft parties and meeting all these art world and downtown people around the A, B, and C streets, when it still felt pretty dodgy and dangerous. We met Bernadette Van-Huy, Anthony Haden-Guest, John Currin, and Rachel Feinstein. We went to these underground clubs and drank cider from big vats.”
“That day didn’t feel like a big deal at the time,” says Hill, “which is probably why I forgot all about even shooting it.”
Some years ago, when Hill’s mother’s garage was flooded, completely gutted, and cleared out, she found, among the drenched debris, a damp box belonging to Hill. It was just last Christmas that Hill finally opened it up.
Most of the box’s contents were unsalvageable, save for a few negatives: images of Glastonbury festival goers and snaps from the X-Girl show. Hill wasn’t on assignment, just capturing what she thought looked cool, and the photography reflects X-Girl’s scrappy, skate-schooled, anti-establishment spirit.
“It was cheap and cheerful, and more about having a good time than a serious fashion show,” says Hill of the day. “It still had more impact than many of those that take months of planning and money.”
Her words echo Gordon’s in her 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band: “X-Girl’s sidewalk guerrilla fashion show was a success in that it came off at all,” Gordon wrote. “In a way, X-Girl gave me far more notoriety than Sonic Youth ever did.”
“X-Girl was real girls’ clothes—what they were wearing and wanted to wear,” says Hill. She already had a few of their pieces—a sleeveless tabard top, a checked mini-skirt—from a small selection that was available at Slam City Skates in London’s Covent Garden.
Sevigny, now a longtime friend of Hill’s, has written the book’s introduction. At the time of the show, she had been working as X-Girl’s fit model and crashing on stylist and “indie royalty” von Furth’s couch. She recalls the “romance and love of hijinks” that inspired the event.
“The exuberance captured in Angela’s photos was a combination of being part of something that didn’t happen all too often,” she writes. “We did it without permits or permission, we broke the ‘fashion’ rules, [and] a few city rules, too.”
In the coming months, Hill shares that Idea will publish a decades-spanning book on Sevigny herself. “Her mother’s so good—she saved everything, every little news clipping, photograph,” says Hill. “And Chloë saved all of her clothes, of course. It’s amazing, this archive they have between them.”
Hill’s previous books include the monograph Sylvia—which delicately moves from fashion to documentary photography as it captures Sylvia Mann over 21 years—and Edith, which traces her own daughter’s life from teenagedom to womanhood in vivid detail. Situating the energy and flurry of the X-Girl Show within her quieter, more ethereal oeuvre at first felt a little strange.
“It’s not even my type of photography… and yet it is, in another way, because it is not perfectly composed,” says Hill. “If I’d gone to college to be taught photography, I’d have gotten into composition, angles, using up these thirds of the page, lighting… but I just picked up a camera and started taking pictures.”
She was, however, always influenced by cinema: Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Railway Children, Whistle Down the Wind. “I always want my shoots to look like film stills,” Hill says, giving context to her eye for rich detail. “Everything has to look real, so you’re as engrossed in the character as you would be watching them onscreen. You believe the girl lives in this house, these are her clothes, that’s what she eats for breakfast. That’s how I want fashion shoots to be. The world has enough fashion shoots.”
