Stylist meets style icon Alexa Chung to find out exactly how she always looks so enviably good

Photography: Ben Rayner
Fashion: Alexandra Fullerton
Words: Helen Bownass
Photography director: Tom Gormer

Alexa Chung is obsessed with clothes. Not just the look of them. But the fit of them. The cut of them. The feel and challenge of them. At our photo shoot in New York, she’s in turmoil over whether to buy a vintage shirt she saw last week. “I’ve been imagining our life together,” she laughs. “I’ve pictured us frolicking on a plane. Worn with dungarees walking down Second [Avenue]. But the thought of adding any more clothes to my wardrobe makes me feel a bit sick.”

Laughing is something 32-year-old Chung does a lot. She is pure fun. Two weeks earlier when we first meet in London, despite the fact she’s been awake since 4am with jetlag after flying in from LA, she whirlwinds into the suite at the Rosewood hotel. As well as intelligent conversations about the nature of fashion, our interview also covers tattoos (“I’ve thought about getting one a lot,” she admits. “I recently got gifted a prison tattoo kit. So I tattooed my friend, and it went very well. I gave her a polar bear”); Bernie Sanders and the fact she is “thinking of taking psychic classes” because she has “weird instincts for things, it’s often synchronicity overload”. At one point I even find myself singing Do The Bartman to her after she tells me it’s the first cassette her brother Dominic ever bought (hers was Madonna’s Immaculate Collection). She’s totally unflustered by the outburst.

Fast forward to when Stylist sets up camp in a studio in the endlessly cool Meatpacking district of New York – Chung, who grew up in Hampshire with three siblings, and parents, Phil and Gill, now lives part-time in Manhattan and the rest of the time in East London – she is equally affable. She sings throughout our shoot – the same couple of lines from the same couple of songs (Nick Jonas’ Jealous and You Give Me Something by James Morrison). She also does a lot of impressions, from her friends to random people in the street to characters in Vinyl, the TV show she discusses with the crew over lunch. After a decade in front of the camera as a model, TV presenter and fashion muse, she is totally at ease in front of the photographer’s lens; it is sickeningly impossible to take a bad photograph of her.

After both encounters I’m left with a gnawing sensation, a deeply uncool journalistic admission, that I really want Chung to like me. I want to be in her WhatsApp group. I want to drink flat whites with her at her favourite coffee shop in the East Village. To do a bit of cod psychology – the best kind – it’s not hard to connect the dots over why her approval is so desirable. She is the ultimate tastemaker. The woman that every fashion student and every brand, from high end to high street, feature on their moodboard season after season. Year after year. She still tops every best-dressed list. Validation from Chung is worth it.

She’s already lent that might to her collection for AG Jeans, been an ambassador for Chanel, had that bag named after her by Mulberry, while her first independent fashion label is in the offing. But, for now, her current passion project, and the reason we’ve flown across the Atlantic, is her new collection with high street stalwarts Marks & Spencer. Archive by Alexa, released on 13 April, is full of useful essentials with a traditional twist and saw her diving into the M&S archive – spanning the Forties to the Noughties – to pick her favourite items, which were then reborn into a 31-piece womenswear line. The pie-crust collar shirts and classic white sneakers with yes/no detail will sell out, we’ll put money on it.

What do you think your clothes say about you?
Oh my god, I don’t know. Do you know? What would you hope they project? It’s more instinctive. I think about clothes a lot, but I think they’re a good way of expressing yourself. All you’re expressing is your you-ness. I like to feel like myself.

Do you apply any kind of logic to getting dressed?
The advantage I have is I really do adore clothes so I’m often thinking about them and already editing in my mind what would or wouldn’t suit me. I like stuff that makes you feel something. It’s the only thing where you can actually go on first impressions. And then sometimes I like the challenge of having to slot in something that’s uglier and figure out how to make that look nice. Sometimes if it’s a vintage thing I’ll buy it and I’ll be like, ‘That’s not for right now but in the future I can imagine that working’.

You often take items like a Barbour or high-waisted jeans that are bit ‘Home Counties riding mum’ and subvert them…
[Laughs] I think that’s because of growing up in the British countryside; I can’t escape that background. But also your eyes just get used to a certain type of dressing and then it’s just in your DNA, isn’t it?

Is fashion a visceral thing for you?
Yes because I think ultimately, as sort of ridiculous as getting dressed is – and it is literally the most shallow pursuit – it can be emotionally impactful. When I went to Leeds [to visit the Marks & Spencer archive] they had this dress from a woman who had worn it on her first date with her late husband. I started crying. When something has sentimental value or emotional resonance then that’s when fashion gets elevated to something meaningful.

Do you plan your outfits?
Day to day, no. I get in the shower and then think about it. I’m quite lucky because I don’t have an office job or any kind of uniform to adhere to. I have a shower, do some intensive body moisturising and then get dressed. Make-up and hair is at the end: I wash it, comb it, put it behind my ears and hope for the best. I wash it every day. I’ve got about three strands that get greasier than Danny Zuko in one second.

When has your hair looked its all-time best?
At one Chanel show a few years ago, I smashed it. This stylist came round to help me and it was lovely. It’s never looked that good again!
I remember thinking that day: this is it, this is the day [laughs].

Once you’ve decided on an outfit are you steadfast in your decision?
No and it alters throughout the day. I’ll come home, I’ll be bored, put a different pair of shoes on. Maybe I get the external pressure of knowing I’m meeting a friend who’s really chic and then you kind of adapt it, which is a really weird thing to do anyway: to try and match what someone else looks like.

So if you’re meeting someone super groomed you’ll echo that vibe?
Often if I am under too much pressure to look a certain way, I panic and then go back to just looking insanely scruffy. I had a meeting yesterday where I had to look feminine. I was in the shower and thought, ‘I should probably wear a nice top or a dress’. And then I was like, ‘No f*** that’, so I wore wide-legged trousers and a man’s shirt.

How do you work with proportions?
Balance is key, but there’s no one rule because it’s dependent on each item. I don’t suit puffy trousers or harem trousers. I’ve got very small shoulders so I have to keep it big up here, but not on the leg. Also I don’t really have a full-length mirror. I have to feel whether something might look proportionally correct.

Hang on, you don’t have a proper mirror?
I found one on the street in New York and I put that in my room but now it’s covered by clothes. I have one in my bathroom that goes down to there [indicates her waist] and then on the way out of the building I check the lobby mirror.

What doesn’t suit you?
I feel like the older I get, the harder it is to buy a cheap dress and make it look expensive. It just looks ageing or something.

Does getting older worry you?
No it doesn’t, but you’re aware of what suits. You evolve as you get older; you just don’t want to wear the same thing. I don’t want to wear a smock dress and loafers anymore. I’m bored of it.

Alexa Chung on her morning routine, living with clutter and the spiral of stalking people on Instagram