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.”
Photo: Angela Hill
Photo: Angela Hill
“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.”
Photo: Angela Hill
Photo: Angela Hill
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.”