“Some of the club kids have great fashion sense and they influence high fashion,” Chloe says. “Last spring, Anna Sui and Donna Karan were definitely influenced by the rave scene. All that athletic wear and techno wear, all the stripes. Anna Sui rips everything off.”

Chloe scans the room. “It’s kind of tacky tonight,” she says, observing dozens of young men who are wrapped in sheets. The word has apparently gone out on some deep-buried wire that tonight is toga night. Here, at what should be the cutting edge of street fashion, the late arrivals look like a bunch of beer-bashing Phi Delts. And over there is Methuselan mogul Steven Greenberg, the Benjamin Franklin look-alike who has haunted the hot spots since at least the Pleistocene, wearing four young women with his well-cut navy business suit. “Oh God, him,” Chloe says. “That’s the guy who gives my friend Carissa money all the time. He’s like her sugar daddy, but she says she doesn’t have to do anything.” Chloe’s idea of an attractive older man is Evan Dando, who is twenty-seven. Her current boyfriend is an eighteen-year-old named Robby Cronholm, who plays in a band called Crumb. She takes out his picture and displays it. “Isn’t he cute?” He looks like a very attractive twelve-year-old with long hair and a big goofy grin. Unfortunately, Robby lives in San Francisco. The thought turns Chloe melancholy.

At 3 A.M., Chloe is checking out the merchandise spread along the sidewalk on Second Avenue between St. Mark’s Place and Seventh Street. Last week, she bought a great silver-plated picture frame for fifty cents, but she doesn’t find any treasures tonight. She steps over a pile of women’s shoes into the narrow doorway of the apartment building where she’s been staying for the past month—in a second-floor walkup she and her friend Lila Lee are subletting from the “Kids” costume designer. It’s a small studio with uneven brick walls. The tub is in the middle of the floor; toilet’s down the hall. Chloe surprised a junkie there last week. The refrigerator harbors a pitcher of cold tap water and not much else.

Lila returns at about three-fifteen. She’s just had her butt-length dreads waxed, and she keeps feeling them. Lila is one of several people who are said to be Chloe’s best friend. She is from a first-generation Korean family who live near Nyack. Like Chloe, she hates the suburbs. “I started coming down to the city when I was thirteen,” she says. “I got into some really weird situations, staying with squatters. I can’t believe I didn’t get in more trouble than I did. My first kiss was in this squat; I kissed two different guys on the same night.”

Chloe puts on Pavement’s “Slanted and Enchanted” album. Pavement is currently one of her favorite bands, along with Sebadoh and Courtney Love’s Hole. “My first place in the city, I lived on Fourth and Avenue C with this friend and her boyfriend,” Chloe says. “She was a junkie. It was a spot, and the dealers would watch out for us and take care of us, but eventually one of the dealers ripped my friend off. When we went out, we’d go to Limelight and USA and raves. After Avenue C, I lived in Brooklyn Heights with another junkie friend, who was also a dominatrix. She was eighteen. It was a real hell house. Everybody was doing a lot of drugs. When River Phoenix died, we had this tribute party. We rented four movies and did dope. It was pretty sick.” Dope is heroin. Chloe says she doesn’t do dope—she’s too paranoid—and it finally became awkward for her to hang around with junkies. “It got too weird. The police would come to the door about credit-card frauds. I had to get out of there. Then I went from house to house, living with different friends. Then I moved into another house in Brooklyn Heights, with four friends, until June.”

When Chloe left the Brooklyn Heights flop, she and Lila drifted from place to place together. “We stayed with friends,” Lila says, “and if we couldn’t find a place to stay we’d just go to a rave. Every Friday night, there was a NASA rave at the Shelter.” (NASA refers not to the space agency but to Nocturnal Audio Sensory Awakening, an unofficial organization devoted to another kind of space travel.) “It was open till 8 A.M. It was the after party. People would be at Limelight, and then they’d go to the Shelter.”

During the day, Chloe and Lila would hang out outside, with the skateboarders. Skateboarding is not quite equal-opportunity employment. The girls mostly watch. “You’d just sit there for hours waiting for people and watching people skate,” Lila says. “Skating is a little life style. They stick together. Skaters aren’t really into drugs. Just weed and booze. They shun hard drugs.”

“In the summer of ’93, the ravers came in and took over Washington Square Park,” Chloe recalls. “If you were a geek in high school, you could be a raver. Anyone could go to a rave. At a hip-hop club, everyone’s putting on a front. Everyone’s tough. At a rave, everyone is high and mellow. But then heroin came along and made it much darker and more depressing. There was this big ecstasy dealer everybody knew on the scene. He died of a heroin overdose, and it really fucked everyone up. But they still do it.”

From the stereo, Pavement sings, “Can you treat it like an oil well, when it’s underground, out of sight?” Lila says, “The scene in the park got too commercial. Kids from New Jersey would come in, and the skaters had to find more down-low spots.”

“Down low” is a cherished concept: secret, alternative, not commercial—everything one wants to be. Except one also sort of wants to be famous, and here is the contradiction at the heart of Chloe’s world, the dilemma of subcultures that ostensibly define themselves in opposition to the prevailing commercial order, the dilemma of all the boys and girls who want to be in Paper and Details: What do you do if Harper’s Bazaar, or Calvin Klein, comes calling? In Chloe’s case, so far, you sort of blow them off.

Chloe lights a cigarette and pours a glass of water. Lila gets up to change the CD to A Tribe Called Quest. She tells Chloe she’s rented “River’s Edge.”

“I hate Keanu,” Chloe says. But, since it’s there, they play it, watching until dawn.

When “Kids” wraps a few days later, Chloe isn’t sure what she’ll do next. First she’s got to move her stuff back up to her parents’ house, in Darien, simply because there isn’t anyplace else to put it. She might go to London for a few weeks—she’s never been. And then she’s going to get her portfolio of drawings together and apply to college. She’s thinking about some kind of fashion or design degree. Someday, somebody should erect a statue to Chloe in Tompkins Square Park, with the amazing legend, “She didn’t want to be an actress or a model”—although she is going to do the Martin Margiella show at Charivari, since she likes Margiella clothes. What she thinks she’d really like to be is a costume designer for period films. For the time being, she has decided to go back and work at Liquid Sky, which is more of a home to Chloe than any of the apartments she’ll be crashing in.

Liquid Sky is the creation of Mary Frey, a waifish bleached blonde from New Orleans, who actually looks more like Edie Sedgwick than Chloe or anyone else does; Carlos Slinger, a.k.a. DJ Soul-Slinger, a Brazilian disk jockey and rave evangelist, whose air of mystery is enhanced by his wraparound dark goggles; and Claudia Rey, a London based artist and designer. The store presents a narrow, liquid face to Lafayette Street: a sheet of real water shimmers down the front of the window. Inside, a clubby, trippy ambience prevails. Over the cash register is a giant papier-mâché head of Astrogirl, who is the house mascot. A cooler in the corner is stocked with smart drinks, including Gusto Love Bomb: “It’s the surreal thing.” A staircase at the back leads down to Temple Records, billed as “100% underground. Import dance techno. We have the top acid, trance, breakbeat, ambient, house and jungle. The American music industry (radio) does not want you to hear this music.”

Mary Frey ricochets from one end of the store to the other, wearing a blue Astrogirl T-shirt, bluejeans, and a nose ring. “Liquid Sky is a posse, a concept,” Frey says. “It’s a whole vibration. It’s music, it’s d.j.s, it’s fashion. It supports the whole future of adolescence. This is New York Rave Central. We’re the connection to all the raves on the East Coast.” Frey sees the rave scene as a reaction to the élitist night-club scene of the eighties. “Everybody was sick of the corporate clubs. They were doing that picking-and-choosing thing, that exclusionary thing. The raves are more democratic.”

Frey first noticed Chloe at one of the boutique’s parties and was taken with her unearthly poise. She said to Gabriel Hunter, an Aspen transplant who was hanging out with Chloe, “Who’s that girl? She seems so together.”

When Frey, Slinger, and Rey opened the store on Lafayette Street, they asked Gabriel and Chloe to join them. Gabe and Chloe became in-house muses, models, and gofers. Chloe also became a seamstress. “I needed somebody to sew,” Frey says, “and Chloe said, No problem. She would gladly do anything that needed doing around the shop.” At twenty-six, Frey considers herself somewhat ancient, and feels lucky to have the inspiration of youth. Speaking of Chloe and Gabe’s generation, she says, “They don’t want to hang out with older people and go to the Hamptons. It’s a completely underground scene. A lot of fashion people come down and they rip it off. But that’s O.K.”

Today, Frey has to run down to Chinatown to grab an outfit for a wedding in London. This guy who’s in Depeche Mode is getting married, and she’s flying tonight, and all her clothes are dirty. She keeps talking on the way out the door: “Chloe’s her own category. She’s not a raver. She’s not a rocker. She’s like the old muses of Chanel or Christian Dior. Now you have this commercialized beauty, you have these cheesy-assed models like the ones who live in that building.” Frey pauses and points into the ornate lobby of the Police Building, the super-expensive downtown coöp. “It’s not about what designer you’re wearing anymore,” she says to the building.

Chloe’s old room in Darien is waiting for her. Its bookshelves are filled with back issues of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Face. There’s a lava lamp on the bookshelf and a framed poster for a Sonic Youth and Breeders concert hanging over the desk. Chloe shows Lila a spread in the November, 1992, Sassy, with the head: “Our intern Chloe has more style in her little finger . . .”

Chloe is going to drive Lila back to her parents’ house tonight. First, though, they head for a thrift shop in downtown Darien. Chloe works the racks the same way she works the pages of a fashion magazine—thoroughly, meticulously. She goes up and down the rows, missing nothing. Eventually, she comes up with a cream-colored Christian Dior shirt with a long collar, probably from the seventies, and a thin aqua belt. She almost buys a man’s brown felt fedora but decides it’s a bit too big. The total for the shirt and the belt is five dollars.

Then Chloe is spotted by two girls she knew in high school. It is hard to imagine these chubby-cheeked girls, with their white baseball caps and Top-Siders, in the same school lunchroom as Chloe. Her claim that she was an outsider at her high school begins to seem like an understatement. Whatever these girls may have thought about Chloe Sevigny in junior year, they are clearly thrilled to see her now.