A Zandra Rhodes dress worn by Sevigny to the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002 and now stored with The Wardrobe.
Courtesy of The Wardrobe; Kevin Mazur/WireImage
Inside a warehouse in an undisclosed location in Los Angeles’ South Bay, a shipment of clothes belonging to Chloë Sevigny recently arrived. They are being photographed, cataloged with barcodes and properly boxed and hung by The Wardrobe, a New York storage and preservation company that recently opened its first archive in the L.A. area.
“I’d just been holding onto everything for so long now and not storing things properly, from my first communion dress to my Oscar dress [a YSL in 2000 for Boys Don’t Cry] and my Golden Globes dresses,” says Sevigny. “I have almost everything.”
Sevigny connected with The Wardrobe founder Julie Ann Clauss over Instagram. The two met up at the actress’ storage unit in Connecticut and began sorting through her trove of clothes. The items include spring 1996 Miu Miu designs (“I was in one of their first campaigns, and they gave me the entire collection,” she says); a blue T-shirt from her breakout role in 1995’s Kids; Alexander McQueen and Proenza Schouler dresses worn to the Met Gala; and “my first pair of Margiela’s famous cloven-toe Tabi boots.”
Jason Merritt/Getty Images
Some of Sevigny’s things had been destroyed by moths over the years, including a box of Alaïa pieces; now everything that’s in the hands of The Wardrobe is stored in a temperature-controlled environment with an optimum humidity of 50 percent. “You don’t want things too dry — then they crack,” says Clauss, who has a master’s in the history of fashion and textiles from FIT and worked for Tom Ford before starting her company in 2011. “In terms of repairing [garments], I use museum-level conservators to do all our work. It goes far beyond your average dry cleaner,” adds Clauss, who notes that she’s about to accession a new collection from a client that encompasses “12,000 objects that have never been catalogued or organized.”
As she walks around the warehouse, Clauss points out a newly accessioned garment that had previously not been properly stored. “You can see it’s not very happy — the shoulder line will be destroyed,” she says of a dress on a hanger that will be transferred to a box and laid flat.
Clauss — whose clients include another Oscar nominee, a multi-Grammy winner and designers like Ford — offers a quick peek inside an enormous room that houses an archive for an unnamed star. “It’s everything that gets worn on tour, every performance, every red carpet appearance and things that are publicly seen on Instagram,” notes Clauss, adding that all of her clients can access digital records of their collections. Prices start at $350 a month.
The work of archiving collections also includes properly identifying where and when clothing was worn. “There are certain clients where I’ll be like, ‘What is this piece?’ and we’re racking our brains trying to figure it out and then we’ll see [it on] a fan account on Instagram and go ‘This is amazing’ We’ll know exactly what day it was worn and where,” says Clauss.
Sevigny, who next stars as socialite C.Z. Guest in the second installment of Ryan Murphy’s Feud, says the work of organizing her collection has included similar research. “We’ve managed to find pictures of me in the garments to help commodify them in the future if we want to [sell] something for charity or [keep things] for my son. It’s just good to know it’s taken care of.”
Courtesy of The Wardrobe
Bunny ears from the 1997 film Gummo, which starred Sevigny.
Courtesy of The Wardrobe
Sevigny bought this jacket from actress Linda Manz, who wore it in 1980’s Out of the Blue.
Courtesy of The Wardrobe
A version of this story first appeared in the March 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
