Alexa Chung Celebrates Collaboration for AG Jeans

As the president of the United States was giving the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Alexa Chung was making a declaration of her own. “This weather is awful,” she said. “I can’t handle it.” Chung was sprawled out on a plush couch, tucked away in a small room inside a former theater in the Lower East Side. Outside the door, a party for her denim collaboration with AG Jeans aptly titled Alexa Chung for AG was beginning to unfold. It was the second of four planned events to fete the collaboration. “[London] was so epic,” Chung said of the first stop, which took place late last week. “It was so epic that it took me two days to recover. No, really. I was lying on the floor of the plane like, ‘Ugh.’ And then they were like, ‘We’re doing it all over again.’”

So here she was, braving the “awful” East Coast weather (it was a balmy night for January a fair 30 degrees). Luckily for the Brit, the next stop would be in Los Angeles. “I’ll be thinking of you guys while I’m in my bikini,” she said. A denim bikini, perhaps? “I didn’t think of that…Next collection. I’ll give you 10 percent.”

Denim bikinis aside, Chung’s debut collection is full of Sixties and Seventies-inspired looks perfectly in tune with her oft-coveted style: cropped overalls, swingy miniskirts, high-rise shorts or “dungarees,” to abide by Chung’s native slang. For the party, Alexa Chung selected a pair of white skinny jeans, a white blouse and Tabitha Simmons flats. “I don’t think it would be any celebrity,” she said, when asked who her dream customer would be. “I’d be happy if I walk into [NYC restaurant] The Smile or something and someone had them on. That’s better because if it’s a celebrity, we may have gifted them. Whereas, if I see them on the street, I know she bought those.”

Gifted or not, the collection was well represented by the “It” girls who turned out in force to tip their hat to one of their own Leigh Lezark, Harley Viera-Newton, Jen Brill, Langley Fox-Hemingway and Tennessee Thomas. Appropriately for the quirky events space, a former vaudeville house in the early 20th century that later became a recording studio, Thomas gave a performance with her band Summer Moon.

“I, for sure, thought I was about to walk into someone’s appointment,” noted one guest, marveling at the secret space. Adding to that mysterious vibe was a tarot card reader who was tucked away in a canopy bed. While some guests opted to populate the nearby buffet, which offered a range of American mainstays (sliders, pigs in a blanket) and British delicacies (Yorkshire pudding), Chung gamely hopped into bed with the pseudo-pyschic. “All good things,” she said upon exiting, flashing a thumbs-up and sauntering off to the beat of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.”