Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane jacket, $3,590, and pants, $995, 212-980-2970; Dolce & Gabbana shirt, $995, shopBAZAAR.com; Jennifer Fisher ring, $285, shopBAZAAR.com; Eddie Borgo bracelet, $225, shopBAZAAR.com; Cartier bracelet, $7,200, 800-CARTIER; Hermes watch, $2,800, hermes.com. Fashion Editor: Joanna Hillman.
Dating can be stressful when you're a countercultural icon. "It's weird," Kim Gordon tells me. "It's definitely difficult to meet people, and it's rare when you actually connect with somebody. And if you do connect with them, then maybe it takes a while to figure out that you really like them. Or then you start balking for some reason—you know, it's a different time in your life when you're not meeting someone who you're going to start a life with," she says. And then there's that fear of being alone or that you might never meet someone else …"
"I don't know," Gordon muses. "It's kind of like being on acid."
Gordon, 61, is calling from Los Angeles. While she'll forever be associated with New York from her days as the singer and bassist in the influential art-rock band Sonic Youth, Gordon grew up in California; her father taught sociology at UCLA, and her family on her mother's side dates back to the Gold Rush. She still lives in the Northampton, Massachusetts, home she shared with her former husband and bandmate of three decades, Thurston Moore, and their daughter, Coco, now 20 and in her third year at the Art Institute of Chicago. But since her marriage to Moore unraveled in 2011—their divorce was finalized in November—Gordon has been spending more time in L.A. It was there during a monthlong stretch last winter that her new memoir, Girl in a Band, finally began to take shape. "There's a certain lightness about being here—you know, the weather," she says. "And then being in a house that has almost nothing in it is liberating in a way. I have a huge house in Northampton filled with so many things … It was just kind of a good atmosphere to look back on my life."
Girl in a Band is filled with vignettes from Gordon's early years: scaling the dirt mounds, pipes, and ravines that would coalesce into L.A.'s web-like freeway system; watching old movies with her brother, Keller (who would later be diagnosed as schizophrenic); driving cross-country with the late artist Mike Kelley, and making her way in the amped-up world of downtown New York in the '80s. Then came Sonic Youth. The band, which Gordon and Moore founded with guitarist Lee Ranaldo in 1981, became a force in the alternative-music scene of the '80s and early '90s, with Gordon—art savvy, independent, and the lone woman in the group—emerging as a kind of beacon for younger artists (Kurt Cobain, Chloë Sevigny, Sofia Coppola, Kathleen Hanna, and Spike Jonze among them). She also embraced fashion at a time when it was not yet de rigueur for underground rock bands, using looks from Marc Jacobs's infamous Spring 1993 "grunge" collection for Perry Ellis in a video, and playing in minidresses and heels. "It was this whole circuit where it was all rock T-shirts—it was all very tomboy," she says. "There are certain things that I've always been interested in—the '60s and the '70s, basically, and people like Anita Pallenberg or Marianne Faithfull," she continues. "But it was the idea of wearing something that was a contrast for people who liked dissonant music or had some idea of what rock is supposed to look like."
Dolce & Gabbana shirt, $995, shopBAZAAR.com; Jennifer Fisher necklace, $300, shopBAZAAR.com.
Hair: Peter Gray for Wella Professionals; makeup: Linda Gradin for Giorgio Armani Beauty; manicure: Tracylee for Dior Vernis; prop styling: Todd Wiggins.
Over their 30-year partnership, Gordon and Moore, who married in 1984, seemed to offer a vision for a kind of grown-up bohemian life where compromise was not an inevitability of adulthood. In Girl in a Band, Gordon writes candidly about the end of their marriage, which began as a great punk-rock love story and collapsed five years ago, when, after stumbling upon some text messages, she discovered that Moore was having an affair with a woman he'd been working with on his fledgling publishing imprint. "When something traumatic happens and breaks everything apart, you kind of want to look back and see, 'How did I get here?' or 'What did I do wrong?' or 'Who am I?,' " says Gordon, who, in the midst of the breakup, was also diagnosed with a noninvasive form of breast cancer and underwent a lumpectomy. "My identity was wrapped up with this band and my relationship with Thurston. So you lose your identity." Everything, Gordon says, is a work in progress. "Your life is hard to change. But at the same time, I've also always felt that I'm the same person now as I was at five, so I've been sort of reaching out to that too, in a way."
Gordon has a new band, Body/Head, with Bill Nace, and she has rededicated herself to her art practice, which she'd sidelined during her years in Sonic Youth. (An exhibition of her word-based sculptural pieces opens at New York's 303 Gallery in June.) She's also planning to sell her house in Northampton, though she hasn't decided where she's going to move yet. "With my daughter at school, I don't feel like I need to be there anymore," she says. "I feel a little unstrung, to be honest. It's weird to me at this point to not know where I'm going to live and to have so much happening. Maybe I'm a slow developer. But I feel pretty good about life right now. I feel good about the future."
