This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.Kim Gordon Is Still the Coolest Person in the Room

Véronique HylandThu, March 19, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC

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Kim Gordon Is Still the Coolest Girl in the RoomJeannette Montgomery Barron/Trunk Archive

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You know things are getting dire when even Kim Gordon is worried about being replaced by AI. On her new album Play Me, the 72-year-old godmother of grunge addresses an unnamed, possibly robotic “boss” and reckons with the uncomfortable reality of our algorithmically driven present—and future.

“I was just scrolling through my Instagram,” she says. “Looking at algorithms. It’s just kind of the landscape that we have. And I like to find challenging things to write about. ‘Let’s see if I can make a song out of this’ kind of thing.” She tries not to doomscroll, but she does sometimes feel like she’s living in an endless Groundhog Day where progress resets to zero. “I thought we were getting a handle on racism or sexism,” she laments. “But I mean, America has been a country run by corporations for a long time. So it’s just more extreme as far as the wealth gap and everything.”

Gordon and Daisy von Furth at X-Girl’s 1994 show.Mark Lennihan - AP

Gordon can also be seen in two new documentaries: Sofia Coppola’s Marc by Sofia and Tamra Davis’s The Best Summer. She and Coppola have been friends for a long time, but when the two of them sit down with me, they struggle to remember their first encounter, before finally settling on the answer: a mutual friend’s wedding. “Until you asked, I was like, ‘Oh, I just have always known Kim,’” Coppola says.

Gordon and Coppola share many things—a love of fashion; an immersion in the art world (Gordon began as a visual artist, and still practices in addition to making music); a love for their daughters; and a soft spot for physical media. The title track on Play Me riffs on the jargon of AI-generated streaming playlists, e.g., “Rich popular girl” or “Chilling after work.” The song, Gordon says, is “about convenience culture and people not making choices anymore. They think if you’re listening to this band, you’ll like this band. And it’s like, no, actually that’s not really the same.” The two reminisce about Other Music, the downtown New York record store that closed in 2016, and Coppola says, “I’m all for a return to things in the flesh.…My daughter [Cosima], who’s 15, is always like, ‘I’m so jealous that you got to be around in the ’90s.’” Gordon adds, “Pre-internet, everything seemed more mysterious.”

Gordon wearing X-Girl in 1994.John Aquino/WWD - Getty Images

Davis’s documentary, constructed from Hi8 tapes that she found while evacuating her Malibu home during the Palisades fire, is one of those pre-internet documents, filmed in 1995 and early 1996 at a festival tour in Australia. “Our favorite promoter did his ideal collection of bands,” Gordon says. “Beastie Boys, Pavement, Swimsuit Kill, Rancid, who he had because he thought they’d help sell tickets. Baby Foo Fighters. And Beck before he got so big.” And, of course, Sonic Youth, the band that Gordon fronted from 1981 to 2011.

Gordon originally came to New York to be an artist, but “I kind of fell into playing music,” she says. “Dan Graham, this artist I knew, wanted to do this performance with an all-girl band. He did this piece called Performer/Audience/Mirror, where he’d have a mirror behind him and he would describe the audience being self-conscious and stuff. And then he would turn around and describe himself looking at the audience. He wanted to do that with an all-girl band, and we were supposed to make some intervention with the audience, and we didn’t really do that.” Gordon wrote the lyrics, which she based on display and ad copy from fashion magazines. “There was one called ‘Cosmopolitan Girl,’ and it was this whole first-person text, this ad they always had. And then things about soft, polished separates and lipstick and stuff.” She remains drawn to found text in her work now, both visual and aural, but now she jots terms in her phone, especially 2020s neologisms: hopium, wishcasting, slopaganda.

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In those days, fashion and indie music had an uneasy relationship. Marc Jacobs first met Sonic Youth when he let the band film its music video “Sugar Kane,” starring Chloë Sevigny, in his Perry Ellis showroom. “It was funny—he thought that you guys would think he was a poser. He was intimidated,” Coppola says. “Well, we were kind of skeptical,” Gordon admits. But Sonic Youth went on to play at Jacobs’s fall 2008 show, and Gordon and her daughter, Coco Gordon Moore, fronted his handbag campaign in 2022. More recently, Jacobs cited X-Girl, the cult brand designed by Gordon and Daisy von Furth, as an inspiration for his 2026 runway show, a tribute to the late ’90s that brimmed with nostalgia.

The two friends speak in the laconic argot of the effortlessly cool, but listening to Play Me, I found myself thinking about how refreshing it is to hear a “cool” person express rage, anger, and discomfort. And while Coppola’s emotional temperature is on the softer end of the spectrum, her films also have a distinct feminist bent. When I ask Gordon and Coppola about the cool-girl moniker and its limiting connotations, Coppola jokes, “I don’t think you can answer that in a cool way! I appreciate that Kim has a mystique, and I think a little mystery is always a cool thing.”

Coppola and Gordon at Marc Jacobs’s spring 2016 fashion show.Jamie McCarthy - Getty Images

“This friend of mine once said, ‘Once you’ve given birth and seen death, the idea of cool doesn’t really enter into the equation,’” Gordon says. “I think it’s cool to be a mom. The thing that isn’t cool to me is being corporate. I kind of have always been resistant to that. And that to me is really what, if you were to define punk in some way, it would be sort of anti-corporate. But it doesn’t have to be anything stylized or sound a different way. It’s an attitude.”

Now, as Gordon prepares to go on tour for the umpteenth time, she’s still wrestling with the existential questions on Play Me. And a few less existential ones: “Every tour I’m like, ‘Can I still wear shorts?’”

Lead image credit: Jacket, pants, Celine.

A version of this story appears in the April 2026 issue of ELLE.

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