As any seasoned performer will tell you, there is no known cure for stage fright. Electropop singer Uffie would like to make the case for retail therapy. “Shopping for costumes helps calm my nerves,” she says, pulling on a pair of staggeringly high diamanté heels. Née Anna-Catherine Hartley, the 22-year-old is prepping for a show at New York’s Don Hill’s, a one-time-only affair to celebrate the launch of her collaboration with Diesel. For the occasion, Uffie has picked out a slinky black jumpsuit from the capsule collection—her answer to the LBD—and is now sourcing a few fun accessories at Patricia Field on the Bowery. “The last time I came here was with my friend Paul,” says Uffie, referring to Paul Sevigny, DJ, restaurateur, and godfather of her one-year-old daughter, Henrietta. “We were going to play Lollapalooza together, so I bought a pair of gold-sequined undies to wear to the festival.”
Fast-forward two summers, and now there’s Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans, the sartorially minded debut album she’s been touring in support of for the past few months. Uffie was studying to be a designer before her music career took off, so her new fashion project brings everything full circle. “My dad worked in fashion, so I grew up in Hong Kong around the factories,” says Uffie, who moved to Paris as a teenager. “I saw how everything worked.” There’s a remake of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Hong Kong Garden” on the record that acts as a style manifesto, which she’s calling trash versus class. In practice, this means artfully funneling two very different ideas into one look—like a silk-chiffon dress worn with beaten-up boots, messy hair, and smudged makeup. Uffie is eager to road-test the distressed boyfriend jeans from her new collection with a new pair of ladylike blue-velvet Louboutin pumps. “Shoes are my weakness,” she says. The starlet almost broke her neck on stage in Paris at La Cigale last month while tottering around in vertiginous heels, and she dislocated her shoulder in a crowd-surfing incident in Australia. According to Uffie, an outfit only becomes show-stopping once you’ve figured out how to stage-dive in it.