Kim Gordon is the first lady of alternative rock and bass player for Sonic Youth. She is also the creative spirit behind X-Large's sister company X-Girl.
As the first lady of alternative rock and bass player for Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon is the creative spirit behind X-Large's sister company X-Girl. Having risen from the same early 1980s New York music scene as the Beastie Boys, Kim and her husband/bandmate Thurston Moore have remained friends with the Beastie Boys over the years. When she was approached by Eric Bonerz to help run a clothing company, the fact that Mike D was already involved helped the business team to gel together.
Yet whereas Mike D's role in X-Large's designs has been very limited over the years, just the opposite is true with Kim Gordon. Kim is not only a partner in the company she is also a co-designer. In a June 1997 interview with Select Magazine Kim said, "...when we started out, we really just wanted to make clothes that we wanted to wear and a lot of things were, like, modified ideas about a good fitting T-shirt or pair of pants. Things that you'd find in a thrift store that you'd want to alter slightly." The concept caught on and soon X-Girl was enjoying the same attention that big brother X-Large had previously.
The only complaint about to surface about X-Girl was that the sizing ran every small. In the same interview Kim explained how difficult it was to have a factory actually make clothing that was like the original design samples. "We got a reputation for selling tiny T-shirts, because the first line of clothes came out so small. We really didn't want that." The odd sizes did not hurt sales, and the tiny look became as popular as if they had planned it. To this day, used X-Girl clothing is always a fast seller on eBay.com; not even X-Large can boast that.
Along with her X-Girl and Sonic Youth responsibilities, Kim keeps busy with a handful of side projects such as playing in the band Free Kitten. Also, many Beastie Boys fans have had the pleasure of seeing Kim play live at the Tibetan Freesdom Concerts. Maybe it is because of that exposure, that so many Beastie Boys followers are also crossover Sonic Youth fans. It is not at all unreasonable to speculate that there may be a joint project between the two groups down the road. Perhaps the Beastie Boys will remix a Sonic Youth single or better yet, maybe Kim will play on an unreleased Beastie Boys track.
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