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"   Photo: Getty Images   Like the mini skirt, The Clash, and Cadbury chocolates, we Americans only get Alexa Chung&amp;#039;s new book after it&amp;#039;s become a smash in Great Britain. Titled It (as in &amp;quot;girl,&amp;quot; not the creepy &amp;quot;cousin&amp;quot; from The Addams Family), the catalog of Chung&amp;#039;s personal style debuted in London on September 5, and the publication finally launches stateside next Tuesday. After trading some state secrets and/or cronuts to score an advance copy, we started reading Chung&amp;#039;s musings on life and oversized cardigans\u2014and we couldn&amp;#039;t stop laughing or turning the pages. So it seems on top of her front-row fashion week seats, her stash of Chanel bags, and her Eyeko beauty campaign, the Hampshire native is also a gifted writer. Cue: jealousy. We spoke with Chung\u2014who turns 30 on November 5\u2014about her book launch, and we got her current playlist from Spotify because, of course, she has amazing taste in music, too.  We know you like to draw, but have you also always written? I have. In America you wouldn&amp;#039;t know, but I used to write for The Independent newspaper. I had a weekly column for them! It was called &amp;quot;Girl About Town,&amp;quot; but it ended because I wasn&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;about town&amp;quot; anymore. And when I moved to New York, it was called &amp;quot;New York Doll.&amp;quot; Besides the essays, your book is crammed with vintage photos and movie stills that have inspired you. How long did it take you to find all of them? Most of them were pictures I was already familiar with. I have huge photo books by Juergen Teller, David Bailey, and Sam Haskins, so [the images] were all just things I already like. And it was nice to share that, because those are true references for me, but I&amp;#039;m also putting them out there so I can discover new things. Does that make sense? You&amp;#039;re purging your inspiration files? Yeah, kind of. There are only so many times you can talk about Fran\u00E7oise Hardy and Jane Birkin. Even on Instagram, not a day goes by when Birkin doesn&amp;#039;t pop up. Ladies love her! So I think [my book] is about putting [my inspirations] out there, but keeping my next ones a secret.   There are also photos of you and your friends in the book\u2014and sometimes they&amp;#039;re naked! How did you get them to agree to pose bare-chested? It&amp;#039;s quite a unique situation! I hadn&amp;#039;t experienced it before, and I wasn&amp;#039;t sure what to do. I know [my friends] posed willingly for those photographs, because I took them. So I texted the photo back to them, and said, &amp;quot;Hi, here&amp;#039;s a pic of you with your boobs out. Do you like it enough to let the whole world see it?&amp;quot; And I guess they did!  There&amp;#039;s also a photograph of someone grabbing your chest\u2026 That&amp;#039;s from when I was a teenager in Australia! That&amp;#039;s my friend Misty doing the grabbing. I think it was when Terry Richardson had just come to our attention. We were like, &amp;quot;Oh, that&amp;#039;s really cool,&amp;quot; and so I think we were trying to make our photos look like Terry&amp;#039;s. &amp;quot;Trying&amp;quot; is the important word, I think!  In another chapter, you describe walking up to Marianne Faithfull at a bar after you&amp;#039;d experienced a bad breakup, and asking her how she got over Mick Jagger. We were on the same bench at a party, but we weren&amp;#039;t talking to one another. I was drinking the contents of a liter bottle of whiskey, and I thought, &amp;quot;F*ck it, I&amp;#039;m going to start chatting to Faithfull.&amp;quot; And it seemed like an increasingly good idea the further down the bottle I got. But that&amp;#039;s the beauty of being heartbroken: I would never have done that otherwise. There are many references to heartbreak in the book, but you do mention that one of your must-have items is a &amp;quot;boyfriend cardigan&amp;quot; or a sweater stolen directly from your boyfriend. But what if you don&amp;#039;t have a boyfriend? Then what do you do? But then maybe you don&amp;#039;t have a true pair of boyfriend jeans if you don&amp;#039;t have a boyfriend. Maybe they&amp;#039;re called &amp;quot;extra spacious skinny jeans&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;boy cut lady jeans...&amp;quot; That seems kind of sad. Or how about, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to talk about it&amp;quot; jeans? &amp;quot;It&amp;quot; by Alexa Chung debuts in America on October 29. Pre-order your copy now on Amazon.                                          "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/music/news/a18747/alexa-chung-weekend-playlist/>