Design Darling

TARA SUBKOFF PUSHES THE ENVELOPE

She's been called an actress, a fashion designer, an interior decorator, an artist, and a provocateur. But 31-year-old Tara Subkoff rejects all labels. "Can't I just not have a title? We're in America, not England," she says with a husky laugh. "I think it's more interesting to just talk about what you're actually doing."

Four years ago, Subkoff, a fine-boned, Connecticut-born beauty with a bent toward controversial creativity, staged her first fashion coup by showing her Imitation of Christ clothing line in a downtown funeral parlor. Her friends Chloe Sevigny (The Last Days of Disco) and Natasha Lyonne (American Pie), plus a few top-model pals, strutted the thrift-store finds she had reworked as cutting-edge designs.

Subkoff, who deplores the antiquated runway rut, continued to tweak the concept of fashion shows during Paris couture week this past July by sneaking models into the Dior show via ambulance-think a sort of Punk'd Trojan horse. Her attempt was ill-received. "They love to hate me," says Subkoff, who constantly pushes the envelope.

Her unique and inspiring approach, while sometimes met with arched brows, has also gained her a legion of admirers and opportunities. Her recent collaboration with New York's Creative Time—a movable Plexiglas box holding a lone salesman modeling different I.O.C. couture pieces during fall Fashion Week—created buzz for her newly opened store. She's been named the creative director of Lalique, the Paris-based crystal and glass company. She's putting the finishing touches on her "overgrown John Huston-like Moulin Rouge design" for the new Nell's nightclub, in the West Village. And she's just wrapped production on Mary Harron'sThe Ballad of Bettie Page, in which she plays a 1940s pinup girl.

"I always said I'd reach my prime when I'm 90," says Subkoff, who would next like to find a film project to direct. Of her uncanny ability to juggle so many careers, her boyfriend, Wes Anderson, offers an appropriate cooking analogy: "She buys an overwhelming amount of stuff and makes everything at once in total chaos, and it always turns out beautifully."

CHRISTINE MUHLKE