London women believe in a second layer: cardigan, hoodie,
shacket. New York women, in my experience, do not. They’d
rather a long-sleeve blouse, a cashmere sweater, or the kind of
brightly coloured, expensive, delicate spring coat you can wear
in New York for exactly nine days in May. In both cities, as far
as I can tell, the heel as daywear is dead. Not as dead as it is in
Paris, where you rarely see a young woman out of trainers – but
still pretty dead. This past summer, I was having lunch with
my friend Ashley when a woman hobbled by our window in
Sex and the City-era 5in stilettos and the whole restaurant
stopped eating, curious to see if she’d make it to the next corner.
Poor lady: she’d not gotten the memo. Yet in a way I admired
her, for New York can be oppressive when it comes to memos.Take me and Ashley: two lady writers having lunch, hadn’t
seen each other for a while, and yet – same outfit. A-line tent
dress with massive arm flaps; flat sandals, huge earrings, huge
glasses; no make-up except lipstick, wild Afros. Angela Davis
goes to Palm Beach. Where do such memos come from? I get
that the fashion-industrial complex usually has a hand in starting
them, but these crazes also seem to have localised areas of
intensity, which then spread. I first became aware of the
boilersuit in the early Noughties, as it radiated out of Brooklyn,
penetrated an initially resistant Manhattan, and then crossed
the Atlantic, with the consequence that I now spend about
three months of the year wearing boilersuits, which feel to me
GETTY IMAGES; SHUTTERSTOCK as neutral a piece of clothing as a pair of Levi’s once were. It’s >10-19-Well-Zadie.indd 237 16/08/2019 13:31