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definition, cooler, because being cool means
not caring too much, or not looking too much
as if you care, and with all respect to my
adopted city, New York evidently cares a lot
and all the time. On the other hand, never-
not-caring can result, in New York, in the sort
of avant-garde sensibility you see less of in
London, especially among the very old. In
London, to be very old and still caring about
clothes is to be “eccentric”, dressed in many
colours, perhaps, or with one’s hair coloured
in some unlikely, spirited way, and bright red
glasses and “jolly” accessories and so on. But
I quite often see 80-year-olds in New York
dressed in asymmetric all-black fashion sourced from obscure
Japanese labels, or wearing hard-to-comprehend shoes that
look like installation art, and with their hair tied back in a severe
grey braid that reaches down to the waist or else shaved off
completely – all without a hint of whimsy. Gives me hope.
Some New York memos, collective and unindividuated and
everywhere, are simultaneously signs of widespread social
transformation, and therefore heartening to see. Afro hair worn
natural, boys in sequins and eyeshadow, gender-neutral
separates. Others drive me to distraction. For three winters in
a row, I swear there wasn’t a woman in New York who didn’t
own a ribbed woollen hat with a fake-fur bobble on it (although
when I emailed friends in London, it sounded as if it was just
as bad over there). And last fall, the ubiquity of teddy bear
coats made me feel violent towards teddy bears, as a breed.
This tendency towards conformity is most visible at black-tie
events, where previously reasonable New York women suddenly
unleash their inner prom queen en masse. And when everyone’s
in a strapless satin gown, it isn’t very hard for a Londoner in
a jumpsuit to imagine herself some kind of fashion radical. (In
London itself, you’d have to work a lot bloody harder.)
When it comes to nostalgia or historical dressing (another
form of memo), I’d say London has the edge, having so much
more history to draw from. You’d look peculiar in Pilgrim-era
wear in America, but a high-necked Queen Anne-style dress
can still make sense back home. The ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s
are regularly mined on the London high streets, whereas in
New York, for the moment, the ’90s is all there is. Part of the
issue with American clothes nostalgia is surely that every era,
if you think about it for half a second, was fun for the few
and hell for the many. Last Christmas I was invited to a Mad
Men-era costume party. Not wanting to arrive chained to a
lunch counter, I racked my brains for something glamorous
and ended up going for “Diahann Carroll at a Hollywood
party in Malibu”, only to discover that every other black
person at the party had gone as a Panther, black beret and
all. A spectacular case of missing the memo.
That was a true fashion disaster, but I make more of them
in London. So much socialising there is done indoors, in houses
and flats, and it’s very easy to be overdressed in someone’s
living room. Personally, I think it passive aggressive to ask
someone to dinner then answer the door barefoot in sweatpants,
but maybe that’s just me. I’m also conscious of overdressing
for a night on the town, forgetting the hard-won realism thatleads London clubbers to think very carefully about what they
truly want to be wearing at 3am, miles from home, pissed,
looking down the barrel of a long night-bus journey. Athleisure
is a transatlantic malady, but more people seem inclined to
wear it all day in New York than in London, and unless you
want people to roll their eyes at you and accuse you of being
“so New York”, best not wear leggings after midday.
Behind my own front door, left to my own devices, it’s some
version of pyjamas all day long, no matter where I am. To write,
I have to feel absolutely unhindered by elastic, buttons, cuffs,
collars, belts, socks, laces, zips. Old Mets sweatshirt. Unspeakable,
threadbare NYU tracksuit bottoms. Woolly beanie. It’s a “look”
that depresses everyone I live with, but I can’t manage any other
way. Clothes, to me, are performance, and I like participating
up to a point – but only up to a point. I never get tired of
watching others, though. The streets of New York and London
are the best shows I know, and nothing pleases me more than
watching the people go by, their fascinating or outré or banal
or bizarre self-conceptions made visible in fabric. “Vain trifles
as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices
than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the
world and the world’s view of us.” Woolf again. She was even
more conflicted about clothes than I am, but she better
understood that what a woman does with her wardrobe is not
very different from what a novelist does with her characters:
clothing the self as a way of viewing the world and of being
viewed. My own truest self-conception in clothes – pyjamas- is of course best kept off the streets, but if I ever do feel like
going out that way, in a pair of furry slides, to seize the day in
the clothes I just slept in, well, there’s always LA. n
Americans
have no idea
that when
I say, “It’s a
brand called
G e o rge,”
this means I
bought it for
a tenner in a
supermarket
called AsdaGETTY IMAGES; SHUTTERSTOCK
In New York,
clockwise from
top left: Kendall
Jenner; Hailey
Bieber; Karlie
Kloss; Gigi Hadid10-19-Well-Zadie.indd 239 16/08/2019 13:32