Zadie Smith On Her Markedly Different Style In London Versus New York

By Zadie Smith27 October 2019

A transatlantic life has its complications – and none so tricky as nailing the looks, the author finds.

I work in an American university, but in the long academic holidays I come home, to England. Twice a year – and for the past 10 years – I’ve stood before an open suitcase in New York and thought: what do people wear in London? Or, conversely, if the suitcase is in London: what do they wear in New York? I always forget, I never get it right. I’ve turned up on a Tuesday night at a local pub dressed as you might for a quick pre-dinner cocktail with a girlfriend in Tribeca. (These are not the same outfits.) I’ve rocked up to Hampstead Heath for a picnic looking about ready for the Afropunk festival in Fort Greene. (Also not the same outfits.) A decade of travelling back and forth can create sartorial schizophrenia – but you learn a lot, too. For example: it’s perfectly acceptable, in New York, to put all your tragic mid-life-crisis energy into outdressing every other parent at Family Morning, yet in London, this is considered bad form. (A performance of maternal chaos is preferred.)

If you go on holiday with Londoners, you can take a “capsule wardrobe”, if you like. No one will ridicule you as you model your various outfits around a small Cornish town chock-a-block with screaming toddlers. (Of course, despite what the Sunday style sections may suggest, no one will pay you any mind, either.) But if you go on holiday with New Yorkers, any deviation from denim shorts, white shirt and the plainest possible sandals will make you look like a try-hard fool. You can’t stand an hour in line for lobster rolls in a pair of platform espadrilles.

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 as neutral a piece of clothing as a pair of Levi’s once were. It’s a long time since I wore Levi’s. In both cities, Levi’s are now for the young, worn mom-style, pulled up to the belly button and accompanied by a cropped white vest or a brutally ugly throwback sweater with a comedy logo (Care Bears, The Simpsons, DARE), or a clearly flammable shellsuit top, or a normcore flannel shirt, vintage crap, all of which looks inexplicably fabulous – on them. I think of it as a form of generation Z revenge dressing, intended to demonstrate – to the generation that crashed the economy and despoiled the planet – that we can’t buy back our youth or return to 1991 to reclaim what’s been lost. They wear it well.

Mass-market cheap clothes have a different life here and there. In New York, they tend to be poorly cut, with loose buttons and sticky zips. Often they look as if they’ve been constructed out of the remains of a ghost net, and rarely survive three washes. They do look good when brand new, but, again, mostly the young seem to benefit, or whoever can be bothered to trawl Lower Broadway on a weekly basis. In London, cheap clothes are so good, so plentiful, that only the very foolish and uncreative fail to make use of them. It’s the delight of the Londoner to turn up to a wedding or a club looking a million dollars in an outfit that cost £49.99, thus demonstrating a good eye, canny style and admirable thriftiness. Nobody in London is impressed by the branded bags, shoes and watches that New York women always look so proud to own and yet whose only possible message to the passing observer is that there’s money in them there hills. Cheap kids’ clothes, in England, are of astonishing quality when compared with their American equivalent. Every September our children are flattered at the school gate by Americans who have no idea that when I say, “It’s a brand called George,” this means I bought it for a tenner in a supermarket called Asda.

“Unending beauty, ever fresh, ever new, very cheap and within the reach of everybody, bubbles up every day of the week from an inexhaustible well.” That’s Virginia Woolf writing about the experience of shopping on Oxford Street. The only update required is our present guilty awareness of the ugly labour conditions underpinning our fast-fashion pleasures. Most Londoners don’t brave Oxford Street very often, but they go to the identical stores in their own hoods, and pick through the piles for a bargain. If you’re clever about it, as my mother is, these purchases act as a base against which to set off your own more fabulous items, in her case, a collection of South African Zulu crowns, that look even more regal combined with a shiny minidress rescued from the sale rack at the back of Cricklewood’s Matalan. The first ennobles the second, until you can’t tell the difference. I was born into this London habit of mix and match and I cannot change it in New York. My “Rachel Comey” white heels are actually Zara, all my “gold” and “silver” hoop earrings are from branches of the Duane Reade pharmacy, and my fanciest underwear can be bought in packs of 10 at Gap. However, New York has instilled in me the importance of tailoring, of a good dress that reaches to the knee and can be worn anywhere, and of the kind of well-made brogues in which you can walk 40 blocks – and I spend too much money on all of them. I look around and see that I am not alone. Notwithstanding the aforementioned cult of youth, grown-up dressing is respected and celebrated in New York, and constantly supported by other grown-up women who will stop you in the street, sometimes several times a day, if they see something they admire. I don’t think there’s a higher compliment in this world than being stopped by a stylish 50-year-old and asked where you got your winter coat. (It is, in terms of its effect on the spirit, the exact opposite of being cat-called by a bloke in a van.)

In the New York summer, things get more complicated: few can remain stylish in that heat. The temptation to go floaty and diaphanous is strong, like a net curtain awaiting a passing breeze. I hate floaty. And diaphanous. Thankfully there is very little boho spirit in Manhattan, and hardly anyone spends the season in those long, flowy, tasselled or fringed garments that you do seem to get a lot of in London, and which entail being able to create a silhouette out of the natural contrast between your waist and the rest of your body. Having no waist, I can’t rely on such fripperies. And though crisp, tailored shorts or the kind of summer dresses that need ironing will get you some strange looks in the London parks (where wrinkled linen and cotton sundresses abide), in New York, summer proves no obstacle to a certain formality. Formality. Is that the key difference? Brooklyn would laugh at the suggestion, but to my eye both Brooklyn’s transplanted hipsters and its original natives appear – when compared with their London equivalents in Shoreditch or Harlesden – somehow more arch, more obviously stylised, more in costume, more like someone on TV. Which leads many to the argument that London fashion is, by 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 that leads 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.

This article was originally published in the October 2019 issue of British Vogue.

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