Fashion Neurosis with Zadie Smith

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1:10Hi, come in.

1:17Welcome to Fashion Neurosis, Zadie Smith. Thank you for having me. I wanted to ask why you chose what you're wearing today. I think I was trying to will spring to arrive. So between November and late February, I would seem to wear black every day. And then when March comes, I try and add colour. And pink is, for me, the beginning of spring. Well, it didn't work. It didn't work. It never works in this country. But in America, it always worked. They have that very banal expression which is true March comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion Yeah It's been going like a lion since about January Yeah, it's exhausting, it's really hard to get dressed for But I'm just tired of wearing winter coats and I'm done Do you have any obsessions at the moment?

2:21I maybe have an obsession about not looking ridiculous which is maybe a preoccupation of women in their late 40s so I have a little more anxiety getting dressed than I used to you ask yourself a lot of questions like are these jeans or does this skirt or will this coat etc I do that a lot these days does it relate back to anything like did anyone in your family dress in an embarrassing way? I mean, no, I have an amazing example. My mother, I mean, she dresses, I would say, she dresses to be the centre of attention and she always did. But she was very good at it and very chic, actually. She wears lots more colour now, but when we were young, she was kind of a specialist in like silky black separates everything very clean lines and very elegant I'm sure she's the only Jamaican woman wearing a beret around Wilson in the late 70s early 80s so she was very chic and she absolutely has not gone quietly into that night she she dresses more and more outrageously as she gets older yeah it's interesting the thing of your mother or one's mother dressing in a kind of beautiful way but it happened to be embarrassing at the time or or just distracting I think I mean we're not very different in age she's only not 20 years older than me.

4:03So there's often been periods where we've looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. And that seems to be happening again, actually. But she definitely, she, you know, she really had great taste and no makeup. I mean, she didn't need any makeup. So that's also something that has kind of impressed on my brain. Like I wear a bit of lipstick, but I mainly just focus on clothes. Yeah, my mother, she, I mean, she dressed as a hippie and she had these like beautiful clothes and she was beautiful. But because we were very poor, it felt really awkward and it felt it drew attention to us in a way that was hard to sort of, it was somehow invasive.

4:58People felt that they could comment on how we were because we were, you know, we were hitching or something. We didn't have protection. Right. And you want your mother to look like everybody else. Even today I went out, took my son to school in a T-shirt which said black nerd and I was wearing a white Kangol cap and yellow library socks that look like they've been, I mean, they've got the kind of stamp of a library on them. I think I must have got them for the New York Public Library. And, you know, he was distraught, which was fair. But, yeah, there's that tension between not embarrassing your children and wanting to dress as you please.

5:39Yeah. I know. It's a very delicate tightrope. um I remember my sister wanted wanted my mother to wear a brown crimpling trouser suit and have black curly hair like the woman who lived up the road they want you to look like a normal mum but I think there is no such thing really and I notice all kinds of little expressions of style in in the women I live around and particularly of your generation right like so you see all these mums and you can kind of detect which one was the raver which one was the indie kid which one was a sneakerhead it's all like lost in the winds of time but you can still see these little glimpses of the 90s or whatever I think it was the same with my mum's generation my dad wanted to be like a 50s beatnik and my mum wanted to be yeah a hippie or some chic North African living in Paris yeah sounds really good but of course it always sounds good to everyone else but do you have any fashion dreams ever um I mean I quite often think dream about clothes not so much now but in my 30s when getting dressed was a big drama and I was I was really into it um I would often think about outfits or imagine I had things I didn't have and also because I when I was about 33 maybe a bit younger 31 or 32 I lost my entire wardrobe in a fire so for ages after that I'd be thinking that I had things that I no longer had you know dresses that I wanted or missed or so that used to turn up in dreams sometimes god that sounds so stressful I mean it wasn't great Yeah, I lost everything and then I had to start again.

7:38I still sometimes think about individual items in that wardrobe that were so lovely, but yeah, all gone. What did you start with when you started again?

7:52Trying to think. I mean, at that point, then I had some money. When I first started buying clothes, the first thing I actually bought for myself was when I went to college and I got a student loan and instead of spending it on necessities, I immediately went and bought some red and white Nike Air Max and was so proud of myself. But after the fire, I think I was living in Italy and I probably would have bought something from the little boutique shops there. You know, it's like Paris, you're always buying individual strange little things. I remember I remember Nick's for some reason my husband bought a t-shirt which says I have a cold robot heart I remember that that was sometime after the fire but I don't remember what I bought I think if you have the right outfit you can think better um I think when thinking and articulating is is so important to you which clearly is to you part of my salute you know part of what makes my brain and my mind feel secure is my outfit.

9:01And I think that's why I became a fashion designer. I mean, it's changed. I can remember when I first became a writer, it's such a different time, 1999. If I spoke anywhere, or when I started teaching, because I started teaching quite young, the emphasis was always on, you know, the same with stand-up comedians at the same period, like don't like don't let on you're a woman almost you didn't want to if you had to be taken seriously so you couldn't wear anything to uh I don't know feminine or I was always trying to walk that line to look like a serious person it seems so funny to me now um but I remember dressing like that like if I had to give a reading I would be like all lady writers in the 90s in a black blazer and a black shirt and some black jeans black boots like it's it's kind of ridiculous um but then that faded away and you think particularly living in Italy and seeing women at all levels of society even though it's such an unbelievably misogynist country sorry Italy but it is the weird uh flip side of it is that it's it doesn't make this puritanical thing about women and beauty so powerful women can be very very dressed and still considered powerful it's like a weird flip side of patriarchy so there's not a lot else in Italian life I would adopt but that part I found quite interesting that there was no contempt for the idea of a woman dressing up yeah Yeah, I lived in Italy for a couple of years and I agree that that aspect is really good.

10:45I mean, there's some sort of further misogyny that happens here about that when a woman does make an effort to look nice, it's so up for grabs, really. It's up for sort of being derided. Right. And it's very empowering because we're taught that, you know, you shouldn't care about your appearance, but it's a means to an end. So it's a strategy. So, yeah. And actually it's very effective. Also, I think there's something a bit darker about it, which I only understood when I published because I'd never considered myself. I was kind of an awkward looking kid. I couldn't dress. I was very much in the shadow of my mother.

11:28So I never thought about anything apart from my work. And then when I published and I learned to dress a bit, I kept on reading these pieces about me saying, well, she can't be good because look at her. And then I thought about it and I thought, what does that actually mean? It must mean that in England, the idea of female beauty or attraction is antithetical to the idea of intellect. So the point is, why would you bother being smart if you can be pretty? That was the argument. Like she can't be smart because if you're pretty, then that's what you get, what you need as a woman. and why would you bother doing anything else?

12:03And vice versa, if you're smart, you must have become smart because you couldn't get whatever England has to give you any other way. I mean, that is such an extraordinary set of ideas when you unpack them. It is. It's totally... I mean, they completely go against each other because the brilliant combination is to be both or it isn't... They're not mutually exclusive, like being intelligent or having intelligence that you know how to use partly in how you dress is so much fun. So intelligence doesn't only reside in intellect, does it? I just, I found it really interesting. I realized that that's what these men think.

12:46They think that beauty is a kind of tool used against them and a very effective one. They understand it's effective, but once a woman has it, why would she bother with any other tools of life? So that was kind of instructive. But yeah, I guess living in Italy, watching, you know, literary critics and mathematicians and physicists all on telly done up in these interesting ways, I found it kind of engaging, just surprising because I'd never seen anything like that in England. Yeah, my father used to start a painting at the point between the eyes and I wondered where you start an outfit.

13:26I'm usually lying in bed and I think,

13:31I do think of lipstick and a colour, a kind of colour scheme to go with it. I feel like I almost never get it wrong. And then sometimes I, very recently I got it so tremendously wrong and I was really shocked. part of it was the problem that the dress I was wearing the zip split at the last minute and then I had to go to this very fancy thing and the and the dress code was business attire which I realized did my head in like no dress code has ever because what is my business attire pajamas usually and a beanie every day for 25 years so I literally went to this thing dressed as Stella McCartney was there and explained to me I looked like a secretary in Nat West in the 70s behind a bank till.

14:27And she was correct. I just lost the plot. So sometimes I put an outfit together in seconds, usually in my mind. And I always think that I go with my gut and it's like playing a character, you play a role. And I really realized when I did this thing a few days ago, that the role was so unfamiliar to me, business attire, that I just absolutely screwed the pooch. It was terrible. And yeah, it was awful. And just as you say, because I was so badly dressed and so so wrong I couldn't really think I kept on talking nonsense I sweated profusely it was like a full disaster yeah but I'm interested you think of lipstick at the same time as as your well it's the only adornment yeah it's the only I can't I just don't I find makeup really really boring and I don't have any patience for it so lipstick is the one thing and uh I kind of no I guess I only have two modes which is bright red no three dark red or a light pink and that kind of sorts in my mind and then along various lines of uh how masculine do I want to be or how feminine and that changes day by day like sometimes I really feel much more butch and want to be in a full suit and much less common now is this kind of girlish dress thing but sometimes I used to wear a lot of dresses but less now do you remember the first time in your life you found a piece of clothing that made you feel different um I mean by different I mean it sort of gave you something it acted for you I think um gosh yeah there was a that a dress which went up in that fire it was by I think it was a French brand and I can't remember who it was exactly now but it was a I guess a tea dress like a 1940s tea dress but new and just fit uh perfectly and when I was in it I felt like uh Joan Crawford who is one of my great um fashion inspirations um and just very happy that kind of dress it's Joan Crawford's such a good example it is feminine but it's also not it's like they're very bossy those dresses and I mean the one style I cannot abide personally is that kind of boho hippie skirt peasant I know ladies look lovely in it but I it's like antithetical to my entire existence I could never wear anything like that so large periods of the 90s were painful for me that kind of Glastonbury look and I can't stand it I kind of prefer like take inspiration from the kind of formal way you get in places like Ghana or Nigeria like bright lines, powerful outfits, all those 1940s lady movie stars like Crawford.

17:41Yeah, I really agree about the boho. I find that totally undermining. If I had to go out dressed like that, I wouldn't know who I was at all. I'd be so miserable. And it's about a certain kind of prettiness. Like, I don't know, someone like Sienna Miller is pretty. But I'm not pretty. I also have no aspirations. I'm not concerned with prettiness. So for me, it's just not a thing that I would ever be interested in wearing or being. Yeah, because the Ghana outfit that you described is when you said that, I thought that's my version, that my version of that is to wear a suit and a tie. And I feel much more feminine within a more formal dressing structure.

18:27Yeah, it has to be formal. Like I can't, I think my least favourite hymn in the world is that handkerchief hymn. Oh my God, that is an abomination. Or anything with fringes, tassels. I can't, anything that's not distinct or isn't a clean line. I cannot, anything silly. I just can't abide anything like that. I can't wear it. But I think it's so good to know what you can't wear. It just makes life much quicker. You go into a shop and 85 % of the clothes there are just filed under, not for me. Yes, yeah. So it's a very quick process. No, it's very soothing, actually, because instead of there being, you know, an awful amount of choice that leaves you then completely confused, you see immediately what's there for you.

19:19Right. It's either for you or not, and then you're done and you're empowered. That's it. But that's also about not being a leaf in the wind of trend. I think that's a line of Martin Amess's. So you can't be opening magazines and thinking, oh, it's whatever it is, skinny jeans are in. That's just absurd. You have to think about what works with your body and with your sensibility even more importantly. But then weirdly within those trends, when they mostly don't suit you suddenly spy something yeah sometimes it's a gift it's it's like when the kids came up with I don't know something like the word they as a pronoun like oh yeah that's a that's a fantastic idea it's like something that comes to you as a gift from a younger generation so that's certainly true of jeans like every now and then some kid invents a different way of wearing a jean and you're like oh yeah that's much better I hated like I I wore a lot of boot cut jeans but I was really grateful when that died I never need to see another pair of those jeans again my next question is very much on this subject of if you fancy someone but don't like their clothes does it kill your attraction to them that's interesting I'm thinking I'm trying to work if I'm more judgmental about women or men's clothing in this department,

20:49I think it might be a close run thing. I once saw a very beautiful girl at a literary event in formal shorts and I just could not ever take that person seriously again in any form, in literature or in person. So some things like that I just cannot, I can't. If you turn up to an evening event in formal shorts, I can't. That's it. There can be no attraction, sexual or personal or anything. With men, I... Yeah, I think there can be... That thing of men of my generation dressing in exactly the same cargo shorts and Adidas tops that they were wearing in 1996, I find pretty tough to take. but um i don't know i think with maybe with men clothes can really make a man like really make him attractive when he might not otherwise be whereas i don't know women i'm less sure about that what kind of clothes for men because i mean i i find that lots of men are famously have no idea really what they see something in a catalogue and they buy those that thing and there's something very kind of endearing about a man just wearing some clothes yeah I mean I I always think I would have been a good stylist and when I think about my female friends I'm always excited to I'd love to go help them get dressed or point them towards things or send them links or but if you ask me how to dress a man I literally if I walk into a men's clothes shop I just don't even know what I'm looking at it just seems to be just I have no opinion I have no idea I don't understand how men get dressed at all and yet when you see a man is well dressed you're like oh you look great but I don't know where he found those clothes I wouldn't be able to find them so to me it's a complete area of mystery I know that there are certain kinds of like really good Japanese jeans that sometimes men wear, they look amazing, but I don't know how you get those.

23:04I can't buy my husband anything at all because I don't understand men's shops. I don't know. On the hanger, you can't tell what you're looking at, whereas with women's clothes, in a second, you can tell exactly what it is, what it would look like on, who it suits. So I'm in the dark a little bit there. Also, I find something about, I mean, I find it much more difficult when a man has tried to dress in a kind of groovy way or trendy or something and then it's so painful. I mean, I remember one incident with this guy I was seeing and he came to see me dressed up and he looked like someone in the chorus of a pantomime and it was so shocking.

23:47Yes, it can go so wrong. But my way of addressing it was to, you know, I knew it was a really bad sign and I knew that really I ought to run a mile, but because I wasn't really ready to run a mile, I overrode my feeling by falling more in love with him as to sort of overcome this terrible kind of... Oh, God, and this terrible outfit. Yeah, the terrible outfit, but, I mean, in the end, the outfit won out, but... I think you see it sometimes with young male actors who've been dressed by stylists. they look lost and like the clothes are wearing them, as they say, and just completely it hasn't worked in any way.

24:32So I always find that a little bit depressing, that particularly with young men, the style should come from you. And some of it is like enjoyable eccentric, like I saw a picture of Paul Mescal, who had for some reason cut his own sweat top into a kind of belly top and his shorts, I think. He cut them with a pair of scissors. And that was a good look. Like he'd made an effort. I like that kind of ingenuity. God, really? Yeah, it was quite a look. I suppose if you can pull it off. If you can pull it off. But pulling it off sometimes just means doing it. And even though it's kind of horrifying, it's something.

25:16Yeah. But I'm not sure how attractive. Well, I also think, you know, Black Streetwear, both in America and here, is pretty awesome. It's always attractive. It's simple. It's always, you know, the fresher it is, the fresher the sneakers, the fresher the sweats. I love all of that. It's like a tux or something. It's always well done. Are there certain clothes that make you feel better when you're feeling low? Yeah, if I'm wearing block colours, yellow, blue, red and green together, for example, or sorbet colours, light pink, light yellow, light blue, and the sun's out, I feel very cheery. I really like wearing an African print in the summer.

26:09That cheers me, a kenti cloth.

26:14and when I was younger I used to really love wearing 50s silhouettes I haven't done that in years but all the way through my 30s like I really enjoyed wearing these sometimes vintage from Alfie's you know off Church Street but like proper crinolines so funny to remember now big 50s skirts But, yeah, that always made me happy. What about bags? Do you have any feelings about bags? That's only come with age. When I was young, I used to think, who are all these sad old women who, like, want bags and shoes? I don't think they're the life. That's what I used to think about. Everyone who was concerned with bags, and I had literally no interest in them, apart from like 50s clutch bags which I just get from any secondhand stall or um but of course as you get older the attraction of bags as soon as it becomes obvious you don't have to fit into a bag or a shoe uh they're always available to you um I still can't I honestly cannot spend money on a bag and I never have I bought them for my mum because she likes to show off a nice bag but Like it's, I'm incapable of walking into a fancy bag store and laying out money for a brand.

27:38It just, it makes me feel sick. So I can't do that. But I do admire the shape of certain bags. And I've been lucky sometimes with like Loewe Jonathan Anderson, who is a friend of my husband's. Some of his family is from Northern Ireland and they knew my husband's family. He gave me a few Loewe bags and they're amazing. They're absolutely amazing. I don't think I could buy one, sorry, John, but I am really amazed to own them. They're like works of art. Yeah. Yeah, I feel similarly about bags. I like a kind of cheap, rubbishy bag that somehow, I've bought things down Portobello. I bought this fantastic Lion of Judah bag that was 10 quid.

28:27I love things like that. But shoes are in a different category. She's in a different category. I find like bags, like Chanel bags, I find that really kind of, it's like anti-fashion to me. I don't get it. I know that it's got kind of classic connotations, but I really don't enjoy it. But sometimes big totes, I don't mind. But the reality is I've usually got a canvas bag. So it seems, and I've got to carry a laptop almost always. But I have one big, beautiful pink tote leather bag from New York and a red one. So those kind of alternate depending on what's on my mouth. But shoes, shoes is a whole other affair.

29:16God, shoes is just what I live for. That's where I start with an outfit. I think how do I, how elevated, I mean literally how elevated do I want to be today, either in a trainer or in a huge something that goes up. And then I just feel like, it's like my soul is repositioned. I just, I feel a different type of confidence, a different type of sense of myself. I mean I feel I have a real hard time with it because you know I spent my whole childhood and adolescence reading great amounts of feminist theory and I am a feminist and I find heels really stressful as a concept and yet I have owned so many of them.

30:04never ever ever a stiletto I can't I hate to be uh unstable but platform heels big square heels I mean particularly in my 20s and 30s and it was exactly that the feeling of that when I was in them I didn't feel vulnerable or the kind of feelings I don't enjoy I really did feel like I was about to stomp somebody into the ground and I really enjoyed it I enjoyed the height particularly I am tall but I would really love to be taller um for me as far as women go the taller the better so I just I liked being tall um and then I mean it's all kind of you know for I think 20 years I didn't buy Nike because I read Naomi Klein's No Logo it was a great book she published same year I published White Teeth and I swore to myself I will never buy another a Nike trainer.

31:03And, you know, I grew up on Nikes and they were, you know, grew up in Wilson. They are, they are fashion. Anyway, about four years ago, I broke and I bought Air Max red, white, the same ones I would have had in 1992. Sorry, Naomi. And I really do enjoy them so I have those I have a silver pair and I have a gold pair that's the other thing I do pink and red lipstick or silver and gold so lesson of my mum's I mean I'm sure it's everyone's lesson that you can only wear all silver and or all gold never mix them so uh I need to reiterate nothing I'm talking about is actually real silver or actually real gold but they're separated um and i a lot of my outfits are based around whether i'm silver or gold today yeah i mean i don't think being sexy is at odds with being a feminist at all or heels or anything it's not the sexiness i hate i don't refuse to be uncomfortable or uh in any way you know just not free yeah so when a heel uh gives me pain or slows me down or I cannot.

32:25So stilettos are not a possibility for me. I can't have it as a kind of liability. So I do have a conflicted feeling about it

32:39because I do like the costuming part of feminine life and I've learned to enjoy it more and think of it as a kind of art form, mainly through actually meeting fashion designers and fashion people who I realise take what they do as seriously as I take what I do. And that they're making the world. Like one of the things when you look at fashion history, I just wrote this novel set in the Victorian period, and I read a lot of books about Victorian clothes, is that they're genuinely, it's not a new thing to say, but they are expressing the mood of the time. like in in the most practical and direct sense so you can look at a photograph of any decade in 20th century and know within a second what decade it is and it's it's from what people are wearing it's immediate even more than their haircuts or anything else so it's a way of expressing time so i i think when i was younger i just i just thought of it as a system that oppresses women and so I found it really hard to take but I've learned to have more fun with it and think of it as like a just as like what I do when I'm making characters on the page like it's characterization except I'm the character a friend told me he masked his shyness with misbehavior have you ever tried that do you dress up or down with shyness um I absolutely am shy in a sense I'm not because I spend so much time by myself during the day in the evenings.

34:18I'm a bit I have I think I have like a permanent lockdown personality. So I'm just a bit rusty. I'm aware of people having jobs and being with colleagues all day long. And so having these social skills a bit more fluid than I have them. So when I go out in the evening, I am liable to have an awkward conversation or say the wrong thing or just not know how to talk to people. So I absolutely dress, you know, I think I learned it from my mom. Like she enters the room like a queen. And that means that people are wary of you. They might be a bit scared of you. It gives you a bit of time to get yourself together.

35:01And I just much prefer to enter a room like that than to enter in a kind of mousy or vulnerable way. so I things like capes are very important to me I like a good cape uh and I just uh I enjoy particularly when I lived in New York if I had to go to an event or a literary event I'd rather walk into a room in an outfit which makes people anxious to talk that they don't are too scared to come up to talk to me that's I guess that suits me better basically it's interesting what you just said because I was thinking about asking you what was the first thing you knew would invite disapproval and did it make you feel more free or more self-conscious but I'm very interested that it's part of your way of handling going into a room that there is a level of intimidation that creates a pause between people just being presumptuous about invading your space.

36:11I mean, it sounds a bit grandiose, but... I think people do, particularly in my world when I was young, people do talk at literary girls. They talk at them. They lecture them and they tell them what books they should read. There's a lot of that. And I didn't really want... it's kind of about wanting to be the person who's talking rather than the person who's being talked at. There's definitely a part of that. And sometimes it's a bit perverse. Like I, you know, if I was going to a very stuffy literary event, then I might want to wear a big Afro or, you know, to wear something quite street wearish or, you know, cause it's funny.

36:57It's funny. The contrast is funny it will amuse me at least when I was younger that everybody's dress like a blue stocking and I'm dressed in streetwear or sometimes the other way around you know like I go to a more street like party and then I'll I'll be dressed like a blue stocking something like that like the contrast amuses me I guess it works that way but it's never I don't know if I think if the aim was to to look pretty in the conventional sense that would be such a different to me that's such a vulnerable thing place to be like like if you as if you're asking the question when you enter the room am I pretty like that's something that I never ever wanted to ask or get the answer to I suppose just not a question that interests me do you remember the first thing you wore to be consciously attractive to someone?

37:54I mean, when I was in school, I, because I felt so outside of all of that, I had the kind of, I was just very angry about pretty people and their pretty clothes. I just didn't want to be involved with them. And I had that kind of resentful, like, oh, you do that and I'll sit here and read all day long. And so I was very negative about all of that. And in those days, it was kind of, we called them Becks. They were like beautiful North London girls in skinny white jeans and with huge blow dries. And then there were, I didn't aspire to that. But then the other girls, like the girls I knew, like black girls in big trousers and tiny belly tops.