This past winter I survived the misery-months by reading all five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Many things happen in those diaries but the event that’s seared into my mind involves a new hat. It’s 1926 and the diary entry begins this way: “This is the last day of June & finds me in black despair because Clive laughed at my new hat, Vita pitied me, & I sank to the depths of gloom.” Oh, Virginia, girl—I feel you! The shame of wearing the too-big thing or the overly shiny thing or the thing that’s just wrong in every way for the occasion… We’ve all been there. And yet it had all started so well for Virginia: out on the town, on one of those free-wheeling London summer nights, heading to multiple parties with Vita Sackville-West, picking up friends along the way—and wearing this hat. Interestingly, she doesn’t tell us exactly what kind of a hat. We only learn that she was feeling neither one way or another about it, until she bumped into her sister, Vanessa—wearing a “quiet black hat”—and together everybody headed to the house of an old friend, the art critic Clive Bell. It was there that disaster struck: “Clive suddenly said, or bawled rather, what an astonishing hat you’re wearing! Then he asked where I got it. I pretended a mystery, tried to change the talk, was not allowed, & they pulled me down between them, like a hare; I never felt more humiliated… So I talked & laughed too much. Duncan prim & acid as ever told me it was utterly impossible to do anything with a hat like that… Came away deeply chagrined, as unhappy as I have been these ten years.”
Many of us will recognize this post-fashion-disaster shame spiral. But I’m going to suggest that while none of us enjoy appearing ridiculous, writers tend to be especially anxious about “looking the part.” Maybe because the part is so narrow. Actors and comedians and singers have a certain amount of permitted absurdity built into their job descriptions. Bankers and lawyers and teachers can all put on their silliest glad rags for a Saturday night or a party. But even on weekends writers are meant to look—what? Serious, I suppose. And dressing that part—while still taking pleasure in your clothes—can create a lot of anxiety. We’ll never know what was so terrible about Virginia’s hat, but it’s far from being the only piece of clothing that caused her to experience “frock consciousness,” as she called it. In the 1920s, she was photographed for Vogue wearing a borrowed Edwardian-style dress with puffed sleeves and a voluminous skirt, and you can see the worry on her face. A look of tragi-comic uncertainty, bordering on cringe, as if to say: is this the right sort of thing? All her life poor Virginia was caught between the poles of feeling overdressed and underdressed, equally uncertain at a society party as she was in a town hall lecturing about literature.
Can you be serious and seriously glamorous? I remember having a lot of frock consciousness when I first started teaching in Boston, that self-serious city. It felt impossible to veer very far from black jeans, black shirt, and black blazer if I had any hope of my students accepting me as their professor. A few years later, I moved to New York, which at that time belonged to Carrie Bradshaw, who thought nothing of walking down the street in a leotard and tutu. The Carrie effect was everywhere on the real-life streets of Manhattan and this loosened me up a bit. I bought thrift store dresses off the stalls that would periodically pop up on Third Street, and mixed them with fancy shoes and vintage coats.
And I was in good company. By the 2010s it was impossible not to notice that many of the women writers I knew in New York could give Carrie herself a run for her money. Every time I saw the writers Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton and Sheila Heti together, for example, I thought they looked more like three indie-movie actors heading for Sundance than people in my line of work. They weren’t just good dressers—they were great. (And wrote a wonderful book about clothes together.) Leanne in particular is and was a thrift store genius, and would periodically resell her second-hand clothes to the rest of us at all-day shopping parties in her apartment, at which the most expensive garments went for a hundred bucks. Meanwhile, my narrow dark jeans despaired and basically went into permanent retirement once they’d clocked my NYU colleague Katie Kitamura and her various adventures in trouser silhouettes. Why wear black when writers as good as Aminatou Sow, Sloane Crosley, and Ashley C. Ford were in every colour of the rainbow?
I had local historical precedent too. I thought often of Toni Morrison in her practically see-through Lurex at a disco. Of James Baldwin looking more like a ballet dancer than an author. I very quickly abandoned my anxiety and went absolutely berserk. For 10 years, I dropped my kids at school and then walked up Sixth Avenue to my NYU class dressed in every form of ridiculousness you can imagine. I’ve taught Kafka in a kaftan and Muriel Spark in sparkles. I’ve color-blocked for a class on The Bluest Eye and worn bright yellow platform shoes with one circular heel and one triangular to discuss the aesthetic theories of Susan Sontag. I couldn’t outdo or surprise my students, however, who were going for it just as hard. One summer, there was a trend for turning up in big pairs of knickers, like so many Lady Gagas.
I soon discovered there are no Clive Bells in Lower Manhattan. You really have to push the boat out to get as much as a head turn from anyone at all. No hat on this earth—no matter how loud or large—is going to shock commuters who regularly see a man walking a pot-bellied pig through the village or spot RuPaul at the corner of MacDougal. In Manhattan almost everybody was dressed like a character and it dawned on me that writers might even have a little advantage in that scenario, characters being our bread and butter. And I have to say, I had a great time, playing a “writer” in my New York days. Essentially, my whole wardrobe was a costume. Only when I returned to England did I realise that I owned no T-shirts, no sweatpants, and nothing in the way of “a normal pair of trousers.”
Recently I’ve been reminded that the world remains absolutely full of Clive Bells—and many of them seem to live in my neighborhood. A few days ago, I attempted to wear a simple red cotton jumpsuit with some red trainers and red lipstick but couldn’t get even as far as Sainsbury’s without raising multiple smirks and the repeated comment, “You off somewhere special?” So mostly I’m back in black and the only hats I wear are woolly ones when it’s raining. I try to avoid even the possibility of frock consciousness and read any invitation that I receive very carefully to establish if dressing up is actually required (it almost never is). I now understand that cocktail attire, in London, basically means “no jeans.” Dresses I used to wear to class in Manhattan, I would now only wear to a wedding or a very fancy affair.
But even from the sartorial sidelines of middle age, I cheer on every young writer who I spy eschewing the usual staid blazer and risking the ridiculous. Picture my delight at opening a copy of Money to Burn, by Danish writer Asta Olivia Nordenhof, whose author photo shows her in a red leotard with the words “Hot as Hell” emblazoned across her chest. More of that, please! It adds to the pleasure and variety and beauty of the world, which even writers—serious as we’re supposed to be—crave as much as the next fashion victim.
Dead and Alive: Essays by Zadie Smith is out on October 28.