A WARDROBE ALREADY DECIDED
Joan Didion and the freedom of not reinventing yourself
In one of her last interviews, published by Time in 2021, Joan Didion was asked about being a style icon. “I don’t know that I am one,” she replied. By then, the rest of the world had more or less decided otherwise. The sunglasses, the loose hair, the cashmere sweaters and long dresses had become almost as recognizable as the books.
Haley Mlotek once described Didion as a cultural “mental shortcut,” which feels about right. She had come to stand for an entire collection of qualities without needing to say very much at all: intelligence, independence, good taste, a certain melancholy. And then there were the clothes.
Born in Sacramento in 1934, Didion became one of the defining writers of New Journalism. She wrote for Vogue, Esquire and other publications, documenting California, politics, Hollywood and the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. Her writing moved easily between what was happening around her and what was happening inside her head. The ease was deceptive. Didion was famously careful with her sentences. Her wardrobe seems to have required considerably less negotiation.
During her years as a reporter, she kept a packing list taped inside her closet door. Two skirts. Two jerseys or leotards. One pullover sweater. Then, among the practicalities: a mohair throw, bourbon and baby oil. The point was to be able to leave for an assignment “without thinking.” Behind one of the most referenced wardrobes of the twentieth century was, essentially, a system for not thinking about clothes. It worked.
There is something rather appealing about that now. We have become used to the idea that identity should be made visible through consumption, that clothes should say who we are, what we know and perhaps even where we belong. Personal style has become another form of self-production: documented, refined, reconsidered and continually updated.
We find someone whose style we admire, borrow the look for a while and move on when another reference takes her place. The clothes change, the references change, the version of ourselves being presented changes with them. Yet for all this insistence on individuality, the results can look remarkably similar. In trying to look individual, we can end up spending a remarkable amount of time looking like everyone else.
Didion had clearly decided how she wanted to dress. This is not to say that her style emerged from nowhere. No personal style does. We borrow, notice, imitate and absorb things from other people. The difference is what happens next. Didion seems to have arrived at a visual language that felt like hers and then, for the most part, stopped renegotiating it. She repeated herself.
Look through photographs of Didion over the years and the same things keep appearing. Simple dresses. Oversized shirts. Cashmere. Dark glasses. Loose hair. Sandals or bare feet. Very little announces itself as fashion. She simply looks like Joan Didion.
In “Goodbye to All That,” she remembers arriving in New York at twenty in a new dress that had seemed very smart back in Sacramento. By the time she reached Idlewild Airport, it already seemed less so. We never find out much about the dress itself. What matters is that it had worked in one place and suddenly didn’t in another. Clothes often appear in her writing this way: as small details that locate a person within a room or a particular world. Didion understood perfectly well that clothes communicate. Her own, however, seem to have had another job. They had to let her move around.
While reporting in San Francisco in 1967 among the teenagers, runaways and counterculture figures who would later appear in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion was asked by British Vogue what she had worn. “I went as myself,” she said. It is an almost annoyingly good answer. There was no reporter costume, no apparent interest in becoming someone else for the occasion. She wore what she normally wore and went to work.
Even when photographed for fashion — for Gap with her daughter Quintana, or decades later for Céline — the clothes somehow remained secondary to the person wearing them. Over time, the repetition became a style of its own. The sunglasses became the sunglasses. The simple dresses became Didion dresses. Even the less glamorous things acquired significance: fur boots, old sweaters, an apron printed with “Maybe Broccoli Doesn’t Like You Either.”
After her death, the fascination extended to practically everything she had touched. Her furniture, books and household objects sold for nearly $2 million at auctions. People wanted the objects because they had belonged to her, as though some small part of the person might still be contained in them. There is a certain irony to it. A woman remembered for having such an unmistakably personal style became a style icon precisely in the conventional sense—someone whose individuality other people tried to reproduce.
Perhaps that is where the real appeal of Didion’s style lies — in the quiet radicalism of deciding what feels like your own and simply staying with it. Perhaps personal style begins where the search for it ends. “I went as myself.”