On Joan Didion's Closet
Phoebe Philo's icon and muse.
In an interview for Time Magazine in 2021, one of her last interviews before passing, Joan Didion was asked about her role as a style icon: 'I don't know that I am one.' As much as the rest of the world was obsessed with her style choices and her furniture objects (the auction of her household items after her death netted nearly $2 million), for the journalist, novelist, and screenwriter, getting dressed was just another way of navigating life's everyday ordeals.
As a self-professed Didion fan, I've read everything from, about, or on her and have my Pinterest boards filled with pictures of her as the embodiment of all things tasteful, intellectual, and beautiful. Perhaps it's because she functions as a 'mental shortcut' as Haley Mlotek wrote for the Awl in 2015 (when Didion was all over Céline's ads), to all of these qualities that her figure appeals to me (and to so many) so much. The loose hair, the large sunglasses, the cashmere sweaters. The cigarettes, the long dresses, the bare feet.
She was the paramount of style for many, and as Mlotek argues, especially for a certain type of person: 'she requires very little explanation to a very large group of people, representing a class of consumers who tend to be young, female, upper middle class, white and somewhat inwardly tortured.' I not-so-secretly tick most of these boxes.
People have often tried to draw lines between her writing style and clothing choices. Born in California in 1934, Didion quickly became one of the pioneers of the New Journalism, along with other writers of the time like Tom Wolfe or Gay Talese, infusing her pieces with both facts and personal narratives while reporting the American social and political landscape of the 60s and 70s. Her writings were published in Time, Vogue, and Esquire during those years.
She was the quintessential observer, offering incredibly immersive perspectives on all the topics she touched. She could make the everyday elaborate and profound, almost magical even, combining stories and using her experience to narrate very specific contexts. Throughout all her pieces, she kept an incredibly controlled style (she admits her perfectionism in this interview from 1992, one of my favorites from her), measured her words, and revised paragraphs almost obsessively.
One of her most iconic moments is the packing list she had taped inside her closet door during the years she worked as a reporter. The list starts off with very general clothing items: '2 skirts' and '1 pullover sweater', and then becomes increasingly specific and peculiar ('mohair throw,' 'bourbon,' 'baby oil'). In her words, the list allowed her to pack 'without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do.' The list doesn't offer any sense of style or guidance, just practicality and decisiveness. Lots of it. As she mentions in the words that serve as a footnote, 'this was a list made by someone who prized control, yearned after momentum, someone determined to play her role as if she had the script, heard her cues, knew the narrative'.
Her self-assurance and methodical ways were instantly translated into her looks. In pictures, she's always in a silk dress, an oversized shirt, a cashmere sweater. Wearing those giant black sunglasses covering half her face. The hair loose and un-styled. Bare-footed or wearing either flip-flops or sandals. The permanent, slightly waif look, a mix of fragility and strength that seems to increase as she gets older. When hearing her in interviews, one can't help but notice her voice - low, delicate, and calm - her lips downturned, and her mouth barely open when speaking. No version of Didion seems to exist out of that ease, comfort, and effortlessness, a very distinct mix of elegance and melancholy.
Clothes to Didion weren't a way to know herself or experiment: they were a way to tell others who she was and how she wanted to be perceived. Of being in control. In 'Goodbye To All That,' one of the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she comments on a dress she bought back in California to wear on her first trip to New York. 'When I first saw New York, I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewind temporary terminal in a new dress which seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewind temporary terminal […]'. The silhouette of the dress, the color, where she bought it aren't important, but how she felt in it, out of place, uncomfortable.
Didion carefully chose the words on the page, and she selected her clothing items in the same way, with extreme consideration of the function and the possible outcomes. In the end, she was not just wearing clothes; she was reporting and writing in them. Clothes had to allow her to stay anonymous in a way, to 'pass on either side of the culture,' as she mentions at the end of the infamous packing list.
In a British Vogue interview from 1992, Georgina Howell asks her what she was wearing when reporting from San Francisco in 1967 while hanging out with 14-year-olds high on acid who had run away from home. 'I went as myself' was Didion's answer. 'I thought it would be dishonest to go in as anything other than what I was. Some people were amused by this. Some were derisive.'
Ultimately, her clothing decisions mattered less than the fact she made them and stuck with them, whatever those were. Including the 'maybe broccoli doesn't like you either' apron that was auctioned after her passing or the fur boots she wore when photographed at home, maybe because of the pain of Parkinson's disease. Maybe because of fashion. We'll never know. In everyone's favorite Didion essay, 'On self-respect,' she describes it as 'the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life.' Perhaps it's precisely that - flagrant self-respect - the key to that wardrobe of consistency and effortlessness.