To Pack and Wear:

2 skirts, 2 jerseys or leotards, 1 pullover sweater, 2 pair shoes, stockings, bra, nightgown, robe, slippers, cigarettes, bourbon

(The White Album, 1979)

This is a packing list – more specifically, Joan Didion’s packing list when she was at the peak of her journalistic career, a career that now cements her role as a pioneer of New Journalism. Didion may have started her career at Vogue, but fashion was never her concern. In all of her works – seven collections of essays, six screenplays, five novels, three memoirs – attention to fashion appears only briefly in this one essay from The White Album.

The list is minimal, uncomplicated. Didion does not seem to think it necessary to disclose details about her fashion choices – the hemline of the skirts, the neckline of the sweater, the type of shoes (flats or heels?) are ambiguous. We are left to imagine these obscurely described articles of clothing as plain and unassuming. Take a look at any photo of Didion from the 60s and 70s, and this assumption is verified.

“It is clear her fashion choices were not just minimalistic – they were in pursuit of invisibility”

Didion then goes on to instruct us to “Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture.” It is clear her fashion choices were not just minimalistic – they were in pursuit of invisibility. Fashion icons are rarely remembered for their pursuit of invisibility. Usually, the opposite is true; their fashion statements are what people remember them for. Think of Audrey Hepburn’s pearl necklace, Lady Gaga’s meat dress, Marilyn Monroe’s bright pink dress in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the list goes on.

It has therefore always been curious to me that Didion – a writer and journalist who avoided making remotely bold fashion choices – has become a fashion icon. In January 2021, less than a year before she passed away, Didion was interviewed by TIME magazine. When Feldman, the interviewer, asked her the question, “How does it feel to be a fashion icon?”, Didion humbly responded, “I don’t know that I am one.” The internet would suggest otherwise: Didion’s style is the topic of hundreds of fashion articles. Her Celine campaign – which became an internet sensation, picturing Didion at 80 years old – remains one of the only examples of a fashion house as large as Celine celebrating older women. Of course, this unconventional choice of model age for Celine was part of the reason this campaign went viral, but it does not fully explain why Didion is, to this day. seen as a style icon. Why have Didion’s very few dabblings in the world of fashion elicited such a disproportionate cultural response?

“Didion always maintained relevance as a writer, not because she reinvented herself to stay relevant, but precisely because of the opposite: she remained constant”

I think it has something to do with our culture’s fascination with Joan Didion’s persona rather than Joan Didion as a writer. How we dress is, in some way, an exterior reflection of our interior thoughts, and our culture seems to be fascinated with decoding the enigmatic interior life of Joan Didion – more interested in what she didn’t say rather than in what she had to say. This is most recently apparent in the rather controversial publication of Notes to John this year, an unedited version of diary entries written by Didion (never intended for public viewing) when she was seeing a psychiatrist in 1999.

Didion always maintained relevance as a writer, not because she reinvented herself to stay relevant, but precisely because of the opposite: she remained constant. We can see this reflected in her fashion choices by looking at her two major fashion campaigns – Gap (1989) and Celine (2015).

“With or without sunglasses, her gaze is formidable”

The contrast between these two brands couldn’t be more stark: Gap, an American casual clothing retailer, and Celine, a French luxury fashion house – the former found on the high street, the latter seen in Paris Fashion Week. The campaigns are separated by almost three decades. In her Gap campaign, Didion is pictured with her daughter who passed away in 2005, a decade before Didion’s Celine campaign. Despite these facts, Didion’s image remains remarkably consistent; she dons the same unrevealing neckline, the same iconic bob, staring directly at the camera. With or without sunglasses, her gaze is formidable. (Those iconic Celine sunglasses sold for $27,000 in an auction following Didion’s death.) Didion may be modelling for distinct fashion brands, but dressed in a minimal black turtleneck in both, she is in control, wearing what she’s most comfortable in: her uniform.

It is Didion’s immutability – and her refusal to cede to fashion trends or loud displays of style – that cements her status as a style icon. In the few instances this reclusive writer allowed herself to be captured by a camera lens, she consistently projected an achingly chic image of herself – etched into the popular imagination, her impenetrable gaze unwavering.