Smith, 47, owns some of the most glamorous and hilarious designer brands, including a sculptural gold Alexander McQueen necklace and giant bubbles from Alaïa, the famously sexy and intelligent French brand directed by Peter Murrier. wearing the splendor of Maison Her Margiela tabi boots are what Allbirds technically handles for the art world, a fun and terrifying uniform of attribution. Smith looks at the camera with a confident and knowledgeable look, as if to say, “This is fascinating stuff, it’s a lot of fun.”
Ever since she became famous, her interest in fashion was evident when she published her first book, White Teeth, in 2000, which she wrote while studying at Cambridge University. She appears at the reading in a patterned dress with snug heels and a signature turban. (She wore it on the cover of cult British women’s fashion magazine Gentlewoman in 2016, and in March 2022 she sat front row at Loewe’s fashion show, the pale pink of Sunshine Yellow. It swayed comfortably with the Loewe jacket.)
“I waste a lot of money on fashion. I have a very clear understanding of my body and what looks good on me,” said Jing Tseng, the profile’s author. I will speak to Mr. “I don’t want to know how much it costs. I have a completely guilty relationship with it.” and boots designer Rachel Comey and Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson.
Giles Hattersley, Vogue’s European feature director, called Smith a “magazine friend,” and she wrote an article about Queen Elizabeth II in British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful’s debut issue in 2017. I pointed out that I wrote In recent years, the magazine’s pages have featured the likes of Sally Rooney, Isabel Wilkerson, Leila Slimani, Salman Rushdie and Jennifer Egan, and Granta’s list of the best young British novelists. has a tradition of posting group portraits. But given the timing of Smith’s new novel coming out on September 5, she said, “We wanted to do our best to shoot and interview for the worldwide edition.”
Still, Hattersley says the relationship between Smith and fashion is an anomaly. “I hope you don’t mind me saying Zeddy isn’t into the model dog and pony show of the day. But she’s more personal and intellectual than many writers.” I am also interested in fashion on a much higher level.”
The story received rave reviews online. The two similar shots of the model on the cover of the magazine, Vogue and British Vogue, were taken by Vogue regular Rafael Pavarotti and are more traditional fashion magazines. Content. Celebrity models in familiar, glamorous clothes appear there to promote an upcoming tell-all documentary. Apple TV Plus in late September. They are also rigid in comparison with the passionate naturalism of Smith’s spread, begging to question whether the author is a better model than his four supers.
“More of this, please!” Literary critic Barry Pierce said: On X, formerly known as Twitter, to add: “Why doesn’t this happen all the time? Why no cover shoots with authors? They literally serve every time.”
Why really? For most of the 20th century, being in Vogue was as coveted as having your byline in a New York book review. Joan Didion started her career in magazines. (An essay she published as part of her junior staff, On Self-Esteem, is still widely circulated in her writing courses and is the fodder for her Instagram.)
Tina Brown and Graydon Carter have made writers such as Donna Tartt and Rushdie regulars at Vanity Fair, giving them the full treatment of Annie Leibovitz with creepy profiles that make heart appealing. argued that it could be the equivalent of a well attraction. cut suit.
But over the past decade, the worlds of literature and fashion, and more specifically, aesthetics, superficial pleasures, and habits of taking pleasure in the kind of beauty that feels frivolous or trivial, have diverged. Writers still appear in magazines. Edited by Mel Ottenberg, Interview is particularly good at capturing emerging authors such as Emma Klein, Madeleine Cash, and Otessa Moshfeg, and in the September 2021 issue of Italian Vogue, Shock It featured Klein and Moshfeg, photographed by jock artist Jordan Wolfson.
But such moments are so rare that they often feel like a challenge. And as magazines increasingly exist as an event business and community brand-building exercise, or to power stories that drive traffic that can cost huge digital advertising dollars, magazine pages Why not turn over more pages instead of the ones you find valuable and interesting? What do you think the magazine will sell?
Perhaps younger writers simply have a more contradictory relationship to fashion. Although clothing has been a literary staple for centuries, either as a clue to a character’s social status or interests, or simply as a source of fine prose, clothing has largely disappeared from modern fiction. I turned it off (Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, Jean Lys, Tom Wolfe).
And it is true that earlier generations of writers had a more fluent relationship with clothing than their contemporary counterparts. Daniel Steele has used some of the wealth he has amassed from selling body slippers to assemble a world-class haute couture collection. Fran Leibowitz, on the other hand, is celebrated for her wit as well as her custom cowboy boots handcrafted on Savile Row and vintage Levi’s and Anderson & Shepherd jackets.
Didion’s relation to clothing was almost sublimely flawless. In one of her most famous essays of the 1960s, she looked at her personal inventory as a lens for explaining her declining mental health. She also appeared in a Celine ad in 2015 wearing giant Garbo-esque sunglasses.
Perhaps these artists understand how the aesthetics of clothing and the enjoyment of identity complement their work. Perhaps they just feel that struggling to think of the right words or the accuracy of a sentence is a nice or luxurious job to be rewarded.
Or maybe it’s just that fashion brands and designers don’t know how to interact with the world of books. Valentino’s Spring 2024 men’s collection, which incorporates passages from T magazine editor-in-chief Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel A Little Life into jackets and handbags, is too crude a representation of fashion’s power to inspire. It seemed like
Yet isn’t the writer’s job to tackle contradictions, unsolvable problems, and irrational human behavior? Fashion, with its increasingly complex dilemmas and mischievous entanglements with every aspect of capitalism, is like an epic novel.