There can’t be a novelist who writes with more authority about clothes. If you are going to pay serious attention to women—to their sense of themselves, their position (social, political, economic), their assumptions about the face they are presenting to their world, it helps a good deal if you know exactly what they are wearing. Joan Didion always knows which woman is wearing a Liberty shift and which one a crepe-de-chine wrapper, who’s in a Peck & Peck silk shirtdress with a fallen hem and who’s in a navy-blue dress with Irish lace at the collar and cuffs. She learned from the magazine about houses and decorating, two subjects that are of immeasurable usefulness to anyone who is going to write about what Tom Wolfe calls status culture.

(from Caitlin Flanagan’s “The Autumn of Joan Didion”)

ignoring the de/merits of the rest of the piece for a moment, i kept coming back to this assertion in Flanagan’s piece about Didion. i’m a Didion fan—albeit not at the level that Flanagan describes, in that i don’t consider her prose to be life-changing—but that’s irrelevant here.

i grew up obsessed with Vogue; i hung tear sheets from issues on my bedroom walls and created scrapbooks of season trends. i sewed my prom dresses because the malls in Pittsburgh couldn’t match the fashion found in those pages and i couldn’t afford to buy the real thing. and i started my media career as an intern in the WWD closet. in my arrogance alone, perhaps, i feel like i know a little about the use of fashion as a utilitarian art in writing about, understanding and relating to people.

that said, the wherewithal to ask what (or who, depending on the subject) someone is wearing is helpful, even necessary. the power is the intelligence to ask, not to know. but, more grating to me is her assertion that fashion is a feminine tool. i will always regret not asking toby keith what brand was under the lip of his cowboy hat when i interviewed him. and if you wanna talk about modern culture, status, fashion and brands, kanye west is probably one of the best starting points.

which is all to say, paying attention to how someone chooses to cover his/her body is part of being observant, something didion handled with otherworldly adroitness (even if it was only observing her own feelings). puddling her talents into some sweeping, convenient generalization about women, fashion and writing is just unsettling and ignorant.