why joan didion remains fashion’s favorite literary it girl
and the evolution of her signature hairstyle through 20 photos.
Ah, Joan Didion.
*cracks knuckles*
Where to even begin? Just invoking her name feels like waving catnip in every feline alleyway of the literary internet. Honestly, if you’re the audience of lit girlies I imagine you to be, I am a bit intimidated by you. You’ve probably read far more of her works than me. You know passages from The White Album by heart, I do not. But for anyone who sits at the cultural intersection of fashion and writing, she is the blueprint. The patron saint. The anti-celebrity celebrity. The face of California cool. Sacramento’s most prized cultural export. Godmother to this genre of sad white woman culture:
I am going to admit something extremely uncool, something you are not supposed to confess—
Which is that I have spent more time poring over Joan Didion’s aesthetic (and our cultural treatment of it) than her written works. Sure, I’ve read a few essays. I picked up a copy of Let Me Tell You What I Mean from a used bookstore in the DeVargas Center in Sante Fe. I know that she believes writing to be a hostile act, that she always gravitated towards the specific over the abstract, that she wrote fashion copy before she became the revered, steely-gazed novelist we remember her as. I know the broad strokes.
But. What consumes my thoughts instead, is the way Joan Didion was (and still is) the object of the fashion industry’s utter worship.