The Diamond Light Of The Metropolis

We reveal the secret of why New York chic continues to captivate

Thanks to screen icons, design pioneers and street style stars, the city that never sleeps has shaped fashion trends for centuries, and continues to do so today.

This is as much about confidence as it is about a particular trend or overarching aesthetic, says Solleen Hill. Senior Curator of Costumes at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). “New York women are comfortable in their own skin.” Since 2017, Johnny Cirilo, photographer and author of Watching New York: Street Style from A to Z, has been documenting the style of the city’s residents on his Instagram account, watchingnewyork, which has 1.4 million followers. “I’ve seen fashion from all over the world and no one dares to be as chic as the women in New York,” he muses. “They are always one step ahead.” The city’s status as a hotbed of fashion influence is very long. “New York has been the capital of American fashion since the 19th century, because of its great port, manufacturing and retail,” says Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the FIT Museum. The city was a key battleground for first-wave feminism, with Amelia Bloomer, pantyhose activist and editor of The Lilly magazine, playing a leading role. “The restrictions imposed on women’s bodies through dress in the late 19th century reflected societal constraints,” explains Harriette Richards, a lecturer in the School of Fashion and Textiles at RMIT University in Melbourne. “Bloomer used (The Lilly) to encourage women to ditch the corsets and dresses of the time and instead wear trousers, a baggy style of trousers, which soon became known as bloomers.”

Fashion Elite

Wealthy cities copied European fashion until the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940 necessitated the development of local alternatives, explains Valerie Stelee – specifically, the American take on sportswear. Wartime designer Claire McCardell was one of the first proponents of this style, offering a combination of easy-to-wear garments with practical details such as zippers and pockets, championing functionality and form at the same time. Lacking inspiration from Europe, famous fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert (who later founded the Met Gala) launched New York Fashion Week in 1943 – then called Press Week – to showcase homegrown talent. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1964, his wife Jackie Kennedy moved into an apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her signature style of dressing as first lady included elegant costumes and hats, and then evolved. Mrs. Kennedy Onassis’ style in the late ’60s became more relaxed, with the obligatory oversized sunglasses and capri pants. Those years also saw the Trumm Capotes Swans, a group of socialites, hairdressers, beauty and taste experts, including Mrs. Kennedy Onassis’s younger sister, Lee Radziwill, rule the town. Edie Sedgwick – model, poor little rich par excellence girl and Andy Warhol’s muse at his legendary New York studio The Factory – embodied the youthquake style of the 60s with her pixie hair, dramatic earrings and leopard print clothes.

Leading second-wave feminist and New York magazine columnist Gloria Steinem has been celebrated and criticized for the way she dresses. “Gloria’s New York identity – modern glamor – was characterized by her long hair, aviator glasses and silk shirts, which were seen as at odds with her political views, for which she was known,” says Richards. “Steinem showed that a woman could be a fashion icon and a political activist.”
In 1974, Diane von Furstenberg introduced her revolutionary dress, a modern piece of clothing that combined comfort and elegance, a dress that was equally good for a business environment and for a night out and the dance floor of Studio 54. In 1985, Donna Karan became even more influential in the fashion world when she launched her eponymous brand with the Essentials line, composed of interchangeable Seven Easy Pieces. Revolving around the fulcrum of the bodysuit, Donna Karan’s modular wardrobe concept was an early iteration of the modern capsule wardrobe.

Despite operating for only three years (1977-80) as a nightclub, Studio 54’s cultural influence remains strong to this day. As a synonym for glamor and hedonism in the late seventies, it still has the same meaning today, almost five decades later. “The iconic scene of Bianca Jagger, dressed in a red chiffon Halston dress, on a white horse, cemented the club’s reputation as the epicenter of style,” says Matthew Yokoboski, senior curator of Fashion and Material Culture at the Brooklyn Museum and author of Studio 54: Night Magic. It was a legendary place where, Yokoboski said, the dance floor doubled as a runway.

Disco gave way to the burgeoning New York punk rock scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s, and fashion followed suit. The edgy creations of pioneering punk designer Stephan Sprouse were often worn by Debbie Harry, such as the asymmetric dress she wore in the 1979 Heart of Glass music video. Patti Smith has perfected the art of androgynous style, borrowed from the boys, via her signature uniform of ripped denim and Chak Taylors.

At the legendary party in the Bronx in 1973, hosted by DJ Cool Hertz and his sister Cindy, hip-hop was born. “Hip-hop expanded the definition of traditional sportswear to focus on what black and brown teenagers were wearing—(somewhat previously) overlooked by the fashion status quo,” says Elena Romero, president of marketing communications at FIT and author of Free Ceiling: How Hip Hop Changed the Fashion Industry. Romero believes that it forever transformed New York and world fashion: the ubiquity of leisure, for example, owes a lot to the movement. In the 1990s, Camelot seemed to be back when Calvin Klein’s chic publicist Carolyn Bessette joined the Kennedy clan through her marriage to John F. Kennedy Jr. She and her husband died in a plane crash in 1999, but the Bessette-Kennedys style, captured on the streets of New York – white shirts, oval sunglasses and slip dresses – remain in vogue twenty-five years later. Not so long ago, the late, great Iris Apfel became, in her words, a “geriatric starlet” (she signed on as an IMG model at age ninety-seven in 2019) thanks to her refreshingly eccentric, maximalist style.

City of Opportunities

The Mode Operandi co-founder Lauren Santo Domingo continues the long tradition of impeccably styled Manhattan ladies who can never be seen without their hair done. Eva Chen, Instagram’s director of fashion partnerships, has attracted 2.5 million followers on the platform, who can’t help but appreciate her combinations of corporate cool, off-duty casual and red carpet style. Designer Aurora James highlights traditional African craftsmanship through her accessories brand Brother Wellies, while encouraging retailers to dedicate fifteen percent of their shelf space to Bloack businesses through her award-winning Fifteen Percent Pledge initiative. Take Florence-born Elsa Peretta, who first worked as a model for designer Halston and then as a creator of groundbreaking jewelry for Tiffany and Co. Jamaican-born icon Grace Jones, who regularly performed at Studio 54 at the height of disco fever, moved to the Big Apple as a teenager. Like Texas-born Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys, New York has long attracted wide-eyed dreamers like moths to a flame.

It’s also noticeable how rich New York is in our collective imagination, populated by modern figures from fiction: Golightly, Rachel Green’s friends, and the privileged Upper East Siders of Gossip Girl. To name just a few. The vision of Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly, opening the shop windows – with that Hubert de Givenchy little black dress, hair updo and pearl necklace – is culturally ubiquitous. The late ’90s brought Sex and the City and Carry Bradshaw to our screens, whose fun outfits, by legendary designer Patricia Field, are too many to describe individually (a little, maybe just ‘she’, maybe just her in the opening sequence…) “New York is full of true style icons,” says Richards. “No wonder so many fictional ones appeared instead of them.”