RERUN: Zadie Smith

Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud - Bella Freud

In this episode of Fashion Neurosis, writer Zadie Smith discusses her evolving relationship with fashion, personal style, and identity. From childhood

Key takeaways

• Fashion is not just aesthetic but deeply tied to identity, memory, and personal history.
• Societal norms often force women to choose between being seen as intelligent or attractive, a false dichotomy Smith challenges.

Main topics

• The psychological weight of clothing and personal appearance
• Mother-daughter fashion dynamics and generational identity

Notable quotes

"In England, the idea of female beauty or attraction is antithetical to the idea of intellect."

"I realized that that's what these men think they think. That beauty is a kind of tool used against them."

Conclusion

Zadie Smith reveals how fashion has been a lifelong companion—shaping her sense of self, navigating

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:02) Our earliest childhood memories can feel so visceral. I Speaker 4 (0:07) have this memory of my mother standing on the beach, you know, the wind whipping her hair and her jacket, calling into the wind with my siblings out in the lake and the dam, you know, looming in the distance. But none of these memories were true. Speaker 5 (0:25) This week on Explain It To Me from Vox, why can't I remember being a baby? Speaker 4 (0:34) Credit scores. We love them because they can qualify us to buy a house or get an apartment, and we hate them because they can seem irrational and confusing. I'm Vivian Tu, Your Rich BFF, and on this episode of Net Worth and Chill, we're looking into where these scores came from, how to get and maintain a good one, and how to make them work for you. Ready to impress some lenders and make your credit score work hard? Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. Speaker 2 (1:13) Welcome to Fashion Neurosis, Zadie Smith. Thank you for having me. I wanted to ask why you chose what you're wearing today. I Speaker 3 (1:22) think I was trying to will spring to arrive. Speaker 1 (1:28) So between November and late February, I seem to wear black every day. And then when March comes, I try and add color. And pink is, for me, the beginning of spring. Speaker 2 (1:43) Well, it didn't work. Speaker 1 (1:45) It Speaker 3 (1:45) didn't Speaker 1 (1:45) work. It never works in this country. But in America, it always worked. Speaker 2 (1:50) They have that very banal expression, which is true. March comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion. Yeah. It's been going like a lion since about January. Yeah, it's Speaker 3 (2:04) exhausting. It's really hard to get dressed Speaker 1 (2:06) for. Speaker 3 (2:08) But I'm just tired of wearing winter coats and I'm done. Speaker 3 (2:13) Do you have any obsessions at the moment? Speaker 1 (2:18) I maybe have an obsession about not looking ridiculous, which is maybe a preoccupation of women in their late 40s. So I have a little more anxiety getting dressed than I used to. You ask yourself a lot of questions like, are these jeans or does this skirt or will this coat, etc. I do that a lot these days. Speaker 2 (2:40) Does it relate back to anything? Like, did anyone in your family dress in an embarrassing way? Speaker 1 (2:47) I mean, no, I have an amazing example. My mother. Speaker 1 (2:52) I mean, she dresses, I would say, she dresses to be the centre of attention and she always did. But she was very good at it and very chic, actually. She wears lots more colour now, but when we were young, she was kind of a specialist in... like silky black separates, everything very clean lines and very elegant. I'm sure she's the only Jamaican woman wearing a beret around Wilson in the late 70s, early 80s. So she was very chic and she absolutely has not gone quietly into that night. She dresses more and more outrageously as she gets older. Speaker 2 (3:39) Yeah, it's interesting the thing of, your mother or one's mother dressing in a kind of beautiful way, but it happened to be embarrassing at the time or Speaker 3 (3:50) just Speaker 2 (3:51) distracting. Speaker 2 (3:54) I think, I mean, we're Speaker 7 (3:55) not very different in age. She's only 20 years older than me. Speaker 1 (3:59) So there's often been periods where we've looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. And that seems to be happening again, actually. But Speaker 7 (4:12) she definitely, you know, she really had great taste and no makeup. I Speaker 1 (4:20) mean, she didn't need any makeup. So that's also something that... It's kind of impressed on my brain. Like I wear a bit of lipstick, but I mainly just focus on clothes. Speaker 2 (4:33) Yeah, my mother, she, I mean, she dressed as a hippie and she had these like beautiful clothes and she was beautiful. But because we were very poor, it felt really awkward and it felt, it drew attention to us in a way that. was hard to sort of, it was somehow invasive. People felt that they could comment on how we were because we were, you know, we were hitching or something. We didn't have protection. Right. Speaker 1 (5:05) And you want your mother to look like everybody else. Even today, I went out, took my Speaker 6 (5:09) son to school in a t-shirt which said black nerd. And I was wearing a white Kangol cap and yellow library socks that looked like they've been... I mean, they've got the kind of stamp of a library on them. I think I must have got them from the New York Public Library. And, Speaker 1 (5:24) you know, he was distraught, which was fair. But, yeah, there's that tension between not embarrassing your children and wanting to dress as you please. I Speaker 2 (5:35) know. It's a very delicate tightrope. I remember my sister wanted... wanted my mother to wear a brown crimpling trouser suit and have black curly hair like the woman who lived up the road. Speaker 1 (5:52) They want you to look like a normal mum, but I think there is no such thing really. And I notice all kinds of little expressions of style in the women I live around, and particularly of your generation, right? Like, so you see all these mums and you can kind of detect which one Speaker 6 (6:09) was the raver. Which one was the indie kid? Which one was the sneakerhead? It's all like lost in the winds of time, but you can still see these little glimpses of the 90s or whatever. I think it was the same with my mum's generation. My dad wanted to Speaker 1 (6:25) be like a 50s beatnik and my mum wanted to be a hippie or some chic North African living in Paris. Yeah. Sounds Speaker 2 (6:35) really good. But of course, it always sounds good to everyone else. Speaker 2 (6:41) Do you have any fashion dreams ever? Speaker 3 (6:47) I mean, I quite often dream Speaker 1 (6:50) about clothes. Not so much now, but in my 30s, when getting dressed was a big drama and I was really Speaker 6 (6:57) into it, I would often think about outfits or imagine I had things I didn't have. And also because when I was about Speaker 1 (7:05) 30... three maybe a bit younger 31 or 32 I lost my entire wardrobe in a fire so for ages after that I'd be thinking that I had things that I no longer had you know dresses that I wanted or missed or so that used to turn up in dreams sometimes god that sounds so stressful I mean it wasn't great yeah I lost I lost everything and then um Speaker 6 (7:33) I had to start again. I still sometimes think about individual items in that wardrobe that was so lovely. But yeah, all gone. Speaker 2 (7:42) What did you start with when you started again? Speaker 3 (7:48) Trying to think. I mean, at that point, then I had some money. Like when I first started buying clothes, Speaker 6 (7:55) the first thing I actually bought for myself. was when I went to college and I got a student loan and instead of spending it on necessities, I immediately went and bought some red and white Nike Air Max and was so proud of myself. But after the Speaker 1 (8:10) fire, I think I was living in Italy and I probably would have bought something from the little boutique shops there. You know, it's like Paris, you're always buying individual strange little things. I remember... I remember Nick's, for some reason, my husband bought a t-shirt which says, I have a cold robot heart. I remember that. That was sometime after the fire, but I don't remember what I bought. Speaker 2 (8:37) I think if you have the right outfit, you can think better. I think when thinking and articulating is so important to you, which clearly is to you, part of what makes my brain and my mind feel secure is my outfit. And I think that's why I became a fashion designer. Speaker 3 (9:00) I mean, it's changed. I can remember when I first became a writer, it's such a different time. in 1999, if I spoke anywhere, or when I started teaching, I started teaching quite young, the emphasis was always on, you know, the Speaker 1 (9:17) same with stand-up comedians at the same period, like, don't let on you're a woman, almost. You didn't want to, you had to be taken seriously, so you couldn't wear anything. Speaker 1 (9:28) to, I don't know, feminine or I was always trying to walk that line to look like a serious person. It seems so funny to me now. But I remember dressing like that. Like if I had to give a reading, I would be like all lady writers in the 90s in a black blazer and a black shirt and some black jeans, black boots. Like it's kind of ridiculous. But then that faded away. And I think particularly living in Italy and seeing women. at all levels of society, even though it's such an unbelievably misogynist country, sorry Italy, but it is. The weird flip side of it is that it's... It doesn't make this Speaker 6 (10:09) puritanical thing about women and beauty. So powerful women can be very, very dressed and still considered powerful. It's like a weird flip side of patriarchy. So there's not a lot else in Italian life I would adopt. But that part I found Speaker 1 (10:25) quite interesting, that there was no contempt for the idea of a woman. dressing up. Yeah. Speaker 2 (10:33) Yeah. I lived in Italy for a couple of years and I agree that that aspect is really good. I mean, there's some sort of further misogyny that happens here about that when a woman does make an effort to look nice, it's so up for grabs really. It's up for sort of... being derided and it's very empowering because we're taught that you shouldn't care about your appearance, but it's a means to an end. So it's a strategy. And actually it's very effective. Also, Speaker 3 (11:14) I think there's something a bit darker about it, which I only understood when I published, because I'd never considered myself, I was kind of an awkward looking kid. I couldn't dress. Speaker 7 (11:22) I was very much in the shadow of my mother. So I never thought about anything apart from my work. And then when I published and I learned to dress Speaker 3 (11:30) a bit, I've kept on reading these pieces about me saying, well, she can't be good because look at her. And then I thought about it and I thought, what does that actually mean? It must mean that in England, the idea of female beauty or attraction is antithetical to the idea of intellect. So the point is, why would you bother being smart if you can be pretty? That was the argument. Speaker 1 (11:52) Like she can't be smart because if you're pretty, then that's what you get, what you need as a woman. Why would you bother doing anything else? And vice versa, if you're smart, you must have become smart because you couldn't get whatever England has to give you any other way. I mean, that is such an extraordinary set of ideas when Speaker 2 (12:10) you unpack them. Speaker 1 (12:10) It Speaker 2 (12:11) is. It's totally, I mean, they completely go against each other because the brilliant combination is to be both or it isn't, they're not mutually exclusive. being intelligent or having intelligence that you know how to use partly in how you dress is so much fun. So intelligence doesn't only reside in intellect, does it? Speaker 3 (12:37) I found it really interesting. I realized that that's what these men think they think. that beauty Speaker 6 (12:44) is a kind of tool used against them and a very effective one. They understand it's effective, but once a woman has it, why would she bother with any other tools of life? So that was kind of instructive. Speaker 3 (12:57) But Speaker 6 (12:58) yeah, I guess living in Italy, watching literary critics and mathematicians Speaker 7 (13:02) and Speaker 6 (13:02) physicists all on telly done up in these interesting ways, I found it kind of engaging, just surprising because I'd never seen anything like that in England. Speaker 2 (13:12) Yeah, my father used to start a painting at the point between the eyes and I wondered where you start an outfit. I'm usually lying in bed and I think, hmm, Speaker 3 (13:27) I do think of lipstick and Speaker 1 (13:32) a colour, a kind of colour scheme to go with it. I feel... Speaker 1 (13:42) I Speaker 3 (13:42) feel like I almost never get it wrong. And then sometimes, very recently, I got it so tremendously wrong and I was really shocked. Speaker 6 (13:52) Part of it was the problem that the dress I was wearing, the zip split