How to Dress Like a Low-Key Rich Bitch
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At the start of a recently acclaimed feature film, an exacting conductor is seen picking out fabrics for a series of custom shirts, suits, and coats. The tailor’s dressing room oozes luxury, but a logo is nowhere in sight. Lydia Tár doesn’t wear labels on her sleeves. As if. In her soft-pedal bespoke finery, she is the spiritual lodestar of an increasingly visible type, the woman who doesn’t need to use fashion to broadcast her power—or deep pockets. Call her the low-key rich bitch.
Look around and you’ll spy her everywhere: pushing a cart around Erewhon in Los Angeles in a buttery nappa leather bomber. Is that the new…Loewe? Yep. Or slipping into an afternoon screening of The Conformist at New York’s Film Forum in a broad-shouldered, floor-length trench that the untrained eye may not recognize but those in the know immediately clock as fresh-off-the-runway Saint Laurent. She’s probably reading this magazine right now through Morgenthal Frederics glasses.
The low-key rich bitch is not a new phenomenon. She has been with us since time immemorial, from the days of Empress Joséphine—whose eveningwear rejected the rococo excess of Marie Antoinette—up to the golden age of designer Phoebe Philo, still the queen of this cohort, which hangs on every post from the Instagram account @oldceline (393,000 followers and growing). But the spring runways gave the #LKRB a lot of new options to choose from, and Philo herself announced this week she's unveiling her new brand in September.
“Brands embraced simplicity across their collections and are clearly anticipating that customers will be adopting this approach to dressing,” says Libby Page, the market director at the e-commerce site Net-a-Porter.
At Bottega Veneta, creative director Matthieu Blazy presented outfits so unremarkable that the models (including a nonchalant Kate Moss) looked as though they could have been plucked off any suburban street corner. Shlubby flannel shirts, faded denim, and white T-shirts were among the first few looks. Yet all was not as it appeared. Upon closer inspection, the garments revealed a delectable sleight of hand: Each was rendered from a yummy leather and given a print treatment to look downright, well, pedestrian. Those “flannel” shirts? Each required 12 layers of printing to achieve the designer’s desired workaday patina.
Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, meanwhile, presented wrinkled oversize blazers as a key piece of their lineup, and one of the label’s biggest carryover styles from fall is the humdrum ribbed tank top—the kind you can buy three-to-a-pack at CVS but which from Prada will set you back a grand. From the Row to Michael Kors, from Lemaire to Chanel, designers eschewed theatrics in favor of the perverse pleasures of elevated normcore. In January, Lemaire Instagrammed a, uh, gushing picture of Cate Blanchett's Tár conducting in one of its button-ups, hashtagging the image #Lemairepeople. (Note to the brand: you're in for quite the surprise in Tár's second act.)
Alessandro Michele captured the imagination of hypebeasts everywhere with his look-at-me maximalism, but his departure from Gucci in November was an inflection point. When Dakota Johnson, a card-carrying LKRB and one of his most enthusiastic brand ambassadors, turned up at one party at the Sundance Film Festival in January, she wasn’t in the boho-chic duds of old but in something subtler, more discernibly clued-in. What at first glance looked like a Canadian tuxedo was actually a three-piece denim look by the if-you-know-you-know designer Magda Butrym and a diamond chain necklace by Jessica McCormack.
Sotto voce eleganza isn’t just confined to the latest season, either. It’s also playing out in the secondary market. A recent report from the resale site the RealReal showed that consumers are longing not just for the ungarish styles of the early aughts but for the intellectual minimalism of the ’90s, with Prada and Jil Sander on the rise.
How did we get here?
A couple of factors played a part, notably a welcome interest in sustainable fashion, the long tail of the return-to-office movement, and, of course, the ongoing effects of the pandemic and how it reordered our lives and, by extension, our closets. “We saw an increase in sales of investment pieces during the pandemic, and as our customers have returned to ‘real life,’ there has been an increased focus on wardrobe staples that can be taken from day to night and office to dinner with a slight and simple switch-up,” Page says. Everything seems to boil down to three words, she adds: “Comfort, longevity, and practicality.”
This renewed desire for durable, foundational garments may well be an outgrowth of emerging economic anxieties. “People in a recession, or even a recessionary mindset, go back to classics,” says Sarah Owen, co-founder of the trend forecasting firm Soon Future Studies, which has noted a move away from “products” toward “artifacts,” or shopping that’s driven less by season or occasion, with purchases intended to be passed down like heirlooms. “In times of uncertainty, you see people latching onto stability.”
But Sean Monahan, the man who coined the phrase “vibe shift,” says the momentum behind stealth glamour can be attributed to a simpler and more prosaic factor: a generational changing of the guard that is also affecting spending habits. “The United States has never been as old as it is right now,” he says. “The median age of Americans is much older than it was 20, 25, 40 years ago.” In other words, zany Gen Z styles may get a lot of airtime, but the truth is that millennials are now the largest demographic, and a large swath of the population has reached the age when it is discovering how freeing it is to stop chasing the dopamine rush of novelty.
In the face of Barbiecore and Y2K and every other trend that bubbles up for 30 minutes on TikTok and begs us to rush off and buy something for “likes,” perhaps it’s not surprising that adults are, well, adulting, and dressing the part. Call it classic, call it timeless, call it enduring. It’s what Lydia Tár would want. In that respect, if nothing else, we can side with the maestro.
This story appears in the March 2023 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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