We sit down with the writer, editor and Central Saint Martins course leader to talk quiet luxury, the archive fashion boom, and his new book An appreciation of Cheap Chic
“It’s interesting, people always want to talk to me about quiet luxury,” says Dal Chodha as I start our conversation by asking him about the aesthetic. The writer, editor and CSM course leader has become known – amongst many other qualifications – for his consistently chic monochromatic and voluminous uniform. So the fact that I, and other writers and journalists, would want to speak to him about quiet luxury “is partly because of how I personally look,” he admits. But despite appearances, once you engage with Chodha’s work, you’d quickly come to know that the term is a far cry from what he’s really all about.
One of those works, Chodha’s most recent book You gotta keep your head straight about clothes: An appreciation of Cheap Chic, was released this year and acts as an entryway into the academic’s ethos. Described as “part fan letter, part essay” and set out on the page like a sprawling stream-of-consciousness, the book is an homage to Cheap Chic by Carol Troy and Caterine Milinaire, a guide to thrift store shopping published in New York in 1975. Chodha was introduced to the book while interviewing Christophe Lemaire in 2010, when a copy appeared in front of him on the French designer’s desk. The edition contains such advice as “buying less is buying better”, “paring down your wardrobe is going to simplify your life” and, “in the basics, you can remain anonymous, observe and stalk the life you’re after in a quiet and individual style.”
Reading these quotes, and especially the final one, you might think the original Cheap Chic book was professing the same kind of “quiet” approach to fashion that quiet luxury does, but Chodha disagrees. “My frustration with the term ‘quiet luxury’, or the idea of quietness, is just that it’s not cool – it’s not fashion, and I’m interested in fashion.” According to Chodha, quiet luxury allows people to “not really have personalities, and to not have fun with clothing,” whereas his approach is the opposite. “I think the idea of wearing clothes that anonymise the body, or that perhaps don’t reveal too many parts of one’s personality, that’s what I’m interested in,” he says, “but that’s not me being quiet. In fact, it’s me being conscious of the signals that clothes give off. I’m constructing and playing.”
Chodha’s An appreciation definitely isn’t a paean to quiet luxury, then – so what else is it? “The thing about Cheap Chic is if you hear someone talking about it, it might sound like the rules of today,” the writer explains. “Which is ‘buy less, buy better’. That is shorthand for buy a nice blazer, buy a good pair of jeans, buy six great t-shirts, and a boring pair of adidas Stan Smith and that’s it and you’re sorted.” But actually, this kind of ‘capsule dressing’ isn’t the point that Chodha wants to hammer home. “Buy a fucking amazing embroidered coat from wherever, buy a stupid leather pair of shorts from your favourite designer that you love. Just make sure to respect those clothes and use them and love them as much as you should. This is more about care and intention,” he says.
A big part of that care and attention in the original Cheap Chic is, of course, buying second hand. There’s a section in his book where Chodha remembers purchasing a military jacket from a charity shop in his youth, and his parents’ horrified reaction. In the retelling, Chodha advises to buy second hand “if you’re not squeamish about buying clothes that have lived lives before you – unlike my parents who were horrified by an olive green army surplus I found in Oxfam when I was 17, shrieking ‘we worked so hard and you’re walking around in a dead person’s clothes.’ With this exchange, Chodha reminds us that “wearing second-hand clothes is not as new as silvery resale websites and curated vintage shops would have us believe”, because people have real life aversions to the practice. Despite this, buying second-hand is something we should all be doing and a very real antidote to overconsumption, which Chodha describes as “putting more shit into the world”.
“Every single thing that Bella Hadid has worn I salivated over in a copy of British Vogue when I was 15” – Dal Chodha
Although An appreciation is concerned with the second hand consumption of average people like you and me, it also brings into question the current archival explosion that we’re seeing on celebrities on the red carpet. A lot of what that practice pretends to care about – namely re-using and re-loving fashion that already exists, not unnecessarily producing new clothing – are the same kinds of morals that Cheap Chic and An appreciation also profess. But the truth is that the current archival obsession is more about signalling status and syphoning clout from bygone eras of fashion, than being proactively ‘sustainable’.
“I’m really conflicted by it,” says Chodha. “A lot of the clothes that are being pulled, they’re the stuff I looked at growing up. Every single thing that Bella Hadid has worn I salivated over in a copy of British Vogue when I was 15 or 16 or 17.” And while Chodha appreciates the fact that celebrity stylists like Law Roach and Karla Welch are now being celebrated as the ones with the taste, and not their “flat avatar” clients, this particular practice of wearing second hand clothes has become so far removed from any kind of ethic that Cheap Chic put forward all those years ago. “[Celebrities] are much more about saying ‘look at the access that I can pull archival John Galliano from his graduate collection’. That’s what it is. I don’t mind that performance, but there is something a bit empty about it.”
Though Chodha might be critical of archival dressing, An appreciation is by no means a call to be quotidian, or an argument against having fun with fashion. “If you had no context of who I was, you might read that book and think, ‘Oh, God, he just wants everyone to walk around wearing Lemaire all the time. Big, big, baggy, beige stuff. And that is not what I want to happen by the way – the world would look fucking boring.” While dressing with his own uniform works for Chodha, he recognises that might not be exactly what everyone else wants to do. Instead, he suggests “it would be healthy if everybody had a bit more of a philosophy on how they dress, rather than get caught up in the anxiety of maybe I’ll do this, maybe I’ll do that.” That anxiety leads directly to over-consumption – but this can be combated by truly knowing ourselves before we buy more clothes. “That’s the main message,” says Chodha. “This is not about everybody dressing like a Lemaire model.”
You gotta keep your head straight about clothes: An appreciation of Cheap Chic by Dal Choda is published by Tenderbooks and available here.