In most Italian towns, the best-dressed woman on the street is somewhere around seventy-eight, carrying a bag of tomatoes, and she has not thought about her outfit once today.
I notice this every trip, and every trip it annoys me slightly, because I have spent the morning thinking about mine.
She is not participating in anything
The fashion world has recently discovered her. There is a whole aesthetic now — nonna style, the granny dress — and the cotton midi with a vivid print has genuinely come back around onto runways and into shops this year.
She is entirely unaware of this. That is the first thing worth copying and the hardest.
Her dress is the same shape it was in 1994. It will be the same shape in 2030. Nothing in her wardrobe is responding to anything, which means nothing in it can go out of date, which is the actual mechanism behind a look that has stayed good for fifty years.
Three habits underneath it
Strip away the specifics and what she does is fairly repeatable.
- One shape, in several versions. The button-through cotton dress, mid-calf, sleeves to the elbow. She owns six. They differ in pattern and nothing else. She has never once stood in front of a closet wondering what suits her.
- Pattern instead of accessories. A vivid floral, a check, a small print — the interest is in the fabric, so nothing has to be added on top. Her detailing is built in: a bit of lace at the hem, embroidery at the yoke, piping along a placket.
- Clothes that permit the day. She walks to the market, cooks for eleven people, and goes out again at seven. Nothing she owns prevents any of that. Elegance that has to be protected from your own afternoon is not elegance she would recognize.
What she refuses to do
She does not dress younger. She also does not dress like a woman who has given up on being looked at, which is the trap on the other side.
Italian grandmothers are, in my experience, entirely uninterested in disguising their age and entirely interested in being presentable. Those two things turn out to be compatible, and the combination is most of the effect. There is no wistfulness in the outfit. Nobody is trying to be thirty-five and nobody is hiding.
She also does not own very much. Six dresses, two cardigans, one good coat, sandals and closed shoes. The whole thing fits in a wardrobe the size of a door.
And she is unsentimental about replacing any of it. A dress that has gone thin at the seat is not kept for the memories. It is retired without ceremony and a near-identical one takes its place, which is how the shape survives decades while the individual garments do not.
Borrowing it at fifty instead of seventy-eight
Pick the shape before the pieces. Long enough to sit down in without adjusting, loose enough to cook in, defined enough at the shoulder to look intentional. Then buy that shape more than once and stop auditioning alternatives.
Cotton, always. It is the fabric that makes the whole thing possible — washable, indifferent to heat, and better in year three than year one.
Our day dresses are chosen along those lines, which is why the rail looks quieter than most: one or two shapes, in the patterns that came back this year and the plain colors that never left.
The tomatoes are optional. The indifference is the part that takes practice.
She travels to Italy each season to hand-select the boutique's collection, choosing fabrics by hand before they reach the rail.
Keep reading
The jewelry your grandmother wore is back
Why nothing in an Italian closet looks brand new
