The June Issue: Joanna Rakoff

+ a dispatch from the Persephone Festival, Sonia Delaunay, garment-magazine hybrids, and more

Last summer, I read My Salinger Year, Joanna Rakoff’s memoir about working at one of New York’s oldest literary agencies in the 1990s. The agency feels like something out of Rona Jaffe’s 1958 working girl novel The Best of Everything: there isn’t a computer in sight. Instead, desks are covered in paper correspondence and manuscripts and Rakoff is assigned an IBM Selectric on which she is expected to conduct all agency business, including responding to fan mail for one of the agency’s most famously private clients, novelist J.D. Salinger. It’s a wonderful book about Rakoff finding her footing in the publishing world, committing to become a writer, and falling in and out of love with the wrong people. It’s also full of great descriptions of vintage clothes—the kind cool women wore to work in 1996.

Rakoff is also the author of the bestselling novel A Fortunate Age, winner of the Goldberg Prize for Fiction and the Elle Readers’ Prize. I was delighted to discover from her Instagram that she also lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that she still clearly finds as much joy in getting dressed as she did back in her agency days. Here is our interview:

Meet Joanna Rakoff

Joanna in Boston's Public Garden, wearing a vintage Bob Mackie scarf, vintage Tamara Jarmon coat, vintage YSL heels, and a Tila March bag. Photos by Salma Kilaouy.

Your memoir My Salinger Year has several wonderful descriptions of the clothes you wore to work in 1990s New York: “the neat skirt and sweater, redolent of Sylvia Plath at Smith. . .Black Watch plaid, and a dark green turtleneck sweater with a zipper up the back, from the 1960s, purchased in a London thrift shop. . .” How has your style evolved since then and how would you describe your approach to getting dressed now?

Is it strange to say that I’m not sure it has? The silhouettes and colors to which I’m drawn have not really changed, nor have the fabrics in which I feel most comfortable, nor has my general aesthetic or approach to acquiring my wardrobe, which involves a lot of thrifting and vintage shopping (definitely, I suppose, a hobby of mine). I still wear pieces identical to those described in the book: Black Watch plaid skirts, close-fitting vintage turtlenecks. I am still a devotee of loafers, Mary Janes, block heels, black tights, knife-pleat skirts, velvet, dresses that nip in at the waist, and dramatic styles with unusual detail. 

But I’ve had periods when I’ve made a conscious effort to either dress in a more professional, grown-up way or to adhere more closely with current trends or simply to blend in more, sartorially. I’ve worked, twice, with stylists: once when I was the editor-in-chief of an online magazine, managing a staff that included people significantly older than myself; and again when I was touring the world for My Salinger Year, and found myself both unsure of what to wear at events—showing up over- or under-dressed—and also photographed at every turn, making the pressure to get it right feel very high. Both stylists told me, firmly, that I was too old to wear puff sleeves and embroidery and eyelet and floral prints, too old and accomplished for peasant blouses and block prints, and absolutely no more vintage; both wanted me in pencil skirts and silk shells and blazers, in navy blue and black with pops of red. In both cases, I complied, ridding my closet—mostly—of the girlish items they’d pegged as wrong, and donning the proscribed outfits—with my own little, rebellious twists—but I always felt uncomfortable and awkward, like I was wearing someone else’s clothing. When I look at photos from those periods, I cringe, as not only do I not look like me, I look like no one and everyone, in my tasteful generic outfits. The second time around, in 2015, I ended up simply selling pretty much everything—give or take a few pair of great-fitting pants and a leather jacket from The Row—and using the proceeds to acquire things I love: dresses from Ulla Johnson and ba&sh and Batsheva, vintage Laura Ashley and Albert Nipon and Marc Jacobs, Liberty print blouses, the simple cashmere sweaters and wool pants I love.

If anything has changed, it’s that now I am completely okay with dressing in exactly the way I like, without worrying about appropriateness or approbation, and also—maybe more importantly—that I’ve embraced the importance of clothing in my life, the ways my wardrobe is inextricably tied to who I am, how I live every minute of my life, a way of (ugh, this sounds cheesy) determining the shape of my day and my mindset, a way of bolstering myself on days when I feel fragile and unsure and comforting myself on days when I feel unsettled and anxious.

One funny thing: until 2013, I lived in New York, where it’s really fine to wear quite literally anything, in any situation. I worked at a shared writers’ space and some people showed up in pajamas, while some people arrived in three-piece suits, like bankers. I live, now, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a city I truly adore—walking its winding, flower-lined streets, I sometimes swell with joy at its beauty and history—but in which my own mode of dress makes me stand out, in a pretty radical way. I work at home and spend my days either writing on the couch or racing my kids to doctors’ appointments or crew practice or the grocery store and I could, easily, spend every day in sweat pants or overalls or jeans, but I still tend to Get Dressed, capital G, capital D, every single day, in dresses and high boots or trousers and heels, and this attracts an almost insane amount of attention. During lockdown, I preserved my sanity by daily walks to our local bakery, Hi-Rise, for a cappuccino, and I couldn’t walk a block without running into a colleague of my husband—an MIT professor—in leggings and a sad swag tee, openly astonished by my outfit, which read as a sign that I was violating pandemic rules by Going Somewhere or Doing Something. I tried to explain that I needed to put on proper clothes so as to not go insane but he just raced away, horrified. During this period, I also got a lot of Carrie Bradshaw comments, which I took as a compliment, though I’m not sure they were meant to be. But I think, like that fictional character, I dress to live.

Joanna in a handmade vintage dress and Vitadhi earrings. Photo by Ivan Mrsic.

I identity with this so strongly—I walk down Mass Ave to and from work every day and if I’m wearing An Outfit, like, say, a pink corduroy suit or anything with heels, I feel like I draw a lot of attention to myself, but I do my best to own it, channeling Carrie “strutting” down Fifth Avenue.

One of my favorite aspects of the 2020 film adaptation of My Salinger Year is the costumes by Ann Roth. I especially love the way Sigourney Weaver's shawls and trench coats drape delicately over her shoulders, and of course, her cigarette holder. Margaret Qualley’s wardrobe is exactly what I imagined yours to be reading the book. Did you get to collaborate at all with Roth on the looks for Weaver and Qualley?

Okay, so first, I should explain that Ann Roth is Sigourney’s longtime costumer and Sigourney specified, in contract negotiations, that she and Ann were a package. At that point, the director, Philippe Falardeau—who has a very distinct visual style—had already signed on an incredible costume designer, Patricia McNeil, who’d been putting together mood boards and gathering ideas for months and months. So, Ann came on board purely to wardrobe Sigourney and Patricia designed the costumes for everybody else. 

Thus, sadly, I had no contact at all with Ann. If she was on set—and she had to have been—I didn’t meet her! I had no say at all in Sigourney’s incredible outfits, which are not just utterly perfect for her character but generally quite accurate, in terms of what my boss wore, in real life. (It was very clear to me that Ann had read the book—the caftans alone!—and also that she understood the eras that informed my boss’s fashion lexicon.) Also, Sigourney definitely contributed to Ann’s vision for the character. She researched my boss—and the publishing world—with astonishing thoroughness. I mean, she even showed up at Harold Ober Associates—the agency at which I worked—and talked to everyone and anyone who’d known my boss.

I did, however, work closely with Patricia on Margaret Qualley’s costumes, which hew very closely to the outfits I wore in that year, some of which I still own. When my friend Lauren—the friend I consult before making any purchase—saw it, she said, “was that the embroidered blouse we bought at Camden Market? And how did they find a short-sleeved purple turtleneck exactly like that one you bought at The Gap in 1995?” The A-line skirts, the blouses, the opaque tights, the Mary Janes, the black velvet dress, the vintage dressing gown, those all came directly from my descriptions and photos and, in some cases from my holding up articles of clothing over Skype! 

Left: Margaret Qualley as Joanna in the film adaptation of My Salinger Year wearing a green suede trench coat similar to one worn by Rakoff. Right: Sigourney Weaver as Joanna’s boss “Margaret” wearing an ensemble by her costumer Ann Roth.

I am reeling from the fact that Weaver and Roth come as a duo.

You have a delightful cameo in the film. How did that come to pass and how did you decide what to wear for your cinematic debut?

It’s become a convention for authors to have cameos in film adaptations of their books and so, from the start, I knew I would appear briefly in the film. Initially, Philippe decided to give me a tiny speaking part—I think because I trained as an actor, a million years ago—and eventually he settled on having me play an anonymous writer, a client of the agent played by Yanic Truesdale. In the original cut of the film, I have a line or two about Salinger, “I hear he’s not written anything in decades.” But because I’m not a member of the actor’s union, it had to be cut. (Dashing my dreams of stardom!)

My outfit in the scene is so pedestrian you’re going to laugh: It’s a skirt and blouse from Madewell, purchased the day before I left for the shoot, on Newbury Street! And not at all what I envisioned myself wearing!  

Before I flew to Montreal for the shoot, Patricia asked me to bring along some pieces of clothing from the year in which the book takes place, in part because she thought it might be fun to show them to Margaret, and in part because she thought it would be fun to have me wear something from that year in my scene. I brought along a beloved silk slip dress—purchased at the late, great Daffy’s, a store still missed by true New Yorkers—and a green suede trench coat. My first morning on set, I was brought to the wardrobe trailer to meet Patricia and figure out my costume for the cameo, which would be shot the following day. It was about a hundred degrees out and ninety percent humidity. The set was not air-conditioned, so I had dressed for the heat—and for a long, long day on my feet—in that just-purchased Madewell chambray dirndl skirt and puff-sleeved floral blouse. As I left my hotel, I caught a glance of myself in the mirror and realized I’d unwittingly clad myself in the kind of outfit my mom wore in my 1980s childhood (a not-uncommon occurrence for me). 

Patricia, to my surprise, perceived this outfit as being actual vintage rather than Madewell ersatz vintage and said, “I love this! Let’s have you wear this in your cameo! With your green suede coat! And tights! I have these very Joanna tights!” And she pulled out a pair of Kelly green opaque tights and brown early-80s clogs. I said, “great!” But I was, honestly, disappointed not to be given the chance to sift through her zillion clothing racks, landing on a perfect mid-90s writer outfit. Patricia is truly a master, so I trusted her; but I also knew that neither I nor any of the writers who visited my office would have worn an outfit like the one I had on. The mid-90s were a time of blacks and neutrals, of eggplants and maroons and dark greens, with the occasional Clueless-inspired pastel. This was the era of Prada and Helmut Lang and A.P.C. minimalism, and Darryl K. and Marc Jacobs grunge, of Cynthia Rowley and Vivienne Tam sheath dresses. I would have felt nauseated at the idea of pale chambray and wouldn’t have touched a puff-sleeved shirt. What would I have worn if I could have chosen a Great Writer of 1996 outfit from those racks? A fitted boatneck shift dress, black tights, and loafers with a high block heel. An a-line wool skirt in black or plaid with a fitted turtleneck or tee or tailored button down. Maybe a sleek, knife-pleated skirt and shrunken sweater. (I miss the fashion of that time. I would still, today, wear any or all of the things listed above.)

Do you have a penchant for a particular clothing item or accessory? 

Can I have two? I’m definitely a coat person and have been since early childhood, so much so that it’s part of my family’s lore: When I was three, we went on a long road trip, during which I outgrew my winter coat. We were near the original Burlington Coat Factory—an enormous warehouse in New Jersey—so we popped in to pick something up for me. My mom picked out a few practical puffers for me, but I refused to even try them on. I’d found a fake fur Tyrolean-style dress coat, with toggle closures and embroidery and ribbon trim. I refused to even consider anything else. My mom caved and bought me the coat, which I wore happily for years, until I was busting out of it. 

I feel strongly that a coat is an outfit of its own—and an integral part of whatever you have on underneath. And I also believe that a coat should perfectly match the weather. I basically can’t leave the house if my coat doesn’t suit what I’m wearing or is too warm or too cool. Thus, at any given time, my closet holds MANY wool coats in different colors and styles. Right now, I’m looking at two Cinza Rocca coats—one plain grey, one black with pony hair trim, which I’ve had for ten full years and taken all over the world with me on book tour—and two vintage brocade evening coats (which I wear over everything from evening gowns to jeans, and which my older kids call “iconic”) and a brick-red, slightly oversized, wool crepe Philip Lim, with a belt (purchased at Goodwill for $8, with the tags still on!); a lemon yellow 1960s car coat; two double-breasted, belted camel coats, one Vince, one 70s vintage; a maroon H&M bathrobe coat to which I affixed a pastel mink collar; several leather moto jackets, in red, black, dark green, and ivory; two navy trench coats, one lighter weight and Everlane, one wool and Burberry. (Listing this all out, I’m realizing that nearly every single one of these was thrifted, and maybe this is the moment to say that coats are, I think, among the best items to thrift!)

But I’m also, and a lot of people know this about me, a dress person. Again, since childhood. In preschool, apparently, I had arguments with my mother in the mornings, as I wanted to wear embroidered, smocked, puff-sleeved dresses to school every single day, and she wanted me to dress like the other kids, in jeans and t-shirts. I still, always, feel more comfortable in a dress or a jumpsuit or a beautifully cut skirt than in jeans and a t-shirt. I’m not entirely sure why, other than that perhaps my specific body feels more suited to dresses? 

Ugh, and I realize this is a third thing, but I have a huge penchant for high-waisted, wide leg wool trousers, and always have, even when everyone was wearing low-rise jeans. I own many pairs and often wear them for speaking engagements. Oddly, because I wear dresses so much on a day-to-day basis, when I get dressed up I tend to put on pants.

Left: Joanna in Miami Beach, in a Foxydox dress and Deco denim bag. Right: In Philadelphia, 2022, in a handmade vintage lace blouse, Proenza Schouler trousers, vintage Ferragamo pumps, vintage Ralph Lauren blazer, and handmade vintage coat.

Tell me about your favorite thing in your closet and how you wear it.

This is a very hard question for me! I have a LOT of beloved things in my closet. I suppose the first thing that comes to mind is the older of those two brocade coats. The backstory: I am not just a huge Gilmore Girls fan but the original Gilmore Girls fan. I fell in love with the show when it first aired and have watched the entire series too many times to count. One tiny shred of my love for the show stems from Rory’s wardrobe, which spoke, so strongly, to my own. The early aughts were a time of strongly sexualized fashion trends—again, those low-rise jeans, etc.—very much at odds with my own personal sensibilities. And Rory’s floral dresses and cardigans and army pants and sweaters could have come straight from my closet. 

In the final two seasons, she wears a beautiful silk charmeuse dress, turquoise with large dark blue flowers, underneath a brocade coat, and it just, to me, at the time, felt perfect. In this era before Worn on TV and Instagram, it never, not once, occurred to me that I could own this outfit. I assumed, without consciously thinking about it, that all her clothing was made by a costumer, rather than purchased or gifted by a designer. Around this time—2005 or 2006—while racing around Soho trying to find a dress for a friend’s garden wedding, I found myself face to face with THE DRESS. Rory’s blue dress. Which was not bespoke but Marc Jacobs and on radical sale for $102 and my size. And fit as if it were made for me. Obviously, I bought it, and wore it not to that wedding (rained out) but to dinners and parties and on any possible occasion for years and years. But as soon as it was hanging in my closet, I knew that I also needed a brocade coat to wear with it. Every time I slipped my regular old trench over it, I felt a pang of wrongness.

For years, every time I visited a thrift or vintage shop, I scanned the racks for the glimmer of brocade and came up with nothing. Eventually, at one of Cleveland’s vintage warehouses, I found it: gold and silver in a kind of paisley pattern, close-fitting on top, subtly arcing to an A-line from the hips down. And I’ve essentially worn it to death, in every possible situation. It is a magic coat. Put it on over sweat pants and I’m all set to attend anything from library story hour to a meeting with my agent to a formal gala (depending on shoes). When my older kids were little, it saved my life, for I could be trapped at home with them, unable to wash my hair or put on mascara or change out of my stained trousers and Gap t-shirt, then put on THE COAT and transform myself into a chic, iconoclastic, cocktail-ready lady human. I have about a dozen photos of me wearing it to give readings or talks, because I didn’t have to change, and knew I could just slip it on and go.

Left: the “Rory Dress” by Marc Jacobs and Alexis Bledel as Rory Gilmore in seasons 6 and 7 of Gilmore Girls in Joanna's longtime favorite dress. Photo by Shien Bright Shop. Right: Joanna in the vintage brocade coat she bought to wear with the dress.

Wait, you have Rory’s blue charmeuse dress AND you filmed (an unreleased) scene with Yanic Truesdale, Gilmore Girls’ Michel? That is actually very spooky. I have chills. 

Do you have any style icons?

I realize this is a cliché but: my mom. 

My mom, Phyllis, who passed away in September, was an icon not just to me but to many, for whom fashion was a way of life, an inextricable part of her psyche, the fabric of her days. She grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, first in a small town in the Adirondacks, then in New York, and even in the earliest photos of her, you see her natural, hyper-elegant, highly specific style. Perhaps because she had a rather difficult childhood and adolescence, rife with instability, and the one constant was her extraordinary beauty—I can say this because I look nothing like her—clothing stood at the center of her life.  She possessed deeply refined code regarding dress, which allowed her to wear only certain fabrics—wool, cashmere, cotton, silk, linen—and certain colors (deep jewel tones, black, and gray), and certain silhouettes: Wide legged trousers with one or two pleats (never three!!); fitted two-ply cashmere sweaters with turtlenecks; collared silk or merino blouses; in the summer, camp shirts or peasant blouses and dirndl skirts. She held strong beliefs about appropriateness: after thirty, skirts must hit below the knee; skirts and dresses should never be made of jersey, in any form; shorts are for children; if you find pants or shoes that fit perfectly, buy them in every color; slips should always be worn with skirts or dresses, no matter what; scarfs should be silk and only silk and coats should not be worn without them. She did not own a pair of jeans, which she called “dungarees,” or a pair of sneakers, other than the “tennis shoes” she wore only to actually play tennis. She bowed to no trends and read not one fashion magazine, despite her heightened interest in fashion, because, in her words, “I don’t need them to tell me what to wear. I know what looks good on me.”

As a teen, I found all this absurd and hilarious and archaic, even though I knew she looked stunning, but I now worship and aspire to her elegance and style, her steadfast confidence in herself and her taste. And I realize, of course, how much I inherited and absorbed from her.

But I also have a wide range of icons, both fictional and non, from Rory Gilmore and Carrie Bradshaw to Katharine Hepburn and Carole Lombard. Once, for a Vogue shoot, a stylist asked me to characterize my taste and send her images that embody it, so she could put together options for me; I found this challenging because, I think, my style comes more from an inner compass, from my own internal sense of what’s beautiful and right for me. I’m drawn to lush textures and details—velvet, smocking, embroidery, lace—and elements that signify the Victorian and Edwardian eras, certain sleeves and collars and patterns, but also compelled by the ironic interpretations of these elements by 80s and 90s designers. And yet I’m also drawn to the neo-1970s styles of Ulla Johnson and Isabel Marant, and. . . I could go on and on. I dress, I guess, to please and satisfy myself, my mood and mind, on any given day. Anyway, the stylist called me, after sifting through the photos I’d sent on, and described my style as “schizophrenic.” But to me, it’s cohesive.

Left: In Philadelphia, with Joanna’s youngest child, Izzy, in a J. Crew trench coat. Right: In New York, heading home after speaking engagements, in her favorite Cinza Rocco coat, The Row leather jacket, ATM wool trousers, and Cinq a Sept blouse.

Are there other writers whose description of clothing or dress you admire? 

Oh gosh, I still think about Anne Shirley’s clothing in Anne of Green Gables. I wanted, very badly, that brown velvet dress! L.M. Montgomery truly understood the power of clothing to transform a person and its importance to imaginative young girls. Edith Wharton, of course, used clothing to broadcast everything about her characters and possessed an insider’s understanding of the ways a garment can signify the most minute details of a person’s class and background. What else? The dresses in Little Women! 

One of my favorite contemporary writers, Diane Johnson, uses clothing in a similar way. In her most famous—deservedly so—novel, Le Divorce, her narrator transforms, almost by osmosis, from a jean-clad SoCal slacker into a Parisian sophisticate, from her bespoke lingerie to her silk dresses.

But there is one fictional item of clothing that has a daily influence on my life: Anna Karenina’s black velvet dress, worn with a simple strand of pearls. Do you know the passage I mean? In which we see Anna through Kitty’s eyes? I first encountered this dress, this description, when my high school boyfriend—a year ahead of me—went off to college, read Anna Karenina in a comp lit class and sent me a letter with the passage copied out, saying, “this could be about you.” I read it, heart beating uncontrollably, not just because of this absurdly romantic gesture but because I did recognize myself in Anna: the, er, low-maintenance hair (in the high-maintenance 80s, my air-dried curls were an anomaly), the pallor. On formal occasions, I too wore a single strand of pearls—inherited from my grandmother—and simple black. And I thought that perhaps, like Anna, my mode of being, of presenting myself to the world, could be perceived as “simple, natural, elegant and at the same time merry and animated.” Here’s the whole passage, which still makes me shiver:

Anna was not in lilac, the colour Kitty was so sure she ought to have worn, but in a low-necked black velvet dress which exposed her full shoulder and bosom that seemed carved out of old ivory, and her rounded arms with the very small hands. Her dress was richly trimmed with Venetian lace. In her black hair, all her own, she wore a little garland of pansies, and in her girdle, among the lace, a bunch of the same flowers. Her coiffure was very unobtrusive. The only noticeable things about it were the willful ringlets that always escaped at her temples and on the nape of her neck and added to her beauty. Round her finely chiseled neck she wore a string of pearls. Kitty had been seeing Anna every day and was in love with her, and had always imagined her in lilac, but seeing her in black she felt that she had never before realized her full charm. She now saw her in a new and quite unexpected light. She now realized that Anna could not have worn lilac, and that her charm lay precisely in the fact that her personality always stood out from her dress, that her dress was never conspicuous on her. And her black velvet with rich lace was not at all conspicuous, but served only as a frame; she alone was noticeable—simple, natural, elegant and at the same time merry and animated.

I love that passage. Tolstoy wrote a lot of great garments for Karenina and we constantly see them through the eyes of female onlookers. Tolstoy understood that most women dress for themselves and for other women. 

Would you like to recommend a book or film to Luxe Libris readers?

One of my very favorite novels of 2023—or, well, ever—was Lydia Kiesling’s brilliant Mobility, which traces the history of the oil industry through the life of one not-particularly-remarkable young woman, and I think Luxe Libris readers will appreciate the ways in which Bunny, her heroine, defines herself through her clothing, using it, consciously, to present herself to the world in different ways, and the ways in which she takes such pure satisfaction from this dress or that bag, a satisfaction known only to those for whom costume is an integral part of the texture of life. 

Also, I suspect that Luxe Libris readers have read Dawn Powell, but if not, they should begin with A Time to Be Born, one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Which has a lot of great clothing!

Thank you so much for talking with Luxe Libris Joanna! To keep up with her book criticism, author events, and forthcoming books, you can find her on Instagram at @joannarakoff. She also writes a monthly column “Joanna Rakoff Recommends” for Janet Ratcliffe’s newsletter Beyond.

Sundry

• In April, my friend Molly Brown and I were invited to give a talk at the Persephone Literary Festival in Bath, U.K. to celebrate the publisher and bookshop’s 25th anniversary. This month we have a photo essay reflecting on the experience in the Womb House Books Review inaugural issue, which also features interviews with Sheila Heti, Claire Foster, and Heather McCalden. If you enjoy Luxe Libris, you’ll likely enjoy WHB Review; subscribe here.

• On a recent trip to New York I was dazzled by the Bard Graduate Center’s “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art” exhibition featuring over 200 objects lent from around the world in celebration of the Ukrainian-born artist’s career as a painter, book artist, ceramicist, fashion designer, weaver, and interior designer. As a longtime admirer of her book arts, I loved learning more about her work in fashion; Delaunay dressed the most interesting people of her day from Nancy Cunard to Francoise Hardy, and even inspired the dadaist ensemble worn by David Bowie in his 1979 SNL appearance.

• I am newly smitten with the work of artist Anouk Becker who creates garment-magazine hybrids to explore hidden stories about fashion. She also recently risograph-printed her clothes (!!) for a large-scale modular print.

• The Fashion Institute of Technology has released a Fashion & Textile Collections Global Index and Map, a digital map of archives, libraries, and museum collections, that include fashion or textiles and related materials across the globe.

• As long as there is war in Ukraine, Luxe Libris will ask readers to consider donating to ForPeace, an organization run by my friend Britta who provides local, on-the-ground humanitarian aid to Ukrainians in need.