Fall’s Most Defining Clothes on Fashion’s Biggest Characters (2024)

This past year, whenever I’ve felt like I’ve needed an escape from our current reality, which is often, I’ve dived into reading histories of 20th-century New York City. I love this genre in part for the fleeting glimpses it provides of the types of people we used to call characters: people who convey an entire life story in a single gesture or turn of phrase or biographical detail. In Smash Cut, a memoir of falling in love at the brink of the AIDS crisis in the late 1970s, Brad Gooch mentions, in passing, his therapist, Sister Mary Michael, a nun at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, whose office is in a tower in the church and who gives sage relationship advice, like: Over the years, in relationships, partners change roles. In February House, Sherill Tippins’s book about the group house where Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, W.H. Auden, and other famous writers lived in the early 1940s, we briefly learn about Miss Middagh, a descendant of a founding Brooklyn family who fights to democratize the street names of Brooklyn Heights in the 1850s. According to legend, Miss Middagh, appalled that her neighboring streets bore the names only of prominent families, tore the signs down until the city finally renamed them for fruits: “Pineapple, Orange, Cranberry Street, and so on.” And in My Soul Looks Back, a memoir of 1970s Black bohemia by culinary powerhouse Jessica B. Harris, the author mentions a late night at literary haunt Paparazzi when she encountered Paul du Feu, a carpenter, male model, and bon vivant who managed to become the ex-husband of both Germaine Greer and Maya Angelou. He appears in this memoir on Angelou’s arm; they are wearing mink-lined denim jackets.

I love these scenes because they offer brief portraits of people who seem to be fully themselves, no matter the setting or consequences—people who are true to their own singular spirits, who don’t necessarily abide by what others expect of them.

Today, though, it can sometimes feel like the world is short on characters. There are certainly fewer of them in our culture now, perhaps because the risk has become too great. Being a character isn’t something that is necessarily monetizable. There are the influencers of TikTok and other social media platforms, but by and large, they eventually have to conform to an algorithm of some kind to be recognized. Then there is also the moral question of character. To be a character often means swimming against the tide or what’s popular, even being wrong, in our age of empty gestures and hollow symbolism.

Because we overvalue likability, so many of us squelch any flowering of character before it has a chance to grow. The fear, of course, is that someone might find something about us or who we are or what we like to be strange or off-putting. But true character exists outside of any of that. Sometimes, as I scroll through Instagram, liking memes about mental health, I wonder if the lack of characters in our current cultural landscape is because of this drive to categorize and explain. We are faced with an array of big, seemingly insurmountable disasters, and we are constantly being told there is little we can do to mitigate or stop any of it. It makes sense in the face of that, then, to turn inward, to become obsessed with a taxonomy of the self, to wish to trace everything back to definable traumas and comforting diagnoses. But character exists in that ephemeral space between experience and personality. Characters can spring from anywhere—from adversity, challenge, triumph, survival, or simply out of the deep boredom of the everyday and the desire to be something shocking and different.

The most recent book about the city I’m reading is Cynthia Carr’s excellent biography Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar. It’s an accounting of the remarkably short life of the dizzyingly influential trans woman and Warhol superstar Lou Reed immortalized in his 1972 song “Walk on the Wild Side.” The book describes a New York that is brutal and surreal, a place that contains both a placid suburban street on Long Island where Candy was nearly lynched by two teenage boys and the stables in Babylon, Suffolk County, that she fantasized about escaping to as a teenager. It’s also a treatise on character—on how Candy took the parts of herself that were always there and found ways to celebrate them as a person and a performer whose life and art were always intimately connected. Early on in the book, Carr describes a photo-booth portrait of Candy as a young kid, on which she’d drawn a flip with bangs over her boyish haircut—a glimpse of the character who would soon meet the world.

Opening image: From left, on model Dede Mansro: Dolce & Gabbana cropped blazer. On dancer and model Day Day: Wales Bonner jacket and trousers. Dolce & Gabbana shoes. On dancer and model Honey Balenciaga: Max Mara jacket and jumpsuit. Dolce & Gabbana heels. On movement artist and model José Lapaz-Rodríguez: Dior Men jacket, pants, and derby shoes. Jewelry, his own.

Styling: Carlos Nazario; hair: Jimmy Paul; makeup: Yadim for Valentino Beauty; (on Amanda Lepore) makeup: Esteban Martinez; manicure: Dawn Sterling for Nail Glam; production: Day International; set design: Griffin Stoddard; special thanks to Please Space Studios. For more shopping information, go to bazaar.com/credits.

A version of this story originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.