“I live on my own,” said Guardian fashion columist Hadley Freeman as we sat in a bar a stone’s throw from Bryant Park during the early days of Fashion Week, explaining how fashion and feminism intersect in her life. “I make my own money. I don’t let any man pay for me. And I like to spend my money on things that make me happy. I don’t see what problem Gloria Steinem or any other woman could have with that.”
Freeman wasn’t just in town to cover the new lines being unveiled under the tents; she was also promoting her new book, The Meaning of Sunglasses, a collection of biting mini-essays on fashion accessories and the culture that’s grown up around them. (“The current fashion industry is about generating excitement over things like handbags and pretending that you feel fabulous even if you’re broke and haven’t eaten since Wednesday or slept since Monday,” she writes in one chapter. “Drugs are very useful in all these instances.”) The book came about after a stint as the co-author on Victoria Beckham‘s style guide. “She’s a very nice person, and this isn’t a reaction against her,” Freeman emphasized, but the two do have very different approaches to looking good, and Sunglasses is Freeman’s opportunity to say what she thinks on subjects like ankle boots (“so wrong and yet, and yet”), jewelry (“when fashion just gets obnoxious”), and how Kate Moss “has not started a single fashion trend that has benefited womankind.”
Although Freeman points out much of what is ridiculous in the fashion industry, especially in the world of fashion magazines, she is quick to defend the culture against critics who suggest that it’s demeaning to women. “Women are smart enough not to look at Vogue and say to themselves, ‘Oh my God, you can see her hipbones&#I’m so fat,'” she insisted. “That’s so infantilizing.” (Look at it from another angle: When was the last time you heard somebody suggest GQ makes men feel inadequate?) “By that reasoning, shouldn’t Nigella Lawson make women feel bad about themselves for not being able to cook?”
So how’d she wind up covering fashion, anyway? The Upper East Side native moved to London when she was eleven years old, and years later won a writing prize at university that led to feature assignments from the Guardian. While studying abroad, she filed a few fashion pieces for the paper, then wound up being given the assignment permanently when she came back to London. She likes the freedom of covering the industry for a newspaper. “I’m extremely grateful that I don’t have to kowtow to advertisers,” she said. “I have to be able to say what I think. If I wasn’t able to do that, I might as well be writing press releases.” Covering the eternal cycle of fashion shows and running into the same reporters over and over is like “a funny school trip,” but, she admitted, “I still get quite starstruck whenever I meet someone like [NYT reporter] Cathy Horyn.”
Is Freeman thinking about another book? “My agent is,” she laughed, before reflecting that she spent nine months writing Sunglasses on nights and weekends after her Guardian gig. “And now my evenings feel really empty,” she joked, “so it feels like an oppurtune time for me to write a book again… And I have a lot of opinions, and I like to foist them on people. So it’s probably a sort of mercy to siphon them all into a book and let people choose whether they want to hear them or not.” Somehow I doubt that’s going to be a problem.