In the season that brought us the It Tracksuit, it is a stone-cold fact that dressing down is the new dressing up. Yay! Right? Well, not necessarily. DDITNDU sounds like good news: it sounds like permission to wear flat shoes all day, and/or justification for alternating two sweatshirts and calling it a Work Wardrobe. Sadly, it’s nowhere near as simple as that.
If you look gobsmackingly beautiful in, say, nylon tracksuit bottoms and a sports bra, then DDITNDU is good news. You can also get lost, sharpish. If you are an actual human being, then DDITNDU is a Trojan horse. A fleece-lined Trojan horse, true, but still one whose gifts are not what they seem. The mantra promises an easy life, but then lets you down when you look in the mirror and realise jersey sweatpants look glamorous only with an extra five inches of leg, and that, short of an injection of supermodel DNA, the only way you can add five inches of leg is to wear uncomfortable high heels, which sort of kill the loungewear mood.
For us norms, the trouble with dressing down is that it does exactly that: it dials you down. So while you can enjoy the comfort that it brings – no one in their right mind doesn’t enjoy the breathe-easy benefits of a drawstring waist or the cocooning sensation of a hoodie – you have to offset the nothing-to-see-here vibe with something to catch the eye.
The grey hoodie is a bona-fide fashion piece this season, but to feel like A Look, you can vamp it up with heels and big sunglasses, for pretend-casual LAX celebrity chic. But to look sharp, rather than glamorous, your best strategy is to play up the preppy, Silicon Valley credentials of the hoodie by wearing it over a poloneck or under a blazer – or both, until summer arrives. This look is three parts Mark Zuckerberg (“I’m so high status that I play it down”) and one part Princess Anne (“I have a small amount of status, and heaven help anyone who forgets it”). The power-version of dressing down is about balancing these two characters. The no-brainer look requires the most strategy of all.
• Jess wears hoodie, £26, and blazer, £49, both topshop.com. Rollneck, £62, gudrunsjoden.com. Trousers, £185, joseph-fashion.com.
Chair, £1,300, habitat.co.uk
Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair and makeup: Laurence Close at Carol Hayes Management.
