In August 2023, a bronzed and buffed Hailey Beiber walked into a Los Angeles branch of Dunkin’ Donuts. She was promoting a strawberry-glazed doughnut – a collaboration between the fast-food joint and her Rhode make-up brand – and so she wore a miniature red dress with strappy red stilettos. Husband Justin followed behind in a grey marl tracksuit with a baseball cap tugged over its hood and… Crocs.
People online suggested these clashing outfits were symptomatic of latent marriage troubles – because it is impossible, surely, for two individuals to share distinct tastes in clothing and still be in a happy relationship. I’d offer an alternative: that neither are trying to hew themselves to a self-conscious, brandable aesthetic, but are instead accepting of the other’s likes and dislikes. Is this not also what makes Lily-Rose Depp and 070 Shake such successful – and realistic – dressers? “One resembles an off-duty ’90s model,” said this magazine’s Daisy Jones in a recent article. “The other a drummer in a grunge band.”
The couple was yesterday afternoon photographed en route to lunch in Los Angeles. 070 Shake was dressed in double patchwork denim and lug-soled boots, while Depp wore a shrunken tank top with a pale pink miniskirt and Repetto ballerina flats. These two are not dressing for the cameras – see: the Beckhams in 1999 and the Beckhams in 2024 – but themselves. It is proof perhaps that you shouldn’t need (or want) to compromise your personhood to enjoy a fruitful relationship. In life, I have found the most aspirational couples to look nothing like all those double-headed chimeras in matching Christmas sweaters, finishing each other’s sentences and speaking always in “we”, but two independent adults capable of carving out a space for each other’s differences.
