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.
