Sotto Voce ELEGANZA

Neutral tones. Straight-cut trousers. The perfect knit. #OldCeline or the subtle cues of the low-key rich bitch wardrobe?

- MAX BERLINGER

At the start of a recently acclaimed feature film, an exacting conductor is seen picking out fabrics for a series of custom shirts, suits, and coats. The tailor’s dressing room oozes luxury, but a logo is nowhere in sight. Lydia Tár doesn’t wear labels on her sleeves. As if. In her soft-pedal bespoke finery, she is the spiritual lodestar of an increasingly visible type, the woman who doesn’t need to use fashion to broadcast her power—or deep pockets. Call her the low-key rich bitch.

Look around and you’ll spy her everywhere: pushing a cart around Erewhon in Los Angeles in a buttery nappa leather bomber. Is that the new…Loewe? Yep. Or slipping into an afternoon screening of The Conformist at New York’s Film Forum in a broad-shouldered, floor length trench that the untrained eye may not recognize but those in the know immediately clock as fresh-off-the-runway Saint Laurent. She’s probably reading this magazine right now through Morgenthal Frederics glasses.

The low-key rich bitch is not a new phenomenon. She has been with us since time immemorial, from the days of Empress Joséphine—whose evening wear rejected the rococo excess of Marie Antoinette—up to the golden age of designer Phoebe Philo, still the queen of this cohort, which hangs on every post from the Instagram account @oldceline (393,000 followers and growing). But the spring runways gave the #LKRB a lot of new options to choose from.

“Brands embraced simplicity across their collections and are clearly anticipating that customers will be adopting this approach to dressing,” says Libby Page, the market director at the e-commerce site Net-a-Porter.