There is absolutely no reason for a walk of shame—that hungover, postcoital strut home—not to be chic. In fact, the art of looking effortlessly stylish while feeling sexually spent has a long and prestigious lineage. It was perfected many decades ago by the old-school Hollywood divas. Look at the buxom Elizabeth Taylor, who played the flirtatious girl-about-town Gloria Wandrous in the 1960 movie Butterfield 8. She wakes up picture-perfect in her paramour’s expansive apartment, her shimmering blue eyeshadow still sprinkled onto her lids. She lazily searches for a cigarette, beelines to the sink to brush and gargle with scotch, then finally leaves her one-night stand, deftly throwing the fattest fur in Manhattan over her slinky slipdress.
On the latest runways, it looked as though designers were obsessed with outfits that could go from dinner to boudoir to morning sidewalks without missing a beat. A sultry vixen at Valentino wore lingerie under a long, slender shearling coat. Saint Laurent paired an engulfing fur with tights as pants. There were clubbing-till-dawn denim microminis at Prada and a tiny black censor bar as a top at Courrèges. And don’t forget Chanel: A long, luscious red wine leather coat covered a beaded fishnet dress. The look is on TV too. Ryan Murphy’s Love Story took creative liberties to explain the lore behind Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s famous outfit of an askew white men’s dress shirt tucked into a high-waist black skirt. In the Hulu-verse, she had slept over at John F. Kennedy Jr.’s TriBeCa loft and needed something to wear to work the next day.
The reality of most walks of shame is hardly as glamorous. They usually involve crusted eyes, coagulated foundation caked into the cracks of a dehydrated forehead, and the steamy emanation of vodka from every pore. Some even suggest that this once-ubiquitous rite of passage is becoming increasingly rare: Gen Z is reportedly having less sex than their predecessors, and according to a recent survey, 48 percent of them are virgins. All the while, apps have sterilized dating. These days, getting to know someone is like interviewing them for a life insurance policy. Plus, no one is guzzling martinis anymore; they measure out peptides or gulp down mounds of probiotics.
Perhaps that is why the catwalk version of hobbling in heels after a night of under-the-influence, raucous lovemaking has never felt so good. Why wouldn’t we want to look as if we’ve just emerged from under a lover’s covers instead of waking up in sweatpants after a night of swiping on our phones alone in bed? According to sex and dating writer Karley Sciortino, the walk-of-shame aesthetic is yet another form of generational nostalgia. The look is “romanticizing and being jealous of a period of time that was just inherently more spontaneous and messy,” she explains. Sciortino knows of what she speaks: In the heyday of mid-aughts indie sleaze, she was a bombshell carousing around downtown Manhattan and Williamsburg. “When I was in my 20s, I had never heard of a skincare routine, and I was using Sharpies as eyeliner,” she says. “We would go out, get drunk, and not be documenting anything.”
Maybe that’s it—we want sexual freedom! No, not in the sense of Gloria Steinem second-wave feminism, but in an emancipation from cameras and social media chronicling every kiss, fall, and mistake kind of way. Looking as if you’ve been caught proudly slinking home at sunrise is, at least, slouching toward that freedom. It’s channeling Madonna in the David Fincher–directed “Bad Girl” music video from 1993. In it, she plays a publishing executive who has a just-in-case nipped-waist Alaïa jacket, fresh in a dry cleaning bag, hanging in her office closet for those mornings after. A look like that “transforms what should be, in theory, ‘shameful’ into something that’s playful,” says Sciortino. “There’s a ‘fuck you’ to it that is powerful and attractive.” Fuck you? Hey, at least someone is getting some, even if it’s only clothes-deep.
Top image, left, clockwise from top: Courtesy of Isabel Marant; Courtesy of Chanel; Courtesy of Gucci; Courtesy of Dolce & Gabbana; Courtesy of 7 For All Mankind; Courtesy of Saint Laurent; Courtesy of Valentino; Courtesy of Tom Ford. Center: George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images.
