Many places where the rich have second homes tend to have their own fashion flair. Palm Beach, Fla., is known for Lily Pulitzer florals, for instance, and it’s hard to take a stroll on Nantucket without encountering salmon-pink trousers.
In the Town of Southampton, the Long Island enclave that includes the hamlets of Bridgehampton, Sagaponack and Water Mill, the scene at a party at the Southampton Arts Center last Friday suggested an enduring appeal for blue-blooded staples like white and printed pants, navy blazers, pastel dresses and the $725 hand-sewn loafers known as Belgian Shoes.
“They love velvet slippers and fancy pants and big hats on ladies,” Jeffrey Banks, a fashion designer and an author of “Preppy: Cultivating Ivy Style,” said while surveying the crowd. “It’s all part of lush living.”
Mr. Banks, 71, was among the roughly 200 people who had gathered to celebrate Southampton SEEN, a column in The Southampton Press that features event and man-on-the-street photographs taken locally. Along with glimpses of notable names — Southampton SEEN has featured snapshots of the model Christie Brinkley, who lives in Bridgehampton, and the leather-wearing architect Peter Marino — the column has also offered a peek into its subjects’ closets, so to speak.
Steven Stolman, 67, a fashion designer and author who has lived and worked in Southampton on and off since the 1980s, started it in 2021. Since then, he has taken more than 2,000 photos, training his iPhone camera on glitzy socialites, the occasional A-lister and tattooed townies alike.
His photos highlight people wearing trim blazers and slacks, bursts of color and gauzy, flowy dresses that he can catch in motion, as he put it. “It’s a moment of the confluence of a human being and a garment and how it moves in the light and in the wind and on the body,” Mr. Stolman said.
He had previously published similar pictures in The Palm Beach Post, and he said that the inspiration for his later-in-life turn as a photographer was Bill Cunningham, the event and street photographer for The New York Times, whom Mr. Stolman co-wrote a book about. (It was released the same year that he introduced Southampton SEEN.) “Maybe I could do in a teeny, tiny, little way for this small paper what Bill did for the world at large,” Mr. Stolman recalled thinking.
Of the style in Southampton, he said, “Right now there’s a certain romantic quality to the way I’m seeing people dress.”
“I’m seeing women dress more romantically,” he continued. “Softness, a little vintage. And with men I’m seeing much less formality. There’s an ease of the way we’re dressing. We don’t tuck our shirts in anymore.”
Mr. Stolman wasn’t the only person in the room full of country club garb who described the style in Southampton as looser than it once was. Debbie Bancroft, a trustee at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, noted that the museum’s annual gala in July — where some guests wore polo shirts and patterned pants — was way more casual than the black-tie affair that it used to be.
“It’s so much more relaxed,” Ms. Bancroft, who was wearing a psychedelic dress, said. “It’s so much more accessible and comfortable.” The area is more “bohemian chic” than other ritzy destinations like Palm Beach, she added, with “a little more New York style leaking into it.”
William Manger Jr., 60, the mayor of Southampton Village, echoed Ms. Bancroft’s sentiments. “I think much more casual attire has really taken over,” he said. (The jacket and tie he was wearing somewhat suggested otherwise.)
Though stores for brands like J. McLaughlin and Peter Millar in Southampton have helped it retain a preppy sheen, Mr. Manger bristled at using the word to describe the area. “It sounds kind of elitist,” he said. “I always thought that Nantucket was an extremely preppy place.”
Observing the room, Fern Mallis, a fashion consultant and a former executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, said that pink and hydrangea blue were two colors she associated with Southampton wardrobes. Ms. Mallis, 77, who was wearing nautical blue-and-white stripes, mentioned something else she saw as synonymous with the area’s style.
“I still watch women, which I don’t understand, go to parties out here with heels and stilettos,” she said. “They’re killing themselves walking on lawns because their shoes don’t support it.”
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