How Can I Avoid Looking Like a Tourist in New York? (2024)

I am coming to New York with my family for the first time. We will be going to a Broadway show, museums, dinners and so on. What should I bring that will make me fit in and look good, but not touristy? — Nancy, Tucson, Ariz.

A better question may be what would make you not fit in? There are so many different versions of New York, so many layers of history and psycho-geographies — uptown and downtown; literary New York and financial New York; the hipster havens of Bushwick and Greenpoint — that almost anything goes, as long as it comes with the right attitude.

Indeed, the quintessential New York look may be more about how you carry yourself than how you actually dress. This is a city, after all, in almost constant flux, made of people largely from elsewhere, who, as Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation once told me, come to New York to reinvent themselves or become more themselves; to leave their mark.

We were talking about the former fashion editor André Leon Talley, who in his operatic self-presentation, favoring sweeping caftans and towering hats, was one kind of quintessential New Yorker. When I asked colleagues to name some others, the answers included the writer and critic Fran Lebowitz (who favors men’s suits), the actor Chloë Sevigny (known for her eclectic wardrobe), the artist Patti Smith and the social doyenne Annette de la Renta.

They look very different, but the one thing they share is a clear sense of their own character, built from the inside out and expressed in the ways they dress. That’s what makes them seem so New York. Whatever you wear, said Raul Lopez, the founder of the Luar fashion label, wear it with aplomb. Worrying that you won’t fit in is the thing that makes you not fit in. (Well, he added, that and waiting patiently at the corner for a traffic light to change to green.)