Cities Dress Their People
How the quest for a purple dress sparked a theory about cities and appearance
I once went looking for a purple dress in Montevideo.
The request did not seem extravagant. I wanted something feminine but not romantic: a midi dress with a structured collar and a pencil cut. No ruffles, bows, floating fabric or girlish details. I was looking for a dress that acknowledged the female body without turning it into either a sentimental fantasy or something that needed to be hidden.
What I found instead were shift dresses, shirt dresses, and oversized silhouettes. Clothes that fell from the shoulders with as little contact with the body as possible. When I explained what I wanted, sales assistants did not tell me that it was sold out. They told me that it was not something people asked for here, so shops did not stock it.
This has happened often enough that I now import almost all my dresses, blouses, skirts and tights. Price is not the obstacle. Expensive shops reproduce the same limited taste as cheaper ones: shapeless silhouettes and the same rotation of brown, beige, grey, navy and black. Spending more might buy better fabric, but it rarely buys a more interesting idea of womanhood.
A store’s inventory is a census of anticipated desires
It tells us not only what is fashionable, but what retailers believe women are willing to wear, what kinds of bodies they expect women to have, and how much attention those women are prepared to attract. The clothing available in Montevideo seems to imagine a woman who does not wish to embrace her feminine traits too openly. Perhaps she is uncomfortable with her body. Perhaps she has learned that looking too deliberate will invite comment. Perhaps she simply wants to get through the day unnoticed.
After enough unsuccessful shopping trips, I began to suspect that my problem was not merely the local fashion market. I was trying to dress against the disposition of the city itself.
We usually say that people dress for the climate. This is true, but incomplete. Cities teach people how to present themselves.
Architecture, commerce, public life, beauty, neglect, ambition, and resignation all find their way into posture and clothing. A city teaches its inhabitants how visible they should be. It shows them whether effort will be admired, ignored, or mocked. It tells them whether the streets are places in which to participate or empty distances to cross before shutting the front door.
The unofficial dress code of Montevideo is caution
The recurring colors are brown, beige, grey, navy, and black. Silhouettes are straight, loose, or oversized. Shoes have heavy soles. Grooming tends to be basic, and makeup is either minimal or absent. None of these choices is inherently objectionable. The problem is the monotony, and the suspicion directed at anyone who departs from it.
A full face of makeup, even when it looks natural, can be dismissed as trying too hard. Skirts, tights, and heels carry the same risk. A man in a three-piece suit may look perfectly at ease in another city, but here he is likely to appear as if he is performing a role for which no stage exists.
Behind this restraint lies something more powerful than fashion. Uruguay has a persistent crabs-in-a-bucket instinct. Success is not readily celebrated; it is inspected for signs of fraud. When someone looks unusually good, the achievement is attributed to genetics or money. The years spent learning, training, eating well, exercising, cultivating taste, or correcting mistakes disappear from the story.
This is why “effortless beauty” receives praise while visible effort is treated as pretentious. Of course, much of what people call effortless takes years of work. A healthy body, good posture, natural-looking makeup and an apparently simple wardrobe may demand more discipline than a conspicuous display of labels. The effort has not vanished. It has merely become elegant enough not to announce itself.
My own appearance is evidence against the belief that everything comes down to money or birth. I did not emerge fully formed with a wardrobe, a colour palette and a clear understanding of my body. I learned. I experimented. I made bad choices and corrected them. I trained my eye. To call the result genetics is not modesty. It is a way of denying that personal cultivation is possible, because admitting that it is possible would make passivity less comfortable.
The city did not always look so defeated
When I began looking at archive photographs of Montevideo in the 1950s, the contrast startled me. Men wore proper suits. Women walked through the city in fitted dresses, skirts, gloves, and hats. The elegance was not confined to galas or wealthy enclaves. People dressed to enter public life because public life appeared to matter.
The buildings also looked cared for. Walls were not covered in graffiti. Shopfronts had not become fading reminders of businesses that had disappeared. People were not stepping around others sleeping rough beneath the remains of an elegant façade.
The city has not merely become more casual. It has lost part of its confidence.
The paper Decay Buildings and Their Impact on Urban Regeneration Through Art, by Rafael Sumozas and Maria Cacique1, examines how obsolete and abandoned buildings acquire perceptual meaning in the lives of their surroundings. Its subject is Taiwan, but I recognise the visual language immediately: broken windows, peeling surfaces, abandoned interiors and buildings whose former purpose remains visible even after life has left them.
Downtown Montevideo and the Old City are filled with these ghostly reminders. Bare shelves can still be seen behind dirty glass. Fading signs advertise places that no longer exist. Weathered surfaces make entire streets appear suspended between memory and abandonment.
Decay does not sit in the background. It teaches.
A building whose windows remain broken tells people that nobody is responsible for it. A building left vacant for years tells them that decline is expected to continue. When beautiful structures are repeatedly neglected, beauty begins to look less like a shared inheritance and more like evidence from a civilisation that has already departed.
People absorb that message even when they cannot put it into words. Shoulders lower. Eyes turn towards the pavement. Clothing becomes something used to endure the journey rather than take part in the street. People walk as though they are merely passing through.
I would not reduce depression or suicide to architecture, dress or urban neglect. Human suffering has far more causes than a façade can explain. Still, it is difficult to romanticise Uruguay’s famous melancholy when the country remains among those with the highest suicide rates in the Americas. In 2024, the national rate was 21.35 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, and the broader trend has risen since 2000.2 The statistic does not prove my argument, but it makes the visual resignation harder to dismiss as harmless local character.
There are exceptions within Montevideo, and those exceptions are revealing. In Carrasco, Punta Carretas and Pocitos, people seem more likely to dress to enjoy life rather than merely get through the day. The colours may remain subdued, but the textures, cuts and individual garments are different. People appear more conscious that they are entering cafés, walking by the sea, meeting friends and occupying shared space.
This is not only about money. It is about expectations. In those neighbourhoods, being seen is still part of the day.
Granada taught me what the opposite feels like
I have family friends in Granada, so my attachment to the city is not based on a brief visit or a polished tourist route. I know it through neighbourhoods, afternoons after work, familiar cafés and repeated returns. I love it most in autumn, when its colours come alive: warm stone, ochre walls, dark green foliage, and red and golden leaves giving the city a richer, more inhabited beauty.
The first thing I noticed was not any particular dress or hairstyle, but the zest for life. Cafés fill with people in the afternoon after work, and not only in the centre or tourist districts. My friends live in neither, yet their neighbourhood carries the same sense that the day continues after working hours. People do not seem eager to retreat indoors as quickly as possible.
That one thing changes how people appear.
Outfits are more thoughtful without necessarily being formal. People walk confidently, but their faces look calm. Women wear makeup naturally and well. Skirts and dresses are everyday clothing rather than declarations. Voices are warm without sounding hesitant. Across different kinds of businesses, workers tend to look polished and well groomed.
Because Granada is enjoyable on foot, people dress with the quiet knowledge that they will encounter others. They may meet friends, neighbours, colleagues or strangers. They may also be seen by visitors who have come to admire the place they call home. Public appearance has not lost its purpose.
I love seeing women there in fitted clothes, with their hair pulled back and red lipstick, wearing nothing expensive that I can identify, walking as if the streets belong to them.
Their charm does not come from displaying wealth. In fact, obvious luxury would weaken the effect. Their elegance comes from proportion, grooming, posture and ease. They look as though good presence is not a special performance but a normal part of being among other people.
In Montevideo, a woman dressed that way may appear to be asking for attention. In Granada, she appears to be participating in the city.
My own clothes became intelligible there
A dress did not turn me into an outcast. A skirt and blouse did not draw puzzled looks. Makeup did not require an explanation. I had not changed my style, but the city around me had changed its meaning.
This is one reason I travel with a notebook instead of a camera.
A photograph can preserve a façade or an outfit, but it may miss the relationship between them. It cannot always record how a woman carries herself through a plaza, the tone in which a waiter greets a table, or the difference between people who linger in a street and people who hurry through it. These things are better captured in sentences written before the impression disappears.
My notebook holds women with pulled-back hair, fitted clothes and red lips. It holds busy cafés far from tourist routes. It holds service workers whose grooming suggests pride rather than obligation. It also holds racks of beige clothes in Montevideo and sales assistants explaining that what I want is not something women ask for here.
Cities do not control every person who lives in them. Individual taste can resist local habits, and some people will always refuse the instructions their surroundings give them. But resistance requires energy. It is easier to dress well in a place that considers appearance a contribution than in one that treats it as an accusation.
Climate tells us whether to carry a coat. A city tells us whether to stand tall inside it.
It teaches people whether beauty belongs to daily life, whether effort is respectable, whether ambition should be visible, and whether the streets are worth dressing for. In time, those lessons settle into bodies, wardrobes, voices, and faces.
Cities dress their people long before their people open their wardrobes.
Author’s note: I write this as a Montevideo native, not as someone looking down on the city from a distance. My criticism comes from attachment and from the sincere wish to see it recover its confidence, beauty, and public pride. Opposing vandalism, neglect, and resignation is not hatred. It is refusing to pretend that deterioration is harmless, and believing that what has been lost can still be restored.
Sumozas, R., Cacique, M. (2023). Decay Buildings and Their Impact on Urban Regeneration Through Art: A Case Study in Taiwan. In: Villa, D., Zuccoli, F. (eds) Proceedings of the 3rd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Image and Imagination. IMG 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 631. Springer, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25906-7_68
Pan American Health Organization, “Uruguay: When Young People Lead the Conversation on Health,” 2025.
https://www.paho.org/en/stories/uruguay-when-young-people-lead-conversation-health