Does Santa Barbara have a uniform?
A stylish set shows the town is not as narrowly luxe and beachy as you’d think.
In the popular imagination, Santa Barbara is a gauzy pastiche of chilled wine, sunsets, and palm trees. Everyone is definitely hanging out in the backyard garden of a renovated Spanish colonial–style home you’ve seen in Architectural Digest. Sunkissed linens and sumptuous, casual knits in ecrus, beiges, and blues are the unspoken dress code, the more billowy, the better. There might be a big dumb hat or two.
But what does the outsider really have to go on? Last year, Vogue said Meghan Markle was “the very definition of Santa Barbara style” wearing a thatched version of one of those hats, a slouchy V-neck, and sailor pants on her way to her new bookstore in Summerland.
When Gwyneth Paltrow hosted a publicized dinner at her Montecito home last spring, she did so wearing a drapey cocoa-brown suit, and Oprah, all white (both looked great, we might add).
Lifestyle magazines perpetuate the idea of a place cast in a permanent glow, where poplin and chambray button-ups meet posh jumpsuits, and shoes are optional since the beach is just over there.
The reality is, yes, some do sip chardonnay sprawled on well-oiled teak lounges, wearing the kind of “lowkey and beachy, but extremely luxe” attire sported by celebrities and residents aspirationally affecting the look. Zooming in on our postcard of a town, however, reveals that Diane Keaton-heads-west isn’t the entire picture.
“Some do it really well. I tried, but it just wasn’t for me, and if I feel that way then others must feel that way,” said Jen Steinwurtzel, who made the transition to the beach town from New York City in 2009.
She opened Jake & Jones near downtown to counter the “upscale beach dressing” she found here. In the store, you’ll find racks with pops of primary colors and the likes of Issey Miyake, Orslow, and Jacques Solovière, a blend of beloved imports and smaller, more-obscure labels that one wouldn’t immediately associate with a tony town basking in a mediterranean climate.
“I was missing that risk-taking style of dressing, dressing not to look like everyone else. Dressing to be more expressive,” Steinwurtzel said.
But that can be challenging with weather like Santa Barbara’s, where breezy layers make sense, and so do workout clothes, which some are saying are just real clothes now. Some of us live in moisture-wicking fabrics, and none of us can escape them all of the time, but there likely isn’t a more homogenizing—or less risky—way of dressing.
“You do see a lot of athleisure, and it’s very casual,” said Teagan Ross Giffin, who has a good vantage of the city’s predilections from his vintage shop on State Street, Santa Barbara’s promenade. Where an abundance of sunshine, hiking trails, and pilates and yoga classes make activewear easy to reach for—and layering like you might in an East Coast city difficult to do—“you have to be more creative,” he added.
Giffin stocks Favorites with the kind of stuff he likes to wear, he said, sticking with light layers that do heavy lifting. That means no big coats, and nothing costumey like ’80s blazers with shoulder pads, but stuff you could put on in the morning here and wear all day: Beautifully broken-in 501s, fatigues, graphic tees, faded-to-perfection sweatshirts and flannels, and dad and trucker hats dated from the ’70s through the 1990s. (My latest score? A tee from line dancing night at a now-shuttered local bar that reads “boots and butts drive me nuts.”)
Like Steinwurtzel, Giffin saw an opportunity to import something you’d typically only find in a bigger city.
“Growing up here I would always have to go to L.A. [for vintage], and I always wanted there to be a cool place in my hometown to shop,” he said. The clientele are often young families who’ve relocated from larger metro areas but are still seeking out curated secondhand. (I feel seen). Others are Gen Zers who just love vintage.
“I think people are relieved to have a place locally that they can pop into before the farmers’ market or after grabbing coffee,” Giffin added.
Another vintage stan, Mike del Campo isn’t phased by Santa Barbara’s nearly 300 days of sunshine a year.
“My friends make fun of me for wearing long sleeves all the time,” said the SeaVees brand designer and lifelong local, who tends to favor well-worn varsity jackets, obscure selvedge denim, loafers or tennis shoes, and heirloom rings and bracelets. (I asked if he wears SeaVees to the office — he said yes, when he goes in.)
And as for reaching for comfort? “I play a lot of softball, and I can’t even do Crocs after the game like some people,” he said.
Santa Barbara’s outdoors culture has in fact fostered a remarkable number of globally recognized brands, many surf related, SeaVees among them: There’s Decker in Goleta, which owns Ugg, Hoka, and Teva; skate label Shorty’s, del Campo pointed out, which shuttered postpandemic after 30 years of operation; Mollusk, a San Francisco operation with ’70s verve that has one of its three stores in town; Channel Islands, majorly responsible for surfing’s dramatic evolution; and down the highway, Patagonia.
For a relatively short stretch of coastline, its influence outside California is actually vast. (del Campo did say that it is not explicitly SeaVees’ mission to export an image of Santa Barbara.)
When I asked my hair stylist, Anastacio Lombawa, what people think of when they think about what defines Santa Barbara style, he brought up Patagonia and surfers. (He isn’t one himself.)
Behind the chair or on the town, Lombawa, who’s lived here for 12 years, combines sharp blacks, pops of gold and silver jewelry, and loafers or box-fresh sneakers; you could drop him into a studio in Paris or London without a record scratch. It’s possibly the antithesis of California’s cliché of a salt-rimmed surfer, but equally easy going and at home against Santa Barbara’s sun-drenched buildings and verdant palms, jacarandas, and olive trees.
If “going casual” is the default here—whether the upscale version à la the Duchess of Sussex, one with Crocs and Vuoris, or something in between—it must be asked, how much can you “get dressed?” Steinwurtzel, who likes to push the limits, found them attending a few parties.
“It’s a reminder that it’s just not as dressy, which has its pros and cons,” she said. “On the days you don’t feel like getting dressed it feels pretty good, and then sometimes you sit and watch your really great things not be worn, and that’s kind of sad.”
“You can get away with wearing so little here,” del Campo added. But there’s no need to wait around for a reason to really start dressing, as they say.
“A lot of people here might not feel like they have an excuse to get dressed and that holds them back,” Steinwurtzel said. “But I think people here really do appreciate it.”
There is something to be said for doing as the Romans do. Projecting Santa Barbara’s glowing postcard of an image IRL at the farmers’ market, say, might turn heads, especially if you’re one of its progenitors.
A few weeks back, for Gwyneth Paltrow, blending in at produce stands meant going as if part of the staff at a Santa Ynez on-vineyard tasting room by wearing an oversize knit ecru sweater, vintage denim, and a Chelsea boot. That particular uniform, one that Santa Barbara doesn’t own, but does well, did for Paltrow as it does for anyone. The Goop founder’s salt-of-the-earth ensemble made her just another passerby at the strawberry stand, a honey sample taster, a browser of snapdragons, a Santa Barbaran.
As with any place, Santa Barbara has frameworks within which to work: One is the far mar. Another, a book release at Meghan Markle’s Summerland bookstore. Yet another, Steinwurtzel’s busy corner shop near downtown, where, with a couple of cafés helping to create something of a daytime scene akin to ones in bigger cities, putting on clothes to match has purpose.
“I think our little corner has become more welcoming of that,” Steinwurtzel said.
In a town basically run by a uniform-wearing hospitality industry, Satellite, back on State Street, shows what a framework with the right limitations can look like.
Emma West, who opened the natural wine bar in 2017, said employees can basically wear what they want as long as hair is pulled back and shoes are close-toed.
“Otherwise it’s really open,” she said. Dealing in natty wines does provide some direction: “I like that with Satellite, there is a container. Farmer to glass, farmer to table.”
In other words, looking like Paul Giamatti in Sideways—which gave us a roundup of shirting as misunderstood, let’s say, as Miles Raymond’s view on Merlot—probably misses the mark. What hits it, though, is looking like you might actually enjoy taking down a bottle of pét-nat with the homies.
This comes, ahem, naturally for the staff. Some of the guys go head-to-toe in workwear, combining Dickies 874s with Ben Davis shirts, the kind of thing you could source locally from 2001, a no-frills West Side shop. For the girls, a few go “on-trend,” West said, while others might mix a vintage band tee with jeans, finished with the usual suspects in footwear for a laid-back floor staff: Chucks, Blundstones, Doc Martens, Hokas.
“I personally fall into more of a Doc Marten world, or do Hokas—they have these very, like, janitorial shoes,” West said, who’s well aware of their function-first aesthetic. Otherwise, she “keeps it tonal,” sticking to one part of the color wheel whether black, white, brown, or blue; lightweight denim on denim is one of her specialties.
However the “dress code” shakes out on any given shift, keeping things on the casual side is intended to create a more inviting atmosphere for guests, West said: Intimidating obscure varietals are made less so by a cooly dressed staff.
Sometimes, the come-one-come all vibe is still a non-starter, though. “Is it really for everybody?” she asked, the question being about what Satellite provides for Santa Barbara — from the staff’s unfussy mien down to the natural wine itself. West isn’t challenging newcomers, but more admitting that, in fact, sometimes the answer happens to be “no.”
With the irony of that question lingering, West added—and she can relate—that sometimes you want something that feels a little more classic.
Of course, if that’s your flavor, Santa Barbara has it in spades.
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Love seeing those familiar SB faces on substack 💖