Earlier this month, Austin Butler arrived at JFK wearing a cropped T-shirt bearing the words “Library Science,” which also happens to be the name of his girlfriend Kaia Gerber’s book club, which she founded alongside editor Alyssa Reeder in 2020. It was an explicit endorsement of their relationship, but he has always been the Callum Turner to her Dua Lipa: a boyfriend so supportive that his clothing choices seem to be engineered with the express purpose of casting a spotlight on his other half.
Take last night, for example, when the couple were photographed dining out with FKA twigs and Julia Fox in New York. He wore a baseball cap so low that it almost concealed his eyes, sturdy cargo pants, a bomber jacket and lace-up boots: a combination of clothes that, despite looking good, do not warrant much explanation. He went anonymous, incognito, as if the shadow to her shine: ie, a LBD from Susamusa, a camel trench coat, knee-high boots, and a Celine medium Tilly shoulder bag.
It was an emphatic break from Gerber’s usual, “I’m just popping to the farmer’s market” approach to fashion—see: here, here and here—and will doubtless form a blueprint for autumnal dressing. The LBD dovetails with the neck-up fashion that Vogue’s Laird Borrelli-Persson identified as a key fall 2024 trend, while Gerber’s choice of boots and a trench is perhaps the most perennial of style combinations for when the mercury drops, fired in the coals of Christopher Bailey’s now iconic Burberry adverts. Revisit a handful of the season’s most important directives for autumn here.